Guild Wars 2

By support i mean stuff like mass weakness,

Used extensively in high level fractals via skale venom, warrior warhorn blast, thief sword auto, etc.

AOE crowd control

Warrior tremor, guardian binding blade, mesmer mantra of distraction, magic bullet, thief pistol whip, etc.

actual damage misdirection

reflects are rampant in dungeons and fractals.

Whats sad is prety much nobody care about it jump into the frey and kill them nonetheless because why would you waste time rupting the healing warrior and preventing that drummer from playing?

Because the dredge applies the protection too frequently for it to be worth interrupting.

Lack of ennemy control currently isnt punishing enought, some ennemy party should be insanely more difficult to kill if left able to do whatever they please in battle

Try not reflecting risen elementalists, try not dealing with ascalonian elementalists, try ignoring illusionists, try ignoring kaeyi when fighting tazza (if you aren’t able to pull tazza separately), try ignoring the mobs in CM throughout the entire dungeon. The elites in dungeons can actually tear you apart if left unattended.

“How do I become a good warrior?”

“Oh, by the way I don’t actually want to use a good build”.

I’m pretty sure using a good build is one of the steps on how to play a class well. This is like me trying to become good at magic but saying I only want to use some ****-tier janky combo deck which will win like 2 games out of 50.

I’ve never understood the resentment towards “meta”, I just see it as suck it up and run it or don’t run it and accept you’ll be suboptimal or even bad.

ANet have already said that:

1. the Aetherpath was a large commitment of resources and not many people did it
2. they will not be adding any new dungeons in the next six months at least
3. if they add new instanced content they prefer to go about it via fractals

Your interests do not align with theirs. My interests do not align with theirs. I have taken a break from the game until I feel the urge to pick it up again.

I have also finally finished my 7th Origins + awakening + all DLC playthrough and holy **** it was the most satisfying gaming experience i’ve had in a while

Play how I want actually means that you can do content of your choice and be rewarded for it. For example, open worlders are rewarded, pvp’ers are rewarded, wvwers are rewarded an so forth. It does not mean that every build will create results equally. I wish people would stop twisting the play how you want quote just to fit their own agendas when it wasn’t even meant for them, literally just that you can perform any content and feel rewarded.

FGS made mesmer dumpster tier but now that it’s a non-issue, mesmers are in a nice place.

Night/slaying or slaying/force.

and meleeing Aldus Stormcaller in HOTW Path 1

WALL OF REFLECTION, SHIELD OF THE AVENGER

ZERO HEALING REQUIRED

Those things allow enemies to die faster and that is always “good”. It is NOT however NEEDED to complete content in any way.

I don’t “need” a tank. I don’t “need” a healer in some trinity game instances.

They’re “good” to have.

here’s the thing – you clearly prefer players to have to be interdependent in dungeons. I, and a lot of others however do not want to have to rely on the tank or the healer or the dps to do their jobs properly to even be able to clear the content. I like knowing that I can be in a group of four absolutely atrocious players, pull my weight no matter what class I’m on and get us through it.

Independence > interdependence, IMO.

So zerker is meaningless for DPS?
I think what you said is more true for GW2 than say WoW, but gearing is still impactful on your role. So you could wear Giver’s armor for DPS and yeah you could still DPS but you wouldn’t be as good as a character in Zerker’s.

Gearing is still important, but if you trait stupidly you can still hit for complete peanuts in berserker gear.

A warrior in an optimised build for example can achieve 38% in damage modifiers and might and vulnerability on critical hit through traits. Now if you include night/slaying sigils, scholar runes, that’s an extra 30%. Plus of course you have 250+ precision and 300+ power and 150+ ferocity from traiting.

So if you run full berserker but trait like a complete idiot, that’s a lot of damage you can lose out on. The person in soldier but with DPS traits might end up doing more damage with optimal traits and sigils.

Stop associating gear with roles. Associate classes with roles. Mesmers and guardians provide group condition cleansing and damage mitigation via reflects, blocks. Mesmers can double boons which is unique to them. Warriors and rangers are offensive oriented classes so they are capable of providing might, fury, banners, spirits and other passive dps buffs. Eles can provide vast quantities of might as part of their combat rotation and conjures, thieves provide stealth and are the epitome of glass cannon dps, engineers are a toolbox able to grant might, stealth, reflects and large amounts of vulnerability. The only class that doesn’t fit well is necro, but they can at least provide vuln, condition cleanse and condition conversion and boon corruption.

idk, path 3 bosses are pretty easy to solo melee. hunter and crusher will be perma aggroed to the local bearbow so it’s not like you even need to dodge, magecrusher is just chaining reflects, lupicus is lupicus, wraithlord… you could probably set up 3 phantasms and then just run rings around him if you were worried about getting rekt by the kitty slap.

dlonie.6547:

I haven’t played with mods (I hate using them on a first playthrough…) but the graphics are pretty decent vanilla, especially given the game’s age. Very pretty world.

