Guild Wars 2

Guardian is actually meta for large hit-box bosses. Their DPS for large hit-boxes is 2nd only to ele.

Of course pugging as DPS (role) is a lot harder than pugging as support/tank.

I wouldn’t recommend pugging raid until you at least someone experienced with the encounter being pugged. This is because guild groups often have no patients for PUGs. At least the group I run with, we would kick PUG if their DPS is below PS or they are noticeably messing up mechanics. While for guildie, we would explain and compensate for their shortcomings.

Join a raiding guilds.

Raid is a form of commitment. Even for non-set groups, for every raid session, you are committing yourself to 2-3 hours with 9 other people.

Problem with LFG is there is no expectation for PUGs from LFG. Very often PUGs would leave in the middle of fight or quit because the group doesn’t meet their expectation.

Expansion technology – mount’s skill 1 is for entering combat as well.

DavidGo.1729:

I really enjoy playing at range but being self-sufficient while still able to contribute to a team.

You should let go of that mentality for Raid and Fractals in this game:

• Druid and Chrono support abilities are mostly melee range, so standing far from them means they would not be able to heal/support you
• Many raid/fractal bosses have punishing mechanics targeted at the furthest away player. For fractals, a few bosses have teleport skills which are annoying to deal with for teammates. For raid, groups often assign someone to be the sacrificial lamb for these attacks.
• Generally you also want to prevent boss from moving a lot, so classes that deal most of their damage from AoE won’t lose DPS because boss can move outside of their AoE. One common way groups do this is to have everyone stand in close range to the boss. Having player unnecessarily in range increases the chance boss might move around.

You can still use ranged weapon in melee, as most people do in those situations. Condi warrior & druid’s meta builds are all ranged weapons.

P.S. These mechanics might change with the expansions tho.

Condi PS warrior is more desired, but not significantly for it to matter.

All the builds now are for Raid and high-end Fractals. No one care about other PvE content, as they are mostly faceroll with any recent builds.

• https://qtfy.eu/builds/ has curated builds for Raid and Fractal by a top guild. Their builds are considered optimal.
• https://metabattle.com/ has a bunch of community voted builds, it contains some useful but sub-optimal builds. (e.g. more facerolly less min/max) The site also lags behind a bit after patch.

This “bug” actually made the encounter significantly harder as it is more difficult to deal with the disappearing platform when he is on the edge. Maybe it is worthwhile for future “challenge mote” or whatnot.

They had a system like that before HoT where the levels are not tied to the scales. You would get 3 random fractals.

People would re-roll for the easy ones (usually mossman) for progression and reward, in the end not bothering learning the mechanics.

Feanor, there is a screenshot of the skillbar in action on Reddit somewhere.

I think using only 2 attunements is fine. Most of the rotations only involve 2 currently anyway. You would use the others in special situations, usually for CC/emergency healing. I guess in the expansion, you would just forgo those options.

I don’t think we were talking about the same thing.

When I said “doesn’t meant it has to be a web app” I was referring to the conversation about the amount of in-memory data being enormous.

When I said “ArenaNet had this in mind” I was referring to this ticket of theirs

Guardian has a lot of utility. I would recommend learning to use those, especially there are two guardians.

Most pug guardians I see just camp their DPS setup, and offers no utility to the group. Because they often camp melee, they would die more than my ele.

Guardians can:

• block/reflect projectiles
• tank mobs with mace/spirit weapons
• group mobs with GS/trap
• knockback with hammer
• protection and aegis for the group
• might with staff

HTTP+JSON doesn’t meant it has to be a web app. It can be a CRON job that periodically curls or a Graphite integration.

Interesting that ArenaNet had this in mind already.

I would like to suggest a potential LFG API. The reason for this is for developers to be able to build tools on top of it for the purpose of forming groups.

• Tools for better searching/filtering LFG
• Tool that provides ETA for certain LFG group (e.g. how long it takes to form a AC group at 5pm?)
• Tools for creating groups with certain group composition (e.g. auto-update LFG text to reflect group compoistion)
• Non-transient LFG tool (e.g. show me all the users who LFG’ed for XYZ in Achievement Hunter in the past hour)

For dungeon and low-level fractal (t1-t3), it doesn’t matter what build you run. As long as you know the optimal rotation of your build and you know the mechanics, you can breeze thru it.

For T4 fractals, its better to go condi/viper necro for pugging.

What FrostDraco is getting at is that current necro’s best build can’t compete with the optimal meta. So if you have 2-3 friends you always play with, you should re-roll and create a group with meta composition (e.g. ele, chrono and PS), and your combined damage would be 2x that of a group of same number of necros.

