Guild Wars 2

Fully ranged play is viable for open world, and even in dungeons if you have a competent group and you know how to buff them. Also if you are resorting to melee because you need a dps boost, GS is not the right call. Although I haven’t done (or seen) any number crunching done after the rework to Maul and the hilt bash, GS is still a bit slow and feels defensive.

Long story short: full power longbow works for casual stuff.

Ayrilana.1396:

This thread is pretty much another raids complaint thread in a thinly veiled disguise. Your post about the title being “misleading” really has nothing to do with this thread. Read the linked thread(s) if you want answers to those questions.

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. I personally haven’t been around long enough to know what the game looked like at launch, but the things I hear about the “old” GW2 seem remarkably similar to what I hear about the current game.

I pug 8 to 16 dungeon paths daily for 1 or 2 frequenter pops. I do it mostly as a place to practice some of my more group-oriented rotations in a setting slightly less meaningless than an open-world mob (as in I can actually observe if a specific party member is too far to get a certain buff, etc).

In those 8 to 16 paths, I’d say a solid majority (at least 3 out of 5 players in the party) either

(1) proudly run some sort of non-meta build and insist on letting everyone know, or
(2) are brand new and have no clue how to read tooltips, and their “build” is just a hodgepodge mess of abilities and non-synergetic traits.

Most of the players in category (1) seem to be seasoned vets, or at least are committed enough to the game to be sick of the meta concepts. I actually add many players of type (2) to my friends list, and surprisingly many stick around and make it to be solidly experienced players.

This makes me assume that for the vast majority of content, people are still doing whatever the hell they want, using whatever weapons they want, and doing fine.

This, to me, is what GW2 was. I don’t think that’s changed. I’m frankly amazed at the effort some posters seem to put forth in casting raiding as a threat to this. To me, it just sounds like “raids are too hard for me, and I don’t like that such a thing exists in my favorite game.”

I’ve never found AoE to be much of a problem.

Viper condi druid, running A/T with quickdraw basically has great bonfire uptime. With the spike trap and roots, I’m spreading fire and tons of bleeding around, not to mention continuously immobilizing enemies. Sure there might be other superior aoe builds on other classes, but you have plenty of aoe tools:

1: SB #2, while best used stacked right on an enemy hitbox, pierces naturally without any traiting. so if you have mobs clumped up when you use it, you tend to see lots of green ticks form.

2: Torch #5: already discussed – with quickdraw, has a very high uptime.

3: Axe #2: splitblade acts much like SB #2, in that you want to toss it out at melee range to land 5 stacks on one target, but it naturally pierces.

4: Combos using your own bonfire: the aforementioned SB #2 and axe #2 each have a good chance of turning into piercing, flaming projectiles. 5 of them. Given how long you can stand in your own bonfire due to quickdraw uptime benefits, this is far from negligible.

5: Pet choice: while I tend to run lynx for single targets, sometimes I break out a drake for more consistent aoe performance. I favor the marsh drake for its bouncing poison f2, simply because I cover bleeding and burning pretty well from my own ability set.

edit: forgot about combo fields with bonfire

I killed him pre-nerf on my full viper condi druid, and I downed several times but didn’t find it unmanageable. Like others have mentioned, I just ran in circles tossing shards to cc, made sure to pop the counter magic every time it showed up, ignored most adds, etc. I also laid down constant burning, bleeding, and poisons so that did a lot of the work for me as I ran nonstop.

I found the fight a ton easier on my condi cancer thief though. Endless evades that simultaneously laid down heavy condi pressure – didn’t even down once, pre-nerf.

I run A/T + shortbow viper druid for PvE, but I’ve found it extremely underperforming for PvP. I just couldn’t reapply high enough number of different conditions to significantly outpace cleanses. Not to mention that such a setup would make almost 100% of your attacks projectile based, which a warrior (and several other classes) would throw right back in your face, on a regular basis. In fact, when playing my bunker druid, I love seeing an enemy A/T + shortbow ranger (yes, I have seen some in PvP), because there is almost no threat of death on my part.

Bunker performs extremely well in a variety of situations, and with the right rotation you can actually notch kills as well. I highly recommend it.

Metabattle marks which builds are for what mode. Conquest is for sPvP, WvW is for… WvW lol, and Fractals/Raids are marked exactly as such. What works for Fractals and Raids will generally work very well for any PvE, although you might want to make adjustments for faster movement in open world PvE.

I second the recommendation to make an ascended viper set. Condition druid (axe+torch / shortbow) is an excellent dps build, and of course druid heals are pretty much at the top of the game. As long as you figure out how to either kill stuff efficiently or keep others alive through big hits, you’ll be welcome anywhere.

