Guild Wars 2

Brahmincorle.1264:

Zenith.7301:

What part of not “optional” do people not get from fractal 50. 70 AR is not OPTIONAL.

like pretty much everything in any other MMO ever

Really? I was unaware of raidwide auras that tick for a % of your health if you havent grinded hundreds of gold worth of gear and infusions.

What part of not “optional” do people not get from fractal 50. 70 AR is not OPTIONAL.

Dante.1763:

Zenith.7301:

Dante.1763:

Zenith.7301:

You have to rune that gear, and the runes come at 6-12g a piece.

Depends on the runes you want, just saying…

You know what the runes that are expected are.

I do? Huh…im sorry…i must be playing wrong…my eles armor set cost about…maybe 12 silver for the runes, all of them…There are other ways to play you know, beside whats set in stone…you dont need those uber expensive runes, you dont need ascended Armor or weapons to be able to play the game just fine. better than fine if you know what you are doing. i have no ascended armor on any of my characters, and i can handle every game mode including Fractals and PVP, and the harder world bosses without trouble.. So…and heres the big part… for me their no grind policy works fine. if you want ascended armor, obviously its not, as you have to grind for it..its really all in the interpretation of what you see as grind.

I don’t need to be lv80 either to do explorables. It’s fun to get carried isn’kitten

Dante.1763:

Zenith.7301:

You have to rune that gear, and the runes come at 6-12g a piece.

Depends on the runes you want, just saying…

You know what the runes that are expected are.

Fafnir.5124:

Full outfit of exotic only costs 20g too. And only way to get challenge play with only white gear. Only difficulty in the game is from Lag.

You have to rune that gear, and the runes come at 6-12g a piece.

TamTiTam.9574:

You do not have to grind, if you do not “need” to get Legendary or ascended Gear in a few months.

They might be the best gear for years from now.
You can get most of the necessary ingredients by just playing the new content now and then.

You do not need to grind WoW raids. You can wait and just do 5 mans and in 3 months they become legacy raids that anyone can complete easymode.

See what I did there?

Welcome to B2P/F2P games, everything is gated behind horrible RNG and gold grinds to encourage you to buy ingame currency from their cash shop.

Rem.9627:

Or they could just make skills that scale with a certain stat….DPS wise

For example does more dmg based on healing power.

No, what they need to have is encounter mechanics where these things are useful and NERF Guardian skills so that threats to berserker builds are not trivialized.

The problem is berserker builds can completely eliminate their weaknesses, whereas other stat builds can never get rid of their weakness (lower dps/clearing time). And there’s never a time in any encounter where the turning point of a fight is whether you have enough of a defensive stat or built durable.

If anything can be done by the berserker (and let’s be honest, any highest damage toon assuming in the distant future condi builds did the highest damage), then what’s the point of building for toughness or healing power stats?

There’s a reason why cleric, shaman stats are useless in PvE, as are most healing traits. You really can’t build for any role but damage since damage is all you need. The guardian and ele classes in turn bring all the team defense you could possibly need.

PvE scene in this game is dead compared to other MMO’s because there’s really no specialization or team synergy aspect besides bringing the classes that fart boons (guardian, warrior, ele) and stacking to abuse bad mob AI/boss attack design.

GW1 sure had bodyblock balling up and aoe, but things like interrupts were important and the variety of viable builds in PvE endgame were far more varied than GW2. In GW2 you just burst crap down while boons and dodges keep you alive.

And there are scenarios in which it’s not even skill based, just damage. Look at ascalonian fractal. The things hit you immediately for 5-6k+ autoattacks, each soldier at once. There’s no such thing as skillfully dodging all that damage. It’s about balling them up and killing them before they kill you.

Stark.1350:

naiasonod.9265:

Stark.1350:

naiasonod.9265:

captainteemo.6537:

After a short break from playing gw2 and coming back to it from other MMOs. You guys seriously don’t know what it means for an MMO to be grindy. Guildwars2 has it pretty good. If you’re upset, go try out other mmos and see for yourself.

Hey, well, there’s cow crap in the water over in India, so we shouldn’t complain about turds in ours? Bugger off.

There’s cow crap in every water, everywhere in the MMO world. There is grind in any game you can mention. Appreciate the fact this one is less so.

I have a philosophy in life, and it goes a little something like this – if you’re willing to tolerate crap, you deserve all the crap you’re willing to tolerate.

I’m tolerating it just fine. My character is decked out in ascended gear, no problem. When I feel there’s too much grind, I’ll stop playing. Clearly I don’t feel that way now. I’ve been through the grind of WoW, EQ and EQ2 – which is why don’t play those games anymore.

Accept the fact that those that invest more time into a game are going to get more out of it.

LOL, “grind” in WoW.

In 2 weeks of raiding Warlords I’m already on my full raid itemset. In a month I had my upgraded legendary ring.

You don’t know grind. Even the legendary weapons at worst took 3 months, and they were GUARANTEED, not some RNG crap randomly gifted to people so that you could work toward the weapon without needing to play the Auction House game.

GW2 is ALL grind. They say items are optional. Well duh, everything in a game is optional, and when most of the activities and skins released in the game are “optional” and made to be huge gold grinds to drive their gem store exchanges, is when people get tired of this game.

I don’t play this game to farm gold or play the auction house to get what I want. If I do fractal 50 everyday, I should get my kitten skins. Not every other century because of the horrendous RNG.

In all my hours of gampleya I have not seen a single precursor. My friend got 2 precursor drops. The second he sold to fund completing his Twilight while I had to work for 4 months to grind up gold to get mine.

This game is one big casino with every kitten “optional” content addition being implemented via RNG black lion boxes to drive up their gem sales.

