Guild Wars 2

Are you intending to take Skale Venom (Weakness, Vulnerability) or Spider Venom (Poison, Weakness with a trait you already have) for your Dry-land utility set? Because I would heavily recommend taking Spider Venom. It would also make your choice of Deadly Arts V (33% bonus poison duration) make sense.

If you do want Skale instead of Spider no matter what, you really should change your 10 point in Deadly Arts, since you have no source of poison other than your steal.

I would suggest taking a stunbreaker in your 7 slot, especially for dungeon play where getting knocked down by a boss / champion can lead to a quick death. Shadowstep is a pretty good choice, and Roll for Initiative is a nice panic button, especially if you tend to hover around 3-5 initiative during fights.

Edit: I guess you could be intending on Acrobatics XI being your stunbreaker, but the 60 second cooldown and generally unpredictable nature of procs like that (Goes off on an AoE 1 second stun when the boss is focusing on someone else, then isn’t available when it charges, knocks you to the ground and starts killing you) I really think you should have a backup gtfo button.

For your case, I’d say take the boon duration. The only real source of Might that you’ve got there is when you cast Life Blast, and you can afford to gain only 19.5 seconds of Might per cast instead of 21.

If you were running the “Gain Might on Signet Use” Trait or Blood Is Power then it might be different, but Might really doesn’t seem like a major focus for your play style.

This concerns an event guarding a skill point in Snowden Drifts, in the back of the cave west of Darkhoof Heights. (Northwest section of the region)

The full title of the event is “Slay the evil Raven shaman, Vilnia Shadowsong, and her helper” (according to here.) The event shows two health bars, one for Vilnia, and another for Noxia.

However, Noxia has the “Determined” buff, and it does not seem to expire throughout the duration of the fight. Fortunately you can kill the (Veteran) Vilnia Shadowsong first and still complete the event, but Noxia will never despawn, continuing to try and kill anyone that doesn’t run for the back shelter where you commune for the skill point.

I just encountered this today on the Sorrow’s Furnace server, but I know that I did the same event about a week ago where Noxia was not Determined, and died (or fled?) after I dropped her health but before I defeated Vilnia.

I wish that Death Shroud let you still access your utility skills (Spectrals would either be greyed out or end DS immediately or something, I think) and I really, really wish that it would still show you what boons / conditions were affecting you. I mean really: DS underwater practically demands that condition transfer is the major focus but I’m not allowed to see if I’m bleeding / poisoned / weakened?

I really like the options Necromancers have when dealing with boons on foes and conditions on themselves. Well of Power, Well of Corruption, Plague Signet, Corrupt Boon all have insane potential, even though they’re not always useful in all situations.

To my understanding, burning stacks in duration, but uses the highest damage burn first, no matter what. So you burn a target for 2 seconds, then 1.5 seconds later someone with +400 condition damage burns them for 1 second, the new, higher damage burn starts ticking down immediately, and the remaining 0.5 seconds of your burn won’t do anything until the new 1 second burn expires.

I don’t have a source for it, but that’s what I recall hearing.

Grimwolf.7163:

One thing you missed about Head Shot in PvP; even if you actually do interrupt a skill, it only recharges for a few seconds, at which point they can just use it again and you’re out 4 Initiative that could’ve been spent on another Unload.

I may be wrong, but I believe that if you use it while your foe is using a channeled skill (Things like Meteor Storm, Life Transfer, Rapid Fire, Hundred Blades) the skill actually goes on full cooldown.

It only goes on the reduced, 5ish second cooldown if you interrupt the action before the skill starts activating, which can still be worth a lot in certain cases.

I personally don’t take issue with the idea of using mostly 2 skills out of 5 on a skill bar, with the other 3 being for specific situations. When my goal is ‘deal damage’ I don’t need four nigh-identical ways to do it. I need one good way to deal my chosen damage type. (Condition or direct)

Amiron.1067:

EDIT: Also, I’d like to add that Headshot is incredibly useful. Do you know how many allies I’ve saved from being finished in sPvP? Or how many people I’ve stopped from healing? It’s one of the very few stuns in the game that doesn’t have a cooldown and is RANGED and INSTANT. I find it amazingly OP in my opinion.

