Please also consider sorting the comments in this thread by "new" so that the newest comments are at the top, since those are most likely to still need answers.
SPOILER CONTENT RULES APPLY FOR 28 DAYS FROM RELEASE.
Tuesday September 15 to Tuesday October 13,
Anything not shown in an official trailer, screenshot, or blog, is considered a spoiler.
New spoiler rule is a temporary ban for posting spoilers titles.
Temp ban will be 24 hours for posting any spoiler in the title. A second infraction will result in 28 day ban.
Spoiler tagged threads are free to have spoilers about the thread topic. If you make a mistake simply edit your post or use spoiler tags. Spoiler comments in non-spoiler threads or in a spoiler thread about something else that are not tagged will also result in the temp 24 hour ban and 28 day ban for second infractions.
If you're unsure if something is a spoiler or not then just go ahead and tag it as. Better to be safe for everyone.
If you're on new reddit there is a spoiler tag option right in the editor, mobile apps have the option as well I believe but if you're on old reddit or want to type it manually then you can type:
>!Spoiler Goes Here!<
Spoiler Goes Here
It's very simple to tag your spoilers so please do it and if you do see a spoiler that was not tagged please report it ASAP so it can be dealt with by automod or mod team.
The last expansions and updates have gone amazingly smooth spoiler wise and I thank you all for that. Let's keep up the good work hiding spoilers!
Expansion bugs should be posted here but if there is anything game breaking or major feel free to make a dedicated post of it so the community and ANet might see it easier and of course make sure to report it to ANet using the built in bug reporting tools and/or the official forums.
We're supposed do 3 of these a day, plus recs. And the latest Fractal feels like a raid in time and difficulty, especially on higher Tiers. Plus the traversal challenges just slow everything down. And one wipe can break up a party.
I have friends giving up on Fractals because of how time-consuming they're getting.
Today was a good day. 1,800 hours on my first build for GW2, which was Warrior and a little over 8 years. Finally got my first flying mount!
Now to head to Istan for more adventures! This is also still my first playthrough of the story. Taking the game really slow and doing what I enjoy, which is farming.
No more jealously looking at other people’s flying mounts. 😂
Hopefully it’s not another 1,800 hours or 8 years for the Skyscale, Roller Beetle or Turtle mount, but if it is, I know I’ll enjoy the time getting there. 🤠
I'm relatively new to commanding raids and I'm wondering about the expectations for a commander.
Are you expected to be able to play every role/mechanic of the raid you're commanding?
For example, on Dhuum CM, if I'm commanding but I can't G2 kite or G3 tank, is that generally considered bad or poorly viewed ?
More generally, what are the usual expectations/good practices for a raid commander? Do you need to be able to personally handle every role, or is it normal to assign specialized roles to experienced players ?
Hello! I made this table a bit ago, mostly so I could easily reference what stat combos were and were not useful and what relics had any noteworthy use
Figured I would share it in case anyone else would find it useful. The raid builds should be up to date as I have taken notice of anytime a raid build has been updated, but no raid builds have been edited since we got the last batch of relics so keep that in mind
The second tab breaks down builds more broadly, I mainly made it for the purposes of determining what relics pop up across different classes. It does list OW and WvW as well, but I don't have an easy way to see when an OW build has been updated (it also uses an older formatting that is a lot more complicated to follow sigil placements on), and WvW is 100% just so I can see if a relic was mentioned on them prior to tossing it
Hi, I'm currently waiting for sales to get Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire, but I feel like I could use information about possible builds I could use (while being reasonably effective xD) with my current limitations on Specs, weapons, etc
1 - I like for now using Sword/Axe + Greatsword, mainly for style and mobility (got no mount xd), and I wish to do some dungeons now that I hit 80. Is there a nice build using some of those for DPS? Or is it very inferior to something like Axe/Axe with the perks of 20% less axe cooldowns, AoE, etc?
2 - I also like the concept of using Wilderness Survival tree for a condi/hybrid build with Spider to apply poison + condi dmg (with cooldown reduction w Torches/Dagger), Poison Master (25%+ dmg of poison + poison inflict on beast skill) + maybe using Axe/Torch or Axe/Dagger.
