Guild Wars 2

The SAB skins are a little gaudy, but it’ll probably thin out as the event ends and the world becomes more populated with new players, returning players, and alts that didn’t have a chance to pick them up. I’m fine with seeing them here and there.

That said, use some discretion, people. Alright, I can see that super greatsword going well with a guardian, but it makes your non-blue warrior just look tacky.

I’m not looking forward to having to buy a ton more fine transmutation stones for all of my characters when ascended armor and weapons come out. Already bought dozens upon dozens of them.

Worthwhile weapon or not, the blue tennis balls just look and feel really lame.

DoctorOverlord.8620:

If it was Account Bound so it could be shared by my characters, I likely would have bought one. But a Character Bound item like this doesn’t make me want to buy it.

Considering it’s there to make things more convenient, I dunno if making it account bound would sweeten the deal much. Having to swap it between characters all the time sounds less convenient than just buying normal picks.

Even though it would have been economically unwise, I probably would have picked this up if it gave one to all of my characters. But as it is, I’d have to be utterly insane to spend $80 or enough gold to buy a precursor. Not really much point in getting it for just one when I play them all.

Undean.9704:

Some fun math on the Molten Alliance Pick.

Currently costs 21.6 gold (this has probably changed).
That’s 540 regular 4 silver picks.
That would require you to mine 54,000 nodes to make up for how much you spent on it.
That ends up being 162,000 pieces of ore.
Good luck ever mining that much, but I bought one anyways :p.

And that’s assuming you mine absolutely nothing but orichalcum. The molten pick just gets worse if you keep around a cheaper mithril pick for lesser metals.

I know when I’m playing my squishy non-guardian characters, I like having a guardian that can take an okay amount of punishment. Especially as a squishy D/D backstab thief. When you get a glass cannon 1h sword guardian in your group, you just wish he was a warrior instead. On my guardian I run knight’s armor, a couple soldier trinkets, and the rest berserker. I find that in most dungeons this offers just enough survivability to make you a solid front line while still being able to dish out some respectable damage.

Obviously this changes in high level fractals where things are different. It also changes if you don’t ever run with anything but your extremely capable berserker geared mesmer and 3 warrior buddies who know exactly how to burn down everything in the game quickly enough that defense doesn’t matter. But I’m willing to bet most people don’t find themselves in that situation most of the time, let alone 100% of the time.

Mesmer is a straight up better class. More damage, more utility, and fairly even in terms of survivability (necro is better against unavoidable chip damage, mesmer is better against stuff that you can react to). I’d say both of them are about average in terms of difficulty to play. More complex than a warrior/guardian, but not as much as an engineer/elementalist. I enjoy my 80 necro more than my 80 mesmer though, even if it isn’t as good.

No way. I don’t really play sylvari, but I appreciate that Anet decided to add something interesting and unique. Not just more kitten elves.

Shadow Protector’s regeneration does not stack, unlike every other form of regeneration. This means it does nothing if you stealth before the last one is over. Which means boon duration is a negative stat.

P/P is an awful weapon set where you just spam one ability that does very unimpressive single target damage with no real AoE or defensive options. If you’re leveling, S/P with shortbow is king. Group up mobs in your black powder circle and cleave them down. Pistol Whi kitten ituationally useful for interrupt/evade spam. #2 is a decent condition removal/stunbreak.

I feel like half the posts in this entire forum are Vayne telling people that trust me, bad classes are fine (because…reasons?) and it doesn’t matter if they’re bad. Over and over and over again, all day, every day.

I’ve been going with this lately:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mMkzzc9cMlFCMmlFCM0xx0acoqVcom

I hit for about 25% less damage compared to when I ditch shadow arts for a deadly arts glass cannon build, but it’s much more survivable in so many situations that I find it to be a worthwhile tradeoff. I’ll switch D/D to S/P in some circumstances which it still works fairly well for, and will often trade out Cloaked in Shadow for something else (usually Shadow’s Embrace). I use zerker gear with a few minor pieces of soldier (back, shoulders, helm).

