Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.

No. A build is something players should be able to get comfortable with. You should be able to set it and forget it. If you get bored with your build and want to change it then that’s fine, that should be an option, but the content should never bully you into it.

We just have completely different opinions in what builds are meant to be.
If the content should never bully any build (anyone can be potentially the favourite for some player) there would be no chance for the game to provide the slightless level of challenge ever.

Ohoni.6057:

….. A build is something players should be able to get comfortable with. You should be able to set it and forget it. If you get bored with your build and want to change it then that’s fine, that should be an option, but the content should never bully you into it.

No “mandatory” content should force you into a specific build, specially given the cost of switching gears (I don’t mean only the cost of crafting or buying the equipment, you need to store it somewhere and that cost gems).

I do think that there should be personal achievements that only can be achieved by using specific builds much like the achievements that can only be done by certain classes and professions (ie, those related to PS and weapons), like “Do 15000 damage to a target dummy using a single skill” or “stack 12 bleeding by yourself”.

Vargamonth.2047:

Whenever the content is about tagging and getting loot, survival is way more important than damage. The PVT player might die to the second Battle Standard, but the Berserker still dies to the first one and might get downed easily by many other damage soruces like Lighting Strikes or Grenades.

Except outside of mass aetherblades you can’t actually die, and in those LS events the zerker still has a better chance of tagging a random non-elite mob. The first Battle Standard will down, not kill.

Vargamonth.2047:

Some classes can fill their bar with damage improving utilities and other don’t. If you’ve no other meaningful utility, a power boosting signet is among the best things you can slot.
As a Guardian, with Aegis, Reflects and any other defensive utility being a complete waste, Bane Signet is actually my second utility choice for this content right after Stand Your Ground..

Valid. Meh, I don’t care much, I main mesmer. Can’t even veilbot here, at least GS auto doesn’t earn me random burns.

Vargamonth.2047:

And when I talk about adapting, I talk about a full retrait before porting to L.A.
Retraiting “on the fly” is still useful but nowhere close to what a fully respec can achieve.

I meant this stuff shouldn’t exist until we can have a full retrait “on the fly”, or at least swap between 2-3 premade templates while out of combat.

Vargamonth.2047:

And don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartly dislike the Knight fight.
I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.

Then start by prodding the builds that actually work and make sense to bring in the first place? The first thing I’d throw on a boss as a sadistic/adventurous game designer would be Thorns Aura, i.e. reflecting a % of all direct damage dealt (the distinction between the 2 would be the exact percentage value…)

Vargamonth.2047:

I wasn’t calling the Knight battle a minor nuisance :P
That was about porting to the Mist for a full retrait.

Oh, so was I. Fix retraiting first, then add encounters that warrant it. Or put the stuff in raid instances with a big sign “TTS only, bring ascended food or you’ll fail”.

Vargamonth.2047:

About your hypotetical encounter … you would need a good amount of power damage for the Knights and a good amount of survivability for the Holo. I’m not sure if it could be matematically possible to achieve both.
Condition vulnerability still wouldn’t be a problem since you could easily reach the cap with a couple of dedicated conditon players. Those should attack while every other player dance and cheer at them (there’s a chance on inflicting weak conditions and lowering the overall damage if they attack) :P

I wasn’t talking about buffing the holos, just doomsaying for the next patch (“Scarlet’s Return – she actually found a way to become undead, woohoo!”). The last example was to imply forcing Settler/Apothecary stats which no one will have at hand.

I’m all for more challenging gameplay and shaking things up a bit, but there should be choice and diversity and not railroaded do-or-die junk like the last knight patch. Their engine supports free retraits (sPvP), dividing enemies (without the timer the UV holo would actually be the best part to encourage condition use, just up the toughness on the micros), reactive boons to replace Defiant (see Karka, they gain stability when CC’d but have Defiant and CC immunity anyway… ), Eye of Zhaitan with the buff-shield has been in since release and is a great way to kill 1-spammers, lazers down glass cannons and could easily be rehashed into a Veteran-level version to not doom anyone caught in its attacks. Some random enemies lay boon-corrupting wells or mass confusion. I love the holo fight because it encourages mobility and tactical foresight while dps is rarely an issue.

