Guild Wars 2

Thats a good point. I think that playing mesmer first has sort of given me a bad habit of dodging too much to produce cloes, which doesn’t translate to success in other classes very well.

I want the scepter autoattack to be more useful. Not condispam, but just somehow more worth it to use.

maxinion.8396:

I generally agree near light, but warriors got two great new traits (Dual Wield Agility and Phalanx Strength). Shame that mesmers are this useless!

Oh phalanx strength is new??? I don’t paly warrior at all so I just assumed it was always there :O

And yeah, I love mesmer and all, but I just feel ineffective playing it in most pve content (surprisingly) and even more ineffective running around in WvW with my guild

I’m not a very compliant veilbot I’m afraid.

Well thanks for your input everyone. Its kind of depressing to me because I’m a good portion of the way done with meteorlogicus, and now I’m worried that I’m not going to have any class to use it when my guild does WvW. S/X ele is inferior to staff in WvW, Condition mesmer is bad in zergs (as is mesmer in general), I’m pretty sure scepter is not on the meta guardian WvW builds, and finally as you have said, condition necro is inferior to power necro in for wvw large group fights pretty much in every way. I guess I could just slot the weapon over axe in a power-well build, since its not like axe is that great anyway. I’ll be running something inferior, but at least I know that I will look good doing it..

Bhawb.7408:

How larger are larger fights? 10+? 15+? 50+? Basically the more players the less condis matter. Up to about 15-20 condi can be made to work if you are really amazing with landing corrupt boons and chaining that into easy deaths (its super easy to catch a guardian with a big stack of boons and CB+PoC 7 boons off them, then fear chain to death). But once you’re above that power just gets better and better, especially since if there are tons of players you know some of them are going to afk in your well.

I’m on a T2 server so usually we fight decent sized groups probably around 20-30. We also fight random zergs sometimes but usually we go up against organized guilds that are anywhere from 15-40 people. And yeah usually afk players aren’t really a thing, but since these enemy groups are stacked together pretty closely, I feel like epidemic could be pretty strong. I could also epidemic downed players, since we always cleave them down, which gets them loaded with conditions.

Roe.3679:

Power is better. Condis get cleared and take longer to get ramped up. Most power attacks for necro are set it and forget it.

I was afraid of that. I wish they would be viable because the idea of the playstyle of condition necro with epidemic and the weapon skills and just general AoE damage over time is very appealing for me. But thanks for your input, unless I can justify running this kind of build then I’ll save my tokens on the rabid gear needed

This is a very interesting discussion. As a non-thief related example, when I play ele in hotjoin spvp I typically run glassy S/D or S/F fresh air, which is not the current meta (celestial D/D or glassy staff). In fact I got in a long conversation with another ele who spent a while convincing how in every way S/D is inferior to D/D ele because the surivability and mobility are lower and that he thinks that D/D strength runes has better sustained damage, mobility, easier to use burst, and better cleave for trying to kitten up stealth. And he is probably right for most of those things, but I don’t really like to do the same thing in pvp as everyone else. I don’t care if scepter is an inferior weapon. I like the idea of being a glassy magical ninja bursting people down with complicated air burst combos, and even if I am hindered by survivability, mobility, crappy autoattacks, and long cooldowns, I don’t care about that meta because I feel really cool playing this way, and I generally do I great job as long as fights aren’t stacked ridiculously against me

That being said the pve meta is a more serious nature, because dungeons/fractals take time, and we don’t want them to take up more time than needed to get the rewards we want.

D/D ele has great surivabilty and pretty good sustained damage and its not that hard at all to play compared to S/D or staff.

Mesmer is also worth looking into, as you get a lot of the same surivabilty as thieves do through stealth and micro-mobility (teleports and evasion and whatnot), and its a very interesting playstyle if you go the shatter route. The main issue is that it can’t stay on capture points very well in pvp.

