Guild Wars 2

Pandabro.8743:

Xavori.3768:

I have three warriors.

Is this a common thing? Why would you need three of the same profession? Is the cost of switching traits really hitting your pocketbook?

Hello. My name is Xavori. I’m an altaholic.

I have 71 alts in Champs Online but not even 30 in GW2, so obviously I’m getting better

It comes down to three things
1) I like trying out differing stuff works through as much different content as possible.
2) It’s easier to just kit out a toon exactly the way I want it and never mess with it.
3) A lot of my toons ‘theme’ comes from how they look or their name, and I’ve carried these through lots of games.

For example, my main, Xavori is ALWAYS a rogue-type. He was actually born in pen and paper AD&D. He was well known in UO. He was in DAoC. He was in WoW. He was a witchhunter in Warhammer Online cuz that was as close as I could get. He started out as a scrapper in City of Heroes (again, as close as I could get) but was deleted and remade when City of Villains came out (how many people do you know delete complete characters just because they have to have the name and theme fit as close as possible…I’m so broken in the head). He was in WoW. He was in the Star Wars beta (both games…I never played past beta because while I’m broken, I’m also smart enough to spot train wrecks from way off) He’s in Champs and here. He’ll be in whatever game I move on to from here. Heck, if a single player game lets me create characters (ie. mass effect), he ends up there, too.

Vol.5241:

Learn to use banners.

Why?

I like my shouts zerker warrior. Perma swiftness. Perma fury. Perma 11-14 stacks of might out of combat, I’ve had it get as high as 20 solo in combat, 25 in warrior groups is normal.

Oh, and my teammates get 50% uptime on fury which is way better than even the shiny new 170 points of precision would be (mathzors: 21 points per 1% crit chance. Fury gives extra 20% crit chance, so equals 420 points). They also get a perma six stacks of might (mathzors: 1 stack of might equals 35 points of power AND condition damage so 6 stacks is 210×2).

Well, my teammates who are not the mezzie get all that since the mezzie doesn’t sit in the kittenpile on the flame effigy so NO AWESOMESAUCE FOR COWARDLY MEZZIE

(mezzies, I joke…first, I haz two mezzie alts…second, I lurve when mezzies drop time warp on my warrior and I would haz a sad if they stopped)

Yes. That was snark.

I have three warriors. One is a tank. One is a MF farmer. One is a zerker.

None of them remotely needs buffed. The whole reason I picked warrior for my head to toe MF character was because warriors were way far along on the strong side of the whole tissue paper – OP continuum.

I have one engineer. I don’t play her much at all because frankly, everything she might be able to do okay, I have another class that does much better. Single target DPS-thief. Ranged AoE DPS-ranger. Easy AoE DPS-warrior. Flexibility-elementalist.

Even more support-ish roles are better in other classes. If you want to be healer, be a water spec’d elly. Want to buff teammates – guardian or shout/banners warrior.

But engineer…poor engineer. Sure, you can have some silliness with a few builds that are based on your opponent killing themself, provided a) you can find an opponent without a functioning brain and b) you don’t get killed long before finding a).

So a few people figure out that the new flamethrower tweaks make that underwhelming kit someone useful. Can’t have that. NERF DETONATION.

Heck, I know it’s prolly a bug getting fixed. I don’t really care. Engineers need a lot of love that they just aren’t getting (as do necros, but necro love might be just fixing minion AI so that they actually always fight). Instead, patch after patch they just get further and further behind the other classes.

I mean, you’re never going to see a post on gw2lfg.com saying “GLF2M Zerker Engineers Only” now are you? In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a group actually looking for an engineer ever, nor are there ever that many people who eagerly post the fact they’re an engineer looking for an invite.

On the other hand, when I need a few quick gold, I’m all about posting “80 full zerker warr LFG”, and I think I’ve had to wait as long as 30 seconds once to find a group…at 2am…on a weekday…

OP,

I’m going to give you the ultimate secret to easy mode mesmer.

Sword/Pistol – Clone on Dodge – Clone utility skills (Mirror Images and Decoy) – Illusion health signet

That’s it.

Even though you’re holding a sword, you don’t want to melee. You want to stand back and cast your Duelist Phantasms and let them do damage for you. But, you do want main hand sword because sword clones CHARGE THE ENEMY.

Enemies have a strong tendency to aggro stuff that gets into melee. Your clones will do that. If you give them some extra health, they’ll occupy enemies non-stop. Clone on dodge requires enough points that you’ll end up with Sharper Image by default, so those suicidal charging clones will be stacking a few bleeds each. Oh, and sword clones also stack vulnerability.

While they’re doing that, you’re happily in the back of the group taking pot shots with your trick shot pistol and spamming duelists. Duelists stay way back which is good because while they have solid DPS, they are uberdelicate. They’ll also be adding more bleeds, and they’ll get bonus damage since your clones which are tanking for them are stacking vuln, as I said. You’re also free to rez your teammates as your DPS personal DPS is negligible.

Oh, you can use your sword to make yourself invuln if something does take a swipe at you. It also has a short-range clone skill which works surprisingly well as a leap if you practice with it. Sword leap-clone, wait a moment or two for clone to charge in, then his the button again to swap with that clone, invuln sword attack, dodge back leaving another clone between you and the bad guy.

Or, if you want, you can stick with the just the duelists thing. Leaves you free to rez your teammates too since its your duelists, not you, providing your dps

Strifey.7215:

Xavori.3768:

Dahkeus.8243:

I’m torn…

On one side, I know that there will always be content that will be farmed for gold and I am really happy that one of the best ways to do this right now is through a dungeon instead of mindlessly killing mobs over and over in open world.

However, it is disappointing that this heavily favors people that have a mesmer or warrior at level 80. If this was something that was viable with other classes as well, it really wouldn’t be an issue to me, but right now there are two main problems that prevent that from happening:

1) Warrior dps is so far beyond what any other class can do, it’s no wonder that many people won’t join a group for something like CoF unless it’s a 4 warrior 1 mesmer group. I’ve heard the argument of melee getting higher dps since it’s riskier to be in melee than in ranged, but melee for many other classes still isn’t close to warriors (rangers may be one of the best examples of this issue).

