Guild Wars 2

During the stream they mentioned multiple times burning will stack and that it will hit a lot less hard. In one of the tooltips it says burn does 1s/120 damage so it might be a third as powerful potentially. The burn stacking might cause a lot of issues for the ele.

The fire aura was already the weakest aura and I see this getting even weaker, I think that is why they made the fire aura from signet/conjure usage 5 seconds instead of 3 to make up for this potential nerf. If burn does a third of the damage the 1s burn attached to it suddenly becomes almost a non factor. They could make the baseline burn 2 seconds to make up for this decrease, the problem with increasing durations of auras is simple : aura durations don’t stack!

The active on fire signet could easily be overlooked as well. If the damage is cut in third im hoping fire signet does 3 stacks of burn instead of just 1. If the active remains 1 stack of burn after the burn change the entire signet becomes total trash.

Hopefully they don’t kitten these skills up when changing how burning works.

During the stream they mentioned giving some love to the two conjure weapons people never use.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Conjure_Earth_Shield

I’ll run down the list of skills in order and what I think should change.

1. The first two parts of the auto attack are just alright. The crippling shield attack, the 3rd segment, is simply awful. I would add another 2 stacks of bleed to the crippling shield part of this attack to make it somewhat viable to actually auto attack with. Most people do 2 bleeds/second condi wise anyways so 2 stacks on a .75 second sluggish attack seems very reasonable, the cripple doesn’t really do much and needs help.

2. The block has be bugged since launch and 1/2 the time it doesn’t do the bleed stacks. Overall the best skill on the weapon tho, increasing radius to 360 might help a little.

3. The surge is a fine skill, the cooldown is fairly long though at 12s.

4. Magnetic Shield needs a total rework, this skill is trying to do what they want taunt will do in the expansion so this is the obvious choice. Change this to an instant cast pbaoe taunt that gives protection for each person it hits, and it is suddenly a great skill.

5. The invuln on this skill is pretty terrible, make it so you can move around while doing it at least. The problem with the invulns like take root is if they are focusing you in pvp/wvw and you use these stationary invulns is that you suddenly get way out of position and end up dying because of it anyways.

Those are my thoughts, hopefully they fix the unloved conjure weapons finally.

Yeah I agree, they did make the cleansing fire trait better by making it trigger at 5 conditions instead of 3 now. That being said it is still pretty meh. The fire aura trait really boils down to how they rework burning damage/stacking. But yeah I think all 3 adept traits are stronger than all 3 master traits in fire :P

Blinding ashes is now GM trait worthy. The 5s icd before was around master tier in power level and this reduction to 3s is an 80% buff. Trait is very, very good now imo.

This game actually has very little cc spam compared to other pvp. You can’t get slept/rooted for 10+ seconds from single skills, most dazes/stuns in the game are 1-2s as they should be. Also the game has a great use of stunbreaks and instacast condi clear making counterplay, not to mention stability is still very strong. On my warrior which I have 1000+ hours only wvw in I really haven’t noticed any times where my stability stacks ran out because I was running through so much cc. 5 stacks is a lot.

You probably want to check out the sos website sosgw2.com and ask around in public chat. If you keep that chat window open people OFTEN post when it is open and it makes a dinging noise when people type.

Projectiles in this game are very wonky sometimes. The no line of sight error message occurs sometimes when it shouldn’t, it is a bug, but it isn’t game breaking, more annoying if anything. Not sure if this is gonna be fixed anytime soon.

The pirate ship meta imo is a good thing. It makes the game a lot more skillful as frankly it punishes blobs of guardian/warriors pressing all their buttons in a very low skill fashion. The pirate ship meta seems more chaotic and more like a roaming fight, which requires A TON more individual skill than the typical wvw encounter of push in a straight line with our melee blob.

The guy that mentioned stealth was correct. The best fights guild in the game still uses melee, prolly around 40%, but they engage in stealth everytime. Wanna keep playing your warrior? Find a good d/p thief to run with.

