Guild Wars 2

Kintoun Zetto.2651:

sablephoenix.1593:

You can take as long as you like to finish a jigsaw puzzle. The comparison is invalid.

Now, if you had to complete a jigsaw puzzle in five minutes or it dumped you in a freezing pool of water, then yes, I’d complain.

No, YOUR comparison is invalid good sir. As a jumping puzzle that was clearly listed as having a time limit, that is supposed to be super hard, it’s your fault for participating if you can’t handle that. What you’re saying is that if you bought a jigsaw puzzle that specifically said in huge lettering on the box COMPLETE IN FIVE MINUTES OR BE DUMPED IN FREEZING WATER (some assembly required), then you would complain about it because the puzzle did exactly what it said on the box in every way, to the letter.

Don’t buy the jigsaw puzzle that advertises those features. Similarly, don’t do the OPTIONAL jump puzzle whose rewards are acquirable elsewhere. If someone starts complaining that it hurts real bad when they punch themselves in the face, you’d probably tell them that the best solution is to stop punching themselves in the face, right?

So dude, stop punching yourself in the face. Just stop.

this is not a good point. while i don’t think sablephoenix is right, it doesnt make sense to respond to criticism with “well it said it would do that”.

imagine someone had an actual valid point as to why it was a bad idea to make a jigsaw puzzle that will dump you into freezing water. it doesn’t matter if you then write on the box of that puzzle “yeah this thing is kind of bad”, the point still stands that it would probably have been better to make it not bad.

this is so much easier, i’m actually disappointed. was looking forward to another challenging jumping puzzle. but this is pretty much one where you can’t really fall off unless you want to, with a very forgiving timer on it.

most of the encounters aren’t complex enough, although i can’t talk about most of the fractals. except for those, though, every dungeon should have at least one boss like giganticus lupicus in every explorable path. that is the kind of complexity and business you expect from dungeon content that was said to be challenging.

apropos business: i can only echo a lot of the other players and say that most bosses have far too much health for how busy their fights are. most of the time, you need to pay attention to about 3 relatively simple things and that’s it. a fight like that doesn’t have to take 10min on average just through the dps requirements.

i would like to see more phased encounters, because i feel they make longer fights more fun. different phases give you a sense of progress inside the encounter, some nice variety and make it feel less outdrawn, because you have to change up what you do during the fight (you’re not doing the same stuff all the time).

last, but not least, some stuff is/was bugged in a way that i don’t think is okay for a release version of the game. like arah being closed and unopenable for the majority of the time on most servers.

Lorana.2468:

no it’s because he died, over and over.
and how in any way is muscle memory skill, thats no different than me never taking a single hit from Subject Alpha because i know exactly when to dodge roll.

the only way your ever going to get true difficulty out of a boss is if the boss is random, the fight is chaotic to the point where you cannot guess or predict what’s coming next.

if you know what’s coming, and when it’s coming it’s not hard and it never will be, why else is WoW PVE so easy these days? because addons do it all for you, it’s not that much different from GW2 tells.

Artifical Difficulty in another form, that’s all.

I don’t think you understand the term “artificial difficulty”. Even if you had to die to most enemies in Dark Souls to learn their patterns (you don’t), that’s not “artificial difficulty” at all. There’s still legitimate challenge to the player’s gaming skill, some people are going to be better at recognizing attack patterns than others, some might be better at responding to them.

“Artificial difficulty” is when there are cases where you can’t beat a challenge even though you have all the mechanical and analytical skills required. This actually happens in a lot of games, but Dark Souls is probably one where it’s the least prevalent.

You can kill every enemy in the game without leveling up your character or your weapons, although not upgrading your weapon will make it take quite a while. Your ability to do so depends solely on how well you are able to learn and how much attention you pay. Pretty much every enemy has very clear tells for when he is dangerous and when you can attack.

