Blumpf.2518

Yesterday i watched a group doing Adina in a Stream. Boonthief, RenegadeHealAlac, Soulbeast, BS, 6x Dragonhunter.Speedkill setup with over 30k DPS for each damagedealer. They had 1 Pillarspawn each phase, so high was the DPS.Should have been an easy bosskill.But what happened? They wiped about 10 times with their speedkill setup before finally killing the boss and guess why?No Boon removal - Retaliation killed the dragonhunters within an instant.Low Heal - Damage to group could not be healed completely.Or people just walked into Adinas sandray attack. Their "skill" was only maxDPS based, but movement "skill" wasnt there. Switching a Dragonhunter for a 2nd healer, maybe a necro who does shields on 10 people and brings projectile blocking poison cloud and boon removal or a chrono who just keeps 3 swordclones on Adina that remove Boons and brings a focus for projectile reflect wouldve solved their problem. The DPS would still have been superhigh to still only have 1 Pillar per phase. But instead of first trying the boss with a safe setup they wasted so much time with their speedkill setup and had a lot of unneccessary wipes and that only because they chose DPS over more sustain. And thats what snowcrows is promoting, that DPS is better than everything else, which leads to situations like this.

Youre all talking about "efficiency" or "effective" as if it was the same for everyone, but you dont realize that this can mean very diffrent things depending on who you ask.For snowcrows an "efficient" build is a build that does more DPS than other builds and helps them kill the boss as fast as possible. If thats your goal, the build is "effective" cause it will reach that goal.Now if you have a lfg raid and play an "efficient" snowcrows build, but your goal is not a new speedkill record, or worse, youre not able to kill the boss while playing that build, this build is now not "effective". "Efficiency" and "Effective" very much depends on the intention what you want to achieve. The normal LFG raiders goal is to kill as many bosses as possible in the time theyre playing. A raidwipe costs a lot of time, especially a wipe if the boss has low hitpoints. Two wipes with a snowcrows build easily cost you 10 Minutes of Raidtime and will probably lead to people leaving the raid, so that you have to find new people, which costs time again. And then a DPS focussed build is neither efficient nor effective.By playing a safer or more group supporting build you couldve prevented the wipes which wouldve saved time and wouldve prevent people from leaving the raid.In this situation the 95% of max possible DPS build that has more group support is more efficient and more effective. Often all thats required for that is changing some traits or skills. The equipment can be the same. Therefore, for the normal raiders who only want to kill some bosses, the dps focussed snowcrows builds are not the most effective builds in achieving that. In fact they will often prevent that cause the raid is so squishy that a lot of unneccesary wipes will happen.

Why dont you continue your metaphysic metadiscussion in another metathread, so that the rest can get back to topic.

You know, i tried that, but since my "range" on the internet is so much less than snowcrows the thing that happens is:I: "Hey i see youre having trouble in this bossfight, you might wanna try this trait instead of this and this utility skill instead of this"Lfg Raider: "WTF? Are you stupid? Im playing the metabuild from snowcrows, now shut up" I'm not the reference for builds and rotas. I neither have the internet range or the reputation. Im not publishing stuff on youtube or websites, im just a normal person who thinks for himself. If i tell someone something about raids or classes or builds it only comes from my experience as a gw2 player who plays since release and has done a lot of raiding with >2000 LI and killed all bosses multiple times with multiple classes. So yeah, i have gathered some experience and i know what problems appear for the average raider and how to deal with them.But for people in LFG im just a random stranger, telling them things, they never heard of or even considered thinking about. At the end of the day Snowcrows is like the Wikipedia of Raidbuilds or a famous football club and im only a normal person walking down the street. Of course people will listen to the "big players" then, its totally understandable.But when youre the big player, the number 1, the wikipedia, the idol, you have a responsibility now. You must know that whatever you say or recommend will affect others and thats where snowcrows totally fails. They know almost everyone is using their builds but they dont care about the consequences of their recommendations for normal players.

And here we go again with claims that are just not true. You dont seem to know what the classes are capable of and what not or you wouldnt say such things. Or maybe for you its just "alternative facts" or so, i dont know.

