Guild Wars 2

Same issue, but I also had the network error message whilst trying to get into the mad king’s labyrinth just now.

With the change to megaservers, these temple events are pretty infrequent affairs as most are uncontested on the majority of maps almost all the time. This is a problem for people who want to get the traits without spending gold/skillpoints and those that want the reward chests. Yes, it is possible to do them still, but there are a couple of things that make it needlessly awkward.

One issue is the defense events. They can be completed easily with a small group, which then resets the temple timer and blocks the event for the rest of the people on the map. The rewards for the defense event aren’t nearly as good as for the attacking event (although some defense events allow you to get your trait completed).

There are two possible ways I can see to fix this:

1) Remove the defense events completely and simply have the temple flip control after a set amount of time.

2) Rework the defense event, so the boss always spawns (so people can get their traits fixed) – this happens in several of the events in any case, so I think it’s mainly events like Lyssa that would need some reworking. In addition, make it so that the defense event rewards the same daily and boss chests as the offense but that you can only do one (defense or attack) per day.

My personal preference would be for option 2. This would prevent a small group of players essentially trolling a whole map by preventing the attack event from starting and allow everyone to get daily rewards.

tl:dr Current defense events aren’t promoting cooperative play in PvE and are allowing small groups to block progression for the rest of the map. Altering the reward system for these (and in some cases the event itself) would allow everyone to get their rewards/traits.

This is my guardian. Trying to get away from the “less is more” armour archetype

I’ve made both the juggernaut and sunrise for my guardian.

With Sunrise, I could get charged cores/lodestones from the dwayna event, champ boxes, CoE and an occasional drop from a spark. You could also promote cores>lodestones. When I got my dawn from the forge I had around 70 lodestones from just normal gameplay.

With the Juggernaut, the molten lodestones weren’t a problem, but the doubloons weren’t really obtainable through normal gameplay in the same way as the lodestones.

Adding a recipe to combine copper doubloons or to downgrade gold or platinum doubloons would increase the market for those items, which are currently nearly worthless. (2-6s for copper/gold/platinum, compared to around 1g90s for silver).

You could argue for dropping 10 points in zeal and picking up PoV as well as the passive 10% when endurance isn’t full.

In a zerker build you’ll be dodging a lot anyway and it’ll affect all your damage, not just the symbol. Plus you get extra group condition removal as well.

Aye, that never gets old. Similarly with putting BoB next to someone who’s downed by a cliff and walking off

Imo, the aetherized shield is hand-down the best looking engi shield in the game.

The basic ascended pistol skin is quite nice as well. It’s similar to the aetherized one but with a longer barrel and minus the particle effect (and cost).

I’ve been using a bunker build in WvW recently:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/engineer/?2.0|a.51q.h1l.e.51q.h5.0.0.0|0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0|1q.71m.1q.71m.1q.71m.1q.71m.1q.71m.1q.71m|3x.0.21m.0.31m.0.3x.0.2x.0.3w.0|k35.0.k17.u69c.0|30.d|2c.2x.2v.2e.30|e

I’ve found it works very well in the thick of things in large fights in WvW, but it’s more about supporting the frontline with water fields and condition removal whilst being very tough to kill than doing massive damage. I thought about going 30 inventions for the extra healing from eib, but decided it probably wasn’t worth it and I prefer the extra burn proc from incendiary powder for smaller group fights.

For extra survival (and to chuckle at the hammer train) use saffron bread (-20% incoming damage when stunned and -20% condition duration, cheap as chips to make) and swap reinforced shield for stabilised armour.

Thanks for a fun week everyone. Congrats to Vizunah Square and thanks to Seafarers for the (really fun) fight in their garrison this afternoon.

Good luck to everyone in their matchups this week.

Well, if and when I make myself an ascended set it’ll just get transmuted onto my current armour.

If I were into conspiracy theories I might think that Anet deliberately made the ascended sets unappealing so that transmutation stones would be the better option… if I were into conspiracy theories.

There’s only one small issue. The gift of souls requires the gift of knowledge (500CoE tokens) and it’s account bound.

I’d craft it for a friend or for sale, but whilst I enjoy CoE I’m not sure I’d give away 500 tokens to anyone who asked

The shield of the avenger is the only one I use in group PvE. Combine it with Wall of Reflection and you have nearly 30s of almost complete invulnerability to projectiles.

The shield is an absolute lifesaver in some dungeons and in higher level fractals. I use it purely for the missile absorb rather than the special ability (which I agree, is very weak). In fractals like the harpy/dredge/volcano or in dungeons like CM/SE it makes everything much smoother.

The signet that increases condition damage is one that I’ve never used though (ooh, an extra 40 points of damage per second on my burns!). I’ve never used signet of mercy either (most revive skills just take far too long to cast, except warrior’s banner and engi’s elixir).

I’ve been using something fairly similar to the hammer/gs setup 3 posts up, except I went for 15/25/0/30/0, dropping the 10 in virtues.

The might stacking from virtue of justice is nice, but rather short-lived and I’ve found that an extra 10% damage against mobs with conditions seems to add more damage overall. The buff to consecrations is nice though.

I went the opposite way with food/sigils, with bloodlust on my GS, truffle steak dinner and master maintenance oil so I guess they’ll even out. I use force instead of sigil of the night on the hammer as I’m often in the daytime dungeons as well.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.0|1.5g.h4.0.0.0|2.5g.h2.0.0.0|1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e.1g.7e|2t.0.2t.0.3t.0.2s.0.3s.0.2s.0|f2.p26.0.u37b.0|69.7|v.19.1g.11.1i|e

Well, I can confirm that the mystic forge recipe works fine as I made one today. I got the recipe for the gift of souls last year (when it was rather more reasonably priced, materials-wise).

