Guild Wars 2

I really wish the people who have just now said DPS is the only thing that matters actually read my post, it would help dispel the notion of GW2 just being a pure DPS game, but it feels like people actually want the game to just be DPS rather than educating themselves on how the game actually isn’t just pure damage and that you can make strong use of control and support at the same time.

So Mad Queen is complaining because it isn’t necessary to take a certain class for dungeons (the point on inter-class interdependence) and that supposedly CC isn’t relevant.

Okay.

To put the CC argument completely to rest:

Watch 6:20 through to 7:15 and 10:55 to 12:20.

The whole video.

There are more examples I can dig up, but I think these two get the point across. If it isn’t clear to you on the COE golem, whenever he does the wind-up to spin around and knock everyone back, he gets interrupted every single time so the party can maintain DPS as it works through its defiant except at the end when they run out of interrupts.

Regarding classes.

If you want it to be necessary to take certain classes through content, you end up with “lf healer” and “lf tank” all over again. Nobody wants that. GW2 is good because specific classes aren’t required to beat content. You can do Fractal 49 with five warriors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqtvXsJU_lY). You don’t need guardians. Guardian makes it 1000x less painful, but they’re not even close to necessary.

You also claimed warriors and guardians dominate the PvE metagame, and if you’d literally spent two seconds looking up the meta, or even looking up youtube videos from rT, DnT, SC, Kr (etc.) you’d see they aren’t. For a meta comp, basically the only requirement is one warrior for banners. Beyond that, you try as close as you can to reach the utmost in DPS (triple ele, ranger and warrior) without compromising the efficiency of the group. So for Arah this may mean a single warrior, a ranger a mesmer and then double ele. It could just mean a warrior, ranger, mesmer, ele and a thief. That way you have dps utilities/traits covered (empower allies, banners, frost spirit, spotter), reflects covered, you have elementalists stacking fury with blasts on their fire fields which means a warrior doesn’t even need to use for great justice and then you have thief to stealth on skipping sections and they can pick up fiery greatswords since they have a damage modifier when using bundles. The thief and and mesmer also have further relevance against Lupicus since the three phantasms and two allies from thieves guild makes Lupicus fire more AoE projectiles on the party which allows for more reflections.

Engineers aren’t so good in meta comps but if you are pugging and the group isn’t very competent they’re a very good carry class, able to stack might and vulnerability very efficienctly in addition to a bunch of other conditions in their dps rotations – and a number of classes have an “if enemy has conditions” or “if enemy has [x] condition” damage modifier, so it will proc that too. Quite literally the only class which has no place in the meta is necromancer, and if that is something that upsets you – then you have the backing of the whole dungeon subforum because we all think it would be great if all classes were able to fit in to dungeon groups. 7 classes out of 8 having a use though I still consider a win, and despite having basically zero utility, power necromancers do have DPS on par with warriors so it’s good if you just want a DPS.

Basically – what makes the Guild Wars 2 system great is that in order to excel at the game you need to practice active damage mitigation so as opposed to stacking defensive stats – this promotes skill and, skillful players are rewarded by blazing through content. For people who argue “you just stack in a corner and press 1”, and I open this challenge to everyone – go in to a dungeon, stack in a corner (LoS or pull the boss or whatever) and just press 1. No dodges, no utilities, no other weapon skills. If you are in berserker gear you will wipe every single time. If you are in cleric gear however, you can solo the spider queen – I issued that challenge and someone on the forum pulled it off. Bonus points if you record fractals or arah because they actually have a level of challenge to them, minus points for COF p1.

If people want a trinity, there are a lot of other MMOs where I assume instanced gameplay just involves players executing skill rotations and watching boss/ally bars, but GW2 is not that game. You need to execute your skill rotations within the confines of the encounter mechanics (e.g. you aren’t going to pull of flawless rotations on Mossman, you seriously just won’t), and while doing this you need to be supporting your team with damage mitigation, positioning, offensive boon stacking, etc. etc.

I would quit this game if ANet introduced trinity.

timezones are no excuse, i’ve stayed up till 6am doing dungeons :p

To be able to trait the mantra healing makes it much stronger and definitly worth taking. Especially combined with condi cleanse on heal wich is not available if reflection is required and only 2 traits are unlocked.

No it doesn’t.

I really like the 15 of illusions. It’s more phant uptime indeed, but I will loose about 15-20% phantasm damage due the lack of a trait and power. I think those are extremly +/- in each situation and not really a general “A is better than B”. It’s just … we are talking about 4 sec waiting while aa vs 15-20% dmg.

So you are able to replace phantasms faster and get a 9% damage modifier. Why would that be worse than a 15% phantasm modifier when compounding power scales up your reflect damage which is kind of the reason why mesmers are taken in the first place? you don’t need two phantasm damage modifiers.

But I really like to sacrifice this damage boost for the 3rd utility trait. Even if it’s just a higher survivablity for phants, condi cleanse, mantra heal, in the end it results into an increased passive damage due supporting.

