Guild Wars 2

Dave.2536:

Though more importantly you miss far less by botching an interrupt in GW than one in Wildstar. In Wildstar an interrupt that is not done significantly introduces difficulty to the fight if not an outright wipe.

Wildstar was not a game marketed at casuals. GW2 seems to be the opposite end of the spectrum. Do you really think ANet wants to create wipes for casual groups just because the party comp had no good interrupt, or because the interrupter missed?

We speed runners will happily take bottlenecking content like that, because it’d increase the difficulty of content, remove all the casual bads from the dungeon runs (or make them extremely easy to filter), and give us pretty a much bigger relative share on dungeon gold income. It would end up looking like, say, any of the less casual-catering MMOs.

---

Other games punish you for not doing things well by wiping your party or adding significant difficulty. GW2 lets you yolo through content with anything for the most part, but doing things well makes it faceroll easy.

It’s for the sake of keeping the casuals and bads viable that content isn’t made harder, not because the dungeon community lobbies to keep things faceroll.

Luckily for casuals Wildstar now has adventures, veteran shiphands, open world content and dynamic events, and a solo instance with several paths to boot.

GW2 can already cater to casual players via open world content, which there is plenty of, and WvW.

Hell, they can make story dungeons not be terrible rewards wise and be the casual equivalent. Then they can actually make explorables what they advertised them to be and raise the rewards accordingly to the time and effort spent.

Problem is explorables are only really profitable if you speed clear them relative to open world content. That needs to be fixed. You can even introduce achievements into dungeons like boss mechanics execution and death counters/ time limit achievements while fixing all of the cheesiness of some speed clears that is most egregiously present in Arah (and they can in turn go and revise the dungeon and remove some of the trash packs).

Another thing Wildstar did well with its revamp of dungeons was Veteran Sanctuary of the Swordmaiden. People did not initially like it because it could easily be a 40-50 minute run for organized groups (speed can push it to 30-40 mins), and it was just basically a version of Arah full of trash packs that you had to dance around/skip and abuse to make the timers.

They went and cleaned in the packs, and also did a complete rewards overhaul. Trash mobs received sizable drop rates for customization items like mount flairs (basically accessories for your mounts). The gear quality was upped to be the best pre-raid entry gear (in the case of GW2, they could just make mobs drop ascended and t6 craft materials and the chests for all dungeons should have a decent to good chance of dropping ascended chests).

So, Vet SSM was still a longish dungeon, but you didn’t mind a 40-1 hour run (pugs can take from 50-75 minutes for the silver timer) because the rewards were rather good. And completing the dungeon could net you like 2-3 plat (the equivalent of let’s say 10 gold in GW2).

But I have my doubts about them ever making the game rewarding, since their pet economist seems intent in keeping this game a casino for microtransactions so rewards can’t be good or people won’t farm and grind for months and be more likely to buy gems at the store.

RemiRome.8495:

Zenith.7301:

Interrupting key skills in GW2 is unreliable anyways since the defiance stacks on some bosses are very high

Openworld isn’t really “dungeon speed runs” is it now?

Even in fractal 50 there are enough defiance stacks on a boss where you need a very specific niche set of skills to consistently get off a CC right when you need it. Mesmer’s mantra of distraction being one of them, but poor necromancers should have something like that too.

I still think nerfing necromancer fear as a reliable interrupt against bosses was one of the worse ideas they came up with.

Though more importantly you miss far less by botching an interrupt in GW than one in Wildstar. In Wildstar an interrupt that is not done significantly introduces difficulty to the fight if not an outright wipe.

I really liked the dynamic in GW1 and with interrupt mesmers. The interrupt and counter system there was done far better than in GW2.

I hope they revise the power of boons vs conditions because quite frankly in pve boons are just superior forms of condition. Protection and aegis tend to work better than their condition counterparts (example being, dredge fractal where mobs are immune to blind, but there’s not a single encounter where boons are targeted).

Conditions have caps, boons do not. Conditions like blind and weakness don’t even affect bosses to the same effectiveness boons protect you from them.

I rather liked all those conditional builds (not just conditions, but interactions between skills and conditions on mobs, and interactions with mob behavior) in GW1 and hopefully in HoT they start edging more toward that.

Thaddeus.4891:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah, his group sucked, it’s a PuG.

But you don’t think that linking that video shows just how poorly designed PvE is where someone can cheese conjures on large hit boxes and the power of might stacking to down a boss in a few seconds?

If you think its cheesy try to do the same. Stacking 25 might on yourself on an elementalist is hard in one shot and need practice. You can do it more easily in two shot, but either you don’t have enough time to kill the boss with all your might or you need Rune of strength. He had to change trait quickly, then had a good rotation. He also dodge Icebow to concentrate the damage on a line. Something that isn’t easy in a combat situation.

FGS back in the days. That was cheesy. You simply had to pull the boss in a corner and press 3 skills, no practice, no preparation, no skills.

Zenith.7301:

You don’t lay waste to mythic level bosses in less than 2 minutes, and you certainly don’t get to skip Imperator Margok or Blackhand’s mechanics however much you are geared out.

And you don’t lay waste to Fractal 50 Bosses or most of the higher level World bosses. AC is a low level dungeon with scaling issues. Every mobs is super easy to kill in there. You can’t say that its a broken PvE because 1 low level boss is super easy to kill and then compare that to the hardest boss to kill in WoW. That’s just a stupid comparison.

Don’t expect much of a response from me. I already replied bringing up Arah and fractal boss kill times by optimized group but some people don’t like being replied to so they resort to reporting people to get mods to purge posts they don’t like off threads.

I’ll just agree to disagree as in every thread it’s the same particular individuals coming in to trash talk and nitpick and quite frankly I’m not interested in more infractions.

Veydar.5017:

Whoever thinks GW2 dungeons are toxic and have a steep learning curve should give Wildstar a try. The first boss of the first dungeon (before the latest patch that introduced Prototype) wipes so many people that most groups who don’t make it to the end of the dungeon actually disband right at the beginning (Stormtalon’s Lair).

STL is actually the easiest dungeon to gold. Sanctuary of The Swordmaiden and Skullcano are worse offenders, and Slavedriver in Ruins of Kel Voreth is the absolute brickwall for most inexperienced groups as it has hefty healing checks and need to coordinate CC alongside breaking people out of tethers.

The really toxic times were when adventures only dropped epics on gold so people would disband immediately if an objective necessary for a gold medal was not achieved.

And despite all that Wildstar has never had a history of dungeon communities looking down on certain classes, granted in raids nobody minds a surplus of warriors and they prefer to keep the amount of spellslingers and espers low (much like GW2, buffs are melee based so light armor classes have to sit in melee and soak up more healing since they take ~20% more damage than heavy armor classes while having no damage advantage, and in wildstar there are raid damage auras and other unavoidable damage so it’s not like you can do anything about that gap in efficiency).

Wildstar’s combat is actually very similar to GW2 if you look past the presence of a trinity system (which exists in GW2 in its own way, somebody soaks the damage or redirects it away from the group, and water field blasting and proactive mitigation take the place of healing’s reactive mitigation).

The steep learning curve is also due to Wildstar’s interrupt system. It’s virtually the same as Defiance, where you need to remove stacks, but interrupts actually work because there are dangerous casts to interrupt that when properly interrupted give a moment of opportunity for extra damage. Interrupting key skills in GW2 is unreliable anyways since the defiance stacks on some bosses are very high and the tells are too short anyways so you’re better off dodging/using aegis/reflects.

