Guild Wars 2

To answer the title, yes it should remain usable in instanced content. While we’re at it, more things should be usable in fractals and dungeons than currently are. Skale Venom is incredibly weak currently since they made it compete with the wrench buff, and pretty much the only time I use it is when my pub team is horrible enough that we need the weakness and vulnerability.

spoj.9672:

I have moved it to unrestricted for the time being. If we want to create a path specific rule we can move it back.

I really don’t think this is the appropriate action. It should be restricted until voted to be banned as a path-specific rule by the speed clearing guilds.

spoj.9672:

Chilling force needs to stay as it is. Its the same as forceful greatsword numbers wise. And it adds a strong solo trait to the necro to increase the necros self sufficient damage. Would be better if they changed siphoned power to a 10% modifier to be honest.

The problem isn’t inherently Chilling Force, it’s Chilling Force stacked with Reaper’s Might, which would pretty much guarantee solo 25 might permanently when attacking with RS1. I’d personally prefer it if they kept Chilling Force and replaced Reaper’s Might, but they really shouldn’t let both stay as-is.

spoj.9672:

The greatsword isnt bad. I do admit the damage doesnt look as high as it needs to be. But the spam of gravedigger might make it a top weapon. That said i would like the rotation to involve swapping between dagger and greatsword. Because camping greatsword and DS is going to be boring.

It will no matter what if only for Warhorn 5. If GS ends up being obscenely strong than the rotation would have you swap to Warhorn for the 5 before going into RS and when you come out you swap directly to GS, skipping Dagger. That said, I’m pretty confident that RS’s skill coefficients are much higher than GS’s, and given that D/W is a much better complement to a RS build, I can’t see GS seeing that much use.

Jumping over the door in CoE would be allowed except that it breaks rule 5, whereas this discussion is about rule 8. As for the safe spot on the core, I honestly have no idea to what you’re referring, so I can’t comment other than to say that safespotting is barred under rule 12.

grumbles something incoherent about no timer being annoying as hell I feel like a broken record. Approved.

Velho.7123:

Leaping over and standing on an otherwise impossible to get to wall.
Jumping puzzle on Arah P4.
Jumping is a game mechanic, right?

Not even considering you already teleported the NPCs.

“Clever use of game mechanics” is an excuse for slowly going over the line about what is and what is not restricted.

Teleporting NPCs is legit, and Arah p4’s tree skip is banned because you legitimately do go out of bounds as there is no mesh for the terrain at certain points of the skip. As far as the rules are concerned, IMO, what is being done in this path is allowed. The only way I can see that it should be marked as UR is if the guilds vote on it as a specific exception like was done with jumping over the wall in the Urban Battleground fractal.

It’s slow, generates life force slowly, and from what I could see in the video seems to be dealing less damage than D/W. I’d probably only ever have one on the swap for the AOE blind skill and the pull when that’s relevant. Regardless, once we can figure out what amulet he was using in the videos we can actually do a proper comparison.

Ideally you’d just have a timer that starts at 00:00:00.000, shows increasing time over the course of the run in real-time, and then stops increasing once the boss is dead. Failing that, exact start/end times would be fine but we’d still have to verify them, so please make the timer much larger—the reason I said there was no timer the last time I looked at this was because it was so small I didn’t even see that it was there.

Greatsword is pretty terrible, but reaper’s auto attack DPS is pretty impressive and it seems to have really high coefficients on the other skills in Reaper’s Shroud. Plus, it’s self-sustaining to autoattack with Vital Persistence and keep it up 100%. With Deathly Perception you won’t even need the critical hit chance on vulnerability to fly past 100% crit chance.

Given that they want to rework Chilling Force anyway because the perma 25 might is a little too much, they could just turn it into a +10% damage modifier against chilled foes and that would really put Necro DPS up to where it should be.

Overall I’m really disappointed with Greatsword, frustrated with no blast finishers even though a number of effects look like they should have one, disappointed with the shouts, but fairly pleased with Reaper’s Shroud. Also, it sure looks fun to play even if it’s bad. Story of my Necromancer’s career.

I’ll be working this all into a report sometime in the next week along with the community’s comments on the Chronomancer and Dragon Hunter.