In 2 years they didn’t release a single additional dungeon with extra armor and weaponsets. Every “new” skin was either the 183791263823th backpack piece or a 0.03872% drop chance helm.

2 kitten years of not a single dungeon with explorable paths, and they haven’t even fixed the ones already ingame! Arath is still full of exploits as are most of them.

Tree.3916:

Zenith.7301:

Tree.3916:

Your argument is not valid and is actually an ad hominem (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem).

The problem here is that there is no problem to fix. The people who balance this game are educated people with degrees in their respective fields. Are you saying that you know more than them and can offer better solutions given the restraints they work with? The fact of the matter is, non berserker builds are rewarded by being allowed to stand in one spot and soak all the damage. That not rewarding enough? Put on some berserker gear and stand in one spot.

It is really rich that someone talking about ad hominems goes on and makes an argument for authority right after talking about logical fallacies and on top of that making a circular argument.

Here is some evidence to back up my claims…
Lupicus vs 5 Full Clerics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZgRUtK7LkM
Lupicus vs 5 of the same class for each class
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OamhniesRfg&list=PLrtWAmj0-iOpWgRRX9BOyoLhrn5jGkg7P

Lupicus vs 5 Meta Group (in 2013…)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAK-QYShjro

Which one of those can you just stand and eat all attacks? I’ll give you a hint… it’s the first one.

What we see here in these videos is that content is balanced in such a way that any gear type can complete the content.

What we have here is people who think absorbing damage is not rewarding enough (with which I agree, learning active defense is the most rewarding thing in this game) and think that their “toughness” or “vitality” should contribute to their overall damage which is just absurd.

Instead what you have is a video of guardians and ele farting boons, which are pretty much passive defense as well with the frequency said boons can be applied.

And while the content can be completed, the time to complete is more than SEVEN times greater when a risk free berserker group only needs to dodge OBVIOUS tells and finish the fight in a fraction of the time.

Now, tell me, in a game in which the prestige skins cost 2k+ gold, and you get maybe 5-6g per run, guess which gearset is going to be required in LFG. Hint, not the gear that more than triples your grinding time.

Yay, more AI, it’s not like the one we have had for over 2 years hasn’t been total garbage.

Tree.3916:

Your argument is not valid and is actually an ad hominem (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem).

The problem here is that there is no problem to fix. The people who balance this game are educated people with degrees in their respective fields. Are you saying that you know more than them and can offer better solutions given the restraints they work with? The fact of the matter is, non berserker builds are rewarded by being allowed to stand in one spot and soak all the damage. That not rewarding enough? Put on some berserker gear and stand in one spot.

It is really rich that someone talking about ad hominems goes on and makes an argument for authority right after talking about logical fallacies and on top of that making a circular argument.

Also, defensive stats don’t really make you tanky. The difference between a 2.2k toughness toon taking a lv50 fractal archdiviner or Mosmman autoattack and a full zerker is that the full zerker if not a heavy armor toon gets instant downed while the toughness specced toon is left with 20-30% life. It’s the difference between a one shot and a two-shot.

Bosses in high level fractals can’t be tanked, only with a Guardian providing aegis and high prot uptime and healing can it happen. Again, the entire viability of defense is monopolized by a single class.

It’s not the gear that actually provides survivability — it’s the boons provided by a single class (guardian) at a high enough uptime. Characters who gear defensively more than halve their damage output in exchange for marginal defensive gains. The fight gets prolonged, and this game has not enough healing to absorb the damage some bosses put out.

This is why boon-heavy classes like warrior (might, fury), guardian (prot, aegis) and ele (might, fury) rule, and boon deficient classes like ranger and necro and even engineer get benched.

Because boons>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>conditions in this game. They propose that necromancers don’t have access to boons because they have conditions, yet conditions by default do less dps, have stacking limits, and bosses are not even affected by the likes of weakness, cripple, and blinds. All while protection and aegis fully works on bosses.

And not only that, but classes like warrior and guardian with vastly higher innate survivability compared to the rest, seem to output similar damage to massively more fragile classes like elementalist, ranger and thief.

Jerus.4350:

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Mapisto.2154:

things.

Coming from a bunker warrior that went full zerk, I can attest to the fact that trading all defense for damage is the farthest you can get from lazy. being unable to soak damage/ take more than a few hits forces you to pay more attention to actually staying alive; there’s much more to it than doing big damage.

I agree condis should have a pve buff to make those more viable, but I believe your viewpoint for zerk is a bit off.

People get that viewpoint from open world and a dungeon tour that consists of ACp1/p2. Those places yeah you can kill things before they get to hit you more than once and the one hit doesn’t kill you. It’s only when you get into more challenging content do you get that “ohh crap, i’m gonna die”.

I mean hell my Thief is squishy enough that a single kick from lupi downs it, the difference between that and survival can simply be the time of week with the WvW bonuses, by like wednesday I can take a kick

Or, you can dodge the kick, which has a huge tell. Or a guardian can simply pop his aegis anytime it comes up so you don’t even need to worry about it.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Leo G.4501:

naiasonod.9265:

Leo G.4501:

What if the boss’ telegraph attack was still pretty strong, but during the channel of a certain one, it blocks critical hits, has heightened armor and if interrupted, he kind of “explodes” doing AoE CC and ripping all your boons away? If he uses the attack and lands it, he follows up with quick flurries of weaker hits but while doing so is much more vulnerable to damage for a time?

Yeah, that sounds overcomplicated and would lend to being broketastic from the moment it were implemented on into the rest of the game’s lifestpan.

I shudder to imagine them trying to make something that complex playable for the average GW2 player.

Hah, I love this attitude.

