Guild Wars 2

A couple things: yes, unbuffed my traits give me a grand total of 90% increase in Fear Duration. However I was under the impression (haven’t tested) that Terror on a target with conditions already had a good chance to tick damage twice given 1-3/4 listed fear.

Secondly, when I run food buffs, an additional 36% condition duration is usually all I need to fear to hit that +100% mark. I may play around with Soul Marks anyways since I have some issues with keeping up my life force, but I currently think Master of Terror is worthwhile

My build is pretty much a variant of the terror build, only sitting at 20/10/20/0/20 for extra boon removal, and a universal 40% boon duration increase without food.

I do about 1000 damage per tick with terror specced, and my bleeds are based at 93 damage per tick. That said I’m mostly looking to see if there is anywhere to juggle my stats to do more spike damage when I need it, especially for those classes that drop targetting regularly.

And yes I know Necro roaming is a bit unfortunate, but it works reasonably so far. If I ever want to pick up easymode roaming I’ll hop on my thief :-P

Edit: Currently using Plague Form as an elite for survivability and Stability.

After glancing at the Runes I may have to think about full mad kings. I’ll lose 10% Condition duration but it definitely has some perks to it. If only they weren’t so expensive…

Primarily a roamer, zerging only when necessary.

Edit: A little background on me so people don’t end up offering too much unnecessary or obvious advice -
I’ve been on the Sea of Sorrows server since headstart and spent most of my time in WvW. I have 7/8 of the professions now at 80 (only missing guardian) and all of my 80s are geared for some kind of WvW build or another. I personally dislike mass-zerging because even though it’s the most efficient use of groups I feel like it SHOULDN’T be that way so I roam and hope for the day that organized small-man teams can make their mark on the game.

A short while ago I levelled my necromancer to 80 and put together the following build for him:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.0|6.1o.ha|b.1o.h1d.d.1o.ha|1b.712.1b.7g.1h.7g.1b.7i.1b.7i.1b.712|1b.63.1b.63.1b.63.1b.63.1b.63.1b.63|k2a.a6.k28.0.k49|0.0|3r.3w.47.48.0|e

It’s designed as a condition hybrid build to directly combat the boon-stacking builds that are oh-so-popular these days on guardian, elementalist and engineer players. Spinal Shivers, Chill of Death, Corrupt Boon and Sigil of Nullification all allow me to de-boon targets consistently, while the condition damage ticks and laughs off the best efforts of protection to prevent damage. Fear, Reaper’s Touch, Reapers Mark and Corrupt Boon (Stability) all offer excellent ways to control targets. The build works, but I’ve run into a few problems.

Against decent Greatsword mesmers, I have a lot of trouble, since their long ranged attack is better than mine, and I don’t quite have the burst to make them disengage consistently. Constant-stealthing thieves also don’t get spiked hard enough before they can stand back in stealth and start cleansing conditions. I’m trying to see if there’s any space in my build to add more power into it, without affecting my condition damage too badly. Any suggestions?

I think Bhawb has something there… I mean I have a Charr necromancer and he turns into a CLOUD OF BUG THINGS when I use plague form. As much as a cloud of tiny charr would be hilarious, I don’t think that’s in the making there. Same holds true for Lich: Only currently documented liches in GW are human in origin.

Henrik.7560:

The funny thing is, Pistol improvement thingy (IX) is in the dueling tree, but yet dueling is skills with 2 of the same one hand weapon right? So why don’t we already have a main hand pistol.

… No. Dueling is the act of having a Duel. From Merriam-Webster.com

Duel (noun): a combat between two persons; specifically : a formal combat with weapons fought between two persons in the presence of witnesses.
Duel (verb)to fight a duel

Not to be confused with the word “Dual” which sounds very similar. Again from Merriam-webster.com

Dual (adjective): 1. of grammatical number : denoting reference to two
2.
a : consisting of two parts or elements or having two like parts : double
b : having a double character or nature

Thus you get “dual-wielding” for when you are using two of the same weapon.

On Topic: I wouldn’t mind having mainhand pistol for a mesmer. But I don’t see Anet adding new weapons for classes anytime soon. Or at least I hope they’d handle existing traits and weapon skills that don’t function quite right first.

My thief, an homage to the Assassin and how much I miss Cantha.

So I’ve got a problem. Not even 24 hrs ago, I was playing fine. Running WvW, PvE events and Jumping puzzles normally.

Today: I am getting no better than 30 FPS (and that’s while standing still) and in situations where multiple effects need to be rendered, it drops to 1 FPS or less. And by effects needing to be rendered, for example, I mean “Opening up the trading post window.” Or “going into stealth.” on a thief.

The only thing I’ve done between yesterday and today’s occurence was I temporarily dialed my advanced settings up to “highest quality” to take some screenshots, then dialed it back down to my normal settings (just a notch above highest performance.)

As I said, yesterday this wasn’t a problem, but now try as I might I can’t get the game to perform normally at all. Not even with Advanced settings set to Highest Performance / Lowest quality. Whenever something “new” happens on screen I get Frame drop, Audio hiccups, Audio delay, and Lag like there’s no tomorrow.

Any possible assistance on the matter would be appreciated.

Edit: Shutting down, dusting out and waiting seemed to have fixed the problem. Will post more if it reoccurs.

Fun little exercise in comparison for sustained regeneration. Assuming 300 Healing Power, Warrior gets:
Healing Signet: 209 /second
Adrenal Health: 120 /second
Total: 329 / second
Active Heal: 3620
Total regen drops to 120/second assuming full adrenaline for 20 seconds

Ranger:
Signet of the Wild: 80 / second
Natural Healing: 67 /second
Total: 147/second

Active Healing:
Heal as One: 6820 hp
Total: remains 147 /second.

