Guild Wars 2

Sooloo.1364:

I never understood why developers create content just for small segments of the community instead of everyone. This always leads to elitism and exclusion.

Your right, pvp should have never been created. The only content they should make is open world maps like auric basin.

Is the great hall the part with the chains? All members of the party need to move behind the central pillar to get detha to start.

Fractals largely have a theme of being able to move through time and space. What if we could buy something like teleportation charges with our fractal relics for specific places. Maybe places like rich resource nodes? So you could spend your relics on these charges, and then you could use them to do node farming runs quickly.

Fractals have a lot of damage now that most players will not avoid. If you want to do fractals on a warrior, demand a good comp, make your own lfg, and post this:
“t4’s, 1 magi druid, 1 chrono, 2 dps”

You can’t expect to do everything on one class. The best way to survive trash mobs is to have a surplus of blinds (necro, ele very strong burst aoe blinds if they bring them, thief has good sustained blinds, engi has enough to get you through most fights). As a warrior you have a single blind (longbow 4). For trash mobs, don’t use the qt bench mark rotation (which is designed for single target). The mobs will often be spread out, and so scorched earth is your main priority (unless a mesmer will pull them into a pile, in which case do regular golem rotation). Typical rotation without focus pulls: longbow 4 (it explodes to blind multiple, so shoot for a crowd), headbutt, scorched earth, blood reckoning, scorched earth, by this point you have set yourself up to successfully kill the mobs, continue your rotation like normal basically.

The best way to survive boss monsters is to have a magi druid heal you through everything. Most bosses can be killed completely stationary if you have a magi druid. Ever do a mai trin kill where all 5 players never move outside cannons? Its pretty great. Additionally, this actually speeds up your kills because the druid brings such great group buffs that even a healing druid will lead to faster kills than no druid at all.

Here are the facts, many players have a dozen or more sets of ascended, so even exchanging fractal currencies for ascended is not a good sink. I would say t6 mat bags, leather, metals, wood. But Anet_Ben says the currency cant do that.

Maybe fractal armor?

Other account bound items that end game players want? Icy runestones, mystic clovers?

counter point: by having achievements be one time only, they can actually have good rewards. Compare the rewards of cairn cm to cm nightmare. Cairn way more rewarding, difficulty fairly comparable imo.

vicious.5683:

thrag.9740:

well at the very least players will stop demanding necro be bad damage, as the excuse, ‘it has two hp bars it would be op’ will go away. So I’m hopefully it will be balanced to be competitive damage in realistic scenarios.

That’s a bad excuse, that “second hp bar” (which is not) is THE only form of survivability necromancers have. It’s like saying “ele can’t have high damage because they have a lot of mobility and invulns” it doesn’t make any sense.

Necro has other survivability. Good access to blinds, chill and weakness make necro great at rolling through trash mobs. Unfortunately, debuffing is useless on boss monsters. While blocks/evades/distorts work on both bosses and trash mobs.

well at the very least players will stop demanding necro be bad damage, as the excuse, ‘it has two hp bars it would be op’ will go away. So I’m hopefully it will be balanced to be competitive damage in realistic scenarios.

if you join a group advertised as exp, you should expect that you skip all trash mobs basically.

By the way op, skipping is easy if your willing to come prepared. Get these 3 consumables:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Harpy_Feathers_
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Order_of_Whispers_Spy_Kit
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ash_Legion_Spy_Kit

In particular harpy feathers are your most commonly used (very low cool down). Use harpy and whisper kit before/while running through trash mobs.

maybe?

I doubt we will ever see 4-4-2 again, as SOI is no where near as powerful as it was when that was meta. So you won’t replace a chrono, additionally condi ps was buffed so I doubt a herald could replace a warrior now (I could be wrong about this).

That means rev would either have to replace a druid or a dps. I will say this, I have seen padl logs where a pure power mesmer hit 25k+. So a herald/condi rev hybrid in the dps slot allowing chrono to bring less commander gear could be significant if it allows chrono to get closer to its pure damage build. Or a healer herald generating alacrity could allow chrono to keep fewer shield phantasms up and more sword phantasms, but possibly at the heavy cost of 2 gotl stacks. Additionally, your condi ps could probably run berserker runes, and/or damage sigils.

I don’t know OP, I’m not really a numbers guy who can give you specifics. Qualitatively, the right trade offs are in place. That is to say, facet of nature would allow 4 builds to change (2 ps and 2 chrono). If it were possible for rev to focus facet of nature onto those 4 players specifically, you might really be able to do something. However, I don’t know if a group comp exists that would work.

