Guild Wars 2

use a ranged weapon. stay out of the room. let the npc die. if you pull any spiders, kill them off.

even 3/5 people in a group all using skill 1 on a rifle / longbow / etc will bring the tree down inside 10 mins. it’s a little boring, yes, but it still takes almost no time.

I’d like to see account bound stuff, but considering it’s for the individual character I do not see this happening imo.

I’m hoping for:
Exotic Gear Box for your character’s profession.
Jugs of Karma.
Bags of Coins.
800 Gems. (enough to get 1 cool thing or multiple smaller things)
and a randomly generated account bound type item (BLK loot table, rare quality or higher)

I know I’m dreaming, but this would be really nice. It should be as impressive to a monthly as the monthly reward is to the daily.

I’ve done half of mine already. Did the Jormag event once for a few of those. Otherwise, here’s my secret:

Dungeons. Run a couple of AC or CoE paths, or do a couple fractals. If you get the uncategorized fractal consider yourself lucky.. there are 4 champs in one room there half-way up.

Same issue here. Midwest US. Every 5 to 15 mins there’s a lag spike. About 70% of the time I get booted to the character select screen. I never seem to lose connection to the login server. The rest of the time it’s just a huge rubber-band effect. Guild-mates in dungeons have commented on how they see me walking into walls more often now.

Been playing since beta without this problem, and all other internet connections are solid. Everything else works. I’ve troubleshot everything I could think of on my end. This is a client / server issue.

Time of day does not matter either, nor does total traffic in house.

10 minutes to take out a champ? you need more damage. Most should be done with a “balanced pick up group” inside of 5 or so, and that’s not much time. Most bosses have gimmicks already that reduce the experience down to stack and spam tactics. A reduction in health would just mean fewer people on the servers for less time in the long run. This will not pay for the game.

Instead, how about a reduction in mob toughness? If the vast majority of the playerbase is going into zerker style squishy builds, eventually the enemies should learn from this and follow suit. Lower defense and increase offense. The fights will be faster, more intense, and more engaging, without any time really lost.

They did something similar in GW1 with several expansions, following the build trends and making mobs dual-classed in some of the favorite methods. It forced everyone to change their tactics.

why are you traiting into toughness anyway? hit dodge, bring a shield, and endure that pain. wars are much more effective on the offensive. if you want to soak damage and support your team, roll a guardian. (speaking with lvl 80 exp w/both classes here)

If this is all for PvE, just start ignoring toughness. grab a rifle and max your arms traitline.

for PvE, yes, you will need some toughness. You have access to more than anyone else. If it’s still not enough, you need to start looking at other factors. (build / traits / playstyle / effectiveness)

you should try using a stun break. Stability can be tough to come by, and if it isn’t applied beforehand it’s useless. Stability lying down will keep you down.

save your stun break for when you get KD’d. Dodge out, then reposition. Anyone running without an effective stun break and some way to mitigate conditions in a dungeon run is just asking for some pain.

I don’t think stealth lasts long enough for it to be an issue, imo. Just use an AoE attack or something. Stealth does not equal invincibility.

Realistically, conditions ignore toughness (not armor) Its a no brainer that how matter how sick you are your armor won’t help you.

It’s also fairly obvious that no matter how tough, strong, or built-up you are, if you are bleeding out of the right vein no matter of muscle or determination is going to save you.

Conditions go through toughness for a reason. It makes sense.

Want to combat conditions? See: Vitality / Boon Duration

I really like this idea a lot. It would allow for some interesting build combos and theory crafting.

+500 Power
+15% Critical Damage
Conditions last 50% longer on you

fresh content = high server load.

try playing during lower load (stress on the server) times like early in the morning or mid-afternoon. avoid weekends. see if you still experience the same issues.

I haven’t played with them much, but whenever I do I notice they are pretty tough on their own. Yes, they have health bars, but they last longer than most mesmer clones and some necro minions. Plus, you can just command them into oblivion anytime, so their health is really just a buffer so you can time your command. They were never meant to be a long-term 2nd auto attack.

