Guild Wars 2

Tyler Bearce.3427:

There is no matchmaking in Hot Join (PvP Browser) matches. Matchmaking only exists in tournament matches, and it is based on your rating (a hidden value), not your Rank.

Let’s look at this from a solo player’s perspective.

So hot join gives us completely random fights and we just keep getting new ones until we leave.

Tournaments give us fights that are around our skill level. If we win, we get a reward. If we don’t, not a big deal.

From the perspective of a solo player who doesn’t care whether or not they are the best (and hence, if they get paired with a bad team, it’s not that big of a deal as they aren’t losing anything in the long run), isn’t it generally a better idea to do tournaments than hot join?

Benefits of hot join:
- Not counted towards your own ranking (which the player I described above wouldn’t care about)
- Can continue on without having to wait

Benefits of tournament:
- Match accustomed to your skill level
- Get reward if you win

As sPvP becomes more popular (both due to these tournament changes and eventually due to further upcoming sPvP changes), tournaments will likely have a very short, if any, wait time.

It seems like hot join will become pretty pointless, unless hardcore sPvPers, who are potentially more skilled than the average person in hot join, want to practice sPvP without potentially screwing up their tournament ranking. Hence we get more and more people who are highly skilled PvPers being put up against, although random, people that are often, on average, not as skilled as them.

Overall, these changes are for the better, but there definitely seem to be some… for the lack of a better term, holes in the system in regards to the aforementioned.

I assume you’re talking about bunker D/D eles. 0/10/0/30/30 with soldiers+cleric gear.

CC and conditions. Immobilize and poison especially – quite deadly to us. Also, right when we start using our water attunement heals, chill us. It’s a lot more helpful if you have a reliable way to consistently reapply it, as our condition removal is quite good.

Most D/D eles all use a very similar, pretty predictable rotation (or numerous rotations). Learn them, learn when to dodge, and destroy them.

For more information, there’s already a thread about this. Use the search function.

Intigo, were you using -40% condition duration food?

Interesting build. FYI, I’ve heard numerous people report that on-crit and on-swap sigils share the same cooldown, and thus one can’t be triggered while the other is on cooldown.
There’s also a somewhat similar bug covered briefly by the wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil_of_Battle

There’s one huge problem with wanting GW2 to have the same quantity of activities that GW1 offers:

How long GW1 has been out: 2858 Days

How long GW2 has been out: 177 days

Guild Wars 1 is more than sixteen times the age of Guild Wars 2.

It’s my opinion that the main objective with this change is to encourage larger zergs to split up into numerous smaller zergs.

Why? Because it’s a good strategy. It often leads to better coverage and better defense. PUGs often tend to gravitate towards one, or perhaps maybe two large zergs in a single borderlands. Splitting up into smaller zergs is and has always been, at the very least in many scenarios, a better strategy. Splitting up into smaller zergs is how you beat a single larger enemy zerg.

There are a couple problems with this change, though. The most blatant one is that 25 is too high. By setting this number to 25, they are essentially telling us that 24 or lower is a small zerg. For many servers, often even the higher tiers, this is not the case. I would feel much more comfortable if the number was 10-15, and I imagine that others would feel more comfortable with a smaller number as well.

The other problem is that the number of players that makes up a small zerg is often, on average, smaller on a lower tier server than on a higher tier server. While 5 will often give little to no advantage (to what is deemed as sizable zergs) no matter the tier, 25 might wherein that, while 25 is a small zerg in T1, it may be a large zerg in T8. They can lessen the impact of this difference between tiers by simply lowering the number of people it takes to make orange swords, as I’ve already said – ideally from 25 to 10-15.

Shock the market, eh?

My first two guesses would be that either they’re making precursors account bound, and a lot easier to get, or they are going to be doing one or more things that are going to drastically increase the supply of precursors on the market, thus causing the price to drop.

Cynical.2097:

Rookni.2469:

Wont affect me. I am DD, but I am not a forum guide PVT DD!

It will effect you. They are nerfing the D/D setup.

They are nerfing D/D bunker. They feel that it’s slightly OPd, although they are aware that it’s as strong as it is primarily because you have many small boosts that, when combined, make you… well, slightly more powerful than they’d like to see.

They’ve also said that they are aware some of the ele weapons/builds are more lackluster than they’d like them to be, therefore implying they are planning on buffing them a bit.
(There’s also the mysterious AoE nerf that has not yet been done.)

