Guild Wars 2

If you don’t like running all the sigs, I would at least recommend the following:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBLhZ6kjGocTszGw2GgeTsgLYxXxu4YkKN0GiWQXtAwBA-TJhHABCcIA8uMQQ7PAwTAAA

you can still use dagger OH for the blindness and condi transfer, if that’s what you’re more comfortable with

Spectral wall really falls off the map in terms of usefulness in a fight when we’re having most other elite specs throwing protection out like its going out of style passively. The CD on spectral wall is too high to be reliable in conquest which makes it a wasted slot

spectral grasp, also too situational, it goes so slow and even if it does connect with your target in the current meta, they will be invuln/block/stable to it which also makes it a wasted slot. It also brings nothing to a teamfight

spectral armor is still a decent choice among a few others like well of corruption, corrupt boon, flesh wurm, “Rise!”, and “Suffer!”.

chill to the bone is great in teamfights, also good for hampering chained attacks and to help people gtfo of bad positions.

consume, vamp sig, and rarely oh so rarely is the shout heal the current viable options. maybe if you’re running teamfight bunker necro traited well(s) could pull through in an oddball build, but there’s a reason why the sigs are needed, ESPECIALLY plague signet.

imo all reaper builds should at the very least have plague signet traited/untraited.

While it may seem boring to you, you’re probably not using your signets judiciously enough. They’re not there to just take up space in the bar not to be activated. They’re VERY active skills in competitive pvp, and the reason why traited sigs are meta is because of what you bring to your team, not just what you bring to a 1v1.

dagger OH is okay if you’re really trying to push bleeds, but against another condi reaper, you’re just wasting dagger5 into the pool of tossed/cleansed condis. That can hurt you, or help you depending on your skill. my personal choice is warhorn for the locust swarm weakness field vs. melee burst, and the daze on warhorn 4 is absolutely crucial to moments in teamfights as its a cone AoE daze that cuts through block. This is needed to bring down revenants wrecking your team (which is primary meta as of now) and locking down bunker mes mid rotation.

there are two big reasons why people keep spite in their build completely independent of running power or conditions. the spinal shiver proc is going to hit more often than your traited terror, as well as continue to corrupt boons w/o needing to main carry a focus offhand. The traited signets bring so much to a teamfight it’s not funny, and given our immense access to chills via our toolset and sigils, you’d be wrong not to abuse spite 3/1/1 for how our class is set up for the large vuln spike application.

while soul reaping skills can be fun, if you’re going to roll into ranked games with your build, you will not be supporting your team whatsoever, and you’ll probably come to find the meta is pretty crushing without equipping yourself to compete in it.

Been going with the dark forgeman theme for necro, fits well with the dhuumfire meta.

Sorrow’s Embrace Legs
Citadel of Flames Shoulders
Carapace Vestaments (I really like this one for the chest padlock and draped neckline, fits with the hood)
Reaper’s Hood (From completing elite spec in PvE)
Carapace Boots (for the flared out calf/knee look)
Hellfire Vambraces (3k Achievement point milestone, you have to choose between this and a divine skin)

I always check the comp pre-match to decide what i run in my bar

If there’s a higher chance of condi stacked team like multiple revs, or multiple necros, I go:
consume conditions/“suffer!”/plague sig/spectral armor or well of corruption/“CTTB!”

If i’m going against more cc/bunkery comps, ill run:
vamp sig/locust sig or “suffer!”/plague sig/spectral armor or flesh wurm/“CTTB!”

Dirame.8521 has pretty good advice on taking on the DH.

If you catch someone unaware, you can unload a bunch of chill to pretty much disarm someone and scythe->spiral->break 3 for interrupt-> reaper 2->autoattack for finish if running the carrion frostfire meta. even just spiral->auto reaper can put burns ticking for 3.9k+ on someone, which will put people down.

in low mmr ranked pvp matches, I’ve personally put down 3 players trying to rez their teammate just by cleaving in place with reaper using the dhuumfire trait. nightmare runes, max condi damage. so a huddled group of 4 downed bodies is not impossible, but not common. flow.6043 has a really good point, that if you’re not watching a fight for their blown cooldowns and such, its not likely to get burst in with a reaper.

Otherwise, reaper has some of the easiest and best sustained damage both with power and condi…

personally trying to focus out the bunker mes has indeed been difficult, but you have to watch that certain player to feel for how they time their skills and get those clutch interrupts in to lock down the punishment, holding out your last interrupt for their heal so your team can close them.

airick.9850:

Sorem.9157:

Morwath.9817:

Incoming patch notes:

*Players can gain pip in their League progression every 10.000 Golems killed in Heart of the Mists, we hope you will enjoy your stay!

Bonus with title: Golemslapper.

That title should be in the game regardless, because that’s hysterical

I second this, I’d rock golemslapper in WvW just to intimidate people rolling asurans

as a condi reaper, DH should be the class that you farm. ranged condi pressure the crap out of them and they’ll come to you instead, which means → spiral, scythe, auto for dhuumfire… majority of DH players will go down vs. the carrion condi meta build for reaper

1) remove premade Q

2) remove MMR, make it one big bag of mixed salty peeps

3) make the only two maps forest and foe

4) problem solved?