When I used to play DS power necro in pvp, thieves and mesmers weren’t an issue if you could lock them down. Lifeblast at close range decimates them. But a good mesmer or thief won’t get locked down in the first place so theirs that. For condition I’d try to use the various AoEs to make their stealth lives a lot harder.

I have no idea, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. If you can afford those skins they seem like they’d be a good fit!

The new mesmer GMs are pretty meh. Most of them would only be worth it as adept or master level traits. But thats true for every class’s new GM’s, the only really good one I can think off is the necro’s path of corruption, but even then, that should probably be an inherent part of the dark path skill, not a trait. And aqautic benevelonce is good on Ele, but even then its not really optimal for most builds.

I really like the idea behind the new GMs for domination, chaos, and illusions, but I feel like they’re really misplaced for the types of builds that would actually use those traits, or don’t really synergize with the playstyle that could use those traits. For example, most condition builds, don’t go into illusions whatsoever, but go heavily into dueling and chaos, so the torment shatter trait could be a better fir there. However the problem is further compounded by the fact that condition builds get way more mileage out of keeping illusions alive rather than shattering them for the torment, which is an inherent contradiction to the playstyle rather than a useful addition for it.

Similarly the new Chaos GM would be great on a non-glkittenter build, however shatter builds depend on Illusionary persona and deceptive evasion (as 98% of pvp mesmer builds do) and would not be able to pick up that trait even though it does synergize with the playstyle, because it takes away one other trait that is much more vital. If that trait were master level, and located in illusions, or even if it were to remain in chaos, it would be in a good state.

yeah PU condition is definitly the easiest build in general to run with, I like 0/6/6/2/0 with balthazar runes. When I run that I only lose 1v1 to an overload of burst, but not from thieves usually, they are torment fodder. I lose to condi-bomb terrormancer that will corrupt my aegis into burning and have me feared running into a wall for 8 seconds with 10 conditions! But then again they get easily focused and dispatched in team fights, so it all balances out

Other than that, the only other weakness to PU condition mesmer is that they don’t have a lot of soft CC or ways to keep enemies from just running away. You just have blink, and the possibility of chaos storm to maybe snare. maybe. You could also run a focus or pistol OH, but then you start to become less of a PU and more of an interrupt build, which is probably the next skill level up for mesmer.

I play my necro pretty much only in WvW now. I’ve been only really playing power-well DS bomber builds, which seem to work really well, but lately I’ve had the inkling to satisfy my DoT cravings with a condition necro, especially since condition mesmer and condition thief, which I have tried before really don’t off much for medium-large group fights in WvW. With necromancer, it sounds like that could work a lot better, mainly due to epidemic, AoE condition application from staff/tainted shackles/scepter 2, which could be further improved by the torment sigil.

For those who are veteran WvW necros, how does condition necro compare to power in how much it contributes to these large scale battle? Is the ability to tag just as good between epidemic and staff marks that do more damage for bleeds/poison? Or are conditions cleansed easily before they can tag any players?

I don’t have condition gear on necro at the moment, but I have a reasonable amount of dungeon tokens for rabid exotics, and I can move the ascended rabid/dire gear (no back yet) from my mesmer to my necro. I was also planning on salvaging my thief’s perplexity runeset from back when it was cheap, to give to either my mesmer or necro, or to just sell for a good amount of gold. Are perplexity runes worth running on necro, to proc confusion from our many terror-boosted fear sources and possibly the WH daze? Or am I better off using torment runes or undead runes or whatnot? I would probably run 0/6/4/0/4, with terror traits, and I’m also interested in running path of corruption over lingering scepter, as that GM seems like one of the few new GMs from april thats worth using out of any of the new GMs added to any class.

Thanks for any advice you can offer!

Anet hasn’t been overly vocal about what we’ll see in terms of new content and features added to GW2. All we really know for sure is that it will involve permanent content in the form of the semi-gem store related story journal system, which I also makes me believe that these story arcs must have to have good awards associated with them or their achievements to make buying the arcs in the gem store worth it If you return to GW2 after a long break.

