Guild Wars 2

As has been pointed out in every similar thread on the BLTC forum: prices increasing is not the same as inflation so long as purchasing power increases at the same time. In fact, the definition of inflation is when purchasing power decreases relative to prices, which is a big problem. Since people are generating more gold per hour than they were at launch it stands to reason that prices will rise. Since people are generating more gold per hour than they were at launch it stands to reason that their purchasing power is similar. Unless you have indepth analysis proving that purchasing power for an hour of gameplay’s gold is decreased, I would say don’t bother responding since all you will have is baseless conjecture.

Looks familiar.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11OEZo2ixbdBUzr1UmmabFd3NcAgXVkxgr4aST2ubT3c/edit#gid=1866558721

Seeding and selections. Good luck to the teams!

DigitalKirin.9714:

Interesting. So with 91 characters, you’d have 11 teams with 6 (5+1alternate) and 5 teams with no alternate.

At 31 Eles, you’d have an average of 2 eles per team except for one team which has only 1. They make up 34% of the population.

21 Warriors means that there’s 5 teams that potentially have 2 warriors while the other 11 have 1 warrior.

17 Guardians means there’s at least one team with 2 guardians.

I wonder how the alternates list looks. o_O;

I went by all teams that entered, not just 16. So I think we had 18 or 19. Most teams had 2 eles, a few only had 1. One team had 3 warriors. at least one team has no guardian.

Metagame breakdown:

Elementalist: 31
Thief: 15
Warrior: 21
Guardian: 17
Mesmer: 3
Ranger: 2
Engineer: 2
Necromancer: 0

Registration is closed!

We have 18 registered team for the 16 team event. Unfortunately two will be left out. At 7pm est tonight I will live stream the random.org rolls as I select the teams for the bracket and the match ups. Good luck to everyone who registered, and thank you to the community and anet for embracing this concept!

Yeah, we will split each round in half so instead of 8 simultaneous matches in round one, we will have 4 then 4. And then 2 and 2 in round 2. Then watch the semi’s back to back and then the finals. Splitting it like this will make it easier to coordinate and require fewer proctors to make sure things start on time and are monitored properly.

For people who want to watch the side by side of a match I won’t be casting, multi-twitch will be awesome for you.

edit: @Rising Dusk: There won’t be a time difference. The original plan was to stagger the first round so we could watch all four games. Now, we will show 2/8 games from round of 16 and 2/4 games on round of 8. It should take roughly the same amount of time, there will just be fewer games from each round happening on my stream.

I’ve decided to expand to 16 teams since turnout was so high. The original plan with 8 was to stream all four of the first round games, but expanding to 16 team won’t allow that to be possible. I figure streaming two matches from the Round of 16 and two matches from the Round of 8 will air the same amount of content for the same time but allow twice as many teams to participate.

Unless anyone has a real big objection to this, I don’t really see a downside, other than now teams need to prepare to pick 4 paths if they go all the way.

@RisingDusk: Honors Claw and Detha (and any other NPC) can res players, but none of the players can help them.

@Iris: Whoever is on your roster as #6 by close of registration (3.5 hours from this post) is locked in. If you leave it blank or the person is a no show on game day you can 5 man it.

@Dominik: We have registered you now.

Veckna.9621:

Dual.8953:

If they use the standard tactics and stream it, I wonder how this’ll make GW2 look to the casual viewer.

The casual viewer would not comprehend anything that was going on and would be left thinking “Man, this looks pathetically easy…”

It will be up to myself and whoever shoutcasts with me to do a good job of describing what the teams are trying/likely to do at each encounter and the potential risks of it.

That way it instead of it being “a stack of particle effects and explosions and a dead boss” it will be “a conjured frost bow #5 to freeze the boss while the rest of the team uses Ice Storm; but if the boss gets his AOE off before the #5 the team could wipe.”

Can’t get ascended gear without the trading post? I want to know what on the TP you need for ascended gear.

Dragonite/Empyreal? Nope.
Mithril? drops from playing the game
Iron/darksteel? Richs nodes same place every day.
Silk? drops from playing the game?
Low level cloth? Maybe you will need to buy some of these from the TP, but you can get linen and cotton and wool in low level dungeons at a pretty decent rate.

Rings, Earrings, Backpiece you can get through gameplay, sometimes exclusively through gameplay.

So no, your point isn’t valid at all.

