Guild Wars 2

Gandara is definitely a quality WvW server, Piken’s is heading towards higher tiers so no need to feel bad about the loss. Beware of Aurora Glade’s last second rush though, that’s how we win our matches. We are usually behind on points until Friday…

It’s nice to have new opponents for a chance.

From what I’ve seen, Gandara had skilled and organized players, but their presence was a bit low at the beginning. Had a good 20 minute war for the southern tower on their Borderlands. Mostly encountered players from the Yak guild.

Dzagonur have been unbeatable lately but somebody has to put an end to it. I hope that will be us.

Rush them, use stealth, daze them to prevent them from utilizing their million skills, crowd control. This was a good example of what not to do vs an organized group. A sensible warrior would’ve just kept killshotting them from within the masses.

Thieves and warriors having a more effective fear is a sad state of affairs. Then again they are more fearsome than the average necromancer I guess.

The off-hand axe doesn’t really bring too much to the equation in my opinion. The main-hand axe auto attack already deals all the damage you need, you just need to put your enemy in a position where you can land it.

For this I use an off-hand mace. 1200 range knockdown is pretty good. For PvE mobs Whirling Axe is nice though.

Nope but the game would benefit from every classes downstate being as bad as the necromancers. It gets a bit annoying to have to tank 10 seconds of damage in order to get someone out of there. And necro doesn’t exactly get too many benefits in comparison to other classes anyway.

Atherakhia.4086:

RTL isn’t the problem. And Warriors don’t need strong escapes because they have heavy armor, 25k hp, strong snares and incapacitates. And even with all of this, you can’t honestly pretend that the escape options for warrior are exactly week with 2 greatsword and 2 1h sword options on short cooldowns with fairly long range (not 1200 I realize, but you’re also not a ranged class in light armor with 15k hp).

And look at other abilities with similar affect to RTL. Rangers have swoop with the same range and cooldown. Warriors have rush which is on only a slightly higher cooldown and can still use whirlwind to get an opener or savage leap. Without RTL or a snare on the warrior, they can out run anyone. And they have insanely high burst (which is probably the AE damage they’re talking about toning down).

Even with high armor, high HP and high damage the warrior class is still fodder for most decent players, unless you meet a warrior with exceptional skill or get caught by HB in a mob. There’s little utility to speak of and whatever little utility they may have, there’s counters for them. But it is impossible to have a counter for each of the 20+ skills that any elementalist can utilize.

You can say that you can counter this and that but other classes simply do not have as much to offer. They’ll be waiting for those 60 second cooldowns while the elementalist already has a full set of skills to utilize.

A bunker ele is far more survivable than the average warrior, while a bunker warrior is completely missing the point and is basically a static object to beat up on. Warriors are just not a problem, let’s put it that way.

I’m not saying that elementalists having a lot of skills is wrong by any means, because that’s the point of the class, I’m just saying there should be more risk involved for the use of those skills. When you go all in, you can’t expect to be able to pull out of it when things aren’t going your way.

Cirax.9231:

With that mentality, you would also avoid thieves, warriors, or any class that can get out of combat and remove their escape mechanisms? Any class that uses a skill to escape combat does not get the benefit of the skill – the tradeoff of using it to either enter or leave combat. Of all aspects of d/d eles, mobility is the least of concern compared to its bunkering capabilities or aoe damage.

Sorry to sound harsh, but button mashing on any profession will beat unaware players – if you are being beaten by a button mashing ele, you need to work on improving your gameplay. Also, the major skills are on a 40-45 second cooldown – RTL is a movement /gap closer like any other similar skills on other professions (and not to mention stealth which is the easiest way to escape combat safely. Edit: Marzattackz summarizes this nicely in his post above).

Warrior escape is a joke. It is definitely not on par with Ride the Lightning, which is usually followed up by several other skills which can create a gap large enough between yourself and your enemies to break combat. Warrior defense largely consists of facetanking every bit of damage the enemy can deal them. Let’s not even bring them up.

Thieves are another class that are complained about for obvious reasons. Thankfully most thieves are too stubborn to actually escape combat and are terribly glassy in the end.

Button mashers are not a problem for skilled players, but with the endless amount of skills that elementalists can access, a button masher can go a long way. On most videos of elementalists playing, the lack of thought put into their use of skills is laughable. Despite this they can get away with it because of the ultimate bail-out button on a 15 second cooldown. These are players who think they are among the most skilled in the game. When there’s little risk in going after a group of 3 or 4 enemies, there’s a problem.

