Blood Red Arachnid.2493

That all depends on what you define as "open world." There's a difference between running around casually and trying to solo the more difficult champions. If you're running around casually, just about anything works. Take the maximum DPS raid build, adjust a few of the more situational utilities/traits for better ones, and go ham. If you're trying to solo champions, you might want to be more selective. The only one I'd recommend avoiding for most players is Ele, largely because it is hard to play, and works best with non-standard gear sets that you'll have to go out and buy. Nearly every profession can do it, though. For example, about two weeks ago I hopped on my Condi Daredevil and went off soloing bounties for the weekly achievement. The only thing I changed were the utilities, as venoms don't work well while alone. I could beat nearly all of them, with the exception of one that I had to change into a specter for. The reason was simple: with all of my endurance and skill dodges I could avoid most of the damage. By slowing my roll a bit and saving my dodges for dangerous attacks instead of DPS, I could stay alive indefinitely and whittle the boss down. If I were to give a short list: #1: Engineer. Mechanist can auto pilot through most challenges. Scrapper's self-sustain lets me solo dungeons and fractals. Holosmith isn't as recommended. #2: Mesmer. Virtuoso has immense self sustain and can kite forever. Mirage can dodge nearly everything. Chronomancer has an immense burst, but is the hardest of the three. I've used Virt for champions, but I duoed Hearts and Minds CM with Axe Mirage. #3: Warrior. Nearly all specs have decent self-sustain and damage. I prefer the Bladesworn, which can do really well with hit-and-run tactics. I've also solo'd many bounties on Bladesworn. Spellbreaker has skill dodges and the best sustain. Berserker is least recommended, as it's berserk mode comes at a cost, and the heal skill is great but otherwise it lacks a lot of survival tools. #4: Ranger. I don't play ranger, but it gets recommended by a lot of people, so I'm putting it here by default. #5: Thief. Deadeye can trivialize ranged bosses with infinite projectile destruction. Daredevil can dodge nearly everything. Specter has good self-sustain. All power builds can have decent self-sustain by switching one trait in critical strikes. Aside from the example above, I've used staff Daredevil to tank the Sand Giant. #6: Guardian. I don't play Firebrand as much to speak about it, but both Dragonhunter and Willbender have strong active defenses that let them carve through groups of enemies. I've used both to solo dungeons before. Personally I prefer Willbender, for it has one more psuedo invulnerability skill than Dragonhunter, but the DH has better cleave and a more reliable Courage effect. #7: Necromancer. Haven't played this one in awhile, but it's immense tankiness does drop off the longer a fight goes. Still, having high health and a shroud to absorb damage has its benefits. Scourge and Harbinger benefit from Parasitic Contagion, but Reaper has the simplest rotation and setup. #8: Elementalist. This one is low on the list not out of potential, but because it requires different gear sets to really become strong. Granted, if you do buy a Celestial/Marshal/Traiblazer set, then the profession has incredible survival. But, that's a long way to go out of the way just to breath. My favorite is Weaver, due to all the barrier and skill dodges. Tempest has super-protection and high damage reduction in general. Catalyst used to have the hammer, but now that it has been proliferated there's not much to Cata for open world solo. #9: Revenant. This may seem strange, but as of late this one hasn't been cooperating with me. Most of the sustain options have been nerfed, and while Bunny Lord Vindicator is fun, it does require alternate gear and it only works against hordes of weaker enemies and not difficult champions. Most sustain options really hinder performance in other areas. Best option is probably Herald, which has the best heal skill/boon support and it cooperates best with alternate trait lines. Renegade limits you to an area for its sustain, and Vindicator needs to sacrifice a lot to keep itself alive.

I'm not sure exactly how it is so many people became convinced that removing the target caps on offensive skills wouldn't increase the favor of smaller groups vs. larger ones. I still remember an old Woodenpotatoes vide on on the subject back in the day: This was pre-nerf Ice bow, but you get the gist of it. A group of 5 players buff themselves up, use Shadow Refuge to sneak in, and then unload a boatload of damage all at once. I'd have to look at what builds we have now to come up with an "optimum" comp, but without a target cap a group of 4 berserker dragonhunters and 1 specter could CC and kill an entire zerg by dropping all their symbols/traps/CC all at once from out of stealth. To put it into perspective, think of your current WvW build, and could it handle taking the burst from 5 berserker/marauder players all at once. I'm not sure any actually could. Without the target cap to buffer the damage via superior numbers, every player would effectively be hit by that same burst. A group of 50 players could hit a group of 5 players just as hard with or without the target cap, so the smaller teams stand mostly to gain from such a change.