Restorative mantras is basically the AH of mantras where it goads you in to using irrelevant utility skills just for the heal proc. The problem here is you’re over valuing the third inspiration trait slot when there is really just nothing worth taking. If warden’s feedback was an adept trait I’d be tempted to just run 15/30/0/10/15 for if the vuln ever gets low on a boss.

Actually more like 3% since 50%~ is phant dps (if not reflecting much)

If you’re not reflecting you’re basically not worth taking in the dungeon.

There are more than enough situations where condi remove is required and by cleansing myself with mender’s purity I can save my cleansing mantra for the others so they don’t need time to cleanse themselves or heal themselves wich results into higher passive damage

Or you could just use mantra of resolve. If that isn’t enough there’s phantasmal disenchanter or null field. I don’t see the point in trying to hold off using your mantra.

restorative mantras support the selfheal at difficult levels or when allies get hit by stuff like Mai Trin,

We don’t use restorative mantras and we do Mai Trin at Fractal 50. What actually happens is four people stay on the left side of the room while the mesmer sits on the right side to block every pistol shot so that Mai doesn’t teleport. This means restorative mantras is a complete dud since you’re out of range.

Longer reflection uptime is definitly useful, for example ascalon fractale, harpy, etc, where not single bursts have to be reflected, rather permanent volleys.

You just stealth past the harpies, and if you can’t kill a harpy within the duration of your focus and untraited (duration) feedback then your group is literally just bad. Ascalon fractal, blind is a bit more relevant.

Just because you haven’t been willing to learn better solutions to situations in dungeons doesn’t mean that your solutions are the best, especially when high level dungeon guilds don’t do anything you’ve just wrote.

There is no build you can use which performs well in all game formats.

I’m afraid you’re going to have to spend five seconds retraiting for each game mode.

And that’s exactly what i meant when i said “there’s no such thing as a mesmer meta”. Meta is for me what a lot of people use because it’s superior in dps, not too hard to play and helps your group.
If anything we could agree that power phantasm builds with reflects are the meta, while the exact build is everyone’s personal choice.
Some prefer mantras, some prefer Illusionist’s Celerity, some prefer the 3rd Inspiration trait.

It needs to be said again – your preference does not equal a good build. Meta builds are meta because they meet the acceptable trade off between damage modifiers and utility, which all meta builds strive to do (e.g. 30/30/0/0/10 mesmer is higher DPS, but with 0/30/0/25/15 you’re able to drop your DPS slightly in return for glamour and focus traiting which is deemed an acceptable tradeoff). This is why 10/30/0/20/10 and 0/30/0/25/15 are the meta builds, they hit damage modifiers and a bunch of other useful traits which are useful in a lot of instances, rather than having a full 30 in inspiration where the third trait could just be irrelevant or extremely narrow and not worth giving up the 9% damage from compounding power when a mesmer is scarce on damage modifiers already.

Most of the time you find yourself with needing 1 utility for a boss, then take blink because it’s awesome and you have one last spot for MoP/ MoR/MoC, whatever might be more useful in the next fight.

There is zero reason to take blink in any dungeon fight ever. There are literally zero fights where blink is useful.

2. As Xyonon already mentioned, Inspiration has a lot of great traits. Of course, if you don’t need reflection and don’t care about giving your group a bit of extra support (via Restorative Mantras) you don’t need the traits, but in most dungeons you will need reflect. Also the healing mantra in combination with Mender’s Purity actually opens up another utility slot because you very rarely need more/group-condi cleanse.
And I can’t even count how often my Restorative Mantras saved my pugs from wiping.

If you don’t need reflection, slot out focus traiting and stick on restorative mantras. you don’t need 30 points in that trait line. Replace glamour mastery with the 20% phantasm HP or something.

3. I dropped Illusionist’s Celerity a while ago and I never have problem with reflects. Atm Warden is still unreliable anyway and even if he is fixed you have to consider that the 3rd Inspiration trait allows you to double trait glamour

You don’t need to double trait your glamours.

On weekends, Nike streams dungeons and fractals so maybe it might be worth watching for all the situations where 30 in inspiration would be a complete dud and damage modifiers are better.

what possesses you guys to use those horrible fishnet legs, seraph boots and barbarian tops :O

you need more of the ascended look :p

It feels like we’re getting “hatred’ed” from all sides.

Deathcon.5903:

Hey I am back after a long break and started playing with this spread in sPvP, it has been awhile mind you but kitten is it effective, there is something satisfying about hitting the enemy team with a shatter that removes all their boons then mind wracking them right after. I got to say you guys have really explored the lockdown playstyle a lot in such a short time, after I craft a set of berserker gear I will begin testing builds for WvW, which is of course my favorite area. the 30/10/30 build seems like an epic Mantra group support build in WvW if your just running a small 5 man. With that said I have to say thieves are my most hated enemy, I can barely lock them down with all the stealth they have, conditions aren’t even that problematic as of yet.

Immobilise.

Every single time I PvP, if I don’t have any sort of teleport and get immobilised I literally get obliterated off the face of the earth.

It was aimed at haviz. And the lack of communication in the CDI is infuriating.

