Guild Wars 2

Chobiko.9182:

Artemis Thuras.8795:

If you cant watch animations for confusion applying skills ( or at least keep an eye on the effect bar) in pve ( when most of the time you should know to expect confusion) then you have a problem with the zerker meta in so much as, you’re not using active skills (be it aegis, condi clear etc correctly.

Lesson here: zerker meta has to know how to condi cleanse – or have a party member who can ( and knows how to) group cleanse. You could also simply dodge the confusion applying attack. PvE incoming confusion is a L2P issue.

Most zerker metas nowadays, however, do not have condition cleanse. Usually only mes, thief or guards have them. So that would require some change to the builds.

While it is easier said than done. Yes it is possible to avoid many confusion attacks.
That said many players live far away from the servers, and believe it or not, dodging hardly helps due to a 0.5 second latency (most attacks have a ~1 second telegraph, and by the time you have registered that and dodged it’s already too late server-side). It’s not an excuse by which to increase or nerf anything, but the handicap is there, nonetheless.

how the hell does confusion application require you to change build? you literally just stick a condition removal utility on and remove a DPS one.

Hayashi.3416:

A PuG carried by a mightstacker PS warrior/elementalist might wipe attempting a SEp1 triple golem stack. Aside from that the overall change in speed is unlikely to exceed 10% given that much of the time is spent running, not really fighting.

This will affect raids and WvW zergs far more when people actually make a point to mightstack much of the time, and may cause close calls in Triple Wurm/Tequatl to turn into full fails.

What causes wipes there is pugs not knowing what on earth the golem’s attacks do and how to deal with it, not a slight DPS drop from a might nerf.

so i decided to youtube the ending of the solas romance in DA:I

and omfg those feels

</33333333333

Obtena.7952:

maha.7902:

This is nothing to do with min-maxing or meta, this is to do with weeding out people who don’t meet your requirements joining your group.

You can already do that with asking them to ping their gear.

There are people in this very thread who join these groups and ping some gear they just keep in their inventory to ping, not to actually wear.

There are people I know who use a 3rd party DPS meter program on people in their groups who are not using berserker thanks to being able to identify their HP and the group’s overall DPS which is lower than what a full berserker group would be doing.

These liars and leechers are the people who will be filtered out if the OP’s suggestion is implemented. I still don’t see how this is a bad thing. People still aren’t explaining how something that can weed out undesirables and which you can fully opt in for would be a negative thing for the game. Want to join “zerk only exp” groups? Have your gear on display, nothing to hide, no problemo. Want to just dungeon with your non-DPS build? Sure, that’s cool too, you just can’t see the groups that would like you to have your gear viewable. Everyone wins.

On the other hand you make it easier for finding a reason to kick which will happen,

But the reason is already there, the tool just makes it easier to identify and quicker to deal with. How is that bad? If someone is set on only wanting people of a specific type in their group, having a tool that helps them achieve that is only a positive since it filters out undesirables from their group.

diminishing the chances for players finding their teammates because they play an unpopular setup.

No, what actually happens is that people asking for a certain type of gear don’t get trolled by non-(gear stat combo) people joining their group, and the people who don’t care about requirements can carry on forming groups no problem.

It sounds like people haven’t even read the OP and are just arguing about “gear checking” rather than what the OP actually wrote.

This is nothing to do with min-maxing or meta, this is to do with weeding out people who don’t meet your requirements joining your group.

If I ask for pink gear only and someone in blue joins, I reserve the right to kick.
If I ask for soldier gear only and someone in zealot’s joins, I reserve the right to kick.
If I ask for berserker gear only and someone in apothecary’s joins, I reserve the right to kick.

This tool would be designed to make it possible for people to stop unwelcome visitors from joining their groups. We’ve already had one hero in this thread mention how they join “zerk only” groups with his tanky character, which is unacceptable and unfair on the people making the group, just how if someone writes “killing all mobs” and gets crack, elite dungeoneers who power through the dungeon in 5 minutes ignoring everything besides the strict requirements to complete the dungeon, that is unacceptable too.

