Guild Wars 2

It doesn’t. Except for a bomb venomshare spammer with caltrops and P/D, but that’s against inexperienced players. Fun to see those 25 stacks of torments, though. Thing is what makes condi thieves op is mainly shadow arts regen and condi removal while being tanky, and SA is a really bad traitline for pvp, since being in stealth doesn’t help capping or killing. The thief role, at least in this meta, is still fast decapping and assassination of squishies, something you won’t do with a condi build. If you still want to play condi, avoid D/D.

Can you please share your build?

While you’re at it there’s also conjures and transforms. That would be a nice QoL changes, but really not necessary.

Belorn.2659:

With two large nerfs hitting the class, it is good to look how it will impact which class one choses to play.

In wvw zergs, bringing my ele is still likely to be my primary choice since frozen field and water fields is constantly needed to adjust the fight into a favorable outcome. That is, until frozen field is nerfed.

My ele sPvP builds will be uneffected.

Fractals will be uneffected. The only boss that was partially FGS’able was Molten Furnace, and that boss is very simple with or without FGS.

For world bosses like Teq/wurm, I will likely switch to warrior because of the double spot exploit. It is hard to beat 75k 100-blades on teq, added with the utility of res banner and might shareing.

For all dungeons except Arah, I will switch to warrior. Arah feature less stacking and more stealth exploits which make ele equally valid as before this patch. AC might be an exception, but AC is so simple it doesn’t really matter.

I especially laughed at that part about fractals. Mossman, archdiviner, svanir shaman, ice ele, dredge endboss, thaumanova ooze, ettin, about all the trash mobs, all are fgsable and were fgs’d. It just required coordination, that’s why no one was complaining about those. The changes to those elites are pve oriented, hence why you won’t see much difference in pvp game modes. Arah feature less stacking. Ooze, tar, belka, abom, lupi, alphard, crusher/hunter, mage crusher, wraithlord, melandru, balthazar, lyssa, dwayna bosses excluded. Yeah. Eles are still valuable, but now the difficulty difference between for instance ele and warrior doesn’t justify the dps increase in pugs/solo. Don’t get me wrong, the fgs nerf was needed. But first, having encouters like fractals where fgs is hard to pull off would have helped. As someone said on another topic, they are adressing the symptom, not the cause.

Warrior for record times, guard is easy to play, thief has the conveniance of permanent stealth uptime. I wouldn’t recommend ranger ( far too long, stupid sword aa), necros ( lack of active defence), mesmers ( 1 hour later, that single trash mob is about do die) or eles ( squishy as kitten, and the high reward that came for that is nerfed to oblivion)

What game mode? In www, GWEN is still meta, in roaming we may see more “lol i’m an archer” rangers so that’s some free kills.

For pve, eles are weakened by the huge nerf to fgs, especially in solos. They are still in a good spot for the meta, but we probably won’t stack 4 eles anymore. Warriors are still banner bots, we probably won’t need empower allies without an fgs meta. Engineers will probably be more valuable in speedruns, and even if they are not it’s a great casual run class, with really good dps, crazy vuln stacking and access to stealth, might, water fields, reflects, blinds… Necro could replace a 4th ele in easy dungeons. Guardians are still good, rangers are upped a bit.

tl;dr: pvp didn’t change much, we’ll see more med guards and bearbows; for pve, best class is still ele, but engineer and ranger are a bit more optimal. We’re waiting for the exact numbers to see what classes will rise in this new meta.

Sorry, I don’t like repeating myself

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Question-Plans-on-old-group-content/first#content

etc

Problem is you won’t be full DS at 25% health. That’s what people are saying. The only form of damage mitigation excluding spectral armor for necros is death shroud. Having a full bar under 25% health is a matter of inexperience. And even if you do, and if for whatever reason you do get 25 might stacks, your low health and the diminushing of your ds ressource makes you vulnerable.

