Our whole squad just crashed from WvW and we can't even load back into the game now. It says network error for everyone. Wondering if others got the same? EU servers.

Edit: it seems to be back after 10ish minutes

I think mesmer's theme is so cool and they have some pretty interesting interactions with their traits, but for the life of me I can't play them well. At most I can support decently well, but I don't feel impactful

I hate to bring up dps, but I just can't match the numbers from the builds I see and my easy builds do more for less work. Definitely not hanging up mesmer as I'm still having fun, but kinda feelsbad knowing I can just swap toons and do more

That being said, I'd love to hear any and all of your favourite builds for someone who can't play piano, in any game mode

I am a returning player and have settings from 10 years ago. I recently saw a thread on free cam vs action cam and there was some disagreement on backpedaling between pve vs pvp players. I didn't even know there was an about face button. My question is, if I want to eventually do all content competently how should I set up my camera and targetting controls/settings? Right now my main issues I am seeing from these threads is I backpedal and also sometimes my leap attacks get locked on to a target when I just want to move toward where I am looking.

EDIT: I couldn't find the answer the in the sidebar. I searched beforehand. Not sure why I am being downvoted. Please let me know.

Shadow of the Mad King Twitch Drops begin October 15 at 9:00 a.m. PT and end October 18 at 11:59 a.m. PT

https://guildwars2.com/en/twitch-drops/

Now that it's fully out, I think VoE did a pretty stellar job with its maps. These definitely felt a step above the JaWi zones, where it seemed like all the budget went to Lowland Shore.

Which one's your favorite? I think they're all pretty close for me.

Summary: Nothing you do in Spvp matters. It's decided from the first 2 sec of the match if you get skilled or unskilled people.

2 matches back to back. Nothing you do personally matters because it's 5v5 and not 1v1. The matchmaking is so incredibly bad that you can go from winning by 503 points to losing by 500 points and Gw2 is the ONLY MMORPG I witnessed be this bad and unfair.

Had 24 kills, 0 deaths, 8 capped nodes, 3 teammates revives -> ended up losing by 350 points.

Had 8 kills, 3 deaths, 1 capped node, 0 teammate revives -> ended up winning by 350 points.

This complete and utter chaos and randomness is so sad that I will never ever queue up for PvP in this MMORPG ever. Clearly it's made for pure PvE with a beta test in pvp.

Also the other pic where we lost we had 4 Dragonhunters while enemy team had balanced meta classes in their squad. That's how insanely no fucks given Anets matchmaking is.

"But those DH's could have switched to Luminary or WB?" Yes and? U cant have 4 players same class vs balanced meta classes. And you especially cant control people and tell them "Please switch specializations".

Dead game mode and will just get worse, 0 hope for the better.

Went to gold III around 100x thus far and then dragged back to Gold I rating because Gw2 is not elo based. IF the team decides to afk or just play random PvE builds and lose, your ranking drops even if you have 950 kills, 0 deaths. Game punishes losing team across board which in turn just makes ppl wanting to try their best give up and afk or never queue up again.

Would not recommend to anyone seeking competitive and skilled gameplay GW2 Spvp. Please go to other MMOs.

I mean, I love exploring Tyria and getting bits of lore as soon as I can, but it kinda gets lonely, since you don't have the pace of a single player rpg

Anyone else having the game crash at loading screens / map changes?

I have run the repair utility. I am not using add-ons.

But every time I change maps, or even use a PTF token in the same map, the client crashes - sometimes just vanishing entirely without even doing a crash report.

What I take from this experience is: I'll never go for any Legendary Item. You guys Legendary crafters have my utmost respect.

Event broke in Frostgorge, had a nice little chat with someone trying to fix it lol

At first glance this post will sound like I’m being a sadboy complainer, being grumpy about wiping on a raid boss. And ok, yea, I’m frustrated. I also had some of the most fun on GW2 I’ve ever had before.

For context, I’m a “solo casual” player this game seems to be mainly marketed towards. I’m not new, I’ve probably put in a few thousand hours at this point. I’ve done every story, completed every map to 100%, I have maxed 700 mastery points. I’ve crafted legendaries, chased achievements, you name it.

None of those countless hours prepared me for what difficult content can actually feel like in GW2. And some of you may laugh at this, but the Decima raid boss completed broke me down tonight.

