Guild Wars 2

Chris.8206:

Thanks for the response and advice! That’s exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. I went to the TP to check on prices (not really into crafting) and it doesn’t list celestial gear. If that isn’t an option, is there anything else that might be close to that build that you could recommend?

Celestial gear can only be crafted using Quartz Crystals and the right recipes. Everything is accountbound. It’s also time gated to one charged crystal per day (or you get lucky harvesting a crystal node in a home instance or Dry Top).

Ele is actually worse off when you stack defense abilities, that’s the truth of it. You can bunker as an Ele, but that revolves around a lot of keyboard wizardry and if you want a ‘casual’ build I’d say just go for Marauders/Berserkers Staff with both Glyph of Elementals on your bar. That way you should be able to summon an Earth Elemental most of the time, which can tank like no tomorrow and hold mobs in place for your staff AoEs. I think that’s as casual as it gets for Ele.

VorianAtriedes.3207:

thebatman.6250:

I tried this build out in PVP and I managed to go on a rampage and get 10 kills on my second game

Necromancer says hi

lol. Anyway I tried my build with Jalis armour and its even better than Dire armour. I mean I had like full hp when I soloed a Veteran Stonehead

As long as the game offers active defenses in the form of kiting, dodging, blocking, etc. the defensive stats will always be inferior in a rather static environment such as PvE. It’s good if you’re having fun but that doesn’t make the build remotely viable for anything but open world PvE, in which every build is viable.

Claudia De Anar.6304:

Its most obvious in Dungeons, and after that I would think Fractals, but even open world you do see it at boss events. Also I think a return to a more dynamic play style would increase the player base still participating in dungeons.

Actively punishing players like this won’t go anywhere,

I would normally agree with you, but I don’t see this as Punishing players, I do see it as presenting the players with a choice, they can pack themselves in like a Phalanx, but there is a price to be paid for that packing, or they can spread themselves out minimally, and avoid the cost.

1. I’d go out on a limb and say the few people who still run dungeons are people who are new to the game and don’t participate in the ‘stacking meta’ anyway. That is usually for speedclear groups (on top of being the rational choice for the most part due to the game design), and those pretty much don’t exist anymore. Fractals, maybe. But even so:

2. Whether you word it differently or refuse to see it that way doesn’t change that it’s punishing players for something that is fine and largely player choice.
What you suggest, however, is not a choice anymore. You force players apart or suffer combat penalties. Not to mention that I don’t see the point of then saying ‘oh standing RIGHT next to each other is fine, but please no overlapping!’.

The ‘stacking meta’ isn’t even that much a problem, because you already have an easy and powerful tool to avoid it: Just don’t do it. The game works perfectly fine without stacking, but, as I said twice already, the game mechanics make stacking advantageous. Is it the only way to play? No. In WvW it can also serve a tactical purpose. You stack so the enemy cannot immediately see how many people are around. Does it make sense from a realism point of view? Well, does it make sense you can pet someone back to life with your bare hands?

This topic, to me, just looks like a typical ‘I don’t like how many people do X, so I think we should enforce Y so this won’t happen in the future!‘, and as such, has little value and is bolstered by personal opinion (’this would surely benefit the game’) which misses the point that it’s already very much possible to avoid X. Form your own groups, kick anyway who wants to stack and enjoy your suboptimal runs, nobody is stopping you.

If you want to move away from the stacking meta (what mode are we even talking about? WvW? Fractals?), the simplest fix would be to get rid of Boon range for party members. When the majority of synergizing traits and skills work between 0 and 600 range, of course people will stack to get the most out of it. Make it so that the whole party in the instance gets the Boons or massively increase the application range and people will be more inclined to spread out.

Actively punishing players like this won’t go anywhere. Plus it opens the door for griefing by actively bodyblocking (a few people can simply bodyblock a whole area and other players can’t get in, great) and purposely deflecting blows to other players. Hence it will never happen.

As Ele I wouldn’t spec defensively in PvE. I’d suggest Earth Armor, Lesser Glyph of Elementals and Signet of Air as utility and Glyph of Elementals as Elite.

