Guild Wars 2

Spirit weapons work okay in PVE until you get higher level. At 80, good luck keeping one alive long enough to use it. The spirit weapon builds of yore are toast, though.

Looking purely at racial abilities, Charr. By far.

Norjena.5172:

Sigil of Blood has got a 5Second CD, Tooltip is wrong. And AH Builds can use this Food too.
And u will lose 30% of Critdmg, to get 10% Dmg and Precision (AH Builds can take Fiery Wrath too)….(don´t forget that u will lose ~4% Critchance from Retributive Amor, and 2 will have 2-3 for 2h Weapons useless Major Traits in Radiance).

And 1h Weapons are dealing less dmg, espacially if u want to do AoE. What mean, u will get less healing (from Food) too.

What is your contention, exactly? That an AH build will do as much damage as a DPS build with Radiant Power and Fiery Wrath by virtue of 30% more critical damage? Or that the survivability of an AH build offsets any DPS advantage of a straight damage build? Or something else?

Any DPS build needs as many damage multipliers (straight % bonuses) as possible and Empowering Might with high critical percentage. Fiery Wrath and Radiant Power are your best bets for multipliers. Empowering Might is a major DPS increase. Stack Berserker armor and trinkets, use maintenance oil and omnom pies, and enjoy. You’ll heal more than an AH build as long as you are attacking, and your healing will scale with the number of enemies present rather than the number of allies, which makes it viable solo as well.

Use a Sigil of Blood for additional healing and damage on crit.

Dunno! PM a moderator, if you like.

Random tip – Guardians and Thieves have very controllable and very fast Blast combo finishers, on Hammer and Shortbow respectively. Blast combo finishers are really impressive AoE buffs, debuffs, heals, and so on. For example, a Blast finisher on a Fire field will yield 3 stacks of might for 20 seconds, and it works with boon duration. On my Hammer guardian (when I run that spec) I am traited for boon duration and can single handedly get a party to 25 stacks of might if there’s an Elementalist in the party. Thieves are similar. Also works great in a Water field – about 1500 healing AOE when you Blast that. There’s a table on the wiki that shows what everything does.

Neat as it is, it’s not essential, as Ganzicus says.

Yeah, sure. It’s just basic algebra.

Damage = Weapon Damage * Power * Coefficient / Armor

The skill tooltips use 2600 Armor in their damage calculation. In order to find out the coefficient, we plug in the things we know: If you look at your current stats in your hero panel you can fill out your power, average weapon damage (aka the bottom value and top value listed in the weapon’s tooltip added together, then divided by two), then for Damage on the left side of the equals you use the tooltip’s listed damage for that skill.

Pulling these numbers out of my kitten, but here’s how it works: If a skill lists 800 damage, we have 1800 Power, and an average weapon damage of 952.5 (which is the damage of an exotic 1 handed weapon) we say:

800 = 1800 * 952.5 * Coefficient / 2600

Algebra-foo dictates we multiply both sides by 2600 and simplify:

2080000 = 1714500 * Coefficient

Algebra-foo dictates we divide both sides by 1714500:

Result is 1.213 = Coefficient, so for simplicity we round to 1.2. In other words, the totally fictional skill, the tooltip of which listed 800 damage for our given stats, has a skill power coefficient of 1.2 and you can use that to then calculate how much more damage you would do if you added a certain amount of power or precision or critical damage or what have you.

Hope that helps.

Equip one, look at your skill bar tooltips, see what the damage is. Equip the other, look at your skill bar tooltips, see what the damage is. Compare. Whichever is higher is the better weapon, unless you want healing power for some reason. (Spoilers: You don’t!)

If you want the long version:

An attack’s damage is determined by the following.

Damage = (Weapon damage) * (Power) * (Skill-specific coefficient) / (Target’s Armor)

Your skill tooltips uses 2600 as the default value for the target’s armor when you’re level 80. In order to successfully calculate the damage you’ll do with a particular ability, you need to know the coefficient of that ability. This is a multiplier which determines how powerful that skill is compared to other skills. When you see skills on your skill bar that do more damage than others, they have a higher coefficient.

