The condition damage it puts out doesn’t scale with player stats, last I recall. So even in the best case it’s putting out 100 damage burns.
I’d actually like it if Expert Examination affected all hard CC’s. I’d definitely use the trait then.
You’d think that Flamethrower auto is in a good place with all the aegis, shields of wrath, and projectile denial flying around, but the issue is that you just can’t trade hits with people as an Engineer. It’s a long channel with low damage, and any class that just decides to sit in your Flamethrower and auto you while you auto them is going to win that trade almost 100% of the time. Which IMO is really, really sad.
It took Anet 3.5 years to release new skills, and they did it under the Elite Specialization system. Judging from where they’re going with these, it seems like we might only ever get new skill types rather than expansions on old ones. This is fine for most classes, but for Engineer it means they might never get another kit. Which are the reasons why some people even play Engineer in the first place.
Would you guys be okay with a turrets attempt #3 for the next expansion? Because I don’t think I’d like that very much.
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I’ll bet you guys money that the reason Tool Kit got nerfed is because they’re going to sell it back to us by making an Elite spec that revolves around blocking, and Tool Kit’s block was too strong for it. You heard it here first.
Core engineer currently has a lot of problems when it comes to defending themselves, so turret buffs are certainly welcome.
Something that a lot of people don’t realize is that, because autoattacks are so strong in this game, simply defending yourself is a dead end. If all you do is block and evade and heal, you’ll never get anywhere in a fight. At best, you’ll stalemate the enemy if they don’t have the damage to kill you. At worst, you’ll die without having done anything meaningful.
This is why I have a massive issue with the tool kit shield nerf. It was strong, it was long duration and had a short cooldown. But when an Engineer blocks, they’re blocking. When an Engineer heals, they’re healing. When an Engineer attacks, they’re attacking. Sounds stupid and simple right? Not really.
The most powerful specs for each class are the ones allow you to do multiple things at once. A Guardian can put up Shield of Wrath and start hitting your face. He’s protecting himself while hitting you at the same time. A Warrior can enter Berserker stance, or Balanced Stance, or Defy Pain, and cover himself while he goes HAM on your face. They’re instant-cast defensives that can be utilized while continuing the offense. Core Engineer doesn’t have any utilities that really do anything close. Scrapper gets Hammer, which can attack while blocking and has evade frames, and the Scrapper in general gets lots of stability, which covers a lot of weaknesses. But core engineer generally just crumples and dies as soon as it goes on the defensive. Turrets could cover a weakness here, since they act independently of the Engineer, and could provide an opportunity for the Engineer to defend himself while staying on the offensive. I think that’d be decent.
In my opinion, gadgets/gyros, and pretty much anything that’s not a kit needs to have either a drastically low cooldown, or be completely overloaded with stats, passive abilities, boons, or offensive utility. For Engineer, the problem has always been, you’ve giving up 5 skills for one if you ever take something that’s not a kit. So anything that’s not a kit needs to essentially be worth 5 abilities in one, or it needs to be have a far lower average cooldown than those 5 abilities, or they need to fulfill very specialized roles, if they’re going to be taken. And that’s a hard task.
For example, if Slick Shoes had half the current cooldown, I might consider taking it then. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? Even after the nerf, a 20s cd on Slick Shoes would be one of the best cc utilities in the game. And that’s how powerful it would need to be in order to be competitive. We don’t have weaponswap, so our utilities need to provide us with defense, offense, and utility. If they only do one thing, they have to do it incredibly well, otherwise they’re just worthless to us. The fact that rifle and pistol MH are incredibly bad doesn’t help things at all — As far as core engineer goes, we can’t rely on our base weapons at all. Rifle and mainhand pistol absolutely completely suck. Rifle has decent damage, but can’t be relied on at all for defense and its “utility” is single-target exclusive, and very prone to projectile hate. Mainhand pistol has a tiny bit of utility and defense, mainly in static shot, and it has absolutely no offense to speak of. All these things push us even further towards kits.
