Zenith.7301

Power herald is the lowest DPS spec in the game.

Meters should be expansive. They shouldn't just track damage, but damage TAKEN by source and healing per second as well. One should also be able to see damage dealt breakdowns for each source, like how much time you spent padding DPS with some cleave versus focusing a key priority add. Meters are only elitist when they obfuscate the picture. True meters allow for greater class comp and build variety by proving that other compositions can work just fine and that it's not the healer's fault you are facetanking unnecessary damage and dying or that the group DPS is so low that the wipe is due to low DPS and not because a healer spec is not viable. Of course you will still get the whiny idiot who complains about your DPS despite the fact you got flux bomb 2-3 times in a row during a boss fight and had to walk it out, but that idiot would be easily proved wrong by you linking them the amount of flux bomb hits via some meter to prove your point rather than letting him talk without having data of your own to present.

You realise goldsinks are their to combat inflation right? One-time goldsinks are an atrocious way to combat inflation. Proportional taxation of gold generation is way more effective at removing gold from the population anyways.

Goldsinks should be removed and raid currency from CM clears should be the standard. Yes, you can still buy the CM clears, but the cost would be prohibitive to most and the skins would get the prestige. It's also a matter of design. You should earn the reward for doing the content relevant to it, not just complete the achievement and then bugger off raids because raid payout is abysmal and the mountain of gold to craft the rest of the armor is more efficiently farmed by doing open world braindead zerg farm or auction house baron. This game is atrocious about making instanced content rewarding because it would rather squeeze the whales' credit cards by putting immense goldsinks on everything to incentivize gem to gold conversions. WoW and FFXIV have it right, the relevant content should award the rewards without forcing some economy aspect into them.

Yup, if I join a T4 normal fractal run that isn't a CM's+T4 70+ essence run, I can guarantee you that often just the 3 T4's with no CM's will take significantly longer than the T4's+CM's combined based solely on the huge gap between player skill. And some of that is because this game really makes no effort in nurturing a baseline of skill proficiency, and the other part is just how unintuitive DPS is in this game. Because autoattack chains are interrupted and reset over skill usage, performance between people who can count autoattacks and those who do not creates serious differences, and because this game offers no UI modifications to suit player needs in keeping track of important skills and resources, only those with good working memory and internal clock skills perform well at DPS while others do so poorly. Then there are people who complained about obscure mechanics like ether signet after cast with c split gimmicks being removed as affecting the skill ceiling of the class, but the fact is that this is a ridiculous way to increase class complexity or difficulty and that skill expression shouldn't be so completely obscure. I far prefer the condi renegade model of complexity over gimmicks highly reliant on ping. Once we get a serious commitment to instanced PvE content as the main form of content delivery to this game and a serious class balance/development team not made up of a skeleton crew that mostly thinks of PvP concerns for balancing and PvE as an afterthought, then we will have a system where a raid and dungeon community can grow. But for now the raid and dungeon communities will continue to degrade as the development direction clearly places very little priority in supporting this kind of content and instead delivering the McDonald's of videogaming via the open world maps. FFXIV and WoW should really be looked at as models that encourage the replenishment and growth of raiding communities, because they allow the necessary UI/add on modifications, content cadence, and player analysis tools to support player growth in instanced content. It also doesn't help that for all the logistical investments in getting started on raids, the monetary returns for so much investment are pitiful compared to just farming some open world maps. You know something is wrong when it's more efficient to get your legendary armor/ring collection done via the minimum amount of raid runs and then stop raiding altogether to craft the armor way faster by farming gold more efficiently outside of raiding. Placing such a ridiculous amount of goldsinks to access armor that's supposed to be gated behind skill checks is an atrocious idea when you don't design for the content with the highest player skill investment to provide undisputed gold/hr advantage. Which is why raid rewards should function purely on a raid currency of its own.

