Guild Wars 2

juno.1840:

Piratoz.8627:

Until several major things change, zerker meta will stay as the prevalent build for all classes in GW2. Why is that you say?

1. No holy trinity. The holy trinity remains as the primary way of designing a combat system in MMOs. It works well and is easy to make content for. However, in guild wars 2 the 2 sides of the trinity: tanking and healing either don’t exist or just kind of suck. There is no way to reliably control aggro, tank stats are pretty useless other than for personal survival. Healing power scales extremely poorly for PVE and is largely seen as useless as every class has a heal skill with high base healing. Instead the “trinity” of gw2 was advertised as DPS, support, and control. However this leads me to my second point…

2. No matter what you build, your CC and boon giving abilities are pretty much the same. The zerker elementalist is going to give roughly the same amount of boons as the full soldiers elementalist. Outside of boon duration, there is really no way to make your support or control abilities stronger. By building any stat except for damage you are really just gimping your party in a way unless you can’t survive. However this leads me to my third point…

3. Content in guild wars 2 is easy. There. I said it. You can view it how you want, but in my opinion, content in guild wars 2, especially older content is fairly easy compared to other popular MMOs because of one mechanic: Dodge. I love dodging in this game, however the ability to have evade frames for a good second at any time if you have the endurance to pay for it makes it so that even the glassiest of characters can survive almost all encounters in the game. I have a feeling that Arenanet won’t change this as they have the motto of “play how you want”. While some players may make this excuse to take strange or “unoptimal” builds, it works both ways. The full cleric guardian should theoretically be able to complete the same content as the 11k hp elementalist. This leads me to my final point…

4. Because of these reasons, there is no real need for teamwork . This is by far one of the biggest gripes I have with the game. Your thief and elementalist are dead or downed? Guardian AFK? Thats okay! Chances are, if you or the other person are good enough you could probably solo or duo the boss. Every class is self sufficient. While this does have its strengths, it really detracts from the most challenging aspect of MMOs, and in my opinion, the part that is the most fun: working as a team to beat challenging content.

I’m not saying that I hate Guild Wars 2. I love playing the game. However like most things, there are many things that could be improved in this game, one of which is the combat. There will be many people who disagree with me, however one of the best parts about playing an MMO is working with other people, often people that you don’t know. The holy trinity was an easy way to make it so that it was necessary to play the different roles and work with other people.

TLDR: I do believe that gw2 can find a way to make their “soft trinity” combat system work, but right now PVE really needs some love from the developers. Until there are major changes to combat or the way encounters are designed, the only trinity in the game is power, precision, and ferocity.

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).

Q1: Ever did arah?
Q2: Ever played guardian?
Q3: Ever played high level fractals?
Q4: Ever participated in a speedrun?

Yep, the game isn’t hard at first especially if you don’t leave ac. In more difficult conditions ( something anet doesn’t want to support (ironically)), defensive support is needed. At least for offensive geared user, since ptv guards and warriors can still fail to dodge and facetank.

That warhorn is really ugly, yeah.

You’re actually the first to ask that and that’s such a wonderful idea!

Yeah, the bombers Taku was refering to can be blinded and it works. There’s also one other type but I forgot wich.

There’s 2 dredges types in se story vulnerable to blinds.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

fishball.7204:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Jana.6831:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

You said it right there. Soloers. Because it is impossible for a single player to put out the sheer amount of damage to quickly kill a dungeon enemy, survivability becomes much more important.

You need to put out as much damage as possible to be able to solo dungeon bosses as you need to kill them before they can kill you = avoid as many of their attacks as possible.

While true, a single player cannot put out the damage required to kill a boss before you run out of dodges (aside from thieves). Thus, building more defensively becomes optimal because those stats matter.

This is so wrong on many levels do you even know how to dungeon?

Go check out some goku solo videos where he kills spider queen in 11 seconds or whatever. On an elementalist.

Spider Queen is squishy for a dungeon boss, though. I’d love to see solo kill times like that on Howling King from the same path, for example. Or other dungeon bosses like Subject Alpha or Searing Effigy, to say nothing of Arah bosses.

Plus, that kill time was before the FGS nerf. It’s impossible now.

It was post fgs. But even on long bosses like lupicus, berserker does fine provided you know how to play.

nomad, bro?

Let’s state it again then. You stopped caring about us long ago and you don’t even have the balls to come and tell us you’re not giving a duck anymore. Come here directly and tell us to go screw ourselves.

