Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Most of the complaints about the class being bad are from the PVP/WvW perspective. For PVE, the profession is fine. I recommend going with the chronomancer as the first choice, for several reasons: (1): The run speed boost is a massive QoL upgrade. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it. (2): If you ever find yourself in a group, the trait Seize The Moment gives everyone near you permanent quickness, which is the best boon in the game. I sometimes run buff chrono in the overworld, and it is a massive force multiplier. (3): The burst rotation with continuum split and all of the phantasms can do a massive amount of damage in a very short amount of time. The mirage was designed to be a dueling spec. Most of its abilities can be divided into either being evasive, or doing condition damage. It doesn't have the punch and strength of the chronomancer.

This is something I noticed, too. All the threads on this forum quickly devolve into petty fights. There's no more talk of philosophy. It's all about nerfing professions, claiming someone else is good/bad, and gaslighting. It's like everyone gave up and started some weird 9-way tribal fight divided between the professions.

Mace is lower maintenance because it has better healing. Though a lot of people run axe because it gives team fury.

Well, honestly for PVE I don't have a "build" insomuch as I have a bunch of utilities and traits that I swap around, depending on what I need to do. For soloing bosses, there's two builds I run. First is the deadeye build: Weapons: Rifle in a group or when fighting a projectile based foe, Pistol/Pistol when solo, + Sword/Pistol. Gear: Full Marauder or full Berserker Sigils: Force, Impacting Runes: x6 Rune of the Scholar Utilities: Signet of Malice, Filler Space, Signet of Agility, Assassin's Signet, Shadow Meld Deadly Arts: Dagger Training, Revealed Training, Executioner Critical Strikes: Twin Fangs, Practiced Tolerance, No Quarter Deadeye: Malicious Intent, Premeditation, Maleificent Seven This is the closest thing to a base build that I use for Deadeye. In reality, I'm constantly swapping around traits and utilities, depending on what I need. I.E. for more survival I go with Invigorating Precision, for more CC I go with Basilisk Venom, Smoke Screen to stop projectiles, etc. The strategy is really simple: run around in circles while shooting at an enemy. Or, if you're fighting a ranged boss, camp with the sniper and use Sniper's Cover to stop most incoming projectiles. If cleave is needed, or if the boss attacks in slow intervals, use Pistol Whip to time dodges and avoid damage right in their face. ---------- Next up is the daredevil build. I haven't run this one as of late, but it does let me do crazy things like dodge-tank the Sand Giant. Weapons; Staff, Pistol/Pistol Gear: Same Sigils: Same Runes: Same Utilities: Channeled Vigor, Fist Flurry, Signet of Agility, Assassin's Signet, Basilisk Venom Deadly Arts: Dagger Training, Panic Strike, Executioner Critical Strikes: Twin Fangs, Practiced Tolerance, No Quarter Daredevil: Marauder's Resiliance, Staff Master, Bounding Dodger Again, swap out traits and utilities as they are needed. I.E. against the Sand Giant I run Bandit's Defense, Signet of Agility, Shadowstep, Signets of Power, and Escapist's Fortitude. The main strength of this build is its ability to dodge endlessly. Combine Vault with Bounding Dodger, and you can stay close and aggressive against most enemies. You'll be swimming in endurance with this build, so use dodges liberally.

I know this is an old thread, but it bears mentioning: With a future expansion coming up, it is probably a good idea to build up a healthy cushion of karma. Unless Anet's design philosophy changed, then there's going to be a lot to buy once the new maps come out.

It's very difficult. There isn't a true rotation, insomuch as there is an opener and a whole lot of improvising afterward. There's a bunch of different things that can interfere with your clones and your own skills, so you'll spend the whole time fighting with your own skills and your own clones. https://snowcrows.com/raids/builds/mesmer/mirage/condition/

I will encounter stuff like this on occasion. There's a few things to consider when testing out different rotations, gear types, etc. (1): Make sure you don't forget anything. There's been at least a dozen times when I was comparing gear and I realized I forgot to put the proper runes/sigils on them. (2): Quickness does not affect all skills evenly. There are a couple of skills in the game that are animation locked in one way or another. For example, Rocket Charge on Scrapper is a DPS net positive only when not under quickness, because it doesn't get faster with the boon. (3): Alacrity has similar differences with quickness. Though instead of it being animation locked, it has to deal with skills that aren't tied to normal recharge. (4): Conditions don't scale with the same proportions that power does. Tests with maximum might on an otherwise mightless build will change the proportion of damage done between power and conditions. This change won't be reflected in early tests. It doesn't seem like a lot, yet it somehow seems to creep its way into whatever you're trying out. Working with Thief? Alacrity changes how initiative works with utilities. Mesmer? Boons affect clones and phantasms differently, also depending on how often you shatter. Revenant? Similar issue with Thief, except its energy instead of initiative. There's also animation locked skills all over the place. Though it sounds like this issue was resolved in other ways, it helps to consider these whenever something... odd happens.

