I main Revenant, I'm around level 65-70 in Fractals, it's the point where I feel I must get serious with my build and equipment. I took a look at Discretize, both Power Renegade and Condi Alacrity Renegade are mentioned in the meta builds, BUT apparently, power is king in T4 fractals? From the description of the Condi build, it seems it's only recommended over power renegade in a single fractal (Sunqua).
So my understanding is that as a Revenant, if I want to PUG T4 fractals, my group will expect me to have a power build, and to provide alacrity to the group. But:

1. is there room for a straight DPS power build (full zerk)?
2. what about a condi build in fractals other than Sunqua?

I have 2 concerns: finding a group easil and not getting kicked out, but also performing well enough to not jeopardize our chances of success.

What would be your take on a general build for Revenant. Hi level fractals, High damage, meta would be highest damage I suppose, but I am looking at a bit out of meta, decent pug support, good sustain.
And if you have the time what variants for particular Fractals.

Note: I'm on my way out for the night but I wrote this guide today and I wanted to get it posted before leaving. I'll probably add more detail later tonight when I get a chance.
Hey guys, I'm xylo. I'm currently leveling a Revenant and I decided that I would write a brief guide to leveling one, both for my own benefit and hopefully someone else will find it useful too. Yesterday I wrote a really detailed guide for Elementalist -- this one won't have as much detail since I'm still testing the class and different specs, but here's what I've come up with so far for a pretty nasty burst Revenant build:
TL;DR
Click here to see the build.
It focuses on:

• Stacking Vulnerability with Devastation traits
• More Vulnerability with sword's (1) ability
• Using Invocation traited-Fury and Assassin's Impossible Odds to spam crits
• Swapping to Demon during downtimes

Weapons
Primary -- Sword/Axe
Secondary -- Staff (5 skill for travel, 4 heal, 3 projectile shield)
Leveling/Hero Points
1-21: 13 points into Assassin (4-2-3-4), 17 into Demon (4-2-3-4-4), 2 into Invocation (2)
22-29: 28 points into Invocation (3-3-3-4-5-5-5)
31-33: 9 points into Demon (9) for Elite Skill, 6 points into Invocation (6)
35-37: 24 points into Invocation (8-8-8)
39: 13 points into Assassin (4-9)
41-47: 44 points into Devastation (2-3-3-3-4-5-5-5-6-8) (up to Swift Termination)
49-55: 52 points into Corruption (2-3-3-3-4-5-5-5-6-8) (up to Diabolic Inferno)
56+: You should be at full build by 55 so fill in the rest of your traits however you wish.
80: Once you hit level 80 you will likely need a more defensive build, so feel free to experiment with new builds and unlocking the Elite specialization: Herald.
Specializations
Invocation (3-1-1) -- Grant Fury on Invocation swap or heal, massive amounts of burst from crits while Fury is up.
Devastation (2-2-1) -- Stack vulnerability and vicious lacerations (% dmg increase)
Corruption (3-1-1) -- Debuff, poison, torment, burn with Elites
Optionally, replace Corruption with Retribution for more defensive traits:
Retribution (2-2-2) -- Reduced ranged damage, Retaliation and Stability when dodging, chance to take 50% less damage when struck
Rotation
The basic rotation for the build is pretty simple. You won't have all of your abilities as you're leveling, but you can work without them, and once you get the crit spam at level 39ish you'll be doing massive damage.

1. Stay in Demon form when traveling, using Staff with (5) ability to dash
2. When approaching enemies, weapon swap to Sword/Axe, then use Demon's Unyielding Anguish (9) ability to jump onto target. Jumping in Demon then swapping to Assassin gives you Fury which generates a ton of crit damage.
3. Swap invocation to Assassin, toggle Impossible Odds (9) on, spam auto-attack til energy bar is at zero. This is your primary source of damage.
4. Swap invocation back to Demon, toggle Elite (0) on, use your Sword (3) ability to shadowstep for damage while Elite ticks
5. Heal if needed before swapping back to Assassin when it's off cooldown, then repeat steps 3-5.

Combos
This build doesn't have very much combo potential, but your combo abilities are:
Assassin's Impossible Odds (9) - Dark Field
Sword (2) -- Whirl Finisher
Staff (1) -- Whirl Finisher
Staff (4) -- Blast Finisher
You'll rarely execute any combos in your own rotation but you may see some benefit by taking advantage of allied Fields.
I hope you guys enjoy this guide. Like I said I'll be adding more detail later but feel free to contact me here, ingame at xylotism.8014, on twitter @xylotismgaming, or on youtube: xylotismgaming
Take care, and be cool to people!

Title.
Does anyone have a build available for this? Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4PvlPFl4aA

Heyo, so I was active a long time ago in the core days of GW2 before expansions, I played a little bit of HoT when it came out as well. I am the type that likes to get attached to one character and mainly use them for all things, so I was wondering what the community would recommend as a class for like longevity as in good with metas like PVP, Fractals, Bosses, Raids, maybe good flexibility or whatever you guys think might be good to consider. Especially, now that I see there are a loooot of specializations and even a new class.
I tend to like classes that are a good mix of combat and magic, like a battle mage (so not pure magic or pure strength). I like classes that aren’t too complicated or do not have too many skills (or buttons) to keep track of.
I used to main a Human Thief, I liked how it felt like a mix of fluid combat and flexible abilities that I could do well solo and roam, but I bet with mounts and specializations, the game probably feels completely different from core days.
However, these are just some suggestions to narrow things down, I am really flexible and open to any fun suggestions. My personality has changed a bit from the many years ago where I mained thief so I just wanted to see what the community had to suggest about current classes.
After some looking I can say that the Ranger and Revenant classes look interesting but I know nothing 😅
Thank you to anyone who reads through this as well as those that suggest thingss!
TLDR: Was active in core days before expansions, game looks completely different with specializations and mounts, looking for recommendations for classes with good viability in metas and all game modes, I like to main one class thats simpler and a good all rounder
Edit: Thanks for all the replies!! You guys make me wanna play ALLL the classess aaggh (but i like that)

What is the optimal revenant build for endgame pve? i see people run S/S but i have no idea why. if someone could fill me in on what the meta is for rev i would be grateful.
Thanks

Thanks

About 2 years ago, my friends showed me GW2 and I got hooked on it for a little while. I played around a lot with Elementalist and then the Weaver spec after boosting to 80. I also made a Necromancer and levelled him naturally and specced into Reaper and I like that a little more. As of now, I have a different character for each class, and have been loving my Staff Mesme Mirage for fractals and dungeons.
I'm at a point now where I would like to learn the buildcrafting side of the game better and understand what things do, such as why I would choose berserker armor over Viper or any other type. Or which armor runes I should get. So far, they had me just find a build on Metabattle or Snowcrows and then replicate that as close as I could. One friend recommended that I take a brand new character and level it naturally but also find something to center the build around and figure out how to enhance or upgrade that aspect of the character. That seemed like a good idea, but i'm wondering if there's a better way to test things and get a feel for things before committing to the full finished build and spending lots of gold to buy stuff from the TP.
So far I have: Base Guardian for WvW roaming - Not super in love with this build yet. Reaper Necromancer setup for Condi DPS in Dungeons and Fractals Weaver Elementalist for Open World Mirage Mesmer for Dungeons and Fractals Soulbeast Ranger that I set up a long time ago and I'm not sure what for or if it was fully finished.
I have barely touched: Warrior, Thief, Revenant, Engineer

This is about Quickness Firebrand and Condition Firebrand in instanced content like fractals/raids/strike missions after the recent rework in the 29.11. update.

tl;dr

Firebrand got reworked. Healbrand may be interesting but DPS Firebrand suffers from many different issues that make its DPS builds very boring and unintuitive to play. The damage may still be good but without changes the rotation will not feel fun.Also I suck at writing.

Who am I?

I'm making benchmarks and guides for Firebrand and Condi Willbender mainly for the SnowCrows Website and other Sites since 1.5 years. Together with other players, like TJ, I do theorycrafting on builds and rotations for condi guardian. You'll see me helping out other players with condi guard questions in most big Gw2 discord communities. I usually don't start discussions or comment much on this sub because there is usually someone else that is able to express the problems I have with the game.