They were probably hoping it would just be a thread about dredge and then carebear topics like lore and puzzles, but when you offer the hardcores who have been ignored for over a year an outlet to express themselves, of course they’re going to shift the topic away from completely inane subjects like lore and … re-rolling and on to actual, real issues like rewards, lack of content and unskippable dialogue sequences.

I saw the exact stream he is on about, and there was quadruple FGS and a wipe.

I couldn’t find the video on the person’s profile though, maybe they took it down or I’m an idiot and couldn’t remember what it was called.

Please, please, PLEASE don’t change Lupicus. He’s probably the best boss fight in the entire game and it’s a blast performing solo kills on him.

I did use Valk as my example. It, or sin should come close to zerk damage based on math. Yes, zerk is the top dps gear, I get that.

With valk, even though you’re stacking crit damage, you have basically zero precision besides base and traiting which means you’re not really doing that much DPS since you’re not getting crits. You might as well PVT, at least that way you can stack an extra stat (toughness) that you can use reliably rather than hoping every now and then you get some crit.

Assassin is a lot closer in DPS, though it just has power and precision swapped as primary and secondary stats so that’s perfectly understandable.

You know what they say about assumptions, but hey, judge the book by it’s cover more. So the people that have run the dungeons naked must simply be terrible, correct? They weren’t wearing zerker gear…. /sarcasm

The only people who have run dungeons naked is either people doing it for a laugh or to prove that a certain type of gear (99% of times, berserker) isn’t required for clearing content. When people complained about TA F/U being too hard, people did it naked to just show how simple it is. NoTrigger has done a naked Lupicus solo too. Doing content naked is more a demonstration of skill and you mentioning that has absolutely nothing to do with the three points I’ve mentioned, so stop with the strawman. I’m not being condescending or rude so I don’t see why you can’t extend me the same courtesy.

I can understand people wanting to do dungeons in the most efficient, fastest way possible. That’s how they like to do it. Fine. Not everyone plays that way. To each their own. I highly doubt the OP was trying to join a ‘zerker only, must have 10k AP, speed clear must be melee’ group when attempting to dungeon with his girlfriend. Too many groups are simply marked ‘Story’ or ‘Px’ and that’s probably what caused his issue. Lack of clear communication on the lfg tool.

A little while ago I wrote on the lfg quite explicitly:

“Zerk + scholar runes only, experienced only, full clear”.

I got someone with rampager gear and scholar runes. I got a mesmer with eagle runes. I got a warrior with baelfire runes. The obligatory mesmer with their traveler rune set. the obligatory warrior with ruby orbs. I had to tell them all to leave. So it’s not entirely the LFG’s fault, there are people who literally don’t even read the LFGs, so it would (although possibly wrong) be a fairly reasonable assumption for me to make that the OP could have even joined a group without fully understanding the description. If they joined something which just said something like “lfm p2”, entered and then got gear checked, then sure, the LFG didn’t specify it (they should have) but at that point they can just say well okay, I don’t fit your criteria I’ll drop party.

Ugh head hurts now.
You know I never once said all “elitists” were bad players, or even bad people. Yes, like many I tend to use the term derogatorily because the more vocal portion of the group tend to be a bunch of kittens. There are also many that claim the title that, like you point out, just plain suck.

What I’ve found while reading these forums is that people who simply argue a different viewpoint are branded elitists. It’s unacceptable and the moderation should really do something about it. It’s at the point where people don’t even use the word for it’s actual meaning, it’s just flat out used as an insult. Players who are part of elite dungeon guilds are of course elitist since the guilds themselves are exclusive by their nature, but hammering the word in to peoples heads over and over again, it just gets tedious to read. That’s not to say they’re entirely in the right when they retaliate by referring to players as casuals/bads/baddies/etc., but it’s an extremely predictable reaction when you get abuse hurled at you over and over again and the other side refuses to engage in rational debate.

I have found that a lot of people are quite receptive if they are treated respectfully and not simply like trash.

People are hostile on the forum because they’re sick of arguing with brick walls. If everyone wasn’t so insistent on saying “play how you want” (which for the record they purposely take out of context – it’s referring to being able to play dps, support and control roles no matter what class you are – which is correct, not to being able to sneak in to “speed run” groups with a non-dps spec) there wouldn’t be such an acidic atmosphere rampant on the forum.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/The-elitist-bubble-that-Anet-has-created/page/2#post3748402

my post is going to be ignored by everyone

i make a constructive post

and it gets ignored

Q _ Q

Wethospu.6437:

hendo.1940:

soloing lupicus for groups sometimes provokes indifference, sometimes frustration (why didn’t you warbanner?) and sometimes you get people like this who are amazing:

http://i.imgur.com/nk4uWpr.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SBmZpMb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/St0MkUa.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8inUiJZ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/C7FppSy.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tj40vCk.jpg

and then another group

http://i.imgur.com/Xdk51Wx.jpg

Imagine how fun this was a year ago. When practically every group (exaggerating bit) was stuck on Lupicus.

If only I was even remotely competent a year ago.

I was using a guardian with AH and a zerk/knight/valk mix :/

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

[snip].