You can figure out the coefficient by simple algebra. If you’re using a level 80 one handed weapon which has an average damage of 952.5 (which is the average for 80 exotic 1 handers) and your tooltip says that your ability does 1000 damage, and your current Power as listed in your hero sheet is 1800, then you can figure out your coefficient by the following:

1000 = (952.5) * (1800) * (Skill-specific coefficient) / (2600)
- multiply both sides by 2600, multiply 952.5 and 1800

2600000 = (1714500) * (Skill-specific coefficient)
- divide both sides by 1714500

1.516 = Skill-specific coefficient

So we say that 1.5 is your coefficient for that particular ability, or nearly. Knowing this, you can now back-calculate to say which of those weapons is most powerful. So you would say:

For Avenger: Damage = ((174+192)/2) * (Your power (remember you’re adding some with this weapon)) * (1.5) / Armor (plug in whatever value you want for this to see your damage against it)

For Zweihander: Damage = ((186+206)/2) * (Your power) * (1.5) / Armor

Whichever’s higher wins. You can use this technique for theorycrafting later on when you’re 80. But yeah, for now all that matters is looking at the tooltip damage.

I assume that it uses 1000 for weapon damage just as utility skills do, but that may or may not be the case.

It takes 3.5 seconds for Hundred Blades to channel from start to finish, is what that means.

There’s actually what you might call a “hidden” cooldown on abilities. Basically it’s the time at which it takes for the attack animation to begin and end before the next animation plays. This causes some abilities to take longer than their advertised activation time.

The coefficient for Chop would be:

800 = (952.5 (this is the average damage for a 1 handed weapon)) * (Your power) * (Coefficient) / 2600

If we assume you have an average power of 1900 at level 80, then we say:

2080000 = (952.5)(1900)(coefficient)
2080000 = 1809750 * (coefficient)
= 1.14933 rounded to 1.15

So your coefficient for Chop is 1.15 or so, but that’s given some assumptions and based on the non-specific tooltip damage you gave us. In order to get the actual number, you need to have your exact damage and your exact power (NOT attack) stat. There’s a coefficient like this for every single weapon skill and damaging utility, including each individual skill in your autoattack chain. For utilities, you use 1000 as the weapon damage.

Edit: By the way, the usefulness of knowing this number is that you can now insert any armor level, and any power stat, and figure out how much damage you’re going to do on average. You can’t really determine that unless you know the coefficient for the skill.

Lysico.4906:

You got a track record of failure as a GM it appears. That is fine. Does not make you a bad player, gamer etc. So stop trying to be a GM and move on..

Yeah, when I was 14 playing vanilla WoW. Ten years makes a lot of difference.

We’ve been very successful and have been having a lot of fun up until the point at which I could no longer be logged in or run as many events and such.

The main issue I’m looking for solutions on is how to find people willing to be active guild contributors. The general consensus on that seems to be “luck,” which is fine – I haven’t been very lucky in that respect. But I have been lucky in that my guild has had absolutely no drama of any kind in the six months it has been running, we’ve had a lot of events, a meaningful impact on the community, and I’ve made a lot of friends in the process. That didn’t happen because I’m a bad leader.

What needs improvement is inspiring other people to contribute in kind, and I’m out of ideas there, at least until I can spend some more meaningful time on it, when I’m less busy.

Lysico.4906:

But specifically for the OP, you want to run a roleplaying guild and you are not around much.. Sorry man but you get what you put into it.. a guild like that needs interactions and if the guild leader is offline a ton, it won’t happen..

>implying I haven’t already dedicated hundreds of hours to the guild

You make a good point.

It’s not so much that they “can’t RP without direction,” though. Rather, I think it’s more like “there’s nothing going on over here, so I’m going to go someplace where there is something going on.” My issue is that I know how much fun these people have together during events and such that I host. They’d have just as much fun if they hosted things themselves, but they won’t do it. I’ve had people straight up tell me they’re afraid their events won’t be entertaining, or they’re afraid of people getting bored. Which is absurd, and I insist that it’s not the case, but they rarely agree and instead continue not doing anything.

Then they wander off. Alas.

I don’t think so, because events were never mandatory. Nothing in the guild was, not even attendance or representation. We have the occasional meeting here and there that is strongly encouraged but no one has ever been pressured to my knowledge in any way.

PopeUrban.2578:

My point is, specifically, why do you need such a large number of members if there’s so much administrative headache for so little payoff to either the members or the organization. What is it you need all these people for? “critical mass?” To sustain what? If your natural sustainable number is in fact eight people… then did you really want those other 42 people in your guild in the first place if you had to prod and coddle them? If so, why?