First my new benchmark:

Condi Firebrand Benchmark | 33.449 without Allies | 38.420 with Allies | 29th of November PatchThis is not grinded and the numbers could be higher because some bugs are holding me back. More on that later.Also remember that this benchmark runs 8 pages and Renewed Focus. Quickness Firebrand doesn't have that luxury. That means on qFB you play with less pages so its gameplay will be a lot more boring than what you can already see here.

That looks like decent DPS. What is the issue with DPS Firebrand after the rework?

It's not fun to play for many different reasons. First there is the rework itself and then there is bugs.Let me try to explain why:

The rework itself:

Just so everyone understands the changes for DPS Firebrand:We now no longer have tome cooldowns but the skills inside of tomes have higher cooldowns. Some, more powerful tome skills also cost more pages. You recieve a new page every 8 seconds.You start with either 5 of 8 pages, depending on your trait choice. If you cast 3 skills inside of 1 tome you recieve an additional page thanks to the updated Swift Schloar.So far so good. How could this possibly go wrong?

• Once you run out of your initial 5 or 8 pages you can either use Renewed Focus to restore some pages or you keep going but you will be very limited with how many pages you can use.First there is F1 - 5: Ashes of the Just. This skill costs 2 pages and has a 16 second cooldown. This skill competes with F1- 4: Scorched Aftermath. F1 - 4 does not require allies but it does about 20k less damage at the same cast time and page cost.So what do we do once we run dry on pages? We enter our tome once every 2 pages, which takes a total of 16 seconds to regenerate and cast Ashes of the Just and we leave tome. Before, we had an interesting tome rotation consisting of "F1: 2 -> 5 -> 4 -> 1 -> 2 -> leave", now we have "F1: 5 -> leave". That doesn't sound fun at all. It also leads to the seconds point below.
• Y**ou cannot see the cooldown of your tome skills while outside of your tome.**If you look at my benchmark, you notice that I try to enter F1 every 16 seconds so I can use Ashes of the Just (the 5th skill) off cooldown. I only know that this skill should be up again at this point because I've written this whole rotation out on a sheet. Imagine being in a raid/strike but having only 70% alacrity instead of 100%. Now you would enter your tome expecting that skill to be usable again but it's still on cooldown. You are forced to leave your tome and reenter a few seconds later. This feels very bad.Players who just want to figure out a rotation for themselves without strictly going after a benchmark are even more punished by this. They have no information when to enter their tome again.
• Renewed Focus only restores 5 pages when it previously restored all 3 tomes fully. For an elite skill with a 72 second cooldown (with alacrity) with a 3 seconds channel time, this feels awful. If you run Archivist of Whispers it does not restore 8 pages.
• Because we no longer do the old tome rotation of F1: 2 -> 5 -> 4 -> 1 -> 2 but instead do at best F1: 5 -> 4 -> 2 we spend much less time inside of our tome. This directly reduces the value of DPS Firebrands second weaponset: Scepter.Camping on axe all day is nearly as good as switching between axe and scepter, but that requires much more effort. For qFB its DPS gain is estimated around 300. For cFB its in the range of 1000 DPS. Scepter was already not a significant DPS gain, this rework made matters worse and brings us close to just camping on axe.
• Internal Cooldowns: Don't we love them. You often can't see them until it's too late, thanks to the amazing UI. Torch 4 and its trait Radiant Fire was already one thing that bothered a lot of players. Both the weapon skill and the traited skill stack and count as ammunition so you can queue them but the weapon skill has 9.6 seconds cooldown with alacrity, while the trait has fixed 10 seconds cooldown but also relies on a crit activation. That means often these two do not align, if you don't crit at the moment this trait is up. Players are also tired of tracking when this trait exactly procs again as it has an impact on your rotation.Now we also have this brand new trait called Quickfire adding more internal cooldowns to our rotation? But this trait is not new. They just took the old trait and nerfed it to a single target one. To optimally use this, you would want to open and close a tome every 8 seconds thanks to the synergy with Swift Scholar. Opening and closing a tome for a Quickfire proc that rewards you with roughly 6000 damage does not sound like a well designed trait. Please remove this part of the trait entirely and replace it with something meaningful.

F1 Tomes don't have cooldowns but we have to deal with the extremely slow page regeneration of 1 page every 8 seconds and tome skills have higher cooldowns than before.If thief initiative is a good system or not is debatable but either it stays on thief or it comes in to play outside of DPS Firebrand rotations.With this new rework we also got a list of new bugs and possibly unintended behaviour.This is relevant because some bugs like the axe 2 weapon swap bug have been in the game for years, reported several times, but never fixed. It makes me wonder which one of these new "features" will stay long term.

The bugs and possibly unintended behaviour:

I don't want to go too much into detail about every single bug but I will pick a few important ones. These issues make DPS Firebrand a lot less fun to play right now and even causes you to lose damage. I hope this will get fixed soon. Read more about it hereFrom the linked list:

Pages seem to refresh on a server tick, not from when you first use your page. So you could get your first page back 3 seconds after you use your first skill, or 8 seconds.

• You can see that in the benchmark too. I start my rotation a few seconds after the last page has regenerated, so that I get a page recharge the moment I use my first tome skill. Gaining a page for "free". This is also to avoid my pages recharging at different times with every rotation. If a player were to not do this, they might sometimes be able to cast a tome skill at X moment but sometimes they will not be able to, because the page regeneration is different every time. This is inconsistant and not fun to play around. Apparently they just fixed this with a recent patch. Yay

If you leave tome too quickly after casting your last skill, you don't get the extra page from swift scholar

• Pre-rework Firebrand left tome automatically once the last page was used but you could also leave your tome manually by pressing F1, while the last tome skill was casting. Now you will not always want to use all of your pages during one tome, so you always want to leave your tome by pressing F1 while the last tome skill is casting. This way you can already queue up the next weapon skill resulting in a smooth rotation. However is not possible because Swift Scholar (which is supposed to grant you a page after every 3rd tome skill) only gives you that page back after you fully finished casting your 3rd tome skill. This means you need to wait for the full cast, then press F1 to manually leave your tome and then you can queue up your next skill. This results to losing at least 0.5 seconds every single time you leave your tome. In my benchmark at least 3 seconds are lost because of this, which translates into roughly 800 DPS lost and it feels very clunky to play around. Players with higher ping or players that don't pay much attention to this detail may lose a full page or waste a lot more time.
• Renewed Justice used to give full tome resets, then it gave 1 page on kill reset, now it removes the “Dormant tome” debuff, which does nothing if you have Quickfire equipped because that's the part that the new Quickfire disables. This is now a dead trait for any DPS Firebrand.

My Suggestion:

Keep in mind these changes are not targeting Healbrand but the rotation of DPS Firebrand.

• Remove the "granting Ashes of the Just" part of Quickfire and replace it with: Gain 2 pages (to a total of max. 7 pages).The idea behind this is to allow the old DPS Firebrand tome rotation of 2 -> 5 -> 4 -> 1 -> 2, which now costs a total of 7 pages.
• Revert the F1 tome cooldowns back to pre-rework.Without this change you can't go back to a tome rotation, because your cooldowns won't be back up.
• When you have Quickfire traited you now gain 4 pages back after spending a total 7 pages inside of one F1 tome.

This change makes it very difficult to "abuse" tomes and prevent players from just spamming F1 - 5. The very high page recharge rate punishes you for not doing a rotation inside of your tome. This makes your tome rotation only cost 3 total pages after getting 4 pages refunded.Because you regenerate a new page every 8 seconds this would allow you to do a tome rotation every 24 seconds. Pre-rework, the tome cooldown with alacrity and the virtues traitline was 20.4 seconds. So pretty close to that.Because this is all tied to Quickfire, such a change would only affect DPS Firebrand.With the 8 pages trait you could now go up to 10 pages total when also running Quickfire. This just gives you some pages to spend, either for some additional damage or for other tomes. I didn't want to touch this trait because it can be used outside of DPS Firebrand traits.

Other solutions and suggestions:

These are other suggestions from myself or other players, mostly from the Snow Crows Help Desk Community Discord that I wanted to mention.

• Renewed Focus should restore all available pages and refresh all cooldowns from all page skills. This would make it feel like an impactful elite skill.
• Display the highest page cooldown of each tome instead of the "swap" icon of the tome. This way you can instantly see when all your page skills inside your tome are available again without having to tap in and out of tome.
• Quickfire now restores our pre-rework F1 tome back. With the old page cooldowns and the old tome cooldown system. This would be basically reverting the rework for DPS Firebrand, while keeping it for Healbrand. The regenerating pages could be kept to occasionally allow DPS Firebrand to access F2/F3 but never more than a few skills.