Quoting this for truth. Headshot is a ranged, near instant interrupt skill. If you can show enough restraint to keep at least 3 initiative at all times instead of using every point as fast as you regain it, it will generally come up when you need it.

In PvE it also counts as a crowd control skill that removes a stack Defiant. A thief can single-handedly remove 3 stacks of defiant in about 1.5 seconds (assuming that they start with a full initiative bar) setting up for an ally’s heavy CC skill like a launch or pull.

Really the fact that it does damage at all is a pleasant bonus. It’s an amazingly good interrupt because of how easily available it is.

EDIT: Regarding the original post: stop expecting that skills with 900 range will have equivalent damage to melee attack skills. The risk of attacking from 900 is nothing compared to getting into melee, even if you are playing an acrobatics heavy thief. Plus, every single P/P skill has a combo finisher component.

digiowl.9620:

After playing a bit of elementalist and having experienced recent events with my necro, i really wish those ground target effects would happen on my focused targets location if i double tapped the skill button. Trying to effectively put down that ground target while both myself and my target is moving, even with things like greater marks, is a major pain.

Have you tried enabling smartcasting? I don’t know from experience, but that sounds like it might be helpful.

For the record, it may be that rather than agony / conditions ticking for double damage, Death Shroud’s life force pool is half the size of your character’s actual health pool.

ddrake.5436:

I understand that this wasn’t about the OP as it was stated @Retanaru.2901.
now @Softspoken.2410 learn to read quotes.

you obviously didn’t read my post because if you did you would realise that your statements contradict.

1. it does not increase the damage as it is a % damage. I fail to see how 5% of 15000 health is less damage than 5% of 20000 – the overall damage yes, but the end result you are left with 5% less health.

2. it does not allow you to cope with damage more easily as you are taking a … do you understand how % works? if you take 50 of something it is 50% less of whatever it is taken from if it’s 10000 or 50000 it’s still 50% so coping with it? you still see half a health bubble.

3. in the original post he mentions prec->vit… he is either saying it’s better or go prec and then pick vit, he is not saying it’s a poor counter

4. read the posts before you comment, less you make a mistake.

1) 5% of 15,000: 750. 5% of 20,000: 1000.
Static values are still relevant, since Agony being based off of the size of the health pool of the target is a very unique characteristic. So ‘Agony does more damage to characters with larger health pools’ and ‘Agony does a flat % of each character’s health, irrespective of health pool size’ are not mutually exclusive statements.
More on this in point 2.

2) I’ll try to make my assertion regarding this point more clear:
All other things being equal, half a health bubble is worth more when the health bubble is bigger.
If Agony is going to reduce you to 50% health no matter what, I’d rather have 12,000 life remaining than 8,000. That 4000 life difference can make a difference to if I survive other attacks not based off a percentage of your characters’ health pool, of which there are many.

3)

you say that vitality is a bad counter to agony, I disagree and I will explain why.

Can you see why I might have thought that you thought that he was saying that vitality was a bad counter to agony? (Read that last line carefully, I couldn’t think of a way to make it be less circuitous)

4) Thanks for the advice. You should be aware, however, that you sound nearly as condescending as I do.

Upon reflection, I’m probably just derailing this thread even more, which is a bit shameful. I’ll stay out of it from here on unless I think I have something interesting to add to the original topic.

I believe that previous to this patch, Dancing Dagger alone could out-damage other skills whose only major purpose was damage, while also being a ranged multi-target crippling attack. It was just too good at too many things, so they decided to focus on its crippling aspect rather than its damaging aspect.

That focus (utility > damage) is pretty universal on off-hand weaponry.

