Guild Wars 2

Reflection:
Lot’s of problems here. Ran a guild mate through ascalon dungeon. We stated using reflection helps on queen spider. They responded they just ran twilight and was told reflection doesn’t work on Giant spiders. He is correct, it does work on one giant spider, but not on ‘that’ giant spider. Boss description needs to display anti-reflection description.

Imbued fire shaman: Guardian wall of reflection works on boss projectile. Warior traiting of shield will also reflect projectile. Mesmer tempral curtain, despite using warden feedback will not. Iwarden will also not reflect when traited, nor will it reflect projectiles when in its ‘save bubble’. Anything with a trajectory will not be reflected on wardens feedback. Mini spiders, engineer turrets, everything I have checked so far that arc’s the projectile will not be reflected by mesmer focus, but will by other professions reflections.

Simple quality of life adjustments are needed in this regard. It is difficult having to explain to people that reflection will work, but not with this profession this way, or it will work on this boss, but on that boss that looks and behaves exactly the same as the other one.

Reflection doesn’t work against Spider Queen because her projectiles can’t be blocked.

Ever since the several nerfs to projectile blocks and reflects (WvW siege and such), it’s difficult to tell which projectiles can be blocked and which of them can’t (apart from inofficial lists, trial and error, common knowledge).

The Ice Wurms in Frostgorge could be blocked for a very long time, and then from one patch to the next, the projectiles couldn’t be blocked any more.

What the OP is asking for is a symbol in the boon bar of the bosses (or anything similar) indicating in advance if you should even bother trying to block or reflect. Given the randomness of “can be blocked” and “can not be blocked” that’s not a bad idea after all.

It’s not intuitive to find out what can be reflected, if some projectiles of the same type can be blocked while others can’t… (Or like in the case of the Ice Wurms, it’s being changed over time for some reason).

Yes, the anti-projectile mechanic (encompassing both absorption, and reflection) is poorly designed, and also poorly implemented. ANET’s attempts at “fixing” how reflects can trivialize certain encounters have made the issue even worse.

Sometimes, the same class of anti-projectile skill will behave different across classes, or even on the same class with different anti-projectile skills.

Sometimes, reflecting projectiles won’t work, but absorbing them will.

Sometimes, projectiles cannot be absorbed or reflected.

In some of these cases, ANET has purposely altered the encounter so that projectiles don’t count as projectiles anymore, because they’re just too lazy to either re-design the boss encounter so that it’s not trivialized by such skills, or because they’re too lazy to re-design the anti-projectile mechanic in such a way it’s useful but won’t lead to such “problems”. In other cases, they may have realized reflects trivialize things, and decided that they’re proactively only going to allow projectiles to be absorbed. In still other cases, it seems like it could be more of an oversight on their part, or a bug, or just poor design and testing.

In any event, the state of anti-projectile skills is almost a microcosm for everything involving Guild Wars 2 that doesn’t involve artistic aspects, the Living Story or the Gem Store.

I am not the only one seeing this. My guardian can reflect it, but my mesmer can’t with traited focus, but can with traited distortion. My warrior can reflect it, but rangers axe reflect can’t…in short, refection is not operating universally. In the above stated example of where reflections were seemingly making short work of bosses no new descriptions were added to their bylines. It seems odd with every living story update each profession gets enhanced skilled descriptions and range indicators, yet no profession courtesy has been added to inform players of boss changes.

In short, rules are only rules when they apply to everyone. If one profession can reflect it, all professions reflect should be able to do the same.

The devil is in the detail.

Just tested warrior, doesn’t work.

Regarding Temporal Curtain, the height of the “wall” is extremely low. That’s why a lot of projectiles aren’t being reflected : they just fly over it.

I think this is a pretty reasonable request, to label enemies attacks accordingly. And RedStar is right about Temporal Curtain, it’s height makes it pretty weak unfortunately.