MarzAttakz.9608

Watched on my phone so couldn't see clearly. Fire/Air/Catalyst 233 with Marauder + Eagle runes + Force & crit Sigil?

Is it uncleansable? Is it unconvertable? Will it hit through aegis, invuln or the latest scourge barrier? Raw healing isn't the issue, it's all the other kitten on top of it.

Yeah I'm with you mostly on Staff. I do appreciate the support changes make no mistake (I'm a WvW staff support Tempest main) and most of my criticism is centered around competitive modes (compare the differences in skills between PvE and Competitive). However I've played since Beta and got to experience staff's full glory from before day one. It and to a degree the justifications for the Balance Philosophy of the class haven't aged well. The reasoning behind many nerfs we received in the first couple of years are no longer relevant. They did a 180 on those philosophies and never undid any of the nerfs. Simple example: Lightning flash not being a stunbreak because it does damage, we don't use it to damage, we use it to survive. It's not 1200 range because damage. Take the damage away and make it a copy of Blink. How many more years are we going to ask for a projectile speed increase, the removal of self-rooted channels, better access to stability or changes to Static Field and Unsteady Ground. But they changed Gale, great stuff! The bottom line for me at this point is that the calibre of the studio today is far below the calibre of the studio ten years ago. 11 years is a good run, how many more can we expect?

I'm not a roamer by any means but that rule has always been respected. Testimony to the times we live in. It's sad.

11 years of passionate feedback, 11 years of studio denial. I'm done investing thought and energy into a black hole. Now I talk with the only currency they understand: money. It's very simple, I don't spend it on ArenaNet anymore.

As one of the few 11 year Ele mains left in this godforsaken forum, that brought a very sadicious smile to my face. Unhinged.

They couldn't unkitten tangled spaghetti before Soto, what makes you think they're capable of unkittening a bigger mess of tangled spag now? Sorry my confidence in their ability has left the building. Regarding actually releasing Weapon Mastery as an expansion feature: it's the least amount of work they could possibly do. Remove the coding restrictions, make a few internal adjustments as required. Done! kitten balance, kitten QA, kitten yeah! Chest thump much? After 11 years of their nonsense, I'm finally done supporting them.

There isn't a universal build, apart from Celestial to some degree. If it's just open world then look at Lord Hizen's updated one. And it isn't about attunements specifically because they follow the same general theme, as do the traits for those elements. First start with which weapons you feel work best for you, then build around that.

When I thought they couldn't get any worse - I should have known better. It's time for two individuals to be taken out to pasture.

You're riding the LIGHTNING man! It's all-in or nothing-at-all! Jokes aside, it happens. Used to be back in the day you came out of it with great momentum, so much of it that if you happened to go down a very slight decline you'd almost die from fall damage. Or get stuck on anything. Please don't go the burning speed path.

I've mained mine since Beta at 180-250 ping South Africa to EU - you can do it, sometimes your 1v1 loss may be due to the latency but I don't know any better and probably never will. I still top the heal stats and get fairly close to top cleanses as Staff Support Tempest and can get fairly high on the DPS charts when playing Weaver or Catalyst (in WvW as my primary mode).

Outside of Minstrel's support you're just a hindrance going melee and a rally at best. It's not like 2012-2015 where you could go Soldier's and make an impact with shocking aura spamming anymore. Aura share is still the best you can do. Celestial survival in a large squad isn't all it's made out to be and without 25 might you're practically just tickling people. Good luck with your spheres in a mobile fight. Now days I play full Minstrel's staff support as a front line spec and it's tough enough to survive most things. I go Arcane/Water/Tempest and forgo some cleanses for a better spread of boon distribution because I don't camp water unless I absolutely have to and tend to play very aggressively being the driver next to the commander providing CC along with heals. If retreating I fall back to a rear guard position and utilise the same CC plus superspeed, stun break, stab and reflect to keep our slower members as safe as I can. If not support then it's Mara/Dragons Weaver AOE nuke that dies to a breeze meme. I'll switch to a bastardised Cele variation in a squad under 15 and run a more damage oriented aura share build (sometimes Cata, sometimes Fire or Earth/water Tempest) and be hybrid heal + damage but the results are middling at best. Dagger/Dagger's days are gone and I do miss them and don't think we're ever going to be going back there sadly...

