Guild Wars 2

The number you’re seeing changing when you equip/stow a kit is Attack. It means nothing. Literally nothing. Attack is simply power plus the higher end number for weapon damage. Nowhere is attack as a stat used in calculations. The damage formula is Power * Weapon Attack * Skill Coefficient / Target’s Armor. Kits have exotic level weapon damage that is, as you have noticed, lower than those of your pistols and rifles. This makes little difference, because what damage kits lack in weapon damage, they make up in higher skill coefficients. (Except flamethrower, but that’s a different issue.) The highest sustained dps we can do as engineers right now involves staying in kits most of the time.

The only real debate about kits’ weapon strengths is that they were bumped up to Ascended levels with the ascended weapon update, but later brought down to exotic level again, without any scaling when you equip an ascended weapon. This means there is little incentive for a kit engineer to upgrade to ascended weapons.

Alright, so I have this so far. Do you think superior runes of strength would be worth taking over scholar after the balance patch?

I don’t want to run staff though— I’m rarely in groups that have decent might/fury uptime already. I’m having trouble getting fire 2 to line up right without a target for might though, in S/F.

I recently got my ele to 80, and have some questions about gear/build/general usage for dungeons. I mostly PUG dungeons, and I’ve been thinking about a 30/10/10/20 LH build. After looking at builds over on the ele forum, I switched to S/F for might stacking, but I’m having trouble stacking as much might as with S/D, and I miss the movement skills on air for dagger. The invulnerability on earth is nice, though. I’ve also been wondering what to use for my third utility— I’d like to have a stunbreak for a lot of situations, but the only stunbreaks we have I’ve seen have ridiculously high cooldowns.

So:
1. S/D or S/F? Any help with might stacking rotation would be appreciated.
2. Final utility?
3. Any general ele tips or dungeon instance specific tips would be nice.

I’m sure I forgot something, I’ll edit if I remember.

Sylvari have a lot of seed turret defenses and the like that mimic human/charr weapons, so I don’t think they’re strangers to technology at all— they just like to put their own spin on it. Here’s my Sylvari engineer:

Not really, no. If you really want rare/exo gear to throw in the forge, use your laurels to buy Heavy Crafting Bags, sell the resulting t6 mats, and buy the weapons you want. Heavy Crafting Bags currently have the best laurel-to-gold ratio, followed by Unidentified Dyes.

coglin.1867:

Sins.4782:

Sorry mate. Since you made the initial claim (10.5k dps ’nades), the burden of proof is yours. What are you calculating with, anyway? Both war banners, frost spirit, spotter? Empower allies?

Since that is the amount of damage he is attributing to the engineer in the spreadsheet he posted, then um, no, it is not on me. Further more, he is now claiming that it can be done by spaming simply 2 grenade skills.

That was directed at Guang, sorry if that wasn’t clear. I thought I would leave the double quote in there for context.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

coglin.1867:

So now your suggesting spamming nothing but grenade and shrapnel grenade does 10,500 damage per second? You were being out far enough in left field with your original comments. Now, well, your not doing your credibility any favors. Care to offer a fact or evidence of your claim that spamming just two skills does even half that damage your claiming?

Since you’re the one coming out of nowhere with your claims, why don’t you offer some proof that it doesn’t?

Sorry mate. Since you made the initial claim (10.5k dps ’nades), the burden of proof is yours. What are you calculating with, anyway? Both war banners, frost spirit, spotter? Empower allies?

Ghost warden.4026:

Just curious, but why p/s? For the blast finisher/block? Or is that more of a personal preference?

I find the blast finisher is just too good to pass up, not to mention the knockback for interrupting when necessary. The projectile block on 5 is more situational, but great for certain skips. That plus the on-demand blind on pistol 3 for when grenade 3 is on cd make it worth taking over rifle imo.

This is what I run while PUGing dungeons. Third utility slot gets switched around based on the situation and group, but goggles are great for groups that don’t keep permafury up, and the toolbelt is nice for an initial vuln spike on bosses. Rocket boots for skipping, rifle turret for blast finisher and toolbelt spamming, thumper turret for blast finishers, elixir gun where extra healing/condi removal is needed, elixir u for wall, etc. Bomb kit does great damage, at much higher range than you’d expect when traited, and the might stacking and stealth capabilities are just too good to pass up. Grenade 2/4 for damage, and autoattack when you need more vulnerability stacked.