My guess, is that it is unlikely to become a popular thing. But we will have to wait until the more studious guilds make a statement.

The first healing class you gear up should be magi druid., because its the most common in pug group. Additionally its very easy to gear up.

Remember, you can easily get exotic magi armor and weapons from ascalonian catacombs (already includes the runes you want). Additionally you can buy exotic magi trinkets from karma vendors in orr.

For pug groups, pre-nerf dungeons were slower gold than sw farm, so how exactly were they not balanced?

total rewards per week is irrelevant. Gold per hour is the metric to use.

For this analysts I am going to assume it takes 20 minutes to beat cm nightmare. I know you can go faster than that, but when you factor in time to organize the group, I think it is accurate. cm nightmare possible rewards:
-100 spores: value 9g. That’s 27g per hour. Lake doric beats that, has very little risk of failure, no ar gating, pretty much no build requirement, and the luck aspect brings down that number significantly.
-3 mystic coins is 6g at best. 18g per hour. Even worse.

Maybe the infusions are good money. Until the crash in price that is probably incoming. We will have to wait until we see the drop rates. Additionally, it appears that only the blue infusion can be traded, not the red (which wiki states is account bound).
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Celestial_Infusion_
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Celestial_Infusion_

tldr: difficult daily content is fine, but anet is not willing to make the rewards reflect the difficulty.

zealex.9410:

And also whats bad about some not so casual daily content? I dislike te format in raids, i tried it and it wasnt my thing so idk i didnt ask for it to be changed but i want this harder daily content i like the challenge and if i dont feel like it one day i simply skip it no biggie.

I don’t consider harder daily content inherently bad, certainly not. The problem is the way anet balances rewards for weekly vs daily. Rewards should be balanced based off difficulty, but instead they are based on the gating system. This is evident when you look at the rewards in any content.

Lets look at the fractal cms. I have done cm nightmare about 30 times. I’ve never gotten a weapon skin (other than the guaranteed skin from the first clear). The liquid rewards have never been good either. Dungeons use to give 2 gold for paths like ac. Cm nightmare gives no gold, toxic spores are only 9 silver each. Compare this to weekly raids, where you get 4 gold + rare + exotic (which aren’t even account bound!) for each boss of w4. And every boss of w4 seems easier than arkk on cm.

With shattered observatory cm, you have to complete it somewhere between 30 and 90 times to get the infusion via the currency (btw not in wallet ffs). And the liquid rewards don’t look that good.

If these rewards were better, I would happily form a static and do them. Maybe I wouldn’t do them daily, but once a week probably. But for these weak rewards? Forming a static doesn’t seem worthwhile, but the content is challenging enough that pugging is frustrating.

p.s. For anyone who wants to say raid rewards are the problem, and way too good, I will point out that like always, sw farming is competitive, doric leather farm is competitive, and both of those require far less training than a quick full raid clear.

Making armor that all 3 classes in a weight class is difficult, but it’s a whole lot harder when you make the core customization system (dyes) incompatible with it.

But honestly, this discussion is far more than anet deserves. We all know whats going on here. Anet doesn’t want to release good armor in game, because they want gem store outfits to be more appealing. 3 dye channels in legendary armor, 4 dye channels for new gem outfits.

I wish they got the same skins as us, maybe then there would be enough backlash to fix this.

lol im sorry zealex, idk why I was thinking sabetha. But xera seems notably larger than ark, in particular taller. I think the height of the boss matters the most. I never have trouble seeing xera.

I agree that individually each of arkk’s attacks would be visible. The problem for me, is I either play zoomed in tightly to see the ground orange circle, or I zoomout to see the above the head indicators. Frustrating. Also the ground circle doesn’t last nearly as long as it should, it disappears and then a second later the attack happens.

The solution seems simple to me, there should be dyes that are glossy, that way people can choose what they want. Why is glossy restrained to the armor? Isn’t the dye system in place to offer us these choices?

Of the people I know who have legendary armor, more of them have re-skinned it (including myself) rather than wear it. So if what matters is if people are using it anyways, then it is quantifiable failing by that metric. This particular set fails to deliver on being Legendary because it doesn’t dye right.

Actually I did start running less fractals because of chaos and nightmare. Not because I myself couldn’t handle those fractals, but because the pugs I joined couldn’t. It started with chaos, the final boss would run all around, get invuln because of poor positioning, and be a huge mess.

