Guild Wars 2

Cormac.3871:

Are you saying that all those zerkers who complain about lower dps builds because they reduce the chance of success are bad players?

If they complain about not being able to success instead of the efficiency of the run, then yes. If you can solo it, why do you need a team?

Let’s be honest, most players in this game that play with zerker gear are facerolling during boss fights.

I thought that “play-how-you-want” doctrine originally referred to a team composition, not builds.

I confess to made this event bugged on vabbi and whiteside ridge. Happens when the historian has this living story debuff.

What is wrong with melandru except not entering healing phase and not resetting when you get out of the combat?

I created one of the greatest build ever that was centered around spirit weapons. Here are the two examples of its gameplay, you can clearly see the viability of this build as well as its efficiency.

http://youtu.be/PfmilDFq7yQ
http://youtu.be/zjwcNbMrrT8

Shame.

You just described the typical more-than-one-year-ago tactics of 99.9% groups which were really bad. I would direct you to the arah guide I had pleasure to write but it’s no longer available. However you could try watching some of the solos to learn a bit more about his attacks and how to counter them.

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Most events can be solo’d, outside of world bosses, temples (depends on scaling) and the karka stuff (doable, but so fustrating). Are you in full exotics/using a build that is good for pve?

You can solo a few world bosses, including temple ones.

Cormac.3871:

One zerker is going to have a bad time in a party that’s relatively low dps.

One bad zerker.

Syn Sity.5826:

What exactly do you do when you find yourself in a group with four people who actually know how to dodge/mitigate damage and don’t need your support?

I would practise for incoming (at least datamined) Tag Team instability!

Why would you want to stay far away from him? Make him kite you!

Staff is okay for damage if you have decent offensive support but it’s more boring gameplay than pure lightning hammer builds. On the other hand when you try to use staff as a support/cc weapon you are overestimating your efficiency and you might as well swap staff to other weapon sets that are more useful.

ProtoGunner.4953:

IMO it’s still pretty ridiculous for such a huge AAA MMO not having new challenging content with more tactical bosses/for bigger parties (at least 10 ppl). We only have Lupi and a handful of other ‘raid like’ bosses.

Comapred to other MMOs that have around 10-20 and up to 100 (WoW) such bosses GW2 seems totally out of competition and has to be addressed.

What needs to be addressed first is the aoe limit. Unless you’d like to turn dungeons into world bosses.

Like (Double) Tag Team aka Who wants to leech?

Solo temples.

Best piece of advice – do not use staff. It’s a horrible weapon.

Bart Weird.9671:

You played a warrior a profession basically made to play in melee range. I just can’t understand why you want to hinder your groupmate’s gameplay to force him to play in your comfort zone.

And guardian wasn’t? Before some beta weekends he didn’t even have 900 range weapon. Iirc it was only because of wvw-ers complaining about lack of ranged options that anet increased scepter range to 1200, though they forgot to improve speed of the projectiles which clearly shows that scepter was designed as a short range weapon.

Bart Weird.9671:

Impressive or not try this with a melee weapon!

Sure, done it.

IceBlink.4317:

• Fire Shaman – while Shaman scales fairly well to small teams, he still hits hard, so might want to go range. His fire ember stages don’t scale well, you will generally spend more time defeating those to reduce the meter rather than fight Shaman.

His damage output doesn’t scale at all, only hp. And he hits hard with almost no tell. Ranged is probably much easier.

• Temple of Balthazar - apparently it will be easier to do the escorting part with morale with a smaller team as the risen scaling system will account for it and not throw as many vets, and no elites or champs.

Done it with about 7 people, mobs can still nuke npcs, especially nobles with their shadowsteps. CCs and baiting their AoEs by yourself is advised. Balthazar himself dies very fast, under 1 minute.

• Temple of Dwayna – scales decently to small teams

Her damage output doesn’t scale at all, she hits as hard with 100 people and solo. Only difference is Malchor’s Tears attack which scales with the number of the people.

• Temple of Grenth – scales decently to small teams in the Risen priest, but the second part (defend) doesn’t scale to small teams. Two champions will always spawn at set times (not at same time), and a small team will generally not have the DPS to take it down along with the mobs coming to attack the NPC.