Sure, the DPS is good but numbers aren't the only thing that makes playing a spec enjoyable. In the current state it would be more fun to just lock us out of our F2/F3 tomes and revert the rework.Overall I hope something will be changed about this rework.
Edit: (Some more suggestions picked up by other players)

• Rework scepter into a core guardian condition weapon. Scepter doesn't feel fun to use. Right now all its power lies in scepter 2 and scepter auto attacks feel and sound very bad. This way it would feel more impactful swapping weaponsets on Firebrand.
• Leave tomes the way they used to be but make them share a cooldown. This way you sacrifice a lot of damage for another tomes utility as a DPS Firebrand.

Attempt 3
Presentation \o/
Hello to everyone, its a while since im part of this sub, but for who doesn't know me i will introduce myself! My name is Andrea, Im Italian and i live in Rome, im part of this sub for 2 years now and sometimes i try to make a Request when i have periods where i can't afford games, sometimes worked, sometimes not, its part of the game i guess. Im an avid gamer, i started playing videogames back when i was a 4 or 5yo kid, i played a large variety of games and single player when i was younger, they were my passion (and still are) and i love every aspect of gaming.
When i grew up i started playing MMORPG's, one of the first mmo's that i played was "Metin2" i was 12 and for me it was one of the first experience with a game that had huge world and deep interaction between players. I was overwhelmed and amazed at the same time, the first true MMO experience!I played that game for 6-7 years straight, till i switched to other new mmo's as i grew up and some other genre, like moba's or arpg's.
MMO's were and are always part of my life and i think i will play them till my braincell works ahah! It's really me favorite genre of the entire gaming culture and when i come back to home after a bad day or a stressing period of time, i just turn on my favorite mmorpg and i start playing with new people or friend that i met during my journey.
Today im here, because unfortunately i had some monetary issue during this summer and i can't afford games or similar item. I lost my job during this summer, i had a Show-Room with my family, but we had to leave and close it for a lot of issues. So for now im just living day by day, working with some "little" job here and there to pay bills for my family and to help them, till we have enough money to open another shop.
Ok so what im asking for really?
Well recently, one of my best friends, gifted me a Guild Wars 2 account, it was one of the few mmo that i played for thousands of hours back in the day, i met a lot of good people and i had great memories with this game, but unfortunately i lost my old main account, i can't recover it, so i got this account gifted from my best friend. The account have everything that i need, only one piece miss from completing the "puzzle" and is the New Expansion: End Of Dragons.
The Expansion "End of Dragons":
This new expansion, introduce a lot of new content that i would like to explore and dig in with my friends and the new guild i just joined.
- A "new" continent to explore "Cantha", where you have oriental vibes mostly, with amazing views, Point of interest to discover and new foe to defeats. Other than that Cantha is one of the most historical lands of the world of Guild Wars, so it will be amazing coming back to it and know more of the story of this place.
- New Elite specialization (like new classes for most of mmo's). They introduced and released 9 new elite specialization to the game (which most are now "meta" and considered the most competitive classes as any game proceed to grow) which are:
The Virtuoso (Mesmer elite spec.), The Willbender (Guardian elite spec), The Mechanist (Engineer elit spec), The Bladesworn (Warrior elite spec), The Untamed (Ranged elite spec), The Vindicator (Revenant elite spec), The Harbringer (Necromancer elite spec) and lastly The Specter (Thief elite spec).I love most of this classes, but my favorite are The Harbringer, The Virtuoso and the Bladesworn.
- The new expansion will bring a new activity like Fishing and Sailing with your boat! The possibility to go under water with one of your mount and of course a lot of new Meta Events, Bosses and a lot of new content. (open world activity's that reward you with currency, money, item to sells achievements point and a lot of progression towards your goals)
- New Masteries that will help you navigate through Cantha and will help you with your new boat, mount and other content (masteries are the only vertical progression is basically a level after the level cap that gives you some passives or skills that help you explore or do some specific content).
- New Strikes Missions (Mini raid, with some of them having Challenge modes, one of the best pve content along side with raids and fractals, very challenging for who love pve group content).
And much much more.
Why Guild Wars 2? What this game about?
Well, GW2 its a semi-open world MMORPG with horizontal progression, this mean that once you reach a certain type of gear and level you will not need to grind anymore for gear progression and you can do most of the content in the entire game for both PvP and PvE.The game have an huge world to explore, with every map being different and with a lot of content from Events, Meta Events, Point of interest and much more. There's even an achievement for the core map of the world where if you explore the entire base game map to 100% you will recive a component to craft in the future you first legendary weapon, its called "gift of exploration".
The levelling system is much diverse compared to the standards mmo and its pretty unique, basically you have a "Personal Story" for your character and each 10 levels you will unlock a chapter (Max lv is 80) of your story, meanwhile to earn experience, you have to explore the maps around your level and do pretty much every activty the various map offers to you to level up (you can even level up only doing instanced PvP, but that is a way i dont really like even if really like pvp). When you hit level 80, you will end your personal story and start your journey through the "Living World Seasons" (Basically small DLC's with chapters that are in between the three expansions) and the Three expansions: Hearth of Thorns, Path of Fire and the last one End of Dragons.
The combat system is one of the major point for me. Its an hybrid-action tab target gameplay with weapon swap, dodge mechanic and a lot of movements. Its for me, one of the best combat system in the western mmorpg market. You have a lot of specialization and you can use various builds for the different contents you want to do.
PvE side we have: Open world meta events, Dungeons (with a lot of path for every dungeon that gives you a lot of replayability options), Fractals (mini dungeons with more challenging mechanics), Raids and Strikes that are basically the hardest pve content in the game. The enviroments of most of the pve content is amazing and the mechanics are really challenging. I wish i will find a good raid group in the future!
PvP have two type of mode:

1. Instanced PvP with a ranking system and 3v3,5v5 that is really cool, because you can just go in level 1 and make your build and start doing pvp from the start and you eventually will make a lot of currency to even build your own character and a lot of resource to even boost a character to 80 without spending a single cents.
2. WvW (World vs World) is a large scale battle against server and you can go in as a squad or small group or even solo. I never played this mode because i really like the instanced pvp, one day i will try it!

Anyway, Guild Wars 2 is for sure one of my top 3 favorite mmorpg and i will be always playing it, it really respect your time and doesnt force you to log in everyday and play 10 hours a day to reach your goal, its truly a gem in this vast world of MMO's.
If you wanna help me i will list below all my avalaible conctacts, you can send me a DM on Reddit too, no problem.
Discord: Nevada#0911
Steam Profile:https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198259313755/ (remember that i DO NOT OWN the game on steam, im linking my steam account only because is required for the thread, I OWN the game ON THE EXTERNAL GW2 CLIENT)
End of Dragons trailers:1)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-iol-TY3wU&ab_channel=GuildWars2 2)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUpAxUcCpyg&ab_channel=GuildWars2
End of Dragons Standard edition Official Website: https://buy.guildwars2.com/en-us/end-of-dragons?tab=0

