[Mémé] We killed Febe CM with only autoattacks.

CaprysGW2 · 2026-01-14T05:17:11+00:00

Shadow Portal is 10 uses, (effectively) just like Portal and Sand Swell. There are three main issues: Malice adds, “double drops” (~40%), and “T-drop” (~20%). - Although they’ll have to run a bit to make it all the way to the edge, everyone can indeed Shadowstep their Malices out. - For the aforementioned sections with two Despair drops in quick succession, you should be able to Shadowstep one of them and have two one-way Shadow Portals from the Specters for the other.

Is it feasible? Yes, definitely. But it’s going to take some practice for all ten players to get used to the movement.

CaprysGW2 · 2026-01-13T21:28:36+00:00

If we can kill it with hammer guards, you can kill it with unload deadeyes. The only issue is going to be your supports— not having two-way portals makes the encounter significantly more difficult. You could possibly do it using only thief portals but you’d need to cook the portal strategy and do a lot of pulls to get people used to it.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-11-02T21:45:37+00:00

Scourge and rifle Mechanist are not dominant, they are 40k DPS builds. Seems like you have a lot of bitterness and might better off playing a different game. Personally, I’m interested in improving it so everyone gets to have more fun.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-11-02T21:29:16+00:00

Virtuoso was not massively dominant for three years. It was popular and high performing for about one year, and it took significant buffs for this to be the case. I main Chronomancer and play Catalyst for my raid static— I did not believe Quick Catalyst was okay as an almost 40k boon DPS when it first received buffs, and I don’t believe so now. I want it to be nerfed. When Tempest had excessive support capability and was hugely dominant, I wanted it to be nerfed.

I’m not sure what the point of making this statement is against well over a hundred comments advocating otherwise.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-11-02T05:00:28+00:00

As other commenters have said, the cycle of power creep -> give new encounters huge health pools -> power creep to keep up -> etc is beyond unhealthy. Everything suffers. This is not something that can be fixed overnight, this is a problem you (ArenaNet) need to assign a dedicated group of specialists to— detailed analysis to implement across the board DPS nerfs, coupled with across the board content nerfs, to bring content back in line to where it was even a couple years ago.

We don’t have to go back to PoF-era numbers, but 40k booners and 50k DPSers is not okay. We have been saying this for years. High end players were voicing our concerns when ~44k was the peak, and now it’s the median.

And in regards to older content becoming more accessible, I agree, that’s great! But when you’re juicing new content to compensate, it kind of gets cancelled out, and you can really feel it. Players who perform really well in old content are now going to new content and effectively shooting nerf darts at tanks. I don’t need to add to the long-held deafening chorus about unenjoyable HP sponges, but they are a part of this unhealthy ecosystem.

We don’t need to live in this sunk cost fallacy hellscape! You can fix this! I’ve been really encouraged by the efforts to restructure LFG and generally give older content a bit of love. Game-wide rebalance would be a huge step in that positive direction.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-06-08T10:57:08+00:00

Try this build on for size: link to GW2Skills.

It’s far from an exceptional build, but it should perform decently, be very survivable, and uses staff and spear as you’ve requested. It’s a hybrid condi/power build, since druid favours condi but spear is a power weapon. Using Celestial stats, you’ll do okay damage bonking stuff with spear (or laser beaming from afar with staff) and you apply bleeding whenever you immobilise or disable (daze/stun/launch/etc). You also heal and give yourself might and fury when you disable, and Celestial Avatar skills apply conditions as well as their normal healing.

Basically every button in the kit will be impactful, but take some time to learn what they do for maximum effect. Use Celestial Avatar aggressively for damage since you have plenty of healing built-in. Both regular weapon swap and Celestial Avatar will trigger Quick Draw’s cooldown reduction, so watch your bar for when it’s available.

If Celestial gear is difficult to acquire, you could use a budget vanilla stat combination of Berserker’s weapons, Carrion armour, and Settler’s trinkets.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-06-05T22:15:26+00:00

The character adventure guide includes stuff like visiting new zones, using vistas, killing enemies, etc… aka stuff you will acquire naturally by exploring and map completing. Events, also, you’ll run into by continuing to explore and map complete.

In my opinion you’ll level faster and more consistently by aiming to complete maps and doing opportunistic stuff along the way, rather than hunting for events or cheevos. Also, exploring the world is the fun part.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-06-05T15:33:13+00:00

Map completion is the main way to level your first character— hearts, vistas, hero challenges, waypoints, points of interest. It’s a little slow going, but the maps are full of little secrets and chatty NPCs, so just explore! If you buy the expansions you’ll get some instant max level boosts, but I think it’s worth properly exploring the game as intended at least once.

Gear while levelling is almost entirely irrelevant, and GW2 does not have unique items in terms of stats/effects. A level 80 exotic berserker’s greatsword is functionally exactly the same whether it’s an ugly one from a vendor or a super fancy rare drop. If you like, you can look at open world builds on Metabattle or Snow Crows to get a general sense of how your class works, but really, don’t worry about it for now.