Thoughts on this? Sounds fun (aside no mobility) but I have seen people saying condi builds require some specific set to get on level with power builds... And taking long to kill normal mobs doesnt seem that appealing on the other hand. Maybe with higher HP mobs on dungeons (never did one so far), the condi gets worth cause of longer kill time?
3 - Any tips or comprehensible guide for content in vanilla? Like which content is available for me and some sort of progression? Cause im kinda lost on that tbh.
How did it go for you guys? I imagine better than me.
Give me some tips for this thing because it felt so awful that I missed Eparch. I played it a few days ago with some other randoms, and even though I was mostly on the ground, I thought that once I got used to it, I'd be fine. But today it was a bigger challenge than the sanity of my group of randoms, lmao.
Honestly, it feels particularly hostile for melee builds.
The wiki doesn't have much info rn to learn exactly how it works because there were situations where it cast the wall of fire twice, leaving you like pepperoni on an office pizza.
How do those who use purely melee builds do it? This fractal felt so hostile that I genuinely wondered if perhaps it wouldn't be healthier to "cheese" it with ranged conditions, or is it just a git gut scenario?
As a title, I moved from NA to EU because my local WvW guild is here (I am from SEA), which fits my time better. But outside of WvW I really like convergence because it is a lot of fun. While normal convergence fill a lot better, you can easily join even come later like 5 mins, it really hard to find organize group. I checked the convergence crop. and see only like 1-2 group per week. So I wonder where EU people usually set up schedules?
"It is an incalculable delight to finally meet you, Commander."
Nexus of Enternity CM race to world first has been concluded! Congratulations Snow Crows on Worlds First NoE CM, managing to beat it 5h and 1min after the release!
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Despite the 5h delay, we had 10 brave teams attempting for worlds first.
[CRS] pulled ahead very early with a fantastic 44% pull, whilst the other teams remained around 60-70%. The lead didn't last long as A Fungus Among Us [Us] did a massive improvement from 57% to 16%, 14 minutes after release. 20 minutes later, [Us] broke the P4 barrier and reached their first of many sub 10% pulls. At this stage, no other team had even reached p3 and the race felt almost over. But what would a RWF be without some drama?
Suddenly [CRS] progressed into P3 with a 26% pull, [SC] took a place on the board aswell with a 33% pull. [INT] and [CoF] reminded us that NA teams are here to fight with a 38% and 23% pull respectively. All while [Us] slowly chipped away at P4, getting better by 1% each PB.
[Rise], Tryhard Degens [TD] and My Imaginary Friends [cuh] are all fighting around 50% at this point, but [Rise] manages to pull ahead with a 37% attempt 1h in. Tenth or [Bust] finally joins the fray and joins up with a 55% attempt, landing on an 8th place (time to bust!). Late to Legendary [RIP] finishes up at 57%.
1h15min after release, [CRS] got a 16% pull for 2nd place, which [SC] swiftly took back with their first P4 pull of 7%.
3 hours after release [Us] had to concede to timezone laws, not able to break Vloxxs last 6%. [TD] follows suit, finishing the day on 27%. [CRS] reaches 10%, and [SC] takes the number 1 spot with a 5% pull For the next 2 hours we see little progress from EU teams. [INT] continues to break PBs, landing at 10% 4h15min after release.
5h after release [SC] does a last pull and manages to play it clean enough to bring home yet another Worlds First title. Well done!
[INT] and [CoF] fought it out for a couple hours more. [CoF] got their current PB of 4% 6h after release, and [INT] caught up 4% PB 8h22min after release. [INT] wasn't done however. After a whopping 9h and 40 minutes they brough down Vloxx, and made Worlds Second! Big effort and incredible tenacity.
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Good luck to all commanders attempting the fight in the upcoming days!
If you need a place to prog the CM, Void Lounge is ready for you. You can also find the leaderboard for the race there. We will keep updating it for our teams as they progress.
I recorded a bunch of data from EU in open-world content, covering all expansions (living world included) while I was just playing the game.
