Guild Wars 2

Firstly I want to say that I loved the Hallowe’en event. You guys outdid yourselves. Don’t listen to the screaming and crying from people with gambling addictions on Guru.

Secondly I don’t know if this is the right place to be posting, since the Hallowe’en forum is now archived and none of the other forums seemed appropriate.

Now to the point: I was really excited when I first saw the Mad King runes. The gimmick ability of crow swarm on elite activation sounded fantastic. I had this mental image of building my thief around Dagger Storm and shadow stepping into groups of vulnerable WvW players for a Fiddlesticks-style Crowstorm that would be both effective, and a fun prestige thing from a cosmetic perspective.

I had plans for building around all the different ways the crows might work, like if they remained as summons, if they were a PBAoE field that functioned like a Locust Swarm, if they were like the crows the Mad King summons that caused fear at the same time…all had really exciting possibilities.

I did not plan for there being no crows.

Imagine my disappointment when I go up to some training dummies and Dagger Storm. I spin for several seconds, the move completes, nothing happens and I’m left standing there confused. Eventually 3 groups of generic ranger hawks do the warhorn attack.

Hawks are not crows.

8 to 9 seconds after you activate an elite is not “when you activate an elite”.

Concerning the lazy cosmetic effect; I’m really surprised the generic hawks are being used considering there are already assets for crows with attack animations in the game.

Concerning the broken functionality; This is part of a larger bug with runes activated by skills, which is a pretty serious one I’d like to see addressed soon. It seems that any channelled skill will not trigger runes until after the channelling is finished (sometimes as much as a full second after). Transforms have it even worse; They won’t trigger the “crows” (or things like Rune of Lyssa) at all.

This is compounded by the fact that the “crows” seem to be choosing their targets earlier than when they actually appear. The already pitiful maximum of 3 targets is nerfed further when some or all of the groups choose to attack targets that died in the Dagger Storm itself.

I had generally poor luck with the labyrinth chests and had to spend a lot of gold to make this set, so the fact that it doesn’t work as described (or even look good) stings a fair bit. If someone from Anet could confirm whether there are planned changes to this rune set I would really appreciate it, as that will affect whether I start investing in something else.

I would like to second this. Though I do not really care for the late response of the birds, I do mind seeing hawks in stead of crows. The crows are allready in game, Mad King Thorn used them! So why can’t we get the same awesome animation and sound effect? Please change this.