Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if it was stated already, but you can get pretty decent looking sets of skins for Badges of Honor in you servers WvW Borderlands. These skins can be applied directly to your low level gear and are mostly unique to WvW and look good (depending on tastes, of course). The skins range from 100-200 BoHs up to over 1000. You can get BoHs VERY quickly by hopping over to Edge of the Mists and joining your server’s Commanded group there. It shouldn’t take more than a half hour to get the 100 or so needed for a set of skins. The BoH vendors are to your right when you enter your Home Borderlands. Hope this helps. Good luck and welcome to GW2.

*I don’t recall ever playing an MMO that offered ‘epic’ looking gear options within the first hour of play. Perhaps dial down the unreasonable expectations and focus more on learning how to play the game first. It only takes a couple of weeks to level to 80 playing casually. At level 11, “Is this the best I can expect?”, seems very silly to me tbh.

Chill only affects CDs while it’s active, so for every 1 second of Chilled, the CD takes an extra 2 secs to tick. It doesn’t just directly change the numbers like your first question implies. Also, note that it is very strong against mobility too. Chilled+a bit of ‘AoE bait’ is a great way to force dodges to setup for a burst. Chilled will also slow down the Ele’s attunement recharges. Try to survive one ‘rotation’ until they leave water, then hit them with it and cover it asap. A DD Ele would probably rather have to deal with any other condition (or even a couple) in the game besides Chilled. It’s a huge pita for them. Access to it isn’t super common though so use it wisely. Hope this helps.

AND he has a Ranger pet!!! O.o

Confirmed: New ‘Light Armor, Pistol/Warhorn+bad AI’ Thief Specialization will be a /fail.

‘Heroes of Old’ mini collection with a host of mini heroes from GW1. Koss, Zenmai, Livia, etc.

Chameleon paintjobs for our toons? Can we get some 20" spinning rims too plz?

Shoots and Laughters

I said this instantly after the Rev preview but I don’t recall the thread. We still haven’t seen what DPs and Support have up their sleeves though.

Yeah Bell, I read ‘Funniest’ the first time too. Was gonna point to the YouTube series “Guild Wars 2 This is why we hate…”. 10 minutes you can’t regret. Lol.

Even though I only blame a badly made match. One time I (Necro), an Ele, and a Mesmer actually won a 3v5. Started 4v5, but about 30 secs into the match our forth said “this is pointless” and left. Was on Niflhel. The opposing rage in map chat was funny and sad at the same time.

I play Power Necro but condi can be just as effective with his strategy. First of all let me point out that I PvP, so open spaces in WvW or getting caught off guard can be a bit trickier but still is achievable following the same method. So far you’ve listed everything that I’m not talking about. Scepter, daggers, deathshroud, and or off hands are NOT the ‘longest range attacks and are all futile. As long as you see the Ranger and aren’t ambushed, STAFF (which should be on every Necrosis bar for the utility and other good stuff in XvX node fights) is your go-to for turning the tides in this matchup to your favor.

As soon as you see the Ranger, immediately swap to staff. Start running toward him. His first couple of attacks are gonna be autos to try to get you to burn dodges (and make sure you’re in a good range, so he can open up with Rapid fire. Dodge forward through the first Long Range shot, be prepared to possible eat a second one. By now you should be right at about 1000-1100 range. This is where you want to get to. AS SOON as you come out of the dodge roll, drop Chillblains immediately followed by Putrid Mark right on top of the Ranger. Chillblains will create a Poison combo field and Putrid Mark is a blast finisher. The mean that the Ranger will have Poison, Chill AND Weakness on them for a moment as you continue to advance toward them. At this point, they will mostliky try to use RF which will have much less affect or they use one of there defensive abilities or possible Barrage. You should be well within 900ish range by now and dropping Reapers Mark (and then swapping weapons)to interrupt any of these skills in order to close the rest of the gap and get in his face in order to force more panic play, or at least, even the odds. Also, not that any of those skills are gonna be affected by Chill and Weakness and also that Poison is gonna be detrimental to a LB Ranger at the start of the fight, b/c all the counters he will have to this approach are not something he wants to have to use in the first 10 seconds of the fight, BUT now you’ve turned the fight around and it is, at least fair if not much in your favor depending on what kind of spec you’re running. If scepter, you can now Cripple the ranger and his pet. Locust swarm to build LF and keep then in your control. Enfeebling Board for another large area weakness to counter the Ranger Great sword that might come out next.etc.