Geekfox.4267:

For Temple of Grenth cleansing event, it can be done with 8 people if the group is OP.

You can duo defense event assuming you avoid getting pulled by champion spider and interrupt champion wraith. Obviously having high dps is needed.

• Temple of Melandru – scales well to small teams. If the priest repeatedly turns everyone into lizards (why lizards?) and heals up, there might be problems. The defend part scales to small numbers and will not spawn champs if the criteria does not reach a certain amount of players.

Soloable even with healing phase if you use certain trick. Soloable easily without healing phase. His damage also doesn’t scale. Defense event is very easy even for alone player.

Overall, doing world events solo or with few people shows what’s wrong with scaling mechanics. Most of the bosses, if not all, scale their hp only, damage output remains at the same level. On top of that, thanks to the 5 aoe limit, if you are the part of the zerg you can go for a smoke leaving your character on autoattack and still survive and receive gold rewards. World bosses need to have their attacks not affected by this limitation. It would improve vastly those fights and force people to use their brains.

KazNaka.4718:

what about the dredge fractal bug:
in the car room, you attack but it doesn’t hit the mobs, it doesn’t say invulnerable either. No numbers, nothing appears.

You’re probably attacking clown car.

IceVyper.6810:

That is my point exactly, I do not want to do mindless zergy meta events in order to get dragonite ore. The same applies for many other players. The events may seem fun the first couple of times but in the end become a boring chore. How many times do I have to slay Jormag so I can craft one ascended sword? Pristine relics could offer that possibility, it is an alternative way to get the ore. It can be compared to the obsidian shards. You can get those with karma. But if you don’t want to do endless event chains to get that karma, you can buy them with fractal relics.

You don’t need to do zergy events. If you’re playing on one of the EU servers you can come along for the temple of melandru event, I could use someone else. Soloing it is definitely not zerging.

Though getting more sources of dragonite would be welcomed. I’m swimming with empyreal fragments, not to mention bloodstone dust.

Relativity.3264:

What are you smoking – there are dredge all over the floor of the first room. The first thing you see when you get dredge is that they added dredge

You had level 80 and you’ve never seen those spawns? Were you resigning on the first sight of underground facility fractal?

You said that!

Shadowmoon.7986:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

We’re currently looking at a few things regarding individual fractal difficulty and length. A couple of options are reducing the length of unnecessarily long fractals (dredge)

when they only change was to add more dredge including a veteran that has way more health than other vets in the panel room (what makes the fractal tale longer) you can put 2 and 2 together.

They didn’t add any dredges. They just fixed their spawns.

Stooperdale.3560:

At top of the cliffside fractal it is possible to be stunned by the hammer on the seal at the same time that adds spawn that are not sunned. These adds essentially get a free kill of the squishy classes before the stun wears off.

This bug have been present for few months and you’d know if this if you hadn’t been using faster “tactics”.

Astralporing.1957:

Yes, zerker guards have way better dps capabilities than bunker/hybrid builds. That’s nothing new, right?

Yes, in a group. Zerker guard solo is not exactly the epitome of dps if there are no reflections involved since he cannot buff himself offensively. And he used a scepter.

Lopez.7369:

Lv. 33: Outflanked – Enemies do more damage when attacking from behind or the sides.

It doesn’t change anything for berserker metagame.

Lv. 36: Losing Control – Outgoing control effects have reduced effectiveness.

Blind is considered as contol effect by this instability.

Lopez.7369:

Lv. 40: Agonizing Expedition – You are frequently afflicted with agony.

Pointless gearcheck, nothing else. Forces you to have enough ar that you would take 1%/tick which only trivializes whole instability plus scales 40-49.

Lv. 42: Lethargic – Reduced endurance regeneration.

This changes nothing with zerkers.

Lv. 43: Bloodlust – Combat is agonizing. Get a kill for relief. (You take increasing damage each time you hit an enemy, based on your health. A single tick is 0.1 percent of your max health. Each hit causes one tick.)