EDIT: In regards to PvE: I could literally do more damage with dancing dagger on a ?/D setup than the main hand skills. At 900 range. While also applying crippled. While also hitting a secondary target. It especially invalidated using pistol main-hand, but was a pretty good offender with the sword as well.

ddrake.5436:

you say that vitality is a bad counter to agony, I disagree and I will explain why.

lets say you have 15,000 health and take 5% health of agony a tick.
5 ticks = 750 × 5 = 3750
lets say you have 20,000 health and take 5% health of agony a tick.
5 ticks = 1000 × 5 = 5000

all these numbers are meaningless as you are taking a % of dmg and please do not confuse % with numbers.

5 ticks = 25% of damage at 5% health of agony a tick.

this means you will be at 75% health regardless of your HP pool.
however…. you are not attacked solely by agony, you are also attacked by monsters.

lets say you have 5000 hp and you take a bleed for 1000 a tick (you are seriously endangered) 5 sec to live
lets say you have 10000 hp and you take a bleed for 1000 a tick (you are endangered) 10 sec to live

the same could be said for toughness:

5000 hp and you take a 3000 hit however halved to 1500 from melee/ranged – halved from tough (not exact math, but bare with me) 3500 hp remain
10000 hp and you take 3000 hit however doubled to 6000 from melee/ranged – doubled from not having tough (not exact math, but bare with me) 4000 hp remain

now lets throw some fun into the mix, if you take a poison condition your healing is reduced by 33% – do you really think healing ASAP is the fix? or condition removal?

tough does not beat vit and vit does not beat tough, they are seperate mitigations and should be treated as such. to say 1 is not useful is false, it is dependant on the situation.

having 900+ healing and trying to heal through poison is -33% effective.
having 300+ healing and trying to heal after removing poison is 100% effective.

math is fun, theorycrafting is fun, but just remember there is no perfect spec/build/combo etc.

This post is almost completely irrelevant to its own thesis statement, let alone the post it was replying to.

About the only thing relevant in there is that if you stack vitality, you’ll have more life remaining (on an absolute scale) once Agony has stopped having its way with you. Which is true, but as noted in the original original post, vitality is still a poor counter because it doesn’t actually reduce the damage that Agony does to you (In fact, it increases it!), it just allows you to cope with taking damage more easily.

Quillixx.7034:

With the trait selection of Master of Corruption in the Curses line, you can lower Blood Is Power’s recharge to 24s, and have a permanent uptime of 10 stacks of might from that utility skill alone (depending on spec). All in all, I maintain on average 27-30 stacks of might on my power build, which comes out to +944 to +1050 power.

This is the best/most clever tactic I have yet read on the Necromancer subforum. Good show.

You’ve correctly pointed out that these skills aren’t used by all types of players/necromancers. The reason that these utility skills exist is because the Necromancer has a few tricks to let them either consume, convert, or transfer conditions on themselves. If you’re running a build with a few of these tricks, a self-inflicted poison debuff is no problem.

Consume Conditions will make it so popping a Corruption right before you need to heal anyways negates the condition you get.

Skills like Putrid Mark (Staff 4), Deathly Swarm (Dagger 4) and Life Blast (Underwater Death Shroud 1), and Plague Signet can all transfer conditions from yourself back to an opponent, which can let you weaponize conditions that are applied to yourself.

Finally, Well of Power can convert conditions to buffs, meaning hitting two corruptions and Well of Power can quickly net you regeneration and protection.

So Corruptions are given those weaknesses because with a build that plans for them, they’re more like weaponry than drawbacks.

Heh, hackks beat me to it. But yeah, there’s a lot of sneaky tricks to let the Necromancer not really care about conditions applied to them.

I shouldn’t be as surprised at the hate for the Dancing Dagger nerf as I am. I honestly thought it bizarre how much damage it was capable of dealing to a pair of targets beside each other, and have thought so for a long while now.

I hoped to see a few changes to Traps overall, since I feel like they’re our weakest utility skill category, but given how limited the changes were to most classes I guess ArenaNet just isn’t at that point yet. The change to Shadow Trap is pretty solid though.

