LadyKitty.6120

Kitty's PVE suggestions as PVE off-meta buildcrafter and reasons for doing the changes. Pretty much none of these should affect the mainstream builds but rise more off-meta builds into somewhat valid options as big problem currently has been kinda incoherent coefficients between weapons which has caused great gaps between weapons despite using pretty similar build. These will also include some traits that introduce new builds into the game. (This post is part 1 of 3.) Revenant Hammer Bolt: Increase power coefficient from 0.95 to 1.0. Coalescence of Ruin: Increase power coefficient from 1.75 to 1.95. Herald Shared Empowerment: Reduce cooldown to 0.5 seconds and might duration to 4 seconds. (Same duration as in WvW/PvP while solving the problem of long might ramp-up). Thief Pistol Whip: Increase the cleave's power coefficient from 3.15 to 3.4. (Currently does a lot less damage than auto-attacking while very risky to use due to taking a moment to activate and immobilizing the thief for its duration.) Stab (Sword skill 3 without off-hand): Increase the power coefficient from 1.05 to 1.2. (Promotes using skills.) (Malicious) Tactical Strike: Increase the power coefficient from 1.0 to 1.6 or 1.8.(It's currently pretty much useless in PVE and for comparing, dagger's Backstab does 1.2 from front and 2.4 from behind.) Dancing Dagger: Increase the amount of Torment inflicted by this skill from 1 stack for 6 seconds to 2-3 stacks for 6 seconds. (Currently very unused skill and this change would allow crafting a poison+torment-focused off-meta build.) Death Blossom: Increase the amount of Bleeding inflicted by this skill from 3 stacks to 6 while reducing the duration from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. (Damage doesn't change but becomes a bit more bursty as long ramp-up time with this skill has been a serious problem for dagger/dagger condi thief.) Skale Venom: Increase the duration of Torment applied by this skill from 5 seconds to 6 seconds. (Makes it more competitive against Caltrops and Thousand Needles for aforementioned Poison+Torment-builds. Requires statting more general condi duration instead of specializing in Poison and Bleeding.) Shadow Savior: Increase self-healing coefficient from 0.2 to 0.3 and ally-healing coefficient from 0.4 to 0.6. (This change alone would make heal thief a possible weak'ish off-meta healer option in skilled hands.) Necromancer Dark Pact: Increase the power coefficient from 1.2 to 1.5. Increase the Bleeding applied to self from 10 seconds to 12 seconds. (It has a long channel and currently main-hand dagger both lacks damage and does higher damage by spamming auto-attack than actually using skills. Bleeding synergises with Life Siphon.) Spinal Shivers: Increase the power coefficient from 2.625/1.875/1.125/0.5 to 2.75/2.0/1.5/1.0. (To promote using skills instead of auto-attacking. Currently focus on necromancer is only useful for boon stripping and sometimes life force generation if camping axe. Using it for anything else is detrimental currently.) Enfeebling Blood: Increase the Bleeding inflicted by this skill from 3 stacks to 6 stacks. (Currently it's essentially same as scepter's Grasping Death but with longer cooldown and boon strip. This change would make it potential secondary off-hand for PVE condi necromancer builds.) Furious Demise: Instead of gaining Fury, grant Fury to 5 allies for 8 seconds within 240 radius when entering Shroud. (This change would instantly make necromancer with proper boon duration a viable might+fury support. Currently it's capable of providing might for 10 but lack of fury or other boons make people consider it useless as boon support. This change might remedy that.) Scourge Serpent Siphon: Make each magical sand pile grant Barrier for 5 within 180 radius of the sand pile, each sand pile healing 20% of what they currently do. (As of now, current randomness makes it totally useless for a healer.)

One big gate that's keeping people from raiding is the false perception that raids are harder than they truly are. And Kitty's not speaking about possible new raiders who are hesitating due to difficulty but about people who insist on metametameta though good portion of raid community probably doesn't even know how meta works. Let alone what meta even means. Big problem is, as Kitty's ranted about for years now, that big majority of raiders go for "max dps comp" they're taught since "high dps means no mechs". But many raiders overestimate their skills, eat mechs they can't afford and due to low support 'cause metametameta, the heals aren' t up to cover for their mistakes. It's actually very rare for any squad to hit enrage at most bosses so bringing a powerful healer to cover for druid (when it comes to sheer healing power, druid is half a healer and thus squads typically have 1,5 healers or less) would actually increase the chances of scoring a kill drastically. Heal scrapper, renegade, ele, mace healbrand and heal scourge are such healers, in the order of strongest to weakest. Esp. Heal scrapper's ridiculous amount of heals, utility and remote resses and scourge's barrier and resses and might would make many of the easier bosses(W1-4) pretty much 95% certain kills even with worse squads. There's also bunch of dps builds with pseudo-immortality for minor dps cost, like power ps berserker (insane self-heals due to Mending Might), power renegade, power scrapper (most OP build), condi Tormenting rune mirage, Condi tormenting renegade,Power IP Staff Mastery staff DD etc. Simple builds like shortbow soulbeast, kitless holo and power assassin+dwarf renegade would also lower the entry threshold by eliminating need to learn complex rotations. Tbh, if people started using some of the builds Kitty mentioned, the chance of successful kills would increase a ton

All mission CMs are doable as of now, even Snowden. Just requires doing good amounts of damage to kill stuff fast and knowing how to use the in-game mechanics to your advantage. That escort in particular is easy if you know how to do River of Souls in W5. Though Kitty won't go into too much detail to avoid ruining the fun. Let's just say that one of Kitty's favourite things is really helpful. ;)

