Guild Wars 2

It gets worse. Players from other guilds hang around the boss, but don’t attack it. This makes the boss stronger (because there are more players) and thus will take the guild that is fighting it longer to take the boss down. If they succeed at all.

All to give their own guild a bit of extra time to easily find the boss should they get the corresponding bounty.

The right way to play at the moment is to zerg rush stuff. Wheter it’s dragon bosses or guild bounties, or even karka farming or running through dungeons using exploits and short cuts. You’re not supposed to casually enjoy this game.

The manifesto stated that instead of competing with other players for kills, you’d both get the full reward, to promote teamwork.

On my server however, guilds seem to adhere a policy of “don’t tell the other guild where the bounty is so they won’t steal our kill”. That way, when they spend an hour seeking out bounties, they at least won’t have to suffer another guild stealing their target.

If nothing else, this should be the reason to change the bounties.

At least a reply, dagnabbit!

Used to do a casual AC run every other day or so with my guild. Then it got changed, and now we just about never do them anymore. Yes, awesome change.

It was supposed to be in the game already. Then it was supposed to come a short while after launch. Now, it’s not even worked on.

A big letdown, but what can you do about it…

Buffing the staff’s auto attack projectiles a bit might be the best solution. It won’t affect group play much (if at all) but in 1v1, you end up using them a lot more often. Hence it would make the staff better at duelling while keeping the zerg damage the same.

Alpha.1308:

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2guru/b/377719641

That’s where the focus comes in…it has an invulnerability skill that can take up that role, as well as 2 spammable blinds (one of which is even instant cast).

I’m more pondering what this would mean for scepter air and mesmer greatsword…

Chaosky.5276:

• A 2 second activation time for Shatterstone is absurd; I say reduce the activation time, reduce the time until it shatters or increase its AoE radius, and increase the damage.

If it were instant cast like the tooltip suggested, it’d actually be fine…but currently, that’s not the case.

• The scepter’s fire and air attunement autoattacks are very poor, and its earth autoattack is pretty bad without condition damage, as well. Damage increases would be welcomed.

The thing with scepter I think is that it more or less assumes that you use at least some condition damage. And that’s where it shines too. Skills like the fire and earth auto attacks benefit from both boosts of Might for example. I’ve tried scepter in a balanced build, and even without bleeding extensions it could deal more than 2000 damage per cast if I stacked 25 Might (easy to achieve on scepter). 2000+ damage on an auto attack, even if part of it is bleeding, is nothing to scoff at. Fire has the same thing, with an added bonus that it cannot be avoided.

There’s the Fire Aura/Signet build, that, combined with Scepter/Focus, can deal quite a bit of damage and still has the neccesary tools for survival. At the very least, it’s different. Maybe you can perfect that to a playable thing?

Arcane 5pt trait gives you near-permanent Fury on its own, provided you swap often. A trick I like to do is cast Meteor Shower, swap to water mid cast, use Ice Spike and the switch to Air for a Blinding Surge…if your enemies are lined up, this means a lot of Meteor Shower crits with the added vulnerability from Ice Spike. Quite a nice damage combo.

The standard boon build comes to mind. Which uses Elemental Surge combined with boon duration lengthening runes and frequent swapping to grant your allies all kinds of boons, as well as regen and condition removal.

titaniumm.2983:

could be fun have a staff like i design, without combo field, and with a single trait that increase cooldown of certain spells making it combo field

Not sure how easy that would be to implement…but it’s an interesting idea.

If you dismiss chill then you have no idea how powerful it is.

As for the staff, it’s the combos that make it exponentially more powerful the more players are near you. A single Frozen Field can cause up to a minute of chill in a group of 5 (though it’s duration is halved on dungeon bosses). A lava font can add a similar stack of burn. Meanwhile, just think of all the healing the water fields can give…there’s a reason rangers almost always us their healing springs.

Bottom line: when balancing the staff, consider the fact that we have combo fields. They must be weak when soloing, or they’ll be stupidly overpowered when in a group.

Navzar.2938:

^I used to run something very similar to that glyph build early on, but I could never really get the hang of 1v1ing on staff. Could you give me some more specific 1v1 tips? I’m getting pretty bored of d/d tbh, and new characters take a while to get to max lvl in this game, so I might try going staff again.

