Guild Wars 2

Sarahfull.4930:

I.. Im thinking of making a post in reddit like the one I made in the player helping player forum here a year ago about helping out with fractals.

How is the reddit guildwars comuminty? And how are they to such post? do you think it will be worth it?

Sorry about all the questions. I do tend to over think things

It’s definitely worth posting there. Both of my educational Arah tours were posted there, and both were well-received. Just be aware of when you post (IMO shoot for ~Noon US Eastern time), so that a few possible early downvotes don’t lead to a buried topic.

I love it when people use dark magic to bring dead threads back to life for absolutely no reason. It’s almost like they simultaneously can and cannot read.

Best of luck with this. I will suggest that you post this to Reddit (/r/guildwars2) as well, as you’ll reach a much larger audience that’s also probably more interested in participating than the regulars of this subforum.

xDudisx.5914:

ZeftheWicked.3076:

And that’s why i suggested my solution from the first post. It does not fix each every problem, but it’s a huge improvement in many areas.

Right now:
Two rotten apples can kick anyone they like as long as they are in sync to do their kicking fast, regardless of wheather they contributed to clearing the dungeon or not, or the fact they’re a minority.

Simple example. Two cheats want to kindnap a path and sell it. They join a late p1 Ac, get to boss kick everyone else, sell it for 2g. With 3 buyers they would get 6 gold divided by two people = 3 gold “reward” for their sleeze.

If my system goes live:
Wouldn’t happen at all, since the 3 party members they joined would have both the numbers and point advantage. Only kicking those two rotten apples could do is leaving the party themselves.

To scam successfully you would need 3 ppl, from the very start, all the way to the end. Now even if we had that (and scammers don’t like doing honest work which a fulll run is), they would only have 2 slots to sell and 3 ppl taking the money. So at same price as above – 4 gold income divided by 3 “businessman” = 1.33 gold each.
And that’s after they’re forced to do a full run from the start, rather then lazy abduction of someone else’s work.

Also do keep in mind that those 3 ppl can do the dungeon without extra help and make it an honest sale. It’s certainly easier then with just two.

As you can see it’s not perfect. Some more security would have to be put in place still. But it’s sure a lot less convinient for the rotten eggs of dungeon community and that’s a step forward, though not saying the last and final one.

Except that in a party with 5 you can’t kick with only 2. You need at least 3 votes. They changed it from 40% to 50% the number of votes to kick.

No, they had it in the patch notes that they changed that. But then they stealth changed the patch notes to remove any mention of it. The change never made it into the game.

Because… communication?

Condi engi is pretty good at solos, but you’ll need another set of power-based (i.e. sin/zerk) armor for some bosses (crystalline entities = immune to condis; alphard = 95% base condi duration reduction, brie = first 50% of life direct damage is amplified 10x).

Windsagio.1340:

Grok Krog.9581:

All we need really is to have a party leader system. Leader can’t be kicked, and majority vote is needed to kick.

No, because then we’re back where we were before. We had a leader system, and they took it out because of the problems.

We had an owner-with-no-power-except-kicking-destroys-instance system with everything else left up to plurality vote. That’s not a party leader system; a party leader system is something altogether different.

Squishy.3694:

Are there any noob-friendly guides out there for those that want to learn?

Thief Arah p3 guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdESq4RQBLQ

For the most part, you don’t need an actual guide though. Go to gw2dungeons.net, check out the skills mobs have, then watch solo videos of someone on your class to see how people handle things. Or just jump right in after you’ve read up on the mechanics.

WabbaJaga.3861:

Maybe kicking should only be possible before the second boss is reached, and then only if three people out of five agree. Wouldn’t that solve the problem as well?

There are a ton of legitimate reasons to kick a person at or after the second boss.

Worth a look: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Dungeon-Mentors-Noob/first

“It’s meant as a means to hold agony resistance for Fractals and it just happens to be a little bit more powerful”

Incorrect.

Exotics could hold AR. They made the choice for a new more powerful tier of gear for other reasons.