Cast the lesser Glyph in Earth to get the elemental to tank for you and burst Garm down. Eir will come to revive him, focus on her. That’s the whole strategy for the fight – down Garm, attack Eir while she is reviving him.

When your Lesser Earth Elemental is gone, summon the Elite one in Earth. When that one is gone, your Lesser should be ready again.

eligecos.8429:

One thing I never fully experienced was the story modes in all the dungeons. It gets harder and harder to pull together a group of people to play them without having to go through the effort of finding a group or a guild that wants to do them. Doesn’t help much that I generally enjoy the content of GW2 as a solo player.

But what I liked about LW season 2 content is that it can be enjoyed as a single player and a group. Likewise, when playing the final chapter of your personal story by killing Zhaitan, you could play the story mode of that dungeon solo.

I wish all story modes of every dungeon had this. So I thought since they did it with Arah, why not make a solo version of all dungeon story modes work this way as well?

Arah was for the longest time a group dungeon as well, even in the Story Mode. They only changed it after numerous complaints that people couldn’t finish their Personal Story that is nothing but soloable instances without grouping up. Though I suppose the original idea was to have a transition from the Tutorial (aka open world PvE) to the group content.

The other Story Modes are not related to the Personal Story other than giving the background information on the reunion of Destiny’s Edge. Lastly, most people only did the Story Modes to gain access to the Explorable Mode for the loot, which isn’t the case anymore either. Even though a fix to make them soloable would be rather easy (just slash all mob HP by 5), I doubt it will happen. Seeing how they killed dungeons it would be nice, but ultimately not worth the development time I feel.

If you really want to experience the story, you can try looking at a video on the playthrough on Youtube. Most fights in between the cutscenes are just busywork anyway.

And yes, solo clears are possible, especially for Story Modes, but eh. Takes way too much time / effort if you just want the story.

Astralporing.1957:

Azoqu.8917:

The reason Elementalists can stack boons is because they have terrible armor and health. If you removed their way to survive while keeping them at low health you would have to make them a true glass cannon and increase their damage by over 3x if you wanted a slight breeze to blow them over.

On the other hand, Revenants have the best armor and better health, and they can stack buffs even better than eles. Without sacrificing damage. Funny how that is.

Opposed to Eles they melt against any decent condi player, funny how that is. It’s almost like there’s more to classes than just the boons.

Ally.4382:

If I were to say, murder your family. Would you accept “ignoring” me as a good form of justice for my crimes?

I understand people still do not want to take cyber bullying (for lack of a better phrase) seriously. But it IS real.

Sorry, what crime? I think those things mostly come down to people lacking thick skin these days. Cyberbullying can’t be a thing if you can simply block the person and they know literally nothing about you personally in the first place. It’s you submitting yourself to their ramblings without blocking them and then continuing to dwell on it when a healthy reaction would be ‘I dont’ care, I don’t even know this person’.

So a more strict policy to accomodate for modern hugboxes isn’t the way to go I say.

That being said, actions should be taken when people are repeatedly doing nothing but riling up the map chat. But condemning every personal attack as a ‘crime’ and demanding punishment for it is seriously out of proportion.

VorianAtriedes.3207:

With this build I was able to defeat Zhaitan with the help of only 1 other person who is a pro, whose name is Agiel.6098. With this build I managed to tank the mouth of Orr till it was at half hp.

That’s really cute.

FFMFeliciano.7526:

OtterPaws.2036:

You have the ability to change weapon stats at will, so thats a + at least.

since 90% player run zerker for 100% of their time, this is not a thing

Pssh I can swap from Berserker’s to Assassin’s to Marauder’s, plenty of choice!

I don’t see how a miniscule increase in stats would make Legendaries more desirable. They already have the bonus of always being best-in-slot (though with the rate of releases and uncertainty what ANet means when they say ‘no vertical progression … except these Ascended items that are vertical progression!’), having unique (and sometimes annoying) effects and being able to stat swap on the fly.

But the last point is really meh until they add a functionality that saves the Sigils in the stat slot. Because it’s true, you can swap the stats but why would you when going for another build usually requires you to use different Sigils as well. Being able to save (or at least ‘unlock’ a Sigil on the item by consuming it) Sigils (and then Runes for Legendary armor) I could see them having a much bigger incentive for players.