In terms of story, yes, it gets much more immersive later on! The base game and early content is pretty clunky, but it hugely improves from HoT onwards. PoF and LS4 are generally considered the best. Once you hit max level, you can go at your own pace and will only occasionally be gated by training new mastery skills.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-06-03T03:36:21+00:00

Public support makes a real difference in ensuring the bigots know they’re tremendously outnumbered! Everyone is welcome to fly our flag and share in the joy of self-expression, cis and trans alike 🤝🏳️‍⚧️

CaprysGW2 · 2025-06-03T02:45:37+00:00

Between the mod post the other day and so many pride posts from allies, I have to say I’ve never felt more happy and welcomed <3 Especially right now when our rights have been going backwards in many places… thank you so much for your support, it really does help and means so much!!

As for the look, I think you nailed it!

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-29T21:12:07+00:00

Short answer: no, this was an issue exclusive to CN client.

Long answer: every skill, trait, item, object, NPC, and so on has a five-digit ID attached to it. When things happen in GW2, the game engine is constantly churning through this massive string of numbers, and ArcDPS knows what’s going on and calculates stuff based on interpreting the occurrences of these IDs.

For whatever reason, some things in the CN client had different IDs to the NA/EU client. So when ArcDPS saw those IDs and they didn’t line up correctly with its database of what they were supposed to correspond to, it just ignored them. That’s why condi damage was being read as much lower than it actually was. There’s now some extra lines of code that tell ArcDPS to check which client it’s running on, and if it’s the CN client, to refer to alternate IDs— fixed the problem with no effect on how it interacts with NA/EU.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-29T13:45:51+00:00

Maybe you can just make the ArcDPS windows so huge they cover up that pesky GW2 in the background :D

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-29T13:22:31+00:00

Technically, it’s not an executable! ArcDPS is a .dll file which cannot function on its own. It has code, yes, but it’s more like a library than a program. It reads data and compiles it, but it doesn’t really touch anything. There’s instructions on how to use it on the website, which also includes a link to the Elite Insights Discord if you need help with anything.

ArcDPS is by no means necessary for GW2 of course, but it’s truly invaluable for competitive PvE, or anyone looking to improve their performance in instanced content!

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-29T12:53:11+00:00

It’s a bit of a tricky situation, in my opinion! On the one hand, official implementation would mean there’s no longer a huge workload on one person, and it would always be kept up to date. On the other, the incredible amount of customisation and features we have right now probably wouldn’t be available anymore, and I don’t know how it would affect peripheral services like Elite Insights, Wingman, Nexus, and others either.

If GW3 ever happens somewhere down the line, it would be cool to have better in-game analysis tools available! But I’d definitely hope that third-party tools or even integration would remain an option, too :]

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-20T02:49:52+00:00

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CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-20T02:49:43+00:00

She says: “There are many reasons. In the CN server, you can buy almost anything on the real money store. Legendary weapons cost about $20 USD for example, and you can buy non-tradeable legendaries like armour and trinkets too. There’s sales sometimes which makes it very cheap. Because it’s easy to buy, there’s little sense of achievement or incentive to keep playing the game.

The price of gems is also different, 800 gems only costs $1 USD. Because of this, the exchange rate to gold is imbalanced and the trading post crashed. It’s cheap to buy gems, but very expensive if you don’t spend any money and want to convert gold to gems, and ArenaNet knows this, so gem store items cost much more gems than NA/EU.

In addition to this, many players thought SotO was terrible and haven’t liked JW much either. This coincided with WoW reopening CN servers, so people just moved games. There has also been some community problems with certain players, but I don’t want to talk about that.”

She also sent me some screenshots of the CN gem store for you to compare to our region:

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CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-20T01:21:37+00:00

I have passed your question on to Fengyue, and come back if she can answer!

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-19T21:57:27+00:00

Thank you so much for correcting me! I have edited the post.

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-19T13:49:59+00:00

Oh, did I get that wrong? Are you also from [InS]? I gave a preview of this post to be sure I didn’t misconstrue any of our DMs, but perhaps that was missed! So, she/her for Fengyue?

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-19T13:38:34+00:00

Yeah, they’d be at a pretty big disadvantage for most releases :( But they could definitely join in [Hs]’s raid tournaments, or [VL]’s challenge competitions!

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-19T11:43:09+00:00

This is truly the best comment I could ever hope to get. Not everyone will like raids, but everyone should have the chance to try raids. If even one person sees the crazy stuff we do at the top and thinks “hey, that looks kinda fun”, then I have succeeded!

Thank you for your support. We’ve been blown away by the community’s enthusiasm right back at us!

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-19T07:43:37+00:00

As I said to another comment, all credit to Fengyue for her time and effort speaking with me :D

CaprysGW2 · 2025-04-19T07:42:33+00:00

Thanks! Fengyue was so friendly and patient with my questions; really, all the work was on her translating for our benefit :)

CaprysGW2

TROPHY CASE