The axe/torch + shortbow condition druid build on various sites (check metabattle) has served me very well, with a couple minor adjustments.

One of the best survival adjustments for solo working through HoT and LS was putting on a lot of Survival skills (Troll Unguent for heal, Lightning Reflexes as an extra dodge, Quickening Zephyr for a stun break, and Entangling Roots for elite) for very easy access to tons of condition cleanses. Each of those can be specced to cleanse 2 conditions, which is a godsend. That left me another slot open to use Spike Trap, which in addition to adding a lot more bleeds also helped with its area knockdown).

For survival, I got used to having 4 dodges (shortbow #3 is a backstepping evade, lightning reflexes is similar, plus your two regular dodges) and that negates a ton of damage while your pet is hopefully plugging away all the while. Shortbow #3 also has a short cooldown, so it’s a consistently available option as an extra dodge. As a druid, having access to celestial avatar is HUGE. The sustain is even more viable when you learn how to heal yourself while consistently moving out of danger. There is almost nothing my ranger can’t safely kill or walk away from, as a result.

I also ran cc pets (Electric Wyvern and the regular wolf) early on just for insurance, to keep enemies at bay if things got out of hand. But I find bleeds and burns work remarkably well for getting you through HoT safely, and Troll Unguent works quite well as a preemptive heal (it ticks for a long time, in exchange for being a weak burst heal response). I quickly found the extra cc not necessary for survival, and instead focused on rapid kills with some small amount of healing when necessary.

I focus on stacking bleed and fire mostly, but you get access to poison via shortbow #2 and pets as well. Stuff like pocket raptors die rapidly as they try to mob you while you’re standing in your bonfire.

The one drawback of this setup seems to be that almost all of your attacks are going to be projectile based. I think Torch #5 is your only non-projectile attack, aside from the trap and roots. This means when your enemy enters a projectile-reflecting phase, you have to be careful about not shooting yourself repeatedly in the face.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

voltaicbore.8012:

I won’t pretend to have done enough thinking about hard resets and the inner workings of a solid Glicko system to talk about those things, but I would like to see the up-and-down of that number reflect actual performance, rather than just the win or loss.

It’s worth noting that it is not just “thinking” that backs Elo and Glicko, it’s actual hard math. Probably a mostly pedantic point, but … it’s worth noting that these have had significant thought and math and refinement applied in the real world.

Heh not sure you read carefully – I clearly noted that I am the one who didn’t think hard about those things, in no way was I trying imply that elo/glicko wasn’t refined/tested/applied math.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Anyway, the key issue with your idea is that it builds a metric into your score changes. Once you have a metric, people play to the metric — and you get what you measure, nothing else.

If taking top stats is worth something, you get builds for it: the “top DPS” glass cannon build, the “nothing but stability, and resurrection” build, all of which contribute less to winning the match, but more to the personal score of the player involved.

The only thing that, ultimately, reflects skill without forcing particular playstyles on people is … win/lose. Not how you get there. Which is why these systems pretty much all end up falling back to it.

I’m not sure how the current system doesn’t similarly encourage particular playstyles already. The meta builds enjoy their status for a reason, in that the playerbase has discovered them to be highly effective across the vast majority of situations. In other words, meta builds help many people contribute better to wins, and wins are currently the way to gain skill rating. I don’t see how reducing skill rating loss to the extent that I suggested would really shift the already meta-heavy spirit any further.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Also also useful to remember: no matter which game you point to as having a “better” MMR system, it’s almost certain they use the same basic math that GW2 does.

Totally agreed. Again, not sure how anything I said had anything to do with this point though. Did I miss something? Or are you just saying stuff? Genuine question.

In the end, I think I’ll ultimately have to surrender to the accuracy of the aggregate; while individual data points (spvp matches) might show fairly large swings away from where they are supposed to be, the aggregation (your hopefully 4-digit skill rating) of those points will land on target. I think I have legitimate mathematical, economic, and legal objections to applying that faith in aggregation to as many things as we do, but this is probably not the place for it.

I won’t pretend to have done enough thinking about hard resets and the inner workings of a solid Glicko system to talk about those things, but I would like to see the up-and-down of that number reflect actual performance, rather than just the win or loss.