Take screenshots whenever you’re playing with multiple players from the same guild. Report them if they kick to bring in other guildmates. There’s really nothing else you can do about it. (Also, inb4 this gets moved to the Dungeon forum).

Most PUGs I’ve seen that kill kholer will pull him between the fallen pillar and another pillar on the northwest part of the platform, then attempt to dps him down while stacked, ignoring the adds. With FGS rushing and decent dps, he melts quickly, but a lot of PUGs don’t have that great dps and will run into trouble if they fail to interrupt his pull/spin. Many who do fail to dps him in time are then killed by his spin, leading to the general line of thinking, “kholer is not worth killing”.

Personally, I would much rather kill kholer, as well as the always-skipped graveling champions (1 patrolling north of the silver spiders on p2/3, 1 in the room just before ghost eater on p2, and 1 in the tunnels run through on p1/3), and troll, if only because he’s fun to melee. They’re probably not worth killing in a time/money sense since the nerf on silver from champ bags, unless you run every dungeon every day, but I prefer to make the most of every run when possible. That said, you’re more likely to win the lottery than get a PUG to agree to kill all those.

I don’t sell dungeon paths. I’ve never even done Arah. But I don’t care at all whether people sell paths or not, or where they do it. Unless they start PM’ing me like those gold selling bots, but I seriously doubt that’ll ever happen. Their path selling does not affect me. At all. I don’t buy runs, I don’t sell runs. At most I’ll see 3-4 of them on the LFG in Arah section. I don’t mind. I’d rather see selling posts than no posts at all, because that means at least someone is doing the dungeon.

Adding more player-count gated mechanics in dungeons is not the answer. Some people like to challenge themselves by doing content with fewer than the recommended player count. Solo dungeon videos never cease to amaze me, and even though I know I don’t have the patience to do that sort of thing, I wouldn’t want to deprive those who do.

AP is somewhat a measure of how much a player has played GW2. Of course, there is a huge rift in AP between those that farm it and those that don’t, but you can generally say that a player who has <1k hasn’t been in-game long, because of how easily AP accumulates at first. When looking at dungeon PUGs, you can generally tell who’s going to have the least experience if they’re below 2k or so. Players who have played longer are more likely to have more experience and be better at the game. I would be perfectly fine if AP on hover was replaced with hours played, as it would be a much better indicator. In general I don’t mind if people are low AP, but if everyone in a party but me is below 1.5k it’s almost guaranteed to be a painful run. Sometimes I want to avoid that.

(But seriously, AP stops being a decent indicator of time played after 2.5k-3k, so I have no idea what those guys advertising for 4k or 5k+ AP parties are thinking)

Are you sure you haven’t changed anything else about your build? Traits, consumables, sigils, runes, might stacks, vulnerability stacks, bloodlust stacks?

There’s a demand for the Arah tokens, so players are filling that demand. It keeps players who would rather not do Arah out of there, assuming they’re willing to pay for the convenience. So, in a way, more people running it are there because they want to run it, which you could probably argue ends in a better experience for all. Some dungeon selling in GW1 like the CoF runs were even monetarily beneficial to everyone— around 2 plat for a run, and over 2 plat in rewards from that run. If dungeon selling in GW2 overflows into other dungeons we may see situations like that here.

Kick players to sell spots, as in players who completed the majority of the dungeon with the sellers.

The reason you see so many selling posts on LFG is because they don’t fill quickly. The groups with players who actually want to complete the dungeon do fill quickly, and then are gone until the next one pops up.

This recent post in the Dungeon forum sums up ANet’s stance on selling dungeon paths perfectly.

rojak.1894:

Here’s a quick recap. Why would you still need word from Anet? The support team may just have confused Dungeon Sellers selling for in game gold with real money.

“Thanks for pointing out that we seemed to have had a bit of miscommunication about offering “runs” as a service in the game. I can tell you that runs are not disallowed if they do not in some other way form a breach of the User Agreement or Rules of Conduct. We consider such an offer a form of a “gentleman’s agreement” where two parties agree to a specific service for an agreed sum in in-game currency (or in-game items, as the parties decide).