A cleric [class] is not contributing more damage than a berserker [class] that dies early on. It may surprise you but a meta guardian whirling wrath on Magecrusher while capping out on buffs and vulnerability is the equivalent to five cleric guardians doing the same thing. So basically if we take a fight like Lupicus, the zerker player can faceplant at the end of phase 1 (so basically they get grubbed, have no stability then get swiped or AOE’d while knocked down, this isn’t completely uncommon in pugs), and if we assume almost full DPS uptime for both players, the cleric player has to keep wailing on Lupicus consistently for the entire fight to equal the DPS output of the berserker who died at phase transition, which is around 75-80% of Lupicus’ HP.

Assuming a player who doesn’t run berserker is bad also is a fairly safe assumption since from my own perspective it demonstrates one or more of the following:

1. Wants to roleplay a healer or tank (not necessarily bad, just refuses to use berserker gear)
2. Doesn’t understand the concept of active damage mitigation (bad)
3. Doesn’t understand the sheer strength of direct damage so as opposed to condition damage (bad, excluding fringe circumstances, e.g. dredge fractal at level 79)

Point one links in to point two as well, they may feel they’re helping their team by healing whereas an aegis, protection or blind could do a lot more (just throwing these out as examples).

Judging on AP is pretty stupid though, at around 5,000 AP I had taken part in two dungeon world records and was able to solo Lupicus, while I’ve played with pretty high AP players who are just plain terrible. To offer an example that isn’t me, I did Arah p4 with a friend months ago and we had (I think) a 1.5k AP mesmer. And I tell you what, they were amazing, almost flawless besides a few uses of greatsword which is no bueno. And it wasn’t a euro player on NA either.

The problem I feel with the GW2 community in regards to dungeons is that there are a lot of tryhards (just look at things like “heavies only”) who are to be honest, plain terrible and have probably never left COF p1, and aren’t particularly that friendly. If you take a look at the dungeon mentor guild in the dungeon subforum, a number of the meta/arah mentors there are some of the most elite players I have played with (I was a meta mentor for a little while before stepping down from it … too many requests), but the thing is – when you reach that level of skill you don’t have to take things seriously anymore. I can solo Lupicus in the dead of morning while half asleep, and I know that looking for pugs on the LFG I’m not going to find people of that calibre, so it’s best to just shrug it off when you pug and get average players since that’s just how your average GW2 player is, and the crack elite are like the 0.2% minority. But the core of veterans on this game are actually very friendly and willing to teach, and we’re all pretty easy going on voice comms (we’d be booted from our guilds if we weren’t anyway, lel).

Nevertheless, teaching people is an act of charity. I don’t charge people. When I join Arah groups at Lupicus and solo him down, I don’t charge. I ask if they want me to drop to invite a friend in (though to be honest they always ask me to stay) because I’ve done Arah a billion times and they may have a friend who wanted the path instead. The problem is that teaching runs properly takes a bit longer than just blitzing it, and I’m not a fan of just soloing everything if my students fail a certain point, and even though it’s satisfying when you get to the end and you’ve taught a bunch of people, it takes it out of you.

tl;dr … most “experienced only” players are bad, the actual elites are easy going and actually skillful and willing to teach, but people need to be willing to take and receive – a cleric dealing 20% of the damage of a berserker player is a bit of an issue and people should at least partially be willing to accomodate to the needs of their party by slotting out some of that defensive gear for maybe even just knights.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Haha they love you, girl ;P

I don’t know why pugs think i’m a girl ;p

maybe the character name just doesn’t sound like something a dude would come up with, or the fact that i’m not using abyss + twilight, i dunno.

pugging arah is always a fun experience though, it never gets old seeing how people who probably think it’s the hardest dungeon sit there dead on the floor or stuck on a skip and then the cutscene pops because I solo’d the next boss and they’re just like “what just happened”

kekeke

Saint.5647:

He always pulls there quite quickly. I haven’t timed the difference between his pull time to stack and killing him on the trap though. A six second kill is pretty long but you may have a point with the pull time.

http://www.twitch.tv/nike_dnt/b/509094145

~59:30

Around 8 seconds for the kill, no banners, no FGS.

If you pull to the corner you have to waste time with him spewing gunk everywhere as he runs towards you and the actual walking itself.

There’s practically no reason to FGS him at all.

The boss melts in like six seconds without FGS, there’s absolutely no reason to 4x FGS it at all. Even worse, if you rushed it in a corner then the time you lose pulling is time you could have spent just killing normally.

For the record, pretty much every player who writes things like:

“zerk only speed run”
“zerk only PING GEAR”
“80s only fast run”
“experienced only no noobs”

Are just trash players. That’s not to say they’re looking for experienced players to carry them (though I have seen this happen), it’s just the players who probably think they’re good actually aren’t, and most competent players run with people of an equal skill level in their own guilds, they don’t pug. If I want to do a dungeon train, I ask in guild chat, I don’t put up an LFG.