If you look to Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, there are quite a few cases of “artificial difficulty” which come to mind. The most prominent is probably a low level player trying to take down a high level monster. This game (as opposed to Dark Souls) is not designed so you can avoid every attack against you. Dodge roll and invulnerability skills are way less prevalent. You can kite, but once there are more than 10 levels between you can the mob, it becomes immune to your conditions. With this in mind, there are quite a few situations where you can only level up your character to even have a chance of defeating a certain enemy.
Here’s the kicker though: You may have noticed how I tried to distance myself from the word “artificial difficulty”. That’s because it’s a dumb concept in my opinion. I don’t agree with people who place their mechanical skills on a pedestal and act like they should be able to beat every game as long as they can push the right buttons. RPGs in particular tend to have a lot of character stats and a lot of depth to allocating these in the right way.
I don’t see a problem with pieces of content locking players out who can’t spend their stat points wisely, even though that’s exactly what people mean by “artificial difficulty”.
Theorycrafting is a skill like any other and players should have to acquire it.

This is a step in the wrong direction. No matter how small the difference, new gear introduced by patches should never be stronger than what people could already get.

The maximum gear level never changing is exactly one of the best things about Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2. It meshes perfectly with the no-subscription model, because players only need to get gear once and then can take peeks into content updates at their leisure.

It also allows for the PvE content to leave less of a disappointing feeling when you do it again. It’s better for the challenge to always be the same, so players can feel like it is their accomplishment if they have less trouble with a certain piece of content.

If you make that piece of content reward the players with stronger gear, though, they will always have an easier time on consecutive runs, just because their stats are higher.

That is not as rewarding and not as satisfying as knowing it was your skill that made this run go faster.

Finally, it will cause a partial split in the community, if the content is challenging enough. If the content in question is challenging enough to be made significantly easier by the stronger gear it provides, public groups looking to farm the content will only accept players who have already done it a couple of times and obtained the gear.

The content in question has to be challenging enough to be made significantly easier by the stronger gear it provides, because otherwise, there wouldn’t be any meaning to the gear having higher stats. I’m sure you are not looking at pieces that have maybe 1 Vitality more or something. It will be a small, but significant increase.

This kind of Power Creep is probably why most people left the MMOs they played before. Guild Wars 2 was said to not have it before launch, and that was a huge factor for buying it (at least for me).

Kholer literally takes like 5min to kill if you’re bad. That time alone is made up by the waypoint you unlock, except for Tzark’s path.

vespers.1759:

swiftpaw.6397:

vespers.1759:

Zefiris.8297:

i stopped reading when you said that an opinion can be wrong.

“The earth is flat”
“The earth is carried by four elephants”
“Snakes only eat earth”
“Angela Merkel is a lizard”

All four are opinions. Three of these are opinions once held by the majority of the people in a given country. All of them are factually wrong.

Opinions can, in fact, be wrong. It takes a really, really bad education to think that opinions cannot be wrong.

lol no they are beliefs. an opinion would be “this book is good”. try again.

opinions are how you FEEL about something and therefore they cannot be wrong.

I feel that destroying all man kind is the right thing to do. Just my opinion.

not sure what the point of this is.

Sometimes, people FEEL about some things the wrong way. There are a lot of people that FEEL suppressing certain minorities is the right thing to do.
Are you saying we should give immunity to their viewpoint precisely because they don’t argue for it but just feel that way? If someone bases his stance on a mere feeling, that is all the more reason to question it.

nachtnebel.9168:

You might think that I have overlooked the part where you asked for something to compare the empirically collected combat data to. I have not. You yourself have done a good job elaborating on what would be suited as a comparison. One could simply do the math to find out what numbers their spec can pull under optimal conditions, then proceed to compare them to the actual happenings. This way, you could get a far clearer grip of how well you are doing compared to the possible optimum than trying to just take a guess or go by your feeling.

This won’t tell you anything more than just counting the obvious mistakes you made during a fight, e.g. missing an CD, placing an GTAoE wrong, dodging in the wrong direction, miscalculation distances and so on.

If you want to get resulst that are more than just rough guesses you would need a replay of the fight with a free cam mode – or at least multiple vidoes of the fight from different angles – and a listing of all the events happened. And even then you would still have to do a lot of math before you could draw the right conclusions that would actually provide more insight than the above-mentioned rough guess.

