[What are your favorite WvW builds and why?]

Definitely go with Marauder.  90% of the damage of berserker, but that extra health is always a life saver.

When it comes to zerg builds, I hate to invoke the term personal preference, but a large part of it comes down to that.  Each of the elite specs has their own toolbox that has value in different ways.  Tempest has the best group support utilities, excellent skills for tagging and downstate play, but the gimmick is cumbersome and the traitline is lackluster otherwise.  Weaver has extra weapon skills, the stances for barrier/evade and good mix of offensive and defensive traits, but weaver's dual attunement locks you out of some important skills sometimes.  Catalyst has the best elite skill, and staunch auras for a lot of stability, but otherwise Catalyst lacks a lot of power and utility that the other two specs have.

Personally, when I'm running staff zerg build, I'm running Lightning Rod weaver.  While Meteor Shower can end groups, I've found a far better utility for zerg combat is control.  Lay down Unsteady Ground and Static Field, scatter the push and catch a bunch of players without stability, do large amounts of damage and spread weakness with Lightning Rod, and pick off the stragglers with Pile Driver.  Shockwave, Frozen Ground, and Lahar are also good as soft-CC's to follow up after the hard ones.  Biggest weakness is the lack of ready access to magnetic aura, which would really help with the longer cast times and wall defenses.  

[Builds for Higher Level Content]

I'm a big fan of power boon chrono myself.  Switches between quickness and alac with a single trait.  

[Profession For Learning Fractals / Instanced Group Content?]

Whichever one you're most comfortable playing.  It's a simple answer, but the best profession to learn stuff in is a profession that you're already good at playing.  That way, you can concentrate on the new stuff instead of concentrating on how to play the toon right.  It isn't a problem using elementalist if you already know how to play it well.  

[Low Intensity Mesmer Builds?]

Auto attack axe mirage got nerfed into oblivion.  Closest thing I'd recommend is good ole' condi virtuoso.  I regularly play that one with one hand, and it is pretty simple.  Just mouse-click the weapon skills and the shatters when they're up, and you'll rip most things to shreds.  The self-sustain is really solid, too, if you don't use the signet to double up on phantasms.  

[Jade Tech Boons]

It wasn't a matter of means, but of ideas.  We had to convince Anet that capping everyone's boons for free wasn't a good design choice.  Only then did Anet actually look at the code of the Jade Tech overcharge buffs and see there was an issue.  

[heard complaints about EOD paid off.]

I can tell whenever one of these threads comes up, because I'll get emoji traffic on my older posts.

The good news is that, while I had many complaints about EoD, misandry wasn't one of them.  I've read a book about the subject, titled Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young.  It is... a rather dry read, actually.  It was published in 2006, so most of the examples it gives is come from movies and television shows that we're all too young to remember.  The meat is in the beginning and ending chapters, with the intermediary chapters serving as a large set of case examples.  To give a brief summation of common misandry, it follows several traits

• Men are depicted as obsolete, or incompetent.  Largely to be laughed at, or an obstacle to deal with.
• Men who are not incompetent are malevolently evil, overly aggressive and destructive for the sake of it.
• Men are depicted in modernity with technology and architecture.
• Women are seen as innocent, collaborative, pure, and intelligent.
• Any woman who is not seen as above is evil only at the direct influence of men, either beguiling or oppression.
• Women are depicted as nature, with plants, animals, rivers, and natural geological formations.
• The only "good" men are the ones who are honorary women; either an intersectional stereotype or constantly espousing the evils of maleness and the virtue of femaleness. 

If you want an example of these tropes in a more modern context, I'd go with the second season of Hilda.  That is one of those shows where, if I were to attempt to dissect and tear the whole thing down, it would require a video that is several hours long.  Every bullet point listed above is plainly shown in spades in that show, with the second season being particularly egregious.  

Because of this book, I've decided to make a small misandry test, much like the Bechdel Test or the Mako Mori Test.  It's really simple: If a show has male characters of note, there must be at least one male character who is functionally competent, morally good, and not an honorary woman.  Side corollary, if there is an antagonistic woman in the show, she must not be antagonistic solely from a man's influence.  Looking at this standard, you can see why it is I do not claim that EoD has misandry.  It has male characters that are functionally competent and morally good while being distinctly male (Gorrik and Rama).  Likewise, it also has a female character who is evil, but not from a man's influence (Ankka).  There's complaints about Gorriks hilarity, but he's still good and makes contributions in the story.  Minister Li is cited as an evil man, but Rama is fighting him by your side.  

There's roughly 90 years of examples of misandry in media that EoD doesn't align with.

[Did someone request beach wear? [Merged]]

Good news.  But now, I am torn.  I did pick a lot of my toon's armor sets, and I don't want it all to go to waste.  Now, I have to decide which build will have their standard armor, and which are going to be the beach wear.  

[New revenant player asking for guidance]

Technically, everything in the game is balanced around exotics.  With rare exception, anyway.  In any practical sense, the question isn't if you can rise to the challenge, insomuch as it is if other players will let you join them.  Many will... and many won't.