So to be perfectly honest with you, you aren’t missing out on much. You’d end up being grouped with people who haven’t got a clue how to play their class besides thinking that if they stick berserker gear on they’re somehow better, while being experienced actually involves knowing your build, including both minor traits and major traits, weapon rotations and the synergies you rotations have with your traits in order to maximise your efficiency.

Whenever I pug (which is mostly Arah) I just write “lfm anyone welcome”, the group fills up quick, and if they’re good, big deal, and if they’re bad then I can carry them through most boss fights which allows me to practice my soloing skills, so it’s a win-win for me. If they’re newbies who want to learn and they explicitly state so, then I just teach them.

If you’re on NA then drop me a PM on the forum so that I can tell you when I’m next available and I can take you along to some dungeons or something.

soloing lupicus for groups sometimes provokes indifference, sometimes frustration (why didn’t you warbanner?) and sometimes you get people like this who are amazing:

http://i.imgur.com/nk4uWpr.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SBmZpMb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/St0MkUa.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8inUiJZ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/C7FppSy.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tj40vCk.jpg

and then another group

http://i.imgur.com/Xdk51Wx.jpg

I play hard games. So don’t come in here waving your finger at me, and claiming I want everything easy

you:

This is why I get so ticked off by bosses that revolve around reflection. I don’t have reflection! I’m a necro! Where is the sign at the start of the dungeon that says, bring someone with reflection? That’s dumb design.

I’m pretty sure you do want everything to be easy. You don’t want trial and error, you literally want to faceroll encounters first time.

Let me ask a fair question, to those that do not understand the argument I’m making about boss tells. Why don’t any of the bosses have an attack as clear as this one?

Because ANet aren’t interested in making stupidly faceroll bosses with slow wind up attacks who call out their own skills and want to actually improve the skill level of the average player with their living story encounters and then hopefully apply that to dungeons.

Clearly ANet have never followed your ideas on encounter mechanics so maybe you should just get the hint and stop playing since the game clearly isn’t designed for you.

I know all depends on situation but nobody going to change his traits his traits 15 times per day :P what’s most optimal choice from all these build u suggested? Most optimal for open world + some dungeons? What’s recomendation

Utilities, not traits. Going 10/30/0/20/10 and then III – II/IV/XI – II/VIII – III can cover you for basically every piece of PvE in the game. However you can’t just sit with something like blink, feedback and null field on your bar for every single piece of content. There is content where all three of them are just complete blanks and you’d want mantras, or phantasmal disenchanter, or … anything besides the three I mentioned.

and I actually slot in and out traits depending on the situation. If I go in to a fight with no mantras I may be able to swap empowering mantras for duelist’s discipline, or against Brie I can swap out a phantasm damage modifier trait for a shatter trait, or for Arah skips I take far reaching manipulations for a 1200 range blink. For fractals on warrior I’ll swap slashing power for axe mastery and forceful greatsword for rending strikes for trash mobs and then for easy bosses I bring back in slashing power and forceful greatsword. It depends how much you want to optimise – being at the peak of my efficiency is important to me so I switch traits, weapons and utilities around while auto running and have obscure slaying potions like outlaw slaying even though the only CM path I run is CM p3.

There are some situations like in SE p1 where you can change the trait for lower cd on pistols without paying to retrait.

The only situation you would even need to do that is on Tazza (I’m not aware if she has any reflectable attacks). For literally every other fight you need reflects (golem #1, nokk, triple golem) so that means you’re going sw/f and then sw/sw is your next highest DPS phantasm, so pistol isn’t even considered.

1) Please no shortcuts :P i had 1 year break I wonder do 5% DMG Sigils stack on dual-wieled weapons? I mean 2x 5%dmg = 10% dmg?

No. Hence why I said night/force, force/slaying, night/slaying or force/accuracy on your main hand and off hand.

2) What’s the diffrence between skill Empowered Illusions (Illusions deal 15% more dmg) and Phantasmal Strenght (Phantasms deal 15% more dmg). Are illusions treat like illusions + phantasms?

They do exactly the same thing for all intents and purposes.

Relaying on build above isnt better to go 10/25/0/25/10 taking off Blade Trading and adding Phantasmal Strenght??

You lose empowering mantras which is one of the few damage modifiers a mesmer has. Mesmer practical DPS is quite low in the first place so it’s best to not shoot yourself in the foot giving up the modifier. Some people will say it isn’t a big deal, but basically nobody serious about dungeons would ever suggest a mesmer not sticking 30 in dueling.

Mad Queen would be happy if they all had “dodge this” in giant neon lights for those animations.

Trial and error bad, need to know what to do first time.

10/30/0/20/10

OR

0/30/0/25/15

OR (low/no reflect instances)

30/30/0/0/10

sw/sw + sw/f

can swap out sw/f for sw/p for no reflect fights but … not a massive deal if you don’t.

berserker gear + scholar runes unless soloing or in a pug where you don’t feel you can rely on them for fury, in which case full assassin + scholar is good.

skills you always swap out depending on the situation. for example, feedback is godly for lupicus but terrible on the crystalline entities in arah.

Sigils, you’ll want either force/night, force/accuracy, force/slaying, night/slaying. Force/accuracy is probably the best catch-all since mesmers are pretty low on precision and it’s crucial that you hit higher crit chances.

