Guild Wars 2

My only complaint is that people hate being told they’re wrong (especially when it comes to builds). You can be extremely helpful in giving correct, accurate and honest advice but people will still report you. I mean, I received infractions for asking if somebody could figure out percentage differences by themselves after going to the effort of calculating effective powers & eps numbers for 4 builds for them. That’s not even the most ridiculous infraction/suspension I’ve received.

Yes, these forums are clean and polite, but if you’re an experienced and well informed player – it’s obvious to see that similarly well informed players are absent from the forums. There is a huge lack of helpful advice in the class forums, nobody is bothering to say “that is a bad build” to people any more when they ask for opinions, because nobody still posting knows any better. Even the dungeon forums, once a safehaven for skilled minmaxers are eerily casual nowadays.

Good call on the elementalists for frost bow etc. Agree totally.

Suspect we will also see a lot of cleric guard dodge healing all over the place. Besides that, Dps warriors.

What are your thoughts now that guilds can attempt to take down bosses themselves?

Did you not see the new heals?
They are a waste of space and were a waste of development time.

I don’t want any new skills if they will be as useless as that.

Would it be a good idea to be able to instantly have your crafting at 500 if already unlocked, while leaving the option to level it manually for xp if you want to?

I agree the gold for levels aspect of it is important.

Eskarina Tigress.3785:

fadeaway.2807:

Thanks for your thoughts guys.

Unfortunately since it looks like there is still a chance to hit the jackpot from trash enemies in events/living story I will continue to spam aoes.

I fail to see why that’s unfortunate?

Certain classes or builds aren’t very good at aoe. Aoe tagging based loot discourages people from playing these.

Thoughts please

Why? / Why not?

I wish I had picked order of the vigil on my guardian for roleplay reasons, but I am stuck with whispers.

I would reroll but I spent a lot of money getting crafting to 500 :/ At least I can transfer my ascended gear if I do decide to go for it though.

Thanks for your thoughts guys.

Unfortunately since it looks like there is still a chance to hit the jackpot from trash enemies in events/living story I will continue to spam aoes.

Dat suspense!

15 charrs.

I’m just wondering if I still need to be primarily aoeing during events and living story.

I don’t care if it will result in more junk, because I don’t care about that. Junk and greens aren’t worth much.
But if aoe tagging results in more valuable loot like precursors then I will worry about aoe lots.

No opinions from over 100 views?

Do aoe based characters (staff guards etc) still get more loot from events, living story etc due to the dominance of tagging?

Is the quality of loot impacted (eg : more chance of finding a precursor) or do aoe based characters just get more junk than everyone else?

To clarify; perception is 250 precision. Bloodlust is 250 power.
Will we be able to put sigil of bloodlust and sigil of perception on the same weapon?

They definitely said the weapon needs to remain equipped, I didn’t see anything about having two stat sigil though.. I thought it might make sense since all sigils now have separate cooldown.

Anyone know if stat stacking runes will stack with each other after the patch? Has Anet said anything about this?

I’m waiting for the balance patch to take another look at my numbers, which are a bit old now. I’m also too messy to bother making my work easy to look at by others ^_~ Mine and the OP’s probably differ based on the timings used to calculate auto/skill dps since effective power is rather difficult to get wrong. I know hammer is good but I don’t recall it beating 10/30/0/5/25 and 20/25/0/0/25. I don’t see power of the virtuous in your numbers which is roughly +5% dmg for those builds. I’d also put money against Elusive Power being active a decent amount of the time.

On hammer vs gs …
EP:
Both the following scenarios have asc zerker gear, force sigil, scholar, butternut squash curry, 10% dmg potion, 25 might, 100% fury, banner of strength + disc, spotter and 25 bloodlust.
20/25/0/0/25 gives me 15629 EP, or 17.06x base dmg.
15/25/0/20/10 gives me 13988 EP, or 15.27x base dmg.

