Guild Wars 2

Actually the number 3 does increase the difficulty. Count how many pugs down and instant rally. People think they are good because they complete the content in zerker fast, but a lot wouldn’t be able to do it without the rally system. They yolo their way into a fight, stack, do dps, down, rally, finish the boss. Good zerker group actually use their support to keep themselves alive because downing slow your dps.

Personally, I would like to have zero rally in hard content. But it wouldn’t be enough by it’s own to make the content challenging.

I’m not sure about the merging condition/boon duration. They are way too different. Because they could decrease the base duration of boon and condition and boost the effect of those 2 stats to make them more important.

That way 1-2 zerker guy with food or runes couldn’t max might, vulnerability, etc. They would either need the 5 of them to work, or need someone with boon/condition duration to max it. Right now, it’s kind of easy to max those thing out.

I disagree with the initial post, but I totally agree that condition duration and boon duration need to be standardize like ferocity.

Well. This ain’t bad at all now with a couple of twist. An Hammer + M/T build with Zeal/Radiance/Honor is only shy of 3-5% DPS compare to the GS + M/T Zeal/Radiance/Virtue build. It’s the second best dps build for the guardian and allow you to keep a decent amount of might. Not as good as Warrior for sure, but for pug, it’s a plus. Especially since now, Phalanx Warrior with only rune of strength have a bit of difficulty to keep 25 stack of might.

Dadnir.5038:

Well… The only way to make heal bot valuable (since this is basically what ventari’s legend is) will be to introduce an area degen around boss.

Healing power being what it is, there is no way that a player can “heal” it’s party since boss/silver mobs attack are OH KO mechanisms.

Tanking abilities being what they are, ther will never be “tank” since ther is no way to hold aggro nor to survive OH KO repeatidly if fights goes on.

You are wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ubRKdpDfU8

They do level 50 with 3 people in 30min and one of them is full clerics. Healing Power in the right hand can be good. Not as good a DPS/Support build since Support is better and don’t limit your dps, but still. People believe falsely that one person in healing gear will make the run take 3 hours.

Not being optimal doesn’t mean that it’s useless or even not efficient.

Personally, I would like that they standardize boon duration like they did with Critical damage.

In Giver’s armor 1% Boon Duration = 96 points of stats.

From foood 20% = between 100 and 70 points of stats so 1% = between 5 and 3.5 points of stats.

From Runes 15% = 100 points of stats or 1% = 6.66 points of stats

They should make a stats like Ferocity and standardize the amount. That way, gaining boon duration would be harder and buffing your team will be harder. We would actually need to work a little to gain that 25 stack of might.

This is sad. Personnally, I wouldn’t join your group because that’s not what I want when i go into a dungeon. But this is freaking stupid when people join a LFG and don’t read or ignore them or something like that. Meta group have the same problem. When we ask for something specific, we rarely get it. But at least we don’t get kicked out.

People are asking for a party leader system for a very long time. We are still waiting.

Eirdyne.9843:

A — remove achievement points from being visible in dungeons or in party.
B -- remove the linking of armor stats within dungeons to allow for players to play support roles, condition roles, and etc.
C — disallow use of damage meters

A) I hate when people kick because of AP, but I don’t want it to be removed. I want to know if the guy have 400 AP, I’m gonna ask if he now the patch. Either because I’m gonna help him or because I ask for Experienced in the description and I want to know if that’s a second account.

B) People after the patch should accept condition build in pug. That’s just stupid to kick for that unless you specified zerker or meta. But that’s cute what you think about support. Usually that’s the kind of people that take AH, Staff, toughness and vitality in their build and present themselves as support even if they have almost zero support. Personnal survivability isn’t support and the only stat that affect support is healing. You could have a point for zealot gear, but other than that…

C) Something really funny is that damage meter would actually help PHIW people. A good portion of the players would realize that they don’t achieve near the dps numbers that DNT advertise and they would realize that the gap between meta and some non meta build are very small. That wouldn’t help for a Cleric AH Staff guardian. A bad dungeon build stay a bad dungeon build, but it would help to kick some sense into try hard.

