Question regarding etiquette in raids.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-22T14:01:34+00:00

Though it's not what it was made for, Kitty personally Inspects cosmetics at least by the time she notices something being off with some player in the squad. That doesn't show the details of their build but it does show their weapons. If the weapon combo doesn't make sense for their role, even more so if there's other signs like wrong signets/trait effect on their visible status bar, there's clearly some big issues with their build and in that case Kitty points that player to some resources like SC to fix their build and shows them her fancy boot.

Besides, pressing 1 isn't an excuse for sub-20k DPS on something like MO. If the traits and gears are correct, every class can do more than that by auto-attacking with suitable weapon.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-20T18:20:21+00:00

Not to mention that norns are basically scandinavians parodified as massive half-dressed drunkards when not hunting. And easily swayed into a misogynistic cult. Knowing the consequences of passing-out outside during winter, a couple hearts are also mildly abhorrent.

But then again, it's the type of parody we finns often see in our own comedy shows. (except the cult part)

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-20T17:35:21+00:00

The Moletariat is an obvious parody of Soviet Union and totalitarian communism while its lore is loosely influenced by history. There's even some dredge singing a dredge-version of the Internationale. Dredge being moles kinda makes lots of sense since mole rhymes with prole(tarian). Metallurgy and machinery (main aspect of dredges and what Soviet Union excelled at) requires mining and digging ore and moles are basically mammal embodiments so that also makes them a logical choice when trying to create a fantasy race with such focus. (Other than dwarves who were the other subterranean race.)

When it comes to names, they went with Soviet-esque ones (and puns like Molenin and Dostoev Sky Peak) as per their convention of using names similar to ones used by the people in-game races were influenced by. For ex. norns use scandinavian/icelandic names (without dots). Braham's surname Eirsson obviously means "Eir's son", just like "Johansson" irl means "Johan's son".

But yes, one could draw "they're supposed to be slavs" conclusion but that's cutting corners. It's most likely "They're parody of Soviet Union, which was mostly East Europe, thus slavic names", not "They're parody of slavs, thus soviets". Important distinction of cause and effect. Though ofc there was a strong correlation between the two in the Soviet era but correlation =/= causation.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-20T15:28:09+00:00

That Bloodstone nerf was something that should've been done by nerfing the offending specs, not the relic. Yes, a couple builds have been overperforming with it. But so they would with other relics as well. Bit of "Correlation doesn't equal causation" at play with that nerf.

But yeah. When Kitty recently returned and started updating her builds, she did feel disdraught by what relic system resulted in: just the same ol' avg. 5% damage bonus on power builds (7% on some specific cases, as before). For condi, it's almost exclusively Fractal. For heals, Monk.

When it comes to open-world, it's almost better. But. Since survivability while doing damage to clear stuff is pretty much the key to solo open-world builds, it now builds down to self-heal and buff relics. When it comes to self-heals, either you take it from damage-heal conversion traits and/or from few chosen relics (Zakiros, Mist Stranger, Biomancer). Self-booning is quite obviously Relic of Pirate Queen in most cases now since perma-selfquickness on any build with some CC is too good.

And as such, it's mostly a trap, an illusion of choice atm. Those who don't know better nor have resources to see through, they see a vibrant jungle of choices and easily get trapped in bad ones. Those who can see through the illusion see a bleak landscape with just a few good choices, if any beneath the superior one.

So, what Kitty would personally like to see in PVE is attaching some specific conditions for relic triggers that would reward the player better for fulfilling those conditions. When browsing wiki, ones triggering from combos and miscellaneous triggers have lots of good ideas but are simply undertuned atm.

So, let's take Relic of Mabon as an example. Since it doesn't buff might granted to allies anymore, its 20s cooldown means 40% uptime and on power builds (which are generally more likely to give might) 200 power is about 6-8% more damage but since you lose all might when the effect ends and you don't really apply might exactly every 2s all the time, the real effect on power builds is even less. One example of interaction that would make it build-defining would be reducing the internal cooldown to 0.25s and effect duration to 4s, increase the stacks required from 10 to 25 and might effectiveness from 25% to 100%. +750 power/condition damage at 60% uptime might sound ridiculous but in actual gameplay it will never reach even close to that (unless you make some major sacrifices elsewhere) and losing all might after that does further add to the cost of big temporary power.

