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Blood Red Arachnid.2493

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Everything posted by Blood Red Arachnid.2493

  1. I'm calling it here: OP is a psychologist fishing for data to write a new article.
  2. I would go with Heavy, largely for guardian. Guardian has condi FB, condi WB, quickness FB, healbrand, power dragonhunter, and power WB. A lot of those have different sets of gear and runes, which makes building each one individually a pain. Revenent also has quickherald, heal herald, power alac renegade, condi alac renegade, condi renegade, and power vindi. Warrior... doesn't have that many builds which require different gear, but that's the trend for most weight classes.
  3. I can't speak for the obsidian armor, but I found while getting two of the raid armor sets that, over the time It took to get them, I had earned basically all the money I needed and then some. Getting six Gifts of Dedication will give you quite a few materials, and the raids themselves have a lot of drops. Same thing with my WvW Armor set. It took me 20 weeks to get the WvW set, and 20 weeks of playing WvW to full skirmish completion will get you most of what you need. Over the time it took for me to craft all legendary armors and trinkets, I always hung around the 1k to 2k gold mark. You'd think that with 12 pieces of envoy gear (5k gold), 6 pieces of Triumphant (2.5k gold), Ad Infinitum (1.3k gold), and all of the trinkets, (6.8k gold), that I would've run out, but I didn't. If you're pursuing the armor, leave the gold expenses for last. Use alternative means for getting the clovers, don't even worry about the ectoplasm until you've acquired all of the other materials that require the hard grind. Only then should you worry about expenses.
  4. ... Use TP to friend who's standing at the waypoint of the map you want to go to?
  5. The funny thing about all this is the simplest solution would be to give us the SotO relics and just be done with it. By sticking to their word and not to their (possible) original intention, they would only satisfy players and create no ill will across the rest of the game.
  6. I'm still convinced that somebody is sitting under a bridge and telling riddles, but I'll bite anyway. In this world, there's two kinds of problems: a "we" problem, and a "you" problem. The thing about "you" problems is that it is not practical or rational to demand that the world reorient itself to fix it. The cause and solution to these kinds of problems sit between the keyboard and the chair. Not wanting to complete a quest because it has casual drinking in it is very much a "you" problem.
  7. It's Virtuoso. There's a lot of split mechanics that force all melee builds to disengage for long periods of time. Virtuoso can do almost all of its damage at range, maintaining DPS throughout all of those mechanics. Most of Virt's attacks pierce, letting them handle adds and mechanics very easily without losing much damage. Finallly, Virtuoso has a lot of innate self-sustain due to their traits, and there's high DPS pressure at many points of the fight.
  8. It is a bit of a tin-foil hat theory I have, but I think that there are Anet employees hopping on alt accounts and spamming all these posts with confused emojis. Normally, generally unpopular opinions have a lot of responses disagreeing with them, and it takes a certain set of personalities that will spam confused emojis on other players. However, these threads on the legendary relic don't follow that trend. There's a lot of psuedo downvotes, but no noticeable population that would be giving them out. Seriously, look at the topic post. Even if you disagree with the intention of getting SOTO relics without soto, the most you could say in response to his evidence and his claims is "oh well, guess we'll have to move on." There's nothing there that would incite half of the forum viewers to admonish him. He isn't insulting the playerbase, he isn't saying something that is clearly irrational or crazy, he isn't out to ruin the game for other players, and there's no strongly motivated argument as to why what he says is wrong. Yet for some reason, he and most of the other players who either agree or are sympathetic have incensed an abnormally large amount of silent players to spam negative emojis.
  9. As an ele player, I still do this. I set up and then blast water finishers all the time, both to heal myself and also small-scale allies. They really appreciate it when I drop 3 water blasts on them all at once.