Well, right now I only have two builds for weaver that I use in PVE. (1): Fire/Fresh Air/Weaver in either full Berserkers or full Marauders. I change the utilities depending on how dangerous where I am going is, but at its most defensive I use Glyph of Storms + Arcane Shield + Stone Resonance. Marauder with Master's Fortitude has you sitting at about 20k health, which is enough for most PVE situations. (2) Water/Fresh Air/Weaver in full Marshalls. Not sure which does more damage, Fire or Air, but I go with Fresh Air for ease of use. This is the imported set from WvW, but I discovered that the self-healing makes me incredibly hard to kill. It isn't so much about big bursts of healing insomuch as it is invulnerability by a thousand band-aids. I've only whipped this one out on a few occasions, but each time it has let me solo a champ that I otherwise couldn't on a berserker build.

If you put the sigil of malice over impacting, it would be 52%. But the issue with having people just hybridize their gear is that the 4-stat sets have more total points than the 3 stat sets. 3,612 as compared to 3,303 total. Every 4-stat piece you swap out for a 3-stat piece ultimately means getting less total points. Because of this, I'd like to have the stat set give most of its points toward offense. Even if I have to make more pieces of this theoretical armor set, it would still give me more points overall. My concerns about Anet changing disabling conditions to require this set comes mostly from fractals. Particularly, what happened with the chronomancer. Originally, the chronomancer was capable of maintaining permanent team quickness and alacrity easy. They just had to equip runes of the chronomancer, set up 3 shield phantasms, and then the team would be capped even with a berserker set. But, as the class kept changing, running a chronobuffer kept getting harder and harder. The worst of it was when we had to wear a full commander set and run a rotation dedicated wholly to giving out boons, and even then we had a slim margin of error before the entire team lost momentum and we all died. Heal druid didn't have a much better time, getting their boon application reduced over and over again. Part of the reason why the current comp is healbrand + alacrigade is because Chronobuffer and heal druid were nerfed so much during the previous years. Granted, the chances of this kind of nerf happening in PVE is quite a bit lower. In Raids the boss is usually condi-capped anyway, and Anet seems to have backed away from this mentality as of late. However, that isn't going to stop some dev in the future from sitting down as saying "I don't like how easy it is to get perman chill/weakness/slow with this armor set. Lets cut the durations in half to "balance" it and make the debuffer a dedicated role."

For the debuffer set, I'd prefer Power and Precision be the main stats, with ferocity and expertise being the minor stats. The reason is simple: Diviner's has around 75% of the damage of berserker, while Marauder has 91.7% of the damage of berserker. Sacrificing 1/4th of my damage for greater condi duration isn't a tradeoff that I'm willing to make. But sacrificing 1/11th of my damage IS something I'm willing to trade. The only problem is, I suspect that if such a set was made, that all of the vulnerability and disabling conditions will have their durations halved to make the set mandatory.

Well, I found a conversion. For butter, 1 tablespoon = 14.4 grams. This means that one stick of freedom butter is about 115.2 grams of ye olde butter block. Give or take, depending on the brand and density of the butter. For comparison, one tablespoon of water is 15 grams. Sometimes our butter comes in tubs, too. Especially the kind that is pre-mixed with oil for easy spreading.

For PVE the answer is yes. PVP/WVW is the wild west of builds, but most of the high-DPS builds use Marauder.

