Boh.4568

Free quickness when doing the daily flax/quartz/nodes gathering! Massive QOL improvement!

Do OW-only players even need to swap runes and stats that often that they need a legendary armor?

I see a lot of regular groups now, if you play in the evening and you check LFG at specific times (about 1:10hrs before the escort premeta) you see a handful of commanders welcoming everyone and only asking to follow chat commands. Even the ones checking for quick/alac usually pick 10+10 members from the 50 man pool, and the other 30 can be whatever. I can assure you never get the "play alac or kick" response you would receive in a raid LFG. I do DE almost daily at the same cycle and in the last ~10 attempts we only failed once because of a bad call to ignore the tail because the dragon was under 5%, only for us to waste the last 3 minutes not being able to DPS that 5% because the tail was absorbing too much damage.

I'm a simple man, I see the Anet tag, I pull, CC and moa.

I enjoy fighting small groups containing support eles/scrappers/FBs because I like seeing my arcDPS strip counter go from 0 to 50 with just a couple skills. Actually killing them requires focus and picking them one by one while they are low/offguard, but luckily I use my party members as meat shields while I chain corrupts on the boonballs.

The price of summoning stones will drop a lot, slowly but steadily, because even if you don't plan on crafting a gen3 weapon there's no reason not to buy your weekly stones (at least 4/5 excluding strikes currency) and resell them, I mean you can exchange 1g for 9g right now, 1000 karma for 9g, that's insane and as more and more people max their arborstone and check that merchant, stones could drop to a couple golds, maybe around 5g tops since they are weekly.

Then your grind must go towards full ascended first, and then slowly adding stats infusions (i recommend WvW infusions if you don't plan to do fractals, they are MUCH cheaper than stat+agony infusions). Remember to attune and infuse your rings and back item to add more infusion slots. That's about as high as you can go in terms of raw stats. From there you can try different stat combinations to optimize your build, but your total stat count will never go any higher. Even legendary gear has the same stats as ascended, it's only QOL. You can also grind the chef and other crafting to make a lot of high tier food and enhancements, as those raise your stats. Depending on the map you're on, you could also stack buffs and bonuses based on the map, but they are limited to the map you're in. (e.g. jade bot offensive/defensive protocols) or the meta (participation bonus for meta events).

But that's already the case for PvE? LW maps give you accessories, LW maps again give you an amulet, Fractals give you a back item, Raids give you armor and a ring (or 2 since they are not unique anymore), general OW farming and exploration give you weapons. It's not in bad faith, I see no issue with the diversity of options for PvE. And I don't understand the 2h per segment part, getting legendaries in WvW requires months of commitment but no one complains because WvW is boring and forgotten? Why should PvE take just hours? Why not months of timegated PvE collections to make it aligned with WvW? I can already see the hundreds of forum posts if that ever happened. At least raids are way faster.

You don't like > you don't play > no reward. What's the point of 5 pages of discussion? You don't like raids, you don't like WvW, you don't like PvP, that's not anet's fault if you don't like the majority of endgame modes. Do you at least like fractals? That's a back item at least... Only doing open world gives you 2 accessories, an amulet and weapons already (please do not use gift of battle as an excuse), get the legendaries for the game modes you enjoy playing, and use ascended for everything else.

"I want legendary armor but I don't want to play [game mode], and also [game mode], and even [game mode]. Why can't I have the legendary armor???" This is what I understand of this whole thread. Now ask yourself: why don't you play PvP? Why don't you play WvW? Why don't you raid? People who make this type of discussion act as if the game modes they don't want to play can't actually be played at all, like for example your PC explodes if you enter WvW or your religion forbids you to enter the Dhuum arena. Truth is you don't want to play those game modes, nothing is stopping you from playing them. Maybe they are too hard for you, maybe you don't have time to invest, maybe the community is too toxic, whatever else is out of your comfort zone. That's fine, play the game how you want, that's the good thing about GW2. But certain rewards won't be available to you because you CHOSE not to play the corresponding game mode. Personal experience: I'd rather uninstall the game than get all the achievements for Aurora and Vision. Fine, no legendary accessories for me, I'll just farm ascended ones in bitterfrost. On the other hand I play a lot of WvW and I'm planning to do armor + 2 rings + back item with that game mode alone.

I admit it's not that easy, but during peak hours in EU (evening) I map hop a lot while doing other stuff and once in a while I peek into DE and check the meta status and if there's a tag, then I check if the tag is just there for the jade maw, and if I see they are preparing the meta I stick in that map instance. If they are open to anyone I join, if they ask for dumb stuff such as 250LI I stay in the map outside of squad and then join for the final fight and leech the clear.

I have cleared a fair amount of DE metas and I think the only real problems are the very long wait times during the preparations (30 minutes to finish events, 30 minutes to prepare, 30 minutes to nightfall, 30 minutes to clean your shoes, etc.) and the actual timer for the boss could be a bit higher (5 more minutes) to give more lenience towards those semi-organized groups who do all the mechanics but maybe have a mediocre DPS. That said, the boss itself doesn't feel harder than let's say drakkar, I often join squads without discord, where the commander divides into groups without asking for roles, just so we know which group goes to fight which miniboss on the platforms, and then they just call for CC, tail, focus, etc in team broadcast. This is a chill group for me, and it's the kind of group that clears the meta 90% of the time no matter who joins, as long as we are enough for a full squad. I'm also a bit biased towards less "chill" runs when I see that every single AoE with at least 5 seconds of big orange telegraph still manages to down a third of the squad...