For the expansion, Anet finally got the memo and decided to give us a strong base weapon, the Hammer, which can actually live on its own as primary defense, offense, and utility, so that we’re freed from the burden of having to rely on kits to carry our damage. The only problem being that hammer is so unbelievably OP that it received multiple nerfs and is still the best class weapon by far, and has even gotten the core engineer nerfed numerous times. Anytime you end up taking something that’s not a kit, 99% of the time it’s because the hammer enabled you to do it just because it’s so OP.
Anytime someone talks about engineer problems, it’s actually multiple problems intersecting that cause the absolute CF that is the engineer class. We could receive buffs to pistol MH, or rifle, or shield, or buffs to everything not a kit, or they could just give us weaponswap and we probably STILL wouldn’t be OP (if we somehow took hammer out of the equation and it be swapping between pistol and rifle). But, another patch comes out and nothing, so…
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To be honest, I feel like Flamethrower is just a weak kit in general right now. Mainly due to bugs, honestly. Air Blast is bugged so if you accidentally cancel the ability during the cast time, or you get interrupted, it goes on full cooldown. The 2 ability STILL gets sucked into the ground half the time and just does nothing.
Tack on the fact that the 1 and 4 abilities are generally, fairly worthless in PvP, the fact that incendiary ammo almost never lands anymore (evasion/reflect/block uptime has gone up dramatically with the release of HoT) and Flamethrower kit just becomes a product of a bygone era.
I do think Flamethrower, among MANY of the engineer’s utility skills, could use some love. If they added a bit more functionality to it, it could be competitive. It doesn’t have to be on the 5 ability, but I think your idea is reasonable.
That said, I think the 5 ability is decent. It’s an instant-cast AoE blind on a moderate cooldown. You can pop a blind while in the middle of executing another ability, which is fairly good utility. Or…well, it used to be good utility, until HoT power creep came out, and a single blind didn’t cut it anymore, at least in PvP. I actually like the ability, but it probably fell behind a bit with the power creep of the expansion.
You forgot, Shredder Gyro is still UNIMAGINABLY worthless.
Who the hell came up with this stupid idea? Where the hell is the ‘purity of purpose’ in this gyro, Anet? Does it do damage? Does it give utility? Zone control? Area denial? CC? Currently it does NOTHING. If fields/finishers ever receive a rework, maybe then it’ll be an exciting pickup. As of currently, it’s COMPLETELY worthless.
This ability is on par with the Ranger’s Muddy Terrain for absolutely most trash ability in the entire game.
Mine gadget used to actually be a kit, where the 1-5 abilities were all mines. It was changed to a gadget later…I’ve always been sad about that. I think it would have been way more viable as a kit, where we could surround ourselves with chill mines and stuff. I wouldn’t even mind if the skills were basically carbon-copies of bomb/grenade abilities just because of how fun traps can be.
For starters, though, I’d like it if mines were UNDODGEABLE. To begin with, I think the game could really use a lot more undodgeable abilities, and it’s pretty degenerate gameplay to dodge into an AoE to trigger it harmlessly. For some reason since you were rolling on the ground the explosion didn’t hurt you, despite the fact that you detonated it with your face? Necro marks suffer from the same problem.
Also, another thing that would help is if the cooldown for mines started when you placed them, rather than when they detonate. Currently, if you are crazy in the head and somehow find a way to fit Throw Mine into a build, it usually functions better as a knockback-grenade rather than something you place preemptively. Which, to me…kind of doesn’t seem like what you should be doing with mines. To function as traps, they should have some function that rewards you for intelligent pre-placement. But hey, building turrets just to destroy them 2 seconds later doesn’t seem like ‘purity of purpose’ to me either, so…I dunno.
The new monuments are really great. If it’s possible, I’d like to see a journal/sheaf of papers monument, and a monument that’s literally nothing. We’ve been telling small stories with the monuments in our Guild Hall, and it’d be nice to have something that could be construed as anything with a bit of imagination – like “disturbed ground” or something.
Okay, let me write a story about a completely different, unrelated game.
In GW2, account-based rollbacks exist.
Maybe you can do some research before blindly supporting a broken system next time.
- This hasn’t been an issue since launch, because the current limits were added afterward.
- The limit after sending 2 emails in a row is ~30 seconds (seems to vary a bit — I’ve waited as little as 10 sec and as long as 45); it is never an hour unless you keep trying to press send without waiting.
