Guild Wars 2

Rickster.8752:

It is a bad idea because it leads to more bad feeling in games with things like 3x necro or 3x thief comps which are not fun to fight with or against.

I am assuming, perhaps naively, that if “yes” wins the poll they’ll start using profession-based MMR and better profession-balancing algorithms in the matchmaking.

Sarda.5918:

The incentive to do the challenge more more than once is provided by wanting additional challenge. If that’s not enough for you, then challenge was never really what you were looking for.

This is a ridiculous notion. A person is allowed to both crave challenge and want to make progress working towards in-game goals at the same time. Spoilers: This is why Fractal 100CM and regular raids are done regularly by players; they’re rewarding and challenging! The idea that people should do the challenge mode strictly for the challenge is absurd. Beating it once that way is enough; after that the challenge loses novelty and the increased rewards from regular mode should encourage future play.

All I’ll say is that once again, it is a DPS increase for a Necromancer to enter down state.

This fractal is the ultimate snoozefest. I basically AFK at the boss and periodically use a heal skill or chicken peck my dodge key, then blow up stuff whenever I finally get something to do.

They could make this much more interesting if you had to fight an elite mob while the weapons tests were going on, and then that particular weapon test ended when the champion died. Doing it this way allows extremely competent groups to speed through it by burning down the elite mob quickly (please don’t make this thing an HP sponge if you go this route). This would be very similar to how the elite Icebrood Goliath works during Snowblind’s boss icicle drop phases.

I also agree that the waterfalls stage is an unnecessary waste of time. Let’s go one further and skip the whole drill thing entirely. Still make people clear the side rooms and use the boulders, but just let them run at their own pace instead of sitting and waiting for the drill to move.

Thanks Crystal, I’m glad it’s on your all’s radar.

Need more trails on raid weapon skins (poor Jade Pistol/Sword/Bow are such a letdown because of this). Matthias Staff cannot be the only one!

Fay.2357:

What’s the difference between a minipet and an aura? They’re both purely cosmetic effects with no objective value.

The ‘issue’ is that they’ve set a standard already, and then changed it. Remember when they released Mini Sabetha on the gemstore and everyone got mad? That was because every other raid minipet was acquired in-game. Every raid minipet up to now has been account bound. This one breaks the mold, and so it appears as though it might be an accident and not intentional.

For what it’s worth, auras maintain value better over time when compared with minipets, assuming both have steady incoming supply. After a few months of it repeatedly dropping, Eye of Janthir will be so cheap that it means nothing to anyone. That’s pretty unfortunate.

So I’ve had weird aggro and reset bugs ever since the patch with many of the old bosses. VG, for instance, will kill anyone outside the platform immediately now when aggroed instead of giving people a grace period to get inside. Sabetha, again, starts shooting people way back on the bridge and will drop the bridge even if no one has done damage to her. In many cases when this happens, the boss will never correctly resets, and you have to remake the entire instance. This is also happening on bosses like Matthias and KC as well.

I agree that these are pretty bad design because they encourage bad play that negatively affects the entire group (intentionally wiping, getting hit by random stuff you normally should avoid, etc). They should just be simple things like “be alive when boss dies while carrying Crystalline Heart”.

I wouldn’t lie just because it’s dishonest. Regardless of whether LI makes sense as a check or not, you’re not obligated to join these groups and they’re not obligated to accept everyone who joins. Be honest with people, start your own groups, and if you know what’s going on then just advertise for “exp”, take people at face value, and go from there.

Yeah, I think this is a case where it should be account bound since it’s a minipet. This is probably an oversight, and I hope they address it. That said, I think there should be more things available in a raid that can be sold to maintain the value of the Magnetite Shard. Things like auras are great for this.

I’m surprised people are upset over this, really. The story told in Bastion of the Penitent is totally tangential to anything that is going on in mainland Tyria, and is really just tying up a loose end from GW1. It’s a cool story, don’t get me wrong, but it has to be. Fighting a bunch of nameless, pointless, loreless encounters in a box devoid of features would be terrible. They have to have something compelling, but they’re being nice by not having it be main encounter stuff. If they had bosses like Caudecus or Lazarus in the raid, then I’d agree with you, but everything we’re seeing here is minor and side-note at best.

OneUP.3024:

this complete wing is an absolute joke. Waited 6-7 months for a new raid and all we get is this. The bosses look cool but their mechanics are either copies from raid 1 mechanics or no mechanics at all. Also 2 Bosses with big hitbox and 2 bosses with medium hitbox. Why would anyone bring anything else but eles to this wing. This raid just shows how little anet understand about their own game and that kicking experienced raid guilds from testing wasn’t a good idea at all.