Ascended exists to appease the crowd who really likes spending time to get gear and who doesn’t like spending that time unless they can be “better” than other players. It also exists for some in-game economic reasons (it helps to take gold out of the economy… but there are lots of ways of accomplishing this, obviously).

Honestly, I’d suspect most of the truly hard content in most games is never properly beaten while it’s being tested. You design something that’s way too hard to beat for your testers (and well designed!), make sure it works as intended (you can cheat to win while testing), and let players rise to the challenge.

Knowing what ANET knows about the attacks a boss has, the AI the boss uses, and what counters players have available, they can make theoretical estimates on the feasibility of beating the boss with a given set of tools, and obviously, the required set of tools can be estimated as well, along with a ton of other stuff. It’s really not that complicated a thing to do, if you have all the information that ANET necessarily must have when designing a new encounter.

Plus, some games have released content the designers found to be theoretically impossible to actually complete, because it was tuned to be that hard, and of course players still beat it. Players always think of more possibilities than the developers do, because they’re not constrained by a mental model of how the boss is “supposed” to be fought.

You should check out this thread (especially cat’s and my python scripts, which could easily be modified to give you what you seek): http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/18718546-post-patch-assassin-mix-ep-evaluation

If you were to actually do that for your constraints, I’d probably expect precision to pretty much always win out over ferocity for any realistic scenario. Especially for scenarios where your critical chance isn’t approaching 100%.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Thank you for this info. I’m confused, too!

Let me see if I can find out more about this on Monday. Oh heck, I’ll send an email now… but probably wont’t be able to post until Monday.

What happened was that in a previous patch, the notes included a supposed change that it’d take a majority of group members to kick (or similar wording) thus upping the threshold from 2 to 3 people for a 5 man party. Less than half an hour of those notes going live, you guys removed that change from the notes, and made no mention of any edits/corrections/anything to those patch notes.

The kick threshold was unchanged. But it would have been great if ANET could have (at the time) just made a follow up post to the notes (like you do for everything else) saying it was mistakenly included in the notes, or just didn’t function properly, or whatever was actually the case there. This goes back to the whole communication issue, which has been discussed before. We don’t terribly much care that you didn’t change the kick threshold; it’s more frustrating that you communicated that you did, when you didn’t, then didn’t issue any kind of actual retraction leading a lot of people to believe false things about the kick threshold. I can only imagine the “when its ready” communication policy is a huge part of the reason why no retraction was issued.

There was some discussion in the dungeons subforum about this at the time (and it’s been discussed a few times since, as people slowly keep finding out by experience), but I guess you guys don’t regularly read that subforum (it’s okay, we pretty much already knew this).

Fixing forum bug.

I love how this bug exists.

And here I was thinking that we meleed the archdiviner because a guardian is block-tanking him, that no harpies actually need to be killed in the harpy fractal to stealth past each portion, that if you did want to kill harpies there’s no need to 1200 range them, that both dredge fractal bosses can be meleed, etc.

If you want to watch cutscenes, make your own group and put it in the LFG title.

While their behavior was unethical, it’s very unlikely ANET will give a kitten. Based on personal experience, they seemingly don’t even care about “pay or kick because we want some free gold” type extortion.

dlonie.6547:

I need to get my FotM up….still.

I thought of the risen knight because his AA has been pretty brutal to me solo (even on thief, I never have enough dodges…), but you’re right, in a group, he’s not really a problem. Chaining aegis / heals / blocks + dragonrolls would probably be enough solo on guard.

PS Warr is a good point — Ty runs his with me a lot, so I might start experimenting with hammer during those runs just to get a feel for it. It would be fantastic to get another blast for stealth, though I really like having GS / sw+f on skips…

I feel bad for all the pugs that carried that st/sc+t guard to 50, Lilith xD Did he at least brag about his burning uptime?

Hammer on the risen knight might not be bad in pugs, where people are facetanking the autos. In an organized group, he’ll die before you run out of Aegis to give. Solo, you can just max melee circle strafe and take 0 damage (bonus on guardian: 100% UC uptime) – it takes a bit of practice to get down reliably, but it’s really not too bad.