I really wanted to take some stuff out and put it into acrobatics, but I came to the unfortunate realization that having any boon duration completely screws up Shadow Protector, since it doesn’t stack on itself. If you’re following Scoot’s D/D attack rotation, you’ll stealth before the previous regen wears off and get nothing out of it until your next cycle. I hope that stacking thing is a bug because it is very stupid.

We typically have around 40-50 people for guild missions on saturdays. Every week we get Sotzz. Every week we kill the other non-Komali or Yanonka targets within a few minutes without prescouting. Every week we have 40-50 people scouring over Gendarran fields looking for Sotzz for 10 minutes, including the 15-ish that were there searching from the beginning. Every week we fail to find him, and fail the bounty.

I guess we’ll try to be more lucky next time. Also, guild bounties are terrible.

Lupi for sure.

Another boss I like is the forgeman at the end of SE story. Sure, it’s easy to solo, but it’s something different/interesting, it’s not tedious, and is also visually impressive.

Corrupted Shard has an icy particle effect. The new black lion chest daggers do as well, but forget that. There’s also the asura-style stuff: Peacemaker, Dark Asuran, Inquest, Glyphic, and Mystic.

Pretty much all thief nerfs reversed. There are a whole lot of them, and they were very, very silly things to do to PvE thieves.

Saying “I rip up dungeons with my ranger friend” is pretty meaningless. You can clear content no problem with a ranger in your group. I cleared a bunch of level 80 dungeon paths no problem with a guy in his level 20s tagging along. Point is, it would have been easier and quicker if the same guy was playing something better. A good ranger or necromancer isn’t even in the same league as someone just as capable playing a warrior or guardian. The difference is staggering. It’s pretty rare I bother taking my 80 necro or ranger into dungeons these days. My warrior, mesmer, and guardian get a ton of use though, because I know it’ll speed things up considerably and if I end up in a bad group I might be able to pull them through. Thief gets a lot of use too, but that’s only because I really enjoy the class and it isn’t -total- garbage.

With an 80 of every class except Engineer/Ele, I’ve gotta say that thief has one of my favorite downed states of the bunch in PvE. #2 is unbelievably useful for getting out of AoE circles, teleporting near allies so that they can rez you, and getting behind corners. #1 bounces so you can easily tag as many things as possible to help you rally when your teammates kill something. #3 is utter garbage, but oh well. That’s not at all uncommon for downed skills.

It does kinda suck for soloing, but how often are you getting downed while soloing? Especially as a thief with a million tricks for getting away? Who cares? Maybe your 500 hours played thief would have died 3 times less with a better solo downed skillset. It doesn’t matter.

From a PvE perspective, I prefer vitality solely because high toughness attracts more attention from mobs. If it weren’t for the aggro thing I would probably go with a balanced mix of each, because toughness is better at making you last longer, but I don’t feel comfortable with base HP since even with toughness there are attacks that will one shot you without a good health pool.

I dunno why people are acting like warriors get owned outside of CoF1. Maybe if you go 100% zerker, ruby orbs, full dps greatsword build. But anyone meleeing full time like that is gonna get eaten alive. I have a very small handful of soldier pieces on my warrior with a 20/0/0/30/20 Axe and Shield Banner build, and I still do more damage more consistently than everyone else while providing tremendous support and being very durable. Alongside guardians and mesmers, it’s still the best PvE class by a huge margin.

Toss me into the pot of people who are disappointed. A few minutes of smacking signposts and a couple ultrageneric story missions that are indistinguishable from any number of “follow this NPC and kill a few normal mobs” personal story missions or escort events fails to impress. The writing and character’s aren’t strong enough to really get me to care, let alone when something so minimal is stretched over several months. You spend a few minutes doing the content to clear up your UI and then completely forget about it until the next installment. I don’t feel like the Charr or Norn are being threatened and driven from their homes – I feel like there are just a bunch of annoying periscopes and dredge APCs cluttering up random spots in Wayfarer/Diessa that are just going to keep respawning until June or whatever. Everything else in the zone is business as usual.