My apologies for this wall of texts but I truly helps you in the future.

I am Tman, Guild Leader of Violence Is Passion [ViP]
Aka. Razing The Dead

Good luck and say “HI!” If we ever happen to run into each other! /wave

It’s not "more difficult than I’d think " b/c I wreck them all the time.

I never mentioned scepter though…

Necroes have tools against pewpew rangers too. Just FYI. Most necrosis just don’t know what they are or how to use them. But yeah lb ranger will wreck most necros.

Yes Carlin, that’s exactly whit I’m saying. In the context of the function of how GW2s weapons work, a 2h Axe would bring absolutely nothing to the table that Hammer or Greatsword don’t already provide. Except maybe “hey that looks cool” which is why I propose a skin but flagged as a GS or hammer, similar to the slingshot/short bow deal. This is no different that requests for crossbows, or the please for ranger to get pistols or rifles. Use you very matter and plz explain, in the context of GW2’s skills, kitten would these additions actually ADD to the existing skill set. And Noe contrived skills a cool animations won’t cut it.

Conditions are fine except in two areas of the game. In fact, they excellent in the others. The problem areas are zerg events where you have a ton of other allies and/or a timer which makes me wonder why you’d be running ‘damage over time’, when the sheer numbers makes attrition completely silly and nothing more than a roleplay. The other is dungeons where people want to clear things quickly and question you motives as a ‘team player’ who makes the conscious choice that they’d like to kill things slowly. Use conditions where they’re effective and use power where it is effective/needed. OK. Now that we’ve got past the psychological inistantce of PHIW and using the wrong builds for the wrong content, we can agree that conditions are fine.

Yes add two-handed Great-Axe please and well try to pretend that it’s not exactly like the greatsword fundamentally as far as skills and usage are concerned. Or, much like the Slingshot, just make it as a skin and flag it as a Great sword, since, mechanically, the would be absolutely identical. Mmkay thank. This is kinds like the ’give Rangers Pistols and/or rifles nonsense that comes up every two weeks tbh.

Give us access to Nomad’s please….and then nerf it.

Opening dialogue in AC as Nike pointed out first. Been my fave for 2.5 yes now. Nothing else comes close.

Special recognition to the hilarious Asura personal story though.

*Select Vigil for you Engi….stupid autocorrect…mah

Select Vigil on you Engine, buy the stuff you want for your Guardian, mystc forge the items and sell the results to make some coin back. Then transmute the skins over to your Guardian. Otherwise, no, I don’t think so. The gear you get from them is just rare quality with bad stats anyway so you should only be getting them for the skins. Good luck.

Some life blast or BiP can even give Power a bit of condi pressure with good timing of my transfers.

Don’t forget about Putrid mark as well. This combined with Deathly Swarm makes condi Necro nearly impossible to lose against another condi in a 1v1 fight. Especially when used right before a Fear. Lure the condi clears/stun breaks then hit them with Deathly Swarm (transfer tracks to multiple targets) and follup up with Terror traited Reapers mark. 5-7k damage the can do thing about. These are fendementals tactics of playing a Terrormancer. This also works for me as a Powermancer. Although I don’t have the condi pressure it can still set them up for an incoming burst. It’s a bit unconventional to run offhand dagger but a good condi transfer followed by AoE weakness has saved my but many times when starting with 0 LF.

For those that are under the false impression of how GW2 aggro mechanics work which is based off lots of first hand testing off what I and others found consistent. Quite a while ago. The wiki was then updated after I spelled out the basic mechanics and suggested the wiki explanation should be updated. We have nothing more than anecdotal "well, this one time’ kind of statements to imply any of this has changed drastically. No other CCs change this and taunt or ‘tanks’ won’t change this.

