Besetment.9187

I feel like running Glass Staff Weaver in a squad and on tag ignores what the class and the weapon is good at. There are just so many reasons why its suboptimal: (1) Weaver is one of the most selfish classes in the game. It demands a lot of resources but unlike Rev/Necro/Guard doesn't share much utility and boons with allies in close proximity.(2) movement interrupts meteor shower and pile driver and casting times are horrible. Makes it very clunky when you need to dodge through ground poo and be constantly mobile to stay in support range of allies on tag since you will constantly interrupt your own casting.(3) melee training on tag doesn't play into Weaver's unique strength - your ability to do monster burst at greater than 1200 range by using FGS, lightning flash and burning retreat to safely overextend, burst and retreat to a distance where nobody can hit back. I don't see anything you can do in squad and on tag that you can't do better in a dedicated party, playing off tag. You might as well put all of your weavers into one sub group with a pve firebrand and take up positions where you can abuse terrain advantage and get huge flanks to free cast on enemies like they are kitty golems. What are they going to do? Spam ground targets uphill and not hit anything? Hah! Break away from their tag and chase you up to high ground so you can drop down and say see ya later? They are never going to outrange or outkite you and they put themselves in a dangerous position if they even try. Just embrace the fact that anet raised you to be a selfish git, show up fashionably late with your lacky firebrand supplying you perma offensive boons and ruin the party. Use your allies as bait, pick a target that is busy fighting someone else, get a big flank on them and pile driver/lightning surge/plasma blast until they cry. If they go down put a lava font on them and if anyone is dumb enough to attempt a rez, channel meteor shower and lightning flash to safety. If they chase you, burning retreat and let your allies kill them when they realize you still have FGS and they can never catch you.

DPS Herald is fine for pug CMs. The boon stacking is nice and gives your support players more margin for error. The dps is not so bad that its going to be the reason your groups don't clear 99 and 100. That is always due to failing group mechanics and to a lesser extent, too many people failing individual mechanics. The only problem you are likely to encounter is people asking you to switch to Support Renegade (Alacrigade or Alac as it is commonly referred to). Or they join your party thinking you are a Support and when it turns out you are on DPS Herald, they might get freaky or feel like their time is being wasted. Most pugs end up waiting the longest for a Support Renegade and there is a good reason for this: they are typically responsible for solo mechanics (like Arkk anomalies and Artsariiv ball). They are responsible a significant amount of defiance bar damage in CMs where everyone dies if you don't break bars fast enough. If No Pain, No Gain is an instability, you have to go Mallyx and boon rip. You are also responsible for providing supplemental stability, to save your entire party from death by CC. It is a meta hard carry role and has the most individual responsibility imo. I consider it to have the highest skill floor of any meta role and is probably the hardest one to learn - certainly if you don't play it well, you will be responsible for the most party wipes. That said, there is no harm having a pocket meta support. If you are comfortable with mechanics on a Support Renegade, you will have a straight up easier time on every other class. It will also enable you to play Herald since you alway have the option to switch to Support Renegade if your party just won't let it go. However, if you go the learning pug route, its going to be a bit overwhelming at first but what it will do is drill very solid fundamentals into you. Its much easier to learn CM99/100 on heal firebrand but I sometimes find the aegis and passive healing encourages sloppy play because you can simply get away with making more mistakes. Overall, I don't think CMs are fundamentally all that different from T4s. Its mostly the same mechanics you have seen in T4 but theres just more of them happening at the same time, you are under greater time pressure and failure tends to punish the whole group instead of just the individual. When making the transition from T4 to CM, I think the hardest part is realizing all those times you didn't bother to learn mechanics in T4 is coming to back to bite you. For example, in T4 100 pugs, it is common to see people getting feared by Arkk. The common excuse is: its only T4/recs. So you never learn to recognise the eye symbol above Arkk's head as a threat and never learn to turn away/about face. In T4 it is rare that getting feared will result in you getting killed. In CM100 there are more disappearing platforms, more skull bombs and concentric rings to cc you. All of this is stuff you have seen before but its all happening at the same time. So not learning the fear mechanic is going to end badly for you. You will get cc'ed with the bomb, your nova launch is on cooldown and don't have enough time to reach the dome. Or you can be standing in the dome with the bomb and you get feared out of it just as its exploding. Or you get feared into a hole in the floor, or feared into a concentric circle and stunned on a platform that is about to disappear. And if you nova launch to stunbreak out of the fear, now you don't have it for the shockwave/red puddle and you'll die to that instead. So to end with some positive words of encouragement - CMs are not as hard as you initially think they are. You are not going to do many mechanics you haven't already seen a million times in T4 already you just need to respect them and stay calm. You can do it!