The other thing we really can expect is some sort new area, whether legit or instanced dealing with Maguuma through the details known about brisban, and the fact that Mordremoth is likely to live in Magumma.

But is this really all we can expect? The story arcs, a new zone(s). Is there any chance that Anet could surprise us with the many things players want like a new race, a new class, new weaponsets for existing classes, new skills, or even something as grandiose as new legendaries or a way to acquire precursors without RNG or the TP? I guess these things seem rather unlikely as Anet would probably have provided word on these features if they will actually be available. Many of us equate the idea of S2 as an expansion to the game, and many of those things are typically found in other games through expansions. At least we’ll know the gist of what we’ll get in less than 2 weeks, but I do wish we had more of an idea of what to expect, especially in matters concerning to the overall gameplay and economy of GW2.

I don’t think using alt-keys would be a very good idea for me! I’m very spastic.

Thanks Zelhyn! I’m going to try this out! it looks way easier to go everything, so hoepfully I can get used to doing S/D burst combos again with this set up!

Yeah I think Anet is too busy overbuffing warriors and fooling around with the living story to make new weapons. Although lol if we had double pistols we’d be like a wildstar spellslinger rip off!

I was wondering where you guys bind your attunement swap keys (as well as those for other skills and whatnot) for most efficient use in combat. I want to redo a lot of my bindings, which will take a while to acclimate too but will be helpful overall for pvp scenarios. I play gw2 on a macbook pro, so I’m limited to that kind of keyboard (its not as bad as it sounds I promise!) so the f1-4 keys don’t even work for interacting with the game sicne their used for other things by the computer overall. So I moved them to the keys for ; ’ [ and ], which works pretty well but I have trouble not hititng enter or delete which opens up a chat message of some sort, so I can’t do anything for a few critical seconds when that happens. Additionally I also need to rebind a few other things, because I’m so sick of accidentally pressing b or g when trying to press v to dodge, and then messing everything up because 2 giant popups block my vision.

So what bindings do you use and what would you reccomend for my type of keyboard?

Hahaha I’d say go for the minstrel if you really do want it! I think that overall its a nice looking weapon even if the effects are underwhelming, and the musical note trail is really nice as well. Its also really cheap, to the point where I would be almost finished making it if I wanted it instead of meteorlogicus. Anyway, I hope I"m done making it within the next month, I’m close to buying the precursor, and then I’d need another 600 gold or so to finish off the charged lodes, T6 and icy runestones, which isn’t too bad.

As far as S/F builds go, I’d like to see how well its AoE damage does in comparison to necro-well bombs. Dragon’s tooth has a much much lower cooldown and the same range from which you can cast with the well-target trait. Additionally focus gives ele really cool defensive skills that necros can’t get (they just have their shorud), so overall I see this build forming a similar role to power-well necros in the GWEN meta, but with more burst and probably better 1v1/focusing target potential. And I also like how S/F will give me a much better chance at blowing up thieves that try to pick me off.

Wow, I’m surprised that this whiny thread of mine has sparked so much discussion! And yeah, I love necros, but I won’t really use mine outside of WvW for well-bombing. And interestingly enough, ever since making an ele last year, its become the only class I can really play in PvE without feeling like I"m gimping myself somehow, but then again I don’t have a warrior or guardian.

Yeah the trailer was a bit pointless. I mean its cool for the fanboys of S1, if they exist.. but I feel like in general I’d rather learn more about S2. All we can really assume is that it will deal with the jungle dragon and that we may get new zones in magumma.

I think its in a pretty good place, but I’ve heard that some people think it looks awkward on their character. I may make one after meteorlogicus, but I kind of want the fractal focus skin more in my opinion.