There’s already a ‘strange fortune change’ in the works called Heart of Thorns. Shoot! You can stay now! Or is it that you like the losing really b/c it makes that one time that you win that much more of a rush? This is one of the psychological problems with gambling tbh. People will waste $2000 and then think they ‘won’ when they finally hit that $1000 pot. O.o So far you’ve spent what 1300 gold or more gambling for a Pre that costs less than 1000? Will you gamble another 1000 before it finally drops? Or do you think "OK! It HAS to drop this next time?

It alters the ‘effectiveness of Fury’. A 50% increase in effectiveness for a total of +30% crit chance from the Fury boon.

We haven’t seen what the Power line or other Legends have in store for us yet, but I’m already predicting 4/4/0/0/6 Berserker Revenant will be very good and highly survivable still. The amount of passives (in the two DPS lines we can see ATM) they already have shown is looking pretty ridiculous from a PvE standpoint.

Uhm..because that “+70% critical chance increase from fury trait” is really only +30%.

So..you original argument got blown to bits so you decided that making convoluted, contrived appeals to semantics so you can be stubborn and think you were right all along? No! A tank isn’t just someone that mitigates a bit of damage and slaps some control effects on enemies. That’s defensive support at best. There is absolutely no such thing as a tank role if you can’t reliably maintain high aggro priority in order to keep any allies from ever being the target of attacks in the first place. Otherwise, you’re just a guy that can take a bunch of hits to the face…not a tank. With Renewing Stamina, my full glass, might-stacking D/D Else can mitigate a LOT of damage, but I would never be silly enough to call that a tank. She can even be traited to share Protection to allies and still..no dice.

If you think your going to wear a bunch of defensive armor and tank for your team with this new Taunt effect (not looking to have much access to it either) then I would strongly recommend learning a bit about how GW2 prioritizes aggro. You’ll be sorely disappointed. This is only a control skill as has already been repeated at you a couple dozen times.

“Oh my Ranger friend is down and pet is healing but he’s about to get stomped? Here, have some Taunt and then get wrecked!” These are the kind of scenarios that taunt is gonna shine. There’s not gonna be any glorious Nomad’s moments where you pull 50 mobs to you and hold them for a nuke and save the day, riding off into the sunset after a proper /bow from your party. It’s just not gonna happen.

You’d think that’d be the case Dream. What you have to understand though, is that people want to be special and diverse and unique by copying exactly what every other game does… :/ It kinda reminds me of the ‘goths’ from hi school. “Hey, dye your hair and buy some black clothes so you can join our ‘individuality group’!” O.o I’m at a loss…

Spire of the Sunless looks so nice on my Necro with Marjory’s Daggs. <3

Knight and Tefkan, great couple of posts to prove that this is a psychological deal that’s stems from the tunnel vision so many people have acquired from years of previous trinity MMOs. Everyone needs to have their specific, specialized role where I only need to be good at that one thing and someone else will do the other things for me and, if they’re not capable, we’ll wipe, start over, and it can be all their fault. So many players still haven’t accepted that one of GW2’s primary tenants was/is to do away with that notion completely. So many still can’t fathom and haven’t made the jump to accepting that their are no roles to define yourself as in GW2. There’s no bragging rights for “I’m the best ‘X role’ in the game bro!”. Everyone is responsible for every roll. You’re designed to be self-sefficient in the context of cooperative group play. You’re a good general player and capable of doing all the roles simultaneously, or you’re probably making ‘We need a Trinity’ threads.

The above comments about giving ‘tanks’ (we don’t have those) stats to make their CC stronger and giving ‘support roles’ (healers? we don’t have those either) stats to reduce and counter damage to allies are based on the assumptions that every profession doesn’t have access to these things for themselves (this is false) and that the name of the prefix of you gear determines what you can/should do in a party combat scenario (also false).

Every profession is designed to fulfill every aspect of combat independently while still being effective in group dynamics. Healer? Everyone has self heals and weaker party support heals. Tank? Everyone has dodges and personal damage mitigation (ie. Active Defenses) as well as less powerful forms of party damage mitigation (think proactive here instead of reactive like trinity models). Control? Everyone has access to some form of hard or soft crowd control. Damage? Everyone is capable of inflicting both physical and condition damage. When everyone in the group takes personal responsibility for all these things, combat is very dynamic. (AI arguments aside.)