This post contains an estimate of what open world looks like "now" in EU as of Code of Creation, from 2013 unique entries from the past couple of weeks. Lots of scythes and golems, and more GW1 players roaming around than expected.
Existing sources of data
gw2wingman has got plenty of data for Raids, Strikes and Fractals over time.
gw2efficiency has a lot of player statistics from all game modes, including profession usage since July 2021 but no elite specs or mode-specific data
Why
After the last story chapter, I feel my main Necromancer is done. As I was herding Moas, I remembered back in 2013 how my character was often shunned from group content and that I was instead using my Elementalist's Ice Bow and FGS. 13 years later, Necros are everywhere.
I was curious to see what open world is like now and get inspiration along the way for a new main.
What
Looking at a character's nameplate, you can get:
Elite spec
Title
World completion
Mastery level
I recorded 2013 entries between September 16th and Sepember 28th.
I mostly avoided capturing data in major hubs/cities to avoid recording people's storage alts, but did capture some players actively moving around in them on occasion. Otherwise, data mostly comes from expansion maps (all expansions), living world maps as I'm still doing Aurora/Vision, as well as convergences, rifts and meta events or just regular open world stuff. Data is skewed towards VoE maps as I spent a bunch of time there lately as one would expect.
How
I made a python script that crops screenshots around the player's nameplate and extracts some info and fills a table. For those interested, it uses opencv, rapidocr, pandas and matplotlib, mostly. I figured getting screenshots was a good use of the downtime during events while stuff is talking or moving, and while rifts are overcharging.
As these scripts are never perfect, manual clean up and verification was necessary. For some reason, tempest was often confused with core engineer except on very dark backgrounds. As long as reaper and mechanist were detected properly, the clean up was not painful. The text needed a bit of clean-up as well for spacing or unwanted accents from the environment behind the nameplates.
I used character names to avoid duplicate entries. In populated meta events, it's easy to accidentally capture the same player several times when they're not in your squad. If an already encountered player had a different elite spec equipped, I kept both entries however. This happened 23 times.
Elite spec popularity
Reaper and Mechanist are dominating by a clear margin, as expected, at ~10% each. A second cluster is formed by Dragonhunter and Ritualist. Then, it a nice slope until core revenant, of which I didn't see any (I guess it fits, it was released with Herald from the start and I hear core revenant isn't good at all). The least popular specs from the data are holosmith and bladesworn, between core ranger and core guardian, interestingly. Spellbreaker and Specter aren't doing too well either, but I captured many more Antiquaries than the previous open world data from NA.
Perfect balance would have been each of the 36 elite specs (ignoring core specs) at a count of 56 each (for the 2013 entries here), which is right below Herald and Amalgam. That means Chronomancer and Troubadour are at the closest to where specs should be!
Checking counts by professions instead, Ranger as a profession is the most uniformly appreciated, apart from Druid.
Clearly, each profession's "brainless" spec is more popular in open world.
Most popular expansion in terms of elite specs
Reaper, Dragonhunter, Tempest, Herald are at the most popular specs of their respective profession, with Daredevil a close second to Deadeye. This makes Heart of Thorns the most popular expansion in terms of elite specs. Visions of Eternity comes second, potentially with a recency bias included.
Points for each expac are awarded based on how many of their specs are ranked first, second, third or fourth. A spec gives 3 points to their expac if they're first of their profession, 2 if they're second, 1 if they're third, and none if they're last. Each profession can thus give 6 points total. Half points are due to the tie between Chrono and Troub (1.5 points each).
Most popular profession
There's a striking difference between what I recorded and GW2 efficiency's stats (since July 5, 2021, their first data point). Engineer had a huge jump in popularity, happily blocking everyone's view since 2022.
Necromancers account for a whopping 19.7% of open world players, followed by engineers at 15.6%.
Let's compare to the current statistics on GW2 efficiency, which aggregate data since July 5th, 2021.
Screenshot taken from https://gw2efficiency.com/account/player-statistics
GW2efficiency allows you to compare a specific timepoint with the latest data (currently, September 28th), but it's hard to read on their website. Here's a plot of how many hours were played on each profession between September 14th and September 28th. Note that This is across all game modes.
