Guild Wars 2

Durzlla.6295:

Correct me if I’m wrong (haven’t played in a while) but don’t Chronos provide a lot of healing as well? Although I’m pretty sure they’re tanks too

Only if Minstrel’s, but yes that is correct. They can provide a lot of sustained healing over the course of an encounter through Mantra heal and the regeneration boon.

For T4 Fractals you can run anything and do just fine. People won’t discriminate against the class assuming you don’t die.

zealex.9410:

distortion is not a self invul only tho and most of the invul other classes have are very limited

All other classes with invuln also deal 30k+ DPS with their meta builds.

We’re still recruiting!

The things I said before where we have raid group openings is definitely true. We kill things fairly reliably, have an incredibly good time, let people bring whatever they want in lots of cases once we’ve had a chance to make sure they’re super familiar with encounters, and do training runs constantly. If any of that stuff sounds good, let me know!

Additionally, we do guild missions twice weekly and have a good time bantering about doing random stuff the rest of the time. Please let us know if you’re looking for a guild of friends to romp around PvE with!

They have no plans to take the Year of the Ascension achievements away. You have all the time in the world to get it.

None of what you’ve said justifies nerfing it, though. Mesmer has abysmal DPS as a class with awful ramp-up and even worse cleave. It makes up for this by packing a lot of very potent offensive and defensive support options, including Distortion. And sure, while you can F4 or time your signets to get Distortion to allies, it has a short range and lasts 1s on allies, so it still takes skill and coordination to land it for the big hits. The number of random Mesmers I encounter who botch it constantly is quite significant.

The other—more important—point, however, is that ANet has plenty of mechanisms at their disposal to prevent Distorting big mechanics if they want to take that route. They employed one on Deimos already. If they want to limit Distortion’s application in other encounters, they can continue doing the same thing with the encounters instead of nerfing the skill, which is the better path anyway since Distortion share’s strength is limited to these raid/fractal encounters.

I’d expect another raid to ship alongside the next expansion. That’s my gut feeling from their current pace, where we’re at in the year, and how close (I’m estimating) we are to the expansion announcement.

I think Distortion is fine. It’s functionally no crazier than what other classes have, requires perfect timing to utilize effectively, and the Mesmer has to give up a lot in its class’s DPS to have this kind of utility.

I wrote this in another thread on the front page and I think it’s very applicable here. If you plan on pubbing a lot, Druids are the way to go because they’re ubiquitously useful, good enough at healing, and offer lots of team damage. If you have a group of friends willing to experiment, however, then other options open up as totally usable (and a lot of fun).

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Hmm…I thought notification of the polls were sent to WvW players, and only those who played a specific amount.

This is correct. If memory serves it requires you to have ranked up twice since the last poll for it to come to your in-game mailbox.

Painkiller.4361:

The first 3 Builds are for raids?

Yes, but they work in Fractals as well. Any modifications to those builds specifically for Fractals are described in the fourth, Fractal build.

I recommend reading this guide for the optimal setups for a Thief and going from there.

Painkiller.4361:

A other question is can i use my gear for fractals also for Raids?

Absolutely. There’s significant overlap for optimal Thief builds in raids with fractals currently.

Azoqu.8917:

I love how everyone skips over Guardian as a healer. Not like it matters because GotL and spirits overshadows everyone but they do exist.

• Guardian has lower HPS than both Herald and Elementalist
• Guardian offers no offensive buffs
• Guardian has weak burst heals outside F2
• Guardian loses almost all damage to get heals to be usable compared to other options
• Guardian has worse protection uptime than Druid or Herald unless you camp Hammer, which has weak healing

Nyel.1843:

Sorry but what’s GotL? I just returned to the game and I don’t know what that is.

Grace of the Land

• Spotter competing with Hidden Barbs is very good for Ranger build diversity in PvE because it encourages distinction between Druid and condition Ranger builds.
• Sharpened Edges as a minor trait would make the line too condition-focused when right now it’s fairly diverse.
• Sharpened Edges could be merged into the major trait Hidden Barbs to maintain the relationship between Hidden Barbs and Spotter, but enable Rangers to also take Trapper’s Expertise. The replacement for Sharpened Edge’s spot should be something that would be relevant for other builds (possibly power Ranger).
• Picking up Light on your Feet alongside Quick Draw and every other condition-based trait in this line would result in the condition build being overpowered relative to other classes.
• Most Dangerous Game is bad and should be replaced.
• Side Note: Quick Draw is extremely strong and it’s doubtful any GM trait in that line could ever compete with the sheer versatility and strength it offers. About the only thing that might see use would be a 20% damage modifier against foes under 50% HP or something for power builds with already low CDs.