Wildstar’s interrupt system is much more similar to GW1’s system and the playstyle of interrupt mesmers.

I got the power/toughness/ferocity chest. Once. I also have most fractal weapons except mainhand sword and staff.

The drop rate is marginal and to be honest rings should be removed after fractal 30 from the loot table.

Do you want fractal skins? If not, skip fractals. They’re still the most “challenging” content. As far as GW2 challenge goes compared to other MMO’s serious PvE content.

Some bugs from the very time they were introduced still exist, to give you an indication.

Lifestealer.4910:

Releasing a class to be OP is intended to get people to buy the expansion. Once the sales die down then they nerf the class to “balance” it.

Yeah right, because guardian and warrior have been nerfed and necromancers and mesmers have been brought up to line in 2 years….lolno.

It’s also cute how necromancer’s minor traits on its power line is some garbage like small heal on mob death and 7% of power turned into healing power (a worthless stat) and getting 1 puny might stack when hot at low health.

Or mesmer’s terrible minors as well from the domination line or ranger’s BM minors and that awful opening strike.

But hey it makes sense to follow the tradition of only polishing design on the heavy professions.

Jerus.4350:

I used to do raids in other games. I had similar videos of us just laying waste to things like they were nothing. Playing well and making things look easy can be decieving. Couple that with the fact that we’re talking the first boss in the first dungeon that was significantly nerfed last April, well… yeah…

If you’re blowing up Arah bosses with as much ease, bravo, you’re better than the vast majority of groups out there.

As far as dying in under 1-2 mins, I personally don’t miss the half hour + fights of other MMOs I played. I think 3-5 mins is about perfect personally. Which is probably what a boss fight takes most pug or inexperienced groups in any of the higher level content in this game, play things perfect and you can do better, but isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Designed around mediocre play, allow exceptional play? I mean that’s pretty standard game design from what I’ve seen of every MMO, only rarely do you see stuff where devs say “well we don’t think they can beat it” but then of course people do I’ve been there.

You don’t lay waste to mythic level bosses in less than 2 minutes, and you certainly don’t get to skip Imperator Margok or Blackhand’s mechanics however much you are geared out. People still need to do the mechanics. You still gotta do your force novas, people still need to lay down traps properly, and they still need to spread out and drop stacks and mines properly. Black Furnace doesn’t allow you to just ignore killing the adds and taking bombs to the furnance and luring the elementals to take off the shield off primal elementalists just because you brought enough damage you can mongoloid zerg a boss down.

In this game the damage output is so high that you only worry about a few dodges if any assuming your guardians or thieves aren’t making the group take virtually no damage.

So I learned to perfectly dodge a few tells through repetition of content and a boss dies in 2 minutes or less. I don’t feel good about that. There’s no attrition whatsoever.

I hope this game has more encounter mechanics that force group members to do differing tasks during an encounter other than stacking and putting up reflection field/aegis and the odd dodge, while zerging every content down with OP boon stacking (they’ve been getting nerfed for a reason, might stacks are broken and so are conjures on large hit box mobs).

I see the glitching going on in this game and it’s sickening. From abusing boss hitboxes to taking advantage of AI deficiencies and stealth spam takes the cake. They might as well take out most of a dungeon and advertise to people “Join this dungeon, get your 3g in 10 minutes or less and get out. You’re just here for the gold anyway as it’s clear that you try to avoid as much of the content as possible, so just come into the instance and get your gold without the hassle of playing the game”

I was honestly excited about the HoT talks and trailers, maybe this awful pve content gets a fix to encourage more interesting encounters.

Guardian Of Tyria.6397:

Zenith.7301:

Vayne.8563:

The real answer is don’t buy them. They’re not a rip off because they’re absolutely not necessary. If you want to spend money gambling, you make the assumption that you’re going to lose. It really is that simple.

By making it so that everyone wants needs to buy them, Anet would be doing a disservice to people who don’t want to.

As it is, plenty of people do buy them.

Problem is some skins costing 900g alone, far more than a precursor itself and it only gets worse. Imagine paying 900+ gold for a skin, that’s outrageous when that can go down as 80% of the cost to make a legendary yourself that is ascended, with infusion slots and can switch stats at will.

Something needs to give with making black lion claim tickets more accessible.

I’m looking at the Dreamthistle Staff skin for my ranger. I had gotten all the relevant dreamthistle skins for my ranger when the skins only cost 1 ticket, but now they announce a druid specialization, and I find out there’s only 5 skins on trading post and the lowest is 800 godkitten ed gold.

Assuming that in 2-3 hours of playtime I make about 15 gold AT BEST doing the activities I like, not just farming, that means I’d be looking at nearly two months of farming just for one skin.

If you want it bad enough, you will get it, if you don’t want it bad enough you’ll just forget about it. If you want it bad enough you’ll speed run dungeons and get it in a month or so, if not you’ll keep playing and get it in a couple of months or not at all. Games don’t always have to be about instant gratification, work a little bit for your goal. The Dreamthistle stuff is only as pricey as it is because of simple supply and demand, same as all the SAB stuff (which, by the way, aren’t in BLCs).

As for the OP:

The stuff in the BLC aren’t useless, you just don’t put any value to them. I don’t mind the boosters since they can give me extra run speed and more magic find/karma gained (especially with the powder to convert the boosters to other ones).

Just because you wasted money on keys trying to get a ticket doesn’t mean the items in the chest are useless.

Advice for you…..just buy the skins off the TP if that is what you want, you’ll save lots of money.

Why do you keep talking to me as if I bought keys. Do you even read?

And games ARE about gratification. If I wanted to work for months for something, I’d do it in real life.

I know some people here are hamsters that love their little hamster wheels, but it’s a fact of opportunity cost. I can either blow 800-900g (which you won’t get in a month, I don’t know where you get that deranged idea unless you play the TP or farm for 4+ hours frequently).

I mean, in the 2-3 months it would take me to grind that gold, the skins themselves could be gone from the TP or so few would remain from the initial price that the price would keep rising.

A mere skin costing more than a legendary is absurd.

Behellagh.1468:

Zenith.7301:

Behellagh.1468:

Zenith.7301:

Vayne.8563:

The real answer is don’t buy them. They’re not a rip off because they’re absolutely not necessary. If you want to spend money gambling, you make the assumption that you’re going to lose. It really is that simple.

By making it so that everyone wants needs to buy them, Anet would be doing a disservice to people who don’t want to.

As it is, plenty of people do buy them.

Problem is some skins costing 900g alone, far more than a precursor itself and it only gets worse. Imagine paying 900+ gold for a skin, that’s outrageous when that can go down as 80% of the cost to make a legendary yourself that is ascended, with infusion slots and can switch stats at will.

Something needs to give with making black lion claim tickets more accessible.

I’m looking at the Dreamthistle Staff skin for my ranger. I had gotten all the relevant dreamthistle skins for my ranger when the skins only cost 1 ticket, but now they announce a druid specialization, and I find out there’s only 5 skins on trading post and the lowest is 800 godkitten ed gold.

Assuming that in 2-3 hours of playtime I make about 15 gold AT BEST doing the activities I like, not just farming, that means I’d be looking at nearly two months of farming just for one skin.