Just adapt and get as agressive as the game discussion subforum. Let’s break this comunity.

bullkitten level: Anet

Well, we need a tag of some sorts when posting real things, and let the others do their anti stacking threads. Something like putting a [dungeon] tag before the thread name, to filtrate dungeon posts and toxic phiw posts.

Edit: What about going to the norn or charr subforum? No one ever go there, they won’t notice.

Just play meta and get money quickly to buy berserker gear. It’s really not that expensive.

Trashcan knows your feel. Give up.

Problem is you can’t do that in a group, because you’ll move mobs too much for the melee players (= everyone). Using rocket boots break the ball of mobs, so it’s counterproductive.

Well, soft cc is nice to have, but 1) you have enough with grenade 4 and 2) completely negating an attack is better. At least in the current meta.

Mobs are about the same except you can use blinds and, for a lot of them, reflects. It works the same though.

You could watch a lupi solo video for instance. Or a speedrun at gwscr.com, but those are quite fast and it’s hard to know what’s going on if you’re not used to. Any kind of solo video is slow enough.

No, what i said is active defense is the meta, and I explained you why, that’s all.

I answered in my previous post and will do the same for this one if you feel like going on with this discussion.

Yep, you’re wrong. I’m soloing and duoing dungeons everyday with a lot of classes, all of them being berserker or assassin and engi included. The key point in your argumentation is survivability. That’s fine if you need some breath via gear, but when you’ll gain more experience, you will be able to survive without vitality and toughness from gear. At that point, you won’t need it anymore, and getting offensive gear will be a given. It’s not only about killing things quickly: it’s about killing things before your active defense runs out. What it means is, even if i’m soloing naked, I’ll still kill the mobs. In the case of engi, i’ll chain blinds with nades/bombs/ft, blocks with toolkit/shield offhand, reflects with elixir u,and/or dodges with 100% vigor uptime. With all of that, there’s no point investing in vitality or toughness. If i get hit, that’s my mistake. You said that yourself, I think, but since you’re still not confident about your abilities ( wich is again perfectly fine) you don’t get the meta philosophy.

You’re right about one point, we can’t afford to make a mistake like you. But that’s where we’re having fun. Hope this helps understanding the meta and the posts directed to you before.

Edit because i can post once every 10 minutes: It goes for build as well. For instance, a berserker shoutheal warrior isn’t meta. What we refer to “berserker meta” is in fact “all the builds based on getting all the support possible without loosing too much dps via the stacking of a lot of damage multipliers and the use of berserker and assassin gear to further boost the damage output, but with team support abilities when it’s needed”. But berserker meta is faster to write.

Ok, so I think I know where you got lost. You assume meta players are worse than you. And you assume than playing berserker or assassin make soloing impossible.

So, here’s the thing: In the situation you described, I would kill those elites. Simple as that. Playing with offensive gear makes things harder, but far from impossible.

A quick comment on other assumption: We don’t follow guides, we make them. The strats you see and the builds you see are created by the high level pve guilds.

Well if I’m not right, I wonder who will be left.

That’s what we said when they added watchwork portal, turned out it was expensive as duck and no one used them outside of creative uses ( swamp yolo solo). Hope it will be pricy.

Hello,
Fractals are meant for a 5 players group. Each “path” is actually a random selection of 3 “mini dungeons” and one boss fractal. Each fractal (=the mini dungeons i’m talking about) have different encounters and strategies, and you have to complete all 4 including the boss to gain a level and a pristine relic. Fractals can be hard for newcomers, but level 1 to 10 aren’t so bad and mobs have low healths and damage compared to a fractal 50. I’d advice doing low levels only, and either doing it with guildies or joining a lfg such as " all welcome" or " non experienced". Good classes follow the dungeon pve meta. For easier runs, you want to have either a guard or a mesmer for defensive support, making it easier to recover from a mistake. Warrior is quite tanky and is good for newcomers. Eles is a really solid choice as well. All classes can do well in fractals, though. Try to not stack only one class, for instance 4 mesmers or thieves, and it will be alright.
Here’s a ling to gw2dungeons.net, a fantastic web sites with all the strategies and encounters: http://gw2dungeons.net/
If you’re on EU servers, I can come and help you, though i’m not that great of a teacher. Alternatively, the noob guild is helping new players to do dungeons, check the dungeon subforum.

Good luck.

Toybox.2940:

Snakebyte.2804:

Toybox.2940:

Eh. I guess I’m just not pro enough for this forum, and this is just going to turn into a fight I’m not interested in, so I’ll just admit I’m wrong and take my leave.

Dude, you can’t go around admitting that you are wrong. This is the Internet, for goodness’ sake!

