6461

That just sounds so weird to me. I can’t even imagine how new character personal stories go now.

6462

I can’t imagine non-instanced personal story content. Personal story is the only part of the game where you are the hero (or at least, ahem, the right-hand man of the hero. Stupid Traeherne!). It’s where giant set pieces play out resulting from your decisions. It’s the last place where you would want a bunch of strangers to suddenly jump in and steal the kill that makes your legend.

6463

Lion’s Arch is still a functional location, it’s just that the architecture isn’t quite so impressive any more.

And I believe that the only personal story episode there is one where you just watch a conversation or two.

6464

A couple days late here but oh man the ten dollar sale was a fabulous move on their part, as I bought a couple keys for friends who might not have played otherwise. It’s an absolute steal for the amount of fun there is just leveling up and experiencing the cooperative nature of the game.

6465

It has become clear to me that my awesome gun warrior build from the winter of 2013 probably isn’t quite as uber as it used to be.

Anyone got a suggestion on where one might find builds that are up to date with any class balance patches?

6466

Try this wiki: http://metabattle.com/wiki/MetaBattle_Wiki

6467

Excellent, thanks FB!

6468

My warrior made it to level 2 before I got bored and deleted him so I’m not sure what this is worth but I did hear that today’s update included some kind of buff for rifle warriors. Way more importantly, a huge 30 second cooldown reduction to Mesmer’s Time Warp. As the old song goes: let’s do the Time Warp more frequently!

There’s actually an attack on LA as part of the personal story. You defend Claw Island, a fortress at the entrance to the harbor which is only accessible during the personal story missions but is still technically part of LA.

It’s kind of funny to play that mission now because all of the NPCs are so concerned about the possibility of an attack on LA and how Claw Island has never been taken in blah blah a lot of years and I’m kinda like “uh guys, have you turned around in the past year or so?”

6469

I only stumbled across it the other day, when I was looking for engineer build tips. (I decided to just ignore the meta and play what I like. I wanted a build I could easily switch between turrets and kits, and that’s sufficiently not-optimal that nobody is going to post builds for it.) Seems like a nifty resource, though.

Mike, I have an alt that’s in the Lion’s Arch part of the story now, too, and it’s a little odd going between city in good shape and ruined city. I think it would make more sense if the personal story were presented as flashback, since that’s definitely what it is at this point.

6470

What’s funny is that I played for a while last night and one of my old buddies from DAOC logged in. I told him about respeccing and that I was probably going to change to Great Sword from rifle and he mentioned that GS got nerfed a while back. Reading some of the builds though, still seems viable.

6471

“Viable for what?” is probably the more pertinent question. You can play with pretty much anything in the open PvE world during leveling. Just pick a few skills to try, hop in, and have fun. If you don’t like any of them, swap them out for something else. That’s why getting back into Guild Wars 2 is so much easier than other MMOs. You don’t have stacks of hotbars full of commands to remember. It’s a lot like Diablo III.

But if you’re looking for optimized builds for PvP, WvW, dungeons, or fractals, then I’m guessing there are tougher choices to be made, and you do need to be familiar with more of the tools for any given class.

-Tom

6472

Personally, I’d lump WvW in with PVE as well, in terms of “anything goes” (cue the music!), at least that was my experience with it previously. Since you’re part of a larger group or a zerg, your individual contributions are muted. Players are trickier opponents but I’d still take the same approach of “slap some stuff on your hotbar and replace what you don’t like”.

6473

Viable for…playing anything in the game at my level probably! Went to just do some resource collecting and mob-bopping for dailies and found myself getting in trouble against stuff at or just below my level and realized that I probably needed to take a closer look.

For the near term though, likely PVE for dailies, the episodes, and then trying to become a non-liability in dungeons or fractals.

6474

This has always been one of my main issues with Guild Wars 2, and one that’s primarily responsible for me taking an extended break from the game. I don’t have any issues doing stuff out in the open world, but I never feel like I’m playing my class (and perhaps the game) right, and worse, I don’t really know what I can do to improve. In WoW, I could run a damage meter, find out where I am relative to other players in group content, and if I was low it was usually fairly easy to determine if it was gear, rotation, or both holding me back so I could work on it.

In GW2, I never really fully understood the gear stats, what made up optimum builds, which skills/weapons were best, and rotations. As a result, I’ve always felt awkward in dungeon content, particularly since the other players always seem to breeze through everything. There was a time when I ran dungeons with 4 friends, but one of them had to leave and when we started picking up a random 5th, they either fussed at us for being so slow to kill stuff and run the dungeon or said nothing and eventually dropped.

And all of us are seasoned WoW players and have beaten top raid and dungeon content at one time or another. We’re all capable, but there was never anything which brought us over the hump in GW2 so we could move from open world newbies to competent end-game players. In GW2’s defense, that’s in part because we invested more time in learning our classes in WoW, but even in the early days it was far easier and quicker to find the info needed to make the same transition, and WoW (plus addon authors) provided more tools and feedback to identify issues.

6475

I’ve never played WoW hardcore, and certainly not as much as I’ve played Guild Wars 2, so I can’t comment on the differences in terms of what information is available. I don’t even know what a “damage meter” is, but I presume it’s a third-party add-on that shows how everyone’s doing in a dungeon relative to each other.