Base DPS:
For greatsword I used 296, 296, 443 for the auto attack (1035) over 2.5 seconds for the base dps of 414. I used 1428 as the base WW damage assuming all projectiles hit, and 1016 as the base damage of the symbol.
I then used a WW, symbol, 9 seconds of auto attack, WW, 10 seconds of auto attack and repeat 24 second rotation, as the cooldowns for skills begin when you have finished the skill. I assumed 2 sec cast time per WW and 1 sec for symbol.
This meant 1428, 1016, 3726, 1428, 4140 for a total of 11738 over 24 seconds, or 489.

For hammer I used the three hammer swings as being 296, 333 and 370, followed by 5 ticks of 185 for a grand total of 1924 over 3.7 seconds, or 520dps.

DPS
20/25/0/0/25 = 489 * 17.06 = 8342dps, 10427 after vuln.
15/25/0/20/10 = 520 * 15.27 = 7940dps, 9925 after vuln.

(You will notice these numbers are slightly higher than the ones in my thread. That is because I forgot banner of strength in my old thread).

I originally thought 20/25/0/0/25 with weapon swapping > 10/30/0/5/25 with weapon swapping > 20/25/0/0/20 camping 2h > most other things but the below probably changes things..

One thing to point out though which we do know is changing:
You have assumed 25 bloodlust, sigil of force and sigil of night for 1h but only 25 bloodlust and sigil of night for a 2h. This works for now.
Going forward you will need to have the bloodust weapon equipped.. so the 1h will be night+bloodlust (loses force) and the 2h will be night+bloodlust (loses nothing).

For this reason I think 20/25/0/0/25 camping 2h and 15/25/0/20/10 are probably going to be very close to the top spot next patch, and they’re significantly easier (lazier) to use.

Thaddeus.4891:

fadeaway.2807:

Thanks for the answers.

That’s a shame.

I realise the grind is small compared to a real grindy game, but one of the draws to gw2 for a lot of people was the promise of no grind. I don’t have time to grind either a different playstyle set of ascended gear or a set of ascended gear for another character, and the thought of returning to the same playstyle and same class I played before isn’t too inviting. This is true for a lot of people.

I always had a hard time figure out, why people want so much that ascended cost almost nothing so they can put any stats they want and on all their alts. I’m an hardcore player. I have 8 toons at level 80, 3 legendary, i do dungeon speed clear with my guild where we push our selves and our build to the max, i do WvW where we actively search for ennemy zerg that outmanned us and we feel ashamed of ourselves when we lost a 15vs30. And still i use exotic armor and weapons on all that. My ascended armor is on my guardian pve that i use only in some casual run or when i do guild missions.

It’s fairly easy for skilled, organised and well informed players to do what you mentioned, whether it is excelling at pve or stomping twice your number in wvw. The difference in stats between exotic and ascended is also fairly small, which is one of the things which allows this.

The problem however is that gw2 was always advertised as a grind free game where everybody would have the same gear setups and the fights would always be on a fair footing. Yes the gap is small, but it exists, and it’s a psychological barrier to those who want to be maxed out and/or on the same playing field as all the other players.

Bad idea. Back when I played I spammed high level fractals because I found it fun and arguably the most challenging part of the game.
Guess how many achievement points I got for that?

Thanks for the answers.

That’s a shame.

I realise the grind is small compared to a real grindy game, but one of the draws to gw2 for a lot of people was the promise of no grind. I don’t have time to grind either a different playstyle set of ascended gear or a set of ascended gear for another character, and the thought of returning to the same playstyle and same class I played before isn’t too inviting. This is true for a lot of people.

I’ve spoken to a lot of ex players to find out what they think of all this feature pack noise and whether they would consider coming back to gw2.

The major questions which need answering with the correct answers are requirements for most of them returning, however interesting the feature patch may look.

A) Is there still a grind for the gear with the highest stats? (Ascended).
B) Do I still need to perform this grind for every alt?
C) Do I still need to perform this grind for every playstyle? (eg – grind for zerker, then grind for tanky, then grind for healing, then grind for conditions?)

