Armen.1483

> @"Linken.6345" said: > > @"Armen.1483" said: > > It is actually a good question. First things first. Many of you have answered that you can still pew pew the mob from distance: wrong, saul's clones can bodyblock the projectiles causing issues. > > > > I don't know what makes the aggro mechanic there, but it might be one of those: most condi damage (if playing condi soulbeast) or maybe even most damage OR number of attacks per second. Soulbeasts usually have many fast hitting attacks like lb 2 or 5, it might be the issue. The person who does most ammount of attacks gets some mob aggro, but not sure about Saul, just an idea. Lastly soulbeast has that weird toughness thingy on merge. If you are the only soulbeast in the group, maybe you get to be the 2nd highest toughness after tank which causes the mob to aggro. Anyway this is an interesting question, I'd like to know that too. I will try to test it this week if I manage to convince my friends to play ranged on Deimos. > > Btw, did you try to stealth yourself for a moment to lose aggro ? I am not sure if it will work, but might be worth giving a try. The lb 3 should be able to do the job. > > Uhm your supposed to take down the clones so them body blocking dont make a differance. > My comment about pew pewing from range was to avoid the black the correct clone of the 4 was standing in that they had to take down. > And if it was toughness it went after it would go after hand kite 100% of the time. Losing precious time to kill clones with already a low DPS is not the best idea in my opinion, you are NOT supposed to kill them, just the real one. With that logic you could advise killing Deimos melee, but that doesn't answer the question of the OP, I am pretty sure they know about that. Hand kite doesn't always have high toughness.If playing herald you can go with no toughness at all too. And maybe even there is a mechanic that makes mobs not aggro HK at all. Anyway there are many bugs concerning toughness aggro since the launch of Deimos especially when there are soulbeasts and firebrands around. Jumping also messes up aggros there sometimes.

It is actually a good question. First things first. Many of you have answered that you can still pew pew the mob from distance: wrong, saul's clones can bodyblock the projectiles causing issues. I don't know what makes the aggro mechanic there, but it might be one of those: most condi damage (if playing condi soulbeast) or maybe even most damage OR number of attacks per second. Soulbeasts usually have many fast hitting attacks like lb 2 or 5, it might be the issue. The person who does most ammount of attacks gets some mob aggro, but not sure about Saul, just an idea. Lastly soulbeast has that weird toughness thingy on merge. If you are the only soulbeast in the group, maybe you get to be the 2nd highest toughness after tank which causes the mob to aggro. Anyway this is an interesting question, I'd like to know that too. I will try to test it this week if I manage to convince my friends to play ranged on Deimos. Btw, did you try to stealth yourself for a moment to lose aggro ? I am not sure if it will work, but might be worth giving a try. The lb 3 should be able to do the job.

I assume it is about the end game content. For condi firebrand, you get the signet of wrath, but don't use the active part. For power quickness guardian and heal firebrand (and of course dragonhunter) you should use Bane signet active with perfect inscriptions trait and use it to CC, ideally doing the last ticks of CC bar with bane signet to have the signet's power share buff as through the whole exposed debuff on bosses. Other signets can be used by heal or tank firebrands in raids but meh.

> @"Marieno.1930" said: > guardian (hfb) renegade (alacrity) and warrior (power bs) by far but i see many people underestimating power gs chronos' dps output which is really insane if played correctly but it is a very difficult class to master.I outdps people 95% of the time with my power mesmer in 50-100 kp cms (that's where i am currently) people just dont know how to play it it's really good.People also forget that this is the class with the 3rd highest benchmark in the game at 37.6k In low kp fractals chrono is actually really good as phases are long. However with high kp comes higher burst. That's where fast CC and short phases kick the 17 sec chrono burst to oblivion. You just won't have enough time to finish your burst, even warriors will outdps chrono there. But I agree on low KP chrono is a pretty good carry.

> @"lare.5129" said: > there is no any choose for common player. only qfb. With mesmer you should put wells, wich on tick 3 apply boons .. but who care what on tick 3 yours team in that place? no one:) Nah, you don't need wells for current meta STM chrono. Just use full berserker's and a sigil of concentration maybe for your sword, pick STM as a trait and just do your power chrono rotation, you'll share quickness with no problem same way as a guardian: staying near the team.