When skipping, just keep your inventory window open and mostly to the right of the screen, and equip hammer just when you need the blasts. Hammer is useless on skips other than the blast, so you definitely don’t want (or need) to keep it equipped for them.

It wasn’t clear to me from a 6-month old dead, necromancer-resurrected thread for a post written near the end of the third page which contained wording that suggested a deviation of context from the OP, no.

…I suppose I must be beyond help, as you suspected. I’ll just leave this discussion at that. I don’t think it’s going anywhere productive at this point.

Zenith.7301:

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.

So now you’re insisting that you did say the encounter mandates reflects, while at the same time saying that:

Zenith.7301:

I didn’t say the encounter mandated reflects.

Are you serious here? Like, seriously?

As for reading your post, there are only two paragraphs that could be pertinent to the specifics here.

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.

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.

Because you totally made the “in a random group if you want to actually finish the fractal in less than 2 hours” qualification in the post. Totally. It’s right in there. Wait… Where is it? Can you point it out?

You can claim you were talking about a specific context all you like, but it seems pretty strange to do that when in the same sentence you’re talking about a specific context you reference the all-context-encompassing thing that’s the fundamental design of the fight, which very strongly implies you’re talking about the fundamental nature of the fight, and not the extremely specific context of “a random group if you want to actually finish the fractal in less than 2 hours.” Then you go on to say something that’s entirely designed to reinforce what you just said, and definitely does not serve to narrow the context at all.

Perhaps this is all wrong, and you can paint a coherent picture of how all your statements on this topic actually don’t contradict each other at all? I’m not seeing it.

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.

Q: What Necromancer elite skill resurrects old threads?

A: “Post Reply”

Zenith, you claimed the encounter mandates the presence of a reflect class (implied by you to be mesmer or guard), especially a guard.

This statement was shown to be demonstrably incorrect.

Instead okittennowledging that you were wrong, you pretended that the proof you were wrong just showed you were correct in the first place, while at the same time attempting to move the goalpost for a proof that you were wrong.

People replied, saying that you were shown to be wrong, and should admit it. They also replied saying that your new criteria is actually much easier to meet, with reasons as to why.

You mostly ignore all of that stuff. You come back and state that the ranger axe 5 doesn’t reflect projectiles. You then further try and alter what we’re talking about, further moving the conversation away from whether or not you made a factually incorrect statement regarding the mandated presence of a reflect class or not (…while in that statement, saying that anything is possible…).

People reply, pointing out that you’re factually wrong about ranger axe 5. They also respond to your diversion to ‘heavies only’.

You respond only to the person who talked about ‘heavies only’. Shown to be demonstrably wrong on your statement here, yet again, you decide to try and move the argument away from what you said, because you can’t admit you are incorrect. You start talking about thieves and elementalists.

Someone responds, asking if thieves and eles are heavies now. Perhaps they really thought you were implying they are? I mean, if we they thought you were at all intellectually honest, this could even be a proper reading of your response (it seems interesting that you don’t even consider this to be a possible proper reading of your response, isn’t it?). Perhaps they were pointing out your apparent intellectual dishonesty. In any event, it seems quite impossible for them to be making a deliberately obtuse comment.

It might seem as if you’re just looking for an excuse to stop responding, because you can’t admit you were incorrect at any point. Is this correct? Why not just admit you were wrong and stop digging the hole deeper?

Apparntly the filter filters out ack – now – led – ging because like… It’s a piece of kitty?

Jerus.4350:

Nokaru.7831:

Jerus.4350:

only takes 2.

Maybe I phrased it wrong, but I meant it requires 3 people to agree that “I should kick this guy.”

1 to initiate and 1 to accept… how are you figuring 3?

Probably read the patch notes about the kick change that never actually happenned… before ANET stealth changed the patch notes with no “oh sorry, we put an incorrect change in the notes” note.

