Guild Wars 2

http://www.twitch.tv/nike_dnt here you go

Not so much something that bugs me, but whenever I pug arah and I’m playing like complete cancer and we wipe a few times on Lupicus, I always always always always always get one guy in the group whispering me saying some variation of this group sucks or I wish we could solo/duo. like, I don’t even know what gives them the idea that I know what I’m doing when I eat the floor from some stupid error ;p

only thing that bugged me recently was that when leashing the risen before belka they went ahead and triggered it, I had deadeye aggro and got trash canned – they die twice on spider skip so I solo abom, they die in phase 2 lupi (I was in rabid and holding aggro as a result, annoyingly, so I thought rather than give them an easy ride I would purposely position myself so that they are in the cleave of his kicks and swipes – I hate when people just camp the opposite side and afk it) so I soloed phase 3 – we do alphard (switched to zerkburger obviously) and then one of them says “I wanted to actually play the dungeon, not watch someone else solo it”

well if you wanted to play the dungeon

stop wiping on bosses and failing skips

¬_¬

unless you’re playing warrior, engi, necro or ranger and soloing content

30/20/0/0/20

30/20/0/20/0

30/30/0/0/10

10/20/0/20/20

full assassin, scholar runes
sword/sword + sword/focus
undead slaying/accuracy

switch utilities dependent on situation, stack mantras on the first 3 builds if theres no utilities worth taking so you can get a 4% damage modifier per mantra

sometimes if we’ve been fiercely holding our bastion of sanity too long, legendary modbots are spawned in the boss waves and tend to cull our numbers.

PvF is basically tower defense – you have unending waves of PHYWs bearing down on our elitist fortifications and we have to fend off their infestation while being given brief respites before another wave of anti-stackers appear in view.

People with banned mains at the top of the leaderboard.

elevation seems to be the cause of the problem most of the time.

i tried doing full warden coverage on alphard with myself max meleeing, with myself only casting feedback and then myself having no other input besides summon wardens and they bugged out every single time at around ~70%. There’s a bunch of other spots they’re sketchy around too (pack of mobs + hunter after tar/abom wp, hunter/crusher etc.).

As stupid as I find it when people basically get carried through an entire dungeon and then sell – I do have people I solo Lupi for so that they can sell and they give me a nice amount of gold per kill.

i’d recommend (when the 1-1-1-1-1 zergers aren’t all over the place) soloing open world champs

completely shameless plug

seems like the kind of fight you’d want

Tree.3916:

maha.7902:

we did this like 2 days ago in some trashy 4 warrior 1 guardian comp with terrible dps

Actually our DPS was pretty great against everything but Subject Alpha. Organized groups with meta team comp would be lucky to be as efficient as our Heavies Only 2012 Throwback Tour was.

http://www.twitch.tv/nike_dnt/c/4465223

There were quite a few fights that were noticeably slower (TA tree, kholer, spider queen, belka, evolved destroyer etc.) but tbh, I think we gained a lot of speed by being able to yolo basically every skip rather than waiting around to stealth.

I kind of wonder how fast a 2014 meta comp would be now, without conjures just as a DPS + speed comparison.

i just want to wish you the best of luck dude, you made this whole thing possible

if you want to spend a year stacking, go ahead

it’s a QoL thing – you can either just use accuracy and leave it at that or grind out 25 stacks for 5 minutes in a dungeon that takes 10 minutes to complete

Did a dungeon tour and made around 40 gold (3h, so 13.3g/h)

If you sell Arah you can make around 24g/h

frostgorge sound i heard is meant to be 6-8g/h or something

then there’s TP flipping.

so basically, the higher the skill required of the content you do, the more gold you make – so selling arah or putting in the time and research to flip the TP.

how to mesmer in dungeons

re-roll to guardian

:D

21 precision = 1% crit chance

so 250 precision = 11% crit chance

stacking is a waste of time anyway, so just run accuracy if you want extra precision.

