Guild Wars 2

IMO that would be magi druid. Doing your basic job should be pretty easy, but there’s high skill cap and a lot of potential to grow as a player.

Condi PS warrior might be even better, but it’s questionable whether it’s a support role or not. One of your tasks would be providing might, banners and possibly take care of some stuff (support), but you’re also contributing a lot of DPS, so it’s kind of a hybrid role, not a pure support.

Yes, animation cancelling is a thing in GW2. No, it’s not a huge thing, it’s just something minor. You will not be missing out on a lot if you don’t do it.

In PvP, it is used by top-tier players for obvious reasons. You can trick enemies into thinking you’re doing some dangerous attack, bait them into dodging early and possibly use the attack some other time.

In PvE, animation cancelling is usually incorporated into class rotations to maximize the DPS output. If you learn rotations by heart (the way they’re written somewhere or from a video guide), it will help you to get rid of the aftercast of some attacks and do more damage, but the difference is so minor, it will (again) be used only by the top-tier players.

FrostDraco.8306:

…its because they serve no purity of purpose. It’s meh at everything.

^ exactly this.

The original intention behind the item very well could be, as Astralporing said, to “compensate” these weird mishmash hybrid builds for being naturally inferior, or simply result from Anet’s lack of understanding how PvE works. I’d really like the utility buffs to receive some treatment to better support builds which have a clear direction.

If you wanna play an extremely tanky build (I will not get into whether or not this is a good idea in PvE), you will surely benefit more from an item, which increases your vitality based on toughness (or the other way around), but you surely have no interest in power or other offensive stats, because they won’t do anything for you.
Similarly, if you wanna deal as much dmg as possible, you don’t want to be cornered into using defensive stats by some weird, poorly implemented item.

Remember how traits some time ago received a similar update? There were many useful traits, but they were tied to completely useless stats, because each traitline had its own set duo of stats. Eventually, Arenanet completely separated those, because it doesn’t make sense to punish players for choosing beneficial traits, by giving them useless stats.

Let’s have a look at options for support classes (like minstrel chrono/ele):
They can either choose to run a bountiful version of any utility buff, which will give them 10% extra boon duration as well as 100 of a stat that is completely useless to them. Or they can run furious tuning crystal, which gives them 100 extra healing power, but it comes with (again, completely useless) bonus ferocity. How much cooler would it be, if you could have best of both worlds, and have your utility buff give you both boon duration and healing power?

There are many possible builds for PvE. But the fact is, the vast majority of these, regardless of whether they are “meta” or not, are suffering from the poor implementation of utility buffs. By reworking these items and giving them clear purpose, many builds could work much better, whether they are damage dealers, support or tanks.

I’d like to bring to attention this aspect of GW2, which in my opinion, is weird, completely out of place and extremely counter-intuitive. It is the functionality of sharpening stones and other utility buffs.

From https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Sharpening_Stone:
Nourishment(30 m):
Gain power equal to 6% of your toughness
Gain power equal to 4% of your vitality
+10% Experience from kills

Most other utility buffs function in a similar way, only perhaps giving you different stat or converting smaller percentage based on level.

I find it weird that an item, which is supposed to boost your offense by increasing your power/precision/condition damage incentivizes you to invest stats into defense, by having a percentage of your toughness/vitality being added to the offensive stat.
Of course, nobody would ever do that, because the amount of stats gained by investing into defense is way lower than the amount of stats you would have to give up, so the purpose of these items becomes completely self-defeating. The best way to utilize these items is to just take advantage of your base toughness and vitality, gaining 100 extra power/prec/condi dmg, or – better yet – use the toxic variant of these items, which gives you straight up 100 stats (without the toughness/vitality nonsense) as well as an extra 10% condition duration.

I think these items should be changed completely, to better allow you to achieve the goals of your build. If you’re trying to increase your power/precision/condition damage, it is absolutely clear you don’t want to invest stats into defense and you shouldn’t be forced to by the nature of the item.

Therefore, I’d suggest that these items either give you straight up an amount of stats (just like the toxic variants), or, if Arenanet wants to stick to the idea of gaining stats based on the amount of a different stat, make it somewhat sensible. For example – it would make sense to increase ferocity based on precision, because precision increases your critical hit chance and feroticy increases the damage from critical hits, so it benefits from that stat directly. Alternatively, you can boost power based on the amount of power – in other words – increase your outgoing damage by a certain percentage.

What do you think? Do you think it’s okay that an offensive item incentivizes a self-defeating stat investment? Can you think of some other solution?

The only boss, which physically requires boonstrip to be even able to finish, is Vale Guardian. During the 66% and 33% phase of the fight, the blue split has a buff, which makes him take no damage and has to be stripped in order to progress the fight.
Other than that, the only thing that comes to my mind is Xera. If your shard clearers are slow (or just plain bad), you’ll be forced to move her to a new tanking spot through the shard AoEs, which makes her receive a lot of nasty buffs like quickness and fury. In that case, she will probably kill the tank and anyone in her way. Same applies to the ad mobs AFAIK. These boons can be stripped, but you can deal with it in a lot of other ways – wait it out, have a minstrel tank or… (this is probably the best solution) tell your shard clearers to git gud.
I can’t think of any other place in raids, where boonstrip would be required or even beneficial.

Personally, I always farm SAB in april. Do every zone on normal and tribulation mode each day, loot the glorious chest and have a chance at the blue (and orange) skins to sell at the TP. They have dropped in price quite a bit, but you can still make some money. Last year I got ~6 chests with blue skins, this year I got 5 so far. No orange skins ever.
Thinking about it, the g/h ratio is not very impressive, but I still like doing it because SAB is some of the most enjoyable content in the game.

Personally I would recommend necro. You will be rejected from some tryhard parties, but it’s really the superior class when it comes to FotM. DPS is mediocre, but it has amazing survivability (even with full offensive spec, which is what people run), that will allow you to carry your team and finish any encounter solo.
Warhorn as a weapon for necro has been falling out of the meta, especially after the GS buffs and Farbstoff’s new DPS rotation. But since most FotM pugs still live in 2k16, you see warhorn very often. Also, GS on condi necro can hurt your DPS more than it helps if you play it poorly, so sticking to scepter would actually be wise for a newbie.