I’m just old fashioned in that way. I don’t sit around reading guides or doing things the way everyone else wants me to do them, so there’s not much to discuss.

I was under the impression this thread was just for discussing playstyles and general PvE. But since I don’t know who “Lupi” is, my information is apparently invalid. Which is fine. It was my mistake. I misinterpreted the point of the thread.

What we, as toxic elitists, are trying to avoid, is misinformation for newcomers. The people here are trying their best to teach you and every inexperienced players how the game works, how you can have fun, and how it’s different from other games. No one is denying your playstyle, but we, or at least I am denying its effectiveness in high end pve, and its support abilities. We’re indeed discussing with you, and you’re the one ending the discussion, ranting about elitism and such. If we were truly elitists, we would only talk between elite players. I and others gave you advices and opinions about your build, how some things felt out of place, how we personally see it working; that’s the point of a discussion.

So don’t come and say we’re not discussing. We are. We all want to make sure other players avoid the mistake we pretty much all did at the start of the game when no one was here to tell us what to do, when anchor guardian and condi necros were a thing.

Lupi is the nickname of giganticus lupicus, one of the best bosses in all gw2 found in arah, considered a high level dungeon for what it’s worth. It shows really well the importance of active defense and it’s a fun boss full of mechanics, it’s also the typical exemple when talking about dungeon bosses.
Anyway, you have to understand we’re not against you, we’re trying to help. If you have any question, all the people on this forum will answer it.

Pistol 5 may stop the mobs for a few secs. Rifle 3 and 5 will kill the trash mobs, and death is the longest cc in the game. Cripple and immob aren’t useful on trash mobs as they won’t dodge out of the ball you created by LOSing or pulling them with guard gs 5 or mesmer pull ( or ele earth shield but.. meh). If your goal is Ai manipulation, just pop a smoke bomb. Mobs won’t hit you. In pve, movment impairing conditions have 2 goals: proccing related traits like predator’s onslaught, and keeping a boss in place. For the 2nd case, rifle is still superior.
Pistol do have a faster attack speed than rifle. But grenades are better than both for that.

First, mesmers don’t use berserker for most dungeons, they use asassin. Warrior dps is pretty bad and most people find it decent because of the hundred blades syndrom, where putting big numbers, even on long channeled skills, looks like higher dps. They also have the ability to self stack might and fury, so their dps in non organized group is higher.
There’s no such thing as " berserker guardian is good". Guardian itself is a great class, as is mesmer, and the fact they are in berserker gear is a given, because that’s optimal. Guardian is, in a way, a protection provider, if you include active defense as a form of protection. They rely on blinds, aegis, reflects, condition removals and stability instead of just giving boons. Hammer does have the ability to maintain a 100% protection uptime if needed, though. But all of this doesn’t require any gear, and being tanky in pve is a selfish investment. All point in vitality and toughness are a training wheel and you help your team better by playing full berserker ( or a mix with assassin , or full assassin) and taking the usual support, again not tied to gear.

For mesmers, they share common uses with guardians, mainly projectile defense and condition removal, and they also have the portal ability along with a bit of stealth to skip trash mobs. They rely on phantasms for most of their damage, so they are indeed clone manipulating, however you don’t spam clones to confuse your foes in pve. First, because mobs don’t get confused by clones, and second, because their base health is too low and they’ll get oneshot anyway.

Here we go again. Post those in the general discussion subforum, I don’t want that in the dungeons subforum. Just go there and have a bunch of toxics agreeing with you, we won’t even bother to try and teach you why you’re wrong.

Nice job Vee Wee nice to see you there.

That thread in the players helping players about greatsword users is so toxic.. There’s some dense phiw in there.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stealth
Omg, such exploit.
Everyone can solo a keep. And yep, soloing a keep alone is pretty much the point of soloing.

This thread..

I would enjoy my shield of giant slaying so much. /rolleyes

VoR is virtue of resolve, traited with absolute resolution for3 condis cleared every 50 sec ( another 1 with renewed focus). Both persisting flames and virtue of resolve removes multiple condis, making it above warrior’s condi removal. Light field+whirl is on a low cooldown as well, and most people forget it since fire fields is preferred most of the time. dropping a symbol of wrath in between might stacking for condi removal isn’t so bad, though. You don’t have to take supbar runes like troopers and your dps doesn’t drop as much as a shout warrior as well. Speaking for pve that is.

Don’t worry, people half a map away are still in your range, so you got that going for you.

Yeah, because rng has nothing to do with that.