Right now as of 2am you have a 45 man squad vs 15 Deso (we were 35 an hour ago). Drakkar have a 15 man squad. You've capped SM which we couldn't defend, and you're starting in on our EB side. 30 mins from now you'll be taking our Keep undefended and doing the same to Green. I have no sympathy left for your server.

Sorry, if you get a link then your status should be set to full. Perhaps it's just the times you play. You're aware that you're the only Spanish server and draw players from not only EU but NA and Latin America too right? From personal experience facing you for a number of weeks in a row, there are specific times when your server are fielding multiple guilds of 30+ and at worst attacking multiple objectives with full zone blobs. Very early morning (2-4am GMT+2) you consistently have a 25+ squad karma training everything they can against 0-10 defenders. Granted some guilds have transferred and you're likely seeing fewer players but BB with a link would be comedic. Instead of numbers I'd suggest you work on your skills, generally speaking you won't fight unless you're outnumbering opponents by 1.5 - 2x - my two cents for whatever it's worth. I do however agree that T5 is a kitten show and you're inevitably going to sink to the bottom if unlinked. Population imbalance and server status are severely kittened in EU right now.

Back during the 2012-2015 period my server had about 4-6 large active WvW guilds and manage a decent spread of timezone coverage. Every Friday an hour before reset we'd have a server council meeting and borderlands were assigned to specific guilds. The meeting was open to all verified server members. As time crept on and the inevitable Guild ego clashes occurred, our server fractured somewhat around 2016 and never fully recovered. Some of the guilds transferred, others imploded, players quit the game and moved on. We still have a strong sense of server community but I'd say there's a core of 50 or less veterans, and perhaps 15-25 players that I'd count as regulars during my playtime. The majority are members of all the WvW guilds that are left. It's very different to how things started and I'd be lucky to say we have 500 players today. I don't know how things stand regarding Alliances from a server community standpoint but I know the core group I'd like to play with, and even though I prefer being guildless, they are the guild I'll be choosing during the test periods. As a server that's for all intents and purposes permanently full (how I don't kittening know and want to see cold hard figures supporting it) and unlinked for the second time in a row, I would understand if certain guilds on our server decided to not align themselves. The need for fresh blood and different players to change the status quo is becoming pressing. Then again, rather the Devil you know, than the Devil you don't...

Yes they did lower targets caps across the board (both DPS and support caps) to improve performance (slide show three ways at a garrison were not fun) - but then what did they do after that: add more kittening buffs like Presence of the Keep etc, added more stats like Expertise, Ferocity and Concentration and added in more boons (and the new classes that applied them even faster) as well as conditions. In other words: even more server side calculations to keep track of. The whole target cap low = better performance excuse falls flat when you factor in the above. The bottom line is that they're too lazy, too incompetent and too cheap to really give a kitten about a game mode that outside of transfer costs (which probably barely cover their running costs) makes them no profit.

At least you got a link... My server (Desolation) is marked as full almost permanently. No link for the second time in a row. I've had the (mis)fortune of playing outside of my regular hours the last couple of weeks. Here's what I've experienced over the last linking period... 6am to 10am: less than 10 players vs 25+ 10am to 2pm: 10 to 15 players vs 25+ 2pm to 6pm: less than 25 players vs 30-50+ 6pm to 12am: 25 to 65 players vs 100+ 12am to 3am: 35 to 45 players vs 60+ 3am to 6am: 20 to 35 players vs 40+ We've faced Baruch Bay for a few weeks in a row now. They're the only Spanish server and are kept open due to that fact and their active times are spread out to span from 7pm to 4am and they're able to field multiple squads of 25-50. During this period we've faced two German servers and Piken Square and in most cases when BB are slowing down, there's a brief window before the other opposing server comes online to morning cap. These numbers are based on squad counts and factor in the addition of non-squadies I count during fights. Enemy numbers are taken using the "know thy enemy" ArcDps add-on. EU linking just makes this worse. Also these observations are from having faced opposition through tiers 2-5 including the top dogs of Whiteside Ridge and Fissure of Woe. I would really like to see the concrete calculations used by Anet to determine population status because from where I'm standing and based on my personal experience (10 years active on Desolation, I've seen firsthand the times where we had an active night and morning crew and those days are far behind us) something is very off with the population status.