I’m inclined to say that if Honors Claw manages to res you, you can rejoin. It will take a long time if no one else helps to res and it’s part of the dungeon and equal for both teams so I guess thats an added benefit for HotW

Yeah make sure the full party UI is on so we can see buff bar. Also you will be allowed to res your streamer even if he is full defeated.

You can register here or send me a mail in game.

How is this group going? Do you need more people? Should a second group form if enough people are interested?

Alex Sentarou.8059:

Tree.3916:

haviz.1340:

I do have 2 questions. Do organizers intend to organize more of those events and if so do they intend to participate in next editions?

If it’s fun and successful for sure we’ll do more. Whether we participate will be up in the air depending whether we can establish a system where there would be clear enough rules that no bias could come into play. This one is really a learning lesson proof of concept so we’ll evaluate it afterwards.

It is impossible to establish rules that no bias would come in play. If organizers participate, there will always be a question whether or not they were neutral. It is very naive to think this is possible.

editted for politeness.

Thanks for the philosophy lesson Socrates.

Alright, happy to announce the prize breakdown. Hopefully the payouts through 8th place will encourage fence-sitters to sign up.

All rewards per player

First Place: 150g + 2000 gems
Second Place: 100g + 800 gems
Third Place: 75g + gem store armor of choice
Fourth Place: 50g + 10 transmutation charges
Fifth through Eight: 30g

dutchiez.7502:

Are story modes even allowed?

Yes allowed. The way some of them allow you to do multiple objectives at once is pretty interesting to me tactically.

Arah story is banned for sanity purposes.

I look forward to someone picking hotw story mode. There are some… interesting encounters.

I am leaning more toward banning CoE from this tournament unless….

1. Golem is fixed in a patch.

2. We get 100% confirmation of what bugs it and how it can be avoided. If we know 100% what causes it to bug no one can argue it bugged unintentionally and we can just consider it a wipe.

Otherwise I see this dungeon as being too likely to result in a bug out for me to want to risk it. Thoughts?

And I see no problem with using positioning to prevent the plague attack so long as you can still be hit by other attacks. It sounds more like an old spider queen situation than a Ooze coral situation but feel free to correct me on that.

phys.7689:

2.Dungeons, your speed running skills help here, but there isnt much excitement in shaving 30 seconds off your time, since your reward or chance of good reward is the same, Essentially making a 10 minute run into a 9.5 minute run is just a 5% increase in time saved, since every path is daily anyhow, this will only make much of difference if you do like 12 paths in one day youll save a whopping 6 minutes of time. Getting the same rewards.

This is partially correct at best. Sure, for CoF1, shaving 5% of time (if we assume that figure as a given) isn’t a huge time savings. I would argue that figure in an instance like Arah is significantly incorrect.

If you can run all four Arah paths in about an hour you’re looking at around 15g- 20g considering drops. I reckon there are not many in game outside of elite pve guilds who can manage that. Your random LFG “speed run” pug or non-hardcore guild teams would probably take close to 2-3 hours to run all four paths, especially if you stop to gearcheck to ensure competency. So there is a rather huge advantage in being able to speed run some dungeons, especially if you are limited more by daily playtime than the daily dungeon path limit. Also, consider that the more/harder dungeons you are able to do the less limiting the daily path limit is; if you are only capable of running AC and CoF you will hit the daily path limit a lot sooner than a player who can run every dungeon.

Prize pool is closed no more donations please.

Current Prize Pool:

3000g
2k gems to each player on the 1st place team
800 gems to each player on the 2nd place team
6 Gem store armor sets
60 Transmutation charges

Donaters:

16800 gems – Arenanet
Shin – 1000
Nike – 500
Luther – 300
Scrabbler – 250
Rezard – 200
Maarten – 200
Dom – 300
Dekeyz – 100
Lucy Storm Crow – 50
Don Quack – 50
Ten Mins – 30
Mad – 20
Lilith – 5x gem store armors
Iris – 50x Transmute charges

IndigoSundown.5419:

I don’t think it was a lie. More of an intention that was not implemented well enough to stand the test of time.

Just after launch the forum was flooded with posts about dungeons being too hard. Those tapered off after a while and are now being replaced by, “zerk is jerk” and, “stack is crack” complaints. That shift argues either that the player population has changed substantially or that there’s been a learning curve that has now plateaued.

