voltaicbore.8012

I'd like to reiterate this. I personally play new games quite slowly, almost entirely solo. I spent a long time learning a few classes, then learning 1x meta build and 2-3 other builds of my own making, then acquiring 2-3 full exotic gear sets mostly through solo dungeon clears. Exotic gear came so easily along the way, because I wasn't in a rush. But this was when HoT was the only expansion released, and before living world season 3 was out. So even if I took it quite slow in the beginning, I had so little to catch up on. Fewer maps, fewer currencies, and even fewer traits/specs to learn. Even if the game was not good then (just as it's still not good now) at teaching all this stuff, there was just less to learn. I could reasonably learn everything at a very slow pace, and once I caught up, I became a "veteran" and only had to learn what each expac added as they came along. I can understand how players starting now don't feel like they have the luxury of taking it as slow as I did. There's a lot more content now, so many more choices that feel like you could be making the wrong choice. Here's the magic of GW2 though - there is never a point where you Must do the "Right" Thing, Right Now. In fact, the greatest disservice you can do is commit too early to just one idea of how to play, without even knowing how to make it work for you. I think the best approach is to not be afraid of deviating from your initial ideas to meet the challenges of the game. Once you crack the code, so to speak (of learning how to balance killing vs staying alive), you might be surprised at how effective "healing" builds can be in solo combat. But give yourself the chance to learn, which in turn comes from playing without following some other dude's guide like it's the bible. Read your tooltips, get gear piece by piece, learn attack patterns, learn your timings, etc.

This is about half your problem right there. GW2's instanced content has been... uneven at best. The first instanced content (dungeons) were officially abandoned quite early on, and the system that replaced it (fractals) is getting extremely slow updates. They finally added a third system (raids) during HoT, but raids are now pretty much officially dead as well. The game is on its fourth system now (strike missions), and those are getting updates for the foreseeable future, although some of the more recent updates are perhaps questionably in quality. It seems you're just trying to push too hard into a game that you really don't understand. You're still missing basic information like the fact that PvE is on megaservers (so it's not that people on "your server" are selling Harrier's for 14g, it's 14g everywhere), and have yet to make peace with the idea of needing dps in this game to solo. If you add me to your friends list and ask, I'll gladly carry you through literally every single expansion hero point and soloable dungeon, but it sounds like that's not really the experience you want. Correct me if I'm wrong though - like I said, I'll gladly help you out so you can get some hero points, get some coin, and get past this phase of "the game isn't allowing me to do what I want right now."

As long as GW2 can be kept 'alive' to the extent of the original GW, zero complaints from me. I play the vast majority of GW2 solo anyways, although I have to admit I'll miss giant meta events from time to time. As for whether or not I'd dive into GW3, at this point it would have to be pretty impressive to get my money.

Minion necro can solo the Guano HP (which is the vampire one from VB you're referring to) so long as you know how to cc it. the immob minion, chill minion, and flesh golem are more than enough to drain the breakbar, and you can always run staff for more chill and fear. I make most of my brand new necro characters full condi minion builds, so they can easily solo every single expansion HP, including the ones on your list. All it takes is knowing how to cc, when to cc, and when to pop into shroud for emergency survival. Outside of that it's just trying to help your minions secure the kills a bit faster.

GW2, in my experience, is one of the most generous games out there when it comes to providing information to players. It's why it came as such a pleasant shock to me that they included something like the Griffon collection, which was a complete secret that players stumbled upon during the early days of PoF. To the OP (and those agreeing with them), I suggest attempting to just... learn your way around the UI?

Agreed. The moment ele gets just a little too good at just a few too many things, it becomes something of a monster in competitive. Which is a shame, since with skill splits it's theoretically possible to have a weapon perform exceedingly well in pve but be nerfed more properly in competitive... but what we get instead are weapons that just kind of don't work anywhere. As for my own experiences with pistol, it worked surprisingly well with my meme earth-bleeding build; it seemed much easier to reach 40+ stacks of bleed. Switching to water for heals-on-hit felt okay, but the real disappointment was that fire stance wasn't that much better than earth on dps, which is ridiculous given how heavily burning should outperform bleeding with the right stats.

GW2's competitive modes suffer deeply from this, yes. Ironically WvW was supposed to be the "safer" competitive mode, because unlike 5v5 in sPvP, there was supposed to be less individual pressure when you run in a massive WvW group. But if you happen to be outnumbered (which of course happens all the time, especially to a new player), there's precious little to learn from getting curbstomped. Only lessons: don't defend, and run from any uneven matchup.

For your parameters, I highly recommend minion necromancer. You'll want to start with gear that combines condition damage and vitality, and as you level, keep going for those two stats but also favor sets that add a bit of power as well. That +condition, vitality, and power combination is the Carrion stat set others have already mentioned, and can serve you decently well at/around 80. This is how I'd run your build at level 80, primarily using scepter autoattacks. Although I have Ritualist stats, Carrion will still do okay. Doing so will consistently keep a stream of healing and barrier on you, as well as allowing you to apply (admittedly small) amounts of bleeding compared to other more tryhard builds. That said, it's enormously safe, with up to 33K HP with your minions constantly tanking for you and cleansing you of conditions. Also, if you ever want to do anything more than just autoattack, you do have access to higher level gameplay like corrupting boons and cc.

Which isn't to say someone at Anet couldn't find a way around the issue, but it would likely require a lot more effort than it's worth. I, too, would like to replay personal story (perhaps even redo some choices) on some of my characters, but I accept that may never happen due to the coding issues.

I meant in PvE. Like I said more big numbers coming out of teef in any of the competitive modes probably isn't going to happen (and if it does, won't stay that way for long).

