Guild Wars 2

I think right now gw2 pve is some of the most balanced we have ever seen it (still not perfect of course). Anet has been doing a good job taking steps towards improving it, and while those changes are certainly slower than we would like, they have shown a commitment to it. Unfortunately, we rarely discuss our ideas on what we would like to see in this department, so I want to outline my thoughts on a few things, and start a conversation about this.

1.) Power rev. I think the obvious thing to compare power rev to is hammer guardian. Both can provide permanent protection and great cc. Both provide a little bit of off might as well.

Uptime: Unfortunately, power rev trying to perma upkeep protection is very clunky because of how frequently protection is pulsed. Legend swapping too fast or too slow will result in protection down times as large as 4 seconds. Compare this to hammer guard, which is a very simple rotation. I believe that after facet of nature was nerfed, and max stacks of protection was lowered from 9 to 5, anet never revisited how that affected rev boon upkeep, and I think it is time to look into that.

Damage: Additionally we need to talk about damage. According to qt’s benchmarks, power rev and hammer gaurd are very close, the problem is that none of rev’s damage is burst. At every boss, there are little sections of time where you can’t do damage. For example, at sloth during break bar. During that time, guardian’s cool downs keep ticking, and once the boss is vulnerable again, the guardian can use all those cool downs and get a burst of damage at the end of the invulnerable phase. Rev has almost none of that. Sword 2 isn’t very much dmg, and if the rev wants to actually make sure they upkeep protection, they can’t just wait in jalis to turn on hammers. Rev needs the ability to provide more burst damage.

Assassins Presence: Some players will point to this to justify rev having lower damage than guardian. Sorry but that doesn’t fly. Our condi overlords are here, power builds are dead, and AP doesn’t add much at all to condi rangers or condi engis.

2.) Necro: Can’t viably heal, isn’t a buffer class, so the only roles we can look at for necro to fill are dps slots. There are 2 main builds, power and condi, and they both have problems.

Power Necro: The damage isn’t there. It needs a direct buff and it needs it badly. Some people will say necro is too tanky to have good damage. That’s ridiculous. Pure condi (i.e. non-ps variant) warrior can hit 30k while having max health and max armor, while also having a heal skill that scales with their damage. Thieves can bring invigorating precision (basically unkillable) and the expense of only 250 ferocity, and in addition they have 3 dodges and 3 evades and can even bring a block if they choose to. Power Necro needs a direct buff for it to be competitive.

Condi Necro: The damage is there, but inaccessible. Farbstoff showed us condi necro can hit 30k realistic buffs, which is competitive (for comparison condi engi/ranger bench marks are around 33k). But the entire build depends on combo fields. What is that garbage? This is literally the only class I know of that has to depend on the combo field system to do its damage. Its stupid. Remove the whirl finishers, and just put chill directly on the skills. Or, fix the minion nerf. Rather than a huge stupid overreaction that literally removes the purpose of half the traits in death magic, and all synergy in blood magic, actually put in the effort to tune the class correctly.

3.) Elementalist: Make a decision, does ele damage scale with hit box or not? Because your meteor shower nerf just made us move towards things like wildfire, lightning orb, and phoenix, additionally skills like icebow 4 and lightning storm still do scale damage with hitbox size. Picking a single skill and putting an internal cooldown on it is inconsistent with the class. Either all skills should have internal cool downs or none of them.

My personal suggestion: Put an internal cool down on every skill, but buff its damage accordingly. Its stupid for 1 class to dominate large hit box, and then another to dominate small hitbox. Balance it so eles do the same damage regardless of hitbox size, and make sure that damage is competitive with condi ranger.

4.) Power Ps: Probably needs a damage buff. Condi ps has better damage, better cleave, and can do most of its damage at range, and even has an easier rotation on small hitbox. Power PS can generate more might, so maybe power ps is suppose to be viable for a 7-1-1-1 comp, but right now mirror comp seems like the clearly better choice, and so power ps is literally a niche build for kc at best at this point.

Feanor.2358:

So… how exactly is the raid meta notably different? It is essentially two identical parties, with the occasional sacrifice of some dps for utility…. Which is totally fine for dungeons and fractals as well, even if it is less useful there.