Presentation \o/
Hello to everyone, its a while since im part of this sub, but for who doesn't know me i will introduce myself! My name is Andrea, Im Italian and i live in Rome, im part of this sub for 2 years now and sometimes i try to make a Request when i have periods where i can't afford games, sometimes worked, sometimes not, its part of the game i guess. Im an avid gamer, i started playing videogames back when i was a 4 or 5yo kid, i played a large variety of games and single player when i was younger, they were my passion (and still are) and i love every aspect of gaming.
When i grew up i started playing MMORPG's, one of the first mmo's that i played was "Metin2" i was 12 and for me it was one of the first experience with a game that had huge world and deep interaction between players. I was overwhelmed and amazed at the same time, the first true MMO experience!I played that game for 6-7 years straight, till i switched to other new mmo's as i grew up and some other genre, like moba's or arpg's.
MMO's were and are always part of my life and i think i will play them till my braincell works ahah! It's really me favorite genre of the entire gaming culture and when i come back to home after a bad day or a stressing period of time, i just turn on my favorite mmorpg and i start playing with new people or friend that i met during my journey.
Today im here, because unfortunately i had some monetary issue during this summer and i can't afford games or similar item. I lost my job during this summer, i had a Show-Room with my family, but we had to leave and close it for a lot of issues. So for now im just living day by day, working with some "little" job here and there to pay bills for my family and to help them, till we have enough money to open another shop.
Ok so what im asking for really?
Well recently, one of my best friends, gifted me a Guild Wars 2 account, it was one of the few mmo that i played for thousands of hours back in the day, i met a lot of good people and i had great memories with this game, but unfortunately i lost my old main account, i can't recover it, so i got this account gifted from my best friend. The account have everything that i need, only one piece miss from completing the "puzzle" and is the New Expansion: End Of Dragons.
The Expansion "End of Dragons":
This new expansion, introduce a lot of new content that i would like to explore and dig in with my friends and the new guild i just joined.
- A "new" continent to explore "Cantha", where you have oriental vibes mostly, with amazing views, Point of interest to discover and new foe to defeats. Other than that Cantha is one of the most historical lands of the world of Guild Wars, so it will be amazing coming back to it and know more of the story of this place.
- New Elite specialization (like new classes for most of mmo's). They introduced and released 9 new elite specialization to the game (which most are now "meta" and considered the most competitive classes as any game proceed to grow) which are:
The Virtuoso (Mesmer elite spec.), The Willbender (Guardian elite spec), The Mechanist (Engineer elit spec), The Bladesworn (Warrior elite spec), The Untamed (Ranged elite spec), The Vindicator (Revenant elite spec), The Harbringer (Necromancer elite spec) and lastly The Specter (Thief elite spec).I love most of this classes, but my favorite are The Harbringer, The Virtuoso and the Bladesworn.
- The new expansion will bring a new activity like Fishing and Sailing with your boat! The possibility to go under water with one of your mount and of course a lot of new Meta Events, Bosses and a lot of new content. (open world activity's that reward you with currency, money, item to sells achievements point and a lot of progression towards your goals)
- New Masteries that will help you navigate through Cantha and will help you with your new boat, mount and other content (masteries are the only vertical progression is basically a level after the level cap that gives you some passives or skills that help you explore or do some specific content).
- New Strikes Missions (Mini raid, with some of them having Challenge modes, one of the best pve content along side with raids and fractals, very challenging for who love pve group content).
And much much more.
Why Guild Wars 2? What this game about?
Well, GW2 its a semi-open world MMORPG with horizontal progression, this mean that once you reach a certain type of gear and level you will not need to grind anymore for gear progression and you can do most of the content in the entire game for both PvP and PvE.The game have an huge world to explore, with every map being different and with a lot of content from Events, Meta Events, Point of interest and much more. There's even an achievement for the core map of the world where if you explore the entire base game map to 100% you will recive a component to craft in the future you first legendary weapon, its called "gift of exploration".
The levelling system is much diverse compared to the standards mmo and its pretty unique, basically you have a "Personal Story" for your character and each 10 levels you will unlock a chapter (Max lv is 80) of your story, meanwhile to earn experience, you have to explore the maps around your level and do pretty much every activty the various map offers to you to level up (you can even level up only doing instanced PvP, but that is a way i dont really like even if really like pvp). When you hit level 80, you will end your personal story and start your journey through the "Living World Seasons" (Basically small DLC's with chapters that are in between the three expansions) and the Three expansions: Hearth of Thorns, Path of Fire and the last one End of Dragons.
The combat system is one of the major point for me. Its an hybrid-action tab target gameplay with weapon swap, dodge mechanic and a lot of movements. Its for me, one of the best combat system in the western mmorpg market. You have a lot of specialization and you can use various builds for the different contents you want to do.
PvE side we have: Open world meta events, Dungeons (with a lot of path for every dungeon that gives you a lot of replayability options), Fractals (mini dungeons with more challenging mechanics), Raids and Strikes that are basically the hardest pve content in the game. The enviroments of most of the pve content is amazing and the mechanics are really challenging. I wish i will find a good raid group in the future!
PvP have two type of mode:

1. Instanced PvP with a ranking system and 3v3,5v5 that is really cool, because you can just go in level 1 and make your build and start doing pvp from the start and you eventually will make a lot of currency to even build your own character and a lot of resource to even boost a character to 80 without spending a single cents.
2. WvW (World vs World) is a large scale battle against server and you can go in as a squad or small group or even solo. I never played this mode because i really like the instanced pvp, one day i will try it!

Anyway, Guild Wars 2 is for sure one of my top 3 favorite mmorpg and i will be always playing it, it really respect your time and doesnt force you to log in everyday and play 10 hours a day to reach your goal, its truly a gem in this vast world of MMO's.
If you wanna help me i will list below all my avalaible conctacts, you can send me a DM on Reddit too, no problem.
Discord: Nevada#0911
Steam Profile:https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198259313755/ (remember that i DO NOT OWN the game on steam, im linking my steam account only because is required for the thread, I OWN the game ON THE EXTERNAL GW2 CLIENT)
End of Dragons trailers: 1)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-iol-TY3wU&ab_channel=GuildWars2 2)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUpAxUcCpyg&ab_channel=GuildWars2
End of Dragons Standard edition Official Website: https://buy.guildwars2.com/en-us/end-of-dragons?tab=0
Thank you a lot for your time and stay safe!

Hello guys,
For a long time, I was a GW1 player. With the release of GW2, I donve head first into it in the beginning. Before the first expansion though, I had already quit playing.
With the black friday deals, I was considering buygin the expansions, but wanted to get a feel of the game in its current state.

1. is population still healthy or do they mainly play new areas? Is it expected to not find groups for dungeons of the 1st exp, for example.
2. how is the guardian class at the moment? What am I expected to fulfill in a group? I used to spam fractals at the time in a more offensive support role. Doubt any build at the time is still relevant today.
3. what is the current "endgame" now? Do I need to come back every day to complete some missions?
4. do you think it is still worth it to come back, even though I might have only like 5h-10h a week?

Thanks in advance.