You miss the subtle difference between lenght and difficulty. The fights are doable by my dog playing a naked mesmer with scepter mainhand only. You’re all assuming miku is talking about difficulty, because you probably all thought you were da best ending that ls. However, he’s speaking about the nullification of more than half a profession from a mechanic oversight.

The point of the pve meta is to take the maximum support available without loosing too much dps. Since healing isn’t worth it and there’s no other stat to up your support, you just take the most damaging option as it’s a form of support ( more team dps> less mistakes / more survivability> less team dps). Guardian is a bit special as it’s pretty bad for offensive support, except for vuln stacking and fire fields. They are king of defensive support along with mesmers, making them the archetype of the “tank” or “healer” in other mmos. The fact you’re playing full berserker/assassin has no influence on your build. The goal is still to keep everyone alive.

Only the gear is offensive. Most of the time, you’ll take supportive traits instead of pure dps oriented traits. There’s also quite a lot of diversity in the different meta builds, and guardians make use of every weapon minus shield.

I would to those kind of posts if I was a native english speaker, but since I’m not, I’ll keep my sarcastic one sentence thingies.

You’re not creating walls. You’re creating doors to the litterature heaven with your writings.

“Decipher?” He asked, and the story repeated itself again.

SHM.7628:

oxtred.7658:

Well, it can work in open world pve, but yep, you won’t do big damage, you won’t have aoes for tagging, you won’t have permanent swiftness.. It comes down to a matter of personal preference. Some people I know really love their mesmer and even with these obvious disadvantages they enjoy playing it more than say, a thief or an ele. If you like cc, eles have good area controls+ everything the mesmer lacks in open world pve ( swiftness/movment skills, damage, offensive support and self buffing, cleaving/aoes).

I am at present leveling a Thief. A lot of the frustration you discribed about mesmer, I am feeling with thief. Great single target damage, but in this game AOE is king. This gets better with level, I know. No speed buff is kinda painful too.

Yeah, I like Ele too. My faves so far are Ranger, Guardian, and necro. (in that order)

Thieves have far better cleave ( sword and dagger aa actually do damage), aoe for tagging ( sb2 and 4), speed and a lot of teleports (sig. of shadow, TotC, shadowstep, steal, inf.sig, sb5/sword 2 spam). They don’t have half their dps on AI as well.

Sword 3 isn’t a dps gain over auto attack. It’s main selling point is the longer reach and the projectile block.

lol, 32k meteor shower hits would be so devastating. I want this thing to happen.

Yep, balance is totally about taking 2 traits from 2 classes and compare them to tell wich class is really op.

Well, we call ourselves elitists as a joke, because that’s how we’re categorized by the other end of the spectrum, but the real elitists, those who try to force their playstyle onto others ( those are in both meta and non meta groups), are a totally different thing. Nothing new really, and people not willing to listen to that won’t magically change. There’s a lot of us “elitists” helping less experienced people to progress by showing them our strats, by taking them in our groups, by sharing and arguing about builds and how we learned how the game works. There’s also the noob guild, my and others teaching run via lfg, etc. On the other hand, there’s also non meta players perfectly fine with the meta, and realizing they’re not optimal for speedclears, wich is the last of their problems. And there’s tards everywhere.

Mystic.5934:

According to a guildie: I chose a Sunless longbow for my Ranger.
How this went down: I got a Tequatl’s Hoard from teq. I already had ascended weapons on my mesmer main, so the only place it would be useful was on my ranger. ranger already had a wupwup shortbow from another ascended chest a while ago, so I saw it as replacing the exotic longbow with an ascended longbow.
Why I guess it was stupid: sunless weapons have Rabid stats (Cond / prec / tough), and longbow on a ranger doesn’t apply any conditions. At the time, I knew I would of preferred berserker stats, but I wasn’t too picky and just preferred full ascended.

Now I’m actually curious which deals more damage… exotic berserker longbow, or ascended rabid longbow. They both have prec, but berserker has power and ferocity while ascended has 42 more base damage. I have a feeling the berserker is more. Which begs the question: rare berserker longbow vs. ascended rabid longbow?

Berserker is far more damage.
(Yep, I’m just passing by to say that- though, to answer the question, I guess our 5 necros/ 5 mesmers runs were quite high in the stupidity level)

You also get might on interrupt and daze via domination minor traits.

Scholar.
/15elitistschars

Night and force works together. It’s also a solid choice.

No one’s here to add new things but when something “has” to be shut down there’s surprisingly far more quickness to act. meh. Can’t see why that thread was closed.