The Snowcrows Metas goal is: "Kill the boss as fast as possible."And NOT "kill the boss".With the goal "Kill the boss as fast as possible", everything that can make the fight easier is sacrificed for DPS if possible. And that is the problem cause it makes the fights harder for all the people who dont have the SC raid composition, skill, classes, Gold to buy 18x +5 Infusions, dps, perfect rotas etc.With that SC goal in mind people nerf and cripple their raid and remove a lot of stuff from it that makes it easier to actually kill the boss.If you play the SC meta, you should always know that this meta aims at speedkills. But with the goal "Kill the boss", you have so much more possibilities.For example, back in the time some months ago, when firebrand still got 250 toughness from quickness, the tank had to have more than 1250 toughness or firebrand would be the tank. So i decided to switch 3 Harrier Items of my druid for Minstrel gear, increasing toughness and vitality to 1236, which was still lower than the firebrands toughness, so it was no problem at all. It didnt affect the healing or the boons of my druid but it was so much more relaxing to play cause incoming damage was lower and hitpoints were higher. It was so much easier to play only because of some more toughness and vitality and cause i didnt really have to care about staying alive, cause even when i got hit by something it wouldnt hit as hard as before. Only because of 3 items changed. You can still do this on almost all healer classes as long as the tank has more toughness than the healer and it makes raids so much easier for you. Or another example, as Warrior i play Core Warrior. Why, because Battle Standard can rezz a lot of downstate players instantly. In LFG people will go down and if there are like 5 people down its usually a wipe. So playing not meta can prevent a group wipe. Berserkers have Headbutt as Elite, so they cant take it. Well they could take it, but then their CC sucks. Also Core Warrior has 1000 Toughness instead of 700 like Berserker, so incoming Damage is lower. My Mace F1 is always ready, and not only when in berserker mode, so i can do a lot of CC. I can freely choose between Bolas and Kick (immobilize or even more CC) and since im playing with healing signet, thats a skill less i have to use which makes the rota easier. Theres no berserker mode which makes the rota easier again. And the funny thing is, while at the training golem the berserker does more damage in theory or benchmarks, in lfg raids i outdps the berserkers most of the time. And what is great as core is the empower allies trait. +100 Power for everyone in the group. And while it doesnt add to my DPS it increases the DPS of other players, so basically it comes from my core warrior and is just not shown in ark dps. If you have a core warrior in a power group you can add +5k dps on top of the core warriors dps, cause thats the dps others do more, but the reason for it is the warriors empower allies trait. And yet another example, as alac renegade most people will use the power based diviner build cause in theory it does a lot of dps. In reality however people will most of the time deal about 10k dps with it. So why not use the renegade as a healer that grants Alac. Use a Healfirebrand in Group 1, a HealAlac Renegade in Group 2 and add a Chrono for quickness in group 2 and thats it. Most people dont even see that possibility and play something like 2xfirebrand+druid+alacren. And since theyre not really good at it, their metabuilds will most of the time perform bad. And another funny thing with HealAlac Renegade is if you take the "replesnishing despair" trait from the corruption traitline - which might seem weird at first - you can activate the bubble of the tablet and you wont lose energy. With that one trait, you can have a permanent bubble that blocks all projectiles while the tablet constantly heals the people inside the bubble. Its great at all bosses that use projectiles like Sloth Adds or the Adina Hands or the Sabir Lightning Adds on the platforms. It just makes life so much easier for everyone in the raid. And there are a lot more of ways to play out there that will only slightly reduce the overall Raid-DPS, but will increase the raids survivability so much and help the people kill the boss.But the SC meta completely ignores this options and that makes raids harder for people who think they are using the "best" build. For SC "best build" means that this build will allow the raid to get a new speedkill world record, if the boss is killed.But for the average player "best build" most of the time means: "This build will not cause a wipe and allow our raid to kill the boss".And then the meta and that SC are the reference kicks in and people suddenly think that SC builds are best for the goals of average players, while the truth is that this SC builds will drag average players down and make raiding harder for them.

What Seera.5916 basically said is: "If you want to learn how to drive a car, go to the formula 1 racing track first and learn how to drive that highspeed car that can get people killed. And once you are able to do that, slow down to the level that works for you and drive your Toyota at the speed that you want."Which is of course total bullkitten.

