Seon.8402

Yeah maybe its just time to take an extended break. I played RuneScape for 12 years and there were times during that I thought I would never quit but eventually I moved to other things. There are a lot of other really great games out there, or even other fun things to do with free time besides games. I like GW2 first and foremost for the varied gameplay loops of different classes and will play it even with no updates or rewards, but I do feel this. Part of the fun is getting new tools and puzzle pieces to make different builds with, however I think eventually any game will start to run out of design space to keep adding "newness" there, even if it takes decades. Strangely I have sort of scratched that itch by getting into making music the past couple years; there is so much to learn about with music theory, production, instrumentation, etc. and using all of that in interesting ways to make something cool. It may sound a bit silly but I get that same sort of feeling as playing a new MMO; there's so much to discover and master if you really want to dive deep. When I have Ableton open, hours can go by without me realizing 😆 I've now played GW2 for about 10 years, and I will sometimes take weeks or months break. The nice part about GW2 is it's easy to come back to later when they do add more 🙂

Any spec can work with open world, but my top right now are: Vindicator - I usually play celestial condi, which is very survivable but good damage even on your own. Alliance stance gives some nice healing/stunbreak/cleanse if people are dying at world bosses, and mallyx pull and boon rip are also great utility Tempest - again celestial gear for hybrid damage and free healing and boons. Overload animations are cool, and provide alacrity. I usually run something close to a heal tempest build with celestial gear so it does decent damage and very supportive to other players Virtuoso - really fun to kite enemies into a line as almost all your attacks pierce. I Usually use celestial or rabid for extra survivability Scrapper - standard quickscrapper build, provides quickness, perma-superspeed, big personal barrier and might. A lot of fun to just zoom around, get in close and smash things with a hammer

Yes this may be true, but permanent alac enabled all other boons to basically have +20% uptime as every other skill that provides all the other stronger boons can be used more. I think it's a good idea to see how this plays out separately before seeing if further adjustments are needed.

I don't see any way to get this info 😔. I did some digging and all I could find was a thread from a year ago asking for the same thing Looking around at a couple build sites, it looks like the default (PvE) values are shown even when the build is meant for PvP. The only place I found that has accurate values for competitive modes is gw2skills.net. The only way I can see that being done is manually integrating the values for PvP/WvW into the data from the API, unless they are doing some other trickery. Maybe there is a way to get that data from the wiki instead of full manual, but still I believe you would need to combine it all yourself.

I've had the same kinda feel where I don't just want to copy/paste a build and memorize a rotation. I like to mess around a bit and try out more uncommon things, as there are a lot of traits, utility skills that are often unused in the meta builds (which does makes sense, as they tend to focus on maximizing damage). For me it's more interesting to be able to trade a bit of damage for some type of utility to be used reactively to help the team, even if I'm playing a DPS or boon DPS. But as others said there is a reason certain builds are common, especially in the context of instanced content where players will specialize in roles. It sounds like you're already accomplishing your goal of learning a spec deeply and understanding the"why" behind the meta builds listed on build sites. This is valuable as it can help you learn more about what makes these builds work and able to adjust them on the fly based on the needs of your group or specific bosses. Adding on to that, there are so many traits, utilities and weapons that just may not ever be really useful in a gamemode like instanced content but come in handy to swap around for WvW, PvP, Soloing things in Open World. So again for a class you really like to play studying it as you are is a great thing if you want to play it everywhere. I have found when trying out my own builds that arcdps is very handy not only to see overall damage or if I am generating enough boons but another really cool feature is a "Self Skills" panel that shows a percentage for you how much each skill or condition contributes to your total damage. It is super useful to help find out which of your skills are actually the most damage and which to prioritize, which ones you can swap out. The damage listed in tooltips can give some idea but is not always really easy to tell and keep track of. As far as group dynamics go I don't think I have much to add to what others have already said. Usually people want to get a clear as quick as possible, so more damage = faster. But for me it's worth to trade for some utility that may save us from wiping. Less wipes = less time for people to complain and look for points of failure. It is a fine line, you don't want to give up too much damage if that is your primary role. I will say if you get some people together that regularly run strikes or raids, that can be some room to try more unconventional builds and roles. P. S. I am also a Heal Tempest fan. I have only recently started playing it and with Cele gear it's a nice little bump to your team's damage

Lol I could definitely see that. I just know that Anet has been pushing offensive support builds to usually require some boon duration to help differentiate them more from full dps. So to me this change is a bit odd but my thought is that this kind of fits in with that, but also giving a bit of freedom to do some smaller trade offs.

