Guild Wars 2

I use phantasmal swordsman in phase 3 to eat bubbles for when I don’t have dodges and need them to take aggro so I can recover endurance since I don’t use energy sigils and i’m bad

A zerk warrior has best DPS-survivability-skill ratio in an unorganised group,

“pugs suck therefore warriors are higher dps”

nothing changes the fact that warriors are average dps, it’s just stupidly easy to hit their peak dps since they do a lot of self-buffing and can maintain massive amounts of might on themselves through forceful greatsword.

A good glass-canon might-stacking ele with a lightning hammer will bring more to a group stacked in a corner and will survive with proper dodges, interrupts and aegis from party members; a bad warrior will provide more DPS by smashing buttons and for longer than a bad ele who got downed by a grenade barrage while casting meteor shower (and a good ele who popped swirling winds to reflect grenades as well, by the way).

If we take Crown Pavillion for instance, my experience at Boom-Boom tells me that a group consisting of 4-5 warriors plus 1-2 eles with ice bows usually deals very good DPS and 5:00 on timer left with Boom-Boom ready at 5% is possible, while a mix of rangers, necros, thieves, engies and what not generally cannot reach it.

bad players are going to have bad dps no matter what class they’re on, it doesn’t make warriors better. your experience is that the rangers, engis and thieves you have played with suck, therefore you don’t think they’re capable of doing damage. we do runs with rangers and thieves all the time – engi if people want to play with it and the kill times on bosses are honestly basically identical. we have five (class) lupicus kills on obal’s profile if you want to see what times we got – it was generally classes with reflects ranked highly, classes with high might and vuln got similar times and then you had thief and necro who had slower times because of bad might and fury.

Indeed. I went to bed last night knowing that warriors were one of the highest most sought-after DPSers. I wake up today and they are suddenly crap; only good for their banners? Then I read things like… this….

if you watch the recent caudecus manor records, they literally don’t even take a warrior.

[necromancers] What.

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/page/2/m/6563292/viewthread/12821718-necro-dps-trials-halp-dek

here’s the relevant dps numbers:

fully buffed group:

30/30/0/0/10 necro w/lich form – 13,920DPS
30/30/0/10/0 GS warrior – 12,919 DPS
30/30/0/0/10 d/f + d/wh necro – 10,468DPS

as a bonus for people who say guardians suck-

20/30/10/0/10 gs + sw/f guardian – 12,080DPS -WITHOUT UNSCATHED CONTENDER!-

so to correct myself – warrior DPS is higher than necro but necros aren’t low DPS junk that everyone thinks they are, lich form is a full on 1,000 more dps. ele dps for LH builds is between 12.5 and 13.2k, staff builds are higher IIRC. if a warrior is taking an empower allies build their DPS drops to like 12.4k IIRC as well.

I’m not comparing any specific build. I’d love to know how a necro does more dps and bring more group utility than a warrior.

none of us claimed utility. necromancer utility is just ….. so easily replaceable. but their DPS is honestly pretty decent.

30/20/0/20/0 is what i use for soloing lupi or pug lupi, being able to sit inside wardens in phase 3 reflecting the spray is pretty strong.

take triple mantra- heal, daze and stability + feedback, just before you reflect cast daze mantra for the vuln on daze proc to get extra damage, stability obviously to break out of bubbles.

for organised groups you want 30/30/0/0/10

David.9807:

maha.7902:

what are you talking about more bosses being designed for zerk warriors? you do realise they only have middle tier dps right?

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

We and other dungeon guilds have either been using one warrior or zero warriors for world records. Guess why? The DPS isn’t good – you just want them for banners and empower allies. Thieves, non-fgs eles and triple phantasm mesmers surpass the DPS of warriors. Necromancers and guardians are on-par or maybe even slightly higher.

what are you talking about more bosses being designed for zerk warriors? you do realise they only have middle tier dps right?

LoSing mobs and reflecting bosses are unintended game mechanics?

Are we really doing this again?

Relshdan.6854:

Ropechef.6192:

Relshdan.6854:

they made cc skills useless in pve….

they did?