Just a crazy theory but what if anet’s determination of server population status is based on the strain that is on their servers and not based on the actual amount of players. If lets say dragonbrand’s server was running at 90%+ it might be considered full status. This might explain why even servers with very small populations are labelled as “very high” because we all know anet works the servers to the max all the time.

Hamster.4861:

I thought that PPT was fun, for the first thousand hours I played WvW. During that lovely time in EB, I learned to defend towers, how to siege enemy towers, and how to deal with zergs. I learned to command, and led the half afk mobs in a parade around the map taking things. We laughed, we loved, we danced on the bodies of our enemies as we took their things from them.

Then, in the second thousand hours, i got bored. I got tired of laying siege in the same places, stopping people from getting in the doors, and destroying ACs with focused meteor showers, getting pushed off by 5 ACs and endless siege spam. I still taught people the basics of WvW, i instructed new commanders, I recommended people watch youtube videos of WvW fights in order to be able to sustain in them. I started to understand what “Coverage” meant, as i found fewer and fewer commanders willing to take over when I tagged down.

By the third thousand hours, I was done PPTing. I was done pugmanding, i played WvW for the pleasure of playing with my friends and guild, improving on how we played and fought together as a group, and for the pleasure of outsmarting other commanders while fighting outnumbered, and GvGing some of the best players in the game. You play in the field, you win, and then you GvG with a top guild and die in 45 seconds. Its remarkably humbling to get outplayed like that. It reveals where your group, (or you, if you’re the commander) have weaknesses that your enemies capitalize on. I spent the third thousand hours improving our play, and teaching others. By this point, PPT is something that I did in between fights, just to have something to do.

By the fourth thousand hours, Guild raids are all that I played for anymore, my server had gone through bronze and silver, and been ground to dust by the population imbalance at the top of silver league. Our coverage was inferior in every time slot. If you didnt stay in structures you captured, you lost them in less than 15 minutes. If you stayed still in any place for too long, the enemy servers’ roaming fights guilds all converged on you, and you get blobbed to death by a multi-guild jam. Fighting an uphill coverage battle is fun when you have the right mentality for it, but it wears on people. Upgrading a keep all day is rather pointless when, an hour after you log off, the enemy servers are organized and fielding 4x the number of players that your server has available.

I enjoy reading a lot of your posts hamster! Props to holding down the fort in IoJ, I really hope the expansion brings some life into wvw, enough life to by time for anet to figure out how to fix some of the absurd server issues. <3

Yeah I have been trying to make sure I throw seige down slower to avoid the bug. It is still bugged though.

I have lost a bit of expensive seige that just seemed to vanish in my inventory, including omegas. Basically what happens is this:

1. Throw a piece of seige down from a far distance. Keep inventory open.
2. While the first piece of seige is in the air right click use another piece of seige.
3. The second piece of seige disappears.

This is a very annoying bug because good commanders try to get their seige down as fast as possible and if it just vanishes sometimes its very annoying. Wvw is already super unrewarding to command, if my seige that costs 1-3g just vanishes its a bit disheartening. Anyways hopefully this gets fixed!

Engineer is pretty unpopular even in the roaming world. Necros/rangers/engis are always targeted to be killed first due to their lower defensive skills. Yet engi’s can not do nearly as much burst as necros/rangers. Rangers are actually somewhat more durable with better condi clear and invulns, where as a lot of engi’s I see in wvw die within 5 seconds of being focused.

They really need to get rid of the crafting stations though. Pve players already are making WvW near impossible with the insane server population statuses, joining wvw to do the daily ruin achievement or craft and filling the map is absolutely absurd. Separate pve from wvw completely.

Sebrent.3625:

-33% Cripple/Chill/Immob duration
-40% Condition Duration Food
-25% Condition Duration from Melandru Runes

= -98% Cripple/Chill/Immob duration
= -65% Condition Duration

Can’t do anything to mitigate it either.
No boon stripping.
No waiting it out (they can just eat a bit more food … and runes and trait points don’t go away).

