Guild Wars 2

How do you even get “Another Goo Puddle”? I tried tanking all of his abilities, but nothing seemed to trigger it. My next guess was to stand underneath his spawn spot like Claw of Jormag and Shatterer’s squish achievement, but I haven’t tried that yet.

• Raids are great.
• I have a casual static guild group and I pub weekly to fill the gaps of missing boss kills.
• I help with training runs and get lots of newer people with the right attitude kills.
• No changes need to be made to the overall way raids are done in GW2. Thanks raid team.

Blanche Neige.7241:

Why don’t you use your official forum for that instread of a third party website?

Because Reddit is a vastly superior medium for that kind of discussion compared to a forum.

Just do Escort. Seriously, it’s easier than Dragon’s Stand. There are only three things you need to know:

• Don’t let Wargs get to Glenna
• Don’t walk inside the red circle of a land mine
• Leave one enemy alive on each tower to prevent them from respawning

There you go! If you need a friend (NA) to help you through it, whisper me when you try to run. I don’t fundamentally object to splitting raid masteries off, but it is an extremely easy thing for anyone to get around.

See this thread for an official answer to this issue.

Blaeys.3102:

Goldfox.5729:

OnizukaBR.8537:

This topic again ? Let me show you how to use the search tool on the forum.
Here you can see this same topic already beat to death, and answered/locked by the Devs:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/An-issue-raids-and-their-accesibility/page/5#post6389189
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-problem-solutions/first#post6389222
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Making-tiers-in-Raids-like-fractals/page/5#post6390112

So there is nothing more to discuss and this topic should be locked.

If there’s so much debate about it then maybe it should be considered instead of locked down.

This.

It is pretty evident that this topic isn’t going away anytime soon. Even outside of the more vocal advocates like myself, it has a tendency to naturally appear in other subforums as people take a more critical look at raids and how they fit in the game.

Just because a ton of players keep asking for something (ie. Open World Dueling) doesn’t mean it should be implemented. See this post for all of the well-documented reasons why this shouldn’t be implemented.

That’s true, my previous post was assuming you already had the crafting discipline at 500. If you don’t and only need a few pieces, it could be worth it to use the Fractals vendor.

Good post, and I agree with a lot it, but there are some things I disagree with:

• Hall of Monuments stuff should never be unlockable with a GWU.
• Any skin associated with an active achievement (ie. Luminescent Armor, SAB Green/Yellow Backpacks, etc) should never be unlockable with a GWU

Boon sharing is far from the problem, the problem there is actually that so few classes get access to boons in the necessary quantities to compete with big league hitters like PS Warrior (Might) or Mesmer (Quickness+Share) or even Druid (Protection/Fury). If you removed the ICD on Herald’s Shared Empowerment, made Impossible Odds AOE Quickness, or did something along those lines you could do wonders for boon diversity in raids.

• Always buy ascended anything with raid tokens first, as those actually save money.
• The Fractal vendor is more expensive in every possible way than just crafting your ascended gear.

I don’t care if it’s rehashed or whatnot, I am extremely excited for the new Fractal because the ambiance is unique and it offers us a chance to see more S1 LW content that we would (realistically) never see otherwise.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

also: Scarlet Hologram fractal when, that kitten was absolutely amazing and would easily be a good encounter to rework as a stepping stone for raids with the mechanics it had. On top of that the music and whatnot.

Scarlet Hologram boss Fractal would be pretty much amazing.

• PvE rewards should stay in PvE.
• WvW rewards should stay in WvW.
• PvP rewards should stay in PvP.
• All game modes should have more exclusive skins (armor/weapons) that encourage players to play the respective game modes.

Moving PvE rewards to PvP or PvP rewards to PvE is a bad idea, and encourages players to tunnel-vision their preferred game mode and get all rewards that way. It also muddies the prestige of skins because you have no idea where a person got said skin if it’s available in multiple game modes (This is why HoT legendaries are not available in the ToL, for instance). ANet wants to encourage players to be playing multiple game modes for more time so that all game modes have solid player bases. ANet should never have moved dungeon rewards to PvP, and I believe they recognized that mistake after the fact and won’t do it again.

Anyway, these are some reward tracks that I want:

• Repeatable reward track that rewards Black Lion Keys and Mystic Coins
• Repeatable reward track that replaces Tomes with Transmutation Charges and rewards a Makeover Kit at the end
• Repeatable reward track that incorporates new skins exclusively for PvP

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

How many people do you think hate the idea of new races? People are saying it’s not a realistic business decision on ANet’s part: huge expense, small benefit to the community.