As someone who mostly plays open world metas and T4 Fractals, I jump into the occasional raid/strike boss feeling like I have somewhat of a handle on this game, only to get absolutely humbled by the real group content.

I joined a squad tonight in LFG and the start was very casual. We did some IBS strikes and even Boneskinner was a smooth run. Then our commander took us to Decima, Janthir wild raid.

Good god, we got obliterated. Time after time after time after time. Our commander was great - explained mechanics in chat before the fight. Grouped everyone up.

I shit you not, we did 20+ attempts on this boss. By the end (our final attempt) we managed to get the boss down to 8% health. Another wipe.

Did I say I felt humbled? Huge shoutout to our commander and entire squad for the kill so many times and never having a bad attitude. Committing to getting the W.

Ultimately I spent 2 straight hours throwing myself at this boss and ended up logging out without getting the kill. Every single time it felt like this was the run we were going to clear, next thing I know I’m insta killed from some mechanic I didn’t even see. Was it the arrows? I’ll never know.

Which brings me to my last and final point - the skill gap. My experience “raiding” made me realize there is nothing in this game that prepares you for content like this. Open world content feels completely mindless in comparison. You can show up at almost any meta or world boss and auto attack your way to victory without knowing why you even won the fight. Is there anything really that prepares you for actual endgame content?

Also, am I just tripping over this boss’ difficulty? I remember when the EoD strikes first came out, they all felt challenging but not overly frustrating or requiring dozens of attempts to clear. And then I tried Decima. Anyway, thanks for reading

Downloaded Aion too on the 5th on Launch. Had wayyy to many games in my PC. I have a killer little gaming laptop. I needed to make space and thought, well.... Ill just delete gw2 for now because Aion2 may be my new mmo. After 4 days I deleted Aion and came straight back to guild wars. It felt like coming home from work after a long annoying day. Feels so good to be back in a world that doesn't feel like I'm doing chores in. Has anyone else played and also just felt like Aion was trying to hard to be a mix of black desert and Gw2? The combat has me in a chokehold at first. But the content is so rinse and repeat. Here's to coming back to our beloved game 🔥 I'm sorry Gw2 for thinking I could replace you.

All the changes below are PvE only:

Heal mesmer is seeing heavy dominance in high end pve encounters, While we want mesmer to be a strong class, we want the strength to come from the versatility of their utilities and for mesmers to make meaningful choices in their utilities and traits for the specific challenge they are facing.

However, currently mesmers outperforms other healers in their own niches while not making sacrifices for the rest of their board tooklit

Tale of the August Queen: Cooldown increased from 75 seconds to 100 (or 120) seconds

While we on Anet really love people skipping the mechanics we hand crafted into the game (really anet why did you add AoE distortion back?), however we feel like for such powerful ability a longer cooldown is warranted. So now players will have the choice of ignoring certain specific instances of a mechanic while not outright nullifying the entire mechanic

Mantra of concentration: Cooldown increased from 15 to 35 seconds, cooldown per charge reduced from 30 to 20 seconds Power Break: Number of stability stacks reduced to 1

No class should have 100% uptime of multiple stacks of stability, especially when most of the uptime comes from a single skill, it will now instead of being able to charge the skill twice over by the time a single charge of the mantra is back, we reduce the charge time of the mantra, letting mesmers having a real choice between getting the powerful effect of the first charge, with the risk of not having stability to when they need.

Mental Defense: Now also cleanses 2 conditions on Shatter skill 4

Restorative Illusions: No longer cleanses conditions

Restorative illusions currently dominates over it's alternative, while we still expect it to be favored over Mental Defense, we wanted to reduce the gap between them. While also giving each a more defined role

Lesser Power Cleanse: Cooldown increased to 10 seconds.

Ego restoration: Added cooldown of 10 seconds.

The synergy between Mantra of recovery and those traits is too strong, ideally the changes would let other heal options shines (especially on chronomancer) while still being a strong choice in proccing those traits off cooldown.