> @"The Boz.2038" said: > That's a stretch of a backronym. Nah, I don't think making a backronim of a greek word that has nothing to do with the META meaning makes any sense. The greek word today is used as a prefix, why would we create a backronym of a prefix, it just happens to match by accident as it is a 4 letter word. Regardless even if it were a backronym you'd still write it in capital letters.

> @"KelyNeli.4516" said: > > @"Kodama.6453" said: > > > @"KelyNeli.4516" said: > > > I too love to get killed by any single breeze of air on my elementalist. I need to take some lessons with sasuke uchiha so i could learn sharingan, so i could play this profession effectively without dying to a veteran mob skill out of blue. > > > > You are doing it wrong. The trick is not to get killed by a breeze as the elementalist, but to **kill the enemies** with a breeze. > > That would be the case if ele had any good damage. > Berserker has higher damage, higher burst and is like 3 times as tanky. Elementalist got a very good damage. Both power and condi weaver and tempest. Same with bursts. Even condi weaver's burst can be higher than power berserker. Squishiness is not an issue either if you play the same stats and in certain scenarios in open world you have builds with a very tanky ele. In group content where dealing much damage is relevant your supports will keep you alive. In open world try another builds wiht self sustaining boons, use water and earth and you won't die, but it is not easy if you just wanna mash keys. Gotta learn playing ele unlike warriors. It takes some time, but worth it. Warrior is just extremely easy to play, you don't need any practice to do good damage as berserker while some ele builds are very difficult, so we end up seeing warriors outdpsing elementalists because of the skill gap of the players.

I am not sure if this will help, but one thing I have noticed the big orb always spawns to your left if you look at the center of the arena. What I like to do is to take a couple of small ones near the center while heading to the big one on the edge. And of coruse while flying up before you get to the highest point you can start moviing to the first orb you see above you. Sometimes rushing the big one for the safety can be a bad idea. I agree it is not the easiest thing to do, but greens is what makes Dhuum difficult, other mechanics are easy. You can have a bad RNG sometimes but you can always work around it but honestly I think with 150 ping it can be difficult to do so. About collecting the orbs. It should be because of a lag. Happened to me on my old pc when I had low fps and high ping. What I felt was working is not using movement keys on the second you are collecting the orbs.. But beware hitboxes are weird. And I think that the big orb has the same hitbox as the small one, I might be wrong, but many fails made me think like that. For the number of orbs. Many people say it is RNG, but I think it is related to the number of spiders you kill. Normally if you are rotating right you'd be cleaving em down pretty easily. But I agree that 3rd green is the worst one to do, I always avoid being 3rd when I can XD

Regardless, we use cfb in CM100 not because of damage, other specs can be on par our outdps cfb, but they don't have aegis spam and an amazing ranged CC skill. I remember before consumable removal we asked "cdps" in lfg instead of "cfb", as CC wasn't an issue.

> @"Master Ketsu.4569" said: > Necro nerfs missed the mark entirely lmao putrid explosion is not the issue with Necromancer. It never has been the issue with Necromance. Big lolwut nerf here. I see many people didn't get it. Here is my opinion on this: Will start with saying "necro needs more nerfs, and DH is too strong bla bla bla" before somebody comes and points out that I forgot and missed it while it is unrelated to my post which is about scourge minionmancer. Now the essential: Those necro nerfs were aimed to minionmancer bunker scourge. That spec is absolutely broken, I am not sure that those nerfs have fixed it, but will definitely make it easier to deal with those scourges. The thing with them, their most damage comes out of destroying their minions, and their best counterplay is also killing minions to make them less tanky, while by killing those minions melee you could end up killing yourself. So overall a good nerf, it opens some counterplay vs those scourges, which are a real nightmare. I guess the whole patch was aimed to tune down the bunkers, I don't understand why everyone is so unhappy. You haven't even tried some games before commenting, test at least a lil before making assumptions.

> @"Janitsu.6284" said: > You are only comparing pure damage here but you are ignoring what the class brings and what it needs. > @"Nephalem.8921" said: > You completely forgot to factor in tome resets. Its insane in some fractals. During some encounters you spend more time in your tome than on your weapon set. Also weaver needs weave self for burst which has a very long cd. Fb just needs the tome which resets on each kill. Guys please read what you are commenting about, I have mentioned both before several times. We were talking about damage comparison. My whole point was that it is not damage that makes firebrand so good. > > @"Armen.1483" > Firebrand's damage becomes really broken only when there are opportunities to reset F1s and ofc very easy to play + immense amount of utility which make it so popular in other fractals other than CM100.

