Guild Wars 2

I’m pretty sure a weapon blasting a fire field on low cooldown (I suppose every auto chain is ~2.4s) isn’t on the same level as another weapon which has made it possible to score a 7-second lupicus kill, so that’s a pretty weak argument.

Pretty sure LH is conjure lightning hammer aka a conjure. And as per https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/The-Ele-Meta-Dungeon-Speed-Clears/first
Every last one of the build has either LH or FGS for use in it.

ok allow me to rephrase

get rid of broken conjures (ice bow, fgs)

No it would be
1. Remove wall of reflection
2. Nerf aegis

not really. removing FGS is just removing something with a DPS which is completely out of line with everything in the game, same with ice bow.

A few months ago there was an age of enlightenment in this subforum where people were forced to accept that greatsword is bad for dungeons – so maybe that enlightenment has filtered down in to pug groups.

I can’t remember what my exact numbers were, but GS @ 900> range was like 60% of 1h sword’s dps – and then if you include the fact that duelist and swordsmen are higher dps phantasms than berserker, it pulls ahead even further.

“berserker” isn’t good enough, you should be using the right weapons.

Staff builds, LH builds, I think sc/f is the might stacking set (derp, don’t have an ele, someone correct me)

They’re all extremely good DPS or dps packed with support. Just not stupidly overpowered like bows and fiery noobswords are.

gz buddy

it’s a hella good feeling the first time you do it

- I don’t think that FGS should be remove completely. The weapon is only OP when you can stack in the wall and use skill 4 that do massive amount of dmg.

“only” when you have walls around you almost all the time.

it’s a skill-less, overpowered weapon that literally needs to be outright removed from the game. I did both TA paths I think yesterday, we had no eles. No conjures. No noob fgs stacking. And bloody hell it felt good. No stupid conjures making jokes out of the fights, we actually had to dodge Malrona, we 4-manned Leurent, again with no 4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4 and then I dodged too early on the nightmare tree and went down lel.

ANet are trying to improve the skill of players in this game – as long as this weapon exists in its current state, that’s going to be … challenging.

- I don’t agree on the Ice bow. Only 1 skill is really powerful on that thing. So, ya it crazy powerful againt big target (burrows, boss, etc), but its a niche things. I’m not using my ice bow all the time and when I do, I use it for a really short period of time. Its a great dmg burst, but its doesn’t make any content trivial (except AC burrow).

And “only” 1 skill is crazy powerful on fgs. If FGS was removed from the game we’d literally just go to spamming ice bows. it’s a boring ele-stacking meta which is no better than the old warrior stacking meta. get rid of conjures and you’ll actually have a reason to take other classes than “however many eles we can pile on while still keeping the run smooth”.

- Of course if the enemy is only launching projectile, its a bad thing. You put a wall of reflection and that’s it. That’s totally a design flaw in some of the encounter of the game. But they should really retract on the ‘’some projectile are reflect, but some or not’’ mentality that they started recently.

of course. don’t remove reflects, just give bosses with projectiles melee attacks as well.

exhibit #1 – lupicus

Give unstrippable retaliation on some bosses in each path and enough hp so that the retal can fully tick in. Expect some people to be surprized and the FGS to be toned down.

Except that’s a bad idea since it will just hard-counter low-hp classes as well. I can survive ginva on a warrior, but on a thief I can’t even pistol whip to proc signet of malice, retal just eats me alive no matter what I do.

Did you try to FGS the Ginvra the butcher in Hotw ?

yes, you kill the retal turret, then 4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4 him to death.

Alternatively you can give bosses some block skills he uses when he detects the FGS fields or other short duration high damage fields.

if I recall correctly, mobs moved out of dangerous aoes at one point and the amount of crying was so immense anet just patched it out. so no, let’s not do that, there’s already enough crying on these forums.

Line of sighting isn’t even a problem, if mobs didn’t LoS we would literally just pull them together.

