Barraind.7324

You dont need to see every build to know that throwing 5 skills which dont synergize with each other (and are at rank 1), a useless elite, and 2 skills you might want to actually press some day isnt going to make a build capable of doing anything. That alone knocks out 90% of builds by itself

People act like ANet doesnt have their own internal tools that can sim fights based on current rotations. They have that. Theyve been using it a lot more recently.

Thats a funny way to say "is the absolute most absurd quickdps build that has ever existed to the point where you're just silly for not using it with certain alac healers". Herald, both heal and qdps, has been beyond brokenly good for a while now.

If we're talking about a dedicated tank role (thats not healers tanking things), it doesnt work in the game as is because the game as is isnt designed for one. To justify a tank role, you need things that arent bosses to turn everything else into paste, and that hasnt really been a thing outside a couple orr dungeon bosses. Its not a unique issue with GW2 either, even FF14 only "needs" tanks because bosses have moves specifically designed to be eaten by people in tank gear using abilities only tanks get (and sometimes needing those layered with a second defensive ability from somewhere. People bring up role compression a lot, but its not really even that, its a response to fight and raid wing design. We're less role compressed right now than we were 2 years ago before buffs got lowered to 5 people. Just imagine running 1 healmech / Druid, 1 quickherald, and 8 dps, which is where we would have been headed as a standard comp.

I dunno about that, My groups healers run full (or near-full) Givers at this point, because theres no reason not to. I think thats become pretty standard across a number of static groups. Optimization comes in dropping 1 (or both) healers for a boon dps on fights where you dont need the healing. You want your healers able to do all sorts of stupid things / mechanics without dying, because theres a lot of that to do, and the dps loss you're going to see is minimal at worst.

Competitive modes will forever be a mess until enough people at ANet have both the ability AND want to do something about it. I dont disagree with your take either, but they need a whole lot more than a preview to not be dumpster fires.

Nono, dont stop there, please tell me which builds in the mass of "this is perfectly fine" builds you think arent capable of being competitive on multiple encounters, both raid and strike. Please note, that list doesnt include Power Core Engi (which is perfectly fine almost everywhere, but isnt recommended for long fights because its APM is almost unbearable after ~6 minutes), or condi core engi (which has the downside of not being better than condi mech or condi holo, where PCEng is higher than both scrapper and mech) There is a difference between "you really shouldnt play any quick dps except herald" because Herald is far into the bonkers end of the scale (and we still play qharb on a couple fights anyway...), and "you cannot possibly keep up with these specs", which is where you find Miralac and PAMech (Which I still have to play on 3 fights every week because its less time to play that on KC, Sam and CA than swap characters for 1 fight per wing).

Capricorn seems to work. Nifihel and Skyhammer do not work in unranked.

Meanwhile, balance is probably the best this patch its ever been, minus a couple outliers on the unacceptably low end. There are ~28 dps builds, including power, condi, and hybrid, all within 3k of each other, and dps boons are in a similar state

CS is actually balanced by being not perfectly balanced. Ancient, for instance, is +9% CT favored, while Anubis is -9% CT. At any/all skill levels, you find very few maps that dont greatly favor either T or CT by a large margin.

Your DPS on 'the hardest strikes' stand well into the bosses hitbox almost the entire fight, and times when they arent doing this they're running with their back turned / while the boss is invulnerable + dodge rolling / portaling in, with one single exception (that you can skip entirely with good dps unless you're doing GitV title runs). Your dps in raids stands in roughly the same relative place, the only significant exception being Twin Largos, and thats mostly only an issue on CM, where you just cant play certain power melee classes (Bladesworn is fantastic because it lines up incredibly well, reaper has to interrupt every single shroud unless you delay all of them until right after a dash/strip, and at that point, dont play reaper) because their rotations are horrifically mistimed with the mechanics of dodges + platform clears assuming competent dps numbers. The only other place this has any relevance is Dhuum bombs, and the difference in damage there is something like 1 ability use, assuming you dont have a gap closer. We do not currently live in a world where dps does non-random mechanics (not counting q1 kite or q2 pylons either, because you're forced into incredibly specific builds), save, potentially, one dhuum green, and we dont live in a world where they're standing anywhere close to range unless they did a bad (or are doing q1 kite or q2 pylons).