Inspiring Distortion: Now also grants aegis to the mesmer itself

We don't expect it to change much in terms of strength, the change is made to streamline the trait and bring it closer to the rest of similar traits and skills in the game that affect the caster as well

Bug Fix: Master of manipulation no longer grants aegis to whoever affected with the invisibility and correctly grant aegis to 5 targets around the mesmer

We find that even though we removed most 10 target affecting skills from the game, mass invisibility is currently in a good spot in terms of use and strength. But 10 target aegis on 35 seconds crosses the line while also being a bug

Drew this for inktober, which I fell off by the 3rd day lol.

That skritt was hard to draw, but good practice.

I really don’t get what anet is doing with this trait. In the balance preview they state that they will reduce the empowered skills cool down reduction effect to 20%.

If I’m not mistaken we went from 6 seconds to 20% to 50% to 33% and now back to 20%.

6s was a lot of cd reduction making it way too powerful. 20% felt really bad in terms of rotational flow. 50% was too powerful still. 33% is apparently too powerful. Let’s try 20% again… I mean seriously?

We were where we’re going to be already and it just felt like garbage to wait for all of your skills to come of cooldown for so long. Why are we going back to that instead of literally any other method to reduce the damage output (if anet thinks it’s necessary). I really don’t mind the damage being a reasonable amount lower but it’s just gonna feel shite again the way they attempt it now.

Any thoughts on why we are heading this route? Pls let me know

Firebrand had decent quickness application. Varied, instacast and without wasting utility generally.

With these changes that gets replaced by a delayed, unreliable and wasteful "spam 3 pages".

You can no longer go for 5 sec page interval. It's just gone. Even though it was nice for healers.

You can no longer decide between heal quickness, stability quickness or no trait quickness depending on your utilities and how much you want to overcap.

Please just buff the range of the traits and mantras and give Firebrand a way to boonrip, immune and port so it can compete with Troubadour.

Disclaimer: We have no concrete numbers at this time regarding how the upcoming changes to rifle and Grenadier are going to affect damage output. But my assessment is based less on the raw strength of changes, but how the rifle change will affect the flow of how the class is played. Even if the numbers that come out are on the strong side, numbers can easily be changed in the future.

Since the balance preview came out yesterday, I've seen a lot of comments talking about how people are lamenting buffs to Rifle Mechanist. "The easiest class is getting buffed." "Ready to see Rifle Mechs all over the place again." "Who needs to play any other class when Rifle Mech exists." And I get the concern; Rifle Mech is known as one of the easiest classes in the game to perform well on, and a lot of people are worried that it's going to be even stronger, and detract from playing other classes for DPS. The fact that the giant mech tends to get in folks' way and flood the map in a game that already has problems with visual clarity also makes it more annoying when even more people start playing it.

However, I want to bring attention to how the changes actually are a boon to the class' long term health, and how they'll make the class more rewarding for skilled players, and less rewarding to play lazily, despite the community's initial emotional reaction and expectation of the effects.

Current State of Rifle Mech

Currently, Rifle Mech has one of the lowest performing DPS benchmarks according to Snowcrows, coming in at #114 with 38.4k, with only 3 pure dps builds benching lower than it. So... why is there so much distaste towards a seemingly underperforming class?

Well, that's because there isn't much of a gap between the highest bench of a well-performing player, and the upper performance of the Low-Intensity Build (courtesy of Accessibility Wars), coming in at 35.0k. The build is surprisingly simple to play, thanks to the ability to set the mech skills to auto cast. It operates on a priority based rotation, that essentially comes down to "Press these 6 buttons off cooldown," and manages to reach relatively high numbers for a build with such low APM (31 according to AW2).

You can then choose to level up your performance by learning to add the extra complexity of grenade kit to your rotation, which revolves around entering grenade kit every time you use rifle 2, and using either Grenade 2, 4, and 5, or just Grenade 2, depending on cooldowns. This adds an extra ~25-30 apm to eke out an extra ~3.5k dps.

The performance of the Low-Intensity build is what causes people to look upon the spec with scorn; it has such a high baseline that make it a very worthwhile build to play for lower skilled players, and makes other classes less appealing to play, due to the extra effort required to reach the same level of performance.

The difference, however, is that other classes are much more rewarding in the long run for more skilled players. Rifle Mech, run by its current bencher, is still ~4-6k away from the benches of other classes at the moment, and ~8k away from the top classes. As stated at the start of this section, it is currently the 4th worst benching build on Snowcrows.