But every time we’re fed more junk bosses of the form “kill it before it kills you or the timer runs out, oh and this, this and this won’t work, but just beating it down with all direct damage buffs you’re left with will work just fine”.

The holo fight is excellent within current standards. It’s a huge, epic final boss we get to fight together that doesn’t end in “stand at its foot and whack it”, rewards awareness and coordination but doesn’t outright fail you for a small mishap, at least tried to encourage different playstyles (red is high dps, green has conditions and reflects+punishes stacking, blue is a failed pro-condi experiment), the loot is decent on top the “chance” at rare stuff, oh and the music is so catchy I can’t get it out of my head at all. Just 3-4 minor bugs/oversights and the framework of GW2 PvE to worry about, really great job overall.

Vargamonth.2047:

I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.

Vargamonth.2047:

Ohoni.6057:

I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.

No. A build is something players should be able to get comfortable with. You should be able to set it and forget it. If you get bored with your build and want to change it then that’s fine, that should be an option, but the content should never bully you into it.

We just have completely different opinions in what builds are meant to be.
If the content should never bully any build (anyone can be potentially the favourite for some player) there would be no chance for the game to provide the slightless level of challenge ever.

I’ll admit responding to these is getting a bit difficult to word, but I’ll try.

I think part of it is that there is a world of difference between poking and nudging to experiment and punching and kicking someone to do those same experiments. By bullying a build, one is effectively punching it and it’s users. Making them think about how to handle a new boss is fine. It’s making them go out of their way to deal with build issues that’s problematic.

Photoloss.4817:

Vargamonth.2047:

And when I talk about adapting, I talk about a full retrait before porting to L.A.
Retraiting “on the fly” is still useful but nowhere close to what a fully respec can achieve.

I meant this stuff shouldn’t exist until we can have a full retrait “on the fly”, or at least swap between 2-3 premade templates while out of combat.

I agree with this. It’s not like the 3s fee for retraiting is a gold sink at all for the current rewards.
Unfortunately, they released something like an instant retraiter in the gemstore, so I have no faith on getting it for free as a feature, not soon at least.

Photoloss.4817:

Then start by prodding the builds that actually work and make sense to bring in the first place? The first thing I’d throw on a boss as a sadistic/adventurous game designer would be Thorns Aura, i.e. reflecting a % of all direct damage dealt (the distinction between the 2 would be the exact percentage value…)

I already provided some information in the first page about the most important trait/utilities for the classes I feel I could.
The rest is as simple as tracking offensive stat boosts and final damage multipliers (10% when X, 5% against Y) and think about how achievable the conditionals are for the given fight (the “2% damage for every condition on the target” on Engineer would work properly only during burn phases, so other conditional working all the time might be better).
The end result doesn’t even need to be “perfect” (that would require doing math, which is something that obviously most players won’t want to do). When you’re looking just for damage most of the choices are fairly obvious and when this isn’t true, then there isn’t that much difference.

Photoloss.4817:

I’m all for more challenging gameplay and shaking things up a bit, but there should be choice and diversity and not railroaded do-or-die junk like the last knight patch. Their engine supports free retraits (sPvP), dividing enemies (without the timer the UV holo would actually be the best part to encourage condition use, just up the toughness on the micros), reactive boons to replace Defiant (see Karka, they gain stability when CC’d but have Defiant and CC immunity anyway… ), Eye of Zhaitan with the buff-shield has been in since release and is a great way to kill 1-spammers, lazers down glass cannons and could easily be rehashed into a Veteran-level version to not doom anyone caught in its attacks. Some random enemies lay boon-corrupting wells or mass confusion. I love the holo fight because it encourages mobility and tactical foresight while dps is rarely an issue.

But every time we’re fed more junk bosses of the form “kill it before it kills you or the timer runs out, oh and this, this and this won’t work, but just beating it down with all direct damage buffs you’re left with will work just fine”.

I can pretty much agree with everything you said here except maybe the last part.
I find really hard to allow a player failure without some kind of DPS check (not necessarily a timer).
I agree with the Knight one being quite harsh and I find it terribly placed on the preevent of a fairly decent season finale end boss, but without DPS checks at all nothing prevents player from building for extreme survival (which survive so extremely well that you made pretty much anything else unviable if you try to threat them).
Unless the content is somehow farmeable (so clearing speed matters and the full bunker setup is naturally discouraged), we’d move just from one extreme meta to another.