> @"Ganathar.4956" said: > > @"Armen.1483" said: > > > @"Ganathar.4956" said: > > > > @"Armen.1483" said: > > > > The consumables while fun to use, were kinda gamebreaking too. It was making the game much easier. So it was a double edged sword. I am not quite sure what to think about that change up until now. For me only thing that changed was a tini bit of my gameplay. > > > > > > > > However as you brought up the CM100 issue. Well everything would be ok, but I found myself asking in lfg only condi firebrands as dps for that boss. Problem is not that there is too much breakbars, but that not all classes can deal with it _efficiently_ . My complaint is that I am locked into playing only condi firebrand there. Of course I am not saying you can't play anything else there and it is not only the Sanctuary that makes Firebrands so good there, but the fact that we see only firebrands there and 1 replacement with some scourge or something is considered something exotic and can even scare off people joing LFGs where they don't see a full firebrand group. > > > > > > > > I think if the consumables were still present, playing full team of firebrands with sanctuaries +alac would still be the way to go, but that would make playing other classes there less punishing. So in my opinion the removal of CC consumables hurt the accessisibility of CM100 for all classes except for firebrand. > > > > > > This is purely an issue with class balance and fractal design. Not a good excuse to enable consumables. If anything cFb has needed shaves for a long time. condi burst that nobody else has, ridiculous support for a dps build and lets not forget that it's one of those "melee" builds. What I mean is that it's widely considered melee, but it has much more room to hit stuff while avoiding mechanics than something like weaver. Then the sanctuary cc is the gravy on top. > > > > Well, while I agree that firebrand is very strong, it is not the **ONLY** burst condi class out there. Condi warrior, condi weaver and ofc condi soulbeast have similar burst because they also do dps with burning and bleeding, which are bursty by nature. For CM 100 you could easily be on par or outdps fbs with those classes, though they don't have the same CC, aegis spam and invuln the aoes utility. Nerfing firebrand too much will make it useless, cutting a lil damage will not change anything in the META though, as it is a rework issue. And if sometime firebrand gets out of the CM100 meta, newer and casual players will suffer the most, which is not a good thing imo. > > I disagree with your assessment on condi burst. Those classes do have a bit of a condi burst, but it is in no way comparable to FB's. Don't get me wrong, they can still compete for total damage in 100CM, but it's not because of their burst. That fight simply allows their short ramp up to happen. How often exactly do you see other condi classes in the other CMs? You almost never see them, and that's because the quicker cFB burst matters more there. > I guess you haven't tried it, it sounds like that firebrand's burst is better than other's because of the popularity (which is ofc the case for many situations cause of other factors), but it is not true. If there is no situation where we can prestack ashes of dust you get around 40-45 stacks of burning. Weaver does nearly as much burning + another 40ish bleeding which ends up in higher burst and does roughly 4k dps more of a burst than condi firebrand. If we take fractal cm100 scenario, pretty sure warrior with enough precision will outdps the CFB too even with prestacks. Same with ranger which has spirit dps buff to all his teammates which can't be calculated by arcdps compared to AoD. Firebrand's damage becomes really broken only when there are opportunities to reset F1s and ofc very easy to play + immense amount of utility which make it so popular in other fractals other than CM100. Yes condi weaver (and even tempest) are not popular in fractals, but they are better at dealing damage than firebrand. Soulbeast maybe not as much but not too far, and ofc you got a better version of power slb to choose from there, so we don't see much condi slb in other CMs for good. Same with berserker. To back up my statement here I invite you to compare the burst numbers of the mentioned classes on golem benchmark videos in youtube. I have personally tried them in fractals in my same static and can surely say that the burst difference is not very much different, some do a lil better, some worse, but it is pretty close, so clearly comparable. Now why you see such good numbers on condi firebrand in other fractals ? Same reason you see berserkers outdpsing the traditional DPSes. Breakbars aren't broken soon enough and long phases favor linear graph dps players. Try condi weaver in those groups you'll see it is even better than firebrand. We see firebrands and not weavers because everyone can play firebrand, but few can play weaver. And people who can play condi weaver are experienced enough to know that they shouldn't play condi on CM99 and will always choose a better option. Popularity is not a really solid argument here for that reason. Firebrand is very strong, but it is not a damage issue. Easy to play means conistency which ends up in artificial better damage that it's counterparts. CM100 though shows that very well, CFB gets outdpsed quite much there by other classes I mentioned, but those other classes are worse to play because firebrand brings so much more than damage. So I say it again, my whole point is about the accessibility. Firebrand nerfs are maybe needed, but it will affect only new players. No veteran player I know plays condi firebrand in non CM100 fractals seriously.

