Guild Wars 2

I can verify this as well. I’ve been fiddling with NTP the last couple of hours to see if one of the servers are off, but MS’s servers and the US Gov servers seem to be in sync. My phone carrier network is ahead by 5 seconds… but thats pretty normal for them.

As for the authentication… the codes are only valid starting at t-10 of the app’s rollover timer. This means the Anet auth server is ahead by at least 20 seconds PLUS whatever the tolerance window for TOTP they’re using (which shouldn’t be higher then +30 seconds if they follow common practices). That is insanely huge when you consider data centers are rarely off by more then a few seconds from a global time source, since values higher then 5 seconds start to mess with time stamped protocols (authentication and encryption being the most sensitive).

Elementalist has the copyright to all guildwars Earthbending. They’re also way more stylin then trenchcoat classes.

sPvP would never tolerate a mode where you aren’t directly dominating another person by force. It would have to be mario kart where every weapon is a blue turtle shell, before it would be a hit with the PvP crowd.

but the aren’t valuable…… the whole point of legendary weapons is to get more expensive by over-consuming materials which have other demands. :P

Considering Soul Beast expressly exists to get rid of the pet….. how do you convince people to spend money on skins for them?

Weaver….. Ele is the only class thats consistently Meta due to wide variety of purpose builds, and would be the only class to meet your insanely broad requirements. Keep in mind that Meta rejects things which aren’t min/max, and Especs purposely trade design weaknesses in exchange for build strength….. which is why Druid, which is marginally useless in 90% of the game, achieved meta status because it hamfistedly has access to a unique and powerful damage buff.

I would advise against trying to force yourself into a “main” that does everything, for the sake of your sanity, as the game has gone out of its way to eliminate that opportunity whenever it can. Guardians used to be the whole game’s meta….. now its not even a must pick for most hard content, and only really gets taken for 2 or 3 situation specific skills, rather then its build performance.

Instead, I would recommend running 3 characters, each configured to slot into certain roles as its main setup, so you don’t have to struggle finding variety in game play. If anything, it makes you better player, as you gain perspective into build craft in a way that never could by sticking to only one profession.

They dropped roll over rewards, because they were piling up in spades with nothing to spend them on. The replacement, spirit shards, can be had by other means…. but unless you’re an avid crafter, theres really nothing worthwhile to spend them on.

The switch to mastery unlocks was an active attempt to steer away from effortless accumulation, and would had been dead stop if it wasn’t for roll over rewards being psychologically entrenched in the player base’s mind set.

While it also bugs me knowing the roll over rewards stop…. if you aren’t doing achievement hunting, the vast majority of masteries aren’t useful to players. Theres only 4 specific masteries in HoT that “required” to move forward in the story, while the rest exist to make access to certain achievement tasks possible. Even considering its usefulness, Ley-line gliding isn’t required for any of the LS3 maps. Lava tubes are the same way.

The whole point here is that you might want to rethink your attachment to rewards cycles, if you aren’t a completionist at heart. More over…… the worst its really doing is “coaxing” you do other content; because other then Gift of Battle, the minimum investment for cross-mode reward requirements are incredibly shallow. If you can’t be kitten d to spend a whole 30 minutes doing something new, even to just get it out of the way….. then its not worth your time to be obsessing over.

To unlock the Raid track all you have to do is be part of a Boss kill. All that really takes is some social networking to find a group who would be willing to carry you to get it out of the way, and you’ll never have to do another HOT raid again. You can literally train the tracks using any HoT mastery points, and exp gathered while in any HoT (or LS3) map to progress it.

This whole thing bugged me at first….. until I realized how fast spirit shards were piling up anyway. I’m also not adverse to the Raids….. in fact, I find most of their designs should had been more baseline for open world (and kind of are with the LS3 world bosses). Its the attitude of the Raid community that kills my incentive to PUG it. Its a huge shame, because the raids are actually very fun, when someone isn’t throwing a tantrum because the speed clear isn’t carrying them hard enough..

Leafy.5407:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

It’s amazing how often rumor and player speculation become fact and promises from ArenaNet.

The Devs speak about Mounts and their implementation into the game at this time in a recent Guild Chat.

Good luck.