Pretty much amounts to “ACCEPT THE GAME THE WAY IT IS! FLAWS, REPEAT TACTICS AND ALL!” I mean, geeze, you’re basically not even trying

And you’re trying to add complicated mechanics that target a specific stat choice. Why “blocks critical hits?” Why not “blocks all hits?” I’m fine with more interesting fights, but not with targeting play styles because some people don’t understand the concept of opportunity cost.

There’s no opportunity cost to a zerker playstyle when you can use a guardian and the evade mechanic to mitigate most of its weaknesses. Please stop trying so hard to paint zerker playstyle as this incredibly risky affair.

I’ll take a full zerker group to my fractal 50’s any day over some PVT or condi spec garbage. I’ll take heavies over some necro or ranger as well. Nothing poses a risk if you can kill it before it becomes a threat and a guardian is feeding your group aegis+ reflect making you virtually immune to dying for enough time to wipe out the threat.

A “block all attacks” mechanic would even hurt condi specs far more than power specs because most condi specs mainatain condi stacks through cd skills while power specs get the majority of their damage from autoattacks. A single blocked autoattack is not the same as getting a 8 sec cd condi skill blocked.

AI SHOULD target playstyles. There should be mobs resistant to direct damage and mobs that spam conditions so that groups have a variety of specs in them instead of the usual full zerker.

If the game doesn’t encourage variety in group composition, then every single comp will just try to maximize damage.

Fluffball.8307:

SilverWF.4789:

At the 99% of roaming vids (for every class) we can find only “Me the Great against bads” and nothing else.
Who is better in beating kids? This is the same question.

While I agree with you, I’m not entirely sure what else you’d put in a video. A montage of getting the kitten kicked out of yourself?

I’ve thought about making a video with in-depth breakdowns of difficult fights, but I suck at getting video recording to work, I have no experience with video editing, and I doubt anyone would learn much at this stage of the game. And I’m lazy.

That idea mostly came from back in the day before LBs were “viable” and everyone claimed you couldn’t roam on a power ranger. Now any idiot can beat a thief 1v1.

Not really. A half decent thief will never die to anyone in WvW if he doesn’t want to.

He can own any build he’s strong against since nobody can run away from a thief, maybe a warrior or FGS ele, but absolutely no class can catch a thief who knows he’s facing a build that counters him.

And with patience a thief can wear any class down by baiting their cd’s and constantly resetting until they can burst you down with any cd’s up since thief skills thanks to initiative have far lesser cd’s than normal profs.

There’s a reason most roamers are thieves.

Now, for team fights, there is nothing more OP than a warrior+guardian melee train.

Klonko.8341:

Kjeld.9730:

Everyone’s ranger alt in [Walk] We currently hold all 10 top spots of best ranger EU
our latest vid here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-MEnbmOerQ

Top 10 ranger loosing a pet in a fight where he stands at 1200 and pew pew? I guess you are not…

Its sad you are not including spvp player… Because those has often a better skill level than wvw roamer.

sPvP and WvW class balance are vastly different, so no sPvPer would do betetr than a WvW roamer.

For one, stats are inflated, increasing the value of burst builds in WvW. D/P thief and hammer warriors are vastly more porwerful in WvW than they are in sPvP, for one. Thief in spvp who wants to build D/P is at ebst sporting 14k HP.

In WvW a thief can sport 18k hp and still land 6k backstabs. That would never happen in sPvP. Similarly good dueling warriors are stupidly OP in WvW. Build hammeer and axe/mace combo with stance spec, signet, swiftness on rage signet and fear me and he’s a completely absurd dueling build. He has CC for days, axe auto does ridiculous damage in between hammer stun cd’s.

So, yeah, combos that are nonexistent in spvp due to stat limitations on amulets are fairly prevalent in WvW.

Also, sPvP’ers are often trained to fight over points and to abuse certain map elements with blink, none of which is a part of most WvW play.

champ.7021:

Zenith.7301:

You can do it, but you complicate your life significantly by doing so and drag out the run by a considerable amount.

I could go back to WoW and carry a bunch of guildmates through mythics while they’re doing 17k dps while a few of us do 30k+ dps, but I have no desire to make my experience more time consuming seeing as how I’d rather have that extra time to do other things.

So, yeah, I could use a longbow on my RANGER, and maybe use the black moa I worked so hard to get the hall of monuments points for, but that only makes the run a far worse experience.

And what I want is not to complete the content, but have competitive playstyle options instead of the whole stack all zerker, bring a warrior with banners and an ele to stack might and zerg the boss in 2 minutes garbage that most PvE content currently is.

In dynamic events you just switch it out for stacking guardians and warriors in melee and having eles spam staff skills.

As usual, necro and ranger can do whatever because they’re a subpar class anyways that doesn’t fit into most game formats.

There’s not a single recent time where in WoW you even encounter something like "no rogues/hunters, paladins and warriors only. "

This game has such an egregious disparity of power between builds and professions, and people like to sit here and pretend that the supremacy of Warriors, Guardians, Thieves and Elementalists in PvE and WvW isn’t something real.

The only class that isnt equal to the others is necro. Ranger engineer and mesmer which you did not mention in that last list are all very very good in PvE giving off good dps. Engineer and Mesmers are super helpful because of vuln from engies and reflects/ pulls from mesmers.

What you’re talking about seems to be just a problem with how easy PvE is and how boss mechanics are simple and easy to bypass. How does that relate to Zerker? People are complaining about berserker but everytime i run any dungeon i always have to right zerk only to get maybe 3 members with good dps. Its not really a problem not everyone uses it and most people couldn’t care less if the run takes a couple minutes longer. Talk about how certain professions need to be boosted and how challenging dungeons need to be created in HoT, dont complain about a build thats strong.