5) ???

6) Profit

/endtroll

nope. still not comprehensible. i’d recommend you type it out in french and have someone translate, like laserbolt said.

1v1 i have no trouble with DH

in a teamfight, simply add any second player to that DH that can help secure a cc chain on 2-3 players and you’re done. trap stack and death.

yeah, real crappy matchmaking. I found 4 other players i like playing with for premades.. NON GUILD, straight up puggers to try to tackle divison, before the patch we got a solid 11 wins based off of teamwork and skill, none of us tanked MMR.

now we’re all individually discouraged because we’re facing crazy OP stacked gimmick build teams or full on 100% condition+cc pressure comps that just faceroll.

overnight, we went to having fun meeting challenging teams and winning 500-470ish to… I haven’t even seen my new friends log in after patch. progress on tiers has halted for all of us more or less, and we just get burnt out and /log for the day

edit:
prior to the patch/hotfixes we were facing harder and harder teams, having to adjust mid game as a team to overcome and win but now it’s just gg defeat streak against really bad exploit comps since the patch hit.

Well, if i’m a necro going up against you running a condition heavy build, I could roll in, executioner’s scythe your minions, then spiral them to death pretty quick since that can drop in almost 9-12k condition damage. once your “Rise!” mobs are gone, which in 1v1’s only 1-2 spawn, it’s almost nothing to fight against. Those condi necros are almost always running plague signet, and waiting to drop staff4 on you when you drop out of shroud when low.

Your build doesn’t have a lot of offensive pressure traits, and minion builds i’ve seen that have been decent have had reaper traited GS to help compliment the toughness coverage. gravedigger helps pin down the offensive when minions can’t get the full 100%

Ragion.2831:

Im not saying Necros are worse at cleansing at healing because that is just untrue. I am saying that every other class has the ability to be effective while overcoming their weaknesses.

A well played thief can actually outplay 3 or 4 people without spamming stealth. It is hard, very hard to do but if you have the composure it is possible, when I use the class i definitely feel anything is possible as long as I very quickly make the right choices. The same goes for revenant. I don’t have much first hand experience with the other classes but just from my experience playing against them all those negate chains evades and mobility skills make those classes very flexible at overcoming many situations as long as the player makes the right choices very quickly.

Necro is a complete disaster of a class at doing this. The class feels like it has been stripped naked and wrapped around with bricks. It is always vulnerable, any other class handled by a competent player can make a necro do what he/she wants. I know this because i have been on both sides.

What im asking for is a build, any build that allows me to outplay under any circumstance. Like the way thief can. I have never run Shadow refuge, hidden thief or short bow so if i make too many wrong decisions i will die a lot but I found that these three things are not necessary if I kite properly, attack the right target properly, switch to a different target at the right time and most importantly, use the map terrain properly I can do some pretty insane stuff especially thanks to the DD elite.

Seriously ive tried everything, every build is always lacking something because the class cant use movement to compensate. Some of the cooldowns are too long, some skills are very luck oriented while some just put you in this impossible position where you need to use it to stay alive but you have to do something else at the same time to stay alive. I seriously need this class to work, too much is on it for me to just swap. So im just looking for a PVP build.

unfortunately, I agree. For pvp my team is the following comp:

necro
necro
mes
ele
engi

and we’re pretty balanced together, fairly successful. Had a strong 11 win streak in ranked, then got a loss on a stacked double rev double necro condi team that just cheesed condi stacking and blew us away, and with the nerfed plaque sig its too much to push off. even timing condi transfers and bubbles, we’re looking at condi stacking so fast, can’t even press a button fast enough before going down. we continued to win a few, but the next day and day after that, we starting seeing a lot more cheese comps just decimating ranked matches..

triple DH trappers denying caps out of sheer burst and the cheese chain grab->trap which is unavoidable.

double revs running around focusing under mesmers

diamond skin twin comps combined with DH trappers, etc.

plenty of cheese comps out there, and most times we swap and play sides to avoid those unfortunate stackups. Sometimes we pull through and win by good teamwork, but a lot of time if not most, its like playing against unstoppable combos.

sometimes the class just feels like its useless against certain builds. there’s little room if none at all to simply excel by skill alone. It would be nice to stretch outside the box and be able to do more than just bring weak condi pressure and chills to the fight, albeit there are some poison and interrupts we can get in, but most of the time we’re walking health bubbles that get focused w/o any way to push people off.

edit:

here’s the three builds I run:

Bunker/Soldier – Sustains well and brings the chill, interrupts, and healing for teamfights but near zero damage input means can’t take down most if not all meta builds in games current state

Marauder fighter – even when bringing full on condition transfer tools to the table, zero chance agaist condition stacked teams. can fight well enough, but still suffers from no active blocking and mitigation, which it seems like other classes are rolling an abundance of.

Condi flavors – cele/carrion/viper/etc – Can bring the condi pressure, chills, poisons, some builds bring the burn+weak power pressure, but will fold under condi stacked teams, or two players with a lot of interrupts since our toolset is slow and easy to see telegraphing.

yeah, there is a tell but my god if you get caught in it, its pretty much death sentence.

even when running condition pressure, it seems you can’t touch it until it blows all its CDs. kind of a bummer.

