Blood Red Arachnid.2493

> @"Aigleborgne.2981" said:

> > @"DotDotWin.4357" said:

> > Persistent flames, in fact, fire in general, is not worth using 90% of the time because of the recent nerfs.

> > You don't have the mobility or armor to survive in fire and without Lesser Lava Font, when you go down you are totally ducked.

> > I have really lost all interest in playing my Elementalist because it's just such a pain in the kitten to keep him alive now knowing that if he dies I have to run back to where ever I am. The nerf to PF pretty much made the class not worth playing.

> >

> > It's just not worth the effort. Getting set back and having to travel over and over and over because you get gang banged by mobs is just lame.

> > Even engineers are better than elementalists now, IMHO. It's a sad state.

>

> I feel the same. Fire lost too much with these changes and now I prefer air to fire.

> But without downed lava font, it seems difficult to play fire and air for a power build as you go down very fast without any tool if (read when) you go down.

>

> What strikes me through is, as usual, we got no words from devs about nerfing 2 of our best grandmaster traits and it is going to last for months at least. I mean, in this particular case, it is so obvious those changes were uncalled for and totally misplaced. But well, devs are most likely happy with it so...

>

> I feel bad because I still like this game, but balance policies are slowly pushing me out. I had great hopes for system teams but they prove to be no better than before.

You've got to look at it from a different perspective. These changes to fire were made specifically for fractal and raid groups. Damage modifiers and additional attacks are better than might and fury in a group setting, because might and fury are handled by teammates already. Power Ele benchmarks all increased by about 3.5k with those new changes to Persisting Flames.

Though you guys shouldn't have trouble surviving just from the lack of fury and down-state lava font. The irony is that all of the best solo traits are now defensive (Burning Fire, Smothering Auras, Blinding Ashes), so enemies should have a hard time getting through all of the blind spam and condi cleansing.

My urge to Math is rising... Soldiers gear is one of the best sets in the game, having a really efficient distribution of stats. If there is somebody who legitimately can't play through PVE in Berserker gear, then Soldiers makes for an excellent alternative. Something I've also found is really helpful is health regeneration food. Mango Pies and the like. That ticking health bonus amounts to a lot over a long duration, and it means you can fight off the champions easier by running around in circles until your health goes back up.

HoT isn't that hard overall. The enemies are actually pretty simple. They have one or two gimmicks, and once you learn to either dodge or walk around that gimmick, then you can beat them with little effort. Assuming you have a decent memory and are paying attention, a new player can quickly learn what each enemy does and how to beat them. There's only two stumbling blocks that a player might have going into HoT:

(1)Learning what CC and break bars are.

(2)Learning not to run an RNG build. That is, a build which is whatever gear happened to drop along the way to 80, comprised of random stats with no coherent theme.

Which makes me wonder: has Adam Warlord posted up what build he is using? I know he's recessed into defending this all as just opinion, but I can't help but think there's some unstated set of mistakes on his part that is leading to these difficulties.

> @"Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582" said:

> > @"Khisanth.2948" said:

> > > @"Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582" said:

> > > > @"Pifil.5193" said:

> > > > I fail to see why the Visage of the Khan-ur is OK because it's a drop but this is not OK because it's crafted. Just the OP's dislike of crafting showing?

> > > >

> > > > Regardless, it seems to be moot as the Frost Legion Infusion also drops from the final chest after the Frost Citadel meta according to the wiki. So this seems to be another example of ArenaNet providing multiple paths to an item which is great to see!

> > >

> > > Well, when you make something a rare drop, its because you want it to be a rare drop. Why bother making it craftable if you are going to make it so expensive to craft that it may as well just be a rare drop and you can just buy it from the TP.

> > >

> > > Don't get me wrong, that it is craftable is great, but also I have probably put millions of clicks into the Mystic Forge because its setup so you need to do 10 clicks for every recipe, every time. When you have done that thousands and thousands of times, it gets tedious. Particularly when they could just add a "repeat recipe" button. Which I have made suggestion for many times. But if you read my remarks above about it being a legendary infusion etc, you'll see I do not have a dislike of crafting, the opposite actually. I would prefer _more_ crafting steps for it, rather than just clicking 500 times in the forge with 5000g worth of materials.

> >

> > Well for one there has been plenty of posts asking for non-rng way to get some of the other infusions. This is a case of giving what people have asked for.