GS isn’t used because it deals about half the DPS of main hand sword, has zero utility and a phantasm that is completely outclassed by swordsman in terms of DPS, and warden in terms of utility.

Why did you ignore my post which elaborated on the problem you and your pug had and offered a solution to the burrow event?

The amount of cancer rampant on this forum just makes me want to flip tables.

You expect new players to all be running power and berserker builds?

12 stat combinations have power in them. Berserker isn’t even a factor here since burrows can’t be crit.

The problem here is not that those pugs are not spread out enough, but that they can’t kill them fast enough. It’s a lack of DPS, pure and simple. And the likely reason for that, is that they aren’t running power builds. Why should they be running power builds? At what point does the dungeon inform the players that their conditions really aren’t of any use here, or anywhere else for that matter?

The bit where you attack them and none of your conditions work. That is when you should think “I need power here”. It doesn’t take giant neon lights or “immune to conditions” on every single object’s description, you literally have to just look at the object and notice how none of your conditions are being applied to it.

Surely that’s a flaw in the balance of the game itself? Unless you tell players to slot in a power build, you can’t expect players to know that a power build is required for a specific encounter. That’s just silly, and poor design.

There is no flaw in the balance of the game here, it is condition users not paying attention to their condis not dealing damage on objects and demanding to be catered to, and pugs in general having poor technique in dealing with the burrows. All you need to do is like a 3/2 split, with one group starting on the middle burrow, and the other group covering the two other burrows as quickly as possible. This reduces the number of spawns to deal with and enables the other burrow spawns to appear quickly so that you can deal with them.

It really isn’t. If I go into AC with a random pug, and notice that my team can’t pull of the required DPS no matter how hard they try, I no longer blame the skill of the players, and start blaming the encounter.
I’ve done AC enough times to know by now just how much easier spamming Icebows and Fiery Greatswords make the burrows. I think it would be hard for anyone to claim otherwise. That’s because they quickly do a lot of damage, and don’t suffer from being “obstructed”. There’s clearly a balance problem when these two skills make such a huge difference in beating this encounter.

No, it really is.

The reason pugs can’t do it is if they’re using condi builds on objects and/or don’t spread themselves out appropriately for the burrows to reach them in time.

It’s quite amusing that you can’t comprehend the idea that you and your pug groups might just lack skill, and you instead blame it on the game.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The problem with AC is that while not a very difficult dungeon, it has some mechanics to it that are just very badly designed, and are very unforgiving to new players. These mechanics such the fun right out of the dungeon to anyone who ventures in there for the first time.

Most of the trash mobs are not so bad, and even the Spider Queen should be doable with half a decent team. But the burrows are still a DPS check. They are ridiculously easy if you spam icebows, and ridiculously hard without them. There’s no point where any npc informs you just what kind of DPS is required, nor are players provided with environmental weapons to take out the burrows. So in the end you have an encounter that is extremely unbalanced, and favors particular classes immensely. It can be like a walk in the park, if your party packs lots of icebows and Fiery Greatswords, and an armor grind without. It’s just not very well designed, and not any fun.

Kholer is a terrible boss. He’s mostly terrible because he’s in the wrong place in the dungeon. His difficulty is disproportionate to every other boss in AC, and he’s a stumbling block to many new players who assume he’s a mini boss. This leads to a high armor repair bill, and that just aint any fun.

The Patriarch on the other hand is a boss who scales really well. He obviously requires a bit of coordination, and a fair amount of DPS is still required (which I despise), but his mechanics are pretty solid.

Colossus Rumblus. I don’t like this boss. Too much knockdown spam and overpowered trash spawning. I hate being stuck in a CC-chain that instantly downs my character without any chance of escaping.

The howling king is alright as a boss.

We happily do daily dungeon tours without an ele on AC.

You don’t need ice bows or FGS. You quite literally just need gear with power main stat. Power secondary probably even works. That gives you 12 viable stat combinations for the burrows. If you still can’t kill the burrows then it’s not even a matter of DPS, it’s a problem on your end.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

haviz.1340:

“Lore people” will play fractals once or twice and move on to roleplay in divinity’s reach while more dedicated players will get bored because it will lack any sort of challenge except bigger numbers.

What should be done is to severely decrease the number of scales, the difference between 1 and 9 is trivial. Introduce complex mechanics for higher tiers (not just numbers) and make those god kitten cinematics skippable. Obligatory reset included.

I am so tempted to be hyper critical on this post but I won’t, as it isn’t this single comment that has been frustrating but instead a culmination of posts in the CDI.

Suffice to say this post emphasizes why this CDI has been pretty good and not great. In my opinion there have been to many posts that have either not been well thought out or the poster has not taken the time to get educated in the discussion before putting pen to paper, and more specifically too insular in terms of goal resolution instead of thinking about the broader audience.

I will leave it at that.

I am still interested in continued discussion around your boss/encounter mechanic ideas, Rewards and ways in which the fractals could be evolved moving forward to provide new types of challenge.