Plus I have a doggy: GaryLasereyes

I just finished my playthrough and I’ve gotta say I do love the final part of the game so much :p

watching the bad- kitten dwarves in black plate made me kinda kick myself for not making one so if I play again i’m absolutely doing it

One dodge’s distance will not place you close enough to guarantee a max range Duelist that won’t be killed after a Leap.

uh………………..

. It’s harder to pull this off after the iLeap changes/nerfs,

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I have never used iLeap on abom, just dodge forward to get back to him

Goatjugsoup.8637:

I put up an lfg for honor of the waves last night and was waiting for almost half an hour with no takers

Strange, when I pugged it with Brazil to get my frostfang tokens our groups filled like instantly.

And yes, we did the atrocious underwater paths.

Jerus.4350:

Lord Kuru.3685:

hybrid.5027:

That’s a serious problem if true. If 916 = 4% crit chance and now 926 = 4% crit chance that’s a real nerf. I suppose it’s offset by 10 extra Power and Ferocity though.

The formula for crit chance compensates for the 10 points:

Critical Chance = (Precision – 832) / 21

while it used to be:

Critical Chance = (Precision – 822) / 21

What’s the purpose of all these changes?

Throwing a guess out, maybe it works out better and neater for their now very visible stat increases per level?

maha.7902:

insert obligatory condition damage videos here

Solo or groups that conflict with your bleed stacks?

Well if I was to argue from a technical standpoint, conditions in groups are neither useless nor unreliable. The purpose of many of them is damage amplification in direct damage builds (cripple, bleeds, burn all trigger damage modifiers, some others im probably missing too) and they’re very reliably applied most commonly with on-crit traits, at different stages of autoattack chains or in the case of guardian after a certain number of attacks.

insert obligatory condition damage videos here

Purple Miku.7032:

How many tears streamed down your face as you typed that?

You’re probably trolling but in case you’re being sincere… I suggest you lean back in your chair, maybe stare out the window nearby (if there is one) for a few minutes and think about why it is that this particular acronym upsets you so much.

I suggest you cut out the toxicity and accept there are people who want to learn but maybe not willing to go all the way with meta builds and consumables. Here is how I see it. If you teach pupil X then you can mention the significance of slaying potions and food. You can also mention a good build or two for their class, but you can do all of this non intrusively while teaching – and if your explanations can allow them to see the merit of meta build Y then they would just change to it and say ‘hey I’ll retrait/re gear’. I kind of find strictly requiring meta builds kind of sad to be honest, a teacher in my opinion should be proficient enough at a dungeon that they can do enormous carries should the situation demand it just to push along the progress of the instance if the students get stuck somewhere. And if after demonstrating the merit of build Y if by the end of the session they aren’t interested in using anything like it … well just don’t teach them again. But that’s just my opinion. Clearly I’m more tolerant of weaker players than most.

You could just not respond to or read posts from skady if it’s annoying you that much.

On ranger it’s a fire field you can apply blast finishers to, on guardian you can use it to apply more burning to proc more fiery wrath if you are low on burn uptime.

And there we are with the condescension again.

Apparently it’s too hard to say “[give personal lessons to people] using their own builds/using suboptimal builds” – instead we have to throw the pejorative abbreviation.

This is precisely why there is so much bad blood on both sides, people taking cheap shots at other peoples’ builds/gear/playstyle.

I never asked people to run meta when I taught. If they asked for a build, sure i’d give it to them but I didn’t make it a requirement.

You’re completely ignoring his point.

Condition damage is capped because of the stack. The stack can’t be increased because of technical limitations. Therefore you can beg and beg and beg and beg and beg all you want, but conditions will never be effective in groups because of this cap, and the DoT nature of conditions so as opposed to the burst of direct damage.

Do I want conditions to be viable? Sure, it would actually be great. Will it happen? No. Is it fair? No, not really, but that doesn’t change anything.

There’s nothing wrong with not playing meta and not wanting to – the actual problem lies in people on either side trying to impose their view on others in regards to ‘moral’ grounds. You get PVT heroes making rude remarks to berserker users and you have people who use the aforementioned gear making remarks about the non-meta players. Some people just flat out don’t want to run meta, and the people who drone the meta need to get over that.