2) Dungeons right now, as a whole, generally encourage glass cannon builds since damage is often avoidable through dodges and unavoidable damage is so low that there’s not much reason to ever bring a person running a full support build.

1) Warrior DPS is AoE. Thief DPS is higher, but only on single targets as their AoE stuff isn’t as strong. In CoF where you have several key fights with pile o’ trash, AoE is more important that raw DPS.

That said, my ranger has better AoE DPS than greatsword warriors which is why I speed run CoF using a sword/axe shout warrior who has enough boon duration bonuses that she can be standing around and still maintain 11-14 stacks of might, permafury, and permaswiftness. She also sticks 6 stacks of might on everyone around her. When she starts fighting, 20+ stacks of might aren’t out of the question, and since might buffs both direct and condition damage, and condition damage ignores armor, and sword autoattack stacks bleed…

Ya. No rangers get to the kind of AoE DPS she has once she gets going.

I’m also thinking of using her rune setup on my guardian to see what kind of ubertank it turns her into

Your ranger has better AoE dps then a GS warrior? What world are you living on..

And a sword/axe shout warrior in CoF… really… gotta be trolling.

You lack creativity. Tell me how a 20+ stacks of might on a warrior that can whirl in a dungeon where mobs come from all over isn’t better than a cone attack? Plus, when the mezzie drops time warp and you send out 15 chaos bolts on top of your melee attacks, way better than greatsword.

And ranger…just go all in DPS on longbow since you don’t even have to think about taking hits. Pretty sure there are no greatsword warriors that can drop an area attack and while that attack is still proc’ing turn around and machine gun everything in a line. So ya, better AoE DPS.

Greatsword warrior is not the best. It’s the easiest. That’s what makes it popular. You have an attack to get into melee range and an attack that does all your damage, and that’s really all you have to do. No worrying about combo fields or keeping buffs up or anything. Just get in, hundred blades, get out, rinse, and repeat. Easy peasy.

Dahkeus.8243:

I’m torn…

On one side, I know that there will always be content that will be farmed for gold and I am really happy that one of the best ways to do this right now is through a dungeon instead of mindlessly killing mobs over and over in open world.

However, it is disappointing that this heavily favors people that have a mesmer or warrior at level 80. If this was something that was viable with other classes as well, it really wouldn’t be an issue to me, but right now there are two main problems that prevent that from happening:

1) Warrior dps is so far beyond what any other class can do, it’s no wonder that many people won’t join a group for something like CoF unless it’s a 4 warrior 1 mesmer group. I’ve heard the argument of melee getting higher dps since it’s riskier to be in melee than in ranged, but melee for many other classes still isn’t close to warriors (rangers may be one of the best examples of this issue).

2) Dungeons right now, as a whole, generally encourage glass cannon builds since damage is often avoidable through dodges and unavoidable damage is so low that there’s not much reason to ever bring a person running a full support build.

1) Warrior DPS is AoE. Thief DPS is higher, but only on single targets as their AoE stuff isn’t as strong. In CoF where you have several key fights with pile o’ trash, AoE is more important that raw DPS.

That said, my ranger has better AoE DPS than greatsword warriors which is why I speed run CoF using a sword/axe shout warrior who has enough boon duration bonuses that she can be standing around and still maintain 11-14 stacks of might, permafury, and permaswiftness. She also sticks 6 stacks of might on everyone around her. When she starts fighting, 20+ stacks of might aren’t out of the question, and since might buffs both direct and condition damage, and condition damage ignores armor, and sword autoattack stacks bleed…

Ya. No rangers get to the kind of AoE DPS she has once she gets going.

I’m also thinking of using her rune setup on my guardian to see what kind of ubertank it turns her into

Tommyknocker.6089:

No need to nerf it, just gate it along with all the other dungeons. Once you kill everything including the trash (give these better drops) then the next section opens up to you. This way the runs will be completed at close to the same speed by most parties.

I could never understand the leashing process anyways, if someone enters my house looking to rob me and I’m home, I don’t ignore them if they enter my bedroom because it is too far away from me to bother with them. If you agro it you should have to deal with it IMO.

Most of CoF 1 is gated. You have to kill the slavemaster. You have to kill the acolytes. You have to do the pillars-gate thing. The reason it’s popular for speed runs is that all of those things can be done best with raw DPS which means they can be done very fast.

Contrast that with the vines in TA where you want DPS, but if your group has nothing but DPS, the vines starts spraying AoE puddles everywhere and your delicate little zerkers all start falling down boom. Much better to have someone who can facetank the champ and draw a bunch of the fire. Heck, the fastest I’ve made it through that bit was playing my bunker necro who stood side by side with an altruistic healing guardian and just laughed off ALL the incoming fire from all the vines which meant the other three people in the party were free to go kittening crazy DPS.

Anyway, CoF1 isn’t speedrun because of a lack of gating, it’s speedy because all you need is deeps.

Lightrayne.7829:

Even more proof that the level argument is invalid and that if you take the time to learn encounters, you can deal with the new AC. Nicely done.

So the fact a very good solo player can abuse AI patterns makes the fact that a vast majority of players don’t like AC anymore invalid?

I have a whole pile o’ alts that can solo Spider Queen. These same alts can into big trouble in groups because the AI has more variables to react to, and hence, isn’t perfectly predictable.

I’m thinking I don’t want the ‘easiest’ dungeon in the game to require perfect game play. I want it to be newbie friendly. I want people to live through making a few mistakes.

The new AC is nowhere near that. You make a mistake now; you die. That’s fine for hardcore players, but it drives everyone else away.

Out of curiousity, if I made a video of me soloing the new Kholer, would that also mean he’s not overpowered with his new infinite adds? (hint: use the stairs and water) Cuz again, I don’t think the first dungeon should require someone with over 1500 hours of gameplay who has the AI’s flaws down pat (ie. me)

I built a reflect mezzie specifically to hunt karka kiddies. She can actually kill young karka fast enough that I collect more shells/potent blood than I could buy with gold earned in the same amount of time.