> >

> > If those people also meant "and it should available for as cheap as possible while remaining a rare prestige item" then they should have made that explicit as well.

>

> Why does it need to be a rare prestige item?

Because something has to be.

I'd prefer to keep it strictly social etiquette. The commander tag already pays for itself, just by letting someone complete events that otherwise wouldn't have gone off the ground. If you do a good job you'll already get plenty of tips. Most I got was 40g for hosting Serpent's Ire.

Holosmith loses the elite toolbelt skill. Reaper Shroud burns away twice as fast as regular shroud. Tempests get increased attunement cooldowns on overloads. Firebrand loses the instant-cast virtues for their books.

Grieving Weaver has always been one of those mysteries. I've never actually seen anyone do a DPS test for one, so its PVE performance is an unknown. I'm not even sure if it should be built as a berserker with extra condi damage, or viper with extra power damage.

I'm assuming it was meant to be a WvW set. With Master's Fortitude, a Grieving build would get an additional 2960 health, which is more than any other combination of stats. The weapon skills for the ele are hybrid in nature, which generally means that either playstyle had to designate 2 weapon skills as no-goes because they wouldn't do the right type of damage. Grieving would essentially free up an elementalist to use whatever tactic or skill they wanted, because all of them would do good damage. Constantly applying both high condi pressure and high power pressure would exploit the holes in player's defenses, as well as their expectations. But again, information is scarce.

Personally I own three sets on my elementalist. Berserkers for PVE, Harriers for heals/buffing, and Marshalls for WvW. Though for a time, I had a Marauder set for WvW. As fun as experiments in Grievers would be, chances are it won't amount to much, and it would cost a lot of time and resources. I can only recommend it if you have money to blow.

Welcome back. Unfortunately, I'm still here.

Guardian hammer is bad, in the sense that it isn't the best weapon for anything in the game. This doesn't mean that it is without use. Personally, when I want to turn my brain off or rest my hands, I equip a bunch of symbol boosting traits and just hammer auto everything. It gives out protection, might, and minor heals to everyone within melee range,

IMO all of them are good, except for warrior and ranger.

It isn't just EU servers. Here in the U.S. servers I've been getting lag spikes, even in the dead of night.

Well, aren't I popular today? I'll keep it brief. I'm putting these two together, because they're basically the same point.

> @"Svarty.8019" said:

> Is that the selling point of the chest? Is that the reason you buy it? A statuette? Let me check the advert... no. That's not what it says.

> @"HardRider.2980" said:

> Actually the way they market and sell the loot boxes are actually gambling. As they always say x items now in the box.. go get em if you're lucky.

> Just because you get something as a basic doesn't mean it's not gambling compared to how to market it

Then they'll change the advertisements.

Look, you're arguing about the philosophy of gambling. That's all well and good, but very distinct from the law of gambling. When it comes to the law, all of those little minutia matter.

That is... a whole lot of buffs. Holo would be quite scary in PVP/WvW if we were to give them all of that.

Though, in a broad sense, Holosmiths aren't particularly selfish. The spec in a vacuum looks like it, but remember that basic Engineers already have a lot of support skills. Holosmiths do bring Hard Light Arena, which I've used to carry in fractals before. But, more importantly, the holosmith supports through controlling enemies. They have great CC skills, and a lot of disabling conditions. Keeping everything blind, crippled, vulnerable, and perpetually stunned has benefits that reverberate through to teammates.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> In US, you mean. In my country both mechanics have been already recognized for what they are - an attempt to circumvent the spirit of the law, and so are actually covered by the current legislation and the only thing that prevents lootboxes from actually being treated as gambling is that they still sort of "fly under radar".

>

> It's not like the people making the laws are completely dumb, you know. Even if there is a lot of lobbying being done to leave those loopholes, those are still loopholes, and everyone that is even tangentially interested in the issue _knows_ that they are loopholes. Eventually they _will_ get fixed. The only question is how long will it take.

Then you have a level of confidence and faith in governing bodies that I cannot share.

Anet will sidestep the laws through two technicalities.

(1): The Gold to Gem conversion means that keys can be bought and used solely through in-game effort. This doesn't make chests gambling any more than anything else in the game.

(2): When you open a chest, you're getting a statuette with some additional bonus items. This constitutes, at the minimum, a guaranteed purchase. It doesn't count as gambling because of this.

This sounds like an oversight more than anything else.