I love challenging content, I full clear raids with my static every Monday and I love it. One day a week at a set time I can fit into my schedule. But I can’t really fix my schedule to have a static fractal group every week. I am stuck pugging, and pugging fractals is a lot less fun than pugging dungeons use to be.

zealex.9410:

Arkk isnt smaller than Xera tho. And even if he is by a little you only have the clutter of 5 ppl partially stacking not 10.

What attack does xera have that you would actually want to dodge? Flame wall is the only one, and it has a very easy to see aoe indicator. Arkk has a few. Bouncing ball, eye, expanding ring, I think that’s all of the big ones?

imo there are some issues that should be addressed:

boss 1: The sun is a visual eye sore, so bright its blinding and unpleasant to have on my screen.

boss 1: split phase: the trash mobs use cc so frequently, but they are a small hit box made of white light, not easy to actually see the tells, and so its difficult to dodge. You can’t blind or cc them, so it feels like there is no active counterplay, just spam distore/aegis/stability.

boss 3: Too much visual clutter, raids can have lots of mechanics because models are large enough you can actually see things among the sea of visual noise. In short, Ark is too small to see comfortably imo.

Feanor.2358:

Ah, so what you actually care about is the rewards, preferably received without any effort on your side. I’d say “good to know”, but it’s hardly news to anyone.

What requires more effort, molten duo or shattered observatory? Which gives better rewards? Unfortunately they both give the same rewards. Do you know why arah p4, aether path, and SE p2 were never ran? Because anet never properly balanced the rewards. Proper balancing of rewards is essential to keeping content alive.

TexZero.7910:

Still feels more like a dungeon that the Press 1 damage golems we had in actually dungeons.

If all you did was press 1 in dungeons, you were an absolutely terrible player, and you would have made at least double running sw chest farm.

honestly after watching some of wp’s videos and such, it seems like we don’t really move that much faster with mounts. If we are not moving faster, I don’t know how much of an impact mounts will have. Maybe the camera zoom was deceptive. Hopefully we can test it a bit in a week.

Sykper.6583:

I do like to think though that most Raiders would have more thicker skin earning their Envoy Armor and not caring too much about how their favorite dyes aren’t working with it and just experimenting with the literal hundreds of other ones to get what they want.

Are you really misunderstanding me, or are you intentionally ignoring my point? I don’t care about the specific dye. No matter what color I choose, I get to be a washed out pastel easter egg. I want rich colors. Here is an example of what I want:
http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/productImages/1000/4b/4b63c9a7-e106-4a75-914d-adf91f0ed054_1000.jpg

Here is what I get:
http://www.chicshelfpaper.com/images/P/0210.jpg

raiders should be very angry about legendary armor, even with shadow abyss you come out looking like a pastel easter egg.

I would absolutely love some new dungeons. Dungeons utilized a very different skill set and I enjoyed it. Additionally, it was nice to have some casual content that was rewarding. I love getting together with my static once a week for raids, and occasional fractal runs with friends, but with dungeons I could join any pug group and pretty much guarantee smooth success because they were so easy that 4 meat shields and 1 competent player was enough.

Pugging fractals is much less enjoyable than pugging dungeons used to be. Especially when you have mechanics where your own team mates can kill you such as social awkwardness, random anomaly well, and break bars that are essential (chaos final boss).

Also unlike fractals, dungeon currencies actually go in the wallet.

well again, they could do this like they did bloodstone fen. Giving us standardized abilities in only a specific map (the raid map).

Benjamin Arnold.3457:

skullmount.1758:

Benjamin Arnold.3457:

Sorry, I misspoke, I should have said, “the next patch with fractal and sanctuary updates”. It is coming very soon, apologies.

Is this also the patch that will give the sanctuary the ability to put us back to where we started/used the pass?

Yes.

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/264/200/acb.jpg

Have wanted this feature for so long

Benjamin Arnold.3457:

There’s gonna be more raids and fractals, chill guys ^-^

Maybe using mounts in cool new and unique ways

Well remember, originally gliders had no combat skills either, but bloodstone fen showed us the evolution of that technology. Just because you can not do combat on mounts yet, doesn’t mean it can never happen.

Your views on raiding as a tank are outdated/inaccurate.

For perspective, currently my static runs 2 magi druids, 1 minstrel chrono, 1 zerk chrono, 2 condi ps, 4 dps (specific classes for these 4 change weekly). We full clear (13 bosses + all events in between) in about 3 hours typically.