It seems its this build:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Dragonhunter_-_Meditrapper

So I’ve been fighting a lot of the same Guardian lately in pvp..

they come in and do that annoying vortex skill and a chain of cc that all together can’t be avoided once you’re in range and will instadown a lot of people. As a necro I have to let it burn out a whole LF pool and come out with a shred of my life to fight back or try to get out of it. Can’t use skills, stunbreaks, etc.

I’d like to learn how to combat this build if anyone knows of it, as I feel its completely gimmicky and unskilled.

I try to stay back and boon strip them/kite them or see if they have any tells/waste their cast but sure enough they do the same thing every time, but if I manage to survive it, the player tends to not know what to do after they’ve done it and i just push their faces in.

Is there another way to combat this build? Or is it really un-breakable/undodgeable?

I would love a pocket raptor backpack.

warbignime.4610:

Why are pve titles in pvp? Why is legendary earned in pve aviliable in pvp? these are all clutters, also remove all pve skins while at it just make everyone standard model. smh.

/sarcasm

you know, it actually used to be like this. pve skins were removed from PvP, you had to earn pvp-only skins.

And what defines a commander in your book?

I’ve seen people successfully “command” with the mentorship “welfare” tag. Not sure where you’re coming from.

I think the best thing I’ve ever done is lead a SW chest farm, then convinced the whole zerg to run whatever tag they had. So everyone was running an apple/tag and it continued on just fine… whats to say no tag can’t be just as effective?

/m join party for DS mid/north/south lane — need x people

once they get there, people taxi others in anyways.

Ill wear it with the balthazar regalia skin and have double cape aweseomeness.

Why power is always good to run: traited shroud will always bump your crit chance and scale with power.

Viper>other condi sets

If you want best performing, Berserker and Viper sets.

I personally run Zerk, as it will let you stay on top of the game in almost every game mode from Raids, Open world, fractals, etc. But I’ve also wanted a full set of Viper for the chance to be able to run condi builds.

I felt like the final battle was challenging enough for personal story content, but overall the whole chain felt rushed and short. Not enough time spent with certain characters to learn about their personas (except Taimi, they did a pretty good job there)
I think it would have fared a little bit better if they tied the personal story directly into going to dragon stand and hitting the meta chain there, as it kind of goes full circle, you kill the mental manifestation, and the physical.

new meta: fashionwars2

Tom Gore.4035:

Heart of Thrones is like Game of Thrones, but with pink unicorns and nobody dies.

Heart of Thornes is the sequel to the Bold and the Beautiful.

I live for these types of forum replies

Yep, doing DS meta alone is more “epic” and seems more fitting than the actual personal story. I also encountered quite a few show-stopper bugs in the final instance that required me to relog two times

start the storyline mission yourself. problem solved.

I like playing stronghold, but its pretty easy to tell who will win based off the first 30 seconds of play. The first team thrown on the hard defensive will lose, combined with whoever spawns the mist champ first will usually win due to obvious superior coordination

It would be nice for a dev or someone to address these concerns, i think I’ve seen a lot of the same complaints on the HoT subforums.

Some of the issues I bring up aren’t exactly whiny I think, more of problematic cruxes the new expansion has introduced into the whole game world overall, starting with the introduction of Dry Top and Silverwastes prior to the expansion release.

ChrizZcE.5981:

Ayrilana.1396:

And people would stop playing the game within a month due to lack of things to do.

If that were true everyone would´ve stopped playing vanilla GW2 two weeks after launch after they hit max lvl.

which funny enough, my whole guild did right after the release of fractals because of the 80% disconnect rate at the time since there was literally no other content left at 80.

Yep. 100 people vanished from GW2 within a month. but once fractals got stable and the karka stuff happened everyone went crazy over ascended trinket grinds and skin/collection farming

Thaddeus.4891:

1) Not really a problem. Failing a meta event (not counting Chak Gerent) is very very rare if you full the map. And that problem will slowly grown smaller and smaller as most people will have their map completion. A raid lobby on the other end would help a bit.

I think I meant to describe this as, when you zone into a map, its either dead (meta wise, since its full of roamers) or all focused on the metas. So you either get lots of people doing the HPs together etc, or just huge zergs following tags making the vicinity scale up punishing players who were roaming or trying to explore… because a tag popped up and people start taxi-ing.

2) I’m not sure I follow. The problem is how player perceive the content, not the content itself? Nothing can be done about it except to educate players. But more accessility like a Raid Lobby, a LFG section for raid and a better interaction between the LFG and Squad is needed.

I think more along the lines of, the raids right now are so busting-at-the-seams challenging that its made notorious for having to spec into the meta to even play. Some of it is how players perceive it, but when it takes almost half an hour to an hour to find the “ideal” 10 people to run one single boss 1-10 times (depending on the skill level of the players) it gets a little daunting. I like running raids, but i don’t like the fact that so many people don’t feel like they can do it because it requires so-and-so build, for so-and-so hard meta roles, with a specific comp for ideal completion. (chrono is a must, condi engi is primary, etc.) It really pushes a lot of players away from trying to get into the content because of what… gear/dps/trait checks? I’m not saying nerf the raids, im not saying make it easier or whatever it is, but something should be changed to make it more accessible to the players. Heck, half the pugs i just join into to get the group together have fought over TS just because the healer wasn’t running Druid/Zealot gear and wanted to run Druid/Magi. It should not be that big of an issue just to play a facet of content.