Right now karka shells sell for 5-6 silver. In a single omnomberry bar’s 30 minutes, she’ll collect 10-15 of them, 2-3 potent blood, and around another 30-40 silver or so in drops. It’s the only thing I’ve come up with that’s even in the same zip code as CoF speed runs in terms of making money, and unlike CoF, I don’t need to be in an optimum group (course…when you are in an optimum group, it blows karka hunting out of the water for making money)

Another way to look at this…

Before the patch to AC, AC groups were a constant fixture on gw2lfg.com. You could always find groups, and you could find groups that were happy to bring completely new players along and help them level and have fun.

Now, there are usually no more than one or two listings for AC groups. In fact, right now there are more groups for everything but HotW (cuz underwater is hated) than AC. I think it’s pretty obvious that quite a few players no longer think AC is fun.

It’s that fun thing I care about. I don’t want new players going into AC AT ALL because a bad experience there, which is likely, might very well turn them off to running any dungeons. Contrast that with pre-patch where AC was a great way to introduce new players to dungeons. Right now, TA is where it’s at for ‘recruiting’ players to run dungeons (and in not at all surprising co-in-key-dinks, there are a bunch of listings for TA up right this second).

As far as I’m concerned, the devs confused ‘interesting’ with really hard (see also: new krait). If instead they come up with mechanics like Ghost Eater versus traps without Ghost Eater’s OP attacks, that would have been good. If instead of random fire circles that are only up some of the time during the Howling King fight, Hodgins put up fire circles that are always there, even if they moved around, and toned down HK’s attacks, that would have been good. And most importantly, if they hadn’t given practically every graveling knockdown/back so players didn’t get CC spammed, that would have been much, much better.

Keep in mind this game doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you nerf enough stuff, the people who play for rewards, and who tend to be the ‘farmers’, will just go find some other game. Without those people filling up the TP with stuff they don’t want, everyone will start to suffer as the TP gets way more expensive with way fewer options.

This was one of the fun parts of balancing way back in the pen and paper RPG days. Too much loot makes the game too easy. Not enough loot and your players revolt because their characters aren’t ‘growing’ fast enough.

Danireathorn.2814:

A week or so ago, a group of players with Lv 35s attempted to finish a path of AC Here and succeeded. I think it shows that even at Lv 35, understanding what strategies and tactics to use when and where trumps gear and levels.

I admit, the knock backs have made the dungeon a bit trickier, but not by much. As far as I know, every single class has either a utility skill or elite skill that produces stability in order to counteract knock backs. As far as I have experienced, path 1 is still fast to run, path 2 is fast with communication and knowing how to debug the NPC/Ghost eater, and path 3 has gotten trickier unless you really know what you’re doing.

edit: As far as CM goes, I haven’t run that in a while so I cannot give any input in that area

I saw that thread. Instead of level 80, maybe I should have titled this thread “Are new players not allowed in dungeons?”

There is no way a group of new players is completing any AC path when they hit 35. It is likely no group of new players is completing AC no matter what level they are.

I took a new-ish group on path one last night. It took three hours even though I know exactly what to do and even took time to explain things. There was more wrong than just the difficulty (ie. Kholer by himself ending up culled at least once because of the sheer amount of particle effects from two necros with wells, guardian symbols, marks, mesmer clones, etc), but the big problem is that you’re asking new players to play perfectly. If you miss a dodge, you die. If you miss Kholer’s sparkly hand, you die. If you miss getting out of the way of Howling King’s scream or lazer, you die. If you burn up all your endurance dodging and another graveling starts you on the chain-knockback, you die.

As for skills and stability…what you’re arguing is that not only do you need to be an experienced player, but you have to use a build designed specifically to counter the bad design decision of 3/4ths of all the mobs having cc abilities. Thankfully, you don’t actually need stability to finish, but that’s not going to be a convincing argument that the dungeon difficulty isn’t out of whack unless ANet specifically wants dungeons to be experienced players only.

If they do, so be it. There’s lots of other content to do. The problem is that in turn, a lot of players won’t do any dungeons. Open world PvE rewards are better, lower risk, no groups required, etc.

I’d greatly prefer the old gravelings and Kholer with improved boss mechanics in the fights. At least then the only gravelings with out of control CC were the scavengers. I’d also very greatly prefer if the boss fights weren’t dependent on random NPC actions (Hodgins fire circles are annoying since he tosses them randomly and slowly…Grast at times just gets stupid)

Another way to look at the out-of-control difficulty of AC versus even Arah. You can solo Arah. It’s way, way hard, but doable. You cannot solo AC.

This is a serious question resulting from my experiences with the new AC plus some of the other dungeons.

Now, I think the new AC is flawed because knockback spamming swarms of mobs are simply not fun. This is actually a long running complaint of mine going back to the first games that allowed the AI to CC chain. It’s just not fun getting killed without being able to fight back. The new gravelings might be better individually that the old graveling scavengers, but there are more of them now with knockback/knockdown and therefore, the end result is the same. You eventually can’t dodge anymore, and then you die.

That out of the way, the biggest problem is that I’m 100% sure there is no way a group of level 35 toons in even the best level 35 gear can complete any of the AC explorable paths now. This is a pretty significant change from before were you could not only complete them, but it wouldn’t take that much longer than a full 80 team (maybe 35-40 minutes instead of 20-25).

The new Kholer fight with infinite adds bites. Eventually he pulls a necro or ranger out of his back pocket, and since those are still the OP mess that they’ve always been, it’s death to the party…unless it’s a full DPS level 80 part that just buzzsaws everything. But an actual mix of different classes and builds and levels…hah…party wipe.

The new faster mob-spawning burrows that spit out so many more gravelings, most of whom have knockback/knockdown…ya…party wipe unless you have the same massive DPS, preferably with an elementalist or two for ice bows.

The boss fights themselves…yes, more interesting. I like the new mechanics of taking them down. I do not like the ‘you miss a single dodge you die’ level of their damage output. Well, actually my bunker necro can take a few shots, but I’m thinking if the standard for fighting bosses is a head to toe high vitality class wearing high defense armor and traited/runed to get back damage from toughness, then maybe the standard needs some re-thunking.