It’s almost as if people in this thread don’t want it to be possible for people to play with likeminded individuals, instead people on both sides of the pond have to put up with undesirables intruding on their groups, because of some sort of “greater good” of “no discrimination” which will never ever happen as much you would all want it to because people have different standards, expectations and want to uphold those.

Also, half of the people in this thread are just ranting about things the OP already answered, so please actually read the OP before commenting.

sten is great :O

his general behaviour and attitudes are so alien to the rest of us since he’s a dedicated believer in the qun and hasn’t known anything outside of it, and being able to earn his respect as the warden was honestly one of the highlights of the game for me (omfg when he refers to you as kadan <33333)

wat

it’s earlier levels that feel harder on nightmare, it gets easier when you are higher and have a ton of abilities :S

and iron bull has a lot of charm, gogogo get to work on it :p

has the meta progressed from just human female to human female blondes?

time to watch the rest of the video

Rasimir.6239:

Why, oh why are there always big-mouths in the general forums that feel the need to inform me that I better not turn up in their sacred dungeon runs as they’ll kick people “like me” with no mercy? None of them even knows the first thing about my ability to play or understand my classes.

Just by saying that I’ve gotten some characters to 80 post trait-revamp and got enough traits during leveling to have a good starting point for a decent build, or mentioning that you can complete all of the dungeons in this game in non-meta setups in a decent timeframe gives people the right to claim that I don’t know anything about dungeons, requirements and builds, or how to play my classes?

I may not be the best dungeon player there is, too old, poor reflexes, not enough time and determination to get the necessary practice to become one of the best, but I know my theory, and if I talk about things, I know what I’m talking about. I’m really getting sick of those stupid kids that can only defend their opinions by attacking and down-talking others.

/rant-mode off

Has something happened in particular? I barely even read much of the forums now so I’m starting to miss a lot of references.

Is this something to do with tryhards with no patience trying to optimise their pug run?

didn’t SC burst him in the middle with no gimmicky strats in their p3?

no need for any change here imo.

sent you two energy sigils bro check your mail

on a warrior if you want to be able to solo it reliably just build up bloodlust stacks beforehand. it’s possible without but it’s pretty sketchy. i’m sure there’s some recent videos lying around somewhere, i’ve got one but it’sbefore one of the strength rune damage nerfs so it’s probably not relevant anymore.

mesmer phantasms don’t do damage on brie so mesmers are like complete dead weight for that part

if you want to be able to reliably duo it, go like warrior+ele or something. well warrior or ele + anything would be able to duo it.

i’m pretty sure that’s because nobody has actually bothered to try rather than because they can’t do it. I mean I think there were people wanting to do no-damage-taken ele mai trin solos, you just need to actually bother to get round to do it.

the FGS comparison I’m making is that in regards to solely damage output, we have something head and shoulders so far above the rest that atleast for solo/low-man settings it’s just the default answer to everything which has a ceiling and either non-threatening mechanics or a way to mitigate the mechanics (which…. just happens to be on the exact same weapon) long enough to get the casts off and delete the boss.

i guess i’m just salty that d/f eles which is probably the set that takes the most work to get it to work right is like, the worst for DPS and it just seems lame that that’s the case, while line casting two skills does so much higher in comparison.

As far as I’m aware, nobody has even played the “lacks skill” angle for MS/LB.

The only argument I’d make is that it makes doing fast times very … I dunno, one-dimensional? It doesn’t feel like other classes can score comparable times so it’s kind of like FGS where you just start defaulting to a single tactic for a fast video. I mean, if you look at some of the fastest lupicus kills pre-ele craze, thieves, mesmers, eles, warriors, guards, engis all basically had kill times which were pretty much within a minute (give or take) of each other, so while some classes are obviously better kitted out for the fight, they all feel on-par for the course.

now compare the fastest [insert boss here] kill time of ele to [insert literally any class here] and you have this enormous difference.

i mean i basically don’t even play the game so i’m not going to go on a giant rant and tirade (like, I literally don’t care enough to defend my points) but this is what my perception is of how people may view this “problem” (inverted commas because YMMV).

