Guild Wars 2

BrotherBelial.3094:

done this too, all have said they are not on when I am. I play in the mornings. everyone I’ve spoken to plays in the evening/night. funny that not everyone can “just find people just like that.”

What do you want Anet to do about that? I mean you don’t play at the same time then other people, that’s nobodies fault. I remember someone on the forum complaining about raid because he work on call so he can’t raid because he could get a call in the middle of the raid and have to go. Anet can’t design a game around everybodies own personalize schedule, work hours and life style.

Wait there is something that I don’t understand here.

In raid and fractal most people use either Glint/Jalis (highest dps) or Glint/Mallyx (easier to use and bring more utility).

In PvP the meta is Glint/Shiro, but Condi Glint/Mallyx is also super popular.

In WvW the main build is Glint/Mallyx.

So I just don’t see the Glint/Shiro supremacy you are talking about since it’s not the best choice on 2 out of the 3 mode and in the 3rd mode, it’s not the only build use.

TokyoGhost.6492:

How often do you do Teq/TT? Almoust every day
How often do you do fractals? What levels/tiers? Same as above, 1-40
How often do you do the PvP reward tracks? Once in 2-3 days I play PvP, currently doing glorious armour track as no other brings any good PvE loot

I am literally lord of calamity here among all of you. Not a single freaking drop. It feels like game don’t want me to play it.

To be honest, I think that Teq/TT ascended drop are too low. I mean compare it to the droprate in fractal, raid, sPvP or the time needed to get the mats needed to craft ascended. When it come to ascended WvW and Open World kind of get the short end of the stick. That said, the reward total for Teq is pretty good. You can’t just look at the droprate of ascended and you are not unlucky because the ascended droprate there is very small for everybody. Most people have either 1 or zero Teq skin, with very few people having 2+ of them.

If you play level 1-40 why do ask yourself why you don’t drop ascended?? I mean you are not suppose to drop much ascended in those level. As far as we know, there is zero chance at weapons from level 1 to 50. And if you do your tier 2 daily everyday on average you should drop 1 armor each 100 run or each 33 days. The patch was 15 days ago, the abnormal situation would have been that you dropped an ascended in those level.

You don’t play much PvP so of course it will take time before you get an ascended drop. But which level are you, because I don’t think you have a decent chance of ascended until you are level 30+ and get large rank up chest.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Already looked, the guild that are about are all NA. I don’t have the time to set one up my self, I simply don’t have the time to recruit people.

You don’t need to create a guild. You can just talk to people that say they have the same problem as you in the forum. Ask them if they are on EU and if they want to raid with you.

If that’s too much work, then why are we talking? If you can’t put the effort, don’t raid.

No the rules are.

- Same sigil don’t stack : So no 2 sigils of force or 2 sigils of night.
- Stacking sigil don’t stack : So no 1 sigil of bloodlust and 1 sigil of perception
- Same sigil of different level don’t stack : So no Superior and Major sigil of Air
- Same sigil with cooldown can stack, but will share the CD : So you can have 2 sigil of battle, but both will only work each 9sec.

Apparently as of today the guild is still working and therandomguy is still helping new raiders. So to all the people complaining that they can’t find a group because they don’t have LI, that’s your chance.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Someone already started a guild solely for that reason him and his friends teach people how to raid it’s on the dungeons and fractals sub forum.

The people complaining should know about it or at least try to find it. I never saw in those post someone asking for if such a guild.

Rednik.3809:

Again, fractals here can be good example. Pretty much best money farm available in fractals is f40 one, and yet majority of t4 runners don’t care about it at all. And T4 don’t really have lots of unique stuff available from them, except for random ascended box here and there and VERY rarely some gold skin (insert sad fractal tonic joke here).

I don’t see how that’s relevant? Fractal 40 isn’t better than Tier 4 in term of reward. It’s only good for farming AFTER you completed Tier 4. If I have only 1 hours to do fractal per day, I won’t be farming Fractal 40. I will be completing my daily Tier 4. Why? Because the reward is better and the content isn’t as boring since I don’t do 15 times the same fractal over and over.

That’s good because nobody choose Fractal 40 over Tier 4. It’s only a complement to the Tier 4 for people that want to farm. That’s how it should work or at least it’s a working system.

But remember just 2 weeks ago? Who were doing fractal 76+?? Ya that’s right nobody except for experiencing the content or completing the achievement.

See two reward system in fractal. One screw up the level 76+ that almost nobody was doing, making it extremely hard for ppl that wanted to play these level to find ppl to complete their group. While the other one incentive people to play whatever level they want.

If anet can screw up the reward so bad with Fractal and that we have to wait 4 months before they fix it, what make you sure that Anet won’t screw up the reward for raid if they add an easy mode? Anet have an history to have bad reward system that take months to fix, even Blizzard did the same mistake in WoW. So you can see why raider are afraid that it could happen right?

There is a real danger here, so are prudent. Can you blame us? We are not against easy mode just because we are kitten.

BrotherBelial.3094:

The biggest bar to entry is other people. The every groups I’ve joined wont take someone who’s never done the raid before. Yes I’ve tried to start a group myself and as soon as you say you’ve never done it, or put it in you group add, no one joins.

With the numbers of people complaining about that in the forum, you would think that one of them would start a guild for that exact type of people or at least start to message the others to form a group of their own.

Too much work maybe I don’t know.