Synopsis: Combat recording tools are overrated, not cause the data they provide is worthless but because the fast majority of the players who use them don’t know what the data they see actually says.

First Paragraph: What if I want to know what those mistakes actually amount to? Am I not permitted to because you deem the values meaningless?

Second Paragraph: Please provide an actual argument for your view or make it more clear from what previous statement this should follow.

Really, if you are interested in keeping up a conversation with me, please be more clear about what you are trying to say.

As for the first part of your post.

Unless you do the math to..

But I would do that, see what I wrote in the second paragraph for that. Furthermore, I actually said in that very paragraph you quoted that I would like to do multiple runs and compare the resulting different data sets.
I really don’t get why you deny the possibility that someone just compares the data he got from his combat log to his prior experience, then notes whether it was better or worse. Also, if you theorycraft a build that’s able to put out 100k DPS or 10 dispels ever 20s or 20 stacks might every 50s (arbitrary numbers), then find you can’t ever get more than half of that because the spells you use have impractically long cast times or something, you can go look for a build that looks weaker in theory but is stronger in practice. But whether or not that build is actually stronger in practice is hard to discern without a proper combat log. This is stuff that you can’t calculate, you just have to record how well a build does when it is used. On top of that, the information gained in this process is meaningful. It shows flaws in a specific style of play and helps you make better decisions as a player.

I really don’t see your problem with this view. Don’t mean to be rude when I say this but please, please try to be very clear if you decide to respond to this post. I am not in the mood for deciphering.

Brazensage.1328:

spreadsheets.9805:

Tres.5427:

spreadsheets.9805:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We’re very aware it is happening with bunches of structures (bunches being a super technical design term). The fix SHOULD fix a lot of situations.

Are you also aware of this bug having to do with targeting?
If the player disables auto-target (so it doesn’t get targeted again), then deselects the burrow and just aims their attacks in its direction, they will all hit without problem. You don’t have to circle or do any weird stuff.

Don’t ever have to target the burrow at all just swing/shoot in general direction and everything will land.

That is pretty much exactly what is written in my post.

Its easy to melee something without aiming…but shooting a bow without targeting?! Not a reasonable way to bypass the bug.

Ranged attacks fly towards the middle of your screen. HTH
You don’t need to be mega exact at all.
It’s not like I said there wasn’t a problem, but let’s not act like the bug is hard to circumvent.

nachtnebel.9168:

spreadsheets.9805:

Condition damage doesn’t work like that.

Of course it does, all the formulas and values can be found in the official wiki:

And for real: a recount of your actions during one specific fight does give different information than theorycrafting a build. The two are not in a more-less relationship. Instead, the data from the meter will allow you to judge how well you actually did in practice, while maths allow you to get a grasp of both the limits and the average performance of your spec – without regard for your personal ability. They’re different kinds of data sets, interesting for different kinds of reasons.

A DPS Meter will allow you to judge how well you did, but it’s also highly situational. Recording your DPS during a specific fight is like performing a specific experiment. Both have no real value as long as you don’t have anything to compare them to and as long as you can’t repeat them. So, unless you intend to fight the exact same mob, the exact same way over and over again there is no point in a DPS Meter.
The only exception to this would be if you really know EVERYTHING about the game and the fight, which is far beyon what a DPS Meter could tell you.

Your post seemed like you thought the damage was literally just the scaling coefficient * condition damage, as you left out the base.

Note how I never talk about a DPS meter specifically. In fact, I have tried to stress the importance of a more encompassing record, which would reveal a great deal more than simple damage values. But even if I could only see my damage, that would still be a huge help.
Let’s just look at the condition you posed: If I want to fight the exact same mob in the exact same way repeatedly, a combat recount would be of use. Now, there are a couple of problems with this. Firstly, the “exact same mob” part is trivial and can easily be dismissed. Yes, I do plan on fighting the same bosses multiple times. As for me having to fight in the exact same way: No, this is not the case. I want to try out different ways of fighting the same enemy and see which way yields the best results. A combat recount would provide me with a means to analyze different attempts at the same content more easily, thus serving a specific purpose. It should be clear by now that only the former of your assumptions holds true.