Gear stats are a personal, passive offense/defense slider scale. They determine how much of direct and condition damage you want to do and how much passive defense you need to survive encounters. Everything else about your ‘role’ is determined by your build, not your gear stats. Builds include specific weapon selections, Runesets, Sigils, trait distributions, utility skills, and profession mechanics where they apply. Those are the things that matter in the context of party dynamics. The Meta uses Berserker’s and Sin’s gear because, with proper usage of active defenses, party utility, and mob control, they have the highest potential output for clearing content. That’s just logical; if your group synergy/skill level allows you to completely avoid taking damage with the game’s mechanics, then you should strive to output your maximum damage in that context.

I see a lot of people saying they love this game, but then say they just want to drastically alter it in the same breathe. I think it really comes down to being hung up on what they’ve encountered before in other games and, therefore, not appreciating what GW2 does outside of that mold and accepting the game on it’s own terms.

*Gear prefixes are just words. They don’t have any intrinsic meaning. Please don’t get so hung up on arbitrary words. We could easily just have the Devs change the name of the Pow/prec/fer prefix to ‘Super Uber Battletank OP Heelz’ and the placebo effect would be quite strong I think.

I’ll be here all week folks…

I do appreciate that that scenario appealed to someone who wants more diverse, dynamic combat for the sake of GW2 though. Hehehe…

Lol! Hehehehe…you’re right Knight, they don’t need to do all of that.

Oh, and so nobody feels left out, after some balancing, we could alter conditions to unload their full damage instantly (exactly like direct damage O.o) but we could call it bleed and burning damage so all the snowflakes could feel speshul (in their own minds) and their ‘damage over time’ skills would finally compete with direct damage.

We could even take it a step further and give every piece of equipment Celestial stats but they could all keep their current roleplay names b/c in GW2, like every other previous MMO that people have been used to, gear stats/names=build/role.

One possible solution to this perceived ‘problem’ (I won’t go to much into how this whole deal is 100% purely psychological): (PvE only) leave the current game the way that it is and give every profession a GM trait in the toughness line that instantly and passively procs Taunt on all enemies in range with 100% uptime and a GM trait in the vitality line that increases outgoing healing by 10,000%. This way, all the PHIW can run their roleplaying trinity setups with a healer standing still at range spamming water fields, a tank standing still in the middle of a group of mobs spamming shield block skills and their 3 Damagers standing next to the enemies spamming skills off cooldown. This would also allow the full Meta groups to continue using the games mechanics to keep themselves alive, offensively and defensively support their allies, control enemies, and do high amounts of damage in order to complete content efficiently with the tools the game was designed with/for. The traits, I admit, are a bit contrived, but so is this whole argument. It’s a win/win for everyone.

Protection is calculated after armor reduction.
Condition duration is calculated before duration reduction. (No the don’t cancel each other out.)
+% damage modifiers are calculated after power/critical calculations and are calculated multiplicatively.

In general base calculations are gonna be done before modifiers and personal calculations are done before enemy calculations (conditions durations for example.)

Before last April’s patch we had ‘Steady State’ Weapons in Heart of the Mists that had specific damage values (without a range) that allowed for much more consistent data sets for testing various mechanics and for minmaxing of theoy-crafting in the Mists, but for some reason this where removed.

Also, make sure to belittle people and tell them they suck and need to learn how to play, in a sarcastic manner, in order to improve veteran/noob relations in the hope of a better future for the PvP community :/

I see people concerned about Sigils of Energy with the synergy of this trait, but I’m curious how the on-swap Sigils are gonna be able to work on Rev exactly. From what I see, they have no way at all to swap weapon skillsets (how Engi and Ele can pull this off) to make them proc. Swapping Legends isn’t exactly the same and only changes the utilities. Also, when swapping Legends, their built up Energy pool goes back to 50% so trying to abuse this trait might not be as beneficial in the course of a fight as some people are assuming. The adept minor trait is pretty good though considering they don’t appear to have any other Vigor.