Iris Ng.9845:

My trick to reduce the annoyance from pug stealing my LH: slot an extra ice bow. My utility bar always has: Arcane Shield/ Lightning Hammer/ Ice bow. If pug picks up my LH, I just use ice bow 5/4/3 to finish whatever is still alive. If the fight is long (like against Bjarl), your LH will come up and ready in no time. For short dungeons, spare no conjured weapons! Even FGS! Don’t save it if you can handle the fight without it.

The downside is you are missing on signet of fire. But at lower level dungeons, your crit chance isn’t that great with SoF either. You might as well go with precision food or accuracy+ night sigil. Get ascended weapons asap as your conjured weapons benefit from it.

Okay, thats a great idea Iris! And yeah SoF doesn’t seem to mandatory. I’m waiting until meteorlogicus is done (hopefully in a few weeks) before I get an ascended dagger or focus (or staff), mainly since I stopped playing for a while the month after ascended weapons came out. In the meantime though I’ll get an accuracy sigil that I can just salvage later (using force and battle now), as I was planning on using accuracy on my scepter in WvW

Until like a week ago, I ran fractals every day (getting the GS skin in a level 26 fractal hooked me, but I’m taking a break on them to focus on dungeons and wvw with my guild, since I need gold! And yeah, I find that ele focus is really really really good in fractals, between the projectile block, and using obsidian flesh to rez people, I feel like it definetly curbs any problems with suriving due to zerker gear! I do usually do S/D in easier dungeons though… but I will get kitteny if pugs keep taking my lightning hammer on purpose, but I guess if they do that then they didn’t really want me to do high DPS anyway…

And yeah Iris I agree about the valkyrie! Toughness is pretty useless in dungeons, but the vitality can help you take a few more hits and those 80 second poisons, and the DPS with valk armor and zerker trinkets doesn’t seem to be too much lower than full zerker. I’m eventually making some ascended valkyrie armor pieces for my WvW build, so maybe I’ll end up using some of it in relaxed PUGs

Thanks so much for your feedback! And yeah I’d say the extra crit chance and healing power is a definite advantage of your set up over mine. Maybe I could try using a few zealot’s pieces over valkyrie in some slots, but I’ll play around with that later. I’m halfway done making meteorlogicus, so I’ll probably swap between zerker, valk and zealots when thats done

So your might stacks come from guardian allies mainly? Or do you blast flamewall too? (I haven’t been able to check out your video yet but I’ll be sure to later).

And lastly, yeah I really like DB! At the moment, I’m part of one of the few organized WvW guilds we have that are active right now, so its been a struggle. Lately mag and SoS have been ganging up on us, but its still a fun time. I hope my guild would allow me to run such a build. I feel like I could almost contribute more with the extra blast finishers, although I’ll miss the AoE CC from staff, but the fire/air skills on S/F are generally a lot more useful damage wise.

Hello, I think I remember going up against your guild a few weeks ago (I’m on Dragonbrand, just transferred there)! Anyway, I’ve had some fun experience with both S/D and S/F in spvp, and I was working on an S/D build for roaming, but I also feel like running a similar build for zerg-play with S/F but one thats a bit less glassy than yours. I’m also worried about my guild approving the build, as we’re technically supposed to run group play centric builds, which for ele means staff and 0/x/x/6/6, but maybe I could see if they’d let me play S/F on a night when we have 4+ staff eles.

Anyway this is the build I was working on:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fFAQJArdhUM6c24wnBf0AOACxgxEHJQiiXXC-T1CBAB7pHgjHAwlqp0lSh0UCilSIAOBAepkJLlBWqaRR7PAA-w

Basically it uses a mix of valkyrie, soldier’s, zerker, knight’s, and cavalier to obtain a good mixture of stats. I may swap out the zerker-valk amulet though for a celestial one (which also has a karmic infusion in it), which would be only a little less power but more toughness/healing power/vitality, since my armor is still a bit low for the ideal amount. For runes, I just picked pack runes, but I was also thinking about hoelbrak, and for sigils I picked accuracy so I wouldn’t have to use as much zerker or knight’s to get a good crit chance, and hydromancy to help out with CC and burst in combos, but that might be a better idea for roaming, so sigil of fire or battle might be a better option. As far as traits go, I didn’t go into fire at all, and if I go with tempest defense, 6 in arcana might be better, but I like going at least 4 into water at all times for the extra vitality. So let me know if that build looks at all viable!

