Guild Wars Thread

[feedback]

The GW wiki suggests this for paragons wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Talk:Guide_to_the_Norn_Fighting_Tournament#P.2Fany

Fun fact. Apparently spectators count as allies for some paragon abilities like Leader's Comfort.

[buhwhyen]

Well. I'm playing again. Dragon age expansion was very...short. Outside of my warrior, it doesn't have much appeal for replaying through. And I beat it the second time around on my warrior in a single day.

Not that I really expect anyone to join me. Just thought I'd throw it out there just in case, though.

[Pikachu]

Huh.. I'll get back to you if I find a substantial FT job and get the hang of accounting

[buhwhyen]

Was reading the news on the wiki and it seems they're trying to "address" certain pve imbalances still, which is pretty cool. Biggest points being nerfs to shadow form and obsidian flesh, basically they didn't rape the spec entirely. They just gave it an actual downside, offensive damage reduction. You can still be near invincible, you just take a hit to how much damage you deal out.

Buffing hammer spec for warriors (in pve mostly). And tweaking end game ritualists, so they aren't completely useless. Also a pretty huge change to the tactics line for warriors, not sure how this will really impact the game...but it looks interesting.

Blood magic got some pretty interesting changes too.

Other skill "trees" are being reworked so they are at least viable, which I approve of.

wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/News

Rangers had some changes to make their dps slightly better. Power attack now does fixed armor ignoring damage, and sundering attack/penetrating shot have a 3/4 sec cast instead of 1 sec. Probably won't make a real difference, as the changes were mainly for GvG and PvP balance.


Oh...and the codex arena now resets every 6 hours, instead of daily. Lol. And they made some changes to how many skills are available to each class.

Some classes get 25 skills, others get 23, and 20, with 5, 4, and/or 3 elite skills. See the bottom of the next link for the list.

wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Feedback:Developer_updates/20100128

[Pikachu]

I suddenly want to play GW again. Lots of interesting Mesmer changes in May.

[buhwhyen]

I've been playing on and off. Not too much time recently, and I was playing mostly SC2 beta and SSF4 when I had time. I'm up for playing more GW if people are interested though.

[buhwhyen]

Recent changes to some hard mode stuff has made it a lot more reasonable. Quite a bit more missions (HM) and areas are doable with hero/hench now.

[buhwhyen]

Playing to get achievements that might transfer over to guild wars 2. Mostly doing Eye of the North stuff.

[buhwhyen]

New repackaging of Guild wars platinum edition (prophecies + EotN) for $11.

[buhwhyen]

I was playing my elementalist again and I guess because of a different perspective and new EotN PvE skills had a lot more success. Fire builds seem much more playable overall with some new pve skills, mostly YMLAD and Finish Him which lets you aoe burn into 2 knockdowns (rodgorts -> SF -> YMLAD -> meteor -> finish him). This makes killing healers really easy and surprisingly the build does better without glowing gays for energy management, auspicious and lesser energy glyph make it really easy to regen energy if you keep your energy at lest around the ~10-11 region.

THough I think energy blast is still better in HM because it's hard to go wrong with 130 damage (before urals).

Water builds...are pretty damn bad. Even against destroyers it's pretty awful (destroyers are -20 AC against cold damage).

Earth builds are...meh. The damage just isn't there and you have to use some variation of an aoe elite which are terrible unless you can aoe snare which earth lacks at range. I've thought about trying to get a stoning spam build working, but it's just so expensive to spam out at 15 energy each. THough it can provide quite a few knockdowns before you run out of energy which is really good for shutting down healers - but is also easily shut down because it's reliant on having the weakness condition (not the gay condition) for knockdowns.


Another random thing I never really thought about (not sure why I didn't, but cracked armor should affect all damage, not just melee damage because it's just a straight -20 AC (min. 60, the base AC) and all damage is based off of pure AC. Dunno why I always thought cracked armor applied only to physical damage, but this also helps elementalist dps quite a bit.


I also found a bunch of dwarf PvE skills that I had ignored but are actually really damn useful (for melee characters). 'Brawling headbutt' is great and all (touch skill - does ~60 damage and knocks down), but 'low blow' is really hilarious, touch skill that does ~50 damage and if it hits a knocked down opponent, it does an additional ~50 damage and inflicts cracked armor. Both are adrenaline based and are 3/4 cast time skills.

The real reason why this was hilarious to me was because I was trying to make better hammer builds for my warrior. If you base hammer builds around knockdown, you can use' low blow' with 'renewing smash' for some really sick dps that's all off of cast time attacks (ignores swing speed). So you knock down with 'backbreaker' (4 sec knockdown) you can low blow into 3 renewing smashes for a total of about ~400-500 on mobs in HM. If you bring other random skills like "to the limit" (tactics shout that gives you instant adrenaline based on the number of enemies in EARSHOT) you can chain 2 'backbreakers' back to back (nh) for 8 second knockdown and close to 1k damage.