the only thing I will say is i’ve noticed as fast videos have become more refined is that there’s more and more UI micromanagement with trait and gear changes than ever before as people eke out every last bit of efficiency.

ele off wall

your body will not be ready

Well it’s linked to the mana system. Rogue blocks cost mana unless you trait them to refund mana on proc’ing the riposte, warrior blocks actually have cooldowns but can be held infinitely until triggered but drain mana as you do so for two-handed blocks, while shield blocks drain mana on each hit (and blocking big boss hits will basically dump your entire mana bar). Dodge rolls on warrior I remember having no cooldown but I think they had a mana cost to them.

So basically – GW2 lacks a mana system so you’d need to tie it to something like warrior adrenaline (which means you’d be insanely fragile at the start of a fight), thief initiative or something like that. Seems like too much redesign to me.

well there is actually a dodge skill you can unlock on warrior which repositions you rather than give invuln frames (so more like a wildstar dodge to get out of AOE than to invuln it), plus you have blocks on shield and 2h. rogues can evade backwards or parry with their daggers, and especially when taking control of a dual dagger rogue (I spec’d sera in to one) you need to have kitten amazing reflexes and positioning to not just get deleted out of existence by every trash mob).

#ridethebull

how is someone an elitist for giving away a dungeon path?

It’s almost as if people actually get time off during the christmas season.

IvanTheGrey.2941:

maha.7902:

Miku Lawrence.6329:

So i read somewhere here about DA:Inquisition. Its pretty good ._. Feeling involved in an RPG !

Then i remember GW2 removed the 3 “emotion” choices for your character. ;’(

ye it’s pretty gr8

though i still miss my warden

Finally started playing it. What an amazing game. While the combat in GW2 seems to be a bit better (only 10 hours in), the story is exponentially better.

tbh, even though GW2 combat is good I honestly don’t really miss it that much. Some people find it hard to play other games after playing GW2 because the gameplay isn’t as good, but I don’t really find it that much of a deal breaker.

i’ll tell you what – considering the fact that half of the game is ferelden and half of it is orlais, I honestly didn’t find all of the pseudo-french voices that annoying.

Miku Lawrence.6329:

So i read somewhere here about DA:Inquisition. Its pretty good ._. Feeling involved in an RPG !

Then i remember GW2 removed the 3 “emotion” choices for your character. ;’(

ye it’s pretty gr8

though i still miss my warden

Well yeah, that is pretty much the ANet solution. leave mesmer alone but amend skill facts every now and then and pretend to fix phantasmal warden.

What “should” or “could have” happened a long time ago is irrelevant, people hate fighting mesmers in PvP, they will froth at the mouth whenever anything is done to make them even slightly better and therefore no improvements will be made to their viability at higher levels of play.

BlackDevil.9268:

Well doubt we get any massive changes soon so, in the theme of the Mind Stab change, what skills or traits would you like to see changed slightly that would, in your eyes, improve mesmer in PvP?

My changes would be:
Increase confusion duration on shatter from 3 seconds to 5 seconds on cry of frustration and Illusionary Retribution.

Especially in the current cele/hoelbrak meta the confusion is way too short and not to mention it’s only 1 stack which already deals pathetic damage. This should in my opinion totally get a buff ever since confusion was nerfed.

Illusionary Warlock":
Been long enough that this phantasm is so easy to avoid and so unpredictable. I would totally give up 5-10% damage on the phantasm to make its projectile somewhat like Wind of Chaos.

Phantasmal Mage:
This phantasm is pathetic… Cooldown should be reduced to 20 like all phantasm.

What are your changes?!

Your changes involve making the mesmer class stronger.

The last time ANet decided to buff mesmers, there was enough forum QQ that the tears could fill an entire stadium.

Your changes will therefore not happen.

“avoiding the sellers”?

How hard is it not to click on “selling path [whatever]”? Is that actually hard work?

When you sit and watch a game you enjoyed be so woefully mismanaged over two years, you’ll understand why people are so pessimistic.