There are different… let’s say “meta” comps for fractals, as the noob-friendly “4 condi 1 druid” one, but just taking half a raid comp works perfectly, provided the players are at least semi-competent.

Well I’m sorta taking meta to mean an attempt to go fast, but not necessarily speed clear record tactics. So base minimum, attempting to make fights fast, maybe even doing some good skip tactics. Half a raid squad certainly does work fine, I just wouldn’t call it meta. You don’t have to have a meta group to be a good group.

First lets discuss fractals: Raid meta is notably different in specific builds for the buff classes being different, and different dps classes being strong.

buff classes: condi ps probably still best. No more magi druid, just go condi druid. Certainly no minstrel chrono, just go zerk/commander.

dps slots: Here is where the real differences arise. While condi ranger and condi engi are pretty much top dps choice in raids by a significant margin, in fractals power builds are going to do much better (except maybe cm100). However, fractals still have a lot of positional constraints, making builds that can do damage at distance much more effective imo. So in fractals I would say ele edges out into being best dps role, with guardian a solid second. Additionally, in fractals blinds are much more useful so I would say the ability of an ele to choose between using sandstorm and lightning storm is great utility.

For dungeons things get crazy. Every fight is so short if you have good players, it changes what would be meta. I can’t comment as I haven’t ran dungeons regularly post HOT. At the very least always have a source of stealth seems like a part of any meta dungeon comp.

Numenlord is clearly a troll please stop feeding him.

As for OP, for a power necro at least some pieces of power-ferocity-condi damage would be an improvement over berserker’s, as you can easily hit 100% crit chance without full zerker, and so stats are being wasted. Converting those stats to something at least somewhat useful would be an improvement. However, how much of a difference would it make? IDK, but necro is probably one of the best classes to try to make a decent true hybrid build (roughly equal split between condi and power damage).

Also, greatsword can spit out condis quite well, and is part of a min-maxed condi necro build (used with constant weapon swap). Unfortunately it depends on combo fields. It does this through blind = chill and chill = bleed traits. Gs2 is a whirl finisher for chill bols, gs 4 is a blind, and gs5 is a chill. You just can’t camp gs as a condi necro.

NumenorLord.6539:

thrag.9740:

15% from target the weak
50% from decimate defenses
20% from fury
8% from discipline banner
7% from spotter

It’s been proved several times that optimal damage comes from maxing precision no matter what bonuses come from other players. In the hypothetical-perfect-scenario where a Necro runs alongside a Warrior and a Ranger there’s no way to upkeep Fury 100% of the time and Banner of Discipline has a cooldown interval, also target the weak has a 13% crit chance cap.

What you’re saying equals to say that Elementalist meta should run Valkyrie instead of Berserker because he can obtain 100ish% crit chance from other sources and that is absolute nonsense. For my part I think that this stat has no place in the game, talking PvE wise.

Is this a troll? We are talking about raids and not pvp or something right?

If maxing precision is always optimal, everyone would run full assassins not berserker. And yes, everyone create’s power builds which hit 100% crit chance, and no higher under some of the given assumptions. Look at meta builds, they bring 1 or 2 pieces of assassins on certain classes to do this, and no more.

No way to up keep fury? lol wtf. Ill screen shot my next kill with bgdm and show you fury uptimes over 90%.

Banner of discipline has very little down time if you have good alacrity up time.

Raid meta is notably different from fractal and dungeon meta as power builds are much better the faster enemies die. Any basic 5 man comp (raids are usually just 2 subsquads with 5 players each), will have the 3 buff classes and 2 dps slots.

Typical 5 man meta comp is:

ps war – druid – chrono – dps slot – dps slot

ps war can be condi or power, with condi the clear winner in raids and most fractals. Honestly I consider power ps niche at this point.

druid can be damage focused (condi vipers) or healing focused (magi) based on needs

chrono can be glassy (zerker+commanders) or tanky (full minstrel) based on needs.

two dps slots can be almost anything, especially outside of raids where time isn’t an issue. Condi ranger and condi engi, are all quite strong, but power ele, power engi, power thief, power guard, and pure condi (i.e. not ps) war are all quite competitive in these slots too. Condi mesmer has niche fights where it is good for these slots.