Let’s compare a necromancer who has to pay close attention to the amount of boons and conditions on the enemy and cannot afford to waste a single skill which are usually on cooldowns of 60 seconds or more. There’s just much more skill required to achieve a similar result. I’m not saying they should take everything from elementalists, but there’s definitely a problem even within the elementalist class itself of one particular build achieveing a lot more with the same amount of effort put in (or less).

1 second of fear is quite useless except on interrupts. I’ve actually been able to get over 1 minute of vigor with the Well of Power, not that it’s a reliable source by any means.

Softspoken.2410:

In regards to the bolded sentence: UI too strong? I sympathize with having difficulty clicking the correct target (the camera angle for downed mode is really disorienting, in my opinion) but this is honestly the first I’ve heard of the downed fear actually firing at a different target than the one the player chose.

As to a level playing field: mesmer, thief and elementalist have escapes, rather than a hard interrupt. This can actually make it easier to finish them because if they don’t teleport far enough (in the case of the mesmer and thief, due to obstructing terrain and the like) someone can actually kill them without breaking the channel on their original finisher. Even if they do teleport far enough, a foe who is paying attention just has to walk a bit further and start again – something that can take less time than recovering from / escaping the hard CC of another class’ interrupt.

Edited for a better response regarding ‘level playing field’

The fear does not target another player, but in a mass group of people it will be difficult to target the enemy stomping you considering that the effective time window you have to work with in order for the stomp to be interrupted is about 1 second, due to the cast time on the fear. With a mass of players and NPCs surrounding the stomper, it’s quite difficult to find an area in which to click him and target him.

If you haven’t come across problems with the downed state fear and believe it’s on par with other classes downed skills, then I don’t know what to tell you. Necro is a beached whale once they go down, which is the way it’s supposed to be, but other classes do have legitimate options of getting out of harm’s way. I’ll take a teleport/stealth/clone any day over a single target fear even if 1% of the time you are stuck in a bad place.

I find it odd that the class that deals with death has about the worst state near death.

Come on now, you really think they could make necro’s AoE damage any lower? You’ll be lucky to see 1000 with our AoE. I believe they will simply subject the other classes to the same standards as the necromancer’s AoE.

I use the staff more so for the effects (chill, poison, fear, regeneration) than the damage, because the damage output is laughable. You can’t possibly take away from what isn’t there in the first place.

I mean the base damage of about 100 for all the skills other than Putrid Mark is really going to scare away a zerg.

Ride the Lightning obviously needs to go. It’s not much fun to battle against an elementalist when you know they’ll just run away and break combat the moment you start getting the better of it, every 15 seconds. The cooldowns on major skills are so ridiculously low that you only need to button mash with this class to beat most opponents.

No real need to think for a half a second whether you should be using this skill at this stage of the fight unlike with other classes.

Invulnerability stomp is another one that needs to go. Obviously not intended.

I seriously doubt necro AoE damage (what damage?) is the problem they are looking at. Maybe they’ll just change the rest of the classes AoE’s to the same standard.

There’s no need to empower the zerg. In this video 4 did not beat 30, they beat 4 at a time because the enemies were too hesitant to rush in and do what they were supposed to do. An organized zerg will still rule with an iron fist.

I do think eles are an easy, skill-spamming class though which takes little ability to utilize. But that’s my opinion.

Against mesmers don’t waste your time chasing the clones, it’s not difficult to distinguish the real targets. As said they don’t bring much condition removal so depending on whether you’re a power or condition build, control them or spam them with conditions.

I’m too tanky and knowledgeable about mesmer tricks to lose many fights against them. My simple strategy is to chase them down, chill them, cripple them and eventually immobilize and daze them while I get in 4 seconds of free shots with the dagger. After that the fight is pretty much over.

It’s always best to enter a 1v1 situation with full death shroud, otherwise you are not operating at your full capacity. With 27,000 HP, 2500+ armor and death shroud I can take a couple of shatters.

Softspoken.2410:

TheGreatA.4192:

Even then it will usually target some random NPC instead of the player trying to stomp you.

You could always target the player stomping you yourself.

I reckon you’ve not been in a large scale fight with clones, minions, pets and random NPC’s all over the place? Where it would’ve been perfectly possible to survive in all the chaos if not for a single enemy trying to stomp you. You click that enemy, and it targets somebody else because there’s too much going on.

Guardian doesn’t have to worry about targeting, neither does the mesmer, thief or elementalist. Make it a level playing field, or don’t make it at all is what I’m saying.

In my opinion it should be an AoE fear with the same mechanics as the Warrior’s “Fear Me”. The closer your enemy stands to you, the longer the duration.

At the moment it’s completely useless unless you only have a single opponent standing next to a cliff. Even then it will usually target some random NPC instead of the player trying to stomp you. It’s ironical that the necromancer has about the most useless state next to death.