To be honest I wish they’d offer a $15 DLC for GW2 that finishes W3 and W4 and makes SAB available all year round from your home instance. This helps pay for their effort to implement the new worlds, gives people who just love it and love running around in it the ability to do so, and doesn’t force everyone to endure it all year round.

Lordrosicky.5813:

At least you can play a variety of builds. ATM there is 1 build per class so they could balance for their failed esports. Well it failed now so lets get the amulets back

That isn’t how it works. If you bring back all of the removed amulets then all you do is invite stronger builds back to dominate the meta again, and those builds end up being the only build you can play competitively. You’ve traded one set of singular builds for another.

Nyel.1843:

What about Revenant healers with Ventari? I planned on creating one, are they not competitive?

They’re fun as hell and really good at keeping people alive. Having played one a lot recently because my guild lets me play whatever I want, I find that they’re a middleground between elementalist and druid. To help out I’ve created a little pros/cons table below.

Elementalist

• Exceptional HPS (~5k)
• Weak burst heals
• No damage boosting modifiers
• Extremely low personal DPS (~800-1.4k)

Druid (Magi)

• Low HPS (~2.5k)
• Strong burst heals
• Exceptional damage boosting modifiers (GotL/Spirit/Spotter)
• Low personal DPS (1.2k-2.5k)

Druid (Condi)

• Low HPS (~1k)
• Weak burst heals
• Exceptional damage boosting modifiers (GotL/Spirit/Spotter)
• Good personal DPS (10k-12k)

Herald

• High HPS (~4k)
• Strong burst heals
• Mediocre damage boosting modifiers (AP)
• Decent personal DPS (3k-5k)

I don’t understand why we can’t have Labyrinthine Cliffs. Remember what ANet said about maps being in their own slice of time? The Labyrinthine Cliffs could just exist in a time before the Living World took the Zephyrites away, and everything would be fine lore-wise.

My guess as to why it doesn’t return is that there was nothing really compelling keeping people coming back (something they put a lot of effort into addressing with HoT/SW/DT); it would likely be a very dead map like Southsun Cove.

Assuming equal skill, an Elementalist healer will always outheal a Druid healer by a wide margin over the course of an encounter. The distinction, however, has never been about which is a better healer. The reason that Druid is so popular (particularly in pubs) is that even when running full healer it brings a plethora of damage boosting buffs to the team that mitigates its substantially reduced DPS. There are only a few encounters like Matthias where pubs bring an Elementalist healer, and all of those are largely because the DPS check is so minor that staying alive makes a run more consistent.

Just make Well of Darkness a smoke field and you’ll see that it adds some utility to the skill but otherwise doesn’t change a lot. Any more stealth than that is probably excessive and outside the scope of what the class should be capable of.

This change was welcome, a bug fix, and provides counterplay. It’s good on all fronts, and doesn’t even make the fight easier in any meaningful way.

OriOri.8724:

The nerf came about directly because of that. Anyone who believes otherwise is just wishful thinking

Or you’re doing like so many other and just believing what you want to believe. They buffed a lot of those utilities, sure, because they sucked in any context other than ghost thief and that shouldn’t be the case. They also buffed other classes and changed light fields directly in response to WvW balance. More likely than anything else, they felt that the other changes would circumstantially bring the ghost thief into balance, which it didn’t. That’s why we’re seeing the change now.

Focus has an invulnerability skill on Earth, a condition clear on Earth, projectile destruction on Air, and a nice CC (and blast finisher) on Water. Overall it’s just better for what the auramancer build is trying to do.

These things are terrible to see. They have little to no verticality, no audio, and just having a few ground AOEs layered over them will render them near-invisible. One thing I’ve found helpful is having my guildies remove their legendaries to get rid of the footfalls. That helps a lot.