Yep. How hard are the “hard” bosses in Dark Souls the 75th time you fight them? How trivial are WoW dungeons two years after they come out?

Time is the great equalizer. The strategies, builds and tactics people took weeks and months to create eventually trickle down to the pug level to where even bad pugs have the instances on farm. Anet did nothing wrong. Most of their dungeons would be considered ridiculous hard if you didnt have good tactics already developed, good builds and lots of practice.

Dump everyone in Arah p1 at launch wearing green gear with crap builds and let me know how well that goes.

maha.7902:

we did this like 2 days ago in some trashy 4 warrior 1 guardian comp with terrible dps

Actually our DPS was pretty great against everything but Subject Alpha. Organized groups with meta team comp would be lucky to be as efficient as our Heavies Only 2012 Throwback Tour was.

http://www.twitch.tv/nike_dnt/c/4465223

haviz.1340:

Usually DC ends with death and it might be problematic to decide if a death was the cause or the result.

Right, the line has to be drawn somewhere though and if one of your players has a spotty connection that day perhaps it would be better to use the alternate in his place, or accept the risk.

As far as dungeons bugging out here are the ideas currently thinking about…

1. Allow the team to restart the dungeon, but only if they were in the lead at the time the path bugged. If they were losing at the time no restart. This has pros and cons obviously, but I don’t want anyone to ever have an incentive to bug a dungeon intentionally and frankly part of the spectacle of the event is two teams running side by side on live stream and having a restart is something I would like to avoid at any cost.

2. Ban ACp2 and all of CoE. This accounts for 95% of dungeon bug outs. The other major ones (Arah p3 ritual and p2 belka) are either only done if intentionally since they can be actively avoided but not doing certain things, thus if you bug out those arah paths I have to assume you did it intentionally and you lose. I would hate to ban an entire dungeon (CoE) but the golem bugs out far far too often and if we can avoid 90% of potential restarts by avoiding CoE its seems feasible? Entirely possible Anet fixes the golem in a patch before then. ACp2, I dunno. Detha rarely bugs for us, but if its a huge problem I would say we should just avoid this path? I would like thoughts on that.

You can reconnect if you were not downed or defeated when you DC’ed.

Rule addendum: your streamer (or one of your streamers if you have multiple you must declare which first) will be allowed to be hardressed. If he is defeated he cannot waypoint, but the party can stop to hardres that person.

haviz.1340:

I do have 2 questions. Do organizers intend to organize more of those events and if so do they intend to participate in next editions?

If it’s fun and successful for sure we’ll do more. Whether we participate will be up in the air depending whether we can establish a system where there would be clear enough rules that no bias could come into play. This one is really a learning lesson proof of concept so we’ll evaluate it afterwards.

First run would be something like 11am EST / 8am PST. That should make it somewhere around 5-7pm for most of EU. To make the finals it might be a late-ish night, but I reckon perhaps all three rounds will take 6 hours maximum counting down time between rounds. Hopefully that isnt too late for EU.

Updated prize support!

big thanks to to Shin for a big donation!

So long as the event works out to be a success we should be in good shape.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

I’m still a bit confused. Can anyone register and participate or only certain people/guilds?

Preference will be given to guilds that have current or past speed run records on gwscr, but after that the remainder of the invites will be raffled.

Anet has kindly offered to sweeten the pot.

2k gems to each player on the winning team
800 gems to each player on the second place team

You guys need to register for this.

Grouch is helping me work out the technical details so Brazil and I can shoutcast it.

Prize support is up to 1200g+.

Thanks for the feedback Agony. in regards to your points…

We will discuss what to do if a dungeon bugs out. Any good ideas will be considered. In the case of a DC the person can reconnect so long as they weren’t down or defeated when they disconnected.

The prize will be be proportioned out once it’s finalized. I anticipate getting more prize support before then so I don’t want to give any definite breakdowns now.

I think most of the gwscr rules for particular issues are resolved, but if there is any ambiguity on anything we can discuss it.

The tie breaker paths will be preselected from a list before the tournament begins. So long as no one picks the particular path that is due we will just go in order. If someone happens to pick the tie breaker path early, we will skip it and use the next one on the list. Since the paths for tiebreakers will be pre-determined (but hidden from competitors) there won’t be any shenanigans or gamesmanship.

edit: Registration closed Friday June 20, 2014 at 12:00pm PDT

Prize pool now above 1000g. =D

edit:

Speedexploit for 500g?
Should I take this serious?