While I’ve taken advantage of this … I’ve always wondered how this could possibly be “balanced” for people to be able to mitigate conditions this way … particularly condition damage.

Heck, -65% on condition duration … that’s fairly ridiculous given that protection (which is strippable) is only -33% damage reduction, direct damage can’t be “cleansed”, and direct damage doesn’t have to deal with the current stack limitations.

Some stuff I hope that ArenaNet is keeping in mind moving forward with their discussions on making changes to Conditions in-game.

I think you are forgetting condi durations in this game are additive and not multiplicative. If you hit someone with a 100% duration immob that lasts say 8 seconds, and the target has -100% condi duration, they still get hit with a 4s immob. The way you counter this is adding condi duration to your soft cc’s. Gvg guilds have been doing this for years.

I bet actually most people that think this food is OP think that condi durations multiply instead of add. Also there is a condi duration cap of 100% already. Learn how condition duration works and these foods make a lot more sense.

imo the +40% condi duration food is in line with the power food in this game in terms of additional damage. for instance the +10% damage modifier on seaweed salad is often gonna give players that use damage modifiers +20% damage effectively.

the +40% condi duration even to a 100% condi class is probably gonna do around 20% or less extra damage effectively. how fast things are cleared in this game and other factors means +40% condi duration isn’t often used to the fullest.

For example, I have a 10s bleed, it is 14s with the food but on average the guy im attacking is dead/cleared it before the 10s mark so effectively that +40% is way smaller.

On the other hand the +10% damage modifier food is never effectively worse.

necro might be the best class in the game, even more powerful than guardians in big groups at the current state of wvw.

hey hamster, thanks for shouting out my guild PRAE. PRAE is the biggest roaming guild on the server, but there is also NoWo and HoA and ENVY and OP, roaming on sos is still very alive, some members that really like roaming join multiple roaming guilds just so they can get groups easier. the T2 roaming scene is very rough on solo roamers but 3-5 still has very good fights. I can hit you up in game, or you can add me as well. PRAE has a lot of great warrior roamers, 1 of the 3 guild leaders pretty much only plays warrior and knows the class incredibly well.

Leader in PRAE, the biggest roaming guild on SoS, ill give some tips. First you need to decide if you want your group to be agile or not, it sucks getting run over by zergs constantly if you are using slow classes. Your running a staff/hammer gaurdian so thats about as slow as it gets. Group stability isn’t important in roaming at all, however if your going slow group condi clear can be important. If your going staff on gaurdian id pick up AH for that group healing, its too good to pass up, period. Hollowed ground is bad, switch for purging flames if anything.

Cele stats are great in pvp, and less great in wvw, not enough spike damage at all. The thing about d/d ele’s is they are geat for the aoe damage and some group support but they dont provide the spike damage needed, and they are still weak vs spike.

That engi build kinda just looks like an easy kill, maybe switch to a full condi build to do more damage and be tankier, same thing tho engis cant hit for 10k+ if your using cele stuff.

Warrior hammer is very slow, often too slow for havoc fights, warrior greatsword is incredibly quick and good damage still. Both killshot and evis do the spike damage you need and if your running a super glassy warrior im not sure why your not setting up for either of those. I’d still probably run warbanner also.

General tips, even if your running a group with support guardian, you might wanna run builds that just tank up really well, and it seems like your running support guardian with glassy stuff which doesn’t make too much sense. If you wanna run support guardian in your comp, practice shadow refuge to retreat or your gonna get run over. All havoc groups need SPIKE damage, people hitting for 10k+ within a second, you know how you even the odds of an outnumbered fight? Kill 1-2 people super quick.

tldr: AH on gaurdian, id take greatsword>hammer, greatsword/rifle or greatsword,axe/shield for warrior and get warbanner, ditch the engi or make them go full dire condi perplex maybe swap in a necro instead, keep the thief thats fine, d/d ele is alright, maybe swap that out for something tankier also if your using a support guardian. practice spiking people down and killing them out of stealth, blast stealths with thief shortbow and engi smokefield or just start fights with shadow refuge.

bumping this one more time, hit me up if your a good dps war looking to get into wvw organized raids/gvgs

I originally thought that if your guild claimed something in wvw it would get guild influence per hour or per tick or something like that. It makes a lot of logical sense to me for that to be the case. There is already a system set up so the majority of people that flip a camp/tower/keep have dibs on claiming it, so there is already some build in anti-trolling system set up.

