oh you want to go power reaper? You mentioned vipers in your OP so I thought you were planning to go condi. Power reaper is a much tougher sell.
I definitely agree that getting all of our members to the point where they are aware enough that me calling out pulls and epis is unnecessary is a good move. Our guild will get there eventually, it was only 2 months ago we were struggling to get 4 people to stand at vg green circles, but now we either 1 or 2 shot him, so I am confident we will get there.
I am really starting to learn more about what playing druid entails. Druid is pretty much the only class I don’t have/haven’t played. I think, the second something like a volatile poison spawns on a player, we need to have a druid dedicated to making sure that player stays alive.
I’m worried that people here think mirror comp is exclusively 2x war-druid-chrono-ele-ele. My experience is that any group running 2 war,druid,and chrono would be called a mirror comp. They might have condi rangers, hammer guards, eles,necros, condi mesmer; almost anything in the 4 dps slots. Additionally, even within the set 6 spots, there is a fair amount of variation (2 common builds for warrior, 3 for druid, 4 for chrono). The comp dusk posted would still be called mirror comp as far as I am aware.
As for necro, I see them ran frequently at vg for green circles, and sloth for ad control/projectile. Additionally I see them at escort doing back warg, and trio for saboteurs. I wouldn’t say you can easily do all 9 bosses as a necro, but 4 of them I would consider necro strong in my pug experiences. Additionally at matthias they are pretty common too. So I’d say 5/9 bosses they are pretty common. 5/9 is more than half, but less than all.
You will have to decide for yourself whether 5/9 is good enough to warrant gearing your necro. But I will say this, once you reach raiding, you should stop seeing your progression as character based, and more so as account based. Everyone in this game has at least 5 character slots, and the developers know that when they create content. Choosing to only use one of those slots is unnecessarily limiting your options.
Thanks to everyone for the help and advice. We got a sloth kill at the end of last week, and we also got one yesterday night. I don’t think it is quite on farm status like the other 3 bosses our guild clears, but we are getting better.
Ultimately our comp was (as best I can remember) :
zerk ps -magi druid – zerk chrono – viper necro – zerk ele
zerk ps – magi druid – zerk chrono – viper necro – condi ranger
I was sort of in the position of commanding, and I think one of the most beneficial things I started doing was paying close attention to timing. In particular the spawn timers for ads. What I did was, if someone was about to eat mushroom, but it was within 5 seconds of an ad wave spawn (6:30,6:00, 5:30, etc), I would have the eater wait, call out for epis and pulls, then tell everyone the eater was eating.
I can’t say I had the timing for this down perfect after the first 3 mushrooms, but the first three mushrooms I made sure we pulled and epi’d perfectly, and I think it helped get us off to a good start. We ultimately killed him during the 7th mushroom being eaten.
Additionally, the burning stacks from the condi ranger made the epi a lot more potent I believe. In the future I think condi ps would be a very beneficial change to make, not just for burning on epi, but also for their tremendous cleave potential.
I also made sure to tell everyone how I would handle volatile poison for each specific class, and I think this led to fewer people being downed on green stuff. This plus druid search and rescue and our transfusions allowed us to get 10 people to the end of the fight. The tips I gave were:
warrior-run defiant stance heal, and pop it after taking some damage while running the volatile poison out, additionally you can swap weapons to mace shield if needed
necro – go into death shroud as you run the poison out, bring consume conditions instead of blood fiend
chrono- distort or shield 4 while running the poison out
druid – staff teleport to get poision out, and also self healing
ele – focus 5 earth while running poison out, mist form as a utility over feel the burn is an ok trade off to make.
tldr: Are there any off-meta tactics to make sloth easier for beginners? And are there specific points where volatile poison should be dropped?
Hello everyone,
My guild has been progressing through raids, we typically can one or two shot VG, Gorse and escort (all bosses we have trained). When we were first learning VG, we did some non-meta tactics to make it easier. For example, we had 5 people go to green circles every time, just to make sure that mechanic was taken care of. We also adopted a minstrel chrono tank, to make things a little easier. We also brought hammer guard a few times.
The next boss we are trying to get onto farm status is sloth, and I was just wondering if there are any off meta strategies that can help create a safer kill?
We have experimented with a few things. We have tried having eles run the water trait line instead of the fire trait line for auramancer off healing. We have tried magi druids and zerker druids. We tried minstrel chrono and zerker chrono. We tried having a rev camp ventari tablet (this isn’t very helpful because slubblings inside the projectile protection bubble can still hit you it seems).
We have been good about getting volatile poisons out to the wall the last few runs. But around the time we get to have the fourth person eat the fourth mushroom, it seems like the first and second volatile poison aoes have grown and are still in our way. Is there an agreed upon spot for dropping these poisons? It is almost like we are rotating around the room too fast. Is that even possible given the timers? In pug groups, I always just drop them as far back as possible.
Its not so much that we have a single giant group wipe. It is more so that we slowly lose people over the course of the fight. In particular people getting downed on the green stuff as the fight progresses.
Any tips?
I hate that we consider expecting your teammates run effective builds, to be elitist. Elitism is when you exclude meaninglessly. Excluding meaningfully is just efficiency. If your angry that no one wants your ele, you have 4 other character slots, just reroll a warrior or a mesmer.
How do you know this is true? If raiders are less casual, they would most likely spend more money on things like salvage-o-matic, bank tabs, character slots etc. I myself have spent probably around $100 on those items, after returning to gw2.
First, hardcore players are always far less numerous. Second, in GW2, they are far more likely to use in-game gold for those purchases. It’s mostly so called “dedicated casuals” (people who have time to play, but a casual approach to the game) that spend the most.