If it will be so easy and trivial, you should have no problem winning =P

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/13284824-announcing-death-taxes-invitational-competitive-pve-tournament

Death and Taxes [DnT] is proud to announce The Death and Taxes Invitational, the first competitive PvE tournament. Eight teams of five will compete for the fastest, smoothest dungeon runs in a competitive environment on Saturday, June 28, 2014 at a time convenient for both NA and EU players.

First prize will be 500 Gold to the winning team and additional prize support will be announced moving forward.

The Format

The teams will be paired up before each round for a best of three path contest, and one randomly selected team will have the right to pick which path is run first. Their opponents will pick which path is run second. If a third path is required, Death and Taxes [DnT] will pick a dungeon path. The two teams will begin their dungeon runs simultaneously at an appointed server time, which the runs broadcast live on Twitch.tv. At least one member of each team must be able to live stream the run in order to participate.

The dungeon runs themselves will be regulated and timed according to the http://gwscr.com restricted rule set found here: http://gwscr.com/redirect?id=restricted-records-rules

In addition to the Guild Wars Speed Clear Rules, a defeated player may not resurrect at a waypoint, and may not be resurrected by his teammates. Should a player be defeated, the remaining 4 must complete the dungeon. Should the last member of the team be defeated, or point in the dungeon be reached that cannot be completed with the remaining members of a team (i.e. only two members alive for Shaggoth in Arah Path 1 or the Brazier puzzle in Citadel of Flame Path 1) that will be considered a “Wipe.”

As long as the team that is still alive is able to finish the path without wiping, the finishing team will be given the win regardless of time. Should both teams wipe, the game will be considered a draw and will move onto the next path. If both teams wipe in the third path of the match, the team furthest into the dungeon will be considered the winner.

The Teams

Teams will register with 5 members and one optional alternate. The registration will list the account name of each player and the profession that player will be playing. Players must run the same profession they register with throughout the entire course of the tournament. The alternate player can fill in for any player on the team and may play any desired profession.

This will promote a risk reward proposition between an “all around” team composition that can tackle all paths of every dungeon and one designed to sacrifice utility for additional offense. The alternate will allow creative teams to tweak their team compositions to their advantage.

Registration

The tournament will be by invitation only, however we are soliciting for interested guilds or teams. Guilds may fill multiple teams if they have sufficient members. Any interested guilds or teams may register in the registration thread on the Death and Taxes forum. http://dtguilds.com/forum

The 8 invited teams will be announced on June 21, 2014.

Members of Death and Taxes will be excluded from participation in this tournament.

Questions or Help

Should you have any questions regarding any aspect of the tournament, please post them in the official tournament thread on the Death and Taxes forum.

If you would like to donate prize support (gems, gold, precursors, legendaries) please contact me in game, my IGN is ‘Nike’.

If I had to pick a “tournament format” here is what I would do.

7 dungeons = 128 teams (multiple guilds can enter multiple teams). Teams are seeded 1-128.

Rules: Defeated = no waypoint, you’re done. You can be hard-ressed if someone wants to take the time to do it. Time wipe = GG no RE, you’re done tournament over. If you opposition wipes in p2 and you wipe in p3, you win since you progressed further. Restricted rules, timer starts when the first person moves in p1. Timer ends when the XP pop for the last boss in the final path of the dungeon dies. Restricted rules for consumables, exploits etc. Once person from each team must live stream, if only one person streams and the stream dies, counts as a party wipe. If both teams finish without wiping, lowest timer wins and advances to the next round

Round of 128 – AC
Round of 64 – CM
Round of 32 – TA (no atherpath)
Sweet 16 – SE
Elite 8 – CoF
Final 4 – CoE
Finals – Arah

Last rule, paths must be done in sequential order, i.e. p1 must be done first, p4 last.

I imagine doing this over two weekends would be good since that is a lot of paths to run in one day.

My exile is over. I have returned.

Is Nemesis going to be in shock when he sees how Might and Fury stacking works with a 2x ele party, or what?

So did Leonardo DaVinci invent the helicopter?

http://www.leonardodavincisinventions.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/leonardo-da-vinci-helicopter.jpg

or did Louis Breguet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Breguet

or did Igor Sikorsky?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_R-4

All three could lay some claim to being the “inventor the helicopter.” There is a lesson in here, but I doubt the OP will understand it.