Ensign.2189:

If you want to approach it from a macro perspective, be very explicit about your assumptions about the relative growth rates of the three asset classes (gold, coins, hard leather) over time – both flows and stocks – as well as your assumptions about their respective elasticities and how demand changes over time.

Which set of assumptions is necessary for your model to hold?

I am probably not going to be able to model it with such detail (both because of data available and my own time). Maybe someone working at Anet would be able to? And potentially blog about it?

Ensign.2189:

If inflation is positive. Is inflation positive? Why should we expect inflation to be positive?

From a boring monetarist perspective, inflation is positive if the net rate of currency generation (relative to the stock of currency) exceeds the net rate of non-currency asset generation (relative to the stock of assets).

Is Sliverwastes farming inflationary? That is, is the ratio of gold to assets that it generates higher than the ratio of gold to assets in the game as a whole? If it is lower, efficient Silverwastes farming would be deflationary, not inflationary.

You are right. I assumed the economy has ongoing inflation based on my prior experience with earlier generations of online games. However, after thinking about it, most of the value we get from loot in this game are not from NPCs vendors, but instead are from other players.

I have been thinking about pulling the API, and try to measure the inflation. Maybe I will look into it.

Funny in real life, the monetary policies are generally gear towards promoting economic activities, which increases circulation of goods and thus overall availability. In addition, you can rent out “hoarded” assets in real life, thus making it more accessible.

However those facilities are not available in an MMO.

Ensign.2189:

That…no, that’s not how asset pricing works.

There isn’t any interest or rent producing capital in the game. Expectations about the price trajectories of various assets are priced into their market prices.

I.E., if it was certain Mystic Coins were going to appreciate in the future, people would start buying them now at higher prices – until the price is high enough that people didn’t see any more upside to holding coins over holding gold anymore.

I would argue that you’re cycles of falling risk premiums (as A.Net does nothing to address the fundamentals), followed by rising risk premiums (as prices spike and the risk of intervention rises).

Interesting perspective. You are approaching it from a micro-economic perspective. My argument approached it from a macro-economic and behavioral perspective. I feel, micro approach might be difficult to apply because people value utility and opportunity cost differently from real-life.

Also when I said “end-of-life”, i am actually referring to time at which the game is near the end, but actual time can be better predicted with micro approaches.

Ensign.2189:

Overall, though, no, there’s no guarantee that there are assets that will outperform gold in the long run. There’s no guarantee of inflation in the long run, and there have been plenty of short run periods of deflation.

If there is inflation, the inflation-measuring basket would outperform gold.

There might be short-term deflation, but I am doubtful there is long-term deflation since farms like Silverwaste/Fractal40 don’t suddenly become less productive.

We all know that people complain about Mystic Coin and Hardened Leather prices a lot. Anet came out and said people are holding onto them because they are “hoarding” them. However as someone with an Economics major, I am not sure if that’s the correct way to characterize those people.

Store of Value vs Hoarding

In economics, there is the concept of store of value, which are assets like “savings account” and “retirement fund” that you use to keep the value of your wealth as time passes, usually against inflation or other economic risks.

Because Mystic Coins and Hardened Leather Sections have had limited supply and a steady demand since HoT, their values have steadily increased since HoT. If you were to look at the gw2spidy charts for them for “all” timeframe (Mystic Coin, Hardened Leather), they are basically upward sloped curves.

It is obvious from those charts that since the release of HoT, those two assets have been better “stores of value” than gold. Thus the aforementioned “hoarders” are not hoarding per se, but are in fact “informed investors”. And they are not holding onto those coins/leather as “speculative investment”, but are holding onto them in lieu of holding gold.

I can say with certainty that as long as there is inflation, there would always be some item (or collection of items) that is better “store of value” than gold. (This is self-evident if you understand inflation from an academic standpoint.)

Going forward

Now what can we do here? IMO, our behavior should be dependent upon our expectation of Anet’s future action.

So what can Anet do here about Mystic Coin and Leather? As an economics major, I can list a few scenarios (not an exhaustive list):

• Anet does not intervene – In this scenario, it would be prudent for everyone to use those items as “store of value”. Price of those item would continue to increase until end-of-life for the game. There might be short-term bubbles, but that won’t dampen the increase of price of coin/leather in the long-run.

• Anet intervenes directly hard: demand is sharply fulfilled by supply – In the short-term there would be a “bubble” for leather/coin and their prices would collapse. In the long-term, another “store of value” would likely emerge.