What I’m mostly excited about, based on what we’ve seen so far, is how ridiculous berserker Rev is looking to be. I’m guessing something like 4/4/0/0/6 is gonna be a really nice setup. Fury gives +30% Crit Chance!?! O.O sounds nummy. Not to mention Rev is looking to have on of the most survivable zerker builds in the game. Soooo much passive…

There is one cloth node but it’s a Gemstore item for home instance (once per day) and gives random T1/2/3 cloth drops, so it really isn’t reliable for just Jute. If you have a spare character slot, you can roll an alt (Scholar preferably) and farm for low level cloth armor or open you SW champ bags on them. You could also use the Karma/MF trick. None of these options will be better than using a reliable gold farming methods on an 80 and just buying the Jute though.

Yeah Blind is a terrible comparison and I don’t see the connection at all tbh.

I would assume a specific skill like Balanced Stance might be changed to something like ’you’re immune to CC for X seconds’ and maybe have the duration slightly reduced. That is the point of this specific skill after all.

With that said, I still think this will be an interesting change to stability and will add some nice opportunities for some epic saves in PvP from ‘stab stomps’. Downed player uses their rupt to peel the stack of stability so necro ally can fear or Mesmer hits with Diversion etc. I think we all know the players are gonna come up with interesting uses of new mechanics that the Devs won’t anticipate and game balance will be out the window for the first couple weeks or so. Necro+Mallyx Revenant duo condi bombs anyone? :/

“Options are good. There’s not only one way to do things guys! That’s why I believe Anet needs to ‘fix’ their game by implementing forced roles like every other MMO ever has done.”

What a silly, contradictory thought process… :/

yeah i already though of that one too. make sure you pop stability first though. we’re having mesmer speculation though ;p

A lot of people seem to be completely confusing or misreading what was said about how this will work.

“…a Taunted enemy will run toward THEIR target and begin to attack…”

If YOU are NOT the one already targeted by the enemy, then you are not gonna get attacked. This IS NOT an aggro mechanic in any way. It can’t even be mistaken for a psuedo-aggro mechanic. It doesn’t say, “a taunted for will run toward YOU (the caster”. It, very clearly, states the enemy will go toward it’s already selected target. It is a status effect with a similar but opposite mechanic to Fear. Just because you’re targeting the enemy, it does not mean that they are targeting you. In fact, if your trying to roleplay a ‘tank’, then chances are, you’re not being targeted in the first place and using Taunt is only going to send the enemies toward the allies you think you’re going to be gloriously protecting right now. Reading comprehension is crucial to understanding groupings of words… :/

Why are these PHIW threads always full of people who don’t understand that ‘zerkers’ (I assume you mean ‘Meta runners’ and haven’t realized that gear stats=/=build) support each other just as much as any other silliness that any other PHIW ‘support’ build has ever proposed?

I know what will happen: condi clears, dodges, stunbreaks, self heals, Aegis, Blind, blocks, invulnerable and any other active mitigation will still operate at 100% efficiency, no matter what gear you’re wearing, and nothing will change about their not being a trinity in GW2.

Congrats to Heart of Thorns for getting it’s first “Nerf these zerkers” thread even though it it isn’t even in alpha testing yet. That’s got to be some kind of record. :/

Tell a hungry man he’s got ‘egg on his face’ and he’ll try to take a bite… lol :/

What I would really like to see is fore the Chronomancer to be able to caste Quickness on enemies. Strategic use of this in combination with the use of Slow would have some epic, outside the box control potential for PvP and could, at the same time, solve the uselessness of Confusion in PvE. Not to mention the sweetness of their applications of Torment if they also get access to Taunt. This would be more similar-ish to Mesmer’s combat control in GW1 without shoehorning anything that goes against GW2’s design for them, ie. getting rid of Illusions. Although, that could still happen, but something major would have to take their place for survival. I don’t see spamming interrupts, Shutdown style, as a path that the Devs would want to get tangled up in.

Chill affects skill cooldowns and movement speed. Slow affects cast/aftercast speed.

Arbitrary or not, it would help with the 4,000 posts from people who have mistaken this for an aggro mechanic :/