Guild Wars 2

RoyalPredator.9163:

Patch happened, good direction IMO.
Read of the Wind is still weak, my opinion is to merge it with Eagle Eye to get a really logical trait, which is like; 1500 Range, ROF & Arrow velocity increase.

P.s.: Signet of the Hunt & Signet of the Wind’s activated DPS buff actualy decreases my dmg. LoL.

Yeh I’m struggling to find a build that needs the signets. SotF still seems the better option for power builds.

The main differences I am seeing so far is:

1. LB more viable
2. PvE dmg increased by Predators Onslaught
3. Beastmaster more viable from axe mainhand/fortifying bond

4. Signets has not helped much
5. Greatsword Buff un-noticeable

Hey VeeWee do you look like this?

Total noob bearbow rangers in PvP with them are pretty annoying…

Yeh its not the right mouse button for me…

So much noobing QQ…

THE DAMAGE IS THE SAME. ONLY THE CAST TIME WAS INCREASED.

It is now easier to dodge/evade the whole channel.

Oh so they’re not in PvP? So much for that theory then. He must have been stealthing from his buddy’s combo field.

PO=predators onslaught.

Last night in hotjoin I fought what i think was a GS, PO, trap ranger.

He was using the traps to proc stealth and confuse me, as well as proc the 10% PO.

I thought it was interesting but I killed him with my lb…

What is it with strength runes and 6 points in nm?

Also its long enough to get off a path of scars

So a build that can 1-2 shot and gets 1 shot itself is op?

Sounds balanced to me.

Sina.9208:

nearlight.3064:

Sina.9208:

It looks like (maybe) not all is lost for serious pve rangering. With a point blank Longbow + Sword/A,H rotation the dmg seems to be so high, that even spotter alone could make us viable. Needs more testing.

longbow will NEVER be viable in high end pve unless you’re afk bearbow soloing belka.

Using the initial burst on LB (in melee range) before swapping to sword seems to be a big dps increase.

No more than it already did…it adds vuln stacks like it always has.

The new meta will be 6/5/0/3/0 as it was, but with predator’s onslaught. And Frost Spirit will be replaced by SotW.

Kicast.1459:

One word: rallybot
Do you really want having more challenge as an under populated server ?

They could be made unable to rally off, like summons are.

Fluffball.8307:

Hmm, fighting large numbers of AI opponents. Sounds suspiciously familiar.

What exactly? There is quite a lot of it in WvW already, especially as a solo roamer.

And what do you do when you breach a keep/tower? Kill about 5 NPCs.

Work in progress

TLDR: Individual players in the two lower population servers in every matchup have the option of adding NPC heroes to their party, equal to the number of players the highest population server currently has online.

The goal here is to use NPCs to fill the player gap on the lower population servers. They are an optional addition for outnumbered players/servers.

Hero = Pretty much the same as GW1 heroes. An NPC of any class, builds may or may not be customisable.

Heroes will follow the player around and attack enemies. They can also carry supply and be ordered to build/repair. They can also be assigned to siege where they will attack enemies within range.

Heroes may or may not be micro-managable (as per GW1).

An individual player on lower population server can add up to 4 heroes to their party (to make use of existing mechanics).

This is dependant on them not exceeding the total number of real players that the opposing team(s) has.

EG: Server A has 10 real players, Server B has two real players. Each of those two players on Server B can add up to 4 heroes each to their party.

They can then run around together as a 10 man blob, or as two separate 5-man groups.

If Server A has 4 real players and Server B has 1, Server B can only add 3 heroes…etc.

Each real player is going to be micro managing their 4 heroes if they wish.

Heroes will have all exotic gear and all weapon/traits options available to them. Or they could even come in the form of a few meta build options for simplicity.

Why do this?

This should aid outnumbered servers in defending their territory, capping objectives when there is only and handful of players on either side, and work towards levelling the playing field for lower tier servers/out of hours covereage.