- As noted above, the limit is setup to prevent spamming by gold sellers — it succeeds in preventing them from annoying more than two people before they are /reported and suspended.
There’s no question that it’s a pain and I wish it was more flexible. However, I accept that it’s the price we pay for the fact that some of our fellow players choose to buy gold from Real Money Traders — if that advertising didn’t succeed, the RMTs would stop doing it.
1. Yes, it has been an issue since launch. Look up “Mail Suppression” on google, since Anet’s search engine sucks. You’ll find sources dating back to 2012 complaining about mail suppression after just two mails.
2. That’s your personal experience. It doesn’t invalidate my experience of waiting upwards of 40 minutes to send out another mail after sending out a little more than 2. It likely snowballs into longer waiting periods depending on how many mails you send out.
3. That’s an absolutely ridiculous argument. Are you trying to argue that it’s worth it if a system causes a gold seller to annoy two less people when the system itself annoys – without hyperbole – THOUSANDS of legitimate players?
No, sorry, I don’t care if half the playerbase buys gold, there shouldn’t be restrictions that penalize legitimate players so heavily. As I stated, I never even asked for enormous changes, I’m sure there’s a balance point that Anet could find which isn’t the ridiculous system we have now. Whether it’s based on mutual friends, guild/party/squad members, an “I’m running an official contest” buff or a global increase on the cap, there absolutely needs to be a change so that mails aren’t so heavily restricted.
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That feeling when you send 2 mails out and are then suppressed for an hour.
This has been an issue since launch, is it ever going to be resolved or at least throttled back? I’m not even asking for much, maybe let me send 5 mails out at least before suppressing me, this is incredibly ridiculous how it is now.
I feel awful for those people who honestly try to host a fun event and mail out prizes and they get suppressed instantly. Maybe Anet should just go the whole way and ban them for gold selling as well.
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im pretty sure most of the people complaining just complain because they cant get the infinite portal and are salty about it but thats just a guess
im pretty sure most of the people complaining about too high cooldown just complain because they can get the infinite portal and now want to feel themselves special, and are salty about it but thats just a guess
Is there something wrong with that?
You seem to be complaining about people complaining because you’re salty and you just want to feel special, that’s just a guess.
Why are guild invite permissions bundled together with the ability to promote/demote lower ranks? It’s been this way forever and it’s awful. They should be separate tick boxes.
It’s a subtle mockery of players who afk in meta zones for rewards.
10/10 Arenanet.
It would be nice to have the feature of going to the decorations NPC or something, and having him be able to open up your map and show you where decorations have been placed in the guild hall, as glowing dots.
For various reasons you might want to track down errant furniture, like when you’re placing decorations and you accidentally place one 50 miles away, or if you forgot where you placed something, or if you’re just trying to track down where your guild members have placed things. The general idea is that sometimes we want to remove decorations, but we don’t want to do Remove All…like if there’s just one decoration that you lost, and you have to either go on a massive scavenger hunt or accept the fact that your guild’s decoration max cap is now -1.
It should get an aoe pull on first whirl or something. Chaith it’s 100% correct, and that tree is not even a little bit worth barking up any more (why Mesmer illusions are exempt from this BS I will never understand…). You’re better off asking for some added affect that doesn’t go against a stated game design concept. Hence my desire for a pull.
They should make it have some insane unique effect that’s different from normal whirl finishers. Not only is the ability competing for an incredibly important Engineer utility slot, it still doesn’t even do anything by itself, you need to set up a field for it. And since half of the whirl finishers in the game create damaging conditions, which are useless on the NON-SCALING shredder gyro, it’s just so laughable.
Or just forget about finishers and make it a utility skill that repeatedly pulls foes in, like you said. Then maybe it’d see some occasional use in troll PvP builds or something.
Were they trying to insult us with this ability?
They even looked at it recently, “buffed it” and said, yeah, this skill is ok.
Just make it so it scales off player stats and can crit.
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Just a thread to toss in some suggestions for guild hall decorations.
I’d like to see more options for decoration privileges, such as a rank setting to allow certain ranks to lay down decorations that other guild members can’t remove unless they outrank them. For personal rooms and displays.