WvW is also fairly unrewarding so at least this way we can get guilds into the game taking pride on actually owning something, and it actually makes the whole game mode slightly more rewarding. Claiming stuff at the moment doesn’t have too much pride, you basically claim stuff for +5 to drain it then leave, so this changes that up a little.

What do you guys think?

bump it up!~ still looking for a good dps warrior for our guild comp

As the title says, Bad Guys Anonymous from Sea of Sorrows is looking for a really good DPS warrior. We are a fights guild in t2 that run during na prime, monday-friday from 8-10 pm est. We can help with the transfer if you are on another server.

Basically for our perfect comp to be complete we need a solid dps warrior to round out our main dps party to really elevate everyone elses damage as well.

We run 15-25 depending on the night, which is a good amount of fights on t2. We have some gvg experience but mostly just do open field fights. We require you make 3/5 nightly raids so were not super hardcore but we still wanna be at the top.

Hit us up in game or repsond here:

rocketmist.5436
ethoalmighty.7180
kingofspadesANV.4180

We have raid videos and stuff here and you can apply there also:
http://bga.shivtr.com/

some awesome new videos up on our website, still recruiting, got 17-18 people on last couple ngihts, need necros and gaurdians still to get our numbers up to 20-25. hit up our officers and we can help you get here for some awesome fights!

Very hard to play skill classes in ebg still, 5+ second lag spikes in a gamemode where you need to react to break stuns in .5 seconds or your dead is a little annoying.

Im a wvw player so im used to numbers higher, so the s would be lower. Anyways 10 was a lowball, its prolly closer to 20%. But my point being, its not nearly as helpful as a full power build, so having condi runes that stack might are gonna be worse than power runes that stack might, and the overall point was saying how bad the antitoxin runes were in general… theres so many runes in this game I legit have never even heard of someone using let alone trying, and theres a reason why.

It is still pretty fun when I pop my elite skill and do a sick rush attack on my ele, and it legit hits for 400-500 damage in wvw. Could use a change XD

Before I get into some notes I think gw2 dev’s tried to balance them with a framework like this, so each # bonus should theoretically be fairly balanced with each other runes same # bonus:

+25
+35 / 10% specific condi or boon duration
+50
+65 / 15% specific condi or boon duration or small bonus
+100
+125/ 20% specific condi or boon duration + bonus effect/ or effective 4% damage multiplier

But it breaks down pretty quickly into unbalance…

The superior runes of the trapper give +10% condition duration to all types of conditions as the 2 set bonus, where as the following only give a 10% bonus to one condition and nightmare and mad king only give 5%, trapper #2 bonus is far superior.

bleeding – afflicted/krait
burning – balthazar
chill – grenth
poison – orr
perplexity- confusion
tormenting – torment
nightmare/mad king 5%???

Nightmare and mad king gives 5% and trapper gives 10%… come on now, thats like having the #1 bonus be +50 strength on something instead of +25, absurdly unbalanced.

All the runes that give bonuses when you reach 20% hp need to be buffed. 20% hp is too low and the fights over 100% of the time at this point, considering only scrubs use these 20% hp runes at the moment because they are so bad.

Runes of earth – magnetic aura at 20% hp…
Rune of svanir – becoming a block of ice when at 20% hp… so immobolize yourself at 20% hp, cool, sounds like a benefit for your opponent.
Runes of orr – quickness at 20% hp…

Orr – I mean the #4 gives 50-100% poison uptime and the #6 gives quickness when your about to die, come on even the #4 is vastly more powerful than the 6 set bonus, its absurd.