You might think that I have overlooked the part where you asked for something to compare the empirically collected combat data to. I have not. You yourself have done a good job elaborating on what would be suited as a comparison. One could simply do the math to find out what numbers their spec can pull under optimal conditions, then proceed to compare them to the actual happenings. This way, you could get a far clearer grip of how well you are doing compared to the possible optimum than trying to just take a guess or go by your feeling.

Zinkey.6983:

Also with regards to meters in general I think in a game like this they would probably cause more issues than they would solve. Say for example you have a player who feels raw damage output is the most important thing a player can do, (and lets face its thats probably quite the majority). If they have a meter saying somebody is short in this area, meter will get linked – “Your DPS sucks etc.” and hostilities ensue. While no doubt this probably occurs now, if somebody feels they have proof of this it will only fuel the fire.

This seems like a useless point to argue to me. Players who would act like that if they were “empowered” by statistics probably already are acting thoughtless and are not the kind of person you would want to run a dungeon with.

The kind of person who needs to berate their party members and push their own ego will always find something to whine about. If you take away their statistics, they will just start acting like kittens once they see somebody make an actual mistake.

It seems to me that implementing a good and strong statistics tool would rather make it easier for informed players to repel others who try to flaunt their high DPS numbers. A good tool will collect data about other things as well: The number of interrupts, the number of dispels, the uptime of certain buffs/debuffs. All this data can be used to show beyond the shadow of a doubt that even lower DPS builds can bring value to a party.

Condition damage doesn’t work like that.

And for real: a recount of your actions during one specific fight does give different information than theorycrafting a build. The two are not in a more-less relationship. Instead, the data from the meter will allow you to judge how well you actually did in practice, while maths allow you to get a grasp of both the limits and the average performance of your spec – without regard for your personal ability. They’re different kinds of data sets, interesting for different kinds of reasons.

nachtnebel.9168:

You don’t have to use a Damage Meter or Heal Meter to compare builds. Use simple math to get the raw stats which are then reduced by your skill level and the circumstances of the fight. And since the later are different each time and can’t really be simulated in a testing environment you wouldn’t gain more information from a Damage or Heal Meter than you can get by simply using math.

Please give me a spreadsheet with every warrior skill’s scaling coefficient and every dungeon mob’s armor value. The math isn’t simple enough for me.

Haha, wow. Thank you for providing some insight, but still I am amazed. I’ve done quite a few runs of just about every dungeon, but I never encountered the bugs you describe. It actually frightens me a bit that there might be even more bugs that I don’t know yet.

But, regarding Path 3 second boss: I think he is working as intended. As far as I have observed him, the marks he uses don’t get triggered by players standing on them, but by another skill he does. The boss spreads marks across the area and then blows them up.

zencow.3651:

Meh,thelarger proportion of rage is at Simins later on in that path. I’d prefer they fix the spark imprisoning/persistent health reset at 50% rather than on timer bugs (after first stealth she’s meant to stealth again after 40 seconds but instead she stealths immediately again at 50%) first.

It’s just so silly that we have to go out of our way to break their game and do stupid things to make Arah work and has the terrible unfinished game feel. #Gw2wasn’tready

I’m pretty sure the way to beat Simin is intended. It says in the mob description that she only hides, which already hints at using a couple of players to keep hitting her while she is invisible.
As for stealthing immediately again: I suspect that the cooldown begins to run as soon as she stealths. So the longer you take with decloaking her, the less visible time. Up until the extreme of stealthing basically immediately again.

In general, I agree on the “unfinished game feel”.

edit: could you please tell me more about the issues with path 1 and path 2? I can’t remember ever encountering anything like that, so I’m interested.

zencow.3651:

Doubt they’d do that anytime soon. He only needs to be alive as you enter the room for the cut-scene to start. Better off just sticking to that you’re doing and kill him off.

I’m just not going to do this path again, anyways. But I do feel bad for those who do run it .