Cheers,

Chris

You anger the Fractal community by resetting their personal reward level, nerf rewards given in fractals, make no effort to fix a particularly obnoxious fractal (dredge) and by introducing fractals with constant time gating (Mai Trin + cannon phases, molten facility + weapons testing area).

You let said fractal community simmer on these problems without even giving them the slightest bit of response to let them know you even give a **** and then when your dedicated fractal community tries to maybe give you a little nudge to ignore the terrible, completely pointless suggestions which aren’t even real problems (re-rolling and lore are two things nobody even cared about until people decided to invent the problem when this thread started and everyone got their frustrations about dredge out the way) you call out their post for being uneducated, insular (and what about those people crying about zerker nerfs? Aren’t those comments insular too?) and not thinking about the broader audience.

Well I tell you what, if you “fix” re-rolling, and for the love of god I hope you don’t fix a non-issue, that won’t be thinking of the broader audience, since people like to roll swamp and you’ll drive more people away from fractals if they have to worry about getting a terrible roll of something like ascalon > cliffside > dredge at level 50.

Though to be honest, this will probably be removed for whatever reason a moderator can come up with or just ignored and swept under the rug, because who even cares about fractals or dungeons, living story for the win. Let’s only fix slaying potions when they become linked to living story, GG ANet, well played.

How is paying attention to positioning, cooldowns, reflects and evades boring, while mindlessly spamming attacks (staff + gs) with pretty much zero effect anyway is fun?

More features!

Thats actually the best mesmer armor I’ve seen yet.

There are no real DPS checks in this game.
Set dragon timers on 2 minutes instead of 12, that would be a dps test, even though still doable.

Well, killing lupicus without phase change was a dps check, not a global, but a selfmade one.

I mean, pure berserker isn’t even superior to pure assassins in lots of cases. They are usually about as effective as (in party runs or on self-buffing professions) and especially for reflects assassins is definitely better than berserkers.

He crutches a bit so he “moves” both hands.
Illusionists are using their right arm to summon the chaos storm, though

guanlongwucaii.3162:

RIP in peace zara

fixed that for you

Yeah, Level 82 Illusionists are pretty OP.

Anyway, as for evading the kick I just do it reactional. When practising necro solo with no endurance food and no energy sigils, I simply wasn’t allowed to do one single unnecessary dodge. After all, it was good practise and helped a lot to prevent getting dubble kicked.

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

hendo.1940:

The whole point of this anti condi and anti projectile mechanic is to teach people to adapt, because ANet want to improve the quality of the average player so that they can make more challenging content.

Complaining and refusing to pick up another set of gear, or refusing to drop your ranged weapon makes this impossible and implies you want them to just make 111111 zerg events rather than coordinated zerg events.

For the record, I’m not playing WvW since I haven’t picked up appropriate gear for it, so it would be nice if you could do your servers the courtesy to pick up the right gear before taking part in the event.

The problem with that is melee zerk gear is already the meta and generally accepted as the best choice. So instead of it saying to me that I should be able to do both of these things, it says to me that the rest of the community is right and this build you have made yourself is worthless and you should feel bad because you are not contributing.

Maybe if anet included the ability to change traits easily enough, there might be an argument that you can change, but as it stands right now it just sounds to me that anet is saying “You know these stats that you’ve invested your time and money into that have been out since launch? That’s kittening worthless.”

And condis and tanks are meta in WvW and PvP, yet you don’t see me saying berserker should be meta.

Why is it PvE can’t have it’s own meta but WvW and PvP can?

I only ran scarletpath once. kitten unskippable krapscenes, unavoidable damage and time gated stuff.

I don’t see how you stacking toughness and vitality and hiding behind your illusions is “taking it like a man” whereas chaining reflects where even the slightest point of error causes you to be one-shotted isn’t.

I honestly don’t get this community.

Also:

1)Iirc Spatial surge is 3 instances of damage, Zerker is 4~ instances, Winds of Chaos is 2+ instances of damage. That’s insufficient?

Yes. duelist, 8 bleeds, warden, 12.

Then I pass off like 15+ might stacks from Mirrorblade on top of what bounced to my allies. Good for stacking, no?

No. Blasted fire fields are.

The whole point of this anti condi and anti projectile mechanic is to teach people to adapt, because ANet want to improve the quality of the average player so that they can make more challenging content.

Complaining and refusing to pick up another set of gear, or refusing to drop your ranged weapon makes this impossible and implies you want them to just make 111111 zerg events rather than coordinated zerg events.

For the record, I’m not playing WvW since I haven’t picked up appropriate gear for it, so it would be nice if you could do your servers the courtesy to pick up the right gear before taking part in the event.

Wharrgarbl.9263:

Clarification: go check gear on diablo 2. It allows plenty of customization, minmaxing and theorycrafting to obtain maximum damage output, and it STILL gives you wiggle room to add defensive / utility.

On gw2 is zerker scholar all slots, all classes. Thats LAME.

In GW2 you add defense and utility through traits and skills. The guardian meta builds aren’t balls deep in DPS, they actually sacrifice some for utility.