And it’s not just AC. Anyone really enjoy running through the caves in any of the paths of CM? How about all the mobs that got the sniper stuff added to them, espec since they’ll have a dozen or more other mobs to hide behind while sniping?

There’s a reason why gw2lfg is getting to be more and more limited to just a few paths seeking players with just a few builds. Players want to have fun, and getting wiped a half dozen times or more is not fun.

I’ve leveled every class to 80, and most more than once…or twice. I’ve run a multitude of builds, and even more back in beta.

If all you’re looking to do is solo to 80, anything works (except maybe a minion necro…but that’s cuz minions don’t work). In fact, solo gives you more option than a team based build because that huge mega kitten of a problem with condition builds doesn’t matter since a single player can’t hit the condition cap by themselves (not even doing the afflicted, krait, centuar runes with earth and/or bleed duration sigils in two weapons).

So honestly, pick something that sounds like the way you like to play. Do you like just wading in and beating the kitten out of stuff? Play a warrior or a DPS guardian. Do you like knowing your invincible versus most mobs? Play a bunker guardian or necro. Do you like knowing you’re one badly timed dodge from being dead while at the same time inflicting much whining in WvW? Play a thief. Do you maybe want to be able to change drastically on the fly? Play a elly or engy.

Sky.7610:

Orion the Cursed.1206:

“How exactly am I punished? Economically. Everyone who completes the dailies gets some silvers + mystic coin + a Jar of karma accompanied by some experience.”

^You are not punished. You are just not rewarded. Huge difference. Why are you not rewarded? Because you didn’t do the event, and they did. Do you expect to gain when you dont even bother to log in now?

I dont do fractals so im punished by not getting free ascended gear? Hells NO

You are not going to get paid if you dont go to work.

I’m being punished because that free money, mystic coin, and karma you got from the daily makes my gold less valuable due to inflation, therefore I am being punished.

Getting ascended gear in fractal does not harm you and is only beneficial to the person wielding it and cause no harm to others.

Wow. You must really hate the people running dungeons then. They get over 1 gold each that you don’t. I mean, that’s at least 20 times worse than the 5s for a daily.

And don’t get me started on those people running around Orr doing events. They’re totally crushing your hopes and dreams by inflating the economy.

And oh kitten…I’m guilty too. Just last night I was killing karka and a few of them dropped coins. I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to ruin the game for you.

Behellagh.1468:

Shayne Hawke.9160:

I could go back to GW and start a fresh character in Prophecies right now and have maxed out gear in less than a day. I could even shave a few hours off that if I permitted myself access to the expansion.

Show me how to do that in GW2, and I’ll stop believing that Ascended material and time costs aren’t absurd.

Ever considered that capability you had in GW was intentionally left out of GW2 because it’s dumb in terms of retaining players who spend real money in the cash shop?

ANet is in business and need to pay the bills and would like a steadyish cash flow so they can do more work and keep the servers up. Having a whole bunch of players insta-max level/max gear doesn’t lend toward that goal you think?

Just to give you a counter-example:

Champions Online makes most of its income from costumes. Players happily spend real money to get more choices for what they wear. This means that players who have maxed their characters (I have 71 of them maxxed out) still have lots of reasons to give them real money that have nothing to do with grinding.

I have over 20 alts. I can assure you the one laurel per day – ten laurels per month is not going to get them all their amulets. The first question I asked when laurels were announced was about other ways to get them, and I got a positive response. So I didn’t get to the holding my breath and stomping my feet and screaming that ANet doesn’t really love me.

Now we have the once a week thing with guild tokens and earrings. Eventually you’ll be able to get more than just two tokens a week as guilds start adding the other events, but even then, that is gated to just the big guilds, and seriously gated to real world time, not game time. This is bad, but I’m holding out hope that ascended gear will work its way into other acquisition methods.

Ultimately, I wish ascended gear would become craftable. Craftable items already have a plethora of acquisition methods. You can run around harvesting. You can farm bags. You can buy with gold which in turn means practically all the content in the game leads towards being able to make your item. I expect that ascended items would need lots of high end mats, but I’m totally okay with that provided that I really can do anything in the game I want and still be making progress towards acquiring BIS gear.

I think this is one of the reasons that things like the gem store are a win for gamers. It gives developers a strong incentive to stick with improving the game rather than simply moving on to the next project since the cash flow from the game doesn’t end at release.

The interview with GW2Guru makes it sound like a stealth nerf is coming, and maybe it might possibly be needed. However, I’d argue that right now nobody, including the devs, has any idea if stealth is actually useful when working as intended, let alone overpowered.

Right now, we have horribad culling. That culling turns an effect that breaks targeting and sets up a couple moves into near permanent invisibility. I agree this is bad. I haven’t played my WvW thief (who is also my main) in a while because it’s boring to have that much of an advantage over practically every opponent. (I play my faberge cannon ranger in WvW instead)

But if you go pure theorycrafting on what stealth does, it’s not particularly powerful. In PvE, it no longer has an effect on mob aggro which means when you come back out of stealth, the mob you were fighting will instantly pick you right back up. Heck, when you add up the delaybetween when the mob “loses” you, finishes whatever it was doing before you stealthed, and you coming back, there are times when it appears stealth had no effect at all outside of whatever move (flame burst, backstab, etc) that it sets up.

In WvW, at least you know other players lose targeting, and lose sight of you for a couple seconds. The normal reaction from good players is just AoE wherever you were. That means that to use stealth for anything but it’s setup, you need some kind of mobility move immediately after stealthing. Mesmers and thieves can have such a move, but they are on fairly long cooldowns so it limits how often you can do anything but the setup part of stealth in a good fight.

All that said, maybe stealth really will have some synergy with something else that makes it overpowered even after the culling fix eliminates the biggest problem with stealth: effective permainvisibility. But we don’t know that yet because nobody has gone looking for it. Players who use stealth in WvW only care about the EZ-mode perma. Maybe taking that away is really all stealth needs to get back in balance.