> @"Ganathar.4956" said: > > @"Armen.1483" said: > > The consumables while fun to use, were kinda gamebreaking too. It was making the game much easier. So it was a double edged sword. I am not quite sure what to think about that change up until now. For me only thing that changed was a tini bit of my gameplay. > > > > However as you brought up the CM100 issue. Well everything would be ok, but I found myself asking in lfg only condi firebrands as dps for that boss. Problem is not that there is too much breakbars, but that not all classes can deal with it _efficiently_ . My complaint is that I am locked into playing only condi firebrand there. Of course I am not saying you can't play anything else there and it is not only the Sanctuary that makes Firebrands so good there, but the fact that we see only firebrands there and 1 replacement with some scourge or something is considered something exotic and can even scare off people joing LFGs where they don't see a full firebrand group. > > > > I think if the consumables were still present, playing full team of firebrands with sanctuaries +alac would still be the way to go, but that would make playing other classes there less punishing. So in my opinion the removal of CC consumables hurt the accessisibility of CM100 for all classes except for firebrand. > > This is purely an issue with class balance and fractal design. Not a good excuse to enable consumables. If anything cFb has needed shaves for a long time. condi burst that nobody else has, ridiculous support for a dps build and lets not forget that it's one of those "melee" builds. What I mean is that it's widely considered melee, but it has much more room to hit stuff while avoiding mechanics than something like weaver. Then the sanctuary cc is the gravy on top. Well, while I agree that firebrand is very strong, it is not the **ONLY** burst condi class out there. Condi warrior, condi weaver and ofc condi soulbeast have similar burst because they also do dps with burning and bleeding, which are bursty by nature. For CM 100 you could easily be on par or outdps fbs with those classes, though they don't have the same CC, aegis spam and invuln the aoes utility. Nerfing firebrand too much will make it useless, cutting a lil damage will not change anything in the META though, as it is a rework issue. And if sometime firebrand gets out of the CM100 meta, newer and casual players will suffer the most, which is not a good thing imo.

The consumables while fun to use, were kinda gamebreaking too. It was making the game much easier. So it was a double edged sword. I am not quite sure what to think about that change up until now. For me only thing that changed was a tini bit of my gameplay. However as you brought up the CM100 issue. Well everything would be ok, but I found myself asking in lfg only condi firebrands as dps for that boss. Problem is not that there is too much breakbars, but that not all classes can deal with it _efficiently_ . My complaint is that I am locked into playing only condi firebrand there. Of course I am not saying you can't play anything else there and it is not only the Sanctuary that makes Firebrands so good there, but the fact that we see only firebrands there and 1 replacement with some scourge or something is considered something exotic and can even scare off people joing LFGs where they don't see a full firebrand group. I think if the consumables were still present, playing full team of firebrands with sanctuaries +alac would still be the way to go, but that would make playing other classes there less punishing. So in my opinion the removal of CC consumables hurt the accessisibility of CM100 for all classes except for firebrand.

Shift+W to mount up. Num lock 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for mount select

Thief runes work well for raids, just gotta gear well for it. Works pretty well on berserkers.

