Which makes it 25% damage reduction if you exclude critical hits. So averagely you can achieve 50.25% damage reduction with those two buffs. Now, add to that random dodges, blinds and other forms of active defense like arcane shield or frost aura and your survivability increases more than marginally. Maybe if you stop exaggerating how everything one shots you, you will be able to complete this fractal with less issues.
Alternatively, start being more restrictive when pugging and kick dead weights or start using your friend list made up of people you find decent enough. It’s not hard thing to accomplish.
And as I said multiple times, stacking weakness and protection requires no coordination hence can be done by pugs. Also, if weakness had 100% damage reduction you’d get hit for 0 damage.
@Haviz you don t pug.
You should know that is hard even to ask to let you aggro.
You can t position.
Protection is useless in ascalon with pugs…attack rate+ damage is too high.
I pug fractal daily since release…and i never found myself in a party trying to do this fractal in a tactical way.
At that point you need something extemely easy.
If you consider few groups let you do the pull train when they have 2 mesmers (requires only to let mesmers aggro), you can see why what you say won t work.
How is protection useless? It’s not a buff that has number of uses like arcane shield. It’s continuously active, same as weakness.
And i wrote something about pugs, explaining and time.
Also two easier brainless tactics.
Stacking those buffs and debuffs doesn’t require any sort of coordination, i.e. you don’t lose protection duration when you use it too soon since they stack in duration. There’s virtually no difference in support capabilities when you compare pug and guild team while using same team composition. Do you not claim that every pug team requires at least 1 guardian (with 2 being optimal)? 1 guardian can give you permanent protection and getting weakness is trivial thanks to skale venom or glyph of elemental power if you play as an ele.
You need to bring more support (protection, weakness) and controls (knockdowns, chills, blinds), brute force and killing before being killed doesn’t always work.
I’m sorry, Miku, but judging from that comment, I have to say that you are not a good Ele. But don’t worry, you’re a great War. lol
Watch this vid for a proper pre-stack with both Dragon’s Tooth and Comet without a target. You can see I get to 18 Might solo. I recorded this in DR just now.
Edit: On the reliability note, I land DT on Flamewall every single time, and I land Comet on it 60-80% of the time. As long as you bug the camera angle all the way up, DT will always land the same distance away from you. As long as you bug the camera angle all the way down, Comet will almost always land the same distance away from you. It’s all about positioning.
In order to land DT between two mobs if they are not stacked you have to use this trick which takes time (unless you are a computer). Ground target would remove this annoyance.
because at higher level any trash mob will have legendary HP and will onehsot you with every attack
Healing area for 12.000 damage, rish for 18.000, lava font for 11.000 per tick before the aoe appears and so on.
That under the fire of sieges that perma knockback and while in minority.
Also mobs will hit you without LoS.
Its pure annoyance that makes no sense.
Its not hard but will probably cause 1-3 wipes making the fractal long and unfun despite everyone in the end will succeed.
You need to bring more support (protection, weakness) and controls (knockdowns, chills, blinds), brute force and killing before being killed doesn’t always work.
Why shouldn’t they? If they are contributing to the fight and not afking in a corner, why shouldn’t they be rewarded?
And besides, my post was about introducing more bosses where fighting them in melee is discouraged. Imagine a boss with an aura around them that constantly inflicts three stacks of Bleed/Poison/Torment per second and a heavy hitting melee cleave attack; kiting him and fighting at range would be the safest strategy. Fighting this guy in melee would be tantamount to suicide unless you were ridiculously tanky.
Ranged gameplay is already too easy, let’s not make it encouraged more than it is. Challenging aspects of the game should be different than kiting while permanently crippling/chilling/immoblizing bosses.
I’ve never had any problem soloing anything in Arah with engie, apart from maybe Alphard without abusing LOS or reflects. I don’t know why you think Arah needs some kind of special comp for the portions that aren’t straight DPS when the stealth provided by the engie’s smoke blast combo is already more than you need to speed past all the trash that you don’t need to kill.
If it was P3 I’d be inclined to agree since stealth blast doesn’t really work (you need Shadow Refuge) for the spawn at the first gate and the skips after Crusher and Lupi, but this isn’t P3.
Moreover, Engies do just fine in movement with Jump Shot, Acid Bomb, and Rocket Boots. If anyone’s slowing down the group during skips it’d most likely be the eles you seem to be so keen on bringing.
