Kichwas.7152

> @"kharmin.7683" said:

> > @"blp.3489" said:

> > Although I only read two pages of the linked thread my thought is that it would be great if they brought the area of effect speed boost to PVE so that someone with the warclaw could help people without mounts move at a common faster speed, making it easier to play with others. For the short period of time I hadn't got the warclaw yet in wvw I thought that was one of the best features ever, now I just wish there were more players without warclaws in wvw that I could share speed with. :)

> This would dis-incentivize people in PvE from purchasing mounts. Not sure that would be in Anet's best interests.

>

You can't purchase mounts anyway.

> @"Buran.3796" said:

> > @"Kichwas.7152" said:

>

> > That seems good in solo content. In group content that toughness boost is going to make you a hyper focused target by NPCs, which dramatically reduces survival odds. I know they say toughness is only used for aggro in raids - but I've found having a toughness of even 1021 from a single back item can make me the near 100% target in dungeons and fractals and very often the target in open world group events. Just shedding that small bit from an old back item upped my survival dramatically on several characters.

>

> If toughness is that bad, how most of builds, classes and players soloing team content (from fractal bosses to OW champions, bounties and ever raid bosses) run so oftenly builds totalling 3.5k to 4k armor?

>

Having been a tank in every other MMO I've played - that's what I used to say too. I had a blog for builds, not updated since before HoT, where I call out all of the people and glasscanon builds and note how much 'better' my tanky build is for open world and dungeons... Then I started paying attention and realized that I was the person most often in the downed state, and with every patch I seemed to get more and more of the aggro. Somewhere after raids came out I started getting ALL of the aggro - and not in raids, but other content.

And when I got rid of my toughness my ability to survive went up dramatically.

As time has gone on they have way over-tuned the aggro impact of toughness. And it just doesn't give you the ability to do something like handle the entire damage input of a fractal or dungeon fight. In open world it also gets dicey because the more people show up the more chaotic it gets. Some of these things are easier solo than in a group if you're the one with primary aggro - it's a bowl curve, with the solo side rising a little lower than the zerg side. Look at how bounties sometimes fail because too many people showed up. You want enough people to spread the damage but not so many that you ramp it up too much - but if you're there with massive toughness - the damage never spreads but even with 2 people it has ramped up a little.

One of the key things to note in the examples you post is that they're soloing open world content - they're no added chaos, and open world just doesn't hit the same way as even dungeons, let alone fractals.t

In fractals - take a given fractal pull with a lot of enemies in it - now have them ignore everyone in the group but one person.

> @"Buran.3796" said:

> > @"otto.5684" said:

>

> > The power damage of attacks, especially SB, is pretty good. You are leaving a lot of damage. I dunno the exact breakdown for renegade, but condi builds deal between 25-50% of their damage from power. I would not bother with this in PvE, especially that condi renegade has good survivability.

>

> So, in exchange of viper stats, Renegade bow boost the damage in less than a 10%. Trailblazer, on the other hand, retains 90%+ of the same whole damage, ads 1172 armor and 6330 HP making us almost invulnerable to one-shooters. Which means that with trailblazer you can kill almost as fast as with viper, but being able to recover from almost any mistake.

That seems good in solo content. In group content that toughness boost is going to make you a hyper focused target by NPCs, which dramatically reduces survival odds. I know they say toughness is only used for aggro in raids - but I've found having a toughness of even 1021 from a single back item can make me the near 100% target in dungeons and fractals and very often the target in open world group events. Just shedding that small bit from an old back item upped my survival dramatically on several characters.

My characters with actually notably high toughness - holdover gear from the Pre-HoT days when I thought Knights was the best gear, or some level boost alts with soldiers... found it just as bad. As much as 1800 toughness, get hyper-focused and while with scores like that open-world gets easy, in dungeons you get so much aggro you get over-whelmed.

Trailblazers looks like a gearset I would only dare use in solo play, or use in WvW where you can toss out conditions into a zerg and they will be distracted enough by the crowd to not cleanse them.

> @"Mortifera.6138" said:

> Dragons! /10chars

I was actually thinking this morning that an elite spec for Ranger in the upcoming expansion could be around not a new weapon, but a new set of pets - 3 small dragons, power dps, condition dps, and support - only useable when the elite spec is traited.

Sigil choices...