Here’s what trivialises dungeons:

1. Fiery greatsword
2. Ice bow
3. Reflecting fully projectile-based bosses

#1, the fiery noobsword can literally be removed from the game and I would be jumping for joy, #2 needs to be nerfed because if #1 is removed people will just spam more #2, and #3 is simply a case of bosses having weak mechanics.

#3: I am not understating the windup. Here’s a fine example particularly 1:26 in, where the team drops the boss in 11 seconds. This isn’t even a particularly good speed run group. When you are in a team where regular mobs die instantly, vets and silvers die in 5 seconds, and legendary mobs live for 20 seconds (or 12 with time warp), there is nothing more useless than a condi build. You get 4 attacks before an enemy is dead, and you can’t unload a full set of 25 bleeds + burn + poison + torment +confusion in 4 attacks.

Nice, a video with myself in it got linked.

And I don’t understand why you’re using old world record attempts as an example of condition being bad, even though our group composition was weak, our rotations and gear were still leagues better than your average berserker player. I’ve pugged a lot of that path and I’ve literally never had a kill that fast in a pug setting.

If you zoned in with a staff, that’s probably why you were kicked.

You mean kind of like the “must be 80, zerk only, ping gear, must have 10k AP” crap we deal with now? I don’t see how shaking it up is necessarily a bad thing.

“80s only, lf 2 zerks, 1 cc, 1 support, classes x and y only [who fulfill the support and cc role better than others] or kick”

You’re still going to have discrimination.

Besides, as far as I’m aware you don’t even play with those kind of groups so I don’t even know why you even care about what berserker pugs who spend a year finding a group do, you are in your group having fun, don’t let what other players do bother you.

Hell, right now you can take seven classes out of eight in to a berserker run (necros seriously need their support elements fixed for pve, they’re useless) since they’re all pretty darn competitive with each other for DPS – if you force “support” and “cc” roles you’ll just have certain classes who do it better than others and you’ll just have classes excluded, they won’t even have to ask you to ping gear or your build, the utilities your class has available just wouldn’t be on par with another class (e.g. guardian aegis has no contender).

I’ve made several suggestions, beyond tying support and cc to gear. Although, considering zerks is designed to make you create more damage per second, why should there not also be gear that extends your boon length, or makes your boons more effective? i can see how gear and control might not work, but support is more than just ‘healing’ and could have sets that make you more effective. obviously some balancing would be necessary, but shouldn’t the two work in tandem to make things better rather than just rolling dps gear and being ‘sufficient’? I’m just trying to add some depth, to mix it up. Something beyond “learn to dodge, gear up in zerkers, call it good.” Don’t you people get bored?

We already have strength runes to increase might duration, phalanx warriors take 30 in tactics which gives them 30% boon duration as well. And guess what – even though the build does like 75% of the damage of the max dps warrior build, it’s still a meta-build since the might stacking is absolutely balls to the wall insane. I mean you can even use hoelbrak as a budget alternative or just scholar runes with boon duration food if you don’t want to spend your whole family’s life savings on stupidly priced strength runes.

Simple solution, match condition dps to direct dps (up condi dps to 5kdps like direct dps). Presently, condi damage maxes out at 4kdps

Condi is already on par with direct damage in a solo setting, you don’t need to increase the DPS you just need to:

1. make condition damage scale with vuln
2. increase the condition cap
3. damage modifiers to apply to condition damage

The last hurdle is to find a way to make it possible to apply conditions immediately at a rapid rate – the ramp up time for condis is the same reason mesmers aren’t popular, by the time you get your dps going the fight is over.

PU stealth honestly makes the skip a complete joke. As long as you’re chaining them correctly you can just roll through at no risk. The best bit is, mesmers do absolutely zero damage against Brie so it’s not like your party even needs to wait for you to get your dps utilities back up

run 0/0/30/0/0, stick on PU

sw/f + sw/t

blink/decoy/veil/mass invis

when you get past the boat and at the corner just before the final tunnel open up with veil and curtain, channel your mass invis a second later, blink forward, decoy near the opening of the tunnel, prestige if necessary afterwards. ez pz

I wasn’t trying to stop speed runners…
If I was, I’d have included things like mobs would never de-aggro (no skipping), you wouldn’t be able to make it to the next section until you cleared the room of foes (no skipping), etc.