Kitty... 16,000 / 10 people is 1.6k healing per person. This is the amount I healed during that boss fight. The potential of the build i could have had in that fight is 11 million healing....Which means i could have healed 45,800 / 10 people is 4.5k healing per person...1.6k as a ratio to 4.5k is 35% efficacy. B ) Another "If" in your equations is the boss damage. The boss damage is different for all bosses and different on every encounter... You don't need this figure to find out the same information...Even if you go around trying to find how much damage the boss has done, that only applies for that particular encounter...it's not an average, and the average ranges anywhere from "Did all my allies stand in the ooze" to "did none of my allies stand in the ooze" This variable is to subjective and that's why your numbers become wishy washy. C ) your number of 2.7k...i'm not sure what it's supposed to represent...because again it's an HPS in a vacuum.... is this the maximum potential healing someone can heal for? Is this the average amount of healing a Tempest can do in a fight? Is this number pulled from a rotation that you used? There's no logical explanation for arriving at this number of 2.7k... Again you can prove this by just doing calculation backwards...if i healed 2.7k HPS per person, then my total healing should come out to 4 million in 4 minutes right? 2.7 x 10 allies = 27,000 per second. 27,000 x 240 seconds = 6.48 million healing. What am i missing here? Where did this extra 2.48 million healing come from? The thing is, you apparently don't seem to acknowledge that most of the heals in GW2 are 5-target and as such, there's usually one healer per 5 players and thus Kitty finds it most meaningful to compare the numbers standardized to that format (with 10-target heals counted as double their value to make them comparable though it skews the 10-target healers potential upwards if playing in squad with less than 10 players (which is why tempest is in fact a really dangerous choice for 5-player party's healer (standard party/subsquad size in PVE) as tempest's party doesn't benefit from those and big portion of subsquad prioritizing heals (esp. healbrand and healrene work that way) never leak to tempest's subsquad to compensate.Though then again, now that Kitty took a closer look at your screenshot, you're in WvW where things are way more like you've been saying in this thread. But that leads Kitty to kind of conclusion that you're trying to translate your WvW numbers to PVE (on instanced PVE content subforum, if Kitty may add) and ignore how PVE squads actually work which causes the builds you're using for your math to be irrelevant to actual gameplay scenario that is discussed on this subforum and thus rendering your numbers quite useless for anyone who'd use these kind of calculations in said content while Kitty's calculations are specificly using the builds used for that content.And as raid support main who's actually created prototype versions of and played many of the currently used and unused builds before they were adopted by raid community, Kitty has tons of videos actually showcasing essentially every single healbuild in raids if you need to check out what builds in this subforum look like. And just to tell you, Kitty ALWAYS does the basic potential math before testing the builds in the content itself and she's rarely turned out wrong. Except about that heal mirage... And as for that 27k for ten players, that 25-29k Kitty HERSELF mentioned is the max. potential in ideal conditions with realistic boons that you can assume to have in any scenario if people even try to play efficiently where this math would even matter to begin with. And that 2750 HPS Kitty mentioned regarding your earlier post is that 16,5k you said to have healed converted to 5-person subsquad standard assuming you had 2 healers (and with 16500 total HPS over 4 minutes, it doesn't sound like you were solo healing unless you had a damn pro squad). "16000 = 0,8 x 5 x 2750 + 0,2 x 10 x 2750, 2750 being the healing per person by average if tempest were a normal 5-target healer." meaning if you were to directly compare with strict 5-target healers such as druid, FB, rene or chrono etc. Only tempest and scourge have direct 10-target healing capabilities in meaningful amounts which is why they need that extra conversion for any comparable number. Ofc you can just calculate without taking comparability and viability account at all for theorethical potential and mathematical self-satisfaction but trying to even test that in any raids as 10-target solo healer... Well, good luck with that. Kitty already had hard enough time on more realistic builds in raids and your build would usually earn insta-kick in T4 fractals 'cause HB. And as for that if-if-if, yes. Kitty uses the word IF a lot when theorycrafting. When doing calculations with possible variables or uncertain/unknown but predictable factors possibly causing any meaningful changes in outcome, you need to take those into account and for setting a scenario with certain set conditions, word IF is kinda helpful to avoid making a list of those conditions. IF is the conditional, after all :3