I don’t want zerker nerfed. I want other stat builds buffed, and zerker people don’t want that because they get their rocks off on having superiority over other builds.

Lazaar.9123:

Zenith.7301:

Except I use zerker stats. On every one of my toons. And I’m sick of the kittenty PvE exploits. Nobody does it for the challenge. They do it for the gold.

How can a 3-4 minute fight translate into a “challenge” is beyond me. All you need to know is where to ball in as a group, and robotically evade the tell.

No real cleansing mechanisms, no party splitting to do real encounter objectives. Just zerg the living crap out of every boss in this game.

So, no, I’ve read your kittenty excuses, I just don’t accept them as a valid argument for making all the other stat combinations and playstyle options worthless for any serious content approach.

Funny, considering anything outside of dungeon speed runs can be done by any build. You can’t even crit the ‘bosses that are zerged the living crap out of’. And yes, people using exploits is a problem, but ArenaNet already does action against them if they see it. But that has no relevance to zerker stats.

You can do it, but you complicate your life significantly by doing so and drag out the run by a considerable amount.

I could go back to WoW and carry a bunch of guildmates through mythics while they’re doing 17k dps while a few of us do 30k+ dps, but I have no desire to make my experience more time consuming seeing as how I’d rather have that extra time to do other things.

So, yeah, I could use a longbow on my RANGER, and maybe use the black moa I worked so hard to get the hall of monuments points for, but that only makes the run a far worse experience.

And what I want is not to complete the content, but have competitive playstyle options instead of the whole stack all zerker, bring a warrior with banners and an ele to stack might and zerg the boss in 2 minutes garbage that most PvE content currently is.

In dynamic events you just switch it out for stacking guardians and warriors in melee and having eles spam staff skills.

As usual, necro and ranger can do whatever because they’re a subpar class anyways that doesn’t fit into most game formats.

There’s not a single recent time where in WoW you even encounter something like "no rogues/hunters, paladins and warriors only. "

This game has such an egregious disparity of power between builds and professions, and people like to sit here and pretend that the supremacy of Warriors, Guardians, Thieves and Elementalists in PvE and WvW isn’t something real.

Lazaar.9123:

Zenith.7301:

People in zerker builds don’t want the other builds to be viable because they’ve invested all their time and gold onto a zerker meta. They’ve got all ascended zerker gear and they’ve got their gold grinds pat down.

That really isn’t true. People want challenging content, but they also don’t want the holy trinity in GW2 because the game was advertised to not have it. I swear, it’s like you didn’t even bother to read the thread and immediately jumped on to hate on people using zerker stats.

Except I use zerker stats. On every one of my toons. And I’m sick of the kittenty PvE exploits. Nobody does it for the challenge. They do it for the gold.

How can a 3-4 minute fight translate into a “challenge” is beyond me. All you need to know is where to ball in as a group, and robotically evade the tell.

No real cleansing mechanisms, no party splitting to do real encounter objectives. Just zerg the living crap out of every boss in this game.

So, no, I’ve read your kittenty excuses, I just don’t accept them as a valid argument for making all the other stat combinations and playstyle options worthless for any serious content approach.

Did you really link me a vid of 5 warriors, literally the class with the best cleave ingame outside staff ele, as proof the fight can be perfectly done without a guardian?

Because I’d like to see a class that doesn’t have 18k baseline hp and the most OP heal in the game. With endure pain and a banner elite.

I mean, please. Show me the video with 5 rangers doing that crap, or 5 eles for that matter without conjured frostbow cheese. Hell, I’ll take the 5 necros.

And then let’s compare that experience in a public group versus the group that has the heavies in them.

People in zerker builds don’t want the other builds to be viable because they’ve invested all their time and gold onto a zerker meta. They’ve got all ascended zerker gear and they’ve got their gold grinds pat down.

They don’t want different content. They want quick content they can gimmick into their gold payout quick and efficiently.

This is what you get when you introduce huge gold grinds as the main method for aesthetic progression in the game. People stop caring about playing the game and just want to get the gold grind for their legendaries done as quick as possible, or get those fractals done asap as well so that they can go farm as much gold as they can get for the day, so that they can buy the next incredibly expensive rare skin they want.

Optionally, an ele can chill the boss to a crawl while in shield and you assing a quick attacking class to take off the shield while the rest of the group quickly wipes the adds after binding blades.

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.

That’s the single fight in the fractals where not having a guardian can royally screw your group over. The rest of the bosses are certainly harder without a guardian, because guardians are broken OP in fractals and pretty much anywhere else, but the presence of a guardian is nowhere near as critical as it is to the fire shaman.

Mostly because they put in a ton of adds that do instnt ranged damage that hits like a truck and immobilizes and the AI targeting system in this game is o horrendous to the point where these mobs can choose to all shoot at a single person and immediately down them.

GW2 is known for its gimmicky PvE, why do you think there is no real progression raider presence in this game. The closest this game got was Death and Taxes.

Kartel.2561:

I actually feel my necro is my strongest and most effective character, and I feel my mesmer is my weakest. I can’t speak for dungeon/fractal runs as I avoid the static instance-grinding scene. But for open world PVE and WvW, I feel like my necro rolls over things easier than my alts.

Maybe it’s because it’s the only one that’s 100% ascended, or maybe because it’s always been my “main” and I’m most used to it the abilities. But I find my necro my most effective killer who does down the least.

Wait, so fractals and instances are grinds, but your pve zergball farm trains are not grinds? The very content where you just mindlessly sit back and mash your ranged skills at some hp sack alongside 30+ other people?

Ascended IS mandatory for fractal lv50, the only content at the moment remotely “challenging” to a group.