I’d also like to be able to put down a chest which you can fill with items or gold and allow other guild members to open and withdraw from. It’s very fun to make jumping puzzles and come up with minigames to play with our guild members, the only thing missing from the experience is a rewards chest. You could have different types of chests, maybe one would require you to find a placeable key to open it. Lots of possibilities, but decorations removal permissions would probably have to modified for it.
I’d also like to see interactable signs. Players can plop them down and write a brief message on them, which other guild members can interact with to read. Not everyone has Message of the Day privileges, and some things you want to say without cluttering the Message of the Day. A pretty versatile decoration.
Also more walls and doors pls. Want to make rooms.
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Thumbs down on this un-needed change. More dev time wasted on something that was fine just as it was.
Do you actually own a HoT legendary? I hope you do, because otherwise it’d be like a pvp player complaining about time being spent on pve content.
I for one would appreciate a longer and more noticeable footstep or aura, right now the weapons don’t feel that legendary when you see them.
Item: Icebrood Crystalline Phial, part of Collection IV of H.O.P.E.
An event in Frostgorge Sound needs to fail in order to trigger the next event for the collection item.
I’ve had to beg people not to do the event, but then even if they listen, they’ve already aggroed the mobs, and the mobs then start endlessly chasing people until someone does just put them down.
This is endlessly frustrating. In addition, Anet’s stance has apparently been that they’re against enforced fail events, and the Lyssa fail event from part of the same collection has already been addressed. This one still needs to be fixed. I’m tired of camping in the middle of nowhere, hoping that people don’t come along. Everyone I’ve talked to that has completed the collection has said they’ve had to bribe people, or wait until a patch comes along and not update, or wait for Jormag’s claw to distract everyone so that they could just get the event to fail.
I hope this gets addressed soon. You could just let us buy the item from the vendor that appears after the event succeeds.
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Still, if the next Elite doesn’t have MH Pistol, folks are gonna riot.
I really hope they add some new weapons to the core classes. It’s going to really suck to have every new weapon locked behind an elite specialization.
Why is this considered okay? The worst part is one of those MHs is the godawful scepter.
It’s just a boring spec. Outside of the function gyro, It adds absolutely no unique gameplay to the class, and the things you can do in this spec don’t synergize at all with the core specs. We got some more sustain options. We got a super gimmicky skill line that feel like rehashes of skills we already have, and the only real thing we bring to the table that we didn’t before and that other classes don’t is super lightning field spam – which our class can’t even take advantage of.
If they changed lightning fields so that whirl/projectile also applied daze, rather than useless vuln which we often have stacked easily anyways, then we’d be halfway to a fun spec. And because of how lightning fields work, whirl gyro is just pointless. It’s a pretty cool idea, but I’m not sure exactly what engineer build has the luxury of giving up a kit slot for what’s basically just a few whirl finishers. I swear I’m going to get upset if someone tells me it’s good for stacking vuln. We have 500000 other ways to stack vuln without dedicating a utility slot solely to it.
At the very least I would have been happy with a few more traits like Expert Examination, traits which synergize with the core specializations and let you play in slightly different ways. But what we ended up getting was mostly stuff like Adaptive Armor. Incredibly boring passive stats that you just throw onto a build anytime you want more tankiness. You don’t even have to modify your build like you would for Expert Examination. It’s just there, invisibly making you tankier. Big whoop. And if you look around, almost every other elite spec grandmaster is incredibly flashy, or incredibly useful. Just look at Daredevil’s GM traits.
Really it just sucks that we didn’t get any fun interactions. We have a unique skill type so we didn’t get anything fun like DH getting access to stealth through trapper runes. And since we didn’t have melee before we don’t have any traits that interact with our new melee weapon, while DH spec revolved around augmenting blocks and virtues, and they had loads of traits that already modify those, so they have a lot of options to pick from. Meanwhile I’m stuck here wondering when the hell I’d ever take a terrible big old bomb minus the kit, and minus the blast finisher. I guess if you want more useless lightning fields? Which our class can’t even use properly? We have literally one leap finisher when we’re using the hammer, while we can put out around 10 lightning fields. On some level I’m curious who designed this class’s spec when other elite specs feel incredibly cohesive whereas ours is “here are a bunch of passive traits, and yet another joke skill line, and umm, and here, have this new F button so you don’t notice how bad the rest of the specialization is.”
