Guild Wars 2

Sykper: There’s no way thief brings more party support than ele. With ele (talking about full DPS berserker ele btw.) you get potent heals, condi removal, party-wide stunbreak, skill that saves you from going downed, occasional might generation and some other boss-specific utilities (shake block on sloth with offhand focus, icy patch clearing on mattias). ALL thief can provide is CC. And in decent squad where everyone pays attention, you will never lack CC so badly that you would have to absolutely rely on basilisk venom.
Ele is better than thief in pretty much every possible way, except it’s much harder to pull off. IMO the only reason anyone would bring thief into raids is that he is a bad player, still learning the encounters and needs something very forgiving in terms of mistakes. Otherwise, any competent player will benefit the group much more as an elementalist than he would as a thief.

Also, you get the order of condi DPS classes reversed. Best is condi ranger (assuming base ranger max DPS build), next up is condi engi and last is necro. Of course in reality most people will do better dps on necro than engi (especially if you can epi-bounce), because engi has significantly harder rotation. Nevertheless condi ranger is the best DPS and fairly reasonable to play, so it will come out on top most of the time. It might be worth mentioning there are more condi DPS builds (like condi mesmer), but they are usually very situational – e.g. condi mesmer has the most value on mattias, but will perform very badly at encounters where boss is mostly static.

With the rest of the stuff I agree. For support you pretty much always want to have mesmer+ranger+warrior. Depending on the needs of your group, there is a bit of build variance (e.g. minstrel chrono vs. commander chrono, magi druid vs. condi druid), but the classes will always be there in some form or another.
For DPS ranking (be it condi or power), you can look at http://www.qtfy.enjin.com/dps. Of course in an actual raid, the DPS will probably be very different (you have to interrupt your rotation sometimes, also some classes are more complex than others), but this list should at least give you a general idea.
As far as tanking goes, always go with mesmer. Over the year I’ve seen many different classes tank (necro, engi, war, guard, ele), but you always miss out on something. With mesmer you can tank and do your normal job as well, so you basically compress 2 roles into one spot.

Agreed with everything mentioned here. Love the new fractal, love the challenge mode. I especially like that challenge mode has new mechanics and the fights work differently rather than simply scaling up the numbers by an arbitrary amount. I’d recommend bringing one heal druid to make it easier on yourselves, but otherwise – as stated above – personal skill matters much more than party comp.

How much leeway for mistakes do you need? If you’re not very experienced or skilled, best bet would probably be double condi necro. You will have very strong survivability even with fully offensive build and can bounce epidemics to do some damage.

If you can manage your evades and have decent experience with PvE, then go with what otome said. Ele combos well with pretty much anything. It has strong damage, lots of blast finishers (for prestacking might and stealth skips), CC and blinds. Only downside is that you go downed easily and usually you need to fight in a very specific way (which varies based on the encounter). You can either pair it with another ele, or you can go thief (easy stealth, good damage and blind spam), engineer (decent damage and amazing utility), warrior (many unique buffs and easy survivability), mesmer (lots of buffs and projectile protection, although personal damage is abysmal) or pretty much anything else, based on your taste and personal preferences.

You can look up some videos on YT, there’s a lot of dungeon solos and duos, you can learn a lot from there – especially class comps and boss-specific strategies.

I’m sure Anet and NCSoft appreciate how a bunch of uneducated and biased stranges on their forums perform analysis of their business plan and draw conclusions about how certain element of the game affects the revenue, although I believe they already have experts taking care of that, not to mention they have much more data available than the aforementioned forum warriors.

Doctor.1905:

Isn’t condi damage superior to power for a ranger especially in fractals where toughness scales like crazy? Ranger deals the highest condi damage right now.

That’s only true for condi base ranger, who has great personal DPS, but provides absolutely no party buffs and actually even relies on a druid to give him some of the buffs. As qT teaches you, in most scenarios party dmg buff >> personal dmg buff, after all meta is based on different classes sharing their unique buffs to maximize the damage.