The way I got into CMs was to create an LFG called "CM100 Learning". I had to wait for about 25 minutes to get the group to fill and we all had to agree in chat that we were going to be learning mainly through failure so its going to be a couple of hours. In CM100, we had to repeat Skorvald about 3 times and I can't even remember how many times we did Artsariiv. Like 10 or something. We repeated Arkk a bunch of times but due to exhaustion we ended up called it without getting the kill. That said, learning through failure is seriously underrated. We let ourselves get hit by attacks to see what would happen. Oh this one literally flings you off the arena. Oh this laser is a one shot. Oh this shockwave is a knockdown. Oh this breakbar is a defiance dps check. If you don't have enough cc, everyone dies. Oh those red puddles hurt like hell. By the end of it I was super confident that I knew everything on Skorvald and Arsariiv. Arkk I was fine with until the platforms start disappearing and then the paaanic set it, so I needed a bit more practice with positioning in tight spaces. I did beat CM100 in my second learning pug but it took a couple more groups to get really confident with it. I also had to create or join CM learning pugs for 99 too. Once you have bashed your head against 99 and 100 for a bit and gotten your first KP, you can join groups that only require "some KP" and those are decent enough - to be honest, theres no real difference between them and 50kp pugs. You can often join 50kp pugs with a lot less KP as long as you are up front about it. I used to ask "hey, is 25kp enough? If not, its cool and I'll leave". But I don't recall any situation where I was refused. However, be sure you know your mechanics because it will become a problem if you don't. If you drilled a learning group where you failed every possible way a dozen times until nothing is scary or surprising anymore, then you'll be fine. I encountered a couple of people in low KP groups that were just legends - one that springs to mind was a person with fractal god title in my second learning group. Thanks to that guy, I got my first KP. He was clearly the most experienced player in the group by a country mile and explained a whole bunch of things we were doing wrong and was patient enough to repeatedly fail with us until we got the timing and the positioning down. If you get a really disastrous non learning pug that is failing defiance checks or group mechanics like Skorvald solar blooms because nobody is kicking the ball to the edge of the arena, people generally just leave without saying anything. I haven't really seen anyone rage on people in low KP groups so I don't think you need to worry about that.

It dyes really nicely but I just can't not wear capes. Capes are the ultimate lore friendly backpieces.

If doing Ad Infinitum, definitely list in T4. There isn't many eyeballs on T1 to T3. I know I don't check them.

Should has nothing to do with it. Do it if it noticeably improves your chance of winning duels or don't. Everything else is just an elaborate and arbitrary excuse for why you are losing and/or consistently finding yourself in unfavourable 1v1s. Thinking like that isn't going to help you win. Sorry to tell you but thats scrub logic.

Ahh, wish you posted it earlier I guess. I'm down for helping people do collections but LFG is not a great place to find people who want to do anything other than dailies. I'm on EU and completed the 4th Astralaria collection recently so most of it is still fresh in my mind - I ended up getting most of them just doing dailies and solo'ed a few of them when I didn't want to wait for them to cycle into the daily rotation.

Look, I didn't disagree with your conclusion but all you are doing is paraphrasing what I already said. The only thing I disagree with is your explanation, which greatly understates how completely busted support builds are and the incorrect use of terms like infinite scaling to refer to builds that have no such thing. It is really common in T4s for people to ruin their own dps by dodging/disengaging unnecessarily because they do not trust their supports to give them aegis for We Bleed Fire and resistance to stand in fire/poison ground aoe. Even when you actually do these things. So you see people double dodging out and waiting for Mama/Siax poison to go away, even though the FB has pre-emptively cast tome 3.4 and the Ren has pre-emptively cast Pain Absorption. Ironically, this can be solved if more dps players roll a pocket support and play it every now and then, so they know what they are capable of. Its also fun, if you are into selfless teamplay.