Another Problem with the SC Website is, that though there is Information, what people actually do in reality is: Lookup if Boss is a Power or Condi BossLookup what Class is recommended for that BossLookup the max DPS build for that classignore everything elseA simple fix would be to recommend not the max dps class/build on their site, but something thats better suited for LFG groups. Something like: Boss: Wing X Boss YRecommended Class / Build for LFG: A safer group supporting build with maybe 90-95% of max possible DPSRecommended Class / Build for Speedkills: A high-risk-high-reward, but squishy ego build with low group support And the safer builds are not bad or completely useless, their max dps output is just a bit lower than the meta builds.We're talking here about if the max dps meta build can deal 35k dps at the golem, than a safer build is still able to deal about 32k or so. And under realistic circumstances at a real bossfight the dps diffrence between a meta build and a safer build is even lower.

I knew stuff like this this would happen in this thread, since snowcrows is kind of a religion to a lot of people where only snowcrows is good and the rest is "crippled" "useless" "snowflake builds" "noob stuff" etc. This thread and the reactions to it shows perfectly what mindset the raiders of gw2 are trapped in. "Snowcrows is good and everything else is bad and heresy! Now burn the witch who dareth to speak against the meta!" Also people are quite delusional about their own skills. I know im good, but i also know, i'm not as good as others and therefore i have to compensate that to make raid life easier for me and others. But there are a lot of people out there who think that because they are exactly copying the SC playstyle they are automatically as good as SC. Bad news for you: youre not and will never be. And once you realize that you can adjust your build, rotation, playstyle to play safe. And by safe i mean, you sacrifice about 5-10% DPS for more group support and survivability. And im not talking about unrealistic Golem-Benchmark DPS now, but of real raid DPS vs actual raid bosses. Lets take Holo for example, most of them are running AED as healskill. Why? You can skip insta death mechanics with it at deimos and sabir and its F Skill does damage, so it will increase your DPS a bit. BUT you could also be running the healing turret which is a group heal, a group condiremove, a water field and grants regeneration. In most scenarios this would be better for the group. And the insta death mechanics can be avoided without using AED by playing the boss mechanics as intended.And there was the example of soulbeast running bear stance earlier in this thread. If youre playing soulbeast and are using one wolf pack and the leader of the pack trait, take bear stance. It will heal the whole group and remove condis. And this can make a diffrence in high pressure situations were the group drops low.Or lets take warrior as example. You can play SC Berserker warrior. What will happen most of the time is: CC bar appears, headbutt is on cooldown cause people used it to have more time in berserker mode or to fill adrenalin bar and berserker mode just ended, so you cant use your Mace F1 and end up with very low CC, Mace3 and Mace5 on a class that normally is a CC monster. But you could also play Core warrior and have your Mace F1 ready all the time with an effect 3x as strong as the berserkers F1. And since youre playing core you can also equip Battle Standard as Elite as an "oh shit" skill that instarezzes a lot of people if needed. You could also be running the tactics traitline and use the empower allies trait, which as berserker would mean a lot of DPS loss, while as core warrior it wont reduce your DPS. Reason for this is that Berserker is running Strenght/Discipline/Berserker and trading Strength or Discipline for Tactics is always a DPS loss, while Core is running Strength/Tactics/Discipline and therefore wont lose DPS. Core Warrior also has a free utility skill where they can choose any physical skill. Most of the time i use "Throw Bolas", but if you need even more CC you can use "Kick" too.Or lets say a CondiNecro at Gorseval or Amalgamate in Wing6. Most people will just say "WTF, this are Power-DPS bosses, play Dragonhunter!" but this bosses also have a lot of adds/orbs which can make life difficult. But if you play a power setup with one condiscourge who uses Epi there wont be any adds/orbs and people can DPS the shit out of the boss. Necro and Epi is not "needed", but its a quality of life feature that makes the boss so much easier for everyone else. And these were only some examples, but it works for every class and if everyone is running the group supporting skills and traits instead of the egoistic max dps stuff it adds up and makes life a lot easier for the whole raid. And the DPS loss is marginal. Maybe your raid loses 5-10% DPS compared to whats max possible, but your raids survivability will be a lot higher. Always remember that a dead hig-risk-high-reward player does 0 DPS while a player with a safer build and an easier rotation can still do 90-95% of the max possible DPS. But since the SC meta is like a religion nowadays, most people wont even consider this is as an alternative.