  10. I play rev because it has an LI build second only to mechanist in it's damage output and general usability. For a long time I focused on rev for WvW, because hammer doesn't use many projectiles and because it was a decent build for solo-roaming as well, but then everything I used was nerfed into oblivion. Right now, all of my toons except for Ele and Thief are mothballed behind a jumping puzzle chest somewhere. I use the thief for home instance stuff and random daily requirements, and ele for WvW dailies. Personally, I don't like how the weapon masteries has forced Anet to nerf all of the weapons over and over again. People talk up the herald builds a lot right now, because that's the spec everything is being balanced around. Aside from that, the main build that I would use is an off-meta build that uses Sigil of Stamina on Vindicator to spam dodges. It isn't super high DPS, but it has great survival thanks to battle scars and spending most of its time flying through the air.
  11. I play sword/dagger celestial weaver, mostly because I don't want to be bothered playing anything else. I alternate between Fire/Arcane and Water/Air sword builds, with both having certain advantages and disadvantages. That all said, my favorite opponent to duel in WvW is another sword weaver. It's like a dance and a firework show are all combined into one. The only problem I encounter sometimes is infinite fights. The darned thing about cele ele is that we frequently lack the offensive power to defeat another cele ele of sufficient skill. Aside from those circumstances, I have no real complaints that can't be extended any other profession.
  12. Or, worst case scenario, everything else will be nerfed around pistol instead.
  13. Good question. There's sort-of a formula that I have to go through to get the defense reward. First, the enemies have to destroy some structures and/or kill a few NPCs. Then, after that has happened, you need to kill at least one enemy player. You can't just run them off. They need to be defeated. Then, if all of those things happen, I'll get the defense credit.
  14. Considering that Anet is in control of both the mechanical capabilities of a profession, as well as the mechanical demands of a fight, then it is very clear that Anet is responsible for the roles that are demanded for the fight. The "meta" isn't something that the players arbitrarily pulled from their butts. Likewise, Anet is currently balancing around maximum golem DPS, irrespective of the utility, mechanics, difficulty of the rotation, or the risk involved around playing the profession. When it comes to actual encounters, the performance of different specs is nowhere near homogenized.
  15. If you put it into a vacuum, there is no counter to stealth spam. In order to "counter" something, you have to know it is there to be countered, and stealth prevents exactly that. If you combine this with the fact that the two stealth-spamming professions have high in-combat mobility, this creates the situation where it is nigh impossible to know where someone is after they've gone invisible. I've marked people with traps in WvW, only for them to disappear completely off of the mini-map thanks to some pre-placed portal or shadow step. The best general advice I can give is to always pack a long ranged weapon, as to minimize the amount of advantage that their mobility can generate. There are some pyrrhic victories that you can get, though. Victory in the Vs. modes is only determined tangentially by the amount of kills you can get. sPVP specifically is about zone control. Stealth makes controlling narrow zone points very difficult, so as long as you can perpetually fend off the annoying players you can maintain zone control and keep racking up points. WvW is more objective based, but if you're roaming you'll find a skilled thief/mesmer to be just insufferable to fight. The best you can do is hope that enough friends arrive to discourage the stealth spammer, or that you can escape to a tower where there's a marking system for you to take advantage of. That is the closest thing you can call "victory" in these circumstances. Seriously, I've seen skilled thieves win 1v5 fights by warping all over the place while invisible, and taking pot shots over and over again. Simply not dying to one is about as much victory as you can get.
  16. I'm going to disagree with point #2. Ele, much like guardian, doesn't have "condi weapons." They're all hybrid. Condi ele does a large amount of strike damage when compared to other condi builds, and with a big emphasis on burning lets it cleave down trash mobs quite quickly. I haven't been keeping up with the all the modern builds, but the cooldowns on the old scepter/focus condi weaver are so low that the spec feels unrelenting to play. There's always more buttons that need to be pressed faster.
  17. None of them are bad... unless they've reduced the total number of hits for rolling light. But, that seems unlikely.
  18. I can explain this. Doing high DPS in this game is actually quite hard, since it requires consistent split-second input chains in either exact sequences or specific priorities, as divined from weeks of research on the matter. This requires days, sometimes weeks, of training just to get a single rotation for a single build down, and many times only for a few bosses. Thus, HP sponges' difficulty comes from the fact that merely functioning properly in this game is a a great difficulty. It's one of my biggest criticisms of this game. If you regard the raid builds as a standard, then the vast majority of the game is full of secret pitfalls that exist to reduce your effectiveness. Previously the game was based more on mechanics than DPS races, which made this kind of design acceptable, but if we're getting into the realm of hard DPS checks, then Anet is going to need to acknowledge that most of their game is designed to make players fail at them.