For pvp, use aegis or blinds ( F3 or F1) for big single attacks, like eviscerate, hammer stun, backstab, etc.. For pve, spam your virtue of justice between other blinds to provide good blind uptime on trash mobs, spam it against bosses for vuln/ burning damage modifier. Use virtue of courage along with retreat to support your teammates. Virtue of resolve is best used when traited with absolute resolution, in that case use it as an instant group condi removal.

Fiery greats… nevermind.

I’m tied between traited steal and corrupt boon. Anything that control boons, really.

Why are EOTM related topics still in the WwW subforum?

sirrealist.1360:

I had my first +7k backstab! It’s fun to see those big numbers.

cough

For kudu, he is indeed annoying. Try to follow him with steal/ inf signet/shadow step to keep an eye on what he’s doing.

maeggle.6021:

Don’t use an upleveled, and don’t go EOTM

FTFY

Anyway, yeah retal is annoying on fast hitting AOEs classes ( >>>engineer<<<). Frost bow is a good utility as a 80 berserker spec’d ele against non-heavies zergs, so basically a pug environment. It could work for organized raids, I used it sometimes back when i could bear zergs, with fb4+ meteor shower+ tornado ( wich is nerfed but even without that’s good aoe damage), but as an upleveled you’ll do less damage than the retal tick.

That’s not a critter ( there’s none in pvp and it would display a crit), that’s the damage number stacking from scepter air aa for years. There was also a thread with a 2 million flamethrower crit, iirc.

anyway, inb4: scepter damage nerfed by 70%

Kashrlyyk.5364:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

….
It’s fire staff, so we’re pretty set in that regard too. At maximum effectiveness, literally all you do is spam 2 off cooldown and autoattack, and maybe a meteor shower situationally, and possibly use utilities.
So that’s maybe five or six total separate buttons pressed in order to achieve maximum power at any point in a dungeon.

I think you misunderstood me. I was interested in knowing how many key presses an ele player has to do to deal the highest damage and then see that compared to how many key presses the other classes have to do to reach their highest damage. That includes the key presses required to reach “maximum effectiveness”. I was not interested in how many “separate buttons” are needed.

Basically a table with “Number of keys pressed” on one column and “Damage done with that number of keys pressed” in the second columen for all classes. As far as I know NOONE has ever done that on this forum.

Talking about balance without having necessary informations and data is just useless.

He understood, the best pve damage spec for an ele doesn’t require keyboard dancing at all, in fact you’re not even swapping attunements in combat. That said, running staff is doable only if there’s other eles to take care of fury/might/proj absorbtion, etc, and even if it’s the best on paper dps there’s a lot of situations where it doesn’t work like that, especially in the soon to die conjure meta. Other meta builds like D/F or S/F indeed requires a lot of action per minutes. The dps advantage of the ele isn’t tied to this though, they need that to compensate their squishiness, following the high risk high reward concept from Arenanet.

Yeah, because doing less personal damage will help you carry pugs. You won’t use the hammer CCs on many occasions, if you do need an interrupt there’s a lot of utilities warriors can provide along with mace 5. A full dps setup, especially on a warrior, won’t get you killed in a pug. Playing a crowd control weapon when you can get a better dps weapon with built in evades and mobility, along with selfish might stacking you do need in pugs, isn’t the way to go. But as miku said, you can rp your hammer charr all you want; don’t try to defend its usefulness over other weapons, that’s all.

2 things:
get a focus offhand. focus e5 is a 4 sec total invulnerability, it’s great. You also gain access to a longer lasting fire field, more blasts, ranged quick cc, condi removal and proj. absorbtion. If you’re using dagger, keep in mind that dagger fire 3 is an evade.

swap your build to 6/6/0/0/2 when learning. You’ll loose a 10% modifier and 100 condition damage, and gain vigor along with boon duration. FGS 3 is an evade as well.

For alpha, you can time your dodge so you avoid both the ice aoes and the earth attack following.