NightStalkerT.1983:

Well since playing this game i have leveled 2 characters to 80, and almost finished getting my elite for thief. Hero points in HoT are reaelly biased towards groups.
Theif is really bad, my character cannot solo the Champion hero challenges, i cannot even solo a tier 1 fractal…
ANother pain point is how much effort and money is needed to ascend gear – fractals get you rings, laurels get you amulets – crafting gets you your armour and weapons, im level 457 weaponsmith – materials cost too much – yet vendor price only costs copper?

Areanet – says they want this game casual friendly and it is totally the opposite. Too much grind and time is needed, just for 1 character – let alone 4 others….
No, ArenaNet – you need to fix this game, you need to make it for people who prefer to go solo – so in your game client – have it selectable – solo mode – or open world group mode = i.e. with group mode – you join groups – and if you dont join a group in 10 minutes your kicked off…

i just want this game to be fun, i want to have a bit of a challenge – and i want fractals to go solo – so i can play at my own pace – dungeons are more a group thing, raids well ive never evn done one because whats the poiint ? the bosses dont drop ascended gear like mathildes razor do they?

its too difficult and it needs to be more fun and less grind. Let me buy ascended gear – gems? yes 2000 gems for like 3 piece armour set – anyway this will prbably get a lot of hate idk, im just expressing how i feel. please respect that.

Instead of ranting, maybe you could find a way to achieve your goal with the current system. For exemple :

- Look up on Dulfy, she have a list of all hero point and tell you which Hero Point can be soloed and which can’t. I completed all 9 of my characters elite. Half of them was by only soloying HP. The other half is with hero point zerg. Each time I’m in a map I heard someone asking for help for an Hero Point. If I see it, you can saw that too and go do your HP with them. I started plenty of HP zerg and I still see them in the LFG. There is plenty of ways to complete your HP.

- Thief ain’t bad. I solo plenty of content with my thief. But are you really complaining that you can’t solo group content?

- Yep ascended gear cost money. It’s the end game gear dude, what did you expect?? It’s not like you need it for anything outside of Raid and Fractal Tier 4. If you want to have tricks to help you get there fine, but don’t complain that the end game gear is too costly, that just make no sense. That said, I will say that there is just not enough option to get that gear. We can get ascended from raid, fractal, PvP, or crafting, but no option for open world and WvW drop rate are stupidly low. At the same time there is some huge difference in price for specific stats in ascended. I see both of those as problem, but not the cost.

- IT’S A FREAKING MMO. MULTIPLAYER. I don’t mind you wanting to solo content, but don’t freaking complain that you can’t solo enough stuff in a MULTIPLAYER GAME. Jesus christ. We don’t complain that I can’t shoot stuff in a car game. We don’t complain that I can’t fight other players in the Witcher. That’s unbelievable.

Ayrilana.1396:

Sigils of Force and Night do not stack.

Since when? They always stacked together before, did they changed it because I don’t remember reading about that change.

Rednik.3809:

Thaddeus.4891:

We all paid for this game, I can’t believe some people actually think their in the fullest right to try to eliminate the end game content other people enjoy, only because they don’t have the skill or the time to do it.

They need to stop setting the bar so ridiculously low all the time.

Uhm… does existence of 1-25 fractals and those who running them eliminating T4 fractals too?

Nope. The problem Rednik is that even if I agree that raid should have an easier mode with nerfed reward. Nobody agree on what should be done to create an easier mode and what should be the reward. And I saw plenty of solution by some poster that would destroy the current raid even if that wasn’t their goal simply because they don’t have the experience in the current raid to create a solid proposition. For exemple not so long ago someone proposed that the easy mode should be like the current raid but without a timer and that it should only give magnetide shard. Seem good enough proposition, but when you have experience in raid you know that almost zero wipe are because of the timer, it’s because of the pressure and the mechanics so that easy mode would solve zero nada for the people that are currently complaining. Right now the shards are 2/3 of the total reward of the raid because of the Infusion. If you allow people to get their shard from easy mode, there is very little incentive to run the normal raid.

Add to that people that want the same reward, other want to be able to get the skins or the legendary and you have a bloody mess of poposition. Some make sense and could work, but a lot of them would kitten thing out. And raider remember what happen in other game, when the easy mode is poorly implemented and they don’t want that.

So yes to easy mode with nerfed reward, but only if intelligently implemented and so far there were more proposition by inexperienced raider with unintended consequences.

1) For an elementalist Berserker is still the best way to go for dps.

2) To best way to get ascended will depend on which piece. Fractal for rings and Guild Missions for Accessories. For back item it depend. Mawdrey is the less costly way to get a back item, especially if you want to infuse it for fractal, but it can take a long time.

Take a look at the list and see which one is best for you: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_back_item

For exemple, if you love fractal the fractal capacitor or even the Legendary could be a good option for you, but someone doing a lot of HoT map could prefer one of the Order back item.

As for weapons and armor. You can drop chest in fractal and sPvP, but depending if you are lucky or not it could take a while. Especially since you need to do t4 fractal to get the highest chance of getting ascended gear and you need ascended gear to reach that level in fractal. Most people craft their first set of ascended, then use that character to do fractals and gear up their alts. Pick what you prefer.

3) If you talk about rune and sigils it would be Scholar Runes with Sigil of Air and Force. If you talk about infusion then it depend. If you want to do fractal then it’s agony infusion. If you don’t care about fractal then it could be +5 stats infusion. There is other option like omni infusion and +5 stats +5 Agony resist infusion, but they are not cheap at all and if you ask me not worth it at all. Don’t worry too much about infusion slot for now unless you plan on doing fractal.