I was also wondering why you built a lot of magi’s and cleric’s into your build. I got an ascended armor chest drop that I haven’t used yet, so I might be able to incorporate that as well.

I’ve played S/D for a good amount of time in spvp, and I plan to run it in WvW roaming/small groups eventually, when I have the means to acquire the gear for a usable build.

Basically D/D vs S/D is all about what you want to do in roaming.

Do you want longer drawn out battles of sustain and mobility? Or do you want to blow up a squishy opponent in a few seconds? Those are the types of things you should ask yourself.

I will say that S/D is considerably more difficult than D/D, as you need to perform burst combos with exact precision and speed to be effective. Some of the above posters critizicize (spelling!!!) S/D for its lack of control, however that can be remedied with a hydromancy sigil, which is very useful in increasing the overall effectiveness and damage of your bursts, as many of them involve chaining lighting flash to a target with hurl, earthquake, fire grab etc., and then switching to air while you’re on top of your target and hitting 2 and 4 to finish off the basic burst. The other sigil could be battle or air or fire or force or energy depending on your needs, and as for runesets, any power prec or ferocity rune would probably work well.

This video was very helpful to me in learning basic burst rotations, and I still have a lot to learn and refine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gAif9qE4WY

If doing stuff like that interests you, I recommend giving S/D a try! Needless to say, its more difficult to perform these bursts on moving players, but its very much possible, because you can get the burst done so fast to the point where no one will be able to react to you.

Lets see anything else….

I find that S/D is a bit better in small group fights and skirmishes since you can pick off and focus targets with your burst, and you’ll have buddies to help you out if things go wrong. S/D’s many blind inducing skills also make it much better than D/D against things like warriors that use slow and powerful attacks. For WvW you also don’t need to go completely glass, but its probably best to run with less toughness and more power than you would for D/D. I’m still playing around with the optimal gear set up, but I feel like a valkryie/zerker/knight’s/cavalier mix is ideal, and celestial isn’t really, because S/D burst builds have less of a need for healing power and much less of a need for condition damage, but zealots could work in a more defensive set up. I also find that glyph is typically the best heal because ether renewal prevents you from doing damage for a few seconds, and SoR is a bit better for tanky D/D builds, but it could work.

It depends on the type of build you run. For tanky D/D, I feel that toughness is more important, while glassier S/D appreciates vitality more to live an enemy burst and blow your enemy up before they can burst again. Or so I’ve heard.

Well yeah, staff ele spaming fire skills on a target that can’t move out of a lava font with a large hitbox is the highest DPS ele build.

Ulion.5476:

Do not go for cavalier or knights gear on a ele. Burst damage is what kill us so you need vitality. For a mix set try pvt armor/berserker trinkets, full celestial works too but you will need to rely on wvw buffs/stacks for extra damage. You are not using many cantrip so arcane evasion is better. If you are tend to not time your dodges well swap back to 4 water. Ether renewal is our best heal but S/D has alot of extra heals and condition removals. The other heals can not be interrupted but you will heal for less overtime in comparison to ether renewal. Signet of restoration tends to work best for tank builds so do not use that.

Alright thanks a lot for that advice! Maybe using some valkyrie gear instead of zerker gear for some slots would help with the vitality in some parts, as long as I can use some celestial and knight’s to patch up the toughness and precision.