“Zerker, ping gear or ban for 3 days” would be sweet.

Ettanin.8271:

maha.7902:

Thank you.

Is there any chance of Spider Queen being reverted in this case? It had a poison attack it would cast at range, and people could melee to prevent it. This was changed so that the queen used it regardless of proximity which reduced the depth of the encounter.

No thank you. Keep it as it is now. Let those fools that still try to cornerstack waste another 10 minutes. I’d rather wait 5-10minutes more for a “no spider stacking” group^^

Are you aware that everyone keep stacking at spider queen because it dies in 1 second anyway? Even in solo you just move once or twice depending on the rng..

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/DPS-guide-for-PvE-Dungeons-Soloing-More/first

Both heavy classes are indeed more friendly than the others. When you get the hang of active defences, guardian become easier. That’s just my opinion but I find guardian far more enjoyable and useful to a party.

When in solo, just be cautious and stay in stealth before you have the upper hand. If you’re not pressured and you don’t have to burst a target quickly, CnD off a mob/ bp-hs combo to regain stealth and position yourself better. In group settings, since you’ll have to burst quickly and continue to apply pressure if you want to win ( if fighting outnumbered you have to kill them fast otherwise the other guys in your group will have a hard time) just blow a cooldown, like infiltrator signet to go right on your target, leaving you some time to move around and backstab. When i first started playing thief i used the +50% movment speed while in stealth and found it useful for better repositioning.

OnyX.9027:

oxtred.7658:

You can run whatever, but you’re being detrimental to your party. Even more than a berserker necro. It’ll be far from “decently effective”, though. The best (= less worse) build is the one lily put above.

^ is a sad but true fact ( and represents the majority of ppl running in a PuG for dungeons)

a-net are to blame in a way as any “elitist” group will ONLY ever want to take FOTM class (primarily zerk warrior or gtfo) so anything else is simply sub-par in the eyes of these groups or as the guy above states “detrimental to the group”

why are a-net to blame? because the very core of the game simply works on the basis of Direct Damage > everything, therefore as a necro you bring nothing to the table due to sub-par Direct Damage

The sad thing is that I have been away from the game for a year and in that time sure there have been trait changes, games changes etc… but one constant remains… Necro is STILL in a horrible place

Necro single target DPS and single target burst is clearly powerful, it sits between thieves and engis afaik. It’s not about their dps, it’s about their lack of utilities and support. Also OP if you don’t mind other people advices, just don’t ask.

Eles and guards, mainly. Full sig mesmers are quite rare but they occur. I don’t mind full signets guy that much because it’s easier to kick on sight. Or kill on sight, depending on the game mode.

Jayjaydee.3827:

When running dungeons with my guildies, they are telling me to put up WoR at certain points, but I’m not seeing ranged attacks happening. Specific examples include 1) Kohler, 2) Sider Queen 3) The 3 golems right before Tazza in SE P1. 4)The golems right before the lasers in CoE.
I suppose Kohler does have a ranged attack when he spins, but thats all i can see, and they are telling me to put it up as soon as he reaches us. Queen has her webs she shoots out, but i think thats it, and the golems seem to me to be 100% meele. Am I missing something or am i getting mistaken advice?
Is aoe damage classifed as ranged? I mean in cases like the queens poison AOE, not symbols.
Also, tell me if i’m wrong, but WoR (or any blockng skill for that matter) wont work well with retaliation skills like pain reversal, as i suspect you have to take damage for the retaliation to kick in.
So cool learning the ins and out of a new profession. Thanks in advance

Welcome to the guardian class! Other explained pretty much your specific exemples, though they forgot something about Kholer: Using WoR ( feedback works better) on Kholer while he has 0 defiance stacks will shoot back the 5 pulls at him, one for each party member, and he’ll self interrupt, saving you a dodge. If he has defiant up though, you’ll still have to dodge. Spider queen aoes were made unblockable some time ago, so you can’t reflect them, but the adds does quite a lot of damage if you can’t burn them fast. I don’t use WoR myself, I just blind spam. Most golems, especially the ones in se, are projectile based. A full berserker guard can nearly one shot the SE golems with a wall.