Ya this position amaze me too. It’s the dungeon thing all over again. Either Sun Lian is part of a almost non existent minority that can’t form any group so the discussion is pointless. Or there is a large enough portion of the player population in the same situation (which I think is the reality), which mean there is plenty of people like him, with the same mindset and they can form group together.

Sun Lian.4075:

Yea, right.

As if it’s really necessary and helpful to join a training group a 100 times, please…

Like that, I would have my first successful raid in about 4 months.
So that’s what those oh so dedicated people that now have 50+ LI have been through as well? I really doubt it.

It took my group 12 hours to kill VG the first time. It took even more time, maybe like 20 hours to kill our first Slothazor.

Raid are hard and take dedication. It’s a team based content that need all 10 players to be on experience enough. So ya if you trained for 10 hours on a boss and you think your a good enough, you might have 1 or 2 players in that group that doesn’t have as much experience as you do. They might have just trained for 4 or 5 hours. So you complain about veteran group asking to prove you have experience because they don’t want to waste time with you, but you don’t want to waste time in training group where people there have less experience than you?

Bellatrixa.3546:

What you and your groups can do isn’t indicative of all raiders, existing and potentially new though. That was my point. What’s not to like about a way for people to get better gear and better themselves while you still get the same rewards and prestige you do now? My suggestion wouldn’t detract from your raid experience other than a hit to the superiority complex should you have one (not saying you personally do). It would help people gain that experience that you rightly claim they need. Also kids aren’t the best indicator of handicap by a long shot; one of my old guild leaders had 5 kids and yet could run every role in every GW1 speed clear. That’s not typical, that’s being a good player with childcare assistance. What I’m suggesting is an aide in organisation and learning of mechanics that could be stopping players, existing or future, from joining your group in being raid knowledgeable and competent.

When ANet added 8 heroes to GW1, I didn’t complain that people would be able to do content easier than I just had. Because how they were able to complete content had absolutely no affect on me. If anything it increased the ability of some people as they were unable to tackle content they hadn’t before. Those of us who already had become skilled, were able to just pull off more crazy stuff. The same would be true of raids if a ‘beginner’ mode were added.

I’m ok with a easy mode or a training mode for raid. But the problem is that nobody agree on what it would be. For exemple, you are saying that it should be the exact same raid but without an enrage timer and with only Magnetide shard for reward. Well I disagree completly with that idea.

1) If you just gonna remove the enrage timer, then you better off no doing the training mode at all because that wouldn’t change much at all the success rate. I killed all boss multiple time and I can tell you. My groups failed a raid because of the timer only because of Gorseval at launch when the agro was broken and we are new to raid. Outside of that exception, we failed because of the timer maybe 0.05% of the time. Everybody fail because of someone failing a mechanics, or dying. So there is really no reason to make your version of training/easy mode because people complaining now, will still complain. The timer is just an easy and obvious scapegoat for other problems that people have.

2) Giving magnetide shard as a reward for an easy/training mode is terrible. Why? Because shards is one of the biggest source of reward from raid at the moment. It’s probably a mistake tbh. I doudt that anet wanted that, but that’s the situation we are now. You can make about 20 gold per hours just with the magnetide shard if you have a good group. That’s more than all the remaining reward put together. Add to that the fact that you have a cap on shards and then easy/training mode will end up with almost the same reward as normal raid. On top of that, I don’t thin that an easy mode should have access to unique raid skin.

So you see. We both agree that the game would be better off an easy mode raid with nerfed reward. The problem is that nobody agree on what is the good level of difficulty that this easy mode should have. Just remove the timer? Half the hp of boss? Decrease the mechanics? Decrease the damage?

Nobody agree on what the reward should be. Some ask for just a nerf on the rewards. Some don’t want easy mode to have access to the unique skin. Some don’t want them to have access to the legendary armor. Some want them to have legendary armor.

And then you have past experience in other game that put a shadow on the idea. In those game, the poor implementation of easy mode destroyed the normal raid. The reward were good enough in those easy mode that people just didn’t have any incentive to run normal raid and that later just became a niche content that is now even hard to organize by lack of players. And your idea would create exactly that even if that wasn’t your intention, because a lot of player that suggest those idea, doesn’t really have a lot of experience in the current raid, so there is information that they just can’t take into consideration.

And that’s why a lot of raider are firmly against any kind of easy mode. Not because they are kitten. But because they know that they are so many ways this can go wrong and that it can destroy the current raid that they love so much, even if that wasn’t the intention behind the easy mode.

FrostDraco.8306:

It’s not. Like i said before. Straw man much? Don’t complain about people asking for help, when you are able to help, but wont offer any.

This is exactly what i was talking about. You completely ignored what i said to say I’m somehow ‘demanding’ help. Asking, is not demanding. Or would you just rather we not ask and ‘figure it out ourselves’, because that’s what it sounds like. You did it, so why not make everyone go through the same thing? Even when you can help us have an easier time than you did? Sounds salty, which is a toxic attitude to have.

And why should we offer our help? Like you said, you are asking not demanding. Well we can help if we want, but we are not obligated.

Think about it man. You are saying to other people that they have toxic attitude because they don’t offer YOU some help to make YOUR experience easier than ours. You don’t know anything about any of us except that we won’t offer you our help. I trained about 20 players of my group into raid. I think I did my part and I continue to do my part and I don’t think that I’m alone here. I bet plenty of people that are not help you are helping other. But in the end of the day we have limited time in the game and we can’t help everybody. So please keep your salty and toxic insult to yourself.