Probably for the same reason that they cant tell if you have a heroic edition of the game or bought the initial GW2 release: The game gets weird about what exactly it checks to see if you're eligible for certain things.

Every single guild mission is doable with at most 6 people, and many are soloable. I know this because ive done almost everything with at most 4 people (theres a whole 1 puzzle that requires 6 people).

A significantly worse way of organizing information and long-term conversation. Its very good at being very bad at that

Yes, I am aware. I had several hundred WvW potions banked. People were banking on updated items in the chests. The chests were updated, just not in the way people expected.

People were hoarding those to try and day1 anything new that was added, so I dont feel overly bad about them losing items which were removed at the same time.

You're in luck, one of the things you cant yet gather is probably (based on some of the things theyve said about their plans going forward) going to be from a Dragons End difficulty meta in zone3.

There are this many extra mastery points: Central Tyria: 33 HoT: 54 PoF: 20 IBS: 13 EoD: 24 (and i think im missing a collection unlock somewhere) SotO: 7

Significantly. Serpents Ire got nerfed hard with IBS waystations. Its not done very often because its a tedious meta that rewards 60s and no unique rewards. MOST Pof metas are garbage in that regard, the exception being pinata, which is 1 minute worth of investment (grab a couple coins, wait, repeat, repeat, 10 second boss mob) for a chance at an infusion. People do HoT metas because you can get guaranteed stat-and-slot selectable exotics (the best way to gear out most affixes pre-legendary), infusions, currency used for a number of things (including raid legendary armor, specialization weapons, and cosmetics), and significantly better bag and generic currency rewards. People will do SoTO metas and events because they drop unique things (and you need to do a lot of content for mastery completion anyway).

The chests give either the 1 purchasable item or the equivalent in map currency (or a rare weapon), right? Ive been shoving my choice chests into the bank until i decide what to do with any of it.

No, but the new rift level thats getting added probably will You currently need 18 metas worth of map specific currency. There are somewhere around 10 times that many days to do that meta before you even have the chance to see exactly what you need from zone 3. Literally every piece of open world has gotten easier over time in this game. HoT meta events are doable with 12-15 people now. We had 18 for the echowald meta a few days ago. Legendaries are designed to take a significant time investment.

2k gold of character slots will buy you 35% of one mystic infusion.

Its Valdhertz. It has worked correctly without maps closing once or twice, at best. Its the buggiest minidungeon they have created so far, and thats saying something. Its been hotfixed numerous times, and it still almost always requires a fresh map to do it.

It doesnt, because thats not a thing you can do under any system. Its both not a thing you could do (you could at best do 2 dailies that way before in any one match, and earning a rank reward in 20s is impossible every day as the loser) and the current system doesnt stop them from doing the same things either.

The pool of dailies is determined solely based on the expansions you own and the options you selected for them to be pulled from. If you dont have the same dailies, one of you is missing an expansion or you checked different options. Thats the one part of this system that ends up making any sense in implementation. The rest of this system is taking a good idea and instead of implementing it as its own thing, tried to fix multiple problems that didnt exist by tacking it onto a brand new problem. Wizards vault offering unique items for doing different tasks? Great idea. Removing the absolute crap that came with daily logins? Great idea. Literally every other aspect of Wizards vault including killing off pvp and wvw potions, gutting of daily login system as a whole, the dumpster fire of a mess that is the current daily achievement implementation, and nonsensical pricing for certain items in the wizards vault (see: whatever aneurysm someone was suffering through when pricing obsidian shards and t5 bags)? Calling that implementation a brain-dead train wreck would be overly kind.