• Anet intervenes directly softly: demand is slowly fulfilled by supply – Depending on the severity of the intervention, those items could continue to be “stores of value”, but a more lucrative “store of value” might emerge.

• Anet introduces a 3rd item that’s better “store of value” than coin/leather – the 3rd item would slowly supplant Mystic Coin and Leather as “store of value” of choice, but all their price would continue to increase relative to gold. The slope of Coin and Leather might be flatter in the long run due to distribution of demand.

They are better off supporting Xbox/PS4/Switch/Linux first than supporting DirectX11+.

Both require significant engine work, workflow changes, and asset remaster. Supporting other platforms would introduce new market, while adding DX11 support would only benefit existing user, so is just throwing away money.

You could potentially have your engine support DX11+ without taking advantage of the new fangles in DX11+ (new shaders, multiadapter, etc), but in that case there’s no point at all.

Not every farm needs to be for gold.

• Lake Doric has leather farm, whose effectiveness would fluctuate based on leather prices.
• Bitterfrost Frontier has winterberry farm for ascended trinkets.

HoT maps revolve around meta, so they are not repeatable enough for farms, but people do do them when the meta is up.

That’s going to fragment the community, which is bad for incoming new players. They are going to see empty maps with no old players.

The game’s PvP meta is not self-evolving. (i.e. “rock” meta would lead to “paper” meta, “paper” meta would lead to “scissors” meta, etc) So the meta is uninteresting/stale.

For PvE, the meta is fine for every except Rev. If you think necro is a problem, you either have been 1) listening to Brazil whining too much or 2) reading too much into qT’s benchmark. Most raiders wouldn’t even come close to doing qT’s benchmark damage, so it doesn’t matter. ANet could easily make necro in-demand without balance changes by designing next wing to be Adds heavy.

Most of the season 1 content that were 5-man has already been re-purposed as fractals. The ones that’s left were either solo or zerg, so they would need to be redesigned

So what you are saying is that discrepancy is entirely because of network latency?

Does that mean the UI doesn’t compensate for lag at all when it displays the cooldown number? Doesn’t that mean if you are suffering even manageable lag (say 300ms), your DPS would suffer.

Last few days, I realized that there is a slight lag in skillbar/casting bar due to animation that is significant enough that if you train yourself to memorize the expected cooldown/cast delay between skills and simply press the keyboard without waiting for UI to update, you would actually improve your DPS by a significant amount.

This is readily apparent for classes whose rotation involves weapon swapping and equivalent. The DPS difference is as much as 2000-3000 at the dps golem, which is like 10%.

I feel this shouldn’t be the case, as it increases skill cap for the sake of UI animation.
Does anyone feel the same way? Anyone know ways to remedy it (e.g. graphics setting)?

That’s how all armor/weapon collections are.

It could be a localhsot:8080 style implementation. This way it is more accessible to developers, as anyone with HTTP JSON experience in any language/platform would know how to use it.

However, I am not sure if Anet has that kind architecture in place.

Crinn.7864:

voidvector.2780:

FrostDraco.8306:

Wrong. My necro can survive both of these attacks without death magic or shroud.

Like I said, if you are dying to either of these its because you failed the mechanic. As for the 15% phase, you will still die anyway because of the feild outside of the bubble, which does % hp dmg.

Elitist much? “I can survive it, so that must be the universal truth”

If you want others to learn and become experienced with the mechanics, you must provide them the road to get there. Telling new players to ALWAYS run min-max “flavor of the month” build is not the answer.

How is proper information Elitism?

You aren’t helping any new players by promoting bad habits. The faster a players gets used to the idea of dodging mechanics rather than taking them to the face, the better off that player will be.

I would agree if it were a more forgiving fight where rez’ing other players is easy, but that’s not the case in 100cm.

How you suppose they learn when if they were to die, they either:

• they miss out on most of fight, thus not able to experience/practice other mechanics?
• they snowball the whole team to a wipe?

ADDED: Also playing with the build variants, you would also learn about other trait lines, thus insight into “build crafting”, something blindly following meta wouldn’t get you.

FrostDraco.8306:

Wrong. My necro can survive both of these attacks without death magic or shroud.

Like I said, if you are dying to either of these its because you failed the mechanic. As for the 15% phase, you will still die anyway because of the feild outside of the bubble, which does % hp dmg.

Elitist much? “I can survive it, so that must be the universal truth”

If you want others to learn and become experienced with the mechanics, you must provide them the road to get there. Telling new players to ALWAYS run min-max “flavor of the month” build is not the answer.