Hello ele community, I’ve been messing around with S/D builds in pvp for a while now and I’d like to run one in WvW, probably mainly for roaming and skirmishing due to its greater emphasis on burst than team support.

Trait wise I’m either going to go 0/6/0/2/6 or 0/6/0/4/4 with fresh air, I’m not sure which one would be better. Gear wise I"m probably going to use a mix of zerker/celestial/cavalier/knight’s but I’m not at all sure of the optimal set up for that, so any help in regards to this would be greatly appreciated! For Runes, I was thinking, holebrak, strength or scholar, and for sigils, I was thinking hydromancy for its added burst on swap abilities, and then either battle or energy for the other slot. Which of these things would be ideal?

I’m not sure for utilities, Ether renewal would probably cause me to lose all my momentum, so glyph or signet seems ideal. Lightning flash is a must to help with burst combos, and then other good utilities are arcane blast, cleansing fire, signet of air and arcane shield (or maybe ice bow lol).

Also I’ve read that a year ago, the air trait, Air Training was bugged and didn’t work. Did that trait ever get patched to work properly? If not I’d go with aeromancer’s alacrity or something like that instead.

Maugrem.7608:

Or you could take your gold and buy rare scepters and start throwing them 4 at a time into the toilet : )

Hahahaha no thanks. I don’t want to lose everything I have. I’m only 100-125 gold away from being able to place low buy orders for storm. Then I need another 200ish gold to buy charged cores and elonian wine to promote them, after which I’ll probably buy the 100 icy runestones, and I’ll save the T6 mats for last since they’ll drop occassionally as I open champ bags and whatnot, or if I do the CP runs every now and then.

I already have all the ecto and orichalcum so thats good I guess!

Good insight necros. My rage has calmed.

I mean if you’re group is wiping and you happen to play fire staff you can always blast water fields to help out, but then you’ll lose tons of DPS.

And I really love S/D hammer builds even though they’re a pain in pugs lol, but D/F is my go to set for “hard dungeons”

Hi necro community. I play necro, but mainly in WvW. I main ele in PvE. I post lfgs for meta zerker pugs, and quite often necros join, but I have yet to see a necro that actually runs the meta necro build for pve. I know necros are the least desired class for pve, and that really doesn’t matter to my pug runs as long as they’re running relatively optimal builds for their class. But for necros, I never see it.

Ever.

6/6/0/0/2 with MH dagger. Why do no pug necros run this build? All I ever see is condition builds that steal my lightning hammer so my DPS plummets, and then complain it can’t apply conditions when I repeatedly tell them not to pick up my hammer. They then try to justify running conditions by saying it adds to their normal damage and that they still DPS when CCed. Oh god.

Another necro I pugged with was a whiny tpvp scrub who just sat back with a staff for every fight and couldn’t survive trash runs in TA. The closest to meta necro I’ve seen was a D/D MM build. But still. Why do I never see good quality berserker dagger/well necros in PUGs? I tend to see suboptimal builds in other classes far less frequently. The worst I see is cleric guardians or GS mesmers, but they’re not as useless as condition/MM necros.

Anyway, I hope I don’t sound elitist or whatnot as I post this, because I really want to know why this plague of pve building incompetence is sweeping over this class. Its very much the same as the bearbow ranger epidemic in my eyes. Hopefully any feedback on this you can provide will keep me from adding “no necros” to my LFG posts.

Iris Ng.9845:

If you have to pug Arah and see me around, I’ll be more than glad to help.

Thanks a lot Iris, I’ll be sure to let you know!

Thanks so much for your advice Illconceived, you’ve filled me with hope for this legendary project!

So yeah it seems like 500 sounds reasonable, but I’ll try 450-475 before then to see if thats at all possible. I still have another 200-300 gold before I can start placing orders though, so hopeful I can have that in another 2 weeks of dungeon running and short term TP flipping.

How long would you suggest waiting before placing a higher buy order?