I - like many of you - was disappointed by the patch notes. They felt as if they were made without any understanding of the implications that the changes would have on the meta.I have written a few brief notes on some changes I would like to see push the GW2 meta in a more positive direction in the - likely vain - hope that someone from Anet will see it.
My expectation is that this patch will serve to cement the already skewed meta we’ve had since EoD launch, where high DPS, high utility cDPS specs dominate whereas lower utility, lower damage power specs languish in underuse. This is also exacerbated by encounter design, where the first 3 CMs favoured ranged damage builds (which are overwhelmingly cDPS specs), with older content being far less discriminating. As such there is no easy numbers tweak that will leave all builds feeling equal, however it is definitely possible for things to be better than they are currently.
It seems to me that Anet is aiming for GW2's classes to end up like FFXIV's where you have a homogenous but balanced array of specs. Unfortunately whilst this patch has increased homogeneity it's done very little to even out the power level of all builds.
Any balance changes should prioritise closing the gap between cDPS and pDPS. Power specs do offer an advantage in burst which golem benches don’t reflect, but the most recent encounters all favour the utility of cDPS specs over the burst of pDPS specs.
Power specs will tend to bench between 30k and 33k, with condi builds landing for the most part between 35k and 38k. The current top performing condi specs will be towards the top of that number except for Virtuoso which will be slightly lower due to the direct nerfs. Power Virtuoso, Catalyst and potentially Bladesworn will be more competitive with condi DPS in terms of golem DPS. Catalyst will likely compete at the top end despite the extensive nerfs.
The Discretize calculator has a preview version which allows you to see what the DPS of builds will look like. Not all changes have been accounted for, so builds like Catalyst, and Bladesworn will not be accurate, however it will give you a good impression of what the numbers will look like.
https://june-28-patch.discretize-optimizer.pages.dev/?m=raids
qChrono, qCata, qHerald pAlactemp (on small hitbox), pAlacren should land in the low >20k range. CAlacTemp should be 27k or so on small hitbox, and pAlac Untamed should be pretty high. We don’t know the durations for the quickness provided by qWarr but I would expect it to be in the low 20s with the rest of the updated builds. By contrast qFB should be around 29k and qHarb around 30k and any unchanged boon support should have their DPS relative to the pack unchanged (so ~2-3k less or so). These are very rough estimates, and should not be taken as gospel at all.
It’s unfortunate that Anet does not appear to have attempted to balance the new/updated specs out the box, or have the confidence to allow them to be overpowered for a brief period while they dial in the numbers. Instead in the period when interest in qHerald should be highest people will be playing qFB as they always have.
I would like to see all support DPS builds do more comparable damage to each other. The trend of alacDPS being bad serves to entrench Heal Alac and qDPS though it’s a comparatively minor issue and fixing it would really only result in more people running HFB.
The first issue with the patch is that removing banners and spirits favours condi specs, as the 5% (4.2% effective) buff from frost spirit along with the 100 poweferocity from banners are more influential than the up to 1200DPS condi specs get from Sun Spirit (proportionally less for any spec which doesn’t cap burning duration) along with the 100 condition damage and precision that most condi specs are losing. Further the precision buff from the omnipotion was removed which makes crit capping on many classes even more difficult in fractals.
I’m glad Anet recognised this issue where it impacts crit-capping and buffed fury and pDPS traitlines to compensate, however the implementation leaves something to be desired for a lot of classes, and the lack of compensation for the other lost stats will only serve to widen the gap between condi and power. It’s extremely disappointing Anet wasn’t able to predict or counteract the negative impact this change would have, as banners/spirits have comparatively simple deterministic effects.
For Ele this buff only applies while in air attunement, a decision which makes no sense when Reaper’s variable crit rate was removed in the same patch. This decision works as a pointless nerf to pWeaveqCata, builds which aren’t especially great as it is. PCata doesn’t really care and pTemp doesn’t care that much either (not that pTemp is a relevant build)
For Warrior this 5% buff was put in Arms. Why? Put it in discipline, which is the mandatory pDPS traitline. Warrior also loses 50 points of precision (along with power, ferocity and condition damage), thanks to the removal of doubled standards, which should also be compensated for should Warrior hope to stay relevant at all.
For Ranger the trait is in Skirmishing which is fine in raids, however in fractals it’s not practical to flank most the time due to the lack of tank. With the removal of the Omnipotion precision buff, the nerf to OWP and the damage buff to Skirmishing this serves to nerf Marksmanship Soulbeast further still. Either remove the requirement to flank or provide buffs to Marksmanship to compensate for the disparity between the traitlines.
For Power Thief this 5% crit is tied to being above 90% health, which is problematic given that so much of your damage is now tied to being above 90% health. The 5% buff should be baseline to ensure that power Thief isn’t needlessly nerfed by these changes, though pDD with signet of Agility can crit cap without this buff. Unrelated but the requirement to flank should be lessened for Thief as it’s part of what’s kept power thief out of the fractal power meta (not that that’s a thing any more)
Power Necro overall loses crit chance, but gains a strong crit damage multiplier which, if it works multiplicatively, should result in a small buff (ignoring the loss from spirits/banners) and will ensure that you never fail to crit a gravedigger again. Definitely one of the better changes in the patch. Unfortunately it still lacks a good source of self-fury despite the patch’s claim to address that.
See below for the numbers on reaper crit:
https://old.reddit.com/Guildwars2/comments/vm6efso_i_calculated_the_damage_changes_to_reaper_pve/
For Power Revenant the wording of Roiling mists implies that it should provide another 5% crit after Fury gets increased to 25%. Unfortunately pAlacren doesn’t run this trait, so is losing out on 5% crit while also losing out on the value of AP. To adress this the base duration of Orders from Above could be increased which would allow pAlacren to run zerkers and more easily critcap while also making it easier to gear for people without full ascended gear, especially for condi builds which unreasonably require full ritualists, and depending on the numbers might allow Healren to drop Righteous Rebel and take Lasting Legacy again to cap might. This would of course function as a buff to condi alacren as well, however it’s not a build which sees much play and it is an issue that AlacDPS does less damage than quickDPS (incentivising healac+qDPS over the reverse).
For power Mesmer only Virtuoso was compensated for the loss of crit chance, with nothing being given to Chronomancer. The crit buff should have been added to duelling if you want it to be accessible to cVirt, pVirt and pChrono (though it would be accessible to Mirage as well). Or the crit chance buff could have been added directly to a minor trait in the Chronomancer traitline if you don’t want Mirage to get it. Further Chrono suffers from being dependent on Slow uptime for Danger Time which is not a common condition in casual play. I appreciate that this is thematic but it should be removed to make pChrono less comp dependent (which was the point of this patch in the first place)
Guardian wasn’t given extra crit chance which is mostly OK, because it’s not needed for Radiance DH/WB. It does however serve as a nerf to Virtues DH/WB though I expect Anet doesn’t much care about either build.
Engineer implementation is fine (it’s only qScrapper which needs it anyway).

Elementalist

For Heal Tempest these changes are okay. It was dead as a spec before and now it’s at least useable. Unfortunately arenanet has designed Tempest such that only the choice of grandmaster trait does anything and all the other traits choices are irrelevant. As such the choice for Alacrity competes with Elemental Bastion, which is the build defining trait for Heal Tempest. Whilst Heal Tempest is playable without this trait, as it’s possible to lean on core heal utilities instead of Tempest, it removes a lot of the identity of Htemp as the shout/aura healer, and makes it more difficult for it to compete with the overloaded kits of HFB/Hmech. Elemental Bastion should be moved to the Master tier or combined with Lucid Singularity, or added to a minor trait to allow Htemp to retain its identity and more easily compete.
Condi Alac Tempest seems at least vaguely viable, however the forced movement on Earth Dagger 3 and Fire Dagger 3 make it awkward to play in a raid environment, and the high hitbox dependence of DPS tempest make the DPS look better than it is. I would like to see the Dagger 3 skills stop at the edge of a boss hitbox and for the Warhorn skills to have their damage equalised across hitbox sizes. This is especially an issue for pTemp, which loses ~6k DPS moving from the unrealistic huge hitbox golem to small.
I don’t necessarily want all builds to be as overloaded as HMech/HFB, but if it’s a choice between that and not being played I know which I would pick. As such Htemp should receive more access to Stab/aegis/barrier to match those builds. While it can bring AOE stun breaks it can only bring 2(4) seconds of Stab through swapping an entire traitline, and has no access to Aegis/Barrier. All of those could easily be added to existing shouts (Stab to air, barrier to earth, aegis to frost) which all have long enough CDs for the boons to be useful but not permanent.
This issue is replicated across most non-HFB/Hmech heal builds which have limited or no access to stab/barrieaegis. Many encounters are designed around access to these buffs, especially raid Challenge Modes. These boons obviously shouldn't be cheap or spammable, but they should be available.
For Weaver the design has always been great, and I honestly never want that to change. Unfortunately Anet doesn’t seem to be able to find a place for a selfish spec like Weaver. As with all power specs the damage needs to come up, and I feel given its selfishness as a spec it’s not unreasonable at all for it to sit towards the top of the DPS charts. A small DPS advantage would be enough to justify playing it over easier and more useful specs without making players not interested in that feel bad for their preferences.
Power Weaver could also do with some buffed defensive minor traits to make it feel less squishy. I would also like to see pWeaver make use of more elements, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion. For condi Weaver its big weakness has been its dependence on Alacrity/Quickness. A simple fix would be to reduce attunement CD by 20% but make them no longer affected by Alacrity. Weave Self could also have a short grace period after it expires to enter your final element, so it doesn’t feel so awful to be very slightly slow with your rotation.
Also buff staff Weaver, there’s no reason it has to be this bad after all these years. GW2 sorely lacks a traditional mage playstyle and Staff Weaver would fit that if it weren’t so atrociously bad.
For pCata the damage should be fine, the problem is that the class is jank to play, and it has the highest skill floor of any build in the game. At least for cWeaver you can just button mash and cycle between fire/fire and earth/earth and Mirage has godly auto attacks. Anet is clearly opposed to builds being inaccessible, and yet Cata’s inaccessibility makes good damage on it unattainable for a lot of new and even experienced players.
For qCata the damage appears to be painfully low, with the 10% nerf slapped on being completely unnecessary given that exactly no one was playing qCata in any context.
To make it more accessible to newer players and more enjoyable to all I would like to see the following changes:
Remove energy. It sucks if there’s downtime and you didn’t get full energy already, or if you downed and it hard locks you into hammer. It serves no purpose and only interacts with a single trait which should just be reworked accordingly.
Give it better CC. Air 4 sucks and is a pain to use and air 5 is used rotationally. It could be a normal knockdown with a flipover skill that displaces you, and it would be nice if it were longer or if it gained more CC through other sources.
Make elemental empowerment refresh when you get a new stack, or increase the duration of stacks so it’s easier to maintain. Every time someone asks me to look at a low DPS cata log, it’s because they’re not upkeeping Elemental Empowerment or Empowering Auras. Even the golem bench doesn’t even upkeep 10 stacks all the time.
Make Empowered Empowerment apply all the time. Because it only applies at 10 stacks it makes the punishment for not being able to maintain 10 stacks massive.
Make earth 4 directly apply an aura (instead of being a channelled single block) so you have a 2nd source of auras in earth attunement as the CD on earth 5 is so long (or reduce the CD on earth 5).
Remove the CD on Hammer 3 (not grand finale). If you accidentally screw up the rotation then you will often end up grand finale-ing in the wrong attunement and being stuck without one of your buffs which feels awful and is quite difficult to recover from. Removing the CD on it would mean that if you make a mistake you can easily recover your rotation.
It was mentioned before the patch that boons would be frontloaded on Sphere application, which would help to limit the struggles qCata has with movement;the increase in radius from 240 to 360 is a good change on this front. I personally am in favour of making the boons from the Sphere be pulsed both around the player and inside the Jade Sphere with a shared target cap (like Scourge)
Make the orbs do meaningful damage and function like primordial stance. Orbs doing damage was cool, them being hitbox dependent was not.
I'd also like the augments to be instant cast and the weapon skill and augment CDs to be reduced all around to speed up the rotation, but that’s just personal preference.
And finally I'd like to see a rework to Conjured Weapons. Having to pick them up is just a chore, and is often not practical depending on the encounter. A simple fix would be to halve the CD, increase the damage and have them no longer drop a second bundle on the ground. A trait could be added in Arcane (i.e not part of the standard pDPS build) which allows a second charge to be picked up by allies.

