| My edgy cabbage Renegade Posted: 23 Mar 2021 07:16 AM PDT |
| Fun Things to do as a small guild? Posted: 22 Mar 2021 11:40 PM PDT Hey guys! What are some things that you have enjoyed doing with a small group of people? We usually have 5-7 people on guild night and love having some off-beat content to do! We've all been playing casually for over half a decade and have done all the mainstream things (World Bosses, bounties, duels at the guild hall, WvW etc) Has anyone come across any fun hidden achievements or treasure-hunts that would be fun to do as a small group? I'd love to hear you're ideas! submitted by /u/Manekk98 [link] [comments] |
| "New" Guild Wars 2 Youtuber Posted: 23 Mar 2021 06:28 AM PDT |
| Did they change Flame Legion armour? Posted: 23 Mar 2021 03:07 AM PDT |
| My First Solo Cairn! Power Rifle Deadeye 32:18 Posted: 22 Mar 2021 04:32 PM PDT |
| [snek] MAMA: 28s (Nightmare CM) Posted: 22 Mar 2021 11:50 AM PDT Hello, everyone! We've been working on pushing the MAMA speedkill time further than ever before, and we're happy to say that we've managed to shave two seconds off the previous record, while following more restricted rules: not using any mid-fight consumable portals, nor bugged pretraps. We hope you'll find it interesting! Recently, Nightmare Shattered [Ns] posted an excellent MAMA speedkill (along with the other two Nightmare bosses -- go check them out!) which was a hefty three second improvement over the previous time by [iV]. The highlight of their kill was their extremely strong second and fourth phase bursts. We're building on their strategy here, pushing it below the thirty second mark and beyond! Log & PoVs https://dps.report/HMkn-20210321-155736_mama Group Composition We believe the optimal team composition is exactly what the previous speedkill record used -- but we have stronger reasoning for bringing Soulbeast, with it now bringing damage competitive with the two Dragonhunters. - Berserker: Over a third of the time in this fight comes down to fighting MAMA's knight adds. Berserker is the only class that can happily damage seven distinct short phases back-to-back without having cooldown issues. The damage it brings to the knights while still contributing stellar damage to the main MAMA phases, breakbar damage, and banner buffs for the entire team makes it invaluable here, and stronger on this boss than any other boss in Fractals.
- Dragonhunters: [Ns] demonstrated the power of Dragonhunter on this encounter. A single Guardian is essentially inarguable for quickness uptime, so the question is: why take two? The alternative damage classes would be a Weaver or an additional Soulbeast, and compared to Dragonhunter, both of these options suffer more from the repeated burst phases with little time to recover, giving DH the edge in a kill where balancing damage between phases is imperative. Why not take a second Berserker? It doesn't bring enough over a single Berserker in terms of group buffs (Dragonhunter at least brings additional shared
Bane Signet via Perfect Inscriptions), and it hurts boss damage too much. - Soulbeast: This class does it all. Its damage on this fight is comparable with Dragonhunter while bringing group buffs that are in a league of their own -- shared
One Wolf Pack and Frost Spirit. The only caveat is that it has the longest cooldowns of any class on its burst, which puts it in an awkward position in an encounter like MAMA. By reworking our strategy to play to its strengths, we take full advantage of the class. - Renegade: The premier support class in Fractals. Without Renegade, we wouldn't be able to break the defiance bars we need to break, and we would be sad. Not the most attractive proposition. But Renegade does more than that: it helps keep us alive, it gives
Assassin's Presence, and its burst damage is more substantial than you might expect, both on MAMA and her knights. Check it out on P3! Strategy In the big picture, the most substantial improvement here is the reworking of the Soulbeast rotation to play to its strengths, allowing us to share One Wolf Pack on P3 (the weakest phase by far) instead of P2. Instead of bursting P1 and having oppressive cooldowns for the rest of the fight, the Soulbeast now bursts P2 and P4, uses a fancy precast to still do decent damage on P1, and shares One Wolf Pack to make up for its lack of damage on P3. This results in a substantial damage gain in all of P2, P3 and P4, with a slight loss on P1 that we made up for with Dragonhunters using stronger precasts. Beyond that, every class has had its rotation improved. Here's an overview! - Berserker: By juggling CC around usage, we've freed the Berserker of using any maces, giving it a smooth rotation that absolutely shreds the knight adds. We considered using