Ranger/druid would also be a very solid option. If you insist on using warhorn, I would recommend going healer build (S/WH+staff), because you would be losing a major chunk of your DPS as a condi.

Ele would be ideal for the tryhard parties, but it requires much more effort and a coordinated team. For most FotM parties, it actually performs much worse, because people aren’t able to play it properly. But if you have a solid group of people, who can play at top-tier level, you could save some time on FotM each day with the metacomp, if you don’t mind paying way more attention to rotations and positioning.

Ithilwen.1529:

blah blah This is a game I play for fun. blah blah

Sure you might find it fun to keep wiping to a single boss because you refuse to look up a guide, gear your character properly and follow commander’s orders, but there are other 9 people, who might not find it nearly as fun as you.
This is a game and you’re entitled to play it in any way you want. But so are other people. And if they don’t want to play with you because of your attitude, you can’t blame them.

It’s weird how delusional and selfish some people are. You want to play a multiplayer game, yet you refuse to take tiniest step to accommodate other people’s needs? Do you seriously expect 9 random strangers to go out of their way to allow you to experience raids in the one exact way you want?

@Charrbeque.8729: Yeah, now I remember this has actually happened to me too once. You’re right, shovel would have helped. Altough if this happens to someone who doesn’t own a shovel, the only fix would be going back to hub and losing all progress unfortunately.

New year, many changes to game engine and obviously many new bugs. ^^
Here’s what I’ve came across so far:

1) Bugged ice physics
Known bug, already has been reported on reddit and also this thread. Has been acknowledged by Mike Zadorojny and Anet is supposedly working on a fix.
As of now I am not sure how to reliably reproduce it. It seems to happen randomly when you’re pressing directional buttons while on ice. Your character sometimes gets a HUGE velocity boost, which makes navigating ice fields extremely hard (even harder than normally, since they’re supposed to be tricky in the first place).

Edit: Slow walking (action you can bind in-game) seems to serve as a work-around for this. I haven’t tried that personally though.

2) Bugged mob behavior
Haven’t seen this one officially reported anywhere, but some people confirmed to me they’re also experiencing this. When fighting enemies, in addition to their standard attacks, which are clearly telegraphed, you also get hit randomly by “ghost attacks”, which are not telegraphed at all and extremely hard to avoid. This is most definitely a bug, since it didn’t use to happen last year.

3) Fish revolting
This might possibly be a feature, but since it didn’t use to happen last year, I would assume it’s bugged and unintended behavior. If it is intended, feel free to disregard this bugreport, but please let people know this is in fact intended behavior.
While you’re holding a fish (mechanic prominent in w2z2 AKA Pain Cliffs), it will sometimes (it’s seemingly random, but might be dependent on some kind of timer) revolt and drop out of your hands. If you’re standing on land, the fish will appear in front of you, allowing you to hit it and pick back up. If you’re mid-air (e.g. when you jump on a trampoline), the fish will disappear completely. You can work around this by dropping the fish intentionally and picking it back every now and then.

None of these bugs prevent progression, but they are mildly annoying at the very least, so a fix would be hugely appreciated. Also, they don’t seem to be tribulation mode features (tribulation mode being unfair and punishing by nature), since they happen on normal mode as well (infantile mode too probably, though I haven’t tested that).
If you’ve encountered any other SAB related bugs not listed here, feel free to add them.

(Edit: found/remembered 2 more)
4) Terrain clip
There might possibly be more terrain clips, but the most prominent one seems to be in the area around 1st octopus you meet in w2z2, as explained in the comment below. The checkpoint right past this area seems to have a rather strange behavior (I attribute this to the 2 red planks above it), so activating it might sometimes result in you clipping into the small area under it. There’s no way to walk (or jump) out, since the area is blocked off by an invisible wall. If you have control over your character, you can use your shovel to dig up (it might take more tries) a hostile bunny that will kill you and let you respawn on a checkpoint. If you however don’t own a shovel, or you clip in a way that you cannot control your character (you get stuck mid-air), the only solution is leaving the zone and losing your progress.

5) Moto out of range after running out of lives
As explained in this thread and this thread, you might spawn too far away from Moto in the “pit and the pendulum” area after running out of lives. As far as I know, this will result in you being kicked from the area and thus losing your progress in the given zone. I would guess this has something to do with the way your character dies before being teleported there, but that’s just a wild guess, I really haven’t been able to reproduce it reliably.

Sublimatio.6981:

Long story short, party wide dps>personal dps – give your ice bows to a condi reaper, let them use 5, 3, 4 and be happy because you just produced team play and a class combo.

While I agree with what you say, this is quite weird thing to see coming from an rT member, since your guild’s philosophy is **** teamplay. I seem to recall a quote along the lines “if they’re dumb enough to get themselves downed, screw ressing, just let them die, ressing is a DPS loss”…
By that logic you should never rely on conjures, those dumb eles will go downed eventually anyway, you’re better off just soloing the boss.

Elessaria.9142:

…and make Reaper’s Onslaught actually useful…

First and foremost I would remove the stupid and insane cap on IAS. As far as I know IAS effects don’t stack with each other, so if you have quickness on you, Reaper’s Onslaught will only give you ferocity, it won’t increase your attack speed.

Yobculture.5786:

The problem for me personally is that the eles that I find with claim to have “good” dps but when I look at my arcdps chart, I’m top of the table nearly every time as a DH. Whenever I point this out people seem to tilt really, really hard.

Sucks to be good.

This. So much this.

Yes, engineer is very commonly played, especially on small hitbox bosses, because you have very solid DPS and boost others’ damage through pinpoint distribution. Condi engineer does more DPS than power if played properly, but it has a very complex rotation, making it harder to pull off top DPS in practice. Keep that in mind when deciding which route you wanna take.

There could be a problem with the fact that infusions are tradeable, but I also agree that it would be cool to make it easier to get AR on your alts after you max it out on your main.

ATMAvatar.5749:

GW2’s lack of any kind of level and/or gear progression ensures that raid content won’t become more accessible over time without another mechanism to do so (e.g., easy modes).