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I enjoy the difficulty, but in some areas the mob respawn rate is incredibly unfun, specifically some events (vinetenders…)
Fully unlocking an elite specialization unlocks the corresponding rune recipe…on only that one character. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t have 400 leatherworking on every single one of my characters and I don’t plan to do that anytime soon. Please make recipes unlock for the account or at least give us a physical recipe we can choose to use on the character that can actually craft it. Or if you wanted to be weirdly special and only let Scrappers craft Scrapper runes, lower the level requirement to 1 or something. It’s currently crazy how it works right now.
Also, completing Daredevil unlocks the Dragonhunter rune. That still hasn’t been fixed yet either.
If your only problem is with leftover points then you should be asking for a system to let you convert unused points instead of shafting everyone else.
The best solution would have been to have all leftover points before every expansion converted into spirit shards, so everyone starts at 0 and has to actually play the expansion to get points while no one has a huge advantage on everyone else. Some people literally had 200 hero points to other peoples’ 0 hero points and these people were all over the forums white knighting about how the elite specs weren’t hard to get…for them.
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Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Aegael.6938
I love seeing so many self-entitled white knights defending their lovely PvE experience.
The most common defenses to the hero points system go like: “It’s not to bad, just play the game”, “mastery points are account-bound” and the evergreen “you guys just want everything handed to you”.
I also want to mention, let’s assume that these people are right and we do want everything handed to us. (I don’t, but let’s just say.)
What’s wrong with that? In central Tyria, the vast majority of skill points literally have you walking up a place and pressing F. In Maguuma, if you press F on a skill challenge while you’re by yourself you will typically die instantly. Why has the difficulty level gone into the stratosphere, relative to central Tyria? Either make central Tyria harder or tone down the jungle. The difficulty curve is absolutely ridiculous and nonsensical. Of course players expect something only mildly harder than pressing F at a skill point, it’s what the game has trained people to expect over a period of THREE YEARS.
If you look at it like this, even if you “agree” with the white knights, they’re still just structurally wrong in their argument. The game is not in a good place, no. The very fact that a good deal of people are complaining should be enough evidence of that. Just because one person has fun doesn’t mean that suddenly invalidates the experiences of other players who didn’t have as enjoyable an experience. You don’t just tell someone who’s not having fun that they’re doing it wrong and think that just magically fixes all the problems. It’s insane to think that way.
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Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Aegael.6938
This thread feels more toxic than Reddit.
How is this possible?
Because, I’d like to make the point that while some of the people that are complaining about grind are being ungracious in their whining, absolutely 100% of the people complaining about the people complaining have been incredibly elitist braggarts that lower the tone of public discussion.
“I didn’t feel like it was a grind, so it isn’t a grind!” contributes basically nothing to the discussion. “You guys are spoiled entitled brats” is one of my new favorites as well.
And also, gating content doesn’t equal content. I’m not sure why people came to that conclusion at all. If there are 3 events in one map and you can do all of them with no masteries, and there are 3 similar events in another map, one of which you can do with no masteries, and 2 of which you can only do after grinding the one event 9999 times, that isn’t more content. The two maps have the same amount of content, just one is insanely more obnoxious. I really hope people can get this straight. At some point you have to ask yourself if maybe it isn’t “rushing” through content, there’s just no content.
When automatic autoattack is on and you attempt to cast another ability, it typically instantly cancels the autoattack and seamlessly goes into using the next ability.
When it’s off, i.e. manual autoattack where you’re pressing the button yourself every time, every time you press the button, attempting to cast other abilities during the cast time no longer cancels the autoattack, instead queueing them after your autoattack has finished, and you end up needing to press ESC if you ever want to cancel out of an autoattack…
Can this be changed? For the longest time I’ve wanted to use manual autoattack, but I also want autoattacks to easily chain into other abilities.