But that is exactly how it is now. Certain weapons are dps losses but because of the utility we may use them – take for example focus on mesmer, the phantasm has average DPS but it offers projectile reflection and mob positioning. Warriors may use axe/warhorn because you may might stack directly on a boss and need the blast finisher so as opposed to the vuln from off-hand mace. Scepter is more DPS on guardian but sword has projectile absorption and blind (which also causes vuln if traited). Eles have weapon sets with better might stacking but worse DPS, worse might stacking but better DPS, higher DPS but reliant on fire fields from external sources and so forth.

Having weapon favouritism because you “like it” literally sounds like the worst idea I have ever seen and just sounds like you want to run whatever the hell you want, to hell with what is best for the party. The fact of the matter is this:

Doing dungeons (unless soloing obviously) is a group effort. If you want to be selfish – run whatever you want. If you see yourself as a team player, run a group-centric build. This means traits, weapons and gear. There is nothing wrong with certain builds and gear being favoured – you’re not actually being stopped from running what you want unless you intend on joining a party focused around clearing the instance quickly – in which case then you run in to conflict, and you either bend to the whims of the group or you leave. There is nothing wrong with this. They are playing how they want, you can play how you want – it’s a win/win. Homogenising builds serves no real purpose.

In order to make conditions viable in PvE:

1. Make condition damage scale with vulnerability
2. Make it possible to burst enormous amounts of conditions right off the bat to reach their cap of damage (berserker builds maxed on might can apply 20+ vuln in basically a second in a decent group and then you reach your optimal DPS right then and there)
3. Remove the cap

And there you go, conditions work.

However, while 1. is probably possible, 3. is highly unlikely because of technical issues with calculating condition damage and 2. just sounds insane (start a fight then go hey look 25 bleeds, burn, torment gogo).

Things will never equally be useful. Let’s say ANet decided to give every weapon the same amount of damage (so pewpewing with a rifle is on par to whacking a boss with a greatsword), people will just take whatever set has the most utility. A warrior would sit on longbow because it has an on-demand fire field and blast finisher, thieves will camp shortbow for spammable blast finisher. So you end up now with people still not liking certain weapon sets despite them all dealing identical damage.

I don’t see how what you want would solve anything, you would still have weapon favouritism, and your can’t homogenise builds (traits) because then we literally might as well just remove them since they all function at the same capacity anyway.

So everything should just be equally as efficient?

Doesn’t that kind of kill the point of “optimisation” if everything is the same?

takes me around 20-25 to reach alphard and then since im completely atrocious at soloing it ill be there for like 10 minutes lol

doesn’t allow much for stacking? you pull it in to a corner, dodge/side step the swings and dodge out the way of the charge

we did this like 2 days ago in some trashy 4 warrior 1 guardian comp with terrible dps

considering you have separate builds in pvp and pve i would highly recommend not using the same build

even if that wasnt the case i wouldnt recommend it

so you stacked in a corner and didnt even think to ask why?

Well then it’s a good thing we don’t just use one build then and that PvE balance is mostly pretty good.

Go do this, make a MMO where you get everything by pressing a button that says ‘Win’, and see how popular it is.

It’s called GW2 and it’s pretty popular. You can go to the pavilion, tag a boss, afk and collect loot.

Look at the market, look at what hype train everyone is on right now: Wildstar. What does Wildstar sell itself on? Raids, and bringing back the challenging environment of vanilla WoW.

And once the hype train dies down you’ll just be left with the hardcores the game is intended to cater to, not the casuals.

if you make a MMO where there’s zero challenge, it’ll be a flop.

It’s called GW2 and it had an extremely successful launch in China.

got called elitists for watching a fashion contest yesterday

:(

Ropechef.6192:

random,

Crucible of Eternity Laser Trap.

dead still dead? or is that an exception to the rule?

(( I don’t mind either way just something to think about ))

Dead is dead.

Better practice dem jumping puzzles

Trice.4598:

Cyrill Faust.9340:

I believe the record time for SE p2 is a little over an hour, while SEp1 & SE p3 take about 10 and 20 mins respectively, so don’t bother with p2. For COE on alpha count to 3 then dodge other wise it’s pretty straight forward.

That 1 hour path 2 was a joke video, it is doable in 15 minutes, but for 1 gold it’s not worth the trouble. It’s also an annoying path.

It is not a joke video, it’s the greatest dungeon video ever.

