SlipLihte.1307

Everybody dies in open world, sometimes to silly things by not paying attention, sometimes to bad luck, sometimes because it's harder content, and sometimes because it's HoT. Don't stress about it, after another three to six months you'll start getting over it. My personal advice for new players is to understand that GW2 is very against tanking damage. Every profession has some niche to defense, such as using aegis or blocks, using pets or summons to distract, or disabling enemies. You will want to figure out what this niche is for your profession and learn to use it. https://youtu.be/lQvSbjjFvCY

I didn't even think of testing that. Why would that happen? Edit: Tested, and found the same, about a 12% drop in alac time when overloading in earth comparing with quickness to without.

Having tested this now, I can see no evidence that this is the case. Although my tests were relatively short and simple done with and without quickness for 2 minutes on the golem, overloading only in fire off cooldown, there was no significant difference in boon uptime between the two. In fact, it appeared over those two minutes that with quickness had slightly better boon uptime than without. I believe this is because the overload finishes faster with quickness, starting the cooldown sooner, which allowed me to get another full overload in in the same 2 minute span compared to without. For reference, I had 62% alac uptime without quickness and 65% with. Again although not entirely scientific and conclusive, this at least gives me comfort that this bug doesn't exist. See update below, this bug only happens in water and earth attunement

*except on OLC strike, then listen to commander

One of my guildies yesterday indicated that there is a bug with the pulsing alac. The theory is that the timer for the pulsing (every 1 sec) is not impacted by quickness, while the timing for the overload is, (normally 4 seconds, but 3 with quickness) so you get less pulses out than intended while you have quickness and provide less alac than you should. Haven't seen anything about this anywhere yet and haven't been able to test it yet. Can anyone confirm or debunk this? Edit: I believe this is debunked, see update below.

Only 7 losses in a row? You must be new here 😭

Tl;dr I'd prefer quickheal firebrand for fractals and heal alac tempest everywhere else. To start off with, in gw2 a lot of people refer tonsupports as either offensive support or defensive support. Typically offensive support can provide either alac or quickness, as well as do dps. Defensive support provides either alac or quickness, as well as healing. Based on the comments in your question, I assume you are referring to a defensive support that provides healing, but please say if you want to know about offensive supports as well. In the current metagame, the defensive supports played most often are Heal alac mech (ham) Heal alac tempest (hat) Heal alac druid (dudu) Quick heal firebrand (qhfb) Quick heal herald (??? Too new to have an acronym it seems) I have personally not played HAM or herald, and can't comment on them. HAM however is a favourite of many groups, and I think the best heal alac for fractals. Qh herald is also very popular because of the amazing boontime and ability to do a decent amount of damage as well. For the rest, Qhfb was meta for years and is still quite popular because of the ability to swap utility skills t suite the situation. Need aegis? Bring advance. Need stab? Bring stand your ground. Need condi cleanse? Bring mantra of lore. Etc. However, it currently faces two problems. The first is that it can run out of cooldowns over time, which means that it can't keep healing up. In heavily scuffed boss fights this may become an issue. Secondly, because it provides quickness, you need an alac dps in your subgroup as well as offensive support, and alac dps is currently not as good as quickness dps. Thus, most static and organisedgroups run heal alac + qdps, and not the other way around. However, I still raid and strike in pug and guild groups quite often on qhfb and usually the alac dps spot will get filled. Personally I like thr playstyle, especially after the changes, and I feel it is quite quick, active and rewarding. It works very well in fractals in my view. Heal alac tempest has amazing amounts of healing and boon uptime, and I have been in groups where a single good heal tempest can easily carry healing for some big boss fights (e.g. Q1, Deimos). The major frustration with HAT right now is the way it generates alac is susceptible toninterruption, but thus is being changed for the next balance patch. Personally I think it plays fun and heals very well, but can be a bit harder to play and you need to be careful not to lock yourself out of water when you need it. I haven't played a lot of dudu and still have a lot to learn. The main benefit I found so far is that it has very good ongoing healing, and alac generation is more reliable than tempest in some fights. It also allows you a lot of flexibility to "send" healing, so you can keep people alive that are off doing mechanics or vice versa. The playstyle is ok for me, but I prefer tempest. It also doesn't keep as many other boons up as easily as tempest does. However I have also never found that this is a major limiting factor in groups. The last one not mentioned above is heal scourge, which has godlike abilities to keep players alive, but doesn't provide alac or quickness. As such it only really gets played in training groups as well as on boneskinner. Most groups don't want the dps loss of having to have a qdps, an adps, and a heal scourge, and would rather have less staying alive power but combine two roles.

This seemed to be slightly better yesterday, but I am experiencing this issue again quite severely today. I am based in South Africa. This issue seems to have started about two weeks ago, a little before the last WvW server relinking. The impact is most pronounced in competitive game modes, but I have experienced it in both open world and instanced PvE as well. I ran various internet speed tests and connection tests while this was going on and can confirm that my own internet was stable and operating at the usual speeds. ArcDPS indicates extreme variances in server tick rates while this is going on. Usually I have a stable 25-30, but during these times it has a tendency to drop below 5.

I can also confirm that my partner and I took part in Battle for Lion's Arch, it failed, and we were able to still enter the breachmaker through a portal in the middle to complete the story.

I suspect double spb or cata will be pretty tough to crack.

All those specs mentioned have reliable self-sustain options built in, including aegis access, protection, blocks, invulns, heals etc. Shelter is an amazing panic button, and then you get to choose Renewed Focus as well for example. The main thing is to learn to use these tricks and absolutely not rely on tanking damage - only real spec that can do that to any extent is necro.

Tl;dr: you will probably be happy going necro Much longer version: 1) Every profession is viable in pve content up to the end game. Sure some are better for the challenge mode content, but unless you are gaming at that level, there's no need to worry about something being absolutely useless. It's more important to find something that you enjoy. 2) You can take a lot of pressure off the decision by accepting that one day you will have (at least) one of every profession. Virtually every player I know has gone this route more or less. Now, if you are 8 years in and have only two character slots, you may be the exception, but I'd be surprised. The game is very alt friendly. 3) Further, the devs have said that they want each profeasion to have a viable power and condi dps spec. So even professions that don't have one now are likely to get one within the next few months (big balamce patch coming Nov I think). 4) Given your proposed criteria, condi aoe etc, I would suggest looking at Necro scourge elite spec. However, you can also build a condi berserker, firebrand, or ranger to suit that quite easily. Condi renegade also a potential option, with thief and chrono as more wildcard picks where you maye give up some of the ease of use and aoe.

Might just be worthwhile to state which side of the pond you are on, would need someone on the same server base (NA vs EU) to help you.

I play quick firebrand in fractals from time to time and am absolute garbage with tomes 2 and 3.