Romo.3709:

The problem with Blitz is not that the Anet is trying to break zerging mentality. The actual problem is that Anet made the zerg mentality with every other LS update since Scarlet first showed. They are now trying to get it “fixed”. But the issue in itself is that many people are predisposed with its mentality so much that the coordination is something of a myth to them. It’s like teaching your dog to sit down at the show of a hand for a year, then expect him to lay down at the same command. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’ll definitely take time, even though there’s quite a few of us that think that zerging was never a fun thing to begin with hence coordination is much easier to come by.

There is some truth to this. But honestly the QQ over the pavillion (and marrionette before) requiring coordination is pretty subdued compared to what the outrage would be if the next chapter of the living story kicks off with a braindead no fun “smack the pinatas” open world event like dragon bash. I think the tide has honestly turned towards even the casuals wanting better challenges.

The true test will be when anet implements pass/fail content (if ever) where they say, “this is supposed to be a challenge and its OK if you can’t complete it because it wasn’t designed for everybody.” I guess in a way the SAB tribulation mode was like that, but I feel like since that is a ‘side-game’ most people didn’t feel like it was unfair to make the content too hard for the average player. But if they came out with a dungeon or elite zone (something in the ‘main game’) that was so hard that average player could NEVER finish it (Domain of Anguish Hard Mode fit that description?) people might complain that it was dividing the community a bit more. So yeah, when/if they come out with content that they don’t expect everyone to complete we see how the community will really react.

Plenty examples of this

“Hard” bosses with good design: Lupicus, Liadri, Hunter/Crusher, Wiggins, Boom Boom Baines, Archdiviner, Vivenna, Korga, Dredge Power Suit
“Hard” bosses with bad designs: Champion Orrian Warrior, Mossman

Easy bosses with good design: CoF1 Effigy, Bloomhunger, SEp3 Destroyer, CoE Golem
Easy bosses with bad design: Champion Ice Wolf CoE, Ginva the Butcher, TA end trees, magecrusher, evolved destroyer

Encountered a warrior last night playing GS+Hammer (probably a WvW guy) and I saw him do literally 0 damage with 100 blades to the target. I whisper him to ask what gear he is wearing and the response is “Full cleric with soldier runes.”

=O

So then I ask his traits. He is 0/2/4/6/2 with Blocks reflect and stronger bow strings. He has no longbow equipped and he has no skills that block anything, and he has shout heals (because of course he does.) I ask him why he has these traits and hear and he goes “I’m just messing around with GS+Hammer, normally I use S/sh+longbow condi with this setup.”

So he considers his “good build” to be sw/sh+lb with blocks reflect, shout heals and full clerics. Now I understand there is a similar build using Apothecary or whatever and banner regen for pvp/wvw but good lord.

The point of this story is to say is that these people are out there, playing this game with you and I. So a properly built Necro or Engineer or Ranger is the absolute least of your potential nightmares.

spoj.9672:

Necro isnt even uber strong in PvP. Its only strong in hot join. But no good team will take one because it can be focused and trained for the entire game.

@Tree
A lot of people have been asking for more finishers for necro. Rather than a trait that puts a blast on DS. I would prefer weakening shroud to be a blast. It wont be as frequent as a LH ele but it would be a 100% blast every 7-10 seconds. Blasts on axe 3, warhorn 4, dagger 5 and projectile on focus 4 and dagger 4 would also really help the necro. All of these together would be too much but i definately feel some of them should be implemented.

Yeah, DS auto being a blast finisher isnt the best idea, just off the top of my head. The important things are…

1. Some kind of access to reliable blasts
2. Some kind of boon sharing for team. Since they already have “Gain X boon when you do X” traits it seems logical that those should be party-wide and it wouldn’t even be crazy. Necro in Strength runes using DS auto to share Might would be a lot less OP than a PS warrior, but it would be enough to make Necros not feel completely useless, especially in pugs.

Ranger – Sword auto animations can be interrupted to dodge. Pet can be permanently stowed even in combat. Fixed.

Engineer – About a year ago grenade kit got a 15% direct damage nerf. Go ahead and undo that. Fixed.