I understand you have been away from the game, so let me elaborate. Magi druid is healing focused, and basically does no dps. Minstrel chrono is tank focused, and basically does no dps. That’s 3 slots in my raid group that do no dps basically. This is not an uncommon practice among casual raid groups.

Groups that really try to minimize their time, can full clear in 2 hours and less from what I understand. These groups like bringing a condi druid (or 2) and no minstrel chronos. But most groups you meet in the lfg are not capable of doing a 2 hr full clear or a 3 hr full clear, or any full clear. In fact most groups you meet in the lfg are happy if they get the kill of the single boss they are advertising for, and are not even doing a full wing, or even multiple bosses.

What I’m trying to say is, you can be a tank in gw2 raids, what you can’t be is a dps running in nomads. But a minstrel chrono with nomads mixed in? That is fine.

I will warn you, the minstrel chrono build basically guarantees that you will be the tank, meaning that on many bosses you are responsible for positioning the boss correctly. You can’t join a group without reading guides and expect to just perform a rotation like a dps can.

Hello, I think many of us are very excited by the fun navigation that mounts offer in open world pve. But, I also want to point out that maybe mounts could be used in new innovative ways in a raid setting.

Here are 2 examples of mounts used in one of my favorite games, shadow of the colossus. In the first video, the mount is used to move into offensive position. In the second, the mount is used defensively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpLOIp5rOTk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wT5WrKt1vA

I am interested in what you guys think? I would definitely like to see one or two unique encounters that really took advantage of mounts.

I think it is likely they are intending to give out more information spread over the next 2 months. Compared to HOT announcements they are moving very fast. We have already seen all 9 elite specs.

I guess my main feedback would be, why did the recent clean up of the material storage system not include things like integrated matrices, and why aren’t cosmic essences a wallet currency?

zealex.9410:

Compairing it to raids is the funniest because raids suffer from your meaning of “action combat” more than anything with blocks evades and distorts soaking all the dmg to the point where not bringing a healer makes sense.

I think you 2 are having a disconnect. He liked that gw2 was originally sold as not following that traditional formula, and your so use to that formula that you think deviating from it is absurd.

zealex.9410:

Atm tho everything other than 100cm can be pug rather comportably.

Even nightmare cm was a nightmare to pug for like 2 3 days after release so since this took it splace as the hardest fractal i think its fitting that it will take a while longer to become pugable.

As ppl learn how mechamics really work and learn how to play around them etc. So getting all ready for statics yet might be abit of overreacting. At least good thing is that the normal 100 is already in farm mode so no bigy.

I agree that it is too early to really judge. I purposefully did not take a hard stance on the new fractal. I certainly haven’t gotten to become as familiar with the new fractal as I would like. I just wanted to bring up the differences between how we consume these types of content and why casual daily content is important. I think this discussion needs to keep that in mind.

I agree strongly with Chaos’s statement. Dungeons had a very different set of skills, that raids and fractals do not replicate, I miss that too. Additionally, I agree that dungeons had much more interesting speed run tactics emerge, I rarely if ever get excited by a world record raid or fractal clear. I guess seeing sloth’s animations block it’s final break bar was neat, but things like portal skips in hotw were way cooler imo.

I think something that should be mentioned is the difference between weekly and daily content. Many of us have statics which get together to do a full raid clear once a week at a set predictable time. We all get into discord/teamspeak and we have 9 teammates who we have practiced with a lot, and so it makes the harder content a lot more approachable. You can’t really expect that organization with daily content, daily content needs to be fairly pugable.

Of course, you can point out, what is to stop you from organizing with your guild, and forming a static fractals group that only does content once or twice a week? Well the big difference is, when we dedicate a block of time in our lives to raiding once a week, we get a few hours of content to play through and good rewards as a result. A static fractal group is looking at maybe 40 minutes of content, a lot less on easy days.

“Added a new achievement for acquiring legendary armor pieces.”

Can anyone find it? I checked legendary armor and rare collections and a bunch of other places?

edit: friend found it. General-Explorer tab- legendary armor, includes title for all 3 sets.

I see, so even max buffing your aura is only like 25% stronger max. Sure would be nice to test how much dps a group gains from it.

I guess they could just make the base buff with no scaling at the golem. Absolute best case you buff a class that does 10 hits per second, which would be 400 dps, 2k dps for the group max. Definitely not good =/

Oh that’s interesting. I didn’t know it scaled with necro’s stats. So I guess group’s would get more dps from the buff on a power necro opposed to a condi necro, but more healing from a magi necro (lol).