I’d be really interested to know just how unrealistic a business decision it is. Would you pay USD $20 for the Tengu, the Domain of Winds, and the 1-30 personal story to go with it? I would, and that’s 1/3 of an expansion right there in price.

The biggest challenge, though, would be the armor sets and making sure they look tolerably good on the new race. Considering the state of ANet’s armor development speed (1 armor set every 9 months), they probably just don’t have the available resources to support a new race. This means, to me, that humanoid races may actually be more likely than bestial races (rip Tengu) simply because they’d be so close to what we already have in body structure.

I really wish I could be a fly on the wall for one of the meetings where they discussed this topic.

I get that a new race isn’t new ‘content’ so it probably doesn’t fit the bill of whatever ANet plans on doing at this stage of the game’s development, but I’d pay good money for a new race. I’d pay $20 – $30 no problem for a new race, a new personal story from levels 1-30, and a new city only accessible to people who bought the DLC.

Bleh, alright. So with some more practice I hit 31.7k while missing 2% from infusions (according to [qT]) and 2% from using a cheaper food. Altogether that would put me at a pretty clean 33k, which is a far cry better than the 28k I had before, but still pretty far off from a 38k average. I noticed in the [qT] video that Flame Burst is being used basically off cooldown. Is that being used to interrupt the aftercast on Fireball? I also think that some part of what I’m messing up is that I’m casting Ice Bow 4 while Meteor Shower is still going on, which removes the Seaweed Salad modifier from Meteor Shower. I think based on the video that [qT] is autoing in air until MS finishes and then uses Frost Bow.

I guess I’ll just keep grinding the numbers, but after about 2 hours it isn’t improving any and it’s surprising that I’m as much as 15-20% off from the target still.

Dinosaurs.8674:

28k is way too low to the point that you have to be making a mistake with the settings. Double check that you have all the relevant buffs on, including things like 5 stacks of gotl (not just 1) and make sure you actually apply 25 vuln instead of just 1 stack.

[…]

This is all really good advice. I know I’m not messing up my autos (I have been watching carefully for that), but I was thinking I might be missing canceling aftercasts or some trick like that. I’ve heard some mention about that on Reddit

Is it really 5 GotL stacks? [qT]‘s website says 3. I actually think I may have been using 2 like the old setup with Revenant. Let me just spell out my test cases here in case something glaring comes up. I already know that I’m missing the 10% modifier from burning and at least 1 GotL stack, so that’s 13% right there.

• 25 Might
• Fury
• Quickness
• 25 Vulnerability
• Alacrity
• Banners (Strength/Discipline)
• Empower Allies
• Spotter
• 2 Grace of the Land
• Frost Spirit
• Food/Utility

Anyway, I’ll keep at it.

Sheesh. I spent a few hours the other night really trying to hone my rotation on staff Ele, and I still can only realistically hit about 28k on a large hitbox. I don’t have power infusions, sure, but there’s no way it contributes that much damage. When comparing with the [qT] rotation builds, for some reason staff Ele is the only class where I can’t make within 5% of the expected value on average. Is there some trick that I’m missing here?

P.S. I realize you’re using FGS for damage in this rotation, whereas I didn’t because I was comparing with [qT]‘s rotation. This is what I’m comparing against: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpYbtb5mSFg&feature=youtu.be&t=108

This is my setup: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XCNNgVPAmNAcYiFBALIAUAOACXySQKwN1ObztA-ThBBAB5pDoS1fC4BAAwFA4MlgYt/o8jUADMGA-e

EDIT: Now that I’m thinking about it more, I actually think I only put Vulnerability on the golem and didn’t give it burning. That would account for a 10% multiplier I’m missing.

This is a good change, and I say that as someone who has already completed both limited duration achievement sets before this was announced.

Nina.4317:

You should change the mecanics:

It must have 3 or 5 rounds.
The round ends when 1 team is eliminated.
No respawn.

Came here to say this. If this one change were made, Courtyard would be awesome and I would absolutely want it back. It’s critical that we remove the “trickle killing” and spawn camping that can happen currently.

cranos.5913:

I see a lot of people ask for a nerf to PS. While I’m all for creating options and I don’t think there should be just one master class at stacking might I sincerely doubt it’s going to solve anything.

“A single class should not be able to stack 25 might.”

To be fair, the true strength of a Warrior isn’t PS, it’s EA and Banners. The fact that the Warrior also generates all might for the team is just icing, really. If we didn’t have that, it’d revert a lot of stuff to the old dungeon style where all fields but fire are banished and Eles are generating might via blast finishers. Either way, Warrior won’t stop being mandatory.

