The Guild Wars 2 Accessibility Challenge

Hello gamers!

Hardstuck and Accessibility Wars are happy to announce a new competition – We want to find the ultimate Low APM (Actions Per Minute) builds! This competition will be open to the entire community, and we are looking for DPS and Support builds for each profession, as well as any kind of secret sauce creative build you might have cooked up.

Our goal is to make the game as accessible as possible to as many players as possible – we love playing the game, and we want you to love playing the game too. So then, what’s in store?

Prizes

We have 20 000 and the Community Hero Title! Each profession will have 3 winners, for a total of 27 winners: Best DPS, Best Support, and Most Creative. Each of these 27 winners will receive 650 Gold and a Community Chest! The Community Hero titles and Community Chests are sponsored by Arenanet!!! In addition to those 27 prizes, we will be offering 10 additional prizes for runners-up, honorable mentions, best highlights, and surprises – We will have 300 Gold for the 10 of you! We want to see some GAMING, so show us what you’ve got!

Rules

• We want to see builds with 20 APM or fewer! We want to see Damage or Healing bursts that require 5 or fewer button presses in a 5-second window!
• What is “APM”? Actions per Minute, or APM, refers to the number of inputs you send to your computer within a minute – in this case, we are specifically talking about key presses / skill activations. For reference, a full meta Condition Willbender rotation can be upwards of 80 APM! Your favorite Power Reaper build might only be 10 APM!
• For DPS, you can get a rough idea of your APM by uploading a training golem log to dps.report and selecting the following options after upload. Add up all of your “Casts” (excluding auto attacks and auto-procs from traits, but including things like weapon swaps, attunement changes, and dodges for Daredevil) under the “Outgoing Damage” tab and divide that number into your time. For example, you have 40 “Casts” in 2.5 minutes, so that gives us a total APM of 16 (40 / 2.5 = 16). Let’s say you have a core DPS burst combo of 5 skills – can you get your burst combo off within 5 seconds, or chain your combo together by pressing 1 key every second?
• For Support builds, you might get an idea by looking at gameplay footage. For example, you are playing Heal Firebrand and you cast “Holy Strike” and “Empower” to fully heal your subgroup in a 5-second window. That’s 2 skills in 5 seconds! If you are playing Druid, you might cast “Lunar Impact,” “Rejuvenating Tides,” and “Cosmic Ray” in intervals of 1 second. You can also break down the fight into chunks of 1 to 2 minutes and add up the healing skills you cast during that time.
• We know this isn’t an exact science, and we want you to have a little wiggle room, so all submissions will be reviewed by a marvelous panel of judges: MightyTeapot, UWV_Preston, BBBaconBoy, KAHMEENA, and more!Kb

Grading guidelines

• Did the player adhere to the overall 20 APM guideline?
• Did the player adhere to the guideline of 5 skill casts within 5 seconds?
• Highest DPS
• Boon output and Boon uptime
• Burst heal and passive heal output
• The ease of use of the build
• Overall creativity of the build
• The coolness of the clips submitted to the contest

Submission guidelines

• Account Name
• Up to 3 video clips highlighting why your build is the best – Training Golem DPS benchmark, Performance in end-game PvE content, fully rezzing 9 people at Keep Construct, Soloing Soo-Won in the Jade Sea, etc
• Build, Equipment, Traits, Food, Utility, Skills, etc used in your build. This can be a screenshot, a link to GW2Skills.net, or a short video.
• Lastly, if you are going to use the training golem showcasing the build for DPS please use the SnowCrows standard, which can be found at the bottom of this page.

When it comes to content you want to show and put on a video for this competition, feel free to do whatever you feel is best to show off the build in whatever content you want. This can be Strikes, Raids, Dungeons, Golem testing, etc.

Submissions will be open from April 9th to May 1st and the winners will be announced once all submissions are reviewed.

Submission Form

For more information about prizing, rules, or anything else you might want to stay up to date on, make sure to join the Hardstuck and Accessibility Wars Discord servers! We cannot wait to see the builds you can come up with, but until then, have fun practicing and theory crafting these builds – and remember, by participating in this competition you will be helping out the Guild Wars 2 Community!