Just remember kids, it’s because of Logan that we even get the Revenant in HoT.

Approved (I swear I approve like 95% of everything). Adding to the database now Added to the database.

I decided to cut you guys some slack even though one of your guild members in this run proclaimed that the entire GW2 speed clear approving group is “corrupt” and that the only reason we approve things is “to stroke the egos of a select few”.

Your timer was a real pain because even on full screen it was smaller than 8pt font on my 1920×1080 monitor, but after spending an annoying amount of time framechecking I nailed it to a start time of 21:13:01.591 and an end time of 21:17:17.784 for a final time of 4:16. You were actually 4 seconds faster than your post suggests. If you submit another record, please for the love of my eyesight use an actual overlay timer. Ask the other guilds how they do it before you post to figure it out if you can’t do it by Google search.

Anyway, approved. Keep your guild members from being kittens or you can bet that no approver will care enough to spend the time in the future.

Right, the CoE door skip is barred because of rule 5 and the Arah p4 skip is barred because of rule 8. I was told the MF one was similar to Arah p4, but if you actually do go outside of the terrain in Arah p4 then that’s very different. Thanks for the explanation.

Nice job. Approved and adding to the database now added to the database.

Hella good thiefin’. Approved, and adding to the database now added to the database.

Anyway, I am approving this. I really don’t think it’s an issue what was done, but I welcome other approvers to contest it if they feel it counts as going out of bounds per rule 8. We can always change it to unrestricted later.

I definitely think whatever it is, it should go to votes among the guild representatives. The whole speedclear community exists because people enjoy the runs, and first and foremost I want rules that are representative of what the majority feels fair and appropriate. If the guilds want to keep doing actual meetings, that’s fine, but I’m not sure what they accomplish that a simple vote on key topics wouldn’t address.

EDIT: While we’re here, can we discuss and maybe vote on whether the record here is restricted or unrestricted? I personally approved it as restricted because the jumps to speed up the NPCs seem fair to me, none of them skip any events, nor do they leave the bounds of the fractal. I was told by someone else who looked at it (not an approver) that this was similar to the Arah p4 tree skip, but I’m actually unfamiliar with that skip and couldn’t find a video of it. If someone could show me a video of that for comparison, that’d be great.

Well, this was the record before [HeX]‘s run, so I’ve approved this anyway so it’ll appear on your guild’s record on the site. I am adding it to the database now. Added.

The rule in question has nothing to do with skipping bosses.

8.) If any party member(s) at any point enter ‘out of bounds’ on a dungeon map, the time will be void.

The real question is whether this specifically counts as out of bounds or not. I personally don’t think it is, and typically if this sort of thing were to be considered disallowed it’d be banned by specific exception. Like I said, I’m personally okay with this one since it doesn’t seem particularly exploity (and seems rather clever to move the NPCs), but that’s me.

Thoughts:

• If a submitted video series meets all of the requirements of the restricted or unrestricted ruleset, it should be approved regardless of volunteer time needed to do so or general player approval.
• It takes substantially more time to approve a record from a new group of players than an established group of players because we have to create record table entries for every player in your run(s) and every character that player uses in your run(s).
• All approvers are volunteers, and part of why they volunteer is because they enjoy speed clears. If a record is “casual” or less exciting, it is less likely to motivate them, and that combined with the previous increase in time to approve makes it less likely they’ll volunteer their time to do it in a timely manner.
• I would love it if approving were incentivized. It takes a lot of time and people as a general rule take it for granted.

Notes about this run:

• Twitch VODs can only be used as video evidence if they are cut down to just the path being approved. We can’t tell people viewing the records on the website to “start at X:XX and end at Y:YY”, and therefore we will not approve from them.
• There is no timer and the video is twitchy. I cannot properly time the run because it’s unclear if frames were being skipped by whatever program formatted the video. Furthermore, the time of the YT video doesn’t match the times of the VODs… So something is weird here and I cannot approve this in its current form. Note, in case you’re curious, this issue creates a violation of Rule #1 in all record formats.

Hopefully that addresses all questions.