Completely agree. I would like to pick up the game again and try another playstyle but the idea of regrinding different stat combos on ascended gear really turns me off.

You should be using party wide battle pres and boon duration runes. Battle presence is ridiculously good combined with Consecration IX and high healing power. Because you can’t guarantee people will be stood in your symbols very often, you need to max out the duration of regen they do get when they stand in a tick. Combine this boon duration with shield #4 and Superior Aria which you should probably take, you can keep perma prot up as well via hold the line.

Healing breeze is also really powerful if you can aim it right.

Your dps is going to be shockingly terrible, give up retributive armor, take +150 toughness instead. It’s at least something.

Use a sigil of energy replenishment when you kill a foe. It’ll mean once your side in wvw starts to win, or once you start killing mobs in pve, you can dodge all day and heal your group for 2k+ a pop.

Don’t get me wrong, clerics suck and you are a waste of space compared to a well played zerker in pve. Most of the time people will be oneshotted before you can heal them anyway. But every now and again you get a group / fight where a cleric shines. A great example of this would be Mai Trin where the whole group can tank + spank on the spot easily for a super quick fight.

kitsuneshoujo.5734:

The OP is talking about GEM STORE skins like the Magitech medium armour… not the in-game stuff.

Does this change things?
I’d buy more gem skins if I knew switching from my Dps gear to my tank gear didn’t mean losing my new skin.

Am I understanding this right?
I don’t need to buy multiple copies of gemstore skins if I have multiple sets of gear or multiple characters?

Thaddeus. With 25% fury uptime, 5 might stacks, no banners, no spotter, cheap pwr/prec food and sharpening stone I see a Dps drop of just under 10%.

The fully buffed, full vuln, full consumables etc scenario As described in my original post show slightly above 10% loss.
If you have any numbers to back up your 15-25% loss claim I would love to see them, because as it currently stands I can deduce 3 things from the change :

A) Dps loss is minimal.
B) Meta will still be zerker.
C) It is more important than ever to stack zerkers, less room for slackers.

Would now be a good time to discuss this again?

Nike.2631:

Jeeze… Wouldn’t you like to take some pride — to get some actual respect — for succeeding at something difficult rather than doing what’s the obvious play under the current system?

Personally I DO take pride in being able to run top fotms as a zerker melee Guardian without dying. I suppose that’s not challenging enough for you. But then again, everyone always says zerker spam is easy and not challenging, but there are a suspicious lack of people actually running the high fotms and putting out videos in zerker gear.

In my experience the people who say it’s face roll easy mode rarely have the skill to actually pull off the full zerker runs in question. And I don’t mean CoFp1.

I want to play a super safe cleric bunker guardian & still have the kill speed of full zerker, because I am sick of seeing “lfg 5 zerkers” and they are not skilled. I think this is only fair.

Thanks.

No idea where you got your numbers laharl but there’s no way organised groups are going to lose 50% Dps.

Zoid.2568:

Ferocity is THE solution. Crit damage now scale down better and Berserker is less effective which means you may not want a team full of zerkers.

I think it is now more important than ever to have a full group of zerkers. Prior to this you could carry bads, now there is less room for slack.

If anyone is interested, I ran some math in the Guardian forums to show the Dps loss is indeed roughly 10 percent.

You’re right that classes with points in the crit dmg tree will get hit harder, but I doubt they’ll be hit much harder. If having near 100% bonus crit damage dropped my dps by ~10%, having near 130% crit bonus won’t be too far away.

Personally I think the correct route would have been to make it easier for pugs to buff.. cap might, make aoe buffs larger in range, cap vulnerability, remove potions, remove mob specific/night specific sigils, and readjust boss HP based on this new easily attainable ‘max dps’ scenario. The problem right now is that the max dps achieved by hardcore players is so far away from the average dps achieved by pugs, so it makes it tough to adjust difficulty and boss hp because you can only satisfy one group of players. Bring the average and max dps closer together and you can easier balance the enemies.

Valor
Communal Defenses – Grand 5 seconds of aegis to allies in 360 range when you block an attack.