Necro – Locust swarm blinds instead of cripples. New trait that gives DS auto a 50% chance of being a blast finisher. All the “applies boon when entering or attacking in DS” are applied to your party instead of just you. Fixed.

I find the mesmer to be pretty useful in fractals and less so in named dungeons.

I agree with your team comp in fractals, but find that switching to Flissy’s comp will be more suitable for regular dungeons though by no means is your team comp “bad” in dungeons.

Lastly, I think your Guardian should re-evaluate his/her build. Even if you guys are all rookies and just learning the ropes, I don’t think Clerics is beneficial. Most Guardian skills that heal aren’t boosted enough by Healing Power to make them worthwhile. Nor are the healing skills themselves efficient enough on their own for the Guardian to prove worthwhile in a “healer” role. If your guardian needs tankier gear for survivability, Clerics is not the way to go about it.

Dalanor.5387:

@Tree
I want your opinion about this 00662 build. Why do you call it full support?
The 5 and 15 point minor in Radiance is too good to pass on, especially if you have already at least 5 points in 5 Virtues (and you will have 10 due to Master of consecrations anyway) and the whole Valor line is crap. Honor traits arent too good either with a few exceptions.

My opinion is it is a horrible Strife-way build and has no place in speed clear meta team compositions. My second point is a lot of roleplayers want to pretend to be tanks or bunkers or anchors or some other term that doesn’t exist in the actual game, and so they go max honor shout cleanses and AH and roleplay as tanks or paladins or whatever they are into.

I wasn’t actually suggesting it as some kind of build worth running. The point I was making, which you seem to miss, is even if you run a trashy build like that, so long as youre capable of dodging correctly the optimal gearing is berserkers. On the other side of the coin if you’re running the far superior dps trait spread of4/5/0/0/5 but you are brand new to the game and eat every attack, it makes no sense to run berserkers unless your plan is trial by fire and giving yourself a crash course in dodging.

Star Ace.5207:

However, disagree with the notion that playstyle is only decided by trait and weapon choices, because many traits and weapon choices lend themselves to different gear stats, and this is quite obvious when you look at the traitlines and some specific traits.

This is what you want to be true, not what is true. If you’re playing a full on support guardian pve 0/0/6/6/2 build, but you know all the boss tells, you’re a fool if you don’t wear berserker. On the other hand, if you’re brand new, and you’re playing a full on 4/5/0/0/5 dps guardian and you can’t dodge anything, you’re a fool for not using Soldier’s gear. Gear doesn’t have anything to do with your playstyle besides determining whether you do direct or condition damage.

Wearing Berserker’s for all possible builds isn’t actually optimal for some builds (which of course wouldn’t have been optimal for pure DPS, even with Berserker’s, but my point is that what you say and are convinced of is not actually true-at least not for many players.)

This doesn’t make any sense. the optimal play is to bring the least amount of defense you need for each instance. If you need a lot of defense, the optimal is to bring a lot. This is my whole point: your gearing is a measurement of how much damage you expect to take, it does not have anything to do with your playstyle. I’m not seeing how what you’re saying in any way disproves what I said. In order to disagree with me, you would have to explain how a support build in the hands of a player who knows the content very well would be better off not wearing berserkers. Or how a person who has never set foot in a dungeon before running a dps build would be best off with berserkers. The conclusion is quite obvious, the gear you wear doesn’t change the functionality aka playstyle of your build.

The above is not intended as an attack on Berserker’s gear, however. Just that in the end, gear chosen does simply also affect playstyles, though I am sure you firmly disagree given your post. Don’t be vexed, just agree to disagree. For me, it’s not logical to use a “bunker” build with Berserker’s gear, and the all offense build will probably be better off without Magi’s.

Agree to disagree is something I do when the other person has an equally valid position and neither of us have evidence sufficient to convince the other. Your problem is there is no such thing as a “bunker build” in pve. There are defensive support builds. But nothing about them improves when you just stand there and absorb hits you could otherwise dodge. A full support 0/0/6/6/2 guardian, if thats what you wanted to play, should be wearing berserkers in PVE provided the player knows what he is doing. An all offensive trait build would not use Magi’s, you’re right, but not because defensive gear itself is a bad idea, but because Magi’s isnt the best way for a defensive geared DPS character to be equipped. If you aren;t experienced and cannot dodge well, and you want to play melee DPS, you should almost certainly be wearing defensive gear whether that is Soldier, Knights or even Zealots.