Aquatic combat is one of those concepts that had a lot of promise but were half-butted into the release and then because of that players didn’t really get into it, which led to unfamiliarity and disliking of it and eventually had it pretty much scrapped.

It’s easy to see just by looking at classes and how they work underwater. Some are amazing (Engi, Necro, Mesmer, Ranger [pet tanking for days]) while others can’t even use their utility skills (Thieves, somewhat Revenant) without that making any sense or just plain suck (Guardian lol). Oftentimes I read that players found the 3-axis combat confusing, which I’d account on the lack of exposure in 99,99% of the game. Though I’d agree that going melee underwater can be a pain at times.

I’d say what would need fixing to make underwater combat viable (most importantly opening up utility skills and give classes equal footing), but it’s pretty clear that ANet all but scrapped aquatic combat from the game (removal from PvP, WvW and nothing added in PvE). People keep saying that Bubbles would warrant a complete aquatic combat overhaul, but I highly doubt that would ever happen. It would be much easier to have the story go along the lines of ‘we got this here machinery with which we can force him up / go down and create airdomes so we don’t need to swim!’ than to completely change the existing system in a meaningful way.

On a completely unrelated note, still baffled by Engi grenade auto working underwater but not on land.

On that note, Invisible is still broken and will occasionally flip back to ‘online’ when you logged out invisible and log back in some time later.

Khisanth.2948:

Every class can have boon removal.

[citation needed]

Well, the thing is, what does a solo roamer bunker in WvW do? Distract people who are not smart enough to just ignore him. It’s literally all they can do. Just go do something else while they throw pebbles at you.

And as it was said, Elementalist can stack those boons because otherwise they die from stubbing their toe. Remove them and that’s it for them.

I’d argue the issue is that, in fact, not all classes can actually (reliably) strip boons (one stack every 10 seconds with a sigil is really meh). But most classes are already very similar to each other in terms of what they do so I’m not sure we need more of that.

Paulytnz.7619:

Lets face it water and water combat failed. Why did it fail? If you don’t take into account all of the bugs associated with it. Mainly because we are forced to use different weapons and skills that we are not used to using and which are usually worse due to many different reasons. One example could be that when we build our builds we mainly spec for land and thus we lose a lot of that in water.

I actually think water combat failed because it’s too confusing/hard for a good chunk of players (on top of few to no utility skills [lolthieves] and difficult meleeing). I mean, we are looking at things like the NPE and continuous nerfs to things that require some sort of onscreen awareness.
Of course, if you keep butchering every aspect of the game that actually has any form of underwater combat people can never get used to it in the first place. But seeing how there aren’t even BL skins for UW weapons for a good while now (and I think confirmation that there won’t be new UW legendaries either), I think it’s really time to just scrap underwater combat as a whole. Clearly it’s going nowhere and remains yet another kitten idea that had great potential but was ultimately left to rot.

If you can’t find anything you want to buy with gold in this game maybe it’s time to move on.

Well, maybe because RTL has a 40s CD if you use it to travel along the map. And maybe because a discussion about ‘which weapon should I use in X’ usually revolves around, you know, applying those weapons to things to kill them, so I don’t see some mobility out of combat as a selling point.

And what out of combat benefit does scepter hold, I wonder, save for pre-combat Might stacking?

dukevonart.2691:

Burn Ele Build Video

Burn Ele Build (note: varies from the video, as it’s just what threw I together in the editor)

Sure, and how do you consistently stack those insane amounts of burning? And what do you do when your burning skills are on CD? Hit with power attacks that do little damage because of lack of Precision and Ferocity?

Watch the video, but basically anything you do will apply burning stacks. The longest relevant CD with D/F is 13s on Flamewall. Additionally the gear is mostly Sinister, so Power and Precision are your secondary stats.

Condi Ele in PvE is possible but outclassed by proper condi classes and physical damage builds so what gives.

My knowledge my not be totally up to date, but burn ele damage is at the very least comparable to other condi classes and slightly behind power ele damage on large targets (both are dependent on the boss being stationary).