70 AR requires fully infused accessories, and 2 extra ascended pieces be they weapons or armor.

And if you wish to change weapon setups? Guess what go grind some more ascended or get screwed in fractal 50 with unavoidable agony pulses.

I know the majority of PvE players in this game are casuals who like their mindless zergball open world farm where nothing really matters, but ascended gear does make a difference in fractal 50 and it definitely makes a difference in pvp where a 5% stat advantage is still an advantage.

Who wants to bet it’s a support profession that’s essentially blacklisted from the PvE “kill kitten before it kills you” zerker meta.

Because you either have to play bunker or a thief. If you want to play a zerker/offensive spec of any other class get ready to be farmed by thieves and warriors, because thieves and warriors both have really easy to land huge spike while having tons of active mitigation tools.

So if I play a ranger and don’t want to be thief food, I gotta build spirits or BM bunker.

None of the classes that aren’t thief or warrior have the escape tools to play effectively an offensive power based spec.

If you’re playing a necro in particular get used to the diea of having a team babysit you beause you can’t be self sufficient at all when you get CC’d to death or just torn apart by the nearby warrior and thief combo.

And then there’s also the bunkers which you stand no chance against as a power spec unless you are a warrior or thief. Maybe mesmer but mesmer is just a crappier thief.

Devildoc.6721:

JustTrogdor.7892:

Tried it a few times. In each case I was subject to messages like, “Noob GTFO”, “Moa me, you suck cheese build”, “You suck, I hope you die”

I don’t care to participate in such a hostile environment that doesn’t respect sportsmanship. It is my impression that many PvP players cannot control themselves from insulting others when they lose or win. That is one reason I hope there is no open world dueling.

I agree, I’ve always thought it was a terrible scenario to put a bunch of video game nerds, who probably never learned sportsmanship as a concept because they hated sports and PE, and put them in a competitive environment.

This is such a load of crap. I mean, you got football players knocking their wives unconscious, having animals tear each other to death for entertainment, or generally trashtalking pretty badly.

Some of the biggest thugs in life are athletes and especially the tribal-minded fans that follow them. Ask a referee about the graciousness of athletes and fans.

These changes are so marginal, the zerker meta in PvE isn’t going anywhere.

Why is RNG the primary reward mechanic? Last I checked right before release you mocked WoW and released a comic strip satirizing RNG on loot and spreadsheets, and what we got were dungeons with multiple paths whose rewards came via token systems.

Then you completely reneged on that design and went for a greedy casino style RNG grind so people would be desperate enough to spend cash on your gemstore to bypass the incredibly low drop rates on items or avoid grinding the immense gold sums such RNG drops were going for.

No other MMO has been as big an offender as this game. Precursor drops are the equivalent of suddenly getting 500k WoW gold dropped for you randomly.

It’s plain broken, not even WoW in its worst days had such an egregious amount of wealth randomly gifted to players.

It’s a total disrespect to player’s time and effort to have around four months of grind randomly gifted to somebody. Some players even twice while players who have been playing the game since beta have not gotten a single drop.

In fact, it’s this and all the fractal skins and the absurd paywall you set behind every skin released ever since explorable dungeons. Since explorer dungeons we have not gotten a full thematically proper armor and weapon set that is not behind some RNG paywall.

Rewards from doing activities in this game are so hideously low, especially high tier crafting materials, that players are choosing to ignore playing the game and instead playing the auction house.

I spend 1.5 hours on a fractal 50 and come out empty-handed, with a measlly 4 gold for my time in stuff sold for running the dungeon and the 193792739th useless ascended ring that you don’t need because for fractal 50 you already have infused accessories everywhere plus an ascended weapon and armor piece which is mandatory to survive agony (70 AR is such a dumb gate to content).

And then if lightning strikes and for some miracle you get a fractal skin, it may be a duplicate or a skin you won’t even use.

Everything about this game feels like a cash shop hamster wheelm. More Korean grind than a proper Western MMO.

Oxidia.8103:

Gnat.9405:

Zackie.8923:

oh so if someone doesn’t play well he should be kicked?

if someone doesn’t use meta builds he should be kicked?

Um, absolutely…

Why wouldn’t this be the case? If everyone else in the group is using a build that is proven effective and contributes to success, why should you be exempt? And more importantly, why are they the bad guy when expectations about the current meta are clear?

As always, start your own group if you don’t want to run the right builds.

I second that. Because i sure didn’t spend 80 gold on runes and 500 gold on my armor and weapons so i can carry people in dungeons or fractals till 4 am.

Then you shouldn’t have used him for your first 2 fractals and then kicked him. You should have asked for gear to be linked before starting the run instead of wasting people’s time.

To the OP, Imbued Shaman is an AoE critical fight. Ranger is bar none the class with the worst AoE in the game. By lv49-50 if your party doesn’t have a coordinated guardian and strong aoe DPS, your chances of success are greatly diminished.

It’s just how they design their crappy PvE. Everything gibs you with autoattacks = higher difficulty.

And I don’t mean the 1038792743927393th cosmetic backpack or the od 0.00000971% drop minipet.

I mean actual content update with actual armors and weapons not tied to microtransactions or RNG microtransaction box tickets.

Don’t you get tired of milking your customers for gems to gold purchases so they can have something in the game when you hide every skin either behind black lion chests or even worse drop rate RNG?

2+ years, end of beta you released dungeons with sets that were guaranteed by tokens from running those dungeons, and then you bait and switched into some despicable F2P RNG goldink items (precursors and fractal weapons say hi).

I don’t think I’ve seen a single new weapon/armorset from doing PvE that isn’t some 0.00093871%-Please-Buy-Gems-To-Afford-It rare item. All of the new looks have been on the gemstore, and some of those armors and weapons even recycles pieces/textures from old armors lol.