This also explains a situation I encountered, where a power necro was practicing on the golem with me, and I was impressed by how much of a difference the buff made. I was playing a d/d fresh air ele, and the dps from the aura scales with attacks per second (no-internal cool down).

The thing to consider is this, expecting to only every play one character in raids is extremely restrictive. So if you want to raid smoothly and reliably, you should look at the first set of ascended armor as an investment, and that investment will hopefully pay off by allowing you to gain more sets of ascended armor. The first set is the most costly, after that it is much cheaper.

So how does your first set allow you to gain more sets? Predominantly through the two game modes you mentioned, fractals and raids. Fractals are an easier, but less guaranteed source of ascended, while raids (or at least some of them) are a more difficult but more guaranteed source of ascended (which you can purchase with the raid currency magnetite shards).

So, what is going to allow you to easily join groups for raiding and fractals? I think power ele is the best choice of the available choices. I’ve never seen an ele rejected from a pug fractal based on class, and it is certainly common in raids. You will want to have a few different weapons for your power ele. In particular a scepter (which you can easily get through the caladbolg collection), a warhorn (which you can get via the tempest collection), a dagger and a staff (which you could get through the dare devil collection). Eventually you might want to get a focus as well.

Also, op you mentioned that you don’t raid yet. Let me just recommend you begin doing weekly escort first. Escort is an incredibly easy raid, that will get you started, and you will begin accumulating magnetite shards which allow you to purchase ascended armor later on.

If you go to the raid test golem, and give yourself the vampiric aura buff via the console, then begin attacking the golem, you will not actually do any extra damage via the buff.

Just to point it out, during this year of necro’s buff being broken, pin point distribution was added to the golem, and actually works.

I’ve tried reporting this bug, but considering we are probably getting the last patch for a long time next week. I wanted to try to raise awareness and push for a fix, as I literally have never seen vampiric aura working at the test golem, and so it has been broken at least a year at this point as best I can remember.

Curious behavior: If you go into the testing area as a necro, turn on the actual trait via blood magic, enter combat, turn the trait off, give yourself the trait via the console, and then enter combat with the golem, it will be fixed.

ps: Its not related to raids/dung/fractals but reporting a bug crashes the game.

Still happens to me too. Did it today, and a couple weeks ago. Running on windows 10.

If your only doing 5k dps I can pretty much guarantee your not putting group buffs on yourself. Your testing solo dps, which is irrelevant mostly.

You need to interact with the panel and give yourself the following boons:
-fury
-25 might
-quickness
-2 more, usually regen and swiftness

Then give yourself the following profession specific buffs:
-warrior: banner of strength, banner of discipline, empower allies
-ranger: 5 grace of the land stacks, spotter, frost spirit, sun spirit
-engineer: pinpoint distribution
-mesmer: Alacrity

Finally, you need to give the golem conditions, just give the golem all conditions.

These are the standards used for testing.

Linken.6345:

Well keep posting about it and dont cry when anet delete said dungeon path.

This is the most absurd thing I have read in a while. Lets really break this one down.

Your saying Anet cares so much about my complaints, that they would remove dungeons because of them? Obviously I would complain even more about that. The only way any of that makes sense, is if Anet enjoys seeing me complain. But even if that were the case, they would get 100x more complaints per manhour spent, by releasing new dungeons and nerfing power necro.

We argue because some of us are more interested in being Anet’s shield than pushing them to fix broken content.

Are you saying that isn’t a bug?

Also are you saying a 33% failure rate is good?

you said clear mobs or don’t die. If you wanted both, you should have said, ‘and’.

Vinceman.4572:

thrag.9740:

p2 is legit broken

Thank you.

Vinceman.4572:

she won’t bug

Vinceman.4572:

Either kill all trash before (recommended for new players with 0 experience only) and she won’t bug

Vinceman.4572:

I said it can happen but you can reduce it if you follow certain paths.

Vinceman.4572:

Either kill all trash before (recommended for new players with 0 experience only) and she won’t bug

thrag.9740:

Vinceman you are very wrong.

Vinceman.4572:

Nope, I’m not.

Vinceman you are very wrong. The 3/5 times I encountered that bug was full clearing trash mobs before hand as a solo run. You are wrong, p2 is legit broken, and every time a player like you down plays a game breaking bug, you are enabling the terrible support that dungeons have experienced for half a decade