Guild Wars 2

So with this expansion and with the new profession and new mastery system I see this as a golden opportunity to revisit the multitude of horrible abilities, particularly with our utility/elite skills, and consider a revision for them.

I don’t want to come off as sounding bitter but I am astonished by how some of these abilities even made it to live. Almost as if they were scrambled together at the last minute as fill in skills without even taking into account any form of usability or creativity.

A lot of these are racial skills some are okay and others are just perplexing to me.

For example Avatar of Melandru – Costs 10 skill points and you turn into a tree, and get stability. Really? Who came up with this? Why do I turn into a tree? Because you were too lazy to make this ability, at the very least, look distinctive? So you copy pasted a tree model. Good, nice job.

I think we should make a list of all these inept skills to make it clearer because I am rather surprised that there isn’t more people voicing concerns about this.

iamzeroxx.6495:

So with this expansion and with the new profession and new mastery system I see this as a golden opportunity to revisit the multitude of horrible abilities, particularly with our utility/elite skills, and consider a revision for them.

I don’t want to come off as sounding bitter but I am astonished by how some of these abilities even made it to live. Almost as if they were scrambled together at the last minute as fill in skills without even taking into account any form of usability or creativity.

A lot of these are racial skills some are okay and others are just perplexing to me.

For example Avatar of Melandru – Costs 10 skill points and you turn into a tree, and get stability. Really? Who came up with this? Why do I turn into a tree? Because you were too lazy to make this ability, at the very least, look distinctive? So you copy pasted a tree model. Good, nice job.

I think we should make a list of all these inept skills to make it clearer because I am rather surprised that there isn’t more people voicing concerns about this.

To be fair, in GW1 the different Avatar abilities transformed you into well a Avatar of said god, the Avatar of Melandru did in fact turn you into a walking tree in the first game. I wish there where more of the Avatar abilities those, one per god, and what god you chose on creation allowed you to have that ONE avatar.

Inepts skills: ALL Racial elite skills, and if i remember right, almost every single Racial regular skill is bad too.

There are some that aren’t racial though. Like Rampage which is notoriously bad. One of the skills when this ability is activated is the ability to throw a boulder. I mean come on. Totally lazy, and stupid. On top of that it doesn’t last long; hell they don’t even dignify you with having auto attack on when the skill activates. Plus it removes all your other utility skills when activated.

Dante.1763:

Inepts skills: ALL Racial elite skills, and if i remember right, almost every single Racial regular skill is bad too.

Honestly, I want them to remove Racial skills and find a better way to implement that idea. Having racial abilities be too useful leads the playerbase into choosing a race for the mechanics, not the race itself, which I think Arena.net wanted to avoid, and intentionally made the skills a bit weak because of that. That just makes them pointless though, and it means that a lot of the racial flavor is just missing, particularly for Asura and Norn.

Maybe Specializations is the answer? A Golemancer Specialization for Engineer and a Spirit Shaman Specialization for… Ranger? Warrior? It’s just a huge shame, because most of the time I can’t even tell my human and norn companions apart because there’s nothing racially distinct about norn in gameplay and most players seem to try to avoid customizing them as huge viking warriors for some reason.

A pass on all of the skills would be nice though, not just racial skills. Because, yeah, there are several classes where the choices are barely even a trap. Even a really casual player who doesn’t do any ability comparisons could tell that some just aren’t worth it over others.

Well, off the top of my head:

Racial abilities all kinda suck (on purpose) it would be nice if we could buff those, but use the new mastry system to acquire functionally identical skills from the other races so people don’t have to pick a race just for its abilities. For instance, in EOTN the human characters had the ability to learn Norn transforms, but rather than giving them a full on shapeshift, they simply gave them a “spirit” version which changed their abilities, but didn’t change their shape. A similar idea would work well in GW2 for skills that are very race specific. For instance, only humans could learn hounds of balthazar, but other races, by applying mastery to “human racial lore” could learn “Release the hounds”, a skill that functioned the same way but summoned two drakehounds rather than the flashy balthazar ones reserved for humans. Some skills would make sense without any art changes at all, like technobabble, the charr mine, etc. and it would be a great way to further specialize characters and dig in to lore.