What if Shadow Assault (Spear 5) had a slight AoE range around you (So if you get surrounded, you hit all close by mobs 3 times) and also stacked bleeds in that area? As a tradeoff, you no longer evade during the animation, but the skill duration is only about one second, instead of two and a half?

Personally I feel like the evasive nature of Flanking Strike and Block part of Nine Tailed Strike means we don’t /need/ another evade in Shadow Assault, since we can stall out a fight pretty effectively without it, and it would make Shadow Assault function a little bit like an underwater Death Blossom.

EDIT: I feel like I should clarify: I don’t think thief underwater combat is bad, or that thieves can’t be effective there. I just don’t think there’s a good condition damage build, which means that a thief that builds into condition damage for combat on dry land can’t continue that role if they’re suddenly forced underwater.

I’m almost entirely certain that’s the level 45/50 crafted armor (Requires around level 150-200 in Leatherworker). It’s literally the “Leather” set. Item names are things like Hearty Leather Coat, Vigorous Leather Shoes, etc. They’re super cheap on the auction house, so it’s not too difficult of a skin to get either!

If you actually want your dungeons to be challenging, run anything that isn’t a level 80 dungeon with as many trait points as you would be allowed at the recommended level (In the case of AC explorable, you only get 25 trait points and you’re not allowed to put more than 10 in any one line) and unequip your accessories.

As for dungeons that the recommended level is 80, I can’t comment.

I hadn’t watched your videos before: I did so for the Asura route just now. It is good to know that the second(?) massive group near the end is really light on silver mobs, so it would melt a lot faster than I’d assume. Unfortunately, my groups are not composed of level 80’s in exotics / rares. I realize that yours are speedrun videos, but just realize that my groups tend to not have the raw power to chew through these mob packs without blinking.

I still dislike that jumping over that fence suddenly makes the 12 mobs stop caring about you, but that’s more between me and ArenaNet than anything.

In explorable mode, in the asura and butler paths, there’s a couple of rooms near the end of the dungeon absolutely chock-full of mobs. (The underground caverns and hidden workshop, I believe. Just before the Vallog / Frost boss fights)

There’s four packs of about 10-12 enemies (with about 6 of them being silver) guarding spots in them, while up to that point the most you usually have fought simultaneously is about 4 silvers. As far as I know you cannot aggro part of a pack: either nothing happens or the entire group comes running.

You can skip most of them, but sometimes only if you have group stealth, which is pretty restricted in its availability. Plus, a lot of the ‘running’ strategies I’ve seen rely on de-aggroing mobs, sometimes in really weird places. There are some strategies that are more sneaking around on scaffolding and things which seems a bit reasonable, but they tend to be finicky on whether or not the massive groups notice you. (Automatically bouncing attacks, for example, can screw you completely)

What I want to know is: is it intended that you bypass these groups? Is a group stealth skill (like Shadow’s Refuge, Mass Invisibilty and maybe blast finishers + black powder) supposed to be required? Or are we supposed to be able to kill them in a straight-up fight?

Sword/Pistol is probably your best choice for easy-to-use weapon set in PvE. If something is melee, Blinding Powder will basically reduce its damage to 0. If it’s ranged, you can get up in its face with Infiltrator’s Strike. In either case, once you’re there, Pistol Whip devastates.

Oh, and if it has a highly telegraphed huge damage attack, Head Shot. It’s a build full of control, but also with a good amount of direct damage.

Something I’m considering for dungeons (CM, specifically) is 20 points in Trickery (what blasphemy) for Thrill of the Crime and Bountiful Theft. There’s a mob in CM that grants itself / others Stability, Protection and Regeneration. You can now steal two of those boons, and give them to your teammates along with Fury, Might, Swiftnesss and Vigor.

Granted, there’s a 38 second recharge on this ability. But to my knowledge the only other way to steal / copy an opponent’s boons in the entire game is the Mesmer’s Arcane Thievery, which has a base recharge of 45 seconds.

Also, regarding pistol off-hand: Head Shot is an amazingly good way to quickly peel off 3 stacks of Defiant, setting up for an ally’s big stun or knockdown. Or one of your own, if you like.