What’s so hard to understand that it’s not the issue of difficulty but efficiency?
Hendo and others claimed to have tested Guang’s build in Arah 2 and said it sucked due to externalities not necessarily related to Guang’s dps (although they claimed his build wasn’t max dps) but related to the nature of speed clearing in general; ie. run speed, the practicality of applying vuln and stealth and other factors Guang may not have taken into account.
To avoid further misundertandings, we didn’t test engineer potential. We tested his “ideal” team composition for arah p2:
By working on paper I meant that it works as everything you do, in vacuum. I’m sorry I wasn’t more specific earlier.
“We accidentally launched the Aboms out of a stack and they wiped us.”
Aboms can easily wipe you when they are being launched out of a stack. Their ranged attack that don’t happen when stacked is an extremely deadly projectile that only the best players in this game can avoid.
I wish I didn’t have to use sarcasm but that’s impossible. It’s not even a theorycrafting folklore anymore.
Are my posts over the top some times (well probably most of the time)? Sure.
It doesn’t change the problematic topics I try to approach with a QA point of view.
Being clear what is wrong in my opinion. Giving examples. If possible giving ideas how to fix it.
You “would have partially agreed” with what I said, if I just expressed myself differently tells me, that in the end, you have partially agreed.
Otherwise you would have not written this answer.
To explain what I meant:
toughness and vitality are far from being useless. They are less efficient.
one shot mechanics is a myth constantly being repeated on those forums. A vast majority of bosses cannot one shot you, especially when you use “useless” defensive gear, utilities and weapons.
every single class cannot avoid all incoming damage that frequent, let alone when you disregard specialisations. Can you do that on a necro or a squishy ele?
The problematic topic exists because the game needs changes but most of the proposals don’t consider issues that they might introduce.
But don’t you see that melee stacking, zerker gear meta, the uselessness of toughness and vitality, the etablishment of one shot mechanics, and many more flaws are the direct result of the ablility of every single class no matter of specialisation to avoid all incoming damage very frequently?
I have been playing MMO’s as melee DD (HoX in AoC, Bounty Hunter in AC2), and still every encounter had a benefit of variation.
The problem of GW2 PvE is that you have 8 classes, but in the end, it feels like every class plays the same with a bit of gimmicky utility.
So what is the point? Stacking is not the problem, it is the result of the combat system in GW2, that narrows down the gameplay to the most simplistic approach to group content I have ever seen in a MMO.
On the other hand, I like the fast paced combat why soloing or doing open world stuff (yeah I know, that’s for noobs and stuff), it is just that I really prefer a multiplayer game to not feel like every dungeon is made for a group and not for a bunch of individuals that are just doing their own stuff till the boss is dead.
I would have agreed partially with you if you hadn’t used that many hyperboles.
Dodging in this game is probably the biggest flaw of them all. Nothing funny about that.
A free way to neglect any kind of damage every few seconds at any place no matter of character build? Good luck designing any engaging content with this mechanic in game…
I’m not surprised you hate mechanics that allow squishy characters to avoid most of the damage.
From what I understood of what you were trying to imply, you tried to stack on the Aboms before Lupi but blasted them out of the stack with some engie skill and got steamrolled as a result, and decided to blame it on the profession rather than the player.
If by steamrolled you mean killing mobs slower because of that than I guess you are right. We kittened that up and got steamrolled. I mean, do you really think that aboms being not stacked is the problem for anyone? They are soloable…
There is a reason why I don’t take any of you rT guys seriously. You can fix that though by actually backing up some of the claims you’ve made, you realize you’ve collectively done nothing but go “lol u suck we totally did it better but there’s no proof” for like the last four pages.
The feeling’s mutual.
Incidentally, I just soloed Arah P2 with my engie in six minutes including the loading screen and without skipping any cutscenes, let’s see you beat that.
You can submit that to gwscr.com, we’ll try to beat that without engie.
As long as it is faster to keep them in the stack it will be used in speedruns. I thought we were discussing them, not casual play-how-you-want runs. But hey, what do I know about playing the game? After all, love arrows are so hard to dodge. From range.
I wasn’t the one counting them as new content. The person I discussed with was and I just used the same logic, since he/she/it wanted to use that logic at only part of the things added.