Anyhow, I agree with Windwalker. Let’s wait and see exactly what the patch notes do before we come to any conclusions.

They are already working on a LFG tool. They’ve said it’ll be usable for more than just dungeons.

It’s not a bug, and I don’t believe it’s related to the quality of the code.

It’s a non-trivial game design issue that they haven’t had the time to fully address as of yet.

The biggest problem is that there is an NPC that follows the dungeon starter (not the party leader, as some have suggested, but the player that starts the dungeon). Similar to the personal story, the person that starts the dungeon is essentially who the dungeon is created for. There just happen to be four other people with them. This is most noticeable in the cut scenes, where the dungeon starter and only the dungeon starter is talking with the NPC.

It’s not the easiest problem to solve, as it ideally requires an elegant solution. Do they switch to another person and make that person the one that the dungeon talks with and what-not if the original person leaves? What if no one in the party has the dungeon? What if they just use the entire party, or a random person, in the cut scenes?

These are just some possibilities, but it’s not a small nor trivial game design change, and thus it will take a bit of time. I’m sure it’s on their priority list as something to address, but, as of now, we don’t know how long it will be. We can’t expect it to be a quick fix, no matter how frustrating and seemingly trivial the issue seems.

I think it was either the first or second guildwars2guru state of the game where the developer, talking with some players from spvp teams, said that dueling was on their priority list. While he said that it wouldn’t be implemented in the upcoming major spvp patch, he seemed to imply that it was one of the priorities to come soon after that. Whether dueling will be for spvp only or not, I don’t know.

Does ride the lightning drop the orb, or is it slowed (it isn’t normally affected by slows)?

Most random numbers generated by computers, especially by games, are, in actuality, only psuedo-random.

For more information about that, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator

But basically, the psuedo random number generators use a seed to generate a random number. The most efficient way to get a seed is just to use the computer’s system time (or a variation that still, in some way, uses the time).

It doesn’t make sense that any server-sided mechanic would use the client’s system time for pretty much anything, especially something as integral as the RND system. While it may be (a lot) more difficult to exploit than one may initially imagine, if someone is able to find a specific time slot wherein RND appears to be consistently higher, it could be used to exploit the system, i.e. get constantly high loot rates.

tl;dr Yes, computers use the system time to help generate random numbers. No, it (hopefully) isn’t your computer’s time – it’s the server’s time.

Quick Mouse.7635:

Earth magic has the combo field FINISHERS. Staff (earth attunement) has 3 finishers on it.

This. To elaborate, the developers have said that they prefer that a single attunement does not have both combo fields and finishers. This is, as we all know, not always the case, but it is what they prefer. Earth is where they most prefer to give us combo finishers.

You said it all really well, and I couldn’t agree with you more. I really want to use D/F rather than D/D, but it just plain is far from viable in WvW. I have put together a pretty viable build in sPvP, but it’s mostly single target and the lack of oh so many things – damage, mobility, aoe, etc – just make it frustratingly non-viable for WvW.

Astralporing.1957:

We don’t really know what “more” means. It may be old combinations, it may be something new, it may be both. Time will tell.

…how much time, we don’t know either.

“More” was a term I personally used while paraphrasing, the dev post made on the forums specified further, as I attempted to do.

If someone that knows what I’m talking could post a link to that exact post, that’d be extremely helpful.

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/
They can help you. None of the community members nor the forum staff (based on previous responses given to people with this exact issue) can help you.

The dev did say in another thread recently that they all new and current ascended gear will have more stat combinations than are currently available. If I remember correctly, “more” means both new combinations and old combinations, e.g. cleric, that ascended does not currently have.

FYI, dueling is on their pvp to do list, though it’s somewhat below their current spvp priorities that they will be implementing in february and/or march. I don’t know if dueling will be possible only in the mists, or also in pve/wvw. This is coming from a state of the game video that one of the devs did with numerous other well known, presumably skilled spvp teams.

And most importantly, once it’s possible to purchase the tonic, how many people do you think will come on the forums QQing about how it’s not worth 100 laurels?

Update on score…

AFK.1854:

JQ’s recruiting effort was like getting a penile implant on your penile implant on your penile implant.

More like a “buy 1 implant get 2 free” offer that wasn’t told to you until after the surgery was complete.

Charr RN.9860:

SmokeyNYY.7841:

Man is JQ not allowed to play during the weekends or something? The difference is astounding.