Limited and special means limited and special. The price doesn’t need to come down or the means to acquire them change. If everyone can afford a Ferrari, then owning a Ferrari becomes meaningless. Limited availability skins grants uniqueness. It would be nice to own my own Gulfstream G550 but I don’t so I’m forced to fly knee sucking coach on Delta. Now if you acquire keys and happen to assemble enough tickets to get the skin you always wanted, great. Or if you have the gold to buy the skin off the TP, great (it’s likely cheaper in gold unless your keys are free).

But don’t complain that the limited/special skin is too limited/special because you can’t get it cheap.

What a laughable remark. The value of having a ferrari is not its rarity, that’s how sheep think.

The value is in the craftsmanship and mechanical capabilities of a car.

Dreamthistle skins are not rare. I got 7 of them in the event for cheap. It’s when they retired them that they became stupidly expensive.

Please don’t act as if you don’t have a dog in this fight. It’s clearly obvious you’re one of those people who makes their earning from buying said skins and holding on to them to sell later.

Actually I don’t. I think I sold one of the glowing ones. Personally none of those skins excite me. I might have open 100 chests in 2 1/2 years and a moderate fraction of those were before tickets.

If you have bothered to read my previous posts here the point of the chests is to hand out a sample of gem store items and as long as what you find is of similar gem value as a 125 gem key, whether it’s useful to you or not, then it’s not gambling. That is what you are buying. As long as you think that they should have tickets or contracts that you can sell for big bucks, then you aren’t buying them for their intended purpose.

It’s as if you are buying box after box of chocolates simply because there’s a chance to win a $100K. They aren’t selling you a chance for $100K, they are selling you chocolates.

It’s simple, if you don’t want gem shop “junk” as you call it, don’t buy keys.

I didn’t buy anything on the gem store. I’d never waste my money on a RNG box. What I advocated for is more reliable access to claim tickets from chests.

Rewarding people via luck instead of effort/skill is garbage design.

Behellagh.1468:

Zenith.7301:

Vayne.8563:

The real answer is don’t buy them. They’re not a rip off because they’re absolutely not necessary. If you want to spend money gambling, you make the assumption that you’re going to lose. It really is that simple.

By making it so that everyone wants needs to buy them, Anet would be doing a disservice to people who don’t want to.

As it is, plenty of people do buy them.

Problem is some skins costing 900g alone, far more than a precursor itself and it only gets worse. Imagine paying 900+ gold for a skin, that’s outrageous when that can go down as 80% of the cost to make a legendary yourself that is ascended, with infusion slots and can switch stats at will.

Something needs to give with making black lion claim tickets more accessible.

I’m looking at the Dreamthistle Staff skin for my ranger. I had gotten all the relevant dreamthistle skins for my ranger when the skins only cost 1 ticket, but now they announce a druid specialization, and I find out there’s only 5 skins on trading post and the lowest is 800 godkitten ed gold.

Assuming that in 2-3 hours of playtime I make about 15 gold AT BEST doing the activities I like, not just farming, that means I’d be looking at nearly two months of farming just for one skin.

Limited and special means limited and special. The price doesn’t need to come down or the means to acquire them change. If everyone can afford a Ferrari, then owning a Ferrari becomes meaningless. Limited availability skins grants uniqueness. It would be nice to own my own Gulfstream G550 but I don’t so I’m forced to fly knee sucking coach on Delta. Now if you acquire keys and happen to assemble enough tickets to get the skin you always wanted, great. Or if you have the gold to buy the skin off the TP, great (it’s likely cheaper in gold unless your keys are free).

But don’t complain that the limited/special skin is too limited/special because you can’t get it cheap.

What a laughable remark. The value of having a ferrari is not its rarity, that’s how sheep think.

The value is in the craftsmanship and mechanical capabilities of a car.

Dreamthistle skins are not rare. I got 7 of them in the event for cheap. It’s when they retired them that they became stupidly expensive.

Please don’t act as if you don’t have a dog in this fight. It’s clearly obvious you’re one of those people who makes their earning from buying said skins and holding on to them to sell later.

Jerus.4350:

Milkduds.7109:

A year or so ago I tried joining an explorable AC run. On the first boss everyone insisted that we stack up in a tiny corner, bring the boss to the corner, stand on the boss, and kill it.

It was a disaster. They tried, again and again, this failing method, instead of just fighting the boss out in the big open room, which seems to be what was originally intended by the developer. Eventually people started getting angry at one another. The group leader and some guy who had a lot of experience started yelling at each other.

I just left the group. No time for that noise. I’ve never done another dungeon in this game. Worst instanced dungeon experience I have ever had in an MMO. GW2 dungeons are a joke. The fact that people can finish them in 5 minutes by skipping trash, doing weird stuff like “running up against a corner”, de-aggroing enemies, and just stacking areas and burning down speak volumes about how lazy the dungeon designers were.

People can poo on Blizzard all they want, and I don’t like them much myself, but dungeons in this game make me consider returning to WoW… which is probably another reason I stay out of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF0ttD5lGkY

That’s solo… your group just sucked. And you don’t need corners, people are just dumb and see stuff in videos and copy it without thinking much about why. People used that corner for FGS, when that was nerfed it stopped being worthwhile.

Yeah, his group sucked, it’s a PuG.

But you don’t think that linking that video shows just how poorly designed PvE is where someone can cheese conjures on large hit boxes and the power of might stacking to down a boss in a few seconds?

How can you entice people that come from competitive raid content in other MMO’s to look positively on this? The video is not good commentary, if a player can solo it in such a fashion under that time, it’s even worse as a group.

I’ve had Kohler died before he can even pull off an attack or pull people. Something is wrong when you can stack damage modifiers to such a degree that you can simply eliminate several or most of the mechanics off a boss.

It’s really boring. Everytime I join an arah run I spend more time stealthed than I spend time outside it.

We’ll see what HoT brings but I hope it’s not bosses that die in under 1-2 minutes to focus fire.

Lazaar.9123:

There is already going to be a different way of attaining precursors in the upcoming expansion.

It only took them 2+ years from first announcing said plans 4 months after release, and then putting that precursor “fix” behind the paywall that will be the expansion box.

Vayne.8563:

The real answer is don’t buy them. They’re not a rip off because they’re absolutely not necessary. If you want to spend money gambling, you make the assumption that you’re going to lose. It really is that simple.

By making it so that everyone wants needs to buy them, Anet would be doing a disservice to people who don’t want to.

As it is, plenty of people do buy them.

Problem is some skins costing 900g alone, far more than a precursor itself and it only gets worse. Imagine paying 900+ gold for a skin, that’s outrageous when that can go down as 80% of the cost to make a legendary yourself that is ascended, with infusion slots and can switch stats at will.

Something needs to give with making black lion claim tickets more accessible.

I’m looking at the Dreamthistle Staff skin for my ranger. I had gotten all the relevant dreamthistle skins for my ranger when the skins only cost 1 ticket, but now they announce a druid specialization, and I find out there’s only 5 skins on trading post and the lowest is 800 godkitten ed gold.

Assuming that in 2-3 hours of playtime I make about 15 gold AT BEST doing the activities I like, not just farming, that means I’d be looking at nearly two months of farming just for one skin.

Jahroots.6791:

You’re absolutely right.

Most of the dungeons are easy enough for any team comp, if each class is being played properly. Ranger and Necro are generally unwanted because experienced runners have noticed a trend where these professions are frequently chosen by unskilled players.

