Guild Wars 2

Defender’s Flame and Torch are basically incompatible for obvious reasons; you don’t have any blocks beyond Aegis and Protector’s Strike if you run a mace.

Unfortunately even with 100% burn uptime you will never pull more damage with condition gear than you would with direct damage gear. I highly recommend that you stick to direct damage and use burning as an incidental aspect rather than primary damage. Burning does open up possibilities for greater AoE damage than standard but you have to be burning about fifteen things at once.

If you do like burning I recommend considering Permeating Wrath in Virtues – there are lots of really neat things you can do with it. The utter lack of meaningful damage and unwieldy condition clearing on Torch 5 makes it kind of lame, though 4 is a good burst damage skill… Which admittedly doesn’t help you much in PvE.

If you are interested in burn builds there’s lots of good discussion in the Pyroclasm sticky.

How am I supposed to get a second Fused Greatsword? :L

This is pretty awful imo. Normally I don’t rage about this kind of thing – maybe because it rarely directly affects me – but in this case, I’m hopping mad. Like, all sorts of up in arms and stuff.

Josh Davis.6015:

Only newly obtained skins in select sets are tradable. In the past, we intended those skins to be account-bound and not tradable. After the change, these skins will remain account-bound and not tradable. We will continue to monitor the value of those skins, but at this time, there is no plan to make tradability retroactive.

That’s the worst answer I could have hoped for. I have an unused Fused Greatsword sitting in the bank and I can’t sell it because of reasons. Neat.

Size and shape of the body has nothing to do with the sound of a voice. It’s all in the shape of the vocal folds. There’s no reason a huge Norn couldn’t have a lighter, higher voice.

That said, I don’t think they should. But that’s just me. What I do think is that some of the phrases are awful, and I would pay someone 20 dollars to never have to hear “Defense before offense!” ever again.

conflict.6539:

I never disputed how it worked, I just disputed how its stupid.

Really?

conflict.6539:

Regardless of someones delusion about how it works, it doesnt work correctly.

Emphasis mine. How much deeper are you going to dig yourself?

Not even thieves burst for 18k in one ability. Mug-Backstab-CnD CAN put out that kind of burst but that’s out of three abilities.

And again, you can hit 12k with Shield of Wrath and Mighty Blow alone. That’s impressive.

conflict.6539:

Im not even going to get into an argument with fanbois. So I get on 1 minute after the 10 minute timer, and now I miss the entire event? seems pretty stupid. And no it doesnt work like that, because yesterday as soon as the icon popped saying there was action in the Iron Marches I went RIGHT there, not 10 minutes after, and I was put into an overflow that did not have the event. Regardless of someones delusion about how it works, it doesnt work correctly. Last patch introduced a lot of bugs, including particle effects going wonky.

“All overflow maps created within 10 minutes of the start of the invasion will host a concurrent version of that hour’s event.”

Ripped right out of the patch notes which I’m guessing you didn’t read. What am I again? A delusional fanboi? How about you stick your foot in your mouth where it belongs. :|

Martolly.2576:

yes on a person with zero toughness or an npc, not on a real player in wvw that isn’t glass cannon. try again.

on top of the fact that you have to be in glass cannon to do that. G_G

So I offer you exactly what you were saying was impossible, and that’s not good enough because of reasons. Look, you stuck your own foot in your mouth, but that’s okay. Just don’t call everyone a liar next time.

I you miss the event by more than ten minutes you can’t do it. However, all overflows made within ten minutes of the event starting run the event concurrently. So… Don’t be late and you won’t have this problem.

Because you can disable the set color in your game options.

Shield of Wrath into Mighty Blow alone is 12k or higher. Follow with ZD for 18k. Alternatively, Protector’s Strike for more AoE.

Burning needs to be toned down? Wat? It’s only 6 bleed stacks worth of damage and bleeding scales better with condition damage. Giving it to Necromancers may still have been a mistake, but the condition itself isn’t at fault.

Grab two one handed weapons, put sigils of bloodlust on both. Kill13 enemies for full stacks, swap back to your normal weapons. Works well.

With some boon duration and Writ of Persistence, if you swap weapons on cooldown and drop a symbol at least once per rotation you should be able to keep both up indefinitely.

AH works with each individual application of a boon. For example, Empower would proc it 12 times, times the number of people affected.

I wish that it only showed in combat, same thing with Aegis.