Im thinking Conspiracy… JQ is trying to manipulate the reset scores. I don’t see the usual amount of AoS, PRX, and EMP tags. In my mind there is no way SOR can be doing this well. Now I wonder why SOS isnt doing more?

If I am remembering everything correctly, this is the first match where SoS is head-on fighting the entirety of JQ post-transfer. Last week they didn’t try that hard due to resets, and the week before we hadn’t got all our transfers in.

JQ has always done poorer over the weekend.

That being said, I wish the abnormal queue issues aren’t as problematic as they currently are. We probably won’t have a full-on rematch for at least a month, which sucks. This has been an excellent matchup from all angels. Props to all three servers.

They have released an update this month that supposedly improved culling issues, but many are reporting the opposite. That being said, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. They are still working on many more things in order to fix the deeper issues.

There is a large WvW update coming later this month, so it may not be all that far-fetched to assume that culling will be further improved this month, though it’s far from being certain.

Here’s a little write up I did a little while ago, based on what the devs have already said, that explains the culling issue and what they’re doing to fix it:

What is culling?: ArenaNet’s servers only have so much bandwidth. When a player’s data is sent to your client, it uses some of their bandwidth. When you receive data about a player, it uses some of your bandwidth AND some of your computer’s resources, mainly in regards to the CPU/GPU and RAM.

To conserve bandwidth on both their and our end as well as to conserve computer resources on our end (primarily when there are many dozens of players around us), they only send our game clients data for some of the players. Thus we only see some of the players on our screen, even though there are technically more players around us… we just can’t visually see them. This is called culling.

How are they fixing culling?: There are numerous factors they have to deal with. Bandwidth sent by them to us and resources used by our clients. They have programmers that are currently working on all of these factors. I imagine that they are currently both bug testing and tuning it. They have to re-factor and further optimize much of the core of both the server and client to do this as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Their goal is to eliminate culling, though some people (with poor computers and/or poor internet connections) may or may not still experience culling, though hopefully not anywhere near as bad as we are currently experiencing it. This will first be applied to WvW, and hopefully either at the same time or some time after that, to PvE as well.

I further modified this to make it more tanky, though I took out a lil bit of the damage potential to do so. http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k3c;0J0B2-U0-57N-Z0;9;5J-TJ;150;204A45-5w0;0w0-PcW5PcW56NG

I personally enjoyed playing this more than the former build. Lots of fun!

There was a thread about this recently. A dev replied that the phone app has been put on a temporary hold while they work on more important things. In other words, no one is working on it at the moment, but it’s still on the to do list.

Rezzing NPCs in certain areas is a lot faster than doing this. That being said, I did do it to help a guildy and I have been killing myself off of that vista long before it was ever in any way helpful. IMO, falling and dying on top of or near a bunch of people is fun.

Learn where our CCs are and how they work. Earth #5 is a very nice AoE blind.

Learn our combo finishers+fields. This is important in general, but many people disregard underwater combat even though it got a somewhat recent (in december I think?) patch to add a lot more finishers/fields for underwater combat.

Earth is our only decent consistent condition damage underwater. So if you’re condition damage, take note. And if you’re not, don’t bother with earth (the autoattack at least).

Lightning #1 is our best autoattack if – and only if – you can land all 3 projectiles on a single enemy. This usually requires you to be at least at mid range.
If you can’t land all 3 projectiles, water #1 is our best auto attack.

Water #5 has extraordinary OP’d damage. It’s just very, very difficult to land even some of the hits. Using your environment and CCing helps, and practice makes perfect.

Water #4 grants aoe regen if I recall correctly. It’s always useful to know where your heals are.

I don’t really enjoy underwater combat, but, if I must do it, I usually do just fine.

They want it to take longer than it does for exotics. Apparently they want it to take a month per piece. The fact that it takes less to get it from a method that not only is more difficult, but also may give you a ring with stats you don’t prefer, is something to think about, but it’s not that bad.

Does the monthly really only give 10, though? I was thinking it’d give 15-20. Where have the devs said this? The monthly for this month wasn’t supposed to give any laurels.

II am also getting this issue as of the roughly last few days or so. I am on Windows 8. It usually takes up about 750mb of RAM and, when it is in my processes, I can not open up another launcher successfully (it also goes in my processes but nothing ever shows up).

When the master volume is 0, all of the “bugged” sounds still come through.

By bugged sounds, I mean those abnormal, very loud sounds that are akin to the siren bug, but only last for a second or two. Sometimes it’s just the start of an ability’s sound, occasionally it’s an NPC talking, and occasionally it’s the siren. I was standing in lions arch with 0 master volume and ONLY heard these very loud bugged sounds.