This has always been the case for GW2, even for open world maps (level downscaling). It also makes sure that all rewards from old content remain meaningful. Because there’s (almost) no power creep in this game, old content remains challenging and can give you rewards on par with the new content. I don’t really know anything about WoW (or any other MMOs), but I would assume if you return to old content with shiny new gear that makes it trivial, none of the rewards you get have any value, they are basically junk compared to what you get in the new content. WoW doesn’t make old content “more accessible”, it makes it obsolete.

Ryudnard.2587:

I hope Anet can find a way to make this content available to relatively new and weakly geared players as well.

Really, REALLY think about what you just said. If Anet tune the difficulty of raids to match new and poorly geared players, they are gonna become extremely easy to experienced and well-geared players.

Raids were always intended to be the “ultimate most challenging endgame group content”. If you’re new, it’s obviously a mistake to rush into them. Unless you possess an insane talent in learning and execution, I suggest you start following the natural learning curve, which for this game is usually considered open world/story->dungeons->fractals and then raids.

Btw. raids absolutely are possible to complete with exotic gear. Heck they’ve even been cleared with full green/masterwork gear. But sometimes even seasoned players with best gear (ascended) have trouble clearing raids, so it’s obviously not recommended to a newbie to start out with anything less than the best possible gear.

Astralporing.1957:

All we can do is to keep bringing it up so they will know there’s a need for this.

So if I keep bringing up that I want all legendaries, Anet will know there’s a need for that and just give them to me? I don’t think that’s how it works mate.

There is absolutely no need for easy mode raids. Toxic casuals want it because they feel entitled to all rewards despite not putting in any effort whatsoever.

Tj Tyler.9521:

Ever since the raids came out in GW2 I was very interested in joining in on the fun and doing a raid here or there, but quickly found out that I was waaaay below the level required for it.

That’s exactly what makes raids unique from the plethora of average Joe content we already have – the skill level required. So no, we can’t have baby mode. If that’s what you want, you can play literally everything else in the game.

This entire game is a stupid 11111 brainless zergfest, you should be glad we have at least some content that is actually fun and engaging.

Wait a minute. Do you have 1400 toughness while reviving someone (due to the trait Determined Revival), or do you have ~1400 BASE toughness, putting you at 1800 when reviving?
If you have 400 extra toughness from your build, you probably have bad gear and should switch ASAP. Raids in PvE are not the same as raids in WvW, you don’t build any extra toughness into your gear, because it’s useless and only costs you DPS.
I’m sorry to say this, but you will probably not be able to play both PvE and WvW with the same set, you need to get a separate one for both gamemodes. In PvE you use berserker for power classes and viper (possibly along with sinister or rampager) for condi classes.

If you have 1000 base toughness (which you should) and get to 1400 due to the trait, it’s not your fault, tactics traitline is a given for any warrior, so chronotank usually builds for at least over 1400 so that you can res other people safely.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

…
Why can’t this be a viable raid tank?
…

The proper question to ask yourself here is who do you replace and what do you get
compared to the “standard meta”.
If you replace one of the chronomancers, you gain a bit of DPS (necro indeed has better personal DPS than mesmer), but you’ll lose way more because half of the group will be missing quickness and alacrity, not to mention occasional distort for safe casting. Not worth it.
If you replace one of the DPS classes, you’ll straight up lose DPS, because power necro doesn’t do quite as well as tempests and other standard DPSers. You gain nothing because having the chrono free from tanking doesn’t increase the group performance in any way.

The reason chronos are always tanking is because they can do so without sacrificing anything. If you take anything else as a tank, you will always have to give something up, resulting in worse overall performance.

It is possible to kill a boss with MM GS reaper tank? Yes.
It is better than a chronotank? No.

I wonder how many people complain about this because they’re geniunely interested in the story (and experiencing it first-hand) and how many people only use this as an excuse to get easy rewards for no effort because they’re lazy.

I used to clear dungeons on a regular basis, now I do the same with raids. All this time, I’ve never actually payed any attention to the story in-game, because it’s kinda hard when you have to focus on the mechanics. I find it much more enjoyable and relaxing to experience the story from someone’s video/summary, where I can actually focus on the story aspects. Of course you can feel differently, but I still think most people use “story” as a poor excuse of their laziness.

Also gotta agree with what Illconceived Was Na said, every bit of lore in this game is gated behind some kind of content. Some is in open world, some in personal story, some in raids. Deal with it. There are players who miss out on story because they’re too bad to go through personal story. Do they make insane complaints and demand an easier version? No. They either “git gud” to experience the story on their own, or find someone else to help them experience it (either in-game carry, or uploading a video summary).

@OP: Sounds like you may want to become a part of a static group. Not only is it gonna be much easier for you to get into weekly kills (since they usually schedule their runs ahead of time), but you won’t run into the same LI problems.
Since in a static group, you get to play with the same people every week and observe their gameplay, LI becomes meaningless, because you can easily tell their skill level. But for pugs, which will probably play with you for the first time, LI is the only thing they can rely on (prior to the actual run itself).

If you are gonna pug and lie anyway, you assume all the responsibility. If you infiltrate a group this way and play well, probably nothing happens, you should be fine. As long as you’re confident in your abilities, go ahead. (My word of advice here would be: Don’t overestimate your abilities. Just like you, I used to think I was a super-pro raider at 30 LIs, but now, a few hundred LIs later, I can easily tell there is a huge difference and experienced raiders can easily see the difference between 30LI player and a 300LI player – assuming those kills were deserved in both cases. It’s not the same even though it might appear to you that way.) There’s also a slight risk – if you join a group pretending to have more LI than you do, and you screw up, they might get very upset with you, kick you, block you and warn their friends not to group up with you. Pretty much what happened to a certain person who posted in this topic earlier, who became extremely (in)famous by doing that. It’s not even necessarily a skill problem, it’s pretty much one’s attitude that gets you into that bad spot. Not saying it’s gonna be your case, just beware.

This thread has gone WAYYY off course, so let me try to get it back on track.
So far I’ve only tried the bosses on normal mode, not challenge mode.

