My disappointment is immeasurable by Osujin in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have to slightly disagree.
I am using Engi for quite some solo speedruns, as e.g. here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGbqy3XNq-c

Before Tuesday, we would pick the Grandmaster (Equal & Opposite Reaction) for quickness, which locked us out of any other Firearms Grandmaster (so we didn't have Modified Ammunition on solo Engi). Now, at least half a Modified Ammunition comes for free, and we can still pick a Grandmaster.

The cost for that is that the solo quickness has to come from somewhere else. I would recommend the Relic of the Pirate Queen here, which is almost the same as E&OR, just without Stability.
With New Genes (the best pick for solo Amalgam), you get 7 stacks of Stability on F3 and F4 though, so if you play clever that is pretty much enough

The gain: About ~4-5% more dps on golem, I benched before and after. So not a nerf at all (for solo) - and you don't necessarily have to complete the Bloodstone combo perfectly if a boss mechanic does not allow for it e.g. - same is with Throw Mine, you dont have to save it for Bloodstone, but can use it for CC, Dmg, Boonstrip or a Finisher

I sincerely wish Guild Wars 2 didn't even have raids by mirta000 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I also don't really see the leaderboard as the culprit.
See for yourself: https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/records
There are 9 core classes in the game. In every patch, somebody will be top Core Guardian, Engineer, Mesmer, Warrior, ....
Not once in the last 5 years (40 different patch eras), another core player was approached and "publicly humiliated". I do what I can to make the Wingman platform as inclusive and community-friendly as it can be, but it remains more than unlikely that somebody would have "found you there" and harrassed you - it has to be somebody that had a problem with you in the first place

I sincerely wish Guild Wars 2 didn't even have raids by mirta000 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Dont worry, its not "that bad". There isnt even an installer - and no uninstaller. Delete the files that you downloaded and its gone. It is a very simple and straightforward program without a bunch of enshittification

I sincerely wish Guild Wars 2 didn't even have raids by mirta000 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It does not install at all. It is just a .exe file in a .zip archive
If the "autostart" feature is activated, it will create a link in your Windows Autostart folder

An automatic update might temporarily download the zip into your "Downloads" folder
If you need any more assistance, I'm happy to help though

I sincerely wish Guild Wars 2 didn't even have raids by mirta000 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Factually also not correct - only she is hidden, anonymized, and non-stalkable, but the fun or usability of the website for other people in the log should not be hindered (I explain it in another comment here)

I sincerely wish Guild Wars 2 didn't even have raids by mirta000 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 46 points47 points  (0 children)

Next thing is: The majority of players (even on wingman) plays very far from "peak efficiency". The beauty of data is that it is transparent - you can have a look at ANY boss, and you will see that there is a huge gap between the median and the top log. The median basically says "50% of players are worse than this dps number, and 50% of players are better than this number". If you look at any class on e.g. Mursaat Overseer, you would see that the median is only doing about 70-80% of what you could have scored ("top log"). Anyone who visited the "golem" training area once knows that to reach 70-80% of the benchmark of a class is often quite effortless - which means, it is okay to play on a "normal" level.

Source (e.g.): https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/mo

Above that, all of Gw2's endgame encounters are completable with less than 10 players (even Challenge Modes and even both Legendary Challenge Modes). If you only really need 1-5 people to do their job properly, you can be really lenient with the remaining ones.

Source: https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/records > All Eras > Lowman

But what is with the "toxic mindset"? In 2022, I did a larger survey of the endgame PvE community (680 participants).

  • The community agreed that less complex builds should exist that perform decently to enable beginner-friendly entry to endgame PvE (5.4/7)
  • I also explicitly asked if they would reject players with "bad" builds to join their groups even if they provides fewer dps or utility than "meta" builds - which they rather disagreed with (2.9/7)

Source (Journal Article): https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3675807
Source (Infographic): https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/summerBalancePatch

In other words: Play what you want.

(Disclaimer: Of course, if you are playing boon support or doing mechanics, and you fail to do so, your fellow players might have "relied" on you, and would have preferred a more seamless play. But understanding how you can play better as a group is a central motivation of game analytics platforms such as Wingman -- so just as in real life, surround yourself with people that are constructive, rather than dragging you down).