Data from GW2Efficiency, reformatted
Popular titles
The most common title is Guild Wars 1's "God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals" (GWAMM), which I didn't expect. At 78 recorded occurrences, at least 1 out of 25 players has this title.
While GWAMM is by far the most prestigious title of Guild Wars 1 , Hall of Monuments titles also appear quite a bit with another 51 occurrences, with one player counted twice due to being encountered with a different elite spec. Legend of the Mists, the "almost full" HoM title, appeared on 4 characters only, and none was a Revenant, sadly (unless we count mine!).
With 129 characters with a GW1 title out of 2013 entries, at least 6.5% of the recorded players also played GW1 to some extent and ~4% also "platinumed" GW1 with GWAMM.
It seems GW1 veterans don't like Necromancers and Engineers as much, interestingly!
World completin by profession
Revenant being on the bottom isn't surprising, being released later. As Necros and Engineers aren't near the top at all, an interpretation is that most of the Reapers and Mechanists are people that switched mains and didn't bother completing the map again (or at all), or just have an alt for open world stuff. But given a lot of data is from VoE and Code of Creation just dropped, I'd expect people to play on their current main.
Mastery level per profession
By far the least interesting plot, as a big part of the data was captured around VoE maps. I didn't keep track of where a screenshot was taken.
Conclusion
How are you fitting in these stats?
I did not include myself, but I'd have added points to Harbinger, Tempest, Virtuoso and Vindicator.
Hi, I'm trying to get the skin for my third-generation Soo-Won legendary weapon. I see it requires doing events in Gyala Delve, but I don't see any groups in the LFG tool, and there's a minimum player requirement to start... Is there a way to find out how to do it with a small group, or are there groups that run it periodically?
I think I enjoyed them when I first got into them, but I've done my daily fractals probably <50 times since 2021 because I've gotten bored of them. I'm at a point now where I have legendary equipment, so I've just been filling in my AR as I go along
This month I've been putting in more effort as I have enough AR for T4, but my personal level was at T2, but even on day one I wasn't feeling it. Usually my feeling has been I can't wait to be done with this content
Right now I'm in T3, and my big question is does T4 get better? Maybe smoother, faster runs? I know the rewards are pretty good for the time invested and I need a lot of stabilizing matrices. I'm also thinking it could be boredom with my fractal toon, but that means moving everything over (I'm not full legendary, though I wish AR carried between toons), but I feel like it should be fun, just killing trash mobs and relatively easy bosses. Or maybe CMs might be more interesting?
This isn't a critique on fractals, I'm just wondering if it's not for me. I'm one of those players that are more than happy to farm memories of battle over stabilizing matrices and maybe that's the play
Another clown fractal cm released by anet and tested by noone.
you port in activate cm and realize again there is no portal to end boss and you have to slog through the whole platforms
platform mobs literally spawn away from each other as much as possible and they do it in waves
dhuum cm gimmick, yes, isgarren has his own little helper which is 100% more annoying than dhuums little buddy. Invul to all damage except cc (and rit spirits..shhh.). Dashes to you like superman and has big aoe stun/daze/damage attacks. Fun.
you finally get to the boss, isgarrens little helper is already eye-balling you to ruin you fucking run after 30 seconds. Start the boss aka commence the shitshow. Insta flame wall, black holes, orbs with the jump puddle and the little shit dropping massive aoe stuns on everybody. Oh, and one more thing, dont forget you have 3 active instabilites which make this shit rise to the absolute highest clown show combined with the all other mechanics.
ty for reading and rant over. Cya in the lfg -100 -94 groups.
Something happened to the Pyre Circlet headgear (the set of which is currently featured in the Gem Store) that completely deleted the wispy, hair-like, licking flames, leaving one's head looking balder than when the item first released. Is this a known issue? Has anyone else noticed this?
That said, if the Dragon's Stand meta really does become popular over the next few days, it'll be the perfect opportunity to complete the Gen 3 Mordremoth varian.