Naturally, if the run itself involves the use of an exploit, that service is strictly and fully disallowed. (And of course we want to hear about any exploiters.) Runs for real-world money or goods are, likewise, strictly prohibited. And if the service ends in a disputed situation — for instance, someone offers a run and then leaves the party, or offers to pay and then declines to do so — then we may take action against a scammer, if an agent is able to confirm what took place. But because the service is a gentleman’s agreement, we do not get in the middle of repayments, re-dos of the run, etc.

Thank you for asking about this. I’ve written and circulated an internal e-mail so that all team members are clear about our policy on this.

Regards,

Gaile Gray
Support Liaison
ArenaNet"

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Please-fix-people-selling-dungeon-slots/page/5#post1162080
Hi everyone,

Just posting to inform you all that selling dungeon runs its NOT against the rules. People are free to do so. Please, exercise extreme caution to avoid getting scammed.

Thanks for your understanding

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Selling-dungeons-is-allowed/first#post3005032
Hello,

it is allowed, if you have a dungeon (you take as an example Arah) alone or in pairs legally – ie, without skips, exploits, bugs or other illegal means – through play, then sell in-game Lfg tool against gold to player ?

Thanks in advance for the answer.

answer
[11/10/2013 08:57]

Hello […]

Thank you’ve turned to the European support team.

There should be no problem, as long as it does not violate the User Agreement, or if you play through the dungeon without exploits or similar.

Should any questions or problems arise, please contact us any time you are available.

Sincerely yours

GM Andi
Guild Wars 2 customer care
http://de.support.guildwars2.com

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Rightful-reporting

A guildwars tradition
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/currupts-running-services-outpost-missions-t10527035.html

TL;DR: Fine unless you use exploits, kick players to sell spots, or scam, or anything else that breaks the user agreement.

Ascended 1h sword: 950-1050 attack [1000 avg]
Exotic 1h sword: 905-1000 attack [952.5 avg]

As you can see, the ascended version has on average 47.5 higher attack, a whole 4.99% stronger than the exotic. This turns out to be a 4.99% boost in outgoing damage, because weapon attack is a multiplier in the damage formula. This 5% higher damage is before calculating in the extra 4 power, 3 precision, and possible 5 extra power or precision on the ascended 1h sword because of the infusion slot.

If you were hitting 8-9k before, you should expect to hit 8.4k-9.5k after upgrading to ascended. To get 11-14ks, you’d need to be running other boosts as well. Have you perhaps changed or added consumables, sigils, or other boosts?

1. Overall PVE balance, AKA the DPS race and condition cap problems
2. Class balance. A lot of skills and traits within some classes are undesirable and generally unused.
3. WTB dungeon reworks. Dungeons are far too static currently, add random events, alternate bosses, alternating trap/mob spawn locations, more interesting boss and trash abilities.
4. (Yes, I’m putting 4 down, get over it) Armor diversity. Specifically medium armor chest slot. Why the hell is everything a trench-coat? Oh yeah, and dye-able weapons.

She only does the poison AoE when she targets someone she can’t hit with her melee attack. So, sometimes you can go for quite some time outside of that range without her throwing the AoE out, and sometimes accidentally dodging (or ranger sword 2 leaping) out of her range will trigger it almost automatically. If you have to range to do good damage or whatever, that’s fine, just stay stacked.

Killing the center burrow sooner means getting those two annoying scavengers from east burrow sooner. Those two can wipe most defenders pretty easily with stunlock. Not to mention the ton of gravelings headed straight for hodgins— it can be hard to get aggro on all of them, so a lot of people pay it safe® by killing northeast burrow before north.

From 16 Ghastly Shields (Black Lion Salvage Kit):

5x Ancient Wood Logs (5.05s ea- 25.2s total)
6x Ori Ore (4.87s ea- 29.22s total)
1x Mithril Ore (.29s)
5x Elder Wood Logs (.kitten ea- 2.25s total)
11x Soldier’s Ori Imbued Inscription (334.1s ea- 3675.1s total)
29x Glob of Ectoplasm (28.59s- 829.11s total)
18x Globs of Dark Matter

Total profit: 45g 61s 17c
Average per item: 2g 85s 7c
Per dungeon token: 1s 36c
Per dungeon run from tokens (assuming 60 tokens per run): 81s 45c

[Note: Prices using highest current buy price, not lowest seller]

Yes, I realize I probably got lucky there. I’ll try to save up 5k tokens or so, then try again.

Will edit with actual profit numbers once these inscriptions sell.

