Guild Wars 2

Why punish people using boons? Because bunker guardians and eles are too good and warriors need the help because they’re terrible in spvp. Maybe down the line it’ll be split between PvE-WvW and spvp, but for now I think it’s a good change.

80 Guardian since release, 80 Warrior since two moths ago. Y’all need some perspective.

Say you have 5 unique boons up. You’re taking 15% more damage. Is Protection among those boons? You’re taking 15% less damage. Do you not have protection in any of your utilities? Maybe it’s time to start carrying HtL again if you don’t already.

I’m tired of people whining about Save Yourselves and Lyssa runes being insta-gib suicide buttons. No, they aren’t. Because they both give protection, which means your net damage taken is STILL lower than it would be without them. Also, it’s a trait, and not all warriors will pick it. A lot will, because it’s a good trait, but not all of them.

Also, don’t forget – this is good for the warriors on your team, too. It’s not some magic anti-guardian thing that only the enemy gets.

In summary: You’re overreacting, carry protection.

I run a custom soundtrack via the custom game playlists feature. It’s buggy, but it’s really cool to have things sync up. I use a lot of movie and television soundtrack music, plus piano stuff by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Erik Satie, which seems to go well especially at night time.

It’s gonna be a huge kick in the nuts for a lot of people. Kill Shot/Eviscerate, unblockable. Think about that for a second. You get down to 1/3rd health, Shelter expecting to block a big hit and make it worthwhile, and instead you get hit with Eviscerate and killed outright. And they’re getting a Burst cooldown reduction trait combined with.. something else I forgot. Pretty big game changer.

Your options will open up tremendously at 80. You’ve already got your racial T1 option available to you, but most of those aren’t plate-ey. T2 tends to be much more plate oriented, particularly for Humans and Norn. That’s expensive, though, for a new player. You’ll also get access to the Splint and Banded sets very soon. Those are much more plated up than anything you’ve been wearing. Search the TP for them, see if you can find them at decent prices.

Another Spirit Weapon HP buff, other than that they were very cagey about what we’re getting, specifically. Warriors are getting a buff to Signet of Might, when they pop it their next 3 attacks become unblockable, so they’ll be able to interrupt Shelter now. Warriors are also getting a “boon hate” trait, 3% bonus damage against targets for each unique boon they have on them. Not sure where in the lines it’ll be. Basically, hope you’re getting Prot in there somewhere.

It’s *go*lem. Thread over.

It’s weapon-specific. When you have your Greatsword out, Bloodlust is in effect. When you have your sword out, Stamina is in effect.

Really, really important note: Any sigil with a cooldown initiates a global sigil cooldown. For example, if you use Sigil of Air on your sword and you score a critical hit which sets off the lightning bolt, the internal cooldown on that sigil activates. It’s five seconds. If you switch to a weapon with Sigil of Battle in that five second cooldown, you WILL NOT activate the sigil even though it is supposed to work on weapon swap.

Not gonna happen. Two handers already do more damage than one handers. It’s more even than if you used a Force or Accuracy sigil on your off hand weapon.

Actually, you do have a weakness. A big one. Divnity gear allocates stat points to magic find, which isn’t a meaningful gameplay stat. So while yes, it does cover everything, it has less points total to give to stats that benefit you in gameplay.

Jesus H. Development houses have teams. The different teams have different jobs. Sometimes they overlap, often they don’t. When one team is working on one thing (new short term content) another team entirely is working on something else (the next big release).

Seeing someone make something like this doesn’t mean they’re taking resources away from the important stuff.

It’s like no one who plays MMOs has ever had a real job.

Detonate doesn’t cancel shield 5. You can double-tap 5 and it’ll stay up the full duration.

10/30/0/30/0

Fiery Wrath, RHS, Pure of Voice

Berserker everything, blood sigils, Ruby orbs or your favorite precision or power runes

Salt to taste.

Seras.5702:

@Foofad – I agree with most of what you typed. However, I cannot agree with the presence of a period denoting an arrogance or finality in the tone of a message.

snip

Also, I’ve never heard of periods being a factor when potraying tone in type. For that, I always thought one used exclamation marks or capitlization. A period is just what goes at the end of every sentence. I’m not trying to denote a moment of finality, simply that it’s my habit to end sentences with “period, space, space.”