I hear these even when my master volume is higher than 0, but they become a lot more evident when my master volume is 0. Maybe this will make debugging all of this, especially the siren sound, a bit more easily.

(On a somewhat similar note, someone said that the siren noise was almost constantly reproducible by having three people spam the unbreakable bell inside of a time warp.)

I don’t understand the current grenth encounter. I’ve done grenth several times and never noticed the mechanic where you randomly get teleported into the air and then fall and die. I was killing a few shades when all of a sudden, no warning from anywhere, I got ported into the air and fell and instadied. It made no sense, and I’ve never seen a mechanic in this game like that prior to this incident. That’s how the majority of people I was killing grenth with died as well.

Pretty nice build, gj. I made some adjustments that I feel may further improve it: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k3c;2B2-U0v4-N-Z0;9;5T-JJ;1508;104-45-5o0;3sV2DsV2D6kJ

- Changed the glyph heal to the signet heal. D/F has roughly the fastest (in terms of ability / second) rotation out of any weapon set that elementalists have. The signet has per-ability heal, and will work very well with D/F.

- Changed air training to Zephyr’s Boon. Instead of the 10% extra air damage, you now gain swiftness and fury on each aura. You have a fire aura, shocking aura, and if you use magnetic leap inside a fire field, another fire aura.

- I changed berserker’s jewel to valkyrie’s jewel. The extra toughness is nice and the extra healing power is nice as well, especially considering we’re using the signet of restoration now. The loss in precision means 4% less base crit rate, but this is more than made up by the fact that we have zephyr’s boon.

FYI, it appears to most consistently work if you kill a mob with your own combo finisher inside an ally’s combo field.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

How annoying would it be if the player who created the guild switched servers and took the guild’s upgrades (incl. the bank) and influence with them?

That’s like saying to a child “How annoying would it be if your parents moved to a different house?” (Except that players aren’t forced to move.)

In the end, it’s the guild leader’s guild and thus it’s their decision to move the guild. While it may be slightly unfair to the player’s who gave their time to the guild if this happens, I do not think that it is unfair as, in the end, it’s the leader’s guild, and they can choose to be a tyrant if they want.

The leader could even kick all the members if they want. That situation would be very similar to if the guild leader moved and thus the guild members that didn’t move don’t get the upgrades, despite participating to help get them.

Also, as others have said, many guild leaders will discuss it with the rest of the guild or at least the higher-ranked members.

Allowing guild leaders to transfer upgrades seems like a very sensible option IMO.

Raging Soul Beta.6845:

The thing that kinda bothered me was your Fire 3 + 5 combo followed by arcane wave

Because Arcane wave is a blast finisher and it can boost the Fire grab dmg.

So it should be something like Fire 3 (u can pop arcane before the blast damage – since u r alrdy on the fire line – might increase dmg of fire 3) and only then fire 5.

Well that’s just how I see those things

I’d like to make it a point that using fire 3 + arcane wave occasionally doesn’t give might as the combo finisher aspect sometimes doesn’t go off.

This may be because, if I recall correctly, fire #3 creates numerous tiny fire fields as you move. I may be mistaken though, as I can’t clearly recall where I heard this. (Though the information must have seemed somewhat legit, as I usually don’t remember tidbits like this unless I think they are somewhat legit.)

Anyhow, if the above is true then it may be because if the tiny fire field wasn’t yet created under your feet, there would technically be no combo field for arcane wave to finish in. Because it happens quickly though, it’s not consistent and thus why it does sometime work.

Whether or not I’m mistaken, it’s buggy and I hope it’s on the list of things to address (at some point down the road… so, so many bugs.. everywhere).

plasmacutter.2709:

So they were aware of it and didn’t fix it.

Now they’re talking about nerfing the remaining trait lines that DO work.

Nice.

Maybe these guys left the company?

At the time, Karl was just QA. I recall someone at ArenaNet saying that he was promoted to a game designer, though. If any AN employee could confirm/correct me, it’d be appreciated.

While the match is far from over, and thus a lot could happen, here are my predictions of who will go where based on the current rankings:

- Sanctum of Rall are going to get to T1. This is probably the only thing that appears to be set in stone.

- Either Sea of Sorrows or Blackgate are going to drop to T2, and it could easily go either way.

- Either Fort Aspenwood or Kaineng are going to rise up to T2, and it could go either way. If Fort Aspenwood makes it, Kaineng will rise to T3.