It feels like a smoldering shot that’s sometimes harder to aim. Considering it’s a minor dps increase to use and it’s more reliable to use it for the blind, the coolness aspect of the projectile deflection doesn’t really ever come into play. If they increased the damage increase on deflection to like 200 or 300%, then it would be a really cool move. In PvE you might actually feel good about using it rather than just using the myriad other tools the Guardian has to reflect or absorb projectiles. And in PvP, playing against it, you’d always be thinking to yourself that you can’t just flippantly throw out projectiles against a Dragonhunter or else they’d just get a massive deflection shot. I don’t know what exactly they were going for with it, but it does feel like wasted potential. There should be some more reward for using it right so it doesn’t just become one of the “eh just use it on cooldown” skills for the longbow.
Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Aegael.6938
Anet, why don’t you just revert the skill point system to what it was? The old system was good because it rewarded you for doing whatever you liked doing. I understand the reason why you changed to this new system is because you didn’t want people to unlock everything on day 1. But what you could have instead done is just separate skill points between expansions, so you can’t spend Tyria skill points on Heart of Thorns skills. Then let people convert their spare skill points to spirit shards, kind of like before. That would fix the problem. Then you could also balance new content around everyone having a fresh start rather than half your playerbase having an instant 200 hero point head start and the other half lagging behind.
I have to say, all the elitists bragging about how “it isn’t much grind, just suck it up” are most likely the ones who started with a massive hero point advantage. Having half of the 400 required to full unlock is an even bigger deal than it sounds – you’ll take far less than half the time to unlock your elite specialization compared to people starting from scratch – since you can just cherrypick the easy and obtainable hero challenges rather than the rest of us who get shafted on every other challenge whether it be due to ridiculous champion tuning or any of the numerous mastery lockouts. I’d really like to a see something more like the old skill system to be implemented so this kind of disparity doesn’t pop up again. 400 points is far too much, whereas 200 points is almost reasonable – and everyone had a different number going into the expansion, so it was impossible to balance around everyone. That combined with the “no more skill points from just playing the game” really sucks.
(edited by Aegael.6938)
Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Aegael.6938
Start seeking out hero points. Find one on minimap. 50 miles above me. Puzzle out how to get there over a period of 15 minutes. Go up there. Oops, I didn’t allocate enough virtual points into my mushroom garbage in order to do that one yet.
I have a few comments on this whole fiasco.
Upon first zoning into the map, I’m told I have to get a glider. Not by an npc, or in the story, but by some magical text floating above my head. Why isn’t it tied to the story at all, if the story is going to require it? I end up running around in the jungle, absolutely no clue what to do (the scout didn’t help at all, at this point I just want to continue the story) and after 40 minutes of wandering around I finally find the scrap event which nets me some mastery points. Great. Now, do I go to find a specialty npc that helps me craft a glider? No, after wandering around in the jungle for 40 minutes my character just inexplicably has a glider suddenly. For no reason at all. Why are you tying the story to this on a mechanical level if you’re not willing to integrate it at all? If the story-required grinds were actually integrated into the story I would feel much better about the grind.
Yes, it by definition is a grind, not “content.” The difference is that I’m doing an arbitrary, unrelated task that I don’t want to do, as opposed to gathering materials for a glider crafter guy that makes me a glider. It’s almost a subtle nuance, but an important one. I play and have played lots of mmos with ridiculous grind. And yet the time I’ve spent today has felt like a complete slog. Because of this simple reason. It doesn’t feel fun, rewarding, or engaging. To unlock the elite specializations, I’m not venturing into the depths of the jungle to learn new things and adapt my fighting style to the harsh environments of the jungle. I went and zerged events that I didn’t want to do and suddenly my guy knows how to use a hammer. Wow.
Also, about the hero points lockouts. You know Metroid? You run around and shoot stuff and unlock power-ups. Sometimes you see an item you can’t reach, and you might think to yourself, “Oh, I might backtrack later when I get the bombs, then I can get that item.” Some people find this fun. That’s okay. But when you take it to the extreme, like in this expansion, you literally end up with more content that’s locked out than there is to do. It’s not an exaggeration to say that 75% of the hero challenges I went to I couldn’t complete due to lockouts. I’d then just leave, disappointed, and having wasted my time, since it’s hard enough just to GET to some of these things. There needs to be content we can just DO, especially near the start. Or else what the hell else are we going to do? Wander around and just hope to dear god that this next hero point challenge is one we can do with our limited mastery track completion? Because that’s what’s been happening and it’s not fun. If you want to do mushrooms, exalted markings, poison walls, if you want to do those well? You make them 99% optional. You get treasure chests behind poison walls. You find vistas locked behind bouncing mushrooms. You don’t lock the majority of the content of the expansion behind this stuff. Some people bought the expansion solely to try out new elite specializations, and to not be able to play, and not even have an IDEA of how to start unlocking them, because of the terrible hero point system? That stings.