First boss is pretty easy, we’ve even already seen lowmans (including a SOLO) of it. Part of the reason why this is a thing IMO, is that this boss becomes way more difficult, chaotic and annoying with a large group, especially when some players are inattentive and bad. On the other hand, though, your DPS should be much higher, so you should be done with the boss much sooner. Punishes bad gameplay, but a few skilled players can easily lowman it after the rest of the group dies.

Second boss is very easy as well, easier than first one IMO. Not even much coordiation or skill required, you just stack and zerg him to death. Good commander can easily carry a mediocre team through this.

Third boss is a bit more difficult and definitely requires some coordination. There is a lot of personal responsibility, you have to dodge (or sidestep) crucial attacks. The split phase can get sligtly chaotic depending on how coordinated your team is. It will definitely become easier once people get to practice it more.

Last boss (this is kinda a thing in all the other wings as well) is the most difficult of the wing. People need to be good at mechanical execution (dodge attacks, step out of AoEs), but to be honest, only the tank and the kiter have difficult jobs. The rest of the people just need very basic ability to read tells and do their rotation. IMO this boss is more difficult than Matthias, because unlike him, there is a lot of teamplay involved in this fight. Matthias is pretty much just DPS and dodge, barely any coordination needed. Deimos combines aspects of personal execution AND coordinated teamplay.

That being said, I don’t think this wing is strictly easier/harder than any of the other ones. It has its own unique challenges and offers a lot of fun. Seasoned raiders will obviously find a lot of the bosses easier, since they’ll be much more familiar with their classes and can carry over some knowledge from other raids. New raiders should be easily able to pick up the first two bosses, and after some practice, move onto the second two as well.

@OP: You may have forgotten this after taking a long break, but 99% of GW2’s community are leechers with 0 skill who expect to contribute nothing and get carried, hence why Nike’s comment makes a lot of sense. You seem to be one of the very few people who takes his role seriously, but it’s natural Nike wants to make sure you understand how involved the gameplay is. It’s for your own good.

IMO the ideal class for you is chrono. You can provide quickness and alacrity, which are extremely important buffs that boost others’ dmg through the roof. You can also share distortion, allowing your teammates to ignore certain deadly attacks. You contribute a lot of CC (which can be a gamechanger if other people are slacking), you can pull ads with focus (this can dictate the difference between wipe fiesta and easy clean kill on bosses like Xera and Sloth). And with minstrel build, you can also heal other people for a significant amount.
Chronotank is probably the most difficult role in raids to pull off, but it’s the ideal support and can literally carry your team if you’re playing well.

Are you seriously complaining about the fact that you cannot glitch that fight consistently instead of doing it the intended way?
If you pull that boss (or any mob in gw2 really) too far away from it’s spawn spot, the aggro will obviously break and it will return. No news here.
Try to be a man and fight it where it spawns, along with the champion. You even get a rare chance to get a pretty profitable recipe.

It is indeed true that dungeons are broken and they would deserve a lot of dev attention. Although this particular mechanic you’re describing is working perfectly fine, as intended. Stop this QQ and instead learn to do dungs properly.

PrinceOfTheImpure.1508:

@Tarasicodissa But it seems like this toughness preferred boss target system is dependent on the specific boss of the encounter, correct?

Also @Tarasicodissa, Indeed particularly since my experience as a more traditional tank in WoW for example seems to have no benefit in gw2. This question comes from a very meandering path of questions that goes something like:
What do I use my 80 boost on?
Mesmer
Why?
They are annoying to level
OK, what can a Mesmer do?
Everyone likes Chronotanks
Oh? I thought there were no tanks in gw2…
Well there aren’t…
Oh, um…

So…
When the encounter does not rely upon a more classic aggro management related, positioning based use of the tank (as it usually doesn’t) it is just that the “tank” is the epicenter of a giant clump of AOEs that are generally buffing the raid (a raid being the only place you would find a “tank” in gw2).

And the classes chosen for this role are those that have generally not great dps because their concentration on raid buffing does not decrease raid damage because their dps contribution was not significant in the first place.

But… the “tank” must be survivable enough to be in the middle of the action… making certain professions/specializations better suited for this role because they are the proper combination of MoreUtilityThanDPS and Survivability.

Let me be a bit more specific:
Vale Guardian, Gorseval, Keep Construct and Xera are bosses which lock on player with the highest toughness. This is where a “chronotank” comes into play.
Sabetha spits fire at the player furthest away from her, so you usually have someone assigned to kite those attacks. That person is usually druid though, not chronomancer.
Slothasor will randomly target one of the 10 players in the squad and randomly switch targets throughout the fight, which means everyone has to be ready to kite him around. There is a clear visual marker above that person, so everyone can easily see who is currently tanking.
Matthias will use one of his attacks (hadoken) at one particual person that he locks on at the beginning of the fight. However, he will physically follow the person that is the furthest away from him (which is not even entirely consistent).
Other bosses and trash mobs use similar aggro mechanic as open world bosses and mobs (I assume), which is a combination of toughness, proximity, how much DPS you’re doing and possibly some other factors.

Also, let my try to explain a bit more clearly why chronos are usually tanks in gw2 raids. They can tank on top of doing their regular job, without sacrificing anything. If you look at any other profession in gw2, they would have to give up a lot of their personal utility to be able to tank. And if you dedicate one spot purely for a (traditional defensive) tank, you are basically giving up 1 person worth of DPS and support. So with chronotank, the squad and job distribution will look exactly the same it would look in any other fight, without a tank. So chronos can easily pick up or drop “tanking” on the fly, without making any significant changes or sacrifices to their build. You are basically condensing two roles (standard buffing chrono + a tank) into one person.

If you are looking for a class to use your lvl80 boost on, I will definitely agree mesmer is the best choice. They are annoying to level indeed, because they have very low personal damage (compared to other classes), even with a fully offensive build. Good chronomancers are always very much sought after, because it’s hard to play them and very few people can do it. And even if you don’t feel like playing chronomancer in a raid, there are many more places in the game where they shine. They are amazing for dungeons and fractals, they can help people in open world (portals at jumping puzzles,…) and do very well in any type of group content in gw2. Only thing they suck at is solo play, because of the “supporty” nature of their class. Which is why lvl80 boost is a good idea, since you’ll be able to skip the solo leveling process.