EDIT: I’m guessing you’ve taken 30 in the critical strikes line? If not, you might consider it, along with Practised Tolerance (Gives you about 94 Vitality, I think, and your build could use a little health) and Executioner (Lots of bonus damage for the half of a boss fight where people are starting to get worn down / run out of cooldowns)

Psientist.6437:

SoftSpoken,

You are not yet seeing how differently the player controlled (almost) Trading Post and The Currency Exchange (never) operate. If only one person in the game could post buy and sell orders for Green Wood Logs, would you buy green wood logs?

Frankly, I’m not going to go into it because the differences between the trading post and currency exchange are not why I posted in here. I came in here to say that the gem store is not a gold sink, since gems are acquirable without the involvement of gold in any way, shape, or form. So its “innate ability” to act as a gold sink has only been “gutted” in so far as it has never existed.

Gems can be acquired with gold, yes, and that transaction has a fee that acts as a gold sink. That is something different from the gem store though. Has its own tab and everything.

Malediktus.9250:

Trading gold for gems is a goldsink. The person who sells gems gets about 30% less than you have to pay for your gems.

I hadn’t considered that.

I still maintain that the core idea of gems for gold isn’t a sink, but I can’t question that the taxation rate applied is. Calling the entire a feature a gold sink to me though feels iffy in the same way calling the Trading Post a gold sink is. There’s fees for posting: those are the gold sink. The actual buying and selling is just shuffling it around.

Psientist.6437:

Overvalued Tyrian gold is making it too easy to buy gems. The demand for character slot unlocks, bank unlocks etc….Arenanet’s source of reliable income, is very rapidly being filled. The gem store’s innate ability to serve as a Tyrian gold sink has been gutted, they will be left with only keys to drive gem sales.

Gonna take a moment to point something out here: the Gem Store has never been a gold sink. It is a gem sink, since the items in it can only be purchased with gems. The ability to buy gems with gold doesn’t actually create a gold sink, since gold doesn’t actually leave the system by that interaction. It just gets shifted around between players.

I think you could do it quite easily if you played the market on a weekly cycle. Prices for crafting materials tend to shift enough that flipping could be worthwhile between the weekend and middle of the week.

Be sure though that you account for the posting fee when you’re doing it though, of course.

EDIT: Given recent events though, this weekend may be a bit different than usual.

In the Gendarren Fields region, at the Snowblind Peaks area is the heart/task for Vollym’s Battle Pit. Fight pit monsters, gain renown.

However, when choosing to fight (hard) – Jungle Raptor, the fight does not complete properly. Whenever you lower the Raptor to about 10% of its health, it turns invulnerable / friendly, its health bar turns green, and shortly after you’re kicked out of the booth without making progress towards the local renown heart.

This is the only fight that does this, the others conclude when you or your foe dies. So I’m guessing it’s a bug.

My only disagreement with the general tone of this thread is: don’t underestimate the usefulness of Head Shot. In dungeons especially, it’s a good way to interrupt high-damaging skills with a lot of windup, or just interrupt combos. (AC Necromancers, CM Snipers, etc) It’s even got its uses on Bosses: You can peel stacks of Defiant off very quickly, making sure to leave the boss exposed to a big CC (from you or your teammates.)

Heck, even in WvW, it’s a funny way to interrupt a stomp over and over and over again.

Honestly I’m not certain why people are coming down so hard on burning. Yes it stacks in duration, not intensity, but how frequently (as a Guardian) are you managing to get a stack of burning that has more than two seconds of duration on it?

I ask because say you put a 2 second burn on someone. Assuming great reaction times / anticipation, they could cleanse 1.5 seconds of burning, but it typically costs a large cooldown to do so. Meanwhile you hit them with your 4th attack again and proc Virtue of Justice, giving them another 1 second burn. Or you hit them with the active, saddling them with a 5 second burn they might not be able to remove, since they just burned a condition removal cooldown.

