silentdante

well i am going to be playing dishonered, borderlands 2, X-com: Enemy Unknown, Assassins creed 3, halo 4, Fifa 13, hitman: absolution, but i also still plan on staying with GW 2 as my MMO, mostly because the PVP is so much different and well done then any other pvp and i have people to play with, which makes a huge deal. and the PVE might be fun too.

as far as being an MMO player i would say i am since i have played them all, and i usualy buy them to see how they handled the systems and interaction, never really for the story, but some have been interesting at least. so i agree that an MMO player might gravitate to this, and also the MESS load of competative players because no other MMO maches PVP like this one.

but also i am a stay at home husband, so it's easier for me to play and MMO and have time for other games too.

well falling skies is over (in the states anyways) now so you can play scott free! haha

@Bahloo: wow our builds are almost identicle for the ranger i made last stress test and i did the best with overall of all the classes i have played in PVP. i'll share mine so you can see how close they are: http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fMQQNAV3YjEVx11VaWo2BgVBBbPykTMZPM0xHPZXpKF;TsAg1Cqoay0koJbTumkNtqYUx+DA

the major differences are just trait choices and the secondary weapon. i went with the dagger over the horn, though your logic is sound about all the bird hits, i am not sure if the earth sigil effects a weapon it's not on or not. meaning i dont know if having the sigil of earth on the axe applies the same blood to crits with the horn. i went with dagger because of the 5 skill mostly, which is a 900 range bleed and cripple, to go along with traps and other conditions. i also like the 4 dagger skill for evasion is a melee person gets close, to evade and then roll away.

for the trait differences i went less survivability and more condition removal in the 30 skirmishing, you take the shortbow cooldowns 20% and i decided to go with the trap cooldown and longer condition duration. i think either choice is fine, i just went with traps because then burn is very quick and lasts a while so if they only have 1 condition removal it's either burn or bleed, and also the cripple from spike trap is longer, and since i don't strafe well the enemy being slower helps me more, haha.

in your build you take VI as our first, where i went with the III which makes incoming disables to hit the pet instead (every 90 seconds) but i took that because of all the hammer and mesmer people i seemed to have faced. i ended up taking VI as my second trait where you chose VIII. i might change, cause i am not sure how much i need the two survival skills to recharge 20% faster over something else, and the regen for 5 seconds (every 20s) might be better then sharpening stone at 36s down from 45s and entangle at 120s instead of 150s.

i think the major problem i ran into was condition builds also, since we only have 1 triat that gets rid of them once every 10 seconds. our heal says it removes one condition from allies, but i dont think it does for us unfortunately.

we both go with full undead, and then you take the rabid/rabid route, which makes your toughness WAY higher then mine at 2974 where mine is only 2330, though my crit chance is 62% where yours is at 49%. i think that really is up to how you want to play, where i kind of rush in and try to do damage where you are a little more tanky. our powers are pretty close, mine being 2393 and yours at 2016. you probly make up for it a bit in the condition damage because you hit 1405 while mine sits at 1127. then a slight difference in health too, which is kind of the difference of toughness, your health is at 15082 and mine at 18372.

@selfconfessedcynic poison would be good, but the lynx just has a nice F2 ability that stacks 2 bleeds, and then also a regular 20s cooldown bleed attack that stacks 4 at one time.

as far as what @Bahloo has for the second pet, i dont know, but i took the hawk, which it's F2 ability is a 6 second cooldown for a bleed stack as well as an 8 second cooldown vulnerability. so i usualy start with the cat, hit the F2 and give it time to hit it's other bleed ability, then i switch out to the bird and mach the quick recharging F2 bleed.

i think with either build you could stack 25 bleeds in 10 soconds or less, but this is also why guardians kick my ass, cause they purge them easy as pie and still wreck face on me, haha

sorry if all that is jumbled, i was just typing stream of conscience, hope it helps to see two sides of a same type of build.

-silentdante

nevermind can't get the GIF to work... :(

@Echinos: as stated by others it is kind of hard to tell, but also the mesmer has a mechanic where if they summon a CLONE that your target changes to target that clone, i am not sure if this is true but i hear it talked about on videos. so they can summon phantasms that usualy dont look exactly like the mesmer, and they can also summon clones which are illusions based directly on what they look like. so yes it is hard to tell which is which.

yeah no worries man, i just hope your puter is ok, and stays stable for launch and beyond!

from the chat in the twitch.tv page the stream was a no go, look for a show midweek or so, but also look for an official word here, just tryin to help :)

done and done

now for one last great stress test blowout!

and a quick reminder to people who might see this thread and want to play in the test, update your client so you dont have to wait haha! :)

@Dourin: damn you are right, i really want to try out the ranger i built since that will probly be the main PVE guy i have, though that minion necro is fun, i dont think i would enjoy it in PVE as much.

i suppose it's just 4 hours away from DS2, haha and i'll get to be privy to what the english call food items and other great topics in the mumble.