Well, for an active game like GW2 (different by a long shot from GW1) single target DoT/debuff over time style skills aren’t particularly engaging. This is especially true given GW2’s skill bar style where you only get 3 utilities, limiting possible enchantment/hex interaction. I would be extremely surprised if ANet ever brought back actual hexes, interactions with hexes, or things like it. The closest things we have are skills like Binding Blade, Tainted Shackles, and Impale, all of which are short-lived or AOE with other factors to keep them interesting. I don’t doubt they could make hexes fairly interesting, I just don’t see them pursuing it given how much effort they’ve put into their current combat direction.

TPMN.1483:

Let me tell you a secret… Trading post barons make the most gold/HR.

Oh my, I never would have guessed! What have I been doing these many years?!

It’s much faster to simply complete a fractal L50 than to grind out 20g and buy it. Even at 10g/hour, which is pretty optimistic, a decentish L50 group can finish the whole thing in less than 2 hours. It’s only really time-saving to farm the gold if:

• …you’re incapable of finding good pubs/friends to run with.
• …you yourself are not very good.
• …you find a really cheap seller (~8g).

Regardless of what the livestream shows us, that graphic is pretty amazing. +1

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Yes, they need to bring hexes back. Then we will have something we are good at. Bring back the classic Spiteful Spirit, and we’ll see a lot less zerking too.

Unfortunately very few creatures actually attack fast enough for SS to be relevant, or the confusion condition if we’re talking strictly GW2 current mechanics.

Windsagio.1340:

Possibly they’re not designing to meet your specific needs as a speedrun/dungeon person, and there are some core issues that necros have with how the dungeon scene involved, but saying you ‘doubt their intentions’ is really far left field.

As someone who plays every game mode a metric boatload, I can safely say that spoj is in the right. ANet is desynced with what a Necromancer needs to actively participate in a meaningful way in all formats. Even in top-end PvP the #1 NA team essentially builds their comp and strategies around carrying the Necro and rotating to guard the Necro just so it can utilize its primary burst (which is, admittedly, great). That strategy lost them the last WTS against a better comp anyway. The only reason they win in NA is because they’re the best at rotation and has nothing to do with their Necromancer.

I don’t think we need to be persecuting ANet or whatever, and the class is very fun to play, but in meaningful content it has extremely severe shortcomings compared to every other class and ANet has, admittedly, done little to level the playing field.

I think there’s unanimous agreement that it’s okay then. Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

Jerus.4350:

It’s different.

Double wall is using a trait to avoid the cooldown. This situation is just swapping when available.

Should you not be allowed to swap a mantra if you’ve charged it and used one? What about Turrets, have to destroy it and wait out the cooldown?

Those are extremely good points in comparing this to turrets and mantras, Jerus. I hadn’t considered that, and I agree and say this falls into exactly that category, and should be allowed.

So someone brought this up to me and I wanted to get it checked by other approvers because it seems questionable to me and I’d like second/third opinions on it.

Context: Fennec’s PoV
Reference: https://youtu.be/BIaf5nA7lHw?t=2m4s
Issue: Fennec summons Rocky for Balthazar, but before the skill expires (and thus putting it on 120s cooldown) he swaps it out for FGS which he then immediately uses. The issue here is that this is a form of cooldown manipulation, and while not explicitly banned by the wording of Rule 11 which focuses on traits (quoted below), it seems like it might raise a few eyebrows so I want to clear it with the team.

It has been this way ever since you could activate the skills for the elemental summons, and ANet has made no claims about it one way or the other. It isn’t explicitly trait manipulating, and it also doesn’t seen like malicious intent (I don’t personally believe Fennec was trying to game cooldowns). I’m personally on the fence (hence my post), but I’d probably err on the side of saying this is OK. Well, other approvers? What do you think?

11.) Party members may not abuse trait swapping to refresh ability cooldowns. e.g. Mesmer Blink, Guardian Wall of Reflection in order to facilitate a second use of the skill prior to its natural cool down.

Windsagio.1340:

I am going to let this go because we don’t need another “WHAT IS META WAAH META” thread, but I’m letting it go with the note that I deeply disagree :p

Edited to say : “What Jerus said below is right on”

Sure, I’m not even disagreeing; my entire previous post had nothing to do with meta and more to do with actually being worth a kitten in a team. Having team support is important in order to feel useful in a general sense playing anything with anyone. Even without other people and ignoring how braindead easy the open world is, having general support you can boost yourself and the occasional ally up with is important in order to really handle those low-man situations. The Necromancer needs a lot of all of these things in order to really be worthwhile in any context.