For that purpose, berserker armor isn't just fine.  It is recommended.  If you're going for ascended, get the weapons first, because those have the most significant impact on your performance.  I know that Sigil of Stamina is really fun and useful for overworld stuff, but a lot of raids/strikes/fractals are boss focused, where the sigil will never proc.  It is worth considering investing in an alternate weapon that has different sigils for those cases.  Ascended accessories tend to be cheaper/easier to get, so feel free to pursue those as well.  

I'm going to be unoriginal and just recommend the raid build:  https://snowcrows.com/builds/raids/revenant/power-vindicator  This can also be used in fractals and strikes with very little change.  Just know what the weapons do and adjust accordingly: Sword has the highest auto and single target damage, Greatsword has the strongest burst and cleaving damage, Staff is used in fights where the boss needs to be CC's a lot, Shortbow (for SotO owners) is the best ranged weapon, period.  Also know what the legends do, in case you need to switch one for another.  I run this build in the overworld, too, and it works fine for... pretty much every meta event.  

[State of weaver (feedback)]

I'm going to delve into mind-reading a bit, but my current assumption is that Weaver is the PVP/WvW based spec for Ele at the moment, similar to Mirage for mesmers.  Very similar, in that Weaver's main advantages are things that aren't generally useful outside of PVP: Self-barrier and vigor generation, weakness, mobility, random bits of group heals/barrier, and evade skills on sword/stances, etc.  I've tried using Catalyst and Tempest in WvW myself, and aside from the brief period where Celerity was used to spam Obsidian Flesh, I found Weaver to be the superior option for most cases.

Weaver isn't without use in PVE.  The main standouts there are

• Superior Elements for AoE weakness application
• Elemental Refreshment for waves of 523 barrier
• A 3.2k group heal on Aquatic Stance every 20 seconds (2 count)
• Some really powerful CC chains with Weave Self and/or Fresh Air

One of the big reasons why i play it so much is that it lacks the weaknesses of the other specs.  Tempests can get locked into an overload, which will kill their performance or just outright kill them if they find themselves in danger.  Or, on the flip side of that coin, Tempests can get locked out of an attunement when it might be needed.  Catalysts need to build momentum with their empowerment/aura traits/energy and can lose out quite a bit during mobile fights.  Also, I find Cata to be far more taxing on my hands.  Weaver, however, has but a single, simple demand: learn that you are half-attuning.  Once that note is wrote, the spec rarely gets more complicated than "press a button, do a thing."  

That all said, I'm not against buffs for Ele in general.  I know the devs are trying to normalize the golem benchmarks to focus more on PHIW style of balancing, but I am still of the mind that complexity and difficulty deserve some kind of compensation.  We aren't getting it mechanically, and the combo system (formerly our specialization) has long been power crept, so there's good reason to crank our damage or buff numbers up as compensation.  

[Which support should I play]

The easiest to play are probably Quickness Herald, Quickness Firebrand, and Heal Alacrity Mechanist.  

[Balance patch preview]

They say those changes are to clarify that scepter is a power weapon, but I'm still going to run it as a condi weapon.  It is nice to get the additional strike damage, though.  

[Return to the final meta fight is excessively circuitous]

1 hour ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

To we really need to teach people now that bigger number = better? 

Is this where we are at now? 

Do we really need to give people third party websites to tell them to get gear? In an MMO? 

It's sad. 

But I see now why mobile game difficulty is in such high demand. 

You'd be surprised.  The average player of this game interfaces with it on a low intellectual level.  For them, the concern about numbers doesn't even enter their mind.  There are other players who give themselves high defenses, because they're more afraid of dying than having poor performance.  There are other players who mix a lot of gear and defensive traits/utilities around, used to the conventions in other games where having a well rounded character is a necessity and a polarized character is certain failure.  There are players who only equip random drops they acquire with no cohesive gear prefix setup at all (AKA the RNG build).  There are players who've decided that yellow quality gear is good enough for them and never bothered to get expensive exotics.  There are players who run roleplay builds not built for function, and frequently use contradictory weapons and gearsets.  

It's a lot of words to say that there's a million ways to come to the wrong conclusion.  You'll never run out of ways.  Compounding this issue, there is nothing within the game itself that tells you that it is being balanced around glass cannon builds in later expansions.  The freeform build system creates countless noob traps concerning efficiency and effectiveness.  Coming to this realization requires either a lot of personal thinking and experimenting, or it requires somebody telling you about it.  

[Any staff open world build?]

There's always the lazy tempest build :http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PGQAYlNwoYLsGWJOqKbtLA-DSIYhipAfG1KBqQBIzzCAUB-e

You start out in Earth, so you can use Magnetic Aura and Sandstorm on enemies.  You can use Unsteady Ground to stop enemies at a point, making it easier to cleave.  After doing that, use Eruption, swap to fire, and stay there for the remainder of the fight.  The utilities are whatever you feel like.  The ones I chose were to maximize uptime of Tempestuous Aria.  This doesn't have particularly high performance, but it will get the job done.