The only good things are no time gates, no events like escort or trio and the overall look of the wing. The 2nd and 3rd boss are looking sick.

I generally agree with this. My guild is pretty casual and middling in overall skill / dps output, and yet we crushed the new wing pretty handily. We were all shocked, especially given how every other wing was a significantly harder learn. We’re much better than we were back when Spirit Vale came out, but Matthias and Xera are still vastly more intense of encounters than anything in Bastion of the Penitent.

Overall I really enjoy the wing, but I feel as though the mechanics were lacking across the board. Samarog just doesn’t have enough going on; there are entire periods of time where nothing happens to you. Overseer does literally nothing to you, and you can just freecast him down to 1/3 HP before a Scout ever has a chance to become a Soldier. It’s like fighting a DPS Golem. Cairn has annoying tells, but otherwise can be low-manned ridiculously easily given how limited his mechanic palette is. Deimos is arguably the most interesting boss in the wing, but Matthias is way more punishing and difficult. I also agree with OneUp that I feel like too many mechanics were recycled where they didn’t make sense (ie. teleport circles on Cairn, Samarog’s breakbar which is extremely similar to Matthias’, kiting some AOE field at long range, etc).

I will say, however, that the animations, enemy models, and general ambiance of the raid wing was on point. That aspect of the raid really redeems it, and makes it an awesome experience regardless. Hopefully this feedback helps the raid team going forward; this is definitely not a slam dunk like the Fractal team’s Nightmare Fractal.

Cal Cohen.3527:

All of the achievements tied to secondary objectives require winning the match as well. So if you kill the enemy lord but lose because it was a bad play, you won’t get progress for that achievement.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense. This incentivizes strange and counter-intuitive behavior like trying to push lord when you’re at 450 points or something and should really be watching your points tick up. It would also be much better if it didn’t require winning because then it allows you to make progress on some of your achievements even if you can’t pull out a victory. Think of it this way: if we’re 300 points behind and assured a loss, would you rather your team AFK and await the loss or maybe rally and push for lord to get some silly achievement credit? I’d take the latter every time, personally. It’s unranked anyway.

lucadiro.4519:

So can someone PM me a legal DPS meter please?

Since these are legal, there’s no need to be all cloak-and-dagger with respect to talking about them. The two that are worth considering now are as follows:

• arcdps

Pros are being able to see raidwide DPS estimates without having everyone connect to a server. No network traffic at all. Cons are that it’s a little less accurate since it has to estimate peoples’ DPS. This one is also very good because it can have its logs easily exported to padl.tk for formatting and sharing with your team. Another con right now is that it has some tools for combat efficacy (total boss HP #‘s, for instance) that technically fall within what Chris Cleary said, but are a little unknown still. I wouldn’t expect to get banned for it, since Chris Cleary explicitly said they’d give people ample time to adjust, however.

• BGDM

Pros are that this is a really simple and low impact DPS meter if you just care about your personal DPS. This is also nicer for people who are worried about others seeing their DPS because it’s opt-in (only shows DPS for people who have it installed). Cons are that this has a phone-home functionality to the server, which introduces some risk since it’s not open source. That said, no one I know has anything bad to say about it, so it’s probably fine for now.

We’re still recruiting even if we don’t spam it all the time! We’re always on the lookout for casual-friendly people who like to have fun. You can be new to the game or a veteran who raids like a boss and if you’re willing to befriend us you’ll fit right in. Let one of the officers know if anything in the OP sounds like a good fit for you! We’d love to chat.

Another 3 months without the new raid wing just because of legendary armor is really disheartening. Just block the final piece of the T2 collection or something, but don’t hold back the raid wing for so long.

Fluffy.1932:

• Condi Ranger dps benchmarks were done with Banner of Strength which gives 170 condi damage.

This is a major point and is something that I was going to bring up. Replacing the PS Warrior means your Chrono, Druid, and DPS classes are losing out on banners. Banner of discipline is important for so many reasons, as without it you won’t reach optimal critical hit chance. This is especially important for condi ranger because of Sharpened Edges, among other things. Banner of Strength gives 170 condition damage, which is substantial.

Your DPS comparisons aren’t apples-to-apples because you’d have to reestimate condi ranger in the absence of Warrior buffs, which would be much lower. It’s not as simple as just replacing the Might generation; that part is easy in the grand scheme of things (eles used to do it long before warriors did).