You don’t have to worry about your health %age. No scholar bonus to lose and the extra toughness allows even more room for messups. No matter wether you wall lupi or not, rabid is way more forgiving. Warrior solos are already considered as the “easy mode”, adding more defense will just add to that. If you’re unable to pull of a good condi rotation you’re unable to pull off a good direct damage rotation too.

You don’t worry about scholar bonus when soloing anymore either, so I have no idea how that is even relevant when everyone is using strength runes.

When it comes to room for error – here’s how I see it:

spray – rabid can tank it
life suck – rabid and berserker can tank it
life drain – rabid and berserker can tank it
bubble – rabid and berserker can tank it

Spray is a non-issue if you dump him in the wall – both gear types are equally as forgiving – rabid is just less forgiving if pushing for times since you’re actually punished for making errors and getting life leeched – and the punishment is more than losing a modifier, you flat out lose your damage full stop.

Which doesn’t change the fact that condi warrior is tied to exactly one weaponset lb+s/s no versatility unless you want to give up large amounts of your damage output.
Instead of giving a valid objection you just say “it’s light armor anyway” and avoid this whole argument.

Let me just get something straight -

My argument for this is the following:

Condition warrior can get kill times on par with direct damage. Against light and medium targets, berserker is superior. Against heavy armour targets – this is the grey area. This is what I want to find out, and what I am currently experimenting on. I’ve condition soloed the abomination faster than every single video I have found except Goku’s 2:34 – and on my fastest kill (2:48) I made stupid errors and don’t even have maxed out gear. This is what I’m curious about. I want to push this build as hard as possible and get the fastest time I possibly can against what is basically a punching bag to see whether if in an almost-vacuum setting whether condition surpasses berserker against heavy armour.

Berserker warrior is tied to greatswords and axes, I don’t even see the difference.

Well any build is “thight on traits” if you want maximum damage output.
On top of that the warrior reflection is nowhere close to mesmer/guardian or traited ranger reflects. You’ll reflect barely anything compared to them, since the “search area” is way smaller compared to wardens/feedback or wall.

Every example I gave you will reflect just as much as a mesmer, guardian or traited ranger – the area has absolutely nothing to do with these examples.

I already explained that I know the build produces close to the same damage output, but that it’s still not as good. As long as it’s worse, I don’t care. I would stop playing warrior too if it meant berserker/direct damage was suddenly worse and I had to use cond in order to be competitive. You aren’t paying attention to what I’m actually saying— I still wouldn’t use it even if the two were reversed and that condition builds were slightly better. I would require them to be significantly better to justify using my least favorite mainhand weapon in combat and a ranged weapon over my favorite one.

lol

Erm sorry but I think I’d rather not clear the orrian turrets before Lupi except the one near the far wall by the aboms. Other ones are unnecessary unless you get absolutely dreadful RNG with the elite mobs hugging the wall :P

Corner turret in the room before Lupicus

Corner turret

Corner

Corner turret

Jotun sure, albeit completely unnecessary and not easier at all. I thought the point of this was to show how it’s useful to trait in defense in some circumstances. I have no idea if this would be faster to do than just standing still with 1-3 reflect crystals, hitting 100-120k each reflect, but it’s certainly not easier to do, and unless it’s indisputably faster to do then I can’t see how that’s worthy of deeming as “useful.” I will try it to compare the time when I next do an Arah P1 solo.

Hypothetical -

You get crystals for Jotun. You get terrible RNG and they all bite the dust. You have block traiting so you can block projectiles then run around while the block goes off CD.

Alternatively – you don’t trait it, lose crystals and die.

It’s not “zerker or screw off”, you are allowed to play exactly what build and gear you want.

ANet “nerfed” it like they did the spider queen because people continued to cry over and over

and over

and over

and over

and over

and over

and over

and over

again about berserker for literally no reason than that their terrible builds aren’t accepted in to faster LFG groups.

Well, sorry to disturb but had to. The whole condition thing is for when you can’t solo as zerk and do bad rotations and/or need practice or need more room for mistakes. Rabid gear can tank 1 full rapidfire from Lupi, thats enough proof to show the skill cap it requires. Not to mention that whatever comparison you might of did between zerk and rabid is unreliable. Goku, Dub, Miku and many more can prove that zerk with proper rotation outdps anything else you’d try. That’s it, end of story/thread/argument.