Nope. We’d blaze through the mobs instantly and the less skilled players would be put off because the trash mobs tend to be more unforgiving than the bosses.

Like I said, nothing you can think of will stop speed runners – every single change suggested will ruin the game for your average player not the speed clearer.

Here’s the incentive:

“I can’t dodge well enough so I’ll take valkyrie until I get better”

or

“I’m not bothered to dodge everything so I’ll take valkyrie so I can eat a few more hits”

if pve AI was more like a real person’s and they had fully functional skill bars, that would fix the issue too…
we wouldn’t have the zerk gear, stack in a corner meta…

People can’t even handle Kholer, make the AI like players and literally nobody besides those of us in good dungeon guilds will run the content.

Literally no suggestion ever suggested will ever stop speed runners from speed running, it only hurts casual runners.

Can you maintain full burning uptime, almost full uptime on torment and almost full uptime of 16-25 bleeds on mesmer? In addition to perma-fury and massive might stacking?

Condi mesmer is fine for wvw and pvp, but it won’t work in solo pve content very well. I don’t mind being proven wrong though, if someone can show me a competitive boss kill time with a condi mesmer, it would be great to watch.

that chestpiece

my immersion

Veprovina.4876:

I know berserker builds only use swords… I use both Sword/Focus and Greatsword… Sometimes Sword/Pistol… I don’t plan on using this build in dungeons, just general PvE i guess…

So basically what you’re saying is, conditions are useless? kitten …
Is berserker the only build that does any damage?

…conditions not so useless

you just need to be solo and have a way to apply them heavily which a mesmer doesn’t

Timer does not make an encounter harder, it’s just an easy way for Anet to increase difficulty

??????

Not really. Your gear is basically your expectation of how much damage you expect to take – your traits are where your play style is. If you stack damage modifiers, clearly you want to deal a lot of damage. If you take heal on X, heal if Y, apply defensive boon if Z traits, then you’re wanting to play a defensive build.

its almost as if my post was entirely to do with PvE

oh yeah

it was

mesmers were useless before the nerf anyway

Purple Miku.7032:

…I’m just gonna go ahead and leave this here.

http://i.imgur.com/J1XHqTK.jpg

Just saying, the vast majority of the attire that’s available on this game is what I’d expect to see on strippers. I really am baffled how you think otherwise. :P

lol.

gw2 is like a nunnery, it’s not stripperific at all.

stayed up all night again

balls

axe/sh + gs
defiant stance/endure pain/berserker’s stance/utility of choice/signet of rage

pop swiftness with SoR, warhorn or whatever, jump down, shield block (assuming the worst turret rng with three of them firing on you), switch to GS, get to the corner where you pull the aboms, but rather than waiting there, just pop endure pain, berserker’s stance, hundred blades the turret down, whirlwind if no mobs nearby otherwise switch to axe, auto a bit, eviscerate it, go in to the corner and you’ll be out of range of the turret near the rock so you can pull the aboms safely

Incorrect. What actually happens is the no-requirement groups fill a lot quicker, while the berserker only ones take a lot longer to fill so they’re the only ones you see on the LFG. One time I did a full Arah p2 solo, exited the instance and there was this same guy still looking for a group.

No Pulse.2967:

P1 is easier than P2 and has the same way from the waypoint to Lupi. You will only need 3 more to help you at Tar. You can even sell the path after you are done practicing.

Path 1 involves waiting an hour for pugs to arrive.

Path 2 is extremely easy to get to Lupi with, kill Belka in ~4 minutes, the skips are easy, kill abom in ~4 minutes.

The only annoying bit is honestly the trash pack with the hunter (and they path if you run past which is – - – - ing lame and then the turrets if you get a turret in the far corner.