Ever since they changed toughness scaling (btw. have you been living under a rock for the past couple of months?), I’d say power-based builds are better for coordinated groups who can burst down most bosses within seconds. That applies to everyone including druids, who can by the way bring extra utility like pulling mobs – which condis cannot.
Nevertheless most groups are NOT capable of doing this and encounters can drag on for minutes, so realistically (especially in pugs), condi is just as (if not more) viable as power.

IMO best team would be zerk druid, chrono, PS war and 2 tempests. You have everything – stealth, portals, gotl/frost spirit/spotter, EA/banners, quickness/alacrity and a lot of damage. Although this only works if you have decent players who can play their classes. If you pug, then roll necro, wait for everyone to die and solo the boss.

Blaeys.3102:

…, but I believe these things need to be said. I would also welcome ongoing dialogue about these topics.

Aaaaand even before reading the post I already knew each of the things HAS BEEN said, at least a million times. I was right. Why do you keep making these posts?

For many of us, raids are not in a good place and changes are needed.

Because something doesn’t fit you personally, the developers are obliged to rework it so that you like it regardless of opinions of thousands of other players? I remember the times when gamers used to adapt to the games they play, instead of crying and whining until the developers make the game stupidly easy.

I’m starting to think none of these people even care about raids, they’re just bored to hell and spend their time trolling on forums, making up problems and then proposing how to solve these non-existent problems. If it wasn’t raids, they would surely find another topic they can beat to death and make 93164713177651 posts about.

thrag.9740:

Ok, thanks everyone. I will stick with the glyph buff trait.

My group generally tanks through tantrum and then breaks at the very end (which buys you an extra second or two). But we don’t currently have the classes to play 5-5, and are running 8-1-1 which is probably optimal for the classes we do have currently, so our dps is not high enough to do fast break no updrafts, but we can do slow break no updrafts. I imagine more optimal groups would find fast breaks more enjoyable, especially if their druids are not magi.

Based on the video you posted in another thread I can tell you your group has way more important stuff to be concerned about than one little trait. Tell your tempests to NOT spam signet of fire off cooldown, improve their rotations and dodge Gorseval’s smash at least once in a while. Dunno if everyone has that problem, but this person gives me the impression of buying the kill rather than actually participating in it.

IMO rev would be slightly better (fury+protection), but the difference would be very small. If you have decent eles who don’t slack and prestack might+fury, I’d prolly go for PS war since it will allow you to maintain might in prolonged fights + party buffs will add more dmg to the group.

Anyway if you’re expecting to have bad pugs who don’t play properly and don’t coordinate actions, there’s no point in you trying to optimize your play. 1 person of out 5 playing properly is not gonna save the run. Just play whatever you’re comfortable with and feels fun to you.

Did I just fall into a spacetime wormhole that sent me exactly one year into the past? O.o

sophiewhite.3149:

they could just create copys of the raids with much worse rewards yet also much easier. so people can practice the mechanics.

This already exists and it’s called raids.
Just enter with a training group and train. You’ll have much worse rewards, because you’re not gonna kill the boss (or kill him after many many tries), but also it will be much easier, because you don’t aim to kill him in the first place. You can just set your own goals like reaching 66% HP, doing better than on your previous run,… You can literally do ANYTHING you want, practice mechanis, have fun, chill, play any build you like, but instead you choose to complain on forums and request something completely useless from developers so that other people get less content.
Let’s face it…. everyone who complains does so because of REWARDS. If you didn’t want rewards and just wanted to experience the content, you’d already have started an “everyone welcome” lfg in raids and played them.
People got used to getting rewards without effort (log-in rewards, lol). Raids are something different, if you want a reward you have to EARN it.

thewaterguy.4796:

GW2 the MMO that has always stood for respecting a players time and everyone can enjoy the same content…is actively blocking people from raiding.