Most training runs are done incredibly inefficiently to begin with so they are not even learning scenarios because instead of picking up a few trainees with some degree of competency and being grown in skill withing a group of mentors, what you have is maybe one or two mentors and then a disparate group of people with wild gaps in skill competencies being recycled around where the group members aren't even the same throughout several training sessions, so every new training session you're dealing with different problem players stretching the group training thin. In essence you get a person who needs practice with the final phase of Matthias but in the 2 days of training the consistency in getting to that phase for his or her practice is nonexistent since that person's practice is being held back by other people who aren't even prepared to make it past the first phases. And since the spots in existing statics are usually so few and often quite stringent beyond just having 3-4 kills on a boss, these people may train and get a kill but rarely move on to grow the raiding community because they find that they can't consistently raid outside of PuGing which has even more outrageous barriers to entry so they quit altogether. This game is absolutely atrocious in getting the average player to a baseline of competency for raiding/fractals because for most of its published content no degree of competency or thought into viable builds is encouraged as it allows zerging to completely overshadow individual contribution tests via open world PvE being its main form of content. At least GW1 did a much better job in training people across story missions first, then optional objectives adding further challenge and ultimately elite missions. But all of them had zero zerging involved and emphasized the individual contribution of each group member by limiting group size.

I swear to god, some players are actively trying to die. I had a Soulbeast on Sloth yesterday that would always stand on the poison floor. People can't be that oblivious of their environment, right? They legit try to die. And blame the healer for it usually. You have people who try a DPS speed rush but they clearly don't have the skill to do mechanics, just perform a rotation on a raid golem, and then they are indignant that they are not allowed to facetank a boss into victory. You would think years long after Arkk and MAMA/Siax have been released, people would realize how much simpler it is to do the damn mechanic instead of flipping out because the DPS failed to solo kill the anomaly or the healer didn't heal through the adds on Artsariv during boon overload+afflicted week. DPS bringing no CC or stability for MAMA/Skorvald when it's obvious there's no quickbrand or the one quickbrand there is not applying stability, swap one of those DPS utilities that give a marginal DPS increase (like mantra or pain on power chrono being swapped by mantra of concentration). Druids refusing to use healing spring over signet heal during afflicted week or DPS refusing to help out on afflicted fractals with high mob density not bringing their own condi cleanse. Refusing to use traited elite spirit for stability on final Chaos Isles boss or Skorvald last phase or MAMA last phase, etc. DPS failing to swap in reflect for we bleed fire week, etc. This game has issues with people constantly trying to brute force an encounter through DPS and failing at it and instead of adjusting their play to do mechanics they can't skip through, throw a tantrum and leaving.

I think this game has an infinitely more toxic environment than WoW and FFXIV precisely because it allows for a lot of obfuscation, so when there is failure there are no practical parsing tools and add ons to not only show DPS, but healing and damage taken, and specifically pinpointing what the damage intake was for each member so you know who's failing mechanics. Often people will pull up DPS meters, which DO matter, but 12-13k is more than enough and the reason people want even higher numbers is because they want to ignore that sometimes the reason they are wiping is because they are failing soft mechanics (by soft mechanics, I mean taking unnecessary damage that may not necessarily be lethal but when taken frequently enough leads to DPS loss because the player starts panicking about trying to not die, the healer is over stressed and trying to chase down improperly positioned, panicked players and in general the attention span for the group breaks and mechanics start to get sloppy). I see this more than ever in Artsariv, where she is a very simple encounter if you a) don't eat more orange circles than you need to, b)use your hypernova to break stuns if stability is not being applied, c) the adds are being ignored in lieu of trying to tunnel DPS and they end up cleaving the party down with certain instabilities. Same goes for MAMA in CM, it's a total disaster when people start ignoring how vital damage avoidance and proper CC application are to the encounter. So when people don't have the add on and tools support to tell fact from fiction through hard data, they start making conclusions on mere anecdote. And that's just terrible for the health of the game.

Condition renegade is one of the highest complexity DPS specs in the game, so unless you're the sort of player that also thrives playing ele and condi engineer, I'd stick to mirage or even condi firebrand/soulbeast (both have really easy rotations and do competitive DPS, firebrand is great because the condi damage is very frontloaded since most of it is burning).