I can’t believe I have been punished for helping someone.

http://i.imgur.com/i6MBPGF.jpg

Mesket.5728:

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Sirendor.1394:

Fenrir.3609:

Not this kitten again…

1. Even if you nerf zerk into oblivion something will always be the “meta” and people will look to utilize that.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

The PURPOSE for BALANCING is to make sure there ISN’T A META.

Make everything as efficient as everything else and be done with it.

Because cleric gear should absolutely damage just as much as berserker and berserker should be just as tanky as soldiers. Right. Gotcha.

Lilith, even though in the end, everything resolves in killing and surviving; it doesn’t mean that all we can do is damage and tank. Cleric is out of the question because it empathize healing and healer is not a supported role in GW2. But we could have another set which increases the effectiveness of our boons (not the duration), making might grant more power or fury more crit. Having such a stat would turn a player into a support role who can at the same time increase Zerk effectiveness. Defiant could be change, instead of having a stack value, it could have a cumulative value (like an HP bar) and having a stat that increases CC effectiveness to reduce that defiant faster or even bypass it in some cases. This would make players specialized in control very effective in such task.

These are just 2 examples I imagine could help having support and control as viable roles without even touching zerk. Of course, the dungeon design has to go along side by side. The dungeons we have today are kinda of a joke.

“turn a player in to a support role”?

each player is meant to be supporting, dps and cc’ing, you’re not meant to have a player exclusively doing one thing.

this just confirms what I thought the whole time, people just want to play afk buff bots because they’re so interesting and everyone loves playing support roles in trinity games hence the complete lack of healers in like every trinity MMO ever.

edited my post, dps and support guards can do aegis, protect, reflect just fine, literally the only difference is missing out on a second virtues trait.

projectcedric.6951:

maha.7902:

projectcedric.6951:

maha.7902:

projectcedric.6951:

Xenon.4537:

projectcedric.6951:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

you can see it most obviously in dungeon runs. most groups want that person in zerker gear who can provide the better dps, but can still offer reflects or protection or w/e adequately. they are going to take that person over someone in anything else because the support that person offers is sufficient.

Pray tell what kind of build this is on what profession. Im interested now. It seems like an OMNI GODLIKE build to bring to spvp.

He’s referring to something like a zerker guard who can still apply reflect wall, aegis, and protection. Or a zerk mesmer who can perma reflect (assuming the kitten warden doesn’t bug out). These builds can be great in dungeons. Spvp is a different story.

Hmmm… are those efficient builds when it comes to dps? They sound very karate-middle to me.

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/viewforum/4280860/m/6563292

we have builds for every single class

No, what I meant is that would a zerk guard provide the optimal DPS relative to say a zerk warrior and STILL be able to provide all those aegis/reflect?

Im more inclined to think that because he is able to do something (CC etc) he should sacrifice a little bit for DPS.

the difference between the “support” warrior and full dps warrior builds are around ~600DPS, the difference between full DPS guardians and “support” guardian is around that benchmark too.

What about the difference between full DPS guardians and full DPS warriors?

And can the full DPS guardians still do those things (protect aegis reflect)?

30/30/0/10/0 GS war – 12.9k dps (dps build)
20/30/10/0/10 gs + sw/f guardian – 12,080DPS (dps build, assumes no unscathed contender which is a 20% damage modifier, so I guess if you throw that in it goes up to like 14.5k)

full DPS guardians lack the extra 15 points in virtues which means they miss out on the second trait, but the master trait tends to not actually matter that much unless the dungeon is condition heavy.

but beyond that, full dps guards can do everything the dps support guard can (20/25/0/0/25)

projectcedric.6951:

maha.7902:

projectcedric.6951:

Xenon.4537:

projectcedric.6951:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

you can see it most obviously in dungeon runs. most groups want that person in zerker gear who can provide the better dps, but can still offer reflects or protection or w/e adequately. they are going to take that person over someone in anything else because the support that person offers is sufficient.