Additionally, sometimes these dps slots are filled with a lower dps classes that can provide additional utility. For example, hammer guard and power rev can both provide good protection uptime and a lot of cc, which can make raiding very smooth. Condi necro can be very good at clearing large amounts of ads and providing group sustain. Power necro is a build that many of us would like to see buffed to fill this role, it is currently viable but it is noticeably weaker (with that said a good necro is better than a bad ele, and bad eles are prevalent).

i think everything is pretty good right now. There are a few tweaks I would like to see. But I think gw2 is about the best I have ever seen it. We don’t need any giant balance changes, continue with the gradual balances in pve (it is getting quite good), and continue to focus on putting out more content.

Some classes can cap crit chance without much (or any) precision from gear. For example, necro gets 50% crit chance from a target having 25 vuln. Don’t forget the 20% from fury.

Right now a condi necro has a fair amount of wasted stats, reaching about 120% crit chance.

Edit: actually its way worse than that. Due to trait target the weak (2% crit per condition), if we assume target has 7 conditions (burning, bleed, torment, poision, vuln, cripple and either chilled or weakness), then condi necro is actually gaining about 15% crit chance from that trait alone.

15% from target the weak
50% from decimate defenses
20% from fury
8% from discipline banner
7% from spotter

Adds up to 100%, meaning that in the meta viper necro setup which has about 2k precision, you literally are wasting about 1k stats on nothing just because the only way to get condi duration involves precision.

I think OP has spent too much time reading meta battle stuff, and too little time in real raid groups.

You frequently see things like minstrel chronos, minstrel revs, magi eles, condi necros, hammer guardians, and magi druids. These off meta choices are brought not for damage but for safety net, and they are frequently used throughout this community.

It would be good if other classes could heal while buffing like druid, but remember that for extremely heal heavy fights like matthias you frequently see things like healer ele/rev because druid brings those buffs at the expense of raw healing power.

Just tested it, green floor doesn’t hit you in stealth. If you watch his combat log, you can see only volatile aura (passive pulsing damage from slothasor) and volatile poision do damage to him. He never takes damage from toxic cloud (green floor) as long as he is in stealth.

Not taking damage from an aoe just because your in stealth seems like a bug to me.

Still fun to watch, good job.

So does green floor not hurt you if your stealthed?

I am in favor of a story mode so that non-raiders can access the story (but none of the rewards). I don’t want it to detract too much from the production of new content however.

So I would say something easy. No rewards, and everything is just scaled down by a factor of 20. Bosses do 1/20 the damage, have 1/20 the health etc. You can still bring in 10 players if you want or you can solo or w/e else. Basically the fights are a joke but you hear the dialogue, see the cinematic, and get a feel for the characters.

I will warn all you non-raiders though, immersion arises partially from difficulty. The enemies feel immensely powerful because of their difficulty. For example, the powerful effects of bloodstone on Matthias and Xera is conveyed in their difficulty, having an extremely easy solo mode might not give you the full experience of raid storylines.

10 days per golden fractal skin is only accurate if your doing guaranteed recipe. If your goal is the entire collection it is much more efficient to use the random recipe for at least the first few skins. In addition, you can salvage the golden fractal skins to get more golden fractal relics.

Cynz.9437:

thrag.9740:

I’m not sure why you quoted me? Is your position that kicking is never necessary?

my point is people are too quick to blame other and kick

Sure, it goes both ways though, sometimes people are too slow to criticize and as a result some players don’t even know they are doing a bad job. I’ve seen eles hit lower dps than chronos, and then the entire group wipes to world eater for 30 minutes and disbands from frustration because no one wants to kick or no one even knows what the problem is.

As I said, kicking isn’t always necessary, and it doesn’t have to be our first resort. Fortunately, a bad ele can swap to a power thief or power engi, literally just autoattack and do a good enough job for any encounter. I think we should ask for a class swap before a kick occurs due to low damage, but the community as a whole needs to due a better job of informing new raiders about how easy these classes are, so that they can gear them up.

I would say that Tex gave you 3 encounters that answer the heart of your question. However, I want to point out the slight contradiction between requirements C and E.