The first time I made a “champion killing” group for AC, some guardian yelled “plz skip kholer” right before we got up to him, and ran right past. The worst part? The other 3 did too.

If I may ask, Colin, is TA the highest on that revamp list? And, if not, which dungeon is?

I consider names rare when they are either:
A. Short, widely known words, preferably linked with complex, important or strong ideas.
B. (Correctly spelled) names of interesting, famous characters.

For example, during BWE 1-2 I had a character named Prisoner, and during BWE 3 one named Sins(which I use in games/websites, still mad I missed it at launch).

Edit— It should be noted that we already have a “best name seen” thread here. It’s actually a pretty nice read.

cranked.3812:

This is just your standard run of the mill logic that is put forth in everyday society and not just in video games. Every time someone is unhappy with anything in life, they want those in charge to regulate it. Happens all the time with people asking the government to try and intervene because something bothers them and, guess what, when you ask those in charge to do something like this, it will just get kittened up and everyone will be less happy.

tl;dr Stop whining and asking ANET to regulate every little thing in the game. My guess is if they did you would like the result even less. Don’t forget to always remember: IT’S A VIDEO GAME, NOT LIFE AND DEATH.

EDIT: As was said above, it’s a no-brainer to make it a majority vote (i.e. 3 people to kick).

Dat caps lock.

What, as a player, would you suggest I do about players like this? At most I could block them all and endeavor not to party with any of them again (which would be easier if party chat persisted after being forced out of a party and a zone). I think the main problem here is not so much the party kick system, although I do agree about the 2 vote kicks being absurd, but rather the way dungeon rewards are so heavily focused at the end of the dungeon. Players forced to leave prior to the end reward feel as if they have gained nothing. I think if tokens were more spread throughout the dungeons, say 50% from various bosses/chests and 50% at the end (scaling for DR of course), this wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem.

Not to mention how they go invulnerable in places where they can and do hit you… not fun.

Seriously? Can we please do something about this? Currently we can’t even report the players who do this without screenshotting every dungeon party, because party chat disappears upon entering a new zone, and most of us don’t have perfect memories for character names.

Veltoss.9135:

Heaven forbid the WvW players get anything.

About the only thing WvW about Obsidian Sanctum is that it rewards badges. As someone who does WvW often, I hate that this puzzle is pvp. Why? Because I don’t like fighting players who aren’t interested in fighting me— and there are an awful lot of those in Obsidian Sanctum.

Nebiros.5612:

more skills for existing weapons, swappable via the weapon skills tab we already have

This. Having 8-10 skills per weapon that you could assign to 1-5 as you wanted would be amazing. Also, more than 2 skill sets to swap between. I feel obligated to take 1 melee set and 1 ranged set as it is, and I miss out on a lot of nice weapons & uses because of it.

aelflune.8590:

But I guess there are always people with the maturity level of teenagers.

This is insulting to teenagers everywhere.

My personal experience about this hasn’t been great. I’m on CD, we’re currently fighting (losing) against FA and DB. I try to do this puzzle every day, the siege and badges from chest are nice. Saturday night I ran into problems. Several members of one FA guild were camping at the top of the arena room, pulling players off of bridge, killing them, and then portaling themselves back to top. After a couple failures, we managed to get a group large enough to kill them, only to find them above us a couple minutes later, as their mesmer up top had run off during fight and portaled them back up. After more stress, we managed to kill them again, once again finding them camping the top of arena room just a few minutes later.

Today (monday), I found the exact same guild camping again. With nearly the same results: around an hour lost dealing with these kittens.

The camping in this puzzle is ridiculous. Obsidian Sanctum was nearly empty before the Aetherblade update, so most of these people are doing these sorts of things only to grief the PvE players coming in. There is nothing tactical in shutting off players in the jumping puzzle. Siege blueprints are easily found as drops in WvW. Your server is not benefited in the least by doing this. Camping here serves only to ruin your servers’ and guilds’ reputations.

To those saying “it’s a pvp zone lolz gtfo carebears”: We already have pvp zones. Real pvp zones where all players enter with the explicit purpose of fighting other players. Do you know why players go to jumping puzzles? To complete the jumping puzzles.

I noticed this as well, and have been staying away from the suggestions forum because of it. Searching through 20 pages by hand looking for one thread you saw recently isn’t fun.

Using Firefox 21 on Mac.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re still working on a system that rewards bonuses and rewards for achieving various thresholds of achievement points on your account. More news on this soon!