Tom Yzf.5872:

Many people don’t bother with the event for CoF, the old tricks to getting past the gate still works. For a while I though there was a trick for CoE too, but it wasn’t widely known.

There is a trick for CoE (both for getting into the room with the gate when the event chain is in the early stages, and for getting into the dungeon from the gate room). See Frifox’s YouTube channel.

Phil, do you main Necromancer?

So, my example of not having a Guardian or Mesmer or any class that provides useful reflects isn’t valid, because it’s a 5 Warrior group comp? Are you serious? Wow…

So, how about 5 Ranger? It’d be trivially easy in comparison. I don’t even play Ranger, and I am quite aware that they have a very good antiprojectile skill on their offhand axe. Part of me thinks that perhaps every ranger could run offhand axe, and make the hardest part of the fight (the bubble/elemental phase) a complete cakewalk. Especially since rangers can do some OP stuff to slow the Shaman, too. Did I mention that bear pets can take the aggro of the shaman pretty easily, reducing the pressure on the team by an insane amount when not in the bubble phase?

How about 5 Elementalist? It’d be pretty easy, in comparison, too, and you’re crazy if you think that any intelligent player would intentionally disregard something as fantastic as Ice Bow (especially since there isn’t any cheese in this context, since you wouldn’t be doing any line casting… but you probably consider icebow lame because it does damage or somesuch nonsense). In fact, you’d only need to suffer through a single bubble phase on a 5-ele comp, because Chill is pretty OP. I bet Rocky might not be a bad bear stand in, either. Plus if you’re entirely against icebow, how about FGS? Last I checked, the 5 skill and the 2 skill on FGS are both 10-target skills. You could LOS the elementals (for that one phase you actually have to endure) in the same spot we did, drop maybe a Swirling winds, and then blow them all up with trivial ease (you could presumably even whirl against the rock!), or any number of other tactics that’d work pretty well.

I think the Imbued Shaman is a well-designed and interesting fight. You do not need reflects of any kind to be successful, at any fractal level. Having a skilled Guardian or Mesmer makes the fight significantly easier, but you definitely don’t need one in your party to succeed.

Proof reflects aren’t needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rS94J9AdIw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9rGB2J4t0Q and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS5WEJt8vOA

And of course, you’d be hard pressed to find a worse group comp (only way I can think of making that group comp worse is maybe adding Necromancers? I’m not even sure of that, though.). Literally any reasonable group comp has more than enough utility for the fight.

It’s certainly a lot more punishing to errors than most fights, but that’s part of what makes it so good.

It should be noted some of these are especially egregious, given they’re noted as thing you can do on the the extended formatting hints page https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/faq/.

Of course, expect no change. Apparently they hired an incompetent forum contractor that they got rid of, but they’re not replacing that forum contractor because it’d cost money and because they’re vaguely pondering moving to a different forum system at some indefinite point in the future so anything they spend on making the forum currently not suck would be “wasted”. Source: a red post awhile back (that I can’t find because the search feature is broken) stating as much.

I’d like to see an individual map completion category. Start at 0% zone completion, and work your way up to 100%. May need to have multiple entries depending on how they enter into the zone.

How fast can you map complete Lornar’s Pass?

/s

I can help clarify a bit more.

You drop shield of the avenger first, and then shortly after the bubble breaks you’re going to want to drop wall of reflection, some ways away from where your shield (and the shaman) is located (i.e. you dodge back). You ideally want to have him slowed enough that you don’t need to reposition the shield, and can cleave down most of the elementals before you break the bubble; it’s better to deal with them when you don’t also have to worry about him.

If you have someone else in the party who can and will provide an initial reflect as the bubble phase occurs, let them and then start channeling shield. If you don’t, you need to precast it to try and get the first activation to line up with the start of the bubble phase (too soon, your shield can be killed; too late and the elementals will destoy you and your team). You should avoid using the command function of the shield during this time (one of the tiny handful of times you don’t want to do this), unless you desperately need to try and reposition it.