Well, that’s basically the thing. It’s highly subjective, and it’s also highly situational. The main point to understand is that, at a very fundamental level, someone like you who is communicating using a very academically correct syntax is actually using language in a totally different capacity than someone who might just be casually communicating in the way that seems natural to them.

In a way, you (and others who disagree that periods can have as much power as they do) are effectively taking the subjectivity and tonal information out of the period by disregarding it as a functional characteristic of the written language rather than allowing it to be just as much of a communication tool as the words that preceded it.

That, I think, gets right to the heart of the schism we’re having in this thread.

Jemmi.6058:

Someone judging another as arrogant for writing with periods is prejudice, and likely results from that person being arrogant. It is actually quite hypocritical.

That said, I am not sure if I use periods in chat very often. I think I mostly use exclamation points and question marks, but rarely periods. I definitely do not judge a person as arrogant for using a period.

Personally I think people are getting a little too hung up on the word “arrogant” as used in this context. As I said before (though maybe not so cut and dried) I actually think that the OP’s use of the word is a little misguided and may not actually reflect what those people were thinking accurately. I believe they were experiencing dissonance in the tone and the method of communication and mistaking that for arrogance. In other words, the use of the period wasn’t some sort of holier-than-thou jab at the unwashed, ignorant plebes – it was just too formal and didn’t jive with the casual situation the group found themselves communicating in.

Forgive the crude drawing, but try this. Instead of shooting 90 degrees to the wall, shoot at an angle.

Like this…

ENEMY
wallwallwallwallwallYOUwallwallwallwall

Like that, instead of…

grassgrassgrassgrassENEMY
wallwallwallwallwallYOUwallwallwallwall

If that makes any sense.

Strength runes. Great damage bonus, and you get might duration increase. Best of both worlds.

There are TONS of dodges in this game. Not just what the game defines as a dodge (the invuln roll) but what you define as a dodge. Particularly Rangers and Thieves get them. Ranger Sword and Dagger is a prime example. You get a massive dodge backwards on 2, a massive flank on 3 that takes you totally around an enemy (spoilers: they can’t hit you if you’re behind them (usually)) and another flank on 4. In all of these cases you can use the skill to move your body out of the way of an attack, regardless of whether they have evade frames on them or not. If you walk out of melee range or out of the melee attack arc, you won’t get hit. The game absolutely takes positioning into account. What more do you want?

You’re being willfully ignorant. There are very few homing attacks – if you move out of the way of a lot of the projectiles in the game (Guardian scepter orbs come to mind) you can dodge them without double tapping a movement key.

Everything you’ve brought up is a subjective discontent with how the game feels to you. There’s nothing wrong with that, but claiming that the system is broken because it doesn’t feel good to you is completely asinine.

What item was it? It might have been a bot messing with you. Happens on EVE, dunno about here.

We live in a world that is heavily dominated by text-based communication. More so than ever before. We’re writing, and reading, more text on a daily basis than anyone could have ever imagined even twenty years ago. We’re also trained from birth to hear beyond the words that are said in order to pick up on tonality and deeper levels of meaning.

Someone mentioned this once before, but I’ll reiterate: The phrase “I never said she stole my money,” can be read in seven different ways with radically different meaning depending on where you put the stress. “I never said she stole my money” reads completely differently from “I never said she stole my money.” We’re used to that in verbal speech, but in the written form the only way you would ever know for sure what I actually meant if I used that phrase would be if I used italics or some other indication of stress, as I did.

Using stress in a sentence to make meaning known is nothing new, we’re all masters of conveying and understanding that kind of meaning when spoken aloud. The problem is there’s no set of rules for how we nuance our written words. Instead, we rely on our experience to figure out what to make of another person’s writing. We know from literature that when a writer wants a character to stress a particular word, he can italicize or bold that word. But it’s also a time honored tradition to deliberately leave things unstressed so that the reader can interpret it how they will.

We know from email and SMS culture that when someone is being casual, they’ll typically leave out punctuation or characters for brevity or simply because of familiarity. We also know that in formal settings, such as emails to someone you aren’t familiar with, proper punctuation is more socially acceptable.