Well, I think we can alle agree that the staff will probably never do as well in 1v1 as dagger/dagger. Having said that though, the evasive arcane/earth blast finisher into fields playstyle, combined with what I wrote in my previous post, should allow you to at least hold your own. Once your GoEP is active, you should aim to try and hit your target as often as you can until they are snared. If you’re fighting a ranged profession, pick chill. If fighting purely or mostly melee, pick cripple because it will be applied more often and lasts longer. It will be a long fight, so try to make sure you survive. Plan your fields so you can combo with them for extra effect (stoning+frozen ground works great). When it comes to elementals, I prefer earth elementals because they cause crippling and last a while. However, under certain circumstances you may wish to pick air or water instead, or maybe a mix. Fire in general, is the least effective because they only deal damage, and even then their major attack is easier to dodge than even your own spells. Finally, you should omit Glyph of Storms when duelling. Armor of Earth, combined with the trait that gives you an emergency Armor of Earth, should give you all the defense you need.

The trick is to outlast your opponent. And the staff ele/glyph build has all the tools it needs to do just that.

Yo momma’s IQ is so low, she tried to use a differential instead of an integral to solve the area under a curve.

Also, you’re not allowed in because you called them ‘collages’ instead of ‘colleges’.

What is the status of Guild Halls and the Home Instance? Anything going on that’s more than just ‘future plans’?

Zaoda.1653:

I’m so frustrated with my elementalist and his lack of survivability.

The elementalist uses active survivability. Which in practice means that, much like the Thief, you need to avoid getting hit, not absorb them. This means using things like Mist Form, earth elemental tanks, snaring, kiting, dodging wisely.

Mind you, with a proper setup, you can facetank. But the idea behind the class is that you do not. That’s what warriors and guardians are for. The ele on the other hand, needs to keep moving and pulling of 5 tricks a second to stay upright.

Seeing as how the staff is very appealing to me, I’m gonna stick with what I’ve said in other threads: the trick to staff is to not approach is as if it were a D/D ele.

There are 2 skill types that synergize well with the staff: arcane skills and glyphs.

When picking arcane skills, you get extra blast finishers for your fields. Combined with Elemental Surge, you can really put on the conditions on your target. Wheter it’s the immobilize in earth, the chill in water or the 15 blinds Chain Lightning/Arcane Power combo, you’ll get some major CC our of it. Be sure to test Arcane Power in the Mists though, so you’ll know which skills to combine it with for maximum efficiency.

The other path, glyphs, essentially revolves around Glyph of Elemental Power. When cast in Earth or Water, all your skills will get a chance to snare your target. The lesser earth elemental, besides being hard to kill, also causes crippling and weakness. Combined with the greater earth elemental (or if you prefer, air or water), you will not only have a lot more dps (because of the added auto attacks) but also plenty of ways to stay away from your opponent, while they have a much harder time avoiding all your spells. Which in turn, add more snaring…etc.

That’s my approach to it anyway. I’m still no D/D, but I can hold my own a lot better in 1v1 duels. Just takes a different mindset.

Loco.4561:

Ultima.8673:

Why nerf it?
best counters are proper played engis necros maybe rangers very good mesmas and very good thiefs just overload the ele with a deadly mix of all condis and u will see him dieing

No you will see him CLEANSING, any good ele will be running enough cantrips and cleansing to completely negate condition damage, I know this because I used to run it on my Ele. And that is the problem, water as it is gives an Ele too many ways of clearing conditions, with the 3 cantrip cookie cutter build, you have:

Cleanse when you switch to water
An on demand cleanse when you use a cantrip
Cleanse on dodge roll with Cleansing water
Cleanse from the Glyph heal OR Ether Renewal.

Your essentially immune to CC (You have 3 very good stun breakers/mobility tools), you negate burst with the nature of this build, you can put out some pretty decent self healing, not too shabby DPS and you have mobility, it’s too much in one package and needs balance. This is coming from the perspective of someone who has played D/D Ele from beta and stopped playing my Ele about a month ago, it just feels to imbalanced.

Hopefully aNet will review and tone down the amount of cleansing Eles can do and that way condition damage could be a viable counter.

I wonder what the game would be like if the condition removal would be given to glyphs instead of cantrips.

kKagari.6804:

ThiBash.5634:

How would you fit what Elemental Surge does in a single tooltip? It seems to behave differently for each individual skill.

Show another ‘skill tooltip’ above the arcane skill tooltip, like chain attacks.