SALT: I have not played this build

21k DPS with an almost full array of party buffs is okayish, yes, but still widely outclassed by power Elementalists. Though I admit the damage is higher than I thought. Still, I think it comes down to ‘you can but why would you’, as other condi classes (Engi and Reaper) do comparable damage but add a lot more utility.

And what exactly is the bug supposed to be?

I laughed at Rev being OP.

You should post this in the Electronic subforum, really.

Sure, and how do you consistently stack those insane amounts of burning? And what do you do when your burning skills are on CD? Hit with power attacks that do little damage because of lack of Precision and Ferocity?

Condi Ele in PvE is possible but outclassed by proper condi classes and physical damage builds so what gives.

This should go to General Discussions. And ANet usually doesn’t tell (or know) beforehand when items are coming back on sale.

Nobody but the people who created the loot system know. Maybe even those don’t know for sure. And while there is no evidence because that would take forever to accumulate and surely be dismissed as insubstantial sample size seeing how there’s millions of accounts and ongoing drops, there’s just anecdotes at times that seemingly must go beyond simple distribution and statistics.

Like the one person I know who literally got 13 Fractal Warhorn skins from Fractals back then, and no other skin. He would only ever drop Warhorn skins.
Or the other person who got around 13 precursors in 1.5 years of playing (PvE only), compared to others who play since release and have yet to get a single one.
Or the person who keeps dropping Ascended Chests in PvE without doing Fractals or world bosses at a rate of maybe once every 2 weeks.

It’s not so much the fact that those things drop, but that those things drop and accumulate on single accounts that makes me wary. In the end it doesn’t matter though. 99,9% of all drops on GW2 are salvage trash anyway, so what gives.

And on that note, ever since hitting 175% magic find the first mob I kill on any map after logging in consistently drops a rare item for me.

Malediktus.9250:

I cannot believe so many people enjoy playing after a shedule waypointing around Tyria from one thing to the next just to quickly zerg it down to reap some rewards for no effort.

You mean like people who join world events like Tequatl only to AFK all the time, letting others do the work and then collect their loot? Yeah, why would people do that, I don’t get it.

And I wouldn’t necessarily call ‘afking on the same map for hours on end in hopes of maybe getting an RNG spawn’ effort, at least not in any sense that anyone would defend that. It would be effort if the boss were really hard to defeat or if it were an instance that needed to be beat. The difference is that those things offer something to work towards, with measureable progress states, as opposed to a binary RNG flipswitch.

But as it stands it’s just a lame champion mob that only gained significance due to a badly designed collection. So what gives that it’s on a timer now.

It could probably work somewhat, but the damage would be subpar. All you have is burning, and while that is a nice damaging condition in itself, condi builds get their damage from a mix of bleeds, poison and burn (and chill if you’re a reaper).

If you want to play condi in raids, try Engineer or Reaper, that’s what people bring for condi. Otherwise stick to Thief I guess.

I mean, OP still hasn’t said anything that can be counted as (constructive) criticism. It was really just a blog post about his PvP endeavours and ‘the game lacks direction’, to which I agree, like I said. But I don’t feel like panning out why, apparently just like OP.

Well, considering they have better things to do than fix clipping issues, evident by things like only releasing outfits because ‘it would be too much work to resolve clipping issues with mix-and-match released armor sets’ or not adding capes because ‘too few people play Charr and it would be too much work to make those work with them’ , I’d point to my above statement.
And I’d argue that most players wouldn’t even notice that (I know I haven’t, because the armor is fine on my human characters). And that a texture issue is not really a bug.

Not trying to be mean here, it’s just how things are.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Ele is the class that to me feels like a master of all weapons, not just one. OP, if you are on a budget, get staff first but if you can afford to buy more, one of each – staff, scepter, focus, warhorn and 2 daggers.

Imo, the really nice thing about staff is that you have awesome range with it but it’s good in melee too.

Right. Scepter is pretty garbage though. So are the Dagger offhand skills because of the redunculous CDs.
I mean, I also have all weapons in my inventory because you never know. But in PvE all you really need is a Staff and Dagger/Warhorn if you want to go for Fresh Air. Focus has some nice defense if you really need it but eh.

Don’t expect any fixes in terms of clipping armor on beast races. Like, ever.

Azukas.1426:

Last finals had 2 revs a team

That warrants a nerfing by all regards.