Maybe the intent here is to give you the choice of 1) take no boon duration which will make you prioritize upkeep skills if you want full quickness uptime or 2) invest in some boon duration so you can build up extra quickness and not have to only use upkeep skills, freeing up energy for road, etc.

Individual armor pieces, for the hat you could look at getting Minister's Hat, which was added with Gyala Delves. Otherwise the only thing I can think of are outfits, which are only available sometimes in the gem store unfortunately: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Outlaw_Outfit https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mage_Knight_Outfit https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Midnight_Hunter_Outfit

I used to think that too and there's a part of me that still thinks it would be nice, but after seeing what happened to scourge I'm not so sure. I would like to play it as a main support in PvE, but it is in an interesting spot where I've used the alliance skills as a backup healer or a condi/heal hybrid and I am scared some of that would be destroyed, since they probably wouldn't just add alac for free. Maybe not as bad as scourge though since the Urn is already limited to 5 target. I bet if they did it though it would be tied to Vassals of the Empire trait, so you would have to choose between damage, alac, and heal just like Tempest 🥲

You could look into Vindicator, it applies chill on the last hit of its greatsword auto attack just like reaper but it can hit 5 targets instead of 3. Revenant also has a trait in Corruption that applies torment every time you apply chill, so you can do some hybrid damage there too. Combine those with Vassals of the Empire trait in Vindicator where you chill on your dodge attack and it's pretty fun for open world. I often run it with full Cele and then swap out weapons between GS/staff/mace+axe and demon/dwarf/alliance stances depending on the situation. Vindicator has a nice pure power DPS build using GS which would apply some chill as well, but there the chill is more a side effect.

If you give us account-wide unlocks for extra build/gear templates instead of per character, I would really consider it. But I switch around between every profession in the game trying different builds and right now they are so expensive per character that it is so far from worth it. One of the reasons that I like this game so much is that a lot of things are account-wide unlocks. These templates should be as well.

Cool! Jewelry costs a lot for sure. If you have some laurels saved up from when you played long ago from log-in rewards, you could use them for ascended celestial jewelry, or do fractals at least for the rings. They have slightly improved stats compared to exotic and are not bound to a character, so you can freely move them about if you want to try a cele build on a different class (especially trinkets, since they don't affect how your character looks). Good luck!

A lot of good builds here, I just want to add a note about acquiring celestial gear. Buying it from the trading post is pretty expensive, and there are a few alternatives: Get stat-selectable gear: If you have Heart of Thorns, in Verdant Brink you can get bladed armor which can be set to cele. You can buy all but the chestpiece for airship parts. The chest you can only get from getting Tier 4 of the map meta. Crafting: if you don't already have crafting leveled, it may not be worth it but this is also cheaper than the trading post. One key with crafting is that all celestial gear requires charged quarts crystals which are account-bound and limited to one a day. If you do buy off the TP, save yourself some money on the shoulders and get Shoulders of the Ebon Vanguard Choice Chest. It's only 3g and lets you pick any weight and stat combo. I have started to collect a set of cele gear of each one of my characters. While it's not optimal, it allows you to test out a lot of new builds and experiment without having to get new gear sets all the time. If you get one set of ascended cele accessories, rings, and/or amulet from laurels or fractal, you only have to worry about getting additional armor sets / weapons for other characters.

Usually traits that increase "critical damage" do so on top of your regular crit multiplier. Which means they are multiplicative and much stronger than they sound, such as Ferocious Strikes. If this is the case with this change, which I assume based on the wording, this would actually be better. For example, let's say we have 750 ferocity for 200% critical damage modifier: regular strike: 1000 damage crit damage: 2000 damage with extra 300 ferocity or crit modifier is 220%, so 2200 damage with 15% bonus on top instead, we get 2000 * 1.15 = 2300 damage So maybe they did do their math correctly. Right now we don't know for certain but most traits with this description are multiplicative. I also won't say all the changes in this patch are for the best but let's wait until next week when we can try them out a bit.

One thing you could do is lean into that and build a character design of someone who was petrified or a statue come to life. Try to prioritize an armor combination that has an interesting silhouette over intricate details, and think about if you want to include pieces with cloth physics or not. Think about if your character was actually carved from solid stone how the shapes would be done. I don't have a ton of other infusions to pair with it so that's the direction I've been going.