This instability is seriously bugged because you don’t get relief after you kill an anemy that thanks to anet great anti-farming mechanics will not give any loot, experience or stack for sigils. This for instance includes lava elementals at shaman, cliffside chanters at arm seals.

Lv. 47: Antielitism – Elite skills cause death.

Shouldn’t kill you if you cancel elite.

Overally, most instabilities are annoying and achieve nothing.

Vissarion.6509:

it takes more for a pug actually, not everybody running with a preready zerk group..

You realize he was solo’d by a guardian, in about 13 minutes at old scale 48 which had more extreme scaling? If it takes more than 5 minutes to kill him your team has horribly low dps capabilities.

Cottontail.8526:

The legendary at the beginning of the cliff-side fractal is even worse. Why does that guy exist? The fractal is long enough already, why do we need to stall for 5 minutes on a pointless legendary? Just put the hammer on top of the altar at his feet. The entire thing is just stalls and gimmicks.

It doesn’t take 5 minutes to kill him.

Fractal Rewards Issues

• Got 37 empyreal fragments at scale 45. Before this long awaited patch it would have been 45 fragments.

Mai Trin

• You might get 9s long agony by moving near the entrance.

Molted Duo

• Effigy often starts to reset during the fight even when attacked.
• You might get 9s long agony by moving on the edges of the arena.
• Sometimes when you wipe you restart at arena instead at the beginning of the fractal.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Cliffside Fractal
• I applaud the devs for trying to fix the Archdiviner exploit which trivialized the encounter. However, their fix is pretty lame. Essentially, the Archdiviner gets 2-3 seconds of free attacks on the party. On several occasions a party member has been given 3 stacks of agony because he spawned the red circles under him during the stun phase. This isn’t a huge deal with max AR, but for people with imperfect gear it becomes a simple RNG gear check which is not how the encounter was intended to be.

That was the case since they remade stun you get while hitting the seal.

They didn’t add any dredges. You cannot add something to infinity.

On the serious note, frankly, they didn’t add more dredges. Initial spawns were bugged and were only appearing when you had got underground fractal while rerolling and then got it again.

Difficult and new fractals in one sentence don’t make much sense.

Izu.8123:

Try Dredge Fractal 30+

What’s so hard about them?

Xae Isareth.1364:

Some instabilities are more challenging than others, so it makes esne for them to appear on later levels. However, I don;t have a clue why level 36’s is there, it does practically nothing, especially given how useful CC is in this game….

Blind is a CC.

BaconCatTheGreasy.9542:

So basically pander to the entitled millennials?

Or being reasonable? I see there’s a thread about dredge fractal being too long/annoying/hard. Should they stop whining as well? Fractals were divided by tiers rather poorly.

Cynz.9437:

don’t me wrong, i don’t like new fractals but what you said is a lie

realistically you couldn’t complete high lv fractals w/o having AR in some fights, especially jade maw

You could have completed all fractals except maw with 0 AR

ozma.3498:

Ranged weapons are much more suitable on Shaman, kind of like when soloing Lupicus meleeing is much more suitable, since you don’t get hit by projectiles etc. People don’t start criticizing players for doing that, so I don’t see why it’s appropriate here.

You can sidestep projectiles at lupi the same way you can sidestep arrows at shaman.

If there is some kind of unspoken rule that you should always use the worst choice of weapon as some kind of community-imposed gambit, then Warriors for example, should stop using GS since it provides an extra dodge, or offhand sword since it provides an extra block.

No one cried about that yet.

phys.7689:

from what i heard thats a matter of opinion. The new instabilities make you alter and adapt your playstyle, the old made you refine it. However i hear the 50 is about the same as the old 50

I haven’t altered anything yet. In fact I started to facetank most of the bosses since they no longer one hit me and thanks to the required ar of scale 40 everyone is almost guaranteed to have enough ar to completely forgot about its existance.

phys.7689:

It was never meant to be equal to the old 80. They didnt really mean for people to be playing those levels (even though you were able to get there) its supposed to be a more interesting 31-50

And it’s easier than old 31-50.