As for using the past to justify keeping a class obsolete….please. Thieves haven’t been close to OP since the 1st year of release and the short S/D stint. Even the s/d stint only had them OP vs mesmer

I like how the post before literally says ‘just because pro teams use something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s OP’ and yet you keep spouting your ‘hurr the top teams used X, it must be nerfed!’ time and again.

Ampa.2749:

Female cloths are crap. Clearly the target demographic is 14-18 year old males.

I gave up long ago and just bought a Jungle Explorer Outfit.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Jungle_Explorer_Outfit

I don’t believe that the cause of girl gamers is served by this sexist bias. Just my opinion.

I know, right! It’s impossible to be female and like those skimpy outfits.

Wait a second, that’s sexist. It’s not so easy these days where literally everything is offensive.

Apparently the achievements for path 2 and path 3 are swapped. So you’ll have to finish P2 to get the one for P3 and vice versa. Because ANet.

Malediktus.9250:

I dont have any of them stockpiled. I always sold them as soon as I got them. But now drytop is 80% less interesting to me, just another farm map on shedule like all the HoT maps.
The point was never to spawn camp for them. The loot was not good enough for it, just some extra suprise loot and geodes when you came accross one. It is pure Anet’s fault to require one of them for a precursor collection. And now they ruin this rare boss mechanic instead of changing the requirement for their stupid trident collection.

Disregarding the fact that apparently the people who designed the collections indeed didn’t know what kind of events were tied to them (which shows how well people employed to work on things know the subject matter at hand), all of Dry Top’s events were already running on fixed timers. If you were really running Dry Top regularly it was already boring by that definition, since 99% of the time you knew exactly what happened when. So what gives.

Malediktus.9250:

I just wanted to thank you for ruining rare spawns in Dry Top. Just for this one stupid collection item you ruined the interesting rare spawns? Why did you not just change it to the Champion Windrider in Southsun instead?

What got ruined?
1) Element of suprise when finding such a rare spawn. Before you never knew when, where and which rare spawns. On lucky runs you could have 3-5 rares. Now just one, always at the same time and predetermined rare.
2) The value of the monkey tonic and miniature is crashing like no tomorrow because now everyone can farm them with a simple timetable and it is getting broadcasted on map (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Slay_the_rare_creature)

In conclusion I think this patch was really fail.

I mean, you’re just mad because you stockpiled a gazillion of those items and can’t cash in. Ain’t that the truth? Overall the change was useful though. Camping the same boring map for hours on end just to get an RNG spawn isn’t what most players would consider fun, I wager.

Amaranthe.3578:

Jahroots.6791:

Nope. I’d rather they let us make continue to make our own lazy decisions. And I especially don’t want to see 59 or 69 Cliffside again, as long as I live. We get plenty of variety on the lower levels. 51+ is just a quick gamble for Ascended chests.

well with such kittened players in the community i guess anets decisions start to make sense now

I’d argue that someone who wants an entire system changed to his personal preference (when it really just limits options further) is a ‘kittened player’.

It’s true that for the dailies people just do Swamp and Molten Duo, but it’s their choice. There’s achievements for doing every single Fractal from 1-100, you can do those if you like. Or make your own parties in the LFG instead of whining on the forums.

Some Fractals are just plain annoying (Cliffside, Dredge with people who can’t listen, Main Trin [so much that it was downgraded from ‘pretty much every Boss Fractal’ to ‘literally only 3 instances in 100 scales’], etc.). And honestly, if you’d roll something like Thaumanova, Cliffside and Mai Trin on 50+ I’d imagine most people just couldn’t be kitten d to do the daily then.

Network lag != low FPS.

On that note, the engine is pretty bad and performance is rather low even with beast hardware and moreso with many people around. It’s just how it is.

I’m not sure what the crit part is supposed to mean. Did you test in a downscaled area?

When I use the Facet I get Fury and the correct Crit Chance values added to my current one. 20% extra without trait, 40% extra with Roiling Mists.

The lack of weapon scaling affects the third attack of the auto chain, Precision Strike and also Unrelenting Assault as far as I know and it should be a known issue. I mean, it was posted on reddit.