Unfortunately, ANet have already turned their back on the dungeon community and disbanded the team.

This is not true.

Ranger mainhand sword for example, is well known for pushing bosses out of position. Pets add another element to the aggro table that can not only screw up boss positioning, but trigger abilities you don’t want triggered because the pet does not understand the concept of stacking on a boss or abusing hitboxes.

And quite frankly try meleeing and reliably dodging archdiviner and mob autoattacks with the ranger mainhand sword autoattack. Even if you have the autoattack chain disabled, there’s an obvious delay in the animation lock that makes you very vulnerable.

You have entire encounters designed with lethal aoe that makes bringing anything but a drake a liability, and even then because pets don’t baseline cleave above 3 targets, the other classes by default with their melee weapons bring BETTER CLEAVE, and that’s fact. Since a large part of runs is trash clears, especially in fractals, rangers being a poor cleave class due to a terrible cleave mechanic, and the fact their aoe sucks and they don’t pack as much utility as say an elementalist or guardian or warrior, leaves them out of the equation.

The same scenario applies to a necromancer. Look at their mainhand dagger damage, it’s basically an inferior version of the warrior’s mainhand axe and it only hits 2 targets while the warrior has no such targeting restrictions, and the necromancer comes with the handicap of no access to vigor so he relies solely on sigils of energy.

I’m getting tired of this crap where people pretend classes are interchangeable. They’re not. Biases exist for a reason and it’s not skill based. I play my ranger and complete lv50 fractals on a daily basis. And it’s undeniable that when I switch to my other toons, a guardian or ele or thief or warrior gets the job done not only better, but for far less effort and hassle.

The pet design alone for rangers in this game is horrendous, a pet that doesn’t scale with gear, has poor pathing, doesn’t avoid lethal attacks, draws aggro randomly and displaces mobs from intended positioning, comprises a percentage of the ranger’s damage but has limited cleaving capacity.

Then you have spirits which are basically banners that can be killed by PvE mechanics and that you can’t move around unless you take a master trait on a vitality/boon duration line that drags spirits into melee range to be slaughtered by aoe.

Pets are a horrible mechanic and it’s not coincidence that the classes with pet skills and trait lines dedicated to them end up suffering.

P.S. And while we’re talking about unskilled people gravitating toward classes, let’s not forget the warrior and elemental mage archetype are some of the most populated archetypes in any game, and GW2 is no exception so don’t pretend like elementalist or warrior as professions somehow have some secret appeal for elite players while avoiding the attention of mediocre ones.

Thaddeus.4891:

Zenith.7301:

Way to read the post. You stack them for the damage, and you can bring 2 warriors for banner and vulnerability stacking if you’re gonna sit one warrior with banners.

There is no reason whatsoever to bring more than 1 warrior in a run, expect if you don’t care about efficiency.

What part of “replace a warrior with conjure ele if you want” did you not get, or is this the part where you argue for bringing a necromancer or ranger in place for a warrior.

Because if so I’m not going to bother with you. Maybe for explorable dungeons a spotter ranger can ever be more efficient than a awarrior, but in fractal 50 all that efficiency is lost as there are several bosses a ranger can’t melee with consistency or efficiency.

Dave.2536:

Zenith.7301:

Or maybe, you know, campaign for the undesirable classes to be made better instead. You know, make rangers, necromancers, and mesmers useful to stack just like warriors or thieves instead of just bringing one for some niche utility.

Why would you stack warriors or thieves for utility? And why would you stack warriors at all?

lol

Way to read the post. You stack them for the damage, and you can bring 2 warriors for banner and vulnerability stacking if you’re gonna sit one warrior with banners.

I didn’t say you bring warriors and thieves for stacked utility. NICHE UTILITY APPLIES TO MESMER/RANGER/ETC. That is, spirits don’t stack effects so having more than one ranger is useless as spotter doesn’t stack either (the only 2 reasons you bring a ranger) and mesmer has heavy diminishing returns on reflect/time warp/portals as you only need so many and don’t want to kitten your damage because mesmer damage is trash.

Feel free to replace warrior or thief with conjure ele if you want, doesn’t change my point as I made sure to include ele/warrior/thief/guardian as the classes people don’t mind stacking because those are classes with far less diminishing returns.

And well, necro, everybody knows.

That spvp chat is just lovely. It’s what Blizzard did right with Heroes of the Storm by only allowing intra-party chat.

That engineer calling mesmers a kitten class when his broken kitten class was tanking 3 people for extended periods of time while also being a top 1v1 contender was such a laugh.

LunarNacht.8913:

+ At release blurred frenzy enabled mesmers to stay in close combat while being part of our burst. Now it’s just part of our burst. I miss playing melee.
+ At this point stability hardcounters control builds (kinda). Those could become more important with the stability rework, but thieves and engies will profit from it just as much as mesmer.
+ Boon control is not very impressiv. While removal can open a window where the enemy is weakend, boons are often reapplied much faster than you can strip them and removal doesn’t cut into the baseline of a class. Aside from that, mesmer itself doesn’t offer many boons, most of them are bound to traits.

They would have to rebalance some classes if they made boon uptime take a hit from boon strip.

Classes like ele live and die by boon uptime, as do guardians. It’s not that they become weaker. Literally all their damage potential and survivability is sustained by the boons, without them they bring nothing and their group wouldn’t want to bring one over a warrior or thief or engineer.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Levetty.1279:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Levetty.1279:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Levetty.1279:

Anet needs to stop trying to make interrupt builds a thing, its not going to become a thing.

If you’re having trouble with interrupt builds it’s because you’re bad at it, not that the interrupt build/gameplay is bad in itself. You’ve just confused the two.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiance

Rofl, PvE.

Roflmao, Lol, omfgtf.

PvE: Acquire biggest stick on hardest hitting class. Continue to face tank while wailing on brainless mobs until they drop loot. If you happen to go down, continue to wail on mob until you rally. Spam F for loot. Profit.

Implying GW2 PvP isn’t pretty casual and easy compared to other multiplayer games.

Regardless of it’s casual or hardcore, even the most idiotic player approaches a challenge with some semblance of thought. NPC’s do not.

Dark Souls can pretty much disprove that statement. If you play the latest Alien videogame, the AI is also adaptive to player behavior (it tracks if you use lockers to hide often, and the aliens evolve to start tracking lockers).

The problem is most developers are lazy. PvE in this game is lazy, and on top of it it is unrewarding on the few parts that offer some semblance of challenge that happen to be allowed to skip.

PvP is player generated content, so you see this flaw much less as in PvP the playerbase can even compensate for the flaws in development.

Me Games Ma.8426:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Rofl, PvE.

Roflmao, Lol, omfgtf.

PvE: Acquire biggest stick on hardest hitting class. Continue to face tank while wailing on brainless mobs until they drop loot. If you happen to go down, continue to wail on mob until you rally. Spam F for loot. Profit.

Show me your Liadri pls.
_________________________________________________________________
I enjoy all three gamemodes. PvE WvW and PvP. There are some points that I’d like to see in PvE (maybe give the mobs some intelligence) but still this gamemode can be fun if you make it fun.
If the boss is too easy -> Make him stronger! (e.g. fight while disabling the red circles that indicate AoEs in Arah, do not strip any boons of the HotW-p1-Boss…)

I have Liadri, and the fight is a total gimmick that could be cheesed by some classes.

For one, rangers were totally kitten because pets were perma dead from the beginning.