Pray tell what kind of build this is on what profession. Im interested now. It seems like an OMNI GODLIKE build to bring to spvp.

He’s referring to something like a zerker guard who can still apply reflect wall, aegis, and protection. Or a zerk mesmer who can perma reflect (assuming the kitten warden doesn’t bug out). These builds can be great in dungeons. Spvp is a different story.

Hmmm… are those efficient builds when it comes to dps? They sound very karate-middle to me.

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/viewforum/4280860/m/6563292

we have builds for every single class

No, what I meant is that would a zerk guard provide the optimal DPS relative to say a zerk warrior and STILL be able to provide all those aegis/reflect?

Im more inclined to think that because he is able to do something (CC etc) he should sacrifice a little bit for DPS.

the difference between the “support” warrior and full dps warrior builds are around ~600DPS, the difference between full DPS guardians and “support” guardian is around that benchmark too.

and why should it not work that way besides “I said so”?

this partially exists in the game already anyway, phalanx warriors take advantage of the 30% boon duration in tactics and 45% might duration from strength runes so that their phalanx might procs last longer and you can maintain 20-25 might on a party at the loss of around ~25% of your DPS versus a full DPS warrior build because of your traiting making you lose a bunch of damage.

Thaddeus.4891:

If you have an Ele, Guardian, Warrior, Thief or Mesmer you’ll be more than welcome in pretty much everything.

Ranger is as good as the other profession, but only with 1 build and most of them don’t like to play that build so you have a high proportion or bad ranger. That give the profession a bad reputation so even if you play a good ranger and bring probably more to the part than a bad warrior or a bad elementalist, they could still kick, which is sad.

Engineer is a good profession that can do everything, but there is always someone else to do it better.

Necro is also a good profession, but the support it bring is more PvP oriented and he’s more of a single target DPS, making him the weakest profession of them all in PvE. Still, I would take a good necro anytime in my party (except for organized guild speed run).

making a mesmer literally blocks you from taking part in any speed run ever

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

I’m in agreement with others that simply nerfing berserker gear is not the answer. I don’t agree that the change to ferocity ‘did nothing’ or is ‘useless’ though. It was simply the first step in a long list of things that needed to be done in order to balance the various available roles to make support and cc more desirable.

I think we’re starting to see some of the further changes, although I don’t think their implementations are perfect. The amount of things no longer reflect able might require a bit of tweaking, for example.

support is already extremely desirable. CC has niche uses but when used, it can be used very effectively. what is the problem here?

Dub.1273:

“Fixing” fgs rush = kittening eles in solo’s.

if you say so

memphis may fire you’re – - – -ing awesome nova

you don’t bypass mechanics by stacking and doing damage.

the only time you bypass mechanics is when using fiery greatsword, which I would honestly be happy if they removed it and deleted the accounts of whoever popularised it because it makes dungeon fights braindead.

1. crit damage is nerfed
2. reflects are nerfed across dungeons
3. spider queen drops poison in melee

and people are still complaining about berserker gear

how much more do you want

those 18 second Lupicus kills are basically rehearsed kills done in vacuum settings, your average kill in a speed clear guild is about a minute.

I’m also not aware of any exploits besides a specific champion and elite mob you can LoS in TA and they do absolutely nothing.

DeceiverX.8361:

David.9807:

Hmm middle tier dps? Thieves do NOT produce more dps than warriors, elementalists without fgs neither. And there are banners, fgj, and a lot of damage increase traits with warrior. QQ

Wut.
Have you ever played S/P thief? It deals like three times the DPS of a full-offense GS war in PvE.

I think you should stop posting

I’m sitting here laughing at all the necros who think they have comparable dps to warriors LOL.

30/30/0/10/0 GS war – 12.9k dps
30/30/0/0/10 nec (lich form) – 14k
30/30/0/0/10 nec d/f + d/wh – 10.8k

maybe check the info i pasted on the first page?

