Guild Wars 2

Unless I understand wrong, the amount of gems+gold in the exchange is continually growing due to the tax on exchange.

If I start with 100 gold and turn it into gems. Then take all those gems and turn them back into gold, then I’ll have ~70 gold. The exchange is now 30 gold “richer”. And a tiny, tiny bit more stable due to having a larger pool

The thing that people who have trouble with Grawl fractal need to remember is that there are 2 distinct dangers:

Shaman’s arrows/attacks.

Spawning elementals

If you’re at 50% health and have no heal available because you did poorly on #1, the second becomes a whole lot more dangerous.

So you really need to dodge the shaman attacks and keep your health up to properly prep for elementals spawning.

There are only 4 zones that really deliver decent cash on map completion:

Cursed Shore
Malchior’s Leap
Straights of Devastation
Frostgorge Sound

L60+, when you get access to the last tier of traits.

Either:

Make Sweet Vengeance baseline and turn the trait into a cooldown reduction
or
Add a cooldown reduction to Sweet Vengeance
or
Leave SW the way it is, but halve the cooldown on Vengeance

Elementalists used to have the worst down state, because Mist Form was on a longish cooldown (7-10 seconds), and they would get stomped before being able to use it. Now they have one of the best, because theirs is actually usable.

Warriors need the same.

Stronger Bowstrings makes most bow attacks a strong (aka 100%) Projectile finisher.

It’s not on the tooltip. It’s also not that great. Look at the attacks before Stronger Bowstrings:

1. Already a blast finisher
2. Not affected
3. Already a 100% finisher

So you get 100% (until they fix it) out of attacks #1 and #2…which are already 20% finishers. This is good in organized groups paying attention to combo fields. Mostly worthless in pugs (it will get you a couple extra seconds of burning from your fire field)

Get Gwen’s, and keep your zerker amulet in your backpack to pull out when you want more DPS and don’t need the extra toughness

CoaxialMazer.9140:

Sadly Cavalier only exist on Trinkets

You can also get cavalier exotic weapons as account bound drops in FotM. I swap between zerk and cavalier axe depending on need. Also had a rifle with those stats, but decided toughness wasn’t worth the loss of precision in a ranged weapon.

Sadly, they’re pretty rare drops

Sil.4560:

Meanwhile, the team Elementalist attuned to water and did a dodge roll for close to the same effect and it didn’t cost him a single utility slot. -_-

Sadly, the heal affected no one but the elementalist, because all of those ele heals, including water field combo blast-heals, have a small radius (wiki says 240 for cleansing wave).

I stopped playing my ele in pugs because of this very thing. It’s too hard to land heals on moving people, without a verbal warning.

HannaDeFreitas.4236:

Spifnar.4712:

Banner of tactics is clunky as hell to use and costs DPS, especially compared to insta-shouts

???

Get to banner, pickup banner animation/lag (the main clunky-ness), activate banner, drop banner, attack. It’s 2 seconds of attack time wasted to get an 800 point heal

But the main problem with banner regen is that regen only stacks in duration. It’s the same problem with a warrior condition build, 2 condition spec players and you hit the condition cap. Likewise, if there’s someone else in the group who is built to provide good regen uptime, banner regen is wasted.

Not that it’s hard to switch from banner regen to shout heals…they’re both at 30 tactics. I have a non-soldier rune DPS set that I carry for when I do switch to banners. It’s just that shouts are useful to me much more often:

With the all-in approach to shouts, they give: A heal, condition removal and 7 strikes of adrenaline, on top of their usual effects, and on a short cooldown (aside from Fear Me, which is unterrated IMO)

Liltaro.6341:

Not sure why are we talking about “burst” healing?

Most people with shout heals run 3 shouts as a default, and if you have the cooldowns available, you can gun out all 3 in 0.1 seconds

That’s about 4k healing for non-heal gear warriors. Also known as more than 1/2 of a ‘6’ heal for everyone in range. Or 30 seconds worth of regen healing

Banners don’t cure conditions
Banners don’t have burst healing available
Banners don’t move
Banner of tactics is clunky as hell to use and costs DPS, especially compared to insta-shouts

Shouts don’t have 2 free utility slots
Shouts don’t get an extra combo blast (or two if you pick it up and plant)
etc

It’s about tradeoffs

Sigil of Blood already has a cooldown. 2 seconds IIRC

FYI, that 2 seconds is so bad that I stopped using it

Fractal dredge, as high as you can handle (actually, whatever level range has no chance to get bomb run) . No need to do the end event. Reset after killing Rab

Most of my runs I end up with 25+ heavy miner bags, and that’s with skipping as much as possible with spy kits. Bags TP for 4s+, or you can gamble for onyx cores/lodestones and T6 mats. That’s on top of the usual drops.