The only thing blocking you from raiding is you. GW2 is exactly the opposite, it’s anti-grind, only about skill. You can gear up and get ready for raids in few weeks max (that is assuming you will be starting from scratch and have no asc gear whatsoever) – after that, the only thing that separates you from other raiders is… skill. Maybe you have to change your attitude, but it’s established that joining raids is far from impossible for those who really want to. There are many groups out there, some may not have been nice to you, but it doesn’t mean all of them are like that. And of course, you always have the option of creating your own group with any requirements you choose. Don’t be lazy.

I have amazingly similar experience as JotGeh. Pretty much the only thing you can trust with pugs, is that they will fail every single mechanic and die really quickly, which is the reason why I always go for necro comp. When your teammates inevitably die, you can easily solo any boss, because necro can kite, CC, has double healthbar, projectile block (which doesn’t work most of the time thanks to unblockable projectiles but hey) and still do fairly decent damage.

What was the last time you’ve seen pugs prestack might? Or precast skills? Instabreak? Or dodge? They don’t do any of these things, which is why you can’t play FotM in an optimal way. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you will get decent people who can at least keep themselves alive, but necro is pretty much the best class if you’re play with pugs. It’s easy and dependable.

I’m okay with halloween being easy, but I want some optional challenging side quests. Some person suggested earlier to have an achievement for finishing Mad King JP the maximum amount of times (without falling once) during the 15 min match. Or something similar. No need to include it in the big meta achievement (so casuals can finish it easily), just have it as an optional thing for people who like challenge. Farming Lab is so dull and boring I’m not gonna do it no matter how profitable it is.

Edit: Also, as far as buffs/nerfs go, last year (IIRC, correct me if I’m wrong) enemies didn’t have breakbars, it was purely a HoT thing that they added retroactively to core tyria some time later. That alone is 50% dmg buff to players and 5 sec disable for the boss. Also, since HoT was just coming out, I believe not many people had their elite spec unlocked, let alone understand how it works and play the rotations correctly. After a year, almost everyone has elite spec fully unlocked and can perform the rotations resonably well, which adds to the power creep quite a bit as well.

No, Anet just decided that finishing Mad King JP is not nearly as great of an achievement as say… opening 50 bags by clicking on them or pressing F next to a pumpkin. Makes me sad, but what can I do….
You can still get an achievement for it if it’s in daily (I did it yesterday for that reason), but you don’t need it for anything, you can just do any other daily as well. So basically no incentive to do this other than having fun. No noticable reward at the end of the JP either.

Mitch.4781:

Zenith.7301:

What you people don’t understand is that these are PvP changes.

They don’t give a kitten about PvE collateral.

Well actually, they were apparently because of issues caused in W vW

So? It’s not like he said sPvP, he said just PvP. Last time I checked, there was PvP in WvW.

@Zenith: Just for the record, everyone realizes they make these changes purely based on PvP and don’t give a **** about PvE. It doesn’t make it okay though, we still got plenty of reasons to be mad.

From what I’ve seen, the recent changes didn’t affect top-tier groups too much (qT casually killed Xera with 4+ mins on the timer), but average groups have noticably harder time than before.
Thanks to the baseline nerfs of Druid healing, you’ll be seeing less heals overall no matter the gear (even full magi Druid will do less heals than pre-nerf). This will put a group under bigger pressure and will result in a DPS loss (because more dodges and recovery are needed) in addition to all the baseline DPS nerfs (boon duration, quickness uptime,…).
So everytime you had a “close kill” pre-nerf, it will basically become a wipe now. Raids are overall more demanding and will require much better gameplay.

Wethospu.6437:

Good job with handling all that pressure!

Yeah, handling all that pressure must have been extremely difficult on necro, the squishiest class in the game with no survivability options. Incredible feat, other speedrunners don’t even come close to this level of skill.

I’m sorry but I had to. We have serious players like Goku posting actual speedruns and then we get solo records on a necro.