You can youtube videos of a warrior who simply bullcharges liadri, uses fear me on the adds and hundred blades frenzies liadri and kills her in a single cycle.

Thief with acrobatics and weakness removal on dodge+3 dodges from feline grace+ snare on dodge also trivialized Liadri. Guardians to a lesser extent also made her easy.

TPMN.1483:

It’s harder than you think to find like-minded zerkers…
Many indivudals will join a LFG looking for a free ride and not read the lfg.

Eg TS3 Read all before joining :GLF <> Exp Meta path <>- Type “Pi to 4 DP” or “Dr Fang” or kick.

We ask for an ele, mes or war – they come on inside with a lvl 65 Necro/Guadd and zone into the dungeon = insta kick. They repeat this two or three times – and bug the LFG so we cannot edit or relist it.

Just means we end up completing the content 3 man.

I believe a class filter is necessary – to help ensure the LFG stops breaking and increasing the chances of actually getting what you would like to fill the group and complete your team composition that your group is trying to run with.

Or maybe, you know, campaign for the undesirable classes to be made better instead. You know, make rangers, necromancers, and mesmers useful to stack just like warriors or thieves instead of just bringing one for some niche utility.

Only run ele if you’re doing organized group play with a guild or a static group.

Ele is a world of pain if not properly supported by a team. 11k hp and doing melee when the group is incompetent at doing a melee strategy means you’ll be face flat on the floor more often than not if guardians don’t know how to do blinds or rotate aegis or keep up protection (or thieves don’t spam blind).

Guardian is virtually fool-proof against PuGs, you can carry bad ones pretty hard. Maybe not as faceroll as warrior due to 7k less hp and no OP healing signet if you facetank damage, but guardian enables their team amazingly.

If you’re confident about your skills, add thief to the list. If you got one stinker of a group, you can alleviate a lot of crap with stealth skips/rezzing and blind spam plus being the one class who can dodge 3 times in a row. Thief is also top single target damage if played properly.

Also, people will love you as a thief or guardian on the dredge/harpy fractal.

Ele is a class with high potential but a lot of that comes from cheesing out conjures and properly performing your might stack rotations, it’s very twitchy and unforgiving so if you go into that class be prepared to put in time into learning it.

Lifestealer.4910:

Lets face it, the only solution is segregation of the community. Anet tries to clump people together who all have different mindsets and goals. From my experience, this never ends well no matter which game it is. Anet needs to provide better tools for people who want to find other like minded individuals to play with instead of trying to force people to play together.

Segregation tools already exist. They’re called guilds.

I mean, how harder can it get to find like minded individuals than putting in bold a message “PRO SPEED RUN. ZERKER WARRIOR/GUARD/ELE/THIEF/MESMER ONLY. PING GEAR ON JOIN OR KICK.” when you advertise your party.

dietzero.3514:

Staff, staff, staff. 1 item instead of 2, and it is the most powerful PvE and WvW zerg weapon. Anet did a very poor job of balancing ascended costs between 1 and 2 handers.

You mean just like how legendary 1h cost the same amount of mats as 2handers? Yeah, what a surprise awful design carries over.

Anyways, d/f is also ranged. the max range for melee eles is farther than mobs can melee you from. You can melee mossman and archdiviner without any fear of eating an autoattack.

With that said, staff is better because it has more overall uses than d/f, but d/f is more fun of a playstyle imo.

I would also recommend you grab ascended armorcrafting instead of weaponsmithing so instead of having to make different weapons for infusions you can make like 2 slots of ascended armor and that lets you use any weapon while maintaining uniform infusions.

Interrupts might be a thing in pvp but they will never be in pve where most of the damaging attacks are fast autoattacks with no tells and the bosses wind wind up tells have tons of defiance stacks.

EcoRI.9273:

Caeledh.5437:

phys.7689:

at least try to come up with something fairly simple that will achieve the same effect.

I thought I did and posted it but it seems to have either gone unnoticed or been considered so dreadful as not bear commenting upon.

Make dungeons like the current dailies. Rather than each dungeon path being it’s own daily with it’s own reward, have the game randomly select a few dungeon paths each day and provide a bigger reward for properly completing those (eg. killing all mobs).

The reward / time for full completion could be perfectly equivalent to the current scheme.

If the game also disabled skipping cutscenes for the selected dailies that would fix the problem of newer players never being able to watch them (without aggravating the speedsters).

Everyone could still earn rewards at the same rate. Speed runs would still be possible but there’d be much, much less incentive to do them. You wouldn’t be (speed) running the same dungeons every day so it might feel less repetitive. Newer players should have an all round better experience.

In my opinion the root of the problem is there are very different types of players in guild wars 2 and some just don’t mesh well together no matter what. Some players like to kill all things and some want to skip all things. Your system is telling players to play how your system wants(aka how you want) which in my opinion is bad.

People skip mobs a) because the game allows them to, and b) because the mobs are a waste of time loot wise. People skip mobs because if you do the dungeon the way is the designed, the time to gold ratio is pitiful compared to just doing an open world framing train.

And neither doing dungeons or farm trains even comes close to acquiring prestige skins compared to playing the TP, which is an atrocity.

Legendaries should have been acquired through achievements, not playing virtual tradesman yet in release I know plenty of people who in the first 2 months had over 4-5 legendaries because they played the auction house while people who were among to be the first to max fractal levels, people who did Liadri achievements, people who have been really successful in WvW and GvG had 1 legendary or none at best.

It is their perverted design meant to squeeze cash out of people that distorts the way people play this game. I can assure you that if doing a dungeon properly was awarded well and gave progression toward prestige skins at a decent rate, people would do the dungeons instead of cheesing them because the grind is so big and they just want to get it over with.

But they don’t want a remotely rewarding game because better rewards means less people spending money on the cash shop. Welcome to F2P/B2P.

Look at how 6 months into release they talked about a precursor scavenger hunt and that turned into a 2+ year wait, and now they put that precursor scavenger hunt behind the paywall of an expansion pack, and you can rest assured that said “collection” will still involve enough grinding alongside the new mastery system to push people to buy convenience in the form of gold/boosts and those who don’t spend cash on the cash shop will instead speed grind.

DeceiverX.8361:

Stealth itself isn’t OP.

A lot of the direct utility that comes with going into stealth is, and this is not limited to the thief class. PU mes arguably has better gains.

PU mesmer is garbage outside duels. A thief on the other hand can join a zerg and spam the ridiculously good clusterbomb+choking gas combo.

Also PU mesmers can’t kill anyone who wants to run away from them, people who die to PU mesmers are people who stay in and eat the heavy ramp up of conditions. They kill slowly and they really don’t contribute much to WvW objectives.

A thief takes out a target quick and moreover can escape from a zerg easily whereas PU mesmer’s stealth isn’t going to gain him distance against a remotely competent group of people and on top of that they’re very easy to stunlock while shadowstep is a double port with condition removal and stunbreak built all in one.

There’s a good reason why GvG’s still take a thief or two into their rosters while they don’t incorporate any PU mesmers.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Ragnarox.9601:

Akagami.9861:

This made me lol so hard, let me quess those 4 people were afk? You can’t just create a thief, put on a build go with lvl 5 equip and kill people in a rampage this is like something George R. R. Martin would write… A FANTASY

….
Every class has something OP about them, and a way to deal with thieves, you just have to know your class. Used to main a warrior, and i know how to wipe the floor with one(unless he is some crazy dude that has like 50k hours on that thief…maybe that would be kinda hard) And as a Thief i met Guardians that kept me on the run all the time, elementalists, engineers, necromancers, rangers…i got my @ss handed to me from every class individually 1 vs 1, do you know how? THEY KNEW HOW TO PLAY, they weren’t busy on the forums crying about invi being overpowerd. They learned how to counter a thief and how to defeat one.