(p.s. I have a really similiar argument when it comes to buffing necro minions. I’d really hold off on buffing until after the AI for them is working properly. It might be that if they actually fight all the time, they’re already good. Or maybe they do need some kind of buff, but until they work right, there is no way to tell.)

Guardians use scepter just fine. As you already commented on.

Mesmers can make great use of the scepter in things like shatter builds. The scepter autoattack spawns clones. Add in clones on dodge and you’ll be able to go from no clones to full clones in a few seconds. So if you trait for damage on shatter, and to speed up shatters, etc., you’ll be golden.

Necro condition builds work with scepter as well. You will have all the inherent problems of condition vs direct damage builds, but that’s not a necro or scepter problem, that’s a condition damage problem. That said, solo the scepter is great for stacking conditions and mix it with offhand items that fit your style, and like mezzies clone builds, you’re golden.

Elementalist is iffy if you’d want scepter. Not because it doesn’t work, but because staff is so much better for AoE fighting and dagger/dagger is just awesomesauce. Still, like any elementalist weapon, you can do all kinds of different builds and make them work.

Just want to comment on the one-per-account versus one-per-character…

There aren’t really any big advantages to multiple alts except maybe farming Final Rest since you can do that multiple times in a day instead of just once. There are enough different dungeons, events, chest rewarding events, etc. that it’s just not possible for one player to run out of stuff in a day.

There are, however, some huge downsides to multiple characters. As an altaholic, I’m familiar with all of them.

I have to level each of them through fractals separately. I will likely never have ascended gear for all of them as 1 laurel per day means 30 days per amulet, and another 20 or so for the infusion. I have to pay 15-20g every single time one of them hits 80 to get them in exotic gear, and that’s after paying the 15-20g cost of a new character slot in the first place. I’m stuck buying multiple copies of the same dye since dye is per character instead of per account.

Now, I live with all those limitations because I enjoy creating characters who fit a specific role really well. Can I pretty please be allowed to at least farm Final Rest a couple times a day in exchange?

I fell in to a burning ring of fire
I went down down down and the flames got higher
and it burns burns burn the ring of fire
the ring of fire

Kanyon.9182:

I run a full zerker War Axe+Sheild/GS combo and got booted today from a party because I didn’t only use GS. Full Zerker Exotic Equipment doesn’t cut it anymore.

You are better off. GS has only one attack, 100h, that is worth anything DPS wise, and it’s only frontal cone. I run sword/axe on my zerker warrior because axe 5 hits everything near you, and more importantly, is a combo finisher that spits out 15 bolts if you use it with a mezzie’s time warp. You also get an extra sigil this way, sword can get 10% bonus crit chance, offhand makes all attacks 5% higher, and sword adds just enough bleed stacks that you aren’t wasting condition damage, and since everyone is screaming For Great Justice, those bleed stacks really start to hurt (my adorable little asura zerker routinely gets 20+ stacks of might going in CoF speed runs)

So if you’re group wanted greatsword only, they lack creativity and/or basic math skills.

NoTrigger.8396:

Xavori.3768:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

All new stuff in dungeons is going to be hard for the first few days. We see it all the time with new content – people fail and get knocked down when they aren’t used to that sort of thing, and they claim it is too difficult.
Give it a week or so for everyone to develop strategies, learn encounters, and build fundamentals, and they will claim it is too easy. Trust me when I say this, the numbers are punishing (but less than they were before), but knowing the mechanics will greatly mitigate the danger.

Uh. There is no mechanic for dealing with cc spamming gravelings. Eventually you will run out of endurance and stun breakers.

The spider queen has the same problem. Once upon a time, I would melee her. Now, that suicide as she’ll drop that poison/acid pool right before her web maintain and if that hits you and locks you in the pool, you die.

The boss fights are better (except Grast bugged into kamakize mode which made path 3 impossible), but everything else got worse. Even Kholer (you do know players skip him because he’s a pain, right?) got worse as he keeps spawning new ghostie adds.

the spider dies faster than ever before. you just need some stability in your group and condition removal.
the same with kholer. he lost a good amount of hp and the adds are really easy to kill. and care when he raises his sword. you have to dodge.

dodge is key. when i go into ac with pugs, most of the level 80 dont know how to dodge and thats why they die at kholer and skip him.

Just FYI:

I’ve run AC a few hundred times at this point using every single class in the game. I’m well aware of the mechanics involved in the fights.

Last night when I was running the new AC, I was using my boon warrior (70% boon duration) who has two stun breakers. For the first time in a very long time, I died fighting the queen because eventually, you run out of endurance. I also died to a graveling pack because while I dodged the first leap, the second leap and my landing happened at the same time. I hit Shake It Off just in time to get hit by yet another graveling leap. Unfortunately, Endure Pain was still on cooldown from the previous fight, so I died.

I died again, twice, when we got to the Howling King because our group had no idea what to do with the changes. However, once we figured it out, I liked that fight as it was a lot more interesting than just beating a bag o’ hit points.

Path 2 I didn’t bother trying to melee queen, and no dying happened because it’s easy peasy to just run away from the circles instead of dodging and you have more time to react to the web beam. The Ghost Eater fight also went better as again, no idea what to do, but when you see those new guns on the ground, and ghostie traps, it didn’t take much for someone who grew up in the 80’s to immediately think “Who ya gonna call?”

Path 3 was a disaster at the boss. Even when we figured out the shield thing, we couldn’t convince Grast not to charge Colossus. So I went off exploring the little unfinished jump puzzle behind the fight rather than waste a bunch of money on repairs.

MasterGeese.4756:

Nnene.7231:

They problem is not that it’s hard and challenging for lvl 80 team. The problem is that it is SUPPOSED to be the EASIEST and FIRST dungeon that you do at LVL 35, to LEARN how to do dungeons and mechanics and teamwork, and all that. What was wrong with the other AC ? It was easy, of course, for lvl 80 people who had done it a hundred times, but it was still hard and challenging for lvl 35 begginers, so it was the way it SHOULD be, right ?

So why change it ? Just why.