You could fill the entire screen with info then. The skill literally does work differently for every individual skill.

Am I still mad about the addition of Ascended gear. No. But do I like it? No.

Ascended gear still feels like a clumsy addition to me. The infusion slots make things extremely complicated with no real advantage gamewise. To show you an example, a guildie of mine mentioned just this week that his ascended amulet didn’t work. After some questions, it turned out that he hadn’t added an infusion yet. However, it wasn’t clear to him that he needed a specific infusion to gain agony resistance. Nor that he could get the basic version for only 75 fractal relics.
The infusion slot type doesn’t matter because ultimately, offensive and defensive get the same options. The difference is the cost only. And if you happen to transmute your backpack, well, then you can no longer tell what slot was in there to begin with.
The second downside is that ArenaNet has to make 2 versions of each item, that in the end are virtually the same. Also, the items being unique isn’t the obvious until after you’ve bought them.

The laurels made availability better, and that was a good move. Jewelcrafting is now useless, and that’s a shame. Forcing people to move to bigger guilds for the earrings…well, maybe people aren’t forced to do so but doesn’t come across as a very well planned move.

So overall, I don’t mind the Ascended gear but overall, I still don’t think it had to be added. And if anything, it needs polishing.

The good news though is that the ‘all stats’ stuff gave my elementalist a major buff. :-)

Xanes.2641:

Engineer suffers similar problems to the Ele. Because we have so much more skills than other classes, Anet made them abit weaker than other classes skills.

My Ranger does alot more dmg than my Ele. Heck, i daresay in full BM build with Apothecary gear that my pet alone does more consistent damage than my Ele in full berserk gear.

That’s also because unlike other professions, that can specialize in conditions or direct damage, elementalists have a mix of both. Which also means that you’ll rarely see high damage numbers, because your damage will be split between attacks, conditions (and maybe elementals).

One thing you could consider is how much stats the critical damage costs per item, and only use the gear the sacrifices relatively little stats per % critical damage.

As for the runes, the boon duration runes are useful for more than fury and might. Longer protections and regeneration could allow you to deal more damage because you don’t have to pull out of danger as often.

If you were an Asura, you’d understand why they wouldn’t accept you to their colleges.

LordByron.8369:

lowest dmg autoattack

Actually, the earth scepter auto attack can easily deal over 1000 damage (listed in the description). With might stacking, I managed a whopping 2100 in a balanced build. Can’t say that’s weak, even if part of it is bleeding damage.

As for the other weapons, did you ever consider that maybe our auto attacks aren’t our bread and butter attacks, but mere fillers? If you keep switching up often enough, you may use one auto attack every 15 seconds or so. Rest of it is higher damage skills.

Getting used to it, but still prefer the old version.

An elementalist casting a meteor shower into a WvW zerg would likely deal the most damage when it comes to AoE bursting. :-)

Since you know, each meteor can hit up to 5 targets, instead of the spell as a whole.

Good point. The actual story hasn’t started yet.

There is a quest where you have to remove centaur traps…and when you’re done, the traps disappear.

Permanence is relevant in MMOs, but they’re trying to do it in a subtle way that won’t disrupt gameplay for those that haven’t completed the event yet.

Seeing all of your reactions, I feel the need to clarify something.

I do not mind waiting a while, or working on something for a while before I can play it. And granted, maybe grind isn’t the best word for it. But I feel that, having to play for an entire year as my guild just for us to be able to play the guild puzzle, is a but too much. ArenaNet feels strongly that the game shouldn’t start at max level. So far, they’re doing a great job of it (I’ve done level 10 fractals with a lvl 30 newbie). However, the current influence/tier system seems the opposite of it. It would have been much less of a problem if we could pick the mission we wanted to unlock first.

Fortunately though, it seems that Issiah agrees with me (as stated in a recent interview) and they’re likely gone tone it down a bit. There’s no shame in that, in fact, I find it commendable that they’re at least considering it, and I thank them for doing so.

Destiny’s Edge is a guild, and it consists of only 6 members (including Garm).

How would you fit what Elemental Surge does in a single tooltip? It seems to behave differently for each individual skill.

The idea is great. I also love the fact that there’s a story that slowly progresses.

My only problem with it is that I have to rely on wiki to see what’s actually changing, and that I have to go out for another momento…I’m just well, missing the info ingame.

