Minax.3284

If we take the (arguably over-the-top) power of the mech out of the picture for a little while, and just focus on its mechanical design, I think it works real well. You can change its loadout with your traits; make it melee or ranged; power, condi or support - lots of ways to tailor it to your playstyle; you can force-move it with Shift Signet which helps dealing with AI quirks every now and then. The elite skill can be a DPS increase or an emergency re-summon, so there's some minor decision-making involved in when to use it. It also feels like it gets stuck in combat or on terrain way less often than ranger pets. From a design perspective, I think the Mech is a perfect example of a good pet-focused spec and I'd love to see a similar treatment for other pet-focused classes.

I don't see why it wouldn't be viable? It seems to be doing pretty great DPS with the buffs, on cWeaver at least?

Anywhere from 20-30 minutes up to hours, depends on what the issue is. Probably doesn't help that it's weekend so it might take longer than usual.

For me, leveling was a lot more tedious than max level content was. Especially once you have access to the Tempest elite spec, you should see a big bump in your survivability! I took my elementalist through all of HoT and PoF and it was absolutely fine (funnily enough, I had more issues in PoF than in HoT, which seems to be the opposite of most people). I've tried various different builds over the years, but what I'm enjoying a lot at the moment is a fresh air auramancer tempest with marauder weapons and equipment (more HP!) and berserker trinkets -- you trade a tiny bit of damage for a TONNE of survivability.https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Tempest_-_Fresh_Air_Auramancer is a good starting point for that sort of build. Obviously, feel free to try out other traits and combinations when you get comfortable playing any build! Sadly, core elementalist feels a tad outdated, so until you get to level 80 and unlock your elite specs you might struggle a bit. I played through core almost entirely on staff because I like the aesthetic, but I'd recommend running either dagger + dagger, or dagger + focus for more defensive options. When facing tough opponents, the glyph of elementals elite skill in earth will summon a durable earth elemental to tank for you; or when cast in water, it will summon a useful healing elemental. I'd also recommend running glyph of storms as a utility skill, which you can cast either in air for a lot of AoE damage or in earth for an AoE blindness field. If you need more defensive options, you can run Arcane Shield and Armor of Earth as well.

The way the Skyscale Collection was handled has me very worried for future content. If I wanted long grinds behind a boatload of RNG as well as a bunch of daily crafts and harvests I'd be playing other games instead of Guild Wars - This sort of grind has never been a cornerstone of Guild Wars 2 and I really hope this isn't suggestive of how future content will be handled. Why is this mount, which supposedly was designed to (unlike the griffon) not be a "prestige" mount and be accessible to "all" players (as long as they own PoF and all of LS4) more of a grind and headache than the mount that actually was supposed to be a sort of "prestige" mount? I don't mind collections. In fact, doing collections is one of my favourite activities in Guild Wars, because they're usually fun and somewhat engaging and take you to a lot of different places. But the Sksycale ones are absurd. Where is the fun in making us tour the same map three times in a row? Some locations for the first three collections were even almost next to each other. Nevermind the fact that we'll also be grinding mobs in Vabbi for up to 30 minutes each to get the djinn to spawn (and hope nobody who is unaware of the Skyscale collection talks to them or else they become hostile and you get to start over); we have to get frozen (with the only two real options being to go to Claw of Jormag and hope that one of his spawned mobs will randomly freeze you, or buy a specific LS3 episode); we have to get a certain event to spawn in Vabbi that shares spawns with other events and is completely random; we'll be grinding every single LS4 map for currencies; leveling up a profession skill; farm 250 quartz crystals from once-per-day mining nodes and converting them once-per-day into their charged versions -- or spend a bunch of gold bypassing the last two steps. Then we get to farm a boatload of mobs which will randomly drop skyscale treats; do some jumping puzzles to catch our skyscale rascals (or spend gold to bypass this step); craft skyscale food (which again uses once-per-day materials) or bypass this with gold as well. And the list goes on. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that this is absolutely mindless, unengaging, unfun content that is meant to be busy-work instead of something interesting to do. On a different note: Why time-gate some things, and then pseudo time-gate other things that you can bypass with gold? Either you want to time-gate content to keep players busy longer (in which case none of these steps should be bypassable), or you want to push players to buy gems (in which case all the time-gates should be bypassable if you're willing to spend enough money). To me, it feels like with the loss of such a huge amount of their dev team, they are scrambling to keep players busy (not engaged, busy.) with easy-to-make, low-cost content, excessive amounts of time-gating and a low-key push to get people to buy and convert gems to bypass some time-gated steps; and the thought of eventual future content updates being handled in a similar way is not encouraging at all. If this is the direction the game is progressing, I don't know if I want to keep engaging with it.

I have two thieves - a human and an Asura; on my human I use the Lightward's Battlestaff and on my Asura I use the Inquest Mk II skin for the extra bonk.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lightward%27s_Battlestaffhttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Inquest_Mark_II_Staff

Seconding ranger and especially warrior. Warrior with the Spellbreaker elite spec is my go-to class for doing anything open-world related. 19K health in Berserker gear, with a 12k heal on a reasonably short cooldown, incredible self-sustain from a combination of traits as well as access to kick & bull's charge completely trivialise a lot of fights that my other characters (especially my elementalist) had issues with. If you become good enough at it, you can also use this spec to solo champions (there's some videos floating around on youtube). The Spellbreaker build in this Build Compilation is what I'm running. Granted, the Spellbreaker part won't be coming into effect until you reach level 80, but even before warrior is mostly smooth sailing through leveling content. Just grab "Might Makes Right" in the Strength traitline and then you'll heal yourself whenever you apply might (which you can do a lot as a warrior!) and keep your gear reasonably up-to-date (goes for any class). Other than that, as others have said, Rangers are great for solo stuff. Enemies tend to focus your pets a lot, and if they don't there is a trait that makes your pet gain an actual taunt ability.