Guild Wars 2

Wyre.7458:

Kal-Spiro-9745 You made a good point about the holograms, but mostly you have a very unique point of view and I’m not surprised that you are unsatisfied because you are obviously very picky. :P
For example, who doesn’t pvp?
I just hope you don’t make a thread every time a game makes you unsatified, eventually you could have your own forum category.

Me neither. I mean I’ll zerg it up in WvW with the server now and again but actual s/tPVP? Haven’t ever touched it.

You cannot easily farm two stacks in an hour. You run into diminishing returns. I hit diminishing returns in under half an hour and started getting a single taffy for each holo mob.

I just do not get how to be any good at this game. My win rate is more like 10-20% I reckon.

Niyo.5920:

@Cameirus: About the exploit: Maybe ArenaNet hadn’t thought that a lot of players are such unfair idiots that they started to try how to exploid in the first minutes of the patch. ArenaNet should think better about the bad side of the people. As sad as this is.

What’s your point? Do you think he exploited his way to a weapon skin and then came back to complain about it?

A lot of helms/hats delete traces of ANY hair whether facial or not. Sadface.

I only partially agree. I mean yes, people have a month to do things but that doesn’t mean the holos are a particularly good idea. It just means people have a month to make up for the fact the idea is bad. Why is it bad? Because as it’s currently implemented, it goes against the design philosophy everywhere else in GW2 wherein other players you run into incidentally on the field are partners rather than competitors.

As for RNG, I’m not sure the ones in the gem store are a particularly friendly practice either. Gambling preys on some pretty fundamental human psychology and telling problem gamblers to “grow a spine and have willpower” is not exactly the best way to do things. I’d rather not see GW2 become a casino or if it does, I would at least like a free bunny girl mini.

Guys, bear in mind these are just skins. The dragon wing skin in particular is pretty meh in any case so I won’t be going for it and someone else will inevitably have my (and many other people’s) leftover taffies before the end. I actually think this is handled rather well because it’s strictly a mark of rarity – it’s not an item you need for stats nor IMO an essential fashion skin. I’d rather they hide this behind a grind/pay wall than if it were a bathing suit, a legendary armour piece, or a new fanservicey medium pants.

There’s a great deal of theory available on how to deal with the events but in practice, any open world event is going to be dominated by mob mentality. You can see this even in much smaller events like the Infinity Coil Commander – for a group of 3 people who know how he works, the fight is simplistic but you would see that boss reset again and again because when they aren’t formally coordinated, people either don’t know or don’t care about the mechanics. IMO, the events are neither “easy” nor “difficult” nor “close to impossible” unless you’re an officer in a big guild that actually has some pull; difficulty implies that you can do anything about it. I can’t look at the uncleared Temple of Grenth and go “Hey, I need that PVT Karma gear and I know how he works, so I’m gonna go do it.” Events like Grenth and Balthazar are simply so big that you, personally, have basically no influence on the outcome. On Sanctum of Rall, the Temple of Grenth, at least, does get cleared once in a while but I haven’t seen Balthazar open in quite some time. This could simply be because Grenth supplies the popular PVT gear that gets some groups interested while Balthazar’s PTC gear is a lot less used and known.

Take a look at most of the armour in the game and you’ll note that:
1) It’s not tiny or full of glowy whatsits, so it’s not Asuran.
2) It’s not made of leaves; not Sylvari.
3) It’s not made of fur; not Norn.
4) It’s not covered in spikes; not Charr.
Hence, most of the clothing and armour anybody wears, is actually Human. Divinity’s Reach is the Tyrian capital of fashion and there is no way I would be born anywhere else. Let them insult our past, let them insult our politics, but they will never insult our tailoring.

When Primordus comes up through the Great Collapse and calls the lack of Cantha to account, we will be there to defend the Tailoring station to the last drop of blood and they Elder Dragons will know that the tide has turned.

A bunch of humans!

Matsune Hiku

My warrior. 15char

Probably should’ve started posting in these threads ages ago.

While Necromancers are not “weak” in an absolute sense, it’s true they are “less strong”. If you’re looking for raw power and crit damage, roll a warrior. Especially if you think you’ll be doing a lot of PvE, it’s virtually impossible to be conversant in it without having a warrior alt anyway.

I dunno if I agree on that. Dungeons give decent gold in my experience and it doesn’t tkae that many runs to make up what I want. What I would maybe like is a system to exchange tokens between players. I don’t know how it would work but I have a friend who really likes Caudecus even though I hate it and have no use for its tokens. None of my pals run Arah and someone else is the only one who really wants HotW etc. It’d be nice to be able to exchange tokens with friends so we’re motivated to run them with each other irrespective of gear choices.