You left out the option E) Some people are too stubborn to take the time and do the (very simple) math in order to figure out objective properties about something.... clearly you missed that there are people here that do understand and are interested enough to ask questions about it. This method isn't some crazy magic dude...its literally adding stuff together...it can not be more simple than that. It's the same as taking the total amount of healing done at the end of a fight, and then dividing by the time of the fight to get an HPS, which is how Kitty does her calculation... It's the same thing except you are figuring out the potential of what could possibly be done in a fight and then comparing it to that number to see how well you are using the build...Because HPS alone in a vacuum isn't enough information to determine how well you are using a build. Example...Above in a previous comment, I did 4 million healing in a 4 minute boneskinner engagement. Take that number, divide it by 4 minutes, and you get 16,500 heal per second. But what does this number tell you? It doesn't say much unless you have some value to compare it to. People who use HPS meters usually compare this number to other people, to determine relative performance with other players. The method i'm using uses the potential you could ever possibly imagine to heal in a fight as a way to compare what you did, to what you can do on that build....it's literally in essence the same exact thing as Kitty's calculation, but taken a step further. This method is better because it takes values from specific skills, so that you can compare those skills to one another too...something an HPS meter in a vacuum can't do. Meanwhile the build Kitty's using has about max. 25-29k potential if there's no waste when calculated with Kitty's method (and note: Kitty's math uses harrier's trinkets+weapons, magi's armor and Earth+Water specs instead of pure magi water+arcane healer you use which has over 40k potential by quick estimation) and thus you only used 55-66% of the build's max. healing potential even if you're running the lower healing boonbot version. In other words that's far more than enough for the boss even if you actually brought boons on top of healing. And considering that big portion of tempest's heals hit more than 5 peoples, tempest even gets further boost in numbers over other healers in healing that takes effect in arcdps. And those numbers just further confirm the numbers Kitty's used earlier in this thread with "Boneskinner, the most damage intensive boss by good margin in popular no torch-strat, does 2500-3000 damage per second. " referring to damage per person and if 10-target heals are even 20% of total healing, that's already bringing the healing done by you within that range as 16000 = 0,8 x 5 x 2750 + 0,2 x 10 x 2750, 2750 being the healing per person by average if tempest were a normal 5-target healer.

I just explained why already...You can make a quickness and alacrity calculation where you will have quickness and alacrity. But if the build itself doesn't include it, it is mathematically fallacious to include it in a calculation. This is why i don't calculate frost-bow tempest with quickness or alacrity. If i were to weigh it the same with other builds then you would do the same with druid, and the same with scrapper, and the same with whatever builds you want to compare so that you aren't purposefully skewing numbers. I even mention throughout my calculations as footnotes, that skills like Medblaster, benefit highly from quickness and i give you the range at which that ability could potentially heal with quickness on...did you miss that part of my comment or something? In a scenario where you wont have quickness or alacrity you would be better of just playing a build that provides those boons. This includes open world pve aswell. Boons are always top priority, heal comes 2nd. Thats even true for other mmos. I would say its mathematically fallacious to not include those boons because you are screwing numbers towards builds or skills that will never be used. Also you always do "real world" checks of simulations. Thats why car manufacturers still do crashtests even with all the simulations available.Druid is listed very low with your calculations but it heals a ton on boneskinner while a hfb has very little healing there. Either the calculation is wrong or i am just a very very bad hfb.Nobody calculates dps classes with just selfbuffs either. It just makes no sense. Okay, i don't know why we are even arguing about this in the first place because it really has nothing to do with the exercise. A ) If you want to calculate a builds potential with alacrity and quickness, go head...there is nobody here saying that you shouldn't. So long as you are consistent in applying the calculation from one build to another build that's all the matters, so that you are maintaining a consistent comparison between things.Kitty's already provided comparative numbers on that earlier in this thread.C ) This boon or no boon argument business makes no sense...if you play a build with boons that's cool I never said you can not play a build that gives out boons or other utility?...why is this all of a sudden an argument about boons or whatever? This is about calculating Healing effectiveness without an HPS meter, and in general is an exercise that can tell you more information about healing effectiveness than an HPS meter can.Healing effectiveness is kinda useless info, though and like peoples are mentioning, what's the usefulness of this thread in any actual in-game scenario if you don't use the in-game builds? And also, if you play pure healer instead of boon value, you'll be kicked unless squad really needs a carry (in which case you'll likely be third healer). This very thing is the reason why heal scrappers are virtually non-existent despite of high heal output and utility: they're the worst booners.D ) If you are playing a hybrid healer with multiple roles as a support, then your healing potential is going to be lower since you are diverting resources from healing, into other utility...Even then for the most part, you can transform those utilities into measurable healing potentials because you can break down almost all utility skills into components of healing, like Bulwark Gyro for example...so the argument that straight healing isn't better than boon supports, or that boon supports aren't better than healing makes no sense, and nobody made that argument to begin with.Again, healers are wanted for boons, not heals. Heals just come as bonus since upping boon duration means a lot worse dps and a second healer works as good failsafe in case primary healer isn't skilled enough/something unfortunate happens to them/they accidentally mistime heals for a moment. There's a reason why HB+druid is the preferred combo for most and that reason has nothing to do with healing output.