The problem is that any blanket nerf to zerker means warrior and guardian get pushed up more as the de facto classes since they have the highest innate survival.

What needs nerfing is might and fury stacking and banners.

Then what you can do is make mobs that are more vulnerable to condition damage so bringing a condi class to the comp is advantageous.

And both aegis and reflect walls from guardian need nerfing, as well as thief black powder so classes with debuffs like necromancer can shine.

Another design issue is that bosses have basically immunity to debilitating conditions so while a guardian and ele and warrior boons work fine on bosses, the encromancer and ranger niches of condi hybrids suck.

People don’t want the meta to change because this game is all about farming the metric ton of gold it takes to get legendaries and other luxury skins.

If you change dungeons so they’re more challenging but longer, people will be upset because this game is incentivizing farming by putting forth hideously long gold grinds.

IvanTheGrey.2941:

This is the first RPG I’ve ever played where I didn’t give a flying kitten about the story. Is that wrong? I just don’t think the writing/storytelling is good enough to get me to care.

Oh well. Got my first lupi solo on thief the other day. A lot more fun than on warrior. I finally realized that playing other classes makes you a better player. Huh.

Hope all my fellow yanks have a good day off tomorrow.

Did you ever play GW1? Guild Wars doesn’t know how to pace story let alone develop a proper climax.

Zhaitan is a good example of a way to kill your storytelling.

I remember pre-release when Ree Soesbee was stumping for the game and talking about all these branches of storytelling we would have. Well a few months after release and now years she’s nowhere to be seen.

These very developers have made it clear on the forums that talking to the community is not part of their job description. What an awful attitude to have, when all other leading games make it part of the job description that developers need to collaborate with the community.

The problem with GW2 is that the best story came from the racial and guild storylines early on. And guess what, all those got forgotten and now everybody gets the same boring story instead of their personalized one.

GW2 was a total bait and switch of a game.

How curious that this is a dungeon thread yet nobody treats fractals as dungeons, when they are the highest level of dungeon mechanics.

lv50 fractals are a whole different ball game, because survival due to the damage output of bosses and mobs, and the total health of bosses, is far greater than any of the usual speed run explorable paths.

So the one trick pony that is an ele in a fractal becomes a liability because suddenly a melee autoattack from a mob, and especially bosses such as Mossman and Archdiviner will one shot him.

In fractals the heavy armor classes have a distinct advantage, and so do the strong AoE classes. Fire Shaman will eliminate ranger, necromancer, and mesmer from the list — all these classes have absolutely horrendous aoe capacity that makes them a liability against the elementals who need to be burst down immediately.

In all the other lv50 fractals classes with high effective HP (which is not necessarily the same thing as a large health pool, but effective mitigation mechanisms such as strong burst and sustained healing, reflection, high access to protection, etc) have the best capability to sustain DPS.

Try Archdiviner melee on a ranger or lightning hammer ele. Try dredge on those as well. Not very fun when a mob takes out over half your health in one swing and is immune to conditions which would otherwise allow you to survive.

For lv50 fractal the list easily favors guardian and warrior with a single ele, preferably a staff ele, as the only light armor class in the group. Thief is essential for speeding up the dredge and harpy fractals, and their survival comes from being able to chain pistol whip if necessary against opponents with hardhitting autoattacks.

Take a good look at paths such as the Aetherblade in TA, it also favors high effective HP classes that withstand offensive pressure better.

Engineer and Ranger might do well in regular dungeon speed runs, but they are no better than a mesmer or anyone that isn’t a Warrior/Guardian/Thief with the token ele in a fractal or aetherpath run.

It’s also no coincidence that the reason necro isn’t well loved for dungeons either is because alongside ranger their power based AoE skills are absolute trash, and this game is all about bursting AoE.

I want my spammable invincibility (stealth) and the 19327917291272937 teleports and stunbreakers thieves have.

I also want the 1983698262393728 evades thieves have too btw.

I want my ranger longbow to not have kitten AoE and have the damage of clusterbomb as well.

I want my ranger’s autoattacks to crit for 3-4k at any range, not just max range, and cleave 3 targets like thief sword and apply weakness.

I also want my rapidfire to be invisible so people can’t reliably dodge it and lose half their health before they see an attack.

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

LB isn’t being Nurfed , rewatch the ready up .

all they said was Its nice too see that Lb’s are being used by many rangers, ignoring all the troll/fun they had while doing the ready up.

who ever wrote that Review of the Ready up Twisted the words not anet or Poorly worded it as too many lbs .

how people are relating that sentence with Nurfs ! it gives no grounds for it, so what there were too many Lb users to start with , now they are putting a animation on PBS some or many of the Band wagoners will go back to there mains or Try somthing different after they get Owned a few times.

Why would it even need an animation? The longbow has no other defense. It has no snare, no other gap opener. With all the chanrges and teleports classes have, that knockback was key to LB ranger survival.

The Ranger survival toolkit is so bad, that most rangers simply stack 2.4k+ toughness on BM condition builds with evades just to survive.

I repeat, power rangers have no survival tools. You got a signet of stone immunity on a 60 sec cd, and that’s it. All the ranger stunbreaks are on hideously long cooldowns, they have no real condi removal options besides a 30 point Wilderness Survival trait. No blinds, no evade spam like sword thief, no teleports, no high access to protection of lots of cc like warrior hammer or condition immunity stances like warrior.

LB rangers are essentially pure glass cannons, with even less defensive/escape tools than a staff elementalist. If you nerf their one defensive skill with an easy to dodge animation (like, Maul, which never hits anything and if it does it doesn’t even hurt), you are going to put rangers again hiding behind a zerg to do anything with a longbow and take them out of skirmishes.