In my mind, a burn-heavy build would be one that is constantly re-applying the 1-2 second burns the Guardian has access to, especially via Virtue of Justice. Condition removal only ruins burning if your foe uses it on a large stack, and you can’t put burning back on them. Access to many short-term burns circumvents that defense.

I’m not an expert, but I think the reason that Guardians are so loved is that they have easy access to light element combo fields. Combine with this projectile and whirl finishers (Projectile finishers are especially easy to come by for many classes) and you have cheap/free condition removal for your group. Curing that 40 sec duration poison on you is actually really important, but some builds and classes have a really hard time with that. They especially can’t cleanse the poison/burning/9 stacks of bleed every 10 seconds that it gets re-applied to them.

Having a Guardian who is frequently laying down symbols and other light fields alleviates this problem for most everyone.

I say this because I want to point out that Guardians can fulfill a very useful function without trying to make them heal the entire group or take every hit, tasks that in my opinion require a pretty specific build to be halfway workable.

Caladbolg is an environmental weapon that Trahearne, very wisely, never lets go of.

Honestly once he gets that, his original class is completely irrelevant.

I thought it worked like that… Do you have any particular reference for it? I like to have something to point at if I bring it up in a thread is all.

Also, would it replace the oldest bleeds, or bleeds that were next to expire, or do you know?

Before anything else:
You’re comparing traits to a dedicated heal skill. Once a thief picks signet of malice, that’s their major heal. And they lose /all/ of that healing when it’s on cooldown.

Really, the Necromancer’s ‘life siphon’ is tied much more closely to the Death Shroud mechanic. You build up a bar of life Force and switch into it, eating a few hits with it before you switch back and build up that buffer again.

I’m aware that bleeding can stack up to 25 times on a given opponent, with each bleed running simultaneously. If/when another stack of bleeding is applied to a foe who already has 25 stacks of bleeding on them, what happens exactly? Does that bleed just get ignored? Is the oldest bleed on the target removed to make room? Something else?

Can anyone tell me the logic or mechanics regarding which stacks of bleeding, if any, are removed when bleeding is applied to an intensity above 25 stacks?

A reference would also be appreciated.

For those experiencing this issue, check if you have five points in Shadow Arts. If you do, it’s probable that the adept trait there is stealthing you when you hit 25% health, you’re attacking and getting the revealed debuff, and then trying to stealth immediately afterwards with your own blinding powder because your health is low.

See also: Trait II in Trickery (Instinctual Response)

If you forced the skill to pick from a category you have equipped, it could easily be abused by equipping three utilities of the same category, then an uncategorized heal skill and elite.

The way that a cooldown refresh like this is balanced is by its unreliability. I honestly feel like if you can ever guarantee a refresh of a specific skill, it would be broken.

Granted, they could afford to buff it a little. Maybe up it to two categories refreshed, instead of just one? So there’s better odds of getting something, but still no guarantees on what.

Tulisin.6945:

Krathalos.3461:

Pistol/Dagger is a ranged, condition build.

Considering the best condition damage source P/D offers is the melee-required C&D->Sneak Attack combo, I see this combination being played up-close far more than at a range.

Shadow Strike is a 4 initiative retreat, so as soon as you’ve used Sneak Attack you can hit that to dash back a good distance. Combine with Dancing Dagger and your opponent needs to do something special to get near you, while you can keep using Vital Shot and walking backwards to save initiative.

The key moments are definitely close up, but you can stall for a good portion of the fight at range.

Just one suggestion: from a support perspective, applying boons to all allies is a big deal, so in your trickery line, take Thrill of the Crime (V) instead of Flanking Strikes (IV). Fury and I believe Mightx5 is a very nice boon, and applying it to every ally near your target can net a kill. Swiftness is icing on the cake, and can even allow for an ally’s speedy retreat.

You do lose out on the flat 5% damage boost, but since your build doesn’t seem to be focusing on direct damage anyways, it doesn’t seem like a huge loss.