Does this apply to fused and sclerite weapons too? I have a fused Greatsword sitting in my bank unused…

Contrary to tanshinza, I would reccomend a bare minimum of 15-16k HP so that you can outlive Thief bursts. You’re looking at 8k backstabs plus another 6k from Mug and Cloak and Dagger. Throw in an autoattack chain and you’ll wish you had brought more health. So you’re doing good there.

I’d consider Hold the Line for additional Protection which you’re going to want to keep up and to have to ablate bursts you see coming.

You could also mention that the burn works the same way, since that’s not obvious either.

I’d say you’re experiencing a bad case of confirmation bias.

I agree in general, though the Krytan mace (as in, the early skin set) is excellent and I use it all the time on mace characters. The rest are awful.

I find it more efficacious to trait for spirit weapon cooldowns than duration for that very reason. If they’re just gonna die anyway, you might as well speed the cooldown instead.

They can be healed though, so you can kind of mitigate their squish factor by running them in healing builds. Something like 30/25/0/15/0 for Selfless Daring + some Healing Power gear and a mace might help with the uptime.

Typo Q21 “If i have…” → “If I have…”

Geomancy and Earth are mutually exclusive due to shared cooldown. You won’t have access to Earth for 9 seconds after every swap.

Yeah, it’s a phishing scam.

Question 21 on the FAQ sticky :]

Does substituting your effective power for your actual power in the skill damage formula give you your average damage, or should you always calculate skill damage and then include critical damage after the fact?

The formula for effective power is (Power × [1 + Critical Chance × (Critical Multiplier – 1)] × Damage Multiplier). Because this includes crits, I would think that you could simply say ([Weapon Damage x Skill Coefficient x Effective Power] / Armor ) and arrive at the same conclusion as the usual ([Damage / Armor] * Crits) for your average damage. For spreadsheet management, using effective power is a bit more efficient than the latter.

Jax.5261:

Wait, wait, wait.
WAIT
So in WvW you don’t need condition removal because two food items will reduce it to nothing!?
Is that a thing?

The important thing to note is that it does NOT reduce it to nothing. It’s additive with condition duration. So a guy with +65% Duration versus a guy with -65% Duration will do 100% Duration conditions. It doesn’t make conditions useless or condition cleansing pointless. It does help though.

Can you revive people with a Tome up? I thought those were mutually exclusive.

Yeah, that ICD really screws with the sigil. With your condition duration you’re looking at four or five bleed stacks max.

Damage reduction is multiplicative. It’s not possible to bring your damage received to 0. Daecollo as it right.

Your supervisor doesn’t take issue with you taking a non-anonymized survey? Really?

You need to modify your methods a little bit. Set up a survey on a survey website and publish the link to it, don’t ask for results in a public thread. Even PMing you the responses isn’t adequate. It’s a major privacy concern and the survey participants should not have to rely on you the researcher to personally anonymize their information. It needs to be automated. No human should ever see their personal identifying information, even if it is a username.

You need to mix it up. Essentially, the conversion of regular stat points to critical damage is slightly different depending on which item slot you’re talking about. In other words, critical damage is “worth more” in some slots than others. You can figure this out for yourself by simply adding the total non-crit damage stat points in a given slot for a Berserker’s piece and dividing by the critical damage. This gives you points per/crit damage. Lower is “cheaper”, higher is more expensive; You want to add crit damage to your gear starting with the cheapest and moving up to the most expensive. Stop when you’re at the level you want. So for example, Shoulders, Gloves, and Boots give cheaper critical damage than Helmets, Chest, and Leg armor. Similarly, Accessories give cheaper critical damage than Rings.

Anything above 2.6k Toughness is more than adequate. You definitely want to get your health up to 15k at least to be able to resist harder bursts from Thieves and so on. You’re looking at 8k Backstabs + Mug and C&D at about 5-6k between the two of them, totalling to 14k.

Is making memes out of other guardians, like, a thing now?

We already have one for one scaling on an ability and a trait, some of our other abilities scale at 80%. It’s already pretty darn high.

Oh, and now you can even score a free 250 healing power off of maces.

You’ll get steamrolled in WvW with Berserkers gear. You will want a second set for that, with more defensive stats.

You will NOT miss the 5% duration you get from Givers accessories. They are horrendously low in meaningful stat points. Definitely swap that out for something else. You can get 100% Might duration by using Strength, Hoelbrak or I think Fire runes in conjunction with Water and Monk, in exchange for 10% universal. This helps a lot with making Empower work on a 20 second rotation. As long as you swap on cooldown you will be able to keep up the 12 stacks.