Bellatrixa.3546:

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And how long had those people put into raids? Just because a small number of players has elevated themselves to that level, doesn’t mean that players new to raids can instantly do that (or want to). Anyone who’s messed around in similar ways knows that they didn’t pull off novelty or fast runs without knowing the content inside and out first or without being exceptionally well skilled to begin with. The rate at which they learned to do that can vary. What you’re saying is that anyone who can clear the raid now is able to do it in greens and we all know that’s not the case. Can you personally do it? If not, don’t judge others by something you can’t personally do.

So what would make you happy. We can clear the raid with 6 players, we can clear it with garbage gear, we can clear it with almost half the time remaining on the timer. That doesn’t prove that average pug can clear it the same way, but it prove that you have a lot of room for error, for less good build or less good rotation.

Like I said to most of the new raider in my group. I rather that you drop your weapons altogether and focus on surviving and complete the mechanics before you even think about your dps. The dps race doesn’t matter, your rotation doesn’t matter. If your group can do all the mechanics and survive you already did 80% of the work. You doesn’t need to be exceptional or spend thousand of hour in the game.

In my raiding group we have parent of 3 kids, we have players that are not that good, we have players that raid once each 2 weeks, we have players that have little idea of what is good or not in their build and they were all able to kill most bosses.

The difficult part of raid is to organize it and to put the effort to master the mechanics.

I stand corrected as for the dps of a Power Necro. I was using the numbers from Brazil, which isn’t an optimized build obviously now.

This change things a lot. I still think that power necro isn’t worth it in raid because the guardian can bring 28k dps which defensive support, while most other can bring between 30 and 36k dps. At the same time, Condi Reaper at certain boss raid like Slothazor. But with 27k dps, I wouldn’t mind bringing a Power Reaper into raid, just don’t think that pug will accept it. As for fractal, it seem a respectable dps enough, with such a high surviability, it can do more than the job.

Naesjasper.1863:

If I may ask what can you say about DH or Druids (not going full healer)?

DH full buff clock at 28k. The Hammer build is great for longer fight aka high fractal and raid, but you are better off with GS build for shorter fight like dungeon and low level fractal. It a solid choice for Fractal because of the defensive support it can bring. Especially the protection, reflect and aegis. The hammer build is also one of the easiest rotation, so it’s easy to reach your max dps.

Druid in not full healing can be both condi with Axe/Torch Shortbow which have a dps of around 20k full buffs or in berserker with 17k dps. Obvisouly they are on the low end, but both can bring great buff like grace of the land, spotter, frost and sun spirit. They can be of great help in fractal to keep the party alive in melee, but they are not necessary. They just bring quality of life. I wouldn’t bring one in dungeon or low level fractal because you really don’t need that heal. That said, you can do a condi ranger which can do decent dps.

Sun Lian.4075:

We all paid for this game, I can’t believe some people actually think their in the fullest right having some sort of monopoly on end game content, only because they have all the time in the world to play gw2.

They need to stop setting the bar so ridiculously high all the time.

We all paid for this game, I can’t believe some people actually think their in the fullest right to try to eliminate the end game content other people enjoy, only because they don’t have the skill or the time to do it.

They need to stop setting the bar so ridiculously low all the time.

Full buff it clock at about 20-21k dps in the SFTA. It’s below most other meta which usually go between 28 and 36k (again full buffs).

So ya in term of dps power necro isn’t on par with most other build. That said, it’s full Valkyrie + 2 HP bar so the surviability is super high and it can keep up 20+ might on yourself and 25 vulnerability on the boss. So in a pug group with limited buffs (like with no PS warrior), you probably gonna do equal or more dps than the others, while having a lot more surviablity than the others.

Even in pugs with buffs, some of them have a lot of difficulty to stay alive so your Power Reaper could be great there too. But for sure, it won’t be on par with other build in good groups. I would suggest you to go Condi Reaper, but if you can afford having 2 gear set for your repeat Valkyrie Power Necro can do a excellent job in Solo and in pugs with no buffs.

Ohoni.6057:

The DPS race is real, and it does limit build diversity and promote a soft gear-gate, but I don’t know that it’s the main problem with accessibility. Being able to gear more into defense might be helpful, but many of the mechanics are designed to auto-kill, which is more of an issue for general accessibility than constant chip damage.

That right there just prove how much you are you really knowledgable in raids. The only boss that had a dps race was gorseval and with the fix to his aggro and the slow cc method, the dps race there is not as high as it used to be. As for all other raid boss, it’s failling mechanics and people that down that make the vast vast vast majority of group failed. It’s almost never because of a lack of dps.

vesica tempestas.1563:

take dps races out of raids and I would have no issues with them, you can have difficulty without forcing dps as a premium – that’s poor design that comes from the dated power race based MMORPG that is slowly dying.

What dps race? Most if not all of them can be 6 manned. VG, Bandit Trio and Matthias have huge slack on their timers. Gorseval used to be a dps race, but not really since they fixed his aggro system and that slow cc method became widespread. Sabetha lack of dps is in the vast majority because too many people down at the last phase and most people bring 2 Druids healers at Slothazor.