I try to get friends back into the game but it’s difficult when I have this this to show them. The prospect of a couple more bog standard (and temporary) story missions isn’t exactly enticing when almost nobody has bothered with all of the personal story missions in the game as it is. SAB has shown us that ANet is capable of putting in something new, interesting, and worth spending a good chunk of time on. F&F has not.

I wish there were PvE titles that were acquired through something remotely resembling competence, rather than just a bunch telling people how much gold you’ve spent, or that you can spend 20 minutes fixing signs in wayfarer. The only one that really fulfills this at all is Dungeon Master.

The crab guild rush is easily the most fun of the bunch, and as far as bounties go I prefer wildman over pretty much anything else.

Guild missions aside, there isn’t much purpose for it though.

Lupi focuses on me probably around 60% of the time no matter what class I play. Glass thief? Tanky guardian? Rabid necro? Zerker war? Doesn’t matter. I don’t really get it.

Medium armor in particular desperately needs new skins. I can always find a cool combo for my heavy/light characters, but it can be a struggle to get a medium armor setup that looks good.

I’ve taken every class but Ele/Engineer to 80, have them all decked out in pretty exotic/ascended items with their ideal runes, and jump around between them for dungeons every day.

My warrior far outdamages any other class. There is no comparison. My thief can top him on a single target if I go 100% glass in build and gear, don’t get my rotation interrupted, and can always stay behind my target, but the difference isn’t anywhere near high enough to make up for the lack of AoE and unbelievable squishiness.

My warrior provides a ton of party support. Only my guardian tops him, and nobody else comes close. I give the party a permanent 170 precision, 15% crit damage, and regeneration over an incredibly large radius with my banner. With my +60% boon duration I give group members great uptime on fury and might using For Great Justice. If I wanted to I could put in soldier runes for party condition removal, which I can also get by slotting in Shake It Off when necessary. I also add a little bit of AoE vulnerability, which is an okay bonus.

Despite not really investing much at all into defensive traits or gear, I am quite durable. Once again, only my guardian surpasses my warrior, and everybody else is far behind. I have a boatload of armor/health by default, and my 30s cooldown heal skill instantly heals for a staggering 8500 health. I have one spare utility slot to stick in any one of a number of good survivability tools, such as Endure Pain, Shake It Off, Signet of Stamina, or Dolyak Signet depending on the situation. I use offhand shield for Shield Stance, which is an invaluable lifesaver, and I have perma regen from my banner.

My warrior does all of these at the same time, with a single spec. Are Warriors overpowered in PvE? They are either overpowered or most other classes are drastically underpowered. Looking at the broken, terrible traits many of them have I’m inclined to go with the latter because that is not a fate I wish upon warriors. The difference between playing my Warrior or Guard and then hopping on to my Necro, Thief, or…..ugh…..Ranger, is incredible. If I join a group and the composition doesn’t look great (i.e. not a lot of warriors/guardians), then I switch to my warrior or guardian because we’re likely to have trouble otherwise. I definitely do not switch over to my necromancer because we don’t have enough necromancers.

Devs need to stop focusing on spvp balance, or at least do a -lot- more skill splitting. Very few players care about spvp and it’s honestly not a very well conceived gametype. GW2 will never become the esports phenomenon they wanted it to be. Time to move on.

The condition cap needs to go, completely. Give each player their own stack of burn and poison. Remove the bleed cap. Power characters do not have their damage limited in this way, and neither should condition players. Condition damage and precision should also contribute to the damage you deal to destructables. There is absolutely no reason for these limitations that arbitrarily punish many players. It certainly isn’t as though they do absolutely incredible damage and need to be held back.