Me neither. Could swap to every attunement without interrupt in 2 different casts. Maybe you moved during the animation.

It probably is confusing, but it says ‘outgoing healing’ which implies that it’s healing that ‘jumps’ from you to other targets. And I assume it’s this way because pretty much everything that doesn’t give you Healing Power but instead ‘% healing effectiveness’ only works with healing done to allies.

So if the Sigil increases the healing to allies, I’d say it’s not buggy but working as intended (and would be in line with all the other traits and effects that work similarly).

I agree though that ‘aktive Heilung’ sounds kittened. But that’s why I can’t stand playing this game in German.

If you’re making another thread then this thread right here is really pointless. It’s nothing but ‘how I played PvP and how I went from Necro to Thief’, without any contructive points or even ground for discussion.

While I agree that this game feels like it has been lacking direction since around LS1 was introduced, I don’t think OP’s post offers anything worthwhile.

I’m not sure about this Sigil in particular, but usually those effects only apply to healing that is applied to allies, not yourself. So a heal for 1000 HP by you with 50% outgoing heal effectiveness (to allies) would heal an ally for 1500 HP while it would heal yourself for only 1000 HP.

Did you test it on yourself or allies?

That’s really great! Before, I was a pure PvE-er but with this change I’ll totally queue up for (un)raked arenas to get the last PvP daily done!

I am so glad that ANet were right from the start, that a majority of the players aren’t playing mostly or exclusively one mode, but are hopping between PvE, PvP and WvW all the time and play each mode equally! Now it also totally makes sense that there’s no split balancing in this game. Maybe in the future we can even meld all three modes into a single one, that could improve fun even further!
And using their dailies to enforce, sorry I mean incentivise cross-mode playing they really hit the nail on the head! Thanks for knowing your playerbase better than the players know themselves.

D:

OtterNase.7863:

Sourde Noire.5286:

patch the biggest issues shortly thereafter.

That made my day, thank you

Well, yeah. Things that make the game crash or something. Anything beyond that they usually patch around the next quarter or never.

lol

Astralporing.1957:

Sourde Noire.5286:

It’s really great. Before the nerf Gerenth failed so often I couldn’t get this achievement.

It wasn’t (and still isn’t) necessary to kill gerent to get it. Just make him unburrow 3 times.
Though i agree, killing him (regardless of phase) should also trigger it.

And I do that how if the event fails in another lane in the first phase? As was the case for the most part back then.
And killing him before starting the 3rd defense phase does not trigger the achievement, since it requires you to take part in 3 consecutive defense events of a lane that obviously won’t happen if the event succeeds in phase 2. And getting people to wait for the kill to pop an achievement is unreliable too. Not to mention the trolls that always do the exact opposite of what players ask for.

It’s fine, I don’t need that achievement. I just find it funny how it’s either ‘too hard’ for the majority of players even in organised maps and then it gets nerfed so hard it’s so easy that you cannot even reliably get the achievements that – using common sense – should pop on a successful kill before the last phase. Is all.

It should be rather obvious by now that ANet doesn’t have any form of QA. :^)

They patch, wait for the player feedback, then patch the biggest issues shortly thereafter.

Improvements

The Captain’s Airship Pass and Royal Terrace Pass can now be used from the PvP lobby, WvW, dungeons, and raids. Using these passes will cause you to lose your progress in those instances.

The RT pass does not work in WvW (neither Borderlands nor EB), dungeons (neither Explorable nor Story mode) or raids.

Without words, really.

Anet is deliberately unclear on this.

In terms of autoclickers to open loot bags it’s pretty much ‘as long as you don’t do anything else while opening the bags nobody can tell and nobody cares’.

It’s really great. Before the nerf Gerenth failed so often I couldn’t get this achievement.

Now they nerfed it to the ground and I can’t get it either because it actually dies too fast.

AysonCurrax.3254:

it was gone for the past 3 updates, now its back.

are you kittening kidding me? it cant be that hard to fix…

I’m seriously wondering what the heck is going on at Anet’s. They keep doing this. They fix something with an update and the next update breaks it again.

I get it, you have different teams working on different things, but maybe some coordination is in order. It’s not only annoying but actively wasting manpower and money.