I’ve been farming gold for Strom through a combination of dungeon running and small time TP flipping, and I was wondering if anyone knowledgeable with precursor markets could give me some advice.

Are there specific times of the week/month/day where the buy price dips enough to be able to acquire the weapon relatively cheaply? While its sell price is around 620ish gold, I’ve noticed that its buy prices seem to be in the mid 500s. Is there any chance that I could place a buy order for about 500 and get it? And in your opinion, is there any chance of this precursor’s price decreasing significantly in the near-medium term future, or have the prices mostly stabilized since the April patch?

While I will always regret being too poor to buy it before the day/night cycle was announced that immediately drove prices upwards from its former 140ish gold or whatever, I’m determined to finish making this weapon, and I’m looking to cut the costs wherever possible. Thanks for any input you can give.

Dee Jay.2460:

I don’t think Guild Wars 2 has any coherent design direction whatsoever.

Decisions are made ad hoc, with no greater concept or vision to follow, with no thought or consideration for a greater plan.

They created what was originally a good MMO with an interesting twist and turned it into…..something with no concept. Guild Wars 2 “endgame” is essentially a gold farming contest. The richest players are those who watch trading post data all the time and manipulate markets to everyone’s disdain, not players actually playing the game. sPvP is shallow and while fun at it’s core, horribly balanced and unfun in practice. And then there’s Ascended gear, something NOBODY asked for and NOBODY wanted and yet still came despite it conflicting with ANets original manifesto.

Guild Wars 2 is a mess of a game, quite frankly. It’s like all the clever people who actually knew what the hell they were doing left the game and moved on to newer projects as soon as it went live.

I agree with some of this (especially about spvp lol, its so unbalanced). And you’re right about the goldgrind fest. The rich people never have to worry about making gold again because they can use the TP to make sure that they almost never run out, because their rich enough to invest and flip items for huge profits.

That being said, I still find the game fun, and while I really really want to finish a legendary, I’m going to try to make the rest of the kittenty gold farm portion of it as fun as I can.

I mostly wish we had a better idea of the direction this game is going in, since there really hasn’t been much since the wardrobe quality of life update. And its frustrating when so much isn’t really known.

maha.7902:

if you cut all of coe you could run arah 1/2/3 and make like double the gold in the same amount of time

Thats a good idea. The only thing is that I still need a few CoE tokens for meteorlogicus, but after that I can switch to Arah. I would be worried about pugging it though, as thats what I’d probably have to do. I can handle all the fights and whatnot, but I do struggle with some of the trash skips.

D/P or P/D Thief for sure if you run a PU set up. You’ll be able to give so much stealth/defensive boons to eachother, its like a match made in heaven.

Hello mesmer community, I was just thinking about how necromancers can occasionally go make hybrid builds, and I was wondering how viable such a concept would be on mesmer (in a WvW context of course).

I kind of want to make it lockdown focused with tools to both apply conditions and do decent direct damage. For weapons I’m thinking scepter/focus/pistol with GS as the “power” weapon. Traitwise it would probably be 4/4/6/0/0 or 0/4/6/4/0 or 2/4/6/2/0 or taking the key traits chaotic/bountiful interruption and debiliting dissipation, deceptive evasion and far reaching manipulations or phantasmal fury. The other less key traits could be halting strike, mender’s purity, warden’s feedback depending on the spread I choose for. For runes, perplexity or balthazar is what I’d probably use, and for sigils, probably battle and doom or accuracy.

I could also opt to go sword/focus with staff (for the AoE conditions), but I’d like to have the possibility of the scepter’s torment and confusions spikes, and I feel like I could stack bleeds rather quickly with GS. I usually run in a small-medium sized group, so I don’t really need the mobility of the staff too much, but the AoE burning is tempting I do admit.

As for gear, I’m not really sure. I’d imagine using a lot of celestial gear would be helpful, as would a mix of rabid/knight’s. Anyway any input would be greatly appreciated, and if this idea is bad, I’ll just stick to the tried and true pure condition builds.