Bhawb.7408:

I bet these salty tears could melt steel beams.

Not enough vulnerability stacks.

Windsagio.1340:

This is why I get so salty on these ‘meta’ discussions. All this back and forth and complaining when it really won’t matter unless you’re speedrunning.

That’s a common misconception. It matters even more in non-speedrun contexts. If your entire team is running around in full clerics gear, your own ability to support them offfensively/defensively and provide massive DPS gains for the team are critical. It’s even more important than when you’re in a full meta group where each personal improvement is only a marginal team improvement.

Hell, it matters even more in open world where your ability to self-boost is critical because no one else will help you.

Bhawb.7408:

Good vuln burst doesn’t compare to what we’re going to get now. We’ll be vuln-stacking machines, and it will be consistent.

“Please keep in mind that the current numbers are not finalized.” ~Jon Peters

I would be highly suspect if chilling stayed with 5 stacks, or that we can so easily maintain 18 stacks just by being in DS. …It’d be cool if it did stay, though.

fishball.7204:

I know people pay 20g for FOTM 50 sometimes on NA. I guess people have more money than time? Or skill?

Absolutely. It’s easy to get 20g in SW and then pay your way to rewards in other content that you’re not good enough to do yourself.

I think Ranger would be much closer to meta if their melee weapon of choice didn’t bounce them off of cliffs like a rabbit in heat. And for what it’s worth, party buffs and being able to contribute to Might/Fury/Vuln would certainly help the Necromancer’s case.

OlliX.1705:

The wiki article (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Trooper) says:
“The sixth bonus activates on any shout and applies to nearby allies, regardless of who is affected by the shout, e.g. “On My Mark!” triggers the condition removal for party members even though it targets a foe."

Ah, well, there you go. Shows how often I use OMM with these runes. Guess it’ll work, then!

Zetsumei.4975:

Yeah ofc :S don’t see why trooper won’t work

Trooper runes specifically say they remove a condition from each affected ally… And if the Necromancer shouts affect no allies, then it will logically remove no conditions. They may change Trooper runes in anticipation of this elite spec, however, so who knows. I’ll try to ensure it gets asked during the live stream tomorrow.

It looks neat, but also so far doesn’t seem to have much in the way of team support. I’ll reserve final judgment until tomorrow, but at least the animations look neat.

We are still recruiting! It’s been tough lately with fewer people due to RL demands, but we’ve been succeeding our guild missions regardless. We could really use some more interested and relaxed people to join us! If you like a relaxed, zero-pressure environment with friends to enjoy the game, let one of the officers know and we’ll talk to you about the guild in more detail.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

So, did Anet get the memo that our class is bottom of the barrel? Because unless the new necromancer specialization fixes this, I don’t think I’ll be returning to this game. I like playing a necromancer, but it’s absolutely garbage right now, and has been for years.

And I’m not sure if they know we have a sub forum, but if they do, then they may have noticed just how angry the necromancer community is. (and rightly so)

Oh yes, they got the memo. I’ve actually had it specifically confirmed to me before that they are aware of the Necromancer’s situation in PvE.

I have every confidence that they’re going to try to address it, but because of their game design policy of trying to keep things the same between PvP/PvE we can only hope it’ll be good enough. It’s really that game design philosophy that has been keeping the Necromancer down in PvE for so long.

RashanDale.3609:

@rising dusk: how exactly does that work? did they ask you to gather stuff about the necros? or do you just pick a topic that you deem interesting and send them a summary of it?

They ask me to collect and report on community general consensus. My focus is fractal and dungeon specific, but on certain topics I bleed over into other areas where it makes sense. Balance has been a large topic of mine that I have been working with providing ANet feedback on recently.

I’m hopeful. I’ve sent them so much detail on Necromancers and I know it went to the balance team so they definitely know and I think they’ll do something with it here.

Just an update; I got busy fixing some other records last night so I’ll take care of this today at some point. Sorry for the delay.