(runs off to go see)

edit:
Nope still works.

you knew i meant defiance on bosses….don’t be an kitten just to be one.

would you like me to offer you my six youtube links of bosses where we use CC?

we were still able to throw her in the trash can in exactly the same spot

Harper.4173:

I’m not very happy with the AC change – it makes it less farmable and thus incentive to go back is lower now.

Still – what really baffles me is why they don’t put these changes in the patch notes.

run with guild/friends.

VodCom.6924:

Lucas.9157:

VodCom.6924:

Fractals on the other hand are much better : you actually need a party to complete them.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Full-Solo-Lvl-50-FotM-D/first

Quoting from OP of the thread linked : “I don’t know if anyone has done this yet but I probably won’t ever do it again because the chances of getting the fractals that I did are so low it’s insane.”

My respect for this guy, he deserves a special award. I still maintain my statement : fractals are not soloable (he had one guildy to allow him to repair) and not regularly (you need a good draw).

person – “here is a guy who soloed fotm 50”
you – “fractals are not soloable”
me -

….

I’m pretty sure you have people in WoW and Tera who solo instances. It’s nothing to do with bad design, it’s mastering content and learning how to do it yourself.

yup.

i’ve done arah p3 with pugs, asked them why they were stacking wraithlord and these are the responses:

http://i.imgur.com/RoRl8Nr.jpg

pugs don’t know why they stack (spoiler: every answer was incorrect). I started fighting in the middle, they got out of their pointless stack and killed it with me.

Imbune.5497:

They changed to spider queen in AC you say? Well now I’m thoroughly confused. When I said (and I’m sure many others) that stacking against the queen was an exploit-for the very same reason; bosses simply do not use their abilities, I got infarcted for wrongfully accusing players of inappropriate behaviour in the game. Now after many many months it’s fixed out of the blue which means it was an exploit? Obviously, because if it was ‘working as intended’ then there would be no reason to fix it…to do the same bloody thing some of us were saying it should do and players were exploiting the fact that it didn’t in the first place.

Then wtf did I get infarcted for?

it’s not an exploit, it’s just like the ferocity nerf – they just made changes so that people would stop crying on the forums.

what will either happen is (lol) pugs will learn how to do it properly or AC will become another dungeon pugs avoid.

alternatively, you’ll get the “know your stuff, lvl 80, zerk only, exp only, ping gear 100,000 AP” stupid lfgs listed by bads who want someone to carry them.

they’re just a player in the guild. shows that you don’t need AP to be decent at the game as much as people seem to think it matters.

enjoy your masochistic pug arah phase while it lasts though, i kind of miss doing it myself.

you’ll get bored.

i’m completely burnt out on the game, i don’t even enjoy doing post-DR pug carries anymore.

well now it’s no fun carrying p1 pugs – it was always good when we died on Lupicus, I ran back, they all ate dirt on the skip and then i soloed and popped the waypoint

RIP in peace arah carrying
RIP in peace bugged alphard

Hardest Bosses are Sîzer and Tàge, you can practice and train a year and you will still have more problems to solo them than anything else.
But probably you guys don’t even know them.

not really. what you do is you get an internet connection that doesn’t suck ( a lot of us have awful connections), spend a while learning the meta, take a build which hard counters theirs and just throw them in the trash can. dungeons actually train your reflexes quite well if you do the not-faceroll instances, and if my connection was better and i took the time to learn the tells for each class in the game and the builds i’d be able to play it at a pretty high level – I remember doing some hotjoin with hambow and there was a guardian bunkering mid and he knew his ****, he blinded my hard hitting skills or aegis’d them, he knew when to CC and was generally just a solid player. if a lot of us here actually put in the same effort we do in to dungeons in to pvp and got not-terrible connections, most likely you’d be seeing what are the top dungeon guilds appearing in tournaments.