I’m looking for four or more other players to do speedruns of some of the explorable dungeons, monday-thursday at roughly 2-3 hours before reset (most of the pve community seems to run thier dungeons at reset but I wvw then).

I’m looking for any class besides necro, in full or mostly zerker gear, running their classes’ meta pve build (or one of them anyway). I play ele, so I’d prefer to have only one extra ele, but guardians, warriors, rangers, mesmers, thieves and engis are welcome, we’ll just play around with the compositions.

Each day we’ll run
AC 1+3
TA up/fwd
CM 1+3
CoF 1/2
and SE 1 and 3
and maybe CoE if there is time

So post here if you’re interested or PM me ingame.

Iris Ng.9845:

Minstrel and Meteorlogicus, I have and love them both. They are understated and beautiful.

That looks absolutely awesome!! And on a sidenote, my sylvari necro has pretty much the same armor as your mesmer! Except darker looking and I have the TA shoulders.

I know I definetly want to get both of them, I just need to get down to dungeon running like a maniac.

6/6/0/0/2 full zerker with MH dagger and focus or WH is your best option. Its single target DPS is actually very high. It just offers next to nothing to support the time, IE no group boons like might or fury or aegis, no projectile management, and no party wide buffs like frost spirit or warrior’s banners. The lack of cleave also sucks for taking out trash mobs, but that doesn’t matter on a boss. The DPS is very high (ie higher than mesmer and probably guardian) but you’ll still get out DPSed by eles, and thieves and warriors. Overall this build is your best option for the worst class at pve, and in a PUG you’ll still probably end up doing way more DPS than anyone else.

Hey thanks a lot! I’ll probably try to do a similar set of paths as the ones you describe but I’ll add in one or two paths from CoE since I need the tokens for the legendary I want lol.

I’m only worried about PUGs slowing me down, and about the possibility of putting me fractal running career on hold temporarily.

Flash.6912:

If u have a delicated dungeons guild you can make 60g a day easy.

Okay then, I guess I’ll look for one thats okay with very limited representation hahaha. Thanks for your input.

So I have some legendary goals I’d like to fulfill as many of us do, and while I can get some extra money from the TP, I’d like to expedite the process a bit.

My goal is to make 60 gold per day, and the TP can usually net me 5-15 gold per day depending on how lucky I get. Since I don’t want to take risks, I figured that running dungeons would be the best way to reach my goal of 60 g per day. If I still flip casually, which dungeon paths would I have to do eachday to make the kitten gold needed to reach that goal?

The only concern I have is for how much time I’d be able to spend on this. I am busy during the day and I typically always try to do a fractal each day and run with my guild in WvW most nights. I could give up the daily fractal as its gold/per time spent is a bit low.

Anyways, I’d appreciate any advice and tips on this subject.

Natsu Dragneel.1625:

^^ Lol, stop giving bad advice. All of the guardians ‘support’ can be provided whist running a meta DPS build, we are NOT a supporter class, our DPS is pretty kitten high (run the kitten meta builds, don’t try to be some PVTHero failsupporter and drag down any good groups~)

Also, do not use a meditation build in PvE, its just bad and offers nothing.

Thanks for your response, and yeah I agree. I was a bit gullible though and believed him for a second, which almost scared me away from making a guardian lol.

Flash.6912:

If you can earn 60 gold a day then yes u can make it in 1 month.

Hmmm well that goal is a bit lofty to me. How would you suggest doing this? TP short/medium term flipping gives me 10-40 silver per item usually in the market I’ve been using, and I can flip anywhere from 10 to 100 items per day.

I guess speedrunning all the easy dungeons could generate a lot of this money, but because I’m busy in real life during the day, and I always try to run a fractal each day and run with my guild in wvw, my free time for explorable dungeons is limited.