Here is the deal with the game:

Gear can have various stats on it. Stats like power/precision/ferocity/condition damage are offensive, they increase your attack potential. Stats like toughness/vitality/healing power are defensive, they make you tankier.
By using gear that is offensive by its nature, you sacrifice your own survivability for the sake of doing more damage. Most people who are experienced use gear that only has offensive stats (like berserker, assassin, viper,…) which means they kill stuff reasonably fast but they’re squishy, so they have to pay a lot of attention to enemy attacks and dodge them.
If you have defensive gear, the game is obviously gonna feel easy to you because nothing can kill you, enemy attacks will be mitigated by your passive defense. But it comes with a cost – everything dies really slow because you don’t deal much damage either.
Additionaly, if you’re not level 80, you probably still have leveling gear, which is gonna be weak. Updating your equipment should do the trick. Wear armor that is close to your level, of best possible quality and as much offensive stats as possible.

Also, melee weapons usually deal more damage, since they force you to come close to an enemy. Range weapons are safe and easy to use, but they will obviously deal less dmg. Again, you’re choosing between your own safety and killing stuff fast. Risk vs. reward.

If you wanna go through story fast, you have the option. Just spec into offense, have offensive stats on your gear and use melee weapons. But it requires proactive and skillful gameplay, knowing your class well and using dodges. Not all players can handle that.
There’s no way you can be super tanky and deal extreme damage at the same time. From what you’ve said I can tell your spec is extremely tanky, so you can change it up. But you will notice the game becomes much more demanding if you spec for offense. No longer you can afford to mash skills randomly and ignore mechanics, you will have to execute rotations precisely and anticipate enemy attacks.

Agreed with OP, all story rewards (not just HoT story but also all the LS episodes and old Zaithan story) should be salvagable and mysticforgeable. You can only earn them once per character, they’re usually not particularly rare or valuable and they take time and effort to earn just like any other item in the game. It doesn’t make any sense to put arbitrary restrictions on them that force you to delete them instead of salvaging/flushing into MF or heck even selling to a vendor.

I’m really glad for the changes they made recently (like making WvW gear salvagable), but they stopped half way for no reason. I know it takes development resources for very little benefit, but it’s extremely annoying having to throw away all story rewards because devs made a terrible and unreasonable decision in the past. It has to be fixed.

You should probably salvage it, it yields 60 magnetite shards. Also you get a ball of dark energy, which is used in some legendary crafting (fractal backpack and leggy armor when it comes).

It’s hard to give any advice when I haven’t actually seen you play, but here are some things that come in mind:

When facing multiple trash mobs (or veterans), blinds are really helpful. You can put down an AoE that will periodically pulse out a condition to enemies that will make them miss you with their attacks → you don’t get any damage. Your best blind fields are Smoke Bomb and Flash Shell.

Since a lot of engineer’s attack deal ground-targeted AoE damage, it might help if you stack enemies in one spot. You can do it either by LoSing them (corner pull) or with Magnetic Bomb if you have Streamlined Kits trait (under specialization Tools).

If projectiles are a problem, you can create a field that will protect you against them by using tool belt skill for Elixir U. If you’re fast, you can toss it before you get into combat, swap Elixir U for something else, so that you can use your desired utility skills and still enjoy the benefit of being covered from projectiles.

For champion-rank mobs, you can disable them (and also deal bonus damage to them) for 5 seconds by breaking their blue bar. Ever since the nerf of Slick Shoes this is significantly harder to do by yourself, but it’s still manageable if you learn all your CC skills and use them all in rapid succession.

You can pre-stack might before the combat begins (by performing a specific rotation of your skills that involves changing utility skills on the fly) and then swap into your standard build, which makes your attacks hit MUCH harder during the first seconds of the fight. This also helps you out defensively, because enemies dying faster means you being in danger for much less time.

And of course it helps immensely if you know your enemies. Know what to look out for, anticipate their attacks and know how to counter them. If you’re new to the game, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know, which is fine. Experience will come with time. Don’t expect to be the best on your first day.