I am really sure it’s not the Stalkers popping out of burrows. Have been launched in places without burrows multiple times already.

Howlers do both a buff and a cone AoE launch.
Breeders can spawn hatchlings and do an evading hit.
You also missed Stalkers, which do evading hard hits.

Tres.5427:

spreadsheets.9805:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We’re very aware it is happening with bunches of structures (bunches being a super technical design term). The fix SHOULD fix a lot of situations.

Are you also aware of this bug having to do with targeting?
If the player disables auto-target (so it doesn’t get targeted again), then deselects the burrow and just aims their attacks in its direction, they will all hit without problem. You don’t have to circle or do any weird stuff.

Don’t ever have to target the burrow at all just swing/shoot in general direction and everything will land.

That is pretty much exactly what is written in my post.

Jasher.6580:

spreadsheets.9805:

Their jump is VERY telegraphed and easy to dodge.
Champion Scavengers are a bit of a pain, because you can’t always interrupt their channeling attack.

Yes, but what about when there is two of them… and you dodge one only to have the other jump on you right after…

Stunbreakers. To be fair, I just pull the groups while I’m in range of all the Scavengers. That way, they all do their jump at the same time. If you add a group, that’s tough luck. But then again, unexpected situations are what you keep oh-kitten-buttons in your build for.

edit: Scavengers really shouldn’t be getting a second jump off. If your group doesn’t kill them before that, something is going wrong.

Their jump is VERY telegraphed and easy to dodge.
Champion Scavengers are a bit of a pain, because you can’t always interrupt their channeling attack.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We’re very aware it is happening with bunches of structures (bunches being a super technical design term). The fix SHOULD fix a lot of situations.

Are you also aware of this bug having to do with targeting?
If the player disables auto-target (so it doesn’t get targeted again), then deselects the burrow and just aims their attacks in its direction, they will all hit without problem. You don’t have to circle or do any weird stuff.

I got into Arah today, only to find the thing bugged when we were done with the run.
This isn’t really an acceptable situation, I literally can’t play that character anywhere else if I want to run Arah before the next patch hits.

I would like to know the thought process behind making a friendly NPC in Arah Explorable who can only attack in melee.

It doesn’t matter for the most part, but gets really annoying when you fight Giganticus Lupicus. During the first phase of that boss, when a grub gets spawned at the NPC, the Lupicus will swallow it near instantly, because the NPC is hugging Lupicus like a big dumb-dumb. There is much less time to kill the grub than if it spawns at range.

So at that particular boss, having the NPC with you is actually detrimental to your groups performance. It’s annoying to be handicapped like that, to have mistakes forced upon you. Even if the whole group acts according to a sound strategy, if they get unlucky, they will get a couple of buff stacks onto Lupicus. And there is not a lot they can do to stop that. Pretty much the only way is to lure the NPC into a mob pack first and have him die, thus removing him completely from the Lupicus fight. That doesn’t sound like an intended mechanic and it sure as hell is not immersive. I don’t want to be forced to kill off a friendly NPC.

I hope what I wrote makes it reasonable to urge the Anet Dungeon Team: Please remove this unnecessary and annoying flaw in an otherwise pretty skill-based and fun encounter. Either make Lupicus not spawn grubs at non-player entities (This would be great, as it fixes problems with uncontrollable pets like necro or mesmer summons.) or just make the path 4 NPC a ranged attacker.

Too bad. I would like to be able to see everything about a dungeon run once it’s over. Damage dealt, sustained, evaded, mitigated, boons applied, conditions applied, healing done, numbers downed, numbers defeated. All of that for every different type of condition or damage source and with all of that data for every boss encounter.

I like to know about kitten.

People who skip mobs are anything but “elite”.

It would be nice to have a dev commenting on this, so we know whether it’s a bug or if there’s some kind of hidden achievement or something.

Try to kill him with a group of very low level characters, you’ll see a huge difference.
The dungeon is tuned so literally everyone has a chance of doing it.