You say that no restriction can be placed on builds, while also saying that the players are willing to take instruction. But these are contradictory in my view.

For example, if you have a warrior in your group and that warrior is running powerful synergy and you ask them to run phalanx strength instead because group wide might is too low, does that violate your rules?

Working together with your team (creating a strategy) goes hand in hand with tuning your build. It is impossible to separate the two.

I think that’s fair. It would have been nice if it had been designed as a mastery from the beginning, but it wasn’t and we are stuck with it.

You guys have been doing a good job making new fractals though which was desperately needed. So kudos, from my point of view you guys made the right choice to prioritize new fractals.

Cynz.9437:

Yesterday i got kicked on my ele from group on Gorse because we did no updraft and instead of afking during cc phase i dropped some damage in, but our druid refused to heal me so i got kicked for going down and was told to not dps Gorse + all other “nice” things in direction verbal harassment.
I join another group (accidentally ended up with couple ppl i killed deimos with on first week) and we cleared all 4 wings without much a problem in one evening (ca. 3 hours?)…. This is gw2 raiding community for you. And this happens all the time, one group just flames and blames 24/7, i join other and we clear wings quickly and without any issues~

I’m not sure why you quoted me? Is your position that kicking is never necessary?

I’m not complaining about the ability to buy otherwise rng rewards. I’m complaining that we have to first convert two fractal currencies into a third fractal currency, and that third currency is only useful for buying one or two items.

It is relevant because we see this again in buying ascended items in fractals. Rather than a straightforward material cost locked behind a crafting requirement, we must first refine all these materials just to use them as a currency.

edit: I don’t think its fair to criticize without proposing an alternative solution. I have been in favor of an alternative solution for a long time. Just make it so you can buy things like crafting materials with fractal currencies, then craft the material yourself.

tldr: sometimes kicks are necessary. More dps slots should be power thief, power engi, and condi mesmer.

I think it is more nuanced than, ‘be a jerk’ or ’don’t be a jerk’. Wiping for 30 minutes then disbanding does no one any good. Sometimes there really is a single player who can hold a group back, such as not throwing bombs at Sabetha (ironically Sabetha seems to hit enrage frequently in my pug experience).

However as far as under performing dps goes, I think a good practice for this community to address this issue is to push people towards the higher dps yet easy rotation classes. In particular power thief, power engi, and condi mesmer. Too often we try to just stack 4 eles at encounters where ele isn’t that much better (note: for gorseval no updraft and kc I recommend you stack 4 eles lol). Both power engi and power thief clear 22k dps just auto attacking. And condi mesmer will often be top dps on a single target boss like cairn and matthias.

1.) Ancient times fighting the giants (things like lupi before it died and was resurrected).

2.) The fall of glint with destiny’s edge.

3.) The dwarves going underground to push back primordus.

SLippyCheeze.5483 could you please fix your post, you falsely attributed that quote to me.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

thrag.9740:

Why can’t I just play fractals and have straight forward rewards?

I am confused — why can’t you? Take your loot and sell it; buy what you want instead. That’s what most of my friends do and they are just as happy as I am — the market is efficient enough that there’s mostly very little difference between paying attention to the nuances and not — you can make more by being careful, but you aren’t losing much by ignoring the market.

Yes you can do that. But there are at least 5 fractal currencies (relics, pristine relics, golden fractal relics, research pages, integrated matrices), more if you include gold and infusions. The entire system is needlessly complicated.

Here is a reasonable question I can ask. How many fractals do I have to do to fully complete the golden weapon collection (assuming average rng on drops)? Look at all the redundant currencies you have to consider. First you have golden fractal relics, which are just bought from pristine and gold. Then you have integrated matrices which are just matrices and regular relics. Why? Why not just have a straightforward cost in terms of matrices, relics, pristines and gold? Why do we have to do all these pointless conversions?

I also think AR is dumb, and would be happy to see it removed (or at least replaced with account wide mastery instead).

I love that in dungeons and raids I can swap to whatever character I want with no concern. AR is just restrictive for veteran players who tend to have more than one character.