Mesmer

Mirage was basically unchanged by this patch. Full DPS Mirage has for a while been obscenely strong however the full DPS build sees comparatively little play due to the difficulty of the rotation. As mentioned in the leaked chats there are extant bugs with Axe ambushes ghosting and being lost. I would love to see these issues addressed as once again Anet’s aim is to make builds more accessible and these issues are stopping that.
For Chronomancer I like that Alac Chrono once again can be a thing, however Anet has gone with the blandest possible implementation of it as “press class mechanic, give boon”. I would almost rather it were “STM but alac” instead. Damage looks to be incredibly low for both STM and alac chrono, thanks to the loss of crit, unique buffs and quick well. On one level I do like that Chrono Shield is being pushed to the forefront, as Sw/Sh is a great aesthetic, however you will lose a lot of versatility from the loss in choice of offhand weapon,

Necro

Reaper has always been dealt a poor hand due to its second health bar supposedly being a justification for why its damage can’t be high while also reducing its damage if your second health bar is hit. I’m glad to see Reaper buffs, even if they’re only buffs relative to other pDPS specs. I personally would like to see a grandmaster trait offer the option of trading away the second HP bar for a substantial DPS uplift (similar to Harbinger)

Ranger

The nerfs to Soulbeast feel unnecessary. It seems that every patch has aimed to bring down Soulbeast’s burst. The change to the ICD on OWP is Okish, as OWP value varies massively by class with Cata able to proc it essentially on CD, but other classes like Chrono provide far less value. Unfortunately the damage reductions push Soulbeast away from the more interesting Stance Share builds towards the less interesting Oppressive Superiority and move its damage towards the lower end of the power DPS specs. These nerfs also negatively affect cSLB which no one was arguing was overpowered or overplayed. I would like to see damage come back up for both flavours of SLB, and on the condi side of things the damage from Vulture Stance should count for the player not the recipient. Once again this change would make cSLB less comp dependent, and as a bonus would make cSLB damage look better in logs.
The removal of spotter as a unique buff leaves Skirmishing without a meaningful pDPS trait in that tier. The updated spotter is supposed to provide more uptime of group fury, but it makes more sense for pDPS builds to just take the very mild DPS uplift from the condi trait instead, which is likely not what was intended. There are similar issues with all the removed unique buffs as they all competed with DPS enhancing traits.
Untamed is kinda still bad, but the changes to pet commands in the pipeline, and the potential for Alac Untamed might save it to a certain extent. APM will still be absurdly high for any Fervent Force build, so it’s probably not a particularly accessible build but damage should at least be decent. I would still like to see a rework for Untamed though, but it’s not something I have any particular vision for.
Druid should probably be fine. It won’t be as faceroll easy as Hmech but it has good boons, great CC (especially now there’s less reason to run Skirmishing) and great general utility that carried plenty of raid teams to success in previous metas. It remains to be seen whether the reworked Frost Spirit and Grace of the Land cause issues with might generation. If it no longer needs Grace of the Land then the updated Lingering Light will offer a pretty substantial uplift in healing output. Aside from not being able to spam out barrier Druid is probably the closest to Hmech in utility and it’s the only healer I expect to see that isn’t an Hmech/HFB.

Engineer

The patch does nothing to reign in Hmechs dominance. Part of the issue is that it just plays itself, as the mech will just happily heal, barrier and provide boons to your subsquad without you needing to do anything. This level of passive sustain should come down and require you to actually press buttons to heal your team. The problem with nerfing mechanist however is that once it’s balanced the frustrations of having to micromanage the mech start to surface. As with Cata I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the buffs from the mech be applied around the player as well as the Mech to ensure you’re not screwed over by the mech AI not playing nice.
Heal Scrapper is overall a very nice, underused build, which is overshadowed by its evil sibilng HMech. It could do with some more boon coverage to supplement its quickness generation. Similarly quickness scrapper could do with some more damage and boon coverage, especially now that its self-sustain has come down to reasonable levels, and full DPS Scrapper could reasonably be buffed into relevance.
Power Holosmith is one of my favourite class designs and to me represents what the limit of a high utility DPS should be. I look forward to playing it again once the damage gap between power and condi is addressed.

Thief

Rifle Deadeye has once again evaded any kind of rework in PvE. I personally would like to see the restrictions on movement from kneeling lessened (or removed) along with the addition of cleave on Rifle skills, and the Deadeye’s Mark staying on targets even if you’re downed. The comparison with power Virtuoso is stark, as both offer similar damage and range while Virtuoso offers higher CC, unrestricted movement and some great defensive utility.
Condi Spectre offers an overloaded toolkit, and is emblematic of the utility on offer from current meta specs. With Head Shot, Basilisk Venom and Shroud 5 it offers massive CC for comparatively minimal tradeoff, while having great access to ranged damage, massive barrier and healing passively from the rotation. It does all of this while offering some of the highest damage in the game. Once again we’ve repeated the issue with Scourge, where high barrier output can be provided with zero stat investment which disincentivises building healing stats and provides too much value for what should be a full DPS build. Scourge at least has the decency to have fairly average damage for what it offers in terms of utility.
Despite this Alac Spectre and Heal Spectre see comparatively little play, due to the poor boon coverage on offer from Heal Spectre, limited returns on healing stats and the forced movement and small radius for wells. Further Condi Thief playrates are essentially capped at 1 per subgroup as Venom skills don’t stack well; changing them to stack like Ashes of the Just would be an improvement on this front. Kalla Condi Renegades have the same issue with the Razorclaw Aura not stacking with allies, which too could see a fix.