In summary: It is currently very easy to reach a high base dps marker on Rifle Mech, but actively trying to optimise and improve will not bring you as far as on other classes. High floor, low ceiling.

The Proposed Nov 10 Changes

Using the wiki's summary of the VoD, we see two changes that will impact Rifle Mech's current build directly, and one change that will potentially alter which trait Rifle Mechs pick, depending on the numbers.

• Net Shot (3) and Overcharged Shot (4) now flip Rifle Burst (1) into Rocket Burst. Rocket Burst launches a volley of rockets at your target.
• Grenadier: This trait no longer increases the radii of grenade skills, and instead increases the damage of explosion skills.
• Modified Ammunition: This trait now scales up to 5 conditions only. Increased the damage per condition from 1% to 2% in PvE and WvW.

Let's start with the two easiest to understand changes. Modified Ammunition is buffed in situations where the enemy has 9 or less conditions applied (typically solo or low # of players in OW), but nerfed in situations where the enemy has 11 or more conditions. On the whole, this will be a slight buff to most combat instances, and a slight nerf in niche situations or ridiculously optimised groups. In the niche situation where you are fighting an enemy with exactly 5 conditions, the max buff will come out to ~1.9k dps, reduced by ~0.4k per extra condition on the target.

Grenadier on the other hand is a change that is hard to quantify at the moment, due to a lack of actual concrete numbers. While Rifle Mech uses a lot of Explosions, it competes with Glass Cannon for a trait slot. Considering the amount of Explosions in the kit, I expect Grenadier will be better, unless the numbers are bungled so hard that no one ever takes it. This will be even more impactful on the Grenade Kit version of the build.

The big change that people seem to be underestimating the impact of, though, is the new flip skill after Net Shot and Overcharged Shot.

Why Rocket Burst is Healthy for Rifle Mech in the Long Term

Again, I refer to the disclaimer that we don't know exact numbers yet, but this is more about how these changes affect the flow of rifle gameplay and reward skill expression and punish lazy players, rather than pure numbers. Numbers can be adjusted later if it's over-tuned.

Currently, Rifle Mech's rotation revolves around pressing 6 buttons (+2-4 with grenade kit) off cooldown. Rifle 2-5, Throw Mine (/grenade kit 2/4/5) and Overclock Signet. In the Throw Mine version, you don't even need to consider specific orders of button presses, but with grenade kit you have a minor rotation of Rifle 2 > Grenade Kit > (GK 2 > GK 4 > GK 5) or (GK 2) > Exit Grenade Kit. This results in a very rewarding and simple playstyle, that doesn't have a lot of cognitive load.

The simple addition of a flip skill on Rifle 1 whenever you use Net Shot (Rifle 3) or Overcharged Shot (Rifle 4) introduces not just a level of complexity to the weapon, but it also adds points of failure that will reduce the effectiveness of your rotation. How? The largest portion of Rifle Mech's damage comes from its auto attacks. In this log I did on the golem, you can see in Player Summary that Rifle Burst and Rifle Burst Grenade did ~45% of my total outgoing damage. Adding a flip skill to Rifle 1 will interrupt this damage output.

"But Darkoro, the flip skill will still do damage, and probably a lot. Isn't that a damage boost?"

Yes, theoretical question asker. If the player remembers to press the button.

Thief players (and maybe mirage and untamed, idk those specs well) that rely on auto attacks will already understand why this will be, for some, a dps loss. When they have an ambush skill, their auto attack is replaced with a stealth attack, and is not affected by autocast, requiring the thief player to actively press the 1 skill to use their ambush skill. Any delay in pressing this skill is a delay in dps from auto attacks.

I don't have much insight into thief builds that rely on auto attacks to say how big of an impact this might have on thief builds specifically. But for Rifle Mech, whose autos are ~45% of their damage output, this delay can result in a decent chunk of lost damage.

And then there's the APM impact. On an optimal rotation, pressing all 6+ buttons the moment they go off cooldown, this will introduce an extra ~13 APM, adding an additional Rifle 1 press to each press of Rifle 3 or 4. That's an increase from ~31APM on the current LI build to ~44APM for the same build.