Aside from outright favoritism, I think at least in sPvP centered around conquest guardian's fundamental design makes it hard not to be easily useful there. Among other things, conquest favors classes that can have an extremely strong presence on the node (big high IQ surprise there, I know). The way I see it, guardian from day one has really excelled in having a strong presence (significantly helping allies in the area, severely punishing enemies pushing into the area, etc.). Thief is both mechanically and thematically the opposite - it's all about not being obviously and oppressively present, but instead choosing fights extremely carefully, finding good opportunities to dogpile on targets while minimizing risk to the thief, and generally being quite effective at exploiting where the enemy is not around. None of these things line up well with heavy clashes - a problem that's even more exacerbated in the non-roaming large scale clashes in WvW. While I don't see a bright future for thief's ability to stand face-to-face in combat combat in competitive, I do think Anet needs to look at PvE thief. In a lot of other games the rogue archetype has one thing GW2 thieves don't have as much of: big 'ol nuke "assassination" type moves. Sure, we have stealth attacks and stuff like Death's Judgment, but it never feels quite as dramatically effective as it does in other games, at least to me.

Which, again, isn't what I was talking about, and is a perfectly valid way to play the game (not that you need validation from anyone anyways). You have made a decision about how far you want to push things, and nobody should impose a "well you should be pushing past that." I just think that if one can't be bothered to ask very simple questions and obtain extremely attainable answers (which again, @kharmin.7683, is a criticism you've shown doesn't apply to you), one can't sincerely say that one wants to improve their gameplay. Nobody needs or should improve their gameplay, so why pretend like you are? I personally think it's a social holdover, many of us have been socialized into thinking that the statement, "you don't actually want to improve" is always some sort of personal attack. It's not. This is a game. Not wanting to improve is fine, but I don't like the longstanding accusation that it's objectively difficult to find various avenues of improvement. I guess I'm pushing harder on this than anyone needs to because I see this "it's hard to even know how to go about getting better" as a longstanding misconception of the game. I consider GW2 very generous with information for the most part. Sure, you do need arc to measure a lot of metrics, but enough games natively lack such a tool suite so I don't hold that against GW2. I believe GW2 truly does have a low barrier to entry in many respects, and I don't like to see anything that runs counter to that narrative. Of course anyone is free to disagree with me, but that's just my take on it.

I'm 100% on board with your disclaimer sentiment. To test fireball shortly after I got it, I went to Drizzlewood for the first time in ages and did the meta normally. Then, only on the first phase of the final fight, I tried fireballing to see what kind of damage it could do. To my pleasant surprise, it could easily crit for 10-15K per fireball since you can hit all three targetable points with one fireball. The numbers were of course not very impressive, given the slow rate of fire and that you'll quickly run out of ammo even using Bond of Vigor for refills. So I dumped all the fireballs and headed down to the surface to offer more legitimate contribution. That being said, I can see a lot of new, inexperienced, or in general less combat-proficient players being outperformed by the fireball (thanks to the get-pushed-around mechanics all over that fight). As such, if someone who has trouble dealing with all that knockaround wants to float and fireball their way to a better performance, I think that should be a valid option. Not the option I would personally choose, and I'd always recommend learning to grow out of it, but I'd still rather have that option present.

And you seem all too willing to commit the common error of scope creep when things don't go your way. I certainly don't consider the game Serious Business, and I actually agree with your contention that most people aren't into metrics, improvement, etc. You simply made a contention earlier that "most actually do want to [improve] (but have no idea how)," and I sincerely disagree with that one concept. I think all the behaviors and preferences you advocate for (which I also agree represent most players) show that people don't actually want to improve their gameplay, they just want better outcomes. Which is fine! Just don't pretend like this acceptable majority of players actively desires improvement. As you say this game isn't Serious Business for most of us. The amount of "research" it takes to improve is absolutely minimal. We're not talking about comparing meta rotations for the most complex class and then practicing them to reach benchmark numbers here. It can literally start with the question: "could I be doing any better in X/Y/Z context?" That can lead to "how do I know how I'm actually doing in X/Y/Z context?" If you're too shy to ask in chat, you can just ask Google, which might lead you to lurk the forums/reddit. If you feel up to it, ask ANYONE in-game - be it your guild, or even just map chat randos - and you'll get the stock answers of snowcrows for builds/gear and arcdps to measure how you're actually performing. That's it. Literally all it takes is the capacity to formulate the question "how do I get better?" and then to Ctrl+V that into a box. Some "Serious Business" this "research" is. My point is that if one can't even be bothered to ask such easy questions and pursue such shallow knowledge (and thus remain ignorant of how to even improve), I sincerely question one's alleged desire to improve. All your bluster about "waaaah you're so sweaty, most people don't want to play like you" only seems to further contradict your earlier contention that "most people actually do want to [improve]."

I think this essentially proves @Gehenna.3625's point, and I share their non-optimism. If a pve player actually cares about their performance, there is a high probability they would have sought out and installed arcdps (the only other option is the combat log, which... is just hard to use). The fact that the vast majority of players don't use arcdps is, to me, a clear indication that the same majority of players don't actually care about performance. They might pay lip service to the idea, or respond affirmatively when asked if they want to improve, but in reality they've likely not even considered taking a concrete step toward improvement. And I don't want to make this just about arc (although arguably I could, given that there's really no other set of performance measuring tools that come close) - all the other resources could be great first steps, and they are widely known and discussed in-game. The fact that most players will never touch any of those is, again, a sign to me that most players don't actually care about getting better at combat. They're interested in better outcomes, but not increasing their own contribution to such an outcome.