This change indicates to me that anet still doesn’t understand why PvE has degenerated into 5 zerkers stacking on top of one another. I haven’t played since January but came back to read the development updates. The zerker nerf isn’t so bad, but I was saddened to see our new traits were either boring passives or support traits which simply won’t work well.

As with many of our other support talents – symbols, empowering might, dodge roll heal, healing breeze, and to a lesser degree shouts.. the range is just too small to be useful.

In a pug group, playing the game normally, everyone will probably be all over the place. Support skills like this are useless.
In an organised group where everyone is less than 360 range apart; everyone is either zerker or should be zerker.

In short : Skills like this encourage stacking. Stacking encourages zerkers.
Buff support characters by making it significantly easier to support!

20/25/0/0/25 build.

Ascended weapon:
188 power
134 minor
10% crit dmg

Ascended armor:
329 power
235 minor
17% crit dmg

Ascended trinkets:
570 power
376 minor
44% crit dmg

Runes, Sigils, Traits:
Scholar: +165 power, +8% crit dmg, +10% dmg
20 zeal = 200 power
25 radiance = 250 precision
Sigil of force = +5% damage
Sigil of accuracy = +5% crit chance

Buffs:
Truffle steak = 100 power, 70 precision.
+10% damage potion
35 might = 875 power
+20% crit chance
Spotter +150 precision
Banner +170 power, +170 precision, +15% crit damage

Grand totals:
Power 3513
Precision 2301 (Crit chance = 65.95% base, +5% rune, +20% fury, +4% base = 94.95% crit chance).
Crit damage = 94% + 150% base = 244%

Overall crit damage modifier = 2.36728.

Damage multipliers:
Zeal +10%, Zeal +5% (greatsword), Radiance +10%, Scholar +10%, Sigil +5%, Virtue 5%, Asc weapon 5%
=1.695

Power of 3513, crit multiplier of 2.36728, damage multiplier of 1.7796
Effective power = 3513 X 2.36728 X 1.7796 = 14,800.

Replace crit damage items with ferocity items @ 15 ferocity = 1 crit damage.

Replace 10% crit damage on weapon with 134 ferocity.
Replace 17% crit damage on armor with 235 ferocity.
Replace 44% crit damage on trinkets with 376 ferocity.
Replace 8% crit damage on runes with 100 ferocity.
Replace banner buff 15% crit damage with 170 ferocity.
Your ferocity is 1015.
Your new crit damage is 67.66%, or 217.66%.

New Grand totals:
Power 3513
Precision 2301 (Crit chance = 65.95% base, +5% rune, +20% fury, +4% base = 94.95% crit chance).
Crit damage = 67.66% + 150% base = 217.66%

Overall crit damage modifier = 2.117

Damage multipliers:
Zeal +10%, Zeal +5% (greatsword), Radiance +10%, Scholar +10%, Sigil +5%, Virtue 5%, Asc weapon 5%
=1.695

Power of 3513, crit multiplier of 2.117, damage multiplier of 1.7796
Effective power = 3513 X 2.117 X 1.7796 = 13234

Conclusion:
Full gear/buffs etc results in 89.4% of original damage when moving to ferocity.

I also ran some numbers on a no buffs build. The damage reduction is less severe, it doesn’t even hit the 10% mark.

I would bet the increase from 1 sigil to 2 sigils has resulted in our dps being higher than it was before the crit damage ‘nerf’.
Whatever gear set gives you the highest dps will always be king in PvE until Anet improve mob AI and PvE encounter design. Root causes have always been one-shot mechanics and the spike nature of incoming damage. This still appears to be zerker gear.
“Lfg zerkers only”.

Zerker won’t get nerfed enough for any thing to change.
Besides, the problem is not zerker. The gear does what it should do, the problem is the content is so old and the mechanics and ai so terrible that there is no reason to fear for your life enough to build any defense.

Questions…

For those who said they hated living story to begin with;
Do you still dislike it?

And for those who originally liked living story;
Do you still like it?