If they want to make other classes relevant, they need strong DPS boosting utility traits like Spotter/EA/GotL on other classes that compete in efficacy with a Warrior and a Druid and a Mesmer. Only then will you see some interchangeability.

It’s an awesome time with great play overall, but feels pretty cheesy that the tank abused the gliding glitch.

TexZero.7910:

I’m not saying i encounter it frequently anymore either, maybe 1 in 10 runs, but it can happen and when it does….. literally nothing will cause it to move. Not the lava font, Not even the Retrievers whose sole purpose it is to take the core back.

I had this happen to me last Friday. It’s always that same spot in the arena, too. Might it be a terrain or pathing map blip or something? I’ve avoided the issue by pushing it around this specific spot.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I dunno that 50 relics/day is anything to write home about, after the cost of acquiring the Reliquary.

While I agree, I still think the better solution here is to make the reliquary more widely available apart from the Fatebreaker collection and to make it a relevant usage of fractal relics. The ley-line matter energy converter, for instance, is a great sink for HoT currencies because lots of great things like lodestones, T6 fine materials, obsidian shards, and more show up in it frequently. In that vein, you wouldn’t want the reliquary spawning infusions (and thus give free relics) when ANet actively tried to remove those infusions with a recent patch.

Rednik.3809:

Proof that raids, when being only repeatable content released, are killing game population due to being badly tuned for majority of players?
http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/earnings.aspx
Here, feel free to read.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Correlation does not imply causation.

Raids could be wildly successful and actually contributing to increasing their revenue and player base, and yet those numbers could still indicate that overall there is a net loss due to other reasons. Your ‘proof’ substantiates nothing. Anyway, not going to argue it further.

Nuka.6701:

I wouldn’t really call it a Fractal Relic sink, as it generates more relics than it uses. +5 simple infusions show up quite commonly, which can be purchased for 25 relics and exchanged for 75 relics.

They should probably replace those with regular +5 infusions or remove them entirely. It’s very likely they just forgot with the AR change patch.

Rednik.3809:

Before introducing raid content my guild had like 20-30 constant online (with 300+ members, a lot of them are playing since game release) during any EU primetime. Yesterday we barely had 10 to do guild activities, where majority of people are supposed to log in. And situation is not getting any better, because no clear promises about new content were made, and no promises about different approach to raids either. But hey, we got a new raid wing announcement.

Correlation does not imply causation.

CptAurellian.9537:

You’re right about his invuln phase. But then there were the nerfs to attack frequency and some other things, which I was talking about.

They only really changed the way he chains skills together to prevent him from doing crazy things that left him open for minutes of ranged DPS. The rest of it was bug fixing, making the Oakheart champs less stupid, and reducing Bloomy’s melee hate so people wouldn’t feel compelled to range all the time. Only other thing you might consider a nerf is slower projectile speed, but it was such a small reduction that you can barely notice (especially in close range). In many cases, the ‘nerfed’ parts of Bloomhunger’s encounter were given higher damage to keep them threatening. You can remind yourself of all of the changes here.

I disagree with a lot of points in the OP, but that’s fine.

• In my opinion, raids have been nothing but positive for the game. A number of people in my guild, for instance, actually log in more than 5 minutes a week now because raids are their favorite in-game content. ANet should consider raids a great success.
• ANet should never make open world content hard. Look at HoT’s marginally medium difficulty maps and the level of complaints they engendered. Open world content and story content should always be easy.
• ANet’s current tangential story approach to raids is great, and I hope they continue it going forward.
• Complaints about the “meta” are crazy in my opinion; I have beaten every single raid boss with non-meta builds and non-meta compositions in every single patch context since they’ve come out. If you’re worried about pub groups, there is literally nothing ANet could do to get rid of the idea of a “meta” from the way players play games.

Warcry.1596:

Personally I find the issue of what the challenge is. Fractals does it better, where the mechanics are harder and more punishing than just a DPS race under a timer. That’s just my thoughts and really hope they take it into consideration for future raid content.

I yolo fractals daily and it’s a snoozefest because of how easy it is. Raids actually maintain my attention because single mistakes can kill teams. They are already heading in the right direction with the changes to Swampland by making the content more raid-like and actually providing an introduction to the complexity of raid mechanics in a dialed back context.

Kruhljak.2705:

It should be added to the new Guaranteed Wardrobe Unlock, just like several other high-value items already have been. It’s a rare skin, so it fits the stated criteria of the GWU drop list.

This.