I see someone jump over the CoE door I roll my eyes at them. I see someone successfully stealth the Arah p3 door and go “Nice coordination”. Regardless of the intent, one seems lame to me and one seems like a fine and neat trick of the path. In general, jumping over barriers just because of terrain has a major stigma associated with it because in the past ANet has repeatedly fixed these sorts of issues (same exact skip as the CoE skip used to be present in CoF p2, and it was fixed). In lieu of that, it really seems to me that the CoE issue is one they just haven’t fixed yet, whereas the Arah p3 one is probably okay.

Wanze.8410:

Pillows.1306:

I study while I play so i leave it on in the background and when something comes up i just kill it to get the event

That is actually against the CoC. IF you dont want to actively play, you have to log out to character select.

AFKing is not against the ToS. If you AFK, the game will eventually log you out due to inactivity. If you’re at your computer and just sort of lingering, participating in things when they come up, that is entirely within reason because you haven’t set up anything to play itself in your absence. It only gets played when you physically press buttons. The only time its against the ToS is if you are AFK and set up some system so that the game plays itself automatically (either by macro, script, or whatever); that is considered botting and will get your account actioned.

I’ll update it with those after work today. Thanks for validating!

EDIT: Fixed!

Cheezy’s PoV actually shows him on his elementalist. Anyway, approved.

I think in principle I agree that Mortar Kit shouldn’t have a minimum range, but I also agree that it shouldn’t outclass the blast on dodge roll. Thus, maybe you’re right and it shouldn’t be a blast finisher. I’ll make note of that and keep it at that in my report, because otherwise we really have no idea what the skills even do yet. I will note possibility of longer fields.

Jerus.4350:

So I think you’re right in your desire I just think bombs is where it should be targetted.

Hrmm… Possibly. I think bombs’ issue is in the power scaling of the other skills; the 1 is pretty great already. I guess this might be a fair time to bring it up somewhere. I’ll add it to the report.

Sublimatio.6981:

another question – what if you have full inventory with the pop up, use specialisation weapon and slot out of the spec:P

It will likely just unequip it.

Sins, Jerus, and insane, thanks for the Engineer comments. I’ll reply to some and then edit my earlier posts with adjustments.

I’ll make sure the counter side of the Grenade 1 skill is heard in my report. I’ve seen a lot of in-game and Engineer forum requests for the ability to autoattack with Grenades, and I personally would really like to autoattack with grenades, so I want to make sure I at least capture that. I especially think that not being able to autoattack with it is a major QOL loss for the kit. That said, I certainly don’t want it to be harder to hit with or miss wildly all of the time.

Insane, I agree with your comment on the Explosives passive proc… I was just trying to keep my suggestion in the realm of what they originally proposed. Instead I’ll adjust the report to make the case that passive procs aren’t fun or skillful and suggest something else.

I’ll make sure to note that the rifle/harpoon gun trait should add damage, not crit chance, since that trait line is loaded with it anyway.

I’ll adjust the speedy kits/kit refinement suggestion so kit refinement only works in combat and rework other suggestions appropriately.

I’ll ensure that I discuss that mortar kit 1 blast finishering is great, but it should have a minimum range or else it will wholly outclass the blast finisher on dodge trait.

Also, I will say that my FT suggestions aren’t trying to legitimize FT camping, just to make the autoattack relevant. I think if FT were in a place where its autoattack when traited were slightly better than grenades once you hit near vuln cap, that would be the sweet balancing point.

ronpierce.2760:

1. Allow healing in DS.
2. Allow utilities in DS.
3. Reduce total life in DS. (A semi-decent amount)
4. Increase LF gained in combat.
5. Outside of combat slowly gravitate to 25% when out of combat.
6. Remove the tait that increases LF from kills (it’s terrible). Make it something better.
7. With less DS HP pools, offer some evasive defensives, which to me doesn’t sound out of the realm of shadow and death magic.

Overall I think this is a good list of things I’d like to see happen with the basic (non-elite spec) form of DS.

I trust that the game designer in charge of the reveal alongside Rubi will keep things on track. The balance team is very aware that full reveals and disclosure are expected; that’s why they gave the Chronomancer traits post mortem.

I can’t promise that they won’t say anything dumb at all, but I can say with confidence that we’ll get the information we need.