Let’s say I sweep the top stats for my team in a really bad silver tier 1 (bottom tier) loss. If the system is gathering data on damage, heals, revives, etc., I feel it wouldn’t be unreasonably difficult to devise a system where

1) the game compares my top stats to the mean/median top stats for silver tier 1 matches,

2) determines how close (within x standard deviations, or percentile, or whatever) my stats are to those mean/median silver tier 1 stats, and

3) adjusts my skill rating loss to reflect that I tried pretty hard (and succeeded to some extent) to carry more than my weight.

I don’t think it should reduce the skill rating loss to 0. Also, I understand how things can be relatively accurate in aggregate, even if the components making up that aggregate may not reflect that.

That being said, why not have a slightly higher-resolution way to assign skill rating changes? I think it could only help with matchmaking precision. As a compromise, I don’t think the skill rating adjustment should ever come close to zeroing out the loss – I’m talking going from a full 12-point skill rating loss down to maybe an 7 or 8 at most. I’m not sure if the same calculations would justify adding more skill rating to wins where you sweep 3-5 top stat ratings. I guess it could, since that could accelerate differentiation (if a player is consistently carrying their team in 5 stat categories through wins, time to move them up even faster, no?).

I tend to feel comfortable around condi druids on the other team – not too hard to eat them alive. Since condi requires a good deal of projectile use, my druid loves dropping staff #5 on a node and watching the condi druid furiously heal me and my pet.

I’ve only ever met one condi druid in ranked, and suffice it to say he wasn’t contributing very much at all. Bunker meta druid (or some other power-support sniper setup) seems to outperform condi way too much right now to make condi worth a team slot.

I, too, was initially disappointed when I first took a look at the druid line. Staff? Healing? As a new player I really wanted something to improve my LB pewpew power.

I quickly learned that heals/dps boost druid and condi druid are pretty amazing. It helps that I am a softie that never kicks the illiterate 400-achieve level 25 player from my “80s experienced” groups, so healing and dps boost to make up for party inexperience made heals druid essential for casual pve play. I decided to learn condi druid just for a change of pace, and now my viper druid setup is pretty much my main.

So yeah – I think the class is in a good place, and the likely (or at least hopeful) addition of a power dps elite spec in the future should round things out.

Vayne.8563:

The odds are the lackluster numbers of the last two quarters has less to do with any one reason, and more to do with a myriad of reasons. Those who think like Devata, whatever percentage that is, will have some affect. Dungeon Runners who left when HoT launched, will have some affect. Small guilds who can’t afford to upgrade guild halls will have some affect. People who think HoT is too hard or too grindy will have some affect.

All together, those groups have a tremendous affect. It’s not any one thing. It’s that Anet managed to alienate large swathes of people, combined with a content drought, combined with pricing the expansion too high, combined with not giving an extra character slot.

No one thing is the reason HoT didn’t do as well as expected.

Devata, this is what you should have said at the beginning if you wanted to be taken seriously on an empirical level (which you so deeply appear to want). You noted somewhere, “why should I have to summarize other opinions?” – to me that indicates that you’re simply ignoring potentially confounding variables. Vayne pretty much did it here without taking too long or overselling a single point.

A few people have touched on this, but I think it merits greater discussion: NCSoft/ANet seem uninterested in marketing this game. Granted, I got into GW2 after HoT launched, so I have completely missed out on whatever advertising blitz that may have occurred. I also acknowledge that the game is old, and conventional wisdom might say that we’re past the point of a sincere marketing strategy now. That being said, this game is still moving forward, and I believe what I love about it still distinguishes it from every other game out there. There’s still something to market if you still want to sell more of this game.

I heard nothing – absolutely nothing – in the US about GW2 outside of Dulfy when I decided to try the free core game a few months ago, and then bought into HoT shortly thereafter. I wouldn’t have even considered GW2 if I wasn’t so sorely disappointed in SWtoR at the time.

I did start seeing some banner ads for GW2 after I actually bought HoT and ran a ton of GW2 google searches and wiki browsing. What I saw was utterly dumbfounding: you all remember this ad for GW2? There’s a thread on this ad already, with its detractors and defenders.

I think this ad is terribly, terribly misguided. Sadly, I also think it’s emblematic of how those at the helm of this game see their own product. The non-game footage part is just…. dramatic-type music with a voiceover trying to make these disparate scenes seem epic. GW2’s particular artistic look and dynamic game world, which I believe set it apart from other products, are not meaningfully revealed in the brief moment of game-like scenery we see at the end. And instead of the Pact, the Legions, or even the Orders, all we get in that scene is this huge melee of all this hodgepodge happening. It looks like any other shiny/nonsensical/Asia-Pacific moneygrabber out there, and the ad itself displays that region of the world’s unfortunate mass-media habit of preferring spectacle at the expense of telling a compelling and coherent narrative.