Also, hardcores are more likely to concentrate on actual QoL and p2w stuff (and there’s no real p2w stuff in gw2), but, in the absence of the latter, it’s the vanity items (and gambling addiction stuff like bl keys) that take up the most part of the gemshop and likely bring the most income.
If you finish reading that paragraph you will see I said, ‘Maybe they replace me with 10 casuals. But will those 10 casuals collectively outspend me? I don’t know, but neither do you.’. Still true, stop pretending you know this is a fact.
You claim that hardcore players would do gold to gems. I think that is incorrect. Typically harder content in gw2 is less rewarding than casual content. Pre hot, consider three activities: sw chest farm, dungeons, fractal 50. Of the 3, sw chest farm was clearly the most casual, and for a typical player, gave more gold than fractals, and was at least competitive with dungeons. Fractals gave you a lot of value through ascended, but that can not be exchanged for gems.
Similarly right now, I would argue that as far as liquid rewards go, most people lose liquidity raiding. They gain a lot of value via ascended drops/magnetite shards. Meanwhile AB MM is still insanely good gold per hour. Players that pretty much only do raids are losing liquidity while gaining value, compared to players that do casual content who gain liquidity and value.
Lets look even further, do raiders get dailies (and the associated gold) just for doing the content they like, like pvpers, wvwers, and open world pve players do? No, they don’t. This notion that raider = rich in liquid gold seems unlikely to me.
It’s pretty simple, raids, like any content, need a healthy population to be viable in the long term. So the current scenario is either most of the playerbase becomes better at the game, or raid population won’t be enough.
Raid population seems fine to me. I see lfg posts all the time. I see guilds clearing all the time etc. My guild has a lot of training runs, we are investing in our own population and its fine.
It’s a matter of numbers, and consequently money. If the raid team stopped doing raids and started doing casual content that is played by far more people than raids, and said increase in population leads to more gem sales, then why bother with raids at all?
How do you know this is true? If raiders are less casual, they would most likely spend more money on things like salvage-o-matic, bank tabs, character slots etc. I myself have spent probably around $100 on those items, after returning to gw2. The reason I returned was raids. If they quit making raids, I will probably get bored and leave again. Maybe they replace me with 10 casuals. But will those 10 casuals collectively outspend me? I don’t know, but neither do you.
Easy/Normal/Hard modes are necessary, because without them, raids won’t be profitable. You need an easy mode so that players can learn the encounters at their own pace, and you need a hard mode because let’s face it, raids are a joke for good teams.
See my post above, where I explain how based on their previous statements, anet would have to nerf raid rewards if they implemented easy mode. Hardly profitable as you claimed.
The other alternative is mixing bosses of different difficulties in a single raid mode, pretty much leading to things like escort and bandit trio, which are usually hated by the same elitists that don’t want difficulty modes. Congratulations, I guess. We could have a full wing of challenging bosses, but your opposition to them forces us to deal with pointless filler.
I like this system. Casual players can work towards legendary armor via a weekly escort, it just takes them longer than hardcore players. Your suggesting that implementing a scaling system would lead to use having the same number of bosses as now, but all of them could scale to Matthias difficulty or higher. I don’t think that’s true. Anet has overhauled the entirety of fractals several times because of their pursuit of a scaling system. Those overhauls could have been spent on new fractals. Scaling systems are more complicated than you give credit for. Forcing a scaling system on raiding, will make the creation of new raids even slower.
We have watched for years as anet continues to try to recreate the wheel, rather than turn out new content. Fractal overhaul (3 or 4 times now?), wvw overhaul (only to then backtrack on half the changes), trait system overhaul (several times now). They released a 50$ half expansion because half their development team was spent overhauling stuff like how to craft a precursor. Now we finally have a team that actually focuses on making new content, and you want to force them to do the same mediocre garbage that the rest of the company does?
I’d rather not see this. Anet told us that part of why they can make raids rewarding is because of their difficulty. For example, they told us that the reason why purchasing ascended with fractal rewards is so expensive (gold wise) is because they didn’t want fractals to be the obviously better alternative for the majority of the player base to crafting ascended. Conversely, they said that purchasing ascended armor from raids can be a good deal because of the comparatively smaller population of raiders.
Continuing with this mentality, easy mode raids would have to do one of two things; not give any magnetite shards, or all the prices of ascended armor would have to have huge amounts of gold attached to them.
If easy mode raids give no magnetite, no one will run them. If all ascended armor has a huge gold price added to it, your hurting the players that enjoy raids as they are right now.
Now, you might point out that easy mode would give less magnetite than hard mode. But that is irrelevant, as T4 fractals give much more relics/pristines than T1, and yet the fractal prices are still horrible because of this.
As far as getting vipers trinkets, to the best of my knowledge, you should only really use bloodstone fen for amulets. The rest can be gotten much faster in the other 2 maps. Here is the easiest way I believe:
Amulet – blood ruby pendant – 125 blood ruby
Accessory 1 – sparking petrified wood – 150 petrified wood
Accessory 2 – Black Ice Earring – 300 fresh winterberry
Ring 1 – Black Ice Band – 200 fresh winterberry
Backpack – Icebrood Horn Backpack – 400 winterberry
Notice there is no ring 2. That is because a min/maxed condi ps runs with 1 sinister ring (Build here: http://qtfy.enjin.com/warrior#Gear2) . You can easily get Verata’s seared ring or plague signet (ring) from living story season 2.
The other currencies, berries and wood, are very easy to get if you have multiple characters (just geared in exotices or even rares should be fine). As for 125 blood rubies, you can do the pvp reward track with pvp dailies in a farm server and earn 50 rubies from the final chest for about 10 minutes of effort every day for 2 weeks roughly.