Sure, it’s not archeage level of mismanagement (good lord), but the whole shutting down and not interacting with the community besides (now) with a useless rep who can’t even say anything besides “cool post, bro!”, and then by introducing a new specialist system with another person will now also be saying “cool post, bro!”, ignoring WvW, making a game a complete sham of an eSport so PvP is just dead in the water, and not even bothering anymore to make five-man instances gives people good reason to be doubtful whether this will be useful or not.

The fact that basically any member that has contributed anything of relevance to the entire forum have extensive infraction histories and single or either multiple bannings means the whole forum specialist garbage is just going to be some ANet yes-man giving them watered down information about what people are currently having problems with.

Assassin
Upon aggro, this mob stealthes, then moves towards a target player slowly but being invulnerable (you can in theory predict where they are but it doesn’t help you much), then dealing a single from-stealth attack which will down a berserker-geared player, just barely (is based on class, so it always downs a berserker player).
A small~medium amount of extra defense or Aegis will avoid it, and they take 10-15 seconds to be able to re-stealth.
Ofc, these mobs could appear in packs, or add during a boss-fight or fight versus another group of mobs. If they come as a pack, they’ll always try to target different players.
And another one:

I see. So rampager, assassin and sinister geared players all take collateral damage thanks to this fixation with downing berserker players. Yeah, that sounds like poor balancing to me. It also sounds extremely easy to mitigate through blocks, dodging or other invulnerabilities when players figure out the timing for it.

Knight
Heavily armoured, these enemies are not only virtually impervious to direct damage from the front, even when flanked direct attacks tend to bounce off.
From the front, 100% of weapon-based attacks are deflected (sword-hits, arrows, etc). From any other angle, 70% are.
Hits where the weapon isn’t actually attacking the target (Mesmer GS, Necro Axe, etc) are possible, though power attacks still face a rather high toughness stat.

So… husks 2.0? Bosses like Ginva and the COE golem have a mere 33% damage mitigation and they’re both extremely annoying and boring to fight against, what makes you think anyone wants to fight against a boss that either forces them to afk at range or stand in melee and do absolutely zero damage? Do you actually think the majority of people would enjoy that?

It’s all expectations, plenty of people complete plenty of content in harder games.
That’s a pretty condescending if not contemptuous attitude towards the mass of players. You should really give them more credit.

Except they don’t deserve more credit, because there are droves of people here who complain about mind numbing, brain dead easy living story content being too hard. If the LS is the maximum tolerance people have for difficulty, then yes of course they would cry rivers if ANet made content requiring brain activity.

See now, I would disagree with that. In the few times I’ve done open world boredo- I mean events, I just leave my standard dungeon build on and just do fine with it.

Unfamiliar content makes other builds attractive (I can’t survive in full glass so lets run this roleplay tank build).

Uninstanced content makes other builds attractive since no one is judging you and so your average open worlder can come to their own, usually incorrect conclusions that they can run inefficient build X.

I also really wish people would stop referring to “zerk builds”, I feel like I’m losing brain cells whenever people shorten the word like that, and referring to it as a build as if the stat combination has anything to do with it.

dlonie.6547:

Go make your own. Hone your skills by becoming that which you hate the most.

Why I can't get lucky in DA:I

hide spoiler

Aaaand I just found out Sera is playing for the other team. Boo. Time for some Iron Bull snuggles, I guess.

G TO THE G

i forgot not everyone read up on stuff like that before the game came out, rofl.

iron bull is a very enjoyable character though, liked him a lot more than i initially thought i would.

When I streamed it stressed my already awful connection even further, and I honestly can’t play around heavy lag and shouldn’t have streamed anyway unless I had gotten myself better internet. Like, I literally can’t even watch other streams or it kills my connection in game too.

So yeah, remove me. I’m not really on the same calibre as anyone else on the list.

people I know =/= best soloists

I have neither the time, patience nor willpower to become a competent soloist.

Jerus.4350:

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Jerus.4350:

My only problem with it is that they’re so good it’s silly to do anything else if you’re going for speed

And I am sure this is what Colesy & Co have in mind as well. Very noble of you. Very human.