If this is pretty much the perspective from which they plan on selling GW2, I fear for the future of the game. I’d have to find advertising records and try to match them with the ups and downs in the data provided, but as any marketer will tell you, ROI on advertising is notoriously slippery to observe with certainty. That being said, I just wonder if the marketing for GW2 contributed meaningfully to the declines in numbers.

hackks.3687:

As I remember it, PvP, or “SPvP” as it was called at the time, was basically released unfinished. They had no idea what it was going to do, and to some extent were relying on the player base to develop the game mode for them. Things were going great until the first feature patch, and there’s been a steady decline ever since. It’s not really surprising that things never developed as they’d hoped when they were basically winging it from the start.

I had no idea this was the case – I guess I can Google it (yeah, I still capitalize the verb form lol) and read more. That would go a long way to establish why pvp structure feels as whiplash as it has.

I still maintain that there are more broken pvp systems out there. Neverwinter comes to mind – that’s just a steaming mess in there. I haven’t touched it in years so I don’t know of any of it has been fixed, but believe it or not it’s a far worse experience than league matches here.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

L80 Boost is the bane of new players. You miss the entire tutorial, and flounder.

This should be the tooltip on the 80 boost. I have been telling people this for as long as I’ve been playing, and nobody seems to heed it until they take their brand new 80 to VB and die helplessly and repeatedly.

I echo the welcome to Tyria! Look me up if you’re ever in need of a hand, I’d be glad to help a fellow adventurer if I’m on and not tied up in something else.

DoogySnowStalker.2069:

Eleazar.9478:

that would be dope but i bet they’ll wont do that. parrenlty the next expac is giving ranger main hand dagger, hopefully there’s something like a blink on there

Hoping that, if it is dagger main-hand, it will be a condi weapon. Tired of my main-hand weapons being hybrid…..

I would pay the full price of HoT all over again if that meant I could get a power rifle on my ranger, with a Hunter trait line to match. Not too excited about MH dagger, largely because I’m not a huge fan of OH dagger. I like that extra dodge for pvp, but otherwise meh.

I am currently working toward an ascended Magi’s set for raid-level healing, and I can keep people alive through quite a bit in all game modes I’ve done so far (sPvP, WvW, dungeons).

For dps, I’ve fallen in love with my Viper condi druid. The shortbow and axe/torch setup just clicked with me (even before the shortbow received some much needed improvements), and I just love the playstyle.

The raiding/super-duper-optimizers would laugh at me for this, but shockingly almost any kind of druid makes an incredible spot healer, all thanks to celestial avatar. My Viper condi druid can heal any dungeon group quite easily just by popping briefly into celestial avatar form, then returning to normal and doing dps. The added bonus is that celestial avatar triggers the reduced cooldowns from the Quickdraw trait, making it that much more useful to be switching between heals and dps as necessary.

This dps-that-heals-occasionally will NOT work for raids, unless your super team needs very little healing compared to what a staff-wielding Magi druid puts down. I too am still working my way out of T1 fractals, so I can’t speak to how far along you can be a dps-healer in the fractals.

I don’t know why they’ve been abandoned, but I totally agree that I want to be able to do these! It would add so much more flavor to the city, and has a perfect “only in GW2” sort of feel to it.

Give HoT a chance the next time it goes on sale! I found it more than worth the cost, and I paid full price for it.

Ulion pretty much covered most of the technical details. Depending on what your characters are, elite specs may be more or less exciting to you. I have a character of every single class, and only in rare situations do I ever feel like running something in place of the new HoT elite spec.

You will find that many people (there’s already one in this thread) deride HoT as grind-y or too hard. I admit it’s definitely a step up from core Tyria, with a very real threat of death if you are not prepared to respond to some dangerous mob groups. However, the mastery system isn’t a terrible grind at all, at least the green HoT mastery points. Many are just like commune hero points, you puzzle your way to them and channel – and you have another mastery point! I like doing a variety of maps and content, which makes it easy for me to fill my xp bar for mastery.

TLDR: If you like a bit more challenge and enjoy doing a variety of different activities within the game, HoT is a blast.

I, too, do not understand people deriding masteries as a grind. My xp bar fills reliably, but I also do a variety of content (dungeons, spvp, wvw when I can stomach it, world bosses, etc). Mastery points were the choke point for me, and I never had to “grind” those. I just looked at the map and explored until I got some. When I felt impatient, I would Dulfy 2-3 more mastery points to just finish out the amount I needed.