Related point: about the verticality of these maps. I’m not sure if you realized, but some people don’t like it. That’s a fact. And you made an entire expansion revolving around this weird platforming aspect. It’s incredibly difficult to navigate. There needs to be better guidance. Better scouts, better pathing, signs, whatever. I could never tell exactly how to get to a hero challenge because of how the map was laid out. And the only reason I cared about how to get EXACTLY to a hero challenge rather than wandering around, serendipitously finding them, (which I would highly prefer) is because you locked what I wanted to do behind them. So instead of casually and slowly enjoying the expansion it’s become a veritable grindfest of “let’s get this point, now let’s get the next one, I don’t want to be doing this but I have to do it to start enjoying the game.” At least help out the players if you’re going to do this. You’ve made something in GW2 no one has really seen before, so of course people are lost. And that easily turns into frustration, especially when we want to be playing specializations, not trying to figure out the map and the interface and the weird platforming aspects of your new maps.
Finally, I really want to address an argument. From all those players who think they’re special snowflakes and brag about how they can handle the grind, and everyone else should just suck it up and appreciate the “content”. They completely misunderstand the point. It’s not about the grind, it’s about how you presented yourself as a do-it-different company, it’s about how it’s enforced, and it’s about how unrelated the grind is to what we actually want, whether it be progressing the story or unlocking the specializations. It’s about how the things we are forced to do are incredibly terrible and soul-crushing, whether it be grinding for 2 million xp to use a mastery point we already own or finding yet ANOTHER hero challenge that’s locked out to us. Some of us went in with 0 hero points. We’d have to either do every single hero point challenge in Heart of Thorns before we’d get to play our elite specialization in full – which basically means we’d have no content to play the elite specialization as – or we’d have to go back to core Tyria to farm skill points, in order to play the expansion. It’s my deepest fear that these special snowflake apologists are the ones that end up being listened to over anyone else. I mean, you already have our money. For the majority of people, it’s unlikely that they’ll seek refunds if they’re dissatisfied, since that’s a hassle on the consumer’s part, compared to other games where cancelled subs would be a real risk and an immediate and direct revenue loss. It’d be too easy for the Arenanet devs to pat themselves on the back for a job well done and call it a day. You’ve got plenty of sycophantic players who would eat that up in a heartbeat. But you won’t have produced a good game.
By the way, does this post sound bitter? It’s because it is. The devs have already approached this issue, among many others, with a “wait and see” mentality which means that the game is yet again left to fester in an unappreciable state. Let me say I can appreciate the work that went into the expansion. It looks like it would be very fun to play, and sometimes it is. But all these small things add up to really dilute the enjoyable experience, and I hate that I have to live with the idea that the people at Arenanet will never quickly fix anything. It’ll be at least a month, or three, or never, before they fix any of these issues. That’s what we can expect, in no small part due to the people who blindly eat up anything you guys do. “Just enjoy the content slowly you guys! You shouldn’t expect to unlock everything in the first day!”
For a lot of my friends, there wasn’t a second day.
(edited by Aegael.6938)
Speaking of which, it would be nice if Remorseless still also procced off invisibility…
I’ve noticed a lot of our new traits that affect the F2, like Beastly Warden, have ICDs associated with them…Which mainly means that if you use the F2, then swap pets and do it again, it won’t work. I don’t know about anyone else, but I think I’d like it if it didn’t have an ICD and just worked off of the natural cooldowns of each pet’s F2 abilities. It just feels really awkward as it is now, like with how the refined kits trait works for engineers.
Every other interrupt trait we have works on autoattacks and thief skills. Only Power Block fails on those. There is really no point to using it now. It’s simply way too high risk, way too unreliable and way too low reward. The biggest flavor of the trait in the first place was interrupting autoattacks and letting spammy thieves taste cooldowns for the first times in their lives. That opened up new playstyles and interesting counterplay mechanics for both the mesmer and his foe. Now that’s gone.