The ramifications of this should be obvious. The method of conveying the tone of your communication is also in how you punctuate and format your text. Because proper punctuation is typically reserved for more formal occasions, using it in “common speech” if you will with people you are on more informal or familiar terms (such as your dungeon party) can be seen as stand-offish or even – yes – arrogant. Leaving your periods off conveys that you acknowledge the casualness of the situation.

An example of this in spoken action would be to use an honorific such as sir or ma’am with your best friend, and not ironically. It’s weird, and it only serves to put distance between you, not encourage familiarity. Or even more nuanced; Using “madam” instead of the contraction “ma’am” when ma’am would ordinarily suffice.

An example from my own experience: I have a friend that I have known for about six years now. I’ve spent far more time talking to this friend with text than I have verbally. We never use periods when we talk to each other casually, except for one case: When that person is miffed about something. As soon as they are irritated, annoyed, angry, or otherwise out of balance the periods come out. The tonal change is blatantly obvious, and it’s a small wonder that so much communication can happen with so tiny a mark. When they’re mad, and those periods come out, everyone knows what’s up.

They aren’t the only one – I notice that a lot about people online. As soon as the periods are broken out, kitten’s about to get real.

TL;DR: There’s a perfectly good reason to view it as “arrogant,” but it has less to do with you being somehow pedantic and overwrought and more to do with using inappropriate tone given the social dynamic you’re currently inhabiting and it sounds weird or makes everyone else uncomfortable.

Sokina.8041:

My “quirks” are so bad that I’ll even put a period after one word responses, and I honestly can’t stop it. Even though one word doesn’t make a sentence and thus wouldn’t benefit from a period’s intended function. But for me, omitting that period is pretty unsettling while I’m typing, and it’s just reflex that I add it.

There is absolutely a difference in tone that most people will perceive between the one-word “No” and the one-word “No.” The second, with a period, undeniably has a more authoritative and final ring to it than the former. “No” would be something you would say aloud after the first time a child asked you to buy them a toy, “No.” would be something you would say the third time, after you’d had enough of it.

Agreed, switching it to only appear in combat would almost totally solve the problem. From a gameplay standpoint you do need the visual feedback, but only if you’re currently engaged.

You CAN use texmod in order to replace textures with green ones. But it’s a pain in the butt and texmod can make the game really laggy, which means terrible video recording rates, which means it’s not too useful to begin with. Have fun rotoscoping.

In keeping with a similar thread started several years ago for another MMO which proved to be massively successful, I wanted to start one up for Guild Wars 2 as well.

This thread is about the really small things that when taken individually aren’t really that big of a deal or much cause for annoyance, but when taken collectively contribute to your discontent with the game. These are not massive class balance issues, or hot topics like botting and Ascended gear progression and so on. These are general quality of life issues. Stuff that could be slipped into the weekly patches rather than having to wait for monthly content. Minor inconveniences.

For example:

• The light Dredge armor still doesn’t have a unique icon.
• I don’t like not being able to see my queue position for WvW.
• I don’t like that the TP refreshes every time I change tabs forcing me to re-search.
• I wish that item icons had a rarity color coded border in my inventory.
• I wish I could see how much gold a character had from the character select screen.
• On Human females, certain long hair options clip into shields when running out of combat.
• For most races, many leg armor variations clip through several leg armor variants, especially ones with narrower shins.

And so on! The smaller the inconvenience the better. The major goal is to gather all of these issues into one easily browsed thread instead of many threads scattered throughout the forums. This is not the place to worry about being laughed out of the room for being bothered by it. I have no doubt that some of the issues brought up will be subjectively annoying at best, but this is about you and the little things that bother you, not anyone else. You may even find that you’re not alone.

Hopefully once we’ve collected a large number of these, Anet will be able to look at it and make decisions on what improvements they think they can slip into their normal patching cycle. Or perhaps, some of the things brought up will be so minor that all Anet has to do is flip a switch in order to fix it. We can dream.

At some point I may make some attempt at curating the most commonly mentioned things into a master list.

Share away!

Elusive Power is totally worthless, don’t take 25 points in Honor. You expend more DPS by not attacking during your roll than you recover from the damage bonus. Not to mention you have permanent vigor up from Vigorous Precision which makes the problem even worse.