> @"Weerus.3701" said: > > @"LuRkEr.9462" said: > > So the only thing I don't agree with on this is bringing 2 eles. Why wouldn't a soulbeast be brought for their unique buffs and abilities in place of 1 ele? > > HB, Alac, BS, SB, Weaver is basically the meta listed on Discreatize. > > I just happened to have 2 power eles in party. Is Discreatize a site or someting? I'm only familiar with snowcrows and metabattle. I would take SB anytime, but I'm just interested in whats the most efficient setup. Here you go: https://discretize.eu/ It is not healbrand though, but power quickness firebrand, meta in fractals is without heals. Weaver is the class that brings most personal damage but nothing else (ok some fire fields for blasting might, but that's it) and can be replaced by a DH with signet share. The important part is fb, alacrev, soulbeast and bs. There is a second reason berserker is META it is not only about banners. On high AR berserker profits from precision even after he is capped on crit resulting them do insane damage on par with other dps sometimes and ofc they bring banners and CC which weaver lacks so much. Soulbeast is there for stance share, spirit and also the moa stance for prestack as the bd can be a problem without a staff guardian. That comp works particularly well in CM98 and 99. For CM100 we haven't figured out the META yet, but what most ppl run are 3 condi firebrands + alacrev +hfb. What is better though is 4 condi firebrands (all of em take sanctuary, and 1 or 2 do the quickness and might job) + condi rev (that shares alac+some might but no CC). Other t4s have all their best comps, but the firebrigade comp works pretty fine as most of the times you are fighting bosses and clearing mobs is not a big deal anyway.

> @"Armen.1483" said: > It depends on which boss you wanna fight. Bosses that attack fast are vulnerable to confusion so mirage will do best, those that move a lot will be vulnerable to torment so Rev will be the best. Firebrand (uses mixed gear tho, not just viper's) is best at burning and got some good power damage too even with full condi build, so they got the best burst damage which shines at shorter-medium phases, then there is slb that is best at bleeding, poison and a lil burning and torment which is similar to firebrand but less bursty, condi berserker is also burning has the ability to bring banners, also not that bad, last but not least on enemies with big hitboxes you got weavers that do very good damage, but it is difficult to play em as hard as they hit. For general use I'd say either condi soulbeast or condi firebrand, as those 2 are verstile even if they are not the top dps on every bos. Condi firebrand is the only condi class that works well in fractals too. > > **So there is no good answer here, it depends on too many factors. If we had 1 class that did best, other classes wouldnn't be played.** Edit: I'll try to leave something like an answer however. On golem highest one will be weaver I guess but not very far from tempest or condi revs around 38-39k. On a real boss: I'd say you can have very good numbers on Cairn with Soulbeast and Mirage again around 40k (more than golem benchmark, as cairn moves and attacks).

It depends on which boss you wanna fight. Bosses that attack fast are vulnerable to confusion so mirage will do best, those that move a lot will be vulnerable to torment so Rev will be the best. Firebrand (uses mixed gear tho, not just viper's) is best at burning and got some good power damage too even with full condi build, so they got the best burst damage which shines at shorter-medium phases, then there is slb that is best at bleeding, poison and a lil burning and torment which is similar to firebrand but less bursty, condi berserker is also burning has the ability to bring banners, also not that bad, last but not least on enemies with big hitboxes you got weavers that do very good damage, but it is difficult to play em as hard as they hit. For general use I'd say either condi soulbeast or condi firebrand, as those 2 are verstile even if they are not the top dps on every bos. Condi firebrand is the only condi class that works well in fractals too. **So there is no good answer here, it depends on too many factors. If we had 1 class that did best, other classes wouldnn't be played.**