If you can name some specific problem you have, I might be able to give you some better advice. But this is all I can think of if you have general difficulty with the game’s combat.

nagr.1593:

All of them selfish and short on time…

How is that different to what YOU do? You expect a good, synchronized and established group to just take you and carry you through the raids quickly because you refuse to take your time and learn the encounters properly? Raids were made for hardcore players who are bored by the game and seeking an ultimate challenge. If you can barely log in a few times a week, then you’re – by definition – a casual player and might enjoy playing casual content more. If you’re getting into hardcore group content, you need to be able to log in whenever it’s needed. Expecting 9 other people to go out of their way to adapt to you is selfish and stupid.
So pretty much what Coconut said. Your struggle has nothing to do with raids, it’s about your attitude.

This is probably the most sensible idea of implementing easy-mode raids and opening raiding to a broader community. I’m curious how would this turn out and I’d frankly love to see this in game in some form or another.
+1 to the OP

Just play the game.
Play through the story (including the new living world season), explore the new maps (focus especially on hero challenges to unlock your elite spec), do meta events, grab easy achievements and then do all of this some more and then even more. If you feel up to the challenge, do raids. Before you know it, you have everything unlocked and are swimming in gold. If you’re looking for more specific advice though:

Easy way to do hard HoT hero challenges is to play WvW for a bit and buy them for the level-up tokens. Alternatively you can tag-up, alert map chat and try to get help of some other people.

You get most experience (as far as I know) from Dragon’s Stand meta event, especially the first half (before the 3 towers). If you haven’t reached it yet, just do any events. They all give experience. If you wanna make it faster, put on an exp booster.

You will get most achievements (and, in turn, mastery points) simply by playing the game, without pursuing them specifically. If you find yourself lacking mastery points for some reason anyway, just open up hero panel and see which achievements you can do.

Currently most popular gold farms are Tarir multiloot and Silverwastes chest farm. If you want gold really quick, join either one of them and have fun. Make sure you follow the rules though, otherwise commander may kick you. If you’re not in a hurry, then just play the game in any way you like, gold will start to rack up.

As far as crafting goes, there are guides on the internet. Just search. The guide will allow you to get to a level in the cheapest way possible, although it’s pretty easy to level up crafting even without one. Collect materials (and buy rest on the TP), then craft whatever item that gives you crafting exp.

@Breakbar: Depends hugely on the classes. Most classes cannot break it solo unless you anticipate the breakbar and precast your CC. But if you have something like warrior/revenant, you can comfortably break it every single time and forget about your team. Of course it would all be much easier if all people contributed a little bit of their CC, but you can’t expect that from pugs since most of them have reaction time of a wooden chair.

@OP: Agreed with point 3 + with daze removal from point 2. This fight definitely punishes melee a bit too much. As far as damage goes, I think it’s pretty balanced, maybe just shift it a little (someone suggested that earlier) in the sense that first two attacks of AA chain will to less damage and the last one will do more. Or add another attack that will do much more damage but is clearly telegraphed and on high cooldown.

Rednik.3809:

And resource-wise 40% of players able to play 1 raid is much better than 10% of players playing 3 raids, though making more difficulties for one raid will certainly take MUCH less resources than making 2 more new raids.

And what about those remaining 60% people? Forget about them? Don’t they also have the right to have a difficulty tier made specifically for them, even if it means the other 40% people will have to wait for their raids EVEN more? Where do you draw the line? Or do you just want the devs to make a difficulty to specifically accomodate YOU and don’t care about the rest of the playerbase?

For me personally, whatever they do to raids, I will adapt. Coz that’s what normal players do. Adapt to the game, instead of pressuring devs to adapt the game to them. There is a lot of people playing it, you can’t possibly satisfy all of them. Everyone likes something different. Although good players who spend their time ingame trying to adapt to it and beat the challenge will definitely get more enjoyment out of it than whiny babies QQing on forums how hard the game is and how the devs should rework it to cater specifically to these people.