Inb4 precursor scavenger hunt component.

Certain harpies will go invulnerable if hit even one platform away with targeted AoE. While this is certainly annoying, it can be dealt with. The real problem is that once they have gone invulnerable, they stay invulnerable until you die or manage to leave the area. The frequency of their knockback attack is also too high for some professions to deal with.

Can any of you legitimately defend how many times retaliation triggers on channel skills, multi-hit skills, and multi-projectile skills? “Use something else” certainly isn’t viable for all professions, as shown by the engineer post somewhere above. As it is, a group with retaliation can spike a player on the walls down with retaliation without ever targeting them, or even knowing they were there.

An option for old launcher would be great. The new ‘20% off Black Lion Keys’ launcher doesn’t have the same epic feeling as the old one, with Jeremy Soule’s music playing in fullscreen on launch.

Maze Fractal

A dynamic maze with 8+ starting points, with different enemies and traps at each turn. After a varying number of encounters, players reach a portal which takes them to the center to face one of three bosses: The Mazemaster, The Puppeteer, or The Chaos Lord. Each boss transforms at 60% health and goes berserk with increased attack speed at 10%(with the exception of The Mazemaster, who becomes the maze at 25%). After the boss is defeated, the maze crumbles away to reveal one of 5 different landscapes from around Tyria.

Ghost Eater, the boss of path 2 of Ascalonian Catacombs, is uncompletable in some cases. The boss decides that it’s spot is either a little west of the west trap, or east of the east trap, and leashes back to that location every time you try to pull it out to one of the other traps. Because of the internal cooldown on each trap, you can’t kill it with just one trap, so the event is impossible. Which is, to say the least, a big letdown after finishing everything else in the dungeon. I will be avoiding path 2 until this has been fixed… second time experiencing this for me.

100% support— I used to listen to the music on this for hours, and I can’t see why they removed it at all.

Levistis.8356:

Just gonna throw this out there: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/07/how-guild-wars-2-plans-to-survive

FTFY.

Sounds like dungeons to me, too. I don’t mind higher difficulty, but I hope they make an effort to make dungeons more dynamic as well… I’ve always wanted dungeons to be different every time I do them. The same 3-4 paths definitely do get boring after a while.

@thread:

Good luck guys. I’ve been running AC exp on my (now level 40) Engineer since 35, and it’s not too bad. Minus than p3 glitches of course. I’ll admit that burrows portions are exceedingly hard without 80s though— need more damage than most 35s can put in, in a limited amount of time. It’s sad that while most new players would have the best experience with a (mostly) 80s team, few teams are willing to take them nowadays.

Gab Superstar.4059:

No, you claimed I didn’t do dungeons for fun.

I do dungeons for fun.

And how exactly did you get that out of my post? O_o

I don’t claim to represent everyone who kills ‘trash’ mobs, or even everyone who complains about people skipping them on the forums. I was merely explaining why I (and likely others) prefer to kill them. Some people would rather push themselves, while others prefer stable (repetitive) content. Hopefully, the next major dungeon update will clear most of this up.

It’s not that killing trash mobs is fun, exactly, it’s just that killing them is better than the alternative for some people. Skipping enemies that are directly in your path is a pretty big immersion breaker, and it kills what little is left of the ‘roleplaying’ aspect of the game. Skipping them means admitting you’re not playing for fun, and that playing (at least in that specific instance) is a chore.

Major changes like this should be given more thought, and more justification. I fail to see why they couldn’t have altered the retaliation aspect of the symbol, or the retaliation trait, or the retaliation light combo mechanic, instead. Destroying most trait combos and halving combo field combos on a weapon just to retaliation in pvp is simply unacceptable.

Gf light field combos & greatsword symbol builds… you’ll be missed. More leaps definitely doesn’t make up for this. Guess I’ll start working on that elementalist then.

A confirmation screen for expensive items(upwards of 40s, 100 dungeon tokens, or 3.5k karma) would be lovely. Especially with the double-click-list-purchase feature currently in place.

7-8 fps at 1920×1080, 12-14 with subsample. ~5 in cities.
ATI Radeon HD 4200, AMD Athlon II X4 645(3.10 GHz), 6 GB RAM.

Yes, I realize the graphics card sucks, but I can’t afford a new one(+ power supply) atm. Any way to raise framerate would be wonderful.