Looking at this build:

He is using Sigil of Bursting and Sigil of Malice

Looking at the Condition DPS builds on Metabattle and Snowcrows:

https://snowcrows.com/raids/builds/revenant/renegade/condition/

https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Renegade_-_Condi_DPS

(discretize thinks Revenant only exists as a boon-bot, so has no Condi-DPS build).

Both favor:

Sigil of Earth, Doom on melee and Geomancy / Earth on bow.

- these two builds though, are just copies of each other.

Bursting is +5% condition damage.

Malice is +10% condition duration.

Earth is 6-seconds of bleeding after scoring a crit

Doom is 3-stacks of 8-second point after a weapon swap

Geomancy is 8-second bleed after a weapon swap

Thoughts on who has the better sigil choices here?

Granted the first build is aimed at open world PvE and the other build is aimed at Fractals/dungeons/raids - but it feels like sigils on the first build would be more ideal in boss fights. Weapon swap sigils are something I'm not so sure about when the swap here is mainly about when you're in melee or ranged.

I find Renegade in open world PvE to be silly powerful.

As noted above only Reaper has been more 'cheese mode' - I can solo some of the temple chains in Orr on my Reaper and she doesn't even have anything but exotic gear...

Renegade - shortbow and maxe/axe. Swapping between Kala and Malyx - it's pretty absurd. Kala's elite makes me almost as immune to damage as Reaper's shroud mode... In fact I often also use it in fractals up through T3 in moments when we're taking too much damage and there's been a lot of group fail - it's a recovery trick to buy time while the group gets back on track - AND if I place it right I can heal my entire group back to full.

Spamming Bannish Enchantment and Embrace the Darkness can strip the CC bar of bosses off very fast if you have the right talents.

> @"Veprovina.4876" said:

> > @"Kichwas.7152" said:

> > Personally I find Mace / Axe a lot of fun because it has really nice animations and sound effects.

> >

> > A lot of people level with staff and hammer because power gear is easy to get while leveling and takes little thinking to play well enough to get through. Plus the staff and hammer both have great animations and sounds (something true for nearly all combos on this class).

> >

> > I see sword/sword a lot, but it's not very potent. It's strong on any other profession so people assume it's good on revenant. It is better than staff because staff is support... but it's not as good as going mace/axe condition.

> >

> > At 80:

> > Shortbow will outperform hammer by a good margin once you unlock it. But Hammer looks and sounds better.

> >

> > Mace/Axe with a swap to shortbow and using all viper's gear is the high damage build for revenant.

> >

> > For a complete flip - go staff / hammer and be support with either harrier gear for a healer or diviner's for a boon-bot. The harrier build will probably not be good for solo play. The diviner's build will be good in open world if you're good at avoiding taking damage - and is very popular in group content.

> >

> > If you go DPS, people will usually assume you're support of some kind - but I've never been hassled over bringing a DPS build and it does perform very strongly when played well.

> >

> >

> > Aside: Staff 5 is a knockback that scatters enemies. PLEASE don't ever use that if paired with a Mace/Axe DPS revenant. Nothing worse than group a huge collection of mobs into my field, only for someone to scatter them out of it right before my blast goes off...

> >

> That's what i'm using now as well!

> Mace/Axe and Greathammer for ranged.

> It's kind of a cool combo too, like, weird weapon choices haha, a mace and an axe, i like it.

> And i like how totally not ranged weapons in this game are actually ranged.

> Hammer for Revenant, Greatsword for Mesmer haha.

>

> Hammer is a bit weaker from what i can tell (for now), but it's good when i don't want to be near something.

> I have both expansions and stuff, so i'll definitely unlock the elite specialization. I think i'll go with the shortbow one.

>

> I'll definitely try staff/hammer though, sounds interesting and since i never play that character solo, only with a friend, i could be a nice support.

> I'll have to unlock Centaur first though, i don't think demon works well with a staff. Dwarf might work, it's close ranged after all, but demon is condi based so idk...

> I'll get Centaur next when i have enough points. Thanks for the suggestion!

>

You won't get to shortbow until you get to the elite specs. It's from the Path of Fire elite spec and even though it's a condition weapon, it's more powerful on power builds than hammer - the power weapon... which is... sad...

Centaur is the right choice for a staff user - a Revenant healer would use that combo.