As a general rule, unblockable attacks aren’t reflectable, most AoEs aren’t, except the one that are projectile based ( starting with a projectile and exploding on target, like lupi P2 aoes for instance). Projectiles high enough to go above your wall won’t be reflected. You’ll quickly gain knowledge on what is reflectable and what isn’t.

Good luck and have fun!

Yeah, but they took the time to nerf FGS. And spider queen. And the ac troll in HOTW. Meh, maybe they shouldn’t touch dungeons if they are doing it this way.

haha, you can’t pull fotm bosses to corner now.
1) you can kill most bosses in less than 5 seconds even without cornering them. Ice bow ftw.
2) That’s exactly how defiance works…
3)It would further enforce the berserker meta you’re disliking. Attacks are perfectly fine, you are inexperienced.
4)You’re implying condi removal isn’t important and gives 2 exemples where every average team will use some. Your logic is flawed.
5)“P1 80”. That’s a mysterious password, type that in the lfg and you’ll get your pp thief.
6)fire, smoke and to a lesser extent water fields are all part of the meta.

Your statements just show a lack of experience in dungeons, you still don’t understand how defiance, fields, and support works.

moiraine.2753:

In my opinion if defiance will stay as a mechanic Anet must add some kind of a boss attack that is not dodgeable or avoidable by moving far away from it.The party has to be made to interrupt that specific attack and nothing else.
Lets take for example a dungeon boss with 5 stacks of defiance.We have interrupted the 1st Speciall attack so the boss is now with 5 stacks.The group has to remove the stacks fast before the next Special attack hits.I always liked the intterupting mechanic in MMOs.Right now in GW2 PVE it’s almost non-existent
There has to be some kind of initiative to remove the defiant stacks from the boss.Right now there is none.The only places that are more interesting are FotM/TA Aether/Arah

@Stooperdale and @tigirius ii agree with you both.

You mean spider queen? Instant death aoes interruptable? Already done.

You can run whatever, but you’re being detrimental to your party. Even more than a berserker necro. It’ll be far from “decently effective”, though. The best (= less worse) build is the one lily put above.

Axe offhand is great.

Yeah, ice bow 5 is a huge dps increase.

Eliteseraph.4970:

Just hit level 80 on my engineer. Lots to read up on and think about. Is the info early on in this post still accurate?

Also, at the time of this post it’s only 18 days away from the patch that’s supposed to update engis. Should I hold off spending my laurels and WvW badges on gear until the meta shifts? Or will the patch largely leave gear choices unchanged?

Yes it is. If you’re not in a hurry, waiting is better, since they could ( unlikely, but who knows) get for instance a precision boost with a trait or a power increase, making berserker or assassin balance different. It shouldn’t affect your gear choice at all, it’s just a being cautious matter. Engis should be buffed relatively in pve in a few months.

Same, I used gs+ sword warhorn when leveling. You won’t come back to bow after trying the op RaO+wh4+qz+sword aa+ a feline pet combo. It’s an instant 25 might for your pet, and it’ll hit like a truck. Getting used to sword takes some time, and practising your dodges in open world is hard because mobs don’t hit hard so you won’t see the difference, but try to avoid every charged glowing attacks while auto attacking with sword, it’ll help. Alternatively you could use gs as a melee weapon and sb/lb as a ranged weapon, but if you’re planning to pve, it’s still a bad habit.
Have fun!

Active defense is part of the guard mechanic and you’ll use it in all game modes. That said, you can’t rely only on active defenses in pvp because you can’t avoid all incoming damages. Best guards does rely heavily on blinds, blocks, etc, but they still need to trait either for meditation heal as a dps spec or ah as a bunker spec.