Well Inculpatus, it is neither rumor or player speculation I was there from the beginning of GW1 and GW2 and this was indeed one of their initial defining points. I’m just curious why the change in concept from the last two releases.

The thing is Anet doesn’t “technically” throw things off the table. Ideas are either accepted or rejected based on need, design investment, and engine investment. Because of the Waypoints, there is no NEED for mounts in this game. So when they were looking for new toys for PoF, they came to mounts under the reasoning of furthering new Map designs, taking advantage of the large space supported by the engine now, and focused them as a proper “mobility tool” in order to differentiate it from bland MMO tropes.

Guildwars 2 is unusual in that its one of the few MMOs that takes full advantage of platformer game design. So in order to justify the existence of Mounts, they’re taking this concept to a new extreme, and leveraging it directly into the map design to give them express purpose. For most MMOs, mounts are just things that get you around faster then walking. With the way GW2 is using them, entire maps in Elona are effectively large scale jumping puzzles.

It not a matter of them “changing their minds” about something…… so much as they figured out a way that makes them worth doing (without looking like a cop out); thus are now putting effort into it.

Given how the MF works by changing item IDs, it doesn’t have the data to revert items like that. Whoever said that was making kitten up.

This is about as current as it gets without being Path of Fire speculation. Covers the important high level ideas for Heart of Thorns.

You shouldn’t be allowed to look in the box……. that breaks the whole premise of the experiment. If you want an observable outcome, I would say have a cat in possible 2 positions (next to each other), and every time you would look away it goes into super position, then collapses back when you look in that direction.

I’d guarantee 4 out of 5 players wouldn’t get the joke without looking it up.

I haven’t checked the math in a while, but most of the incoming Exp for event/task based rewards are % of a level, scaled to the event level.

Open world events give 7% of a level based on the event level. So for lvl 80, thats easily 26k exp for a gold medal. Dungeons I believe give a whole level per Exp path completed. Fractals I’m unsure, but they do have multiple sub-events, including the boss fight. So with that in mind, map event trains are a strong source of Exp for practically no overhead on your part.

Though keep in mind that these rewards are based on % of levels, which caps at 80, but the mastery tracks operate on a vastly larger value scale. So an even doesn’t give you 7% of the Mastery track….. just 26k exp of the potentially 5 million exp needed for a high tier track.

You can see the exp requirements here.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Heart_of_Maguuma_mastery_tracks

Not really. The game is mostly CPU bound, but its due to how the game is threaded that its inefficient, and bottle necks on the main thread. Because of this, you benefit more from per-core performance then multi-core performance…..

So in your case, you might want to upgrade the cooling of its not already running higher end heatsinks, and overclock the boost to 4 GHz- 4.1Ghz. The CPU can easily go up to 4.7Ghz, but it takes voltage fiddling and water cooling to do safely.

Alternatively you could turn down (or off) shadows and reflections, and lower the player model count/detail settings, as those have the most performance overhead in this engine.

Danikat.8537:

STIHL.2489:

Here is the way it works.. if are a player that enjoys PvE, eventually.. you will be forced to raid to continue your progression in this game, it’s really just a matter of how long you can occupy your time doing other stuff before that happens.

Other than running out of other stuff to do (which is just a matter of waiting for Anet to add more content) what is there that forces you to raid?

Due to the hugely disproportionate pay outs, and lowest effort-cost for Legendary armor. The reward system still hasn’t been normalized, despite Ascended gear basically becoming baseline after LS3 trinkets blew the lid off obtaining HOT stat builds.

Its long been known that players will flock to whichever content offers the best rewards; and Ascended gear has been both a Hard and Soft gating mechanism to force minimum investment to those higher reward activities.

Fractals use them for AR, but the only reliable way to get Asc gear is by crafting them. Yeah they drop in T4… but you can’t run T4 without major gold investment in either Asc armor (for more slots) or very high AR infusions (which cost scale steeply beyond +9).

Raids use them to shore up DPS output, since the vast majority of players are incapable of optional skill rotations (and was proven with DPS meters being green lit). Yeah you can do them in exotics…. but that extra group DPS output from Asc stats is always desirable.