Everyone who is raiding has heard of them. Snowcrows and their website with raidbuilds and recommendations what and how to play in raids.Unfortunately that leads to some problems. Almost everyone in the LFG tool is thinking that this is the "meta" and the only way to play, so the builds are just copied and the raidsetups too.What people dont understand is, that snowcrows is a speedkill-guild and not the average random LFG raid. They know how to play their classes, what the bosses do and why and when they use certain traits or skill. Also their DPS is significantly higher that the DPS of the normal GW2 raider, allowing them to skip boss phases or mechanics. With shorter phases you need lesser boon duration, less heal or even 1 less healer. You can sacrifice boon uptime and heal for more DPS to make the bosskill even faster. BUT the average raid doesnt exist of 10 SC members, instead you will most of the time have people whose DPS is lower, who dont know their classes well, or you have a suboptimal raid composition or people dont know everything about the boss or people just make mistakes.And then you have a problem, because boss phases are longer. Boons will disappear because boon duration is bad, group takes more damage because protection is suddenly gone, area damage is ticking all the time and longer as the phase should be or heal is not enough.It also happens that CC phases take really long cause people dont use their CC skill or are just spamming all skills instead of saving CC skills. And then people go down and need to be rezzed and all of that makes the fights even longer. All of that will happen in an average or random raid, but the snowcrows meta doesnt consider this. Snowcrows meta is made for a high-dps group that doesnt makes mistakes who is able to skip phases with dps. As average raid, the sc speedkill meta is nerfing your own raid, because with it, most of the time, boon uptimes are short and heal and cc is not enough. And then people wipe with a normal raid, try again, wipe again and so on. But wiping 10 times with a speedkill setup is still slower, than killing the boss safe first or second try with a non speedkill setup were maybe the bossfight is 1-2 minutes longer. Therefore i highly recommend for everyone who is not interested in speedkills, but just wants to raid to think about this. Bring higher Boondurations into the fight, especially for quickness and Alacrity you want to have 100% boon duration. Use Full Tanks (Minstreal Gear) for bosses who deal a lot of damage to the tank. Have one Healer for each Group with full healing gear. If the group still takes too much damage, bring a 2nd Banner Warrior and use all 4 Banners. If there are a lot of projectiles, use classes that have projectile reflect/block. If damage to group still is too high, use a 3rd Healer or get hybrid healers into the raid, for example condition necros who take the one big shadow trait. Even with full dps equip they can buff shield to 10 people then.And always be prepared to compensate mistakes, because in a normal raid, mistakes will happen. With a speedkill setup a mistake is most of the time a wipe. But if you can compensate it with more heal, higher boonduration, aegis, stability, reflects or whatever there is, you will survive mistakes. Of course Snowcrows dont destroy random raids on intention, but out there are a lot of people for who the snowcrows raid meta is like a religion they have to follow, even if they dont know why. And there are a lot of people out there who dont even accept anything that is not meta, but which would actually help their raid kill a boss. With such people most of the time you will just get flamed or kicked out of the raid if you suggest bringing another healer or a 2nd warrior or a necro for addclear etc. People only know "thats not meta" and thats it.Also the sc meta makes people not think about their classes. They copy the build/traits but dont know what the traits do. And then they are surprised like "oh my skill does now immobilize/reflect/something else as well? Where did that come from?"But the result of this is, that people dont know their classes like they should for raids. So raiders out there, dont just copy everything from Snowcrows. You and your raid is not like them and will never be, so instead of copying their speedkill meta find out what works for your raid and adjust your raid according to your playstyle.

Heres the Flamethrower-Scrapper-Build for you:http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PeQAQlRwcYQsOWJOuLftfA-zRIYRUwXGtVA1lA2OLRssB-e And heres the good build:http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?PeQAIlRw0YcMIWJO2LvtfA-zRIYRUwXG1mAVUA2ONUYGA-e