Druid has more heal than fb and scrapper from my testing. I got 13k hps with gotl. 17k+ is possible with lingering light. Only selfstats work with healing so im curious what other builds could achieve.You show a potential 35k hps for engi and i never saw that on bs. I did a rough estimate calculation with Heal Scrapper, and the potential to heal is there, but i agree in that I do not think it's as strong as Kitty points out. My calculation was very quick and back of the envelop so I'm gonna spend some more time on it make sure everything is right... but the conclusion here is that Engineer has a lower potential than Frostbow Tempest and thus has less long term sustain, but it has a nice way to produce concurrent healing, which gives it more inflated HPS to produce higher healing in certain time frames, by using long duration fields. . The calculation at first was with 100% Healing Effectivness, which i know can't be reached on a Scrapper (it's more like 60%) so numbers that you see in the spoiler tags are mostly higher than their final numbers, where i put in 60%. Also, Quickness was applied to Medblaster where it actually matters, but a more consistent calculation would exclude quickness and alacrity for all abilities in order to weigh it equally with other classes, and one could simply make a calculation later that adds quickness and alacrity. Again i will go back to make a more consistent calculation in order to have it be on equal footing with every class just so people can compare it if they want to.**Calculation**Now basically, 1 mechanic on the build makes up over 60% of it's healing and the other mechanics make the other 40%, by margins of several millions. Those would be -**MedBlaster**>! assuming 9 boons for entire fight on all allies (no quickness, no alacrity)...>! >! base = 370 per pulse (before healing effectivness)>! Healing for each boon = 268 per pulse (before healing effectivness)>! 370+268 = 638 per pulse.>! >! 638 x 3 = 1913 (x100% healing effectivness) = 3,826>! 3,826 x 5 allies = 19,132 per cast>! >! 19,132 x 144 uses in 3 minutes = 2,755,008>! 19,132 x 110 uses in 2m18s = 2,112,172this calculation was made without Quickness and Alacrity, with Quickness those numbers would be doubled...and with an accurate healing effectiveness which is around more like 50/60% instead of 100%, it would be more like 3.7 million healing in 3 minutes from just medblaster.The other mechanic would be the combination of Medical Dispersion Field and Compounding Chemicals, which would vary based on how many boons were actually applied to you during a fight. I used some numbers as a reference from one of Kitty's videos, which is the amount of boons applied during a fight that took 2m and 18s, and then just figured it out and transposed that number for a 3 minute fight to keep calculations consistent.**Medical Dispersion Field + Compounding Chemicals**>! 3,308 in 2m18s minutes (138seconds)>! >! 71 healing per boon granted to self>! medical disperation = 71 healing to 5 allies>! >! So, everytime a boon is granted to you (in this case 3,308 boons>! were granted to you) you heal 5 allies for 71 healing for a total of>! 1,174,340 in the course of a 2m18s fight. This number of course will>! differ based on how many boons are applied to you in a fight in the same>! time frame.>! >! Assuming boons were applied at the same rate for a 3 minute engagement = >! 1,531,747 Healing.Again on this calculation i used 100% Healing Effectiveness, when in reality it's more like 50/60% maximum, so a more realistic number is 919,048 Healing in 3 minutes.The rest of the abilities on Scrapper are near negligible in comparison to Med-Blaster, that it appears that it is almost not even worth using any other skills other than medblaster. ~~And these were calculated with 100% healing effectiveness (for simplicity sake) so the numbers give or take will be less than what's shown (of course quickness and Alacrity would probably make up for the 40% loss in healing effectiveness.~~ Updated the the numbers below to reflect 60% healing effectivness, and added additional abilities. **Bandage Self**618,880 = 3m00s (60%Healing Effectivness)**SuperElixer**350,676 = 3m00s (60%Healing Effectivness)**Bandage Blast**303,424 = 3m00s (60%Healing Effectivness)**Vital Burst**134298 = 3m00s (60%Healing Effectivness)**Elixer Shell**120600 = 3m00s (60%Healing Effectivness)The only thing I've yet to figure out is Regeneration on this build, but i can assume that if engineer were to be able to perma upkeep regeneration on 10 people, with 60% Healing Effectiveness it is maxed out at 669600 Healing**Regeneration**669600 = 3m00s~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~**Conclusion**So if we were to add up all those numbers, without quickness and alacrity, the potential seems to be around 5.2 million...with quickness for Medblaster, that number goes up to 6.2 million. Again, I'd like to do a more consistent calculation so that we can compare it under the same conditions as other builds so that we can have valid comparisons (again this is rough back of the envelop calculation), but essentially you will at least have 1/2 uptime with quickness on a scrapper build and so it's valid to account for it when making a calculation for things like Medblaster which are greatly effected by it. So anywhere between 5.2 million and 6.2 million would be the realistic potential for this build.This leads to the next point, which is that Scrapper according to the potential has less Healing Potential as a Frostbow Heal Tempest. Now all builds have their pros and cons, and i think Scrapper has it's place for stacking up simultaneous healing via long duration pulsing heal fields (which can give you a more inflated HPS during bursts) but over longer durations, it will not out heal a Frostbow heal Tempest.Lastly, this thread isn't really meant to compare other classes and builds really... it's meant to show how effective one is using their build in an encounter. Based on the calculation, One could simply use Med Blaster the entire time and see "pretty" good results. One would weigh in a priority rotation, whether it's worth not using 2 applications of a medblaster in order to use Elixer Shell or Vital Burst etc...Anyway, i will get back to this thread with a more precise and consistent calculation so that there can be no arguments about it. If anyone would like to go head and do calculations using the method to corroborate our findings (It's best to find numbers that agree with each other) than we can be certain about whether anyone has made mistakes or not.Just a tiny note: if you do math about something in squad content, ALWAYS make sure to also include numbers WITH quickness and alacrity. And a big difference is that your builds seem to be full magis while Kitty's are always at least partly harrier since in real situation (pretty much always 80%+ BD), healer's job isn't just healing but also bringing at least basic boons like might, fury, quickness and alacrity while at it if class allows it.Your builds seem to be built as pure healers which have 0 value for most squads as that kind of heal output isn't required in ANY situation unless you're trying to solo heal something with super-high damage pressure and if the pressure ever gets that bad, at least in raids the situation is so FUBAR with failed mechs that it's a wipe regardless of healing power. Since you mentioned 10-target heals, this thread isn't about feactals either, where EVERYONE wants a healbrand. Is this all math for Boneskinner as that'd be the only boss your math would have any actual realistic relevance to and even then, that's only if squad doesn't know their stuff.In all honesty, if you do squad math without quickness+alac and using full magi's, there's no gamemode it'd be really relevant at in 95%+ of cases. Even WvW uses heal tempest as boonbot.