There's nothing casual about a raid, and the moment you start taking up other people's time your fun and individual wants are overridden by the needs of the group. Not to fret, because if you want to not give a kitten about others' standards you can always play single player RPG's which allows you all the suboptimal build flexibility that you want. to be honest, W1-4 are pretty casual these days, the training group i run with rarely fails to kill a boss in those wings with no comms, and brand new players to raids. "easier" on average is one thing. I would not call Matthias or Xera casual at all, and the amount of sub 10k DPS I've seen in training runs on Gorseval (essentially a training dummy) is depressing.

There's nothing casual about a raid, and the moment you start taking up other people's time your fun and individual wants are overridden by the needs of the group. Not to fret, because if you want to not give a damn about others' standards you can always play single player RPG's which allows you all the suboptimal build flexibility that you want.

The problem with GW2 is you really notice the impacts of casual people as an experienced player in a way that with WoW or FFXIV it's far less noticeable because the content is nerfed through gearing (and even with less geared casuals being trivially carried by more geared people). I go into regular T4's and the people you get can mean your T4's can take significantly longer than a daily CM100/99+T4's from an experienced group. In regular T4's I was a weaver doing 12-14k and the rest of the DPS were barely breaking 6k DPS, there was a deadeye camping pistol/pistol and the chrono was just ranging with staff. When time came to do the Urban fractal it was a totally painful experience as you had only 2 people run into melee, get creamed by the horde of Ascalonian warriors while the thief and mesmer were ranging next to the statue. Wipe after wipe after wipe due to poor DPS. Poor DPS in this game is massively noticeable because the mobs are such a vastly bigger threat and the lack of traditional healing systems like in WoW means that groups with poor DPS can seldom outlast the high damage spikes of mobs. So you have a total fracturing of the community because the difference between good and bad is so large and unlike FFXIV/WoW, GW2's DPS performance is so unintuitive and hard to measure/analyze alongside several other obstacles to it. In GW2 for some stupid reason autoattack chains are interrupted by skill usage, which means autoattack counting is vital as interrupting the autoattack chain with a skill in between means resetting the chain. Since there are no add on's to track the chain step you are at, and the game is a neon board mess of visual effects often obscuring your own animations, you have little choice but to stare at your action bar and meorize which icon is the 2nd-3rd part of the chain to make sure you don't cut it off. Which then takes your eyes off the rest of the surroundings.

This is why other AAA MMO's have PTR's but apparently Anet is too uppity for player feedback before implementing changes.

Raids are fine. I had never raided at their very release and within 2 weeks of returning to the game I killed Deimos in a PuG in about 6 pulls. The end boss of a wing dead in 6 pulls is ridiculously easy content. The only remotely difficult task in this game is the chronomancer tanking any encounter or maintaining quickness/alacrity. Every other role is complete faceroll. This game is so easy next to WoW's Mythic raids, Wildstar raids, or FFXIV's Savage difficulty raids. Rather, my surprise is with the amount of horrendous players in this game who can't even pull above 14k DPS in a raid. Go back to your open world farms and stay there if that's the kind of effort you want to put forth; other people have no obligation to carry you.

How is that different from spending 100 gems for a chance at an exclusive dye]? Or 80 gems (in bulks) for BL keys, with a random chance of skins? Like any lotto, play if you think you'll get lucky, otherwise hang tight and buy the specific skin(s) you want when they show up at a discount later. Those dyes can be bought on the TP and flooded quite nicely with supply. Mount skins cannot be bought on the TP. Still, someone had to play the lotto for folks like you or I to take advantage of the discount. In fact, at least in this case, the 400 gems guarantees a skin; the other RNG boxes on the gem shop contain more junk than not. I'm not likely to be willing to plop down 400 gems without getting to choose a skin, but all the same: I can see why you (like I) won't want to spend that amount for RNG, but why does it affect your paying for anything else that the game has to offer? No, you don't play the lotto because the dyes can come from other sources than BLTC, be they drops or the anniversary packs.