Knights armor is a good pick. Do you have runes of the soldier too? That plus your traits will put you at 23k health. That’s plenty. Do you have a back piece?

For more durability, I’d recommend switching traits to: 0/25/15/30/0. Damage on dodge roll is a waste of points when you can get adrenal health. Also, the defense trait of adrenaline on getting hit helps build adrenaline

If it followed the current setup for MF/Salvage of exotics:

4 Ascended rings into MF-> 1 Random Ascended ring with a chance (25%?) for a random Infused Ring

4 Infused Rings into MF -> 1 Random Infused ring with a chance for a random fractal weapon skin

Salvage one Ascended (or Infused Ring) = Chance for 0-3 ectos and several fractal relics. Chance for a Pristine Relic, depending on quality of salvage kit used.

The real reason for not having solo dungeons is because it will force some people to realize they suck…and they can’t handle that truth.

It might also highlight class imbalances more than ANet wants to, and the increase in complaints about PvE and warriors would be too much for the boards to handle

Then again, it might be because some boss encounters are designed around multiple people, and re-tooling them for solo players is more effort than it’s worth.

Longbow has 3 attacks that are useful in an AE tagging situation: Burst, #2 and #3. You need to run the appropriate adrenaline skills to be able to use burst as often as possible. Extra range trait preferred.

For a swap weapon, you can pick between several:

MH Sword – mobility
MH Axe for sustained 3-target damage and 5-target vuln
OH Axe for Whirling axe
OH Horn – mobility
GS – Bladetrail, Whirling blade, 100b and Rush for mobility

IMO LB/GS

It depends on the encounter and your group of course. If I feel I can go full melee (ie, a good melee support guardian in group) then it’s axe/mace and GS. When I feel I have the least amount of support it’s axe/shield with a ranged weapon.

Since I’m 30 tactics, I will “default” to axe/warhorn and longbow for fractals. Some encounters always get a specific weapon set though:

Cliffside, legendary shaman: Axe/warhorn+ranged
Urban: GS+Longbow (rifle for last guy)
Dredge: Axe/shield+longbow

The WP fix is just fine. Death rushing is just stupid

The issue here is

1) Dying in an unrezzable place. Apparently they’re looking into this one instance

2) Death removing your contribution to a boss fight. IMO this also needs to be looked at. If you do your share of damage and die near the end, your contribution should be remembered so you can loot the boss after you rez

Knights/zerker armor, soldier runes, 3 ascended zerker pieces, shout build with 15 disc

158-184k damage. Would be more, but the mosquito always dies on the first hit.

/stupidthread

Food and oil costs coppers. Just use the item step worse than the L80 one. That means a pie that heals 50% of the time on crit instead of 66%

Oil that gives 8% total rather than 10%.

Shadowfist.2708:

They have to be careful though, otherwise this will just end up like WoW, where people never congregate anywhere and just show up in the LFG tool. Kinda killed the community spirit.

This was already the case with gw2lfg.com for the most part, aside from people killing dragons maybe.

ANet just changed the non-dungeon content to be more attractive…we’ll see if it’s attractive enough, or if I open gw2lfg.com every time I load up gw2

I was thinking that AC is so laughably easy that no deathrushing shouldn’t affect that dungeon at all (nor CoF 1 n 2).

But they’ve made changes to downlevelling to lower the effectiveness of higher level people…so who knows. A full exotic 80 might have to pay attention to mechanics a bit more. Best thing to do is try it out

People with parked toons can still get 3/10th as much Ori for the same time investment. And then roam around mining Ori with 80’s if they like

I’m actually amazed Ori prices held up for so long with a safely mine-able rich ori node. Stayed above 2.50 all the way to Jan 7th.