I’d hate to have to try to obtain the recipe now, however.

I had one drop the other day with settler stats (toughness/healing power/condition damage). Pretty bad for PvE, but rather nice for my wvw build for my engineer. I’m sure a lot of WvWers who run the odd fractal for rings would be quite happy with a knight/soldier/Valkyrie etc. weapon.

To address the OP’s question, I run a 15/25/0/30/0 setup with greatsword/hammer (I don’t like the aesthetics of the 1 handed sword) with around 2300 armour and 14.3k health. Survivability comes from dodging, aegis and blind (on trash) with shelter and renewed focus as clutch moves.

As to the other points in this topic. I run fractals 48 on my Ele with a regular group that also does AC/CoE/etc. I still use the 0/10/0/30/30 setup but with full zerker gear as over time I’ve realised that the best support is providing the odd water field, might stacks, fury, AoE missile reflect and some soft CC on some bosses (chill/cripple) to give the melee some breathing space.

I’m also part of a very friendly, casual guild. When I do runs with them, I tend to run a 0/15/30/20/5 spec on my guardian with knight’s gear or take my bunkery engineer along. Why? Because they don’t care if a run through CoF1 takes 25 minutes and nor do I. They’re a nice bunch of folks and we have a laugh whilst we do it. I take high survivability setups along for those runs so I can switch off and revive people easily.

I don’t PUG much (if at all) but if I did I’d take my dps setup along.

TL,DR Know your group’s expectations and take what they’re expecting In most PUG’s that means high dps setups.

My current setup is 10/30/0/30/0 with greatsword and hammer. Stats below are unbuffed (the buff on the bar is an inquest potion I drank by accident )

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/guardian/?3.3|1.1g.h17.0.0.0|2.5g.h2.0.0.0|1n.7h.1g.7h.1n.7h.1g.7h.1n.7h.1g.7h|2t.0.2t.d1e.3t.d1e.2s.d1e.3s.d1e.3s.d1e|a2.u26c.0.u378.0|69.7|v.1a.19.z.1i|e

Though I’m thinking of going 15/25/0/30/0 for the extra vulnerability from symbols. But currently WW varies between 12 and 18k damage and mighty blow is around 10k.

My MMO experience started with Lotro (Lord of the Rings Online, for those who haven’t played it) back at release in 2007. So yes, I’m a newbie to MMO’s.

Back when it was released (Shadows of Angmar), Lotro had very limited endgame content. 2 dungeons, both of which took up to an hour to reach and several hours to clear and the chances of getting a “teal” (exotic) drop from these was low. Subsequent patches released more dungeons and 2 raids in the original game.

End-game gear could be obtained by doing dungeons and raids but was also obtainable from crafting (albeit not as easily as GW2). The crafted gear was often extremely good and many pieces (especially jewellery) remained “best in slot” up until the first expansion.

The game always had a mechanic called Dread, which was an unavoidable debuff created by certain mobs. Dread level 1 gave a minimal debuff, whilst dread level 10 reduced you to 10% effectiveness or less. At Dread level 5 you started cowering (getting stunned) periodically, so ideally, 4 dread was the most you would want to play with. This mechanic was countered by hope (in the form of a consumable or certain class skills) to reduce this debuff.

Then came Mines of Moria. Firstly, crafting got blown out of the water. Crafted gear was okay for levelling but as soon as you hit the new level cap (60) then it was obsolete, mostly due to a new mechanic.

This mechanic was called Gloom and was an alteration to dread. The first raid boss in the new expansion gave (I think) 15 gloom (15 dread). The previous buff gotten from the consumable tokens gave a maximum of +5 hope, leaving you at 10 dread. To counter this you had to use radiance, found on the new armour sets.

The dungeons in Mines of Moria dropped tokens on challenge mode that allowed you to purchase the radiance set, with 60 radiance being obtainable from the dungeons and another 20 from drops from the raid itself.

So with a full set you could almost completely negate the effects of gloom, but you couldn’t even set foot inside the dungeon without an absolute minimum of 50 radiance.

The whole focus of the game changed. No longer could you craft decent gear and then do dungeons for fun or to get some of the rarer drops. Radiance was mandatory to even participate. It caused a lot of division amongst the Lotro community (normally a very friendly community, I might add).

Eventually, the devs realised that gating content in this way was a bad idea and removed the system.

Anyway, apologies for the wall of text; To those who played Lotro I realise that I haven’t touched on the subject of legendary weapons there, but that’s another whole wall of text in itself

Well, I got insanely lucky close to the beginning of the game and got the colossus after combining four random rares.

Unfortunately I play an ele and engineer so it wasn’t much use to me. At the time it was selling for around 40g, so I gave it to a warrior friend, who mainly uses hammers in instances.

One day I’ll get my legend/hunter, but I’m not in any tearing hurry. I toss a few items in the forge every now and then and one day lady luck will smile.

A bigger block seems to be the total inability of my server to clear Balthazar, on the rare occasions when it’s not bugged out.

Probably not the most imaginative build. I mostly PvE and I’ve found this to be a great support/survivability build for dungeons and soloing group events.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQFAWhMmKbwx5gjDAkHnYCLhCEUeMzO2A

The ability to self-combo ( a lot ) along with the healing/condition removal it provides makes for great survivability. Damage is mediocre with very little burst but this is a build aimed at outlasting enemies rather than nuking them (though it’s quite possible to get over 15 stacks of might solo with this setup, which helps quite a bit with the damage output).