I’m still somewhat vexed by a few of the more bizarre notions circulating in this thread. Hopefully, I will be able to help some of the more misguided notions.

Character Building

Your “playstyle” is defined foremost by your weapon choices, skill choices and traits. If you choose utility skills of a support nature, along with melee weapons and use traits that give defensive benefits to your team, you are a support melee character. If you choose offensive boosting skills, ranged weapons and DPS boosting traits, you are a ranged DPS character. These things are true regardless of your gear prefix. Again, who you are is defined by your weapon choice, skill choice and trait choices.

The second component of character build, gearing, has nothing to do with playstyle. Gearing is a measure of the damage you expect to be unable to avoid in your chosen game mode. Additionally, gearing is primarily how you determine whether you will be direct damage or condition damage. But the primary function of gearing is an estimate the amount of damage you anticipate you will need to soak in your chosen content. If you feel you will be able to dodge every attack you would select a gearing that sacrifices passive defense for more offense. Alternatively, if you feel you will receive large amounts of unavoidable damage you would be well advised to bring gear with more passive defense. The only aspect of gearing that determines playstyle is direct vs condition damage.

What is a character in defensive (soldiers) gear with dps skills and dps traits? A dps character. What is a character in offensive gear (berserkers) with defensive support traits and defensive support skills? A defensive support character.

With that out of the way as an established fact, let’s debunk some of the weaker arguments in this thread…

“Build Diversity”: Since playstyle is determined by everything EXCEPT gear, the concept of changing a gear type to encourage different playstyles is literally an absurdism. If you want to actually make defensive support builds more viable, you have to change the things that actually affect the playstyle: traits and skills. Or change the content to make healing/boon duration more useful, but that runs the risk of creating a trinity system where teams require a specific profession using a specific build to complete content, which has a problem all its own.

“Stacking”: Nothing to do with gearing. Even if Apothecary gear became meta, stacking would still be done in places where stacking is done. This is not a gearing issue.

“Zerker trivializes content”: Depends. There are a few bosses who are killed very quickly with fiery greatswords and berserker gear in such a way that their mechanics are skipped. There are also other bosses that aren’t, or aren’t outside of a very organized group. This is partially a content issue, partially a downscaling issue, and partially a fiery greatsword issue. Very little of it has to do with berserker gear itself. In fact, I would argue that Fiery Greatsword is the biggest culprit. The damage it is capable of is so far beyond the scope of everything else that it allows even the least skilled players the ability to speed run certain dungeons. If fiery greatsword was nerfed, it is entirely likely that many people who are being carried by it would go back to complaining about dungeons being too difficult.

“The content is too easy”: No, the content is too old. I assure you, the first time you did Arah path 1 in September of 2012 was not as fast as it is done now, even if you are an elite dungeon runner now. Arah is very, very hard. Drop a new player into Arah with no experienced teammates and no video guides and suboptimal builds. He will fail very hard. In fact, drop the same player into any of the dungeons and they will likely struggle mightily. The content isn’’t too easy, it’s just too old. Even the more challenging raids in other games go on farm after two years of existence. The type of raid that took progression guilds two weeks to beat the first time around are facerolled by pugs after two years once the builds and strats are known. This is how MMO goes. If you want to decrease the berserker population, add brand new dungeons that don’t have established guides and community tactics yet and watch the casual berserker users put on defensive gear, or avoid the content altogether.

Mesket.5728:

maha.7902:

@Mesket

Different would be if by no mean a berserk could survive said content and requires the constant assistance of a support character, either buffing with aegis, vigor and cleanse or a control character to keep his rotation up to interrupt un-dodgeable attacks.

That’s one of the worst ideas I’ve heard recently. Let’s remove the trinity then add it again for no reason. No, the whole fun of GW2 is you don’t need to have specific classes to beat content.

Because playing this with less roles than GTA online is better? Yeah! lets have many classes and play them all like thief wannabe! You are a wizard? fk off, get a dagger and melee! oh you a ranger? forget it! get a sword and melee! wait.. you have a shield there? drop it and get dps! yeah you are right! sounds more likely of the idea of an mmorpg. Lets completely destroy the concept of a party instead and group 5 damage dealers to do their things together.

If you don’t like GW2 there is no shortage of other games on Steam you could check out that will fulfill your desire for traditional trinity MMO.