Cynz.9437:

nobody forces you to play high lv fractals, rewards are almost same outside of higher chance for wep skin

Nobody forces you to do anything. Doesn’t mean gear checks are okay in the game that claims skill should triumph gear.

Before this wonderful update you could complete high level fractals without necessary AR by being skillful. Thanks to the new awesome instabilities it’s now impossible when you are being struck by agony every 10s while in combat.

Fractals became even worse than I’d expected. From skillful challenging content they were remade into faceroll gear check content.

ozma.3498:

My point was that if you’re chaining reflects and kiting in between, then the only extra difficulty a melee player faces is the slow AoE you can walk out of and the spinning attack, which compared with many bosses in the game isn’t too fast, and is very easy to see since it’s a big boss model hovering above the ground.

And an arrow.

And like Wethospu said, they are chaining reflects even more easier so what exactly does make it harder?

Plus, you will rarely find people in this subforum genuine impressed when you mostly use ranged attacks, whatever content you do.

Make thread, preferably hundreds of them. Anet listens always. They removed tafu, they removed flamekissed skin, they might remove underground facility fractal.

Kojiden.8405:

Yes, I do want to negate the point of repeatedly throwing yourself into infinitely spawning dredge.

It’s a defense event, not kamikaze bombing. Besides, you could do it at scale 80 solo without dying.

Cynz.9437:

but ya i would never run that map w/o thief

Is it too hard? What would you do if instability that forbids you from stealth existed? Actually, that one was datamined.

You might need a thief if you want to negate whole point of that part.

Manuhell.2759:

Forced agony checks were there even before. People just had ways to skip them.
So, basically, nothing changed.

No. You could run fotm scales 40-49 with 45 ar relatively simply by not being hit by bosses and using water fields/tome at maw. Currently, if you progress normally you need 50-55 ar to complete scale 40 which makes all other scales relatively faceroll since you have already nullified agony damage to 1%/tick. That in turn makes all agony inflicting mechanics virtually pointless, except maybe decreasing heals by 50% (I’m sure that’s the point of agony).

lordkrall.7241:

You do know that it is actually much EASIER to get Agony Resist now than it was before the update, right?

I wasn’t aware that getting additional requirements for AR qualifies as easier. But maybe it’s just me.

Your sarcasm detector is broken.

Konu.1826:

While one can skip level 40, doing so is clearly an exploit. Anet put the instability there for a reason, if you can’t pass it you are not supposed to progress.

Can’t argue with that.

Swamp should be the only fractal in the first pool.

BaconCatTheGreasy.9542:

I didn’t say it was an exploit. I said it was being exploited. It’s clearly not intended and should be removed. FOTM is billed as 4 random instances, not Swamp+3 Random Instances.

To my knowledge it wasn’t called 3 Random Instances + Maw either.

Azzer.8137:

Can’t you just do a 41 twice and skip 40?, ofcourse 50 you can’t skip this way but 40 there is a workaround.

Yes, that’s what some people will surely do. And that’s what everyone that was arguing for reset was saying, that we haven’t done new instabilities thus we do not deserve having our reward level at 50 from the start.

Yet skipping scales is perfectly fine. Very logical, I must admit.

I see your memory is fuzzy. Not a good sign at this age! I was on a warrior and that was scale 79.

Ascalon at higher levels with new very courageous npcs is a bit annoying fractal, especially when said npcs pull 4 groups of vets.

Though the last boss is now easier than bloomhunger.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Yeah Weth and haviz, you shouldn’t enter the high level fractals if you aren’t ready.

So, I’m just a little confused because I really haven’t gotten into actual fractals yet since the patch. What is the agonizing expedition? Does it make agony more effective? Does it require more?

I have 55 ar.

But I do not see the point of having this instability at X0 levels (40, 50, …). It basically makes whole agony mechanic pointless or forces you to skip those levels. Before this great and awesome update you could do tier 40-49 with 45 AR. This update lowered required ar (55ar to get 1%/tick, before that was 6%/tick) yet you need more ar to do first level of that tier.

I do not compute.

Can’t we all get along? Cookie is the best anyway.