Of the two builds you listed, I would say condi warrior would be more helpful. I don’t like melee builds in fractals, in particular for pugs. In my opinion there is just too much emphasis on position, and as a result I think an average player will do better with ranged builds.
Examples of this problem:
-poison trails, sky hammer cannon, mai trin cannons – all singularities
-reactor boss (no floor/more time just trying to get into position)
-aetherblade boss (laser walls between you and golems)
-chaos boss
Also regarding the nerf to minions, this barely affects condi necro at all in fractals. Rarely (in my experience) did you build up an army of minions anywhere except the longest bosses. However, it certainly hurt necro in raids.
Only 1 problem with the QT benchmarks. If you play power necro, they didnt even bother. So you will have to look elsewhere for rotations on that.
A thread asking about how to start raiding probably shouldn’t venture into off meta builds. Not saying they can’t be very helpful. I myself have a minstrel chrono tank, my guild often has ran with an auramancer healer ele, and we had condi mesmer being used before the recent reddit threads about it. But when your first beginning raiding, it is better to stick with something guaranteed to work that will be easily accepted in lfgs.
Make your own lfg. They fill pretty fast.
First off, you should approach this problem is a sensible way, starting with easiest bosses, and working your way up. Roughly, I would say in terms of difficulty (easiest first):
1.)escort
2.) trio
3.) gorseval (no updrafts is easier than updrafts if you know your dps rotation)
4.) keep construct
5.) sloth
6.) vale guardian
7.) sabetha
8.) xera
9.) Matthias
But before you can try to kill these guys, I would recommend first maxing out your gliding mastery. As leyline and updrafts are useful. Doing the easy daily adventures (such as drone race) is a good way to do this with minimal effort. Mushroom mastery is also useful. Additionally, you need to bind your special action key. Now you are ready for the easiest encounter: escort.
So, read up/watch videos on escort (first boss of 3rd wing), and join an lfg for that. You first time, you should probably be on the ground team. Don’t lie about Legendary insights. Escort is easy enough that people rarely put LI requirements, if you can’t find an escort lfg to join, make your own. Lead it in team speak or discord. Once you get an escort kill, you will unlock your raid masteries. Max these out as soon as possible, as you need them for various roles on some bosses. They are pretty easy to max out with daily adventures.
Now, the next boss for you to learn, should be trio in terms of difficulty. Unfortunately, trio is harder to do, because the instance opener has to have already killed sloth to get to trio. If your joining an lfg, this isn’t a problem. But if your making your own lfg, it is. So, a good second boss would be keep construct, as you can reach it after clearing escort. As long as everyone knows their dps rotations, keep construct is a fairly easy boss. Before trying to kill him, go to the dps golem and test out your knowledge of your class. You can compare dps to qt’s benchmarks (http://qtfy.enjin.com/dps), keep in mind they have completely min maxed with infusions and are using food. If you skip either of these, your dps will suffer quite a bit. Food and utility should be viewed as necessary, but infusions you can skip for now.
I think that is enough for one post. Good luck.
(edited by thrag.9740)
Pugs prefer eles, but there are a lot of pugs that would be better off with thieves. A bad thief that only auto attacks will clear 20k dps, a staff ele that only auto attacks will not clear 10k dps. But without dps meters, it is hard to convince people that difficulty of rotation is worth considering.
There is a lot of subtlety and nuance to answering this, but given that you are here asking, I will try to give suitable advice for a beginner to dungeons.
In traits, I would recommend you bring arms (middle middle middle) instead of discipline (until you unlock berserker, at which point run with that). The reason being that at low level dungeons your critical hit chance is scaled down a lot (stat scaling), and so the extra precision from signet mastery will really help you out in stacking might as a ps warrior (which is your main job besides doing damage). Run with healing signet and use constantly in between all fights to build up more stacks of precision. During fights, you can leave it alone as you will proc additional signet stacks in combat.
Additionally, for skills I would go banner of str, banner of discipline, and fury signet. If the group your running with doesn’t provide fury, swap fury signet for, ‘for great justice’ and use it as much as possible. If you insist on only running one banner, discipline is better than strength I believe, as discipline buffs precision and ferocity, while strength only buffs power. Additionally you can pick up the discipline banner at the start of the fight and use skill 2 to grant fury if no one else is giving fury. Then you can use skill 5 to blast a fire field if there happens to be one.
For mobility, I would not bring pack runes. Instead, I would bring greatsword as your main weapon, and sword+warhorn as your weapon swap. Greatsword is the only weapon you should fight with. The swiftness from warhorn and your elite signet + the movement skills on greatsword and sword should easily allow you to move faster than the vast majority of people you find in dungeons now a days. I would bring strength runes instead but if those are too expensive, Hoelbrak runes are a good alternative. You might hear people say that warrior should run scholar runes, but that is mostly true in some raids where quickness is assumed. If you don’t have quickness, ps warrior will struggle to cap might on single targets (i.e. bosses). Especially in lower level dungeons with precision scaling.
As for armor, if your serious about doing pve, I really wouldn’t recommend anything but Berserker’s gear. At lower level dungeons, it may be the case that assassin’s gear is better, but honestly its more hassle than its worth, especially if your making your first ascended set. A set of berserker’s gear will leave you prepared to move up to higher level pve activites.
ohhhh I see, the dps number is accumulative. I went and did the test again, and the highest number I saw on a single hit was 4.1k before 50% health, and then 4.9k after 50% health. Ok, it is all working as I thought it would.