The dps is almost never an issue in raid. The problem is when people down or miss a mechanics that you end up behind in damage. As a joke with new players in my raiding group, I often tell them that they could remove their weapon completely to focus on the mechanics and their surviability. That’s a lot lot more important than your dps in raid.

By non-ascended gear you mean exotic? The gear that cost less than stats swaping an ascended?

No.

We have been asking that for a long time. In the end, the idea that seem to be the most accepted would be to be able to add runes/sigils you own into your Legendary and after that point you can then swap between the sigils/runes that you added to your legendary.

Will we ever have that? I hope, but wouldn’t hold my breath.

For PvE, the only elite spec that are not consider mandatory is Scrapper for engineer. But that’s that it’s for meta build used in raid and high level fractal and you talked about dungeon and open world. The later is relax and don’t really need any meta build you can play whatever you want. Since you can do whaveter you want, they can pretty much all do anything, but I can list you what they are best in (usually using a meta build or a variance around meta build, which you are not obligated to play in Open World or dungeon, or even low level fractals).

Ranger/Druid : They are healer and buffer. You can play them in Condition with Axe/Torch & Shortbow or in direct damage with Sword/Axe & Staff. You can go full dammage with either Viper/Sinister for condi or Beserker for power. Or you can go full heal if you want. But the full heal isn’t needed everywhere. I would only use it in Raid, Open World and maybe in some high level fractal.

Elementalist are the king of damage, but they are also squishy. The most used weapons are Staff or Dagger/Warhorn, but Dagger/Focus is great for surviability. They have a place everywhere.

Mesmer are strait up buffer. They have terrible damage, but are a mandatory profession in raid as they can give perma quickness to everybody and a good amount of alacrity. Two powerfull buffs. It’s highly dependent on trait so they can be a pain to play as you level up and you gonna need to play a different build when solo because the normal buffer build is all about buffing others, so terrible in solo.

FrostDraco.8306:

And how many training runs does your group run a week? It’s probably zero to three. And even if you did that, you wouldn’t advertise that on LFG now would you?

How is someone supposed to practice raid mechanics when all the groups you try to join wont let you? I have joined 10 raiding guilds this month. They have set times (so they say) for raids. Most of them claim to do a training run every week. Want to know how many i have seen, and how many they have actually done? One. Out of 10 guilds only 1 run, from 1 guild. And that got canceled because the person who was organizing it backed out at the last moment.

So basically its been nothing but constant lies. Of course I will keep trying (because i want to learn the raid), but to sit here and say that we “joined a group and failed and are QQing here”, well some of us haven’t even gotten to join a group. I spent 2 hrs a night since the patch in the Raid LFG and the aerodrome looking for a single beginner run for raids. Have yet to find one that would take me. Viper necro. Full ascended with 5 condi stat infusions. I spent 200 gold switching from power because no one would accept power reapers. And now that I’m vipers those same people won’t do the training runs they said they would be.

So please spare me the bull about people ‘wanting to blame the raiding community’. The raiding community is what has been doing said action so of course they get the blame. Who else should? SW farmers?

I don’t agree with all of the OP’s points, but they arent ‘making up stuff’. Groups will not put what they are looking for in LFG, and then kick you because they expected something else, when they are the ones that didn’t put any requirements in LFG (its happened to me several times).

I don’t know what to tell you man. Organizing raid is hard. Organizing training run and making sure they have at least 1-2 veteran to help them out is even harder. Especially, and that’s from my experience, a lot of people that need training at this point are people that either doesn’t have a lot of disponibility, are average players, have lag issues or are not really active in their training. Most other type of player using end up in our veteran group pretty rapidly.

Look at this that way. You see all the people talking like you about raid? In the forum you read their post and they say, OMG raid are hard to go in. We can’t practice because nobody let us in. They say they have good build, are decent player, but don’t have the insight or the experience to pug on a regular basis. Well go talk to those people. Maybe create a small guild just as a small friend list with everybody that are in the same situation as you. I can see at least 10 of them in this very post. Oh they won’t all be able to play with you because of their disponibility, NA vs EU, etc. But I’m sure you can get 2-3. Take a look at other post, I’m sure you can get a bit more. Do that for sometime and try to pug what you need to the rest.

Because most guild already have their core group setup so of course it will be harder for them to organize secondary run for training. I’m the one doing it for my guild and it’s a nightmare. We brainstorm every 3-4 weeks to find better way to organize our raid and make sure the new guys are playing together, but it’s just hard to organize properly. Your best bet if to organize it yourself. It’s gonna be hard as hell, because it’s hard as hell for most of us, but that’s raid.

Yup and if you have a good dungeon recipe, then it’s even better. But that’s rare, so we shouldn’t count it here.

papry.8096:

Look that vid then come back after.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajZCyIAVuMg

And??

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18IHVJao5j85KOp6lBTOgO8qs4VYD3Xty-jKPZo8o-Q4/pubhtml

Keep in mind that the sample size is relatively low so these numbers might not be correct, especially for item with low drop rate. Also, these are droprate per chest. So if you are doing the 3 tier 4 daily, you gonna get 12 chest, 4 of each tier.

And of course, it’s droprate so it’s all about RNG.

Astralporing.1957:

Thaddeus.4891:

So where is your significant nerf to the rewards?

liquid rewards. Full daily is around the same as before last change in total from daily chests (maybe even a little bit less than befroe), but significant part of it is in T4. There are new rewards that make the wealth gain better (ascended mats, for example), but they are also limited to t4. Also, you’re getting less encryptions now for a full daily.