I’ll leave specific build recommendations to others, but as far as gimmicks go:
Black Powder (Pistol 5) can let you essentially ignore all melee attacks from most opponents. As well, if you’re using a dagger in your main hand you can still drop into stealth by comboing it with Heartseeker. (Dredge are a notable exception and that is part of why I hate them) Other gimmicks I’ve seen around include the Caltrops trait and Signet of Malice, or combining Shadow Refuge with Dagger Storm to get leeching bolts and try to reverse a fight when you’re surrounded.

Shortbow is the easiest to tag a lot of mobs, hands down. You have two AoE attacks and your basic attack bounces. Dancing Dagger (Dagger 4) is kind of close because it bounces as well, but the initiative drain is pretty heavy if you spam it.

Divinity is an all-around rune. It’s good if you either have no idea what you want to focus on specifically, or if you are going to try and utilize multiple damage / defense sources.

If you know you want a Condition Damage build though, Krait isn’t a bad choice, though you are losing out on that 6/6 bonus. Rune of the Afflicted / Centaur also have Bleed Duration bonuses. You might consider taking two Rune of the Afflicted for now, but I don’t know how expensive they are.

I say that because most of your damage is going to be coming from bleeds, right? So runes that boost Bleed Duration would be especially effective. 2 Superior Runes of the Afflicted would see you trading the 45 C.Dmg of your fifth Krait rune for 15% greater duration on your bleeds, which I’m pretty sure is a trade up unless your opponent is very good at removing bleeding.

This occured while I was playing a Human Male Thief on the Sorrow’s Furnace server.

In the Timberline Forest region, between Gyre Rapids and Fisher’s Eye Bridges, there’s an escort event that starts out of Concordia (Gyre Rapids) and heads north. Apparently it’s an escort to a Tower / Watchtower / Build a Watchtower. The wiki lists it as “Bring the Caravan to the tower”, I think. I’m not sure of the exact name.

The event appears to start fine, but once the group passes the bridge, it spawns a mob pack of grawl. The problem is that for the 5 NPCs and 1 player character, about 15 grawl are spawned.

As can be expected, they wipe the NPCs almost immediately, causing the quest to fail. I’m just betting that this is way too many mobs. I did observe one other player character that was AFK on the road just before the mob spawn meets the NPCs you’re escorting, but the difficulty still seems a little over the top.

I attempted this quest twice, and both times an over-large group of grawl was spawned.

I’ve been hearing rumours that Basilisk Venom tends to bypass Unstoppable / Defiant, or in other words it will always work on an opponent. Can you confirm / deny?

I found a couple item skins / names that might be switched. Specifically, the Pirate Speargun and the Pirate Harpoon, as acquired from First Mate Shane at the end of the Captain Weyandt area / jump puzzle in Lion's Arch.

I attached a graphic, but the tooltips vanish when I screencap. While the name matches the stats, the skins appear to be backwards. The Pirate Harpoon of Force (A Spear-type weapon) looks like a Harpoon Gun, while the Pirate Speargun of Force (A Harpoon Gun-type weapon) looks like a Spear.

I only did this with the preview panel, so I’m not sure if my current equipment is relevant, but here it is anyways:
Mending Mask, Pirate Shoulders, Pirate Gloves, Pirate Coat, Leather Pants, Penetrating Boots. The Mask’s skin is transmuted but I can’t remember what from.
Human Male Thief.

MrPicklez.6473:

No one with a brain is going to stand in your AOE and try to rezz their allies, but those four players could easily turn around, destroy you, and rally their buddy.

The problem with this example is completely unrelated to the downed state.

The problem is that you’re effectively trying to 5v1.

As for the thread in general: I think it’s indicative of the way ArenaNet is trying to direct the game towards objectives, rather than the optimal strategy being ‘kill everyone’. And I support gameplay more involved than ‘kill to win’.

Specific to this situation, Slick Shoes would be a great counter. If you used it after they use C&D, they should get knocked down and blinded, so they won’t be able to use the backstab attack at all.

EDIT: Wait the blind is only underwater. One second I’ll keep looking. Although the knockdown is still good.

