Besetment.9187

People say they don't but they really do, judging by the amount of /map chat drama that happens every day. KDR people moaning at their PPT link for not having open tags or guilds doing the stuff they hate and apparently don't care about but have to mention anyway. And the opposite happening at the same time - the PPT guys moaning when they ask for help defending gari and a crap fight guild EWPs, gets one pushed a couple of times and spectacularly rage quits. The only people who genuinely don't care and don't make excuses for why they aren't losing by x points or don't have y kdr or why their server isn't inherently better than the siege monkeys and rally bots on the other servers are the people who only go into wvw to get fast dailies and leave straight after. i.e. people who were never emotionally invested enough to play wvw for any reason except the mystic clovers.

Yeah that part is quite hard, requires a lot of concentration and immaculate skill queuing. And you need to keep your Zealot's Fire timings consistent and only use it when you have 2 charges while never dropping a charge, otherwise gaps open up where scepter autos creep through. Dropping a charge is needless to say, a big dps loss. Its also hard to count axe autos because all 3 hits have the same activation time (0.5 sec) so that part requires a lot of concentration too. Is it a beginner friendly build? Not really? Like BttH Power Weaver, the rotation is not particularly long and achieving 75% of the benchmark is easy enough I suppose, but the last 25% gets very hard because of how precise you have to be. Hell, I think Weaver is easier to be honest and that never makes it into anyone's list of easy to play builds.

Yep. I have tendinitis and have had it since I was 32. Mashing buttons in games like Diablo 3 and decades of playing guitar with ropey technique really took its toll. (It isn't worth it).

Right. The order of skills matter and the time between them also matters. You can queue actions by pressing a skill button slightly before the previous one finishes. When starting out, you need to watch the fill bar, get the rhythm down, then drill it until it becomes muscle memory and you don't need to look at the fill bar anymore. If you queue actions perfectly, there should be no auto 1s between your skill buttons. If you open up your simple rotation and see an auto 1 in between big skills, this means your rhythm is slightly off. Because nobody has perfect metronomic rhythm, this is why you see buttons getting mashed in benchmark videos to ensure they get queued with no gaps in between. I'm learning Condi Firebrand right now and of course I'm using the [sC] benchmark and arcDPS log to identify areas I can improve. After memorizing the rotation, my first logged run ended up being 25k/s average. The [sC] benchmark was 31k/s. I let 64 scepter autos through. The [sC] benchmark let zero through. The skill queueing and zealot's fire timings were so good, they did not let a single scepter auto attack go off. Honestly, I'm not convinced that some of those guys are even human. The good news for you is that if you can chill at 27-29k/s on a golem, thats good enough for pretty much everything in the game except high end speed clears.

[sC] are a bunch of robots with insanely fast and accurate fingers. Luna reaches the first weapon swap in 3.5 seconds. You do it in 5.7 seconds. At the next weapon swap, Luna squeezes in an extra hamstring, sever artery, gash and hamstring before weapon swapping and Luna hits the second weapon swap faster than you did. You appear to have interrupted your first sword auto chain and are completely missing the second auto chain and you are still behind on time. If you want to hit [sC] numbers good luck but it helps if you are young, do not suffer from any type of chronic wrist injury and were a guitar hero world champion in a previous life.

I have alts setup on all the meta roles purely so I can pug seamlessly with the most random of people. This is what pugging is like in every game and if you hate dealing with it, you really need to find a static. In Overwatch theres a pug meta (that looks like pro meta except nowhere near as organised). So if Ana is meta, you better have her as an option when you solo queue support, because you will end up in a game where nothing is clicking with your teammates and if you don't swap someone else will ask you to. Healbrand is so common in T4 that I ended up converting my WvW Firebrand into a PvE Healbrand and I play it upon request because it is familiar to most people doing dailies. I also made an Alacrigade purely so I had one to swap to if my pug group really wanted one. I don't want to be the inflexible person who can only play 1 thing and when its not working, the expectation is the other 4 people need to change or do something differently. If you have too many inflexible people in a group and its not working, nobody is willing to change what they play or how they play, thats when things turn messy. So I just try to avoid that entirely. There are times when I join and want to play off meta and sometimes I get the opportunity to do that. I really like playing Condi FB and Power Reaper. I get how this is a problem if you don't have a Firebrand but instead of complaining and not being able to do anything about it, how about working on gearing one, learning a new way to play the game and having the option to switch (with massive carry potential)? A lot of people in pug fractals know how to play with a Firebrand. Most do not know how to play with a Heal Tempest. So you will get to the end boss in Chaos Fractal and you can't provide aegis or stability to the group so either someone else needs to share aegis/stab or everyone needs to know what the boss's auto 3 looks like and dodge it every time or get chain dazed. I don't think thats a reasonable expectation to have when playing in pugs. You don't have to swap to FB if you really want to play Heal Tempest or Druid, but you can if things get really rough and nobody else can flex. If it works, it feels good knowing that you took the initiative and made a difference.