- Either Stormbluff Isle or Dragonbrand are going to drop to T4, and it could go either way. If Dragonbrand drops, Stormbluff Isle will still drop to T3.

Heh, back during and prior to BWE’s, Karl was often considered as being the best ele in ArenaNet. It was amazing watching him play or people play against him – he was really, really good! Looking at this gameplay now, he seems worse than the current average ele. Of course, a good chunk of time has passed. I wonder how much he’s improved, hehe.

VOLKON.1290:

I heard on TS that if SoS comes in last BG would be safe and SoS could actually fall to fourth with SoR passing them into Tier 1… is this true? I’m not grasping the numbers fully in my head.

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA
The match is far from over, but if they continue exactly as they are, then it’s a possibility.

In general, pretty interesting match. It’s great to see BG improving, and hopefully they keep it up!
JQ has always done a great job at holding their own, but the population and coverage boost that we got from the transfers has been a nice help by allowing us to have a good shot at securing first place.

SoS used to have a lot more coverage and population during the weekend especially, as was often denoted by the score. JQ usually was capable to step it up once the weekend was over, as population was more balanced. With the transfers, numbers are more equal, and we get to really see how tough everyone is when we fight with similar numbers.

It’ll be a great fight for sure!

DXIEdge.2789:

…phoenix doesnt cleanse conditions anymore…

Yes it does. The tooltip says so, and after testing, it is not bugged – it still cleanses conditions.

Shlamorel.8714:

I find it hampers me sometimes too. Two instances I find that it hurts the most:

1. It can affect combos. Sometimes a queue can make my finisher go off to late, too early, or not at all, depending on the sequence of field > finisher.

2. Is it just me or can abilitiy queuing also affect your downed state? For example, I feel that I often activate mist form when downed because I had “2” queued before I got downed, even if I don’t hit 2 while downed. It seems that way anyway… it can truly be life or death in that case.

GW2 seems to have so many customizations in other areas of the game but unfortunately not in the options menu.

(Off topic but somewhat related – the graphics options are very limited; changing post processing for example changes bloom, outline on targets, lighting, etc. etc. I do wish there were more specific options).

2 is a known bug.

Random Jade Quarry player here! I’d just like to share my two cents.

I’ve seen lots of servers and had friends in other servers that were a super power in WvW because of certain guilds. The ride up to T1 and then the fall when the alliances/guilds break/move.

While I’m not in a WvW-centric guild at the moment, when I get the itch to play WvW, I always hop on the oh-so-useful community teamspeak. I feel as if I’m playing with an organized WvW guild.

If you are unfamiliar with Jade Quarry and were to ask which guilds are organized, which are experienced, which are responsible for keeping Jade Quarry in T1, the answer would be all of them. Jade Quarry is a community of quality people. Our strengths lie in not just certain guilds, but every single player out on the field.

The organization that this server (and not just any specific guild) has is amazing. The atmosphere is friendly with no trace of elitism. Everybody I’ve played WvW with respects everybody else despite whether that person or that person’s guild is well known or not. In general, people are helpful, they’re fun to play with and they bring a lot of skill and experience to the table.
Despite the fact that I’m not well known or in a well known guild, I still feel that my opinion is respected by both commanders and non-commanders.

If you make the switch to Jade Quarry, you won’t regret it. Whether you’re a single player or an entire guild, Jade Quarry is a stellar community to be a part of and I am so proud to say that Jade Quarry is my server.

December’s patch was was supposedly oriented around balance and we did not get very many changes at all. My expectations are quite low.

Habib Loew.6239:

wintermute.4096:

Any chance we might get a chance to the slightly awkward badges system we have right now? Moving the bags to the feet of the player is nice and all, but it doesn’t help much in a thick battle, and I’m sure most of the players actively engaged in wvw have had their share of lost bags. AFAIK, there once was an answer among the lines of “we don’t have the tech for that now”, but I can’t really see how this should prove to be unsolvable…

As a suggestion: Couldn’t we just get rewards based on a slightly modified monthly tracker? You know, the one that says “players killed in wvw” – just add an npc that hands out as many bags as the counter says and resets it back to zero.

In the beginning players killed NPCs and found loot on the NPC corpses. That setup is nice because it makes sense (gruesome sense, but still sense). If you kill a dude where is his stuff? In his pockets of course (see also: The Hobbit). If the corpse decayed then a bag was left behind so players would have one last chance to pick it up (it doesn’t hurt that rendering a bag is cheaper than rendering a high-poly character model.