I have not thought through all of this yet and I can see there being technical limitations or griefing potential…but I also see this as the only solution to declining WvW numbers short of a Red/Green/Blue – Factions/Alliance system.

Higher population servers would almost never see these heroes and if they did, there would not be many of them. This is mostly a solution for the lower tiers.

Heroes are also entirely optional so people can still solo roam if they wish.

Thoughts?

To quote Dulfy:

“Exotic Hunter Collection

Reward: 10 AP, Karmic Converter (Double-Click to trade karma for something useful. Can only buy one item per day. Allow you to buy items such as Bag of Empyeal Fragments, Rune Bag, or 5 Obsidian Shards for 4998 karma)."

Are you sure you didn’t read the Dulfy article, forget about it, and then come post here? :P

Ltomato.8649:

Wait wait wait, so you collect a bunch of exotics and you get Ascended Armor, but you complete all the sets of Ascended Armor and you get an exotic?

Please tell me I’m not the only one that this doesn’t make sense for.

I facepalmed

Cufufalating.8479:

I find with meditation guards the best thing to do is just keep those evades ready. They are so squishy they come at you hard and fast, so as soon as they teleport or leap at you you know theres one hell of a burst coming (doesnt really matter what it is). Just evade the second you see the teleport or leap and keep evading till its over. This is why I personally prefer A/D, S/T, or S/D, as long as the sword or dagger is in there, because you always have an evade ready and waiting. If you’re caught with A/T out you can be in for a world of pain, like you are experiencing.

Also as a side note, it seems a bit odd to be using GS with a condition build. Is there any particular reason?

Purely for the mobility. I find it much easier to get around with GS than s/x. But I forget how much you need the evades/poisons of s/d against wars and guards.

Vayne.8563:

Player.2475:

I had a fair amount of Knight’s stuff, though I guess doing this on my ranger was probably the cause of it. Build was just a kitten hybrid between damage & defense with whatever traits the new trait system allowed this new character to get.
I’ve completed it, though I had to emerge completely naked as victor, seeing as all my armor was broken.

Edit: I picked up on its patterns quickly – the adds were what just got me down almost instantly.
I was just wondering if every class had as many problems with this as my ranger did – or if it’s advised to do this with a party rather than alone.

Rangers don’t have a lot of condition removal and almost all of those guys use poison. If you have a lot of toughness, that doesn’t help against poison at all. Only vitality would. Your best bet is still to kill things fast in there.

My ranger used greatword and shortbow in there, jumping in when I could get a bunch of vines at once.

When the Modrem thrasher or leecher spawns, you need to get that down as fast as possible.

With the wolves you have to make sure you’re always facing them. They once shot you. If you see a wolf prioritize it and face it until it’s dead.

There’s a corridor where some attacks won’t hit you as much, a longer arm off the main strip. It’s a good place to retreat to avoid taking on more than you can handle at once.

Ranger’s have heaps of condition removal…EB, SoR, HS, SoTF, Brown Bear…

The build is this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAnfRjMq0yaNLGsQ1aADhqdLEslArAwd8+CXNA-TFyCwAAeEA4U/RxJAIl+AsK/mcEAmt/wYlgAA-w

Fiorrello.8126:

One common medi guardian combo is to chain Judges intervention -> smite conditions -> F1 Skill -> Greatsword 5 double tap -> Whirling Wrath

half of those skills are instant cast and if done right will look like only Whirling Wrath. It gets really powerful if you can get some delayed attacks in on it too. cast focus 5 wait a few seconds then cast focus 4, just before it hits JI to the target so you get the bounce to hit as well.

people complain about warrior hitting hard, but at least they can only hit you with one skil at a time.^^

They must be doing something else because those two skills alone shouldn’t hit that hard (I would have thought).

GS guards just seem to be melting me the way no other class can.

Maybe I should switch to s/d on the other set and stay in melee range. The fight usually opens with them teleporting and melting me 50%, then I dodge to gain distance and back pedal while trying to land a/t skills. Then after another few hits when near death I would weapon swap and swoop to safety to reset.