So because rabid gear can do one thing (tank a spray) which will never even be done since you’ll always wall Lupicus if you want to push for times that means it has low skill cap, lol. And we have two whole years of berserker gear videos, so I don’t want to count rabid out which is why I’m practicing around with it so that I can come to actual conclusions, rather than premature ones – and my initial impression so far is that against heavy armour targets it’s pretty on par with direct damage – and that against light and medium targets, berserker would pull ahead. Without a wall, the difference gets even narrower.

How is it asinine to not want to use a ranged weapon at point blank? xD

It’s asinine because your reason for not wanting to try a build out is “I don’t like this weapon”. If you give the slightest toss about being efficient, you don’t care what weapon(s) you would be expected to use, hell if rifle became the ranged option of choice I’d use that. When pure axe became “meta”, I didn’t want to play it so I just didn’t bother playing warrior – but when doing group content I would play it because, well, it’s being efficient. If being an efficient warrior meant playing a rifle, well guess what I would do? I would either not play warrior or I would suck it up and use it.

And Berserker builds don’t ALWAYS involve a sword offhand when soloing, so we don’t always use sword offhand for blocks. By the way, something else to note is that with a condition build you’re limited with weapon variety and should you need to use something like warhorn in an encounter without a massive loss of DPS (wraithlord crusher+hunter comes to mind), you aren’t able to. With a direct damage build you can have any weapon swap you want.

Or you can trait for cleansing ire. Hunter/crusher are light armour targets anyway – this is where berserker pulls ahead.

Please be my guest to share with me the useful situations for warriors to trait in defense for PvE then.
Enlighten us all.

Final Jotun boss, Arah p1
Corner turret in the room before Lupicus
any point you feel you would pull an ele or hunter.

not sure if it has any applicable use for bosses for berserker builds since the traits are so tight, but you could probably mess around with it in condi, you score 9k reflects against Lupicus with it though you lose 10% condi duration which is pretty sketchy.

After checking my most recent highlight, I think I killed her in about 2:39. I considered this “decent” as in acceptable to not ragequit and restart. http://www.twitch.tv/purpleishawt/c/4444295
I believe my fastest one was over 20 seconds faster if I’m not mistaken. Goku has been prodding me to try to compete with him in Arah P2 full funs, and he’s told me that he’s normally able to DPS her out with only having to run ooc once… so clearly it can be done significantly faster. Just saying.

OOC once with no ember? i’d want to see that.

You also are getting defensive for no reason as I made it clear that my reasons for not wanting to try it are because I hate mainhand sword and try to avoid using ranged weapons the majority of the time. I specifically said that the build is a nice alternative. For the most part, it is probably going to be easier for the average person to play with considering…

Your reason for not wanting to try it is completely asinine. You’re not even using the longbow at range, you’re using it point blank, and you’d know that if you literally spent two seconds playing with it. Condition lacks whirlwind attack as well, so I’d hardly call it easier.

Lupicus phase 3 purges conditions no matter what kind of build you’re using. Direct damage builds lose out on attack of opportunity and any vuln/torment stacks if they fail to evade, which is a pretty significant DPS loss. It may not be nearly as detrimental for them as it is for a condition build but the objective is still the same— to avoid letting him hit you as much as possible to get the fastest possible kill. There is no extra challenge added to the encounter unless you want to point out the fact that the longer the encounter is, the more opportunity there is to make a mistake. It’s simply a different build that performs well, but isn’t the absolute best to use in all circumstances.

Did you just compare the loss of a 10% modifier to basically getting burning, torment and 20+ bleed stacks removed? u srs m8? The whole challenge of using condition is maintaining both endurance and skill rotation at the same time, without a rotation you can’t maximise your damage, but trying to maintain rotation for me (since I haven’t got myself an energy sword yet) means that if I go longbow with full endurance and have to double dodge, I literally have nothing left if Lupicus decides to do something else.