[2 button 19k dps]

Glad to see somebody is doing some LI work now that I'm retired.  A few notes/questions:

#1: The arcane line isn't the best for an LI build.  It gets its damage bonus from having all of the boons, but when doing the random overworld stuff that you'd take an LI build for you won't be boon capped.  Aside from that, the other bonuses it gives are small amounts of might and swiftness, reduction on attunement recharge (fresh air makes that largely useless), and the arcane shield from spamming the elemental elite skill.

It's cliche, but there are reasons why we tend to go with fire.  It has a lot of offensive modifiers, gives flat power in fire, and adds extra burning.  It can be customized to automatically cleanse conditions, hand out random blinds, or do more burning damage if you don't see yourself maintaining more than 10 might for long periods.  

#2:  It is... odd that you are getting damage losses while using the other skills.  Quantum Strike, Pyro Vortex, Cauterizing Strike, and Fire Grab are no slouches when it comes to damage output.  I can understand Ring of Fire and Flame Uprising not doing as much with an arcane build, but those others should still be heavy hitters.

#3: Though it is an LI build, using Pyro Vortex is highly recommended.  For one, its damage is quite insane and upscales very high, being the strongest move that Sword natively has in it's arsenal.  Second, Pyro Vortex will be the build's only source of weakness, which both reduces incoming damage while also increasing personal damage.  

[Quick cata excells at nothing. Here's how to improve it.]

12 hours ago, ZephidelGRS.9520 said:

I’ll never understand why Catalyst needed 3 separated unique combat buffs, and 2 different traits just give Quickness. All that work and it could barely keep Quickness up.

It simply proves Catalyst is as barebone as a concept as it gets that they don’t know what to fill with the traits.

Theming mostly.  The initial idea behind the spec was to build energy like warriors build adrenaline or necromancers build life force.  Playing hammer catalyst very much has a feel of momentum, wherein once it gets going it can be very powerful, but it needs to actually get going force.

Of course, all of this was nerfed after we discovered that the best comp in the game was to stack catalysts, since their auras would proc each other's traits.  Anet's been trying to keep a careful balance on the spec since, for fear that we'll enter into another cata-stacking meta.  

[Its time to increase base hp]

10 hours ago, Bladestrom.6425 said:

 try playing pvp on ele condy tempest or core or any hybrid non meta build with no stats spent heavily into vitality or toughness or heal.

So... my WvW staff Weaver?

[Why do you play WvW?]

Because it doesn't matter.

It's weird sounding, I know.  My biggest issue with sPVP is that it is a team game where you're expected to try and win.  This puts a lot of impositions onto the players to do well and research and practice, and I just don't want to deal with that.  But in WvW my failure or success is largely meaningless, and there is no grand expectations for victory.  This frees me up to be experimental and just have fun.  There's no pressure when I'm doing the weekly and daily tasks in WvW.  

[Fighting thief feels like you're fighting a hacker]

You might not be that far off.  Because of all their shadowsteps and stealth, thieves and mesmers are the favorites of hackers.  All their innate skills make it easy to hide all of the hacks they're using.  Thieves especially, due to their initiative system.  

[Elementalist Lightning Storm souls trait broken]

Ele does have some stuns.  They're just quite rare.  Shocking Aura and Shock Blast come to mind.  But yes, the "increase stun duration" part of the trait is largely useless.  It doesn't work with a lot of CCs.  

["Best" class\build for Open World stuffs..]

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.  

[What makes GW2 combat in WvW fun? (and how I feel recent changes go in the wrong direction)]

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.  

[Struggling trying to gear/get my foot in the door as a healer]

3 hours ago, ChrisTheEnby.9046 said:

-I wasn't in a hurry to burn my level boost, to be fair. And yes i have heart of thorns/path of fire, but that's the only expansions i have, I also don't have the Living World seasons, and that's why i said a lot of those "easy to get" trinkets are paywalled away from me right now. 

-My concern though is, my current gear, bad as it is, some of it does give me a little bit of healing power and toughness, and i worry by "upgrading" to this full power DPS gear, my survivability will actually get worse. Especially if I can't do a perfect DPS rotation to get the most out of the gear...and most builds that use this dps gear would require me to completely change the utility and and healing skill i use, but would also require me to even change weapon types! Also the shield I was given for unlocking chronomancer i already stat-selected for healing power (Minstrel's i think? Only healing option i saw) so if i wanted to change to a full dps setup i've already ruined my shield....With no healing power no toughness, like dps roles in other games, i'm scared too much rotational perfection is going to be demanded from me to not just die like usual.

-I had gotten access to both verdant brink and the desert, hence my comments how i can't even handle being attacked by the normal enemies there, because i guess they assume anyone going there to be in full exotic minimum gear.... which is odd that i need to be able to survive there to *obtain* some of the gear, or even just the hero point to unlock more of my elite spec.

-Yeah i saw your mail, i'll add you in-game and maybe we can work out something when we both have time.

 

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.  

[Do you like how your characters look?]

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.  

[Is Ascended gear extremely hard to get in this game?]

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%.  

[[instance PvE] Should we buff Fresh Air?]

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.