GW2 was built from the ground up to be a PVP game, and as such all professions were given enough base stats capable of surviving most things, even with no investment in defensive stats. This was done to fool-proof the game, preventing players from inadvertently building themselves into incompetence. The only place where high performance will be demanded of you is in Raids and Challenge Mode fractals/strikes. Most of the overworld, while balanced around Exotic Gear, is actually pretty easy. You'll defeat most enemies just by auto-attacking them, and the ones you can't largely have one gimmick move that you need to watch out for. This is true even if you're wearing full berserker or vipers armor. I frequently play this game one-handed (mouse only), and can definitely attest that every profession can do this. The "DPS rotation" with rare exceptions loads most of the damage into a few skills, so if you know which skills hit hard you can obliterate enemies before they have a chance to respond back. You only need a rotation against big HP sponges with a time limit on them. Otherwise, feel free to wing it. The reasons why high damage gear is recommended are many. First, more damage gets you kills faster, which gives you loot faster. It makes money and saves time to hit things hard. Second, it is far easier to change around traits/utilities and your strategy than it is to change gear. If needed, you can equip more defensive utilities and traits to survive, and failing that you can approach the problem in a different manner to survive. So, following this logic, by default you should build yourself for damage, then change the easier things first if you need more survival. Third, there are events in the game that have a time limit. It is harder to squeeze more damage out of defensive gear than it is to play more defensively in offensive gear. So, if the situation arises where you'll need greater performance than survival, you'll be ready for it. Most mechanics in the game are handled by killing stuff anyway, so it is beneficial to be really good at killing stuff. This seems counter-intuitive to how other games handle things, and it is definitely one of the stumbling stones that new players trip over. It was certainly different from the previous RPGs and MMOs I had played.

The answer seems a bit obvious. If I don't like how my characters look, I would change how they look. It's not like IRL where you're stuck with an ugly face and can't afford nice clothes.

Well... what else are you spending that gold on? I just crafted it all back in the days when crafting it was far more expensive. There's many alternate paths to get the weapons and armor, but crafting is always an option that is available to you. Also, small note, but everyone else is underselling the difference in performance. Changing your weapons alone to ascended is a 5% increase in strike damage. Going full ascended is a 10% increase overall, and getting all of the infusions is about a 12.5% increase overall. The increase in armor tier alone reduces damage by around 2.5%.

I'm not so sure. The times since we were trying out Fresh Air vs. BttH were awhile ago, but I remember that Fresh Air's damage loss was very minor. For example, this somewhat out-of-date video has Fresh air being a mere 100 DPS behind BttH. This is weaver focused, though. The other specializations don't make as great a use out of Fresh Air as weaver does. It would be nice to have some updated numbers on this. I can understand the trait not being as useful on the other specs, since those hang in their respective elements longer. But, if Fresh Air remains the DPS competitive yet greater flexibility option for Weaver, that is a perfectly fine place for the trait to be. We don't want to completely invalidate BttH.

It's possible it is the thing that you aren't saying. It is also possible that it was just a good hider. I've taken a few towers by just hiding really well when it was flipped. It is much easier on the red BL, since those towers are large and have a lot of nooks and crannies to hide in.

My "wild guess" is that you have a key that's bound between multiple apps. Since this only happens during raids, if you have some team speak program active in the background, there's a chance that you're accidentally pressing a key that's bound on the chat-app. This could confuse your computer, and make it think that you're trying to navigate in the speaking program, thus nullifying all of the left-clicks in GW2 instead.

I don't see why we can't just navigate to the outfit panel and click the little box.

Careful. Last time I brought this up Anet killed dagger ele.

I use them quite a bit on my ele. One of the few unseen buffs that Ele gives to the team is that they put up constant fire fields, which gives random bits of burning on all of those projectile and whirl finishers. Unfortunately... that isn't much. Random bits of 1-second burns only helps in the smallest of degrees. It is one of the complaints I have about the combo system, in that so many of the finishers just aren't of any noticeable value. In WvW I do try to rotate so that I spam blast finishers in fire fields, and I'll occasionally blast water for more heals.

Mirage's value comes in places that generally aren't useful in PVE: defenses, and mobility. It is rare for me to need the mirage, but one such place was when i was duoing the Hearts and Minds CM, both against Eir and the final boss. I tried using the other specs, but both Virt and Chrono just couldn't heap on the damage or stay alive. But the mirage was able to kite and dodge everything. The clones would upkeep a relatively high sustained damage, while Jaunt/Axes of Symmetry/Phase Retreat let me avoid all of the ground AoEs, and the prolific amount of Endurnace and mirage mirrors let me avoid attacks while reflecting projectiles in mass.

You'd be surprised... well, you are surprised at how much slips through the cracks. I had to issue a ticket once because I deleted a PoF collection item that couldn't be re-acquired. Turns out, one of those random collection items needed to be handed in directly instead of being a junk bit that gets shoved into your inventory like all of the others.

I'm reminded of an interview I heard about once. Sam Tramiel, then CEO of Atari, gave an interview to Next Generation magazine about the status of the company and their console at the time, the Atari Jaguar. This interview was supposed to help reassure customers, stock holders, and future potential customers of the value of the Jaguar console. However... Tramiel botched it. Terribly. One of the things he mentioned in this interview was that the Jaguar 2 was under development. This, among many other things, caused all interest in the Jaguar 1 to plummet, as no one wanted to sink their costs into that console anymore. NCsoft leaking the potential development of GW3 could very well be what sinks this game. The malaise of the OP is going to be a commonly shared sentiment.

They started making events like this to stop players from purposefully stalling events to grind loot. This reach its peak shortly after the champion loot bag update, where people would repeatedly fail the meta events to farm champs. It's far easier to stick all the rewards at the end instead of coming up with some arbitrary DR system for every event in the game.