Slow, large hit box enemies. Which is a very limited list. Bloomhunger, Lupi come to mind. I suppose other exist in Open World, but in dungeon, i’m not sure. Maybe the ooze of path 1 arah when you can keep it in place.

Ya usually when the description say meta, speed run, experienced, or something like that, they could kick you for playing a build like that. If there is nothing like that in the description, you shouldn’t be kicked. Some people complain that they still get kicked, but I don’t know if they exaggerating or no. If it’s a problem for you, just post your own lfg and say all welcome and you will be fine.

Ok I didn’t thought about the IP of the map. But you can’t count with 7 silver since you gonna receive 6 silver from it. At that price you gonna need to gather the 36 node in around 20 min to be equal to pug dungeon speed run or 12min to be comparable to dungeon speed run in team. It’s even worst compare to silverwaste.

It’s been a long time, and when I did it I was gathering both ori and wood, but I think that to do all 3 map only for ancient wood it would take more around 30min per character for around 5 gold per hour. Not that great.

Ayrilana.1396:

T6 node farming is profitable again.

Really? How? With megaserver each time you swap toons there is a good chance that the nodes won’t be in the same place. The only way I could made it semi-viable was with a friend so we could get back into the same map for all our character.

But even then, you gonna need to find all the nodes everyday. At that rate, you are better to farm gold and buy the orichalcum and ancient wood.

You shouldn’t use the same build for WvW and PvE, they need way too different things.

So you are looking at a PvE and WvW support build. For what purpose specifically?

PvE : Dungeon, Fractal, Open World, ?
WvW : Roaming or Zerging?

In no particular order

- TP is the best, but it need some knowledge and not everybody like to play the market.

- Spirit Shards can be used to transform stuff into the mystic forge and make a profit when you sell those item. You need to know which item are valuable and you need spirit shards. If you play for a long time you gonna have a lot, but you maybe short of those

- Dungeon Speed run. If you have a good build and are relatively lucky with pugs, you can make a good amount of gold per hour + dungeon token. Ideally, a dungeon team will allow you to make around 50 gold for like 3-4 hours (depending on the quality of the team).

- Silverwaste have events and chest farm. Chest farm give more reward per hours, but you need to do some events to get shovels and crest to buy key. Both are required to chest farm. You can be selfish and always leech off others shovels, but even then you gonna eventually run our of crest for the keys. That’s one of the best way to farm gold, you can do it alone if you find a good map. But good map can be hard to find.

- Orr farming. I don’t know much about it. It’s less profitable than silverwaste, but it’s less repetitive. It’s also harder to find a good map, but I know some guild exist that do it on a regular basis. So it could be easier if you find such a guild.

- Ambiant halloween farming. I don’t know much about this one. But the basic is an item sold on the TP allow you to transform ambiant into halloween mobs that drop bags and can be killed quickly.

- Karka farming in Southsun Cove is also another good farming spot. Again, I’m not an expert and other people will need to give you more details. I think that wooden Potato did a video on youtube about it.

- World Boss Event. There is several world boss timer on the net (Dulfy is one of them). You just go to the next boss and usually a huge zerg is waiting and you do bosses one after the other. It’s not the most profitable, but it’s the easiest to do and it run almost non stop. There almost always people at these bosses, but after reset time is the best.

Edit: Oh and the Halloween bags farming have A LOT OF DRAMA. That’s why I don’t go near that thing.

What is stopping you from reporting them? You don’t need our blessing for that. And you still have to remove their name from your post.

You have almost zero support in that build. It’s just a tank build that sacrifice both DPS and Support for your personal survivability. Here the list of your support.

- F1 Blind Spam. Most dungeon build already have that.
- Empowering Might. WvW build already have that and some PvE build too.
- Strength in numbers. WvW build already have that.

So now. Are you looking for a support build or a personal survivability build?