Not saying that necromancers should have a powerful downed state, in my estimation no class should be able to do much more while downed other than to lay on their back. But that’s not how it is at the moment.

There’s a lot of stuff you can pull with a necro that you can’t do with another class.

Spectral walk can be a lot of fun and along with the Death shroud teleporting ability, can be used to escape “zergs” or to defend a tower gate or wall without having to use the portal. Since at the moment you can tank any fall damage while in Death Shroud, it can be used as another escape mechanic. If your opponent is foolish enough they might just jump after you.

I win most 1v1’s because my opponents spend the duration of the fight being chilled, feared, dazed and immobilized while I slowly pick them apart. Necro can be especially good for group fights by targeting an enemy, controlling them and having the other people of the group focus them down.

Necro damage is never going to be impressive. Due to the high base HP perhaps berserker & knight would be the way to go. Personally I use knight & valkyrie for a heavily tanked build which can still deal a reasonable amount of damage. I have around 27,000 HP and 2600 armor. Crit chance 50+ % with consumables and easy access to fury.

Necromancer can be played the worst. I felt comfortable whenever I faced a necro while playing as a guardian but now I’m running a necromancer myself. It’s not so weak a class but it takes a bit more skill than most other classes. Still don’t know how to make engineers work though.

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

I’m gonna try and make a necromancer build similar to the D/D ele.
Still exploring the possibilities though.

I prefer the mystic dagger skin, it costs a bit but it still looks decent and I like the electricity coming off of it.

Also does the necromancer not have any good healing skills? I just find ’m all to be so weak…

I find the healing skill which removes all conditions and gives extra healing for each one pretty good myself. It’s like a better version of the warrior’s Mending. With certain skills you can stack conditions on yourself, so with you can potentially get a lot out of it.

Especially nice in WvW where you get spammed with a ton of conditions. Sometimes gives me 10k+ healing on 25 second cooldown.

Had many fights but one which comes to mind was a 4v1 against a group of elementalists (1 or 2 were upleveled though). It was open field and should have by all means beaten me but they played their cards terribly and allowed my deathshroud to tank their best stuff, which is all very telegraphed (earthspike, ride the lightning and so on). After that I just grinded them down with my pathetic damage only because they were extremely glassy.

Had to shroudstomp because otherwise I would’ve been focused down while finishing them off. Mistwalk was annoying but I waited patiently before they would use that card.

I caught the first one quick so it was more like a 3v1 with 2 real opponents (due to my tankiness the upleveled person did no damage whatsoever), so not as glorious as it sounds.

Been working for me, but if you want to do it you have to go all the way. Foodbuffs, sigils, skills and traits. The individual heals are not too much but when you put them all together, you’re starting to look at a very survivable build as long as you find someone to hit.

Dagger/warhorn is nice, atleast in PVP situations since NPC mobs are up in your face anyway. Dark Pact followed by a 3 second daze does in most opponents, if you can manage to land it. Gives you all the time in the world to spam your auto-attack and wells on a static object.

For my lifeleech build, dagger 2 is very nice and is like a second healing skill on a low cooldown. Since it’s a channel skill, it works on thieves while they are cloaking.

As for the dagger skin I use the Krait ripper which looks more like a sickle.

I’ve also noticed that you can fall from any height and survive in the game while in Death Shroud. I don’t know if this is intended or just something that happens to me.

Especially useful in WvW to escape the “zerg” and have a laugh at any lemmings who jump after you.

Death Shroud can be very good but it is difficult to get all the possible benefits for it.

As for me I use it to tank damage while waiting on cooldowns, block big attacks, stack might with Life Blast and gain fury, teleport to my opponent, interrupt a stomp in WvW with fear and use Life Transfer in the middle of a big group of enemies.

Worked well for me so far.

I’ve gotten used to extremely tanky necromancers as commanders on my server. Even when you get beaten, it’s nice to see the commander go out the last.

Been trying out a necromancer in WvW and I’d say while underpowered it is still useful in certain situations.

For PVP situations the damage dealt and whatever survivability the necromancer has is not really quite enough in comparison to someone doing 15000+ damage to you without any amount of skill, effort or risk put in. On the other hand the necro has to play all his cards right with no room for error to get the enemy out of there, otherwise they are done for.

However the amount of control that a necromancer has does make it fairly easy for another person from a damage dealing class to land their hits on the enemy.

It’s a class that shines in groups but which doesn’t make you feel all-powerful in PVP without a significant amount of skill in comparison to most other classes.