The way Kitty's been doing it when crafting heal support builds is calculating avg. healing per ally per second from each skill ( (base healing + healing power x multiplier) x total outgoing heals % ÷ realistic time between casts (cast time+cooldown or time you use it on as part of rota), values from wiki and also taking trait-related variation into account) and then summing them up to a total average heals per second for pretty close estimation of healing potential. Kitty also makes notes of burst heals and general healing floor to get an idea of how well it fits certain bosses based on knowledge about the bosses and "damage taken" data from logs (converted into incoming dps per squadie) and 10-target heals are counted as double their value to get valid comparison against most heal skills (at the cost of less accurate estimation of build's realistic viability as 5-target healer if a healer relies most on 10-target heals, read: tempest and heal scourge). When Kitty last did it a year ago, the numbers were something like this (potential healing per squadie) and they've hardly changed at all in PvE since then :Heal/boon Engineer 7200Heal Scrapper 6800Heal/boon Renegade 6000-6500Heal Frostbow Tempest 5500Heal Staff Tempest 5000Heal Herald 4500Heal Warhorn Tempest (aka. Auramancer) with Frost Bow 4000Heal Firebrand 3200 (Excl. blocked damage due to huge variation but increases heal potential vastly if blocking correct attacks)Heal 10-Mightbot Scourge 2800 (Incl. Barriers which count as proactive heals that usually have very little waste compared to reactive/rotation-bound heals)Heal GotL Druid with normal rotation 2800Heal 10-Quickness Chronomancer 2500Heal Mightbot Deadeye 2300Heal Shout Warrior 2000-2250 (at condi-heavy bosses) To give some perspective, average raid boss does about 800-1,500 damage per second (which is why most classes can soloheal less damage-intensive bosses if the healer knows their stuff) and Boneskinner, the most damage intensive boss by good margin in popular no torch-strat, does 2500-3000 damage per second. You usually want at least 10-20% margin if incoming damage bursts at all and that's probably enough to show why average druid is bad choice for Boneskinner despite everyone wanting one (toss a coin to your soulbeast...). Though Kitty can heal through it as 2nd healer with only warhorn equipped but even then she's so damn greedy mightbot that she outheals most druids by at least 50-100% so that's a moot point. If people want real carry heals, they better bring an engifriend who's watched Kitty's vids. Though the gyro rubs are so cold, Kitty's heard. Not to mention that engi has a certain ress utility that's more clutch than scourge resses in some cases. And dps engi can bring it with AED to cheese through 1-hit squad downed mechs like CA's clap.

Well, they have semihourly tourist tours so...

just dont make any sense. so all the elder dragon want to kill players and destroy Tyria? in this case why we need to kill Balthazar? just let him claim Kralkatorrik and let his army to deal with Primordus and Jormag? + the incoming ally is weak, no army from the other human god? Not to spoil much but it makes sense if you've gone through the story. In short: killing Elder Dragons sounds like a good idea but since they consune magic, their released magic energy needs to go somewhere and obviously one or two EDs having power of all 6 would be pretty OP to fight against. And that's not even the worst issue...

Blaming SC for people playing so meta-centricly (which they don't even really do 'cause they don' t know/understand the metacomps) is quite an ignorant statement, in Kitty the Offmeta Player's opinion. What many raiders have done and are doing is simply copy the gears and rotation from their site (usually not even learning the rotation properly since Kitty can out-dps them on memes that have 15k dps lower ceiling) and they rarely read their raid guides for those builds to learn how the meta builds should be used at various bosses.And ofc they go on chanting the meta gospel and kicking offmeta heretics, even if one person running an off-meta build with carry gimmick would turn constant wipes to easy 1-shot 'cause "BACK TO METABUILD OR KICK!!! 111". Kitty likes to refer to aforementioned type of players as "metasheep" and Kitty dares say that it's the raid community that is destroying itself. Like many problems in-game and irl, this could be avoided if more people thought with their own brain (and using common sense) or at least read the full guide instead of just the index. Though then again, these days 33% of people join the squads with wrong role 'cause they apparently can't read (approximation from Kitty's guild runs when she's needed to pug some roles, including healers joining as dps which happened twice in 10 minutes yesterday) so guess it's hard to expect more than Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V these days. sigh Apologies for excessive snark but Kitty's abandoned all hope of things improving. They really haven't in 3,5 years she's been raiding and trying to make a change.

For open-world: (these follow mostly dps metabuilds traitwise)-Power Scrapper (with Chronomancer runes)-Trailblazer's Mirage with Tormenting runes and Sigil of Strength, Energy and Bowl of Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew-Trailblazer's Renegade/Herald with same setup (except different food and not Energy sigil)-Trailblazer's Scourge with same setup as rene, maybe some minions as bonus in open-world-Power Renegade 'cause Dance of Death. Valkyrie armors+weapons, zerker trinkets, Roiling Mists traited, Strength runes, Energy+Frailty sigils, Bowl of Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew-Trailblazer's Firebrand with Mace as main-hand and Defender runes, Strength+Smoldering Sigils, Fire Meat Chili-Power Daredevil with IP+Trickery traited, Valkyrie armors (rest zerker), Accuracy+Strength sigils, Strength runes

Back in 2018, Kitty actually once had a website (Kittymarks) where she shared easier builds (that were laughed off as jokes since Kitty was derping a lot and she only had 300ish raid kills at that point) and she's also shown tons of simplified builds on her youtube but she's kinda stopped bothering as things that don't really seem to change. She's been just mostly getting flak for challenging the super-exp dps-focused players' views on what less experienced players should do and what'd be the most successful way for them to raid and she's just kinda given up on that after 2,5 years of trying to change things.

