Strider.7849

Work on trinkets first (amulet/earrings/backpiece) from the living world story maps like BitterFrost. The trinkets are basically free, just cost time to farm the berries. Use Astral currency to get the ascended armor boxes (just do dailies/weekly to get enough astral). That's 3 of them for 400 each which will half gear your armor. You can use temporary placeholders for armor by running core tyria dungeons and exchanging the tokens for magi stats. As soon as you're geared you can salvage the armor for ecto. Not only are these placeholders but you can get magi + monk runes from ascalonian dungeon and keep the monk runes for your harrier gear afterwards. You'll also be making gold and get more loot through dungeons as well.

- Utilization of a lightning field. - Gazelle has a bug where it runs extremely far away, which in a pvp/wvw situation can leave you without a pet. - wyvern can CC multiple targets with both of its skills. - wyvern tracks a human target better than Gazelle.

I think you're responding to a thread from last year.

One of the big problems with how the developers go about it though is they keep nerfing around the issue and then when it doesn't work, they remove it. The issue this causes is that the spec becomes not only unfun to play but they wreaked so much havoc across the board leading up to that removal, that all you're left with at the end is a full set of gear that isn't useful anymore or having to rework it into an entirely different role.

Oh 1 boon every 3 seconds in WvW, ouch.

The notes section of the wiki says it removes 3 boons every 3 seconds against players? Do you know if that's true? Last time I tested this sigil was before the nerfs and it had a priority of removing swiftness. I stopped using it thinking it was 3 boons removed every 10 seconds.

An easy way to get it with no crafting or cost involved, use the Astral acclaim in the wizards vault. You can get ascended weapon and armor sets that are stat selectable.

Depends whether you are playing large or small scale. Large scale condi is worthless because of the high amounts of cleansing. Smallscale it still has incredible value.

My recommendation is necromancer. The WvW celestial harbinger build is what I use to speed clear most HP's as part of my farm when I have the time. On average it's about 45 minutes to clear every repeatable HP across all 3 maps. Some HP's like the frog in tangled depths or Tengu in auric basin, I use condi reaper. Condi mirage works fine, but it's slower than necro and you have to pay more attention to the fight.

Chak could use some improvements, I believe adding a (3 second) slow to it alongside its cripple would be perfect, mimicking the chak that you fight rather than just being weaker. I look at it almost like a power oriented iboga, but lacking damage and that little bit of slow to make it unique for how glassy it is. It also competes with other CC pets like Gazelle and lightning wyvern which are more resilient and just a reliable. I personally use the shark on my druids roaming build. Has good dps and a little bit of AoE which helps my build a bit more so than other options.

I play all healers in both end game PvE content and WvW. Druid has stronger burst heals and more cleanses. It's weakness is that it has a hard time preventing damage and allowing your dps to continue, dpsing. To compound these issues, druid also has both a cooldown and an energy requirement to use its more powerful heals, cleanses, and buffs. In PvE its ability to self generate (and give) alacrity helps a lot with its access, but in WvW it doesn't and you can notice it's weaknesses much easier. Healbrand, is a weaker direct healer, rbut has strong sustained heals. Where it shines is in that it can do a bit of everything, it brings easily accessible stability, and brings aegis/reflects. Played properly, I make it where my dps doesn't need to stop to dodge anything but effects that are guaranteed death. This is huge in overall dps of the party, and more often then not you will clear content faster and more safely with a firebrand than you will with a druid. Where I feel Firebrand needs improvements is not in its heals, but in the quickness it provides in WvW. If they were able to maintain quick through its traits alone, it would allow room for better utility and condi clear.

There used to be a table that someone set up measuring the dps of every single pet (prior to EoD). Might take some searching but you would be able to find it eventually through Google. There are other factors to keep in mind like some above have mentioned, like CC. I would add even more important (in competitive) is the pets ability to track and land attacks against moving targets. Smokescale for example has undergone extensive and repeated nerfing and yet still remains a mandatory pet choice in most builds - now more so due to the smoke field, but previously it was because it was one of the few pets that could reliably hit enemy players. Aside from the jaguar, I remember my reasoning for NOT using cats was outside of the F2 ability, couldn't hit a target at all. Lastly, with raid level buffs, Iboga used to be the highest dps condi pet and Jacaranda one of the most reliable sustained dps. I'm sure it's different now after all the balancing, but never been a fan of Lynx or tiger. My favourite pets with untamed are grey wolf/black moa/smokescale. Druid is the aether shark, iboga, Jacaranda, bristleback, Turtle, and smokescale. Soulbeast is black raven, white owl, Gazelle, grey wolf, pig, black moa.

Don't mean this in a rude way, but looking at the way you built it with full offensive weapon sets, glass stats, and only one hard escape - I thought it wad an open world PvE build. You might be able to kill someone who is not expecting the burst or perhaps didn't see you at all in the middle of a chaotic fight, but a single thief can, and will, ruin your day.

I would take ancient seeds any day over Eclipse. Eclipse isn't even needed, only worth taking for synergy with demon queen relic. If you use any other relic at all, you may as well drop Eclipse.

Just some personal opinions: - Minstrels doesn't need to be removed. There is counter play to it that exists in the game currently. It's primary weakness us no damage, it's a full support tank set. - Celestial needs to be reverted and lose expertise and concentration. It was strong without those two stats and the counter was full on condi (in terms of roaming). This is a quick and easy solution in my opinion. The set will still be strong, but not best in slot for everything other than zerging. - Boons need a two-pronged approach in order to be balanced. Toning down the amount of boons each class can provide and returning some flavourful back to diversifying class choices. Secondly boon removal need to be turned up significantly. Unfortunately these problems are part of CMC's vision for WvW game mode. Make roaming exclusive to 1 choice, celestial. This elimates having any skilled players from being able to 1vX multiple opponents through having knowledge of their class, their terrain, and removes thinking and skill from fights. Just spam. Secondly, make zerging only possible with greater numbers of people running specific builds that require no thought process or actual PvPing. Just press buttons on a rotation EXACTLY like in a PvE raid. Upkeep permanent boons and make it so that very rarely does anyone actually die, upon each push only those that didn't stick tightly within the boon ball get wiped. It isn't fun and I'm not sure how any of you are even able to enjoy WvW anymore with the current state of the game. Posting this video below, it's from my current matchup - it's a 3-way fight of boon balls. Each push only kills 1-2 people who weren't able to stack tightly or follow their tag, no skill, no thinking, just press buttons off cooldown like you were DPSing a golem in the raid test area, while following the tag. The video ends with no one gaining any ground or even accomplishing anything. I'm sorry if I sound critical and I dont mean it as an insult to anyone in the video (not mine), but I only played GW2 because of this game mode and its kept me to this game since launch. Sad to see where it's leading. There is only one way to fix this - but it seems like this boring video is what they intend for WvW.