Also, as many people often recommend, do NOT use your level 80 boost on the class that you plan on being your main. It is very valuable to go through the game the “oldschool” way, slowly leveling your character and getting to learn its abilities and game mechanics. As soon as you reach level 80, most people will assume you understand your class well and are able to play it properly. But unfortunately due to the fact that many people just boost their way to lvl 80, you have a lot of max level noobs in the game, who have no idea how anything works. Keep in mind that being max level =/= understanding the game.
A lot of max level content assumes you understand your class and can play well. If you just boost to 80 and hop straight into endgame, you will hit a brick wall.

As others have mentioned, tanks in gw2 only ever exist in raids, they have no purpose in any other gamemode. The way you become tank is by having the highest toughness in your group (which is very easy to achieve, since most people have the default value of 1000, with warriors occasionaly spiking up to 1400 with their traits). Therefore as long as you have over 1400 toughness, you will consistently hold that boss’ aggro.

The reason why chronomancers are usually tanks, is because of how their class works. They have access to a lot of dodges and blocks, while still doing pretty okay damage and providing a lot of boons. Basically, you can tank without sacrificing any of the abilities you would have otherwise. This means, you have to play very well. 1 or 2 attacks can still easily down you, so you need to make use of your blocks, evades and distortion mechanic to avoid all kinds of damage.

There is also the “minstrel” chrono tank, which is a lot more “tanky” in the traditional sense, allowing you to take much more hits before going downed. You basically trade all your damage for extra survivability and very good healing to your group. Nevertheless, even the minstrel build takes a lot of effort to play properly and efficiently. You still need battlefield awareness and you’ll have to time your skills very well.

So basically your role and goals as a tank can vary (dps/buffing/healing/…), but it will require some solid understanding of the game and very attentive gameplay. I would definitely NOT recommend starting out as a tank, since it’s pretty much the most difficult role in raids.

#forumbugs4ever

A lot of good answers have been provided, but I will try to share my input as well.

Your ideal class will hugely depend on what do you want to achieve, and what kind of player you are.
If you want to be very efficient with your gameplay, thief is by far the best choice. They have the best mobility imaginable, very strong damage output and are pretty self-sufficient. You have a lot of dodges, massive healing even with offensive spec (thanks to invigorating precision) and best access to stealth, which will allow you to skip some difficult enemies with ease.
Engineer would be a close second. They share a lot of gameplay aspects with thief (such as high burst damage, self-sufficiency, access to stealth,…), except they’re slower. On the other hand, they are much more versatile and can adapt to different situations better than thieves.

If you’re a very casual player, who doesn’t care about efficiency, go either necromancer or ranger. You will move and kill stuff a bit slower than thief, but you will have much easier time doing so. Both of these classes are much more survivable (especially for casual gameplay) than thieves, while still doing fairly okay damage. You can take your time and easily solo even some of the harder champions without much effort.

Other than that, it kinda depends on your taste and preferences. You should pick a class that you enjoy playing and have some fun with it. Me personally, I have fun with every single class in the game, they are all amazing. You can do very well with any class, as long as you enjoy it. But if you want to go for efficiency, definitely thief.

The way I understand ToS and RoC, if you report an afk farmer for botting, you’re putting your account in risk of suspension or termination, not theirs. If you falsely report someone just because you don’t like what they’re doing (even though it is perfectly okay as far as ToS are concerned), you’re abusing the report feature, which is prohibited by ToS and you may be punished for it.

If you’re genuinely suspecting someone from “botting”, which is clearly defined as using 3rd party program to automate gameplay, go ahead and report them, that’s perfectly fine. But if they’re automating gameplay via legit ingame means (such as using your minions and the autoloot feature), they’re not violating any rule.

I’m not saying whether afk farming is healthy for the game and it’s economy, that’s an entirely different discussion. If you want to go ahead and convince Anet to ban such behavior from the game, that’s okay. All I’m saying is that currently, the way ToS are worded, it is perfectly okay to afk farm, and you are putting your account at risk if you falsely report people for botting, even though they are not.

DeceiverX.8361:

Only on the context of PvE for the power build. Otherwise every other build was massively nerfed for PvP.

Sorry, you’re right. It was silly of me to just assume we’re talking about PvE in a topic labeled “Thief in raids”. This is obviously PvP related stuff.

Thieves never got nerfed, it’s just that other classes got buffed indirectly by the current meta setup. Having 2 chronos allows you to have permanent (or nearly permanent) uptime on alacrity, which buffs other classes a lot, but thief gets almost 0 benefit from it because they use initiative instead of cooldowns.
Because of that, eles, if properly played, have better damage output, especially on large hitboxes. In reality, thief will probably do comparable (if not better) dmg in nearly any scenario, because it’s easier to survive and do your rotation. I’ve seen VERY FEW eles who can actually outDPS a thief.
Nevertheless, despite thief being perfectly viable for any raid situation, I would recommend you looking into a different class instead. Most people don’t really understand the meta or listen to reason, they just copy it blindly and will not accept a class into raids unless it’s commonly used, so you will have a hard time finding a group as a thief.

thrag.9740:

Its not so much that we have a single giant group wipe. It is more so that we slowly lose people over the course of the fight. In particular people getting downed on the green stuff as the fight progresses.

Why is that so? Are your druids not doing their job or is it because of people failing mechanics?
1) Make sure your get stunbreak every time. Bad eles sometimes waste their gale song for the ground AoEs, which means they won’t have it for his fear. You need to absolutely make sure that everyone will be broken out of stun every time.
2) Call out shake attacks and try to block them with distortion. If someone goes downed anyway, be prepared to res them quickly.
3) Have druids watch out for people with posion. If they are low on health and have to drop poison by a wall, they will need to be healed specifically since they’re not in the main stack.
4) Make sure to pull and kill ads as often as possible. People can die to them too. Eles and warriors should place their AoEs to hit slubs along with the boss. Mesmers should spam focus 4 often, druids can pull with axe too. If you can’t pull, make sure you have some kind of protection against the ads (reflects or projectile destruction).
5) If people get downed far away from the group anyway, bring a transfusion necro or have druids take search and rescue.