Tbh there could be a 4th option: try new ways of doing the old things. Yush, new things aren't meta but does everything need to be always optimal, always done in the same way again and and again for hundreds of times. ANYONE would get bored from that yet the hardcore player base insists on doing things that way, whine about lack of challenging content and how things are getting boring. In all honesty, Kitty actually finds hardcore community's way of thinking very illogical: they always try to cheese the content by taking the easiest way out (if you actually do the friggin mechanics instead of phasing with high dps before bosses do anything, stuff can actually get challenging) and they whine when balance changes to shake things up and they need to learn a new rotation. So yeah... Tbh, one of the big reasons why Kitty keeps on theorizing new comps, builds and strategies is to keep things fresh and challenging while still imbuing failsafes in case stuff goes wrong into her tactics and she's adding and stripping those failsafes as needed... Or abusing them to greeeeeed. What Kitty does isn't the most optimal way to play but she compensates by trying harder to get as close to optimal results on something that underperforms or needs to take a harder route to get the same results. And sometimes Kitty's strats are even more guaranteed to clear content that what people generally use simply due to abusing some gimmicks that are minor dps losses but make dying very difficult and allowing Kitty to do some extremely greedy stuff for extra dps that builds benching 3-5k higher can't even dream about doing.So, tl;dr metacentric hardcore community are themselves causing the very problems they have which could be partly remedied with change of attitude and Anet can't do much to fix them.

Are you familiar with T4 CMs, by chance? You don't even need to be super-meta to do decent enough damage. Purely auto-attacking with proper fractal build and pots alone should do over 20k during burns on pretty much all classes with any decent auto-attack weapon. 5k is pretty much healer-tier dps in fractals. (and Kitty's legit seen healers outdps some dpsers in T4 though that shouldn't really be possible unless the dpser doesn't even auto-attack or uses something incredibly stupid like camping water attunement as dps elementalist. Even autoattacking mortar engi does 20k.) And healbrand is meta simply because it can carry so ultra-hard and many pugs need that carry in non-CM squads. Rene can do some things better but it doesn't hard-carry as well.

Kitty also watched a bit and it looked pretty much like a build and L2P issue. The crit rate looked pretty low and you aforementioned having mantra heal trait which means you're trait-wise running a support-style build and if you don't have high healing power (which totally kills your damage), that just means you're getting tiny bit of extra sustain while taking way longer to kill stuff and since the incoming damage per sec is somewhat fixed and 98% likely higher than your sustain (HoT mobs hurt a lot but they're pretty squishy), that sustain actually works AGAINST you. HoT is about who kills faster and tactical evasion timings and even pure heal builds struggle against ganks due to inability to outsustain as solo.And in general, one huge problem about casuals is their builds. Game itself doesn't teach about builds at all and due to vast amount of options, many casuals drown in them and run very inefficient builds with low synergy (if any) which makes things innecessarily multiple times harder for them. Statistically majority of casuals do 5-10% of the damage that hardcores do and half of that 90%+ difference is gears+traits+choice of weapons.Be mindful about your positioning. At some points, Kitty noticed that you left enemies at your back and that easily leaves you blind to them. In HoT, bad positioning, not paying attention to what mobs are doing and wasting blocks/evades on minor attacks instead of heavy-hitters means death. As Sun Tzu wrote: "If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."Kitty's doesn't know what's your exact build atm but here's a good one for open-world. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PiwAExzlVwoYbsFWJW6WataA-zRIYhSND9VIRlABGCRUBqMLifGB-e-Use Focus instead of greatsword if you're fighting masses so you can pull enemies together. Use greatsword if you need to range something.-Using CCs (F3, Mantra, Gravity Well) and Well of Calamity apply Slow which means 100% crit rate and extra damage thanks to Danger Time and Superiority Complex.-If fighting boss mobs, start by summoning 3 clones with gs2+sword 3+sword 4 block and start Continuum Split. Use sword 5+Illusionary Disenchanter+one mantra charge+Well of Calamity+heal signet+sword 5+Disenchanter again during Continuum Split and repeat after the split is over for tons of phantasms and massive damage. Also use F3 and F1 whenever you have 3 clones for them. If you don't get downed during the split, this will also restore you to full health after split is over.

Human: elementalist, mesmer, necromancer, thief, engineer, guardian, warriorCharr: engineer (Iron), warrior (Blood), thief (Ash) and revenantNorn: ranger, warrior, guardianSylvari: necromancer, conniving vegetable thief, guardianAsura: elementalist, engineer, mesmer, guardian, warrior and occasionally ranger to take care of test subjects. Asuras are mostly above traditional thievery as they rather hack and scheme than use oldschool tricks.

Totally-super-hell NO! Whoever even suggests it on "it's enforcing the evil meta!" doesn't know history of instanced squad content at all. It's in fact THANKS to Arcdps that off-meta builds are tolerated. Back in 2017 only a few players, mostly the top-end, were using it and like many have already pointed out, commanders threw the blame of ANY failures on someone who was playing an offmeta build even if that player was hardcarrying the squad both mechanic and dps-wise. If you played offmeta, you were first to get kicked (if you somehow even got into the squad to begin with, it was really difficult).If it weren't for Arcdps, Kitty would've prolly quit the game long ago. Without it Kitty wouldn't have been able to test all the builds she has played and meta would also be way narrower than it already is as some effective dps builds would've never been discovered likely. So whoever wants to play outside the meta, you better be thankful that Arcdps is used so widely these days to allow that.