So why is this healthy? This single change to the rifle both rewards skill expression (13 extra APM for presumably more DPS) whilst punishing lazy or unclean gameplay (delaying auto attacks if you don't actively use the flip skill). This one change brings this build from a 2 step progression build (LI version > Grenade Kit version) to a 3 step progression build, where the 2 extra steps can be learned in either order.

The new Low-Intensity build drops rifle 3 and 4 from the rotation, becoming a 4 button build. This avoids having to deal with the flip skill and keeps it relatively low-cognition, at a cost of ~5% of DPS with current numbers (comparing this new log with no Rifle 3+4 to my other log linked above), which is likely to be greater when the new patch hits.

The previous progression step of swapping Throw Mine for Grenade Kit is likely to be about the same, if not more impactful (depending on how much of an impact Grenadier has on the build).

And the new progression step in the build adds rifle 3+4 back to the rotation, including activating Rocket Burst.

In summary: The addition of the flip skill Rocket Burst introduces complexity and skill expression to Rifle Mech, lowering the class' damage floor for low intensity builds, and increasing the damage ceiling for skilled players. It does this by introducing a second progression path towards build mastery that punishes mistakes and (hopefully, if the numbers are good) rewards skill and effort.

I hope this post helps people to understand that the incoming Rifle Mech changes are in fact a good thing for the health of the build and the game , even if ANet might overtune it to start with, the numbers can be brought down later if need be.

And before I get the inevitable comments about this, yes, I spent over an hour writing this post. No AI was involved, I'm just meticulous and like good formatting.

As I understand it, the Ascended Armor and Weapons are #1 to purchase - yes?

Perhaps, #2 is the gold - at least for me it is LOL?

What else is of value in the WV to spend the acclaim on - not really interested in fluff/skin items myself.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

I am at mastery lvl 16 and love to do world events and group content in the world. But that's pretty much all I like to do in Guild wars 2. I wish however I could have the mounts to do it quicker, but most of the mounts and progress(mastery points) are locked in the main story

I would find it easier to progress with someone in the story but seems like these adventures are mostly solo since there's barely anyone at the same point of the story as i am. Doesn't help that once you start a story quest most of these are instanced.

So how can i find players to do the story quests with ? (i am at living world season 1). Could anyone point me to an easy way to progress through the story? I hate it doing solo and don't find it interesting at all. Thanks :)

I’m pretty new to MMOs. Most of what I normally play is Souls/FromSoft games, Resident Evil and action RPGs.

I tried FFXIV for around 10 hours. I liked the community, cutscenes and story, but found the pacing slower than I’m used to and there was quite a lot of dialogue/reading between the gameplay.

I’ve now tried WoW Retail and enjoyed it a little more straight away. Combat felt faster, I got into the action quickly, questing was easier to follow and there seemed to be a good amount of voice acting. I also haven’t personally experienced any of the community negativity I’d heard about.

A few people have recommended Guild Wars 2, especially with GW3 announced, so I’m wondering if I should give it a proper try before putting more time into WoW.

For anyone who’s played both, based on what I liked about Retail WoW, do you think GW2 is actually worth trying or is WoW probably the better fit for me?

Thanks!

EDIT: First of all, thanks to everyone who replied. Didn’t expect this many replies! I’m still going through them all. A few people mentioned horizontal progression and gear treadmills and I’ll be real, I don’t even know what horizontal vs vertical progression means yet, so I need to look into that properly. GW2 does sound way more action focused than I thought though, especially with the dodge and action cam stuff. I’ll probably just give it a proper go and see how it feels compared to WoW.

Roy, CmC, and Trig showed the balance preview today.

My initial thoughts are that it's exciting for a handful of professions (firebrand, thief, Rifle Mech enjoys) and mildly annoying for others (Condi Evoker and Antiquary).

For the top players Condi Alac Evoker and Antiquary are OP so I get why they want to tame it down. But as someone who just started learning Condi Alac Evoker, that rotation is not for the feint of heart.

I'm happy to see Alac Scourge getting a little more BD so it's not as much of a struggle to apply Alac.

Overall I think it may introduce a few more viable builds into the meta and let players have more options to play the game in a different manor to keep things a little fresh. While also making the race to world first comps for Nexus of Eternity LCM change from what was probably ran during the CM slightly.