Saddly you can be a pro thief in just 10 minutes. 50k hours? now who talks bout fantasy. And you cant win 1 vs 1 against a good skilled thief.

Sure you can.

Mediguards do it almost automatically.

Who runs mediguard in WvW? Oh that’s right, almost no one since guardians don’t have much in the way of escapes from getting zerged.

Jahroots.6791:

Caeledh.5437:

phys.7689:

at least try to come up with something fairly simple that will achieve the same effect.

I thought I did and posted it but it seems to have either gone unnoticed or been considered so dreadful as not bear commenting upon.

Make dungeons like the current dailies. Rather than each dungeon path being it’s own daily with it’s own reward, have the game randomly select a few dungeon paths each day and provide a bigger reward for properly completing those (eg. killing all mobs).

The reward / time for full completion could be perfectly equivalent to the current scheme.

If the game also disabled skipping cutscenes for the selected dailies that would fix the problem of newer players never being able to watch them (without aggravating the speedsters).

Everyone could still earn rewards at the same rate. Speed runs would still be possible but there’d be much, much less incentive to do them. You wouldn’t be (speed) running the same dungeons every day so it might feel less repetitive. Newer players should have an all round better experience.

This is a great idea, until HotW and Arah end up in the Daily pool.

Well Arah isn’t even bad besides path 4, even pugs have been clearing those reliably. Same for HotW, the only true bad path is the underwater one.

None of the dungeons are as pug destroying as the dredge, fire shaman, and thaumanova fractals. Only bad boss is the molten front duo, even mai trin can be handled by pug attrition. But that is because those encounters are very polar, your experience varies depending on bringing the right tools and having proper coordination, and coordination is not something this game encourages in most of its content (open world pve is a joke, and in WvW you can resort to roaming or doing activities that don’t involve much timing of coinciding skills).

DonQuack.9025:

Zenith.7301:

This is not new to GW2. If you played GW1 and went to Domain of Anguish or PvP’d, you would have noticed Guild Wars contains some of the nastiest instanced dungeon communities around.

DOA? Thats your example? psshhh.

Lightbringer rank raging is worse than anything this game has had. People comment on zerker cheese here, they haven’t seen the imbagon crap.

This is not new to GW2. If you played GW1 and went to Domain of Anguish or PvP’d, you would have noticed Guild Wars contains some of the nastiest instanced dungeon communities around.

Moreover, since WoW and other western MMO’s don’t gate prestige gear behind massive gold grinds, you don’t get all these people just wanting to skip anything that doesn’t give effective gold rewards.

Look at WoW, you can finish any raid or dungeon in whatever time, but the acquisition of the item is fixed. What they do have is time gating but the total time to acquire the loot is far less than the massive grind in guild wars 2 meant to push people to buy gems to turn into gold.

At least in GW1 you could solo a run of Exile and make about 200-300k with some drops. Which basically meant in a week or two you had enough currency to gain the most expensive gear/skins in the game.

But this is GW2, and here you do the less efficient speed runs, you open your wallet at the gem store, or you play the TP. Those are your options for gaining any skin (even black lion skins cost something on the vicinity of 200-400g) in a reasonable amount of time.

It only gets worse for fractals because it’s all RNG so people want to get those fractal dailies done quick as the rewards for fractals suck.

And of what use would it be in PvE? Unless they revamp the PvE system, the whole “kill kitten asap before reflects/aegis run out and you get gibbed by 6-7k damage autoattacks from multiple mobs” will still hold.

They can keep adding more ranged weapons, won’t change the fact most people will still demand berserker melee.

JaeleCt.3967:

Andred.1087:

Centurion.7296:

There are alot of counters against stealth… l2p…

Couldn’t help but notice you didn’t mention any of them.

Sic em, whatever the engie “sic em” is called, interrupting d/p HS in BP, pbaoe after they stealth, immoblizations, running in the opposite direction so they’re forced to use a shadowstep. block/aegis and dodgeing after you see aegis strip. there are likely more that im forgetting, be creative.

Dont complain about having to slot a skill specifically to counter a theif, we’ve had to slot daggerstorm ever since the RF buff just to have a chance of not dying immediatly to rangers.

Or, you know, you could dodge three times with your precious feline grace trait and dodge the entirety of the RF channel.

Centurion.7296:

There are alot of counters against stealth, so stop complaining about things you cant handle and learn to handle them @ at all those who have some wierd idea that stealth is this amazing thing and rather l2p than complain about it.

Azhure.1857:

Stealth is OP in this game but I doubt it’ll ever be fixed, for the amount of opposition against it being balanced is high. I despise Stealth, as it is now, mainly because it has no direct counter.

Ok think of it this way, thieves have alot of damage but little health, so take away stealth and they will be like really squishy warriors with little to survive, other than shadowstep which you people will probally complain about after they ’ in a alternate universe’ nerf stealth. So please, think before you type. Also there is nothing to be fixed, it is the way its supposed to be and it accaully has counters btw.

Newsflash, every berserker geared class is squishy.

Stop being so dishonest, a single mug+backstab combo from a berserker thief on another berserker removed about 60-70% of their health and it can be done shortly again to finish them off if your heartseeker spam for some reason failed.

TankAnyone.5370:

Zenith.7301:

Recharge penalty needs to go. There are too many encounters in PvE where if your pet is not a drake it’s gonna die.

It only gets worse in WvW.

Don’t you think that could be crazily unbalanced in some cases? I’ve always read the example of two rangers able to solo essentially all pve encounters when Anet tested adjusted pet mechanics, and the complete removal of the recharge penalty would enable that strategy.

You do realize there are classes that can already solo content, right?

I mean how much effort would it take you to go to youtube and watch a video by Sesshi soloing the hardest OvE content, fractal lv50, on an elementalist or warrior?

And if they are afraid of pets tanking they can simply remove pets from the aggro table of bosses, problem solved.

Recharge penalty needs to go. There are too many encounters in PvE where if your pet is not a drake it’s gonna die.

It only gets worse in WvW.

Windsagio.1340:

Victory.2879:

The bigger problem for me is the lack of cooldown on skills, which means a thief can macro a chain and spam 5-6 skills in under a second, all whilst you are rooted due to a venom.

The stealth mechanic isn’t all that bad in pvp, as others have mentioned if they are in stealth they can’t cap, and most of the time you can see them coming.

Every class has skills available to get out of that, use them.

BP>HS has a lower cooldown than any class’s defensive cooldowns.

Thieves have so many resets where other classes have to pay for their mistakes with death.

There’s a good reason why such a vast amount of solo roamers in WvW happen to be thieves. It’s impossible to die if you don’t want to. The one class where even if things don’t go your way you can just reset and harass until the situation favors you.

I’d love to force some of these thieves and roaming warriors to play a Necromancer for a change.

Please don’t derail my PvE post with a PvP debate. There are 19379276398276 threads about mesmer PvP please post in those.