Why? What changed/reaffirmed your opinions?

Do you consider yourself a Dungeoner/PvEr/FotMer/PvPer/WvWr/LivingWorlder/etc?
Which ones are you?

Where do you see the future of GW2?
Has the answer to the above question changed over the last month?

mwah

The reason the warrior is the most used class is because even though it may lose out to the well played ele, guardian, thief, ranger etc for pure dps, it is extremely difficult to get a dps warrior build and playstyle wrong. People look for pug warriors because it’s a safe bet. You’re far more likely to get a full zerk warrior who can auto attack with an axe or 100b for perhaps not the top dps in the game, but pretty close to it, than you are to find a well played guard/ele etc. Additionally, they are the most forgiving class due to the hp and armor. It’s basically the safest dumb dps you can get, so there are loads of them.

My personal opinion is that almost everybody who wanted skilled high end PvP has left, and almost everybody who wanted challenging PvE has left. We are now left with events where you spam 1 to win, WvW where you spam 1 to win, and some GvG guilds who are still going.

Sales were almost a quarter of what they were in Q4 2012 which is understandable since the game had been out over a year, but up slightly on Q3 2013 so the trend is good.

Still, 31 mil USD in Q4 sales is equivalent to slightly under 700,000 monthly subscribers if you assume a $15 monthly fee. So personally I wouldn’t say it’s doing too great. Without more info on the trend of box sales and gem-store purchases (are players spending more, or are more players spending less?) it’s hard to know more.

Source
http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/earnings.aspx

That empowered might chance will promote stacking.

The sad state of pve

Evon Gnashblade is working for Scarlet.

Back in september 2012 the quote was fairly accurate, explorable dungeons were so hard that people did not like partying with anyone who had the courage to get into melee range.

Since then we’ve learnt every trick possible (and some nerfs) for almost every challenging encounter, reducing them mostly to dps burn dungeons. What happens in other games when you outgear/outlearn the content? You drop healers and take dps.

I haven’t played for almost a month. Was pretty depressed over their announcement to nerf zerker gear, not because of the nerf but because it showed that their focus was definitely not on the mechanical and ai problems which are the root cause of the stacking and zerker meta. I will check out this new patch, but I knew better than to expect it on the Tuesday night UK time.

Irrelevant comments from people who do sub 49 fractal runs claiming dredge fractal is fine. High level this is a nightmare and I can’t believe it hasn’t been fixed.

Nokaru.7831:

Vox Hollow.2736:

How things operate now has been identified as a problem to which devs announce they’re seeking a solution. All that’s left to discuss at this stage is how, not if.

Can you source this? (So we can see if it exists, and if it does, to what extent you’re twisting the truth about it)

The devs have made it clear that they do not recognise the problem is with the ai, game mechanics and pve design by running to the zerker nerfbat. This really upset me when they announced it, not because of the nerf, but because it imo showed they must not be paying attention to the real issues.

I thought this was a post about Karazhan for a moment. Wrong game! :P

Nikaido.3457:

I ran cleric guard a bit in random playasyouwant pugs, your heals won’t even reach the vast majority of these perma-ranged-weapons users. That’s just how useless the whole concept of a healbot is.

This. I deviated from my Dps Guardian and trialed a cleric.
In groups where heals would be useful everyone was too spread out for the heals to be effective. It was very useful if a) group is taking lots of damage and b) are stacked up. Paradoxically healers are more useful in groups who don’t need them. This is one of the reasons for lack of diversity.

Our traits and utilities are supposed to be good enough to make up for our lack of HP.
Fortunately we have more dodges than other- ohwait.

Recalibar.6482:

After nerf, hopefully, the drop in damage is going to going to discourage players from running full zerker builds. 10% less damage means the enemies are alive 10% longer, and are able to deal 10% more damage, and such elitism will be discouraged.

You wish
People will always run the highest dps builds possible when there is no risk of wiping.
People who can’t avoid damage while bringing zerker gear will still be kicked from groups I expect.