User:Yshyii/Getting Started Guide

Getting Started Guide

The focus of the Practical Guide lies in the boss guides. There are plenty of great guides around about getting started. This one is just here for completeness and gives the bare necessities.

Setting up for raiding

• Use Snowcrows for your builds and rotations. Because you are reading this guide, there are no exceptions to this.
• Using ascended weapons versus exotic weapons provides a 6% damage boost for power builds. Using ascended trinkets versus exotic trinkets provides a 4% damage boost.
• Use The adapted Tanetris' gearing guide to find out where to get your equipment from.
• Read Raid Composition to have a general understanding of the standard raid composition.
• Read the 'How Not To Kill Your Squad' for the boss you want to join.

Raid builds

Use Snowcrows for your builds. Practice their skill rotations and read the boss specific guides for your profession.
If you deal good damage, the boss will die before people have the chance to make mistakes.
The potential of every profession and build is dependent on the boss encounter. Pick a boss on the benchmarks page for the optimal composition, or go to your specific build page to check viability per boss, although some professions considered non-effective by Snowcrows can still be viable in a casual raid.

The importance of ascended equipment

All raid builds are designed to max out damage while considering ascended equipment stats. If some of your equipment is exotic it will not reach these min-max values. In general though, you should not worry about this. Focus on grabbing ascended weapons and trinkets for the considerable damage boost, while armour can be exotic.

The calculations for the following numbers were done by someone else, but they should be accurate enough to provide some insight.
Using ascended weapons compared to exotic weapons will provide about a 6% damage increase in power builds. Getting an ascended weapon should be a priority.
Ascended trinkets give a 4% damage increase, and are very easy to obtain. Getting ascended trinkets should be a priority.
A full set of ascended armour gives a 2% damage increase, and is very costly to obtain. Only go for this if you want to run tier 4 fractals or if you have the all your other equipment sorted out already.

Gearing up

For crafting prices, use gw2efficiency. For a more in depth guide, use the adapted Tanetris' gearing guide (very much recommended).

An ascended weapon can be obtained through crafting, (mostly high tier) fractal chest drops, some world boss drops, some collections (most importantly Caladbolg for a limited choice of weapons, or the elite spec collection for the elite spec weapon), raid drops, raid currency, and crafting with fractal or pvp currency. The cost difference between normal crafting and crafting with fractal or pvp currency is marginal, so look up whether you think it's worth it. It is very easy to stat change weapons in the mystic forge, so if you are going for a costly stat, it might be cheaper to craft another stat and then stat change.

Core stat ascended trinkets can be obtained through various ways in all game modes. Buy rings with fractal pristine relics. Buy accessories with guild commendations. Buy amulets with laurels (from the wvw trader if you also have wvw currency, for a lower laurel cost). All can also be bought with raid or pvp currency. Specific types of living world map currencies can be used to buy specific types of trinkets.

HoT stat trinkets should probably be bought with living world map currencies or pvp currency. Buying through fractals is an option, but costs way more than it should. After defeating specific raid bosses, an option to buy their respective trinket stat categories with raid currency is also available through Glenna.

Ascended armour can be obtained through crafting, (mostly high tier) fractal chest drops, some world boss drops, some collections, raid currency, and crafting with fractal or pvp currency. The cost difference between normal crafting and crafting with fractal or pvp currency is marginal, so look up whether you think it's worth it. It is very easy to stat change armour in the mystic forge, so if you are going for a costly stat, it might be cheaper to craft another stat and then stat change.

Raid composition

The standard profession composition for raids consists of two healers, quickness provider(s) (for a faster casttime on skills, including autoattacks), an alacrity provider (for a reduced cooldown on skills), a banner warrior (colloquially known as bannerslave or BS) and the rest is filled up with DPS players. Small variations can exist when the raid mechanics require such (tanks, kiters, ...). Most skills target five players, with party members taking the priority for receiving boons from it. Because boons should be spread out evenly, splitting the squad into two parties of five players will make sure that happens.

• In pugs, most groups will run two healers. Most heals will target five people, so one healer is placed in each party. Two healers are not always necessary, but DPS is usually high enough even with two healers, and a failsafe in pugs is nice to have. Healer spots are usually filled up with a druid and another secondary healer. Druids are geared with harrier stats and use Grace of the Land to buff might to the full squad. They bring two important squad buffs like Spirit of Frost (for direct power damage boost) and Sun Spirit (for more conditions). Additionally they bring a lot of CC. All these effects are squad wide which leaves the second healer spot open to other professions. If you play second druid, consider bringing Lingering Light instead of Grace of the Land, because might will be provided by the other druid anyway. Other healer professions usually provide better heal output than druids (unless Celestial Avatar generation is not an issue), in addition to extra utilities and boons. These professions include Herald, Renegade, Firebrand, Tempest, Scourge, Scrapper, etc.
• Quickness providers can be chronomancers, firebrands, and on some bosses a boon thief. Both chronomancer and firebrands can only provide quickness to five people, so you will need two chronomancers, two firebrands, or a firebrand and a chronomancer to give quickness to a full squad. A boon thief on a boss where they can steal Detonate Plasma can provide 10 man quickness [THIS IS NO LONGER ACCURATE AS OF THE MAY 11TH 2021 UPDATE. Detonate Plasma now only provides a maximum of 5 man quickness.]
• Alacrity providers can be chronomancers or renegades. A dedicated alacrity renegade (alacrigade) can provide full alacrity uptime to 10 people. Two dps renegades with the Righteous Rebel trait can provide full alacrity uptime to 10 people. A chronomancer can only provide alacrity to 5 people, so you need two of them in a composition without an alacrity renegade.
• Chronomancers have many active defenses without having to give up on their boon sharing or damage, which makes them the most common tanks. Other professions sometimes take over that role too.
• Most groups will run one banner warrior (Bannerslave or BS). Banner warriors deal a good amount of damage, bring good CC, while also giving two unique squad wide buffs called Banner of Strength (for a power and condition damage boost) and Banner of Discipline (for a critical chance and critical damage boost).
• The rest of the five spots are filled up by DPS professions. Depending on the boss encounter, various DPS classes can be better or worse than others.

These previous facts will make the standard composition:

• Two parties of five players each.
• Two healers, one in each party. One of which is likely a druid.
• A BS in some party.
• EITHER
  • A chronomancer in one party, a firebrand in the other party, and an alacrigade in some party.
  • OR Two chronomancers, one in each party.
  • OR Two firebrands, one in each party, and an alacrigade in some party.

Breakbars

Breakbars regularly show up in PvE. The effects of breaking them vary from enemy to enemy, but breaking them as fast as possible is usually the best way to deal with them. Crowd Control effects that give a condition like slow and blind will slowly tick away at the bar (soft CC), while pulls and knockdowns will immediately removed a part of the bar (hard CC). Read the wiki page for it if you have no idea how they work.