Feel free to use these Ideas für new Specializations: Warrior -> Samurai:In Addition to Adrenalin gets Combo-Points. Some Attacks and Utility Skills grant Combo Points, while pressing F1 makes the next weapon attack a Finisher and uses all the Combo Points. The Finisher becomes stronger, the more combo Points are used. SHOUT Effects are improved and grant Combo Points.Samurai gets no new Weapons but has to choose between one of these as first Traits:Greatsword Specialization: When using a greatsword: +20% Damage, +20% Attackspeed, 20% Cooldown ReductionLongbow Specialization: When using a Longbow: +20% Damage, +20% Attackspeed, 20% Cooldown ReductionShortsword Specialiazation: When using a Shortsword: +20% Damage, +20% Attackspeed, 20% Cooldown Reduction Guardian -> Blackguard:The Blackguards Virtues are now used to Corrupt the enemy. They cause conditions like Torment, Poison and Confusion and remove Boons.Spirit Weapons now become Vengeful Spirit Minions that attack the Enemy. The Blackguard can absorb them to regenerate life, increase the damage dealt and make his next attacks cause Conditions.New Weapon: Mainhand-Torch Revenant -> Living Legend:The Living Legend does not get two Legends, but only one and he may chose Legendary Dragon or Legendary Renegade as well, in addition to the standard Legends. He can empower those Legends Utility skills by using F1 which increases Energie Consumption and the strength of the legends utility skills.The living Legend does not Regenerate Energy, instead normal Attacks now grant energy instead of Consuming it.New Weapon: Mainhand-Axe Engineer -> Golemancer:The Golemancer uses Parts of Golems to improve his own armor. Turrets now become Golem-Minions that follow the Golemancer and fight his enemies. The Golemancer can consume a turret to improve himself, his stats and and his attacks. For example consuming a flame turret will make attacks cause burning for some time. Living Golems will also use one of the Kits the engineer has equipped but is not actually using and use their kit skills randomly.New Elite Skill: OoMegagolem: Destroy all your other Golems, fuse them into one large Golem that becomes stronmger, the more golems it absorbs and grant their Skills to the OoMegagolem. OoMegagolem also uses all Kits the Engineer has equipped at random.New Weapon: Staff Ranger -> Hunter:The Hunter uses his tamed beasts to chase and fight the enemy while dealing damage from afar.The Hunter can use two Pets at the same time, but they are weaker than a normal pet. F1 and F2 can be used to activate Pets special skills and they also count as petswap to trigger effects.Command Skills are empowered and have special effects on the pets.New Weapon: Rifle Thief -> Ninja:The Ninja uses KI in addition to his normal Energy. Gain one KI when consuming one Energy. When KI is full the next attack becomes a KI-Strike and does increased Damage.The Ninja gets to chose between one of these traits as first Ninja Trait:Deception Skills have lower Cooldown and their Effects are improved/gain new effectsTrick Skills have lower Cooldown and their Effects are improved/gain new effectsPoison Skills have lower Cooldown and their Effects are improved/gain new effectsNew Weapon: Greatsword Elementalist -> EquilibristThe Equilibrist does not prefer one element but uses all elements to his advantage.For each Elemental Attunement that is on cooldown, the Equilibrist gains a bonus to all his stats and to all damage dealt.Cantrips Effects are improved and they gain bonuseffects depending on the attunements that are currently on cooldown.New Weapon: Mainhand-Focus Mesmer -> SimulacrumThe Simulacrum does not have clones, but instead when casting a clone summons a simulacrum that is a copy of himself and uses the same Skills as the Mesmer, with a slight delay.Only one Simulacrum can be active at the same time. If there is no Simulacrum active the next clone creates a simulacrum. If there is an active Simulacrum the next Clone increases Energy and regenerates some life of the simulacrum.The Mesmer/Simulacrum has an Energy Bar. Summoning a Clone increases energy while shattering reduces Energy. The more Energy, the more Damage the Simulacrum does.Shatter Effects are used by the Mesmer and the Simulacrum and the shatter damage depends on the amount of energy.New Weapon: Mainhand-Pistol Necromancer -> BloodmageThe Bloodmage uses his own Lifeforce to empower his Skills. He does not have a deathshroud, but can activate F1 to empower all of his Skills, but loses an amount of life everytime a skill is used, depending on the skill.The Life lost is used to fill his bloodshroud energy. As soon as the bloodshroud Energy is at 100% the Bloodmage creates a blood explosion around him, causing damage to enemies and healing to allies and increasing all stats for some time.The Bloodmages Wells are improved and they gain some new effects. They are now always centered on the Bloodmage and dont need targeting an area on the ground.New Weapon: Offhand-Axe