These are some good ones, but the best would be:

Chronomancer

• Fixed an exploit that allowed chronomancers to go back in time and kill their opponents in PvP before the match began.

Sometimes it’s physically impossible to avoid getting stomped. Imagine this scenario: a warrior and an ele go downed near each other at the same time. Ele goes into vapor form and escapes. Warrior then CCs his avenger, but gets immediately stomped by ele’s avenger that wasn’t CCed. Now tell me… was there any way to avoid that? Every class is given means to avoid their own avenger, but you might not be able to deal with other people’s avengers should they go downed.

Are you serious?
You have never seen a decent run in your life. This is terrible even for a casual run, let alone WR. No mightstack, terrible rotations, bad movement. Furthermore, GW2 speedrunning community has been already established and has agreed on rules that all speedruns must follow. You can find the whole ruleset at http://gw2dungeons.net/Rules
Let me point out some important ones:
Full raid clears, fractals and dungeons: timer starts when any party member moves their model or begins activating a skill.
Fractal records must be at the highest possible scale.
You’ve done this on 40, probably because none of you has even done enough fractals to be able to open 90. There are reasons why people don’t speedrun 40, it’s so trivial that there would be no competition. Everything melts instantly (assuming you perform your rotations correctly, which you did not) and enemies don’t do any damage to you, so there is no danger of dying.

Do yourself a favor and have a look at some of the current world records at http://gw2dungeons.net/Records
Also I dug up this – old Molten Duo record before HoT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPP-ahmNhBY
This was done before the elite spec power creep and also under old fractals (when enemies used to hit much harder), it includes a proper timer (which starts at the beginning of the fractal as opposed to strating it somewhere in the middle) and yet the whole run is still much faster than yours. It should give you a general idea of how fractal speedrun is supposed to look like. Skillclicking and not giving any though to the team splits is not gonna earn you a WR.

Nitron.6405:

An average daily run of T4 fractals, however, takes longer than 30 minutes to complete…

Your average run. Please don’t speak for others. :P
Yes there are issues with how the infinite potions are currently implemented, but I believe they’re none of what OP said. Best suggestions I’ve seen so far were presented in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/infinite-mist-potions
If they actually worked how klerik.4912 suggested in that thread, we would have no problems. But I guess it takes Anet at least 4 years to make stuff easy and intuitive to use, we will have to take their BS for the time being.

Your DPS in an actual raid will be very different to what you see in training area. You will often have to interrupt your rotation, might get downed and have the boss move out of your AoEs. If you want to practice your rotation against a stationary boss anyway, the DPS benchmarks by qT should be very close to the theoretical maximum. They will always specify the setting (all buffs/“realistic” buffs/…). Also keep in mind they use food for the tests.
If your numbers get close to theirs, you know your rotations pretty well. That’s just half of the success though, you need to be also able to execute them under the pressure of a raid.

And if this isn’t obvious, every class has different theoretical maximum DPS. You usually only bring eles and DDs for the DPS, other classes are there for some kind of utility (healing, buff sharing). You should still be doing as much DPS as possible, but even with perfect rotations you won’t reach the numbers of a DPS class.

My experience with pugging HotW is actually better than any other dung. Of course you will have to kick out some 500 AP newbs who are randomly clicking lfg buttons and have no idea what they’re actually doing. But people who do HotW fullruns usually know their way around and are familiar with their class pretty well. That said, last time I pugged it was like 2-3 months ago, stuff may have changed.

Mistlock Instability Mists Convergence: The Fractals of the Mists are blurring together…

What’s the problem?

I support OP’s idea. I missed out on some earlier LWS1 stories because I wasn’t invested in the game so much back then and now I regret it. I’ve accepted the fact that some achievements I’ll never have and I’m fine with it. Even if they brough back the story without any achievements or rewards, I’d still be happy because I wanna experience what I’ve missed out on and perhaps re-experience some of the stories I did and had a great time with.
I realise it would take a lot of work, but I think it’s gonna be worth it. A lot of new people have joined GW2 lately and some were around for a long time, but happened to be busy for long periods of time and may have missed out to LWS1 too. This is why it’d be great to have a way to repeat it on demand just like with LWS2.