No, it's DPS because, like in every single game that has ever existed, DPS scales infinitely with regard to the affect it has on content (Well, up until you can literally insta-kill every available target). Every additional point of DPS you get, shaves the time to kill an enemy by a fraction. With defences and healing, there's hard caps for how useful they are. If you're tanky enough to survive an encounter, that's it you gain nothing else from getting more tanky. If you can heal up all the incoming damage, that's it you gain nothing else from getting more healing. Once Tanks/Healers have met their goals of being able to survive/heal through an encounter, the only thing that's left to focus on, is DPS. Since as mentioned earlier, DPS is always relevant. The only time additional defence/healing matters, is if it allows for more DPS because the Healer/Tank can forgo their own roles and focus on DPS (In a way that outperforms both players having more balanced builds) It's a fundamental flaw at the heart of the RPG genre as a whole, there simply hasn't been invented a system where defence and healing can actually scale infinitely with an appreciable effect on encounters (Outside of mechanics that convert them into DPS). Nor has there been any attempts to provide a hard limit on DPS where it stops being beneficial to encounters from increasing it (With exception from some older JRPG's, such as when Final Fantasy had a damage cap of 9999 making additional damage stats redundant) I think this is sort of the right idea but isn't phrased in the right way. Active defense in GW2 scales infinitely. It does not matter if a boss melee swing hits you for 1000 damage or 10 billion damage. Aegis will block it either way and the incoming damage goes to zero. Same for incoming projectile damage vs projectile reflection and incoming condition damage vs resistance. Support builds are designed to remove all obstructions and interruptions to their teammate's damage output. Their teammate can stand in ground poo and just do their dps rotation with no defensive traits or utilities and without even needing to dodge in some cases (as this interrupts their rotation, lowers their dps uptime and consequently lowers their average dps). Unlike the support player, the DPS player can end the fight sooner by killing the boss faster but there is still a limit to how much damage they can do, how quickly they can do it and how quickly the boss can die (due to invuln phases). Outgoing damage does not scale infinitely and there is a strict limit in terms of how much damage your attacks can do and how many buttons you can press per unit time. You will eventually run into a wall where it is physically impossible to do more dps. Nevertheless, your dps scales aggressively with traits, boons, class specific buffs and player execution up to the point where your uptime is 100%, you have all the damage traits, you are capped on all boons, you have every class specific buff and you don't make any execution errors. At this point your dps will flat line. Damage calculation in GW2 is a multiplication of factors divided by armour rating. Most damage modifiers in GW2 interact multiplicatively. So if you think about how multiplication works, lets assume you have two 10% damage modifiers and your skill damage is 500. Your outgoing damage will be 500 x 1.1 x 1.1 = 605 damage. Compare that having a single 20% damage modifier: 500 x 1.2 = 600 damage. Notice that you get more damage with two 10% damage mods than a single 20% damage mod because they have a compound effect. This is why pve DPS builds don't take a mix of damage, utility and defensive traits. You are heavily incentivized to take all the damage traits possible, even when it makes the build more difficult and dangerous to play. The defence and utility is provided by a support who can pump out far more boons, more healing and more active defences than you can anyway. What isn't obvious to a DPS player not using a DPS meter is the effect of not having boon support, interrupting your dps rotation (for any reason) and not pressing buttons as quickly and accurately as you could. If we just consider boon support in isolation, if you don't have a full compliment of boons, your average and burst damage will literally be halved. My Power Weaver goes from 31k/s average (52k/s burst) with [sC]'s raid buffs to 15k average (27k/s burst) without. Another big determinant in DPS output is how good your execution is. It is very hard to track execution errors without analysing dps logs because they occur at a double digit millisecond timescale. In some cases you won't even see when an auto 1 slips in either side of a skill and you won't notice when and how often you accidentally cancel an auto 3 because its happening too fast. It is also very difficult to quantify how much dps you lose by disengaging for any length of time, for any reason. At some point you will have to do this to avoid getting wiped by boss mechanics, but efficient movement has a very significant impact on dps. For example, take CM Skorvald and compare your dps when you play with a portal chain vs when you don't. The difference is on the order of 1.5x average dps and that is mostly due to portal reducing dps downtime when moving between anomalies.