So honest question, lukejoe – what do you do mostly? I’d be glad to run you through some dungeons to get Frequenter credit and 60K xp a pop, or some other stuff.

Hevoskuuri.3891:

Lahmia.2193:

It would be impossible for me to say I don’t love gw2 as I’ve put more hours into it than every other game I’ve played combined.
My favourite (at the moment) part of the game is WvW, mainly the zerg fights. Despite what people qq about so much, it isn’t just about rushing your foe and winning with higher numbers. Case in point, the fight last night in which we wiped a map semi organised possible map queue with 35 players because of superior tactics and organisation.

This! I’ve had countless palm-sweating, adrenaline-rushing insane zerg battles that often have concluded in results no one thought could happen. Of course, roaming is also fun.

Heh WvW is the one game area I cannot get into. I’m farming memories of battle for legendary crafting, but I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could love this game mode so much. When I first heard about it, it sounded really interesting in terms of the large scale player-driven efforts. Having run it up to rank 15, I’ve found it to be utterly bipolar (usually leaning towards the frustrating pole), and I’ve yet to see any of these interesting pitched battles you speak of. Not doubting they exist, but I must not be on at the right times to ever see them.

Other than WvW, I’ve loved everything in the game I’ve touched, including sPvP. Ranked was a bit frustrating last season, but I’m still fairly new and have to wean myself off the metas.

Not so sure about the troll part. Having seen OP’s posting history, this person seems to be the kind of player who can’t navigate the UI very well or extract the information it readily provides players. To be sure, this is an issue not at all unique to the OP – reading tooltips and other sources of UI information seems to be lost on a huge portion of the playerbase in almost any MMO I’ve played.

But…. it seems OP made a thread after this one complaining about the poison fields around the forts in the Silverwastes meta is killing them before OP can reach the HoT story instance marker at Red Rock. How exactly is this person gliding before doing HoT story?

The utterly forgiving nature of open-world core Tyria content, I think, has attracted/kept a new level of “casual” compared to most gaming environments. Which is a good thing! I think that mindset has led to the creation of one of the most unique game worlds I’ve ever seen, and I’d be sad to see it change.

That being said, I always wonder if OP and other casual players have offered serious thought to whether or not they would even enjoy being in an environment like the HoT maps. They certainly don’t have the expansive feeling of most core Tyria maps, and they are meant to be extremely hazardous war zones that have decimated the Pact. HoT maps very much belong to the jungle, not to the silly Tyrians who decided to set foot in it to challenge the natives.

As for the parts of the personal story and HoT story set in challenging environments, I really have little to say other than I’d be happy to run content with you if we’re ever on at the same time.

Same, trying to get through kessex hills to reach SW then VB. Rolled back 3×. Guess I’ll be lazy and use Gilded Hollow guild hall port to reach the jungle.

Edit: just poking back in here to confirm – for me the problem seems limited to Kessex Hills. AB, Caledon, and Brisban were all normal for me.

I play power, condi, and heals druid – I can personally vouch for condi druid being both effective and a lot of fun. If you tweak the traits right, you can still do a surprising amount of group support without giving up much from your usual condi rotation.

I also run a condi dragonhunter, who pretty much relies exclusively on burns. That being said, traps and other direct attacks often finish enemies I’m soloing before the burn stacks do much of anything. The upside is that between burns, direct damage, and all the damage-avoiding tools guardians have, my DH can pretty much kill anything with very little threat of dying himself.

I want to make a HoT appreciation thread, largely because defending HoT in threads that decry it always seems a bit patronizing.

For me, HoT is definitely a welcome step up from core Tyria. I didn’t have to be an early adoper, min/maxer, or incessant guide-reader to participate fully in the maps – yet the threat of death and mission failure is still very real if I let (a very basic level of) situational awareness slip.

Moving forward, I’d like to see the dev team continue to introduce content at this Goldilocks “just right” level of challenge: good players can solo tough HPs and some links in the meta even chain, passable players can just play the map as designed with groups, and poor players have a chance to see just how inefficient they might have been playing through core Tyria. I see myself as a player that went from poor to passable, and it wasn’t a huge gap. Thanks to HoT for giving me a chance to make that improvement without needing to embarrass myself in a higher-tier fractal or bogging down others in instanced group content.

Not that it’s anything new, but I’m noticing more “nerf PvE” threads, or threads that are ostensibly about another topic but boil down to “[x] aspect of PvE is too hard.”

I’m firmly in the camp that thinks the HoT HPs are fine as they are. Also, I always help with HPs whenever I can, even during a meta event if my particular area is covered. I’m not trying to say that OP is doing anything wrong to be having so much trouble finding a group. I just want to say that OP’s experience is definitely not the norm that I experience when running HoT HPs.