I’d like to point out a very important thing: everything (mostly) mentioned here is highly subjective. Difficulty is subjective and this applies to raids more than anywhere else. Usually it depends on who you run with.
For example, my static group to this day has a lot of trouble with Xera and we need multiple tries to successfuly kill her. This is mostly because w3 is the newest and we don’t have a lot of practice yet. Mattias, on the other hand, which many people describe as the hardest boss, we usually kill on the frist try even if we receive bad RNG. This is because we practiced him extensively and people feel comfortable handling his mechanics.
I find that w1 is the easiest for us, w2 slighly harder and w3 even harder. Simply because the earlier wings are around for a longer time and people have more practice with them. But again, that’s just my point of view and doesn’t necessarily apply to other people.

The one thing I see most people agree on is that Trio and Escort are the easiest encounters. I have the same experience and would recommend every starting raider to try out. After that, feel free to study up on any boss and go for a kill. Only you can judge how hard something is for you. Without trying you will never know.

Core GW2 and HoT are built around the same ideas. Active combat based around dodging and horizontal progression to reduce the amount of grind. If you don’t like those (which you can easily realise by playing the core game), you won’t like HoT either. It’s still the same game. HoT just adds some new content to keep players busy until another expansion arrives.
I’m not strictly against the idea of HoT trial, it might bring back some life to the maps (I’m talking other forms of activity than just multiloot), but I don’t see it affecting sales in any way. Whoever likes GW2 already bought the game and people who didn’t find the experience enjoyable won’t suddenly buy it just because of a trial weekend.

Enemies are annoying rather than difficult to beat. I’d much rather have them hit harder and have more health, but remove the annoying secondary effects of their attacks (like immobilize).
On the other hand, bosses are too simple, easy to beat and have almost no secondary mechanics.
So basically you need to make bosses harder and more interesting, but tone down trash mobs. Seems like in this patch the two had their roles inversed.

Also the game engine needs a complete rework, especially after you introduced this zone with complex geometry and loads of textures. While in other parts of the game I have 60FPS with maximum graphics, in Ember Bay I frequently drop below 20FPS even with “best performance” option. At some points the game almost becomes unplayable. You built your game engine with some map design in mind and now you’re making your maps progressively more complex and difficult to render, which my PC is not able to keep up with.

Other than that, nice update, pretty fun to play. Storytelling and dialogues are amazing as always. Map design is fantastic, too bad I can’t fully enjoy it due to my PC’s HW limitations.

I’d definitely like more challenging solo content, just not in the way OP proposed.

The BEST part of GW2 ever was SAB tribulation mode and Queen’s gauntlet. Of course they were broken in the sense that you could cheeze Liadri with lifesteal and join someone just before finishing trib mode run, but if these worked as intended, it would have been amazing.
I’d like more content where others physically can’t help you and you have to carry your weight. Maybe something that will finally be working and will actually show your personal skill.

It is something nice and useful to have, it gives you bigger room for error because you have better stats (by a little). It is by no means necessary though.
If you play the game for a long time, you will definitely want an ascended set eventually, because you’ll run out of stuff to invest into anyway. Your first set will probably have to be crafted (at least for the most part), but later on, you will be able to get most pieces of asc equipment for free (high level fractals, raids,…) and only craft those last few missing pieces.
It is expensive and gives you very small benefit over exotic. Is it worth it? That’s a question only you can answer. For some people it is very much worth it, for others not so much. Pragmatically speaking, that stat bonus you get, however small it is, is still better than dumping that money into a fancy skin. But again, that’s a matter of personal preference.

(Another nice benefit of having asc equipment is that you can change stats in mystic forge, although you lose the upgrade. This means you can update your build fairly cheaply in case the meta for your class changes.)

Or they could… you know… make the ascended salvage drop rate not TOTALLY INSANE so that even normal people can afford the Fractal Reliquary.