Throw Bolas over Bull's Charge for additional Peak Performance uptime and taking a mace to make up for the CC loss, but after testing, the downtime in the repeated casts of Bolas was not preferable to the more continuous damage from taking double axes and Bull's Charge. This rotation was tricky to nail down, and had quite a few iterations as it had to be synchronized with all seven phases to not screw up adrenaline. We're pretty happy with the result. - Dragonhunter: We chose to rely on the
Spear of Justice tether lasting from P1 all the way to the end of P2, instead of pulling it immediately after P1 in order to recast it on P2 followed by being unable to recast it on P3 due to a cooldown on the cast time. This let us get full Big Game Hunter uptime on every phase on both Dragonhunters, giving us a nice boost to our P3 damage -- the weakest phase. We also added a lot of damage to P1 through the use of Writ of Persistence letting us precast every symbol we could, swapping it off before the fight started. The rest is largely the same as [Ns]: relying on precast damage P1, and using that as leverage to have reasonable cooldowns for P2, P3 and P4, and their very neat usage of a precasted Test of Faith in P2. - Soulbeast: The rotation here was inspired by [iV]'s 33 second kill, where one of their Soulbeasts went for bursting P2 and P4 instead of the usual P1 and P3. Soulbeast bursting P3 at the pace of a 30s or faster kill wasn't working out well, so using that idea as a base, we realised that we could get even stronger P2 times without even using
One Wolf Pack there -- so we moved it to P3, which more than made up for Soulbeast slacking off there otherwise. We used Barrage's duration to our advantage to cast it and take the Mistlock Singularity to reset the cooldown in preparation for P2, and we used the "Sic 'Em!" duration to our advantage in the same way as Dragonhunter's Spear of Justice to get full uptime on it through both P1 and P2. Similarly, taking the Mistlock Singularity later than normal let precasted One Wolf Pack last through both P1 and P2, giving some pretty huge personal uptime overall. We placed the Barrage uses so as to cleave both the current knight add and MAMA herself, so as little damage as possible was wasted. - Renegade: The big improvement here comes from
Citadel Bombardment. By using a pre-fight portal to keep our Renegade on the group while Orders from Above was ticking during the precast, we managed to increase our Alacrity uptime enough to be able to take Vindication over Righteous Rebel. We went for a frenzy sigil on staff to get three Citadel Bombardment casts in the fight, and as Vindication makes it strong as hell, this made for a very respectable increase in damage. Restrictions Some politics! Something we wanted to avoid was the recent trend of the use of a mid-fight portal to get from MAMA's third phase to the third knight and back for her fourth phase. Our reasoning is that of wondering where you're meant to draw the line: it would be an advantage to portal to the first and second knights too, so why not do that? Likewise, it would be an advantage to portal to adds on Siax the Corrupted, so why not do that? We believe that not using mid-fight portals results in a more fun and interesting kill, so we've avoided it. This is just a matter of preference, and it's a perfectly valid strategy in its own right: nothing is stopping other groups from using mid-fight portals on MAMA or other bosses. Likewise, we've avoided using precasted traps that are "bugged" -- this is also a topic on which there is no actual consensus in the Fractal speedkill community, and we've just gone by the rules we feel are the most reasonable. If a trap can only stay on the ground after swapping it off the utility bar via deliberate trait swap bug abuse, we don't use it. Traps are inconsistent in that regard -- most Dragonhunter traps stay, some don't, and all Soulbeast traps do not stay. The main casualty of that is the Dragonhunter's Light's Judgment trap which could have been used to provide instant vulnerability on both the first and second adds at no disadvantage. An additional potential casualty is the Ranger's Spike Trap, which could free us from using some CC, but no group has used that one on MAMA either way. Tidbits These are some little details that we messed around with or ran into headfirst. - If you break a knight's defiance bar too fast (faster than somewhere around 1.8s), then MAMA won't lose her Determined (invulnerability) buff in the following phase. This is pretty unfortunate, so we had to time our CC on the knights to not be too fast. A weird problem to have. This is not new, but worth mentioning.