Compare the rewards of both and Raids and Fractals to Open world meta, or even dungeons, and you’ll quickly realize how much better the first 2 are when it comes to generating coin, and outfitting alts with top level gear. Hell….. WvW used to run at a deficit due to the cost of siege upgrades (which are single use), tower/keep upgrades (which you regularly lose throughout the day), and the extremely low rate of mat generation. Worse still….. you could only get Core stats up to exotic from WvW vendors, and HoT stats required you to do HoT metas for the supplies to craft them. It wasn’t until Skirmish rewards, which added asc gear for tokens+marks, that WvW players had solid net gain in their income, because skirmish rewards now covers the cost of play.

Yet despite those changes to WvW, Fractals can generate around 10-20 gold from just daily rewards and discounted keys…. and rarely take more then an hour, hour and a half, to do. And Raid tokens give you steeply discounted gear, allowing you to gear up alts every couple of months for 130g (thats a full gear set), where as Crafting just the armor set is around 350-400g. For reference, MasterMarks discounts for WvW/PvP Gear vendors results in half price (in coin) over crafting for each gear piece, but also costs tokens from that game mode.

In terms of time efficiency, and general control, Fractals and Raids can reliably generate the highest rewards, and easily fund alts while still turning a profit. WvW has a huge list of X factors that dictate reward output, and the enemy steam rolling you can almost halt it completely. Even skirmish rewards get dodgy, because the conditions for the Outnumbered bonus are very touchy, and ramping up participation is very difficult unless you’re succeeding in some capacity. Open world rewards are easy, but hugely time consuming….. HOT map metas are at least 2 hours long, only a hand full of event trains in Core Tyria make competitive gold/loot, but become mind numbing after a couple of cycles. Compare that to a 30 minute run in Raids or Fractals, make at least 5g in drops/daily, and free to do something else.

“Thats quality armor”

That would make sense if the game was Tank and Spank…..but the mere existence of active dodging changes the entire balance dynamic. Armor/Toughness isn’t there to supplant damage avoidance; its there to compliment it. Both Defense (armor + tough) and HP in general are distinctly tuned to blunt sustain damage, while dodge rolls exist to counter burst damage.

Sustain damage is there to force players to expend skills to recover from the damage. This is known as “pressure” in our Meta. Burst damage is there to overwhelm a target’s defenses, and either force them into a defensive stance, or finish them off. Mitigating buffs (like Protection) are limited duration, not meant to have too much uptime, and is there to blunt burst damage to survivable levels. Since uptime is an issue outside of large groups, protection has to be carefully deployed as a way to conserve your recovery skills.

As an easy example, Medi Guards can use smite condition to clear conditions; but the Healing and Fury from Monk’s focus turns it into a powerful sustain tool. It can fire frequently, adds back health, improves burst damage potential, can deal respectable damage, and is able to counter act condi burst and condi pressure at key moments. Add the trait that casts Smite Condition on Heal, and they effectively have soft immunity to light and medium condi pressure, and can easily reset burst condi on classes that can’t rapid reapply. There was a very clear reason Medi guards were long time contenders on Metabattle.

So again….. the game is heavily focused on “active” combat. That means rewarding well timed and well executed actions/strategies, and punishing passive players for not getting out of the way of big damage when they see it coming.
What the OP is suggesting the players behave like AI in core Tyria….. just stand there like a lump, using skills as they come of cool down, and not move when AOE circles come up. Thank about that carefully for a second!

posting like this pretty much validates what they’re doing….. so the more it bothers you, the most they win. You can requesting a change of account name given the extreme circumstances. Also look up possible legal recourse, as it can turn criminal if certain conditions are met.

The only ones I run open world are Halloween and Wintersday for magic find and Karma bonuses. Halloween is super cheap. Wintersday food runs respectably cheap, but the utilities are consistently run upwards of 5-10s, on par with their basic counter parts.

This is insanely hard to narrow down….

https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=94408
http://graphicscardhub.com/single-slot-graphics-card/
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/best-single-slot-low-profile-gpu-for-a-kaby-lake-sierra-build.217105/

There is the RX 560 Slim, but they’re insanely hard to find… only a few places even list them.

ASL GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Battle Flag is another one worth looking into….. but its a LONG card.

elrin.4750:

If theres one thing I really hate on GW2, it’s titles. They are a visual clutter. I wish I could turn just the titles off.

Anet won’t add an option to disable just the titles, anyone know why?