I don’t follow you. I just listed the reward from daily chests. Are you talking about the chest at the end of the fractal?

As for encryptions. I’m not sure, but I seem to get as many encryption as I used to get. If you used to do the 3 daily each day and now you only do the tier 4 every day, then yes overall you get less encryptions, but that’s because you do less fractals, not because individual fractal give you less encryptions.

WvW zerg bursting (Unfortunately, it’s pretty bad right now)

Level 40+ Fractal when they first came into the game where all agony attack were one shotting dead you. The first truly challenging content in the game. (Unfortunately, it was a bug and they fixed it)

SAB (Unfortunately, they didn’t had any new world this year, but I still had a lot of fun).

Raid ( Need a bit too much organization to my taste, but still great content).

Astralporing.1957:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

It only effictively locks you out of scales 91-100.

It starts being a problem once you pass into required AR level above 100 (at above fractal level 70). Remember, that you’d be short on not only 28 points from using 5 ar infusions instead of 7 ar ones, but will also lack the two attuned slots.
And since after the last change doing only t3 dailies results in a significant nerf to the rewards, it seriously compounds he other problem mentioned.

Yes, you can compensate by crafting/buying better infusions, but even for fractal level 90 you’d need +20 ones. To reach 150 ar you’d need a 27, 27, 26 setup.
I don’t think i need to explain why this isn’t a practical option.

Completely true about the AR. You can reach 100-103 without problem. After that, it start to cost a lot more than other people to get higher since you need to craft 12+.

But I disagree completely about the significant nerf to reward. I’ll take KINGS numbers because they are the best we have. So either you base your assumption on those, you have other numbers with a similar sample size or you use anecdotal evidence. Next to each items, I’ll give the percentage chance of getting each item in Pre-HoT level 50, Pre patch champion, and the Post patch tier 3. I’ll compare them because they are the highest someone without HoT can do. Keep in mind that Post path tier 3 percentage will go higher than 100% because it’s 3 chest, not only 1.

Infused Ring : 53.8% ; 1.2% ; 43.8%
Uninfused Ring : 4.3% ; 17.4% ; 28.2%
Accessory : 0% ; 0% ; 0%
Armour : 11.9% ; 11.4% ; 10.8%
Weapon : 4.2% ; 3.4% ; 3%
Skin : 11.7% ; 0.5% ; 1.5%
Golden Skin : 0% ; 2.5% ; 0%
Golden Relic : 0% ; 0.6% ; 0%
Matrices : 0% ; 63.7% ; 809.4%

Yes we get a bit less ascended armour and weapon in Tier 3 currently, and they said it, but can you really use the word significantly? 11.4% vs 10.8% is significant?? Especially since i think it’s a good thing to have nerfed it since they added another tier on top of it with even higher chance.

The Skin droprate is irrevelant because we can now buy the skin with relic.

The only one that is problematic if you ask me is the 0% Golden Skin and Relic.

So where is your significant nerf to the rewards?

Well start with LFG. You can’t really ask for experienced run since you are not experienced yourself yet. But as you get to level 100 and have 150 AR you will be able to ask for experienced when you post LFG for your dailies.

That will be the easiest way to do it.

Well do you want to be part of a organized fractal/dungeon group that does speed run and will ask you to have probably 2 or more character with 150 AR to create good composition?

Or do you simply want to reach level 100, get 150 AR and do some daily t4 fractal and smooth dungeon run. Because you don’t need a team to do that. You can just pug dungeon and fractal.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Honestly, it doesn’t seem that much different than from before elite specs. In PVP there was usually only one or two builds you could run on a class anyway.

Good news is, as more elite specs get released there will (hopefully) be more build diversity.

Ya but that’s the thing. We used to have some build diversity and HoT was suppose to bring more build diversity, but they just replaced old build with new more powerful one, making the old ones near obsolete and not increasing build diversity at all. That was a mistake if you ask me.

bladex.9502:

Thaddeus.4891:

I don’t remember all the time for boss kill in dungeon, been a long time. But from what I remember most boss used to take 20-30 seconds to kill pre-hot, not 3 seconds.

Maybe in pugs, in organised groups all bosses outside of HotW and Arah (and maybe Tazza) melted.

But then please tell me how somehow the elite specs increased class’ burst potential to reach above-icebow levels?
There is nothing that even comes close to the 150-200k damage icebow did over a period of 2,5 seconds on reasonably sized hitboxes.
Breakbars are causing the power creep you are experiencing in dungeons, not elite specs, if anything elite specs make it easier to achieve decent dps since most classes barely have a rotation anymore

Well, I didn’t test anything about that. But from the aerodrome I saw some 66k dps numbers on a small golem for 15sec. 66k x 2.5 second would be 165k, which is in your 150-200k damage range. That said, it’s a number that I saw on a screenshot. It’s probably full buff, which isn’t realist, but it’s also over 15sec, so over the first 2,5 second the dps would be lower. Gonna need to test it to have a good value.

But I have some difficulty to accept your 2.5 second. Without quickness (which out couldn’t always have pre-hot) it’s about 5-6 sec for the full Ice Storm attack. With Quickness, it’s 3.5-4sec.

But if I look at record run pre-hot. CoE last between 7 and 15sec depending if it’s the 1st, 2nd or 3rd fight of the path. For CoF path 1, it’s 9sec. For AC it’s 7-8 second.