> @"Firebeard.1746" said: > > The "META" team is all DPS > > https://discretize.eu/ > > And there's really only 1 acceptable defensive support (HB) from the high-end community's perspective. Given the number of different supports and DPS in this game, this feels kinda broken. Am curious how the devs feel about it, not like they're around much on this forum these days, but would like some type of response. Having such a restrictive meta is annoying and discouraging once you get to like t3 and people are lecturing you on your playstyle (even if your failure rate in pugs is low). Why have so many different class and stat combinations when the metas are so narrow? The game really should do a better job of both balancing (creating more diversity in play styles) as well as funneling (making sure you don't invest too muchin the wrong gear). In practice I'm sure fractals are doable in a part of all clerics and/or knight's but the community wouldn't have it I'm sure and so I feel like there's some definite improvements needed here. There is a big misconseption in gaming community on how META works. META stands for Most Effective Tactic Available. MOST is a key word, which means if for example devs nerf firebrand, something else will come in place. As @"Infusion.7149" suggested: chrono+druid was meta before firebrigade was brought into game. Players always will experiment and find out what is the most effective way of doing stuff. And ofc devs know that very well. Apart from that, META in gw2 works well, but it is not required. I assume you are a new player and haven't tryed much playing a no heal comp in CM fractals. The comp that discretize suggests is actually very fun to play and is more challanging in some way than playing a less effective heal oriented comp. And actually what is interesting even in very high KP you rarely play with a full meta comp. There are tons heal firebrands in 15k-20k UFE range, weavers are also very rare lately, and even soulbeasts start lacking due to players slacking to swap after CM100, so we end up playing with DHs a lot. What stays most of the time are firebrand, renegade and berserker. Firebrands have 4 different builds to chose from, renegades can go heal too, and berserkers work too well with overlapped precision and banners to not take to, though it is totally ok to play without a warrior and replace it with a soulbeast. So the idea that "everyone plays META" is totally wrong, META in gw2 fractals is quite rare sadly, only firebrigade is omnipresent in one or a different form, and if it gets nerfed, your so called "toxic, evil" veteran community will suffer the least cause they know their stuff, and players that play t3s or hfb comps will quit fractals due to pressure. That is why you have encountered "lecutring" in tier 3s, normally t3 fractals is the point where fractals become a lil more challenging and players still learn playing, and not playing efficient comps doesn't help them. The Firebrigade comp is their best saviour. Lastly: fractals are a gold grind, we want to clear them fast: which means max dps min failure. 30g/h or 15g/h is a big difference. So expect fractals always being focused on speed. Edit p.s.: The reason why I am advocating for full DPS META comps personally is that it makes the game more fun. Playing with a healer and ignoring the all mechanics is lame and uninteresting. Yes it is kinda similar to DPS your way on skipping phases but in comparison to heal wealchair it is more fun as every individual player gets some pressure on their shoulders.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > > @"Armen.1483" said: > > > @"Ragnar.4257" said: > > > Guardian beats mesmer, engi, thief > > Actually mesmer counters DH. You can trigger their traps with phantasms if they want to meme trap you on node. > > > > True, but guardian is more than just trapper-DH. > > TBH, everything counters trapper-DH. Beating trapper-DH isn't about classes or builds, it's just about applying 3% of brain power. But try telling that to this community.... Right, but it is their only cheesy mechanic that is so hard to deal with, other stuff is easy to outplay. Other than that you can boonrip guardians of their aegis and other boons which is a big deal you can oneshot em like they do to you. I donno when I play mesmer in PVP, guardians are free food for me. It is actually the only reason I play mesmer honestly. But I agree guardians are cheesy and braindead class for PVP.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Guardian beats mesmer, engi, thief Actually mesmer counters DH. You can trigger their traps with phantasms if they want to meme trap you on node.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said: > > @"Armen.1483" said: > > How do you know that the gw2 raiding community is low ? > Well, that's what the devs told us. It's low enough they don't feel justified to make more raid content anymore, at the very least. > Any **official **quotes ? What I have read is that they have abandonned raids to concentrate into LW for the moment, but no reasons were given. And the "low cummunity" part was assumed by the players. And even if that were true, that would not be the cause, but the concequence.