Hey everyone,
I have been testing various damage modifier traits at the raid test golem, and I keep getting surprising results. I’ll just post the results of one trait I tested, ele’s air grandmaster trait, ‘bolt to the heart’. I gave my ele 25 might, fury, quickness, 3 grace of the land stacks, spotter, frost spirit, empower allies, banner of strength, banner of discipline, and alacrity. I was wearing full ascended gear, no infusions, and scholar runes, with my weapons being dagger+warhorn. In order to keep the tests consistent I moved my ele to the golem, pressed 1, and then took my hands off the keyboard and did not touch anything.
health: 100%-80%
dps: 12.4k
health: 80%-60%
dps: 12.4k
health: 60%-40%
dps: 12.7k
health: 40%-20%
dps: 13.2k
health: 20%-0%
dps 13.3k
Now, bolt to the heart is suppose to be a 20% modifier below 50% enemy health. Clearly we can see the trait turning on. But if we take the dps for 80%-60%, I thought we could predict the 20%-0% dps like this:
12.4k * 1.2 = 14.88k
So, what gives? Do modifier traits not work multiplicative, but rather additively? As in, is my bolt to the heart modifier added to my scholar rune modifier (and all the others) and then used as one single modifier?
It doesn’t seem like either to me. To me the word, ‘exploiting’ has the connotation of gaining some reward. There is no in game reward here.
I also don’t think it qualifies as, ‘poor design’. To me, good design leaves enough freedom for multiple solutions. This is just an alternative method with its own downsides. If I had to guess, a pug trying to do this would have several players die who picked up banners/ice bows rather than taking the portal lol.
kitten that’s awesome. Great job guys.
TBH the portal isn’t really that big of a deal. You could get a pretty similar effect by dropping the portal on the ground near the updraft to use. All the portal being below the stage allows you to do is save like, 5 seconds per portal maybe? Obviously 15 seconds is huge when doing a 4 man attempt on a 10 man dps check lol. But its not like this is a strategy 10 man groups are going to use anytime soon. Its not something that affects the majority of raiders.
If anet wants to fix broken parts of old raids, I would say making it so you can see all 10 of your teammates at Sabetha would be a much higher ranking bug.
Raids don’t need an easy mode for non-meta players. You can clear raids as they are now without meta builds. If you can’t find a group to accept you as a power engi, make your own group and lead it.
Fractals – condi ps seems best to me
Dungeons – Physical ps
Raids by boss:
VG: both are good. Condi ps can do green circles well, but gs ps can bring more emergency cc for break bars. Bring one of each here.
Gors: both have advantages. Condi ps can hold spirits for days. Gs ps probably does more damage to gorse due to large hit box and gs 3 + dodges, but its not gonna be a huge difference. Additionally, condi ps can help clear close by orbs by directing scorched earth appropriately. Personally I just prefer gs ps here.
Sabetha: power is preferred for pug groups, because people expect the ps to stack inside sabetha and gs 3 the sticky bombs out fast. In an organized group, there is a case to be made for condi ps helping to kill the last champion faster. Maybe the pug meta has already caught up on this one though?
Sloth: Condi has the potential to really help clear ads with the very large aoe scorched earth. But this can also be the condi ps’s downfall, as you could easily catch your friendly slubbling. Overall, cleaving the ads with scorched earth also requires you to be facing inwards, which may not be so possible. I’d go gs ps here.
Trio: Condi probably better for burning the final boss. Plus lots of opportunity to cleave with scorched earth.
Matthias: Condi has the advantage of being able to dps boss even when spread out for bombs. Additionally it clear ice patches. But, gs ps can bring more emergency cc for getting friends out of the sacrifice. See which will benefit your group more and choose based on that.
Escort: Condi ps wins easily imo. Hold wargs for days, huge aoes to cover the entire road in. Tower team, gs is probably better, but tbh, most groups have a few of the tower team jump down in between captures, so I would still go condi ps.
KC: gs ps seems like the clear winner to me. More emergency cc is very nice here. Condi damage ramp up time hurts during the burn phase.
Xera: condi ps seems like the clear winner to me. If your part of the random team that gets teled in the second half, you can stand on pedestal and still help. Additionally you can aim scorched earth to hit xera and bloodstone shards.
war dps is alrdy pathetically low. I’ve stress this many times and I hate this fact.
War dps is hardly pathetically low. If your looking at qt’s golem numbers, that is going to give you a very inaccurate view of what damage your doing in a real raid scenario.
Here is a video of qt killing gorseval with a dps meter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yetoDwSifyE
The highest dps warrior is hitting 14k while the highest dps ele is hitting 24k. But recognize, gorseval is practically designed for staff eles. A large stationary hit box. VG is almost the opposite. Moving, medium size hit box.
Additionally, I would expect qt to play at a higher level than typical pug groups you play with. And I think most of us would expect ele dps drops off faster than warrior dps as you begin to take away skill level.
I’m not saying warrior dps is higher than eles, but its not insignificant by any means.
A lot of guides you find online are designed to maximize dps, but in reality VG is such a loose dps check, that if you are struggling to kill him, you can sacrifice dps for safety. If your actually hitting the enrage timer, most of these tips are bad. But if your hitting the enrage timer, you probably have boon up time issues and rotation issues.
If the enrage timer is not your issue then here are some general group tips:
- 5 players go to green every time. Good solution if people are getting downed and not making it to green circle.
- Smart classes to green circles only. Don’t send a gs warrior or a staff thief. Smart ranged classes like condi ps, scepter guard, condi engi, condi necro. I hate staff eles here. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a staff ele get downed in a green circle. Also, necro is very tanky here. If people are getting downed and not making it to green circles, have them swap to necro (btw flesh golem is a great long range cc for break bar issues). Condi mesmer might be good here too, haven’t tried, but interested.