3) Ya I don’t like most of the masteries. I would love masteries as alternate way to play the game. I like the murshoom and glinding, but most of them are just there for the sake of gating.

as of right now, the mastery system is not an alternative way to play anything, they are required to do most if not all HoT content in a form or another. bouncing shrooms, gliding, updrafts, ley line, poison lore, exalted acceptance, these are all needed to access certain areas and do certain things in the game. While most of them i just listed don’t take that long to obtain, Iztel Poison Lore, Ley Line Gliding are both Tier4 and Tier5 masteries respectively, and can take millions of XP to fill to access certain areas you come across very early in the game. Not to mention people wondering how to do Axemaster Gwyllion in VB without Nuhoch stealth detection. The sheer amount of XP grind you get stuck with in older areas and metas tp get to newer places and metas is not conducive to the casual/moderate player. I explained that in the first post. It can be easy to see masteries as “not that bad in the long run, especially when people get map completion” but when you have to take into consideration everyone trying to tackle the content, i can only imagine the hundreds if not thousands of players grinding VB or AB octovine over and over just to fill gliding and iztel just to play some of the crucial poison areas in DS and TD, or to be able to get map completion

4) I disagree partially. I like that you need to work to fill a map and do a big map wide event. That said, anet should give us better tools. Yo…..

I personally believe Taxi-ing is a construct not befitting the GW2 universe, I don’t like how people have to resort to using the LFG or party tools to force themselves into a map to fill body quotas to get something done. It’s counter-intuitive to the whole idea of dynamic world events, roaming players, spontaneous adventuring, etc. People have gotten so used to “taxi” everything because its become the norm like a bad habit. But if you look at that concept from the outside in, its kind of like… why? Isnt the content supposed to scale with the people that are already there in the first place? Again, can’t really speak for a specific solution, as some metas really do require at least a hundred people simultaneously cooperating to work, but think of the countless duos or 5-man parties of friends or spontaneous players trying to do stuff that get lost in the negative space left by en-masse movement of players taxi-ing to places.

5) I don’t see the problem. We want to fill out map or at least get as much ppl as possible. What is wrong with that? Now, like I talked about on the other points, Anet should give us better tools to make that taxing more easy. The other thing that they should do is to create more categories in the LFG to make it easier to find an event. A Raid, Tyria Open World and Magguma Open World section is the bare minimum that should exist.

Nothing wrong with Taxi-ing. I said it’s not inefficient by any means. Please read my thoughts on the concept of Taxi-ing in GW2 above.

6) Never had this issue so I won’t comment.

7) I don’t see the gap between new and veteran in PvP. New players have access to everything like veteran in PvP. Now if you talked about WvW I agree and if you talk about new players without HoT, I also agree. Bu…..

I think the main issue I’m trying to touch upon is the sort of hard limit this overall change has put on the very brand new players in GW2. If you’re trying to sustain playerbase and gain as many new players at the same rate as losing players from quitting… Having all this “elite” stuff in PvP that is HoT-only can be very limiting to those not familiar with the game yet, those who just purchased the core game/HoT bundle and are just getting to 80 or still getting there. I don’t think its too much of an issue to be honest, but it still is an issue nonetheless. I wouldn’t worry about it too much until it becomes a bigger problem.

9 ) I disagree. All guild small or big can eventually make everything, just like before when the game started small guild had to accumulate influence for longer than bigger guild. ….

Of course they can make everything eventually — But if you’re in a guild with 100 players, 10 on at any given time, all of them moderates playing 3-4 hours a day, the progress on developing the guild hall is a lot slower than a mega guild.. which poses the question… why not ditch the small guild and join the mega guild since its progressing so much easier with so many more people on? That’s the rift I was bringing up. HoT is pushing those smaller guilds to re-evaluate their status quo.. either implode or get big.

10) I talked about that before. Can’t do kitten about the sigma. It will change over time, but people will be people. …

Agreed. as I said, I’m sure Anet will address this at some point. But for right now, it’s still a pretty big reason why a lot of people aren’t even touching the Raids.

11) Plenty of my friend don’t play 5-8 hours a day and can still do most of those things. Yes ok some gating is stupid and we should more ways to get ascended (not easier, just different). But over time a lot of what you talk about will disappear. More and more people will gain masteries as time pass, ascended gear will be easier to get from fractal and materials for ascended gear will drop in price. Like when they were introduced there is a lot of players that want those materials now and the price is high, but will drops as the demand decrease.

That said, some maps are a bit too long. Chak Gerent spawn each 2 hours. DS pre-events take around 1 and 1,5 hour, of mostly escort, which is unnecessary. The day/night cycle is 2 hours, etc. The map should be at max on a 1 hour rotation IMO.