But then you won’t know that I’m the “Be-All End-All” or “Chicken Chaser”. Its of critical importance that you recognize my accomplishments, which is stumbled upon by accident while collecting feathers for a stupid anti-cold potion.

Its so they can sell more outfits obviously. :P

So 40 seconds out of the literal hundreds of hours you’ll put into a character under normal play is so soul crushingly significant, that you can’t even be bothered to stand up and get a soda while you let it roll of on its own? And gods forbid having to open the map once to WP to a spot in the city like do several times a day.

Leon de Damasco.8105:

Can you define “easy”?
As you pointed there is way to obtain legendary armor just playing WvW.
I seriously doubt that about “everyone else is maxed in legendary gear” but, if you feel you are far behind there is a tier called Ascended. Guild Wars 2 is pretty much a game where players’ skills are much more importan than gear.
Hf and GL.

Ascended gear isn’t anywhere near as important as a Competent build. Most people in WvW either roll exotics, or recycle parts of their Raid loadout if the stats match up to what they need. What matters is the build they use, and how they deploy it.

I would wager hes massively over confident in his abilities, but is running an ancient meta build from pre-HOT, and has no idea how to counter play the new Espec builds. The fact that he hasn’t even mentioned what class he runs, or what classes are pounding him, suggests hes not sure what tactics hes losing to.

Pifil.5193:

costepj.5120:

LS4 will introduce a new legendary weapon called The Packrat. All the ingredients will be items for which there is currently no apparent use in the game. No new sources will be added. You will only be able to craft it if you hoarded enough of each. I’m ready.

That’s a new legendary hammer that’s basically just a skritt, right?

It would be a Focus, with a model that looks like a Sack.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Xegrilt.9426:

GW2 capture the essence of gear without giving you the illusion of content and progression. Other game will bring you higher level cap, better and stronger gear that will then be mandatory, illusion of progress and content. Illusion of content because the better gear will make older content meaningless and obsolete, and illusion of progress because you were strong enough to do the end-game content, but then you need to re-grind your gear every new update just to actually reach your previous capacity as end-game toon. GW2 doesn’t provide such illusion and let you keep your power level, and doesn’t let old content become obsolete. The point for those hard to get item is in the rarity itself, not illusion of progression.

Nothing in your post explains why you think that sense of progression is an illusion. If older content is becoming easier, then the sense of vertical progression exists, and thus it cannot be an illusion because it’s real and has real gameplay impact.

I would say it is the exact opposite. It is GW2 that is giving us an illusion of a different sense of progression, when it truly isn’t. Grinding the best DPS stat sets available whenever a new expansion comes is, for all intents and purposes, pretty much a less exciting and more convoluted version of the classic gear treadmill from other MMORPGs. The game gives you the illusion of choice (“that’s horizontal progression! you simply pick the stats you want!”), but flawed balance and flawed game design dictate that specific stat combinations are mathematically the superior option, and you end up having a “stat treadmill” that makes you stronger and old content easier anyways.

That being said, vertical progression can be very exciting when it feels very organic, and that excitement is the heart and soul of RPG mechanics. A RPG without vertical progression will always have a smaller audience, and that’s just normal. GW2 is an anti-RPG RPG, and not everyone will enjoy an experimental product like that.

Its considered an Illusion, because the mechanisms, even the goal itself, is about as contrived as it can get. It also doesn’t change your strategy and outlook (which is signs of growth), but rather reinforces the idea that “merit” has less value then participation. Thus you’re not “progressing” as in “getting better”, but are instead investing time to secure a false sense of accomplishment.

Stat numbers are tangible, thus apparent… which is why they’re so coveted. This hilarious now that DPS meters were green lit for use….. and the startling discovery that the vast majority players of in Raids were getting no where near the DPS numbers they thought they were. Some Players in exotics were getting numbers in excess of many Ascended players… which rightfully robs them of their sense of “accomplishment”.

See thats the real crux of the argument here….. progress and accomplishment are different things, but MMO players have a bad habit of using them interchangeably. Complicating this issue further, the adoption of reward schedules which make “accomplishment” (the reward) an inevitability. But the sense of accomplishment is diminished when its not really earned; thus resulting in the need to be lead around by a false notion of “progress” in increasing quantities, until interest is lost completely.