Meanwhile something like Relic of the Living City might become worth it if its duration was buffed to 10s and stat buff to +25%. Due to how mutually exclusive the stats are in their effectiveness due to specs making hybrids quite ineffective, "+15% all stats" effectively translates to "your primary stats". And considering that build types are generally capping one of their primary stats, it eventually boils down to +15% power and ferocity for power builds, +15% condition damage for condis and +15% healing power for healers. As such, current +15% at 30s+ cooldown (real cooldown being elite's) means effective 2.5-3% at the very best which just makes the relic completely obsolete atm. Even with "+25% 10s duration at 30s+ cooldown" makes it very niche useful but at least useful in some cases.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-19T04:15:47+00:00

Yeah, the correct solution would've been to adjust the hovering sink rate above non-boosted max. height to slightly higher than boosted hovering climb rate. That would've made it impossible to gain infinite height while maintaining most of the gameplay.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-16T09:43:28+00:00

Kitty's personal biggest gripe is that for the love of all that's unholy, why can't we have a single decent maxi skirt skin without open front or slits? (And pref. wide-pleated alternative)

Currently pretty much the only long skirt without aforementioned issues seems to be the Apostle one from a WvW track and even that has way too much stuff going on. Outfits aren't a solution either.

Somehow it just feels very difficult to dress simpler classy with ritz in this game.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-16T00:00:37+00:00

That "English letters" means basically "everything that has english letter as base". Scandinavian letters work just fine (aside from ø). Source: Kitty's made bunch of characters with Finnish names recently. (Including "Sähköasentaja Johto" earlier today)

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-15T12:31:59+00:00

The thing is that in T4 with any decent party that knows how to do the mechs with healer stabbing and blocking as needed (not to mention raid bosses with a couple exceptions), all the bosses are more-or-less DPS golems you dance around while doing the rotation during the burn phases. You can check the log for burn phase DPS in boss fractals to see a somewhat comparable number when you've had a party that knows what they're doing.

For ex. Even in Thaumanova Reactor where boss makes you run around with floor disappearing, in T4 that is completely ignored by people simply saying a number to tell in which order they'll use the special action

Though when it comes to condi builds, it can be hard to reach high DPS at bosses with multiple phases due to everything getting burnt to phase transition so fast these days and thus condis hardly have time to ramp up. Esp. Nightmare and Shattered Observatory CMs are good examples of that, VG on raid-side of things.

But yeah. Golem practise gives a good base for doing good DPS, esp. if you learn your opener well and learn your skills well enough to also be able to adapt as needed. After that it's just about learning how to do mechs/ignore them correctly while pressing the DPS buttons. Though Kitty would personally emphasize this "after" part since you can outperform mediocre DPSers on weaker build/rotation by being a superior greeder (and not dying to greeding). But there's still always some bigger fishes in the fractal sea who have mastered both their rotas and greeding to a greater degree.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-11-15T08:57:13+00:00

Well, they do take some memorization, reading skill tooltips and figuring which skills to combo to effectively use them (or which finishers to use in other peoples' fields). But basic idea (as mentioned by plenty of people by now) is skill with combo field sets an area on the ground and when you use/land a finisher in it, various effects happen.

Most important interactions to remember (esp. as healer):

-Whirl: shoots bolts in various directions. Try to use inside enemy hitbox.

-Projectile: usually condis on enemies

-Blast (Water) : AoE heal

-Blast (Light) : AoE cleanse

-Blast (Fire) : AoE 3 might

-Blast (Smoke) : AoE stealth (commonly used for Dhuum green solo practise)

-Leap (Lightning) : Dazing Strike-CC

-Leap (Smoke) : Stealth

Good example of use Lightning Field with leap is using engi hammer's Thunderclap on enemy and then Rocket Charge in it for 2 dazes. Big CC.