Pre Patch, Hammer build was about 10-5% less DPS than GS + Sw/F, which is more than decent.

Post Patch, Hammer build (Zeal/Radiance/Honor) is around 3-5% less DPS than GS + M/T (Zeal/Radiance/Virtues), which is even better.

The difference in DPS is so small, that it doesn’t really matter in dungeon. Which build you choose should be more about what each bring.

- GS build bring binding blades and since they have the virtue line, they can bring MoC, which Hammer build can’t.

- Hammer build give more survivability to your group with Protection, healing dodge and healing symbol. It also give you access to more dodge with Vigor and and Purity of Blood. And finally, it provide more group might than GS, which won’t really matter if your group already max it, but will help in pugs.

I don’t think Dekeyz assumed 100% UC uptime. She used to take 25% uptime, so I guess that she did the same thing now.

But guys. Lets keep it real. Nobody will reach that dps. Most people will get between 11k-13k dps depending their build.

Timiok.1048:

Condition damage isn’t for the weak, in fact I think it is better than just playing boring power builds all the time, you get a different angle at the game, and I find myself beating a lot of power builds with condition builds.

Thanks for sharing PvP point of view on a PvE discussion.

I just don’t get your math here.

1) Your 345 × 3 is just weird. The auto-attack have 3 strike, but they don’t all have the same damage, nor the same speed.

2) 345 × 3 × 2.3 x 2.35 = 5594.175 but you said around 7.5k

3) 2700 Power? You obviously forget the 1000 base Power dude. That’s like a huge mistake. So now the minimum base dps is 1427, which is very far from your 345 × 3.

4)

When was the last time you were in a pug where you had everything? Let’s uncheck some boxes and see what the Zerker number goes down to.

- No EA, Spotter, or Frost Spirit
- Accuracy instead of Night sigil
- Strength instead of Scholar runes

Wait a second. You compare zerker dps of a RANGER, but you remove Spotter and Frost Spirit? And change Scholar for Strength?? I could see that if you are a other classe than Ranger, but seriously?

I actually agree that condition is close to direct damage right now. But that’s not with that kind of math that you will change the popular opinion.

Only you do 10% more damage.

It happen with every game. I stopped playing gw2 for the last couple of months. I played a bit of borderlands 2, Far Cry 4 and now i’m back for not apparent reason. I just have fun again with GW2.

Harper.4173:

So is rally a gear problem or a game design choice?
Rally was put in this game so that the average player can have a better chance at not failing.
A side-effect is that it makes it very easy to stay alive regardless of gear if you have a coordinated team.

It’s game design choice to make the cause more casual and it cause some problem in my opinion. I don’t think that removing it would be a great idea because it’s a nice mechanic in a lot of situation. But for me harder content shouldn’t have the rally system.

Harper.4173:

That’s exactly what support is.
In a sense even healing is damage. It keeps the DPS people alive so technically you are trading mana or skill cooldowns for more damage. It’s just that it’s other people that are doing the damage.
Same as with the PS warrior.

What?? You can see the difference between offensive and defensive support right. They are not the same thing. The point was DPS (including offensive support) have a huge place, while the game is so easy that it need a very limited amount of defensive support.

In both case you will receive the amount you sell, less the listing fee and less the exchange fee.

Ya but Phalanx is still about raw damage. It’s party wide damage over personnal damage.

GW2 have a huge place for support, but it’s underused. You can have enough support from a full dps build to do any content if you are a half decent player. You never really need protection, weakness. You only see sigil of energy in solo run. You never hear someone asking for vigor. Mesmer and Guardian sacrifice some trait to gain more reflect, but that’s pretty much it. If the content would be more challeging, we would have a more wide variety of build between DPS and Support. If they made CC important, then you have the true soft trinity that Anet talked about from the beginning. DPS, Support and CC.