So harp on me all you want for not wanting to use it, but I have no reason to. I don’t need it and don’t want it. ^^

This reminds me a little of when you started crying at someone because they suggested slotting in missile deflection at certain times – it’s legitimately useful at certain points but you flooded the whole thread with tears.

Considering organised parties are probably like 1% of all dungeons run, why do you even care what we would want? You can form a party of whatever you want, to hell with min-maxing. We don’t even min-max our compositions half the time.

DiazKincade.2891:

Behellagh.1468:

The problem I’m having with some of the replies is that it entirely negates the notion of player customization. You’re focusing on the mechanics only and not the RPG nature of character creation.

You all are saying that the devs should make the higher level content only be done if players use a min/maxed build of traits, skills and weapons for that profession. If that’s the case then why bother providing all the other options, all the possible combinations if only those playing “the right way” have any chance? That’s like building a maze where every path that isn’t the way through is a death trap. That takes choice away from players. That’s the opposite you want to do in an open world MMO.

Here we have a game where you aren’t led from one quest giver to another, gives the players lots of ways to earn XP to level up. But you all are suggesting having content where only one set of choices will work. Not work better or faster, work at all. What you all are suggesting is a game where characters may look different but underneath are all identical. I’m sorry I’m from the school where there should be no way to make a broken character that can’t do all the content. That’s the whole point about balance, that you don’t have tiny Gods or fodder as possible configurations.

We already have the above bolded section but it is not by the devs. the devs are trying to give us options. The elitists are telling others to go zerk or go home. You are trying to lay blame on the wrong guys. I for one am all for testing out build options and I know full well the mechanics of the game. I’ve learned these through testing IN THE GAME. (Engineer is great for understanding combo fields. Reading helps too.) Sure I’ve taken my time looking through the wiki (/wiki command ftw) as well for the finer points (Like wtf is cleansing bolt and wtf does it do?) but it really takes a bit to actually find out all the info in the game.

What the original topic of this thread was about was potentially helping people understand how to do things right and not smash your head into the wall and wonder what went wrong. Also this whole topic was originally about the mechanics and how they should be portrayed to new players so that they can understand how things work. If character creation involves the intelligence (or lack there of) of players then yeah I can see your argument having some merit… as it is intelligence is not a part of character creation. As it stands very little information is portrayed that is used in the meta game experience.

There are no “elitists” telling people to “go zerk or go home”. What actually happens is you have PVT heroes all over this forum demanding ANet nerf or remove berserker gear, and all us berserker users can do is sit and hope that ANet doesn’t listen and nerf it again for no reason besides “wah why can’t my heal spec be good” – and then for it to still be no good after ANet nerf offensive gear.

I have a 2:51 Belka direct damage solo on my computer and a 2:54 condition, and I think that may have been using undead runes. Either way, my rotation on the condition one could have been improved to surpass the direct damage. I also have a condition abomination solo which is a full ten seconds faster than my best on direct damage (2:48 versus 2:59). Because, you know, I actually like trying things out before knocking on them.

Feel free to condescend it as “probably a lot easier to play”, but I’d say preventing Lupicus from purging your conditions in phase 3 if anything makes it insanely harder to play, the lack of whirlwind attack, and having a sloppy rotation making your conditions drop off causing massive loss of damage presents its own challenges.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with builds being good in multiple dungeons. The core of damage builds in GW2 is maximising damage while providing as much party support as necessary (such as empower allies/phalanx strength warrior builds – the latter is an even heavier damage trade-off as you’re losing 28% in damage modifiers plus 300 power in favour of maintaining permanent 20+ might stacks on the party). These builds do not need to be dungeon-centric, and I don’t see why they should be.

You literally sound like you just want nerfs for the hell of it, there’s no actual justification for it whatsoever, and no amount of mocking emoticons is going to make your non-existent point any more convincing.

Have you even tested it enough to confirm that? Condi DPS and direct damage DPS is almost identical on heavy armour targets, and the extra toughness enables you to take more of a beating before having to withdraw a bit to regenerate.

If you give their mobility skills a target requirement, at least make it pvp only – warriors are very map completion friendly atm because you can rush forward a lot and make a lot of ground, make everything require a target and it becomes 100x more tedious.