I'm going with flop as with everything they've released recently. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised - ya right who am I kidding...

In WvW... 3 Equipment loadouts: DPS, Support, 50% Celestial + Mix 4 Build loadouts: DPS Weaver, Full Support Tempest, Hybrid Tempest, Boon Catalyst 1) DPS Weaver + Fiery Greatsword 2) Support Tempest + Rebound 3) Hybrid Tempest + Fiery Greatsword or Elemental (if solo) 4) Boon Catalyst + Elemental Celerity or Elemental (if solo)

30% Willbenders, 15% Harbingers, 20% Soulbeast or Druid, 5% Warriors, 10% Thieves, 10% Catalyst or Weaver, 5% Virtuoso, 5% Herald or Vindicator that's mostly what I'm seeing. Far fewer Catalysts after the nerfs. Still plenty Willbenders and Rangers. EU T5.

Back at launch before everything went to kitten you could 25vs40-50 and out skill those numbers. I know this is nostalgia and serves no real purpose in today's environment but skill as mentioned by Zengara entailed the following (much of which forms part of standard squad play but then wasn't common knowledge): - Squad composition - Role communication - Ebb and flow: push, engage, withdraw, feint, rebuff etc. - Combo fields and blasting as your primary boon source before and during a fight - Out maneuver and out position your enemy - Successful and strategic use of stealth Stacking back then was primarily for two reasons: you had to be inside a field to get the boons when blasting, slight abuse of the target cap. It's a different story today, and I'm not saying there isn't skillful play because there is - however with the changes to target caps (reduced), number of allies affected (reduced), field blasting optional due to anything and everything shitting out boons, strips and corrupts reduced; in most cases it boils down to numbers drowning out whatever skillful plays were made. The skill is still evident in some of the smaller havoc groups running exceptionally complimentary builds meant to sustain and out pressure similar and slightly larger opposition and perhaps evident in those 50man fight guild boon balls but outside of that, to me at least, the game has sadly devolved into a numbers game. EDIT: Here's a very comedic example of what I mean (this wasn't particularly skillful play on our part)... But watch our bars and note the boons back then. https://youtu.be/k8YngWj3a7s

Fine yesterday and this afternoon. Usual ping of 186. This evening WvW unplayable. Constant bounce between 250-3500+ even when alone at spawn. No it's not the zergs, been fighting them the past month without issue. Cape Town, South Africa > EU (Desolation) Didn't run traceroute to debug so not sure if it's Africa to AWS or just AWS routing having a kitten fit.

I'm sorry to say this but your management of the development process is at fault here. Yes handling merges and branches in various states is challenging, and yes refactoring legacy code is walking through a mine field. I get it I really do. I have to deal with it on a smaller scale myself every day. However, anything you're shipping to live should have been thoroughly tested weeks before release. But you can't because you don't have a Test Server that we know of. Why not? The shift you guys made to cloud hosting should make this possible to do. If bugs of this magnitude are slipping through your own developers testing, your internal testing department and your Q&A department then there's a serious problem. I have no doubt that should you open a public Test Server, many of your players would gladly take the time to assist you in testing and help alleviate the pressure in the studio. For free. I think it's time you guys lifted the shroud of secrecy you're so comfortable hiding under and look at better processes to support what you stated.

Queue drama if that happens... https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Farsighted

That's what, about ¾ of a second of totally unmitigated damage? Good lord man, how does this kitten slip through Q&A?