I also don’t see how having to combine different stat gear for optimum efficiency makes things any different, you’re reaching the same goal, it’s just your gear will have different prefixes.

As for dungeons, there are very few situations where range is necessary. The molten facility boss fight is one of the only things that comes to mind, and possibly the jade maw fight. In all other cases, you can use the mechanics available to you to effectively protect yourself at melee range and complete content significantly faster and safer.

You basically just full melee the berserker and chain reflects so the firestorm doesn’t touch you. Jade maw… well the colossi have projectile reflection and are weak and the tentacles are so easy to dodge they’re not even worth ranging.

So uh, you should probably just drop Mesmer right now. This entire class is about deception, reflects, stealth, misdirection, trickery. You sound like you might like a warrior instead, they’re nice and boring and straightforward for you.

I agree, me learning to solo Lupicus on warrior was boring and straightforward. Any old casual can train themselves to dodge inside a boss with one-shot mechanics for extra damage (reckless dodge) to shave seconds off their times, to use burst skills to make distance and restore endurance correctly, to make use of a weapon block correctly to either block projectiles at a distance or to block in direct melee to cause bleeds and proc a 10% damage modifier in their traiting and generally to make careful use of dodges for maximum melee uptime and preservation of scholar runes.

It was all just boring and straightforward.

I’m sure your average joe can pull it off nice and easy.

Of course not. Learning Lupicus enabled me to learn the intricacies of my class and build, and I find mesmer tedious so I don’t play it much anymore, but I’m not going to smacktalk the class.

Paul Kay.4891:

Pyroatheist.9031:

I’m not being condescending, I’m being blunt. Your build will do poor damage due to it being unfocused in traiting and lacking access to the top damage phantasms, as well as utilizing the 2 weapons with the lowest autoattack damage. It has no access to good reflect uptime, 0 traits in the support/utility tree of inspiration, no good mob control, and very poor boon stripping. It does all this while still managing to be squishier than a standard build due to your traiting.

Again, I’m not being condescending, I’m being blunt. Your build is bad for all the reasons I’ve stated before, you just don’t want to hear it.

Bluntness is fine, just be considerate about it. I join back after 1.5 year and meet a rather stale, boring, not too fun meta; are you really surprised I wanna go for suboptimal weapon choices just to find something that’s more interesting?

I’m curious really – if You were cornered into going GS/Staff, how would you go around optimizing it for Dungeon?

hendo.1940:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CKyzb3CDHc

do this with GS/Staff

This looks honestly boring, exploit-like and nothing fun about playing at a corner stacking zones. :/
Not saying GS/Staff is more efficient, but at least it fights its enemies head on.
So what you’re telling me is I can’t play Mesmer well in Dungeons without looking like a total wuss?

You’re saying going right in the face of a boss with a one-shot mechanic and utilising the mesmer class’ mechanic (reflects) is “boring, exploit-like and nothing fun” and that it doesn’t fight them head on?

This just in, reflecting a boss is an exploit.

do this with GS/Staff

Xaylin.1860:

hendo.1940:

Well clearly it does take skill if you can’t use it properly yourself.

There is a difference between something working properly and using something properly. Of course, you can make Temporal Curtain work. But it certainly does not fulfill the task it was designed for. Wall of Reflection makes this quite obvious.

Except, for the last time, it does.

Its purpose is to cripple enemies that cross it, apply swiftness to allies who cross it and reflect projectiles within its radius. It achieves all of these flawlessly.

Someone’s inability to use a skill doesn’t mean it’s broken.

edit – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CKyzb3CDHc&feature=youtu.be

oh look it reflected every time

Mystic.5934:

I like to make parties named “absolutely no zerkers allowed” because I don’t want to spend the entire run scraping you off the floor.

I really wish I recorded the Arah I did with a fully ascended PVT mace/shield warrior with dolyak runes where the whole group faceplanted and I ended up having to finish off Lupicus solo.

Seeing the “I res zerkers off the floor” remarks gets old when you carry pugs through Arah every day while in full glass cannon. Their PVT specs do absolutely nothing, the fact of the matter is:

Bad players die, good players don’t, bad players stacking passive damage mitigation don’t die either.

Xyonon.3987:

30/30/0/0/10
0/30/0/25/15
10/30/0/30/0

All the meta builds use them, the reason to go 30 in duelling is because of them. They also have awesome synergies with good inspiration traits, such as heal on charging a mantra (up to 800 HpS thx to Mantra of Pain) or cleansing 2 conditions when using the healing skill.

They also grant excellent buffs, aoe stability / condi cleanse if required, interruption is also great for bosses like that aetherblade chick or the frost fractale dude with his chilling breath etc.

Normally you can use the mantra heal and condi cleanse for 8% dmg. Feedback is often a must, many also like a good ol’ blink. However if you take blink for the stun breaker, the stability mantra does the job better (harpy, golem worldboss, molten dudes etc). Just use them as fillers. Tbh, if you use 0 of them in a situation, just swap the traits. <3

I can quite safely confirm that no meta guilds use 10/30/0/30/0.

Your personal build =/= meta build.