Fenrina.2954:

Vargamonth.2047:

I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.

Vargamonth.2047:

Ohoni.6057:

I just think that encouraging player to adapt and experiment with their builds instead of sticking to their “chosen one” is something positive.

No. A build is something players should be able to get comfortable with. You should be able to set it and forget it. If you get bored with your build and want to change it then that’s fine, that should be an option, but the content should never bully you into it.

We just have completely different opinions in what builds are meant to be.
If the content should never bully any build (anyone can be potentially the favourite for some player) there would be no chance for the game to provide the slightless level of challenge ever.

I’ll admit responding to these is getting a bit difficult to word, but I’ll try.

I think part of it is that there is a world of difference between poking and nudging to experiment and punching and kicking someone to do those same experiments. By bullying a build, one is effectively punching it and it’s users. Making them think about how to handle a new boss is fine. It’s making them go out of their way to deal with build issues that’s problematic.

We’re just not going to agree on this.
For me, completely changing builds (and sometimes even using different characters) for different content is one of the beautiful things of the game. Not as much as it was for GW1, but still quite interesting.

I just said that the game forcing players to tweak their builds towards some specific goals is something I find positive. Firstly because is something I like.
Secondly because, otherwise, the content is likely to be extremely unchallenging for me (since I will definitely adapt) and I’ll lost interest. If I do not adapt, however, I’ll lost interest for different reasons.

A player that finds build optimization annoying and fairly undesirable just will never agree with my position and there’s nothing bad with that :P

Vargamonth.2047:

We’re just not going to agree on this.

Fair enough. If that’s what you like, then that’s fine. Just don’t expect it to apply to a large chunk of the playerbase.

Vargamonth.2047:

For me, completely changing builds (and sometimes even using different characters) for different content is one of the beautiful things of the game. Not as much as it was for GW1, but still quite interesting.

I just said that the game forcing players to tweak their builds towards some specific goals is something I find positive.

GW1 never forced you to change your build. I would know since I completed the entire game, all campaigns, with multiple characters, using only the default selection of skills (the free ones) and henchmen. Optimizing your build pays out spades in terms of safety, reliability, and efficiency, i.e. making the game much easier, but you never have to do anything in one particular way as long as you have some kind of strategy and good execution.

Firstly because is something I like.
Secondly because, otherwise, the content is likely to be extremely unchallenging for me (since I will definitely adapt) and I’ll lost interest. If I do not adapt, however, I’ll lost interest for different reasons.

And here we have it, the sad attempt at pretending to be an elite player. You claim it’s unchallenging if you don’t have to change builds, and yet the whole point of you changing your build is to make the game easier and more readily completable. Like I said, I never went out of my to change the type of build my characters had during my GW1 campaigns and that of course made the game harder. Hard enough that players like you would probably find it impossible to complete. But I had no real problems doing it and that’s because I’m a decent player and can complete objectives however I choose, as long as the game does not put up artificial barriers like a timed DPS test. Forcing players to use a particular build is lowering the skill cap. It’s saying, wear this, and as long as you do, you win. That has nothing to do with challenge, that is just jumping through hoops and mistaking that for being a good player. See also: gear treadmill.

If you were interested in a challenge, you would be advocating for purely defensive gear against the knights. Or no gear at all. I’ve gone soloing like that before.

Leablo.2651:

Vargamonth.2047:

For me, completely changing builds (and sometimes even using different characters) for different content is one of the beautiful things of the game. Not as much as it was for GW1, but still quite interesting.

I just said that the game forcing players to tweak their builds towards some specific goals is something I find positive.

GW1 never forced you to change your build. I would know since I completed the entire game, all campaigns, with multiple characters, using only the default selection of skills (the free ones) and henchmen. Optimizing your build pays out spades in terms of safety, reliability, and efficiency, i.e. making the game much easier, but you never have to do anything in one particular way as long as you have some kind of strategy and good execution.

Firstly because is something I like.
Secondly because, otherwise, the content is likely to be extremely unchallenging for me (since I will definitely adapt) and I’ll lost interest. If I do not adapt, however, I’ll lost interest for different reasons.