Dwarf is a 'tank' spec for a game without tanking... it literally has a taunt on it... but it's very popular in power-damage builds also. I believe the top 'support' legend is herald - not sure. That's an elite so don't worry about it for now. For now You'd probably want to be swapping around between Centaur and Dwarf - they make great choices while leveling.

> @"Laila Lightness.8742" said:

> It rellies on weak condis like torment and confusion its weaker than condi chrono why would anyone pick this?

Torment is an absurdly powerful condition in PvE. Apply and kite. There's quite a few moments in both open world and fractals where you can use this to great effect.

> @"Balsa.3951" said:

> I explain for everyone who want tengu

>

> Anet is a company who need think about cost of production in relation to how much money they can get from it.

>

> here the workload to implement tengu

>

> [A bunch of stuff]

>

> Here are the wins for anet

> [not much stuff]

Sadly this.

Look at even WoW these days - all their new races for the recent spat of xPacs are like the mount skins here - now your Britney Spears Elf comes in smurf colors, $X please.

Tengu should have been there at guild wars 2 launch when the lore was actually begging for them to be included - so much so that it looks like they were half made and then stopped because somebody wanted 'XXX-anime plant girls' which itself got canned because somebody else on the project said 'WT-kitten', who let the ghost of Roddenberry in here, and made them redo the Sylvari (thankfully).

But um, yeah... too late now.

A new race that shared the body frame of an existing one could be doable. But we already have Norn and Human which basically a walking advert for growth hormones and nothing more... At least WoW made their new elves in funny colors and their goats in glow...

At launch, the game should have had Skritt, Tengu, and Dredge. I'd argue Centaur too because back then mounts were not on the plan that we know of... But doing any one of these now is a big budget refactor of a lot of existing content for not much gain.

> @"Apolo.5942" said:

> > @"Kichwas.7152" said:

> > It's been insane lately...

> >

> > Even after restarts of my system and network.

> >

> > It seems to LOVE hitting me on jumping puzzles in groups like fractals. I will jump, and the screen freezes. and I come back to being dead somewhere...

> >

>

> My connection has nothing to do with this, i have checked pinging other US sites and i get my regular latency.

Yeah - that's what I was trying to note. All checks to my own connection come back as everything fine...

It's been insane lately...

Even after restarts of my system and network.

It seems to LOVE hitting me on jumping puzzles in groups like fractals. I will jump, and the screen freezes. and I come back to being dead somewhere...

> @"Thornwolf.9721" said:

> My vote is for the humans and the asuran to be removed. I don't like Jory or kas

With you up to there. Now just add Logan to that list. Make him first.

I'm still not over him leaving the group in mid-fight in the pre-launch novel to go on a booty call...

Keep Taimi though. She's one of my favorites.

I'd be happy to toss out Caithe too. Keep Rox, Canach, and Gorrik.

And Koss. We just gotta start randomly running around with Koss again - if for no other reason than all the years I spent doing that back in GW1.

- give him some kind of dialogue option where he hints at the hero he ran with in GW1, and if we're human an option to answer "that's my ancestor".

> @"Anen.1742" said:

> I am regularly joining CM + T4 groups to only play CM, leaving after 98CM.

>

> But the real question is why would I wait ages for a CM only group to form when there are multiples CM+T4?

Smart groups deal with this by running the 'least popular' item first.

Do T4 + CM instead of CM + T4.

Not just that, but do it as:

T4 + rec + CM

And in fact... do T4 in numeric reverse - highest number first unless something like Molten Furnace Fractal or Sirens is in there - then do those first because people tend to leave over them. I'd recommend this priority order:

Molten Furnace Fractal -> Sunqua -> Sirens -> t1 recs -> t2 recs -> t3 recs -> reverse number order or t4 -> t4 rec -> CM

- Because that's basically putting the things people leave over first, and the things they will stick for last.

Groups that do this... I regularly see 1-2 people leave group after it forms but before the first item is run, so we can replace them while it's still fresh, and once we get in there people are a LOT LESS likely to leave.

CAVEAT: I'm only progressed into T3 - so some of the above is based on me believing the claims in the thread are true. And... for T1-3, the thing people leave over the most is Molten Furnace Fractal . Maybe by T4 player's have figured it out enough to have it 'on farm' and it won't belong on that list.

Personally I find Mace / Axe a lot of fun because it has really nice animations and sound effects.