You might also try out condi PS warrior. He has both range and melee options, condi damage and sharing buffs (mostly might via phalanx strength).

I wish the mentor tag was removed altogether. Most people just shamelessly abuse it to draw attention to themselves without having to obtain a proper commander tag. Since HoT release I’ve seen maybe 2 people, who used the tag the intended way and actually tried to help/mentor people. But in 99% of the cases they just use it as a cheap substitute of an actual tag.

Sounds like you might want to play a condition necro/reaper. It doesn’t produce many boons, but it fits all your other desires:
Viable range build.
Lots of active conditions.
Easy to play, even in end-game areas.

Keep in mind though that boons and healing are usually shared in small AoE around the provider, so even if you play a range build, people will usually expect you to stick to the rest of the group in dungeons and FotM (called “stacking”). You should only range if you feel your life is in danger (low health, enemy preparing a big attack), otherwise you should try to be as close to your allies as possible, which is usually also close to the boss.

Go to your achievements panel and look for a green star. Every achievement will have a green star next to it if you can obtain a HoT mastery point from it and every section will have a green star if it contains at least one such achievement. Most of these achievements are extremely easy and can be obtained without any effort (you will probably get them as you play without even trying), but those last ones you might have to look up.
You don’t need to do every achievement, there is a huge leeway in case you find some of them hard (you should have about 30-31 HoT mastery points left over even with raid masteries maxed out). If you don’t raid, you should eventually get to a mastery rank of 162, otherwise you can go up to 170. In order to unlock raid mastery track, you only have to beat any single boss you like (McLeod AKA first boss of wing 3 is by far the easiest and doesn’t require much effort or skills).
There are no mastery points or anything remotely related to masteries in PvP as far as I know.

If you can’t complete something and another person can, it means that either your build or your gameplay (or both) are bad. If you really wanna complete it, there’s nothing preventing you from fixing that issue. If your build is bad, get a good one. Meta builds are called meta for a reason. If you play poorly, practice and try to get better. Many people who are among the top raiders now got there by attempting to solo various dungeon/fotm bosses and doing other challenges.

If you don’t want to get better and stubbornly stick to your stupid useless build, you won’t get raid rewards, period. For a long time people used to claim that their special unique way of playing the game (stupid and totally random builds) is just as effective as the meta. Now you have a clear proof that it IS NOT, because you can’t complete it and other people can. Adapt or go home.

(And btw. this is the very reason why enrage timers are a good thing. They tell you your way of playing the game is wrong and bad. Without them we would still have “special snowflakes” who argue that other stat combos are just as effective as berserker, that you don’t need full offense, shouldn’t be forced to dodge unless you find it fun, non-meta builds are just as good or even better than meta and other kinds of BS.)

Artificer.

There are sigil restrictions in raids, but these are only supposed to be +10% dmg sigils (i.e. night and X slaying). Maybe it’s because of how the enemies were designed? I found that many enemies I kill during LWS2 don’t actually count as kills (they don’t give any XP and don’t refresh guard’s F1 with the trait). Or maybe you weren’t actually holding the staff when the kill happened?
To be honest stacking sigils aren’t used much in PvE, since it takes time to build up stacks, you lose them when getting downed and they offer very little benefit over other types of sigils. You’re probably better off with a different sigil, especially as a condi player.

There’s no reason to think finishing the legendary armor will be tied to another raid (which is gonna take a LONG time to make).
The legendary armor is most likely not in the game yet because it takes a full team of artists at least 9 months of work (yeah sounds like a bad joke, but that’s what MO said).

I think it was said somewhere that each raid (or this one at the very least) will have exactly 3 wings. Having another wing of Forsaken thicket would also screw up storytelling, since the ending of wing 3 directly transitions into LWS3.
So what you’re asking for would be a completely new raid.
Even though it’s possible we’ll get one sooner, most people assume it’ll come with new expansion, at least ~1 year from now.