But my experience with Guild Wars is that it’s totally upfront about information. If you check the tooltips, you’ll find pretty much everything you need, and it updates as you change gear, stats, and so forth. For instance, when my ranger weilds an axe, she has an ability that inflicts bleeding for six seconds. The tooltip clearly indicates this and it indicates the total bleeding damage that will be inflicted. When I then equip something fitted with a minor rune that extends bleeding duration by 10%, the tooltip for the axe ability shows 6 1/2 seconds, with the total damage adjusted accordingly. During battle, the amount of damage each attack does floats up as a number, along with a number and icon showing my bleed damage as it triggers. If I need to track it more closely, it’s all in the combat log.

What more do you want to know? If you’re confused about the stats, they’re all explained. Not sure what ferocity is? Tooltip! There aren’t even that many stats. And the tooltips for abilities changes as the stats change. It’s easy to see the relationships among the moving pieces. Want to know how your armor stat is derived? Just add your toughness to the sum total of whatever gear you have equipped. That number is right there on your screen and there are no under-the-hood hidden adjustments.

I guess I don’t get the complaint that you don’t understand this stuff. It’s all in there.

-Tom

6476

To be honest, even though the information is there to be found, it’s not presented in a way that facilitates comparisons.

For instance, are you better off with a PvP Berserker amulet or an Assassin’s amulet? One has higher power, and other has higher precision. Since precision affects on-crit procs, the answer will vary by build. And since crits don’t happen on every strike, a single number is not enough. You really need to pore through the combat log and tally a bunch of events. Or you can make a spreadsheet that simulates a period of combat, but that assumes optimal play.

If you’re lucky, someone has already looked into your question and posted their findings. Now imagine trying to decide between 4/4/6/0/0 Berserker’s + Strength runes vs 6/4/4/0/0 Assassin’s + Eagle runes. You’re probably on your own.

It would be much easier if the game just summarized your cumulative damage output over the last X seconds, for use as a benchmark. The closest we can come is to fight a golem and time how long it takes to die.

6477

Personally, I feel like that sort of thing is not seeing the forest for the trees, to a degree. Those parsers make sense for WoW where it’s typically been about pushing your rotation while making sure you’re not standing in fire. I find GW2 abilities and gameplay to be more situational than that, though. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to know if Amulet X is slightly better for the build than Amulet Y, but I feel like knowing how and when to use the abilities in your build is more important than which amulet your character dons.

That’s all just IMO, but that was things felt when I played the game.

6478

The short of it is that you are almost always better going for Berserker’s gear. There are a few fringe cases where other combinations might be stronger, but even then Berserker’s isn’t a bad choice.

Which is kind of unfortunate, but there it is. I would love to play my kit engineer as more of a support/healer but the bonuses you can spec and gear into don’t justify it.

6479

BTW, I do appreciate all the discussion, and also the discussion of the discussion!

To clarify just a bit–last night I finally spent some real quality time on my 80, instead of leveling up an alt like I’d been doing. I realized pretty quickly that my uber, if slightly disturbing looking, gear and build were probably significantly less uber 20 months later. I’m still looking at different ideas for gear, but that’s obviously a longterm thing to work towards. In the meantime, I was mostly interested in seeing if there were any quick build fixes that might keep me upright longer.

6480

A damage meter is a third-party addon that summarizes a wealth of information (damage done/taken, healing done/taken, DoT uptime, etc.) parsed out of the combat log. At it’s simplest, it’s a way to measure damage you and other players did over the course of a fight, both in terms of total damage done and dps. A lot of folks look at them negatively because in group situations the less desireables will use them to both criticize others while boasting about themselves. However, it’s also a great tool when used properly for determining how your performing. Curious if using gear to provide a higher level of crit over raw damage increase or vice versa will help? Put the gear on, go kill stuff (or use a target dummy), record the numbers then repeat with the other set.

I guess I don’t get the complaint that you don’t understand this stuff. It’s all in there.

First, I recognize this is very much my own feelings towards the game and players who have invested as much time as you or more into GW2 probably think this is second nature. I will also admit that it’s very possible that the situation has improved over what it did when I was playing all the time. I know they’ve overhauled the character UI a number of times and added the combat log to make the information easier to discover. Tooltips are all there, and have been improved as well. However when I try to fiddle with the different moving pieces (armor, runes, weapon/abilities, talents, boons/conditions) without some way to measure the differences over time, I get no sense of whether I’m improving myself or not. On top of that, I have never had a good feeling for how much combos play a part, or should play a part, in your dps. And it’s probably a testimony to how poor a player I am in end-game, but I have also always found that when I spec out for maximum damage, my survivability goes way down, and I spend more time on the ground doing negligible dps. So on top of all the other parts, I’ve got to find some mix of survivability stats so I don’t die when a champion looks at me wrong.

Don’t get me wrong…I’ve been a huge fan of Guild Wars 2 from a long time before the game released. The game is gorgeous, the open world is a ton of fun to play around in, the dev philosophy in general is completely inline with what I wanted in an MMO after getting burnt out in WoW, and I’ve always been impressed with how quickly they released content, as well as their willingness to alter the world permanently.

What I am doing is expressing a bit of disappointment that when I was ready to move into the end-game content (even just level 80 5 mans), I stumbled hard and failed to make the transition because I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on all the moving parts. I’m sure if I spent a bunch of time researching outside the game, or even discussing it in depth in places like this, I could become a much better player. But I do think the game could be (or maybe could have been?) just a touch more intuitive from my perspective. I don’t expect everyone (or really anyone outside my old group) to agree with me.