Note this is only a problem in WvW. My glassbow ranger does not get hit nearly this hard in PvP…

Whenever something like that doesn’t make sense, a wizard did it.

Having been having trouble with meditation GS guards in WvW lately and am looking for pointers.

One particular encounter from yesterday has me the most perplexed.

This guard would teleport to me with Judge’s Intervention and then go straight into Whirling Wrath.

Those two skills alone would take half of my 20k hp before I could dodge out of them, and this is with me having a fairly tanky condition build with 1900 toughness and 20k hp…

My question is, why is this guard hitting so hard, and what do I do about it?

I found it pretty annoying on megadestroyer today when we had about 10 commanders playing with a box o fun and 1 person doing pre…

If you are going to tag up then actually command!

This is my LB + s/d build for hotjoin and yoloq:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAT8YjMq0yaNLmsw1aABhaVA0uGS2l1dTkvf9AqA-TpBFwACuAAMOIA02fYxRAoaZAAPAAA

Unless you happen to have 7200 silk scraps in your inventory, there is no way you have enough of the materials…

That alone costs over 200 gold at current prices.

There is no way ascended is worth it over exotic.

Too bad the male equivalent is a trenchcoat!

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Ruining the economy by trying to force PvE farmers to PvP would not benefit anyone. EotM has already devalued WXP, gold, and karma; this idea would make the problem catastrophically worse.

It could have unique rewards. In gw1 ectos only dropped in uw and they were used to craft armor in fow. They could easily emulate something like that.

sirian.4981:

Just copy what WoW has done. Every few hours you have a big fight over an area. The area has cool quests and a dungeon attached. This forces PvP. You can even give an advantage to the attackers.

This is basically what I was going to suggest. But rather one area for stonemist there should be another one for holding your home BL. Reason being that some servers may never capture stonemist but holding your own bl is not such a huge expectation. Should help with any server stacking issue too.

Maybe they could even give access to the same farming/quest area, but stonemist just grants longer access.

warriorjrd.8695:

Sube Dai.8496:

I think celestial w/axe will be the no brainer post patch. The only thing yet to be seen is if it can stack might in a 1on1.

In a 1v1 might stacking is pretty easy with strength runes and battle sigils and even sigil of strength. Although if you add axe to that, with the might duration, might on crit and might on swap you could get some really high stacks.

If it was that easy people would run it already. I think the new axe alone needs to add a significant amount of stacks, in a 1v1 scenario, or it won’t be any better than what we can currently do (which is not good enough).

Can’t really agree with anything you’ve said…especially the ranger stuff.

I think celestial w/axe will be the no brainer post patch. The only thing yet to be seen is if it can stack might in a 1on1.

Its not as crazy as it sounds. Its kind of the same way fow and uw worked in the early gw1 days.

The only issue would be server stacking.

Not unplayable by any means but you need to adapt to where the game is at now.

Basically high toughness and condition removal are mandatory for most classes.

What sort of gear do you have? Is it zerker? If you don’t know what that is then go to the wiki and read up on the different armor types.

Basically for wvw you want soldiers, dire, knights, rabid, or any of the other height toughness sets.

Single biggest problem is that it is hard to watch. They need to solve that first.

I am still waiting for the ‘big thing’ with this patch. The last one had megaserver, the wardrobe, and the PvP changes. So far this patch hasn’t even had 1 thing on par with these.

nearlight.3064:

Sube Dai.8496:

This is what I will be trying:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAnfRjMq0vaDLGsw1aA/gaZDEAtvhotGY2vPQFOZC-TZBBwAAOBAYOCAeeEA12fAcZAA

That looks like a decent build. I see the merit of Greatsword but I probably won’t run it just to have more evades and keep up more conditions more often. I’d replace the condition cleanse signet with signet of the wild since that signet+regen on celestial is about equal to a warriors healing signet tick, and the stability from the active I’d wager to be me more useful for sure.