The problem with condition damage Chronomancer that also tries to upkeep alacrity and quickness is that something has to give. A pure DPS condition Mesmer requires 3 specializations, 2 utility skills, and a heal skill at a minimum to pull off respectable numbers. The best you could hope for with a fusion build like this is:

• 80-100% quickness uptime on subgroup
• 40-60% damage of the condition Mesmer build (10-14k at best)
• Minimal alacrity uptime on party

It hurts even more that there isn’t a gear stat combination with both concentration and expertise, as you have to waste so many stats just getting both up to serviceable levels. Some things can be leveraged here, however, like that you don’t need 100% boon duration for 100% quickness uptime. It can be achieved with as little as 80% if you have flawless execution and a personal 100% alacrity uptime, but generally you want more for real scenarios. Check this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAre7ansIClfiFoBWoBUrhlcjqeVr1bF9HWiZoMAStWD-TRSAQBX8JAAgTCw4mfIUlc3UJIA3fIjKHio6PBU/ApAWUXF-e

The stat spread is about as optimally distributed as you can get with wanting both boon and condition durations maxed out. Some highlights:

• Sc/P + Sc/Sh
• 100% bleed/confusion duration
• 90.47% boon duration (with Concentration)
• Manages to pick up both Illusions and Dueling for condition damage
• Illusions reduces recharge on CShift, allowing you to use Time Warp more often and get closer to 100% quickness

It won’t be perfect. This is a definite case of a build trying to do too much. That said, I think you’d at least be able to pull off necessary quickness uptimes with about as much DPS as a condition druid. Note that the optimum phantasm split here is 2 duelists and 1 avenger so that you get enough personal alacrity to upkeep quickness.

Any Fractal mob that drops loot drops the spoons. The best farm spots are after Dulfy in Urban Battleground or the Grawl in Volcanic. I personally prefer Urban Battleground at low levels because you get more spawns than low level Volcanic. Another popular spot is in the Solid Ocean Fractal before the boss.

Protip: All Ranger traps deal direct damage on strike and will reveal you.

I think it’s very nice; it communicates your server’s current placement in the skirmish.

I’d prefer just being able to uniquely turn off the Dreamer and Quip sound effects from user preferences (ie. have a slider specifically for gear sounds), but if that’s too much effort then replacing them with something less intrusive would be great. They are hugely bothersome for me, and having to constantly battle my sound volumes based on who is playing nearby me at any given time is very frustrating.

I personally think that Rune of the Herald is better than Rune of Durability just because it enables you to easily control the protection application and easily maintain ~80% subgroup uptime of the boon without much effort. Rune of Durability is only really useful in cases where you can’t use 20% boon duration food because you really want the 10% damage reduction from Mussels Gnashblade. If you aren’t carrying on a Minstrel’s set and are trying to optimize for DPS, however, then Rune of Leadership is far and away superior to other options.

Each rune has its purpose for different builds and contexts. If you’re just pubbing raids / fractals and don’t care about total optimization then just use whatever is more accessible to you so long as you hit the 100% boon duration threshold and don’t go over. Side Note: Runes of the Herald are on the TP which makes them very easy to get!

FrizzFreston.5290:

I’m mostly questioning the added value of doing the bosses in order. Why do people need to be encouraged to do them in order? It could be another layer of challenge I suppose, but it’s more a time constraint and weekly hindrance than a challenge the way I see it.

The reason—whether or not you agree that it matters—is because the raids have narratives that tell stories. I get that it can feel like a hassle, but having this progression actually creates more compelling content both for new players encountering the content for the first time and for veterans who like to see progress made over the course of a week. Raids have this narrative by conscious decision on the part of ANet, and while the encounters could theoretically be designed like Fractals (ie. no raid wings at all and only singular bosses), they specifically decided against that and that decision inhibits them yanking everything apart now.

zealex.9410:

Also i dont see a reason to reopen bosses after you already did them.

Because you want to reopen them for guildies to get kills, to practice, or just to have fun.

Let people do what they want to do—mistaken as it is—and start your own group if you really want to farm this way. It’s only toxic if you don’t respect their wishes and try to join anyway.