My point is that 3sec is an exaggeration. Most boss even in record run used to be killed in 7-15sec. Can we reach now the same level of 3-4sec burst than before the Ice bow nerf? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure we can go near it, but I didn’t test it so I can’t tell for sure. Can we dish out more damage in 7-15sec than we used to even with the ice bow? I’m pretty sure that we can.

But it’s pretty useless conversion. We used to melt them and we still melt them. What I’m sure is that for the average pug, dungeon are a lot more faster to melt now than it used to.

TheLilith.2849:

Agree with above however you need to remember that chests for daily fractals have increased rewards only when you have fractal masteries (I don’t know which part of reward do they affect).

‘’You now receive bonus rewards from fractal dungeon boss chests’‘. That’s the official tooltips for the mastery. From what I heard, it only give you +1 Agony Resistance. I heard rumour that maybe it improve your drop rate in Fractal Encryption, but I’m not sure.

The 2nd mastery give you additional daily, but from what I remember it gave you like a 2nd recommended, which is only good if you are going after the legendary back item (which I don’t think you can do wihtout HoT) and a level 21-49 or Tier 2 daily. That could decrease a bit the ascended drop chance true, but not my by much. The tier 3 give you a lot more chance at ascended than tier 2 anyway.

bladex.9502:

I’m talking about dungeons, not raids, maybe read my post.

In dungeons you usually don’t have all buffs 100% of the time

Why not? I mean, you won’t have all buff 100% of the time in raid either, but you can have a pretty decent uptime. Buff are limited to 5 anyway that you are in raid or dungeon.

I don’t remember all the time for boss kill in dungeon, been a long time. But from what I remember most boss used to take 20-30 seconds to kill pre-hot, not 3 seconds. Even with the Icebow. The only bosses that took a very small amount of time were in low level dungeon like AC.

Like other said it’s all about opinions. But most people don’t consider that the expansion was worth 50$.

The last big patch did wonder to fix a lot of the problems with HoT but there is still a lot of job to do.

- Open World : The 4 new maps were nice to play. But the way they work, they need some organization and taxing to be nice to play on, which can be a pain and from time to time, they is just no taxi at all so you are stuck on a bad map. Bottom line, they are great when everything work well, but it won’t always be the case.

- Dungeons : They are back with the last patch at least reward wise, but if you found them brain dead, they are worst. It’s nice for now because it’s been a long time since we played them, but we literally explode everything in them right now.

- Fractals : They are in their best shape in a long time. They are rewarding, no more swap overdose, and some of the most annoying and long fractal were modified.

- PvP : Pretty good right now. PvP season are nice, reward are decent and the balance is ok. But you need HoT to be competitive. You can do great without HoT, but it will be harder to do so. (AKA most meta build need the elite spec).

- WvW : I wouldn’t even put a feet in there. They changed the borderlands with HoT and nobody is playing them, they even plan on changing it back to the old maps. They made some change to increase the population balance between server, but we are still waiting on the big WvW update. It could be in 3?, 6?, 9 months? Nobody know. Until then, WvW is pretty weak.

- Raid : People love or hate it. The content itself is one of the best in the game if you ask me. They are challenging, ask for team play, ask you to master your profession and give you some nice mechanics to use. But the organization can be a freaking nightmare. It’s also very hard to practice them until you become good. Pugs ask for experienced players for the vast majority of time and most raid team either disbanded under the pressure or are full. If you are lucky enough to find a guild with place and are ready to show you how it’s done, everything will be alright. Otherwise, it will be hard.

Tomiyou.3790:

I didn’t think this was a problem until my friend who has a core account started playing the game again. The current system with +7 infusions and attuning is stupidly unfair for non-HoT players.
The +2 extra AR on versatile infusions is huge, and 2 extra AR slots with attuned rings is much better too.

I don’t say the non-HoT accounts need to get the same stuff others paid for, but simple crafting of those Agonized Essences would be a good solution and for the +7 as well.

Pre-hot you could only get to level 50. Your friend can reach even higher than level 50 without HoT. I don’t see a problem there. Same with the reward. Without any attuned ring and +7 AR you can still reach 103 AR normally, which mean that you can always complete the tier 3 fractal, which give you the same ascended drop rate than the old pre-hot 50. I’m not sure what is the global reward without the fractal mastery, but i’m like 99% sure it’s higher than pre-hot.

And since you he can do up to tier 3, the difficulty level is similar to the pre-hot level 50.

There is a lot of stuff wrong with HoT, but this isn’t one of them. Especially now since they fixed a lot of the issues with Fractal.

Ehecatl.9172:

Even before elite specs every profession had at least one traitline that was considered mandatory if you wanted to be competitive. All that has changed is the mandatory traitline is now called elite and gives you a cool profession icon.

Yes it’s true. It was a problem pre-hot. Not a reason to make it even worst.

Condi Druid is the best setup. It give the highest dps, bring the buffs and bring just enough heals to keep your party alive when needed. It’s especially true in Dungeon, Fractal and the 1st Wing of the raid.

That said, he doesn’t bring as much heals as a power druids for 2 reasons. A condi Druid will have near zero healing power and he won’t be using a staff so he don’t recharge his celestial avatar as much as a power druid. You can use Prickly Pear Pie to help you out a lot, but it’s not as fast to recharge your celestial avatar than with a staff.

For that reason, unless you have a good raid group, you probably gonna prefer a power Druid in raid, especially in the 2nd wing where a lot of group at less experienced and need more healing there. Now it can range from full Berserker to Zealot, or even Magi depending on how much healing your group want or need. That’s really up to you. You can do great in raid with any of the above as long as it fit your team.