NeXeD.3042:

Should probably nerf necro dagger too too much deeps

I know right, it now hits TWO targets, mind blown like how can a 5 target cleave from Greatsword for 20k even compare.

Clearly if Longbow for rangers is seeing a nerf because of its prominence, perhaps you want to follow that twisted logic down to Greatswords, which have dominated many of the game’s formats for, oh, I don’t know, 2 years already.

oxtred.7658:

If you hit a mossmand autoattack on any class, you loose a scholar buff and a crit is likely to down a guardian. If you can’t play anything else than warrior, fine for you, but again, non experienced groups will favor easy to play classes, nothing strange here. That doesn’t make them less balanced or underpowered. It’s great to have a group to protect you as an ele, but it’s not necessary. I can survive in pugs with my berserker ele, it’s just practice. Because less experienced players can’t play a class doesn’t mean that class should be buffed to make it more powerful at low gameplay levels, as it would result in a even bigger superiority when played correctly.

I’m sorry but to have 100% melee uptime as an ele against mossman or archdiviner or dredge you need a group protecting you.

And people were using runes of strength anyway not scholar.

If you create a game where some class only shine with a perfectly tailored group setup while others function just as well in either format, expect the niche classes to be marginalized.

Moreover, I’d like to see what fractal 50 group you run without a guardian at the very least, and even a warrior for banners whose benefits cannot be replaced by any class and are invulnerable to any damage.

You act as if people just bring warriors because they’re easy to play, when they are brought for banners, might stacking, easily the best cleaving capacity in the game, plenty of fury, and because warriors don’t require as much protection the guardian in the group can in turn carry a more offensive setup as well.

People don’t kick rangers from fractal 50 because they’re ignorant. The ranger’s lack of good aoe and inconvenient melee are large factors in slowing down a fractal rune.

MH axe for fire shaman? Please. Like a couple of bounces for 3-4k crits will do anything close to the aoe an ele or warrior or whirling wrath guardian is doing. And if you’re doing a whirling defense reflect as a ranger you aren’t doing any meaningful aoe damage in the process since it’s a channel unlike swirling winds or feedback or wall.

Esplen.3940:

Zenith, I feel like you’re falsely under the impression that Warrior have the best DPS in the game.

If you’re having Guardians on rotation to keep you alive, then you’re better off playing a Thief, Elementalist, Engineer, or even Necromancer for damage output.

However, Engineer and Necromancer have many, many spots where they aren’t very strong.

Thief also doesn’t have very good range, but since we have “Guardians on Aegis rotation” it won’t really matter, so you can camp D/D (and potentially pick up an Ele Weapon with Improvisation for one of the highest damages in the game).

But I digress, having that sweet, sweet armor bonus from being Heavy vs Medium more than makes up for the damage loss. /sarcasm

I think the idea of PRACTICAL DPS is lost on you. If you eat a mossman/archdiviner autoattack on any non-heavy class, you have to range out to not get downed by the subsequent hit.

A warrior has enough HP buffer and the best heal ingame (signet) to have the most potential uptime on a target while under pressure.

Everybody knows conjure ele is top DPS followed by thief single target. The problem is that those 2 classes are heavily dependent on their group to keep them alive. And PuGs are not known for keeping your 12k HP berk ele alive. At least the thief can spam pistolwhip till a guardian gets them back up to full health.

But keep pretending like warriors and guardians don’t have some massive defensive advantages as melee against the other classes. That’s why the WvW melee trains are pretty much made up of warriors and guardians and once ina blue moon the odd celestial D/D ele.

oxtred.7658:

Pugs balance= not actual balance. Rangers are in a good spot in casual runs, and we also use them in dungeon speedruns with good success. See iV’s stories record on the gw2 dungeon. I use my engineer pretty much all the time. Necros are the only class left out for speedruns, and they are fine in casual runs, and better in fractals than actual dungeons.

Fractal 50 =/= speed runs. The ranger is undeniably a liability in any fractal like fire shaman (completely garbage aoe, it’s why rangers in wvw are left out, especially in GvG) or mossman melee group. It’s even worse in dredge.

Most dungeon speedruns rarely have pulls that last beyond a simple aoe rotation. Fractal 50 mobs by comparison are real HP sacks with much more scaled up damage and the bosses are virtually anti-pet unless you switch out to a spider.

Fractal 50 unlike dungeon speed clears also have terribly designed mobs and bosses whose bulk of the damage isn’t in telegraphed attacks (unlike Lupi, etc) but just stupidly broken autoattack damage that there’s not enough vigor and endurance refunds to completely mitigate let alone dodge reliably. It’s about guardians rotating aegis for the warrior and keeping protection up and basically have the warriors burn down the boss to take at most 2 hits before they can be downed on the next attack after they’re out of aegis.

It’s the simple fact that warriors and guardians soak damage really well (and thief has a spammable invulnerability via pistolwhip on top of easy dodge access).

Your ranger eats an Archdiviner autoattack and there goes 70% of your HP. You can’t keep the offensive momentum like a warrior can. A full berk ele can be insta-downed by a single archdiviner or mossman autoattack. It’s completely lopsided survivability that affects DPS uptime on a target.

Not that it stops you from being instantly kicked from any lv50 fractal group you join before you even enter the instance most of the time.

Ranger, Necromancer, and Engineer are still the redheaded stepchildren of fractals. And I can’t say it’s not without reason as in a fight like the fire shaman, ranger AoE is such garbage that you hinder your group. Really good for sitting on a longbow on classes like archdiviner and mossman where you can’t melee efficiently unless you’re a warrior with guardians rotating aegis.