Depends entirely on the boss. Many have breakbars but some do not. When you smash a breakbar, the boss is stunned and gets a debuff called "exposed" for 5 seconds, causing them to take 50% more damage. The goal in fractals is to smash breakbars as soon as they appear and dump as much damage as you can into the boss during the exposed window. Some bosses like Skorvald in Shattered Observatory have very long invulnerability phases where your party's dps collapses because there is nothing to hit while floating between the anomalies. Speed clearing statics will make heavy use of precasting to maximize damage dealt in the exposed window and phase the boss in less than 5 seconds. They will use white mantle portals to reduce the downtime between anomalies. You can watch speed clears on youtube to see how they do it. [dT] has one with a Power Weaver that bursts up to 120k/s and averages 20k/s at the end of the fight but this is only possible with the help of 4 other players. In random fractal pugs, you are doing well if you average more than 10k/s. You cannot compare dps numbers between different bosses. The kitty golem is used for controlled dps tests. [sC] usually posts arcDPS logs in the description of their benchmark videos so you can replicate the test setup and rotation. When the setup is the same, the only difference will be your execution. Because of breakbars/exposed, average dps is not the only important thing to consider. Your burst is important. How much damage can do you do in the first 5 seconds of your rotation and can you line your rotation up to coincide with the breakbar going down? How many buttons in the rotation can you press without interrupting any actions and without letting any auto 1s slip through while cancelling all unnecessary delays (i.e. aftercasts)? If you can burst and average the same numbers as [sC], you are a machine. When I was learning the Condi Firebrand rotation I studied the arcDPS logs [sC] provided and in 4 million hp, they didn't let a single scepter auto attack through. Not one. My first flight run I let 64 scepter autos through. Your fingers need to be very fast and very accurate to reach their numbers. Lastly, meta fractal team composition divides players into 2 categories - dps and support. Dps players do not trait, skill or gear for any personal survivability whatsoever. Their job is only to phase or kill the boss as quickly as possible, thereby minimizing the entire team's exposure to boss mechanics. It is the support players' job to mitigate any incoming damage that can be blocked or absorbed on behalf of the entire party. Boss mechanics typically refer to attacks that cannot be blocked/absorbed/ignored and require you to disengage from the boss. It is the responsibility of all players, both dps and support to not die or cause other people to die to mechanics. Disengaging will lower your dps uptime, which will lower your dps. If you dodge or run away unnecessarily, your dps will go down. In sub optimal groups it is not always possible to just stand and burst so summarising your performance in terms of a single number is not possible. You should practice your rotation on a kitty golem ideally with arcDPS, dps.report and moxie. This will help you to understand where your damage comes from and that its a team effort in real world scenarios. You need boon support. If you bench kitty golem without boons and profession buffs, expect to lose on the order of half your dps. You will learn fractal mechanics by playing them and dying to them as necessary so you know what you can and cant get away with.