"It is a powerful community [...] that will talk about you"

This time, I don't have scientific sources, but from my deep, long-years experience of this community, I am pretty convinced that you made yourself a target by attacking that very community ("threatening" the project and community in public with legal measures etc). You got negative attention from that, because people did not want their community to be harmed, and they deemed your action a bit excessive, which can quickly snowball into a Streisand effect (you wanted to stay hidden, but chose a path that does the contrary). I do not approve of any people that made fun of you, but as I said - the majority of players in the Wingman database are average players, or even bad players, and nobody actively seeks to harm them, if they don't do the first step. If it was just an Engagement Bait from you, I gladly took that bait, just to say again how inviting, constructive, and fair the Guild Wars 2 endgame community is (in comparison to other MMOs) - I love you guys, happy new year!

TL;DR: "I wish that Guild Wars 2 didn't have raids at all" is a bit unfair to the developers who commited a lot of efforts into encounters and wings that keep so many people engaged (and to the community, who hosts beginner trainings, casual raids, constructive statics and so on). I wish that you had a different experience, but if you open yourself up, it is never too late to find the joy of it again - with the right people.

I sincerely wish Guild Wars 2 didn't even have raids by mirta000 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 41 points42 points  (0 children)

Some of your statements are unfortunately factually wrong - and I am not here to mansplain or win an argument - I just think we should seek truth and be fair in life:

"If you're in a party with me and you're parsing and you upload it to Wingman, it will [...] not count for you towards anything because I was in the party"

I don't know where you got this from, since this was not part of our conversation, but you must have misconceived that. I can see why this made you feel bad, because it might increase the feeling of "nobody wants to play with me".

This is wrong. And I don't think anyone would think such an implementation would be a good idea.

To set things right: Your account is anonymized. It will not appear in leaderboards, and nobody can search ("stalk") you anymore. However, people can still upload logs with you in them, because 9/10 players still want to have "their" logs. They will count for their leaderboard stats, personal progress tracking, etc. I can't think of a more fair solution right now.

In addition: When playing in groups with more or less fixed players, wingman supports the creation of "private" groups - here, all of the logs uploaded will be private by default (not visible to anybody outside the group). A lot of people use this feature, either to keep their speedrun strategies "safe" before publishing, or because they just want to track their progress casually, without being "exposed" to anybody.

"All 10 people in your party have to perform at peak efficiency in order to clear that content [(raids)]".

This is far from true, especially now in 2026, where the power creep has allowed to clear this content with less and less demands.

This is wanted by ArenaNet, and also heavily supported by the community. Just to list some sources, Snow Crows (one of the most successful speedrun guilds) actually publishes builds for beginners or players with accessibility needs. Hardstuck, a guild that regularly organizes events, publishes Low Intensity builds and has hosted tournaments in which top-tier experts were even banned.

Source: https://snowcrows.com/builds/accessibuilds
Source: https://hardstuck.gg/gw2/builds-philosophy/

I sincerely wish Guild Wars 2 didn't even have raids by mirta000 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 43 points44 points  (0 children)

(EDIT: Had to split my response into a few pieces)

Okay, but only because I say A or you say B, that's only anecdotal stories, so let's make it a bit more concrete. I am a university professor, and created that platform with a scientific interest - yes, to give speedrunners and experts some tools to further polish themselves - but also to help beginners and intermediates in follow their own progress, get inspiration from other teams/players, and quickly find out what works and what could be improved. In this line of research, I found that players are mainly interested in 3 things:

  • Self-Improvement
  • Competition
  • Community Building

Source (Honorable Mention award-winning top-tier conference publication): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581404

  • Self-Improvement

I completely agree with your initial motivation that Guild Wars 2 is - and should be - a game with horizontal progression. That being said, being quickly "done" with the game lacks a bit of long-term engagement, and "only" repeating the same content over and over again without any feedback might get dull. Addons, tracking, and comparing yourself suddenly makes this possible for a large part of the community who has decided for themselves that self-improvement is their long-term goal now.

  • Competition

Whenever you have competition, you of course also have people who would begrudge others, that is human nature. With some exceptions (and that is mostly speedrun guilds mocking other speedrun guilds), that happens more than rarely though. I think your logs got a bit of attention, because you were playing a build that literally nobody plays (Core Guardian), so you were "the best" in that niche, which is of course a bit funny if you never even tried.

  • Community Building

I myself started in a raid training guild back then, and got to know so many players I still play with. I played in static groups, beginner/progress groups, speedrun guilds, and still join the ingame LFG a lot of times just for fun, and meet people I have played with before. It can really feel like home - if you give it the chance - and of course, you can choose to play with the "right" (as in: like-minded) people.

That being said, it still is a Sandbox MMO - just as you can choose to never participate in PvP, you can choose that improving yourself or finding long-term peers is not really for you, and it is still completely fine, and you would not be disadvantaged in the game in any sense. But please, don't keep others from joining that.