Due to Fibromyalgia I've been playing the game one-handed. The class that I do it with is the Deadeye. The way I do it is simple: I kneel at maximum range, and kill everything before they reach me. I take Mug and BQoBK to maintain effectively permanent quickness and constant self-healing, making it extremely hard to kill me.

However, for instanced content the mechanics make it nigh impossible. There are a lot of AoEs that require dodging or specific movement, no matter what range you are in. But don't fret, because most instanced content is just a trust fall for your healers and buffers. So long as you stay within their range and they are competent, then you will be safe. If you have trouble surviving, there are a few classes who have a lot of self-sustain if you take the right traits. Those would be the Thief (Invigorating Precision), Revenant with Jalis (Dance of Death OR Thrill of Combat), Spellbreaker with off-hand dagger (Sun and Moon style), and Scrapper (Adaptive Armor). You'll still have trouble getting a group, because these builds take a pretty big DPS loss to have those traits, but it should make melee combat much more tolerable overall.

For ranged builds, there's a few worth noting.

(1): Rifle Deadeye.

(2): Shortbow Renegade (condi)

(3): Greatsword Chronomancer

(4): Scepter Scourge.

At least it is good to know that everything I said fell on deaf ears.

Maybe I'm missing something, but how does this build get to 100% crit chance? From everything you posted, it caps out at 87%.

I can't do hard numbers right now, but there are a few things I'd recommend:

(1): Build around Marauder. While Marauder does a little less damage than Berserkers, it has Berserkers beat in two ways. First, it is a more efficient distribution of offensive and defensive stats. Second, it has more stats overall. About 300 additional points worth. The vitality isn't useless, either. That 6.3k additional health has saved me numerous times, both roaming and in a zerg. Now, Marauder does give more precision than Berserkers, but this isn't a problem: just swap out the sigil of accuracy for another sigil instead.

(2): I wouldn't put that much trust into my teammates. Different servers have different levels of dedication, but in Dragonband our groups consist of whomever is willing to show up, and often very loosely organized. Getting a boon herald or FB isn't always guaranteed. To that end, Arcane Wave's main use is on arcane builds, where it is a group immobilize while attuned to Earth. On a Fire/Air/Weaver build, the move is less useful. Likewise, I've had troubles using Glyph of Storms, due to its relatively short range of 900, the long cast time of the skill, and also the small amount of damage that it does. Nobody is going to stand in a DPS field for 10 seconds to get the full damage from the Glyph.

That's why I recommend putting a defensive utility on the bar. Mist Form and Arcane Shield are both good. There aren't many good DPS utilities to use, and I never could figure out another one to put on the utility bar. My favorite choices were Frost Bow, Signet of Fire, or another defensive utility. All have their problems, but the only one I've ever managed to wreck people with is Frost Storm from the Frost Bow.

So basically, the build would look something like [this](http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PGwAYxjlFw8YKsQ2JO+KbvNA-zVJYiRBfZERBURCY7FIgNwrRAzAA-w). 100% crit chance under fury, 19k health. There's very little might generation, though, so if you want that you'll have to start sacrificing some stuff.

> @"zealex.9410" said:

> > @"Ashen.2907" said:

> > > @"zealex.9410" said:

> > > > @"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:

> > > > Is it different from buying Gems to exchange for Gold to buy exotics to throw in the Mystic Forge?

> > > > Is having a Precursor or a Legendary winning the game?

> > >

> > > For some ppl gettong a fully decked ou character is "winning the game" and the more external mechanics that interact with your wallet are included the more it can be considered p2w.

> > >

> > > Plus it doubles down on gambling which is just shameful.

> >

> > Anything can be considered P2W if the person is willing to twist logic to the breaking point.

>

> And nothing will for ppl that are willing to do the same.

>

> Sadly p2w or not its clear anet is getting more and more bold on how much the cashshop affects gameplay.

It is wise not to admit to subjectivity when you're presenting your own arguments. You've just given anyone who wants to disagree with you everything they'd need to dismiss you outright with no further thought on the matter.

Quite frankly, I don't think it is worth the time investment to make a shared gathering slot. For one, there are people with multiple gathering tools. Second, we already have a shared inventory slot which lets us change gathering tools extremely fast. If Anet came out with shared gathering slots, I wouldn't buy any because I already have regular shared inventory slots to get the job done.

As somebody who has no desire for this infusion (6k gold now), I am happy that all of the drops from this map are going to have a stable sink for me to make a profit out of.