I’m not saying that you cannot be a necromancer who dominates most opponents, but I’m saying it’s far easier to be that with certain other classes. Whoever can do that receives my respect. I feel bad at times for necromancers who are doing all they can to kill a guardian character of mine while I can just facetank them without much regard for skill.

I’d be heavily in favour of some improvements to the classes damage and survivability. There’s some bugs to skills and traits which still need work.

Nice to see. I love to fight big groups while outmanned. The hesitancy to actually go out there and fight makes it possible for smaller organized groups to get the win.

You don’t always win but the feeling you get is certainly more rewarding than running over single players with 30 people or in this case losing to four of them. Must’ve been crushing.

juno.1840:

Power and toughness are identical between soldiers and knights gear. You are trading precision for vitality. Guards need some vitality (but arguably not as much as other professions need). If running AH you could get away with a bit less vit than not running AH.

So the only damage increase from knights over soldiers is going to come from the precision stat on the gear alone (again because toughness is the same which takes the 5% tough to prec trait out of the picture).

If your crit is already at 40% without knights armor, then will moving to knights armor to get 50% be worth it over the increased vit? Depends on how you want to roll. For me, the soldiers armor is my only source of vit on my gear so I roll that way (and my crit is already at 40% which seems sufficient to maintain vigor and might).

Sure you can go full soldier set on armor if you switch it up a bit with the weapons and trinkets like you seem to have been doing. But a full soldier set of everything is not going to be quite as effective as having a bit of precision and crit damage on top of it. By this I mean all power, toughness and vitality with no precision to speak about.

As a guardian I hate to go down from high burst damage skills without being able to use my healing skills because of the low amount of base HP so I prefer having a decent amount of vitality.

Soldier’s set is good but some knight’s armor along with it will go a long way to improving your damage while retaining tankiness.

Thing is when you have a lot of vitality & toughness, maintenance oils will give a good boost to precision. There’s also the trait which converts 5% of toughness into precision.

I run a build with 2000+ toughness and around 20,000 HP while still critting half the time with 50+% crit damage. Plenty tough and no joke when it comes to damage.

I do think the pack mentality of most people has never been as quite well displayed as it is on World vs World. I’ve seen 80 level characters fully equipped running from a single upleveled character to the safety of their zerg instead of finding out whether their build and skills are worth anything in actual combat.

I know it’s a game of points, but don’t people enjoy the actual fighting itself? Whenever there’s a group of 5 or less people I’ll have a go at it solo. I’ve won against greater numbers only because people are so hesitant to fight, not because I’m some overly skilled player but because people will turn their backs and run.

Now I play for the team but I did have some 1v1’s for personal amusement a couple of times and was interrupted a lot of the time. One time a player from a third server attacked us in the midst of a 1v1 and both me and my enemy stomped him and resumed our battle. That was fun.

Run after them like crazy and keep your eyes on the real mesmer. Learn all their tricks as well to make it easier on yourself. I’ve fought some fairly skilled mesmers and won, only because I was able to tank more than they could while still dealing out solid damage.

It’s getting extremely annoying by now to work hard into getting an opponent inside the ring of warding, only for them to effortlessly get out of it.

Captured a tower with 2 people last night, could’ve probably done it solo because the tower champion is quite awful and kills himself on Wall of Reflection. The other person was knocked off because of the AoE attack so I chopped it down mainly by myself.

Nuka Cola.8520:

why so many exotics are are acc bound in fotm is what i want to know. Anet sure don’t want us to make money, just pathetic.

They can still be salvaged or thrown in the Forge I think. So you can make money off them.

Even if they weren’t soulbound the best you could likely get from them is 70-90 silver due to the relative frequence of their drops.

Genewen.2415:

It is not built on water, but on a part of the ledge provided by the wall next to it. This is not some tiny pixel where you can barely stand on with the tip of your toe. Also, this place is very vulnerable to attacks. Nothing indicates that this is a bug.

Bypassing walls or gates is an entirely different matter, and I don’t think anyone will object to this being exploiting.

I will agree with Nauda that you should stop discussing realism in Guild Wars 2. Like he or she said, placement of catapults, trebs or ACs is already very unrealistic. Don’t even get me started on AC’s arrows not having LoS, ballistas with by design vertically unadjustable trajectory firing nearly straigth up- or downwards or placing of siege equipment on slopes.

I did not see the picture in question. There is a spot where you can place it on top of water though which prevents melee attacks. Anyway I don’t think those things are too bad because they are in the game, but when you can bypass an outer wall entirely without using siege (or mesmer portals) then you have to start asking whether this is intended.