I was stuck in there too, until well after I’d established that it was crap. I will be so upset if I find out I have to slog through this to get rewards.

Armour is so unequal. Winged looks better than everything else.

Ayrilana.1396:

You seriously can’t tell me that the devs meant for people to stack on berserker and auto/afk attack him?

You are driving me nuts. If you’re trolling, you win. Of course I seriously can! There’s a pile of other bosses where you’re meant to do this exact thing! Moreover you are taking damage from him because as someone pointed else he’s still doing melee flurries at you. And no, just because I’m underneath the boss when he lands is not a good reason for anyone to think it’s an exploit. GW2 is a game where you can be on fire while underwater. You can chill ice elementals. Your logic doesn’t compute.

My fundamental argument is that sexism is awful but screw it, this is a game. Take my money and make sexy leather armour.

Retaliation is grossly inferior to regeneration but Myrm is correct in that we already have multiple ways to keep Regeneration up all the time. Necromancers are not dead weight despite what people claim but they are non-optimal – there is no dungeon run that benefits from having one in lieu of another class.

Anyhow, that’s all besides the point. A Water Field doesn’t provide regeneration on blast, it creates an AoE burst heal. However, (continuing with the theme of Necromancers having the least positive traits of anybody) there is no unconditional way of setting it off. Even putrid mark requires something to trigger it.

Make no mistake, the staff is essential but it doesn’t mean you have to keep it equipped.

When you’re doing dungeons, WvW or even open world pve, people will expect you to have a staff in your inventory and I think that’s quite a reasonable expectation. The 1200+ range is critical as are its control and support options. Just keep a decent – yellow – staff on you at all times.

Ranger! Take the Ranger! Good grief, run while you still can!

JonPeters.5630:

Ok we found a good repro case. It has to do with how death shroud and downed used to interact. I will get someone on it today and try and get a fix to you all asap.

Thank you!

I’m just past being angry and just kind of find it comedic. The thing is, the fewer players play Necros, the less incentive there is to actually maintain the class and then the fewer players play Necros. Whereas if you have one or two woobie classes then you keep the other classes happier because they’ll never be bottom rung.

Roll an alt, I say.

Edit: Then again, they did just acknowledge our downed hp problem. Maybe there’s hope yet! Flagellates self

Ayrilana.1396:

You stack on Alpha since it’s easier to rev players and break the crystal prison. It also stops him from casting dragon tooth which he casts on ranged players. You don’t negate the damage because he doesn’t cast it. The rock attack does more damage the further out you are. Another reason logically melee him.

You’re complete missing what I stated in my previous posts. It’s an exploit if the attack does zero damage when it should be. I don’t see how anyone would think that standing on the location of the stomp and receive no damage as being legit.

I don’t understand what your definition of “should” is besides your own arbitrary opinion. Standing in the middle of a circular boss attack is one of the most time honoured video game mechanics since at least the shooters and platformers of the late 80’s. You don’t take damage from the stomp’s shockwave because the center is not part of the attack’s hitbox.

Vargamonth.2047:

Full zerkers is probably the best choice when you are good/experienced enough to survive with it. It can also be better, survivality wise, than a more defensive approach on many encounters if all your party happens to be damage focused.
From my point of view however, a casual player is not usually going to have a regular dungeon group. He is going mainly to PUG, adn if he is the only one on full damage gear, the killing speed boost is not going to cover by itself the survivality he leaves behind.

Exactly but since there’s nothing in the dungeons to teach anything, people look online and guess who writes the guides. That’s the problem, people who are experienced follow a diametrically opposed gearing strategy than what would be adviseable for someone trying to learn. This is not a problem I’ve encountered in any other MMO. It’s the result of mechanics that are usually incredibly shallow once you know what they are.

Ruruie
Profession: Necromancer
Traited: Power/Support
Experience: Paths 1-3
Time: Available a few nights weekly. No regular schedule.
Other: I am bad at running through mobs solo and need to make significant reslots before some of the runs. Thankfully, I also have other toons, including a War.

Vargamonth.2047:

People that is having issues with dungeons (not on the first try, that issues are expected for a large amount of players) should probably try a more defensive gear/trait setup until they feel confortable enough to give up some survivality and start increasing their damage output.

Here’s another problem. Conflicting information. The first suggestion someone sees when trying to find information about dungeon gear online is to go full zerker. We have a situation in GW2 where taking advice from hardcores – the main transmitters of knowledge – actually hurts your chances of success.