As far as your build goes, you’re really squishy for any sort of pvp, It can work as a roaming spec in www, but that’s about all. I would swap two handed mastery for empowering wrath if you’re using strenght runes. The minor in valor isn’t incredibly useful either, my call would be either 0/5/0/4/4 or 0/3/0/4/6 if you really want to play like that.

Zelyhn has a great detailed guilde about dagger focus in pve, read that. Usually, an ele will play 6/6/2/0/0, or 6/6/0/0/2 if you need vigor, that gives you access to weak spot ( insta 25 vuln with fgs), a 10% modifier while in air or a boost to your critical damage after an arcane spell, a 20% modifier against foes with less thant 33% hp, and a hell lot of critical damage+ferocity. Arcana is a pvp oriented traitline, it’s underperforming in pve. You’ll probably have between 1 and 0 cantrips in pve, so traiting in water won’t be useful as well.

For god sake, stop saying your CC did nothing when it hit a stack of defiance, it’s the point of defiant stacks… Your team want to interrupt a boss, everyone take down defiant, you tell them in party chat/ ts/ whatever how many defiant stacks you’re burning, count to five, and the guy who wants his long lasting cc to hit do it last. How is that hard to understand? If you break a defiant, your cc isn’t wasted, you’re closer to interrupting the boss. “CC specs” are not optimal because cc isn’t tied to gear, and you don’t need special traits to make it works. For certain encounter, any good player will bring things like icebow for eles, pistol offhand for thieves, mantra for mesmers, signet of bane for guardians, etc. It’s not required when not pushing time because the lack of new content makes it easy to complete anything, but I assure you that when we’re beating a world record we’re interrupting everything we need to interrupt.

The best dps for a ranger uses both. Gs 3 and 2 at the start of the fight, then sword aa. But there’s some encounter where you can’t use sword, because it pushes bosses and you can’t max melee, and in those, stick to greatsword.

Edit: rangers are also good conjure wielders so if you have an ele beg for a lightning hammer.

Thief is one of those classes where stacking toughness won’t even help. On classes like warrior or guardian i advice people to take knight/ ptv when starting, but thief will get destroy no matter what. 5/6/0/3/0 is indeed a good spec to begin with. Get familiar with your role as a thief, mainly where do your team need stealth, interrupts, blinds. Run with people who don’t mind taking a bit of time to show you the ropes. I think TC is NA, right? If not, I can take you to any dungeons/ give you some arah paths to gear your char. You could ask the dungeon mentors [noob] guild, they are teachers for all dungeon contents.

For your gear, farm the berserker dungeon sets ( cof/coe/arah). Use S/P for pistol whip spam coupled with the healing sig, or even better, fgs with that heal. It’s basically an instant 100% heal. It comes down to knowing the encounters to know what to do in order to survive, so stick with experienced players until you’re comfortable enough to pug.

Guard is a fun soloing class, but it lacks self buffing. It’s more than decent in 1v1, and a great addition to many dungeon groups. Your role is condition removal, stability, fire fields, and defensive buffer ( aegis, protection, blind spam) in pve, and boon spam in pvp, pretty much.

Yeah, the only reason to run a past twice is to give/sell it, or teach someone, or just trying new strats. Otherwise wait for reset.

It’s fine, but listen carefully to what’s going on, it’s not the easiest dungeon at all, especially when you do it for the first time.

Threads about lack of cc and support are probably the saddest thing, followed by mounts threads.

Do it again, level 38 isn’t a big deal.

For pve, the best gear is berserker ( power/precision/ ferocity). Check the guide “DPS guardian for pve” stickied on this forum. You don’t want to be tankier in fractals because the mobs one shot you in berserker and two shot you in soldier. You need to use active defenses like blinds, aegis, blocks, invul, protection.. in order to survive. If you have trouble at first, use a knight set and switch to berserker when you’re more confident.