Certain boons are more valuable than other boons, same with conditions yet they seem to have similar % bonuses.

Runes of the centaur giving +10% swiftness bonus is total crap for example where as +10% might/fury/protection/stability bonus is highly valued. How about balancing these numbers knowing that certain boons are more important!

Strength runes and aristocracy have the same 15% might bonus but strength runes have the additional might stacking element, clearly another example of the runes being imbalanced.

Hoelbrak gives -20% condi duration and antitoxin gives -12% for the number 6 bonus. Please give condi players a balanced anti-condi runeset, this one totally sucks and is imbalanced. Full condi players don’t give a crap about getting might because conditions scales so slowly with condition damage anyways, even a full 25 stacks is like barely 10% dps increase.

The specific condition duration bonuses are just totally useless for the most part due to conditions being hard capped at 100% bonus. Most condi builds hit this 100% duration (whether that is balanced or not is another question) so something that gives + condition duration for a specific thing literally does nothing vs most people.

We need a dev to step up and take responsibility for balancing the runes, which dev changed them last time? Is there any way to contact them again to get them to work on them some more? Is there any notes/confirmation anywhere that the dev’s mentioned how they balance the runes?

I just pointed out some eye-popping stuff, theres a lot more stuff that could use some more balancing in the realm of runes.

I used to fight a lot of XOXO guys being in a roaming guild in SoS [PRAE], these guys run true burst gank, not the ill banner your staff gaurdian meta XD. Very skilled group if your on the server and wanna learn how to have the most fun in wvw, check these guys out! Way more fun than k-train.

We had our first gvg vs [pvp] on monday and ended 2-3, but we already have made tons of improvement and I think we got a great shot at getting to the top! Come join this up and coming guild, we still need to fill up our melee train, need a highly skilled gank mesmer, and also need more necros!!!

Superior Rune of the Oasis
1) +25 healing power
2) +10% regeneration duration
3) +50 healing power
4) +15% regeneration duration; Outgoing healing effectiveness increased by 10%.
5) + 100 healing power
6) +20% regeneration duration; Dropping a banner creates a water field for 3s.

Rune of the Sandstorm
1) +25 condition damage
2) Blinded foes become weakened, 3s (10s icd)
3) +50 condition damage
4) Conditions are periodically removed while in a friendly sandstorm. (1 every 3 seconds)
5) +100 condition damage
6) Create a sandstorm when hit. (icd kitten

Superior rune of the Golden Scarab
1) +5% condition duration
2) Dodge rolling bleeds. (2 stacks for 5 seconds 180 radius)
3) +50 condition damage
4) The first condition to reach 5 stacks on you is transferred.
5) +100 condition damage
6) +5% condition duration; Activating a signet heals 1250 + .1(hp). Attain a golden aura.

Lol yeah, in wvw the fiery leap hits for me for at most 600 damage, after the 140% damage increase. Cool! I feel like it needs to at least do 1.5-2k damage to be better than an auto attack XD

Our gank team is filling fast, just got a top rated mesmer! Message me or one of the officers to join, we can still help with transfers!

nicely put, fun times on SoS now that we have fights all the time!

Had a great practice today with 16 people on at one point tonight, getting close to our goal of 20-25 active. Message me in game if you want more info or to join/try out for gank!

Durations add a ton more build diversity. Like I can make a warrior that just focuses on regen by trying to max out regen duration etc. The boon/condition system with the counterplay built in it one of the many reasons this games combat is awesome.

If your annoyed about boons, run some boon strip or something that converts boons.
If your annoyed about conditions, run some more condi clear, or -condi duration gear, or even transfers/converts.

We have some guild funds saved up to help people with transfers, if you are looking for an awesome tier and awesome wvv guild, let us know!