> @"Hesione.9412" said: > > @"Khisanth.2948" said: > > > @"Danikat.8537" said: > > > I'm not a dev but I do cook a lot and I can tell you a lot of them are real foods, but the recipies have been tweaked to fit game mechanics. > > > > > > For example [hummus](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bowl_of_Hummus) really is made from chickpeas, sesame seeds, lemon and garlic, although it usually includes oil as well. But the GW2 version is made with 1 chickpea, 1 sesame seed, a whole lemon and a whole head of garlic, which in real life would make....gritty, lemony garlic paste. (I really wouldn't want to taste test that.) > > > > > > Even going by the pictures (6 chickpeas, about 20 sesame seeds, 1 lemon and 1 head of garlic) isn't much of an improvement. A realistic recipe would use something like 40 chickpeas, 40 seame seeds (both would actually be measured by weight or volume), 1/2 a lemon and about 1/8 of a head of garlic (1-2 cloves), plus vegetable oil, but that's impossible in-game becaue you can't use less than 1 of an ingredient and it would make it much more expensive to craft. > > > > I think one of the soup recipes use something like 10 sticks of butter ... > > > > Can you even fit 10 sticks of melted butter into a typical soup bowl? > > > > > > If you're Paula Deen? Or at a state fair (I saw a picture - I'm not in the USA - of deep fried butter, which is like a heart attack on a stick). That all depends on what your definition of "Bowl" is. A stick of butter is 8 table spoons (tbsp). A random search I did found a soup/salad bowl of 32 fluid ounces, and each table spoon is half of a fluid ounce. This means the bowl will hold 64 tbsps, which is 8 sticks of butter.

I've got my own complaints. My biggest one being that Anet's prime way to fix the low DPS is to make the rotations substantially more difficult and punishing. I don't even play condi rev anymore because I can't physically do it. The timing required is too precise, there's too many resources to manage, and if you mess up that split-second timing the DPS floors and never goes back up again. The nerfs to anguish and the changes to embrace the darkness make it both inflexible and high-maintenance, making the entire thing just wholly unfun to play and completely unrewarding whenever I try. Power rev has a similar problem. Anet tried to fix it by making the facet give a small bonus for a short window when activated. The end result is that the power build becomes just as punishing as the condi build to fail, and all for gains that are so low that snowcrows doesn't even host the power build. I hate Anet's nonsensical philosophy that makes it so the biggest obstacle to doing well in this game is moving our darn toons.

Personally I'd like to see a bit more focus with it when it comes to condition or power damage. Anet keeps changing around traits and skills, and I'm not sure if dagger is meant to be a hybrid weapon, or if it isn't at all. I'm not sure how popular this view is, though.

Guardian. It has hybrid builds, too.

I vote for the Sylvari. I have a female Sylvari Revenant myself, and I can tell you one thing: choosing skin tones and glow isn't much of a problem. The heavy armor professions are extremely well-covered. Most sets reveal, at most, the face.

I haven't played the newest 100 yet. But out of all the other ones added, the only one I didn't like was Siren's Reef. Too many unexplained mechanics, too much random stuff to avoid.

Yes. It is quite rare, but mobs can crit from time to time. You can tell when a mob has critically hit you because it will say so in the combat log. I don't have any screenshots, so you'll have to take my word for it.

Chain whip sword skin. It's unsettlingly twitchy and the green flashes is has are distracting. It doesn't mesh well with most of my characters, and the chain only "whips" on a few specific attacks.

Personally I'd prefer it if people stopped benchmarking with food altogether. Just tell us how well the class does without making the entire community stuff ascended food down their gullet just to practice.