I think they are alright as they are. Just stagger them with recharges and you’ll always have one out.

ToW with traited extended elites can get Zeal off twice, meaning two bouts of quickness for everybody. The light hammer skill 5 does interrupt and damage, and everything else is just gravy. If you apply vuln with blind you get more with skill 2 here. It is a very useful elite.

The healing book I never use. It’s totally useless to me.

RF is one of the most useful elites in the game.

I’ve never had a problem with this. It works every time for me. The problem occurs with Mesmer wall, but not this.

I used the same set up for a long time. Shouts and condition conversion are nice, but unless you have zerker gear you will barely contribute to your team otherwise.

With 10 in Virtues you can trait into the reduced Consecration cooldown. That helps. I used AH for a while, but it’s really only needed if you lack any healing power IMO.

For fracs I will always have at least 5 in virtues and at least 15 in radiance. On each kill you can spam AoE burning and might x3, and if you trait high enough, AoE blind (and therefore vuln) as well. You contribute more to the fight while still supporting the team.

Right now I’m doing a power symbol build: 25/15/0/30/0. I miss the virtues bonus but I do so much more damage, any battles don’t last long enough for me to remember…

thats odd.. my healing power was 3 points shy of 1700 at one point (life stacks and cons), and I was getting 26.. What was your power or overall attack at? It may dual scale the same way life stealing does now too.

ZB will trigger whenever your sword hits something. I triggers on the symbol pulses, it triggers, when Binding hits first (but not second), and it triggers on the other skills. It’s most useful with skill 2.

I found the first use for Contemplation of Purity ever. Nothing else I normally use was cutting it. Used in conjunction with Save Yourselves, and it saved our party many times during the last fight. Nothing like clearing all the red, everywhere.

its not RNG. It pulses every other second. Stand in it for a while and find out for yourself.

Hit Retreat, use SoS and stand in it. You will see your swiftness duration change appropriately.

The 25 healing from this DOES scale, but it does not scale much at all. If you get over 1500 in healing power you will heal for a mind-boggling 26 per hit. It can be boosted, but it is not really worth it.

Not that healing power is by any means useless; there are simply better applications.

Just did some playing around with traits in the new dungeon, thought I’d share my findings..

For the record: Full clerics gear, 1 clerics ascended ring, ghastly greatsword of life. traited: 25/15/0/30/0, focus on symbols / vuln / blind

It only heals 25ish per tic. With healing boosted you won’t notice much of a difference.

With skill 5, then skill 2 with a pull mob pull, this will heal you more than Staff’s Empower will on it’s own. It brought me from 1/5th health to almost full and I still did damage / burning / etc AoE. Useful change to the trait.

It still isn’t as easy or generally useful as AH, but it’s an option without traiting into toughness (which, even on a Guard I find almost useless in PvE) Just my 2 cents..

Any others?

thats what the blog is for. read that. they explain why they did what they did already.

we did it, after 8 trys, but there is a trick.

stay close to the center
use the boxes to jump the lower lasers
bring plenty of vigor and stun-breaks, and keep moving.
this isn’t timed. just wand everything to death, slowly. staying alive is priority #1

same result, just submitted a report in-game. we are stuck

I have encountered the same thing, twice before. The only time I have never failed to get the reward from this path is when no trash mobs were skipped in the second half. The NPC needs babysitting and if they go down, there is a very high chance of no reward for some buggy reason.

File this under Needs Attention.

in my experience, the AoE rings in this fight outright lie. that doesn’t help at all. It’s a tricky fight to be sure. Always have 2 people alternating skill 2, everyone else use skill 1. If you can draw the boss on to the trap first it makes it much easier. Only one person calls targets. this is a great example of a fight where it’s more important to run away and not do damage than it is to zerg it out.

while I agree that it could use some attention, the whole mechanic is a nice team building challenge. please just make it a little more user friendly, or allow some practice with this rather unique mechanic elsewhere in the dungeon path before we get there to teach newbs.