IMO, all you really need in Easy Mode is to have an NPC fairy that pipes up with an annoying voice with a hint interspersed with “Hey! Listen!” Like in CoE with Alpha, all you need is someone to make an offhand comment about his powerful ranged AoE and how we need to get in close. The stuff that Trahearne says during battle with Blightghast would be perfect. That’s all it would need. Then, throw in Hard Mode with more of the same rewards as now.

Mind you, don’t hide content like skins behind Hard Mode. Some of us don’t have a group of four friends to run dungeons with. I’m of the belief that all content needs to be fundamentally puggable.

That’s a steaming pile of kitties. Where exactly is this stated and by what means was the notice served to the player base at large who, by the way, mostly don’t hang around forums except in futile searches for instructions on how to defeat bosses “properly”. By your logic, stacking on p1 Alpha is an exploit and stacking on Lupicus and meleeing him down too fast for the AoE to turn out is an exploit. You may as well say full zerk warrior DPS is an exploit.

Moreover, it’s not the player base’s fault that exploits exist. Players collectively can only respond humanly to what the devs put in. In fact, the existence of exploits ruins the atmosphere of the community and damages the circulation of mechanics information online which is the only way mechanics information transmits for most dungeons because there’s nothing in there to actually teach anybody anything except dying or failing repeatedly. The moment exploits crop up, guides and pugs gravitate towards it whether individual players want to use them or not.

If they don’t want us exploiting then patch carefully.

I actually had no idea it was an unintended mechanic. I went through the whole dungeon the first time without figuring that JUMPING rings was a mechanic because it did not work all the times I tried it so I thought the POINT was to get directly under him to that one safe spot and melee.

SPvP is all the devs care about.

My PvE is 0/20/20/30/0. For Curses, I virtually always have Ground Target Wells except for a few very specific encounters where I know I can’t use wells effectively like Lupicus in which case any of the Master traits are valid depending on what is slotted. The Adept slot is usually Chilling Darkness or Weakening Shroud. For Death, Greater Marks and Staff Mastery are no brainers if using staff as 2nd set. Ritual of Protection is also pretty good now and again when the team’s stacked and you know that either of the above two would be redundant. Shrouded Removal lets you shake a condition unconditionally every 10s and lets you afford to run Well of Blood even when every fiber of your being is telling you to run Consume Conditions like everyone else. What can I say? I like big green numbers. Finally under Blood, which i’ve always considered our strongest traitline (lack of BLood Magic is not one of my many necro complaints), virtually everything can be useful.

Necromancer can basically be summarized by Corrupt Boon. We’re the poor bitter pauper children who get nothing except that one move that curdles the milk and tarnishes the silverware.

Personally I don’t see DS as particularly super but also as a distinct case of “count our blessings”. We could have gotten stuck with a minion based mechanic. Bottom line, I consider at least the platewearers’ class mechanics to be less interesting and given an extra utility slot I’m not sure I’d trade the DS away for anything. At the very least DS 3 and 4 are almost always useful.

AirWick.1769:

I dont think there is any other profession without stealth or invunerability that can do that. I also took the assault head on.

Well herein lies the problem.

Guardian – Lots of blocks and Aegis and an outright invuln.
Warrior – Blocks as well as an outright invuln.
Engineer – Has at least an invuln in Elixir S.
Thief – Stealth, obviously, and evasion frame moves.
Mesmer – Stealth and evasion frame moves plus decoys.
Elementalist – Invulnerability moves.

There has got to be some internal reason they’re pointedly ignoring this.

What that means is you did 3 runs yesterday after 8PM EST and 2 runs today before 8PM.

My first to 80 was a Necro and my second was an Ele. All I can say is that the rabble in the Ele qq threads are the most spoiled brats ever. I mean seriously, RtL lost 350 range and you can’t heal in Mist form? We’ve never bloody had any of that as Necros. Eles aren’t dealing with crippling bugs like having 1/3 the normal downed health pool and the Ele one trick pony’s trick is to be able to do everything, not like a Thief that has nothing but stealth. This is me continually levelling toons to 80 and skipping over fences carefully inspecting the grass. So far, short of me discovering that Warriors wreck everything, the Ele’s grass is in incredibly good shape.

I’ve always considered Ride the Lightning to be a brokenly powerful skill. I mean yes, I’m sad it’s gone too and kind of resentful (as an Ele even though I also play a War) that Warriors keep all of their piles of mobility but I’d be dishonest if I said I didn’t think that one skill deserved a bit of a looking at.

Liquid.9672:

Execrable.1064:

Jon Peters mentioned in response my question on a Twitch stream today that he and Powerr tested the downstate health in sPvP, Pve and WvW yesterday May 10th and they felt there was no bug with our downstate heath. That may be the end of the issue as far as ArenaNet is concerned.