Smallest size Sylvari
Warrior
no speed boosts

There seems to still be an issue with this achievement.
A dev has confirmed that carving and the tower are not supposed to count, but look at the attached screenshot.
I have only 2 achievements left, yet the meta-achievement bar clearly indicates that there are still 3 achievements to do. I have done the monthly candy corn consumption to check if that counts. It doesn’t.

Parisalchuk.9230:

People need to realize even in Melee kiting is very easy. Animation goes that he is about to do it: WALK THROUGH HIM. Melee gets a bad rap for a lot of things with coned AOE since the common thought is you cant back out of it, but really getting behind an enemy who is stationary doing a burst skill, really not that hard at all.

To beat these guys, pay attention to the fight and not your skills, learn the attack animations, dont stop moving and always keep firing. Follow those tips in any dungeon and things generally will go alright.

That’s a bad idea against Scavengers and will only work if it’s not targeting you. Scavengers can turn at their normal rate while channeling their attack. I’m not 100% positive, but pretty sure that they also will just jump in the other direction if you try to sidestep it.

You have to dodge. Best way to do it for melee builds after that is using an immunity skill and just burning them down, really.

If you don’t have an immunity skill ready, just go away. Don’t walk around the mob or anything stupid, as that will change the area where damage is being dealt. Just dodge roll backwards. This way, your team won’t be caught up in sudden AoEs they didn’t anticipate.

Huge pro tip for melee users: Turn auto-target off. Just stand in front of the burrow and hit it, do not target. Easy peasy, you won’t miss another hit ever again.

Also, Robert:
Could you tell me if you’ve changed anything about the number of burrows in Tzark’s encounter? I’ve done it today and it felt like there were way less burrows than usual.

Normally, my group would barely keep up with killing newly spawned burrows. This time around, we had to wait a couple of seconds for each to spawn. Just breezing through them.

Simin isn’t even difficult, she’s a simple DPS check.

You wouldn’t call Patchwerk difficult just because he kills undergeared groups. Just like that, Simin is way easier with high DPS groups. The mechanics themselves are really simple.

Shiri.6728:

Yeah, the earth one also has the ice graphic, but it’s not “forming”, it starts already there. I’m guessing it’s bugged and the ice graphic should only be on the ice spike, the earth one would just be normal circles. That would make this less painful (died like 6 times trying to figure it out, normally I just dodge every single one.)

It’s just a simple trick, and a funny one at that. Frozen ground → no spike, frozen air → spike.

It shouldn’t go, because figuring out which you’re in is basically 90% of the challenge in avoiding it. By your logic, the big circle on the ice spike should go, too. But that whole attack is built around looking similar. Just not quite the same.

AoE oneshot? Wow, how many grubs did you let him eat to get oneshot?

Anyways, just don’t rez people unless you have some CDs ready that make it safe. If you stand still long enough to fully rez someone, you have to get real lucky to not die. This is probably one of the few fights where bads going down can really drag down the group by a lot.

You missed something about the ice spike.
The circle where the ice spike will appear actually shows a very obvious frozen mist animation prior to it hitting. If you just watch out for air turning blue, it’s easy to spot and move out of.

This has been happening since day one in all 3 paths of AC, really annoying.
I suspect it has something to do with the dungeon leader being in a loading screen or something.

Needs fixing asap!

Bonus events in dungeons are not rewarding enough.
They basically add another boss to the dungeon, without giving as much as a chest, let alone tokens.

Because of this low reward, you mostly feel bad when a bonus event triggers. It’s not “ooh, interesting”, it’s “ugh, this is gonna take some time”.

So, I am really not extremely satisfied with this dungeon path.
The main problem is how none of the bosses are terribly challenging, yet have massive amounts of HP.

That leads to players basically just bashing a pinata until it gives up the loot, it’s very tedious and not really a challenge. The Icebrood Norn at the start need their HP lowered and some more interesting/dangerous mechanics. Same with the underwater boss.

Godmoney.2048:

spreadsheets.9805:

Good luck removing those 20 stacks of bleeding sitting on a maximum of 10k HP. I hope you have quickness or something, lol.