I thought I was playing a bad guy already. Blood legion charr guardian on a holy crusade to cleanse the land of everything that didn’t belong or worshiped a god? Hmm.. I even killed my own honorless father in a gladiator pit!

for me it’s Guardian, no contest.

in GW1 I made a monk / dervish for Random Arenas that focused on smiting and aoe burning. I liked it so much I made a PvE character and ran through all 4 expansions with it. when the guardian info came out it was simply meant to be: matches my playstyle perfectly.

I second the FotM method. Here you not only get experience from the experience itself, but you also get a drop that nets you an additional return. Stick to level 9 and under to make the most of it, which also makes it easier. Basic Fractal Relics are not hard to come by by any measure.

I still have some of the older event items. I can’t bring myself to get rid of them, on the off chance that those events will happen again in the future. For things like the southsun event or other “one time” flavor things, I’d say delete. For things like holidays (wintersday, dragon bash) I’d keep them around. They will likely come around on the same time frames.

I made money on my mesmer with Tailor and crafting 12 slot bags. For some reason, the cost of the rune was less than the total profit from the trading post. Not sure if this is still the case, and it can be tough because you have to have the money for the runes first in order to make the money with them.

Sell your greens unless you plan to use them. Salvage everything else and sell higher tier mats. If this is your first character to 80 it will be tough to level it just crafting unless you throw money at the gem store to convert. The fastest way to level a first toon short of crafting is still the basics: do hearts, explore, and do dailies on that character. Running explorable mode dungeons regularly will net you lots of rewards.

Oh, and when you outfit your character with new stuff every 5 or 10 levels, just use Fine stuff. It’s more than enough until you hit the higher levels, and you go through the levels so quickly you won’t want to spend any gold on sweet gear until you get to 80.

here’s how I figured it out for myself, having a similar problem before:

Make a new toon, get out of the tutorial.
Go to the Mists.
Play around with build / armor / weapon combos.
Find something that makes me say “holy kitten this is sweet!”
Make that a new character.

http://gw2lfg.net/

everyone uses this. no one uses anything in-game. there isn’t any real in-game support for this… yet.

If you need practice learning how to dodge, make a thief. You’ll pick it up in no time.

at the very least let the “new message” window be movable around the screen so I can see what is behind it. >_<

Smite still isn’t a symbol? >_<

You forgot one:

Rich.

You can have (almost) everything the game offers with enough cash in the gem store. At current prices, if you have a spare $400 bucks laying around you can just outright buy a precursor.

Yes, you can. A guild mate of mine did this with lvl 80 rares. He purchased the cheapest ones available on the trading post. He got it on the 7th try. Some people’s luck… >_<

I leveled this craft up to 400 on a character, so I think I can help.

Just doing what gives you xp will only get you so far. It’s all about the discovery process. Here’s what I do for every armor crafting discipline:

Make 3 of each basic insignia. (7 total, don’t worry about givers or magic find stuff)
Stick to making the cheaper armors, or those that use fewer resources. Hats, Gloves and Boots.
Discover each armor with each insignia.
Make 1 of each masterwork insignia. (Again, just the 7 main ones)
Discover one armor type (Hats, Gloves, or Boots)

At this point you should be past or really close to the next crafting tier. From here just refine for the next level and repeat. You will need a lot of fine crafting materials, but you will not need as many basics since your armor types use less. Stay away from chest and leggings pieces unless you are making yourself a set.

Once you get into higher tiers, selling the berserker’s stuff you make at the TP will help make up for the costs of the fine materials and lower tiers.

I’ve used this strategy for every crafting discipline except cooking and it’s work out pretty well.
Hope this helps!