1) You receive hero point from leveling and from Hero challenge (old skill point challenge on the map). From leveling you received 398 hero pts witch is the exact amount to unlock all the skills and core specialisation. So the only reason to not unlock everything would be if you want to unlock the elite specialisation but you don’t want to do 60 hero challenge (the amount need to unlock a complete specialization).

2) No. But you don’t need them anymore. We used to have skill point after level 80 because we could use them in recipe. But now they divided skill points into Hero Points (unlocking stuff on your character) and Spirit Shards (to craft stuff). Spirit Shard now come from drops, loot, pvp, etc. For now leveling past 80 is in-between 2 system and don’t matter at all. With the expansion it will improve your masteries.

Harper.4173:

Nil – the question you should be asking yourself is this :

Were the full meta groups much easier and faster because they were full meta or because people knew what they were doing and you were running with good players?

Well the rally system is abused in zerker group. It should be harder in zerker group and it is. As long as it’s against 1 single boss. The moment there is thrash mobs, rally make zerker group so much easier.

Like dominik said.

Shelter, Retreat, Virtue of Courage, Focus 5, Protector’s Strike. You also have a lot of source of Aegis from trait : When you get to 25% hp, when you rez someone, when you block. You also have Focus 4 as a blind, Renewed focus as a invulnerability.

As a bunker guardian you also have good amount of protection, retaliation, Vigor, Stability and break stun.

Shout Warrior on the other end have good amount of vigor but not protection nor retaliation and have limited stability/break stun. They have better condition removal and more hp to survive burst, but have limited amount of block. It will be easier to play, but less efficient.

The only place where we really use water field is in WvW and seriously the need for a dedicated healer in there would be nice. Don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t need one for pugs zerg. But it would be nice that one of the meta for zerg fight was an healer or maybe some hybrid ele with some healing power.

As long as they don’t make it so powerful that it’s mandatory, but I think we are so far from that right now. We have wiggle room to improve the importance of healer a bit.

The problem is that WvW is highly mobile in combat and Hammer auto-attack is pretty static. In PvE or on a node in sPvP that work, but otherwise you need to put your focus on Mighty Blow as a source of burst. Just a shame that you can’t take absolute resolution and glacial hearts together now.

I’m indifferent for much of it, but there was also some nice stuff.

PvE
- I like Mace way more than Sword. They could have fixed sword, but i’ll settle with that.
- Symbol rotation is more fun too.
- Hammer build are more on part with GS build.
- Removing stats from trait open up possibility since you can take some support trait without sacrificing as much dps as you used to.

PvP
- Glacial Heart is in an ackward placement, which hurt hammer build

Both
- Damage modifier are ok. Don’t know why they nerfed Fiery Wrath and they should have kept Symbolic Avenger to 20% (even if they nerfed something else) so that being good at placing your symbol would be important
- Burning was nice to try, but it’s just short to replace power efficiently. At least they are closer so you won’t be laugh at for playing a condi guardian.

I agree with most of what you said, but it’s a bit unfair to place the bad skills that are still bad on that list. The last patch was about trait only, they never pretented to fixed broken skills.

We don’t have enough info on the expansion yet. For now, the amount of content isn’t worth the 50$ and announcing that price now is a mistake on Anet part. But we still need info on Fractal and Challenging group content. This could be a game changer or not, we’ll have to see.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Agent Noun.7350:

I know there won’t be new dungeons when Heart of Thorns releases…

Where have they said this?

I keep seeing people say this, but the only thing they provide is an interview stating that they won’t be making any big changes to the current dungeons.

They never said it, but Robert isn’t with Anet anymore and they eliminated the old dungeon dev team. Since then, not a single update to dungeon so people doudt that will change suddently after almost 2 years of drought.

maddoctor.2738:

There isn’t much difference in waiting for a “Tank” or “Healer” than waiting for that PS Warrior, the Staff DPS Ele, the Guardian with the reflects or the Thief with the team stealth. “Pro” groups already have mandotory roles

Here is the difference.

In holy trinity game I need to wait for a tank of a Healer or I won’t be able to complete the content.