I wouldn't underestimate how much dps you lose by disengaging from your target for any length of time, for any reason. A common reason for doing so unnecessarily is getting hit below 50% hp, double dodging away and kiting around until your heal skill is off cooldown. Your effective damage output will go to zero. You put yourself out of range of boon support so you don't have 25 might, fury, quickness when you re-engage. When I bench with and without boons, I can do about 15k/s on Power Weaver with no boons vs 31k/s with. So you can imagine the effect of dropping your dps uptime from 100% to 50% and then bursting with no boon support. Another major factor in your dps is the order of and time between skill activations, which can be a real problem if you haven't analysed your runs and adjusted your practice accordingly. It is even worse if you have a tendency to button mash when under pressure because many skills are a dps loss over auto and you should never use them. The order of skills matters because you are stacking damage multipliers so your total damage is far bigger than you would think by simply adding all the modifiers up. Some of your skill buttons have huge cast times which you interrupt while dodging unnecessarily and some have huge aftercasts which you don't cancel. Every other skill you let an auto 1 slip through and autos are typically only worth doing if you complete the entire chain in contiguous blocks because most of the damage is backloaded into auto 3. Now imagine being plagued by all these little problems and you get hit, panic and run away for 8 seconds until your heal skill comes off cooldown. Big dps numbers are entirely predicated on dps uptime being as close to 100% as possible with as little time between skill casts as possible, with as few skill interruptions as possible. I didn't realise this until I started logging with arcDPS and getting help interpreting the data. The one thing that made me realize this visually was seeing the player summary graph and simple rotation in Fallen[sC] 's arcDPS report for Power Weaver. His opening burst was 61k/s. Mine was 34k/s and I couldn't for the life of me understand why. After getting help analysing my logs, it turned out it was caused entirely by gaps in my skill queuing, which allowed auto 1s to slip in between skill buttons. He reached Fireform in 3.4 seconds. It took me 6.1 seconds. We did more or less the same amount of damage when we hit but he had pressed almost twice as many buttons as I did in the burst window. This is why his rate of damage at this point in rotation is twice as high. In game you don't think about the time cost in seconds and milliseconds for every action you perform. This is something you can only look at from a data centric perspective and identify bad trends which you then have to unlearn. Without analytics, you can easily habituate a playstyle where the time cost of your actions is something you are never aware of. And so people look to infusions, food buffs, ascended gear or some other reason that seems like it explains the difference.

An hour or two? You can often get them in minutes and if its camp capture/disruptor/veteran guard killer, it will be significantly faster than PvE dailies. Its possible to get them all in the same camp. There are other super fast, easy dailies too like master of monuments, land claimer, big spender (buy 3 catapults for badges of honour), veteran creature slayer etc. If you participate in any way beyond that, the GoB reward track goes so quickly. WvW is a broken game mode but there are still many enjoyable things about it and who knows, you might come to like it and catch the bug.

Kill proof requirements are fine and for the most part are a good thing but I do find it interesting that LI became the entry requirement for strikes given that you can't get it by actually doing strikes. I get that raids are harder, therefore if you can prove you can raid, you are overqualified for strikes. It nevertheless makes you wonder why Anet didn't turn misty cape scraps into a stackable inventory item and therefore make them usable as KP for strikes. KP that you acquire by actually doing the thing its supposed to prove you can do. Hell they could have created a series of technical and/or speed clear type achievements with increasingly elaborate cape trims ending in a precursor and legendary cape. Imagine trying to explain this to your noob friend. If it gets too confusing Jimmy, don't worry about it, lets just go gank some plebs in WvW. Whats your spvp rank? Show me your finisher...

Its not a fake resource. You can replicate every aspect of the benchmark and the information to do so is in the log files in the video description. Once you replicate the test setup, the only difference between you and [sC] is your execution/micromanagement, which is what these benchmarks are for. It is to establish a theoretical ceiling for a particular build and then use it to practice your execution. Power Reaper has a lower ceiling than all the other meta dps builds but it also has one of the highest floors. Consistantly high average dps in practical, real world scenarios is easy to achieve on a Power Reaper, more so in sub optimal conditions. Its pretty great in fractal pugs and tends towards godliness the more hopelessly disorganized and incompetent your team is. Slow and steady, its the tortoise which beats all the hares that close their eyes long enough to make a mistake. There is a good reason why it is frequently noted as a strong off meta dps build. For basically everything except high end speed clears, it is not unusual to see a Power Reaper top arcDPS when your Weaver is flinging their camera all over the place and rides the lightning off a cliff (not gonna lie, I've done it) or your Power Berserker doesn't have iron wrists + rhythm commensurate with a guitar hero world champion.