Apologies if this is already in here… I can never get the godawful search function to turn up anything.

I’d like to see the medium Viper skin set cycle back into the store again… one of my characters is looking for a short skirt that doesn’t have some huge bootleg that comes along with it.

I agree wholeheartedly that nobody has to like HoT, and certainly nobody is required to put in the effort to find a way to enjoy it, either. I don’t think any of the “HoT isn’t so bad” posters in here were really looking to change the OP’s mind, ultimately.

I just saw something fairly high up on the first page of the HoT forum, peeked in to see why the OP dislikes it so, and found that it was because of what I consider a fairly easily surmounted issue.

I think it would be terrible for a new player (or just new to HoT) to feel the same way, come read this thread, and walk away giving up all hope of advancing through HoT. I just wanted to ensure that anyone feeling burned by HoT was at least aware that there’s a fairly non-intrusive way past the rapid-and-constant-death-frustration, should they ever want to try again in the future; I suspect that others saying similar things in here had similar motivation.

Unless I totally misunderstand and have been missing the signs all along, Signet of Stone’s active ability doesn’t actually block attacks. My understanding is that all incoming damage for 6s is simply reduced to 0. On the screen, Signet of Stone doesn’t result in seeing “Blocked”; instead, it registers as a hit, but the number that appears is just 0.

Vayne.8563:

6AB542C9-4925-485E-B5C2-15BA7972AF72:

No hard feelings at all.

I play video games to have fun. HoT is not fun for me at all. I’ll restate that “for me” part. As such, I am empathizing with the OP and all the others who have such disdain for HoT. I simply hope the next version is better, in that it appeals to my customer segment. Glad you OP types got what you wanted.

The rest of the game I love very much.

Empathize if you like, but it’s not as hard as you make it out to be. I’ve taught more than a few people how to navigate and get around in HoT, and just about all those people go from having negative feelings to really enjoying the zone.

Saying this zone is hard for me, because I’m not good enough, is a personal choice. Getting better at the game can be fun too, though. It’s your choice whether you want to get better or not.

Here’s the issue. In a game without raising the level cap, the only way you really progress is by getting better, or doing things that are harder. And since for many people, probably most, MMOs are about progression, getting better is part of the progression.

I’ll extend you the same offer I’ve made to many people. If you’re on a US server I’ll be happy to teach you how to deal with the HoT zones. It’s probably not nearly as bad as you think it is.

This. It’s really not that hard. I do not mean to sound dismissive, and if you take offense, my apologies.

I always run my own builds (many of which admittedly align fairly well with meta as it turns out), and most of my characters wear only exotic gear at the moment. I’m not a min/maxer or OP by any stretch, but just a few small adjustments (we’re talking 1-2 utilities, no build changes or weapon changes) were all I needed to do much better in HoT. In fact, for some of my characters, I changed nothing other than learning that some moves I should do off cooldown, and others I should wait to pop at the right moment.

To anyone feeling burned by HoT, I highly recommend revisiting the area with a bit more patience and the willingness to make minor changes to how you respond to mobs.

TLDR: HoT is a tad harder, but not that hard. A pretty casual player like me could do it with minimal adjustment, I suggest revisiting HoT and seeing if a couple tweaks can do it for you.

Tragic Positive.9356:

voltaicbore.8012:

If you like the axe as a mainhand weapon and have issues rapidly pressing keys at a sustained pace, might I suggest trying condition ranger? If super duper top max dps is not your goal, condition builds are nice for stacking condis on the enemy, and then taking a slight breather as they tick away. With a power build, no key press = no dps.

Actually, this works the other way round.
Condition DPS is the complex one that has to keep track of all the cooldowns, especially the quick-draw proc, while power beats a lot from auto-attacks.

Hmmh, but if you had “damage” while roaming and stuff in mind, yes, that’s true. Condis are slow early but then ramp up if the fight lasts longer, which makes them look “less DPS” where mobs are low on HP.
For elaboration, Condis have better DPS on champions and veterans, but less DPS on everyday mobs.

Not sure how do they work for leveling. Never tried it, actually. Might be a nice and less dynamic alternative for the OP.

Yeah, note the qualifiers – not really into max dps, liking axe MH. Now that I know you don’t really open-world level, your comment makes more sense. The vast majority of open-world mobs do not hold up very well against even modest attempts at a good condi rotation, mixed with pets and AAs. Bosses and the occasional veteran mob offer what seems to be the only real chance for most open-worlders to practice anything approaching the meta condi rotation.