Edit: re: materials… if you don’t have any to start with just start salvaging all of your drops. They will add up after a while. Stick to appropriate level zones in your current crafting tier. Hit those salvage nodes as often as you see them. If you are pressed for time or just impatient, you can always throw some cakitten the gem store to give yourself a boost and just purchase off the TP.

I like this idea. It uses a system already built into the game which is nice.

Would take a lot of work tho. Depending on your build, 2 levels is not going to make much of a difference. Bringing it down to about 50% or 75% lower than recommended sounds about right.

Then what do you do about event scaling? Say you are in “Hard Mode” and someone else isn’t. How is the event scaled in this case?

then just don’t use giver’s. on my mes, without giver’s anything, I can top out at 80% (90% with Sig of Midnight equipped). 300 chaos, 2 sup. water runes, 2 major water runes, and 2 sup. monk runs. Any profession can do this with proper traits and rune application. There aren’t even any 1%’s to deal with.

they are nice if you find yourself changing your traits and / or trinkets often.

if you re-trait for each dungeon or for WvW or for whatever, you will benefit from these. It means less armor sets, and it will be versatile enough to apply to any build. That’s the advantage.

The downside is only you won’t be as effective as a min/max using your same build, but you’ll also be more well rounded. (tougher if you go glass, stronger if you go tank, etc) It’s only slightly, but overtime you will notice a difference.

If you just have one build you like to use everywhere, save your money.

I make a lot of gold running dungeon paths. If I want nice armor, I use karma or dungeon tokens. The gold is saved.

I typically sell my T5 and T6 mats. All of them, including gems, food, whatever. That had made up for 65% of my total overtime wealth.

Crafting is nice if you want to power level, but typically it’s cheaper just to buy them outright, and if you constantly sell mats, you’ll have the coin.

Don’t use anything but basic salvage kits unless you have BLKs for rares. Salvage all blues and under, just sell green’s to the merchant outright unless the profit on the TP is higher than the merch value. If you check for every one, it adds up.

Also, if you really want a lot of gold fast, there’s a super simple way to do it that’s built right into the game, and is probably a lot more common that people realize: spend 10 bucks on gems and convert them to gold. poof, you are wealthy.

I’m thinking of going this route on my thief as well. Im just about lvl 60 and have been successful with it so far.

Trinkets will all be Apoth or Settlers. Armor will be Rabid. Haven’t decided on runes yet, but something that stacks condi dmg or duration makes the most sense.

Tinkering around with the buildcrafter I noticed that with full Rabid and Settlers trinkets, you have just enough health and power to get by without making yourself glass, which is good because it’s a pressure style of play to begin with.

I hate this fractal 10+. It’s not too horrible with reflection and stability, and if you can convince everyone to go melee they don’t use their ranged attacks anyway..

but, if I cannot hurt them at all, they should not be able to hurt me either. Invuln from terrain cheese should be reciprocal.

I am insanely envious of this. Looking forward to updating now

guild halls
“follow” option, disabled in PvP or WvW (enemies only)
capes (although, the back banners are pretty b.a.)
musical instrument emotes
“last online” for guild roster

and an Urgoz flavored fractal level. we got the jade sea… where’s the kurz love?

I know how you feel man. I just started being able to farm karka shells with great ease about 2 days before the Southsun updates. Before the update I was raking in silver. 2 days later I wasn’t.

This is not Anet’s fault by any measure. Just unlucky.

“General

Added a new combat/movement toggle option: “Right-Click to Attack/Interact”.

Single best feature updated since launch, IMO. About time.

on my full clerics gear I used to run with exq. saph orbs. I had a lot more healing than I did with sup. runes. I also tried 6 sup. altruism runes for a while, and enjoyed the healing as well as the bonus effects, but it wasn’t min/max’d enough for me.

now Im using 2 sup. water, 2 minor water, and 2 sup. grove. I have the healing still, tho not as much, but the boon duration (and extra protection duration to boot) fits my build much better.

Its all about your playstyle, really.