Crafting materials that form the core of exotic armor crafting should never be as expensive as T6 leather currently is. It has completely gutted a new player’s ability to get armor in a progressive and explorable way and forces them to get it by other means instead (if they’re even savvy enough to know about other the methods). Regardless of how logical its price is based on faucets/sinks, the point is that it needs to change and ANet is being naive and downright malicious in ignoring it.

CptAurellian.9537:

The nerf to Bloomy afterwards was unnecessary.

No, it was a very good change. Now the invulnerable phases have durations dictated by how fast you kill the adds, which is vastly superior to just sitting around for 2 minutes waiting for it to be over.

1. Watch videos of the fights, then start your own training runs and open LFGs for them.
2. Look in the Looking For forum for raid guilds that do training. There are a lot of them.
3. Stalk the LFG while doing other content and join any training runs that pop up. I see at least a half-dozen every night on NA for an assortment of bosses.
4. Get as many people from your guild together who want to learn raids (even if you can’t get 10), and open a training run LFG to find others.

After any of these result in you getting enough practice and/or some kills, then just join normal runs that don’t have hard LI requirements and keep going. That’s what I did and it worked well.

[VZ] is still recruiting!

We still have guild missions, guild events (hide and seek!), 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’re interested in learning raids and are willing to have me dictate your builds / gear to some extent, please let us know!

It’s actually supposed to be a Fractal encounter that serves as a training ground for raids, so it looks like they did a good job by your description! I agree, I think the new Swamp is fantastic.

P/P could be pretty competitive if ANet improved Pistol 2 to actually have some kind of utility. Even something like this could completely change the skillset to be really valid:

Ground Shot: 2 initiative. Shoot the ground at your feet, dealing medium AOE damage and executing a blast finisher at your location.

Liverpaul.4719:

You can geht the normal/silver fractal weapons for 20 pristine fractal relics from a vendor in the hub.

The pristine relics are from the different daily chests, so they are limited to get every day.

Edit: 20 relics each weapon.

This is correct, but note that you must have completed Level 50 Mai Trin to unlock the ability to purchase them from the vendor. This is associated with an achievement.

Silv.9207:

Other strong PvE condi builds better than necromancer:
Ranger shortbow, Engi pistol, Condi Warrior (sword F1 spam fire projectiles…I mean…), scepter Mesmer, burn Guardian, mallyx Revenant. I don’t know about eles but they’re not really focused on condition damage. Also a thief D/D can inflict more condition damage than a necro in some situations.

• An engi spamming pistol skills only is weaker than a necro.
• A ranger spamming shortbow skills only is weaker than a necro.
• A condi warrior ignoring longbow is weaker than a necro.
• I already addressed the proper mesmer condition build above.
• A condi guardian ignoring the consecration AOE field burns is weaker than a necro… and is probably weaker than a necro even with it.
• A condi revenant both relies on combo fields and is weaker than a necro anyway.
• D/D thief relies on caltrops AOE fields for higher DPS than a necromancer.

All of the classes you mentioned with higher PvE condition DPS than a necromancer rely on enemies standing in fields to achieve that level of DPS. Engineer fire bombs, warrior longbow F1, ranger torch 5, etc. Furthermore, all of these things are without addressing the exponential DPS growth that multiple epidemics offers.

Silv.9207:

About range, ranger, mesmer, warrior (LB, expecially traited), engi, guardian, they all have 900 or more range to hit the enemy with conditions.

The only one of these classes that offers respectable condition DPS numbers beating a Necromancer when camping max range is Engi, and that’s before epidemic. The Necromancer loses minimal DPS overall from missing RS4 when camping range.

Silv.9207:

And… what do you mean for “safe condition dps”…?

If you die on a Necromancer in instanced PvE, you’re either playing it wrong, you screwed up a mechanic, or your whole team is dead and you don’t know how / can’t solo whatever you’re fighting.

Silv.9207:

Anyway that don’t make any sense, a high range is already a safe place for condi dps.

Sure, and Necro does it best in PvE.

Cecilia.5179:

That’s exclusively PvE meta. Thief, Mesmer, Ranger, Warrior, and Engineer have condi builds that do more damage than necro and don’t rely on people standing still in combo fields, and they are pretty common in WvW.

You’re correct, I am strictly speaking about PvE. Epidemic is irrelevant in PvP/WvW, and other classes have better sustain versus CC, better disengage, and an easier time landing their strongest attacks. Furthermore, in PvP/WvW different DPS conditions like torment and confusion are actually vastly superior to how they perform in PvE. So, yes, if you’re talking about other areas of the game you are correct.

P.S. I noted that in my previous post if you care to go back and read it again!

Cecilia.5179:

Other condition builds have better dps without combo fields too. Also, we have to spin rs 4 in an ice field or poison field to maximize our damage.