But also very wrong. There will always be one thing that is better than others. I know, I know, this is not a rocket science breakthrough. But apparently this is too hard to understand for many.

If you go after the “best thing” all the time then you end up with whack-a-mole balance like Anet is doing. It is boring, and it is inefficient.

The only thing that anybody here should be complaining about is the lack of addition of new mechanics. We need additions so that the meta changes forward, not backward. Think about this for one second: if we had asked Anet to make mobs able to move and attack at the same time then there would be no FGS controversy, no IB dilemma … and less fun reading posts from DnT

My point was to say that I don’t think ANet should be asked to play “whack-a-mole” instead we could create our own rulesets to play by. If FGS was ruining things, we could have had “no FGS” records, same with IB now. It wouldn’t be all that hard to have special rulesets on GWSCR if people wanted it. That’s all I was trying to say, I don’t want them nerfing anything, I think we have the option to limit ourselves if we want to see what is possible in alternate avenues.

People may have been opposed to FGS records but I think they were more opposed to the idea of non-FGS ones. Think of it like this:

Would you agree to a concept like “no ele records”? I see it as the same thing, people wouldn’t want it, wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t bother with it since it’s just denying yourself optimal play – and records are all about optimal play – hence why the Arah records after the wall trick went public all consisted of using it (well until SC did that p3 where they did a mega burst without even using the wall, props to them for that).

The whole alternate avenues concept is interesting though, the best example is how record times actually went faster after FGS was nerfed since people weren’t taking a year to pull bosses in to walls anymore, they just went in, killed them and this saved enough time to bring down record times.

Personally, I think to keep records interesting, something needs to be done about the pre-80 ferocity scaling, the longer boss fights in higher level paths are more interesting to watch because it allows more room for error, and watching a team execute a challenging fight seemingly effortlessly is more impressive to me. Take for example Ginva or the final bosses in HOTW story – clean kills of those would be impressive, whereas an AC explorable record basically involves running and instantly gibbing bosses (and this is regardless of ice bow usage, it happens no matter what).

rapthorne.7345:

And kitten , it was fun as heck.

Please give us more “epic scale” content like this, ANet, it’s so much more fun than the DPS-fest that all the other world bosses boil down to

Oh, so you mean those burn phases aren’t “DPS-fests”?

It kind of blows my mind how much people hate dealing damage to things.

Windsagio.1340:

Gotta go back though; speed runners aren’t the issue, the issue is random pug advertisements.

In not-optimized-even-if-geared-zerk groups the whole meta discussion is silly, it simply doesn’t matter in a meaningful way.

The funny thing is that most of the people arguing so strong on behalf of the meta are people like Spoj, who I can’t imagine spends a ton of time doing random pugs anyways.

Nope, most of us are actually the ones who pug the most – and it’s this very reason why we’re arguing so adamantly – a way I’d describe this game’s combat is “independence over interdependence” where if your team sucks you don’t have to think oh well the tank died I guess we have to reset or kick and fetch another, if you’re good enough yourself you can solo whatever is causing the party trouble. In a trinity game, if your healer dies, or your tank dies, or your dps dies … well things get very pear-shaped, and I wouldn’t want that sort of forced reliance in GW2.

—

To me, after reading all of this thread, it sounds like people aren’t complaining about “meta” (delete this one and it’ll be replaced with another, it’s a never ending cycle), the actual complaint is with … people. “people” discriminate against non-berserker gear. “people” call non-berserkers bad. “people” don’t want to play with “play how you wants”. The problem here is not something you solve by cutting DPS with a sledgehammer or deleting offensive gear, the problem is human nature itself, is something ANet will never be able to fix and I wish people would stop trying to argue about it .