So when I see people in chat complain about no “sense of progress” I immediately question “what is their goal”. And the response I get is the usual trite “more gear to work on”, “higher levels”, or “an end game”. Note how intangible and open ended these ideas are….. Note how these aren’t really goals, but means of investment. Perpetual investment into an endless cycle of mile stones, as you move the screen to the right and make numbers go higher. Cap it, and they get bored. Make it go down/backwards, and people lose their kitten.

Just to get perspective, go play “Don’t Move”.

It has everything progress junkie could ever want. Leveling, achievements, points, metrics, difficult game play, and everything you do (or don’t do) ultimately progresses toward the ultimate End game. So why isn’t this game considered the greatest game since Progress quest? Because it gives no illusion that anything you do means anything beyond what you assign it. So all the “progress” you can make in a game like WoW is merely an illusion….. because every ultimate end game accomplishment is invalidated the moment a new expansion comes out, and all the time/effort investment you’ve put in is robbed of its value, as those same tasks are trivialized to allow players who came after you to catch up.

Its a very carefully constructed illusion, so as to not shatter itself under something as errant as brief contemplation. So you want to know why moving the goal post = progress in World of Warcraft?

We have dance, sit, sleep, talk, cross arms, and a small set of idle animations….. what possible emote could /afk use to convey that you aren’t there, that any of the above listed can’t? Or are you suggesting a /toilet emote where they fidget in place?

Or are you confusing an away message with an “emote”:
e·mote
??m?t/
verb
verb: emote; 3rd person present: emotes; past tense: emoted; past participle: emoted; gerund or present participle: emoting

• portray emotion in a theatrical manner.*

MokahTGS.7850:

Does anyone know if taking off your armor affects how much damage you take?

It shouldn’t, since its % based. Having lots of HP might make it higher.

If we go by design intent- its to have a wide array of play styles, varying skill caps within a role, and the ability for nearly any class to slot competently into a given role for things like Raids. Because we only have 1 Espec on the roster for each class, its pretty easy to determine ‘best in slot" from a small pool of options. As that list grows, more options open up, as does opportunity for situational relevance.
For instance… HOT raids are all about DPS and counter mechanics. For PoF, theres been hinting that boonstrip and barrier will have emphasis for at least some of the newer raids. They’re also rotating each class between Raid, PvP and WvW with the especs….. and you’ll notice, a pattern.

Mesmer – PvP WvW Utility \ Chrono Raid Support \ Mirage Raid PvP DPS
Necro- Condi Tank \ Reaper DPS \ Scourge Support
Warrior- PvP WvW Control Support \ Berserker Raid DPS \ Spell Breaker PvP shutdown
Engineer- WvW Utility Support \ Scrapper PvP Control \ Holosmith Raid DPS
You kind of get the idea.

In your next statement, you confuse “Meta”, which is a player prerogative, with Dev design intent. Guardians are NOT explicitly designed to simply dish out Stab in WvW…. player Meta developed that, because the demand is for mobile, on-demand stability- to which Guardian’s shout has easy access to, and has a rune set that also synergies to AOE remove conditions. Rev has Inspiring Reinforcement for Stab, and Pain Absorption for condition control, but can’t fire them off at the same time, and limits mobility in how their deployed.
Every Class has access to Stun Breaks, Stability, and Condition clear……. but Guardians can manage that on a group level, and more skills to help sustain it, in a way that Rev can’t even come close to. But at the same time, Rev has easy access to AOE Resistance boons (which ignore conditions completely), which Guardians do not. Mesmers can share Stab through Signet of Inspiration, and multiple AOE stun breaks, while the Guardian has only 1 that it has to trait for.

Its not just filling a role, but how each class can excel in certain situations concerning the exact same job. Its more a failure of encounter design to not leverage that fact in various areas of the game….. with WvW being the most chaotic, since you’re faced with all possible vectors of attack at the same time. So naturally, the Meta looks for the most efficient builds and tries to forcibly narrow the number of situations down as much as possible for PvE, runs counter metas in WvW, and broad counters to over used builds in PvP. The Stagnation occurs when the players refuse to change the meta, because they dislike change….. and have to be forced into it by outside pressure.