Plautze.6290:

I used to come here to seek information, nowadays I only come here to laugh at all these haters, imagining them sitting all day in their mother’s basement, eating cheetos and ranting about everything in at least 12 forums at once. Oh, what a life I can only dream of this.

So what you’re saying is that the OP shouldn’t try to showcase his build against more competent targets? He shouldn’t try to be more informative regarding how this build operates against high-skill enemies? You’d rather he be only praised for the random video with no feedback given whatsoever?

Look, I get it, some people have a rotten attitude about this sort of thing (ie. you), but if the OP would like this build to be taken seriously he needs to better showcase what it’s capable of. Last season I ran power Necromancer exclusively in high diamond and it was good (and worth it for surprise factor), but it was not nearly as good as the OP’s video makes it seem and required gross numbers of team peels to keep alive under high duress. Balance hasn’t changed enough to make me feel like that has changed.

Aeniklast.9283:

Totally understand, but I like the aesthetics of a Staff very much and refuse to give it up. I also hate being cornered into a melee class, even though axe is still ranged I just prefer the look of a staff.

Then bring an axe. Even axe, for all its faults, is vastly superior to staff. In PvE you may as well not be wielding any weapon on a power necromancer if you’re bringing staff. You will do essentially no damage regardless of your stats.

Aeniklast.9283:

I know I won’t have many buffs / debuffs playing solo, I just figured I’d still be able to hold my own in solo content. It’s usually just fluff I’m fighting anyways.

You can hold your own in blue gear with no trinkets, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. You asked what the ideal was, and that’s what berserker is in this case.

Sublimatio.6981:

Dont do it. Don’t convert your gear to valkyrie. It’s only good on paper, think of all the vulnerability downtimes or kitten groups you gonna get. it’s not worth it for the long run.
Only place you could benefit would probably be raids if your party is decent and if you use the right consumables

btw. don’t run soul reaping wtf. blood magic is better, lower cd on wells

@OP: Listen to this person, please.

I normally don’t comment on threads like this, but the Dragonhunters in that video were painfully bad and this is a poor representation of the quality of your build. Most of your foes didn’t even dodge out of the initial AOE fields.

Looks like it’s just a tracker for who you’ve killed in a given week.

Vernon VonHinkelschmidt.4269:

Power for Open World content. Viper’s for Raiding of course ;-)

I also run power for WvW. #livethedream

I’ve been tempted to buy Sabetha just to have people who aren’t totally incompetent on my team. I haven’t killed her in months because the pubs are exquisitely bad for that particular encounter and my guild hates the fight.

For real, though, the only thing I wish they did here was have an LFG section specifically for selling. It clutters the main section and oftentimes makes it really inconvenient to scroll through.

My guild runs a power subgroup and a condi subgroup with 2 condi necromancers in it for every boss except KC and we find it easier and more forgiving than other comps. Yes, we can kill everything. We run:

G1:
- 2 Power DPS Classes
- Power PS Warr
- Magi Druid
- Chrono
G2:
- 2 Condi Necros
- Condi PS Warr
- Condi Druid
- Chrono

Just find a group that plays the way you want to and is willing to make it work and you’ll do fine. If you expect to pub, expect to bring the standard meta stuff and don’t expect to bring your Necro anywhere except maybe Matth (pubs like Plague Signet).

The only raid RNG I legitimately hate is at KC. The difference between getting bombs and phantasms is night and day, and honestly I think the phantasm phase should be made more threatening so that you actually have to deal with the mechanic instead of skipping it.

Both power and condition Necromancer run Blood Magic. Condition Necromancer gets more utility, though, because it doesn’t lose any DPS by taking Transfusion, whereas power Necromancer loses a lot by missing Vampiric Rituals. Condition Necromancer also technically has more utility over power Necromancer in that it takes advantage of utilities that both boost its damage and provide great utility (Plague Signet / Epidemic / CPC / BiP). Power Necromancer offers very little meaningful utility or support.

FrostDraco.8306:

All you had to do was google, literally the first one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sXFsow6rM

27k unrealistic compared to 29k D/W Ele realistic really speaks to how bad power Necromancer is.

FrostDraco.8306:

And this is running blood magic, which would come with the transfusion.

No, it comes with Vampiric Rituals and loses Transfusion, as the former is incredibly important to power Necromancer DPS.

loat.8601:

I make at least 10g from trash items each day, ignoring the high value of stabilising matrices from rings and the inherent value of ascended armour/weapon drops.

I make anywhere from 8-16g a day from my T4 dailies depending on RNG, not factoring Mystic Coins, Stabilizing Matrices, and the value of anything else coming out of the daily boxes. Seriously, loot in Fractals is great right now.