I’m pretty sure it would in FOTM. Take fractal bosses like Mossman, Imbued Shaman, Molten Berserker as examples – they all have hard hitting attacks which if you were able to block off for ~10 seconds would take a lot of heat off the party. Dungeons there’s probably a few fringe examples but I mean, they’re so minor that it really wouldn’t make a difference – in low level dungeons you just burst things down insanely quick post-ferocity path, and in higher level dungeons the bosses either have cooldown between their attacks anyway, or the choreographs are so bad that there’s just no point – take for example Belka’s knockback – it’s annoying but has basically no tell so you can’t interrupt it, or the abomination’s enrage you can just interrupt without power block and you’ll put it on a minute cooldown.

Things like the molten berserker ground pound, imbued shaman’s PbAoE lava fonts, or if we count Mossman’s dancing dagger as a “skill” – those would be great things to put on cooldown. Though to be honest I’m pretty sure they have some sort of cooldown anyway, so a basic interrupt would do the job.

I dunno. The key thing that made it so viable was interrupting through defiant – take that away and you might as well just use untraited interrupts.

Please, tell me more about how in trinity games, healers and tanks serving as the whipping boys of DPS doesn’t turn their instances in to “anything but DPS”.

In this MMO and every other MMO, all support is designed around maximising damage output, whether that be from taking threat off the damage dealers, healing through damage or mitigating damage.

I don’t see any obnoxious berating in either of those threads, it’s people calmly explaining that berserker gear and DPS builds are optimal. In threads made by non-berserker users about stacking and berserker gear they call it exploiting, that it should be removed from the game and that it trivialises content – all three which are completely incorrect – and then when told otherwise, our arguments are completely ignored.

We aren’t forcefully imposing ourselves saying “cleric/soldier/valkyrie gear should be removed from the game/it’s exploiting” and making countless threads about it. Cleric and soldier do however trivialise content as it allows you to literally go up to a boss, turn autoattack on, tab out and get something to eat or browse youtube.

pdavis.8031:

maha.7902:

Actually what happens is people who want passive defense keep trying to force it on the rest of us while we just want to be allowed to play in peace without being harassed about “all you have to do is dodge, faceroll content blahblah no fair I want to tank”.

I’ve seen it go both ways actually…

But if everyone just play and let play, the game and the forums would be a much happier place.

How many stacking and berserker threads have you seen lately?

And then, how many cleric gear threads have you seen lately?

Yeah.

I’m pretty fed up of being told my playstyle is “wrong”, an “exploit” and should be “fixed”.

Actually what happens is people who want passive defense keep trying to force it on the rest of us while we just want to be allowed to play in peace without being harassed about “all you have to do is dodge, faceroll content blahblah no fair I want to tank”.

i recommend giving good advice

Chaos Archangel.5071:

I tried Power Block in a 6/4/4/0/0 build and a 6/2/6/0/0 build and the trait .. isn’t really all that bad. The two problems, pvp-wise, it has is that its hard to tell how effective it is in a chaotic group fight and its hard to find a reason to choose it over Confounding or Chaotic, it feels like the lesser of the three traits.

It’d be fantastic if it worked on thieves/autoattacks. As far as PvE goes, apparently when it used to worked through defiant it revealed how badly flawed the bosses design is, since many of them barely have more than 3 attacks.

1. of attacks =/= bad design

let’s not throw around the “bad design” buzzwords, shall we?

you should have logged ele and said

i play how i want

CyClotroniC.4957:

Almost everything was said about necromancers, that I wanted to add, but I would emphasize two things. For me great balance is about:

- making each class the best of something, what others can’t compete with
- make this thing needed, helpful and viable in every single part of the game

Currently it bugs me so much that “zerkers only” is the basic mentality inside PvE, and I would like to see high end stuff, where the condition classes have an upperhand. And no, it shouldn’t be solved by some bosses like husks at wurm, ideally I would consider it balanced, if condi damage could at least come close to power damage in PvE. It makes me said, when I read all the arguments about, how PvE doesn’t need support and condi classes, because it should be more versatile in my opinion. Let us – condition fans – feel important and special too for once.

I have a 2:48 recorded which I haven’t uploaded too. IIRC it’s the second fastest time recorded.

needs more condi warrior