Generally speaking, you’ll want to be on mace/focus (or if you must range, scepter/focus) with your weapon swap to GS up when he phases. Make sure you get a mace 2 down, and your focus 5 (if it’s up) off before swapping to GS for the elementals. You will generally want to avoid using Binding Blades until you have your Wall of Reflection down, so that you can pull any remaining elementals to you.

You don’t want to run Sanctuary. Run Retreat (along with Shield and Wall) instead. The extra Aegis can be extremely useful, in both good teams and especially so in bad teams. You can run either Signet of Resolve or Shelter for your heal. Shelter is superior if you have a very good team and the floor doesn’t bug (thus repeatedly applying some burning… even when you’re moving and it shouldn’t apply burning). Otherwise, Signet of Resolve is superior (and if it’s really bad, you might even trait reduced signet cooldown). Definitely make sure you have spirit weapon mastery traited, as the reduced shield CD is very important.

As a note, you should always communicate (if possible) regarding your CDs. Especially in a group with less organization, you don’t want to phase him before you have both wall and shield ready to go (or when someone has dangerously low health, etc.). In a coordinated group with enough antiprojectile skills, you could phase him without wall/shield being up and be absolutely fine (with the exact same idea in how they should be used), it’s just riskier (and probably not worth the risk to phase him deliberately in this case).

Knighthonor.4061:

Problem is, what about people that click on abilities in combat? They would not like this change.

They could still left click under the proposed change. I don’t think any skill clickers are right clicking the skills, in any event.

Riku, anyone with any clue realizes two things:

1. The might nerf is a direct response to celestial might stacking builds in PvE. That’s also why they nerfed the Battle sigil might.

2. ANET doesn’t want to split PvE, WvW and PvP balance, even in cases where there’s a needless negative impact on another game mode because of PvP balance. Except, you know, for confusion.

Hayashi, you do realize that the builds that I said are meta are a net DPS increase for the group over the build you’ve suggested, which has higher personal DPS at the loss of group DPS, right? I don’t think anyone in their right mind can defend “net DPS loss” builds as optimal.

I also find it interesting that DnT’s warrior build page, metabattle.com, and all those Warriors you see in record runs would seem to agree with me (including iV’s recent arah p4 record… where if you watch, the Warrior POV you’ll see the Warrior runs two builds… the exact two builds I mentioned, swapping to the second build during the Grenth “boss”). If you really think you’ve discovered a better build, I’d suggest going over to the DnT forums and letting them know about it, or at least taking it to the Fractals and Dungeons section.

In any event, I’m not going to reply to you here anymore. You’re clueless, and I’m not going to drag the thread off topic.

Hayashi.3416:

No, the usage of triple signets already end up with 80% critrate after factoring in the Banner of Discipline. Please stow your condescension and get some experience in creating builds before you try to talk down to theorycrafters.

PS types that run FGJ and full-damage types that run signets, relying on ele buffers, are entirely different builds. The latter uses full berserker and scholar runes, the former uses occasionally full berserker and occasionally assassin-berserker mixes together with strength runes, depending on whether uncrittable objects are to be taken into consideration.

56003 GS + Axe/Mace and 05063 Phalanx Strength are the two meta group play warrior builds at the moment. Neither even uses the Deep Strikes trait, instead opting for Rending Strikes because it’s vastly superior in group play (and actually, still very slightly superior in optimal solo play).

Perhaps for your own special snowflake non-optimal build what you’re saying is true. Unfortunately, it should have been fairly obvious that I was talking about meta builds. It should also be obvious that when we’re talking about an optimal mix of gear, we’re not talking about things that can’t be crit (which honestly, are a pretty minor amount of foes anyway), so bringing them up repeatedly in the context of things that can be crit doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Hayashi.3416:

Thieves and warriors are optimal on full berserker given that the full trait setups push both to ~80% before fury, or 100% critrate after, already. He’s probably speaking from that point of view.

It sounds like you’re unaware that Warriors currently benefit from the head, chest, and legs being Assassin’s, and the rest being Berserker’s. I’m guessing you also haven’t done any math, but are just ballparking what you feel is possibly a correct answer and pretending like it must be correct?