You should try Condi FB. There are some scenarios where it does crazy dps that melee power builds will struggle to approach - bosses with long phases, no invulnerable phase transitions, no breakbars, lots of adds and mechanics that force melee builds to disengage and reposition constantly. On Power Weaver, I find it very hard to even get close to Condi FB dps on Capt Crowe because it plays so heavily to the latter's strengths. No breakbar means no big burst during exposed debuff with impact sigils. Ghostly wind cannot be ignored with stability so disengaging and repositioning is mandatory - melee power dps falls off a cliff when you have to do that because your damage output temporarily goes to zero. The adds benefit Condi FB in several ways - firstly tome 1 resets but also to guarantee crits with cleave. Condi FB is something of a misnomer because its really a hybrid power/condition build. You have 80% crit chance and a very significant portion of your dps is power/crit based. About 2/3 of your total damage dealt will be burning, with the remaining 1/3rd being power based. Applying burning increases the magnitude and frequency of your crits and critting increases the magnitude and duration of your burn ticks. DPS loss when disengaging and re-engaging is not as sharp as with power builds and so repositioning for ghostly winds doesn't hurt you as much. The tome 1 resets are the cherry on the cake, allowing you to stack burning higher than is possible on a training golem. Guardian utilities are flexible and FB tomes have great utility anyway so for this boss it is entirely feasible for your boon support FB to switch to Condi (from either Power or Heal FB). It can still provide 100% quickness uptime and stack might for the entire party. You can still provide a decent amount of reflects and some resistance too by dipping into tome 3. PUGs do like their healbrand though and this is mainly to do with your teammates being comfortable with fighting at low hp. In PUGs, dps players tend not to trust their supports to keep them alive when their health drops below 50%. They get jittery and start running away/double dodging out and waiting for their heal skill. For that reason alone, I will still stay on healbrand if requested to.

What you are doing is the exact reason why people object to integrating a dps meter into the game - you are looking at what other people are doing so you can find a reason to bang them if they don't meet your arbitrary standards. Thats the least constructive thing you can do with the data it spits out. Forget what other people are doing and look at what you can do better, before you look to others. Use it to analyse your own gameplay, which is the greatest benefit of having a personal data collection and logging tool integrated into the game - so everyone has the tools to learn to be a better player in their own time based on real data, not guesses or suspicions. The only time I look at other people's data is (a) to figure out why they are doing so much better than me and (b) because they asked me and needed help interpreting their logs. The most useful feature is the event logging and the history.

I've been using arcDPS for a few months now after being initially resistant to the idea of running a third party plugin. However, after using it and seeing my Power Weaver gameplay improve significantly, I don't think its possible to correctly evaluate your own performance without it. Its not just the meter itself - its the parsing of .EVTC logs with dps.report and moxie that gives you incredible insight into how you play, what kind of bad habits you have, what kinds of things you do differently to benchmarks and how much dps it costs you. For example, after watching an [sC] benchmark for Power Weaver I noticed that Fallen[sC] could spike over 60k/s and I could never reproduce this on the dps meter. The best burst I could do was 39k/s. It turned out that being 38 years old with tendinitis, my fingers are a lot slower and stiffer than they used to be. It took me 6.1 seconds to go from Quantum Strike to Firestorm (FGS 5). It took Fallen[sC] 3.4 seconds (!!). When I saw that information in a graph, that's when it finally dawned on me. I don't think I'm physically capable of 35k/s average, 63k/s burst. Not at my age and not with a chronic wrist injury, but acting on information provided by arcDPS, I was able to go from 18k/s to 30k/s average without straining my wrist. This is the most important thing about dps meters: they help you to correctly identify what is hindering your gameplay the most and what to focus your attention on. I got to see how clumsy my skill queuing was on a millisecond timeline. My opening rotation was frequently punctuated with auto 1s (there should be none in the burst phase from air/fire to fire/fire). I was ruining my dps uptime with aftercasts. For example, I was using FGS 5->4 and getting animation locked by Firestorm's aftercast instead of doing 4->5 and cancelling Firestorm's aftercast by dropping conjure weapon. My Primordial Stance alignment was all wrong. I didn't even know this was until Moxie presented it to me in a way that made sense - you want all your Primordial Stance ticks to be in fire attunement so you need to activate it at the last possible moment before switching to fire/fire. I like to have all my skill hotkeys adjacent to WSAD, so I end up using many ctrl and alt modifier shortcuts. This caused me to activate Arcane Blast and Primordial Stance early to avoid piling up hotkeys since I have to cast FGS and switch attunements at the same time. My elite hotkey = Ctrl + F and my air and fire attunement swaps are Ctrl +Middle Mouse Button and Ctrl + E respectively. Since I already stacked vulnerability to 25 with Quantum Strike and Lightning Storm, I was wasting my Primordial Stance because it was ticking 4 or 5 times in air attunement for vulnerability instead of ticking for burning in fire attunement. ArcDPS also helped me to understand where my damage was coming from on Power Weaver. The top 3 damage sources on my first 30k/s, 4 mill hp training golem run were: Flame Uprising (529.4k)Call Lightning (491.5k)Burning (305.7k)Yep, burning is in the top 3 single biggest damage dealers on a Power build along with the 3rd strike of air auto attack, despite only being used in 2 attunement swaps after exhausting my burst. You know what is even crazier? I interrupted Call Lightning 11 times by mistake in that run and it still accounts for nearly 1/8th of the total damage I put into the golem. These are things I could not even fathom without analytics. There is no way for your brain to track all of this stuff as its happening, so you need to see the data. I don't understand why you wouldn't want to see it? Is it fear that you might not like what you see? Some people are going to use the information to put other people down, but that same information is also one of the best ways to pull yourself up.