Anet shouldn’t bother writing excuses in their patch notes in the future. Next time, they might as well just come out and say: “Fixed an issue: mesmers were having fun.”
(edited by Aegael.6938)
I think most of us can agree that the skill is underpowered or just lackluster in most game modes. Ideas of lower cast time / higher heal / longer delay before the small heal comes out have all been tossed around to make the skill better, but I think the main problem is usually when you want to proc it, you’re going to throw yourself into danger. When the AED does proc, you’re still going to be in danger then, and oftentimes your brand new health bar is going to get chunked down or even removed instantly anyways.
I think it would be nice if when AED procs, the game considers you as having gone “down”, but then instantly revives you. This would mean that it then has synergy with Always Prepared, it cleanses all conditions, and you get a ~1s moment of invuln for breathing room. You could probably even lower the heal a lot in compensation for the changes. I think this would make the skill a lot more interesting by giving it synergy with “going down” procs rather than just being a flat heal.
Condition damage can now be applied fractionally, so can we get fractional burns on each flamethrower auto tick now? It just seems right…
To draw a parallel, thieves that use a stealth attack are still unchanged. A stealth attack can be blocked, evaded, blinded, invulnned, and it still doesn’t break their stealth. To be honest I’d like this change a lot more if similar changes happened to all classes.
What happens when an unstoppable kill shot collides with an uncrittable elementalist?
Answer is it gets deflected and instagibs the nearby stealthed thief.
Just add a large-scale overworld boss “party finder” to the LFG system.
Pretty sure Gadgeteer will only apply to the actual “Throw Mine” utility skill, not Reserve Mines, Bunker Down, or the Kit Refinement mine from Grenade Kit. I’d imagine it could get really ridiculous really quickly otherwise.
That said, I’m looking forward to using Bunker Down. I’ve always missed the old Mine Kit back from Beta. Hopefully this trait will bring it back, along with some added Engineer hilarity of spewing out mines for no apparent reason.
That Gadgeteer trait, though. You’re giving up very high Aegis uptime or permanent +50% endurance regen for a few boons, most of which are easily acquired on other utility skills anyways. Aegis on Throw Mine is a pretty big slap in the face too, compared to Armor Mods.
I’ll wait until patch day until final judgment, but I’m not hopeful about Gadgeteer. I don’t think boons are what gadgets needed. If you use a lot of them, you’ll inevitably end up spending a lot of time in your mainhand weapon, which usually will deal garbage DPS.
They’re different classes with different armor, and the Longbow offers a bit more defensive options with the stealth.
That said you’re right about the GS. Maybe if Read The Wind prevented arrows from being reflected it’d see a lot of play and really fit the bill of a versatile GM trait, potentially useful in multiple game modes. At the moment, I don’t ever see Read the Wind being used in PvE.
A Guardian can definitely spec in a way that he’ll have tons of different ways to apply burning. I would say it’s not even too much of a task to maintain perma burning on a specific target.
The problem is that even with around 1200 condition damage, you’re at best only doing ~628 damage per second with burning.
That’s…not very much. An Engineer can static shot something and he’ll deal that much damage from one tick of the confusion stacks.
Also, even if a Condi Guardian manages to get you to low health, you can typically just heal and run away from them. They don’t have any burst, they’re low on soft and hard CC to prevent escapes, and their mobility is low. This retaliation buff is an interesting change, but overall I think the issue is that Condi Guardians need a way to finish off an opponent. Their sustained damage is actually decent, especially factoring in retaliation. They don’t need a lot of cover conditions because they have a huge number of ways to apply burning. The issue comes with finishing off their enemies. If they got a GM trait that caused burning to be a soft CC like a cripple or something, that would be really interesting.
I passed by and happened to hear her lines and I was thinking that was some ridiculously good voice acting. Props and hope that a few of the other voices in GW2 could learn from whoever voiced her.
Some of these new traits seem like they wouldn’t even be worth slotting if they were adept traits. Having them in grandmaster is just…
Do they plan to have a balance patch six months later? Maybe it’s an excuse so they can swap out an adept/master trait they think is too OP with one of these new GM traits.