Raids are already accessible. There are some raids that are incredibly easy such as trio and escort. Some that are mostly just a check on whether you know how to do your class rotation (gorse and kc), and then there are a few mechanics heavy bosses like Matthias.

You can certainly do the easy raids in bad gear.

I don’t know whether it is cheaper or more expensive to buy ascended gear via fractals or to craft it and the truth is I don’t care. Because yet again the fractal rewards system is overly complex and requires analyzing by the player just to get their reward.

Should I buy discounted keys? Should I buy boxes of the tp? Is it cheaper to buy ascended or craft it? Should I try for a random golden fractal skin or should I pay a lot more to buy a guaranteed one? Should I attune rings before salvaging? Should I infuse them? How many fractal relics do I have if I convert my pristine relics?

Why? Why can’t I just play fractals and have straight forward rewards? What part of this is fun? Take a hint from raids, 1 currency, and straightforward rewards.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

How about new Fractals that offer an alternative path towards Legendary Armor, personally I don’t give a crap because the financial expenditure to make 6 Legs seems mind boggling.

This way each game mode keeps their exclusive skins, and content while the red headed unwanted classes can chill in Fractals while still having their own path to the armor that they paid access for while expecting the same path way for the Weapon Legs.

I don’t love your tone at the end. Just because you buy a game, doesn’t mean you have a right to get any reward through any means you want. Everyone is paying for the same opportunity, same way I will never get a legendary pvp backpack (and I’m cool with that, I don’t want to play pvp).

However, your solution is fine imo. I have no problem with other game modes having their own path to leg armor. Unfortunately, considering it is taking years to create the skins, I don’t think it is wise for every game mode to have its own skins. It still baffles me to this day that an mmo developer has trouble creating armor skins, but that is our reality. And so I would say make multiple paths to the same skins, because anet is simply unable to create multiple sets in any kind of timely manner.

A lot of people in this thread seem surprised by condi necro using greatsword. Here is a relevant video that was shared on reddit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xGFf92ZzS0&t=164s

That seems like a lot of effort and ultimately it just recylces content. I’d much rather see new fractals developed.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

Mitch.4781:

Necro is very popular , especially in wing 2. Epi’s remain their best utility.

lol, let’s try being serious here.

Necro is the worst class to bring to a raid. Even Revenant is better. Their damage is near the bottom and they offer no utility. The only thing they can do well is clear adds but, there isn’t a single fight where clearing adds is important enough or difficult enough to justify bringing a necro. Every fight that has adds all you do is have the chrono use focus 4 to group them up, and then your eles aoe them down.

Popular? No. But no utility? That is far from true. Necro has a ton of utility, utility that is unnecessary (because it is redundant) in good groups. But most groups are not good groups.

-epi: clearing mobs is real. Half the time someone downs at xera it is because mobs are not being cleared enough. Useful at sloth too, and gorse if doing updrafts.
-transfusion: save your whole raid from wiping at sloth by pulling them out of green poison.
-flesh golem: probably the strongest ranged cc possible, can be done further than 1200 range.
-projectile protection: CPC has good uptime (better than feedback), and unlike feedback/WOR, it destroys projectiles, which means it even works against elite slubblings.
-Plague signet: Ever try raiding while perma chilled?

Its not clear to me what your requesting. Can someone explain? I never played wow.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

TexZero.7910:

Also why Greatsword ?

It’s a joke of a weapon in PvE.

Because they look mfing amazing and the Reaper was designed with the GS in mind for fantasy.

If you told a Warrior they couldn’t use their GS any more they’d tell you to suck it

Bad news for you, warriors shouldn’t use greatsword at any boss besides KC I’d say. Most of my guilds warriors are working on, or already have a condi ps. Raiding requires flexibility.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Minion Master, Blood, GS Reaper Support Tank

Why can’t this be a viable raid tank?

You get baked in toughness for aggro, damage reduction through MM mechanics, self heals and ambient heals through Blood, more DPS than a Chrono.

If non boon buffs supposedly span to 10 players (like banners) rumored for the balance patch then why wouldn’t this be a viable Raid Tank?