How is this even possible? The difference in down state health between my Necro and Ele, another light armor class, is like night and day. It’s not even close. My Ele can take 2 to 3 times more damage when downed than my Necro.

Ahahahahaha! Oh man!

Just burn down the spiders with AOE. Their numbers are finite.

No, the vines you’re seeing are new vines spawned by the boss at certain levels of health. They just appear at the same places that the first ones do.

As for avoiding the dungeon, TA is certainly not CoF but it’s one of the more popular dungeons.

Isn’t the elephant in the room being missed here in that Basilisk Venom stuns through defiant?

You don’t need more than 20 points unless going Wells but the fact you already have 20 points is a decent reason to go into them – it’s good synergy. Well pulses can trigger siphon-on-crit in an AoE.

Also, dagger offhand isn’t just a condition weapon – it’s a mitigation weapon that applies weakness and gets rid of your conditions. Having Dagger 4 in my experience opens the way to taking Well of Blood instead of the ubiquitous Consume Conditions which opens the way to taking Healing Power as a workable (if not necessarily competitive) stat which in turns feeds back into Dagger 2 Life Siphon.

Well since someone raised this thread I may as well put in that months of play and patches haven’t changed my simple opinion that Necromancers are a rubbish class. I keep levelling toons to 80 and playing them WvW and dungeons and every bloody one is just better. The only reason I maintain my Necro is sentimental value and some masochistic desire to play an underdog.

Damage would be useless if the target could “just heal”. There are plenty of examples of games where this is true and in those instances, damage is useless and PvP builds wind up looking for burst. In GW2, you usually can’t “just heal” through damage but you can “just cleanse”. That said, the possibility of conditions forces some slotting for removal so our conditions can be viewed as a “threat in being” without us having to actually use it.

I want Cantha too. I cannot understand how it could possibly omitted.

One of the barriers to newbies admitting they are new to a dungeon is the widespread perception that pros are all awful and prone to kicking them if they come out of the closet.

Personally, I think suggesting youtubes and guides as a resource is perfectly fair. The dungeons are designed assuming the use of the internet to access information on dungeon mechanics. It’s a lot easier to access information these days than just a decade ago but obviously not a design decision everyone agrees with.

I’m on Sanctum of Rall and I’m looking for a guild that will run Arah. My current guild is just too frustrated with it to even try.

I don’t mind if the runs take a while or if the guild isn’t actually a guild so much as a group that runs dungeons regularly in a reasonably drama-free fashion. I just need a group that’s willing to do it. In fact it’s probably better if it isn’t too hardcore because I’ve only done the first three paths once or twice each so I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up for the first couple runs without someone explaining everything and telling me what I need to bring.

I have an 80 Necro, Warrior and Elementalist but greatly prefer the Necro because I don’t know the other two classes well.

emon.1863:

(no offense) but necro has a ton of builds , compare to most of the classes.
Necro can play easily any role in the game – how many classes can do that ?!

Last I checked, all of them.

Mate, try to understand me right – to play necro you need a to make a good research about it, you have to undestand deeply your class (did you even read this post ?)

That’s the trouble isn’t it? Very few players really research the game or understand their class deeply. By that logic, Necromancer is only competitive in the hands of a minority of players and is only balanced if you ignore everybody else. The effort to get resources and information to lower level players is laudable but at the end of the day, it’s still basically “l2p”. Necromancers are undeniably the underdog class of the game.

Alright, start help?

1) Do all the trash mobs at least once. I know it’s a tired argument and I swear I’m not a no-skip-kitten. Trust me, do them once. You’ve already wasted 75 minutes on a failed run. Doing the mobs once or twice while on voice will give you a much better understanding of how to run past them, where stability and swiftness help the most etc.

2) When you DO run past them, remember to adjust ALL your traits and slot skills possible at first and only stop doing that when you’re sure you know what the hell you’re doing. That means all the stability, swiftness and GROUP swiftness possible. How the Ele is built could have an effect here but I’ve grown spoiled with giving everybody auras, swiftness and occasionally protection.

3) As warrior, resist the temptation to run full toughness OR full zerker. In my experience, lack of damage can extend Phase 1 of Lupi and increase risk of maggots getting through or just plain extend Phase 2. Everyone needs to be tough enough to survive but you need to put an end to the nonsense before someone (inevitably) makes a mistake. For this, I’ve always been fond of PVT gear, available with karma, as a go-to.

4) Best results I’ve had when someone goes down is for the person downed to look for and request the rez (or to explicitly reject it and self-rez). It helps especially to avoid miscommunication with mistform and the mes downed blink.