Aidan Savage.2078:

Then also realize that even if might is a reduced boost, the “most optimal build” STAYS “the most optimal build.” You lose nothing in the end. So what if the enemies take one or two more hits to kill.

To make such a statement, you must have done the math with respect to optimal Berserker-Assassin mixes for every class and build, and determined the current optimal gear will remain the future optimal gear.

Have you done this? Did you even consider it?

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

http://i.imgur.com/fAUOr2c.png

That’s perfect.

Just solo the dungeon on your own, find other people who like the lore as much as you do, or watch youtube videos of the cutscenes/dialog. There’s absolutely no need for ANET to spend any time here. Stop being so helpless, and help yourself.

Of course line casting is going to deal more damage still, at least as far as the icebow is concerned.

You’ve taken the entire height of the circle and compressed it. You might have had a projectile that was in the same x component of the circle as lupi’kittenbox, but had a different y component. With line casting, on Lupi, every single one of these hits. Even if we say the width is the same as the diameter of the circle, this would necessitate more damage except in the case that the hitbox was literally as big as the IB#4 circle area.

And it’s worse than that. The rectangle you get when line casting is actually not as wide as the diameter of the intended area circle. It’s slightly smaller. Again, we’re going to see more damage due to this unless the target’kittenbox is literally as big as the intended circle.

The only way for line casting not to deal more damage overall in this case, is if the setup/recovery from using it cost you more DPS than you gained. But you barely lose anything by doing it.

Remember kids, if you say “lupi’s” and then “hitbox”, you get something very different. Good job, piece of kitten forum language filter.

You can’t do what you did. For one, you absolutely must have independent trials, and defining success based on a previous trial means that this condition does not apply.

Humans are very good at spotting patterns, even where none exist. If you give a human a string which is “0123456789”, they’ll see a pattern and probably think it’s not random. If you give them the string “2579825731” you can probably convince them it was randomly generated. However, the probability of randomly generating either string is exactly the same, and is the same as “1111111111”.

“As you can see it doesn’t happen always, but it happens statistically more than it should”

Have you run an appropriate statistical test to determine this?

If so, please name the test, and provide your results along with any other pertinent information.

If not, please do not make this claim.

Dub.1273:

Wethospu.6437:

In the new site restricted runs will automatically compete in unrestricted ruleset. If that makes any difference.

I actually think that shouldn’t happen, else all records we’ll see will be restricted again.

You must necessarily let restricted ruleset runs compete in unrestricted as well, as they’ll be following all of the rules of unrestricted. The only around this would be to make unrestricted require you to do things that cannot be done in restricted, or create some kind of tremendously silly arbitrary rule that says you can’t post the same record for both even if it conforms to the rules of both (in which case, people could just post their second best run… and we’ve got the same problem).

You won’t see unrestricted die because of this. Unrestricted times will always have the potential of being faster. Saying unrestricted will die because of this is like saying people posting “kittenty” record attempts for restricted after a reset will kill the restricted format. It just doesn’t follow.

I wouldn’t call your old build viable, given that it contributes much less to a group than a meta build will, and it seems that you are indeed concerned about making sure you’re pulling your weight. If you’re looking for good Warrior builds for instanced PvE content (and browse around if you’re looking for builds for other classes), see: http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/12497977-dnt-warrior-build-9914

The reason that for every class full damage gear (Berserker’s, or for some classes like Mesmer, Assassin’s) is recommended is because if you know the encounters and can use active defense (group projectile defenses, dodging, etc.), stats like toughness and vitality are worthless. Stats like healing power, and healing in general other than your heal-slot skill, really aren’t very useful, either, since you simply cannot out heal the damage that comes in in any difficult encounter. You have to avoid the damage, not take it. So if active defenses are king, and passive defenses are not good, you might as well go full DPS. In fact, it’s better if you do, because that means things will die faster, ensuring more efficient runs, and ensuring that you have to rely on your active defenses for less overall time (after all, you don’t have infinite active defenses!).