Problem is, that isn’t true at all. The decrease in kill speed for the bosses has to do with a regression to the mean: the more players there are in a group, the closer monster death comes to average kill time. If a player is on the low end of the spectrum, whether by gear or skill, then they see only an increase in kill time from zergs. Let alone a decrease in effort to kill things.

opens map chat
hey guys we only had a small group but we were able to kill boom boom really fast
hey guys maybe we should spread out in small groups since the bosses seem to have less hp if you do that

To be honest I don’t really like Arah, the CC-fest mobs are so annoying. Soloing Belka is a nightmare: I dc every 2 tries, and when I don’t dc, that “freeze and speed up” thingy happens and I don’t even see the knockback + ball of doom animation.
Surprisingly, I almost never get connection problems when in a group… It’s weird.

as much as I used to rage at belka, once you figure it out it honestly isn’t that hard

keep your back to walls or anything where you won’t get pushed in to a barrel
on reflect classes just chain them – as a mesmer just use untraited wardens and afk
if you want to make it easier, go out to the bone wall when low on health, clear the burning, get ooc then run back in – you’ll reset but she won’t if you get back to her quick enough.

regarding the thing about mobs – this makes me laugh because people always say mobs should have more diverse skills, support each other etc. but the moment they do, people don’t like it, lel

Well, we could take it to the next level. All bosses are bad designed, simply because their AI is too simple. All bosses are just acting, not reacting. They’re all punching bags, some of them are onehitting puniching bags (Lupicus, Liadri). But not a single boss is reacting. Like using blocks when you’re using a hardhitting attack. Or using poison when you try to heal. Or walking out of AoEs. Or using AOEs when the party is stacking. Nothing like that. That’s what GW2 misses. Reaction.

make every single boss cleave, and bump up their damage a few notches, done. guess where they do this? fotm. guess what pugs do? range. guess what we do? full melee mossman/ashym/mai trin @ fotm 49/50. bosses already have ranged and melee skills too, take the first boss of se p3, if you are at range he will throw you in the trash can, if you melee he will apply a ton of bleeds.

Ryuujin.8236:

Amethyst Lure.5624:

People gave excellent advice above regarding dungeons, but if you are in open world PvE shatter is hardly that bad. I tend to scratch that itch when farming or whatnot.

This is true. OP only asked about PVE, not specifically dungeons – in open PvE, shatter builds can be quite excellent, since they provide strong burst and a large AoE, enabling you to explode swarms of trash in the blink of an eye; faster than a phantasm build in fact.

It’s just important to clarify the differences:

Shatter:

• Large area of effect
• Strong burst damage
• Great for killing swarms of trash mobs

Phantasm:

• The less targets, the stronger the DPS potential
• Excellent sustain DPS
• Perfect for boss fights

Except you can literally just run a phantasm build, cast two phantasms and then shatter them if it’s such a big deal, like literally any open world mob will explode if you do that. No need to encourage someone taking weak traits for PvE when you can melt mobs using a more versatile build that can be applied to both open world and dungeons/fractals.

I couldn’t care less if they removed LoSing, but you’re not ever going to be able to remove stacking unless you add collision detection, which ANet has expressed no interest in doing.

Xae Isareth.1364:

I am in full support of bosses that has AI or mechanics which counters stacking.

But tanks and healers won’t ever be in this game as a requirement. You can bring one, we had an ele water healer on a FotM run once, made things a lot smoother in a PuG actually, but you dont need one.

I don’t really why all the hate in the replies here. Stacking in a corner and facerolling should never be the best tactic for a boss fight, ever. Stacking can be a tactic, but it should involve actively keeping mobs trapped in the stack and NPCs should have ways to counter it.

“lf1m ranger with entangle”
“lf1m hammer/staff guard”

make them try to walk away all you want, groups can just lock them in place. better to have them cast their skills before dying than just simply dying.

“these bosses seem to get harder when theres lots of us but die quicker when theres less of us”

that’s a pretty clear in-game cue. you will inevitably get someone who will say “we zerged boss X and it took us a year but when we did boss Y in a small group he died really quick”

therefore the logical conclusion is = don’t zerg bosses.

so no, the boss blitz isn’t an example of “guide dang it” at all.

I think that with new mobs IQ berzerks wont be so powerfull and there would be some place for tanks or healers .