Happy holidays and a merry Wintersday!

[VZ] is still recruiting even in this wintry season, and we’re still looking for new friends to share in our adventures. As always, we still do all of the things listed in the OP (including raids), so if you’re interested in that stuff and the kind of community we set up please reach out to an officer in-game! We’re always happy to chat a bit and get to know you to see if it’d be a good fit for you.

Quite frankly, T4 fractals are easy enough that you don’t need potions, and in my opinion the potions make them so easy as to not be fun anymore. The only place I use potions is the L100 challenge mote, and even then the only ones I think are really worth it are defensive/mobility.

Tekoneiric.6817:

I guess the spirit of giving is dead. Merry Wintersday.

• Can’t give account bound items.
• Told that account bound items are account bound for a good reason.
• Complains that spirit of giving is dead.

Anyway, if you want to gift an ascended item to a friend, give them the components to make it (sans Vision Crystal) and pay their way to crafting level 500. That would be an exceptional gift.

The new swamp is, quite frankly, one of the best designed fractals in-game right now. The “invulnerable creatures” you’re complaining about lose invulnerability when you pull them into the green, expanding wells.

Anyway, the worst fractal right now, IMO, is Molten Furnace. It is time-gate after time-gate and the final boss encounter is a snoozefest followed by a ten second murderfest of the champion. Also I wouldn’t be mad if Molten Duo were made harder somehow.

PvP only fixes are very good for the game, especially if they tone down overpowering specs, but the really strange thing here to me is that so many of the skill buffs would diversify and improve gameplay in PvE as well. Things like making Signet of Courage have a less godawful cooldown should absolutely be reflected in PvE as well as PvP, for instance. Additionally, I can’t see any downside to echoing the Thief buffs in PvE; those weapons are horribly outclassed right now and could use further buffs.

Anyway, I guess I will be swapping back to condi Rev for S5! Poor power. >.>

This is pretty exciting! I usually try to do something similar for my guild every Wintersday, and this year we’re doing a Sekrit Skritt event (secret santa, basically) that looks to be a lot of fun. If I get anything, thanks, but don’t feel obligated! Cheers either way.

DPS meters should just be personal only, as-in only I can see my own DPS and get my own readouts. You can never find out someone else’s DPS unless they give you the numbers. Honest players looking to improve will work together with the meter, and dishonest people looking to put others down won’t have access to the information. I realize part of the value some would claim is being able to see who the weak link is, but any good raid leader can already tell so I don’t think it’s worth it.

I buy deeply discounted to open any encryptions I get on my own. Once you factor in the 15% TP fees, things start to lose their profit margins, but if you only open the boxes that you get yourself you can start to pull ahead.

[VZ] is still recruiting!

We still have guild missions, guild events (Secret Santa!), and guild raids weekly on top of other random stuff, so if any of those things interest you, let us know! You can message one of the officers (myself included) after reading the OP to get a feel for whether or not the guild would be a good fit for you!

We’ve also been doing a lot of training raids lately now that we’ve beaten every boss with our core group, so if you have a good attitude, are interested in learning raids, and are willing to have me dictate your builds / gear to some extent, please let us know!

It’s done this way to prevent new accounts from abusing auto-loot with bots. This was confirmed by ANet back when it was released.

This is among the best possible changes that could’ve been made to Mai Trin. I’m glad they’ve decided to keep it. For the record, I don’t mind if they want to reduce the timed challenge on Ad Infinitum’s last collection as a result of this change.

Why in the world did you turn this around as if it’s a problem with raids? The problem is with class balance, and the fact that not all playstyles are created equally. And no matter what you do, someone can architect a terrible build that helps nothing, does no damage, and dies instantly. Should a group filled with that build be able to beat raids handily? Heavens no, half of the entire purpose and enjoyment of raids is to come together as a group and build a composition with classes and builds to overcome the specific encounter challenges.

I don’t care what people run in Fractals so long as they don’t die and contribute meaningfully. If I run into a group with a bunch of low DPS builds like power Reaper / healing Guardian / whatever then I’ll just leave and find a better group.

If you want to do raids, you need to be willing to have your gear and build and even class dictated to you for the betterment of the particular group you’re in. If you’re a masterful Engineer player, power Engineer is pretty legit and can substitute for a Thief or non-supporting DPS class, but people aren’t very familiar with it and bad Engineer players are a lot more common so they likely won’t allow it. You’re better off moving that ascended gear to a Thief and going into training runs as a DPS class. Alternatively, do what everyone else here suggested and find a guild who’s willing to see how you fare on power Engineer. Good luck!