Also, no insulting developers in this thread. I prefer when they have the slight chance of bothering to read my threads instead of just clicking something else because there’s a string of posts calling them incompetent/stupid/etc.

I think one solution to confusion in PvE is instead of the measly buffs they’ve given them (buffing it by 33% won’t do anything, you could buff it by 100% and it’d still be weak).

What they can do for confusion in PvE, is make it so when mobs attack you and they are confused, that damage is not applied to you, and instead a % of that damage is applied back to the mob depending on how many stacks there are.

Mesmer, Ranger, and Necromancer suffer as classes because they don’t have access to boons, but they do have access to conditions, and this change would make confusion more competitive with aegis and protection.

Boons in PvE are far more powerful than conditions because boons still work against bosses whereas conditions like weakness and blind, etc don’t work so well.

frifox.5283:

Also, Mind Spike is currently doing 10% less dmg that the tooltip claims too. Seems ANet has a vendetta against dps mesmers…

I hope not lol. I hate the idea of sword+shield so if I have to use those weapons I’ll have a bad case of the sadz.

Autoattacks are a huge factor of sustained DPS in PvE. This class has been crippled by PvP balancing from the beginning. Because the class can burst in PvP, its abilities which are mediocre in PvE have suffered.

- Illusions without AoE protection hampers shatter specs in high aoe damage PvE content. Illusions despawn after targets die, meaning the main form of sustained damage, phatasms, have long cd’s for PvP reasons that really hamper PvE play as you can’t have a Phantasm up against different targets.

-PvE damage is entirely focused around a 3 phantasm stacking build, and this build is extremely limited, for the very reason that you only have a couple of cleaving phantasms, one that is completely stationary and doesn’t move. When the usual groups of mobs dies your phantasm ramp up is wasted as illusions are not tied to you as a caster but against the single mob it was summoned against.

- Clones are not really useful in PvE. Is it possible you could make it so in PvE only (not WvW or sPvP), clones would get back the damage they offered in beta?

- Shatters are ill designed for PvE. They are meant to be a form of aoe, but this aoe guts all your sustained damage given you needed to ramp up 3 phantasms to start doing competitive damage and the cooldown of phantasms is longer than the cooldown of mindwrack.

-Mesmers don’t have much access to boons. Signet of Inspirations relies on other people bringing boons, and the passive benefit is really bad at 10 sec cd of a proc for a random boon. The passive should be more beneficial for the average mesmer.

Yeah, mesmers can have access to boons actually, I know, but that is contingent on condition based builds taht are dead on arrival in PvE.

- Blurred Frenzy, Cry of Frustration, and the damage of our autoattacks is really bad in PvE. Relative to the autoattack numbers of thieves and guardians and warriors, our autoattack numbers are extremely weak, and this isn’t even taking a look at the absurdity of the warrior’s mainhand axe autoattack damage.

Even if you compare the mesmer to the ranger’s mainhand autoattacks, which are weaker due to the pet, the mesmer still falls behind.

As a result the mesmer has become little more than a reflection/curtain pull bot with the occasional time warp. His damage and boon contribution to groups in PvE is anemic.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Firelysm.4967:

Zenith.7301:

Fluffball.8307:

Zenith.7301:

Why are people taking Entangle over RAO? Thieves are immune to entangle due to ports as well as eles, mesmers have staff to port out of it too on a low cd.

They are most definitely not immune, they have to use skills to get out. Either they use the teles to get out and can’t use them in another emergency, or you’ve already forced another emergency and now they can’t get out of entangle. That’s one of the main reasons I almost always use MT, drakehound and wolf, regardless of what build I’m running.

You can’t just spam entangle and expect it to land on anyone. They’ll just dodge it if nothing else.

sword port from thief and and mesmer staff blink most definitely are fairly spammable, and both of those classes have teleports/escapes/clears well below the cd of most ranger cc skills.

Simple dodge, makes engangled miss if you time it:
-dodge
- s/d thief can simpy port back
- blinding ranger will make him/her miss Ent
- stun-breaker

so easy to escape, to easy if u ask me … cuz casting is to long, if it would be 1/2 i would use it.

You forgot the biggest one. If a player stealths they can just walk out of it.
That means thieves, mesmers, rangers, and engi’s (the majority of roamers) can just walk out of it.

Entangle is good for its low cooldown when paired with certain runes and/or traits, but for a power build I almost always run rampage.

Plus with the amount of guardians and warriors around having stability is a must. You might as well alt+f4 if you try to duel a hammer warrior without RaO.

Quite frankly those videos upset me with how hard you have to work for your damage and survival while a thief with one skill from invisibility takes out 70% of your health and he doesn’t need to combo major cooldowns to do so.

And the dumb escapes they have. Whoever came up with initiative did not think it through.

I also am annoyed by how weak all of the mesmer’s autoattacks are compared to a thief. My thief’s autos are hitting for 2-3k on the first 2 swings and 3-4k on the last. My mesmer in full zerker is lucky to land 2k crits on the first 2 autoattacks.

Basically all your damage as a mesmer is piled into phantasms and trait triggers. Which are great for burst, but not that great in sustained damage.

Fluffball.8307:

Zenith.7301:

Why are people taking Entangle over RAO? Thieves are immune to entangle due to ports as well as eles, mesmers have staff to port out of it too on a low cd.

They are most definitely not immune, they have to use skills to get out. Either they use the teles to get out and can’t use them in another emergency, or you’ve already forced another emergency and now they can’t get out of entangle. That’s one of the main reasons I almost always use MT, drakehound and wolf, regardless of what build I’m running.

You can’t just spam entangle and expect it to land on anyone. They’ll just dodge it if nothing else.

sword port from thief and and mesmer staff blink most definitely are fairly spammable, and both of those classes have teleports/escapes/clears well below the cd of most ranger cc skills.

Why are people taking Entangle over RAO? Thieves are immune to entangle due to ports as well as eles, mesmers have staff to port out of it too on a low cd.

Without RAO’s stability, you get CC’d to death by hammer+axe/mace warriors. I guess entangle is nice against engineers and necromancers or groups of people. But for duels I see entangle as a weaker option against several classes.

I’m also curious on what pets are people using. Are we using spider+dogs for CC?

Skeletor.9360:

Just roam over to a tower and wait for a necro, ele thief to roll by and press the rapid fire button. (Be 100% crit, power and crit multiplier specced.) If they survive run out and do the rooty elite skill and pew pew them a couple more times.

Ranger = Cheezor

I actually quit playing power ranger as it was literally an I win button that was reset every 8 seconds. Now my ranger is a trapper…and actually pure cheese as well…stand in 3 traps, let a thief attack me drop them again and watch him die. I’ve done this many times…Never even touched my weapon skills. Complete passive kills are the best!

How are you dropping thieves who actually bother to save their dodges for your rapid fire channel or who run perma evade sword builds or pistol whip specs with high uptimes of invulnerability?

or D/P thieves who actually daze your rapid fire channel?

Thief, Warrior, and even to some extent ele can all work on zerker gear as well. Any class with good escapes and easy to land spike can do so in PvP, and warrior/ele/thief are kings of leaps/teleports+ spike. What warrior lacks in blinds he gets from his stances and ehaling signet while well, you know why thieves are so popular in WvW (because you’ll never die unless you want to).

The other classes have inferior mobility and spike capacity, so they need to build condi bunker or run in a large enough group that can babysit them from being 2-3 shot by a thief.