No it’s not. AC Story is supposed to be the first dungeon you do. AC Explorable is an entirely different dungeon. It’s meant for people who already have experience with completing at least one dungeon and is meant to be a step up difficulty-wise. Think of it as a level 80’s version of the lv 30 starter dungeon. Even though you can do it as early as level 35, it’s meant to challenge even the good dungeon-goers.

Uh. It’s a level 35 dungeon that cannot be completed by level 35 players.

I’d actually be okay with all dungeons’ explorable modes going to level 80 only and being set difficulty-wise to that, but that’s not where we’re at yet.

Of course, in terms of difficulty that makes no freakin’ sense, we have to get to Caudecus’s Manor. Nothing like having a swarm of 20 mobs, half of them silver, rush you at once to make you realize there is at least one very sadistic dev. Prolly the same dev who decided to give the sniper mechanic to half the mobs in that dungeon.

And then at the other extreme you have CoF path 1. A bad group can finish that run in 15 minutes. The fastest group I’ve ever been in finished in less than 8 (I can’t be more precise than that because my ‘timer’ was my food which still had 22 minutes available when we were done).

Robert Hrouda.1327:

All new stuff in dungeons is going to be hard for the first few days. We see it all the time with new content – people fail and get knocked down when they aren’t used to that sort of thing, and they claim it is too difficult.
Give it a week or so for everyone to develop strategies, learn encounters, and build fundamentals, and they will claim it is too easy. Trust me when I say this, the numbers are punishing (but less than they were before), but knowing the mechanics will greatly mitigate the danger.

Uh. There is no mechanic for dealing with cc spamming gravelings. Eventually you will run out of endurance and stun breakers.

The spider queen has the same problem. Once upon a time, I would melee her. Now, that suicide as she’ll drop that poison/acid pool right before her web maintain and if that hits you and locks you in the pool, you die.

The boss fights are better (except Grast bugged into kamakize mode which made path 3 impossible), but everything else got worse. Even Kholer (you do know players skip him because he’s a pain, right?) got worse as he keeps spawning new ghostie adds.

“Challenging” translates from ANetese into English as “Spam CC and conditions”

Gravelings in AC were made more challenging by, you’ll never guess…giving everything bigger than a hatchling knockback or knockdown. This means instead of a single graveling scavenger knocking you down for 4 seconds and then omnomnoming you to death, you get tossed around like a rag doll.

Personally, I’d happily go back to omnomnom as that at least made stun breakers a viable defense against certain death.

This is just one more slice of the player base ANet is throwing away.

People that truly hate PvP cannot complete legendaries, so they quit. (No. I don’t understand the hate for PvP as I rather enjoy it myself, but I acknowledge such people exist and that they were promised a game that was “play your way”)

People who are really into loot and shinies left after it took forever for ANet to realize and acknowledge that the Nov 15 patch really was broken. By the time ANet caught on to what players saw immediately, they’d kissed a decent number of players goodbye.

People with alts cannot go for BiS gear because of real world time limiting on rewards. This one affects me. I’m not quitting right this second, but I’m also not giving any money to ANet via the gem store which means I’m costing them money with only minimal returns based on my participation helping other people enjoy the game more, and maybe some of those people spend money.

People in small guilds have been told that such guilds are no longer legitimate. I’m in a guild with 49 members. We ignored AoW because the best buffs in WvW are tied to forts, and while we like WvW, we’re not so into forts. We’ll almost certainly be able to get bounties, but I’m not sure about anything beyond that. Not that it matters. I don’t think my guild will survive beyond the members who are friends outside the game, and even they are all set to move on if something better comes along. I can’t even recruit new players in good conscience because I cannot offer them a huge chunk of the content available.

At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me that when the scavenger hunt is released, it slices off yet another segment of the player base.

Play your way was a great idea. And the game, while not perfect, had lots of different things for lots of different play styles. Pity that doesn’t seem as important anymore.

Tweekon.2510:

Very long post.. Says exactly the same as all the others.

‘My small guild deserves to be able to do this new content. I will not change my playstyle to fit.’

EQ2 had guild levels. Hitting max guild level gave nice things. Small 2 person guilds whined it was harder for them to level than big raid guilds.

Dev response – so go join a raid guild, or recruit to your guild.

I hope the devs stick to their guns here. And wrap these inane entitlement posts up into one big thread.

So how’s EQ2’s playerbase looking these days?

Hell, how are any of games built around TheVision™ doing anymore

You don’t succeed by starting with a broad base of potential customers and then excluding more and more of them over time. You succeed by looking at your entire customer and making sure whatever changes you do will appeal to as many of them as possible.

Sure, it’s possible to build a niche game and make some money at it. However, GW2 isn’t intended to be a niche game. They started out with a game that had appeal to broad swaths of customers…explorers, socializers, achievers, PvP, WvW, dungeons, etc. Their goal should be to keep all that viable.

The new changes exclude what is likely the larger segment of their player base: players that are active in smaller guilds. Sure, there might be tens of thousands of players in the 500 man guilds. But there are so very many more in the so very many more smaller guilds.

AC Path 2 at the spikes was disasterously bad fps. Didn’t noticed it anywhere else, but there it got slideshow.

The graveling hatchlings also trigger culling in mobs making all the gravelings, not just hatchlings, start fading in and out. It doesn’t even take that many which makes no sense as before you could have 4-5 breeders all puking babies and never lose any of them to culling.

I like the changes to paths 1&2 boss fights. They’re more interesting.

But path 3 being entirely dependent on an NPC is just horribad. I’m the hero, not the AI. Then add in how bad the AI actually is, and it’s just not a fun fight unless you get lucky enough that Grast doesn’t go kamikaze.

As for the rest of the dungeon…

I was happy to see graveling scavengers are no longer certain death once you ran out of stun breakers. I’m not at all happy that practically every mob in the dungeon now spams knockback/down. I like actually playing my character, not watching it flop around like a rag doll (and fyi: I run two stun breakers and am very good at dodging…and still got permaknocked a few times).

There should be a big rule painted on the wall of every game development building:

Do not take away a player’s ability to play the game without very good reason.

This applies to cc spamming mobs, cutscenes that force your character to do stupid things, etc.