There was a mod that sharpened textures on a lot of things but I’m not sure if it’s compatible with the latest patch.

There’s tons of graphical mods for faces, there’s reskins of weps/armours, there’s brand new weapons and armours entirely, there’s weapon, armour and hairstyle conversions from DA2 and TW2 as well for DA:O (I’m using a hairstyle from the witcher on my char right now actually)

It’s a technical limitation.

Run a condition build soloing an instance and you’ll see the DPS is pretty great, but other players applying burn/bleed/vuln/poison/torment kind of takes away from yours if you run it in groups.

I also really wish ANet would add condition damage amplification via vulnerability and damage modifiers like how direct damage is.

Warriors can actually just use healing surge before a fight to start at full adrenaline, it’s just 99.99999999999999999% of warriors are too lazy to even bother doing that.

But yeah, warrior DPS is like dumpster tier.

I bought the ultimate (DA origins w/all DLC) for £5/$8 from my local GAME a little while ago, so you can get it even cheaper if $30 was too much for you.

awww, I picked casteless dwarf…

if you picked a dalish, you would see where my warrior’s last name originates from

:p

You guys are tempting me to buy DA:O. o:

first playthrough was ~70 hours
completed the game about 6 1/2 times (working on a full 7th right now)
done lots of different stuff to get different endings and options in quests (there are like four different ways to end the game in regards to the player and their party – but all the things you do in-game affect the aftermath)
amazing character banter

must buy $$$$$$

And for the added replay value, add some mods into your DA:O run once you’ve finished it vanilla. Pretty nice.

Absolutely 100% do your first playthrough of DA:O and all of its DLCs/expansions vanilla.

If you do second playthroughs and so on though – I’d recommend improved atmosphere (makes cities and camp seem more alive, among other things), dragon age redesigned set to the recommended option (doesn’t touch any companion appearances but adjusts hundreds of NPCs in-game to give them more “flavour” and better representative of their roles in the game), and then there’s other things like disabling weapon auras, enabling the console which allows you to do things like debug certain sidequests, give you weapons/armours you may have missed (e.g. certain rewards dependent on how you handle major plot points, certain weapons/armours you want but weren’t able to afford and you can download cosmetic mods and morphs if you want to be able to make a nicer/cooler looking character (ranges across from completely lore unfriendly hairstyles/faces/etc. to very “normal” though fantasy-ish appearances and then just complete normal).

You can find all of that stuff on the dragon age nexus.

dlonie.6547:

maha.7902:

dlonie.6547:

So did everyone have fun gaming over the weekend? My DA:O play through has been an insane amount of fun, it is easily one of the best RPGs I’ve ever seen =D Can’t wait to see DA:I…

How’s AA early-access looking? FFXIV? D3?

you finished it all already?

including amgarrak, awakening, witch hunt?

oh man i’m so conflicted between working on my me2 or da:o playthrough right now

i’m @ brecilian forest done as the last quest before doing the landsmeet but in me2 i’m a lot earlier on but want to unlock assault rifles by powering through to the collector ship mission

Heh, far from finished. Put about 20 hours in, just got to Redcliffe — I like to go slow and enjoy the depth of, well, everything in that game Hours of chatting with folks at party camp, reading the codex…plus my version came with all of the DLC, so I’ve got a long ways before I can call it done! Just having a ton of fun so far, and since the regulars here seem to be quiet, I assume we’ve all turned to other games and wanted to see what we’re all up to.

Oh ME. I only played one of them, but again, wonderful, amazing depth. <3 Bioware.

I’m rather curious how AA was for headstarters. Since it launches today I guess I’ll find out soon if that grind is worth it. But first, DA:O because OMG STORY AND NPCs AND HAPPINESS.

Purple Miku.7032:

Never gonna get tired of this video being relevant.