At level 20 you don’t have to worry about combos too much, but it’s nice you have noticed. In practice only some combos are actually useful and not very reliable to use (because with more people you have little control over the combo field). Here are some of the more common combinations:

Blast finisher inside a fire field will provide area might. Might will significantly improve your damage output, so it’s good to blast fire fields as often as you can. It is also possible to prepare 25 stacks of might before the fight even begins, so you can start with maximum power (this is called “might prestack”). Elementalists and Engineers are the best at doing this, but other classes can contribute a lot to prestacking as well.

Blast finisher inside a water field will provide area healing. Some classes will learn this combination naturally, because you can enhance your healing capabilities. You will usually summon a water field when you’re low on health so you can heal yourself. If you have a spare blast finisher, you can then use it inside the water field to get some extra healing. Prime example would be engineer’s healing turret and druid’s staff 5+3 combo.

Blast finisher inside a smoke field will provide area stealth. This is usually used outside of combat in dungeons and fractals to provide stealth to your group. Even though it is rarely needed, stealth makes skipping mobs much easier. Thieves obviously have the best access to smoke fields and stealth, but other classes can provide them too (engi, ranger,…). You can also perform a leap finisher to give yourself stealth (mostly used in PvP), but bear in mind your group will NOT receive any stealth, hence why you should prioritize blast finishers instead.

Projectile and whirl finishers inside various fields will make you inflict conditions upon enemies. Fire field does burning, ethereal does confusion, poison does… well… posion. Some classes and builds will naturally incorporate these combos into their rotation (e.g. 5+4 inside reaper shroud for chilling bolts), but these will only have noticable effect if you’re running a condi build. If you have 0 condition damage and expertise in your build, you don’t need to worry about these combos, because they won’t have any effect anyway.

Some other classes and builds will have more, extremely niche combos (like leap finisher inside fire field for condi warrior to get fire aura and detonate it for extra damage), but the above ones are the most common. Seems like you have figured out most of the stuff by yourself anyway, I have complete faith in you that you’ll be able to put combos to good use. As you progress through the game, you will learn everything naturally.

Roald.1260:

If you can get within 80% of the benchmark is sufficient.

I wonder how many people are actually gonna come after seeing this. I’ve seen MANY players with 250+ LI who constantly and consistently fail to meet this requirement, let alone complete newbies. Good luck.

Silvatar.5379:

Run CoF p1 and p2 daily. You can do p3 too if you have the time but its a bit longer and can be frustrating if people are unaware of the mechanics.

Each of the paths can be frustrating if people are unaware of the mechanics. P3 is just as bad/fine as the other two paths. I’d recommend to the OP that he learns the path via YT and then joins exp meta parties, since they can finish the paths much quicker (you will have to search a bit longer though) than the toxic casuals.
CoE similar deal. I would say finding a mediocre group for CoE is pretty easy, a lot of people know it (at least at a basic level) and usually run all paths of it (1+2+3).
Arah is something you should avoid unless you have a full premade group. Pugs are terribad, they will consantly die to everything and you will end up soloing the whole thing. If you actually care enough to learn to solo it (or maybe duo with a friend), the experience will be much more pleasant than pugging, you will clear the path consistently and can even make some money through selling.

Anyway, I would recommend to you to learn paths and start running them in this order (beginning with the easiest path, leading up to hardest):
CoF 1 > Full CoE > CoF 2+3 > Arah 2 > Rest of Arah
You can perfectly get away with just running CoF 1. It’s extremely easy and short. But if you want more challenge and want to speed things up, you may start looking into the other paths as well.

The barrier to enter raids is what YOU make it. Everyone can make a raid squad and advertise a run on lfg, asking for whatever they want.
What you’re talking about is a barrier to leech experienced groups. Very few established experienced groups will let a complete newbie in. Why should they? If 9 people have put some amount of time and effort to prepare for raids, why should the last person just leech them? Especially if they can find someone else, who has put an equal amount of dedication to the game.

If you want to experience raids, you can make your own squad, find 9 people on lfg and go. No TS needed, no gearcheck needed, no strategy needed. Just YOLO in with random builds and have fun. Nothing is preventing you from doing that.

If you want to successfully score a raid kill, I’m afraid you will actually have to work for that. Nobody is going to hand you free kills on a silver platter without you putting the least amount of effort. Gear up, study up on what to do. Join training runs at first and after you feel comfortable fighting that boss (you don’t even need to kill him, just experience every phase and mechanic of the fight), you can start trying to join exp groups. Be honest with them, I am sure sooner or later somebody will give you a shot.

Yeah, for very low skill level groups it would definitely be faster to clear out the whole path rather than trying to skip past mobs.

For experienced groups, they always adapt party comp to the exact path (anyone, who plays for at least a few months has a whole bunch of classes they can relog to), utilize them to their max potential and skip every part of the dungeon that is not essential to finishing it. Here is an example how this looks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=extTdoFs4qo
An entire dungeon path takes 2 minutes to finish in a full 5 man party. Casual run without portal strats will definitely take more, but as long as everyone knows what they’re doing, no dungeon should ever take more than a few minutes.
The truth is pugs are so terrible at the game, you can usually complete a dungeon SOLO faster than they would in a full 5-man party.

So even though dungeons do indeed require many changes (which unfortunately never will be made since the devs already buried this gamemode), none of the changes are related to difficulty or length. If anything, they should be made more difficult, not less.

bLind.6278:

…but I’m strongly considering gearing up my necro and will likely roll Berserker for him as well after the recent nerf that crippled condi necro.

I strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the “meta” a little bit more. I though this was common knowledge, but apparently not, so:
Despite the nerfs to condi necro, it is still one of the most common builds in fractals and is way more common than power necro in all gamemodes. Power necro brings literally nothing to the table. Everything it does, other classes do it better. Condi necro, even though it has lower DPS than some other condi classes, still offers some nice utility like epi bounce, carrying noobs with transfusion, pulling condis from allies (not something you normally do, but it is desirable at some encounters, especially in raids) and some minor party buffing. It is also extremely relaxed to play (as long as you can dodge at least once in a while) and very much sought after by pugs because they’re familiar with it. Condi necro is still a very strong choice, much better than zerk necro anyway.