Basically you want a blind on them, since this sort of build (Assassin’s Signet and Backstab, among other things) is based on building up to one big attack. So if you can deny that attack, you’ve destroyed their build and damage and can retaliate further.

If you could quickly swap to Grenade Kit or Flamethrower, you have a few blinds that you can apply to nearby foes. Or just having a flame turret out, which could be good for punishing a thief the moment they pop out of stealth. (I’m not sure how fast turrets are to react, I’m unfamiliar with Engineer.)

Obviously it’s a lot to think of the first time you see a thief (who may not be running a one-shot style build at all!) but it could save you from your second or third death against them.

Before anything else, the weapon types are Spear and Harpoon gun. Not Harpoons and Spear-guns. So keep that in mind while reading my response.

I see no reason why the melee range Spear should be based around condition damage, rather than direct damage (such as the Vulnerability condition) since condition damage almost always takes more time to do its work by definition, compared to direct damage. Forcing the thief to hang around for a long time in melee range to kill anything forces them to be in the danger zone constantly.

Consequently, Harpoon guns are much safer due to their range, and their retreating skills of Evade and Ink Shot. Even they aren’t that bleed based: the auto attack bleeds, yes, but Deluge is a hard hitting direct damage skill. So the basic weapon strategy is to stack bleeds on your target(s) while you keep your distance with Escape and Ink Shot, waiting for the inevitable condition damage to wear your opponent down to the range that a Deluge or two can finish them off.

Basically I see no reason to make their purposes as suggested in the OP, since both weapons appear to have a purpose that matches their basic damage source.

I’d like to bump / necro this thread, seeing as this still feels like a bug and is still happening.

I managed to fight Gargantula twice last night, and it showed these behaviors both times. It would periodically go like this:

-NPC near doorway yells that another NPC (Captain Morris? The person you’re saving from their webbed doom, in any case) is trapped in a cave.
-Gargantula turns invincible, and a small wave of spiderlings are spawned. (About 8-10 for us, when we had around 5 people I think?) Gargantula starts regenerating life similar to mobs that have left combat, there is no visible regeneration boon.
-Captain Morris (Or whatever their name is, the trapped NPC) announces that the baby spiders are shielding it (Gargantula) and that we need to kill them first.
-By the time this audio clip finishes, Gargantula has regained its entire life bar.
-We kill the wave of spiderlings, Gargantula stops being invincible, but still has full health.

This happened multiple times the first time I fought her, and seemed to be at stages further and further down her health bar. (1/4 health missing, 1/2 life, last 1/4 of life)
It really seems to make more sense for Gargantula’s life to remain static while invincible, since otherwise it takes ages to drop her from 100% to 0%, with nothing interesting happening for that last phase of the fight.

Main hand pistol requires that you stack some condition damage, in my opinion. The bleed on vital shot is half the point.

I don’t think I’d be too far off to say that the heals are well balanced against each other. To tell which one you want, check their secondary gimmick against your play style.

If you like kiting and you’re nervous about opponents getting in your face, and also especially concerned with movement, take Withdraw. It’s a very long roll backwards, so you can generally get yourself out of range really quickly. It also removes chill / cripple / immobilize, so you can keep running. But you need to have somewhere to withdraw to for it to be effective: rolling off a cliff or into another mob tends to just make things worse.

Hide In Shadows is a very strong heal that will cleanse damaging conditions, as well as give you 3 seconds to either flee or get behind your opponent. It can get you out of (or at least let you survive) almost any situation. But it has the longest cooldown, so you won’t get as many uses out of it in a fight. I prefer it if you can really capitalize on the stealth, or kill things quickly enough to only need one good heal to get you through a fight.

Signet of Malice is very nice if tend to attack rapidly, and if your health doesn’t drop too suddenly. If you find yourself needing to use the heal after every hit or risk getting downed, it might not be the one. But if you can take a hit or two and keep going, it could work out nicely since you’ll gradually heal back that damage without burning your actual heal.