Like I mentioned in my OP, we’re an RP guild. In theory, the main reason we’re together is so that we can RP. That’s where a lot of the fun and the glue comes from. We participate in other aspects of the game, naturally, I’m not one of those people that spends all day on a level 20 character hanging out in a tavern. Having a lot of people in the guild means more RP, and more vibrant RP because of the different perspectives. It also means that when we aren’t RPing, there’s more opportunities to do other things in-house.

As for the 50 members – because of the recruitment process I get to know everyone. And because we’re already highly social because of the nature of the guild, I get to know everyone by virtue of that as well. There’s only maybe a dozen people that I’m not too familiar with currently in the guild, and that’s because they’re inactive.

The net result: When there’s no RP to be had, people wander off to find some.

Sadly, I had two friends go into the game with me and they both quit in the first month or so because the game wasn’t for them. One of the first people I recruited was very dedicated to the guild and we were good friends, but he had to stop playing due to getting a new job. I agree that doing it with friends is the way to go, but that wasn’t an option for me.

Rising Dusk.2408:

His view of his situation isn’t the problem, the problem really is the situation he’s in.

It is important having players represent because it gives people others to talk to and interact with and play with. It’s not as simple as being okay with inactivity or what-have-you, because you need to present your players with an “active enough” user base so that they want to stay active themselves. This critical mass for a guild is important for the sustainability of the guild.

I worked incredibly hard over winter break to try and bring up the number of active people so that I could hit that critical mass. Even before that, I always had a mind to try and hit that magic number so that the guild was self sustainable and I wouldn’t have to work so much at it. My reward has been seeing my activity check messages go from high 20’s and 30s for people logging in daily to the single digits. Alas.

Nope, only monster drops.

Edit: Oh wait, did you mean wooden chests? Yes, it affects that, as it’s tied to monster drops.

I’ve been playing since BWE2, and on release I picked Tarnished Coast as my home server, where I’ve been residing ever since. I’ve run a couple of small guilds in the past, but they were never particularly successful, nor did they have much endurance. I wanted to give it another shot in GW2. I’m an RPer, so making an RP guild was a natural choice. We have been successful for six months, but over the course of the last month we went from a very healthy active population to an almost completely inactive population, presumably due to me being much less active due to school.

What follows is some background, skip to the end for the TL;DR and my primary question.

It had a basic historical background, but as a rule I dislike setting up story arcs for guilds ahead of time – I prefer dynamic growth rather than sticking to a fixed path. One thing that I did differently which was very important in setting the tone of the guild was how I handled officers.

In short, there were none. Instead, out of character we were a totally flat organization with task-oriented delegates who handled the various jobs that would ordinarily be for an officer. In other words, we didn’t have a recruitment/administration officer, but we did have someone who enjoyed doing that sort of thing who would do it just because. They were a delegate for that role, and I had other roles as well, such as events coordinators and whatnot.

I think this helped give everyone a sense of camaraderie that is sometimes lacking in guilds with rigid structures. Everyone was on the same level and there was no bickering or drama.

Unfortunately, no matter how many people I recruited, the story was the same: I was only ever able to find two people who were at all willing to actually help out with running the guild. This was baffling to me, because part of our recruitment process was that you had to actually engage with us in a guild event in order to actually join the guild. That meant that you were willing to participate and were at least somewhat invested in the guild.

We’ve had an average of 50 people in the guild at any one time from about October through today. I would periodically cull the people who were inactive for a period of months without warning. If you include those people, and the ones that left of their own accord or the half dozen or so I kicked because they weren’t working out, that means that I recruited something on the order of 80 people or so personally, with about another ten or so being friends brought into the guild by current guildmembers.

Compared to some of the many hundreds of people strong megaguilds out there, those are small numbers, but we didn’t mass recruit. Each of those people was personally contacted by me, or applied to the guild on hearing about us in game or through out of game channels, and then spoken to and vetted by me and the current guild members. They then participated in guild events in order to complete their application.

Because I wasn’t getting any help from the guild, I was forced to do the lion’s share of the work myself. Administration, organization, guild RP events, guild dungeon runs, guild WvW runs. With the exception of a few events which were hosted by guild members, I did everything. I’m in college though, and my workload this semester has been such that I haven’t been able to keep up with my usual two to three RP events a week plus dungeons and so on, and interest in the guild by its members has declined steadily as I’ve become more distant.