To give you some perspective, I run this for dungeons and WvW:

10/30/0/30

Fiery Wrath
Blind Exposure, Powerful Blades, Right Hand Strength
Superior Aria, Empowering Might, Pure of Voice

Sword/Shield + Greatsword

Shelter, Signet of Judgement, Stand Your Ground, Save Yourselves, Renewed Focus

Berserker everything, Pack runes, Sigil of Blood on the swords and Sigil of Battle on the shield (though I may swap to Force)

Omnom pies, maintenance oil

Glass cannon? Kind of, but not really. You’ve got 3 on demand blinds, 100% Vigor uptime, on demand condition clearing, on demand blocking, on demand invulnerability, a knockback, and from all the critting you do you regen a pretty significant amount of health. SoJ is worth about 300 armor or so (well, probably more when you’re sitting at base heavy armor numbers like I am) which helps, but you don’t NEED it. You could just as easily swap it for WoR or Retreat or whatever.

I use this very successfully in fractals, dungeons, and WvW. As long as you know where your dodge key is and know when to blind, you will destroy things. Use the sword 1v1, greatsword for AOE, but swap between them regularly to maximize your blind output. It eats conditions off of allies, and gives them might like crazy. Plus you can knockback, so that’ll save a few people from stomps.

If you don’t feel like conditions are a big deal you can switch to Battle Presence but Battle Presence NEVER saved anyone, it just makes you feel good because green numbers.

Anyway, I love it. It does a ton of damage, it could do even more damage if you go 10/20 Valor/Honor instead. And if you die in dungeons with it, it’s because of poor endurance management or blind/block usage.

Stats: 2181 Power
79% Crit (sword)
62% Crit damage
2127 Armor
13805 HP

P.s., you get more on-paper DPS with Strength runes but lose the second fury source which is the primary reason to use Pack as a guardian (to make up for only having fury on SY)

Actually I just double checked and I do have 100% burst crit, I forgot about the trait in Arms. So instead of Unsuspecting I think I’ll pick up Furious Reaction or somesuch for the Vigor, since that’s something I desperately need.

Frankly I don’t even really need Unsuspecting Foe because my crit chance is 93% with Fury up, which it is almost 100% of the time. I like having Rending Strikes because it bumps up my vuln applications which means I can usually have anywhere from 5-7 Vulnerability stacks at any given time with Cyclone Axe.

I like the idea of doing 30/25/0/0/15 though, I’m gonna try that next and see if losing all those adrenaline traits is worth it. GW2Buildcraft says I get a little more damage out of it.

Edit: Though if I do 30/25 I lose 3% critical chance, so maybe Unsuspecting is worth it after all!

This is what I’ve got so far:

20/30/0/0/20

Berserker’s Power, Axe Mastery
Rending Strikes, Deep Cuts, Furious
Heightened Focus, Signet Mastery

Utilities are Healing Surge, FGJ! SIO! and Bull’s Charge with SoR elite.

All berserker everything, with Strength runes. Sadly I saw the post about using Rubies and getting higher crit damage AFTER I bought and socketed the runes, so… alas! That said though at least according to gw2buildcraft the effective power of both of those options is reasonably close with Rubies coming out a little ahead, so I’m not too worried – also, extra might duration is great.

Playing around with it in WvW I’m able to get 10k Eviscerate crits, solo. That’s pretty good but I’m wondering if I can push it even higher. I suspect I could with Rubies, but I don’t want to resocket so soon after making a big purchase like that. :[

I’m considering switching to 20/25/0/0/25 for Might on weapon swap as suggested by Pyles. Losing Furious wouldn’t be that big of a deal since I don’t seem to be having adrenaline problems.

I’m using my warrior mostly for WvW. In PvP I always prefer burst damage, as opposed to sustained DPS in dungeons. To that end I like to line up the biggest Eviscerate (and to a lesser extent Kill Shot) crits I possibly can, but I’m having trouble theorycrafting exactly how to do that. I haven’t been playing warrior that long so I’m a little out of my element.

Weapons wise, as a rule I prefer Axe/Shield and Rifle, or Longbow if I’m in a zerg. So the Dual Wielding trait is out of the question unless I want to pick up a mace at some point, which is an option. Dual Wielding aside, what combination would bring the biggest hit in one shot?

I’m running all Berserker everything, if it matters. I haven’t runed yet though.