[BGA] on SoS is a new, up and coming fights oriented guild. We don’t have a real gvg history since were newer and fielding around 10-15 on a given night, still building roster, at 30ish now. We have our first gvg this Monday vs pvp. Let me know if your interested.

One of the things we could offer is probably full assistance transferring, pm me if your interested here or in game.

We are semi hardcore, and we are EST, but that just requires signing up for our site, using raid or modified raid builds, and raid from 8-10 est monday-friday, not super strict.

bump for awesomeness, lots of new videos up on the youtube channel

[BGA] on SoS is a new, up and coming fights oriented guild. We don’t have a real gvg history since were newer and fielding around 10-15 on a given night, still building roster, at 30ish now. We have our first gvg this Monday vs pvp, and our gank team def needs a mesmer, right now we have a couple thieves and a d/d ele. Let me know if your interested.

One of the things we could offer is probably full assistance transferring, pm me if your interested.

fast hands with runes of the warrior is 4 seconds no? That’s what they should set the icd too.

seems intended to me, your using an elite that does an attack so it should bring you outta stealth

Warrior holding the birthday gun makes them remove condis stupidly fast with brawler’s recovery. Fix this, put an icd of 4s on the skill or remove the gun from being able to be used in wvw, this is just like tonic abuse that used to happen.

http://www.twitch.tv/rocketmist/c/5346763

Three things

The first most glaring mistake. Your above the hard cap of 100% on your burn duration by a decent amount, seems like a huge waste considering your using a sigil and a trait for that, that’s an easy fix, simply change one of them.

Also shards of ice seems pretty meh considering vuln doesn’t effect condition damage, even as a very slow form of condi cover, but even then you’ll notice the burn gets cleared first.

Any condi build that doesn’t use giver’s weapons is severely gimping themselves.

Anywho good build! Good to see more interesting builds in these forums.

Yep pretty neat idea, what about firey greatsword though? Just separate like normal?

meh I hate undead runes, condi damage scales so poorly, the best scaling condi in the game which is burning only scales at 0.25 so a 6 that just adds more condition damage is really meh, and rune sets with stats on the 4 are pretty meh. access to another condition to cover + doing a ton of damage, you really should save up for perplexity runes, the runes alone might be 30-50% your damage on a d/d condi build.

good condi builds imo have the following things:
(at least 2 of the 3 things as your main source of damage)
-100% burn uptime
-5+ confusion stacks
-10+ bleed stacks (or torment as a mesmer)

High condition duration is a must imo, a lot of people run 100%, if your traitline gives you the 30%. For burn to round up you need at least 87%.

And good condi cover in the forms of vuln/cripple/poison/chill

Does defiant stance negate any cc effects while its active, like fear/stuns/dazes etc?

I’m going to defend immobilize for a second. As someone that knows conditions very well it is one that actually isn’t so easy to reapply. Yes there are some fairly long immobs in this game like a triple devourer venom which could lead to like 10s of immob. But after condi clear its not like a thief can just do it again. Throw bolas and the immob signets have fairly long cooldowns and the spammable immobs from weapon skills and adapt traits are all very short duration.

Unlike cripple and chill immob is good because it stops people from rolling and is often followed by burst. The immob itself doesn’t do damage obviously and doesn’t stop you from attacking in most cases if you can react quickly.

Most classes have skills that can eat a burst even when immobed. Signet of stone/distortion/endure pain/mist form any blink still can usually escape as well. There are – condi duration runes, you should probably try them, and theres also – condi duration skills/traits on warriors/gaurds, and if your playing wvw theres also – condi duration food. Feel free to use that.

Also suggesting a runeset that gives immunity to anything is a bad idea and should not be how a game is balanced. There should be counters but not total immunity counters, that would just make the game too much like rock-paper-scissors.

Also, does the regen duration determined by the warrior or the receiving player?

I’m new to warrior, sorry for the basic question.

Does the regeneration given from the GM trait inspiring battle standard scale off the warrior’s healing tower to everyone or does it go off the receiving player’s healing power.

Thank you!