> @"Sylvyn.4750" said: > > @"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said: > > > @"Fuchslein.8639" said: > > > > > > So you have numbers what makes how much dmg? > > > > Why yes, I do ;) At least, I know how to get them. > > > > The way that the game calculates damage isn't mysterious. All of the equations are on the wiki ([condi,](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition_Damage) [power](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage). The only hard part is putting it all together. But, what you can do is take some shortcuts to see how much you'll be doing in each little part. > > > > Say, for example, you want to compare how much condition damage you do in Sinister gear as compared to Viper. The [item Nomenclature](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Attribute_combinations) page has how much each set gives you. Throw on some runes and sigils (Bursting, Malice, Nightmare), and you'll get the following stats > > > > Sinister: 1,556 condition damage, 0 expertise, 30% total condi duration, 5% increased damage > > Viper: 1,348 condition damage, 633 expertise, 72.2% total condi duration, 5% increased damage > > > > From there, you can see how much damage you'll do with each condition. For example, say that you have a skill that inflicts 1 stack of bleeding. Bleeding does 0.06 condition damage + 22 for every second. So, we'd get the final numbers: > > > > Sinister: 121.13 damage per second for 1.3 seconds, coming to 157.47 damage > > Viper: 108.02 damage per second for 1.72 seconds, coming to 185.80 damage > > > > You can do these kinds of calculations for all of the other conditions, and for all of the other gear prefixes. You can change runes, add or subtract traits, add might, etc. For reference, this means that Sinister does 84.8% the damage of Viper. > > > > -------------------------- > > > > Woof...Condi isn't very straightforward when it comes to stacking attribute points in Condi vs. Expertise...the bottom part of your link to Condi damage calculates a break even for when you have too much of one or the other that isn't doing you much good...I've generally run Power builds as I only do WvW and Open World stuff...in WvW you just don't know how long a condi will be applied before it gets cleansed, and in most Open World situations, mobs don't last long enough to get the full effect of a condi anyway. I'm aware. I was showing some example comparisons on how to calculate the difference in condi damage and power damage between sets. I picked Sinister because it is a core set, and it was the go-to set for condi builds before Viper was made. Getting a full breakdown of total build efficacy on hybrid builds is... messy. You have to know the average sustained rate of conditions, as well as the mean skill coefficient over time. Then, from there, you can create a weighted skill coefficient and weighted average conditions to come up with how much each gear set changes those. It is all excessively complicated. There's two really short ways to look at it that'll help you from getting lost in the forest of details: (1): Viper is better because it gives more stats overall. The 4-stat prefixes give more total points than the 3-stat prefixes. (2): Knowing the basics and starting with a good base set of numbers means you'll do well in other areas.

... I could've sworn that I had actually posted what I use in this thread. Anyway, I use the Power/Precision/Damage reduction food. My reason is that all of the WvW builds I currently play aren't crit capped, and I imagine the same holds true for most other people. I use the Damage Reduction variant, largely because my attention-deficit playstyle has me roaming a lot. Solo fights don't last as long as zergs, so there isn't enough time to really build up advantage from lifesteal or health regen. That said, I think an argument can be made for the regen food, especially after the damage nerf. It isn't well known, but there's a breakpoint where the health regen outpaces the benefit that damage reduction would give. That is when you've regained more than 10% of your maximum health + heal skill. For example, if you have 15k health with a 5k heal, then the break point is at 2000/82 = 25 seconds. Now, 25 seconds seems like a long time, but pay attention to how long some of your fights have become. Heck, even while running around in groups or zerging pre-nerf, I was in fights that would last minutes at a time. If you're running around taking constant fire from enemies while in a squad, regen food could come to eclipse the benefit of damage reduction. Though personally I never bothered with the celestial food. Giving out so many raw stats seems good, but in practice half of them aren't used in most builds or they don't amount to any significant change. I.E. getting 3% more boon duration never means anything, because a build is either built to be boon sufficient, or it isn't.