When I log in on Friday and Saturday night, instead of seeing ten to fifteen people online with only a couple not representing, I now see eight people tops with no one representing. Even our core members have moved on to other things.

TL;DR: So here’s my question: I’m reasonably certain that if I was able to get some more people to actually help and participate in the day to day running of the guild as well as running events and so on, I would not have this issue of inactivity and the guild evaporating before my eyes while I’m helpless to do anything because of real-life obligations. So how do I find these people? Is there a recruitment tactic I’m unaware of that would give me better odds of finding motivated people to help? Am I just going to have to put up with it and rebuild once summer starts and I’m free again?

Thanks for reading! Your comments and suggestions are all welcome.

Hey, this may be a shot in the dark but you MAY be able to ask Support to roll back your account pre-deletion. They do that for when people get hacked, giving you one “freebie” chance to get your stuff back. Maybe you can ask them to use up that rollback on your own mistake instead?

Holdyir.2918:

Remember when you had to que up to get in to the frontier or Thid for DAOC? Yeah I don’t either…. Crazy to think that a game over a decade old could handle RvR so much better than GW2.

Rose tinted goggles. The lag was absolutely abysmal, too.

Oh pffbttbthgbt, I can’t stand healing gear. No, I want Battle Presence and my DPS cake too. 0/30/10/30/0 is kind of interesting.

It would definitely make them not useless.

Downed is not the problem. Battle rezzing is.

I’m racking my brain trying to figure out a way to have Battle Presence and Absolute Resolution while making up for the fact that I no longer have as much crit damage, toughness, or Altruistic Healing. I’ll think of something, but jeez. It’s so much better now, it’s really hard not to want to do that.

ComeAndSee.1356:

Aenaos.8160:

Alarox.4590:

CRrabbit.1284:

Role Number 2: Hold the line or Push , Guardian is the only class who has many area denial skills.

You need to play more professions, badly.

Indeed.
The only classes that have real area denial are the ones that can
lay multiple overlapping AoE that does huge dps.
Guardian area denial is for Hello Kitty.

He’s talking about Wall of Lining and Sanctuary. Both can literally halt entire enemy zergs in their tracks.

Coordinated Wall of Linings and Sanctuaries between multiple Guardian’s can make choke points unpassable. No other class in game has their power.

You realize you can shuffle right on through that with Stability, right?

I really think some of you are missing the larger issue here. There is a glaring inequity of consequences when a numerically smaller force engages a numerically larger one, whether it’s in the open field or attacking/defending objectives.

Right now, there are basically two end states. If you win, all of your losses of life are completely erased and it’s as if there was no battle or loss of life to begin with. If you lose, no matter how close you were to winning, none of the kills you got matter. In other words, as long as you can raise people from the dead, a larger force will always be favorable to a small force, regardless of the nature of what you’re doing, be it fighting in the open field or fighting over an objective. This is always the case. There is literally no reason not to bring more people. Winners win completely, losers lose completely. No consequences for the large group, annihilation for the smaller.

When the possibility of permanent death (relatively speaking – all that really means is you’re out of the fight for a few minutes while you run back from a waypoint) changes that dynamic. With permanent death, instead of having a black and white conclusion to an engagement, with total victory or defeat, you have a gradient of possible outcomes. Smaller forces will still have a harder time winning against larger ones – that’s fine, no one is asking for some kind of blatant advantage to beating zergs with smaller forces. But now, you may not win, but any kills you score will actually be meaningful. You can change what sort of opportunities the zerg has in a meaningful way. Hitting their 40 man zerg with your 10 man squad might inflict enough damage to prevent them from being able to steamroll a keep for lack of manpower and supply, for example. That’s a much richer experience, and much less frustrating for everyone involved. Zergs will still flatten small groups. But that is a much more acceptable experience to be on the losing side of if you know that those guys you killed wont be getting back up again.

The problem is not that you can be downed. The problem is that you can be rezzed after a kill. If you beat one of three people you’re fighting before you die, it’s as of you beat no one at all, and that is massively frustrating. Your reward for victory against odds should be the fact that you put one of your opponents out of the fight for good, at least until he runs back. Same deal with zergs – a smaller force will never win permenantly against a zerg, ever, because of rezzing. If you couldn’t rez, then there would be the opportunity for a Pyrrhic victory for the winning zerg, or one that was so costly that they couldn’t continue.