> @"Tridentuk.1625" said: > @Yasai.3549 > I want something to cover zerging and fracs/raids near the top of the meta (meaning it's something useful enough that some LFG groups will actually post for it) without it being a complete yawn fest like Guardian is to me. I don't mind playing support as long as it has some fun mechanics- mesmer definitely seems like it has the fun mechanics down at least. Fracs and raids are really the priority since I'm having a decent amount of fun playing thief in wvw and I have yet to try the pole dancer build which looks like great fun. > > That's kind of how I play thief right now, skirting round the zerg looking for gank targets or looking for small skirmishes. While fun for me, like you say it's not exactly ideal in terms of impact. As for fractals, don't even try mesmer. Maybe at first levels it will work out but as soon as you get into CMS you won't be willing to play mesmer (neither dps nor support), it is just bad in fractals, nobody will ever search for a mesmer in fractals it is the least efficient class for fractals you will ever find. Literally any other profession will work better there. Noboydy cares about pulling mobs there, other classes can do better. Chrono dps has a terribly slow burst and chrono support is just... not for fractals anymore, it works with druid that is out of meta now there too. So yeah, mesmer for fractals is worse than thief in all terms. For raids mesmers are gods, you can go for it. Just don't look at the metabattle "diviner support" builds, they are pretty outdated and bad. The only viable support capability of mesmer in raids is sharing quickness and tanking (still guard does it better sometimes). Apart from that chrono and mirage are both amazing DPS choices for raids contrary to fractals (mirage can still work in CM100 fractal, but only and only there). There is no "paladin type" or other type playstyle (different from estetics) in gw2 endgame PVE content, it doesn't work like that. You will be meleeing everything and every time no matter what class you play. For example with longbow ranger you will always be shooting your arrows point-blank. That is how it is. So if you don't like guardian in general it is understandable, but if you don't like that guardian is a "paladin" that is not understandable. It is kinda the same in WvW you stack to get boons/heals etc. So you are with the group, meleeing is always better for damage than being at range. Fights are designed like that. Mechanics happen near bosses, so if you were able to be away and be a sneaky "sniper" while being away from mechanics the game would seem boring to you. So choosing a class for PVE, don't concentrate on that paladin/assassin type of thinking, this is not Dota, this is Guild Wars 2 !!! It is a unique game with unique playstyle and plays differently than other games. I play all professions and all are fun in their way. I got my preferences, but they are personal and will be different for everyone. But one thing I can say for sure as long as for end game PVE content there are no "assassins, paladins, mages" etc... There are supports, direct damage and condition damage based builds. All of them are different. As a common rule some support classes are too meta to be changed, while DPS classes can be swapped for another with no big difference. Playstyle difference comes from the rotations and skill types. There are easy or difficult, pleasant or unpleasant rotations. But there is no a "sneaky" or "evasive" rotations for PVE, it just doesn't work like that even for thief that has many dodges. Thief is usually not the best DPS choice for raids or fractals. However there is a raid boss where thief can efficently do a certain mechanic that needs some teleports and back. It is useful to have thief kiters there, but again it is not for being evasive, but using a strong skill that only thief has. Other than that, whatever class you chose, it will bring something, at least DPS. And to answer your question. Every class brings something unique to fill gaps. Yes guardian fills most gaps. And guardian is a paladin only estetically and in lore, not in gameplay.

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said: > > @"Aridon.8362" said: > > > @"Astralporing.1957" said: > > > > @"Firebeard.1746" said: > > > > > @"Ayrilana.1396" said: > > > > > There’s a difference between players offering to teach you and expecting all of them to teach you. > > > > > > > > > > Board games are also very different as players are not driven for rewards compared to those doing raids/fractals. Progress for board/card games is nonexistent in the sense that you’re simply playing the game whereas progress in fractals/raids can be slowed or even halted with having new players. > > > > > > > > I don't expect all of them to teach me. The teaching doesn't happen enough. If I'm wrong the raiding community would grow. And I'm completely fine with being wrong. > > > The raid community doesn't grow not because there's not enough players wanting to teach, or not enough opportunities to learn. It's because learning process itself is too tedious/painful for a majority of players, which results in not enough players being willing to stick with it to the end. Which is a byproduct of both content difficulty and the skill discrepancies within community. And those are a byproduct of the combat/skill/traits/gear system design Anet decided on. > > > > > > With whole game as it is, and the content being as it is, Raids being sustainable would require GW2 having way, way bigger playerbase than it has. Possibly even bigger than it ever had (, well, apart from maybe first months of the game, but _without_ content locust padding a large part of that number). > > > > I disagree with you. It's not that tedious to learn > > It's not that it's tedious to learn, it's that it's tedious to organize. > > The point of this thread was to point out that heavy KP expectation exasperates this problem in a low population community. > > How do you know that the gw2 raiding community is low ? Did you know that most raiders create statics and never bother with LFG unless they miss someone ? And how to fill the gap of the person that is missing ? I know some "elite" veteran players that don't even save their KP as they got their static and don't need to prove anything to their friends. However someone that wants to join that group to replace him on his occasional abscence should prove his ability to play that one time in his place somehow. And that is when KP comes in handy. It is only useful to players that don't have statics. Without KP they won't be even finding any groups if they don't want to integrate into statics. Because in that case what will happen is that statics will just recruit additional reserve players to fill the occasional gaps. What KP does is saving time. Please stop trashing raiders already. We have got enough hate on us already. We are normal people like you that want to enjoy our games, we don't want to barrier anyone because we are evil, just please make your own groups with no requirements if it is your thing and be happy, we can't gate you from doing that, can we ?