-2 healers. One goes to green circles, one stays with the boss/tank. The healer on green focuses on the green circle team, and makes sure they don’t get downed. Druid is great for this, as they have the glyph of tides to deal with seekers.
-non zerker tanks are OK. I have a minstrel chrono for tanking. Its fantastic. Being able to tank a few hits without going down allows the tank to focus on the much more important aspect of positioning. Nothing will wreck a group faster than a green circle spawning in a lit section because a tank messed up. If your tank is going down, have them swap in some toughness gear.
Warrior specific tips:
-A smooth split phase is all about burst. You want to kill the blue guardian before the green guardian is even able to walk over to you. The way you do this is to make sure your group has might via bursting. With all the down time before split phase your might probably drops to 0. As soon as blue guardian spawns, pop your heal skill (5 might for the group). Go berserk if you can, and use arc divider as soon as he is no longer invulnerable. Popping fury signet for adrenaline is fine, especially if your not getting quickness, and need the attack speed boost. Use 100 blades to generate more might, as soon as the first green circle spawns, wait for 100b to finish then whirl wind through the blue guardian to the green circle, then use blade trail, then use arc divider. Make sure your entire team understands you need to burst here. You need fury, and quickness as well. If blue lives long enough to stand near green, make sure you cleave them. But honestly, if your healer is inexperienced, this is a situation you realy want to avoid.
-If your group is consistently too slow with the break bar, you can weapon swap. Reserve headbutt for every time the break bar phase happens. After headbutt, swap weapons to mace/shield, use skull cracker (non-berserk mode, it is much more cc) then shield 4 and mace 3. If he still isn’t broken, pop your fury signet go berserk mode (taunt), and use skull grinder (more cc). Is popping fury signet a dps loss? You bet. You know what is a really bad dps loss though? A green circle spawning in a lit section because the break bar took too long and the tank couldn’t move the boss.
-seeker control a problem? Use a greatsword with force+accuracy rather than force+air, and bring stomp. Is stomp a dps loss over might signet? yeah of course. But so is your tank getting downed from seekers, not moving the boss, and a green circle spawning in a lit section.
Again, most of these tips are to be used when you have an excess of dps. If your hitting the enrage timer, tune your group in the other direction.
Actually I originally shared this video specifically to demonstrate the point that regular guilds could run off-meta strategies and still be ok. 5-5 is great if your group can produce 2 good chronos/ps/druids, but if you don’t have that combination available, then improvising as best you can, can still get you kills.
Hmmm.. if I remember correctly, with no updraft, usually you can only cast glyph of storm once before the spirit phase. The 12s cd reduction wont make any difference because you won’t use the glyph during the spirit phase (save it to dps gorseval instead).
So it doesn’t really matter whether you take the cd reduction of not, but at least tempest defense will give you dps boost for like 2s at least.
This may be true, I will have to pay attention next time I am there and test it out.
I’m aware of the problems demonstrated in that video. Unfortunately that isn’t my ele play your watching, so there is only so much I can do to fix it.
This is a run done by a guild that happens to do ‘training runs’ 3 nights a week. Usually about 6 -10 of the spots are taken up by regulars, but sometimes we have players join us who have very little experience. Because of the casual nature of these runs, I don’t feel comfortable trying to critique everyone, as I would come off as a jerk most likely, and these guys are my friends. The best I can do is optimize my own personal play, and try to gently nudge everyone towards improving.
I will point out though, this group has shown good progress. A month ago we would wipe for hours at vg. We can now reliably finish off escort and vg in one or two attempts, and gorse is going down more and more reliably. If I want to get full clears quickly, I can always pug (which I did to get envoy 1 done), but seeing my group of friends progress has been a lot more meaningful to me.
Also, please don’t be critical without being constructive of that ele, as he was very generous in recording and posting the video for us, and we all appreciated that work.
Ok, thanks everyone. I will stick with the glyph buff trait.
My group generally tanks through tantrum and then breaks at the very end (which buys you an extra second or two). But we don’t currently have the classes to play 5-5, and are running 8-1-1 which is probably optimal for the classes we do have currently, so our dps is not high enough to do fast break no updrafts, but we can do slow break no updrafts. I imagine more optimal groups would find fast breaks more enjoyable, especially if their druids are not magi.
Hey guys, quick question I couldn’t find an answer to online.
For a staff ele at gorseval, is tempest defense really worth it? I know its a big 20% buff, but when you break gorseval’s bar he is only down for maybe 2 or 3 seconds? Is there up-time on the buff that I am missing?
Yes, because this forum wants the raids all to themselves, but this forum is not what matters. This is between ANet and the players, and what I propose is the easier option for ANet, and the better option for the players, whether the raiders like that or not.
I’m sorry are the people on these forums not players? I thought I was a player. You seem pretty convinced that you speak for the people, when all these other people are here speaking for themselves.
Please specifically tell me some of these differences, because I don’t see them.
Really? Have you played Fractals? Or Raids? They seem very different to me. Raids have parties of ten people, while Fractals only 5. Raids take place in the Forsaken Thicket, and have currently nine different major encounters to them, none of which are available in Fractals. Fractals have a path to a Legendary Backpack and other items, Raids offer a path to Legendary armor, and a completely different set of items. Fractals involve Agony and AR, while Raids do not have this mechanic. Honestly I don’t see much that makes them similar, other than that they are both instanced group content.
But I’ll make a deal with you, if they make new low-tier Fractals that:
1. Involve the content and enemies of the Forsaken Thicket maps.
2. Allow reasonable progress towards Envoy Armor.
3. do not require AR.
then I’ll give up on easy mode raids. Allowing 10-man teams would be nice, but not a deal-breaker.