You can trust what is on metabattle for the raid. During the first few months it was a mess, but info on there is pretty solid by now. But I would also search other sources. There is small differences between all of them depending on preferences.

bladex.9502:

There isn’t really such a thing as “OP elite specs” in dungeons.
You barely get more dps than before the icebow nerf from the classes themself, the thing that’s causing the powercreep are mostly breakbars being ridiculously unbalanced.
Before HoT you had to coordinate deepfreezes, now everybody just spams CC and you get a 50%(????) dps bonus

You are not wrong about the breakbar. But you are so wrong about barely doing more dps than before icebow. I couldn’t find info on all profession, but for the Guardian. We used to do around 10-11k dps back before the June 2015 patch. 13-14k dps after the June 2015 patch. And now we do around 23k dps.

Not big enough power creep for you? Nor only the elite spec are giving more dps to most profession, but we also have a lot more buffs. Grace of Land, Quickness and Alacrity are very high buffs and they are all new, or for Quickness used to be very limited in quantity, while now it’s perma.

We can explode the dungeon without the breakbar. The breakbar just make things even worst.

carlito.8954:

Great advice man. I didn’t realize the whole AR for higher fractals thing. This looks the best route for me right now, thanks/

You don’t need armor to do a bunch of high level fractal. You can prepare your trinkets to reach 94 AR just with your trinkets alone with normal AR in them.

If you focus on weapons first, either with achievement (there is a couple of achievement that give you ascended weapons like the Elite Spec weapons, etc), drop (Teq) or crafting then you gonna be able to reach 108, which will allow you to complete the Tier 3 fractal. That should give you around 10% chance to drop an armor piece each day and Tier 3 only take like 30-45min.

I would still recommended to reach 500 in your crafting professions and start to accumulate material and do your daily crafting. But by the time you gonna have enough material to craft your armor, you probably gonna have like 2-3 chest already. Plus fractal can drop your ascended material now, so it will help for your crafting.

Torolan.5816:

Where I disagree with raiders are the following points:
*Quality beats quantity when you want to aquire something. Gathering is much more easy and slower paced than hunting. Is it less valuable or productive, or does it devalue hunting? I think not.
*A taks needs an exclusive reward. I partly agree that a good reward is important. But a reward that is only available there is not good and makes no sense either. Why should any company restrict a good to a certain set of people? That makes no sense. Anyone who has the money can buy a Mercedes, nobody cares if it is an heir or a selfmade millionaire. Anet already understood this when they made both legendary stuff for wvw and pvp. Why not also do that for raids?

1) Are you talking about the Difficulty vs Time vs Reward ratio?

2) Well they purposely limit the availability of Ferrari to make sure that they keep a certain value, same with Diamond. Rarity add value to items. It’s also about the effort behind an object. Take military medal for example. Their value isn’t only their price tag, it’s the effort and sacrifice behind it. If I took the time and effort to complete a challenging content. I’m proud of my achievement and if an Item is given as a reward from that challenging content, this item serve as a memento to that achievement. It give an additional value to that item and if that same item is given for a fractal of the effort, it remove that said value. I’m not saying that all item should have that or it should be the majority. But as long as it’s cosmetic items, I believe there is a place for that. The difficulty is to find a balance to not have too much of those either.

Kydar Schattendolch.6879:

It would be a 1 time effect, if u go down, it’s lost…but it would make Raids for some groups maybe more availabe from the dps side….

more available from the dps side? There is no dps problem with raid, it’s super easy to bring enough dps. The problem is people down or down too much. The only people that would use stacking sigil the way you are talking about would be for record run.

That doesn’t make sense. These Sigil are really powerful, but are balance because they need work to reach their potential. Just a bad idea.

Those sigil still have their place in fractal, open world and WvW.

King Cephalopod.7942:

Christ you people like pulling thoughts where they don’t exist. I don’t know kitten about reward balance, I just said the kind of things I’ve gotten have felt boring, primarily because people I’ve run with have been getting ascended anything (still waiting on the infused ring I want or enough mist essence to craft), which is simply an element of RNG. Apparently people don’t understand reading comprehension.

So you don’t complain about the quality of reward. You are complaining that the reward feel boring? I can understand that. I mean it’s a lot more fun to get a skin or ascended drop than to get a bunch of useless crap that you can sell and get gold for it.

But you feeling bitter because the loot isn’t interesting and just saying ‘’Getting that for a high fractal having sunk so much gold into full ascended and AR just makes me feel bitter’‘. Reading your post it looked like the reward wasn’t enough and not that it felt boring to you.

King Cephalopod.7942:

Thaddeus.4891:

People really have problems understanding the principle of RNG. This is becoming ridiculous.

RNG will be RNG, but I can’t help but be salty when doing 78 urban battleground daily got me an unidentified dye, 7 encryption keys, 5 stabilizing matrices, and 10 resonating slivers. Getting that for a high fractal having sunk so much gold into full ascended and AR just makes me feel bitter.

59.2 silvers + 18.9×5 silvers + 0.83×10 = 1.62 Gold.

And I don’t know what are the average price of encryption right now, but 7 keys at the very least 1.60 Gold of reward.

So you are complaining that 3.2 gold isn’t enough? For 1 fractal? It take what 10-20min??

Are you serious???

So now. Not only people don’t understand RNG, but apparently they don’t understand math either.