I don’t think ascended gear is too hard to get.. it can be very expensive to get the mats which is putting a ton of people in the silverwastes to farm. That alone is a red flag at an economic standpoint, but i won’t even discuss that as its a much more complex issue. But as it is right now, Everyone playing the new maps are either in VB or DS… VB is where everyone is doing the metas around 20-50 mastery level, and DS is where most of the mastery farmers are since they already blew past the mastery gating. Guilds that are pre-organized will hit octovine and an even smaller group doing TD, while everyone else not in on those organized groups probably haven’t even been able to play that stuff. (TD and DS that is, octovine is common to see people taxi the crap out of)

P.S. Yes, I’ve seen a fair amount of people in DS, but its been kind of challenging finding a good enough map to spend my time in, with enough people. I find it kind of odd that I can’t just explore DS without a zerg with me unless I don’t want to complete any events or don’t want experience.

I love pocket raptors and smokescales. Once you learn them, you learn to fight them.

I just want a pocket raptor legendary backpack. 4000 gems OBO. c:

To preface, I’ve been enjoying the HoT content more-or-less than most people, it’s challenging, satisfying in some aspects, and good when it can be.

But there’s also a lot of glaring problems I’ve encountered in the last few weeks with the new expansion that make me worry and also degrade the experience overall. Sometimes, i’ve run into a lot of these problems in great succession in a day and simply Alt+F4 because it can burn me out or put a sour taste in my mouth.

It just so happened that I took vacation off from work to try to enjoy this new expansion, so I’ve been playing this every day for at LEAST 8 hours a day, some times, even 10-14 (i know, unhealthy) to figure out some of the more challenging content given by the expansion. So I’ve put in a lot of hours so far since release and a week prior to release.

I’ve done the following since returning to GW2 since originally quitting after the first “LW” event: Karkas and Fractals came out:

Farmed SW for a cumulative 9 hours for Dragonite/Empyreal Shards/Obsidian Shards to craft all my Ascended gear (Zojjas, because zerk meta, right? That’s a separate issue, some would not even call it that.)

Scrounging the net/forums/in game for a mega guild that runs the content regularly to get back “in the loop” (TTS fyi)

A week mixed of farming meta chains in VB and AB for experience to use… 14-18 Maguuma mastery points for Gliding 2, Mushrooms etc, Exalted 2, Nuhoch 2, etc. and trying to get map completion only to meet the staggering 2.5 million xp barrier for Poison Lore gating in story (which they patched) and lots of areas in TD and DS which to this day I still cannot explore

Busting out Fractal 1-20 for my Amulet and Rings, which took a day on its own. (10 hours gone right there) and for the pristine relic achievements

Many days spent trying to immerse myself into less “grindy” and “mindless” content to simply enjoy the game. No farming, no agendas, etc. Just playing metas, occasional dungeons, helping new players get HPs, etc. But that’s where I stop, because a lot of the time while simply trying to enjoy oneself in the expansion, a lot of the technical glitches and systemic issues that follow sort of put a damper on gameplay.

Now, mileage may vary. A lot of people will say “okay, you’re quitting, can I have your stuff?” (inb4) or, “No, this is EXACTLY what the veteran players wanted. we wanted a challenge, a new content.” These comments are fully warranted, and it’s understandable. But as someone who has already dumped in… 150-160 hours of gameplay, there’s quite a few concerns I have for the casual/moderate player trying to keep up and participate, especially when the success of the content relies a lot on players being present and participating.

So here goes, hopefully people can cover these OBJECTIVELY, please provide some input, as the “lern2playnub” and elitist comments aren’t really new or constructive.

1) Maps are split between “Map Objectives” (Hero point groups, Vista/POI hunters, SW Chest Farmers) and Meta-Chain contributors.
First thing that comes to mind is SW, either you’re in a map that’s pushing the meta for crest farmers, or in a map with a tag for chest train zombies. This issue bleeds into the participation/scaling issue as well when people do HP trains, or people stack on a tag for one chain while other players roaming get stuck asking /m for assistance with lots of downtime before people show up.

2) Raids are gated behind an Ascended gear “requirement” stigma, second catch being Raid Composition > Player availability.

This issue alone I see more prevalent among the smaller guilds. I have foot in TTS (one of those megas) HP, and HC, which are medium and small guilds respectively. The medium and small guilds seem to believe Raids are for ascended gear players only, and are too difficult at this time for casual/moderates to even attempt. They have called me a masochist for pugging VG multiple times in a week for practice, and doing gorseval to them is “unheard of”. The result is a large playerbase simply not even trying to participate in a large chunk of the new content. Some players like this for its exclusivity and elitism for completing the challenges, but tied together with mega guild completing most things on a daily/weekly basis, the pool of players thins out a lot for those wanting to enjoy the content for content’s sake

3) For masteries in Maguuma, a lot of content is gated by Iztel Poison Lore and Ley Line Gliding, or more.

I personally first met this in the storyline with other people trying to help them, and in TD when I was trying to get map completion near the chak hive. When I saw I’d need itzel 3 and Poison lore, that’s about 3 million some-odd xp i’d have to grind just to explore part of the map I wanted to explore. To this day, itzel poison lore is still on my xp bar for the last four days. (they patched the story gating though)

4) New map metas require lots of players (with equal spread) to be rewarding via full completion; lack of reward disincentivises player participation. Map population fluctuates between empty and full to complete metas for what rewards currently exist.