I don’t think opening a cleared instance without having killed everything is a good approach. My suggestion is to allow players who have already beaten a boss to reopen up to that boss whenever they want during that week only assuming they’ve killed the earlier bosses. This is important to maintain the progression of the wing and encourage players to do the bosses in order. Example:

• You’ve cleared W3
  • You can open Escort, KC, Twisted Castle, Xera, Cleared Instance
• You’ve beaten Cairn and nothing else in W4
  • You can open Cairn and Mursaat Overseer only
• You’ve beaten Mursaat Overseer and nothing else in W4
  • You can open Cairn only

Hey, Mass! My general suggestion here is to get a Mesmer friend to come into the special forces training area with you and set up 3 illusions against a golem. That coupled with the Mesmer’s auto attacks will give you four other targets to proc your venoms, which will let you get representative numbers on the golem to see how your DPS rotation fares.

Chris Mavriplis.6517:

I dunno if you’ve ever done fractals before, but losing the equivalent of maybe 3 seconds on a boss fight doesn’t make a class bad… FYI, fractals aren’t timed by the way! You can fairly easily be high 20’s-low 30k dps if you learn the class.

Power Necromancer is substantially weaker than other classes, resulting in a lot more than 3 seconds lost. Even things like IP Thief do substantially more damage than a Necromancer, and are equally invincible. Power Necromancer is also less mobile and has less overall utility than other classes. Side note, I’d like to see a video of your 30k+ power Necromancer rotation with realistic buffs on the special forces golem.

Sublimatio.6981:

You are a whiny casual. Constant movement is another layer of difficulty applied to the combat and the reward is worth it for making you focus more on hand movements

There are about a hundred ways that ANet could implement a damage boosting food that require more skill than moving back and forth. The only thing that seaweed salad achieves is a DPS loss for classes relying on skills that root them.

Congratulations! I remember that feeling, and it was great.

adelaide.6213:

I much prefer Teapot’s version in general, at least for its apparent purpose to carry groups, because it has much more healing. The extra toughness/damage reduction may be helpful for some mechanics/encounters, but if I had to choose one variant to invest in, it would definitely be something more like Teapot’s

This may not be apparent, but by virtue of running a Minstrel’s Chronomancer you’re actually hurting your groups overall sustain (and DPS) by preventing the Druids from building CA as fast. If your goal is to carry, an extremely good magi’s Druid coupled with well-played normal Chronomancers is generally superior outside of extremely high-pressure encounters like Xera or Matthias or encounters where you’re forced to split regularly like Deimos.

[qT]‘s gear has substantial healing as-is, and you can easily substitute food/runes/sigils/traits to reach higher levels without swapping the stats on your gear. Let’s also not forget that by taking domination over chaos you get access to signet distortion shares, which can be far superior in damage mitigation to any level of healing.

Feanor.2358:

No, they aren’t equally viable. Because in practice some builds lose more than others, due to a number of factors, aggregated in the term “difficulty”. Meaning in practice your average player on the easy build X outperforms your average player on the hard build Y by a fair margin. Meaning build Y is by no means “equally viable”. It is at best an acceptable pick if you’re pretty good at playing it. Or if your group has enough players on easy builds to carry you. Class diversity? Yeah, right.

You might be convinced that seems legit, but in reality even the condition engineer with an easy rotation can break 30k realistic dps. In practice, all of these builds are going to have problems that reduce dps slightly, but all builds are affected relatively equally. This could be the boss moving a lot, fight mechanics, or whatever. Even the condition necromancer build has an easy time landing inside its own chill fields if you place them offcenter on the boss, and it doesn’t even lose appreciable damage if you ‘miss’ and hit a fire (2k dps loss, 29k total) or ethereal (1k dps loss, 30k total) field every time.

Now there may be circumstantial strategies that favor certain classes over others in pub groups (ie. sure is nice to be able to camp range at Deimos in super-safe runs), but fundamentally the classes are fine. The only class that has serious problems and needs serious work is Revenant, not that I’d mind circumstantial buffs to Necromancer or whatever. No class should be nerfed just because it’s “easy”, especially when it’s not really as easy as everyone thinks.

This kind of complaint thread is why we can’t have nice things.

Xcorpdog.2840:

The Shockwave on samarog can be stabilitied through, I and the druids in my guild usually just CA 5 through it. And on CM half the time we give stability to the people with the spear so they can ignore the cc’s.