You would still run 2 chronos for group wide quickness. Reaper tank having more dps than chrono is irrelevant. What matters is the contribution to group dps. Chrono dps is garbage no matter what, but the amount of group wide dps it brings is huge, and it can still do this even in full tank gear like minstrels. Having a chrono fill the tank role, opens up an additional slot for a good dps character.

However, I will say this. If Vampiric presence is going to effect 10 players, I think it is worth bringing if you have a few power dps classes.

Don’t quote me on these numbers, because it was a while ago. But with realistic buffs, I believe I I saw a dagger ele dps increase by 2k due to vampire presence. I recall, that the buff did not have an internal cool down, and so classes that do a lot of hits per second benefit the most.

If all 4 dps classes get 2k, and then your warriors also get 2k combined, you would get a total group wide dps increase of over 10k (chronos and druids won’t benefit as much, but they still get some). Additionally you get the added sustain to keep up scholar, and you also get transfusion which is godly in inexperienced groups. Which would make necro more competitive with ele for a dps slot role.

Oldirtbeard.9834 in no way is your criticm actually related to raids then. Your criticism is that not all builds are equally useful. This is highlighted by raids, because raids are challenging content that require at least some degree of thought put into builds.

Your complaint is balance, all of your complaints would apply to fractal 100 CM too.

I like the idea of raids having a wide range of difficulty scale. In general, I think Anet achieves this. Before wing 4, extremely casual players could get at least 1 LI a week via escort maybe 2 with trio. Semi-casual raiders could easily get 6 LI a week, and fairly serious raiders could get all 9.

I would say that boss 1 of wing 4 qualifies as a boss that extremely casual players can kill, or at most is just a notch above that mark. It effectively has no enrage timer (10 players in tanky/safe builds can beat it, someone has already soloed it as a druid). Boss 2 also is incredibly easy, but does require a tiny amount of team work.

So pretty much, as far as raid accessibility goes, we are exactly where we were before wing 4. There are extremely easy bosses available for beginners, if they want to kill them.

Lots of people in the lfg are giving away access to a cleared instance, so that can give you the overwhelming majority of lore.

Then just watch Wp’s video for the rest of it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixilaIk5pCM&t=2118s

Cynz.9437:

First day Anet posted this crap is allowed and we already have toxic behavior.

So just to be clear, there was no toxic behavior before?

Vinceman.4572:

Ok, he left, that’s a complete different thing then.

And yeah, I read and understood your first post btw. You looked for a dps and you chose a rev…
Well, if you want to have a dps class you shouldn’t have let him stay in the first place because the difference between “real” dps and a rev/ps is huge, although good raid groups wouldn’t have had any problems with that. In this case the dps meter was unnecessary from the start – everybody could have told you so before even trying.

I hold my point, allowing the actual inaccurate dps meters will lead to more problems than solvings.

If your not a scientist I guess you won’t understand this. You might as well have said, “experimental testing wasn’t necessary because everyone already knew the theory”.

We have already seen a dps class emerge as a result of dps meters. No one thought condi mesmer would be so good, then they tried it at Matthias and boom, suddenly the world understands that simplicity of rotation can have a real effect outside the ideals of the testing golem.

We have also seen dnt’s thief video, where only auto attacking as a staff daredevil proved to be better than the more complicated rotations of eles on a few bosses.

Fact is, dps meters allow us to give people a chance, and make an informed decision, rather than blindly kicking based of class. Maybe this guy was the worlds best rev, maybe he had a new build that was better, who knows, that’s why you run the experiment, and at the same time he gets a shot to earn his spot.

Vinceman.4572:

thrag.9740:

Fact is, they pulled less dps than our power ps wars, so we did ultimately kick.

Wow, that’s hard. How much was the difference? Because the numbers of realistic damage between both classes is very small.
Also, if he did the mechanics right your group should have been able to kill Sabetha no matter what, saying he wasn’t the problem in the fight then.

Don’t get me wrong, your group and you have every right to kick players out of the squad if you are not pleased with the person but this simple example underlines my scepticism about dps meters.
And while GW2 raid bosses are no hard dps races and more a thing of executing the mechanics properly I’m still convinced that the permission of dps meters will result in more conflicts and toxicity than before, although these levels were relatively low.