THAT is the WvW I want.

I just tested in game, Spirit Weapons do indeed gain boons and everything else. But they still die if an enemy even looks at them.

I was baffled today to find that the giant windmill in Gendarran’s Cornucopian Fields was not an enterable building, unlike the one in Shaemoor. This is really disappointing, as frankly I think the windmill is probably one of the coolest buildings in the game. Seeing the giant gears and all that inside is really really neat. And there’s tons of NPCs!

No, I’m not joking. I wanna live in there.

The incredible thing to me is that they buffed Empower, which can heal for over 5k on a 16 second cooldown, but they nerfed Spirit Weapons, which can mildly annoy someone.

I’m flabbergasted. Of all the nerfs, this is the last one I expected. Make them susceptible to CC, but to make them this ridiculously weak is unreal. There’s literally no reason to use them now. None.

We need to start having the off-peak player conversation again, because waking up to this every morning is completely freaking stupid. Green is currently ahead 63000 points, and the reason for this is because no matter how good you do when you have people around, the minute your peak players go to bed and the enemy off peaks log in they don’t even have to fight – they just roll through and take everything. It’s a cake walk for them.

Great for Giganticus Lupicus too.

Arken.3725:

Just fought a few professions today in a duel and found some interesting facts. Rangers Troll Unugent, which is on a 25 second cool down, heals for 10-12k.. This to me is insane. Symbol of resolve is on a 40sec cd healing for 8.5k. Does anyone here see a problem with this? Guardians are still the most immobile profession, requiring one to stand still for paltry benefits while others have free mobility along with boons. I still can’t wrap my head around this. There are other issues that I see but another Guardian nerf? I’d be very surprised and insulted at the same time.

I don’t know why you’re insulted. It takes 10 seconds for TU to apply its heal. It’s a heal over time. You could be dead before you get the full effect. Heals over times don’t save lives, burst healing does.

I’m not a big advocate of healing power builds, though I do have one that uses about 800 that I pull out once in a while. I’m well aware that healing power takes away from attack stats. I just don’t want anyone getting confused on how everything works.

magicthighs.5372:

ComeAndSee.1356:

Aza.2105:

I feel that many players tend to think about how old style mmos work, i.e soak up damage with mitigation. Its true to a extent in gw2 but toughness, armor and vitality should be considered more of a buffer that is used when you make a error. Dodge is the real mitigation in game, along with block and blind.

That is the case in sPvP, but not for WvW.

Toughness, Vitality, and Armor generally works fine on every class, but Thiefs and Warriors basically ignore your armor with certain abilities.

My Thief -> Stonetouch Venom -> Shadowstep -> Haste -> Cloak n Dagger -> Backstab -> Heartseeker = you’re dead.

None of those abilities ignore armor. Condition damage, however, does.

While this is true, the sentiment is that because crit damage can be increased so much it causes the abilities to feel as though they bypass armor on crits because they hit so tremendously hard. I understand the sentiment, but I disagree with the notion that it’s “too much damage.”

Keep in mind, that in order for it to be mathematically possible to be struck by a Backstab crit in the 9000-10k range against a 3200 armor target, the thief needs to have a lot of factors on his side. Might, vuln, Executioner, Eagle runes/full Divinity, Bloodlust stacks, and so on and so on. Every once in a while all of those factors are bound to combine in such a way as to cause you to get hit for what seems like a disproportionate amount of damage. Especially against a zerg.

I’d be really interested in seeing screenshots of people getting hit for that much damage 1v1. It shouldn’t be possible. What is possible is the much more reasonable 5-6k backstab.

I know someone’s going to get incensed at my use of the word “reasonable” with respect to a single hit dealing 6k damage, but what I mean by reasonable here is that it’s completely within the realm of possibility for a single person, given the amount of damage that Backstab does, to actually hit for that much.

Bumping this so people see it, I’ve gotten some PMs from people who can’t find it.

Seconding Stand Your Ground working brilliantly against Kholer. Can pretty much facetank him with impunity.

But that’s a monster – there’s the possibility that it’s different with players. I haven’t really paid much attention in WvW to that specifically but I don’t notice any issues with abilities respecting stability.