Quick draw isn’t terribly hard to keep track of, imo, since it only applies to one move at a time. This means you get to prioritize your rotation around the one move that works best on swap. Yes, to maximize effectiveness of quick draw, you do need to develop an instinctive sense of when some moves come off CD, but (A) it’s not exceedingly difficult and (B) you can do a passable job in not-so-tightly-tuned content without that level of play.

In my experience condi druid is also a ton more forgiving in dungeons as well. As Durzlla already mentioned, the stats on condi gear leads to a decent margin of sturdiness. If you bring a shortbow, you even get a shoot-and-evade, which is nice. The most relaxing aspect of it, for me, is the ability to fit an evade in here and there and lose very little in terms of consistent dps output, as both the pet and condis do their thing while you escape from danger.

As a long time SWTOR player who only recently came to GW2, I’m frankly a bit shocked that we get anything at all for grinding xp past level cap. Maybe it’s poor design on SWTOR’s part, but your xp bar in that game just sits empty after you hit cap. Frankly I never felt like there needed to be anything further, and here in GW2 I think it’s just a nice plus that some progress is available after you reach the level cap.

I realize I might feel differently once I finish all the masteries (I’m at 124 now) and grind out the few Legendary weapons I’m interested in. Lol I also realize that from a game design aspect, SWTOR sets the bar incredibly low. That being said, I don’t think filling up an xp bar and getting rewarded for it beyond the level cap is the the only (or even a primary) reason to stick around for endgame.

Back to the OPs issue with HoT’s unexpected early difficulty… I agree it was a step up (especially for a new player like me), but I really, really liked it. Sure, it was initially a bit frustrating to be facerolling core Tyria maps but then getting killed rapidly in VB. However, I quickly came to appreciate the difficulty of navigation and survival. It really did feel like my characters stepped into something over their heads, which is exactly what happened to the entire Pact.

Difficulty of navigation only adds to the immersion, I say. I’m no RPer, but I do appreciate a certain amount of logic to my MMOs. It makes perfect sense that it’s hard to get around the jungle. Hell, compared to our Earth jungles, VB is a paradise – clearly visible updrafts and clearly marked paths all over the place. As someone who doesn’t want everything just handed to me, HoT was a huge improvement over core Tyria.

I don’t care about cat ears or glitter dye. Mind you, I won’t throw them out if I happen to get any, but I’m definitely not going to go out of my way to get my hands on em.

As for the “flag myself for X dungeon,” I’m totally opposed to it. I do not care at all about group composition when adding myself to LFG groups, unless it’s Arah. Even with the ability to put a “80s, experienced only” description, you get enough underleveled/clueless people. The dungeon queue pop system you describe will only magnify that, with the added disadvantage of not being able to blame the freeloader for it.

Same. I was running with a very organized Silverwastes map, and we’ve been booted (the entire map’s worth of players) repeatedly, and the event resets as well. Frustrating.

Short answer: no, you are not playing the class wrong for the content you described.

Longer answer: For more demanding endgame content, yes, you will need to abandon A/A. If that level of PvE is something you’re interested in, invest the effort in learning the current meta builds for the present state of the game. You’re right in that most of those builds are for druids, but learning mechanics like quick draw (from the Skirmishing line) are definitely things you can (and perhaps already did) work on.

If you like the axe as a mainhand weapon and have issues rapidly pressing keys at a sustained pace, might I suggest trying condition ranger? If super duper top max dps is not your goal, condition builds are nice for stacking condis on the enemy, and then taking a slight breather as they tick away. With a power build, no key press = no dps.

Your fears seem unreasonable to me.

People have said it already, but many open-world pve encounters are still challenging for new players with trash gear and little experience with their class (let alone knowing how to synergize their abilities with other classes). While it’s true that my HoT 80s regularly solo some content (such as bandit champs) that was probably not meant to be done alone, have you recently tried to take down a bandit bounty with an at-level toon, perhaps with the help of only 2 or 3 more at-level characters who are clearly new? It’s tough enough to give a sense of achievement if you guys make it. I also regularly carry groups of nooblets through dungeons. That stuff is still hard for new folks, hard as it is for some of us to remember how it was to be that way.

I think it comes down to the fact that we hate not being able to clear stuff if we’ve invested a good chunk of play time and effort into an event. Balancing near-guaranteed clears against not making things faceroll easy is probably a lot harder than it sounds.