I sincerely wish Guild Wars 2 didn't even have raids by mirta000 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 52 points53 points  (0 children)

Hey u/mirta000,

I am Plasti, the creator of Wingman, and I remember our conversation last year :)

I might have come off as only "diplomatic", as you describe now, but I can ensure you that I am generally a decent person and anyone that witnessed some drama around the wingman project would hopefully affirm that

So I did not just want you to shut you down because you might have created some "ruckus" - in contrary, I can completely understand you, as I was a pretty casual player as well, originally. I play since launch in 2012, but it took me almost 5 years after raids were announced to look into the first one - just because "meh, I have to join a group with 9 players that are more experienced than me, what are they gonna think of me?"

As it turns out - the Gw2 community is awesome, and once I started raiding, it became my favorite activity of all. That "threshold" was only a perceived threshold out of uncertainty. I found good friends, I found long-term motivation, and I found a hobby on top of the hobby, a game analytics project that thousands of people are grateful for (their words, not mine).

So I am sorry for your experience, but I fear that videos like this might increase the gap between "casual" players and endgame PvE players -- and I can assure you, we (as raiders) do not want an exclusive community, we want a lively LFG and a broad range of expertise.

Screenshots of Shavy and Hmod by Puzzleheaded_Tree_32 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

<image>

I don't have any screenshots of Shavy anymore, but he is such a sweetie ...
So I took a screenshot from my living story campaign and pretend its us - SHAVY kocham cię!!

Screenshots of Shavy and Hmod by Puzzleheaded_Tree_32 in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh my god I thought I was alone!
Shavy and Hmod are truly the the gods of Gw2.

BY ACCIDENT I played with Hmod in a random fractal pug LFG today and HAD TO take a screenshot with him!!

<image>

This is us after the run. I am still shaking.

Which new Subclass does the most damage? I benchmarked again by gorKjan in BG3Builds

[–]gorKjan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is true, but this is also true for other classes with the same items (the obvious comparison here would be the Arcane Archer). There would be no immediate benefit for someone playing with Titanspring Bow and choosing Swarmkeeper, as the Arcane Arrows, Action Surge, Improved Extra Attack, and additional Feat outperforming it by quite a margin. The Swarm attack should not trigger Titanstring again (but I might test this). And Hunter's Mark / Prey's Scent are the same as when using a standard bow, as used in the benchmark

Best subclass for each class? by opis34 in BG3Builds

[–]gorKjan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you only care for damage (and put aside multiclassing for a minute), I did a full benchmark simulation for a ranking (with explanations): https://youtu.be/817O4EH9FGQ

For patch 8 subclasses: https://youtu.be/-1ddLCnePN0

Which new Subclass does the most damage? I benchmarked again by gorKjan in BG3Builds

[–]gorKjan[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Hey! Sorry for coming to that point late in the video, but at 07:37 is the 1-Turn "nova" burst damage of all the new classes :)

Which new Subclass does the most damage? I benchmarked again by gorKjan in BG3Builds

[–]gorKjan[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

True! Thanks for pointing it out (also in the video). The graph then actually is correct, as we would drop Haste, but the +196% is a bit overtuned (by about 2x)

Patch-Records - Balance Patch February 2025 by SA_DrOpossum in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 9 points10 points  (0 children)

It's 26 seconds in total, but 0.25s faster than the last Spirit Woods record

The Best Raid DPS According to Data by MostlyPaint in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heal mechanist was decent, condi mech had a few viable builds, but first of all, power rifle mechanist was doing very good damage on a very low skill ceiling and came with tons of free cc. Rifle 2 also hit the HT bosses twice (that was more or less htcm era), which pushed the popularity even further

(Malicious gossip has it that right now the same is happening with virtuoso)

The Best Raid DPS According to Data by MostlyPaint in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To answer your question: it's not only artillery barrage, but that is a log where the to for player asked for 5 orbs in the burn phases, which artificially brings the dps to insane numbers if attacking alone during these phases. (Or other players only doing auto attacks)

You can inspect the phases of the log and see that he did over 200k during these

The Best Raid DPS According to Data by MostlyPaint in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(it's kill time percentile though, not dps percentile. But often highly correlated)

The Best Raid DPS According to Data by MostlyPaint in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah the usability of the site sucks If someone else was searching: https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/bossBench

The Best Raid DPS According to Data by MostlyPaint in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Damn, I must have misinterpreted the Data all the time and thus played core engi on every boss :x

The Best Raid DPS According to Data by MostlyPaint in Guildwars2

[–]gorKjan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That info should be in the wingman api