I just see that from my point of view as I mentioned in this thread I will use a dps meter myself now and definitely will exclude more players after few tries than before because they don’t meet my dps expectations. This is not a contradiction to my words above, it’s only a thing of self protection to minimize the time wasting. Nobody would deny that there are many raiders out there thinking the same and I’m sure there are many players acting more strict than me.

reread my post. The lfg we had up was advertising for a dps. This guy thought he could fill that role as a rev, and we decided to let him try. Simply being close to war in dps was not enough. I only mentioned he was below war dps to give perspective. We were expecting condi ranger, ele, guard, or thief. And we got rev. But we decided to give him a chance, because we could confirm whether or not he could fill that role.

Sabetha is probably the boss I see hit enrage the most often, and so trying to do it with only 3 dps slots with a guild that is progressing was a real hindrance. Of course 9 above average players can carry 1 build that isn’t optimal. But we are a progressing guild, who currently gets the first 2 bosses of w123. We are not yet good enough to be as relaxed at sabetha as we are at say gorseval. We need 10 players filling 10 roles.

Mechanics wise, the guy was ok, but we were on pace to hit enrage. We told him that it wasn’t going to work, and asked if he had anything else to play. He chose to leave, so I guess saying, ‘we kicked him’ isn’t 100% accurate.

Cynz.9437:

This won’t happen, they will just get instantly kicked over and over and over again. And trash talked on top of it. Have been there, seen that too many times.

I have done VG and co. when it came out, then i took break because i focused mainly on pvp. When i started to raid again, not even VG groups would take me because i didn’t have 50+ LI (despite KP and generally good knowledge of classes i play). I have faced extreme amount of toxicity, only reason why i got any bosses killed and have decent amount of LI now is because i joined guilds (which wasn’t so easy either due to my lack of LI back then, the elitism is unreal). This community taught me only one thing: it is extremely toxic.

Again, the solution is simple, if you don’t like how people run their groups, make your own. My guild grabs a few pugs every week to fill slots, often no LI reqs. Today we didn’t have an reqs other than exp, because we knew the meters would reveal the truth to us. A rev tried to join to fill a dps slot at sab, we let them try for a few pulls. Fact is, they pulled less dps than our power ps wars, so we did ultimately kick. But they had a chance, something we probably wouldn’t have given them without dps meters.

Cynz.9437:

I have years of experience of those dps meters in wow, smart commanders are extremely rare.

Again, if that is how you feel, be your own commander.

Cynz.9437:

This is already happening thanks to LI, i don’t see how dps meters would make it any better.
You have too much faith in community which showed many times over past years that you cannot put trust in it. The beauty of gw2 was that it didn’t allow 3rd party software but guess new devs want wow clone.

I see a great community, that taught me all the raids, and now I feedback into it and help teach them. dps meters make it better because there is no more guess work. If some beginner with low ap, 5 LI, and exotic gear tries to join, and says they know what they are doing, they can prove it and earn a spot. Making players ping LI is a result of bad players trying to join good groups to get carried, rather than creating their own progression group.

I have seen so many things like this. For example, advertising in the lfg for an experienced group needing a dps and a ps joins because ‘ps is dps’, or something stupid like that. Groups put up requirements, because other people lie. With dps meters, we can quickly identify these issues, fix them and move on, rather than spend 30 minutes wiping because we don’t have the dps for no updrafts, and then disbanding because we don’t know how to fix it.

Cynz.9437:

DPS meters just force layers into selfish gameplay – so no rezzes, no avoiding dmg etc. – all for the sake of maximizing dps otherwise you just gonna get kicked because you dared to do 1% less dmg!!! (nobody cares that you lose that dps because you went to rez someone or due to crappy RNG like getting poison on Matt few times in a row). This happened in wow, this will happen here.

If you think that maxing dps means not avoiding damage, then you are very uninformed. You should try being the commander yourself if you believe your commander is so incompetent.

This is fantastic news, especially for guilds like my own who are progressing, and sometimes can not identify where the problems are. I really appreciate this, and I am going to have to buy something from the gem store to show my appreciation (maybe max out shared inven slots?).