Think about it. Let’s say that a condition guy and a “support” guy is suddenly needed in groups. what then? “lf 3 zerkers 1 support 1 condi”. Oh, they have 3 direct damage guys but I want to do direct damage … KICK. Oh, well I guess you can argue “well I guess this makes more playstyles available blahblah diversity”. But if the mobs die in exactly the same time, and all players are just maximising their own damage via rotations like usual, then how is this suddenly better? The fact that for one guy they have smaller numbers appearing on their screen and the other guy has absolutely dreadfully small numbers appearing on their screen?

haven’t tried it and don’t intend to.

regarding the people asking about the game, I’d honestly say give it a go. the downsides i’d say are that I didn’t really connect with the protagonist in the same way as i did with the warden or shepard (who i genuinely enjoyed as characters, though the VA for the inquisitor was very nice i don’t think i took too much to the character itself). the final mission is also extremely abrupt (you start the final quest and then it’s like boom, boss is right there, go fight, pretty much no build up at all which felt really weird).

race-gating templar armour also extremely annoyed me, though luckily you can get grey warden gear which looks almost as cool, though it’s only a tier-2 schematic so it’s not the best stats possible by the end of the game. there’s a few very dull quests like fetching crystal shards, and there were generic fetch quests which i didn’t even bother doing unless it was actually on the way while i was doing another quest in which case sure, i’ll hand it in.

overall i’d say strong characters, maybe a bit of a short story (though what we have is on the whole well-made), if you’re a diehard of the lore there’s a few mahoooooosive reveals in the later part of the game (like huge, huge, been waiting over half a decade for clarification on this huge), combat is fine and the controls I got used to after a while. very annoying how squishy dagger rogues are though, since i built sera in to one and she would just melt when there were mobs flinging AOE everywhere.

also, there are absolutely zero recycled environments. the first DA game with no recycled environments anywhere, and the environments themselves are gorgeous. it just pains me that we didn’t get to see more of val royeaux.

Dub.1273:

maha.7902:

Focusing all AOE impacts on to one spot is about as “legit” as FGS rushing walls pre-nerf.

Yeah, because the fgs nerf obviously made the game so much more entertaining, fun and made less people quit, they now need to do the same about ele’s aoes.

People quit because of ANet openly saying on a video that they’ll be doing **** all with dungeons for at least the next six months, it’s nothing to do with a fiery rush nerf making the game more/less interesting for people.

The way I see it, why stay if you’re unhappy and the part of a game you enjoy isn’t supported in any way besides minor bug fixes by the company? And that’s why I brought my play time down sharply because the carrot and stick approach with all of the moronic collections and other dumb **** that people collect for absolutely no reason doesn’t work on me since I don’t care about gaining any sort of currency in this game. The one thing which I would want, sinister gear, is gated behind doing braindead open world crap which I will never be able to motivate myself to do.

But yes, I consider the ice bow thing as “unintended use of game mechanics” – whether that’s right or wrong I literally don’t care to argue, so everyone in this thread can rant at me until they’re blue in the face but I literally don’t even care to argue it – and it doesn’t even concern me since I’m not even playing the game much anymore.

So +1 to the solo, +1 to people doing the little trick, +1 to everyone who carries on playing the game – and I mean it genuinely that I hope you’re happy, content, and the record is impressive.

Focusing all AOE impacts on to one spot is about as “legit” as FGS rushing walls pre-nerf.

not the hair, her face. her face looks greasy, idk.

also, it didn’t help that in my first playthrough of things i exclusively project my own views and it tended to get disapproval with her since i actually like to work with the nobility than do pranks on them :p

dlonie.6547:

He got worse — when pressed to think of an example of using reflects in a dungeon, he came up with Kohler

And yeah, that crazy elf’s got something special, and I ain’t just talking about her eyebrow. But alas, she holds herself beyond reach :-(

Dorian is too easy. Iron bull…well…I’m a dwarf. Let’s be frank: he would hurt. He is surprisingly charming, though.

Cullen…I didn’t know the advisers were available. I like him, but he’s more of a drinkin’ buddy.