THERE WILL BE NO TANKS AND HEALERS IN THIS GAME

HOW CAN YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THIS AFTER TWO YEARS

frifox.5283:

maha.7902:

Honestly, as a PvE mesmer you shouldn’t even bother with 10/30/0/20/10, just switch between 30/20/0/20/0 and 30/20/0/0/20. I’ll only use 30/30/0/0/10 if it’s actually worth having that third mantra charge (triple daze on Lupicus for vuln on feedback, dazing abomination to shave defiant, maybe triple cleanse for first SE p3 boss)

It’s about time for you to switch to the new trait naming. I have to re-read the builds #’s a few times to actually understand them if you use the 30/30/0/0/10 format. 6/6/0/0/2 makes much more sense.

i’m not using the new peasant naming.

so if Lupicus’ kick was untelegraphed you’d be cool with that

ok

Honestly, as a PvE mesmer you shouldn’t even bother with 10/30/0/20/10, just switch between 30/20/0/20/0 and 30/20/0/0/20. I’ll only use 30/30/0/0/10 if it’s actually worth having that third mantra charge (triple daze on Lupicus for vuln on feedback, dazing abomination to shave defiant, maybe triple cleanse for first SE p3 boss)

i honestly can’t remember lel

ffff i miss those days when we were all on main accounts trolling the forum

hey guys remember when lilith was the worst of our problems complaining about arah p4

hue

:D

jk have some <3

<33333333

lilith cant be a king even if she wanted to since she isnt a bloke

secondly

if she writes “pink dyes only” on her lfg and people join with black dyes, she has the right to kick them for not meeting her requirement

see this is where the issue is -

you call the burrows bad design. we know the sequence, have builds that max out on power and are using good weapons so we can kill burrows pretty much before gravelings even spawn.

this isn’t a case of bad design, this is a case of you not being very good at the encounter.

its almost as if something is telling you all to stop pugging and run with friends

…

like seriously, unless you’re masochistic like me don’t even bother pugging if it’s just going to make you wind yourself up

Fror.2163:

It doesn’t shine: it barely glows. A sword can do that too, plus you have access to an extra condi cleanse with focus that you don’t have with staff. And you’re ready in your max dps build.

our guardians use staff for the spiders there too

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-How-To-Mesmer-in-Dungeons

I know it’s hard for them to adapt, but what I mean is that I don’t feel it’s badly designed just because people can’t get out of the afk spam 1 on bow mentality – forcing people to go out of their comfort zone I feel is a good thing. It kind of just annoys me seeing the remark thrown around about how everything is badly designed, you (not literally you, but “you”) disliking something does not make it badly designed in any way imo.

i’m selfish, play for my own entertainment, and my entertainment is maximising my own damage. idgaf about the rest of my party unless it’s a guild group or people I know – hell I only do banner b_____ in the rare times I run in guild because it’s just out of respect for the efficiency of the group.

i dunno. I feel like its probably ideal for easy content (so basically everything besides arah or pug fractals if they’re ranging), but if i’m doing things where i don’t have any faith in them surviving, then hell no am I running it.

Fror.2163:

maha.7902:

i’d honestly just take 30/25/0/0/15 or 30/30/0/0/10 in pugs, it’s better to maximise your own dps than boost the dps of bad pugs

I disagree. In pugs, fights go much quicker with my phalanx than with my dps warrior.

I pug arah where people are either out of range of PS and/or dying all of the place.

Plus I hate playing support builds and don’t think unproven players deserve me going the EA/PS banner female-dog role since I don’t know if they can pull their weight or not.

but fgs is really interesting

444444444444444444444444444444444444

you know you’ve done something right in your game when bad players complaining about stacking in corners pressing 1 skill is the truth.

Q: why should a player use staff outside of TA and grawl fractal instead of any other option?
A: might stacking, heals

addendum – might stacking is short duration, ~2,000 party-wide heal is negligible

additional note – stack boon duration and/or healing power to amplify the might duration and heal

additional note #2 – amplifying the effect of staff skills involves making enormous efficiency compromises with your build but players will just see themselves giving their team might and feeling that dealing approximately 10% of the damage of a meta guardian is a worthy trade-off

thank you, carry on.

I see this comment thrown around a lot on the forum. Boss blitz is poorly designed. Dungeons are poorly designed. Fractals are poorly designed. PvP is poorly designed. WvW is poorly designed.