And it tells a lot about the state of the content in gw when you have to resort to that.
1) Stealth for skips. Engineer can provide this.
2) Reflects for Lupi. Engi or ranger could technically do this but mesmer is probably ideal. Mesmer helps with Alphard too since 100% reflect uptime and she does a lot of damage to herself as well.
3) Lots of DPS for everything else.
So ideally you’d probably want to go something like EA warrior, staff ele, DPS-spec rifle/nade engie, reflect-spec mesmer, and Spotter/FS ranger.
Ideal wasn’t so ideal because once again you forgot that dungeon run isn’t just few fights with some bosses that do nothing like dummies in LA.
There are a grand total of 2 instabilities that are “gear gating” (the same was already there in the form of unavoidable Jade Maw btw, but I suppose we ignore that). One at lvl 40 and the other at lvl 50.
Which still means a grand total of NINE instabilities that should be counted as new content (by your logic) seeing as every single one from lvl 31 to lvl 40 is fully possible to do without the gear gate.
If you count instabilities as a new content, maybe we should count gem store items as well?
Since we’re going nowhere with this, how about we get an actual video of the alleged engie run, so we can see how bad it allegedly was?
If we’re just going on the basis of “we totally did this (in secret) and it was pretty bad” I could just sit here and claim I did a record run solo with an engie in full clerics gear and beat the existing records but oops i forgot to record it so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
I don’t think you know how speedrun attempt looks like.
I’ll take that to mean you recognize the DPS potential but botched the rotation and something silly happened when you actually tried it in a dungeon.
I’m willing to wait until engies eventually become meta on their own and haviz and hendo and whoever else from rT (Dub?) all start pretending they were running engies from the start. I’m not going anywhere, this forum keeps me entertained one way or another.
We weren’t trying engies, we were testing your team composition for arah p2 that includes an engie. The dps potential of it was rather average and could be improved massively with few changes. Not to mention viability of few builds in certain encounters you obviously forgot to factor in.
Dungeon speedrun is not a set of bosses fights in vacuum.
I’m sort of confused. Are you all testing engi? I read Guang’s engi post on the DnT forums and saw his video. His numbers seemed plausible at the very least.
We were doing arah p2 run with his recommended team composition and I was completely blown away by the result. I am verry sorry to doubt, I wish I knew earlier.
There was an equal problem with many players on low population servers that could not get Dragonite ore because the events where constantly contested. Or do any of the high level content.
Joining a guild is an option but even so you got to go thru the pain of setting up massive events.
I don’t know why people are whining, there are 3 zones in Orr, if they where running events with their guilds already they can scout all 3 zones to find out which events are starting.
Equal problem? People were guesting on low pop servers like Vabbi to do temples by themselves instead of roleplaying zerglings.
As far as I know I was the only one advocating DPS guardian back when everyone was on the Strife anchor AH/EM meta, and the responses back then were basically:
That’s what the detractors usually say when they know I’m right, the math is right, etc. but they don’t want to admit they’re wrong. It’s the classic “I know math, logic, experience, and common sense all support your agument but I totally did this one thing this one time and got a different result” argument that Warlord really brought back into the scene lately. Also keep in mind that the same people were playing the ‘hurr math is for nerds" card when I argued in favor of DPS guardians, DPS ranger, DPS staff ele, DPS engie, etc. And I don’t think I’ve ever been wrong on any major point.
That said, Phalanx warrior is still decent for pugs even at 15 might although you’ll probably still want to consider if it’s really worth the DPS loss. The overall boost is quite significant but the personal DPS goes to utter crap and there’s no guarantee that the other pugs are even doing any damage worth boosting. Double of nothing is still nothing.
I’ve been using dps guardian since before you started this spreadsheet war. You don’t need spreadsheets to show your point, it’s relatively easy to test in-game,
The result should be the same so it shouldn’t matter. Unless you want to stunlock mobs since you cannot stunlock 10 slowly attacking mobs but you can stunlock 2 faster attacking mobs.
Of course they do, but what i’m trying to say is that there isn’t enough build diversity and demand on supporters.
Ever seen a group that specificly ask for a supporter? If you have, then it must be rare.
It is because most players feel that a fully dps geared and traited players is more beneficial in a group.
I have seen, multiple times. Even more often than zekers.