A lot of people will probably think “TANGLED DEPTHS” when they think of this issue, but it applies to other maps too. This can be caused by a large influx of mega guild organizing taking over map instances then leaving them completely, and taxi-ing. I’ve seen my fair share of empty DS, TD, and AB maps without having enough players to tackle some of the dynamic events to even bother with some of the maps, which leads to waypointing out— which is a negative checkmark for player immersion.

5) LFG tool “Open World” Category flooded with “Taxi” usage — a problem with poor immersion design for game content.

Between farming/meta chain map domination differences, weekly resets, etc. and when maps are on the verge of completion, you’ll see LFG get flooded with “X taxi” or “X taxi [XXXX]” for guilds en-masse trying to cap map population. It’s not an inefficient or ineffective way to ensure meta chain success by any means… but for the players to have to resort to pseudo-exploitation of an out of character UI system to simply get a map filled and organized enough to finish a meta, there is an underlying problem.

6) Scaling based on proximity lacks proper balancing and tweaking

I think this is more of an issue on major waypoint areas such as VB’s Pact Encampment and Iztel Waypoints, the Major N/S/E/W waypoints in VB and major lane WPs in TD. If people port to those major waypoints and sit there AFK and scale nearby events when there is already a deficit of players in the area for the events in the first place, a theoretical team of 5 players won’t be able to do the micro-chains to progress the full meta chain due to improperly scaled difficulty. Which creates varying pockets of players who are simply roaming doing the map/exploring/dynamic events scratching their heads wondering why some things seem almost impossible for them to attempt, which again, leads them to waypoint somewhere else.

7) Elite specializations tweaking the “PvP meta”

A smaller percentage of players already make up the PvP sector, those who are already experienced players or who main PvP regularly.

New players just starting the core Tyria content trying to get their first 1-80 are left being discouraged from PvP because the elite specs generally (not all) perform better than the vanilla builds with the exception of a few. This is wedging a larger gap between new players and veteran players in the PvP scene. There are a few more issues than just this with HoT and PvP, but I’ll leave it there for now just to cover my concern for new-new (green) players.

8) Lack of segway from Core Tyria to Maguuma content — significant playerbase left headscratching trying to understand the vast changes in game design.

While there is a storyline progression through dry top and silverwastes to get to VB, once you do get to VB… that’s it. There’s no tutorial on how to use the mastery system, what masteries are, the difference between points and experience use, where to find mastery points, how to use them etc. I’ve talked to a fair handful of players in my guilds that were absolutely confused about what to do once they hit Verdant Brink. This can be an issue for people playing the game that are just not savvy with a search engine, wiki, don’t know what dulfy is, or guild-less because they’re new or returning. Requiring players to research your game to play the game steepens the learning curve for otherwise easy to understand content which can be considered an irritating road bump to jumping in to the content.

9) Guild Hall material requirements encourage mega guilds and discourage micro guilds, also effectively creates a gap and pushes medium sized guilds to grow or deflate based on overall guild completion.

This issue can vary, but from what i’ve seen, there have been a lot of “scribe looking for work” on the LFG tool due to small (100 or less player) guilds imploding from not being able to make reasonable headway on guild hall progression. A lot of hard-earned bonuses small guilds used to have, are now gated behind the expansion, which has scorned a lot of players making them feel like they’ve been “money grabbed” or “punished for investing their hard earned time and money” which is not an invalid concern, because time spent in game has real life value and can be considered a form of accumulation of wealth. The way guild halls have been re-structured has pushed a lot of the closer-knit guilds into the dust and perpetuated the growing need for mega (500+) guilds to make headway on the content.

10) Raid content inaccesible to “casuals” and even “moderate” players.

Lack of LFG support makes finding a group to play Raids more difficult than necessary. Weekly resets mean Guild pre-made groups finishing content on a single day in the week per weekly basis, leaving that pool of “puggers” smaller within an already small group of players. Again, a lot of players from my medium/small guilds have this weird notion that exotics are a no-go in the raids and do not even bother to attempt or even dream of doing the raids, even though they have stated they would love to play them, but feel like they can’t because they wouldn’t be able to contribute due to lack of gearing. While this is wrong, and i’ve done VG with pugs/exotics before, the stigma of the new raid content hasn’t been ultimately positive so far. I expect Anet will address this in their own time though, so I’m not all too worried.

11) Lack of content for those who do not play 5-8 hours daily — Raids, certain maps, and even newer alternatives to legendary and ascended crafting are near inaccesible to those who do not play 5-8 hours daily. (Mastery XP requirements, Mastery gating)

If you did not participate in the Cof P1 Tyria mastery farm, and the infamous DS camping Maguuma mastery farm, you’re kind of stuck behind the gates now. While there are a good handful of players out there running around with 160-200 mastery level being able to go anywhere they please because they no longer have to fill their XP quota, there is an even larger demopgraphic of players who are stuck trying to get certain masteries just to get to new areas and other places. This can be a double edged sword. While its good for ANet, players are somewhat “forced” to play their current content thoroughly into the ground before breaking through XP barriers allowing them to get to the next smallish morsel of content. The down side is, not everyone can play 5+ hours a day (which some people have pointed out is a whole part-time job) and therefore cannot see a reasonable end to the XP gating/mastery farming. Again, casuals/moderates are forced out of certain places or playing certain content that they may have wanted to experience, which ultimately, they paid for.