Then WvW was born and players started killing players. At first we left the loot on the corpses as before but then a thousand player voices rang out and said “WTF man? I can’t jump down off this wall to get my loot because there’s like a hojillion enemy guys down there waiting to plant me like a tulip bulb!” or “WTF man? I can’t get up on top of that wall to get my loot because the whole point of a castle is that people can’t do that stuff!” We heard those pleas and, after some internal arguments (er, design discussions) we decided that realism could go suck it because getting loot is awesome.

So why did we put the bags at your feet rather than just dumping the items into your inventory? Part of the answer is that it was the smallest possible change that could work (programmers like stuff like that). We already had the bag spawning system so we could just reuse it. Another part of the answer is that picking up loot can be a bit like unwrapping a present and we didn’t want to ruin the unwrapping for everybody. Finally, if we just start putting loot into player inventory then we need to deal with a bunch of edge cases and at the time we had more pressing issues to work on. For example, when your inventory fills up items you receive go into inventory overflow and your character becomes encumbered. That makes you move really slowly and that didn’t seem like a nice thing to do to people in the middle of a fight. There were some others that I don’t recall off the top of my head, but suffice it to say there were some thorny design questions about the best way to handle it.

We have tossed around some ideas for ways to improve the system but it’s relatively low priority so nobody is actively working on it right now.

I could personally care less about missing loot bags for the most part, though what’s really frustrating is the medals that I miss when I don’t notice the loot bags (which happens very often). I really wish medals would just go into your bag or perhaps act as a currency similar to gold/karma so they don’t take up an inventory space, thus avoiding the encumbering issue.

It’s definitely frustrating when something is in the patch notes but it blatantly is wrong or doesn’t work or is broken. You’d think that, amongst all the QA they do, testing every single item on the patch notes would be part of that. It’s not like most of the patch notes are that large.

That being said, I’m quite familiar with how difficult QA is and how hard it can be to find very skilled and experienced QA peoples. Everyone, even developers and QA peoples, are only human.

- Evasive Arcana’s water dodge is a nice heal AND condition removal. I often use it right after attuning to water.

- Thieves have the annoying ability to teleport when downed, especially while you’re in the middle of finishing them. You can still get them with one finish though! Start finishing them, and get lightning flash ready. When the thief ports, lightning flash right on top of them. Practice will improve your timing, and good timing will allow you to kill the thief at their own game every single time.

TimeBomb.3427:

Cookie Cutter utility & trait setup (copy and paste the link):
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-k33;0J0R0-V0y47N-Z0;9;59-TT;10;328A45AG

You can modify numerous things to your preference:
- Change the heal
- Change Armor of Earth to Cleansing Fire
- Change the elite (not recommended)
- Remove 10 points from water or arcana and put into earth to get Earth’s Embrace (not really worth it IMO)
- Change Cantrip Mastery to Cleansing Wave
- Change Renewing Stamina to Final Shielding

For gear, you want to have good toughness and vitality. Aside from that, it’s your preference. I personally run cleric armor w/ PTV everything else. (I’m still working towards getting all the PTV though.) You want one dagger to have superior sigil of battle. (If you don’t have the gold for it, major sigil of battle is decent and a lot cheaper.)

Your rotation is as follows:
Fire #3 -> [Optional] Fire #2 -> Fire #5 -> Fire #4 -> [Optional] Earth #3 -> Earth #4 -> Earth #5 -> [Optional; Good idea, though] Air #3
You shouldn’t need to worry about using your full rotation against small amounts of normal mobs, but large groups of mobs or very strong mobs, i.e. bosses, you’ll want to use it.

Works well in PvE and WvW, though I haven’t played much SPvP.

Noid.2871:

EthanLightheart.9168

split pvp /pve skills

HELL NO! That was the worst thing that happened to GW1, and is right after ascended items on my “omg, they’re gonna break the game” scare list. It’s the perfect excuse to not balance PvE at all and just allow stupid overpowered kitty to exist. Ursan, Cry, Shadowform, for example. And because they were PvE-only, it took them a YEAR each to notice they were ruining the game and do something about it.
(Not implying Shadowform is fine now, but it was nerfed at least. And SoS is still unfixed, afaik.)

Do note that they are able to and have already split certain abilities for PvE and sPvP. They seem to try not to do it that much, though, which is good.

Definitely Twilight.