Laughs in weaver.

Well both is ideal and you want more than 1 support per 5 player subgroup anyway but stability is so important. The foundation of blobfighting is everyone in squad having complete and unconditional freedom of movement so everyone can move as one and everyone can stay in boon support/cleanse range of each other. If you don't have enough stability it just becomes a mess where people get knocked around and stunned. People get separated, fall behind and cant be helped, thus becoming rally bots. You can get separated when moving at different speeds, which is the case if some of your teammates get crippled or chilled but those can be cleansed as long as you are in range of your supports. I've played tempest in squads that desperately lacked stability and its so easy to get hard CCed to the point of being useless. When your group wide stability uptime isn't being tested then sure, you can run wild with second supports.

Yeah I think its mostly people forgetting to amend LFG description. Sometimes I just misread the LFG because the full description cuts off with parenthesis... Very rarely there will be a dishonest person but like ArchonWings says, the red flag is when they ask to do a specific fractal scale or change it just before everyone readies up.

Weaver depends on positioning to survive. It is definitely not as self sufficient as Tempest but you will be surprised at what you can get away with if you stand in the right places. For the most part, you want to be attacking the boss's back, so you can't get hit by front facing aoe cones and cleaving attacks. If the boss switches target and turns to face you, then you rotate around so you have the boss's back again. If they still follow you, this is how you know a boss has randomly targeted you. Some bosses have attacks that can hit 360 degrees around them but you have to learn those telegraphs on a case by case basis. Amala in Twighlight Oasis is a good test case because she has loads of phases - Lyssa, Melandru, Dwayna, Grenth and Balthazar, each with different telegraphed attacks. All of them can be avoided by not standing in front of the boss. All the shockwaves can be jumped over, several attacks can be avoided with the special action skill and the rest of the 360 degree attacks have safe places to stand in between the circles and lines of death. Crucially, you don't have to ruin your dps uptime by moving far from melee range either. This is something you will probably learn by getting hit a bunch of times, until you get a feel for the timing and where you need to stand. If you can't walk out of red circles and cones, your positioning was probably terrible to begin with. A good support duo will trivialize most fractals because of the utility they can bring. The combination of aegis, stability, projectile reflection and resistance allow you to ignore most sources of incoming damage and cc. Whatever chip damage does get through can be life siphoned away thanks to stonecleave's summit. You still have a responsibility not to get destroyed by boss mechanics but at the more structured level, a Power Weaver's job is not to worry about survival. It is to end boss phases and kill things as quickly as possible. In non meta pugs, you just have to take more personal responsibility for your own survival. Weaver is a good class to learn the value of positioning. I used to not play Weaver on HoT maps and swap away from Weaver in pug fractals where support is lacking or absent. But now I just stay on Weaver. If you play it enough you just learn what you can and can't get away with. In some ways, I find Weaver more survivable than Dragonhunter. On bosses with adds, I can suicide dps and as long as I'm cleaving the adds, I know I will rally off my own downed lava font.