Only we have to stand in the ice field to maximize RS4 DPS. The enemies can move out of the field, so it alleviates a lot of difficulty. You can easily plan the RS5 field sufficiently to hit any raid boss even while moving without missing a chilling bolt.

Competitive PvE Condition Builds:

• Ranger > Torch Fire Fields
• Warrior > Longbow Fire Fields
• Engineer > Bomb Kit Fire Fields

Less-Competitive PvE Condition Builds:

• Thief > Caltrops Fields
• Guardian > Consecration Fire Fields
• Elementalist > Fire Fields

The only other condition builds out there are…

• Mesmer, which is only good against single targets without adds due to phantasm reliance
• Revenant, which is extremely bad due to undertuning but still relies on Mace fire field for damage

Necromancer is in the unique situation where it has Epidemic, 900 range, safe condition DPS, and no worthwhile enemy-must-stay-in-field reliance. Because of these two things, it will never be tuned to be particularly strong.

I agree on a few points, and disagree on others. The idea that exotic quality skins are excluded makes sense to me because regardless of cost, they want all players to go through (for example) the TP or the Mystic Forge to get things like Infinite Light. They clearly didn’t apply this logic to the minipets, though, but I’m generally OK with that because those items have limited supply and are otherwise no longer available.

That all said, I am in favor of items that are current achievement awards not being included in the list… The Clockheart shouldn’t be available, but I’m OK with Scarlet’s helmet being available. I also think the Molten Jetpack should be added and things like the Bazaar Catchers / Zephyr Rucksack / Desert Rose / etc.

It’s hard to put into words any real specific ruleset as to what I think belongs and what I think doesn’t belong. I imagine ANet struggled with this too.

I actually really love the idea of bringing back random skins to the achievement boxes. I don’t necessarily need a ton of them, but even just 1 for every achievement box would be awesome!

Ranael.6423:

In fact I am super jealous because while we regularly kill Gorseval in my guild, it always finishes during the last World eater beyond the enrage timer, with updrafts…
And people keep on talking about fine details about rotations… there is obviously something wrong with us when you see that not good rotations may lead to a kill.

It’s funny you say that! My guild oftentimes has similar situations, though it’s usually a one-shot so I don’t mind. We actually insist on using updrafts because my guild’s Chronomancer really likes tanking and having the job of pulling Gors to a wall.

Ranael.6423:

#RaidsAreAccessible

I mean yeah, they won even in spite of that personal failure! I’d call that accessible!

Mana Vortex.7543:

Hands up anyone who has a full set?

Nobody?

QED

I have the full Hellfire set currently, and wear it proudly.

Chris McSwag.4683:

The solution to the problem is players putting effort into learning and adapting rather than competing to write the longest posts on the forum about how raids should be easier or how they somehow are completely inaccessible(they aren’t but will take dedication) or full of toxicity.

+1

Tornupto.2304:

Oh. My. God.
That tempest is hilarious. Did he really spam signet of fire, didn’t use lavafont and meteor off cd and even spammed ice bow #1?

I almost didn’t believe you until I watched the video myself. That Tempest is painfully bad.

Like I said earlier, you can keep Fatebreaker very expensive, but the Reliquary needs to be obtained in another way because it is a Fractal relic sink and functionality that most players cannot even get.

Shadowstep.6049:

There is however problem with whole – thief dps comes mainly from AA.

This is actually not true. D/D uses CnD + BS constantly, whereas the optimal DPS rotation for Staff actually involves spamming detargeted WC with camera aimed into the ground. Furthermore, if you ever have to dodge slightly out of position on Staff due to raid mechanics, then Vault becomes a solid DPS gain.

Heibi.4251:

Good of you to notice that. What a great observation.

Just so you know what you think isn’t true for everyone either. And I’m sure that once people who start hitting the cap begin to realize that they are now limited they’d want the cap lifted. Probably more than don’t.

• Suggests to have a poll limited to people who have hit the cap
• Rejects an opposing opinion by someone who has hit the cap
• Presumes to know what the general population who have hit the cap think without any actual proof

Have a nice time in the rest of this thread.

Heibi.4251:

Like someone said, this isn’t a competition.

How you view it isn’t true for everyone.

draxynnic.3719:

While I’d love it myself, I think the concern is that people might use it for matchfixing to farm PvP rewards

GW2 actually already has a system in-place that combats this. If a match is ‘too short’ you get proportionally reduced rank points (and thus rewards) for how short it is. You can already see this in effect if a team gives up and AFKs at base for a 500-0 win.