With that said, we also need to make sure we use this tool the right way. Anet clearly does care about the type of community it creates, and they are trusting us to do this the right way. The majority of us already know what this means. Kicking bad players is a necessary evil, but we can do it respectfully. We can provide constructive criticism and we can help the community grow in all regards. No matter what, we can not let ourselves devolve into trash talking/harassing/bullying bad players, or we could lose this tool.

I think this situation will improve now that dps meters are being allowed. My guild has 1 guy who runs a meter, and when we fill an empty slot with a pug, he lets us know if they are good, and that’s the end of it.

Of course, high dps doesn’t guarantee you know mechanics, but generally they go hand in hand.

Its too bad we don’t have official in game dps meters, so we could judge a person based on their performance rather than their class.

We’ve all seen the dnt thief video from dnt right? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beTkRWJjMp4) Simplicity of rotation is worth considering, and power necro rotation is pretty easy. It would be nice to see real numbers for it in a real raid setting.

I think the total value of T4 dailies is about right, although I prefer less randomness (like the dungeon token system). However the reward method with keys and boxes etc is stupidly convoluted, and just feels bad to me. F50 pre-hot felt better to me because it was just simple. You didn’t have obnoxious extra load screens between every fractal (or worse, reforming the group every fractal), you didn’t have to open 12 chests, etc. It was just simple and fun.

Also, the fractal meta absolutely includes:
1 war who claims to be ps but can’t even keep up 5 stacks of might
1 druid who is actually good because he waited 3 years to finally get to be healer
1 power axe necro who uses epi
1 chrono who camps greatsword because ‘its the only ranged dps weapon’
1 ele who tries to prestack might and fury, but everyone runs past the fire fields

I do agree that selling raids cheapens the achievements etc. But consider the benefits. The existence of raid selling creates rewarding content with a higher level of difficulty. I think that’s a very valuable addition to this game. It is in essence, ‘hard mode’ for raids.

Additionally you could even argue that it unlocks ‘easy mode’ for raids. Players can spend time earning gold however they want, and then get an easier kill. You can even do this to finish up the envoy armor achievements, and then just do the easy kills weekly to get legendary armor eventually.

Raid selling is pretty much players putting their own content into the game, satisfying demand for both elite pve players and more casual players.

Thank you for the might upkeep demonstration video, that makes it easier to understand your gorseval video.

It seems like the only reason your might drops at gorseval is during the spirit phase, the frost spirit can’t move with you. So I guess this builds weakness is movement, which isn’t too bad, as that is also a weakness of condi ranger.

So where might this be optimal? VG seems like a good place to try, as long as your distorting greens. Xera also seems like a good place as long as you use a strategy that minimizes movement. Sabetha too maybe, but i don’t know how good condi rangers are for cannon duty. That burning on karde though lol.

Interesting. Although I think a lot of pugs like the safety net of double staff magi druid, and so who knows if we will ever see this in pugs.

I am concerned about your might generation however. There are many times in the gorse video where your might isn’t 25, and sometimes drops fairly low (like 18 and sometimes even lower). I’m no druid expert, so correct me if I am wrong. But sword auto stacks more might on you, and runes of strength 4 also puts more might on you, but none of this might is shared to your party. So presumably you have the most might in your party, and your condi rangers have even less might than that. If this is the case, the 29k dps numbers may be too high.

1.) You only need a single crystalline heart, and you can use it over and over (thankfully).

2.) Envoy 1 is not in any way related to what legendary armor you will eventually craft. Envoy 1 is a completely free set of armor, use it for whatever class you want to gear up. Envoy 2 is the actual precursor. Its worth noting, you can select any stat combo with envoy 1. I personally used it to gear up a minstrel chrono (as minstrel is an expensive stat to get otherwise). You can stat swap it in the forge if you want, so if you wanted to experiment with one of the tougher to obtain combos, and then decided you didn’t like it, you could just swap it back to zerk or w/e.

I think it is possible that anet is overhauling the rune/sigil system so that legendary stat swapping can be more useful. Then again, they have only shown us 1/3 of the sets, and only on one race, so maybe it really is just the art team having trouble.

An mmo developer that considers it too difficult to release new armor into the game is a strange thing. They must have really done a bad job when first designing their systems, as they clearly do not have easy expandability.