Yes, Raids and Fractals are very different, because of the coordination required in raids. I asked you for the differences between ‘raids without complexity’ and fractals, and your answers were AR, maps/enemies, and legendary armor.
1.) AR: I agree AR is lame. But it is largely irrelevant, as you set up your characters one time, and its ignored until anet once again overhauls fractals. In fact compared to the cost of legendaries, getting enough AR is quite cheap. It is also completely absent in dungeons.
2.) Maps/enemies: Anet could make a new fractal based on the white mantle. That would be cool. They could also make a new dungeon based on the white mantle. Also cool.
3.) The only thing legendary armor gives you is stat swapping, and skins. These are both easily given to players via the old dungeon system, which made exotics so easy to obtain you could easily carry around multiple sets. They could also put new skin drops from a new white mantle based fractal. These skins could also be purchasable with fractal currencies.
What your asking for, ‘raids without complexity’ is a huge fundamental change to raids. However, all of your goals fit very well within the existing dungeon frame work, and can also fit in the existing fractal frame work.
So, if your going to try to push anet in the direction you want on the forums, I think you would be better off pushing for one of these options, as they are less of an overhaul, and more so an expansion of content. Additionally, if you made a thread like, “Anet should make a white mantle dungeon/fractal”, you would probably see a ton of support from this forum, opposed to the resistance you are experiencing.
Breaking: If you don’t have good players able to play the classes you need for a particular comp, the group won’t be good. More at 11.
Breaking: Being a sarcastic kitten and kitten posting does nothing to stop pugs from trying to stack eles on vg, when some easier to play necros would actually lead to them getting the kill.
My advocacy for effectiveness over blindly following the meta can have a positive impact, what does your post do?
His post is just poking fun at the fact that the discussion ended long ago, yet you’re still going at it.
A. Yes, we all agree that virtually any comp can be used to clear encounters.
B. We agree that meta builds are only as effective as the players behind the screen using those builds.
C. To set the definition, optimal in this case is to mean what has the highest potential for the cleanest/fastest kill. Yes, we know mileage varies, and that we are humans prone to error. But that remains true for any build that’s more than just auto attacking….looking at you thieves.
D. Most of us on this thread (if not everyone but you) agree that 5-5 is currently the most optimal comp as of the 10/18 patch. While your video showed 8-1-1 is viable for the kill it did also demonstrate that your team was minutes behind even casual paces of the folks who generated the meta. So no, we’re not saying 5-5 is the ONLY way. It’s just the FASTER way.
E. Pugs will blindly follow the meta. That’s not new to the game. Remember the 4 wars+mes? Or how about the fgs meta? Might stacking, that was a huge thing back then. You run off without 25 stack, and you got the boot. Even if your average player has no clue why the meta was decided on the way it is, said player will still adopt it blindly if he believes they’ll get some sort of advantage.
F. We’re all frustrated with Pugs, it’s happens. If you don’t like what they’re selling just make you’re own group, and I’m sure plenty of people will join (no sarcasm intended). Are we saying that other comps are complete trash? Not at all; we’re just trying to set the record straight on a thread that has an otherwise misleading subject line.
The discussion will never end because people read these forums to learn, I know I did and still do. I want to make sure players hear an argument for practically, focused on getting reliable kills, rather than only min-maxing speed.
I’m not going to discuss every bullet point because the main thing I want to say is that the “meta” is based around fastest kills. And for some reason, everyone thinks fastest = easiest. In your post, you demonstrate this mindset by saying ,“cleanest/fastest kill”.
Pugs are often in the position of wiping to mechanics etc, and so a stronger emphasis on defensive boons may be worth while for them. 5-5 is a fine comp to do this within, but the entire meta discussion is based around the idea that offensive boons are extremely valuable, and places relatively little emphasis on defensive boons like protection, resistance, and even stability. While the defensive boons may be more helpful to inexperienced groups.
This content already exists, in dungeons, fractals, and open world pve.
Nope. If that were true then people wouldn’t be asking. The fact that people are asking is indication that what you say is not true. While there may be some similarities between an easier raid and those types of content, there are also very clear differences. Those differences may not matter to you, but they matter for the people who are complaining. The fact that their complaints don’t apply to you does not mean that their complaints do not matter.
If you want raids without complexity, you should be pushing for new fractals, not new raids.
If people wanted more Fractals, they would ask for more Fractals. The fact that they’re asking for more accessible Raids should be taken as a clue that they want more accessible Raids.
Please specifically tell me some of these differences, because I don’t see them.
If you think you can’t kill boss w/o ts, why not use ts?
I’m not sure what his point is, but mine would be that if there were a less complex variation of the boss fight, then you wouldn’t need TS for a pug to beat it. This would make it more convenient to many players.
This content already exists, in dungeons, fractals, and open world pve. Raids are suppose to be difficult, with a higher amount of coordination and complexity. If you want raids without complexity, you should be pushing for new fractals, not new raids.
everyone who complains about not being able to join raids seems to forget all about guilds. There are many guilds that do scheduled training and loot raids, which is very accessible.
I also I see many lfg groups that don’t check insights or gear, but you’ll be less likely to actually get a kill.
And people who say things like this do not understand what people mean when they say raids are inaccessible. They feel that what works for them must work equally well for anyone else. They are wrong.
I’d say they’re right.
But hey what do i know….
You can join a guild
- 150 LI or gtfo
Use LFG to join a Group
- 150 LI or gtfo
Use LFG to create a Group
- yeah except it requires comm tag and ts
Use your FL to pull together 10 people who are likeminded
- getting 10 ppl together at the same time is extremely hard actually. I have pvp team and we can barely manage to practice once in a while because everyone is busy.