If that’s not clear to you from the thread title, a thread I chose to post on out of the very many threads there are on the topic of dungeons and fractals, then you are beyond help.

You seem to have a real problem grasping the idea that an encounter design that was intended to be done in several ways by the developer in practice has a completely different effect when random groups are considered (the majority of groups also running the content, I might say).

In fact I might even read those parts you bolded again if I were you. I don’t know what “royally screw” and “critical” mean to you, but certainly your ideas don’t seem to align with mine, and I have the suspicion you are less interested in even trying to understand what I am saying rather than just mocking an anonymous post on the forum.

Iris Ng.9845:

The more I read, the more I feel like chasing a rabbit down to the rabbit hole. He said ppl want “heavy only groups” for a reason (to which I say that they are bads and any of us knows not to join these group), then start saying how important ele and thieves are (???) How do these two arguments ever relate?

Not how important. How BETTER than Ranger and Necro they are, and eles being IMPORTANT in WvW.

Zui.9245:

Zenith.7301:

I didn’t say the encounter mandated reflects

vs.

Zenith.7301:

It’s just a really badly designed fight that mandates the presence of a class with reflects, and especially a guardian because mesmer reflect is a lower duration skill compared to guardians, whose reflect skills can be chained and last longer.

You be the judge.

Did you read the entire post or chose to just cherrypick the paragraph, because the encounter does mandate spell reflects in a random group if you want to actually finish the fractal in less than 2 hours.

Or are you gonna argue that a 5 warrior video proves that reflection is optional for random groups?

No, really, bring me a video of a PUG doing shaman without reflects. I’m really waiting.

The amount of kittenty strawmans are not worth the effort. I didn’t say the encounter mandated reflects. I said not having a guardian made it much harder so that’s why people kick you in high level fractals because a random group does not coordinate enough to play specs that are not as selfsufficient as the heavies. Showing a video of a guild group contriving a scenario is not even acknowledging the context of this thread, which is a guy getting kicked from a RANDOM group because he didn’t have a class that is good for playing with random people.

But keep on making arguments for me and nitpicking instead of actually addressing the point I made: that ranger/necros as a whole are inferior classes with inferior toolkits and definitely inferior practical damage output.

Not gonna waste time on people who just want to play gotcha and argue over a forum on bad faith.

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

aerial.7021:

Lheimroo.2947:

~

~

~

Well-founded or not, it’s an opinion. I have full ascended items on three characters and I’ll never have to grind on those characters again. Not for gear.

More to the point, I have a boatload of other characters who don’t have a single piece of ascended gear…well maybe rings from fractals that I’ve done but that’s it, and none of those characters are excluded from content.

That’s the difference that you refuse to acknowledge.

You have one aspect of the game that you can’t stand and you blame everything else for it, but you don’t acknowledge that others, not just me, find other MMOs more grindy than this one.

You have an opinion and it’s a strong one and everything is jaded based on that opinion. I don’t think you could approach this game in an unbiased manner because you’re looking for things to support your dislike of the business model. That’s the worst kind of science.

~

Guild Wars has always had grind for cosmetics. It was always supposed to. I don’t see why you can’t recognize that.

I did not play a lot of GW1 but as far as I know GW1 was way more about lore and PvP then cosmetics. Mini’s you mainly got from birthdays and then there where like two sets of armor of what at least one was really grindy?

Could be wrong but thats what I know about it. I don’t think you can really compare that to how GW2 works. It’s much more an MMO where collecting items is also a more important part of the game. So turning that into a grind also different then doing that in GW1 I would think.

Then again, I could not really start a discussion with you about GW1 as I simply don’t know enough about it.

Guild Wars 1 was a grind for cosmetics. Just about everything in that game was about having different look to your armor or weapon.

A basic set of armor costs 10% of the elite armor, but elite armor had the same stats. Exactly the same stats.

The people who came from Guild Wars 1, always expected this cosmetics grind. What we didn’t want was ascended gear, or level cap increases. That’s because we had the same stats from the first game through all the rest of the games. We didn’t want or need more. We didn’t want ascended gear, because it was too hard to get and it remains, in my mind, too hard to get. The only good thing about it to me is that you don’t need it. I don’t feel it adds anything to the game.

There were two sets of armor that was massively hard to get and a boatload of rare weapon skins as well.

I tried to get a frog scepter for years in Guild Wars 1. Yes I could have bought it with gold, but I wanted to get it. I ran the dungeon bogroot growths until I couldn’t look at it any more. No frog scepter. Then even if you did get one as a drop, it might not have been for the stats you wanted anyway.

There were also minis that were so rare, even as rich as I got, I’d never have been able to afford them. The mini polar bear for example, if you wanted to buy it with gold, you’d have to farm endlessly for years.

And you’d have to buy it from another player, because there was no marketplace there. You’d have to stand around kamadan and negotiate to buy or sell anything.

So Guild Wars 2, which had the update model you keep saying is better, still had the same type of grind for cosmetics.

Nothing in GW1 took long to get. Even Obsidian armor I got in less than 2 weeks by soloing Hierophant’s. In a solo Hierophant run I got about 300k worth of items to sell. Do a couple of those runs and you had the gold for the most expensive stuff ingame.

Please don’t compare GW1 grind to GW2 grind. They’re not even on the same galaxy.

Iris Ng.9845:

Are thieves and eles qualified for “Heavy Only” now? I’m super confused now.

When people are being intentionally obtuse, they get no further replies. Bye.

Iris Ng.9845:

Zenith.7301:

MithranArkanere.8957:

Use offhand axe, the healing spring and the Spirit of Nature, man.

You reflect all the spit with axe 5, keep the burning in check with the healing spring, and when your allies go down, you bring them back with the spirit.

Keep pretending as if the “lv50 fractal HEAVIES ONLY” daily posts on the LFG tool are some figment out of people’s imagination and people choose to favor heavies for no reason whatsoever being bad.

I already know. That doesn’t mean I’m obliged to join them. And I’m sure most people here feel the same as me.

Sure, they’re bad. Clearly rangers and necromancers come on equal footing to warrior/elementalist/thief/guardian.

No, sorry, no. Put the skill you want, a good ranger or necro will never bring to a group what a good elementalist or warrior or guardian does. And they certainly won’t bring the skipping benefits and single target DPS a thief has.

Class synergies are real, and this is why in team synergy heavy formats like GvG in WvW rangers are often not present at all or used largely in niche scenarios whereas guardian, warrior, and elementalists make the backbone of any group.

This game is all about boon stacking and aoe abuse, and rangers are strong on neither. They even had to buff ranger’s warhorn recently. Ranger pets are still broken and you see mostly drakes used for that reason, pets don’t even scale with ascended stats.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Use offhand axe, the healing spring and the Spirit of Nature, man.

You reflect all the spit with axe 5, keep the burning in check with the healing spring, and when your allies go down, you bring them back with the spirit.

That axe offhand skills destroys projectiles. It doesn’t reflect them.

But by all means record that 5 ranger video and compare it to a video of 5 guardians or Warriors.

Anything can be done, people are soloing fractals. But the question of efficiency and likelihood of proper execution with a regular random group is an entirely different question.

Keep pretending as if the “lv50 fractal HEAVIES ONLY” daily posts on the LFG tool are some figment out of people’s imagination and people choose to favor heavies for no reason whatsoever.

What a rich kitten.

And a solo with bunny ears that was glorious. Great music picks too.