Again, Mileage may vary for the vast hundreds of thousands of players in the world of Tyria and Maguuma, but these are just some of the thorns (pun intended?) in my side trying to play the new expansion.

Not quitting by any means.. yet. I like the challenges so far, the raid has been fun and satisfying (although, haven’t been able to get to sabetha yet) but for me, I’d like to just get these masteries out of the way so I can play the rest of the maps.

As a reaper, main people I have trouble with are mallyx/shiro revs, some burst/cc rangers that i simply can’t touch, and those kitten diamond skinners.

Also, condi based vanilla necro can be hard to fight sometimes, just because ranged is easier to generate LF and damage with than melee.

This is probably the first time ive been able to enjoy necro in PvP regularly, a while ago we were SUB PAR in every aspect as a class and nobody was worried about necros. Just like how zerker shatter mesmers were a crazy killing machine that were untouchable, or zerk gg heartseeker thieves, or burning/regen guardian bunkers..

There are very easy to play counters to reaper. And the builds don’t derivate a lot between reapers/necros now so it should be easy to figure it out. I can testify, kite me while im in shroud, survive for the first 15 seconds while im shrouding then as soon as im out of it just dump damage on my face. I will go down. We don’t have a lot of active mitigation tools, if none at all, but we can throw conditions around and shroud is our shield/chasing tool.

I know most people obtained their sets pre-HoT, but for players like me who returned for the expansion, what is the best way to obtain on the BoA/Non-TP materials to craft ascended gear?

5Bloodstone Brick
5Dragonite Ingot
5Empyreal Star
1Augur’s Stone

Above is what’s required just to create the vision crystal to make ONE piece of ascended armor.

Now, looking through the wiki, not all the information there is updated for HoT. I keep reading some things here and there and not everything is clear from lots of players:

1) PvP reward chest track farming for ascended chests?
2) Silverwastes gives you all the materials you need for those bits?
3) Recipes can only be bought with Laurels?

Can anyone give advice on how to even begin getting ascended gear together? Since the release of HoT, its beyond confusing trying to figure out where to begin to start getting all the ascended gear required.

Coulter.2315:

Needs no nerf.. They die easily and are very vulnerable to interupts, controling the way they face and dodges. Play smarter.

Got it. the “lern 2 play” theme is strong.

Jephiroth.3197:

They’re strong, but you get a pretty easy “tell” that they’re aiming at you by having the crosshairs over your head. I target them first and strafe left/right to avoid their ground attack, then charge them and interrupt/dps. This doesn’t help if they have someone else targeted, but avoiding “clumping” together can help there also.

Yeah, if someone else is targeted, it can be hard to tell where the line is going to land. As I said, they’re not too bad, but they really do catch my attention more than any of the other mobs. Bladedancers are somewhat similar, but then they have a somewhat easier avoidable attack chain.

I think people reading my inital post are probably seeing it with the “waah another whine post” mindset, but I don’t think they are TOO bad, just kind of pushing that fine line between comfortably matched challenge and getting wrecked if you’re focused on something else at just the wrong moment.

maybe it seems like I’m just crying over it, but I’m seriously just bringing up the concept: maybe they are just a little too powerful?

I see your point— a fair amount of distance is introduced with people gliding from A to B but your observation of ghost-town likeness might also be caused by use of WvW commander tags in map.

I noticed if I ran around with my tag on near pact encampment in VB or any of the main meta chain outposts and just hit the events in a string with it on, people were quick to flock and zerg through the meta events pretty easily. When I was playing with it off, I could sit in the middle of the beginning meta chain in pact encampment and notice not many people coming to complete the defense event. Just me and less than a handful of people.

Why is it that way? Maybe its because people are so used to the last few years of “go to the tag, that’s where people are gonna be” mentality. It’s pretty substantial. If you’re flying around VB or AB or even TD trying to find people just roaming hero points and mastery spots, of course you’ll only run into the one or two every 10-15 minutes.

I think with the actual expansion out for such a short time still, there is a saturation of players still stuck in VB trying to figure out the nuances of the expansion. Like why the frog HP is swapped with the airship HP… why axemaster gwyllian seems to kill everyone without reasonable counter strategy. There’s a lot of people organized in VB hitting those meta chains over and over again and trying to get their first map completed.

They aren’t impossible, but they are significantly overpowered compared to their melee counterparts. Their ground DoT (fiery line) took out 5 people simultaneously in an event chain, and both me and the dude dead next to me said “they should probably bump down that sniper damage a bit” at the same time.

It’s good and all, but snipers really stick out a lot. Not to mention they are absurdly tanky for the damage they put out. I usually keep an eye out for them and kill them asap but if they aggro and do their initial snipe shot (which already takes out just under half HP even in soldier’s gear) then drop a line and you just barely don’t catch the fire line animation that follows, you’re going down.

idk, kind of curious what other players have noticed with them. Perhaps they’re there to provide a challenge, but all it takes is one of those buggers to drop a line and poof, gobs of players go down hard.