Revenant

With the removal of Assassin’s Presence Devastation Revenant has lost much of its value. pAlacren offered low damage but could at least attempt to bridge the gap by offering high CC and the unique buff from AP. Now that its gone pAlacren offers incredibly low damage without any particular reason to take it over anything else. Damage should be equalized with current high damage qDPS builds like qFB and qHarb. Reducing the BD requirement would help on this front, as would buffs to the pDPS output of the Devastation traitline.
Vindicator suffers similar issues. Its damage is comparatively low and depends on hitbox size while also having to contend with the extra jank from only having one dodge. To me the one dodge experiment on Vindicator has failed, which is borne out by its low playrate. While it could be taken in multiple directions I think the simplest way forward that meshes with GW2’s design philosophy is to simply give it another dodge in PvE. One dodge that you have to use off CD is very close to zero dodges and it just doesn’t feel that good to play as a result. That, along with more damage (especially on small hitboxes), and some more CC baseline (though it can take Staff for a fairly minimal DPS loss) would help it compete more in the current lineup.
It’s disappointing to see that Heal Vindicator has essentially been deleted from the game by the earnest attempts at reworking Salvation. I do like that Salvation is seeing changes and I hope that it will go some way to bridging the gap between HealRev and the meta choices. Similarly I do appreciate why the change was made to remove Alacrity from core Rev, but both Heal Vindicator and Heal Renegade were dependent on that Alacrity to a lesser or greater extent. I would like to see the Alacrity added directly to the boon or heal dodge grandmaster to give support vindicator a chance to be relevant, even if it is competing directly with HRen and indirectly with Healald.
HealRen depended on the Alac from Salvation to compensate for the lower Alacrity output from running Lasting Legacy which is required to cap Might. As such a reasonable fix would be to lower the BD requirements such that it can continue to run Lasting Legacy or to simply add more might generation to the Salvation or Renegade traitlines. The intent of this patch was to make Might more available, but that doesn’t seem to have happened, so it still falls on heal builds to provide that for their subgroup.
While the new and improved Assassin’s Presence finally provides some uptime of fury for HRen/HVin, it’s still nowhere close to permanent even with 100% BD and I don’t think it’s reasonable to require an entire traitline to be able to provide Fury. Not when HFB provides it just for existing. Even with the changes it likely won’t compete with HMech, which will still predominate as the Healac build of choice. As with HTemp either HMech power level needs to come down or HRen/Hvin power level needs to come up, I prefer the former but I expect the latter.
While it has an incredibly strong source of Stability in Jallis – at the cost of an entire legend – it offers no Aegis or Barrier and none of the absurdly high passive sustain on offer from Mechanist or the free utility from Firebrand. DPS qHerald looks to offer too low damage to be relevant. Even the 0BD powecondi Herald builds struggled to compete with qFB for damage and qHerald looks to require pretty close to 100% BD to do perma quickness (even accounting for the boon extension on Glint). I would like to see the base quickness duration come up substantially, even doubling the duration would still leave qHerald with fairly unremarkable DPS.
Healald will struggle for relevance due to the lack of party burst Heal in Glint as it only offers self healing and regeneration. The buffs to Salvation should ameliorate this to a lesser or greater extent. Further the Might output from Herald is agonisingly slow, and should be buffed if it is to attempt to be competitive.

Warrior

Warrior overall has been treated poorly by this patch. The removal of banners disproportionately affects Warrior which needed the bonus stats from Doubled Standards for damage, and the banners themselves for relevance in PvE. The crit chance being in Arms reflects poorly on Anet’s understanding of the class itself. In exchange Warrior gets a quickness build which, as with all the updated qDPS builds, looks to do incredibly low damage.
It should go without saying that Warrior needs buffs, especially buffs to crit chance. It’s gone from having the worst access to crit chance buffs, to having literally none if you’re not running Arms (which you shouldn’t).
The current implementation also conflicts with any attempts to make Shout Heal Warrior work as shouts and banners compete for slots. As the requisite traits are in Tactics condi qWarr is also a non starter. Martial Cadence competes with Vigorous Shouts for heals and Phalanx Strength for might which leaves Warrior only able to do any one at a time, when most other support builds have some ability to do all 3. Moving around traits to remove this conflict and upping the base quickness duration should help to make qWarr more viable and hWarr less of a complete meme, though it will likely need more than that.
Spellbreaker continues to go without change in PvE. In the absence of any major rework to the class – which clearly isn’t happening – I would like to see the damage increase so it can at least be played unironically as a pDPS spec.
Bladesworn’s position remains to be seen after the changes.

Guardian

Firebrand continues to be the benchmark against which all support builds are measured. Even if all these burgeoning support builds are buffed enough to offer competitive DPS they will still struggle to compete with the utility Firebrand offers baseline and with core Guard utility skills. With Tomes Firebrand can offer essentially any boon for no cost at all (albeit on a long CD) and core utility skills like Sanctuary, “Stand your Ground!” and even Purging Flames offer vast utility that most other classes can’t hope to compete with. Only core Mesmer really competes directly with the utility offered by core Guard in PvE, which is no surprise given how long Chronomancer dominated the meta before Firebrand.
As with Mechanist I would prefer to see some of these skills nerfed, however I accept that’s not the direction GW2 is likely to go in. Instead I would then like to see most classes receive reworks to unused core utilities to allow them to offer similar high value utility. When the patch previews indicated that underused skills would be receiving reworks this is what I was hoping would happen as a result.
In terms of the class itself I would like to see better access to regeneration in core guard traits, having played Chaos Mirage with many uncooperative HFB players. Taking the regen mantra is rarely a priority with how contested FB utilities are. Similarly access to might could certainly be better.
Willbender is a decently fun build that manages to set itself apart from other DPS guard builds with its cooldown reduction which serves to speed up the rotation but not to the ludicrous extent that Untamed does. Unfortunately due to its nature as a selfish melee DPS its playrate is comparatively low. It was also hit with the same damage nerf as cFB and is more affected by the removal of spirits than most cDPS builds, so I wouldn’t mind seeing it buffed a little in recompense (though of course less of a priority than buffing pDPS specs).
pWB struggles to differentiate itself from DH, offering lower sustained and burst damage. Buffs to the offhand sword skills would help to provide it its own identity instead of running Sw/F like DH.
The forced movement on the profession skills can be awkward at times, whilst the F1 in theory shouldn’t move you when you’re adjacent to or inside the hitbox it can do so regardless. The F2 which is required for Alac WB forces you to move through the group on activation. If the F2 were a dash to the cursor instead of a fixed distance dash this would help address these issues.
DH longbow is painfully underused. With the power creep since HoT release I don’t think there’s an argument against ranged pDPS DH being viable. Any LB rotation would require you to switch to GS anyway, so it would never have the flexibility of something like Scourge.
I was again disappointed to see the lack of change to underused weapons except Engineer’s Rifle Chrono Shield and Warrior Warhorn (the latter 2 feeling somewhat forced). All classes have at least one weapon which sees almost no use so it would have helped this patch go down more positively if more of them saw changes.
Warrior Rifle, Guard/Rev Hammer, Thief Sword, Ele Staff, Necro Staff/MH Dagger and Mesmer Sceptre could all also have seen changes to make them useful in PvE.
Thanks to anyone who made it this far, I appreciate that this was incredibly long. If anyone has any thoughts let me know.

So, I have played GW2 in the past, i last played at PoF launch, didn't really get far though and I've never gotten to "endgame". I had to the urge to play again and bought EoD and was looking to use the 80 boost. I have a level 80 Engineer, but I wanted to do something else. Ive been using the trial for the boost to mess around with classes and I enjoyed Revenant the most, as I was looking for a death knightish class, and I know the reaper exists but Rev just seems cooler, animations and playstyle-wise, and Im not a fan of scourge/harbringer, Renegade/Herald look more interesting.
My only hold up is that doing some research, it seems the general consensus is that Rev isnt that good. I know you don't really need to stick to the meta to have fun but my main goal is endgame pve such as fractals and raids, where it seems revenants arent really wanted, mostly due to focus on elite specs over base classes. Ive read Renegade is good but I prefer melee playstyles and Vindicator seems to be unfavorable.
Its entirely possible I am just making up problems and I should just use the boost on him but I dont want to waste it. Could someone help me out, is Rev the closest to a deathknight and if anyone who plays Rev could give me some insight of what usually happens at the higher end pve content?