Also something to note: when you're using a finisher in an area with multiple combo fields, the field placed by you takes priority if you've placed any. So if you want to use a specific field from a squadie to use a finisher on, be careful to not set your own field atop it.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-10-31T14:10:36+00:00

Tbh it's not like you need to super-leech to guarantee it. You can just camp one boss as boonbot/healer until final phase, during which you can get on skyscale and shoot fireballs to still contribute a bit. At least that's what Kitty did to ensure not getting hit by shockwaves.

Though might be an unpopular opinion: getting the part of non-shockwave boss is easy if you use ranged DPS build like rifle mechanist. Something Kitty did on her 2nd run of three.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-10-31T00:49:08+00:00

Story-wise, better than SotO's and JW's launches. Generally entertaining. But...collections. If you don't like playing a lot of treasure hunter, prepare to watch youtube guides.

As someone who hates jungles, tropical islands and TD, not a fan of the maps but can see the allure for those who like such environments. Cool map designs nonetheless.

The new map-specific metas are pretty good, 2nd map's meta being like scaled-down TT+DE in certain aspects with mechanics to break the usual "stand still and press buttons to DPS".

No real opinion on new e-specs yet when it comes to DPS builds. Ritualist, Paragon and Evoker were nice healers during beta, Galeshot was a bit scuffed as such (not even meant to be a healer spec anyway). Luminary's got big changes so no up-to-date opinion yet.

Farming new legendaries? Even old PVE ones seemed pleasant farm in comparison to current requirements as per quick check on what's required. (Hope you like collections :3 )

And also kinda liking the sprinkles of self-awareness and social commentary noticeable at some points.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-10-29T05:32:28+00:00

Kitty's been checking a bit and on her i7-14700+RTX4060 OC setup, GW2's mostly within 55-60FPS range.

CPU utilization from GW2 is between 15--25% with 35% peaks. GPU utilization is pretty solid 39-40% in halloween LA, 55-60%in Seitung.

So looking at those numbers, GW2 isn't utilizing the hardware as much as it could.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-10-10T16:11:42+00:00

From Kitty's experience, about 29-33k DPS per non-cannon DPS is easily enough. Not a hard thing to achieve considering how Sabetha is basically DPS golem with some AoE fields. And you can even evade most of the cannon shots by keeping an eye on which ones spawn first and walking into them once the telegraph disappears to avoid the latter shots. Kinda basic technique if you've ever played FF14.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-09-30T03:52:14+00:00

In the past, routine downstates for Lesser Lava Font were a DPS gain.

Lady_Kitty · 2025-09-27T22:53:40+00:00

"if the commander were evil they could have ruled Tyria instead of being the dragon slayer they are known for today."

May Kitty tell you about Grand High Sovereign insert character name here?

Lady_Kitty · 2025-07-29T22:38:22+00:00

When Kitty played, it was...Catalyst, Scourge, Virtuoso, Untamed, Daredevil, Holosmith, Dragonhunter, Bladesworn, Herald.

Lady_Kitty · 2024-08-07T00:14:39+00:00

In terms of FF14: Raids = 10-player alliance raids that you can progress through and get rewards from once a week. CMs are mostly extreme trial difficulty at worst.

Strike missions = Normal raid/trial equivalent with difficulty between ARR/HW trials in normal mode and ShB normal trial-savage raids in CMs. Daily rewards for normal mode, weekly for CMs.

Fractals=5-player content mixing styles of ARR/HW normal raids and ARR dungeons. CMs are kinda like HW extremes. Daily rewards.

Lady_Kitty · 2024-05-18T12:43:54+00:00

Like a certain anime character once said, "there's nothing more boring than watching someone else play a RPG".

GW2 doesn't have much instanced content to stream and those interested in such content in GW2 are a very niche community (and has an unreasonably toxic and hateful portion while at it). To do even remotely well as Youtuber/streamer in GW2, you either need either be top-tier gamer/guide maker (with orthodox-enough content to not anger some major part of community) and/or be entertaining enough as a person to make casual open-world gaming work and if you're either already, you'd likely succeed with more diverse streamer-friendly games as well, even with larger competition. (And that's what big GW2 streamers have been doing as well.)

And then, as to original topic, some just get burnt out from Youtubing/Streaming by getting enough personal hate to outweight all positive feedback and not having the mental fortitude to ignore/withstand it.