Distance from keeps/towers/camps to waypoints is a key determinant in how the map is played. One of the reasons EWP, mounts and gliding messed up the delicate balance of borderland play is because they allow large numbers of defenders to get into a structure way quicker and safer than what was originally intended. You can glide from defender spawn into NE tower. Gliders enable you to take shortcuts that used to be impossible without taking fatal fall damage. EWP advantage is self explanatory. If fighting on EWP, the defender can spam it for invuln. Ninja tower/keep takes used to be things that you had to orchestrate and plan based on distance from spawn and how long it would take for 50 people to port in and run to defend it. If you allow parachuting, there will be no point in attacking structures at all. It is too much of a disadvantage. Just camp your own honey pot keeps and wait till your night crew can take territory unopposed so you have more honey traps the next morning. Defenders already have an overwhelming advantage in borderlands - they have siege advantage, high ground advantage, tactivators and a free pre-buff + stealth engage from behind the safety of walls. They do not need an impossibly good spawn advantage too.

Yeah. Scourge did a little too much a little too well but the hotfix to sand shade was a proper SBooning.

The reason this is bad gameplay is because most damage modifiers in GW2 interact multiplicatively. When you also factor in stat distribution on gear, you end up with a game that heavily favours specialisation. This is why dps and support builds exist and are distinct from one another. The reason you only do 5k-9k dps is because you are trying to do too many things at once and you are limited by stats, traits and utility skill slots. If you try to heal, you are going to be a mediocre healer unless you pump +healing power and traits that give healing% bonuses. But if you go with gear and traits that boost healing, it will come at the cost of damage% and +power, +precision and +ferocity, so your damage will also be mediocre. If you specialized as a damage dealer, you would be able to do 15k/s average with boon support just by standing still and auto attacking in air attunement. If you practice an optimized rotation, depending on how good your execution is, you would be doing 20k to 35k average dps. This is one person doing as much damage as a entire party of 4 to 5 Lyttles. And these are just the averages. The burst capability of ele is absolutely mental. A Power Weaver with boon support can burst over 100k/s during exposed debuff (after breaking a defiance bar). If you have a dedicated support in the party like a heal firebrand, that player can maximise boon uptime and healing and therefore protect you in a way that you simply can't do yourself as a jack of all trades. They can use tome 3, give you resistance, reflect bubble, stability and aegis and you will be literally immune to everything.

Yeah I feel I need a dps meter too because it is incredibly hard to tell where your damage is coming from just by eyeballing it. The meter itself isn't very important to me but the data that arcDPS captures is. You can log your runs and then use analysis tools like dps.report and moxie parse the data and find out where you are doing things badly or inefficiently. I think of it as a data driven approach to self improvement rather than one based on guesses or assumptions (which are often wrong).

In blob fighting you stack up condis while doing power based damage, but until the enemy blob's support loop is overwhelmed, the condis don't really do much. They are continually being converted into boons by scrappers. In high pressure scenarios (i.e. where you get condi bombed), the tick damage is negated by resistance until they expire or cleansing field/fumigate/purge gyro comes off cooldown. Don't get me wrong though, if you are in a blob that is lacking scrappers and firebrands and you get condi bombed, then you are going to get deleted. But most squads I see already know this and do run lots of firebrands and scrappers. The ones that don't get one pushed a bunch of times, morale collapses and everyone leaves, so they don't exist for very long. Power damage is quite hard to negate compared to condi. Its instantaneous, not a damage over time effect and is harder to react to. In terms of counterplay, there is no blanket immunity to power damage unless you count block strings but these are self only and not shareable to 5 allies. Aegis is shareable to 5 allies but must be reapplied every time someone gets hit. But in blob fighting you cant tell who gets hit and when because theres so much visual noise.

WvW squad play is dominated by selfless builds that share tonnes of buffs to allies and either remove or nullify those same buffs from enemies while moving. Mindcircus did a pretty good breakdown. Firebrand is meta because it shares stability and can provide a little bit of everything else (a little too well) - healing, resistance, projectile reflection, cleanse, boon conversion, block and can reliably share pretty much every boon in the game except alacrity. Heal Tempest is a top healer but doesn't share offensive buffs like Rev and doesn't provide stability like Firebrand. It can cleanse but nowhere near the rate of Scrappers and every time a Scrapper cleanses, they convert those condis into boons so its just better. That scrappers also provide damage redirection, high superspeed uptime and stealth engage means it not even a contest really. I'm trying to think of what buffs or redesign Druid would have to get to replace a Firebrand, Scrapper or even Tempest, and I'm drawing a blank.