What is “bad design” and what is simply just easy or hard? A lot of us thought the classes were badly designed until we began to realise they were a lot more balanced than we thought they were. A lot of people in the general discussion/living story forums call the blitz bad design because of the anti-zerg mechanics. Personally I’d say it was good design because it discourages the hive mentality and forces people to split up and actually think for themselves. The scaling is also very linear and easily controllable and is also decently designed – if you have five people with identical dps or fifty it doesn’t really matter, you’ll melt the boss in basically the same time (but of course this never happens because co-ordinating that many players to be playing meta builds and rotations is pretty much impossible and not even needed in the first place).

Bad design on the other hand. I’d say bosses which can be completely mitigated through reflect and bosses with hard-to-tell choreographs are bad design. Take Belka for example – a completely uninteresting boss which troll knockback’s you every now and then with basically zero choreograph. Completely unfun if you haven’t learnt to position yourself so you don’t get knocked back in to a barrel (at <25% when the fire fields are basically triple stacked on each other it’s just gg) and there’s no tell for it. The projectile shield is also pointless, it seems to be punishing ranging but it’s up for like five seconds so what’s the point? Rangers gonna range, they’ll just shoot themselves for five seconds then get back to it.

Rasimir.6239:

CalamityO.2890:

I sometimes pug and ask the same thing, “is this their first time”. And like you said, it’s normally not answered straight away.

I have to admit I often don’t know how to answer this kind of question. I’ve done a ton of dungeons with my friends / ex-guildies, finished every dungeon path at least twice, and have a solid understanding of most paths and their mechanics. But since the people I mostly have run with so far hardly ever skip or stack and range most bosses (successfully, with a colourful mix of builds and equipment), I have next to no knowledge of pug tactics. Am I “new” to the dungeon by your definition or not?

Pug tactics are trash, so I’d say you become experienced when you well and truly learn a dungeon path’s mechanics.

Take Arah path 3 for example:

We take a thief to the gate where the four elites spawn, 4 people pick path, one holds, when the last arrives they lock in the path, thief pops shadow refuge, we skip cutscene then run through the gate. Pugs will clear the entire room, lock the path, LoS the elites (you don’t even need to LoS them) then run through.

For the first pair of bosses, you stack might, aggro from a sneaky little LoS spot (relevant video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzILYccc_NM) to pull them together so you can cleave. Guardian puts up reflect so the hunter can’t immobilise anyone, cleanses any immobilise people get. You obviously dodge the crush. Pugs sometimes will pull the hunter/crusher all the way out in to the first room, respawning all four of the elites for no reason.

For the next boss (pre-patch), he life sucks, throws gunk, creates symbols and detonates his symbols for damage and knockdown. You can sit on him, chain reflects for the gunk, dodge the suck and just dodge the symbol detonation. Pugs would use an AFK range spot and pew-pew.

Lupicus, well this is too long to go in to, people think multiple grubs should force a restart, people can’t dodge grubs, people range it, people don’t know to use reflect, people use weak weapon sets (a sw/sh + axe/axe warrior for example isnt going to have the amount of blocks and evades built in to their weapons as an axe/sw + gs warrior), and so forth. In our organised groups, we dodge kicks, dodge grubs, stability the phase 1 > 2 grub, reflect phase 2, DPS through phase 3 making sure to stay close so he doesn’t bubble, reflect spray.

Pre-patch, people thought you needed multiple people to kite wraiths in the wraithlord ritual. We used one. Pugs always LoS’d him for absolutely no reason (well one pug told me its so you “don’t fall off” and I would fight him in the middle because there was no reason to LoS.

So what I’m trying to say – Pugs copy what they think are “the tactics”. They don’t know why they should do it that way, they sometimes don’t even know how to perform the pug tactic, but they do it anyway. You become experienced at a dungeon when you actually learn the mechanics, how they work and through that, either devise a solution yourself or look up the “meta” solution. If you tried to figure it out yourself and your idea was in line with the “meta” solution, then basically, you understand the encounter. So if I were to be perfectly blunt – I’d say you may just be inexperienced – but 99% of players are anyway. See, ranging bosses promotes simply avoiding them, not directly learning the mechanics which you have to in melee in order to survive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeXr0S3Cdfo open world solo to offer an example). Pugs honestly have no idea why they’re even stacking half the time, you don’t even need to do it mostly.

not really. they’ll be applying their own weaker conditions and if you have a group you might as well stack vuln and get the 25%+ damage from 25 vuln – there is no condition equivalent to vuln.

my bad, i checked nike’s dps graph and 30/30/0/10/0 GS actually has 26 more expected DPS

so… yeah its basically whichever you prefer

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/12497977-dnt-warrior-build-41514

Shun.9475:

Something that seriously grinds my gears to the point of rage quitting Guild Wars 2 for several months is the serious time disrespectful under effective skills over hearted enemies.