- The protective bubble's location is random, and it's beneficial to have it spawn on the second knight, as the timings line up so you can be in it and not waste any time, saving mistlock (and the Soulbeast from being unmerged). We got good times -- faster than the old record -- without having good bubble placement, but getting the right RNG was a necessity for the best result.
- If you're not doing the old bubble skip strategy, then you can't pretrap the third knight. Little adds that spawn after the bubble expires activate any position of third knight pretraps too early almost every time, and as there was already one layer of RNG grind, another layer wasn't particularly preferable. We wondered if there was a way around this, even going as far as trying to use a spare precast trap to instantly cripple the offending little add when it spawned so it would be slow enough walking into the third knight precast traps for them to be useful, but even crippled, the little add was still too speedy.
- Since only one
Test of Faith is useful on P2 with its ICD on proximity damage, we wondered what the optimal use of the second one was. After one pull we noticed that the second knight had taken a massive spike of damage from the barely still lingering P2 Test of Faith, and realised that we'd quite literally pushed the knight into the damage circle, like pushing Lupi to the wall. We wanted to use this on the first knight with our spare trap, but it died too fast to be consistently pushed into it. We ended up thinking that the best use for it was on the second knight, placing it on the opposite side of the knight as the P2 trap to account for more potential bubble locations, but we were too focused on other elements of the fight to really put much time into perfecting this -- it didn't happen in the actual kill. We also looked at having Dragonhunters turn around in P4 so poison damage hits would detonate their Shield of Wrath through their Shield of Courage (as it goes off too late otherwise), but the boss died so fast in P4 anyway that this didn't end up happening either. Nevermind, it doesn't deal damage either way. Thanks, alx! - When watching the [Ns] kill, we noticed that in P2 MAMA had three stacks of the
Spear of Justice debuff, even though there were only two Dragonhunters. We thought nothing of this at first, but then after wondering why one Dragonhunter's Whirling Wrath damage was so high in P2, we realised that one of their Dragonhunters was actually getting the Big Game Hunter damage bonus from two stacks at once during P2. We investigated further and found that it actually occurs consistently, and is actually a bug with using the F1 pull that can easily be used completely unintentionally -- one stack just doesn't go away when both their Dragonhunters use their pulls at the same time. This doesn't matter at all, but we found the bug pretty interesting, so it deserves a mention. Maybe there's some application to this elsewhere. - As we wanted to avoid using portal, we had to actually get to the third knight and back somehow. This honestly wasn't too bad, but the most awkward part was getting solid damage in on P4 while still making sure the last knight actually died. Mostly we wanted people to be able to leave the add early to get ready for P4 -- Dragonhunters had a lot of skills to use, Renegade's
Surge of the Mists windup was no joke (especially while standing in MAMA's poison field), and everyone else had CC to land too, including the Berserker. We placed a pretty big burden on our Berserker by making him use a bunch of damage on the knight while everyone else was already leaving, and Bull's Charge let him get back to MAMA at decent pace. Movement skills were a great help here for everyone but the poor Renegade. - Speaking of the Berserker, normally the "invisible hitbox" that sits almost directly on MAMA is a help for it by making cleave skills generate more adrenaline, but during the
Whirling Axe cast in P3 it was consistently stealing One Wolf Pack procs from the boss, so our Berserker had to stand further away during Whirling Axe on P3 in particular so as to hit MAMA but not the invisible hitbox, getting those procs back. - That Writ of Persistence trait is pretty weird. We were initially hoping to use its symbol radius increase to cleave both P1 and the first knight with precast symbols, but it turns out that after you swap off the trait, the radius increase goes away instantly. Applying retroactively to symbols already on the ground, despite not changing how they look on the ground to be smaller. That was disappointing. The effect on symbol duration (and therefore number of hits) is even weirder. Some symbols retroactively decrease duration when swapping off the trait, and some don't: the greatsword symbol gets 7 ticks; the sword one 5. Theoretically if you wanted the most damage out of symbol precasts on a short P1 you might use the ones that last longer first and the shorter duration ones later, so they all overlap during the phase.