Oh by the way, since it’s relevant – take a look at this reddit thread for most if not all of the healing power coefficients and how much healing they do with various healing power levels:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/122puj/guardian_values_for_various_healing_skills_based/

Roxtar.6487:

Healing isn’t the best. It’s not terrible, but it’s hard to justify prioritizing heal power for PvE since toughness reduces damage more against higher damage since it divides damage done. …

So take this as you will, but also remember that the higher damage from enemies in dungeons will be reduced better by toughness since it is multiplicative as opposed to heal power which just heals. In PvP this is different since there is a much smaller cap on damage dealt.

This is a little misleading. If you have for example 2600 armor and you take a hit from something with 1800 power and a skill coefficient of 1, you’ll take approximately 700 damage. A harder strike, say one with a coefficient of 2, would do exactly twice as much damage. A really hard hit from a boss, say with a coefficient of 10, would do 10 times as much damage. All things being equal, the strength of the skill is a multiplier and regardless of your armor value they all respect the multiplier.

Saying that armor “divides damage done” is extremely misleading. It does, sort of. The calculation for damage is [(Skill specific power coefficient * Power * Weapon damage)/Armor]. But the way you say it, sounds like if all things are equal and the hit is larger in damage, your armor takes a proportionally larger amount of the damage away and that’s not true.

Roxtar.6487:

Power for instance has a ~1.2-1.7 ratio for each invested point depending on the weapon’s skills.

This varies a lot by class, by typically autoattacks have a power coefficient of less than 1 for the first few hits and then higher than 1 for the last hit, rarely going higher than 1.5. Scepter has a coefficient of .66 on its autoattack. There are a lot of skills with coefficients lower than 1. (To clarify for anyone that doesn’t know, each skill has a “power coefficient” associated with it which determines how much of your Power stat is actually applied to it in order to determine the damage of the skill. If a particular skill’s tooltip says it does more damage than another of the same weapon, the reason for this is because it’s power coefficient is higher.)

Roxtar.6487:

Heal power in contrast deals with damage by straight healing it, however only heals for around ~0.3 per heal point on a hammer, and a little bit more for a mace (maybe as high as 0.4? haven’t actually mathed it out).

What healing are you talking about from hammer? Hammer has no heals. If you’re talking about Altruistic Healing through symbols/boon based blast finishers, then Altruistic Healing has a healing power coefficient of .01 (yes, one percent). The coefficient for Faithful Strike, the last hit of the mace autoattack chain which heals on hit, is .18.

Roxtar.6487:

I have no idea where “ComeAndSee” got his 1:1 ratio – it’s not possible.

While it’s true that healing power doesn’t translate directly to healing per second, even on yourself (you heal yourself more than everyone else), with a dedicated healing build you can absolutely heal yourself for upwards of a thousand HP per second, and everyone else in short range of you for 400-500, using a combination of the mace, Regeneration symbol, and various other abilities. That’s in a sterile environment though, and in practice you rarely get that much out of it. 600-800 is definitely reasonable though if you’re good. I’d show you exactly how, but I’ve since overwritten my healing calculations for other builds and I don’t really feel like taking the time to rebuild it. >_>

I can’t tell if you’re joking.

My thief has never pulled one of these mythical 9k backstabs before. My ganking ability is fairly limited 1v1, and I think the highest backstab I’ve ever pulled solo is something like 5k, maybe 6. In groups, yeah when there’s tons of might flying around I can get like 6.5k but I don’t think I’ve topped 7k yet. Never had 25 might stacks to do it though. For comparison, my Guardian gets 5k Zealot’s Defense crits when I’m in my WvW roaming build, solo with no might. But even my guardian isn’t a “gank” spec – I use sword/shield and scepter/shield for WvW roaming when I’m not one of my tankier builds. If I wanted to gank I’d do sword/focus with tons of crit and crit damage and pray for a kill every 45 seconds when I can pull off a Shield of Wrath/ZD combo.

That said, yeah I run D/D and P/D on my thief. It’s fun. But I’m not one of these horrific monsters that everyone seems to hate. I’ve never had a cheap, easy kill solo. Unless you count that time I was surprised by someone walking in on me in Mistwrought and I wasted them, realizing after that they were upleveled.

But this isn’t about me, and your ridiculous, apparently angry attempt at character assassination doesn’t change the fact that you can’t backstab through Aegis and protection reduces damage by 33% and vigor is your friend, etc etc etc.