Yes but you have to be aware of the technical limitations of the GW1 engine. It was probably just easier to scale the human model than to make a new one. In GW2 humans and norn are 2 different models. And yes, female norns are way heavier than human females, but have the same proportions more or less whereas males don't. And that's ok. I like how norn look in the game. Maybe tone the females more in line with the males, but whatever. Who really needs some love are the Charr. Especially in the armor department, most of it looks atrocious lol. A load of crap considering the concept art in GW1 also showed male norn as scaled up humans.

No, it's photoshopped. The OP has good suggestions. Male norn as they currently exist are simply deformed and quite ugly, so you need to use armor to mask their deformities. They have undersized heads for the size of their torso, and the muscular neck and hunchbacked shoulders give a triangular shape instead of a straight, broad shouldered position. The male norn model has also this crooked posture where the body tilts to one side, and in addition it has a drooping chest and large thigh gaps due to undersized legs compared to the body. I hope it's addressed at some point because male norn feel like a joke model compared to female norn who look far more dignified and polished. Even the hair and face options for the male norn are mostly scraggly hobo or scraggly old man while female norn all have youthful looks.

Arkk is a whole other matter since the enrage icon over his head can easily conceal the orbs he conjures above his head.

They could also have the time it takes to complete a reward track.

Funny all i see is wvw clearing out after wvwers get their diamond chest, mid sunday. Also the expansion which was all pve based, pretty much destroyed the wvw population. So I'd say you're in the minority. I'd hardly call this expansion PvE either. The PvE maps are empty outside bounty trains since there's barely any replayable content, and the rewards are even worse than in WvW. The xpac added no dungeons/fractals, or raid wings with its release. These PoF maps will be dead in a month or two since they are so bad in rewards and replayability compared to HoT. At least WvW is pvp, and pvp is spontaneous so you always get new experiences that keep you coming back. It's why LoL can thrive on a single map.

Your wvw blobbling is nowhere near as challenging as spvp. You're a game format whose rewards cannot be balanced because it's always a game of who's got the bigger numbers. If the rewards were any good, people would be fiercely competing to transfer to the top tier servers with the largest, most active zergs. Rewards on a lower tier server would be shit.

They're a failure because they're a wretched replacement for world bosses and meta bosses. Most bounties are recycled regular mob models with unholy amounts of HP that just takes a zerg of spamming 1 to win. They're terribly scaled, offer no storytelling or narrative to the zone whatsoever, and are little more than a spruced up champion train. It's like they took champ trains from the desolate core tyria maps and thought it was a good idea over the cinematic, epic encounters of HoT maps. Nothing even comes close to Dragonstand or the Tarir meta, or the race to stop the Gerent or preparing camps to then fight wyvern matriarchs/patriarchs and the trio.

Fix the aggro range and mob density/respawn scaling. It's outrageous to be getting swarmed by 5+ mobs aggroing from 1500 units away and following you all the way to hell just because you had to stop and fight one mob. Exploring these maps and figuring how to get to an insight or point of interest is just dreadful. Most of the time is actually figuring out how to abuse my griffon to have to deal with this kitten. Veterans that pummel you for half your life jumping you all the way from Timbuktu. Once I get off a mount and get put in combat it's an eternity just to get around due to how long I am kept in combat and harassed, especially with the increased amount of ranged mobs in this map. It's not about challenge. It's outright tedious. The mobs give me nothing of value for wasting my limited game time dredging through the avalanche of them that pops up all over the place.

Shortbow. It gives you complementary range and the only thing you get from axe mainhand is splitblade as the other two skills are power damage skills.

The fix to infiltrator strike is to leave it alone and nerf the condi application that made it broken. Infiltrator Strike has existed as is without problems until Anet went and gave panic strike ridiculous amounts of condi application. Sword dagger should be a power spec loadout anyways, it's a complete aberration that it only works as a condi weapon. The condi weapons are dagger/dagger and pistol/dagger.