Awhile back I was tried to to play pve solo and kill the champion Jungle Troll in Thundertroll Swamp.
Failed miserable a few times realized it was a group event, and went in with 2 guild mates.
For 2 hours long frustrating hours of constantly fighting that b——ard only to give-up and die from the fact that the boss could keep regenerating and spam aoe poisen and slowly kill everyone from slow ineffective recharging self heal ability. I tried to fight other group even bosses, every time completely wrecked. Low-level to high.

I decided to take a look at what was wrong, my traits were maxed out on healing and power for my build how the hell am I not able to have a healing that could give me the duration needed to last those bosses. I decided to just to skip champions and just aim for elites for veteran bosses. Easier, but took 30-15 min each. I looked at the average attack I made did 1% damage. checked for ways to do more damage, none all my skills did average same amount of damage when fully vested traits to power.

Struck my mind, this game is a time wasting meat grinder. Every skill is ineffective at actually doing heavy critical damage to PvE creatures, aside from simply dedicating to the annoying Berzerker set gears. Every Heal skill is ineffective at keeping you alive for a drawn out battle.

This game’s combat progression is basically guild wars 1 combat except you can only do normal attacks and do neat little tricks that fire 3 shots instead of one but have absolutely no effective damage output.

Solution make 2, 3, 4 skills do MORE DAMAGE and Conditions more COMBAT EFFECTIVE (longer durations) and make 6, 7, 8 utility skills provide healing, or 5 provide MUCH MORE DURATION AND EFFECTIVENESS.

was playing an elementalist, theif, guardian, and warrior.

conditions:

solo setting, that is. don’t bother with condis if there is more than one person.

there’s like a 300 difference in effective power in favour of axe so it’s basically whichever you can maintain rotations for, or simply prefer.

Warrior is easier to play, but guardians in general can carry bad groups a lot better.

Veydar.5017:

Everyone wears full zerk and runs meta builds. Guardian with hammer gives protection, chain reflects/absorbs with ele and/or thief. Ele summon earth elemental, everyone keep up cripple. Use consumables, dodge the agony Axe throws, rally on wolves. Its that easy. Just don’t run clerics kitten or tanky gear its gonna make you preserve your mistakes.

It’s “that easy” he says.

Let’s cut out the tryhardism please. Mossman is already unforgiving in organised groups, in pugs he’s harder because you can’t perform the correct tactics.

Or the pugs eat the floor and you’re stuck without 28% of damage modifiers.

i’d honestly just take 30/25/0/0/15 or 30/30/0/0/10 in pugs, it’s better to maximise your own dps than boost the dps of bad pugs

yes

and how does Tp playing show any more skill? or lottery winning from the mystic forge.

If TP flipping didn’t take skill, everyone would do it, everyone would be able to do it and there wouldn’t be all of these complaint threads. Same applies with how people say “PvE takes no skill” – well if that was the case everyone would be trying to sell Arah paths and have no buyers since anyone could do it since it would take no skill.

f you’d bothered to read what he posted…..

From what I see he actually plays the game and his comments about skill were related to legendary acquisition and he was asking for meaningful progression.

You must be one of the multi-legendary wep holders he was talking about.

Or I’m just someone who realises that nothing he listed is a demonstration of skill, and people playing the TP are playing the game just as much as everyone else is. TP speculators and flippers are the ones who depress prices (exhibit #1 – unidentified dyes), introduce supply of highly demanded items (that they hold on to) and are doing the community a service by offering their goods – it’s your average “player” who is responsible for price spikes, if people weren’t so willing to pay massive prices for things, they’d just crash down to a level at which people would be willing to pay for them.

i find it kind of hard to make jokes about this when cryhards make threads about it over and over again and just openly flaunt their lack of understanding of the game

/negative nancy off