Its almost like a server is a big mass of different people with different reasons for playing. Stereotyping the lot of them is a pointless exercise that just creates tribal divisions where there are none. I haven't seen servers get double teamed for being siege bunkers. I can't say I've ever seen that many people exhibit such unified and principled behaviour. 2v1s happen because the 1 is weak.

Gank away. You would be foolish not to capitalize on man advantage or use the fact you have not been spotted to win an engagement before the fight even starts. If I get ganked running back to my team then slow clap. Well done. You got me. I had incomplete information about my surroundings, made poor assumptions about my own safety and got punished for my lack of situational awareness. Making excuses for getting owned or devising a convoluted set of arbitrary rules to justify why you got played is scrub logic. Don't even go there.

HBs and Alacrigades are all over T4 pugs. Its pretty hard to join a T4 pug that doesn't have at least a HB. If your team is wiping, ask you HB to Wall of Reflection, Tome 3.3 and Shield 5 since reflects are super strong. They don't need bane signet here because the boss has no breakbar so its a perfect opportunity to sub in Wall of Reflection. Reflects almost completely negate incoming damage from adds and allows your whole team to ignore them. Also ask your Alacrigade to go Kalla/Mallyx and pulse resistance (Pain Absorption). If you don't have an Alacrigade your HB can also tome 3.4. Your whole team can ignore the condition spam. Beyond that its just moving the red circles to the corners, stacking on the green circles and saving your dodges for when your positioning sucks and you can't walk out of the ghostly wind. If the adds build up too much, your HB can Tome 1.3 and Axe 3 to pull some of the adds onto Captain Crowe so you cleave them down with the boss. Some instabilities like social awkwardness make this fight messy because in pugs for some crazy reason, people play the game like its Overwatch and they need to ADAD dodge spam like they are trying to avoid headshots. Except it really does nothing except lower your group DPS and social awkwardness just pushes your teammates into ghostly wind. If that is happening, ask them to chill and stand still. Trust your supports to do their job and save your dodges for the wind.

No, that is not the mindset at all. People don't take fights they know they can't win. In sPvP you don't run a shatter mesmer into mid and take a 1v3. It doesn't matter how good you are - its a stupid fight to take and you will lose. Dying in WvW has no consequence, but people still don't like losing. Fights tend to happen around objectives (capture points) in sPvP. What do you know? In WvW they also tend to happen around objectives (keeps and towers). There is also the question of scale. Most damage modifiers in this game interact multiplicatively so damage scaling is incredible when player count increases up to a cap, beyond which, you are stacking buff duration and tending towards 100% uptime. To an extent, more players = more condition pressure and more redundant boon and utility sharing. This is why there is a tendency towards large scale fighting. A significant number of people in WvW are running heavily synergistic builds that are not designed to survive and kill alone. They are designed to survive and kill together. A significant number of people in WvW also don't want anything to do with WvW and are just there for dailies and free mystic clovers to finish their legendary. What can you do? You can pick on them if you want and plenty of people do, but 2v1ing a PvE ranger trying to get his camp capture daily is just sad. You can do better than that. I have seen some spectacular roamers that are like storm chasers. They follow mega zergs and harass the periphery players, even managing to spike someone and get out while half the zerg turns on them. Granted they are mostly thieves that have the stealth and the teleports to pull it off, but it still takes an extraordinary degree of confidence, skill and awareness to even survive more than 1 second when outnumbered to that extent.

I don't mind pugging at all, but then I returned to the game from Overwatch where I comp solo queued.

I checked in some other instances and Silverwastes is down to 1 fps with dx912pxy so guess its time to post a github issue.

Disable DX912pxy and your fps will return to normal. Something is happening in the new instance that completely wrecks my fps using DX9->12.