Sandra Martino.3870:

foofad.5162:

Wasd for movement (A and D for strafing, not rotation), mouse for camera rotation, and I have all of my abilities rebound to be reachable without moving my left hand. I also have some extra abilities bound to mouse buttons so I never have to move my right hand either.

Almost the same, although i do use A and D for rotating in conjunction with my mouse. Left bar is still 1-5, right bar is Shift 1-5, dodging is Middle mouse button and thats about it. Im very effective with it, i seem to be using auto-run a lot so when i switch to abilities my runspeed is not effected when i dont push WASD

I use A and D for strafing so that I can use Q and E for utilities instead of strafing. Then I use alt-1 for heals, mouse thumb button for third utility, shift+space for elite. I still use V for dodging, but I use C instead of F1, and shift Q and E instead of F2 and F3. I do it that way because I often spam Virtue of Justice depending on the build, and that being the case I find it handier to hit C with my thumb than to reach up and hit F1 a lot.

Wasd for movement (A and D for strafing, not rotation), mouse for camera rotation, and I have all of my abilities rebound to be reachable without moving my left hand. I also have some extra abilities bound to mouse buttons so I never have to move my right hand either.

Shelter used to heal for about two thousand more than it does now, back in beta. Those were the days…

Yeah, they absolutely can. Do something like 10/30/0/30/0 or similar, with Right Handed Strength, Empowering Might and Pure of Voice. Use greatsword/sword and shield or sword and focus. For 1v1 use the sword, and for groups use the greatsword. Eat lifesteal food, sharpening stones, and run Blood sigils. Runes can be whatever, Lyssa, Eagle, Pack, Strength, it’s all good. Learn to dodge, and you’ll be good to go. Works well in PvE and WvW, though in the latter you may find yourself switching the sword for a scepter in sieges, as well as ranged fights in dungeons. Still, with Fury your crit is going to be about 100% with RHS.

With Shelter and Renewed Focus, it doesn’t even feel “glassy” because between 100% Vigor uptime, virtues, and your blocks, you really shouldn’t be taking that much damage.

Bumping this again, for the people who are still looking for it.

Mace 3 parry is buggy and fails occasionally, so be careful with that.

Define your role a bit more. You clearly want to be a boon factory, but Givers armor is not ideal. Using runes and traits you can get up to 70% boon duration, combined with food that is 90%. Alternatively you can go with runes to increase a specific boon duration (ex. might – fire, strength, hoelbrak 2/2/2) and have 60% for that specific boon plus 50% from food and traits (realistically, 40% – 30 Virtues is hard to justify) and get even more.

Now you can start to say things like “okay, would I rather increase all boons or focus on a specific one?” If you chose to increase Regeneration, you can have 100-110% boon duration for it and use a Mace and Focus and have nearly infinite Regeneration. If you do 100% Protection you can use a hammer and get almost infinite Protection. If you do Might you can use Empowering Might, and Hammer blast finishes to get – get this – 40 seconds of 3 stacks of might per Fire field blast finished. If there is an Ele in your party, you don’t need a warrior, you can get 25 stacks by yourself.

At that point you have to seriously question whether you even care about survivability because a party with 25 might stacks demolishes any encounter.

Right now the easiest way to make that call is to go to gw2buildcraft and compare the effective power between the two sets. Then, calculate how many additional Might stacks you would get from the higher crit chance, and compare the additional effective power to how much more might you are getting. That should tell you what you need to know.

Nothing is going to bring back spear chucking. Sadly. There are lots of glassy offensive builds out there, though you would never guess looking at the official forums. A lot of people do tanky Hammer builds. Guardians, even with 100% Berserker gear are naturally tanky due to Virtues and their selection of utilities. So as long as you are good at dodging, you can usually stay alive in dungeons even with no extra armor.

Guardians aren’t really a “healer” class. Guardians do get some party heals in the form of heal-on-dodge, but most of our heals are secondary effects from other skills. For example, there is a built in heal on Shield 5’s dome, another on Staff’s Empower, a side-effect of Staff 2, Regeneration off of Mace’s symbol, and so on. Guardian healing is an accumulation of small to medium sizes heals gained from using other skills which are ostensibly used primarily for other things. Altruistic Healing is a prime example – you get a small drip of HP every time you apply a boon. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment.