Interesting! I could’ve sworn it didn’t work, but maybe my stability has been getting stripped by something else before the shockwave hit.

The forced bouncing mushroom attacks from Samarog and Deimos both ignore stability, and I agree that it would make a lot of sense if they didn’t. This is a window of opportunity for stability-applying skills to become relevant. I’ve also seen the pie attack culling happen when you’re just coming back from the demon world, and that’s definitely a problem too.

Generally speaking I guess I just wish all of the silly bugs with this encounter were fixed. That said, considering we’re still dealing with Xera gliding bugs and VG walking out of the arena, maybe I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

We’re recruiting, as always!

As a side note that’s really relevant, a number of spots have opened on our raid group due to schedule challenges with some of the regulars, so if you’ve ever been interested in learning how to raid with a super friendly and fun group and are willing to work toward gearing up and willing to let me dictate your build (utilities / traits / etc), let one of the officers know! We’d love to show you around! We raid 9PM EDT on Monday and Friday, sometimes doing extra sessions over the weekend if we’re really motivated.

We also still do all of the other things listed in the OP as a guild, so let us know if you’re interested in any of that, too!

Are you EU or NA? Some people here might be willing to train you to be able to beat the boss on your own without buying if you’re interested and willing to work with the group.

zealex.9410:

Nerfing a class to be on par with what other classes that require similar skill do is not hurting class diversity its quite the opposite actually it promotes it even further.

Errrr… Maybe you haven’t checked the benchmarks lately? A lot of classes are sitting at the 31-33k level, and they’re all equally viable right now. Nerfing a class to not be in that range would be objectively classified as reducing class diversity.

This is a really annoying byproduct of the “Character Model Limit” graphics property in the F11 options. If you have it set to too low of a value for graphical performance elsewhere in GW2, you’ll find that a large number of the hands at Deimos simply don’t render. This is extremely bad, and can be single-handedly responsible for wipes because players didn’t see that they were standing on them and getting downed/defeated.

Can this please be addressed?

zealex.9410:

then nerf its dmg simple enough

That hurts build and class diversity substantially and adds nothing to the game. ANet should never just gut a class because it’s naturally easier to play due to class mechanics than another class.

I don’t think the idea of making all classes a little more interesting to play is bad. Some rotations, like Power Thief and Power Revenant, are really disappointing. Generally speaking I think players should always be encouraged to weapon swap and there should be enough weapon diversity that you want to swap to different weapons, which is something condition classes do well enough thanks to Geomancy sigils and general damage kit dispersal. They could add a power-based sigil that does something similar to Geomancy if they wanted to encourage more rotation complexity for power classes.

Sigil of Empowerment
+10% damage for 7 seconds on weapon swap. (9 second ICD)

This doesn’t solve all problems, but certainly pushes things in the right direction. This would also need to be coupled with damage buffs to skills on non-meta weapon sets to bring them into the limelight. Some examples would be PvE damage buffs to Revenant Hammer/Staff, Engineer Rifle, etc.

There is a better way. The [qT] Minstrel’s chronomancer build is here. The big difference here is that this is actually tankier than MightyTeapot’s build thanks to lots of Nomad’s gear and damage reduction food and that [qT]’s build relies on Concentration sigil for 33% of the boon duration.

Condition Ranger has what I would consider a pretty ideal rotation. It has room for optimization by good players, but it is otherwise not painfully difficult. Just because the condition Engineer happens to be hard to play doesn’t mean every class needs to be artificially given that level of difficulty. Condition Warrior falls into a similar category as Ranger because while it’s easy to just yolo the rotation, it’s tough to get the last 10% of the damage from the benchmark.

Also, quite frankly I don’t think ANet could make a class harder to play without significantly damaging the flow of its skills (see: Staff Ele), nor do I think Ranger (or other classes) have the knobs to turn to successfully do so without substantial re-architecture that it doesn’t need.

OneUP.3024:

Hey, just updated the necro page now. Everything should be up to date. Write me an ingame mail if something is missing or wrong.

Played around with what you’ve got listed and I hit 30k with neither infusions nor the engi buff, so it looks to be in good shape. (Can’t wait for them to add the engi buff to the training area, zzzz)