Thief Venoms and Traps Suck
Seriously, thief traps are horrible, even when building around them with traits. There is literally no reason to put them on your bar with the exception of shadow trap for PvP. Venoms suck unless you’re running full venomshare, and venomshare is a notoriously unfun spec because it requires you to give up far too much in terms of damage and survivability and is completely ineffective when the venoms are on cooldown. Buff venoms, nerf venomous aura.

Necro Minion builds (still) suck
Minion necros were a huge part of GW1, and highly effective at proxy tanking/crowd control machines. Necro minion mechanics need a complete rework, as minions are too few, too weak, and have far too long a cooldown to build a coherant spec around them. We should be able to spend life force for minions rather than using cooldown timers, since GW2 replaced all corpse mechanics with it, and we need a reliable means of maintaining minions.

I second buffing Venoms and nerfing Venomous Aura.

The way it should work is that Venoms are strong at baseline, and then Venomous Aura weakens them slightly to apply them to allies.

I don’t think Traps are as bad as Venoms, but they could stand some small improvements.

I wish they would look at all abilities for every charactor there are a lot that are useless.

Some just need to be improved while others need to be changed for example I wish my elementalist tornado wasn’t a transform but rather a summon so I could use my other skills to stay alive also I find my mesmers utility skills boring and some useless along with there elites like mass invisability.

This is just my opinion others my disagree

Working on the expansion for gw2 I can completely understand that some things can’t be reworked entirely, But the examples i will leave down here below however wouldnt take alot of time to fix/patch/inplement.

for example I play a shouts build warrior, Charr in this case. yet my racial “Battle Cry” has a longer cooldown, (30 to 35 seconds). and grants 60 power/condition damage as opposed to the shout skill “For Great justice” wich has a cooldown of 20/25 seconds, and gives you and allies 90 power/condition damage. seriously, Why??

I understand that Battle cry can be used no matter wich class the Charr player picks but to the warrior its just useless, also when it comes to audio dialogue I like that Battle cry has atleast three to four different things to say instead of hearing the same thing over and over.

Improving the racial skills would be a great way to see them put to use more often, a shout elite skill would also be very helpfull, if possible.
(still talking about warriors in this context though)

Another racial skill that really needs its cooldown lowered is Warband support, 240 seconds is far to long for a summon that lasts 30 seconds in my opinion. same goes for the “Artillery Barrage” skill. it’s damage is terrible and the cooldown shouldn’t be that long, Warband support and Artillery Barrage share the same cooldown time with Battle standard (when not banner spece’d I presume) but both can’t compare to Battle standards uses and utillity.

recommendation for these skills would be something like this:

“Battlecry” 25 seconds, adding 90/100 power/condition damage.
(if shout specced lowered to about 20 perhaps?) I noticed that the skill also doesn’t apply healing even when using the “vigorous shouts” trait. perhaps that can also be changed?

Warband Support: 140/150 seconds, summoning two “Legion” npc’s for about 45/60 seconds? let me know if that’s too much when opposed to “thieves guild”.

“Shrapnel Mine” is a simple racial skill, its cooldown is low so no problems there except it’s very slow compared to other skills that Engineers might employ, I think increasing it’s AOE ring abit and making it respond faster to enemy presence might fix it. slight damage boost would also help to make it more usefull I think.

physical move: “Bull’s Charge” it’s cooldown seems very long, perhaps lowering it from 40 to 30/25?

One more for the record, “rampage” warrior Elite skill, needs to have some more fine tuning to its attack moves when in rampage mode.

Throw Boulder 1 12 Throw a large boulder at your foe.

It’s oke when used in PVE, but compared to Battle standard or Signet of Rage it’s a lackluster attack move in Rampage mode that can easily be dodged by opposing players. if the move could be changed i think adding another knockdown like the hammer adrenaline burst move or slowing a target down by using a shout or charge attack would add more pressure and power to the moveset as a whole.

Seismic Leap ¾ 15 Leap into the air and knock down foes where you land. It’s pretty good the way it is, but it needs a slight range buff I think. this move has an attack range of 600, increasing it to about 700/750/800 would actually make it viable to intercept ranged npcs/players then go in and “rampage” on them like mad.