I think the AB meta is actually a great example of Anet getting the compromise right. Any decently organized map can clear that meta, but there’s still always a bit of tension for at least one of the lanes. The mechanics demand that at least some of those present know what to do (armors keeping frogs pinned/dead, pushing/pulling the bomb, moving triggerblossoms properly, knowing where to run in shroom form, etc), enough so that if nobody plays smart, the event fails. However, with a reasonable number of knowledgeable players, it reliably succeeds.

I feel like that’s exactly where most open-world PvE should be: near-complete lack of strategy/good play = failure, reasonable amounts of strategy/good play = win.

Raids are an entirely different story, and if I recall correctly that content was specifically aimed at folks clamoring for more challenge. Unless Anet does something dumb and uses raids as a gate blocking something cool non-raiders want to get at, I don’t think there’s a raid nerf in the future.

Ever since I got my female human ranger the reading glasses and (enormous) scarf, I’ve wanted to find a plain sweater for her to wear. No plunging neckline or painted-on tight fit necessary. Just want her to look like a well-dressed college student.

I really wish I took a screenshot, but I could swear that while I was waiting for a queue pop in the heart of the mists I saw a male human character with a plain sweater, pants, and the hipster glasses. Looked like an American dude right out of the 70s. I don’t want that look per se, but I could kitten sure use that sweater lol. Anyone have any clue what that might be?

Moneymaking suggestion! I would love to see a katana skin for single-handed swords , just a scaled down version of Belinda’s greatsword. I’d buy one in a heartbeat, zero regrets. I’m sure an appreciable chunk of the player base would too.

I finally picked up a Belinda’s greatsword skin with the most recent sale, and I keep thinking that some of my single-handed sword toons would look great with a comparable katana-esque skin.

Yes, it’s probably cliche, plays on the West’s odd/ill-informed/enduring fascination with Japanese swordcraft, doesn’t really fit the more fantasy environment of GW2, blahblahblah…. I’d still buy it without a second thought.

Apologies if there is such a skin out there and I just haven’t found it, or if a thread like this exists and the search function just failed me.

lol I was so certain that something went wrong on my end, I didn’t even think to look here until after I submitted a ticket.

I’ve only been in the game a few months, but this is the first time I’ve run into a full-blown stoppage. Kudos to you for that, ANet team! Granted, my previous mmo experience set the bar really low, but I still appreciate the virtually ceaseless uptime I’ve had on this game since I installed it.

I’m fairly new to the game, and thankfully my personality doesn’t drive me to keep up with the Joneses on AP. I see AP purely as a rough measure of how familiar a player might be with the game.

Which confused me a bit at first, to be honest. I’ve run low-level dungeons (we’re talking AC and CM) with some 10K+ achieve pugs, and they were absolutely clueless. Running out of dodges on a ranger, failing to empty breakbars on a mesmer… all on the spider boss in AC lol.

Now that I know there are folks out there with 10-15K AP just from dailies alone, makes more sense that this could happen. Forced out of their routine because of the cap, that 5-digit AP count sadly didn’t teach them where the obvious stack points and boss windups are.

I’m a fairly new player, and I have zero experience of what GW2 was like before HoT dropped. That might be why my opinion of HoT is very, very high.

I’ll echo what others have already said: HoT events (I’ve only run Silverwastes, VB, and Auric Basin events so far) actually work extremely well with a small number of coordinated people who know their characters and have some situational awareness. The few times I’ve had anything less than a full T4 VB clear were actually due to a huge zerg pack uselessly following a mentor tag around, instead of reaching all the right outposts.

As for the vertical layering of the maps, I love it (said no one ever, right?). A big part of this is the game I abandoned in favor of GW2. That game – it pains me to even mention its name, so great is my disappointment – was built on an alpha version of the Hero Engine. Suffice it to say that said engine cannot even handle underwater environments. So being able to literally feel lost in a jungle makes a ton of sense to me, and it’s light years away from the game I left. A “jungle” there consists of a fairly thinly wooded map, all one layer, with just some hills and pathing obstacles here and there.

Overall, I feel like ANet’s team puts a ton more craftsmanship into map design than the few other games I’ve run. The cities actually look like places where people actually live and work, rather than being a laggy repository for a few useful vendors. The vendor NPCs at forward bases actually come under attack instead of being oddly invincible from enemies 5 feet away, and players meaningfully participate in the taking and defense of outposts from the enemy. I have yet to even hear of anything so dynamic and involving anywhere else.

Again, I’m pretty new to all this. I just wanted to put in my 2 cents, as someone who came to GW2 from another (and in my experience far inferior) mmo environment. Core game & HoT are pretty awesome to me.