For instance…. Pirate ship meta was big in WvW for the longest time. When condi got stronger, they changed to Condi bombs, and adopted Front line Lock down to keep them in the fields. In response to that, Dive Comp become popular to cut through the condi bombs and maintain mobility. In response to that, a lot of servers are starting to Driver snipe again, since killing the Driver (commander) shuts down the whole zerg.
With PoF coming up, Deadeyes are going to be insanely popular, as are flankers looking for tunnel visioned Deadeyes for easy kills.

Change one skill, and the whole meta can reshuffle because of it…… like when Facet of Nature Boon duration bonus was cut from 50 to 33.

Its part of an ancient system, where clipping used to be a consideration in art and animation for the game. What you describe with reequip is actually a flaw in the game code; and while it can be entertaining to exploit, its not supposed to happen.

its been so long, everyones just kind of caring about it.

Artyport.2084:

dchsknight.3042:

Artyport.2084:

dchsknight.3042:

We already have 3 solid healers in gw2. It is the meta’s fault that everyone and their mother listen’s to the “Meta” bull crap to think that there is any another classes besides Zerker and Condi.

Having the class be support as its theme is the thing that is missing!
THEME!!!
ranger at is core is a bow animal guy.
ele- is a classic mage
guardian – is the closest thing that comes to that but is more paladin themed and not healing themed.

Monk would have its theme start off as support themed.
then could have an elite spec that is smite based and one that is more offensive support base.

You kidding right? All druid can do succesfully is heal and support. That is what their class mechanic is all about.

One thing that I think needs a definition is “class”. A ranger is a ranger, but a Druid is not a ranger. They are a different class with a whole new class mechanic. The soul reason a druid was made was for support and heals. While they can do other things, that is not what they where made for.

Currently there are 18 classes in the game. 4 of them can heal pretty good, 3 of them are amazing at it.

We dont need a healing support class we already got 3 of them that are fantastic at it.

Theme is completely different than mechanics.

A cloth wearing support character who looks to be weak offensively but is strong defensively is a character most of us who enjoy support have played in every MMO.

My point is not that the other classes cant do healing. its not that the druid is a great healing spec but while the ability to heal and support are in game. The feeling that you get from playing one of these archetypes is missing from the game.
Again guardian is paladin style.. and a lot of us hate heavy armored classes. I’ve literally tried everything to make my guardian feel like a cloth wearer.. but his most support weapon is a mace.. which is.. just not the feels people like the top poster are looking for.

For instance FFXIV has 3 healers.
Astro/White Mage/Scholar.
There is no class that has the same feeling as the above three classes.
and that is why BRING THE MONK BACK threads pop up all the time.

Have you never camped water Ele?

Scheduled Betas do more to maintain activity then open PTRs; the limited window and encourages people to push harder, and take more risks to get the most out of it. .

Also, the way the system works, ALL clients are on the current build…… they just section off access to content via flags. That means you can’t have a “pre-patch” build in the wild, without it being a completely separate executable.

Or add tab to UM vendors to convert to UM

SeranusGaming.7362:

Personally, I’ll never buy an outfit as I feel it takes away the unique aspect of my character. I hate running around and seeing another character look exactly like mine so hence why I have never liked the outfit concept. GW2 has such a vast array of variety in how you can create your character with all the pieces of armor, why would I want to just have a “cookie-cutter” look like someone else?

You’d be surprised what a really good dye job can do to an outfit. Theres been several occasions where I didn’t even recognize an outfit because of how good the color scheme was. Suffice to say, the default colors usually don’t do an outfit justice.

But you’ll want to rush in the first week, since thats your best chance to get baddies on the match up. The longer it goes on, the more likely the roster will distill down to only the good/cheesy players.

The Tracks do give clovers, and T6 mats, and T5 mats, champ bags, memories of battle (which is WvW exclusive).

But realize the whole point of the reward track is to get people to spend time in WvW, and get that population to do thing. If it bugs you that much, solo towers in Edge of the mist, since no one goes there any more.

Engineer and Holosmith. Looks to work with rifle, but the Sword has some really good gap closing and dishes out really high damage. You can run Grenade kit as utility for range, and switch into Photonforge for massive damage spikes up close. Traited with explosives, the damage bunker potential is practically unbalanced; dropping a line mines as you dodge, and some synergy with photon forge skills.