And here we have it, the sad attempt at pretending to be an elite player. You claim it’s unchallenging if you don’t have to change builds, and yet the whole point of you changing your build is to make the game easier and more readily completable. Like I said, I never went out of my to change the type of build my characters had during my GW1 campaigns and that of course made the game harder. Hard enough that players like you would probably find it impossible to complete. But I had no real problems doing it and that’s because I’m a decent player and can complete objectives however I choose, as long as the game does not put up artificial barriers like a timed DPS test. Forcing players to use a particular build is lowering the skill cap. It’s saying, wear this, and as long as you do, you win. That has nothing to do with challenge, that is just jumping through hoops and mistaking that for being a good player. See also: gear treadmill.

If you were interested in a challenge, you would be advocating for purely defensive gear against the knights. Or no gear at all. I’ve gone soloing like that before.

I also went through most of the GW campaigns (I eventually stopped playing and didn’t end Nightfalls nor play EotN at all until many years later) with henchmen and without meaningful changes on my buildl (an awful axe one whith Warrior’s Endurance and a lot of 5 energy moves).
It was my first “MMO” (even if I played it mostly as a solo player) and my playstyle was completely different from what it’s now.
The fact that you could think that not me but anyone could find that impossible is really surprising. Being aware of the horrible player I was then (having played almost nothing but adventure games and a few RPGs), this was no way a hard task (a matter of patience with those stupid henchies if anything).

After a few years playing other games I found myself without any appealing title, and since I was expecting GW2, I came back to GW1 for the whole HoM thing.
Maybe some experience with Warhammer and card games brought me into buildcrafting, maybe a fairly large experience with “competitive” PvP (something I was completely uninterested on the first time I played GW1) teached me that efficiency matters.
Dont ask me why, but in my return I found the buildcrafting aspect of the game (I didn’t had care before) not only interesting but incredibly fun to toy with (and heroes opened the gate for A LOT of possibilities) and almost essential for my gameplay.

Nowadays, for any game I play, if I want challenge for the shake of challenge I can go solo, naked and/or give up some skill I could perceive as OP for a given fight, but that’s not the game challenging me … that’s me handycapping myself to find a challenge where there really isn’t.
I’m not on the “roleplaying” side anymore and I’ve no special attachment to my character. I perceive myself as a player and my whole account as the tools to overcome whatever the game throws at me.
I like to know my tools and I try to use them the best I can. If I play a RTS I’ll try to build the best units for countering the enemy ones; if I play a MOBA I’ll pick the character and buy the gear that seems to fit better the match; if I play a MMO/RPG where I can rebuild my character at will, I’ll look for the most efficient spec on beating the content I’m going to play, and if the game wants to challenge me, I expect it to acknowledge I’ll play my cards the best I can.
That’s my natural approach and I don’t think it’s weird nor that it has anything to do with my actual skill as player (which I’m quite aware it’s not amazing btw :P).

Give us access to DPS\Performance charts for current fights. This will give the under-performers a goal to try and become better Guild Wars’ers.

I just want to give a shout-out to ANet for mostly resolving this. We went from 0/4 on Saturday to 3/4 tonight (the 2am run seemed highly under-popped and only cleared blue because green had like 2 people there, but I don’t blame ANet for that).

We just have completely different opinions in what builds are meant to be.

Perhaps.

If, however, builds are intended to be something you swap out relatively casually, then the game does not support that well. If that is the goal of traits and such, then they need to have a way to “memorize” several trait builds in the system, allowing you to swap between them at a button press, rather than having to remember the combination of points and major traits that gets you there. There should also be gear storage lockers built into the UI that would allow you to swap out a Rabid set for a Zerkers set at a button press if you owned both.

Even if trait swapping were that simple, re-learning how to use each combination can sometimes be difficult. I still think it’s best to allow people to play with the build they’re comfortable with, and if you support certain builds in general then you should give a role for that build in all content.

If the content should never bully any build (anyone can be potentially the favourite for some player) there would be no chance for the game to provide the slightless level of challenge ever.

This isn’t true. You should need to put together A functional build, one that works at least reasonably often. My point is that content should not then invalidate that build by making its strengths worthless. You should still have to play well. The Knight fights are no more difficult for a pure Condi spec than for a full Zerker Power spec, they are just more likely to fail even if the two builds are played identically. That is not difficulty, that is not challenge, that is just stat check.