In GW2 If i want I can wait for a PS Warrior or a Staff DPS Ele, but nothing force me too. I can complete the dungeon with about anything. The quality and speed of the run will be different, but we gonna be able to complete it.

In the end though, for a bunker, bunkering is far more important than mobility (compare to brawling wich mobility is as important if not more).

And there is another point against the warrior. The new burst capability of Mesmer/Thief/Warrior make block/invuln superior than healing. Against good team, I don’t know how a shout warrior will be able to sustain the burst wihtout depleting his heals. While a guardian will be able to block it all with 1 skill. Especially since engineer ain’t as popular as before with their nasty magnet to interrupt the guardian’s shelter.

fixit.7189:

Dinks.2478:

you’re just as useless to your team as a clerics guardian using a staff.

And there we have it, this is what it all comes down to.

You are useless if you go clerics or any other support type build/gear set that isn’t the meta dps; you heard it here first!

You’re not useless as a cleric. I had a lot of fun running it with my friend when I got bored. There is 3 problem. People mixing personnal surviability with support. Like Jerus said they take AH and say that they support their team, which is 100% false. They just stay alive. Or take bad PvE like staff and think they support their team, which is largely false since the support from staff is very for PvE (Switchness and CC ain’t really good in PvE).

The second problem is that the content is easy enough that cleric is usualy not needed at all.

The community evolved to extreme over time since all content is old. People think that anything except meta zerker is good and if you change one think suddently your build is bad. In fractal 50 for exemple, you can bring 1 cleric and 4 zerker and the run will be great and fun without being much more longer.

Yes it will be less optimal and not that usefull if you have 5 really good players. But for most people a cleric will make the run easier and more enjoyable, while decreasing the speed by only a couple of minutes. The group could run full zerker, but take no food/potion and the difference in speed will be similar.

I never talk about the reward or the actual quality of FOTM. I just said that fotm is harder than dungeon, but not much people are complaining about it.

Complaining that it’s old content that give almost no reward is another debate. Let’s not mix everything in

I’m not totally sure about that. Not much tears about level 50 fractal. As long as average player can do the content, it’s ok to have harder level for skilled players.

What will never happen is hard content that not everybody can succeed at.

Well personnally I would like increasingly harder content. Something like what Wooden Potatos proposed recently would be nice, at least the concept of it.

Instanced content (raid, dungeon, fractal, whatever) that you can do with almost anything, but that have hard mode that is not just giving more hp and dmg to the boss or have a mechanic that just need more gear.

Jerus.4350:

I’m not a fan of what Thadd implies as he’s basically advocating an attrition based mechanic. That’s the only style that NEEDS healing. I’m not a fan of that stuff.

Not necessarily. A good pug or group may be able to complete the content with support like protection, weakness, vigor, blind, aegis, reflect, dodge ect. But averager player may prefer using a healer, which require less skill/timing/knowledge.

Ideally, support would be more efficient than healing. But Healing shouldn’t be so much behind support either. Now you need to sacrifice trait, skill and stats to do important healing. While support only need to sacrifice trait and skill and you can even do decent support with a full dps build.

But the worst Anet can do is to make Healing a necessity. You should be able to do the content with either support, surviability, healing or a mix of those.

Harper.4173:

How is having something restrict you a good thing?

It’s not restricted. You can do the content whatever way you want. But if you want to go full dps and no defense, it’s gonna freaking hard and you better be good. Now, there is no point of having a build that is more defensive because almost all the players can do the content in a full zerker party.

Anyway. All I want is hard content that will push people to take more defensive skill with them. Not to change the combat system at all.

Khristophoros.7194:

The only way a healer would be useful is if it is required for the party to survive. Why would we slow down our DPS to have a healer if we don’t need it?

I’m fine with this though. It’s quick and easy to pug because we don’t need certain professions or roles.

Well you could have different option and healer could be one of them. Average pugs couldn’t complete content with 5 meta zerker. But you could complete it with 5 zerker and 3 of them would have support trait and runes. Or 3 zerker, 1 tank, 1 healer would also work. Or 3 zerker and 2 zealot, etc.

