gossamer-scraps

[gossamer-scraps]

hey, here's a fun fact: pistol weaver builds (both pistol/dagger and pistol/warhorn setups) can replace all of their viper equipment with trailblazer equipment (and change to magnanimous crystals) for a ~2% reduction in damage output, an amount that can in fact be made up for by switching to writs with high uptime or by equipping stat infusions if one wasn't already doing so.

this increases the amount of damage one can take before downing by approximately 120%. no, I don't mean you can take twenty percent more damage: I mean you can take double the amount of damage, plus an additional twenty percent. so, that's pretty nice.

it is, of course, I would say common knowledge in the endgame pve community that trailblazer on ele is efficient; I was not aware it was this efficient.

(aside: I suppose if you wanted to you could say that, as it pretty safely holds, to my knowledge, the record for dealing the most damage while clearing the game's indisputably most difficult fight, it's the best dps build in the game. I don't think anyone would really try to make that argument for a number of reasons, but it's hard to say it's wrong.)

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me watching this blind: "wait, what? they're gonna have like three minutes; this looks... totally fine? what was all this talk of the encounter potentially being literally impossible and snow crows having to abuse stacking sigils on every single dps player just to be able to get world's first clear—oh wait never mind jesus christ what"

aside: it is really cool that—almost 13 years after launch; took you guys long enough—arenanet made an encounter that's actually hard enough that pve game balance has to either take it into account or force changes to it because an overzealous nerf might make it unclearable.

(alas, no nontrivial gear optimization in this one, so unlike ToF I don't get to pretend I was crucially important to the world's first progression even though I wasn't even aware it was happening at the time)

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20% off SOTU isn't nothing, I guess, if one is catching up on expansions. (Of course they aren't going to discount JW for a while, when it's still in its release cycle, but I was kind of hoping for it.)

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@where-is-caithe replied:

these faces and hairstyles were dropped with the EoD cantha expansion from over 2 years ago. since the last update there were 2 or three new faces dropped (1 for norn women, 2 for male asura I believe and and least 1 for male asura, along with at least 1 face for human women and 1 hairstyle for human women) but the faces in this post are from the cantha expansion and have been available for 2+ years already

​Ah, you know what, that makes more sense. I was puzzled by the discrepancies with what I was seeing on Reddit, but I apparently haven't looked at the TMK interface or character creator since PoF, since I didn't recognize any of these!

Okay, corrected description: here are some hair and face options you might not know about; there are also more as of last week and I'm excited to see those too :D

I'm actually almost 100% certain this is incomplete—I saw another Norn female face, at least—but last week's patch apparently adds a bunch of hair and face styles that were previously China-exclusive but doesn't specify what they are. The wiki has some sections of their appearance option screenshots uploaded separately by the user Sime, though, and if I had to guess, those are the new ones. I wanted to look through them quickly and didn't see anyone do this on Reddit yet, so here they all are. I'm sure someone will make an exhaustive listing eventually.

Oh, also, facial hair:

[gossamer-scraps]

I'm actually almost 100% certain this is incomplete—I saw another Norn female face, at least—but last week's patch apparently adds a bunch of hair and face styles that were previously China-exclusive but doesn't specify what they are. The wiki has some sections of their appearance option screenshots uploaded separately by the user Sime, though, and if I had to guess, those are the new ones. I wanted to look through them quickly and didn't see anyone do this on Reddit yet, so here they all are. I'm sure someone will make an exhaustive listing eventually.

Oh, also, facial hair:

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"Her eyes were break bar blue"

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Idk how relevant this is but let's do it anyways!

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Am I the only one absolutely unsurprised that they're doing raids? Here's why:

I agree with the assertions everyone's making that only a small portion of the userbase, by percentage of accounts, raids. But I don't know if that splits quite so dramatically if you scale by ingame hour count and—crucially—what that ingame hour count correction does to revenue split.

I know a toooon of gw2 enthusiasts on this website who have a deep love of the game and its lore and also log in like three times a year. I guess, ruining my point somewhat, I do think a fair number of those players I'm thinking of will buy the expansion eventually.

But it makes sense to me that there's a fair bit of revenue tied up in players like me. You know, the Snow Crows discord members (okay in my case I actually have a colored name on SC discord, which is fun). And there are a loooooot of people like me who would have a decent chance of straight up not spending that $25 USD if you cut out the instanced PvE part of that announcement. And by $25 I mean $50, because like a lot of this demographic I have 2 active raid accounts, and by $50 I mean $50 + $25 * however many marginal users stay engaged with the game because of the theorycrafting that gets done in this part of the community, the speedrun videos, and in my case the gear optimizer existing.

Yeah, yeah, jokes, nobody raids. But the "nobody" who raids, I have to assume, are worth a decent chunk of money to anet, not to mention recurring weekly users and gameplay hours (I assume NCSOFT cares about those).

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Cool comp. Well, mechanically pretty straightforward, but cool to see builds optimized in a different way than usual.

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this class is absolutely fine

(also okay yeah isgarren relic good)

and now, our feature presentation: vindicator.

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that samarog though

I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a framework for cc that could become a standard in pugs. like oh the dps should be able to do x cc on every bar, the boon dps should be able to do y, one of the healers should each be able to do z to the first breakbar and the other one should be able to do z to the second and they call it out, and it adds up to ccing each bar with 8 people to add a cushion...

yeah, no, doesn't work, classes are way too varied and what will be off cooldown depends on your party dps and mechanic variation and whether people down and etc etc. darn

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random clips I never posted #2: still got it (I think this is dhuum cm number 13-ish for me, probably? might be higher. obviously that wouldn't be many with a static that does it regularly but nope that's all pugs but one)

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random clips I never posted #1: miss this build so much (also, another build I contributed to the optimization of!)

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and now, our feature presentation: vindicator.

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Oh shit did I never post the "the only build anyone should ever run in solo open world" build, did I? Guess I should do that.

Basically, tl;dr this is just stamina sigil vindicator; most of the build choices are situational or irrelevant. Always take alliance stance because scavenger burst x3 -> reaver's rage with celerity sigil gives you a ton of quickness, might, and fury; your second legend can be whatever is good for what you're doing. Mallyx can pull enemies together, jalis gives stability and cc, shiro for impossible odds is the most damage if you don't need anything else, ventari eats projectiles. You have hilarious damage, evade as part of your rotation, evade even more when you kill things, always have a block (greatsword 4), have two heals, have a bunch of extra sustain from battle scars, etc etc.

Truthfully, if you don't have legendary equipment I would (well, I do) just use an organized-content armor set with dragonhunter runes plus maybe lucent oil and a diviner piece or two if you still want some boon duration, but if you're gearing this just for open world, fireworks rune is really cheap, and you can put it in devona's armor off the trading post for like five gold.

(You can also do cavalier relic—although just stack protocols at that point—or cerus/isgarren relic or any number of other things, but you get the idea.)

Power vindi clips if you want to see how it works:

[gossamer-scraps]

See on the one hand that's really not that much damage output... but, I mean, hey, no weapon swap. Practically speaking you should just play chaos virtuoso (blade wizard?) instead because it's 1200 range and has way more utility, but it's nice to have alternatives!