Well, you can always make a build that brings its own might and fury at the cost of potential dps but when it comes to quickness and especially alacrity, you don't have much choice about it unless you happen to play the boonbot (and like everyone knows, FB, chrono and renegade have monopoly on those boons) and usually the way to get full quickness+alacrity provides that for others, too, due to those boon skills being mostly AoE. Even then you need to make big enough compromises that you might be better off not trying to get anything (except might and fury) for yourself unless you indeed intend to play a boonbot. But if you create a fully self-supplied dps, you're just simply pointlessly nerfing yourself in squad content if there's any booners present. T4 fractals also used to be B.Y.O.B. but these days people just run a healer with boons for much better efficiency. (and due to nastier instabs than before+much lower skill level than people used to have in T4 so they need a carry now) In open-world, bringing your own boons as dps-esque build is usually a good idea, but squad content is whole another story. There's a good reason why they have separate builds, just like the difference between roamer and zerger in WvW.

Are those benchmarks with no external boons? With SC's raid boons since the basic set of boons is usually present in any instanced squad content with slight variations. No external boons would imply being completely alone and in such case, autoattacking without boons is irrelevant as 111111 just gets you killed and is so extremely ineffective that Kitty finds 0 point in showing how much damage that'd do. And the discussion was about "even xxxxxx does xxxx dps just by auto-attacking and somehow people do less than that by skillspam". Kitty's simply providing numbers on what a build in optimized gears would do in raid setting by purely auto-attacking. And now that Kitty thinks about it, she's actually sort of done personal autoattack challenge motes on druid and funnily she's been outhealing/booning 99% of druids without weapon skills or by using warhorn-only.

Scrapper would be a super-tanky dps with insane amounts of utility, though often frowned upon due to it's lower potential damage. Though its ability to pretty much ignore all incoming damage as power dps through barrier generation more than compensates for it with increased health-related bonus uptimes and capability of just taking short routes thru nasty stuff (and even dps the boss moving through it) while rest of the squad needs to take long route around with lower dps uptime. For aforementioned reasons combined with extreme utility (superb CC, superspeed, Function Gyro resses etc), Kitty's personal speedclear dreamteam would actually be 7 power scrappers, heal renegade, heal 10-quick chrono and power PS mightbot banner berserker.And ofc scrapper is the 2nd best raw healer in the game, only losing to core engineer a tiny bit but since support's foremost job is providing those boons for dps boosts, heal scrapper is almost never used as of now. But since people don't understand the awshumness of Scrapper and some like to threaten with "go holo or kick" ^1, you pretty much need a holo. Engi's options in endgame PVE are currently pretty much power dps holosmith and condi dps holosmith. (power = direct damage, condi = damage-over-time) ^1 Kitty had that happen 2 weeks ago when squad failed hard enough to need a carry and comm commanded Kitty to continue as holo instead of letting her carry on scrapper to make the Slothasor kill guaranteed. Obviously Kitty left as she didn't have more patience for spending another hour on something she could've made one pull if allowed to.

Boost druid's PVE heals, turn Frost Spirit to apply freeze and might on hit (as thematical opposite of Sun Spirit) while it still has might available thru Nature's Vengeance and druid is finally a rather equivalent option compared to others. (Spotter isn't mandatory even for many power builds.)Make Engi's turrets pulse 10-target boons with Improvised Turrets-trait (Kitty's been asking for this one for over 2 years now) and return quickness to Toss Elixir U (engi used to provide 60% quickness uptime for 5 with it), maybe also add the 5-target quickness to Kinetic Battery in Tools (to make it a choice of full might for 5 or 90% quickness for 5 as scrapper while core engi can get both while losing Function Gyro. Choicessss...).Give necromancer some partial group fury source (now it's literally the only class that can't provide fury for allies), you can name it "Fury of the Dead" or something.Make warrior's Mending Might also heal allies receiving the might by 69 + 0.04*healpower per stack they receive (so warr gets heals from all shared might stacks with reduced co-efficient while allies get heals with increased co-efficient thru received stacks).Give thief a quickness source through Leeching Venoms (replace siphon with 1s of quickness per stack used for everyone who hits enemy with venom) and Shadow Siphoning (Stealth attacks provide 2 seconds of quickness for 5, 3s cooldown). Those changes should make all healers more or less equal. Providing quickness would still require quite a snackrifice and even thief can't quickness, might+fury and dps/heal properly at same time, always a choice (while FB is still capable of that and more, hmm hmm). E: And in case people wonder how mesmer brings fury and might for allies now, keyword: staff ambush. If you rotate properly, full might and fury for 10 with Aristocracy runes while doing 70% of dps mirage's normal dps by using staff/axe+pistol swapping weapon off-CD and spamming ambushes in staff with 3 clones.