If you have access to ascended gear, then you want zerker for rings and back. It doesn’t need to be infused

I see people down on healing shouts, but with a 3-shout investment, you bring a lot of healing to the table:

Regular #6 heal skill heals yourself for roughly 6k every 30 seconds

3x shouts heal for roughly 4.5k every 25-30 seconds and heals up to 5 people in a small radius. That’s kitten good considering shouts are worth using by themselves.

The problem with a support warrior is that you don’t bring a lot else. There’s some condition removal and buffs, yes, but the best support comes from AE/group reflect or block.

Now, if they added a group aegis 30-point trait to Defense (aegis on shout or aegis on banner summon/#2), then maybe warrior would be versatile enough with support to not have everyone go 30 tactics.

The gold->gem and gem->gold prices are set by players.

However, it’s gold sellers that are indirectly driving the price of the gold exchange:

Player A buys 300g from the gold sellers. Some of that gold probably gets spent on gems, a little on gold sinks, and the rest on the TP. This has several effects:

1) The ratio moves a little to favor guying gold with gems, helping out the legit gold buyers

2) Driving up the price of gems when bought with gold

3) General inflation by injecting money

1. and #3 directly hurt players making gold via cash drops. Players farming mats to sell are relatively unharmed, because inflation makes their sales worth more in general

Now multiply that by hundreds of players buying gold from farmers.

Retooling significantly for knight gear, and eating omnomberry ghosts/pie would get you:

Slightly more toughness
Slightly less power
More healing and damage via crits
Less vitality

Which won’t solve the problem of: You’re already not going down until things are really bad…ie, your party is already half dead. So realistically, you need more group support without losing much personal defense.

A great support utility is Fear Me. Useless against bosses now, so use Endure Pain on bosses and Fear Me on trash. It’s also a long duration shout, so kinda works with what you’re doing already.

I assume you’re already using hammer. If not, it’s the most defensively support weapon we have. For offensive support, longbow.

Shield vs mace vs warhorn. Shield is mostly a personal defense weapon. A single target stun is meh for group support (PvE). I find warhorn to have much more group support value via long duration group vigor and medium duration AE weakness. The line-AE knockdown of offhand mace is also great group support

Soldier runes would also give you group condition removal

Kodanroar worked for me until I got the Fractal horn drop

In general (WvW, dungeons and FotM) I have never needed extra health from gear when already going 30 in tactics, so soldiers is a bit of a waste. For defensive minded warriors, I recommend knights. Then swap pieces for zerker as you get more comfortable.

I definitely don’t recommend soldiers style gear for weapons, because you don’t gain health when swapping to a vitality weapon…so it’s a waste of a stat unless it’s on your “initiator” weapon.

I would love to know how many gems ANet has sold. Just out of curiosities sake. Even if it was just the # of gems sold in the first month. /sigh

I know that many guildies bought the 4000 pack early on, with the rationale that without a monthly payment, why not?

The change from a month ago needs to be reverted. First, have warhorn #4 remove cripple/immob/chill, then have any remaining condition converted to a boon if traited.

And that second condition conversion should follow the removal rules of any other single-condition removal. Doesn’t matter if it’s LIFO or weakest->strongest, as long as it’s the same as any other class.

You’ll get the most bang for your gold from buying exotic knights jewelry and slotting them with ruby jewels (25/15/3%)

When thinking about armor, save your gold and karma. Run daily dungeons for tokens and buy armor with that. AC will get you rampagers (prec/power/condition), and CoF will get you berzerkers. Both work pretty well together with knights.

Blowing all your cooldowns for long duration invuln (or something like it, such as evasion) is do-able by many classes.

To the OP’s point, people will get annoyed on trash, because a team full of kiters that isn’t organized (CC, positioning) will take forever to kill packs.

I also love longbow, but I’d recommend starting with a melee weapon. GS, Hammer, axe/mace and more are great for an in-and-out style that compliments longbow well

Axe would add damage and lose control. Eviscerate has nice synergy with high adrenaline gain. The whirl, leap and projectile finishers are nice with a fire field.

This build could use Hammer/LB for packs and axe+WH/LB for bosses. Or axe+axe/LB for whirling fun with packs.

I was wondering what was causing the drop in mithril prices. I assumed the botters had gotten better gathering coded

Odds that ANet retrofits current fractal weapons to ascended stats?

I think it’s obvious there is some content so easy that it can be done in any gear (MF, greens, etc)

This is where FotM is good. The rewards scale up with the difficulty of content.