They said they weren’t going to do this because it would destroy the +1 Infusion market. Just sell your +14 on the TP and buy a bunch of +1’s with the proceeds.

Dinosaurs.8674:

EA and Spotter wouldn’t be so stupid if the buffs they gave were actually in line with the power levels of other trait buffs.

I never claimed that everything was equally balanced. I agree, things like EA are way out of line with things like AA (percent conversion traits in general should go away), but that doesn’t inherently mean that things like EA need to be nerfed. A lot of traits provide extremely potent bonuses to the classes that they’re on, just many of them take vastly different forms.

Dinosaurs.8674:

Also class stacking is already a huge problem, I don’t see how changing class specific support buffs could possibly make it any worse.

Removing or overnerfing class-specific buffs for all classes would result in the average group being 10 of whatever DPS class has the biggest numbers and simultaneously gets all of the right boons (probably Guardian). Class diversity isn’t perfect right now, but at least we get a minimum of 4 distinct classes even in the most hyper optimized of groups.

Dinosaurs.8674:

There are only a small handful of such skills in the game, surely given enough time anet could come up with a decent way to implement them.

I won’t say anything for certain, but to do so would very likely alter playstyles and draw a lot of community ire as a result. They won’t and shouldn’t go for such massive overhauls. It’s OK for classes to have defined roles, with some of them being big offensive buffers. While I don’t love the particular implementation of things like banners or ranger spirits, I don’t think either making classes jump through hoops for the same buffs or removing them altogether improves the game.

While I agree that things like “Gain X power based on Y% of <OTHER STAT>” are too passive, I think things like Empower Allies or Spotter are nice class-defining buffs that strongly discourage class-stacking and add specialization value without blatantly changing the way you have to play the class. If every class just does a ton of damage, then class-stacking becomes a real problem.

They could always keep these buffs and tie them to other actions, sure, but that may not be practical and can result in a lot of them being good on paper and useless in practice. I also think hooking all of these buffs to actions would either interrupt the flow of a class or happen so easily that they might as well have stayed passive.

For instance, consider this option:

Empower Allies: Every time you strike with a burst skill, you grant Empower Allies (+150 power) to up to 5 nearby allies for 10 seconds.

That might sound ‘active’, but it’s really no better design than the passive mode because now it’s a risk if you get blinded/disabled and during normal play you have it permanently anyway. Functionally you’ve added no depth to the class, you’ve just made the trait harder to understand and easy to counter for no good reason.

Grace of the Land, however, is an example of it being implemented pretty well; the player is forced (even on DPS builds) to use a healing-based CA skillset to some extent as part of their rotation to achieve an even higher level of team support.

The problem is that if they took the GotL approach for core classes, they’d interrupt the flow of the class. What if suddenly, Elementalist gave damage bonuses to allies when they used water skills? Your DPS builds would end up feeling weird (and lots of people would complain) because they couldn’t just camp fire or alternate fire/air, and would have to balance some measure of water spam for team support. Elite specs, however, are a great place to do this because by definition they alter the playstyle of the class (and thus players are more receptive to the flow change).

Anyway, these are all things that I know ANet is thinking about. We need to think about them as well.

Sublimatio.6981:

isn’t the lack of it part of the design? it was designed to “be slow and selfish” which of course doesn’t work in this game

I don’t want to be pedantic about it, but if the necro were terribly designed then it would need a lot more than a few changes to be competitive. The reality, however, is that ANet has already proven that they can and will incorporate team support into the necromancer class (Vampiric Presence / BiP AOE Might / Transfusion / etc), they just need to do more of it and it needs to emphasize offensive support.

Sublimatio.6981:

necro is terribly designed. if it was decently designed, the problems it faces now wouldn’t be that severe

I disagree with this point in particular. The necromancer’s design is fine, it just needs meaningful offensive support and meaningful personal damage.

I disagree with the OP. The nightmare fractal is the best fractal I’ve ever seen, and explicitly includes mechanics (including trash mobs and side events) that cannot be stack-burned. For the record, stacking with your friends is a good strategy that will help a lot with introducing players to raids. Everyone yoloing a boss at max range with no boons and no buffs is bad to encourage in fractal design.

Humble Wishlist:
- Corrupting Aura Grants up to 5 nearby allies +150 expertise.
- Well of Corruption dealing the same damage as Well of Suffering
- Hugely reduce the aftercast on Greatsword autoattack chain
- Make Nightfall pulse blind and damage per second instead of every 2 seconds