Hint: What is also literally one of the most common principles in MMOs ever? Being able to mitigate all kinds of damage. Guess what? You can’t mitigate some damage in GW2.

Also, I really hope you enjoy getting oneshot by dumb stuff that 200 points of Vitality would let you survive. Here’s another bit of MMO 101 for you: dead guys don’t do kitten.

How the hell would you get 20 stacks of bleeding on you? What game are you playing.

I’m in full dungeon gear, we clear COF and AC every single night full clears. I have never ever seen 20 stacks from any combo of mobs.

I literally have every single weapon for my mesmer out of dungeons. I’ve ran AC and COF till my eye’s bleed and I have never seen more than a 10 stack and even then that’s extremley rare.

You’re talking with no experience.

There’s some boss encounters and even trash mobs that apply heavy bleeding. Golems in SE is one quick example that comes to mind. Of course, if you’re just doing only COF and AC over and over again, you wouldn’t see those, but that’s just a matter of experience.
h e h

Good luck removing those 20 stacks of bleeding sitting on a maximum of 10k HP. I hope you have quickness or something, lol.

Hint: What is also literally one of the most common principles in MMOs ever? Being able to mitigate all kinds of damage. Guess what? You can’t mitigate some damage in GW2.

Also, I really hope you enjoy getting oneshot by dumb stuff that 200 points of Vitality would let you survive. Here’s another bit of MMO 101 for you: dead guys don’t do kitten.

edit: I also really like how you apparently think “Cleric’s” gear has kittening Vitality when it clearly doesn’t. Check yourself, before you wreck yourself.

Godmoney.2048:

Vitatlity on a healer is a wasted stat. That’s mmo 101.

Toughness and armor are more efficient for healing builds.

If you don’t even know that then why should I trust your knowledge?

Going full toughness will have you die in seconds against some bleed stacks.
If you don’t even know that, then why should anyone care about your post?

Not to mention, you’re never gonna match vitality’s EHP with toughness and a healthy HP buffer is actually something to consider in GW2. Can’t very well heal anything if you’re kittening down before your cast finishes, right?

Hellkaiser.6025:

The encounter allows you to bunch up, take advantage of that.
That means, take some fire field and other group might, if all your duders have 20+ stacks of might, burrows die so fast that there should be no more than one at a time, with all the gravelings just dying as soon as they spawn. Be sure to kill every Breeder you see, they can own the essence collectors pretty hard while you’re not looking.

Staff elementalists or grenade engineers are really strong in the fight, since they have very good ground-targeted AoE abilities. Two staff elementalists will take out a burrow in a matter of seconds, just with Meteor Showers.

Solid post, but the potential for mights can vary from team to team. If you’re suggesting that we stack 2 ele’s for each of the fights, then you’re missing some important values despite the quality of the advice in general

Guardians, Warriors, Eles, Engineers and Rangers have access to fire fields, every class but rangers has access to blast finishers.
Read closely, I am not suggesting everyone take 2 elementalists. That is my report of what I have personally experienced. I think any setup with a similar strength in ground targeted AoE will fare well.

edit: This is all just about the Tzark event.
Hodgins’ event is hilariously easy if you just have one guy kite everything that comes out the burrow at the entrance, then get the rest of the group to kill off all other burrows before touching the one that’s getting kited.

That said, I have done that event without using any sort of great group buffing or anything. It’s a lot harder and a kitten pain in the kitten because you won’t be able to basically quell most of the graveling spawns. But with survivable character builds, you can defend the last stretch if you split up in groups of 2 and 3 people.

I would like to add that it would be very nice of you to refrain from rating my or any other persons post without adding some sort of substance to what you are saying. A remark like “you’re missing some important values” is just very irritating, as there is literally no way for me to know what you are talking about.

So it’s a thinly veiled death zerg. Nice tactic.

The encounter allows you to bunch up, take advantage of that.
That means, take some fire field and other group might, if all your duders have 20+ stacks of might, burrows die so fast that there should be no more than one at a time, with all the gravelings just dying as soon as they spawn. Be sure to kill every Breeder you see, they can own the essence collectors pretty hard while you’re not looking.