Its all in how you look at it.

"Better" and "Stronger" can have different meanings. We recommend berserker gear for open world PVE for a couple of reasons:

(1): Money. Berserker gear has the fastest time to kill. Killing things faster means you get loot faster, which means you can move on to the next thing quicker, so on and so forth. Killing things fast lets you maximize your play time, getting more loot and doing more stuff than you otherwise would.

(2): Timers. A lot of events in the game have a time limit of some sort. Whether it is a clock ticking away in the top-right of the screen, or if you have to defend an NPC from enemies, you are on the clock. Because of this, you don't necessarily want to take your time while killing things.

(3): It lets you carry people. Berserker gear has very high peak performance, which is often needed to compensate for the upscaling caused by less-than-capable overworld players.

(4): Once you get the hang of it, overworld is pretty easy. Most of the learning curve is just familiarizing yourself with the controls and abilities. Most enemies have one or two things that they do, in which you either dodge, strafe out of the way, or use a skill to stop them. You heal instantly after a battle, and it will surprise you how often you can just face tank an enemy and win, even in berserker gear.

(5): It is easier to build around berserker than to build without it. See, if you have trouble surviving, you can always change your traits, utilities, weapon, and playstyle to more defensive options to get you through a tough spot. Changing gear is expensive, because you have to buy that whole new set of gear. However, if you are in a scenario where you need more damage, it is really hard to get more damage by changing traits, utilities, or the weapon.

The recommended overworld builds you see on metabattle and youtube aren't designed to maximize loot.. They're made to give a player a strong combination of offense and defense, to ensure that even the newest of players taking on the strongest of champions will still stay alive and keep fighting. These builds are, overall, stronger than the pure DPS berserker builds that you see in other places. However, the game was designed so each class at base health and armor is capable of surviving and fighting well, so for PVE you don't really need all of that extra durability. This is why most people prefer berserker, and also why I personally recommend it.

The flip side of this is to assert it is superior to never, EVER, put exotic weapons as a possible random drop from the chests. Because otherwise, there's a rare chance that exotic will be a precursor.

I don't see a problem with the chests giving random exotic gear.

I've been saying it for years now, but skill splits made PVP in City of Heroes really hard to get in to. We're starting to see the same stuff happen here, where the timing and functionality of skills changing between modes makes cross-playing difficult.

I always went with Retribution + Invocation. This was done mostly because I couldn't afford a dedicated WvW set, so I tried to balance out my overly offensive PVE gear with defensive traits. It works well, though. That was pre-PoF, but if I brought my rev back in to WvW I'd do it again.

The Salvation line exists just to make ventari healers viable. Most of the stuff there doesn't work without high amounts of healing power. Really, the sum total of benefits from taking the trait line are:

200 heal on dodge (if you pick up the orb)

283 barrier per second (roughly)

Blind on Heal

-15% damage for 2 seconds after using a heal skill

The big one is the barrier. Though the -15% damage after healing seems like it might be good, in practice there's a problem: it doesn't trigger from regeneration. It triggers on skills that actively heal, and also on Battle Scars. So, without running both Devastation and Salvation at the same time, there's no way to maintain the buff with some form of consistency.

Granted, I don't much like Devastation, either. The whole line is basically a bunch of very minor damage boosts, most of which drop off after the first few seconds of the fight. I mean, lets be real here. In WvW the only traits in Devastation that actually do anything are Brutality, Swift Termination (mutually exclusive with Brutality), Destructive Impulse, and Notoriety. Most builds now are running cleansing sigils, so all of the vulnerability related traits drop off immediately. Battle Scars in PVP do very little, and they don't up-scale for multiple enemies. We're basically comparing inconsistent barrier and damage reduction to inconsistent small modifiers toward damage. Which one would I take? Neither. I'd go with Retribution.

Though this does make me wonder how well a Zealots set (Power, Precision, Healing) would do with the Salvation line. I know that Marshals worked wonders on my elementalist once I took it. Zealots with Dwayna Runes and Elder's Respite for super-regeneration might be worth looking in to. With 450 barrier per second, 400 regeneration per second, plus additional healing from all other skills might make the Rev incredibly hard to kill while still boasting formidable damage.

I'll throw my hat into the "keep the changes" bin. It is much easier to maintain DPS against all targets now, instead of targets who are wide enough to be hit by sevenshot at point blank range.