Just want to clear up a misconception, you can make a raid squad without a tag. Also you don’t have to have ts, just find 9 other ppl who don’t want to use ts.
and wipe over and over again?
If you think you can’t kill boss w/o ts, why not use ts?
everyone who complains about not being able to join raids seems to forget all about guilds. There are many guilds that do scheduled training and loot raids, which is very accessible.
I also I see many lfg groups that don’t check insights or gear, but you’ll be less likely to actually get a kill.
And people who say things like this do not understand what people mean when they say raids are inaccessible. They feel that what works for them must work equally well for anyone else. They are wrong.
I’d say they’re right.
But hey what do i know….
You can join a guild
- 150 LI or gtfo
Use LFG to join a Group
- 150 LI or gtfo
Use LFG to create a Group
- yeah except it requires comm tag and ts
Use your FL to pull together 10 people who are likeminded
- getting 10 ppl together at the same time is extremely hard actually. I have pvp team and we can barely manage to practice once in a while because everyone is busy.
Just want to clear up a misconception, you can make a raid squad without a tag. Also you don’t have to have ts, just find 9 other ppl who don’t want to use ts.
Breaking: If you don’t have good players able to play the classes you need for a particular comp, the group won’t be good. More at 11.
Breaking: Being a sarcastic kitten and kitten posting does nothing to stop pugs from trying to stack eles on vg, when some easier to play necros would actually lead to them getting the kill.
My advocacy for effectiveness over blindly following the meta can have a positive impact, what does your post do?
Nice proof you got there.
Here is my guild killing gorse no updrafts this Thursday night. Incredibly non-meta composition. We chose this comp because we felt it was best with the classes we had available and who was comfortable with what.
8-1-1
chrono-rev-ps-condi ranger-ele-ele-ele
druid (magi)
ele (magi)I think this video demonstrates that regular players can get kills without strictly following the meta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JSW8aExLygYes it can be done with any composition, nobody denied that, so what is the point?
Oh sorry, forgot to mention, this group tried no updrafts with 5-5 and it was not pretty. The point is evidence to back ops claim that 5-5 may not be as good in practice as other comps. A typical player enters a raid with 9 other typical players, the best ways to get kills is to adapt to what your team has.
qt can post video of their 10 (exceptionally good) players clearing with 5-5 all day. But if your team only has 1 chrono who is good, and then 9 crappy chronos alts it doesn’t count for much.
edit: just to clear up, im not saying 5-5 is bad, im just saying it really isn’t that big of a deal what you run.
You’re still saying the strength of the composition has to do with the strength of the individuals.
The fact of that is, the better the players in the squad, the smoother it will be. Regardless of the comp used.
Yes, but its not as simple as “player x is good”, its “player x is good at class y”. If you don’t have players good at the classes for 5-5 then 5-5 isn’t going to be good. Again, if you don’t have 2 players who know how to play chrono, 5-5 isn’t going to net you much. As I said above, you have to adapt your group. If you want to get kills, play to your strengths. Don’t try to play your weaknesses just so that you can fit into a perfect meta box.
Nice proof you got there.
Here is my guild killing gorse no updrafts this Thursday night. Incredibly non-meta composition. We chose this comp because we felt it was best with the classes we had available and who was comfortable with what.
8-1-1
chrono-rev-ps-condi ranger-ele-ele-ele
druid (magi)
ele (magi)I think this video demonstrates that regular players can get kills without strictly following the meta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JSW8aExLygYes it can be done with any composition, nobody denied that, so what is the point?
Oh sorry, forgot to mention, this group tried no updrafts with 5-5 and it was not pretty. The point is evidence to back ops claim that 5-5 may not be as good in practice as other comps. A typical player enters a raid with 9 other typical players, the best ways to get kills is to adapt to what your team has.
qt can post video of their 10 (exceptionally good) players clearing with 5-5 all day. But if your team only has 1 chrono who is good, and then 9 crappy chronos alts it doesn’t count for much.
edit: just to clear up, im not saying 5-5 is bad, im just saying it really isn’t that big of a deal what you run.
Nice proof you got there.
Here is my guild killing gorse no updrafts this Thursday night. Incredibly non-meta composition. We chose this comp because we felt it was best with the classes we had available and who was comfortable with what.
8-1-1
chrono-rev-ps-condi ranger-ele-ele-ele
druid (magi)
ele (magi)
I think this video demonstrates that regular players can get kills without strictly following the meta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JSW8aExLyg
I cant tell you anything about what is optimal but I can tell you what we did last night at gorse that worked well
8-1-1
chrono-ps-rev-ele-ele-ele-ele-ele
druid
druid
We met the dps checks to do no updrafts pretty easily. Rev was pulsing might,fury,regen, boon duration. Chrono would drop time warp for initial rotation and then do regular rotations from there. War was strength runes + dumplings.
We would not break his bar at all, chrono would distort the final tick of damage, and 2 magi druids would heal constantly through the break bar phase. Healing was so high, some of the eles would even use ice bow 4 during his break bar phase. I wasn’t that crazy, but I would do lava font, aa, and overload.
TLDR: It really doesn’t matter that much.
Hey OP, sorry your having a rough time.
I noticed you mentioned green circles at VG a few times. The ‘meta’ strategies are great, but often they are more so geared towards quickly killing a boss, rather than reliably killing a boss. Here is my recommendation, send 5 players to green circles, every time, instead of the minimum 4. The dps check at VG is THAT forgiving, you can send an extra player and still be ok. They should still be ranged dps though.