Staff elementalists or grenade engineers are really strong in the fight, since they have very good ground-targeted AoE abilities. Two staff elementalists will take out a burrow in a matter of seconds, just with Meteor Showers.

I just dislike underwater combat, especially as an elementalist. It’s so annoying to have all the mechanics you built your character around (auras, Combo Fields and Finishers) taken away from you when you enter the water.

I understand that combos might be hard to implement underwater and that some skills don’t really work there, but the way it is right now, with a lot of skills/mechanics just disabled without any replacement, underwater combat feels exactly the way ArenaNet said they didn’t want: tacked on, a gimmick that takes up too much of the game.

I am running 0/20/10/10/30 right now and it feels a bit overpowered.
My Traits are I and either III or X in Air, V in Earth, I in Water and V, either II, VI or VII and of course XI in Arcana.
With this setup and healing power gear, you are insanely sustainable through the permanent protection and massive amount of healing you get. At the same time, though, you have permanent swiftness, permanent fury and some might stacks, so both damage and mobility are pretty good, too.

All you have to do is open with the earth blast finisher, then switch to water to lay down an ice field. Now roll into that field, cast Arcane Wave inside it, move a bit, switch attunement and roll again. That will blast-finish the ice field 4 times, giving you and allies inside the blast Frost Aura, Fury, Swiftness and Protection for a pretty long time. In fact, you are able to permanently sustain Fury and Swiftness just by doing this. If you just remember to swap attunements, Arcana V will allow you to permanently keep Protection up, too. Remember, as if this wasn’t good enough just for you already, it also affects up to 5 dudes around you.

If you are running a dungeon, you can pick Glyph of Renewal and go with Arcana II instead of VI or VII. That will allow you to rez 3 people in moments where someone dropped the ball, also adding Protection, Fury, Swiftness and the projectile-reflecting Magnetic Aura upon their Revival.

If you are having a particularly easy time with a dungeon, you can take Blasting Staff for your middle Arcana trait, then use the 4 finisher combo on your Fire field. This will grant 12 stacks of might to your whole party – for 20 seconds. 3 out of your 4 finishers have a lower cool down than that, as does your fire field. Stacking might up this way will see your party just destroying anything that doesn’t kill them too fast.

In my opinion, an Evasive Arcana focused blast finisher build is about as good as you can get both in terms of versatility and strength if you want to support a team. On top of that, I find it hard to believe that any other build will prove better as a solo PvE solution. There might be better builds for filling a more offensive role in groups, though.

Improve underwater.
This means Evasive Arcana should have underwater effects and there should be auras underwater.

I have done some tests with crit damage and steady weapons in the mists.
I’m using the elementalist staff, so the bouncing attack hits all 3 golems at once and I can parse the combat log easier.
These are the results.
0 critdamage:
http://i.imgur.com/MztGX.jpg
30 critdamage:
http://i.imgur.com/go29x.jpg
50 critdamage:
http://i.imgur.com/tmxm5.jpg

You can see for yourself by doing the math, but the critical multipliers are:
1.5 for 0 critdamage, 1.8 for 30 critdamage and 2 for 50 critdamage.
This would suggest that critdamage indeed just gets added to your base 1.5 multiplier.

The numbers don’t quite match for the attacks on the heavy golem with 50 critdamage, but there’s a reason for that. I had to patch that picture together from different samples, because getting a bouncing hit where all 3 hits don’t crit is pretty hard with berserker’s equipment and 30 points in air. Then you look at one trait that Air has, Weak Spot, and you will see that there’s a chance to apply vulnerability on critical hits. That is what screwed up the values a bit.

As for why the actual damage values differ between my shots with 0 and 30 critdamage and the shots with 50 critdamage, I had to move spots because of thieves testing out their heartseeker deeps. Turns out the different golem spots actually have different armor values!

Glyph of Renewal (general)
This skill can revive defeated players. No other skill can do that so I’m assuming it’s a bug.
Also, the earth attunement version sometimes rezzes all 3 players at full health. No idea if it’s related to switching attunements or whatever.