A lot of people level with staff and hammer because power gear is easy to get while leveling and takes little thinking to play well enough to get through. Plus the staff and hammer both have great animations and sounds (something true for nearly all combos on this class).

I see sword/sword a lot, but it's not very potent. It's strong on any other profession so people assume it's good on revenant. It is better than staff because staff is support... but it's not as good as going mace/axe condition.

At 80:

Shortbow will outperform hammer by a good margin once you unlock it. But Hammer looks and sounds better.

Mace/Axe with a swap to shortbow and using all viper's gear is the high damage build for revenant.

For a complete flip - go staff / hammer and be support with either harrier gear for a healer or diviner's for a boon-bot. The harrier build will probably not be good for solo play. The diviner's build will be good in open world if you're good at avoiding taking damage - and is very popular in group content.

If you go DPS, people will usually assume you're support of some kind - but I've never been hassled over bringing a DPS build and it does perform very strongly when played well.

Aside: Staff 5 is a knockback that scatters enemies. PLEASE don't ever use that if paired with a Mace/Axe DPS revenant. Nothing worse than group a huge collection of mobs into my field, only for someone to scatter them out of it right before my blast goes off...

Tengu

100% definitely Tengu. The profession was made for... oh... /sigh...

The 'trick' to Siren's Reef is add control. Stop ignoring the adds on the final boss and don't put your 'black icon' fields on the other players and it's doable.

The 'trick' to Sunqua Peak is to stop attacking when she has reflection up. And um... basically that's it.

the bug in Sunqua is that if you wipe during the reflection phase the fractal is glitched and needs to be started over. Since she does no direct damage of her own in this phase... it's super easy to not wipe: just stop attacking and move to avoid the ground effects that are telegraphed with a lot of lead up time.

I'm usually first in line to point out that 'ranger' is not a reference to 'range' but to special forces.

But this time that's exactly why I say yes to rifle. I'm thinking that a build similar to the sniper build thief got should go to ranger.

A build built around a fantasy take on the modern Special Forces units.

- this would be an elite spec that assumes your weapons are rifle with a swap to dagger / torch. The kit would have boosts for those two weapons. Bonuses to initial attacks that when in melee become bonuses when the range is 200 or less. IE: you specialize in switching from surprise to extreme close quarters.

- A defensive bonus when attacked from the side or behind in melee.

- a conal area attack with the rifle - because even though autofire is amazingly bad accuracy in the real world - genre fiction like Rambo loves it...

- The torch would set down fields, and the knife and rifle would have finishers.

Where the thief rifle I "think" was aimed at the idea of critical hits... this rifle would be about power hits. Rambo shoots from the hip and blows up buildings with bullets... somehow... we don't care how because it looks cool... So... there'd have to be at least one attack on the rifle that was an explosion.

Pet bonuses for pets reviving or pet stealth attacks. Or something that boosts power-based damage of pets or otherwise makes power-based pets better for this build than condition based ones.

With a lot of characters, I'm thinking of going through the list and redoing a few of them. One quick path to making them distinct would be finding some to switch to Condition (a few are condition already, such as one of my Revenants).

To that end, which professions have the best 'toolkits' for Condition builds that are both strong and engaging to play?

> @"lokh.2695" said:

> 3edgy5me

>

> On a more serious note: A Black commander Tag wouldn't be very visible. I wouldn't mind it but I doubt there's a practical use for it.

Visibility wise - the perfect color is yellow. To human eyes, which I imagine most of us reading this rely on; yellow shows up more than any other color (caveat: I do not know if this is still true for people with varying levels of color blindness).

Black and green are both so common in camouflage for a reason.

(In video and gaming... there is a problem of 'accidental racism' in that dark skin tones can blend into backgrounds a lot and so camera adjusted for lighter skin often fail to see darker people, or in photos focus wrongly or develop highlights and shadows wrongly - this has led to things like those games that work by watching player motion with a camera being hard for dark skinned players to use... and photographers not used to working with darker skinned models have often landed into the middle of controversy when their photos of a darker model end up looking very bad - your easy go to example for this is to look at school yearbooks from past decades.)

Commander tags are meant to be "find me on the map really quickly". So I think darker tags should be avoided - and I'd go as far as to recommend people also not get the green one. I'll say the same thing for the white one because the map has snow so often.