There is no built-in dps meter. Players use third-party software called arcdps. And while I in no way condone players sniping at each other over dps, I haven't personally found this to be in issue in T4 fractals as long as I avoid runs that specifically ask for experienced players. 2k-5k is enough anyone saying otherwise is toxic( not uncommon thinking) just play the build you like dont need to listen to anyone forcing you to play something you dont want to Yes, if you want to spend 20 hours doing a raid fullclear and three hours doing CMs + T4s + Recs in fractals. And probably one or two hours for strikes. Have fun. Do whatever you want, aslong as you stay out of groups that are asking for experience or efforts, thank you. If you join such groups, yes, you do need to listen, and you are the one being toxic by imposing your game standards to the group. Toxicity aside, coordinating the right strategy is important and that strategy changes based in large part upon the DPS output of the group. I had a group the other day where we wiped a few times on Subject 6 on T4 because there was confusion about which strategy we were using (And some of it was me! Sorry, guys!). Once we were on the same page, however, it was no problem. Subject 6 is a good example of a fight where dps matters and your strategy changes depending upon that. I imagine this would be a very difficult (maybe even impossible?) fight if your damage dealers only bring 2-5k dps to the fight. Still, that doesn't mean there isn't room to go off the beaten path with your build. On that T4 Subject 6 kill my group were basically using a meta comp: healbrand, alacren, banner zerker, with power holo as the other dps. But I like to play the way I like to play as long as it isn't causing problems for the group, so I just ran my open world build which is sword/focus fire/arcane weaver with dire stats. We burned the boss in 15 seconds, killing it well before any oozes could come near. Damage breakdown was holo 37.8k, me at 32.5k, banner zerker at 28.1k. For reference, even the healer did 4.3k. As I said, the bigger problem was me botching up the strategy! So, I think I have to agree with Antioche.7034 here, but I also think it's possible to play the way you want to play. You just need to be courteous of others. That means not just being polite in word, but also considering the reasonable expectations of others. If you can only manage 5k dps in a fractal, you really shouldn't be joining pickup groups for T4 fractals as dps. It's inconsiderate. I completly agree with your more developed post. You can absolutely play your own DPS build aslong as you are not joining very high-end groups (AKA 300+Kp fractal groups, 100+Kp raid groups etc) where people want specifically top DPS etc or specific classes, or doing incredibly suboptimal DPS/performance. What most people mean by 'I wish to play my own build' is 'I don't want to make efforts but still beat the content easely'. If your own builds performs really decently (Idk, 80% of the meta ones or something), you'll have absolutely no troubles in most groups and almost nobody will flame you. If it does 10-30% of the meta DPS build, that's not okay at all, and you should join groups composed of other people playing this kind of build. Basically, the only important thing in LFG is to joins group you do meet the requirements for. All the same, if you are one of the top players and head into a random group, you should be expecting people to not be up to your standards, and thus you should be fine with their level.That pretty much summarises the basic rules to follow when joining random groups.As experienced player who knows most bosses inside out, Kitty's pretty much set herself a few rules to follow: Never join super-exp clear group on build that Kitty's benched under 28k dps.Always use a build that benches above 20k if playing pure dps. (if using proper gears, Kitty very rarely benches below 20k unless the build is like "pure power weapon with viper's stats". Even rifle warrior benches above that.)If playing off-meta support, bring as close the stuffs a meta support does as you possible can and compensate some other way if you lack something (for ex. scepter+warhorn auramancer is guaranteed perma-boons for 10 and better heals at the cost of losing spirits compared to druid). Healer should always bring boons unless they're otherwise 100% guaranteedly covered by other healer/dpsers. Low dps should also compensate with increased utility.No bad memes at high dps check bosses (like Xera mid strat, KC and Qadim). The more mech-related movement there is, the more memeing is allowed (since Kitty's executing the mechs very purely usually).Obviously there's a big big difference Kitty and new raiders when it comes to skill and gears as Kitty's around 2000 raid kills now and she always uses ascended gears (though rune choices are sometimes quite memeful as Kitty's taken a liking to golemancer runes on asuras lately).And as such, Kitty kinda strongly recommends that new raiders use builds that they can do close to or over 20k+ dps at golem IN THEIR CURRENT GEARS (SC settings), no matter what they're wearing, so they can somewhat carry themselves even when getting ported and stuff (which lowers that 20k to 6-8k usually for new players). And though people obviously like to say "metametameta!", Kitty personally kinda recommends simplifying the gameplay and using some safeguards when learning bosses so the newbies can actually looks around during cooldowns instead of constantly looking at skillbar and figuring how to get back into meta skill loop after getting interrupted. ('Cause #1 DPS loss is getting interrupted and NOT knowing how to adapt which confuses and messes new raiders usually). As such, some builds Kitty personally recommends are power rene (Battle Scars on power rene is pretty OP heals, js.), condi shortbow-only rene (eeezy but pain to gear), kitless holosmith (relatively simple super-dps), kitless hammer scrapper (literal godmode), power banner tactics PS berserker (Mending Might heals omnom), power staff DD with Staff Mastery and Invigorating Precision (spam 2222 and Fist Flurry, no need to evade even), condi firebrand (blox), power hammer DH (literal 111111 and utilities), power tempest (Fresh Air, super-simpele), condi mirage (pain to gear, like mesmers always are), greatsword-only reaper and condi scourge. And ofc condi shortbow-only soulbeast which is super-OP at any mechanical boss.All the builds mentioned above are relatively easy to play and have decent dps combined with good utility and survivability without compromising performance even if playing less-than-optimally in not-so-exp groups with bad healers. It should also be easily possible to breach 20k dps at golem on any of those if gears have proper stats (as Kitty fairly often sees new raiders with random mixmash of stats, traits and weapon type with 0 synergy and she's been correcting them the best she can on the spot). And if less experienced raiders played those builds more, pug raiding might actually have better success rate.