Hello to everyone, its a while since im part of this sub, but for who doesn't know me i will introduce myself!My name is Andrea, Im Italian and i live in Rome, im part of this sub for 2 years now and sometimes i try to make a Request when i have periods where i can't afford games, sometimes worked, sometimes not, its part of the game i guess. Im an avid gamer, i started playing videogames back when i was a 4 or 5yo kid, i played a large variety of games and single player when i was younger, they were my passion (and still are) and i love every aspect of gaming.
When i grew up i started playing MMORPG's, one of the first mmo's that i played was "Metin2" i was 12 and for me it was one of the first experience with a game that had huge world and deep interaction between players. I was overwhelmed and amazed at the same time, the first true MMO experience!I played that game for 6-7 years straight, till i switched to other new mmo's as i grew up and some other genre, like moba's or arpg's.
MMO's were and are always part of my life and i think i will play them till my braincell works ahah! It's really me favorite genre of the entire gaming culture and when i come back to home after a bad day or a stressing period of time, i just turn on my favorite mmorpg and i start playing with new people or friend that i met during my journey.
Today im here, because unfortunately i had some monetary issue during this summer and i can't afford games or similar item. I lost my job during this summer, i had a Show-Room with my family, but we had to leave and close it for a lot of issues. So for now im just living day by day, working with some "little" job here and there to pay bills for my family and to help them, till we have enough money to open another shop.
Ok so what im asking for really?
Well recently, one of my best friends, gifted me a Guild Wars 2 account, it was one of the few mmo that i played for thousands of hours back in the day, i met a lot of good people and i had great memories with this game, but unfortunately i lost my old main account, i can't recover it, so i got this account gifted from my best friend. The account have everything that i need, only one piece miss from completing the "puzzle" and is the New Expansion: End Of Dragons.
The Expansion "End of Dragons":
This new expansion, introduce a lot of new content that i would like to explore and dig in with my friends and the new guild i just joined.
- A "new" continent to explore "Cantha", where you have oriental vibes mostly, with amazing views, Point of interest to discover and new foe to defeats. Other than that Cantha is one of the most historical lands of the world of Guild Wars, so it will be amazing coming back to it and know more of the story of this place.
- New Elite specialization (like new classes for most of mmo's). They introduced and released 9 new elite specialization to the game (which most are now "meta" and considered the most competitive classes as any game proceed to grow) which are:
The Virtuoso (Mesmer elite spec.), The Willbender (Guardian elite spec), The Mechanist (Engineer elit spec), The Bladesworn (Warrior elite spec), The Untamed (Ranged elite spec), The Vindicator (Revenant elite spec), The Harbringer (Necromancer elite spec) and lastly The Specter (Thief elite spec).I love most of this classes, but my favorite are The Harbringer, The Virtuoso and the Bladesworn.
- The new expansion will bring a new activity like Fishing and Sailing with your boat! The possibility to go under water with one of your mount and of course a lot of new Meta Events, Bosses and a lot of new content. (open world activity's that reward you with currency, money, item to sells achievements point and a lot of progression towards your goals)
- New Masteries that will help you navigate through Cantha and will help you with your new boat, mount and other content (masteries are the only vertical progression is basically a level after the level cap that gives you some passives or skills that help you explore or do some specific content).
- New Strikes Missions (Mini raid, with some of them having Challenge modes, one of the best pve content along side with raids and fractals, very challenging for who love pve group content).
And much much more.
Why Guild Wars 2? What this game about?
Well, GW2 its a semi-open world MMORPG with horizontal progression, this mean that once you reach a certain type of gear and level you will not need to grind anymore for gear progression and you can do most of the content in the entire game for both PvP and PvE.The game have an huge world to explore, with every map being different and with a lot of content from Events, Meta Events, Point of interest and much more. There's even an achievement for the core map of the world where if you explore the entire base game map to 100% you will recive a component to craft in the future you first legendary weapon, its called "gift of exploration".
The levelling system is much diverse compared to the standards mmo and its pretty unique, basically you have a "Personal Story" for your character and each 10 levels you will unlock a chapter (Max lv is 80) of your story, meanwhile to earn experience, you have to explore the maps around your level and do pretty much every activty the various map offers to you to level up (you can even level up only doing instanced PvP, but that is a way i dont really like even if really like pvp). When you hit level 80, you will end your personal story and start your journey through the "Living World Seasons" (Basically small DLC's with chapters that are in between the three expansions) and the Three expansions: Hearth of Thorns, Path of Fire and the last one End of Dragons.
The combat system is one of the major point for me. Its an hybrid-action tab target gameplay with weapon swap, dodge mechanic and a lot of movements. Its for me, one of the best combat system in the western mmorpg market. You have a lot of specialization and you can use various builds for the different contents you want to do.
PvE side we have: Open world meta events, Dungeons (with a lot of path for every dungeon that gives you a lot of replayability options), Fractals (mini dungeons with more challenging mechanics), Raids and Strikes that are basically the hardest pve content in the game. The enviroments of most of the pve content is amazing and the mechanics are really challenging. I wish i will find a good raid group in the future!
PvP have two type of mode:

1. Instanced PvP with a ranking system and 3v3,5v5 that is really cool, because you can just go in level 1 and make your build and start doing pvp from the start and you eventually will make a lot of currency to even build your own character and a lot of resource to even boost a character to 80 without spending a single cents.
2. WvW (World vs World) is a large scale battle against server and you can go in as a squad or small group or even solo. I never played this mode because i really like the instanced pvp, one day i will try it!

Anyway, Guild Wars 2 is for sure one of my top 3 favorite mmorpg and i will be always playing it, it really respect your time and doesnt force you to log in everyday and play 10 hours a day to reach your goal, its truly a gem in this vast world of MMO's.
If you wanna help me i will list below all my avalaible conctacts, you can send me a DM on reddit too, no problem.
Discord: Nevada#0911
Steam Profile:https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198259313755/ (remember that i DO NOT OWN the game on steam, im linking my steam account only because is required for the thread, I OWN the game ON THE EXTERNAL GW2 CLIENT)
End of Dragons trailers: 1)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-iol-TY3wU&ab_channel=GuildWars2 2)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUpAxUcCpyg&ab_channel=GuildWars2
End of Dragons Standard edition Official Website: https://buy.guildwars2.com/en-us/end-of-dragons?tab=0
Thank you a lot for your time and stay safe!

Hi there. Veteran player here for over 8 years looking to share knowledge with newbies.
Guild Wars 2 has always been a game that is close to my heart, and no matter how many breaks I take, I keep coming back because I love it that much. One thing I want to pass onto new players is the knowledge of where to find certain information that they may need, because when I was a new player, I didn't know a thing. If I wanted to find the best builds to help me solo content, do well in PvP, WvW, or hunt certain achievements, I had to ask others for help.
That led me to joining a guild and they helped me figure out where to get valuable information that I needed. Here are some of the resource guides that I use from time to time:

• Guild Wars 2 wiki - The first source of information most players will learn to use. For those who bought the game pre-Steam will know from the manual that they can even use the command /wiki (name of item) on GW2's in-game chat to look up information regarding said item.
• Crafting Guide (GW2 Crafts) - If you need help in levelling up your crafting disciplines, this website is a handy tool in showing you recipes that can help to power level to 400 and beyond to 500.
• Build Editor (GW2 Skills.net) - This website helps you to plan your build and share it with others.
• Content Guide (Dulfy.net) - Despite being inactive for awhile, the website still has valuable information that can help newbies unlock certain achievements, progress their masteries, and detailed walkthroughs for older content. --EDIT-- The website's UI may be difficult for users to navigate. You used to be able to highlight the GW2 tab and a dropdown menu of sorts will show you the different types of content available, but it is either broken or removed. Will keep this site for nostalgia's sake.
• -EDIT- Content Guide 2 (GuildJen.com) - As pointed out by the readers, GuildJen is basically the new Dulfy. Aside from having achievement guides and walkthroughs, they also showcase tons of really cool and fun builds for veteran players, as well as beginner-friendly ones for newbies to try out.
• World Boss Timers (GW2 Timer.com) - It is one of the websites that offered a timer that accurately tells when certain world bosses would spawn. Since then, the Guild Wars 2 wiki created a timer of its own.
• Build sources (Metabattle.com) - It is a great source for looking up various builds for open world PvE, PvP, WvW, Raids, Strike Missions, and Fractals.
• Style (GW2 Style.com) - If you are looking to share wonderful screenshots of your characters and alts with their fancy armor combinations and dyes, or want to be inspired by what other players are rocking in Fashion Wars 2, this website has you covered.

Do note that this is not a definitive list of the be-all-end-all guide to Guild Wars 2. There are many more websites that offer tons of utility for players. Some may lean more towards showing off builds, calculating how much gold you can potentially earn from your account, and many more. More importantly, the greatest knowledge I can give to you is to simply enjoy the game and do the activities that you want to do. Don't force yourself to try things you aren't comfortable with at the moment. There will always be some helpful people both in-game and here on Reddit. All you need to do is ask.

I played a bit GW2 in the past and i decided to play a bit again. I used the level 80 token to level-up a warrior from lev2 to lev80.
Could you please advice for an easy build for warrior ? I have first 2 expansions , LW3 LW4 and couple episodes from LW5( jormag )
I mostly want to do fractals and i have 3 trinkets bought with laurels ( berseker damage + crit chance + crit amount).
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EDIT:
In the end I have bought berseker gear and equiped 2 axes and have great fun smashing things : with 2 4 5 F1 . Not sure about my dps but is great fun and the mobs dies more often than me.
Thank you all for the advises.