I’ll tell you what is kitten crap, though – the permastealth C&D wall glitch. That’s ridiculous and should absolutely be fixed immediately. No one should be able to park and stealth indefinitely.

P.s., the only dagger thief that I’ve ever had trouble with is that rotten kitten from Sanctum of Rall who has double Incinerators. I see him a lot, and I see him killing people solo a lot. Given the fact that he has double Incinerators though, I think he has a lot of free time and has probably practiced quite a bit and knows what he’s doing, so I don’t really mind when he does kill people. He’s never gotten me though, that I can recall. Never seen him 1v1 anyone though. Typically it’s him popping in and out of the zerg. Funny thing is, if anyone can chain Immobilize him and drop a load of AoE, he drops really fast.

MHE Tiger.4875:

@ComeAndSee

I messaged you in game, I figured it would have been easier to talk.

But I am not necessarily traited for healing power, how do you suggest doing so?

Just FYI, tanking through healing power is just one way to do it. There are other ways, and healing power is not a miracle cure to being able to facetank. I facetank some of the more obnoxious bosses without more than 300 from traits.

Obtena.7952:

I was unaware of the diminishing returns on armor stat. Is that well documented somewhere so we can review it? I would like to see where those percentages are derived.

Additional damage reduction gained by adding armor is given as the formula:

Additional Armor/[Original Armor + Additional Armor]

You can plug in numbers to see how that works out, but essentially the more armor you have, the less you gain by adding more. It’s not a super extreme diminishing return but it does get less effective. If you want, I can derive that for you, but you can PM me for that.

You’re not going to tank any better by hoarding Armor. 3k to 3.2k is plenty of Armor in order to “tank” in GW2. More than that is too much, and you’re sacrificing damage stats.

Tanking involves a lot of things, not the least of which is knowing when to time your dodges (and having a constant source of Vigor), having a way to cleanse conditions reliably when you need it most (Soldier runes and/or Pure of Voice + Shouts, for example) and having sources of blind, Aegis, block, projectile reflect/absorbs, etc.

Fortunately, Guardians have those in spades. See the boss winding up for a big attack? Pop Retreat for a free block. Or roll out of the way. Don’t just stand there and take the hits.

Edited to add: When people say armor is useless in bulk, what they mean is that there is a diminishing returns on armor. Adding 200 armor to 3000 armor adds an additional 6.25% damage reduction, whereas adding 200 armor to 3200 will give you 5.88% additional damage reduction. So you get less for the same amount of armor.

The main problem with your argument isn’t so much that when you directly compare the two, the Guardian’s option doesn’t compare well. It does. Sort of. The problem is the off-hand. Warriors have Mace, which gives them a massive knockdown. They also have Axe, which gives a massive AoE. Sword gives a ranged bleed, and their shield skills are quite a bit better. And let’s not forget – that #3 cripple/immobilize directly combos into their Burst skill, which is a multi-hit medium damage and massive bleed skill.

So in the end, how it really compares is this: Guardians get a decent range closing, hard hitting autoattack with a temperamental projectile-based #3 skill. Warriors get a decent range closing, bleed-pumping machine with a very good F1 DPS skill and plenty of control in the form of immobilize and cripple to go along with the leap. Then they have the much better off-hand options.

Amins.3710:

Sure Arken…. Got me there…./rolls eyes.

If symbols are following the target, then what about the combo?

I don’t see any reason not to make it a mobile light field. Leaping into it, blasting within it, projectiles on the way to the person marked, etc would all work as normal.

Symbols do okay damage. But just okay. I hit for 3k just hitting one target with Sword Wave. Your symbol would have to do quite a bit more than autoattack damage for me to be impressed with its damage capability, and that’s ignoring the fact that someone can walk right out of it were they so inclined.

Just to clarify: I was suggesting that the symbol follows the enemy, not you. In other words, anyone that was meleeing the enemy would still give you the benefit of AH. It would also have the effect of potentially scattering lines of enemies, which would be an interesting mechanic for purposes of field control.

As for it being a “learn to play” issue, I have 800 hours on my Guardian, I run both tank and damage specs and have multiple sets of exotics (one for each spec), yadda yadda yadda. I know what I’m talking about. This was me ruminating over a random idea, hence the title of the thread.