And I’m no saying that they all need to play equally, exactly, but they should be competitive. I wouldn’t mind if Zerkers were more effective for this content than Rabid, but it should still be balanced enough that a full 50 people in Rabid would be able to beat it, just maybe not get the six minute achievement. The difference should be in time, not failure. And there should also be equally important content in the game for which 50 people in Rabid would do a better job at it than 50 in Zerkers (another balance point they rarely even attempt).

I do think that there should be personal achievements that only can be achieved by using specific builds much like the achievements that can only be done by certain classes and professions (ie, those related to PS and weapons), like “Do 15000 damage to a target dummy using a single skill” or “stack 12 bleeding by yourself”.

Yeah, fair enough, but I’ll add that these should only be permanent achievements, not temporary ones. If you have to of them within a two week period or never at all, then they should be something pretty much any build is capable of, but if it’s something you can do today or nine months from now, then sure, it can require a specific situation.

I agree with the Knight one being quite harsh and I find it terribly placed on the preevent of a fairly decent season finale end boss, but without DPS checks at all nothing prevents player from building for extreme survival (which survive so extremely well that you made pretty much anything else unviable if you try to threat them).

Maybe so, but it doesn’t punish them either. It’s better that everyone with the lowest DPS succeed than that only those with the highest DPS succeed. Victory and failure should be based on how well players deal with the mechanics of the fight, not by how much DPS they do over the course of the fight. DPS should be more of a factor in smaller fights where a handful of players are attacking a single enemy, the big boss fights should be more about dealing with mechanics and surviving the fight.

Really it wouldn’t be so bad if bosses just normalized damage, made it so that every attack did a set amount of DPS (ie an attack that deals one hit per second would deal 100 damage, flat, regardless of stats, while one that deals three hits per second would do 33 damage per hit). Normal enemies would still be subject to fluctuating damage, but not the giant zerg bosses.

Klonex.4562:

wrong actually, they actually didn’t mind it at first. the reason Anet decided to do something about is because of so many people whining about it. if you go back a few pages in this forum you’ll notice a few “tired of zerg content”

Objectively Incorrect. Anet has never adjusted content based on what people on the forums have to say. Whether or not people complain about zerg content anet will continue to use it as it appeals to the LCD and increases thier profit margins.

Klonex.4562:

and the locked “knights give too many loot”

This is the one and only reason. Someone looked at the metrics, decided that the influx of gold from these events would not be profitable to gem sales and reduced the drops.

Vargamonth.2047:

I expect rangers to trait for Spotter and bring Spirit of Frost (which I rarely see btw), probably even traited, for a freaking 3.5%/7% AoE final damage increase.

Rangers were deincentivized by the following fight; getting achievements against the Hologram made a pet a huge liability, so it’s better to just start out with something else.

I’ve run ranger in the Knight battle and actually use both suggestions. Spirit of Frost, one pull from the knight and it’s dead. It’s kinda pointless when it spends more time in cooldown than in action. Spotter, however, should make me an instant hero.

Ohoni.6057:

If, however, builds are intended to be something you swap out relatively casually, then the game does not support that well. If that is the goal of traits and such, then they need to have a way to “memorize” several trait builds in the system, allowing you to swap between them at a button press, rather than having to remember the combination of points and major traits that gets you there. There should also be gear storage lockers built into the UI that would allow you to swap out a Rabid set for a Zerkers set at a button press if you owned both.

It’s interesting to note that we can look and see what they originally intended to be a build. Utility skills are actually least likely to be part of a build. No matter the build, it’s impossible to use all 4 utility skills of a given category. The player was likely expected to swap these around as the situation changes. Given how consistent per profession this is, I’d say it’s completely intentional.

Next up is major traits. They’re swappable just like utility skills, but unlike utilities, players do not have free access to swap major traits. By “free access,” I mean that it’s impossible to put a Fire trait in a Water slot or a Radiance trait in a Zeal slot and so on. It’s still limited by where one places trait points.

And finally gear and trait points, with minor traits by extension, are the heaviest parts of the build. Pretty straightforward as trait points are limited to a max of 70 and gear is not necessarily easy to get or deal with. Even if we ignore tp buying for exotic stats, there’s still sigil/runes to deal with as well as ascended and legendary gear.