Thieves need the ill-conceived revealed changed reverted. Weapons need to be more clearly power or condition based, because currently you just use the skills you’ve geared for and never, ever use the others. You have P/P and D/D thieves who never use anything but skill 3. A bit more group utility is needed. Steal still seems a little superfluous for being a supposedly class defining mechanic.

Necromancers need a massive trait overhaul. You could take away 30 trait points from my necromancer and it would not make the slightest difference because those 30 can only go into garbage. The class needs significantly more group utility. Death Shroud needs to serve more purpose for non-power necromancers.

Elementalists need to be rethought. You get 20 skills, but 15 of them are probably terrible. The inability to switch to a different set of abilities more suited to close or long range during a fight is very stupid, and elementalist traits are almost universally awful.

I don’t know engineers well enough to speak for them, but this class is not particularly great and could use some help.

Rangers are unbelievably bad and I’m not sure the class can be fixed without a massive, Dervish-style overhaul. Probably even more extreme. No redeeming features. The pet mechanic is crippling and out of place in this kind of game, all the traits are mind-bogglingly bad, and I can’t believe ranger utilities exist in their current form. You have a class where the most effective form of play is to run 2 shortbows, swap between them on cooldown, and use no abilities except autoattack if you can help it. What. Then you give them 10% more damage if they stay at full endurance, somehow promoting an even more boring playstyle.

The warrior adrenaline mechanic needs an overhaul. For the most part it is completely ignored in favor of traits that give damage buffs for keeping full adrenaline. Warriors may as well not even have a class mechanic.

There are other minor issues, like guardian sword and shield being pretty bad, or specific elites being worthless, but these are the real major ones as far as I and most everybody in my very large guild is concerned.

There aren’t very many of them. I rarely have a ranger in my party. Never two.

Heartseeker is terrible. If you’re just spamming 2 you are doing things very wrong. But sure, you know what, go ahead. Double the init cost, remove the leap, and make it less effective the more you use it. Give it the greatest nerf in the history of Guild Wars. Make it so there is absolutely no reason to ever press 2 under any circumstances. In fact, make the skill damage the thief and give you 2 minutes of revealed. Then I can completely ignore it like I do Death Blossom. It’s already approaching that point.

That this hasn’t been changed back is ridiculous. It was hasty, poorly thought out move that served no purpose and makes the class feel unpolished. If anet really can’t swallow their pride and admit they made a mistake then I will lose whatever shred of faith I still have in them. Time it back up with the autoattack chain.

I definitely wouldn’t want this, although some of them need to be shifted around. Like, why are the condition-damage based ranger traps in the precision/critical damage tree? It’s stupid for trap rangers and gives crit-based rangers far less options to choose from. There’s tons of stuff like this.

Silver Chopper.4506:

@ Vargs – If that happens, I envision a future where you’d have to do a jumping puzzle ‘a la’ Mad King Tower to get to a bounty boss. All within a strict time limit. Fun for some, agony for others. It’s dicey.

I would vastly, vastly prefer that over some RNG nonsense stacked against you.

Here’s my tip: If you draw Yanonka, write the bounty off as a loss. Then hope Arenanet gets rid of the guy who thought bounties were a great, fun thing to put into Guild Wars 2 in their current incarnation and puts the SAB team in charge of it instead.

They were perfectly fine at first, but I will agree that they are the most tedious part of repeated playthroughs by far.

Who cares? Oh no, they can make a bit of money. They’d be making more in CoF.

Thieves are the very definition of mediocre in dungeons. They aren’t incredible like warriors, guardians, or mesmers, but they aren’t garbage like engineers, rangers, or necromancers. A thief can provide pretty good damage under ideal circumstances while being exceptionally squishy and not typically adding any group support other than shadow refuge and blindspam on non-champions. In terms of dungeon usefulness, they are smack dab in the middle with elementalists, and like elementalists, are very prone to death in the wrong hands.