There are some smart items (Pirate/MF runes on zerk/knight/whatever exotics, MF ascended rings, food) that can be swapped in for 100% MF with a small loss of effectiveness.

As long as the player is dilligent with gear/food switching for the tough phases it’s not a problem.

But in a pug, people usually are not dilligent. And it becomes a problem.

I compare it to people who don’t have the right potion for a run, which everyone can see. Buy yourself some kitten outlaw/dredge/krait/flame legion/grawl/svanir/elemental potions for a few copper each (the 9%/8%), swap often, and be much better prepared. It’s a shame there’s no ascalonian warrior potion :/

Did you not know that ascended PVT rings existed? My ele wears 2 of them

http://www.gw2db.com/items/71385-lost-seal-of-usoku-infused

Royal Signet of Doric and Lost Seal of Usoku

Somewhere around upper 20’s or low 30’s, there are enough dredge that surviving with 2 people on/near each button while the fifth comes down and triggers the console is just not practical in a pug. Dying on the button while a thief does his thing at the console is a class specific workaround that I don’t think they want.

Since I don’t need karma for a legendary, I go through these things like they’re nothing. Dredge fractal, other fractals, aggro wipe (speed run or just need a breather from pressure), rezzing, etc.

There are several little nerfs that they can implement on Spy Kits if they don’t want to remove them from the game:

Cast time
Reveal if any action is taken
etc

Fair buy orders for something that expensive will never be up for long. It means that the money is being held by the TP, so it can’t be invested to gain more gold.

What you can try is to find someone who wants to buy it and have them put up a buy order, then you fill it. That way you won’t get scammed.

T6 upgrades are a gamble if you do them in low volume. Make sure you have enough gold and skill points to do a lot of upgrades to smooth out the RNG if you don’t want to gamble.

I went up to Fractal 17 with 0 agony resist due to bad luck on dailies and being too poor to make a quiver. 5 resist is enough to take you through 19. It’ll suck at 20, but by that time you should have enough daily tokens for a second ring.

If 5 AR isn’t enough, you need more self healing/defense. That way you can save your main heal for when you miss a dodge on an agony attack. Some of the better ways to get more self healing:

Adrenal health at 15 Defense (basically 360 health every 3 seconds with full adrenaline)
Shout heals at 30 tactics (a huge spec change for you)
Omnomberry Pie (lifesteal on crit)
Sigil of Blood (also lifesteal on crit with cooldown)

Most burst attacks don’t do much direct damage, but rather have an effect/condition damage (GS, LB, Mace, Sword, Hammer)

Axe and Rifle are the only ones with high direct damage.

A cooldown reduction for burst skills would be preferable to any % damage increase.

I was on the fence until I saw the # of bans (less than 200). It means they were serious about the “worst offenders” statement. The market upheaval in mithril alone points to people, collectively, making tens of thousands of these trinkets.

On spidy you can see that there was a supply of 100,000 mithril at one point and a day or two later, supply was 30,000. Two days after the ban, supply was at 150k. That tells you how fast mithril can be farmed.

The thinly veiled whine about exploiters being banned is kinda derailing the other use of this thread to drive up silk (and more likely crystalline dust).

Lets stay on topic people

For this level of rarity, they should be tradeable. If ANet was smart and wanted to sell more L80 transmutation stones they would be tradeable.

The 2 that I have are going to rot in my bank unless I decide to play my ele.

At some point you don’t have a use for mist essence either.

If they salvage, they should have the standard chance to drop ectos that an exotic does, plus a vial of mist and a chance of a glob of mist.

“Legitimate” survival would include:

Wearing +heal gear with no vitality
Maybe use +downed health boosters (rune that gives +downed health)
Grouping up and equiping group heal utilities. Tome
etc

But, none of that will work when:

Jade Maw’s agony hits for over 1,172%/second at and past 50; it ticks 9 times too

So you have to work around an insta-kill mechanic. Find a spot where agony doesn’t hit, or find an ability that clears it (I don’t know of either). Pet-rez or orb or ???

Maw agony is pretty predictable. I’d be more worried about other fractals, and the annoyance of needing to rez from complete death any time someone messes up and is insta-gibbed by agony.

I’m only on 26, but I’m disappointed in the jump in damage 50. I’d rather see “legitimate” solutions streched further.