However, there is a problem. How many people bother to swap around utility slots? I don’t know. Anet has an idea. And it seems to bother them as Josh Foreman mentioned it in a thread about the marionette, but he didn’t list numbers. If the % is high, then it’s doubtful that gear lockers and multiple trait sets will see much use. I know I personally don’t actually swap utilities that much. At best, I only switch around 1 slot or the elite unless it’s something big. And even then, it’s more of a canned choice. I already know what to switch to where.

Ohoni.6057:

If, however, builds are intended to be something you swap out relatively casually, then the game does not support that well.
…

I don’t think you’re supposed to enter a dungeon and suddenly go from a glass cannon spec to a heavy tank at mid run. You’re supposed to find out a well balanced build which, even if not optimal for every single encounter, perform decently through the whole piece of content. The game still alows weapon, utility and even major trait changes for more than enough soft tuning.
As a Guardian, for example, I might play without Wall of Reflection for most of the content and situationally slot it when I know there’s a projectile based fight. Aside from WoR being completely OP, I think it’s fairly reasonable to expect me to do this.

When you are going to play a completely unrelated content, however, there’s no problem with retraiting and going for something quite different.
I don’t think I’m expected to play Dungeons and WvW with the same exact template.

I don’t expect people to constantly retrait since most content is trivial enough to be completed with almost any build.
However, in those rare ocasions where you run into a wall, I think it’s good for the player to acknowledge that the option exists. The fight against Knight was pretty much one of these situations (it was no more than a DPS check, I never perceived it as some kind of challenge) and I still think it’s reasonable for a player to visit a profession master and respec towards damage.

The content should never be gear gated, that’s something I completely agree with you.
Expecting players to respec towards higher damage is OK for me. Expecting them to have a berserker gear set (which involves an important gold ivestment and sttorage space) is not.
That’s why timers and such need to be soft DPS checks for the most part. Devs can’t push the numerical limits because neither every class has the same damage potential nor every player should be expected to have the best gear.
It could be possible for some niche piece of content, but I wouldn’t expect not even the 1% of the playerbase to bother with that and it probably would be waste of effort.

IMHO soft timers have worked perfectly fine for the most part.
Even if I find the Knight battle inadequate for the season finale, I don’t really think it can be seen as gear gating at all (even if berserker is clearly a superior choice, I don’t think it’s absolutely needed, not even close).
Even if Anet is to blame for the atrocious scaling that overlooked many overflow / low population server issues (with constant failure demoralizing players and making things even worse), I think that the overall player input was lackluster, both in performance (too many players being pulled by the extraction attack) and attitude/knowledge (no respawn, lack of consumables and/or order boosts).
I honestly think that some improvement on player side (including some respec towards damage, without changing any gear at all) should had been enough for achieving a good success rate.

I do think that soft timers should be balanced around full soldier gear.
In fact, I actually think they are. There’s an often overlooked huge difference, however, between builds even when they use the same gear, on top of many other contributions (using consumables, not dying, …) that not always are there.
Tequatl should have shown players that timed events might fail without berserker gear looming large over them.

In fact, a non-crittable enemy like Tequatl made succeeding much more reliant on player performance/spec than on gear, which is obviously a nice and quite desirable move.
On the other hand, making both Berserker and Soldier stats achieve the same damage output is still unfair since one of them is far more survivable and a dead player doesn’t deal damage at all.
That’s the natural barrier of itemization (a terrible itemization IMHO. Outside of some kind of multifaceted event where every evey spec/gear can shine, there’s no chance for the content to not be heavily gear dependant.

It’s impossible to balance things around Rabids atm because, even if it’s a more offensive stat combination than PVT, condition damage is completely flawed for PvE group play. For large scale group content, Rabid offers little more than secondary precision and it’s not much better than being naked damage wise.
It’s a problem, a really big one that has existed for too long and without devs making any meaningul pronouncement about, but it’s fairly obvious that timers can’t be balanced around soething like Dire gear. Even if a cheap “solution”, I guess it’s safe to think that berserker players counterweight condition ones balance wise.