Even if you roll a Guardian, you will still be doing a disservice to your team and yourself if you’re not wearing full damage gear (except in an extremely tiny handful of instances where a guardian can hold aggro by swapping to Knight’s armor and being able to hold aggro and block-rotate allows your group DPS to go up because no one else has to worry about extremely powerful attacks from the boss). Guardians do do a lot of support, but since passive defense really isn’t needed, there’s no reason to not to be wearing full damage gear; wearing full damage gear is another way you can help support your team. Another thing to note is, Guardians really need to know the encounter to bring support for it; they’re swapping out utility skills left and right throughout any dungeon or fractal, and in many cases retraiting between encounters (or at least, the good Guardians are).

I’m going to copy/paste a list of useful things for a group that I wrote on Reddit awhile back (was in the context of what you want to think about when building a good group):

1. Banners. You need a Warrior.

2. Swiftness. There are a lot of ways to obtain Swiftness for skips, so don’t worry about this too much.

3. Might. You want 25 stacks of might for every fight.

4. Vulnerability. You want ~25 stacks of Vulnerability at the start of every fight, and want to keep it high throughout the fight.

5. Projectile defenses. You don’t want to take damage and lose your scholar bonuses and/or have to dodge unnecessarily.

6. Stability. You don’t want to have to deal with being unable to DPS because you got CCed.

7. CC and Defiance Management. You want to be able to CC important attacks and/or disable the boss for safe DPS, and you also want to be able to strip the defiance and do it again as much as is needed.

8. Condition clears. You don’t want to be slowed during skips, or lose your scholar bonus, or get chilled in combat.

9. Aegis. You don’t necessarily need Aegis, but it sure is nice because it means you can actually avoid dodging some non-projectile attacks until the Aegis runs out, meaning you can pile on the DPS even more.

10. Blinds. If you must fight Elite or lower type mobs, you want blinds.

11. Stealth. You don’t want to have to fight anything that you don’t actually have to fight, because it wastes time and because you practically don’t get any loot for it.

12. DPS. The faster you kill things, the faster your run will be, and it’ll also probably be cleaner beause there’s less time for things to go wrong (and your active defenses won’t be depleted).

As I pointed out in the Reddit post, you don’t need everything in that list. But the more of it you have, the smoother and faster your runs will be.

As a Warrior, you’d provide numbers 12 (everyone in every group needs to provide number 12), 7 (with Mace #5), 4 (with Axe 2, Mace 4, and incidentally through other attacks), 3 (in the case your group really lacks might and you swap to a PS build, and also by helping to blast fire fields with banners and possibly warhorn 5 before fights), 2 (you can put on Warhorn during skips, and swap off when it’s time to fight again, so you can give some swiftness, and also blast fields with #5 to help stealth or stack might), and 1 (Banner of Discipline and Banner of Strength, a fantastic DPS boost!).

Why is speed clearing “the objectives” better than speed clearing the dungeon (to completion, by whatever means)? If more objectives is better, why not include “optional” objectives like Korga in Arah p1, or the Cannon event in Arah p4, or the totems in HotW paths?

Furthermore, despite not being scripted objectives, it’s pretty fair to say that getting from boss A to boss B via the map is something that was intend to be an objective as well. If the ‘ANET intended us to have to do these objectives even though we don’t actually need to do them’ argument is good enough for non-skip objectives, why isn’t it good enough for getting from point A to point B in the dungeon?

It just really seems to me like you’re trying to justify a ruleset entirely so that you have slightly more chance to see interesting split plays, in highly linear content that isn’t terribly conducive to such plays. I’m not convinced that’s such a great idea. I also don’t buy the “but in gw1…” argument here. This is Guild Wars 2.

I certainly wouldn’t care if there were an unrestricted ruleset like you suggest, but definitely would care if it came at the expense of the restricted ruleset like you’re suggesting.

In your opinion, why shouldn’t we also axe the rule about triggering all objectives and cutscenes?

So if we axe rule 5, what is to prevent the next Arah p4 record starting with an “epic” multiple boss skip?