Yeh I usually run s\d in place of GS but I’m excited to see what maul with 25 stacks of might and soth active can do, to 5 people

Might swap SOS for sotw as well if SOS proves unnecessary. Just to make maul even more deadly.

I think sor is necessary for the stunbreak too.

This is what I will be trying:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAnfRjMq0vaDLGsw1aA/gaZDEAtvhotGY2vPQFOZC-TZBBwAAOBAYOCAeeEA12fAcZAA

Strongest power option we have in PvP is glassbow. The only question is will a celestial axe ranger beat it after the patch.

IMO wvw is dead without something like this. So like it or not it has to happen.

Also the pug population could just choose to be part of an alliance regardless of whether or not they are in a guild.

Or treat the pugs as mercenaries and they can join any side…(with non transferable periods)

Eotm is not wvw…

You can do the pvp reward track as well, but that will take longer…

Hang on, people need help levelling?

All I know is that FA is ranked #5 and its a ghost town…so I’d say the population has dropped significantly.

1 handed crossbow plus shield?

Mainhand spear + shield

WvW and PvP are the only end game. If you are only playing for a legendary then you would stop playing as soon as you get it…so what’s the point?

They definitely need at least one stun break.

I love the idea of direct damage on frost spirit as well.

Filovirus.6258:

EotM is a perma ktrain because :
- there is no incentive to win (at all), neither personal nor for your server (the supplies usually don’t really change anything in the end)
- no one is invested, because between the fact it’s cross server and your are put with random people (and screwed over half the time by being put on empty maps for the whole week when blue), you aren’t playing with/against people you “know” but with annonymous people you couldn’t care less about, against people you couldn’t care less about.
- there is absolutely no tactical decisions to be made in that place, because WvW roaming is “balanced” compared to that piece of crap map….. take blue keep : put 10 sieges and 15 people in it defending and you could have both red and green zergs sieging it for the whole mu and they would probably not get in. And it’s only one of the dozens imbalance problems in that place.
- you spend too much time running covering the map to really have anything “tactical” to respond to the ennemy and face it, unless it’s roughly “balanced” and then everything will happen around the center of the map (and it’ll be boring far faster)

- the whole design of the map with various levels/layers, edges, bridges and such makes it nice/original/fun… for a whole lot of 2/3 mus. After that it makes it the most painful broken WvW map, where basically you have the winner decided by whomever control the choke points first, or have people with lines/mass kb/fear walls/fear wells/siege to send a whole group to their death from ledges/bridges on top of making moving around totally ridiculous, and it would be insanely frustrating and a pure evil grind worse than WW2’s Normady invasion to move around the map for any group if it was made “serious”.

This map can NEVER be allowed to host any sort of “serious” WvW that matter, it would be the end of WvW for good.

Unfortunately I would have to agree.

Perhaps a larger advantage for your home server. Like more NPC guards or something. Orfree upgrades to structures.

I like the spectator mode/auto balance trick but I always stay on the losing side. I do it to even up the match. It would be good if autobalance just worked that way to begin with.

Players = 4v5 AND score >250 top player gets swapped.

I will definitely try swapping SOS for LR and BS for EB too.

I really want to keep sotw for the burst/stability though.

Yeh mostly PvP although I will try a wvw variant with more toughness.

Agreed on enlargement fluffball. Its a great buff tho with the 10s stability. The alternative I was thinking was beast master’s might 4/0/6/4/0

Has anyone come up with a post patch GS build yet?

This is about the best I can think of so far. Trying to make use of might stacking axe and signets for burst:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNBhODbkRlWWrYxgFqWDQIUrCg2xQxmCuTiaYHKZFLB-TphFwAAOIADOCAv2fwwFAgxDAYaZAA

I still feel like it would be weaker than current SotF 2/0/6/6/0 glassbow though…

Although that maul should be awesome with both signets active and 10-15 stacks of might.