You do similar stuff with 'earthshaker' (aoe knockdown - more damage midigation) but you get less ground pound hits.

That being said, Axe is probably still the best consistent over time DPS because it doesn't center completely around knockdowns and not having stuff get blocked (bad things happen when the knockdown chains are interrupted), sword still only has 1 viable build (Dragon slash), distracting blow does NOT trigger hundred blades =( even if it hits multiple enemies.


I wish assassins had more variety of viable dps builds. 'Way of the assassin' is just too good and there really aren't many choices for how to do your builds. They're stupidly solid, but eh.


I am a fan of hero spirit spamming builds. Really good overall for support and dps for heroes.

[buhwhyen]

Recent change that includes oppressor weapons (war in kryta rewards) to qualify for display in the hall of monuments.

www.arena.net/blog/oppressors-weapons-now-in-the-hall-of-monuments

Also there was hints that another similar story quest chain will be added to factions in the near future (similar to war in kryta in prophecies).

[Pikachu]

Eye of the North is $9.99 off Amazon. Not bad.

[feedback]

hom.guildwars2.com/

Well fuck. They just released a calculator telling you what you get for having a full hall of monument. Yes you want to max the entire fucking thing to get the best reward.

hom.guildwars2.com/faq

Also a FAQ on the subject.

[buhwhyen]

Fuck. THey're rewarding for more than just what is able to be displayed at one time in your hall of monuments.

[feedback]

www.massively.com/tag/the-road-to-50/

Massively is writing up some pretty good articles on what is needed to get to 50 points, but since we're not insane we don't want 50 points. We just want to get 30 points so we qualify for all the free stuff. Below is a condensed list of what is required to get the full 50 points as well as my comments on what I think is feasible for us. I think we can get 30 points if we try.

Devotion (8 points)
- 50 miniatures
- At least 1 Rare mini
- At least 1 Unique mini.

This one will really depend on how motivated you are. 2 points isn't hard, just get an unique mini. You can get the Black Moa Chick as a quest reward. If you can luck sack a rare or buy it then that's another point. Rares are strangely harder to get than some uniques. 2 more points for getting 20 minis. More for anyone who turns into a collector.

Fellowship (8 points)
- All 3 rare pets and one non-rare pet lv 20 and fully evolved
- Full hero armor

This is the easiest one imo. We can run the challenge missions for some easy hero armor and 2/3 exotic pets aren't hard to get. The hardest part will be getting the black widow from underworld. Underworld runs will be good for us anyways. If we're not going to get obsidian armor for ourselves, plenty of other people will want theirs so there should be a good market for globs and shards. I expect a full 8 points here.

Honor (18 points)
- 1 pvp statue
- 40 statues total

This one is going to suck ballz. I know I've been looking for easy title tracks to max and there really aren't that many. The pvp one is a grind and I'll skip it unless we can put together a group for codex or something. Points are based on every 5 statues up to a max of 40. I figure that we should shoot for 10 titles which will yield 9 points.

My suggested list includes beating each campaign (yes even prophecies) for 3 points. Underworld, Fissure, and Domain of Anguish gets us another 3 points. We can do full completion on all normal mode missions for factions/nightfall for another 2 points. This leaves us with another 2 points from somewhere. Between maxing rep, vanquishing a campaign, and maybe doing one of the campaign missions on hard mode we should be able to hit 10 statues. (Mini rant. I'm hella pissed that I didn't get credit for that FoW run we did. Stupid game not giving me my title.)

Resilience (8 points)
- 7 elite armor sets
- Luxon or Kurzick elite
- Vabbian
- Obsidian

Ouch... Do able, but a massive gold sink. 6/8 points here seems pretty easy as long as we find a good way to farm money. Luxon/Kurzick isn't that hard, but it'll take a bit to farm the mats. At worse we can buy it.

Valor (8 points)
- 15 elite weapons
- 1 Destroyer
- 1 Tormented
- 1 Oppressor

Do able but grinding some of those weapons out is gonna be a pain. I figure we can probably get 5 points easy (one of each and 5 weapons total). Anyone that fills up the full 11 weapon display gets another 2 points. Not too shabby.

Putting it all together (2/8/9/6/5) we should be able to hit 30 points. Not saying that this is going to be easy, just that it's something we could do if we really wanted to. Since it looks like we're all going to be playing GW2 it doesn't seem like a bad idea to go get some free stuff now. Vanity items are cool. Either way we still have a lot of time before GW2 releases so it's something that we can think about. I'm gonna try and get 30 points and will welcome any help getting there.