Drson.4730:

Guard isnt good might stacker? With all Empowering Might trait+Sigils of Strength+Runes of Strength+Staff Empower skill I think its quite easy to get 20+stacks …

Im not saying you are not right, but could you please explain it to me, why he isnt a good might stacker?

Because you won’t be using empowering might nor staff. As i explained on other posts, staff #4 has a really short duration and it screws up more important stacks coming from fire fields+blast, and you’re stuck with a crappy weapon if you use it to refresh the might stacks in combat. Empowering Might is in an unwanted traitline except for hammer specs, and you want to use writ of persistence in that case.

In pve, the ranger is a party wide dps booster via spotter and frost spirit. They have a good vulnerability burst at the start of the fight, nothing too fancy but worth saying it. They have access to personal/group wide reflects, a pull on a 15 sec cooldown great for reducing defiant stacks, along with a lot of interrupts on greatsword. They have access to condi removal and long lasting fire field, a “meh” fire field, and good fury uptime.

In www, rangers aren’t the best choice in zergs, you could make it work but as Atherakhia stated, GWEN will do better. In roaming they are either unkillable rampaging condi machines, or raw ranged dps specs, but the later seems to attract a lot of new players and everyone will always focus that one ranger sitting at 1500 range and not dodging the shatter combo. Ranger is indeed quite easy to level so go full dps and get some points in the precision traitline. For pets, I used felines to make things faster ( since their stats are not tied to yours, even with my level 1 gear my pet was dealing crazy damage, especially stacked at 25 might stacks with rampage as one and quickening zephyr, this combo killed anything close to champion level). I wouldn’t advice using a tanky pet and sits at range since it’ll give you bad habits.

I don’t think getting rid of a profession mechanic gives you any fun. But if you really want to camp an attunement, fire staff and maybe conjurers builds are for you. But even then you’ll swap out of combat for party swiftness, blast finisher available, or might stacking before using your conjure.

Scorpion Over Lord.9036:

oxtred.7658:

Problem is the dagger mainhand and the dagger offhand serves opposite purposes. Dagger mainhand is for dps outside of conjures, and dagger offhand is for burst before conjuring. Dagger focus relies on the defensive utilities of the focus and the good dps of dagger mainhand, scepter focus relies on the good burst of scepter, swirling winds before casting hammer, and then the conjures dps, and scepter dagger is the burst heavy set. Dagger/dagger is a non bursty weapon mainhand with a bursty weapon offhand. You’ll also have less blast finishers than d/f or s/x, and using dagger on a full conjure build is indeed a dps loss over scepter.

Cool, so you have done a full dps test with all these weapon sets to see what the average dps is on each and you have found that dagger offhand comes out less. If your looking at it from a solo point of view, it has less finishers, but in an organised group you dont need to do EVERY blast to cap 25 might and are you honestly expecting every boss fight to out last 2 LHs and lets even throw in an ice bow there for fun…in that case, what weapon set would do more DPS…before you answer, the hint is, your not attacking with the daggers…

The point is, since you’ll be using LH after your might stacking rotation, you take the fastest and hardest hitting might stacking rotation you have. Scepter has a better burst than dagger, and that’s why conjurers take it. Your role has an ele is offensive support and a bit of projectile reflection if using focus, even if your party can cap might without you the scepter rotation (including only fire 2,4,3, earth 4) doing it will cap might faster and lower the boss kill time. Dagger/dagger isn’t bad per say, it has no place in the current meta because every other options are better, and as I said earlier the two weapons doesn’t really work well together in pve.

Defiant is a team oriented mechanic.

Soloing fractal isn’t really efficient, since the rewards are pitiful and some fractals can’t be solo’d ( dredge, or swamp wich is soloable but requires a lot of coordination and a clockwork portal). You should seek a group and farm fractals with them. General build is 6/5/0/3/0, but you may have to take offhand training depending on the situation. Best pets for single target dps are felines, jungle stalker and moas are good offensive buffers, and some drakes have good aoes.