Fenrina.2954:

However, there is a problem. How many people bother to swap around utility slots? I don’t know. Anet has an idea. And it seems to bother them as Josh Foreman mentioned it in a thread about the marionette, but he didn’t list numbers. If the % is high, then it’s doubtful that gear lockers and multiple trait sets will see much use. I know I personally don’t actually swap utilities that much. At best, I only switch around 1 slot or the elite unless it’s something big. And even then, it’s more of a canned choice. I already know what to switch to where.

That’s partly because half the utilities are worthless in PvE overall. Of those that are left the vast majority is invalidated by the mechanics in any given fight: look at mesmer:

Glamour:
Feedback: no enemy projectiles
Veil: no aggro play
Portal: you just stand there and whack the knight
Null Field: conditions are reapplied too rapidly, might be worth taking anyway (but it’s also something many mesmers bring by default)

Manipulation:
Blink: good if you’re really bad at dodging or try to melee, also a common default
Arcane Thievery: no enemy boons and the knight has this as an aura pretty much
Illusion of Life: will probably kill more than it saves
Mimic: lol

Illusions:
Decoy: see veil, at least gives shatter fodder
Mirror Images: more shatter fodder
iDisenchanter: good shatter fodder, no real use, gets pulled
iDefender: too unreliable, dies instantly once people melee

Signets:
Inspiration: boon share, oh great, never do that as mes…
Domination: condi or stun, which is more worthless in this fight?
Midnight: minor boon duration and a blind, one!
Illusions: the knight melts PVT warriors who melee, let alone afk illusions

Mantras:
Pain: still not enough for people to survive melee
Distraction: living under a rock or something?
Resolve: actually decent and I take it over Nullfield
Concentration: good against pull if you’re lazy with positioning or trying to squeeze out every last bit of dps

Elites:
Timewarp: PvE standard
Mass Invis: worse than Decoy
Moa: wish that one worked…

So basic m.o. is to replace Feedback with Mantra of Concentration or whichever condi clear you aren’t running already.

Sariel V.7024:

Vargamonth.2047:

I expect rangers to trait for Spotter and bring Spirit of Frost (which I rarely see btw), probably even traited, for a freaking 3.5%/7% AoE final damage increase.

Spirit of Frost, one pull from the knight and it’s dead. It’s kinda pointless when it spends more time in cooldown than in action. Spotter, however, should make me an instant hero.

I didn’t know but imagined that the spirit would die during the extraction attacks.
In any case, it’s on a 25s CD which is quite similar to the rate those pulls are performed. If summoned right after one of these attacks the skill should have about a 50% upkeep, which is still a 1.75% (3.5% if traited) average damage increase for 5 people.
Assuming an even damage distribution, that would be like having an utility that increases your own damage by 8.75% / 17.5%, which is still fine (specially if there’s no other meaningul utility to use instead).

I don’t know about this, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it were possible to summon the spirit (which has a 1000 unit effect radius) in some tricky spot where the pull doesn’t work (obviously, without wasting a lot of time and damage output reaching it :P).

Photoloss.4817:

So basic m.o. is to replace Feedback with Mantra of Concentration or whichever condi clear you aren’t running already.

You make a good point up until this point. Josh makes it sound like those players won’t even go this far. He mentions this group immediately after those that don’t know about trait points.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/madness/Well-I-defended-these-new-events-at-first/page/5#post3559127

We know that X% of players don’t know about traits. We know Y% never swap out their 7-0 skills to accommodate specific challenges.

However, there is a problem. How many people bother to swap around utility slots? I don’t know. Anet has an idea. And it seems to bother them as Josh Foreman mentioned it in a thread about the marionette, but he didn’t list numbers.

I have to say, on my eight 80s, I almost never swap utilities around. I do sometimes, when a situation really calls for a specific one, but for the most part I find my usual utility loadouts to be so useful that alternatives aren’t even considered. In many cases this is backed up by the fact that traiting into buffs to a specific set of Utilities makes swapping Utilities a waste of that trait, so then you have to swap the trait too, etc.

I don’t think I’m expected to play Dungeons and WvW with the same exact template.

Again, if they intend you to swap out build between those two things then the game doesn’t support it well. You should be able to roll from WvW to a dungeon run to a world event zerg without having to swap out anything. If they do intend you to have three different builds for that night then they need to have templating systems in place so that you can click the “WvW build” button and it automatically realigns your options to what you’ve established for that play style.