Condi war is pretty good too. I used to play zerk war in fractals before, but 99% of the time, when you pug, any melee class is literally unplayable, because people have no idea what social awkwardness does, druids cannot heal properly and bar breaking is extremely slow (even though you do 80% yourself). So condi war is pretty much a godsend, because you’re no longer relying on your team in any way, you can pull off strong DPS, buff others and take care of nearly any job in the team.

Agreed, playing chrono is pretty engaging and your gameplay will be very impactful. The standard zerk/commander chrono combines the aspects of tanking and DPS, while minstrel chrono is more oriented towards tanking+healing. All of this while also providing quickness and alacrity, buffs that are essential to successful completion of a raid.

You may also want to check out ranger/druid. They are traditionally healers/buffers, but can also assume the role of pure DPS. I have a friend, who can play druid so amazingly, that he can essentialy carry a group of mediocre players even through the hardest of encounters. The rotation is easier than chrono’s, but you’ll need much faster reactions and better battlefield awareness if you want to save your buddies from going downed/dying. Doing your basic job is not very difficult, but if you really want to bring your druid gameplay to this kind of level, it will take a lot of effort and experience.

As far as DPS goes, most difficult profession (also the most sought after) is tempest. You will usually not make as much of impact as the former 2 (because you’re “just” DPS), but you can surely tell a big difference between good tempest and a bad one. If you can pull off good DPS, you’ll be able to skip and ignore many threatening raid mechanics and have a very easy and smooth run.

1- Does he have more health in normal mode than in challenge mode? Because I know from our daily challenge mode runs that he dies in about 5 minutes. I cannot imagine any way how the kill would take you 15 minutes. Are you doing a 5 man party run or are you just soloing/duoing it?

2- EZ solution: don’t get downed during the fight. His attacks are SO CLEARLY telegraphed, you absolutely SHOULD be punished for ingoring them. Also, his charge doesn’t kill anyone even in challenge mode. It just applies a few bleeds. They have the potential to kill you eventually, so either heal through it or condi cleanse.

3 – I dunno, to me this seems to work just like with any other fractal. The difficulty is fine IMO. Challenge mode can possibly feel a bit_ challenging at first, but becomes really easy once you get accustomed to it.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Because the BS precious Meta excludes whole classes from raiding, take Necro for example a class that arguably has a higher percentage of player than most classes except for Warriors, but because of shoddy class balancing and dev design flavours we’re left with a class like Necro that brings nothing to the table.

Tbh I think you can make at least one spot for condi necro (and even justify it rationally) in pretty much every raid encounter with the exception of KC.

Projectile protection, extra AoE dmg with epi, additional meatshields through minion spawning, very good and easy CC, easy survivability, party buffing with vampiric aura and saving people with transfusion.
Some time ago I watched as our group DPS improved significantly when we replaced two eles in our group for two necros. Even though eles have theoretically much higher DPS, fact remains that very few people have the intelectual capacity to play them or switch to encounter-appropriate builds. They just copypaste the build from metabattle and then brainafk while spamming autoattack, ocassionally using other skills with no thought being put into the rotation whatsoever.
This means, in practice, classes like necro or thief will pull off significantly better DPS than eles because they’re simpler to play. Necro also has the benefit of lowering the overall pressure on your group, which can help out casuals a lot.
It comes down to the skill and knowledge of individual players. But I can almost guarantee you that for 90% of players (this includes 200+ LI players as many of them are leechers with very little skill anyway) if they switched from ele to a different profession, the raid would be going much smoother, and the DPS would be better.

As for the OP – I’m afraid your current situation cannot be helped. Since condi dmg plays important role in w1 (well, mostly just VG), it’s obvious that anyone looking for engis will be expecting condi builds, not power builds. Your situation becomes even worse considering you have no practical experience in raids and no (or very little) LI to ping to the group. I’d recommend that you make one of the most common builds instead (boonshare mes, ps war, healing druid or DPS ele). Even though you may not find the gameplay as enjoyable or you may perform better on your engi (because of the reasons I mentioned above), playing a common build will make it easier for you to find a group. People are already struggling to complete raids on their own, seeing new builds or styles of play can easily throw them off balance and make it even harder to just beat the encounters. You can have perfectly valid reasons for playing power engi, but very little portion of gw2 community would listen to reason.

Well yeah, I agree that extra CC can save your group from a wipe in phase 5. Although if you’re struggling for CC, you have some better options (thief can blow up the breakbar with no effort whatsoever). Also I’d very much doubt that warrior (since we are looking at a very casual group here) would be able to maintain 25 might during absence of any crucial precision buff (fury sig/spotter/fury buff/discipline banner) unless he has strength runes AND fried dumplings.
So in my opinion it would be the best to make sure people can do at least their basic jobs. Pretty much every single class in their composition has insane amounts of CC available to it, so if at any point the CC is lacking, the group has much bigger issues to be concerned about than warrior not using an extra skull crack.
Also the argument that warrior’s personal DPS doesn’t matter because it’s not a DPS profession is very wrong, because if everyone thinks that way, there’ll be 1-2 people doing any reasonable amount of DPS to the boss and the rest is just watching. And in a group like this, every tiny bit of DPS makes a huge difference because they might even have problems with the enrage timer.
I still stand by what I wrote – using signet of fury for the active should only be done in a very desperate situation. Most of the time it’s gonna simply result in a loss of precious DPS and prolong the fight unnecessarily, putting the group in much bigger danger.

Jerus.4350:

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Thanks for all the good info guys.

So at P1, I drop my banners, dodge and immediately hit Head Butt, burst, and then 100b up to another burst, dodge & AA. Is there something else I should be trying to sneak in?

war dps is alrdy pathetically low. I’ve stress this many times and I hate this fact.

I agree nagr, war dps being lower than a casters is laughable. Do you think the Hulk’s dps is lower than Scarlet Witch’s?

Don’t forget the heal -> Arc after the first Arc in berserk.