Side note: we’ll have guild missions asap. We’d already be researching it, but like a lot of small-medium guilds, didn’t bother with Art of War until the devs announced it a couple days ago. We’ll have no problem with the influence, just waiting on timers.

1. Create a thief alt.
2. Train up your thief’s underwater spear skill.
3. Go fight jellyfish.
4. When jellyfish ramps up its spin attack, hit 5.
5. Collect 3-5 dodges while beating the kitten out of the jellyfish and taking no damage yourself.
6. Repeat until you finish your dodge, and get a nice headstart on aquatic kills.

Too bad you can’t short sell items on the TP. You could make a killing on the pie price drop

Also, what builds are y’all running that you have no survival without the pies/ghosts? I really am running a full zerker warrior build, run it in practically everything, and usually use stew (might on dodge) or bars (gold find) rather than healing food.

Dodging, strafing, etc., work just fine for keeping my delicate flower self alive…

Crossroads of the Lounge (CLVG) – Yak’s Bend – is a guild started by players who’ve been around since the days of Ultima Online and the old Crossroads message board (which is where we got part of our guild’s name). Many of us have been gaming together for over a decade now.

Over that time, we’ve picked up people from not just MMO’s, but pretty much every type of game, and we’re always looking for more people to add to our little community that now revolves around The Lost Lounge message board (another part of our guilds name).

We’re extremely laid back and fun loving. In fact, the first rule of Crossroads is HAVE FUN. The second rule is make fun of Sardonic. Once you meet him, you’ll understand why.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a casual group of goofballs to hang out with, run dungeons, run sPvP, run WvW, run line dancing, etc., just send me or anyone other CLVG tagged freak a message and we’ll be happy to invite you in to our silly guild.

It was at 40.68Mb when it finally ticked to 1%….so 100x that

My full zerker warrior does just fine without silly heal to full food. Then again, I’m not the cookie cutter greatsword hundred blade zerker. I’m a 70% boon duration sword/axe giant asura zerker warrior

Also, she’s cute as a button and the way her head flops around after whirlwind never fails to crack me up.

Add my name to the list of people who think PvE guild missions have no place in the Art of War track. More than that, requiring level 5 of any track excludes so many guilds that it just seems like a really bad idea.

Why not move the first guild missions to politics III? It seems a better fit, and it’s more likely the small and medium guilds can get their in a reasonable amount of time which means new guilds will still be able to use these missions to recruit people.

My thotz on class balance (I haz level 80 everything, and multiples of most)

Warrior – I have a bunker, a zerker, and a MF, and they all work just fine. This class needs no changes but bug fixes.

Thief – I have a bunker/condition and a burster. They are nowhere near as durable as even the zerker warrior, but a burster thief kills one target faster than a zerker warrior. Soon as you get to multiple targets tho, things get way too interesting. Still, I wouldn’t make any changes EXCEPT to frakkin’ fix culling so I don’t feel guilty about using stealth.

Mezzie – I have a phantasmal, and am building a reflect. I’ve also played along side a bunch of other builds. This is one of the most interesting classes ANet came up with, and I have a lot of fun theorycrafting all the cool things you can do. Bug fixes only for this class.

Guardian – I went altruistic healing. My guardian isn’t the most useful solo toon, but wow does it act as a damage multiplier. I’ve also run alongside DPS guardians, so I’ve gotten to see just how well that works. The only tweak they really need is making sure all the gear combos for best-in-slot get done asap.

Necros – I wanted to have a minion toon, but since minions are all kittened up, she’s bunker/combos. She can facetank stuff that even my bunker warrior can’t, and since she uses marks and wells, she’s pretty much a non-stop source of combo fields for her teammates. That said, necros suffer badly from the condition cap and the broken AI on minions. They’re also useless in sPvP and WvW since 90% of players eventually figure out that condition removal is an easy to add feature to most classes.

Ranger – I have a beastmaster, a faberge cannon, and am building a condition ranger (cuz I’m weird). The beastmaster is hysterical to play. I sit down and send my pet off to kill stuff. In WvW, I send it after siege engines. It is extreme DPS pet. My other done range, the faberge cannon, wracks up medals better than any other toon I have. I have no idea why people complain about ranger DPS. I’m pretty sure in a duel versus a zerker warrior, the warrior would be dead long before it got to me.

Elementalist – I change up my elly based on mood. Sometimes she’s staff, sometimes daggers. Sometimes she runs a really cool signet/aura build that keeps her constantly under boons. Sometimes she runs a pretty common arcane attunement spam build. There are also AoE damage builds, healer builds, etc that ellies can run very well. Good class.

Engineer – I have a completed engineer that now has no build. She was turrets/grenades. The turrets were more a little addition DPS and healing while she did the real work. Then grenades got nerfed…twice….cuz engineers were ever so much more powerful than wet kittens. Now she had no build because there is absolutely nothing engineers do well anymore. Any build I can come up with would work better on another class.

AoE.

Stealth isn’t invincibility. Stealth just messes with targeting.

Admittedly, mesmers aren’t the best at ground targeted AoE, but it’s the best counter there is. Also, if you really want to mess with thieves, mesmers are the other stealth class. Offhand torch and decoy are good options, and if you stealth and the thief gets all bursty on a clone…well…thieves are helpless post-burst for about 20 seconds or so.

I’m looking for the best overall build for CoF speed runs as a mezzie. I’m thinking focus w/ Warden’s Feedback and of course Feedback utility.

But what else should I put into this build to make CoF go as fast as possible?

Ya know what fix I want…

Just put all loot in my bags when the mob dies. I’m going to pick it all up anyway. This would make WvW much better as it can be extremely tricky to grab the bags when scrambling for your life. In PvE, it becomes a matter of noticing that you have loot to pick up or not.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Maybe it was a bit too much of an exaggeration when I used the dying 3x in the first room scenario.

True, your stats might not make up for your lack of skill…. and true, players get away with running gear that makes them “glass cannon” and rely on more skill than others, but that is not what I am getting at.

I just feel that MF gear in general does nothing but promote greed for individual players.

