saethe.1897

Care to share your build?

Soloing difficult content is more along the lines of what I'm hoping to do with Daredevil, though I'd like to be useful in raids/fractals without needing to dodge spam. Overall, it's less about being concerned with dying and more trying to find an optimal way to play without relying on dodges as part of the rotation. Obviously, I won't be outdoing the meta by holding dodges, but I'd like a build that comes in at a close second for tackling fractals/raids. Maybe it's just me, but I find dodge spam as a part of the rotation to basically go against the agile and mobile feel of the class. Instead, it ends up feeling tedious and clunky due to the constant need to reposition the camera every 4 seconds, and, as contradictory as it might sound, I almost feel a bit "rooted in the air" because all of my mobility is going toward buffing my damage.

Anyone using builds out there with Bounding Dodger that make use of the dodges beyond just incorporating them into your rotation? How much does it hurt your DPS to hold your dodges(and is it worth caring about aside from min-maxing)? For those of you that do hold your dodges, do you stick with the meta build, or have you made some tweaks? I really dig this class, and I love the mobility, but I've read a lot of "if you have any dodges, you're playing the class wrong" and was curious as to just how true that was.

This is not true. It's become a common throwaway line used to dismiss open-world as 'less than' RAID/fractal builds. Maybe if 'open-world' meant just Queensdale, but its obviously not true that "everything is perfectly viable in Tangled Depths " or "everything is perfectly viable in Desolation", nor is "everything is perfectly viable in personal story". Open-world builds must be more self-reliant than niche builds in a predetermined group composition.Quoted for truth.If the community stopped saying this maybe we would get less players getting dunked on in Verdant Brink or running to the forums raging about the aggro range of desert mobs because they aren't effectively managing the aggro.As a newer player(playing for about a month now), my anecdotal experience leads me to believe that this is an "issue" that definitely isn't going to go away. Admittedly, my inclusion of the the line about viability was to mitigate a slew of posts encouraging me to just play whatever I want because "everything is viable, it's just open world". I actually made this post because a lot of my search results regarding optimizing for open world play ended in people just shrugging off the idea that there's any sort of necessity for doing such a thing. By no means do I mind if other people want to play that way, but my end goal is to figure out how I can strike a balance between playing what I want(specific weapon sets, in this case) and being able to contribute a meaningful amount to things such as meta events instead of just auto-attacking(learning a rotation for those specific weapon sets and figuring out what traits bring the most to the table for them). As I mentioned in my other post, I appreciate all the advice thus far! There's a lot of insight here that I can use while I continue to familiarize myself with the game.

These are all really insightful posts, and I appreciate the feedback. Based on what I've read, it looks like I still need a better understanding of skill and boon synergies before everything will start to click. Out of curiosity, does anyone have any builds to share that they've had a lot of success with that either go against the grain or are otherwise unheard of or underappreciated?

How do you go about making your own builds and figuring out how well they perform? I realize that everything is perfectly viable in open world, but for those of you that rock your own builds, how do you create your own priority list/rotation for that build? Do you just mix and match traits until you find something that works for you? I've gotten a few classes to 80 now and spent a good amount of time on the training dummies across almost every class and elite spec. I can follow rotations fairly well, and I've learned plenty from the videos I've watched and the guides I've read, but I'm still at a loss as to how anyone manages to throw their own build together. Right now, I'm looking to play a GS + D/D Spellbreaker and a GS + LB Soulbeast in Open World/Dungeons(sometimes solo, other times not), but I'm not sure how to approach learning these since most of the resources out there only have templates for meta builds. For the record, I don't intend to curse anyone by entering high-end PvE with these builds. I know they're likely sub-optimal weapon combos, but I'd still like to learn how to play efficiently with what I'm choosing to go with. So, for those of you that craft your own builds and learn them.. what's your process?