Romance is hard.

dorian is just so gudkitten suave and likeable, and when you do his personal quest the big **** off he gives to [person] is great

iron bull is a character i saw being voiced by freddie prinze jr and rolled my eyes at but in-game, i really liked him, though i chose the qunari in his personal quest.

and what you have to beear in mind, is fan girls have craved cullen since da:o. i liked him in da2 for being one of the few sane characters and his ****ing awesome reply to meredith when hes like lolnope i aint serving yo no more

and then da:i happens and hes romanceable and its like mangggggg i been waiting for dis

i don’t think i liked sera’s immature responses to a lot of things i guess. also, maybe its because im poor and have everything on medium settings but she looked pretty greasy.

lol sera u srs m8

dorian is my #1

followed by iron bull

i also need some of dat cullen

i guess to be “on-topic” – blahblah gw2 dungeons suck never updated blahblah

The problem is that meta players are content with the status quo, but you have other players who are angry that their builds aren’t widely accepted and therefore they want to flip the game’s combat system on its head in a way to make their build apparently wanted.

You can see this with the people who say “let’s add more husk mobs” or “mordrem mobs are anti-zerker” – these people are literally just clueless and are only saying they’re anti-zerker because you have to actually use more than two brain cells to kill the mobs while everything else pre-LS in the game doesn’t require any brain cells. So these people would rather ruin the one thing which makes a lot of people even play the game (the combat system) out of sheer selfishness, and then disguise this with excuses like “build diversity” (which already exists).

Speaking of build diversity. In League of Legends there are generally certain items that are staples of certain champions, but depending on the composition of the opposing team and the general state of the game (are you getting dumped by their team or are you miles ahead) you can build more resistances and HP or you can go more glassy and just go raw DPS to gib people in duels and/or team fights. Now if you apply this to guild wars 2 PvE, there is no such thing as magic resistance (unless I ‘ve forgotten since I barely play anymore), though there are HP and armour buffs. So think of GW2 PvE like a never-ending game of LoL – in the early days of the game we were all getting destroyed by dungeons so we stacked tanky items in order to beat the encounters. As we began to learn how to perform in lategame teamfights (or in the case of GW2, learning the encounters) – we decided to swap out tankier pieces for more offensive pieces. Now, rather than diving in to the team fight and just eating CC and damage all day erryday, we manoeuvre around more in order to get a better engage, lock our CC on them before they can do much to us and then kill them. This would be the equivalent of the transition to berserker gear – we learned the encounters, we learned the tells, we now rely more on our active play to beat content and can build more damage items so that we can acheive results faster. Now we’re rolling the other team in every single team fight (…dungeon), are full glass and nothing can stop us – everything is on farm status.

That analogy probably didn’t make too much sense, but anyway. The problem is a content problem. Bringing LoL in to it again, imagine as if this game where we are now destroying them in team fights is basically us VS bots. Now we restart against another team of… I dunno, harder bots or real players, whichever suits the analogy better. We have no idea how they play, how competent they are, etc. We will have to learn everything again. What will happen in this new content is that your experienced players will carry on building glass while your average player will go tankier because they can’t handle it all in full glass themselves.

The problem is not the “meta.” The problem is not gear. The problem is content – we have had the same content for two years, it’s a complete borefest and everyone goes full DPS because it’s ez mode doing content you’ve done a bajillion times already.

time to slink away back to my cave

Rework Defiant along with Toughness. Make it so that Toughness has thresholds at which CC skills remove more than 1 stack of Defiant, up to 5 stacks at 2500 Toughness. This will allow CC builds to be a real thing.

Why toughness? Why not boon duration? Or stun duration? Or… anything else? Why should stacking a defensive stat mean you can shave more defiant stacks?

Rework Endurance so that it regenerates about 50% slower by default. Rework Vitality so that it increases endurance regen by 50% at 2500 Vitality. This is aimed to make vitality more attractive in PvE and force pure zerkers to be a lot more careful about wasting a dodge. Even with Vigor, pure zerkers would still have a net gain of 50% faster regen.

The whole point of vitality is that it gives you more of a cushion for error. In essence, you are required to dodge less, or you can miss dodges and still survive. Why should making yourself not need to dodge as much … enable you to dodge more? I don’t get it.