Sotzz and Yanonka are the dumbest things in the entire game right now, which is an incredible achievement. Worse than rangers.

I’d just like to say that critical path speed running is honestly pretty fun and I’d be sad to see it go. I grinded out 150 bubbles and didn’t want to kill myself by the end of it, which is uncommon for that sort of thing.

In a similar vein, an achievement to beat SAB under a certain time limit could be neat. So would one to complete the whole thing without getting hit. The current achievements are pretty easy and don’t really feel like much of an achievement, although I appreciate that some of them encourage you to check out areas you might not otherwise. It would just be nice if there were some PvE achievements other than Dungeon Master which show people that you’re probably competent at something other than spending gold, and this seems like the perfect opportunity.

While we’re throwing out ideas, some sort of competitive race sounds like a real good time too.

24 runs
2 shortbow skins
1 shield skin

Stage 2 is pretty reminiscent of the final stage of Banjo-Kazooie.

Character movement and the general feel of combat are much, much worse.

Pretty much everything else is better.

I don’t even understand how this is so good. GW2 content patches have been exceptionally underwhelming up until now. I was expecting it to be just another jumping puzzle using the asuran lab tileset. Certainly not all this. It’s really, really great. How did the same development studio behind living story create this?

Race: Human
Gender: Female

The character select screen frames remove most of my character’s hair, which looks pretty silly. Maybe it does this for party frames too, since they usually seem to be the same as the character select ones? Who knows.

I pug off gw2lfg all the time and am very often in the position of telling newer players what to do during each encounter, yet I have never once been kicked from a group. Maybe you just come off as a horrible, unlikable person.

If you just wanna put a bunch of personal dps utilities on your bar, put your traits into nothing but increasing your own damage, and don’t want to even think about looking after your teammates. you are playing the wrong class. Trying to do that will just make you a poor version of a warrior. A warrior will do much more damage and people won’t get annoyed at you for not helping anybody out.

We just failed our T3 because we couldn’t find Sottz. Even after we easily took down all the other (non-prescouted) targets and had the whole guild running around looking for him, probably around 50 people, we couldn’t do it. Blindly running around an entire map hoping that somebody lucks out and finds a completely random spawn so that you don’t waste the time of dozens of people, plus the build time of the t3 bounty, is pretty ridiculous. I know you guys at Anet like RNG, but you’re really pushing it. Nothing about this remotely fun. Nothing about this is remotely skill-based. Even if you do find him, nobody enjoys it. It’s just a really awful piece of content that people do to get some stupid carrot on a stick ascended gear.

If this is your answer to raids from other MMOs, then you have done a very, very poor job. At least guild rushes are pretty fun.

Lupi is great. He isn’t excruciatingly difficult but you do need to at least kind of know what you’re doing. I like that wearing Arah gear tells people “I have at least a very basic level of competence”. This game needs more stuff like that.

Fractal level and story unlocks are the main thing. I can understand why others things aren’t account based, or don’t really care, but these two should not be per character. I am not going to do these on all of my characters when I’ve already done it once because they are long, tedious, boring, and unrewarding.

When I’m in a group that I’m not super confident about, I always default to my guardian. I can always be a solid wall of metal between mobs and my my party, and I can mitigate their mistakes with aegis/protection/heals.

I run dungeons with guildmates for money, which I use to buy neat looking gear and to craft alts up to 80, who I need to buy more neat looking gear for. Legendaries are a bit much for me, but there’s some cool stuff to go for with a manageable but significant price tag. I recently bought a few pieces of t3 cultural for my guardian, and a 40g axe skin for my warrior.

It’s kept me quite busy, and I enjoy doing different dungeons on a variety of different classes every day. It would probably be faster to only play my warrior and only do CoF1 speed runs nonstop, but eh. Cash still comes in at a good clip this way and it’s much more enjoyable.