If it’s wrong to skip these bosses in a record, why is it wrong? Why shouldn’t we allow skipping bosses (and other events), too?

If it’s not wrong to skip them, if there were a dungeon you could literally just exploit to the end and kill the last boss in, would that be allowed?

After all, isn’t it all about doing things as fast as possible? Or is it instead about increasing creativity? Or what? I just don’t see how both ideas are compatible. If it’s about speed, you permit everything, even when it’ll clearly reduce creativity.

I don’t see how the increasing creativity argument is valid, either. It’ll increase it for a short time, and then we’re stuck with the same status quo we are at now. Long run average creativity really doesn’t change much.

As for the suggestion there should be a unified rule set and that ruleset should be unrestricted, I don’t agree. Either the community can support both, or it can’t. If it can, there’s no reason not to have both. If it can’t, why should we go with a ruleset that failed (possibly because of the timer issue, possibly not, we just cannot known for certain) over one that’s demonstrably been quite successful? I’d be all for giving unrestricted another shot alongside restricted, but I just can’t see a good justification to scrap restricted for unrestricted.

For the most part, this seems more like a desire to have dungeons that are highly conducive to split tactics, and thus aren’t nearly as linear as the ones we have now. Changing the rules won’t do much with respect to making extremely linear dungeons less linear. And it seems like some of that desire for splits comes from wanting to see each person having to pull more weight, which could already be accomplished by say, trio records.

If we shift things to hardcore jumping exploits, does ANET’s perception of our community go from whatever it is now to something a lot less favorable?

Welcome to Guild Wars 2. In the open world, there’s a nice continuum of contribution. You have AFKs who aren’t contributing at all, you have nomads-tank-warriors who also aren’t contributing at all but who are actively playing, and you have people who contribute some amount but not as much as they could/should, and you have people who contribute to their maximum of ability. They all get approximately the same reward. And you have everything in between.

I doubt this a big priority for ANET. Even if it were, there’s essentially no difference in terms of actual contribution between an AFK Ranger and a nomads-tank-warrior. The only difference is one is AFK, and the other might as well be AFK. You can say “but at least the guy not contributing but actively playing is spending time grinding for stuff”, but that’s not really much consolation, is it? They’re sill making things harder, and not contributing. The part about grind is especailly funny ANET doesn’t make grindy games, because grindy games aren’t fun.

Playing the game and completing the daily the day of the change meant you couldn’t get the first new daily chest that day. Actively playing put you 1 day behind in terms of login rewards.

I was really hoping that thread would last a lot longer.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Zui.9245:

This isn’t WoW, though. Full damage gear is very easy to get. It’s so easy to get there’s no excuse to not have it. And if you have it, in instanced PvE, there’s no excuse not to use it.

Rationalizations like “yeah, I contribute a lot less to my team, setting them up for more probable failure, but I am the last man standing and sometimes get to save the day because I set them up to fail” are pretty weak. It’s like justifying a healer guardian that does 10x less DPS than a good build, and justifying it because fights are going to last a long time and people might need healing because of it. Well duh, if you set your team up for a specific mode of failure, they’re more likely to fail via that specific mode. It’s not a strength of what you’re doing, so don’t pretend like it is.

And best DPS will not always win out. Having the right gear is good. Knowing how to play is better. The amount of times I’ve seen players get splattered because they just think every fight is a DPS race is not even funny. And as you said someone who’s just dinged 80 can buy what they need from the TP. A British army saying fits well here, all the gear, no idea.

So if I want efficient runs, I need people who know how to play and who are appropriately geared and built for instanced PvE. These things all correlate with each other, since if you know what gear is good and actually got it, you are likely to have at least researched what good builds are, how to use them, and what the mechanics of the dungeon actually are.

If I can definitely get someone who is appropriately geared for instanced PvE, I am more likely to get someone who is has appropriate traits and has some idea how to play the game.

Can you explain why I should rather take someone who is “unknown” on every front versus someone who is a “known good” on one front and “unknown” on the other two, when I am looking for an efficient run?