Actually, it is up for debate. Until we get a “dual spec” feature or something akin to it where we can swap on the fly, it’s a valid option to find one build you like and stick with it.

Nah there’s thousands, but the answer is no – the animations are tied to the skills, not the weapons.

Really? Because I make about a gold per trip back to the nearest NPC vendor just on greens. That’s new money minted just for me.

Sigil of Geomancy is amazing with Permeating Wrath. It’s a point blank AOE that strikes up to five targets; so if you’re in a huge mess of enemies it’s a guaranteed PW proc as well, on top of the bleed.

Warrior for solo or 2-3 friends, Guardian for groups. Which isn’t to say that Guards can’t solo, they can. But Warriors have some really fun solo builds and Guard solo builds tend to be exactly the same as group builds with a couple of traits flipped.

Some armors have really different textures that cause due to become shinier. If you look at the AC or CM heavy armor it’s very dull and ruddy, but compare that to Banded or human T2-3 Cultural and there’s a massive difference. Anyway, that looks like Asura cultural armor.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

The mesmer magic is temporary though. The outside form changes, is in a sense an illusion, but inside it is still the mechanical critter.

I am very much against not only racial rerolling, but class rerolling via gemstore items. It would make class and race selection at the beginning essentially pointless. It would require no thought at all on the part of the person making a new character. They wouldn’t think long and hard about what they really wanted to do, because they could just throw real money at it and make it something else…of the same level, with no drawback what-so-ever. Definitely no.

Race and class selection should mean something, and gemstore swaps trivialize this.

You would have a point if everyone already knew everything there was to know about the class they picked as a new player just getting the game. But they don’t, and at some point they may realize they made a mistake and want to change it without having that time they invested wasted.

Crapgame.6519:

Yup Foofad. However, we have this wonderful thing called offensive and defensive magic /rollseyes

Don’t get me wrong I know what I said and read your reply. Makes sense. However, the whole thing goes out the door once you add that wonderful ‘magic’ layer

That goes both ways – thieves use Deception magic (same school as Mesmer) for their stealth and many of their weapon skills.

Black powder weapons are why people stopped wearing armor in pre-Rennaisance Europe. Because metal slugs going a few hundred feet per second pierce metal. First the armored cavalry reduced their armor to three-quarter plate, then they left off the armor on their arms as well, until they were left with just a cuirass and helmet. The shape of the cuirass and helmet changed from domed or rounded to a rounded wedge in an effort to deflect bullets by forcing them to strike the armor at an angle, which increased the effective thickness of the metal.

Infantry followed a similar path, needing mobility to compete with rifles. Before full plate went completely by the wayside, European style infantry would carry thick daggers which were used to kill armored infantry that had been knocked off their feet, usually stabbing them in the neck between the bottom of the helmet and the gorget, or in the armpit which may have been mailed but not covered by a plate.

So eh, makes sense to me.

AH was a big deal when it was really ‘discovered’ by the population at large back in late September early October. Lots of people used it. But the past year or so has definitely seen a decline in the popularity of the trait, and I don’t think you can reasonably assume most people ran it like you could late last year.

Personally I haven’t used it since about November. There is a lot of build diversity with Guardians although we do still lack a real condition damage option. People just like what’s comfortable and easy.

What’s this for? Dungeons? WvW? If its the former you can get away with lacking condition clears but if it’s the latter you are going to get dominated hard.

Almost guaranteed that he was a Healway variation. That would be this guy.

Lisa.6102:

foofad.5162:

Considering how boring Berserker got for me, I doubt I’ll go back any time soon. But I don’t use PVT, I’m using Celestial armor with zerk accessories and clerics rings.

oh and how are you finding it? I have just lvl’d a guardian and was looking a PVT gear …. but the celestial gear has got me intrigued.

ATM i am running around either naked or with a mish mash of basic everythings including weapons . I need to do something fast

Time gating sucks. You can only make one Charged Crystal per day, and it takes five to make the dang things. Very annoying. In terms of actually using it though, I’m enjoying it very much, and it’s used in one of my favorite builds.

Unfortunately you can only get 3 blasts out of Hallowed Ground if there is absolutely zero lag and you manage to nail it right as it goes down. Mighty Blow takes 4 seconds to cool down, but it also has an animation time, and so you’re looking at more like 9.5 seconds between blasts rather than 8. Really annoying. Same deal with Purging Flames, 2 seems feasible but a lot of times it’s thwarted by lag or other factors.