No Pulse.2967:

maha.7902:

joined a path 2 before lupicus, hit the floor mid-way through phase 3, some dude finishes soloing.

ragequit group.

- – - – this game

I’m pretty sure everyone who can solo Lupicus can relate to that.

I was the one who got trash canned and ragequit, not them

time to not play gw2 for like a week

joined a path 2 before lupicus, hit the floor mid-way through phase 3, some dude finishes soloing.

ragequit group.

- – - – this game

If reflects are a problem, just scale down the damage. They did it to deadeye dunwell, so the mechanics are there.

Actually it’s just ANet pandering (again) to the crybabies like with their genius spider queen change where they thought “a boss with melee and ranged skills? meh, lets just make it spam everything instead, to hell with actually adapting to player proximity”.

maxinion.8396:

frifox posted a nice video comparing a good melee solo of the Champ Ice Wolf in CoE to a GS camping solo. The difference in times was negligible. When you don’t have the group buffs and cleave advantages of melee range, GS camping isn’t bad.

The question is ~why~ you want to GS camp, and in particular, why you are solo-ing this content. If you want to get it done easily, there are better ways than soloing (zerging, bringing friends). You solo for the challenge usually— and kiting has no challenge. Solo-ing with melee prepares you for the situations where you need to melee (with good groups in dungeons) and helps you become a better player.

If you just care about completion, well, then kite away.

Anyway, this is getting off-topic. If OP wants to become better with the meta phantasm builds, they have to practice with the meta phantasm builds— that’s the only solution.

he literally never melee’d the champion in his melee solo, just spawned phantasms, kited it around over and over again and then went in when he had frenzy and riposte up. if he actually had more than 0.1% melee uptime, the melee kill would have been faster.

Because open world champions often have awful ai. You can spawn 2 iZerkers and 1 iSwordsman for nearly permanent cripple, then just run around in circles as they relentlessly chase you to close distance. It’s probably not the absolute fastest way to do some champions, but it sure is easy.

Right – so when you solo champions you’re doing it because “ok it’s just me let’s see if i can take on this guy”. There’s a wrong way and a right way you can do this. You can either go “I don’t even care to learn the mechanics”, pewpew with your laser sword and kill it if after a year, or you can take the time to figure out the mechanics and melee it. if you just want a champ bag just write in the map chat that the champ is up and afk 111111 it down.

How do you know how the fight was meant to be designed?

elementalist – extremely high dps via fiery rush, might stacking
guardian – aegis, reflect (well… maybe not so much post-patch), stability, pulls, condition cleanse
warrior – might, fury, banners, empower allies
thief – stealth, dps
mesmer – reflect, pug carrier
ranger – spotter, frost spirit, reflect
engineer – pug carrier, does everything
necro – dps, weak support

most desirable is … whichever one sounds the most interesting to you.

Fay.2357:

Lynne Fitzgerald.9254:

I’ve read through the newest guides and builds and it seems S/S and S/F mantra phantasm build is the way to go, but I am not entirely comfortable with it since it has a bit less survivability and my phantasms die so quickly. I tried it vs some champion mobs solo and I mostly die with the phantasm build, while it’s much easier with conditions. It works in dungeons but I am not entirely happy with it, I feel like I’m missing something.

The standard S/F+S/S build is not a build meant for soloing all champions. It’s primarily a dungeon running build, optimized for maximum damage output at close range. If you want to solo open world champions, you’d be better off tossing on a greatsword and letting them chase you around while your phants kill them.

good god

why would you tell someone to use a greatsword to solo champions

phase 3 on mesmer in the wall must literally be the worst thing to do in the entire game

worse than leveling

Cof1 is an example. Cof1 was run constantly for farms, causing players to get very good at the game. A series of nerfs later, and given enough time, all of the players who ran Cof1 frequently have left the game. New players coming in don’t have that rote memorization of the dungeon, so the overall skill declines.

lol. GS mesmers, whirling axe warriors.

Most COF p1 farmers sucked.