But hey all the QQ with rapid fire probably means rangers won’t be seeing fixes to their dreadful AoE capabilities or crappy pets or QoL issues like mainhand sword melee animation locks on really twitchy bosses like archdiviner and mossman who melee too quick to reliably dodge even with autoattack turned off to control pounce.

It will only probably take them 2 more years when precursor scavenger finally arrives for the warrior/guardian/ele/thief meta to break.

Thieves and warriors pushed all the other zerker specs out of the meta, that’s why we have condi specs on any class that isn’t a thief or warrior.

Ele need to build celestial or valkyrie to not be 2-shot by a D/P thief let alone demolished by any warrior build.

The reason is that both thief and warriors have multiple escapes and counters to damage to control a fight while having the highest, easiest to deliver burst potential of the bunch.

Ranger is just a gimmick till the morons realize you sit any thief or warrior or necromancer on a longbow ranger and they just fold. Necromancer berserker is a free kill for most thieves and warriors.

Mesmer is on the verge of being as strong as warrior and thief, but both of those classes keep it down from breaking out as a meta berk spec.

You still will never see successful tourney berk rangers, necromancers, or engineers anytime soon, and scepter eles are running water and arcana by obligation and require specifically tailored teams so they don’t fold to pressure.

Warrior and thief are the easiest, most consistent berk specs to get results with because there’s so many ways to get out of making a mistake. And not only do they have great burst, but their sustained damage via autoattacks completely outrank the other classes (which is why warriors and thieves are the preferred DPS classes for PvE).

Good s/d thief hardcounters celestial d/d ele. Well played D/P does as well.

Basically any class like thief or warrior who have high spikes to deny the ele melee range.

A warrior with axe/mace+ hammer setup and stances+ fear me will CC the ele to death.

Celestial ele hardcounters most condi classes so don’t bother. Only a really good engineer can give them a run for their money, or a PU mesmer.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

They can if they’re moving faster than their target. Flesh Golem is the best at sticking to his target, due to the cripple on attacks. Of course, ranged pets/minions don’t have an issue and are reliable anyway.

Which is never, because most targets have swiftness and at equal speed the pet always staggers to launch an attack, falling behind its target.

Moreover, in the case of ranged pets their projectiles are slow and can easily be sidestepped beyond 600 range. Their projectiles are also easily bodyblocked since they cannot be made to pierce.

Pets are simply put a liability. They grant thieves a free cloak and dagger, and are useful for many classes to exploit on hit effects or keeping the ranger in combat since the pet cannot smartly dodge like the player. The pets also do not cleave except the drake’s autoattack, and that’s capped at 3 targets while most classes like elementalists, warriors, and guardians have no such cleaving limitations.

And especially in WvW and high level fractals, they’re dead weight that does pretty easily. On fractal 50 you better get used to bringing a spider for the very moment mossman’s cleave takes off half your pet’s health.

At least pets are optional for necromancer and guardian, but pet implementation in this game has been nothing short of atrocious and negligent.

Warrior/Guardian. Stay away from Ranger/Necromancer.

Listen, even if they removed the stack cap and you could keep perma burning and 25 stack bleeds, you’d still be doing less damage than a zerker spec.

The extra toughness wouldn’t even make a difference to make up for the damage either. The difference between 1800 toughness and 1200 toughness on fractal 50 mossman or archdiviner is none. You’re still going to get 2-shot if you eat an autoattack.

JohnnyZero.5619:

And despite all those nerfs you’re still OP as hell, that’s why WvW is full of your scum class and spvp hotjoin was polluted by you and warriors.

Now somebody isn’t a free kill anymore and you throw a tantrum.

Power rangers are a fad. There have been no legitimate complaints about them that I’ve seen so far while serving a berserker role in tPvP. Yes, they do too much damage from too far away, however:

They don’t have the mobility of a thief.

They don’t have the cleave of a scepter fresh air elementalist.

They don’t have the team utility of a shatter mesmer.

And as a heads up, as soon as you mention WvW in this forum and start calling professions “scum” like you have a personal vendetta against them, no one takes you seriously.

I’m not supposed to have some vendetta against the single class that pushed all other power specs out of the meta alongside warriors? The one cheesy class who has no cooldowns to be affected by chill, who can spam a backstab despite being blocked by aegis or blind and still is not revealed?

The one class kitten y enough that allows for escape and constant reset while other classes get to die for failing?

Nah, I pass on giving a kitten about what people in this forum think. People in these forums made all that drama about poor underpowered warriors and that’s how we ended up with healing signet and stances.

This format is no better than WvW, going into tpvp when eles were broken and teams consisting of 2-3 eles or whatever the new OP crap is. People in this format have no more integrity or credibility than players from other formats.

SerratedOcean.7398:

Mandor.1284:

I’ve always found funny that the Thiefs are the first ones to complain when they can’t kill another class when they’re the ones who have everything easy in the first place.

10/10 got me to reply.

You must be a Ranger then, the influx of rangers in Solo queue is a good sign, this damage seems to be clearly out of balance.

Its repulsive when you say we’re the class who have everything easy. I played this game (sPVP) from day 1, theives been nerfed many time in damage, from back stab to stun duration. Hell S/D got nerfed again, hell even black powder. Easy..please

And despite all those nerfs you’re still OP as hell, that’s why WvW is full of your scum class and spvp hotjoin was polluted by you and warriors.

Now somebody isn’t a free kill anymore and you throw a tantrum.

12 secs of invulnerability? Please link me those skills because if you’re calling killing your pet and losing 30% of your damage via “protect me” invulnerability you don’t know what that term means. The pet under that should is not attacking, if you die to the ranger’s damage alone you are really bad.