IMHO soft timers have worked perfectly fine for the most part.

I think that when they work, you never even notice them, so what’s the point, and when they don’t, they take a fun event and make it unfun because you fail it. Since they added timers to events, the ones that I think have been fine have been the Scarlet Holo, the Fire Elemental, Golem MK II, Jungle Wurm, and the Frozen Maw (although they overbuffed his HP making the fight suuuuuuch a snozefest). The ones that the timer has hurt are Claw, Shatterer, Tequatl, the Triple Wurm, the Marionette, and the Knights.

The one where the timer actually works best, where it adds something to the encounter without taking much away, is the Karka Queen, both because the pre-events are well designed to build up enough players to tackle the main event, and because failure just rolls into a mad dash to reset the event that only takes a few minutes rather than “oh, too bad, come back in 1-3 hours and you get to fail again.”

Doggie.3184

:They did it because it broke their loot system and the knights stopped dropping any items at all.

Ît didn’t break, they disabled the loot tables for the knights until they changed the events… And that was a good thing.

Fenrina.2954:

Photoloss.4817:

So basic m.o. is to replace Feedback with Mantra of Concentration or whichever condi clear you aren’t running already.

You make a good point up until this point. Josh makes it sound like those players won’t even go this far. He mentions this group immediately after those that don’t know about trait points.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/madness/Well-I-defended-these-new-events-at-first/page/5#post3559127

We know that X% of players don’t know about traits. We know Y% never swap out their 7-0 skills to accommodate specific challenges.

But we don’t know X and Y. And the players that truly are that uninformed won’t rethink their ways when getting smacked with a hammer in the middle of 50+ fire effects, they’ll cry for a rez.

The argument was much stronger for the marionette fight. The knights don’t have any meaningful mechanics or counterplay you could learn, just a list of things that will have you kissing the floor for 14 minutes. Condition removal and stability (outside of TTS runs) are only minor boosts or convenience, the truly meaningful choices are the passive damage increases. It’s sad when you can sum up the preparation advice as “read all tooltips, use nothing that lists conditions, pick everything that increases damage in any way” (and the players who actually care to learn the event can take care of the “burn phase”)

I’m also pretty sure most of those uninformed/“bad” players have the chat turned off or are deliberately trolling. Like when you have 5+ people attacking a near-dead colored holo while 5 more spam the chat with “DMG STOP”, then run away and kill another while you’re busy with the spawns. These players clearly can’t or won’t communicate or improve and open world mass events should either a) allow the others to succeed without massive overcompensation or b) find a way to eliminate these players entirely. Stopping fully dead players from upscaling an event would be a good start, then we can just leave them in the dust where they at least can’t actively harm overall progress.

Photoloss.4817:

But we don’t know X and Y. And the players that truly are that uninformed won’t rethink their ways when getting smacked with a hammer in the middle of 50+ fire effects, they’ll cry for a rez.

And that’s what I’m getting at. A gear locker and trait sets will not really change much if a large enough chunk of the population doesn’t care.

Fenrina.2954:

Photoloss.4817:

But we don’t know X and Y. And the players that truly are that uninformed won’t rethink their ways when getting smacked with a hammer in the middle of 50+ fire effects, they’ll cry for a rez.

And that’s what I’m getting at. A gear locker and trait sets will not really change much if a large enough chunk of the population doesn’t care.

It will. Not for them, but I couldn’t care less. It’ll be a major convenience for everyone who doesn’t live under a rock. And hey, I at least would tell “new” players “change your trait setup to include the damage increases – you’ll get more loot for it”, then “and if you die a few times, just save another page where you pick the defense buffs, you can switch when needed you know”.

“make a PVT page” is a much nicer message than “OMIGAWD GO AWAY BEARBOW NOOB ZERK!11!!1”, and “you can keep the other setup, just use this one here and now” is a much better addition than “well, his tone is awful but he’s kinda right, you should have gone back to the city, retraited, and picked up any spare gear in the bank while you’re at it”

Ît didn’t break, they disabled the loot tables for the knights until they changed the events… And that was a good thing.

no, it wasn’t, because then they weren’t dropping loot anymore. When they were dropping loot it was good.