Ultimately you’ll just have to play it yourself though and see. Don’t let anyone tell you Guardians can’t DPS though.

There is no limit to boon duration. It all counts. You can get even higher totals by using boon specific buffs. For example, it’s possible to get +60% Might duration from runes alone, topping you out at 110% Might duration without “Giver” gear. That gives you over ten seconds of Might from Empowering Might.

For those of you asking for Flashing Blade buffs, you aren’t going to get them. Flashing Blade used to not require a target, and also did about four times as much damage. They nerfed it in beta.

The average build should have anywhere from 2500 to 2800 armor, up to 3000 but no more. If you’re going full damage and are good at dodging/set up for defraying hits with blinds and aegis and protection and so on, then frankly just go nuts. I currently have 2200 and I do fine.

I think some folks are missing the main issue. Yes, Sword does have the highest single target DPS. However, when using the exact same build that nets Sword the highest DPS possible, and instead using a Greatsword, you will do very nearly the same damage within a few percent. The ramifications of this being obvious – in any situation where you aren’t hitting just one target, you’re much better off.

Yes, you miss out on off hand skills. But no off hand skill contributes to your damage as significantly as running a Greatsword will. If that’s your concern, then the Greatsword is almost always a far, far better option than a Sword. As a practical matter, you fight multiple enemies so often (compared to single enemies) that the extra killing power you get out of the Greatsword far surpasses Sword.

To be clear, I enjoy Sword except for Zealot’s Defense. And I like being able to use off hand items as well, particularly shield, but Sword and Shield (and Torch, and Focus) are all sub par compared to Greatsword.

Greatsword isn’t overpowered though. Sword is just underpowered.

One-handed sword is fine except for Zealot’s Defense. ZD is terrible. Root, slow projectiles, single target, and I have never had the projectile absorb on it actually work in a meaningful way.

Spirit Weapons are still terrible even after the patch. It doesn’t do anything to address their uselessness in dungeons.

Omnomberry Pie. Greatsword smokes everything else in terms of self healing with pie. Absurdly so. WvW, PvE, whatever.

The problem is not that Greatsword is too good, it’s that everything else isn’t as good. Yes, Sword/whatever is fine against a single target. Greatsword is just as good, AND it’s good against groups. That’s not Greatsword’s fault, it’s not overpowered in my opinion. The problem is that where greatsword is versatile and adequate in any role, everything else is situational at best. Mace has better AOE than sword but regardless of your offhand it’s still not as good as Greatsword or Hammer. Sword has better single target damage than Mace but its still only as good as Greatsword and Hammer, while being poor at everything else regardless of your offhand.

In my opinion the solution is not to change the one handed weapons but rather to give us a dedicated NON-CONE AoE offhand. Though I wouldn’t complain about redoing Zealot’s Defense, which is garbage.

If it matters, I’ve been playing Guardian since bwe2 and have god knows how many hours. PvE and WvW.

I used to build without food in mind. Then I realized how absurdly OP some foods were and started to build with them in mind from the outset. Frankly, food is so good I’m extremely annoyed at how drastically better you are with it compared to without it. But that’s a subject for another thread.

Purging Flames clears one condition total. It’s not any better than Smite Condition in that respect.

If you transmuted the skin to a white or blue piece of gear then it IS account bound, the tooltip just doesn’t reflect the change. It does work just like transmuting starter gear.

First of all you’re making it WAY too complicated, and in the end it’s causing you to make some pretty large errors.

Your “coefficient” for power increasing tooltip damage isn’t the actual skill coefficient. You’re better off looking up the real skill coefficients and then comparing power versus precision on a skill by skill basis. I’ve posted a list of the Guardian coefficients on this forum, it’s probably around the second page.

Most skills have a coefficient between .6 and 1.5, for example. The true damage formula is Damage = Power * Average Weapon Damage * Skill Coefficient / Armor. Once you know the skill coefficient you can plug everything else in, multiply by critical hits, and actually compare precision versus power.

Save your Shelter and Renewed Focus for when they target you. Your best bet is just timed invulnerability. Also, don’t cross the streams. Some of those, excluding bosses, are CCable – Banish works, as does any other knockdown/knock back.