A player's best bet is to stick to yellow, orange, magenta, and pink. But mostly - yellow.

Probably the 'double click this to pick your choice of Ascended footwear' item I got some few days ago. Sent to the character I use for Living Story to 'start' the process of getting ascended gear for her.

As for those Ascended Rings from fractals another person mentioned - my bank is rapidly filling up with those... Anything with toughness or more than 4 stats on it goes into the pile of "salvage this, eventually, because it's trash".

- half of the toughness ones were ones I bought with laurels years ago when fractals were new and I still thought 'knights' was the best gear in the game... /sigh... all those wasted laurels.

> @"Hannelore.8153" said:

> They definitely need to make them more useful somehow.

>

> Fields and finishes are barely even used in WvW--it used to be very common, but they were slowly supplanted by other types of organised teamplay. In PvE, they still see limited use in Fractals and raids, but that's about it.

>

As a DPS Condition Revenant using my own combo fields is a core part of my rotation. Do it right versus fail to do it makes a heavy impact in my results.

But... yes, my gameplay is basically 'do the daily 3 random whatevers, then farm fractals.'

I can see why they'd be difficult in WvW where there are too many people all over the place. In PvW yes - it's often even useful if you see someone else's combo field that you don't recognize and didn't know what coming - to toss out a finisher and see what happens. In WvW, there are often so many people even my 2080 RTX GPU can fail to render the fields so... I have no idea if I'm hitting one or not.

> @"Loosmaster.8263" said:

> In a perfect world, your own fields should have priority...

I think that's really the only solution needed here. Of existing put down - your own fields are always at the top of the stack - most recent to last placed. Meaning you could overwrite your own on accident or on purpose - but not get accidentally messed up by a team member.

> @"maddoctor.2738" said:

> Add a way for a fractal group to see which dailies/CMs everyone in the group has already completed that day. That way if you create a group asking for Full Clear and a player joins that has already finished some of the Fractals on that day, they will be visible. So you will either start with THAT Fractal (so they repeat it first) or they can go find another group or you can simply run with them then replace them once they leave. At the very least the group will have advance notice.

Some things sound really good in theory until you start looking at them more.

What happens if you join group, get through some of the dailies, and then for whatever reason the group breaks up, or loses 1 person.

* Group broke up, now you need to find a new group - but you have this giant scarlet letter over your head so no one is willing to let you join them.

* Group lost one player, new person joins, sees you have already done some of the fractals, and leaves before they get stuck with you and end up being in the first situation...

* Group loses one player mid run on their second fractal of the day for whatever reason. New person joins right as you get completion... and now has that giant scarlet letter over their head when they later want to get that first fractal done, having been unable to leave your group fast enough to avoid the stink...

I really don't see a problem with the current situation. And I end up in groups all the time that have already done some of the fractals I want to do... I just... easily join another group after.

Today I even started my own group that I listed as just one fractal - the one I had left, and I got a group in about 5 minutes. Felt like forever because usually I can get a group in seconds... but 5 minutes is pretty quick when you think about it and compare it to sitting in LFG as anything but a tank or healer in most other MMOs.

If any of you think finding replacements is bad here... just got play any other MMO and try to PUG in your support roles... make sure you have a second monitor going because it's Netflix time. Be it a fresh group or a replacement mid-run.

In fact FFXIV has a little thing you can check to make sure you avoid getting stuck in runs that aren't fresh, which... really sucks when you're group loses one player and all 50,000 people online at that moment have checked that 'avoid getting cooties' box...

My new 'second' Revenant:



Condition DPS in mostly Ascended Viper's gear. Still need to make the shoulder and back item ascended, and one Accessory is Berserker until I get another 100 pristine fractals (and the underwater gear is just random lolwut stuff O.o)...

My old original Revenant:



The old one is in an odd sort of "what exactly is my build here?" state. She's basically tabled until I make proper healing gear, and wearing exotic 'haimi' at the moment.

This is kinda something you could say about 'the next expansion' of most MMOs...

Straying from the launch game is what they do. Each time they do it, some people like it and some don't. A lot of people come back, it fizzles out, and some of the remainder get nostalgia for the old version.

It wouldn't matter what the list you made looked like - it would still have this question.

For me the real test is whether or not Cantha will feel like Cantha but not be too much like GW1 Cantha.