The [dT] Gear Optimizer helps Guild Wars 2 players find optimal builds for fractals, raids, and strike missions.
(I am currently semi-inactive, but I'm one of the people who made the dT optimizer and I maintain[ed] it a bit.)

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The [dT] Gear Optimizer helps Guild Wars 2 players find optimal builds for fractals, raids, and strike missions.
(I am currently semi-inactive, but I'm one of the people who made the dT optimizer and I maintain[ed] it a bit.)
arenanet: "we're Not Fucking Around"
ah shit they finally discounted VoE. I kind of said I would buy it when they did hmmmmm
"Your hair is getting long"
bag slot expansion in daily login rewards?????
dreamed arenanet did a space exploration expansion (not sure how that would work, but sure) and as a frankly wild expansion launch event, you had to pick a subset of your character roster to send to the planet and for 6 real life months they were locked to the expansion zones with separate wallet, mail system, (minimal) bank storage, etc. then at the end of that period they'd get merged together with the rest of your account again (I guess as the asura gate system came online). impractical but incredible.
(as it was a dream it was partially live action, not video game, so the initial exploration wasn't just finding the new currencies, fauna, gear stat combination, raid, etc, but finding out what we could eat. initially there was just the cafeteria in the base that served fast food. I was eating there when we got news someone had found the first extraterrestrial life, which looked kind of like a turtle.)
(I'm not going to make kadenar do "nothing/sword + nothing/axe" even though I'm honestly a little bit tempted.)
...why though.
science has gone too far
what the hell is that autoattack animation
Transference monk luminary: let's take one of the highest-damaging builds in the game, which also coincidentally outputs an amount of ally healing comparable to a support build, and trade about 10% of its damage output for a ~50% increase to that ally healing. (I haven't gotten to play this, but from what I hear it sounds like the strongest build in the game, hands-down.)
Use claw relic when someone is giving you quickness, pirate queen relic when you have to make your own.
Biomancer sustain virtuoso. Or: "what if, in addition to your bleeding damage healing you, you were healed every time you apply bleeding?"
I thought it might be fun to try getting back on the horse a bit with the "themed gw2 builds which are ultimately bad, but which are bad in an interesting way" thing. I thought about trying to do one per attribute combination, but I don't actually have an idea for most of them.
Oh well, anyway: here's my themed build for the vigilant (Laranthir's ascended) attribute combination, one of the most nonsensical combinations of stats Arenanet has ever put out: power/toughness/concentration/expertise. I don't think anyone has used this for anything ever—you're building condition duration but you have power, not condition damage, so it doesn't really do anything. Maybe it's supposed to be for WvW, for immobilizing opponents for a long time? If they... don't have a cleanse? Yeah, I've got nothing.
Well, 13 years after the game launched, we finally sort of got a trait (inferno) that can take advantage of that somewhat? Thus: open world commander toughness aggro boss (?) overkill quickness inferno specialized elements evoker.
Our extremely-contrived scenario here is that we're the commander of a huge squad, none of whom brought any boons or tank gear or have any idea what's going on (maybe we're Laranthir, and our Vigil troops' training sucks), and our enemy has toughness aggro like a raid boss or something I guess just go with it. We're thus going to take a build that gives >100% quickness to 5 allies and fully double its quickness duration, presuming that as random allies move closer to/farther from us we'll be doing decent uptimes on ~10-15 allies (along quite quite a lot of might and some minimal protection/stability), which is a fair portion of the way toward "the most one player can contribute to total squad damage output."
We'll make sure we have ~1650 toughness so we're the tank if no one else has tank/heal gear—this is a bit more toughness than full celestial, which is given by the level 80 boost; if someone has more than this, they're making a deliberate choice and they can tank. We're then putting pretty much the rest of our build into burning damage using inferno; let's say we're the most skilled member of our team, so we can tank without much additional defensive considerations and our rotation will be top-notch so we want to maximize our damage output. This vigilant/diviner/celestial mix does in fact maximize power and burning duration (inferno!) in order to do so given those other constraints.
Now, is this build... good? No, not really! We don't really give fury or protection! Locking yourself into fire scepter/focus gives you no flexibility to heal or do breakbar damage! This much quickness duration will mostly just overcap 5 people! I basically burned the entire second traitline because there's nothing good to do with it! We don't do any outgoing healing at all! Play herald with commander (if you want to go overkill on stability and survivability) or ritualist/celestial mix (if you want to deal damage). See if the ritualist spec in commander/zealot is too annoying to play with boss aggro. At least play the healing version of this, with full celestial and karakosa relic.
But hey: this uses vigilant equipment and is at least coherent, which isn't something I thought I'd ever say. Honestly, it might be kind of playable in the upcoming raid quickplay mode if they no one else in your group brings quickness, and if anet adds any toughness-aggro bosses to it later on? (Though they almost certainly won't, because... I mean, that would be chaos.)
Anyway: here you go, hardcore Laranthir of the Wild stans who actually crafted ascended gear for the theme. Have fun!
normal things to find yourself saying in guild wars 2: "…I have coalescence?"
...huh. that's weird.
I actually can't think of anything insightful to say about this run.
dawns on me that if you actually do it correctly—which no one bothers to do—qtp actually looks pretty cool. explaining everything that's going on here to a player familiar with mmos but not with gw2 would take a while.
(aside: qtp challenge mode should totally have made the boss take 0 damage without any tethers.)
Me: "Hey, Arenanet, remember how a while ago you made sure to take off (or make effectively permanent) every conditional critical chance effect in the game so that players could feel confident setting up their equipment to have exactly 100% critical chance?
Well, in the new expansion you added a bunch of temporary percentage-increase-to-all-attributes effects, which went against this (and, by the way, gave the gear optimizer development team 30 hours of work, by which I mean me, I'm the the gear optimizer development team, hello). I'm sure this was just an oversight or a little flight of fancy, not thinking about the fact that "all attributes" includes precision, but surely you don't want to—"
The January 13 balance patch preview:
Heavy Metal: This trait fills the slot previously occupied by Equal and Opposite Reaction. Your critical strike chance and critical damage is increased against enemies below the health threshold. This begins against enemies below 75% health and increases further against enemies below 50% and 25% health.
Me: "O....kay! That also works."
putting this on main blog because it's more a post about games in general than about gw2 in particular:
I've always sort of assumed that gw2 was considered an mmo with relatively easy pve (although—is that mostly because other mmos require more than 10 players to coordinate in hard content? I know nothing about them).
anyway, I wonder if the antiquary class is finally mechanically complicated enough to make players of other mmos go "lmfao why do you need an online seminar in order to learn how to play a build—sorry, did you just intentionally light yourself on fire and drop to half health during the rotation showcase?"
(of course, there's no ingame content that would require or even particularly benefit from learning antiquary specifically—I sometimes wonder if the devs feel bad about developing an entire class so that basically only Iskarel can play it—so it doesn't affect any general conclusion about whether the game demands or rewards skill in any way, but that's neither here nor there.)