Second option would be Mirage. It has more ramp up then other classes, but it can maintain it indefinitely (and from target to target) if you manage your skills right.

You say you hate rotations….. frankly no build worth its salt will operate without knowing how synergies work, and taking advantage of it. If you just want a straight, reactive bruiser…. DH Medi Guard. But still, your damage multipliers rely on knowing what order to lay down skills.

If you’re PvPing…… Thief. Even without Especs, its the one class made to excel in sPvP for picking of targets 1v1, and has a metric butt ton of disengage options. Having Daredevil merely amps this up to 11.

Pro-tip… don’t bother with Legendary armor unless you Raid….. like ALOT. From Exotic to Ascended, the cost is nearly 10 times higher (gold value) in materials per piece, with a full set of armor costing roughly 400g. Legendary armor cost that much “per piece”, and takes a “minimum” of 16 weeks of time gated activities to craft a set.

The alternative methods in PvP takes at least a year, due to season reward caps. WvW takes about 22 weeks for a set; but without bonus pips its 40 hours a week (at most) for the weekly ticket cap. Getting WvW rank to get bonus pips takes a while….. so you’re looking at 6-8 months for a set if you’re starting from scratch and do nothing WvW.

Or you can spend a month passively gathering materials (plus time gated mats) and gold, and craft an Ascended set when you need it. Its also important to note that you can change the stats on Ascended gear for fairly cheap, once the initial piece is crafted. This makes the stat swapping (as a feature) on Legendary gear incredibly cost inefficient, and is more to save bag space then anything else.

quaniesan.8497:

I definitely could agree with this. The design team of Anet are lacking in ornate design skills. It would seem their artistic philosophy can be summed up by this formula:
Good look = 1000*(particle effect) + stick figures + oversize + X*floating part
Not to say they never had any single good design, however the trends seem to be the over-abuse of particle effects to compensate for the lacking in intricate ornation

Speaking of which, Carapace Heavy chest pieces are, hands down, the best armor non-gem store armor piece in the game.

is the other account EU?

Artyport.2084:

dchsknight.3042:

We already have 3 solid healers in gw2. It is the meta’s fault that everyone and their mother listen’s to the “Meta” bull crap to think that there is any another classes besides Zerker and Condi.

Having the class be support as its theme is the thing that is missing!
THEME!!!
ranger at is core is a bow animal guy.
ele- is a classic mage
guardian – is the closest thing that comes to that but is more paladin themed and not healing themed.

Monk would have its theme start off as support themed.
then could have an elite spec that is smite based and one that is more offensive support base.

We did, and still have a Support themed class…. the Guardian. And it was so good at that job, it dominated the meta (in all modes) until Raids forcibly shoe horned the need for higher sustained healing to counter sustained DOT from the encounters.

Even Ele, which had a specific support config, couldn’t keep pace with the guardians easy access to boons generation in a “Combat” configuration, before they had to reorder everything for Raid Comp.

The problem here is that you really don’t understand how these encounters work, if you think healing is a useful primary function in a game mode (Core Tyria) where every class has access to a sustainable self-healing skill.

This one trait https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Writ_of_Persistence used to be 2 traits that every guardian once took, making it the strongest passive healer in the game. The next closest competition would be Ele and Engineer, mostly because Water+Blast combos are stronger.

As for the argument of Elite spec…… Smite would be a core trait, because its from the original Attribute list of GW1. Smiting, Protection, Healing, Divine favor, and an invented 5th one that would clearly overlap with the Guardian, given Guards were based most heavily on Monks. Hell.. name aside, the Dragon Hunter’s concept of manifesting light through sheer conviction. Spear of Light, if it wasn’t part of Core, would had been the first skill added to that Espec.

But all of that pales in comparison to the reason Monks were scrapped….. Divine power, source of a Monk’s magic, is missing from Tyria, and is practically a Human exclusive to begin with. Guardians were a work around by combing the idea of martial disciple with personal conviction, evolving the Paragon model, to free it from godly sources of power. Take the concept of a Paladin, and allow it to radiate its power outward, and you have the basis for a Protection Monk. “Compassion” used to the be name of Healing power…. and would thematically fit a guardian who focuses on healing the wounded.