  19. I really don't. I think Anet is trying to maximize profits by relegating the old rune effects to DLC and breaking the cottage rule on legendaries to incentivize us to buy expansions. There was nothing wrong with the old rune system, so really what they're doing is their best to get money and not what is right for the community.
  20. Yeah... the legendary relic isn't meant to act like a true legendary. It was just compensation for people who had full legendary runes that had their effects taken away. This created a different problem, since relics were one of the selling points of their new business model. Anet solved this by nerfing the relic completely. In any practical sense, all the relic does is make it so you don't have to spend a few gold on the new expansion's relics, and to make everyone who bought legendary runes feel a bit better.
  21. Partly it is both. I started doing research on it for an argument, but I found it quite useful to know which professions were both forgiving of mistakes and would output a lot of damage with just a few skills. LI builds are important to me, because a bad case of fibromyalgia has made my old carpal tunnel injury effectively permanent, and my tremors keep getting worse with age. Figuring out LI builds isn't exactly magic. Just take into consideration how fast buttons need to be pressed, how many different buttons need to be pressed, how much readjustment is needed to use a build (player positioning and ground-targeting), and how much simple defense/durability a build has. Some standouts include the Auto-attack Rev, which just turns on Impossible Odds/Vengeful hammers and auto attacks, Bomb Kit Mechanist, and the Axe Signet Bladesworn. Frequently, I have to play the game with only one hand, because resting my hands on the keyboard aggravates my wrists. Basically, consider each build as if you've just had a dose of epinephrin, wacked yourself on the hand with a rubber mallet, and can only play the game with a 3 button mouse.
  22. I wouldn't consider either condi weaver or BTTH power weaver to be LI. Fire Tempest only got the title nominally as the easiest build to play, but it still required pressing a lot of buttons relentlessly. Everything weaver does is far more active and also far more restrictive. Now the closest thing that we have to an LI build is Fresh Air Tempest, but whenever I tested it, it was barely better than just auto attacking with the sword.
  23. It is par for the course in my gaming history. Ever since Phantasy Star Online, you needed to have the offensive buffs up at all times (Shifta + Deband), and this carried over into PSU. Another game I played was City of Heroes, where there were so many different ways to buff a team up that it was mind-wracking. Heck, even in Runescape the high-end fights expect you to be under the Overload Potion's buff for extended periods of time.
  24. Somehow all the answers to this got broiled into a debate, and I didn't find them really satisfactory. So, I'll give a short explanation: It is an axis of power. No no, not WW2. Think back to math class, with the coordinate system. The X-axis, the Y-axis, the Z-axis, etc. To provide depth to the interactions in a game, a player needs options to excel at different things. That way they can have interesting strengths and weaknesses that need to be played around and use in conjunction with other players to overcome all sorts of different obstacles. Buffs are an internal collaborative system where everyone gets enhanced by one player who's weaker otherwise, while debuffs are an external system where the enemy gets weaker for everyone by one player who's weaker otherwise. Buffs are debated a lot, because it creates an all-or-nothing issue while playing in big groups like this. In a single player game where there can be a proper power budget it is easy, but in a group setting where you want everyone to be useful you'll get this issue. Either you balance around the presence of buffs and make everything too difficult otherwise, or you balance in the absence of buffs and make everything too weak anytime a buffer shows up. It is difficult to create a system where buffs aren't either OP or UP, so most MMO's take the safe route and balance around their presence, thus ensuring the presence of the buffer role in content.
  25. I'm lamenting the loss of the Fire Tempest. It was the closest thing we had to a LI build for ele. All of those arcane changes remove its strongest skills, making it far less viable than it was previously.
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