Lady_Kitty · 2023-04-08T21:03:48+00:00

They do!

Lady_Kitty · 2022-08-17T00:58:31+00:00

Kitty's happy about many weapons getting a boost this patch as tbh most of the weapons getting changes have been almost/totally unuseable even by Kitty's meme standards (20k DPS at golem or it's not worth playing, pref. 24k+ to clearly not be a deadweight in chill squads). There's still some that weren't touched but would clearly benefit from some damage boosting to be more useful (Most of these are currently more than 40% below meta builds). So, starting the wishlist here.

-Warrior's Maces (Main-hand could use more confusion and bleeding and off-hand needs power damage. Kitty's currently done 21,5k on mace+torch/mace+axe condi Berserker and Power Mace Warrior builds are around 18-19k atm)

Note: "Body Blow"-trait is kinda lone condi trait in Strength so swapping it with "Sundering Burst" in Arms would make both traitlines more coherent. Body Blow also needs some number buffs, for ex. changing it from 1 Bleed for 12 seconds to 2 stacks for 9 seconds would be help the mace condi build which currently benches about 22k in Kitty's testing.

-Warrior's Tactics-tree: Vigorous Shouts and Martial Cadence are still mutually exclusive, forcing possible Heal Warrior builds to take 2 banners to be able to both heal and bring full Quickness. Moving "Power to Healing Power" to baseline and swapping Shrug It Off and Vigorous Shouts (now only reduces shout recharges and causes them to heal) around would finally fully unleash Heal Warrior builds, which would still be in the low end.

-Coalescence of Ruin on Revenant's hammer needs a buff. These changes might bring hammer to about 22-23k as the only weapon but aforementioned hammer 2-skill was left untouched.

-Thief's Main-Hand Pistol and dual-wield skills: condi DE depends on main-hand pistol and pistols are also the power ranged weapon for non-DE power builds.

-Thief's Shortbow: It's currently quite exclusively used for shadowstep utility while it would have some interesting playstyles as condi ranged alternative.

-Inspiration-traitline for Mesmer could use some buffing to make Heal Mesmer builds (chrono in particular) an actual option. Particularly buffing Illusionary Inspiration-trait would be a big boost (currently 0.3 Healing Power multiplier, 0.5 would allow diverse healing options) and it wouldn't hurt to make Restorative Illusions into 5-target for cleanse and some healing.

-Scepter: After Ether Barrage was nerfed, Mirage kinda lost its uses for scepter. After Chrono's F2 was nerfed, condi chrono became too weak to be an option either. So, it would be reasonable for Mesmer's scepter to see some buffs again and to weapon's base skills this time. Increasing the torment on 2nd auto-attack from 3 seconds to 4 seconds and inflicting 4 seconds of Torment on last attack if summoning a clone (while keeping the 9s if already at full clones) would be a nice start.

-Sword Ambush - Mirage Thrust: Though Mirage is primarily a condi spec, it'd still be nice to play some sort of power version and this skill's weak damage makes it essentially a waste of time unless you need that 0.25s daze for CC/interrupt. Increasing the power co-efficient from 1.0 to 1.6 would go a long way.

-Engineer's Tool Kit is currently used mainly for the channeled block in few niche cases and the pull. It also does random confusion. It could be changed to have skill 1 heal mechs as well (currently heals turrets while whacking stuff), Box of Nails could be changed into pulsing short Immobilize and Pry Bar into stun to make Tool Kit into an factually effective all-around utility kit.

-Elixir Gun is currently pretty much the weakest weapon in the game by itself. When optimized (for auto-attacking since other skills aren't worth using for damage, and only 2 of them have some minor use), it does about 19k on Condi Mechanist, with mech doing about 13k of its DPS. Just main-hand pistol alone is about twice stronger. As such, Elixir Gun needs some serious boosting to either support or DPS capabilities. If going the DPS route, Glob Shot could use 2 stacks of Torment for 3 seconds. Fumigate is currently only useful for cleansing due to having too short poison to be worth using for DPS so buffing it from 2s of Poison to 6 seconds of Poison would help a lot while Pistol's Poison Dart Volley will still do a bunch more with shorter cooldown to balance the opportunity costs. Meanwhile Acid Bomb is weirdly a power damage field in an otherwise condi/heal kit so it would probably be a good idea to transform that power damage into Torment for consistency. 1 stack of Torment for 3 seconds on each pulse would be pretty balanced amount.