This but with mesmer clones

Not only it's not even in EB, it's not even SMC inner/lord, so I 100% know it's just an elaborate plan to bait me outside of EB and steal my reserved spot on SMC inner wall while I hopelessly try to come back bashing my head on the queue.

Well now people who complain about gift of battle can do the PvE dailies AND kill ogres and toads. New content for those dedicated WvW players

In WvW I have more fun with reaper than scourge even in big fights. Of course for organized scrims reaper is terrible because the windows for melee cleaving are very very narrow, and no one can heal you while in shroud. But if big fights are more casual, even a power reaper (spite+SR) can rip enough boons with well of corruption, nothing can save you, axe3, spiteful spirit and lesser shivers proc on shroud activation, and then bash in during a push for some big DPS and leap back with specwalk or wurm if red circles get too hot, or cast a CTTB to catch the tail of the enemy zerg and cleave them down. It's about being used to the correct positioning, knowing when to push and when to leap away without necessarily having a commander constantly yelling instructions in your ear (although it helps for wells timing). During the "wait" phase it's a bit more boring because you basically only spam staff marks, but once you go all in it's more rewarding. To go back on scourge topic, as long as they don't nerf well of corruption (so indirectly MY reaper) it's OK.

I really found it odd that they would give more loot to WvW players, they make so much gold already...

FoW is fine, as long as you don't touch the shiny castle they'll just AFK on the walls and you can conquer everthing else.

I don't understand this thread, are Steam players a protected category of mentally challenged people that need to have everything unlocked at level 1 in order to enjoy a game?

Pretty straightforward for OW, reaper shines with power with the high cleave and 100% crit. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSwEE6MsMBmC7gdxKxR6qsZD-zRIYRU/XKNFB1WA9GCVkAmMA-e Gear: You can slot in some marauder or dragon gear instead of berserker if you still feel squishy, but once you get a feel of your skills and positioning the 19k HP (+ the shroud health) in zerker gear will feel more than enough, and with this build you have 92% crit without foods and any external buff, plus 600 free ferocity and permaquickness in shroud, while autoattacking you quickly pump your might and enemy's vuln to 25. Runes/Sigils: You can use scholar runes for better DPS if you are in a party that makes up for your lower precision with fury/spot/etc. If you run solo I feel eagle runes are more self-sufficient. Sigils are DPS oriented of course, you can also try strength to ramp up might faster, or air/fire to proc more hits, and so on. Skills: You can swap spite signet to something more active (grasp) or defensive (stunbreaks, spectral armor) depending on the situation, and CTTB for golem for more DPS, although I hate when minions get stuck fighting somewhere so I use CTTB and warhorn for breakbars. Traits: not much to say here, standard power DPS traits. Decimate defenses is an alternative if you need more crit when using scholar runes but I don't like that it needs ramp-up, most OW mobs die too fast. And soul eater is good when you are out of shoud waiting for the 10 second CD and building up LF again in close combat.

almost as if core wells and elixirs have been tested, while latest expansion wells and elixirs come from a time when devs don't even remember underwater combat exists...

I hope this is true and it would be a wonderful thing I wished for a long time. No matter how many excuses you find to justify going up and down a slope for 45 minutes tagging veterans, VB bauble farm was never meant to be a viable gold farming activity, the meta itself wasn't meant to be played like this, no dev ever thought "and then 45 minutes of stoneheads!" when they developed the VB meta. It's a lazy and cheap way of farming gold and it encourages AFK heralds (incoming 100 replies of "but it's not AFK if I'm within chat range!"). Finding new friends and chatting can be done in any map and any RP setting, nerfing VB won't kill all your friendships ingame. The gold/h ratio wasn't even that good compared to active AB meta during bauble week, and in AB you are actually meant to do the events to progress the meta, as intended by the devs, instead of pretending not to be AFK in a lone corner of the map. People who did VB for the friends will find friends in 100 other maps. People who genuinely enjoyed tagging stoneheads can still do it (you don't do it for the gold right?), and people who did it for the lazy gold will try actually playing the game and looking for some more engaging and challenging meta with way higher rewards. Thanks for the (un?)intended nerf, unironically!

If they expand on jade slivers in LW6 there could be space for jade glyphs that can compete with volatile. As it stands now, I noticed you can buy shipments with jade BUT there are no trophy shipments and leather shipments cost 3 times metal/cloth. Using volatile magic seems still way more profitable, and Dragonfall is a way better gold/h farming map than any EoD meta. But again, since the best metas are usually LW, possibily LW6 will bring a new Drizzlewood with a good jade sink.

They could add some special loot bags so if you gank someone who's fishing you can steal their fish. So many great fishing possibilities instead of old and busted alliances...

Despite the timegate those runes are extremely fast and easy to farm/buy, their price will drop a LOT because people not interested in legis will at least buy the 1g and the karma rune to resell them immediately. This will pump a huge amount of runes in the TP every day, and in a couple months they could drop as low as 2-3g, meaning that you can compulsively buy your mats at a reasonable price. If you can't wait for the market to settle down, well, dish out those 2k gold and have your shiny weapon after one week from release, or else start farming your 5 dailies and when prices drop enough you can buy the rest.