Harbinger.8637:

He doesn’t need more Vitality. It’s obvious he’s going for a dps role. He has almost 16k hp which is more then enough. I don’t know why people think Guardians need this crazy health pool from, there’s a reason they have the lowest base health.

Good crit, dmg, and a nice amount of toughness. Your stats are fine. They are actually better then most of the glass cannon dps Guardians running around.

I’m just saying that if the conditions start turning into too much of a problem, you might want to sacrifice some power in favour of vitality to keep yourself in the fight for longer. Once you crit a lot, have a high crit damage and 2000+ power, your damage will be fine.

Guardians don’t need a crazy health pool because of the healing and condition removals they have, but an all-out DPS guardian may lack those. As a result they can just turn into a warrior who does less damage and has a lesser health pool.

Necromancers are in desperate need of an underwater elite.

Nauda.3678:

Almost every server uses this kind of “tactic”. Arrow carts are always placed as close to the inner edge of a wall as possible(exceptions are arrow carts placed by new wvw players) and trebs or catapult are often placed close to the edge of a cliff to get the best range possible. Also i don’t think we should try to apply real life physics to the game;).

Those are smart things to do. Building a catapult on top of water because of what is seemingly a bug is a bit off though. There’s also been several attempts by people to bypass outer walls entirely by exploiting bugs. But that’s all part of the game until those things get fixed.

I’m not going to be abusing those things in name of fair game though because they are obviously not intentionally implemented into the game.

You should not be losing more than winning vs warriors since guardians have more ways to beat a warrior than a warrior has to beat a guardian. Survive the initial attack with damage mitigation skills and mow them down with solid DPS. Warriors will always win a few because of the damage they can do in a short amount of time but a guardian on average should get the better of them.

With thieves you just have to hope to land your hardest hit on them. Mighty blow works for me. Wall of reflection can work against the average pistol thief.

I’m talking in more chaotic WvW situations that is.

Looks alright to me, but could do with less power and more crit damage & vitality perhaps? Depends on what you’re going for.

Catisa.6507:

yes because we all need to get the achievements NOW, god forbid anything be long term goals, must have instant gratification these days. Achievements that can be completed in the first week of owning the game are a flippin joke and waste of time even making them.

You would need to play 20-30 years to get the Yak Slapper achievement. 10 years if you play 24/7.

I think that’s a bit overboard. I would rather have these stats going to infinite if the achievements for them aren’t possible for most normal human beings, since the main use of them seems to be about being able to view your WvW statistics.

There’s a profanity filter but there’s also the chance to turn off the profanity filter, which kind of suggests that atleast a mild form of swearing is accepted. Otherwise the filter would apply to everybody.

Obviously when you start making personal threats, it’s time to take a little time off the game. A short ban will just do good in that case.

All you really need to do in path 2 is to facetank Alpha and avoid the occasional ice spike since most circles you can simply stand in the middle of. The faster you get rid of him the less chance you have of messing it up, because the boss is fairly unforgiving. Once it starts going wrong it goes way wrong.

This boss is mainly about timing and keeping a calm head under the AoE fire, making sure that you have your defensive maneuvers at hand all the time and knowing which circles you can stand in the middle of.

A full soldier set isn’t very effective since power alone won’t do the kind of damage that a balanced amount of power/crit chance/crit damage will. Some knight’s armor and berserker will boost your damage output greatly.

Healing power in my estimation isn’t that effective unless you go all the way, and even then it’s just a bit disappointing. A few hundred extra healing doesn’t make a big enough difference when the base healing is already at 4,500+ and so on.

37 crit damage isn’t a bad start (our benefit from having crit damage and toughness in the same trait line), if you can get it to around 50+ you can always boost it with food buffs and so on. I think you will notice a difference without sacrificing too much survivability.

It’s annoying when the WvW breakout event commander’s Ring of Warding works perfectly while mine does not.

Pulling off the Ring of Warding on a mobile opponent is a difficult enough feat as it is, you shouldn’t just be able to enter and leave as you please.

Magmaton so far has been about the only one that’s been big enough for a norn to wield. Some of the hammers were more like the size of maces despite having decent skins.

Would love to have Mjolnir but it will take a couple of years… Not even 350 lodestones in the whole market at the moment.

Virtue of Resolve active heals for 1625 + 75% of your healing power. If you’ve put atleast 5 points into the Virtues trait line, it also gives you a few second of regeneration.

The virtue itself only shows how much the passive heals per second.

Banners should be easier to pick up, other than that they are nice.

I have a warrior build which revolves entirely around banners, more of a warleader than a warrior though who hangs behind the front lines unless forced to melee, provides DPS boosts, does healing and revives other people with the warbanner. It’s been working out better than I expected, even WvW in static defense situations.