As long as you need something to keep your team alive and an Healer is one option possible to do that.

Ya the profession need a lot of work, but I have an idea. A normal profession like a guardian for example. You can choose 2 weapons, each give you a fix 5 skills. Then you can choose between 4 healing skill, 20 utility skills and 3 elite.

The revenant could just be the opposite. You can choose 2 legend each give you a fix 5 skills (1 heal, 3 utility and 1 elite). Then on your weapon you can choose 5 skill of a pool or like 10 or something. So lets say the revenant have 5 weapons possible, each would have 10-15 skill to choose from. That’s a lot of skill and could be hard to manage. So they could change thing up a bit and divide the weapon skill in 2.

The auto-attack is linked to the weapon and can’t be modified. But for the remaining 4 skills of the weapon you have a pool or like 20 skills to choose from. Each of those skill are like glyph for elementalist. They work the same way, but gonna give different result depending on which weapon you use it.

For exemple you could have Field of Mist. With hammer, this block projectile in front of you. But on off-hand Axe it would block incoming condition in front of you. In staff it would heal allies in front of you, etc.

Knighthonor.4061:

Hey Anet, if you are going to make the Support role a serious role now,

Support is already a serious role. All meta build have a huge place for support which is needed to complete most content the way we do. Harder content will push the need further, which is nice, but the role is really present right now.

Are you talking about PvE, PvP or WvW. It’s like basic information we need to know or people are gonna talk about all kind of stuff.

Gear have 3 indicators.

1) The level (if you are level 80 you want level 80)

2) Quality. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item#Quality
You should focus on exotic for now. It’s easy to get and more than decent stats. Ascended can be expansive and not worth it for everyone. Especially when you start to play.

3) The Prefix define the type of stats. Berserker or Zerker for exemple is the most popular and give you Power, Precision, Ferocity. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item_nomenclature
Here a list of all prefix. Just a note, prefix are different for ascended. So Berserker in ascended is named Zoija. I don’t know why anet did that and nobody use the ascended name.

Where you can get them?

Exotic can be found in a LOT of place. You can drop them from mobs, boxes, chest, etc. You can also buy them with Badge of Honor or Karma, but then you can’t salvage them. This can be a problem if you put expansive runes and then want to change your armor. You can buy them on the Trading Post. There are relatively cheap and it’s a good way to get your exotic gear. You can craft them, but it’s gonna be more expansive that way. You should only do that if you want to level up your crafting to 500 because you need to craft exotic anyway for doing that. You can buy exotic gear from dungeon token and that’s another really good way. It’s longer to do than buying them on the TP, but if you like dungeon, it’s gonna be cheaper that way on the long run.

Ascended is a whole other story, but you should focus on exotic first.

I think that most people in NA usually don’t play during those hours. I sometime play during those hours but only during the week end. You can add me and ask me if i’m online if you don’t have much people.

I used to play a lot of shoutbow. Using settle is an interesting option. Celestial used to be so good that Brawler (Ele, Engie, Warrior) pushed bunker out of the picture for a long time, but with the recent nerf Shoutbow is only a shadow of itself and Soldier Rifle Engie, even though it’s a decent build can’t compete on the same level as the old Cele Rifle Engie.

That pretty much leave us with only the Elementalist as brawler. With Warior, Mesmer and Thief as pure burst build, this seem to leave some opening for a possible return of Bunker build. On that particular role that shout build could compete against Bunker guardian.

Anyway comparing that build to cele ele make no sense. You can’t really compare a brawler build to a bunker build.

Wiki is written by players, they could write whatever they want. Maybe it’s a bug, I don’t know, but I prefer the way it is.

Spirited Was Eceni.3869:

The problem as I see it is when players from the two opposing fields accidentally mix and that can be avoided by correctly reading/writing the LFG description.

Yes. But that’s mostly Anet fault. A better LFG would fix that.