Zedek.8932:

What’s wrong with you people picking something and then change your mind like that? .. How come that your interests shifted so much you create this thread and it goes on and on?

Cause you can’t play Fashion Wars 2 with female charr or asura. With the exception of gem store outfits and a few armor types, Anet just slapped male version onto females of those races.

My mind didn’t change, I still want to play Fashion Wars 2 on those if possible. It is just that my expectation wasn’t met.

Take for example the Cabalist, which is one of my favorite armor for female human, sylvari and norn: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cabalist_armor
The charr and asura female versions are no different from male version. I don’t like the male version of Cabalist.

EDIT: add example

In my experience (North America), the maps around rush hour (evening-midnight) tend to be T4 maps. They would sometimes fail to reach T4.

I feel most maps need someone to tell people to spread out. (e.g. yelling at them to defend other camps, ping them waypoints so they split on bosses)

Setz.9675:

a race change would reset all your story.

I am willing to redo my 1-80 story without any reward for race change.

There is nothing wrong with using Necro as a learning tool. Necro allow you to learn many more fights without dying and dragging down the group. However, you should still learn the mechanics and learn to avoid it. Don’t become complacent.

savacli.8172:

The one-shot is consistent; it’ll one shot everyone regardless of how tanky you are.

There are at least two mechanics you can survive with Death Magic, while with other variants you would likely be downed.

• “Downward stab, shockwave, hallucination” attack
• “charging across the platform” attack during <15% phase

Though in both cases you can only survive 1 extra hit even with Death Magic, so if you mess up twice in the same attack chain, you would still go down.

Hjorje.9453:

I honestly don’t see a purpose in what this thread is wanting. The amount of resources ANET would have to put towards this wouldn’t justify the limited market the change would create. Plus it would pull resources away from other areas of development and for me that wouldn’t be worth it.

And such is the attitude of Guild Wars 2 community:

• Player 1: Anet is wasting time developing e-sport
• Player 2: Anet is wasting time developing raid
• Player 3: Anet is wasting time developing outfits
• Player 4: Anet is wasting time developing WvW
• Player 5: Anet is wasting time developing API
• Player 6: Anet is wasting time developing gem store functions

FrostDraco.8306:

If you get once shot by the final boss in 100 CM its because you failed to do the mechanic.

Yes, in a perfect world, everyone would’ve already learn the mechanics and be able to execute them perfectly.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’m not against the idea; I just can’t imagine how it would be a good business decision by ANet to make it happen.

They implemented in WoW, and charge $25 dollars. The same arguments were made about breaking quest log, breaking story content, vs re-roll, etc.

Considering how many people use the makeover kit, it is in the same realm of business decision.

Hardcore players are not going to care, and are going to tell people to re-roll. Even if hardcore players use it they are going to pay with in-game gold. Casual players (Fashion Wars 2 players) are the ones going to be the major revenue generators of this. Mid-core players like myself are somewhere in between.

There are 3 variants of that build. The rotation is pretty much the same.

Curse and Reaper specializations are set in stone, but the 3rd line can be Soul Reaping, Blood or Death Magic.

Soul Reaping – more DPS
Blood Magic – more support (Vampiric aura, Last Rites, tele-rez)
Death Magic – more tanky, usually beneficial against one-shot kill situations (e.g. last boss in 100cm)

You can find the other variants here: http://qtfy.eu/build/necromancer

To ArenaNet, I would pay $20 per character for this feature or the profession change feature. Thank you.

To people arguing re-rolling, it would destroy birthday and “/age” stats on characters. Most of the character I want to race/profession change has 3+ years gameplay on it. While other people don’t care about playtime on characters and are willing to settle for creating new characters, people like me do, thus I am willing to shell out hard cash for it.

For most of PvE, there is no role. It is “every man for himself” in terms of healing/buffing. However, roles do exist in high-level PvE (T4 fractal, raid):

• DPS – could be power or condi
• Tank – mostly chrono
• Healing Support – mostly druid, occasionally ele
• Buffing support – usually people would ask for specific build (druid for gotl, ps warrior, dps chrono)

In WvW, you have roles like:

• Roamer
• Zerg front-line
• Zerg mid-line
• Zerg back-line
• Scout

In sPvP, stuff like “bunker” and “healer” can be considered roles, but that’s only if the team runs that strategy.

Having run both ele and necro in T4 for two weeks now, I found that ele is better in encounters where boss doesn’t move around or boss mechanics is relatively simple because ele can easily do full rotation in those cases thus yielding high DPS. Necro is better in most other situations especially with random group composition (pugging or ragtag guild group) as ele would either have hard time keeping rotation or hard time aiming ground-target skills. Of course, with a “decked out” group composition (i.e. chrono & druid supporting ele), some of the more complex boss mechanics can totally be ignored, ele would be better than necro in those situations.