Add more enemies that deal low damage, yet high speed attacks. The point is to counter them through protection and regeneration, not dodging. This will also allow Retaliation and Confusion to be more viable.

So you basically just make a berserker hammer guardian compulsory.

—

How long did you actually think these idea through?

I’ve bumped in to Langrim in Arah once or twice on ranger and he was a pretty competent player. Never saw any of this raging or anything, though I guess that’s because we would both just yolo ahead while everyone else lagged behind trying to perform skips etc.

But yes, judging from the posts I’ve seen in the thread, it sounds like he just vents anger at pug groups and then gets kicked by them, rather than “I didn’t do anything then got kicked”.

Because yes, sure, player X might be doing stupid thing Y, but regardless of how skilled or unskilled your pug group is, you’re bound simply by societal standards to show them all at least a modest level of courtesy. You can be a complete god at the game, but if you’re going to be a kitten then they have every right to boot you. When I used to pug arah paths, I wouldn’t bother getting angry at my group, I wouldn’t try to blow my own trumpet and rant about how I’m awesome at XYZ, because actions speak louder than words – if the party is dead on the floor and I solo a boss, then I can solo it and quietly move on. If they want to say anything about that, then well that’s their choice. This also means of course if I goof up and die, then well I don’t really look stupid since I wasn’t ranting at everyone beforehand for being bad.

Anyway, I’m probably starting to slide away from the point I was trying to make. the point is – I’ve never had any problem with the guy personally, but it sounds like he’s just playing the victim here – conveniently ignoring or downplaying the fact that he most likely ****-talks pugs in his groups when they make the slightest error.

well i guess woodenpotatoes wont be joining that group then

Exactly this. Teamwork is not blasting your buddy’s fire field – you can screw that up and maybe the fight takes 20 seconds longer. Teamwork is something that if you fail at, your entire party fails. GW2 does have much teamwork at all… only forces via the environment (i.e. two people stand on a pressure plate).

Actually it is teamwork, you’re working together to create a result not possible with one person (extra might blasts).

What you’re asking for is forced reliance on one another, or in other words, a trinity. GW2 is not that game.

Why are you playing?

Jana.6831:

RemiRome.8495:

Jana.6831:

I have never seen a video of someone soloing a dungeon without zerker gear*. Search for solo dungeon videos – they all need the damage.

Not true. You have never seen it because most folks don’t have their own private server hall for storage of footage.

So? Don’t just pick one sentence of what I wrote and make a statement on that. And if people doing dungeons in soldiers or whatever gear they really should bring some videos to prove “the meta” wrong. I mean that, btw. And yes, I think soloing a dungeon in soldier’s or whatever tanky gear requires more skill than doing it in zerkers.

Edit: And by that I don’t just mean one fragment of the dungeon but the whole thing.

If you stick on a condition build for two of the bosses in Arah path 2, you will actually get superior kill times to using a direct damage build.

I haven’t got a full run of it because that would involve actually playing the game and wasting my time resetting to get a clean recording, but I can imagine it’s perfectly possible to solo the entire path in decent time if you used conditions on everything.

If you think soloing a dungeon in soldier’s takes more skill, I don’t even know what to say. Does forcing yourself to stay awake longer = more skill? Like, it’ll either let you mess up more and make more mistakes, or you’ll have everything down perfectly and you’re just doing the same fight but for 3x as long and dodging everything perfectly.

ANet did say that for at least the next six months they had no plans on adding any new dungeon content, so this doesn’t come as too much of a surprise to me.

Still, it’s a shame they’re so hellbent on this living story approach.

In the meantime, I’ll be playing Inquisition and farming kiddies (and being farmed by kiddies) on league.

guess which enemies attack more often

dredge

guess who enjoys fighting them

absolutely nobody (insert smart-* response from one guy in the entire world who enjoys it) enjoys fighting them

“breaking zerker” will involve making the game so casual unfriendly that even if ANet wanted to, they couldn’t risk the loss of money, people already whine about mordrem mobs being too hard, or doing story instances until their armour broke (are you serious, come on, wiping at an LS instance until your armour is broken how bad do you have to be for that to be happen).