Actually you should pop the heal after second arc in berserk, to make sure you squeeze 100b twice into your berserk mode and activate arc one extra time. This doesn’t really matter when there are ads to cleave, but when facing a single enemy, that’s when managing your cooldowns and adrenaline during berserk mode comes into play.

Edit: Also I’d like to add (because Sykper’s earlier comment might mislead you), that activating signet of fury during combat is a VERY bad idea. You should only do it when your group is absolutely desperate and you need every single bit of CC to be able to break the bar (at which point you’re not very likely to have a shot at beating VG anyway). Doing so makes you miss out on a significant chunk of your personal DPS as well as diminishing your ability to generate might because you’ll crit less often, lowering the group’s overall DPS even further.

If you’re able to get it to ~15% I’m confident you’ll be able to kill it eventually. You need to figure out where’s your problem and focus on it. If you’re having problems with green, then assign one more person to it permanently. You’ll kill it slower but it will be much safer. If you’re hitting the enrage timer by the end of the fight, you’ll need to polish your gameplay in general and pull off better DPS.
If you’re unlucky with the green and it spawns in a lit-up area, make sure you coordinate your actions. Either have the green team go to it and try to heal through the damage, or have everyone stack at one spot and revive those who go downed. If you panic and the team splits up without coordination, that’s most likely gonna cause a wipe (or at least a couple of deaths which will inevitably lead to a wipe).

The benefit of warrior banners is gonna depend on how close to the middle you kite him. If you place the banners near the center and you don’t lead him too far away, most people should get the banners’ effects.

Gonna post an older video that is still very much relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPXCdOB8wi4

I don’t have the guts to pug dungeons anymore, but I can easily imagine how they look. People have become complete trash. First sign that gives away how bad the group is, is the composition. You often see people playing necros or double/triple warrior and they don’t even care enough to relog to a different class that would be a milion times more useful. They don’t swap weapons outside of combat for mobility and blasts, don’t swap utility skills or traits, don’t even play proper rotations.

Basically it’s impossible to have a decent dungeon run at this point, because everyone capable of pulling that off is not interested in dungeons anymore.

Hello, I’d like to suggest a little QoL upgrade for the Koda’s Warmth enrichment infusion.

Currently the infusion is very underwhelming and its price IMO isn’t justified. The aura itself is very weak (which might be a plus for some people, but let’s be honest – when you get an aura, you usually want it to be clearly visible), the achievement doesn’t give you any mastery points or a title and is extremely costly.
When you invest a significant amount of money and effort into something, you usually expect it to pay off somehow. And in this case, you basically dump 600g and 3 hours of your time into a trash can and get almost nothing out of it.

Here is my suggestion: When your character wears the Koda’s Warmth infusion, it automatically receives warmth buff, which allows you to enter the Bitter Cold without the thaw elixir and be immune to certain effects of enemy attacs (in the same way how thaw elixir makes you immune to the chilled effect from many enemies in the Bitterfrost Frontier).
Basically the equivalent of having the thaw elixir on you all the time. You will still be able to make the thaw elixir if you choose to (for the daily achievement and story progression).
It’s nothing huge and won’t give you any significant advantage (the elixir itself is pretty easy to make), but it will help justify the insane price of the infusion. It also makes a lot of sense lore-wise, because when you’re blessed with Koda’s Warmth, you should easily resist any cold, especially in the Bitterfrost Frontier where the Kodan have a huge influence.

There’s literally no build I could suggest to you fitting that description. If you’re going to ignore dodges and let enemies hit you with every single attack, there’s nothing you can play that would benefit your party (because they could always replace you with someone who doesn’t ignore dodge mechanics, reads enemy tells and provides much more to the party).
Tbh. unless you’re willing to l2p, I’d say your best bet is to stay on your reaper. Power-based damage is superior to condi in dungeons most of the time, so you’ll be contributing a decent amount. Also if you cannot stay alive on other classes, there’s no point in switching, just stay on necro who has double healthbar and is extremely easy to play.

Pro tip: If you’re facing multiple trash mobs (enemies who’s rank is lower than champion), try placing down well of darkness under them. It’s a blind field, meaning their attacks will be rendered completely ineffective for at least 5 seconds.

Pro tip2: Boss enemies usually have breakbar (the blue bar under their health). If you break it quickly, it will disable the boss for 5 seconds, allowing you to freecast as you wish. Your best skill for breaking that bar (called CC) is charge, which is 2nd skill after you activate flesh golem as your elite. Your other CCs include 3rd and 5th skills in reaper shroud.

I quickly went through the new patch and skipped over a lot of stuff, so it wasn’t until one of WP’s newest videos that I knew about the transformation tonic. Throughout the video, he was playing as a Kodan a lot of the time. It took me longer than I’m proud of, but eventually I realised it’s actually quite a huge thing – you retain your transformation during combat and all the skill animations are adjusted and displaying properly. IMO this is a first step Anet is taking towards implementing a new playable race – the Kodan.

It’s no secret that HoT was poorly received when it first came out. A lot of people called the expansion rushed, lacking content and were overall dissatisfied. Eventually Anet went ahead and fixed a lot of problems, making the expansion much more enjoyable, but I think they learned a lesson and want to make the next one better. It’s also not a secret that a lot of people want a new playable race. Of course that would require an extreme amount of work – redesigning all the armor skins, lots of voice acting, animating and coming up with personal story (assuming they will want the new race to function in the same way as the 5 existing ones). I believe that even though it will be very difficult, it’s not impossible.

The current living story is leading up to a big fight with 2 dragons and their minions. Primordus and Jormag. Undoubtedly the Kodan are gonna play a very important role in the fight against Jormag, there’s a lot of undiscovered area in the north of the map allowing for many new potential zones and it seems like the ideal time to drop them in game as a playable race. We’ve seen much more of them in the latest patch and I think there is more to come. Anet are starting to build up their culture, making us more familiar with their ways, possibly in preparation for the next expansion.

Because of all these reasons, I think the LS will end right before the fight with Jormag, which is where the expansion will pick up and introduce Kodan as a playable race.
What do you think? Does anyone else believe there is at least a slight possibility that new playable race will come in some upcoming expansion? Please feel free to update me on any other facts I might have missed out – as I said I kinda rushed through the last update and I might have overlooked some things.