As for power vs condi, I have gone with condi because I already have full set ascended power gear on my ele. The reason I chose to gear necro was to allow myself to swap gears between the two characters in the future (for power necro or viper ele).

What is KP?

If it is the special decoration item dropped by each bosses, then I might have messed.

Hi, I am a novice raider with low LI. Seeing as raid PUGs are asking for 200+ LIs these days, I want to ask:

• How many LIs can you farm a week?
• What is the best way to farm LI?

The story line with the anomaly and new events tied to that. The bandits and new PvE bosses. The inquest story line and its events and achievements. Bloodstone crazed creatures. Transfer chaser. Caladbolg crafting story. Ember Bay and a story section (with achieves and new items to get). Rifts and anomalies. A Crack in the Ice with its new map, achievements and items. The Head of the Snake with its new map, story, achievements and items. As well as festivals; Halloween, Lunar holiday, SAB.

With the exception of SAB, everything else were from a month ago.

; Do you imagine there are employees lazing around with nothing to do? That only the ‘engineering’ team works on in-game content?

No, I work in the software industry. There is something call “critical path” in software projects, whereby any delay of it would cause a delay in delivery of the whole product. Engineering are generally on the critical path because they cannot be cut from the product (cause it is a software, duh). On the other hand, supporting elements of the product can be reshuffled. For example, for design resources, instead of creating new models for mobs, you can reuse existing ones.

Of course, Anet could’ve mis-allocated and it is the engineers who are lazing around currently. In that case, they can’t remedy their “content drought” in the way I suggested, but they should expect cleaner code and more features in the future.

Is guardian capable of sustained healing? I am not aware of any builds.

I don’t really consider protection/aegis as healing. If those are considered, then we would need to include mesmer which can spit out a lot of boons and distortion.

> Some enjoy them, some feel the lore should be included in-game, rather than out.

Unfortunately the latter requires engineering resource, which would further delay development of expansion/living story/etc.

> The rest of your post assumes that those complaints are accurate.

My post is not only about the complaint, but also about the “content drought”. The current “content drought” is readily apparent and mentioned by WoodenPotatoes and various GW2 caster that’s part of TeaTime.

They do, however the last one I saw was the one from January about MomoCon.

I think those can be produced relatively quickly (in 1-2 weeks w/non-engineering resource), and can be released during content drought.

I have seen numerous complains by other players about lacking communication by ArenaNet in the past few weeks. I understand that game content-related communication is difficult or dangerous as it takes developers’ time which is precious.

I want to point out that there are a lot of non-game content related communication that ArenaNet can carry out, most of which could be done by social media managers, story editors or GMs.

Some general ideas

• Lore entry about current/past event (see below)
• Comic about current/past event (see below)
• Concept art showcase of existing game content
• GM run events (e.g. keg brawl or basket brawl with small prices)

Short story/comic ideas

• story about Logan Thackeray packing his luggage to leave DR
• story about Logan Thackeray’s first day on the job as Pact Commander
• story about Seraph/Ministry inspectors doing cleanup at Caudecuas’ mansion
• story about Aurene making a mess in Auric Basin
• story about various Norn spirits and their past deeds
• story about lives as student in asura colleges
• story about various charr warband/farrar

A lot of those could also later be incorporated into the game as in-game books or drawings.

There are currently 3 classes capable of sustained PvE healing:

Druid > Elementalist > Revenant

Druid offers best support (other buffs) even though ele can offer higher healing. Ele is used in less organized groups (e.g. PUGs, first clears) to make certain bosses more faceroll-y.

Revenant is not in the current raid meta, but has builds from previous meta. Usable in T4 Fractals.

You can double click on the item in Buy window. So just move the Buy window so the item would be right below the Yes button after you click it. That way you can spam click LMB.

This was how people bought Obsidian Shards / Icy Runestone before they implemented current buy window.

Window should probably be updated.

I know it would be difficult to implement new weapon type since ANet would need to go back to add a new weapon to all the existing skin types. However, as title suggest, we can implement fist combat without needing to deal with this.

Thematically this is possible for almost all classes with exception of maybe the engineer, and would reduce the design cost of having to add a weapon type.

For example thematically this could be:

• Warrior/thief – boxer/brawler
• Guardian – monk
• Ranger – survivalist
• Ele/mesmer/necro – direct magic manipulator

What do you guys think?