MF gear takes the place of other stats that could potentially help the team (or players around them) and turn it into increased rare loot for themselves.

There is no place for selfishness on a team. Playing on a team is about working together toward a common goal. Everyone wants to kick the enemies’ butts…. and everyone wants to get nice loot. If you are the anchor weighing the team down because you choose gear stats based on the selfish notion of getting better drops… the team should get at least SOME sort of compensation for carrying you. (even if you aren’t “carried” you could still be doing better with non-MF gear)

MF simply decreases your abilities as a player. Your skill might make up for some of the deficit…. but imagine how much better things would be if you had the gear that helped the team (instead of MF) while applying your skill as a player.

And this is the point where the anti-MF argument becomes a “You must wear zerker armor” argument. To which my reply is: No.

Explorer’s armor is very solid DPS. It’s missing some power and has no crit damage buff, but it’s still DPS gear. In fact, it’s exactly equal to Knight’s except it trades out the toughness for magic find. If you as a player don’t need toughness, then Explorer’s is a very good choice.

And yes, I’d happily run most content in a party of MF wearing people provided they are all at least moderately skilled. After all, good players are good in any gear, and a bad player can be in perfect gear and still hurt the party.

Uh…there are combos and attack sequences already in place.

For example, the very underutilized focus phantasm on a mezzie combos with any field to turn what is otherwise a stationary melee phantasm into a PBAoE spray of fun. I’m building my newest mezzie entirely around this concept (focus-glamours-funzorz!)

Thieves also have a pile of built-in combos. They can drop poison fields anywhere with shortbow 2, and shadow refuge, in addition to being an awesome skill on its own, is a dark field, and dagger storm which is a spray of daggers everywhere, when fired off inside shadow refuge or poison cloud becomes a spray of daggers and darkness or poison and awesomesause.

If you dig through practically every class, you can find things like this. Ellies even have some tricks that aren’t formal combos but work so well together they might as well be. For example Ride the Lightning into Updraft into attune fire into Burning Speed into Ring of Fire into attune water into Frozen Burst into dodge backwards and start again.

It’s entirely possible to run that sequence and have an opponent never get a shot in in response. Unless they can get you to hold still, in which case you have things like shocking aura to to mess with them.

kiba.2768:

Xavori.3768:

Once we find out if we can infuse the amulets via the mystic forge, the whole utility slot thing might really go to magic find and gold find even in fractals as if you can, you can get your agony resist quite a bit up there with the built-in agony resistance, freeing you up to put whatever infusion you want in your gear, and as such, extra gold and magic find is going to be way better than 4 points of a stat since 4 points at level 80 has zero measurable effect.

p.s. A player who dies 3 times in the first room of a dungeon is a bad player. All the stats in the world won’t help. You can try to explain mob mechanics of the specific dungeon to see if that helps, but it’s going to be a longshot. Thankfully, most dungeons can be 3 and 4 manned so you can get prolly get away with carrying them.

when we have 12(13) ascended pieces, those +4/5 will have a measurable impact. might want to keep that in mind

I have thought of that. It’s why my plan is to have a single toon go all-in on the gold find/magic find thing which is what I do now. I have that toon run the majority of content that you don’t need to be optimized for.

For WvW, high level fractals, and hard content, I use real gear, either Zerker for all-in damage, or Ascalonian for all-in tank depending on what the rest of my group looks like.

Oh, and given that the magic find mechanic as it’s obvious designed is about rewarding player skill, I doubt group averaging will happen.

The difference between Knight’s and Explorer’s gear is toughness. A skilled player can get around lower toughness. They use their ability to dodge, move, etc. to increase their survival.

What’s more, since most dungeons are meant to be run by players in sub-optimal gear so as to make them more accessible to a larger part of the player base, it’s not like it takes that much skill to make up for the lack of toughness.

Once we find out if we can infuse the amulets via the mystic forge, the whole utility slot thing might really go to magic find and gold find even in fractals as if you can, you can get your agony resist quite a bit up there with the built-in agony resistance, freeing you up to put whatever infusion you want in your gear, and as such, extra gold and magic find is going to be way better than 4 points of a stat since 4 points at level 80 has zero measurable effect.

p.s. A player who dies 3 times in the first room of a dungeon is a bad player. All the stats in the world won’t help. You can try to explain mob mechanics of the specific dungeon to see if that helps, but it’s going to be a longshot. Thankfully, most dungeons can be 3 and 4 manned so you can get prolly get away with carrying them.

Like most people, I have a whole pile of achievements which I’d completed that got un-completed during the latest patch. Of them, pumpkin carving is the annoying one since it cannot be regained. Hopefully they get fixed on the 26th.

One interesting bit that has come out of this…my new mezzie loves the Feedback glamour, especially after casting Illusionary Warden, but even by itself. Anyway, she’s now ‘completed’ most of the projectile weapon achievements like Longbow Master, Dagger Master, etc even though she cannot actually use those weapons. Apparently reflected weapons count towards those achievements, and since I’d already actually completed them and only needed one to recomplete, it made it obvious what was happening which is something I didn’t know before.

Guild: Crossroads of the Lounge (CLVG)
Server: Yak’s Bend

We hit 50 members. Trying to invite more correctly tells us we’re at the limit. However, no one in the guild can convince the registrar to let us raise the limit. Instead, she reports we don’t have enough members for upgrade.

Please fix. We’re a cuddly bunch and want more peoples!

In terms of story…this is horrible.

You don’t start a story with monotony. You start with an action beat. You have to get your reader/viewer/player interested. Grinding 75 ‘good deeds’ isn’t remotely interesting.

Also, we’re totally missing why the refugees are fleeing. Sure, ANet prolly wants to build suspense. Well, Anet writers…you blew it. Every single one of those refugees knows what they’re running from. At least one of them would have told the story. If you want to build suspense, you don’t start out by flooding your story with witnesses. Heck, you could have used the classic dying messenger trope and done a better job with this bit. Anything is better than a complete break from having a whole bunch of characters behaving like not characters.

Then again, if I actually was playing GW2 for the story, I’d have bailed shortly after the first personal story mission. So much fail in terms of writing…