Blood Red Arachnid.2493

GW2 was built from the ground up to be a PVP game, and as such all professions were given enough base stats capable of surviving most things, even with no investment in defensive stats. This was done to fool-proof the game, preventing players from inadvertently building themselves into incompetence. The only place where high performance will be demanded of you is in Raids and Challenge Mode fractals/strikes. Most of the overworld, while balanced around Exotic Gear, is actually pretty easy. You'll defeat most enemies just by auto-attacking them, and the ones you can't largely have one gimmick move that you need to watch out for. This is true even if you're wearing full berserker or vipers armor. I frequently play this game one-handed (mouse only), and can definitely attest that every profession can do this. The "DPS rotation" with rare exceptions loads most of the damage into a few skills, so if you know which skills hit hard you can obliterate enemies before they have a chance to respond back. You only need a rotation against big HP sponges with a time limit on them. Otherwise, feel free to wing it. The reasons why high damage gear is recommended are many. First, more damage gets you kills faster, which gives you loot faster. It makes money and saves time to hit things hard. Second, it is far easier to change around traits/utilities and your strategy than it is to change gear. If needed, you can equip more defensive utilities and traits to survive, and failing that you can approach the problem in a different manner to survive. So, following this logic, by default you should build yourself for damage, then change the easier things first if you need more survival. Third, there are events in the game that have a time limit. It is harder to squeeze more damage out of defensive gear than it is to play more defensively in offensive gear. So, if the situation arises where you'll need greater performance than survival, you'll be ready for it. Most mechanics in the game are handled by killing stuff anyway, so it is beneficial to be really good at killing stuff. This seems counter-intuitive to how other games handle things, and it is definitely one of the stumbling stones that new players trip over. It was certainly different from the previous RPGs and MMOs I had played.

The answer seems a bit obvious. If I don't like how my characters look, I would change how they look. It's not like IRL where you're stuck with an ugly face and can't afford nice clothes.

Well... what else are you spending that gold on? I just crafted it all back in the days when crafting it was far more expensive. There's many alternate paths to get the weapons and armor, but crafting is always an option that is available to you. Also, small note, but everyone else is underselling the difference in performance. Changing your weapons alone to ascended is a 5% increase in strike damage. Going full ascended is a 10% increase overall, and getting all of the infusions is about a 12.5% increase overall. The increase in armor tier alone reduces damage by around 2.5%.

I'm not so sure. The times since we were trying out Fresh Air vs. BttH were awhile ago, but I remember that Fresh Air's damage loss was very minor. For example, this somewhat out-of-date video has Fresh air being a mere 100 DPS behind BttH. This is weaver focused, though. The other specializations don't make as great a use out of Fresh Air as weaver does. It would be nice to have some updated numbers on this. I can understand the trait not being as useful on the other specs, since those hang in their respective elements longer. But, if Fresh Air remains the DPS competitive yet greater flexibility option for Weaver, that is a perfectly fine place for the trait to be. We don't want to completely invalidate BttH.

It's possible it is the thing that you aren't saying. It is also possible that it was just a good hider. I've taken a few towers by just hiding really well when it was flipped. It is much easier on the red BL, since those towers are large and have a lot of nooks and crannies to hide in.

My "wild guess" is that you have a key that's bound between multiple apps. Since this only happens during raids, if you have some team speak program active in the background, there's a chance that you're accidentally pressing a key that's bound on the chat-app. This could confuse your computer, and make it think that you're trying to navigate in the speaking program, thus nullifying all of the left-clicks in GW2 instead.

I don't see why we can't just navigate to the outfit panel and click the little box.

Careful. Last time I brought this up Anet killed dagger ele.

I use them quite a bit on my ele. One of the few unseen buffs that Ele gives to the team is that they put up constant fire fields, which gives random bits of burning on all of those projectile and whirl finishers. Unfortunately... that isn't much. Random bits of 1-second burns only helps in the smallest of degrees. It is one of the complaints I have about the combo system, in that so many of the finishers just aren't of any noticeable value. In WvW I do try to rotate so that I spam blast finishers in fire fields, and I'll occasionally blast water for more heals.

Mirage's value comes in places that generally aren't useful in PVE: defenses, and mobility. It is rare for me to need the mirage, but one such place was when i was duoing the Hearts and Minds CM, both against Eir and the final boss. I tried using the other specs, but both Virt and Chrono just couldn't heap on the damage or stay alive. But the mirage was able to kite and dodge everything. The clones would upkeep a relatively high sustained damage, while Jaunt/Axes of Symmetry/Phase Retreat let me avoid all of the ground AoEs, and the prolific amount of Endurnace and mirage mirrors let me avoid attacks while reflecting projectiles in mass.

You'd be surprised... well, you are surprised at how much slips through the cracks. I had to issue a ticket once because I deleted a PoF collection item that couldn't be re-acquired. Turns out, one of those random collection items needed to be handed in directly instead of being a junk bit that gets shoved into your inventory like all of the others.

I'm reminded of an interview I heard about once. Sam Tramiel, then CEO of Atari, gave an interview to Next Generation magazine about the status of the company and their console at the time, the Atari Jaguar. This interview was supposed to help reassure customers, stock holders, and future potential customers of the value of the Jaguar console. However... Tramiel botched it. Terribly. One of the things he mentioned in this interview was that the Jaguar 2 was under development. This, among many other things, caused all interest in the Jaguar 1 to plummet, as no one wanted to sink their costs into that console anymore. NCsoft leaking the potential development of GW3 could very well be what sinks this game. The malaise of the OP is going to be a commonly shared sentiment.

They started making events like this to stop players from purposefully stalling events to grind loot. This reach its peak shortly after the champion loot bag update, where people would repeatedly fail the meta events to farm champs. It's far easier to stick all the rewards at the end instead of coming up with some arbitrary DR system for every event in the game.

The strike mission doesn't begin until the fight starts. Most groups will stand inside the instance until everyone shows up. Generally though, don't enter the portal yourself until either the commander enters, or a designated player enters (for raids only).

I am distracted by the little cat animation that's button accurate.