Its almost ironic that Revenant gains its power by channeling energy from powerful mist beings. Yet does so, not by devotion and prayer, but by enslaving them. The whole premise of the Monk neatly subverted, twice, in a way that allows them to confront beings they were once at the mercy of.

mtpelion.4562:

“Good” in this context means “Used as or competitive with a Meta build for at least one game area”.

Limiting the number of combinations makes it easier to balance the remaining combinations, which will increase the usefulness of each option.

Tell that to Ranger, which takes quick draw in EVERY build due to how universally powerful it is. Taking away quick draw would force them to use other traits… but none of those trait choices results in better performance.

The problem here is that class mechanics are NOT omni-fucntional to every build. Guardian Virtue actives are beyond impractical, and is why Dragonhunter replaced them with extremely high utility functions. Thief steal has no support options what-so-ever. Ranger pet, for all its diversity, is still a hot mess, and is more of a passive weapon then an active mechanic (hell, even the Flesh golem is a better active weapon, and has even less control in it). Engie Tool belt skills are incredibly straight forward, and the Tools line was only ever taken because of endurance bonus and swiftness, as it only really needed Firearms and/or Explosives for the majority of builds. And as the most extreme case, Ele only benefited from Arcane for Staff AOE size and access to Blast Finishers….. elements that were hardly build defining.

In order for the “Exclusive” trait line, which is aimed at enhancing the class mechanic, to be an Espec, it has to be universally applicable to ALL builds in Core. The reality is it was rarely taken, because the class mechanic itself was not universally applicable, and generally not as powerful as weapon/utility combos (which get stronger boosts from traits anyway).

To even consider making that a Espec, every trait would have to reexamined, and the Class mechanics themselves buffed into universal utility. That trait line would also have to be made synergistic with the other 4 core traits, which is hard to make sense of considering the GM line of those 4 core traits are supposed to be build defining themselves. Frankly, I don’t trust the designers to get this right, because they’re going to have to resort to “best in slot” options for specific pairings with utilities and weapons….. which also means those skills will have to be revamped as well.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Maps are replayable but they are about as fun as getting stuck in a time loop forever. Nothing ever changes and player actions mean nothing. Living world lol.

The world moved on without you. Everything is just a fractal……. once you realize that truth, you can truly embrace oblivion.

GW2 doesn’t raise the level cap or gear tiers….. the whole existence of +5% on Ascended gear is tale that is almost nonsensical as it is short.

So other then new stat sets, no new gear to chase.

Instead of trying to tailor each skill, it should just have a trait that modifies outgoing damage, outgoing effects, or generically trigger on crit/hit. That would be the most efficient way to include both weapons and kits into the spec, without having to generate a second set of skills that have to balanced separately.

Its an Elite skill….. double heals, double net and fire turret, and all of them deal explosive damage when traited, and the kitten thing has a huge AOE stun on landing.

I’d only support this option if guards near villages and towns attack you for having your weapons out. If we’re gonna pull the “roleplay card” having your weapon drawn all the time is a symbol of perpetual hostility, and should be responded to as such.

You may as well adopt the mind set of having to relearn the game from scratch. But if you hate HOT maps for the difficulty, you’re gonna hate PoF maps just as much.

I would also ignore any notions of reaching “end game” before PoF drops….. theres just too much you have to learn, and not enough time to do it in. With the new Especs shuffling the meta, you may as well wait before doing a gear revamp to see where you want to focus your resources first.

All information I can find suggests its tied to the Event participation (specifically the medal award)…… so it might be theoretically possible to tag all 3 bosses with enough damage, and get all 3 awarded on success. As a side note, you don’t need to do Mordremoth.

But from a practicality stand point….. I wouldn’t hope for more then 2 cores in a run. One lane usually has problems with keeping preservers down, which repair blighting pods, which make bosses invulnerable when active. Also factor in travel time, having to make it through the gauntlet (the ramp is on opposite side of the entrance), and hoping the boss team won’t have killed them by the time you show up. There also the risk of you pulling the boss into the path of the zerg as you try to escape….. that can botch the whole run for everyone if you’re not careful of it.

Cortesan.8615:

Where does guardian fit into all of this? The new spec seems strange.

Firebrand is a group support spec, functionally similar to a Support spec’d Ele, but cone targeted. It also has multiple sources of short quickness.