I’ve been moving towards celestial items while upgrading to ascended gear and if anything, I’m getting more and more impressed with the damage my elementalist is doing. The trick is to know what to compare it with. A melee warrior will of course do more, but a rifle engineer has a very similar damage output compared to an ele. How is the longbow faring?

Well, seeing as how the staff ele gets water combo fields that can affect way more than the 5-people per aoe limit, I’d say the elementalist provides the most healing….provided people know how to properly make use of it.

Chaosky.5276:

The GoEP helps, but staff damage is still quite unreliable with it.

You do realize that the glyph activates based on the attunement it was cast in, not the attunement you are in when it triggers?

Sure, not every skill will hit…but you’ll hit a lot more often than without it.

…what about the guild mission unlock?

‘cause I’ve been doing some calculations, and, considering our 30+ active members that generates about 1000 influence a day…

…we will have to play for almost a year, without using any bounties or influence items, to unlock all the guild content.

Is that grinding, or is that something else?

Probably not in te literal sense of the word, but really, playing a year just to be able to play something…that’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?

Miss Pink Floyd.9730:

It would be great if the slots were universal, that way we could customize them to our liking.

They already are. Just look at:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mighty_Infusion
and
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Versatile_Mighty_Infusion

What I would like to know is why this complicated system, which causes extra work for Anet and confusion to players, when the endresult is still that any infusion can be put into any slot?

Go around Rata Sum and talk to the Asura there. They should give you a pretty good idea what everything’s about.

Indeed. Kinda more or less my point.

If anything, I hope they don’t add extra levels to the cap. It wouldn’t do anything other than add a chore for a week, but it would be a balance nightmare.

Just look at what happened in World of Kittencraft. At some point, the number of skill points gained per level had to be reduced because players got too close not having all skills instead of a build. And then they made levelling faster because getting up there took too long…

…seriously, it won’t do anyone any favors. It only creates an illusion of progress and a stupid bunch of problems.

The thing I liked above all in Guild Wars 1 was the fact that, instead of using stereotypical fantasy content, ArenaNet added Factions and Nightfall. It was so new, so refreshing! The African culture in particular of course, but Factions had its own twist of Asian styled things…with the Stone Forest and the Jade Sea, not to mention the huge city. I mean, how many RPGs play in a city?

If anything, it was bold and innovative…and if NCsoft banned it for political reasons, that would make sense. They also forced gear threadmills and gated content on us.

It all makes sense now. Standard management tactics. People with not idea what they’re on about make all the wrong decisions. Happens all the time.

If they truly wanted Guild Wars 2 to become a succes, they’d stop interfering and let the ArenaNet crew do it’s job. All they should do, is collect the cash that would be generated.

But they’d rather be poor than admit they’re wrong.

I have another one:

Why have you chosen to go with offensive and defensive slots, rather than generic slots?

It seems to me it only adds extra work for you since you have to add each item twice. And players can get all types of stats for both slots, even if the opposite stat combinations are way more expensive. But it does add a layer of complexity and confusion.

EDIT: This is not meant as trolling. I’m genuinely curious.

Glasses also show hair. And I like these items.

EDIT: How can that be armor? There’s nothing there to actually protect the character…was gonna say wearing it, but she’s not wearing anything. there are piercings that cover more!

Seriously…how can you guys not like these? The hoodies look awesome!

Oglaf.1074:

ThiBash.5634:

Thanks for adding the new townclothes. They’re awesome! One question though…why is the designer skin 400 gems and the others 200?

But seriously, I love ’em!

Why are designer clothes twice(yeah right. try eight times!) the price of your Wal-Mart clothes?

Well, accroding to a recent developer reply it has something to do with a more complex skin. But to be honest, I don’t care much. They look awesome.

Baladir.2736:

Oh wow. I never tried or even thought of that. So, if I cast Frozen Ground and then cast Arcane Blast, a projectile finisher, I get an aoe Chill effect on every mob in a 1500 radius! Is the duration of the finisher 2 seconds, the same as the original chill from Frozen Ground?

Sadly, it will only work on the mob you’re targetting. You could try Arcane Wave though, and get that neat Frost Aura on yourself.

Stoning is nice, though I like shockwave followed by stoning. It’s fewer stacks of weakness (reduced damage and endurance regen), but is another projectile finisher and immobilizes them in the Ice Field for more chill (or they’re forced to use a cleanse).

You’re correct. I’m not sure why I missed that. Good one.