That's all from us. Thanks for reading (and hopefully watching), and have a great day! submitted by /u/DaemonDayne123 [link] [comments] |
| Game Update Notes: March 23, 2021 Posted: 23 Mar 2021 08:52 AM PDT |
| Otherworldly Fungus Posted: 23 Mar 2021 08:50 AM PDT |
| Game Update Notes: March 23, 2021 Posted: 23 Mar 2021 08:52 AM PDT |
| Query regarding server transfer Posted: 23 Mar 2021 08:29 AM PDT First of all, apologies if this is asked regularly. I'm returning after not playing for 6 years. Me and a few friends are going to start playing tonight. I used to play and my home server is now full. Due to the fact we'd like to play WvW, I'm thinking I'll have to transfer to server we can all play. To avoid the 1.8k gem cost, I've read that you can delete all your characters and then transfer home server for free. - Is this true?
- If I do so will I keep my laurels, gold, bank contents etc?
I'd ideally not have to buy 1.8k gems, as I'll likely be purchasing the additional content soon aswell. Thanks in advance. submitted by /u/UkTreeMan [link] [comments] |
| When you are stuck at 9, do it at 5 ! Posted: 22 Mar 2021 11:15 AM PDT Hello guys, Here is our restricted 5 man Cardinal Sabir, beating the old record by 2 minutes. The funny thing is that it was not really planned. Being only 9 for our Daily, we were forced to cancel the evening. Hopefully, our GM Kozenko proposed us to do a low man. We decided to try Sabir and after a few tries, we obtained pretty good results. Thank you Jayden, Nekloth and Kenny who also participated in this kill. Log : https://dps.report/4rib-20210321-215100_sabir TL;DR : Cardinal Sabir 5 man record, easy fast kill submitted by /u/Titan2971 [link] [comments] |
| Is there any elementalist build I can enjoy? Posted: 23 Mar 2021 07:29 AM PDT I recently came back to the game from a long break, and I'm trying to find a class to focus on. My old main was elementalist and while I love how light armor looks, I remember being frustrated with the class because it felt weak. Dipping my toes back into the game again this still feels the case. Is there some build I've overlooked that can make staff ele feel strong, as I enjoy traditional mages and would like to play that. However staff feels horribly weak single target and sword weaver requires a hamster oding on monster and is horrifically squishy. Of course, I have played and enjoy Revenant, with the exception that I hate heavy armor. I don't like armored classes in general, and in this game that's no exception, if that gives a baseline of the kind of class I enjoy. submitted by /u/Eimi_Shahrizai [link] [comments] |
| Thornwarden (EoD Ranger elite spec idea) Posted: 23 Mar 2021 07:07 AM PDT |
| What to spend gems on? Posted: 23 Mar 2021 07:49 AM PDT Hello everyone! I'm a very new player (started last week) and ended up getting the ultimate edition. I was wondering what would be the best things to spend my gems on. I'm still trying to understand some things in the game so if you can explain what the item does I would really appreciate it! Thanks for the help! :D submitted by /u/jorgey_porgey1442 [link] [comments] |
| Trading Post problem Posted: 22 Mar 2021 03:22 PM PDT I was looking in the weapons section of the trading post and no weapons show up, only infusions. Jewelry also appears missing. Armor seems to show up fine, as well as ingredients and upgrades. Is this a known issue, or maybe there's a fix? I asked in map chat and others have noticed; one said relogging didn't fix the issue. EDIT: So if you don't search using the drop menu on the side, but instead type the names of weapons they will show up. submitted by /u/Thunderous-Wizard [link] [comments] |
| An exalted lullaby Posted: 23 Mar 2021 12:33 AM PDT In this song there's a part with a flute (i think?) which always reminds me of that one scene in the Hobbit. The dwarves arrived in rivendell and sit at the table waiting for food, but all they get is salad and an elven flute as background music. One dwarf in particular gets shown shoving a cloth in his hearing piece to avoid the noise of the flute. Somehow this comes to my mind every single time submitted by /u/MrFoozOG [link] [comments] |
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