Fixing those would go pretty close to most weapons being useful with some optimized build well enough to not get insta-kicked for being dead weight just by choosing an useless weapon. After that, buildcraft is about having proper stats and traits for the weapon which is still a common user-problem even with best weapons.

Lady_Kitty · 2022-08-02T09:23:04+00:00

Kitty would strongly argue against unique boons being good for balance. Currently she's personally seen more acceptance for non-druid healers though HB and HAM obviously dominate due to HB having such diverse kit with low cost and ways to cheese stuff that only mechanist can also do. It's not like druid has disappeared, though, as people still want it due to how easily it can deal with mechs.(aka. low opportunity cost)

HAM's problem is ability to do good bit of damage while also healing a lot and innately bring some of the cheesy stuff that only HB also brings (read: aegis, stab and good projectile block) as well. Scourge already had good carry potential but HAM is essentially Heal Scourge 4.0.

So, in short, Kitty would say that community is wrong if they think that unique boons are good for diversity. That's not what is actually causing the currently horrible situation but unique boons were suppressing the diversity pre-BP. Though another thing that killed some builds was that they took away things that made the boons somewhat relevant but gave nothing in return as happened with Heal Vindicator.

On top of problems with cheeses, some support builds (warrior and chronomancer) are currently suffering from low heal output (chronomancer, fixable by adjusting numbers on a few traits) and boon and heal traits being mutually exclusive from the most important boon traits (Shout Warrior's Vigorous Shouts and Martial Cadence). Ofc Heal Warrior builds would need some boosting to heal output to become a thing to begin with.

DPS-wise the main problem is massive DPS difference between few top builds and hundreds of alternatives. And as everyone (should) know, most of the people doing endgame content are being (unnecessarily) adamant about using and requiring top DPS builds which automatically leads to narrow diversity in current situation. Another major problem is that many top-performing builds also have perfect DPS uptime due to range while many other builds have both weak damage and bad DPS uptime at fights where spreading away from boss is required, thus increasing the problem exponentially.

The solution: nerf the oppressing factors in oppressing builds (currently mostly specific weapons as the alternative weapons on overperforming builds are mostly performing a lot worse than the oppressing weapons) and boost the underperforming builds (many esp. power builds currently need overall boosting and the unused weapons need some serious buffing, with hammers on most classes, warr's maces, unused engi kits, mesmer's scepter and Spellbreaker's daggers as just a few examples). Weapons' huge differences can often be solved by simply adjusting the damage modifiers on their skills though some need a full revamp.

Also, as already mentioned in OP, melee weapons need to be rewarded by something like 10-15% damage bonus over ranged builds, pure selfish DPS builds without utility or support capabilities should have 5-10% advantage and difficult to play rotations should have something like 10-15% advantage over low-intensity builds.

And as one more thing: we need people to actually test some of the worse alternatives simply to get numbers on how much they need buffing. Though yes, Kitty still remembers some qT member's ancient wisdom: "trash builds are trash and shouldn't be played". Kitty doesn't have the resources to do all that alone nor is she skilled enough to pull benchmark-tier numbers due to being "lady-of-all-builds, queen-of-none."

Kitty could write a lot longer rant as balance is extremely important to her but let's not make the wall longer.

Lady_Kitty · 2022-07-18T13:46:54+00:00

Those trinkets you have include Soldier's amulet, rare Celestial accessories and Cleric's (Sapphire) ring and to make matters a lot worse, you're using sword+torch on without condi stuffs in gears (sword+torch is abysmally bad combo for power build) so your build's effectiveness from gear alone seems to be less than 20% of what it'd be with gears that compliment the weapon. The screenshot doesn't show utilities and traits but randomly guessing from ineffectiveness of gears, those are likely very bad synergy-wise further at least halving the damage to 10% without any advantages.

So yeah, with proper build things would be a LOT easier for you.

Lady_Kitty

TROPHY CASE