Ideally if you are running a mirror comp, group 2 is all condi (maybe something like: condi ps – druid (magi is fine) – support mesmer – necro – necro). And then, just send all of group 2 to green circles.
My point is, the best way to make pugging easier, is to adapt the elite strategies used by the best guilds, to better work with the less elite players you typically have in pugs. Sometimes this means giving up dps for leniency in mechanics. Not always though, sometimes high group dps really is the way to make things easiest (KC is a prime example). But for VG, the timer is lenient enough, that you can bring survivability.
You sound too stuck on the ‘meta’ idea. The guides on meta battle and the like are rough guides. You can’t run the same build at every encounter and expect it to do well. Difficult content requires you to adapt.
In fact, the generic meta builds are very often not the best build for a specific fight. This fight needs a stun break. Mai Trin? Well if your team isn’t clensing you (as a warrior) you need a condi clense (shake it off decent option), and signet of healing is probably better than blood reckoning because of the emergency resistance it offers. If the group clense is really bad you might even need to run the defense trait line for clensing ire. The true pug meta is whatever gets your group through the boss.
Love the opaque floors, sooooo much easier to see what is going on.
As for this:
I died from having no stun break.. I’m not sure what happened. I got launched by boss or something and I was stunned literally for like 10s. The tile under me blinked for a couple secs then vanished, I was still stunned but was like wow I’m lucky cos I was midway between two tiles and I thot I could make it.. maybe.
But no, that stun is way too long. I feel kittened for playing a class like warrior that doesn’t have easy access to stun break except for utility, I like how almost every other class has a stun break on their wep skills or something except for warr. Like holy kitten was that an excessively long stun. Either trim it down or help fix our class lol I mean the solid tiles were kinda an unnecessary change tbh it wasn’t that hard to see the tiles blinking even when u were focused on dps’ing and plus the aesthetics took a dive too imo, but that melee knockback is like way hard to anticipate and its not as forgiving either as his other attacks. So pls do something abt this cos it’s embarrassing that any1 should die over this lol
Suggestion: bring a stun break.
Can we please just have all buffs and boons applied to 10 players in pve? Like banners effect 10, grace of the land given to 10 players, quickness shared with 10 players, etc.
Right now, groups are going to start at 2 war, 2 druid, 2 mes, and that leaves 4 spots that are somewhat free to play with (exactly the same as previous 4-4-2 comp). If all skills just effected the whole party, we would only need 1 war 1 mes and 1 druid to cover the big offensive group buffs.
When we all proposed this idea pre-HOT Anet said they didn’t want to create a single super group necessary for raids, but look at how restrictive things are now.
I think you are misunderstanding me. I am not saying I want to see other classes as dps. I am saying that if you look at the majority of the raid mechanics, they are always about surviving, and dps is handled mostly through class abilities etc, and very little damage is attributed to raid mechanics.
I’m saying it could be interesting to have raid mechanics that are for damage rather than surviving. Maybe with a hard enrage timer, so that missing mechanics is still problematic.
Hey everyone, I wanted to discuss something I have observed during my raiding experiences. And see what the community thought about this.
In raids, Necros filling the DPS role often have a lot more encounter specific tools. For example, epi bouncing is the most commonly talked about tactic. But additionally, there is using the environment (like at matthias) and condi transfer to boost personal dps. Compare this to say, a thief, that sorta uses the same rotation at every boss, every phase, regardless of group composition.
It just got me thinking about how the role of a dps could be more than just using the same rotation everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want Anet to change the existing raids, but as the team continues to expand the content, I think they should consider how to make more diverse content, that really feels different.
I would like to see a couple encounters where the dps roles have more to do with encounter specific mechanics. What do you guys think? We already see this a little bit at trio, but unfortunately, I think a lot of people don’t care because trio is so easy. What are some ideas that could work and be fun?
meta pug tactics have never been about speed, they are all about:
-consistency (no wiping)
-no communication necessary
If you want fast runs, don’t pug. If you want reliable runs that don’t involve wiping, run a pug carry build. It happens to be the case that necro has fantastic pug carrying ability in fractals, just as ps war does in dungeons. Remember 4 warrior 1 mesmer meta? lol. People love stacking a bunch of the best pug carry builds and calling it meta.
Also I want to stress in case Anet is reading this, necro is not OP, the reason necro is used is because fractals are practically designed for necro. The way to remedy this is to make more fractals that are more favorable to the melee users.
I really enjoy the fractals blurring together. I think its fun, and I enjoy the randomness. I also exclusively play my necro in fractals now. I probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much if I was still using my ps there.
So for reference I predominantly pug raids (started this summer), I have about 35 total kills, so I’m certainly not an experienced vet, but I’m not exactly a rookie either.
If you are saying that groups are going to make you go to the golem and demonstrate your dps, I have never seen that happen. Literally, never once.
What they may be referring to is your ability to do a smart rotation of your skills in a raid fight. If you are doing proper rotations, you could try to reach the numbers given by qt here: http://qtfy.enjin.com/dps They explain their conditions.
You should try to reach numbers close to the given numbers. However, you must keep in mind that they are completely min maxed, including the agony infusions and expensive food (which you should use for raids, but may not want to waste on just testing). You are going to be 100 power/condi damage below or more most likely. Additionally, I have heard that qt likes to do these tests multiple times, and then report the absolute highest dps rather than the average. If your getting within 10% of the stated numbers, you are probably doing a correct rotation.
However, the biggest thing I want to emphasize to you is to understand your role in the raid. For example, at VG an ele might get put on green circles team. That ele will most likely want to bring lightning flash instead of a dps boosting utility.
The point is, doing a proper rotation is certainly part of raiding, but it is far from your only responsibility.