> @"Fuchslein.8639" said: > > So you have numbers what makes how much dmg? Why yes, I do ;) At least, I know how to get them. The way that the game calculates damage isn't mysterious. All of the equations are on the wiki ([condi,](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition_Damage) [power](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage). The only hard part is putting it all together. But, what you can do is take some shortcuts to see how much you'll be doing in each little part. Say, for example, you want to compare how much condition damage you do in Sinister gear as compared to Viper. The [item Nomenclature](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Attribute_combinations) page has how much each set gives you. Throw on some runes and sigils (Bursting, Malice, Nightmare), and you'll get the following stats Sinister: 1,556 condition damage, 0 expertise, 30% total condi duration, 5% increased damage Viper: 1,348 condition damage, 633 expertise, 72.2% total condi duration, 5% increased damage From there, you can see how much damage you'll do with each condition. For example, say that you have a skill that inflicts 1 stack of bleeding. Bleeding does 0.06 condition damage + 22 for every second. So, we'd get the final numbers: Sinister: 121.13 damage per second for 1.3 seconds, coming to 157.47 damage Viper: 108.02 damage per second for 1.72 seconds, coming to 185.80 damage You can do these kinds of calculations for all of the other conditions, and for all of the other gear prefixes. You can change runes, add or subtract traits, add might, etc. For reference, this means that Sinister does 84.8% the damage of Viper. -------------------------- Doing power damage is more straightforward. So long as you don't throw in a bunch of confounding variables, you can compare gear sets by using the effective power method: Effective Power = Power x (Crit Chance x Crit damage + Chance to not Crit) x Damage modifiers There's a similar value I use for durability. I call it effective health, and it is basically this: Effective Health = Health x (Armor / 1920) x damage reduction modifiers The whole thing is divided by 1920 to make it much easier to understand. 1920 being the base armor for exotic scholar professions. An example of this is something I did awhile ago to cut someone down. I gave an ele a Berserker Set, and then a Soldier set, and showed how they compare. It looked like this: Berserkers: Power: 2556 Crit Chance: 50.8% Crit Damage: 229.1% Health: 11,645 Armor: 1967 Effective Health = 11,645 x (1967/1920) = 11,930 Effective Power = 2556 x (.502 + 2.2914 x 0.498) = 2556 x 1.656 = 4,233 Effective Health X Effective Power 50,499,690 Soldiers: Power: 2556 Crit Chance: 5% Crit Damage: 165% Health: 21,255 Armor: 2928 Effective Health = 21,255 x (2928 / 1920) = 32,414 Effective Power: 2556 x (.95 + 1.65 x 0.05) = 2639 Effective Health X Effective Power: 85,540,546 Now again, you can do this with all sorts of different sets. Just keep in mind that effective power isn't that useful when comparing two different professions. When you do that, all of those pesky variables that normally cancel out suddenly don't, and the math quickly becomes nightmarish. Effective Health, however, is useful across all professions. For reference, Soldiers has 62% the damage of Berserkers, while (for Ele) it has 272% of the effective health. ---------------------------------------- Finally, there's always the brute force version. For this one, you basically buy the gear sets, go to the training golem, and see which one does more damage. This method is highly subject to your personal skill level, but your chief concern should be how well you do personally anyway. I actually did something like this years ago when I compared the auto attack damage of... nearly everything on the meta builds. > @"Konrad Curze.5130" said: > Agree but I think that ship sailed long ago. I really doubt Anet ever had the intention of balancing gear, even in the first year of the game when berserker was what 99,9999% of the player base run they didn't even bait an eyelid. > > Defensive stats exist only in name in this game, in fact building defensively is more likely to make things harder for you, you won't be substantially more survivable, but your dps will fall off a cliff so fights will last longer, you'll take more damage as a result, and die even sooner. > > If they had any intention of making toughness, healing power or vitality count for kitten they'd have done so years ago, it doesn't require a huge commitment to change anything massive, it's as simple as balancing numbers, moving knobs up and down. > > They didn't. They still don't. What we have is what we get. We'll keep looking at 95% of stat combinations and shaking our heads while we equip nothing but berserker, viper and maybe marauder if your lucky that doesn't get you kicked That is a very common misconception. I did some math to show it above, but when it comes to overall impact the defensive stats are quite useful. The Effective Health X Effective Power product I did above has Soldier gear leaving Berserker gear in the dust by a significant lead. This is because the increase in overall durability far outpaces the loss in DPS. If you wanted to build your toons for overall statistical effectiveness, you'd stay away from the glass cannon prefixes. I can make a strong case that Marauder is actually the best set in the game, because it has 90% of the damage of Berserker with 6,330 additional health on top. You won't end up doing worse overall by going with tankier gear. This myth comes largely from players not understanding how important tactics are. Most of the damage that meta builds do comes from the meta tactics. When a player decides that they want to do well in the game, they adopt both the tactics and the gear prefixes of raiders, and when they see a massive increase in performance they attribute it to gear. Personally, one of the reasons why I'll swap to Marshall (Power, Healing Power, Precision, Condition Damage) gear on my weaver is because it lets me beat champions that I struggle with otherwise. That wouldn't work if the healing power did nothing. I still recommend Berserker to most people though, because it is the best in time efficiency and loot per second... but only if you're good. Granted, there are places in the game where durability is nigh useless. Anyone who's fought the Sand Giant has learned that lesson.

The important thing to remember is that the META is largely about community enforcement. The community is focusing on speed clears and defined roles when they recommend builds. A strong case can be made for creating builds that don't do things quickly, but comfortably. Even for raids, you don't need to run the super-effective comps with pure glass builds to win. A community can have expectations where the players prefer not to wear glass cannon gear, because they don't want to spend their time dealing with losses from thin margins of error. The gear prefixes are there largely to help with preference in play. Factoring in overworld preferences and WvW builds of limitless specialization, there are far more uses for gear sets than you'd expect. I myself have a Marshall Weaver for WvW and particularly stubborn PVE overworld bosses.