If you maintain full passive healing, with adrenaline maintained full, a Warrior will heal 19740 per minute and a Ranger will heal 8820 per minute. Advantage Warrior. Even if you assume that Adrenal Health is not healing for half of the time, the number comes out to be 16140 which is roughly twice the ranger’s passive.

HOWEVER, as soon as a burst situation comes into play, where you are cycling heals as fast as possible, the numbers change. HAO and HS both have the same activation time and untraited cooldown. Let’s assume for a moment that you can activate them 3 times in one minute (20s cooldown, disregarding 1.5 second casting)
Warrior: 18060 per minute assuming full adrenaline.
Ranger: 29280 per minute

You’ll note that there’s a possibility that the sustained heal of the warrior actually goes DOWN when in a burst defense situation, while the ranger burst heal more than triples. Even with traits, estimating Healing signet to cast 4x in one minute, the warrior burst heal only moves up to 21680, which is a mere 2k improvement. Let’s take it ONE step further.
“Signet of the Wild is an additional utility slot so we need to even up the comparison.” Okay I’ll buy that. Let’s add a traited FGJ with healing shouts to that. You have now bumped up your healing to 25976 per minute which is still over 3000 less healing per minute than a ranger using Heal as One.

What those numbers suggest to me is simply that Healing Signet does not provide sufficient burst heal response unless traited to allow other abilities to provide heals.

Assuming you’re also using a rare greatsword, you’re missing out on a total of:

167 Power, 107 Precision, 10% critical Damage and anywhere from 113-125 base weapon damage for not having exotic gear.

For reference in what your’e missing out on: 175 power is 5 stacks of might.
107 precision is 5% crit chance
10% crit damage is… 10% crit damage.

In total, you’re seem to be short the equivalen 8-9 stacks of might + 10% damage, which is a pretty significant loss in output.

To the DB Asuran Mesmer Commander on EB. Major props both on your hiding spot and ability to get a zerg around to the northwest side of SMC at around 4am Server Time. If we hadn’t gotten lucky and spotted your zerg coming in, that would have been a picture perfect ninja flip. Major props.

crewthief.8649:

Except last week, where we beat you by 70k points, amirite? You’re either delusional, or just jumped on the SoS bandwagon.

Props are well deserved to JQ for their win last week. However, when analyzing data, you tend to plot a large amount of sample numbers in order to detect trends. When a datum suddenly pops up counter to the trend, you do one of two things: You either throw it out as an outlier, or you assume that you have insufficient data to draw a conclusion.

I’m gonna be generous, call it the latter and then log in to do some WvW.

See you all on the battlefield

Great fights this week everyone and major props to JQ for pulling a rabbit out of their hat and dominating the battlefields. Special acknowledgements:

Nord from JQ, always a good fight

EMP from JQ, don’t know where your numbers came from all of a sudden but your presence has been felt this week.

RemH from SBI, great small group combat and havoc potential. Hopefully we’ll have an answer to you soon

SF from SBI, frag it Jed, one of these days I’m actually gonna catch your golem rush on the scoutdar and stop it before it gets too far. See if I don’t.

Mar Master: there are specific command keys for swimming up and down. Up is usually mapped to space bar.

On topic: I love fighting underwater…. on certain characters. Mostly because most other people have so little idea how that it’s easy to smash them.

Scores attached. We’ll see how they fluctuate as the week progresses.

Free Jedbacca! Let no unjust accusation stand!

I know it’s frustrating to lose a big objective by surprise, and it’s far too easy when frustrated to search for a reason, any reason, on why you lost it. But people should really be more careful of instantly jumping to the conclusion of cheating especially with 0 grounds for proof. I know I’ve had to smooth some feathers on my own server when people saw the briar tower flip with no warning. Of course it’s easier in that case because you can check and find the catapult hidden under it, as opposed to a mesmer flip but still.

Now I doubt it matters to some that Deuce has made his own statement on what happened since regardless of what is said, people will believe what they want to believe. That said I hope that those of you who were on the fence, and more importantly those of you not actually involved take this sort of accusations with a grain of salt.

To the best of my knowledge, SoS does not condone cheating or exploiting of any sort. Not to say that it hasn’t happened in SoS matchups before, but as a group we do not support that kind of behavior and actually get pretty pissed off if we see our own server doing that sort of thing (Flying orb man, I’m looking at you).

Be careful when you make claims about an entire server for the actions of a few. It may make you feel better and justified in the short term but it doesn’t exactly paint you in the best light when you look back on it.

The week’s match is drawing to a close so it’s time for some shoutouts:

To Cover Girl and MORD, I only had the pleasure of fighting you and yours twice this week, but the way you’ve conducted yourself on these forums is, at the very least, praiseworthy. Hope to see more good sportsmanship and better fights in the matchups to come. P.S. Stop putting trebs up in Sunny. It’s MEAN.

To Jedbacca and SF, Always a pleasure seeing you and yours on a borderland I’m on. Means that it’s time for a wild ride guessing where your next target it. Getting the public zerg to stop chasing your havoc teams is a chore but it’s always interesting

To LoD: STOP CHASING ME WITH HAMMERS

To AoS: Your interceptor thief squads are very frustrating to run up against. Next time can you let me treb SBI in peace? No? Well fine then.

In all seriousness, GG to all. Happy hunting.

kidbs.8920:

One more thing… Swirling Winds… WTF???? A-Net you haz some ’splainin to do.

Were you with the group trying to treb SoS Garrison from Longview? If so er… sorry.

Though to be fair, I know I learned the Swirling Winds trick after having both SBI and JQ pull it on day 1 of the matchup.