Its a meta event. The attack isn’t supposed to have range if you are in the area

Azumi.9572:

Crashing like crazy in Auric Basin. Every Meta Event, spending hours building it up and then – boom – crash right at the climax. Game built around staying logged in for Map Progression and increased rewards – and you release it in this state?

I’m not even laughing. I’m legitimately angry.

If you have 32 bit Windows, this can be an issue.

In Verdant Brink, there is an event that gets stuck where one-eyed bongo goes back into NPC mode for unknown reasons.

http://i.imgur.com/vrrPjhL.jpg

Right now, Reaper imo is a so-so trait line to be using for anything. In terms of DPS, if you land 100% of your hits with GS its pushing maybe 10-12% more DPS than the dagger in Zerk gear. The problem with Reaper/GS is its lack of synergy with vampiric/blood traits and its huge damper on mobility. It doesn’t heal yourself very well to -replace- dagger.

My problem I’m facing right now is its inability to land any hits because of how sorely telegraphed its attacks are, and if you’re not hitting with necro… you’re not gaining LF. no LF = no survivability.

In the HoT content, specifically facing insect swarms from mord husks, we don’t have any active mitigation tools like blocks/aegis or chainable evades like with ranger/rev/guardian/mesmer/ele so if you’re caught outside of DS you’re guaranteed death. Blighter’s Boon was a staple for people to regenerate health while turtling in DS, so I understand how people are mad over it not being useful anymore.

The good parts of Reaper aren’t the traits. IMO the traits need a lot of help. Right now you can pump out a lot more effective DPS running Rampager’s gear and do a D/D power/cond abomination with spite/blood/(SR or Curses) build without subjecting yourself to instant death in new content once your LF pool is wasted. The Reaper skills though, some of them are really good for PvE content, like YSIM. Being able to quickly fill both your HP pool and LF pool is what’s needed to survive in the new expansion content for this class, but it detracts from your ability to push out hard damage.

Bhawb.7408:

Yep, Soldier/Trooper runes (change names because consistency) clear condis at a ludicrous rate with shout builds. Also YSIM is a great heal, it is extremely fast, heals for a lot, procs a bunch of on-hit stuff, and can also life steal and give LF. It isn’t for 1v1 builds, but builds expecting to teamfight get a ton out of it.

Good to see you’re still here after 3 years Bhawb! The reaper line has really pushed it more to play like a shout cleanse warrior of olden days. You highlight a lot of the good parts that come with YSIM.

I am in full favor of nominating Drarnor Kunoram for forum specialist. He’s been here since the beginning of release so he’s seen the changes of this class and its evolution. Been away for a year, guys! Hopefully going to come back and crunch the numbers again

Never ever have I seen someone complain that their bleed stacks were so high that the bleeding would never make it to the bottom stacks. You know why? Because people cleanse a million times in a fight. They don’t even have to think about it. And now we can’t either. R.I.P putrid mark.

Honestly, terror builds look cool on paper, but they’re dull in practice. They don’t perform as well as you’d like to think. Too much trait investment for too little gain.

What they should be doing is increasing how much damage gets released per tick for bleeding, as well as lower the amount of stacks applied per each skill… across the whole board. Then we wouldn’t have a problem with the 25 bleed cap, and necros would actually be able to do damage against groups of people larger than two who all together have 685940% uptime on cleanse. Ever try playing against a tight group in PvP or WvW? Dear lord, you’ll do nothing as a condition necro. You’ll always see your bleeds stick to their bar for about a second, and disappear or turn into a boon. It’s disgusting.

Maybe they should think about that balance, not just on paper and 1v1. They should be thinking about staking class mechanics against each other— statically, so they can think about the inherent problems when you introduce the most probable case scenario.

P.S. The reason why dumbfire is doing such good cover damage is because it does such good damage per tick. Why do you think other classes that use burn as a condition do so great?

I would like 1 month content.. its better than whatever this is..

Please check all that apply.
You are:
[ ] Married
[X] Have Girlfriend
[X] Employed
[ ] Have Pets
[ ] Have Children
[X] Are an Adult
[X] Have a Life
[ ] Have no Manual Dexterity
You Think Living World is too:
[ ] Hard
[X] Time Consuming
[X] Temporary
[ ] Full of Jumping Puzzles
You are Currently Threatening to:
[X] Quit
[X] Uninstall
[ ] Kick Colins’ Dog
[X] Tell the Internet That You are Upset
[X] Play Runescape— This is so bad!

I stopped caring after the karka incident.

It was just so… frivolous.

My whole guild left the game after that. Now we mostly play games on steam.

I wish there was more armor, more dungeons, fix the dungeons (for gods sake, to do every dungeon all you have to do is stack in a corner) just write a better story.. And fix the classes. They’re botching mostly all of them save for Warrior and god knows what else still functions normally.

TLDR;
Me nor all the people in my friends list (trust me, i’ve chatted with them) care for the living world updates. None of them keep up and grind 24 hrs. a day while they’re active to get any of the rewards.

Edit:
Maybe if all of the armor in the game wasn’t a simple 3 stat bonus.. and actually had unique set bonuses, elemental damage reductions, and more than those 3 bonuses…
Heck, we might even see build diversity and a shift in the meta— which has always been and probably always will Be zerker gear + whatever covers your butt.