Lupi #1 troll, 10/10

Not many people were fans of it but I really enjoy the Orzammar section of the game. The circle tower is nice too. Also I hope you played a dalish elf, best origin alongside dwarf noble :p

dlonie.6547:

So did everyone have fun gaming over the weekend? My DA:O play through has been an insane amount of fun, it is easily one of the best RPGs I’ve ever seen =D Can’t wait to see DA:I…

How’s AA early-access looking? FFXIV? D3?

you finished it all already?

including amgarrak, awakening, witch hunt?

oh man i’m so conflicted between working on my me2 or da:o playthrough right now

i’m @ brecilian forest done as the last quest before doing the landsmeet but in me2 i’m a lot earlier on but want to unlock assault rifles by powering through to the collector ship mission

https://www.youtube.com/user/colesy4971

class: warrior
includes some solos of which there aren’t so many recordings of (magecrusher/brie and another-yet-to-be-named once I actually get a recording where I don’t get ragdolled everywhere), plus condition solo gameplay which can give insight on rotations for it.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I’m not hoping for anything really, just adding non-constructive useless posts because I’m bored

dis guy gets it

I don’t know what you’re talking about, griefing is fine as long as you don’t do it too many times.

Oh by the way, griefing instances for months and months and months on end isn’t “too many times”, just to give you a benchmark.

:)

Another question about the DnT build 64022 if i remember correctly:
It puts lot of traits on signet distortion and cooldowns.
isn t just better the old 24053 build?
or the 400 more power does so much more than the phantasm cd reduction etc?

The builds our guild uploads aren’t really put together through some consensus, it’s kind of what the individual uploading feels are the best builds – whether this is via math, gut feeling, experience, or a mixture. I personally don’t think some of the things suggested have enough of a justification to use them, but I dunno. I would probably record build guides for certain classes if they weren’t already covered but they are.

So, I take it that mantra builds are the PvE meta now??

They have been for months.

Is more that most mesmers i usually meet in dungeons plays like they are warriors :| only 51111251112TW111121112

….well lets be honest what else is there to the rotation? You summon phantasms, you slot in and use whatever the relevant utility skill(s) are at the relevant time and then you just 11111111111111121111111111111112111111111111111TW to win. Like, it’s not rocket science.

DonQuack.9025:

Might I suggest …… Lelliana. I wont suggest what to do to her. Just do it to her.

alistair is my baby

i swear im not gay

srs

I’m not sure why we need a CDI on QoL when you have already given us spades and spades and spades of QoL in both feature patches (wallet, account-bound dyes, easy access to minis, and so on etc. etc. etc.).

dlonie.6547:

Trust me, I’m not one to stick up for ANet. Take a minute and go through my posting history if in doubt…

But expecting a fix “within an hour” and Q_Q’ing when it doesn’t happen is obnoxious.

Personally, I’d rather they test more before pushing changes to production — assign each dungeon to a team of testers and just have them run through it to make sure it can at least be completed.

But if bugs get out, they are going to take time to fix — more than an hour ;-) And the post in question was made less than a day and a half after the patch went live — not “a few days”.

The problem, and I’m guilty of it too, is that ANet blanking basically everything that isn’t LS set my, your and our bar of standard so low that we’ll just accept anything.

Dungeons being broken after an update and not being rapidly fixed however is absolutely unacceptable and I don’t even know how that would get past the test server – they literally had to spend two minutes in Arah to realise the second path was bugged out.

If this happened in something like Wildstar, wouldn’t people just lose their **** and go crazy? But in GW2 …. we’re so content with mediocrity it’s just “meh whatever”.

play DA:O first for the greatest RPG experience of your life

doing playthrough #8 atm

“Beyond pointless” he says without offering any sort of explanation so as to why.

I guess you mean smoldering.

I haven’t tried it but I prefer corruption/battle or corruption/energy dependent on how dodge-intensive the fight is.

Aither.2859:

Also judging by what you have just posted could it be that a rabids condition build may have a higher damage output than power builds? That would be wild.

Classes capable of applying heavy amounts of conditions already do more damage in rabid vs berserker against heavy targets.

If I can add mesmer to the list of condition soloing classes that’ll be great. The only class I can think of with terrible condition application would be guardian and apparently ele isn’t very good at it either.

… Why not just use offhand axe?

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

I don’t know, I remember seeing the excuse of “its ok to nerf hb/ww because arcing slice buff” and now look where we are, everything was nerfed.

Feels like the patch hit warrior with a sledgehammer and from what I’m hearing, rangers are just gibbing people in PvP.

There’s no point uninstalling and then having to download some 100000000gb monstrosity when the urge to play tickles you again.

I’m mostly just playing Dragon Age and going to get in to playing MTG again, as annoyed as DA2 made me, from what Bioware did since then in the DA franchise (from DA2 DLC to what is being shown in Inquisition) they actually know how to listen to fans, ignore the stupid criticisms (removing walking from ME2 > ME3 ruins my immersion… wtf) and be progressive enough in the gaming industry to draw larger audiences. Plus they make relevant, sizeable content for their games post-release in addition to the little armour/weapon packs and skins.

shimmerless.4560:

maha.7902:

shimmerless.4560:

Can’t speak for any other classes but WoC is approximately one billion times the Mesmer anyone else is in or out of any game mode. And that’s on a cow-man avatar. (Charr)

I doubt that.

There’s one or two on EU who’d probably give him a run for his money, but on North America nein. (I’ve played competitively on both)

PvE is a game mode, and playing Mesmer well in pve versus wvw/pvp is kind of different.

shimmerless.4560:

Can’t speak for any other classes but WoC is approximately one billion times the Mesmer anyone else is in or out of any game mode. And that’s on a cow-man avatar. (Charr)

I doubt that.

What you do for those examples is switch classes.

No matter what you do, mesmer on crystalline entities and brie is an absolute abomination, complete garbage, and feels terrible to play because you’re capped at doing half of your potential damage.

—

- Mesmer should mind wrack at the end of a fight, yes.

- Most likely if you have four warriors channeling a hundred blades at the same time it’s either the start of the fight (vuln is capped due to axe 2/mace 4) or they switched back off their axe mid-fight after using cyclone axe and the boss has 16 vuln. Or…. they’re camping greatsword, which in addition to rending strikes will have pretty solid vuln uptime anyway. If you wanted to actually interrupt a boss to keep them channeling, take daze mantra, easy. “Go through 2 stacks of defiant” is just you being extremely specific to try and find an example which would fit your diversion example perfectly, but that will basically never happen.

- Sure, shatter before an AOE.

Mesmers rarely shatter in a PvE context because -

1. most people don’t main it so don’t think about it
2. mesmers are basically garbage tier so whether a class doing 500 dps can now do 501 dps is basically irrelevant in the grand scheme of a fight.
3. most people are lazy

I didn’t take any statement out of context, they were just giving the usual anti-good player vomit that infests this entire game and it deserves an equally stupid response.

Biggest pet part of mesmer is to Shatter! I hate seeing mesmers run around not shattering, i die a little inside when i see it not happen! Besides a clutch distortion to save their butts in a pinch. Where is your mindwracks? Diverson?!? Every build regardless of the traits are meant to be shattered at some point in a duel or team fight. Not to sit there with your Phantasms pounding away at someone. That is like a thief who doesn’t steal, a guardian who doesn’t use virtues, An ele who doesn’t swap attunements?! That is by far enough horror to kick off halloween early and is extremely aweful gameplay. Imo, i declare any mesmer who doesn’t shatter; bad.

Sure, i’ll just run full rabid and mind wrack for like, negative DPS.

Because otherwise I’m a bad mesmer.

I hate Mesmer’s who only play PU and kinda despise people who only play Shatter specs. Like you are missing out on soo many other builds Mesmer could be running! Confounding suggestions, Chaotic interruption, Healing shatter, Power Block, Mantra builds, Signit builds, clone death! Don’t stick to the meta, stray away from the normals cause Mesmer kit is wondrous and is meant to be there for you to toy with people’s mind! So get to it! Those that know me, know i am always playing something new, changing sigils around, weapons, Traits, builds.

…you hate people who play optimal builds.

Why does society like to condescend and despise people who excel at their speciality? It’s not even a GW2 thing, it’s rampant everywhere. Famous people get mocked for … being famous. Rich people mocked for … being rich. Good players at GW2 frothed at for … being good. Like, I don’t even know anymore.

Ah yes, these mythical one shot bosses. Oh wait, rarely any of them one shot. Most of them hit like noodles.

Windsagio.1340:

The fun thing is that they look to be taking steps to change, if not reverse the viability discussion. The amount of intentionally nonstackable stuff in the new pve content is pretty overwhelming.

Ran berserker, blazed through story instances. Blaze through open world mobs.

Had to stop being lazy and swap gs + sword/warhorn for gs + axe/mace to knockdown wolves but that’s about it.

I love seeing these people trying to claim the new mobs “counter stacking” or “counter zerker gear” when I can just roll my face over keys and kill everything like usual, maybe with an extra dodge or two instead.

People love co-operating with me when I use stealth consumables to run past mobs and then they pull the entire room, trying to run after me without stealth.

I love co-operation.

People are sheep and just follow whatever the “meta” tells them to run.

Rather than, you know, stepping back for a moment and thinking “is this actually worth running”.

The little EA “fad” was something I refused to have a part in besides if I was forced to in guild runs before they finally figured out that it meant absolutely jack all and didn’t need to be used.