Showing Posts For Aldracity.9463:
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I dunno, I find that bans on grounds of profanity are treading a really, really fine line. I consider F bombs to be a natural part of the online dialect, but then again I’m pretty liberal like that.
At the end of the day though, one thing we can all agree on is “Intent to Harm”. Saying “kittening noob why the kitten did you kittening do that kitten” is completely different from saying “kitten me, my bad”. The question at hand, though, is whether or not you punish the latter.
The only part of the Daily that I’d remotely consider grinding is Daily Aquatic Kills, mostly because it takes twice as long to kill stuff underwater. Even then, it’s not too bad since you can knock off a few Events while doing so, and you still get Aquatic Kill credit so long as you’re underwater when the enemies die (read: smack em on land, then hop in the water and pelt them at range).
People aren’t chatting, I’ll agree with that much.
However, I just want to ask one question: WHY aren’t people chatting? Is it because there is nothing to talk about? Is it because they’re engaged in doing something? Is the real reason for the popularity of /2 due to raw boredom, or is it the genuine desire for interaction?
Well… unless someone wants something, or to know something, what is there to say?
/2 and Barrens Chat from WoW. What were these primarily composed of?
From the time I played WoW, I remember a billion Chuck Norris jokes, a few arguments about 0.999… = 1, and the odd WHERE IS MANKIRKS WIFE. Very, very, VERY little of the public chat was actually spent conversing about ingame information, be they dungeon groups, guild recruitment, or even Trades (…which was what /2 was supposed to be). Even in the guilds I joined over the years, much of it was spent talking about random, inane stuff, regardless as to whether the guild was a zerg or just a couple of friends I had IRL.
If you ask me, the isolation issue is likely created because the average player can get a cost-effective experience without ever speaking to anybody. Emphasis on speaking. You certainly co-operate with your fellow players during a DE or WvW zerg, but even if the game had a different combat system I doubt people would bother striking up conversations while doing these activities. Indeed, you’d probably get kitten if /map or /team in WvW was cluttered with random chat, causing you to miss out on important information like event spawns and gather points.
Heritage. Hue.
Seriously, that set is awesome.
People aren’t chatting, I’ll agree with that much.
However, I just want to ask one question: WHY aren’t people chatting? Is it because there is nothing to talk about? Is it because they’re engaged in doing something? Is the real reason for the popularity of /2 due to raw boredom, or is it the genuine desire for interaction?
Player to Player interactions. That’s it. I don’t care if the game is called Barbie Happy Fun Time – if you can get players interacting with each other on a regular basis, you’ve succeeded at the MMO genre. It can be Deathmatch PvP, it can be Raids, it can just be efficient farming teams.
Speaking of farming teams, the most interactions I can clearly remember in GW2 happened when I came across a group that was trying to farm for lodestones. The lot of us ended up chatting for a good hour before we gave up.
Remember when the Karma cost of stuff got changed and then for the first week or so of the game people were kittening and moaning about how much Karma they were going to need to do anything? How many people went and dumped Karma on those Orrian boxes the other day? Laurels are the new Karma. Once you have your Ascended gear and Mini’s and whatever else you want from the Laurel vendor they will just be sitting there growing. Hell, people will probably be on the forums kittening and moaning about having nothing to spend their Laurels on.
You want a guaranteed Exotic? Go and run dungeons.
Poor argument. I’m not saying that item X Y or Z is too expensive – I’m saying that Gear Boxes are a straight up noob trap.
Let me repeat it again: a 2 Laurel item, the Gathering Tools, will create a benefit that can equal or outweigh the Gear Box, a 5 Laurel Item. I also said that if the box is going to create such poor drops, it should have its cost dropped, or to have its cost increased and improve the quality and consistency.
Simply put, 5 Laurels is a total ripoff for what it currently grants, especially comparing it against CHEAPER items.
You really should’ve learned your lesson about GW2 and RNG gambling.
Just don’t do it unless you’re forced to, like with Mystic Clovers.
Go for the safe bets; Ascended accessories or Mini Pets. Or anything where you know what you’re getting.
I’m not going to lie – I did it for great science. I probably should’ve saved it for Ascended (as mentioned) but in reality I haven’t even made it past Lv2 and I haven’t run a single Explorable dungeon yet.
I figured since I’m the sort of guy who probably wouldn’t use it in the first place, I’d take the plunge. Wasn’t expecting it to be THAT bad of a ripoff though, since this lower bound seems to be worse than the lower bound of something that only costs 2 laurels (gathering tools).
How are the material bags looking anyways?
Well, I still felt the thread needed to be made because this is right around the point when people are even capable of affording these boxes.
So, I decided to throw my first 5 laurels at these. What do I get? Two random drop Rares, leveled 78 and 79.
That’s…kinda sad. Really sad actually, since for 2 laurels I would’ve been better off with the gathering equipment, which would’ve yielded expensive materials, which would’ve paid for 2 Lv80 Rares off the TP.
Can we please readjust these? Maybe up the cost to 10 laurels and fix it at Lv80 Exotics? Or drop it to 2-3 laurels and remove the chance for Exotics? Because right now it just feels like I completely wasted my 5 laurels that I probably should’ve been saving for Ascended gear instead.
I remember camping spots for days in Everquest, sometimes only to walk away with nothing.
You’ve ruined your own lands, you’ll not ruin mine!
Big difference in the argument though. You’re cursing RNG, but there’s still a carrot at the end of the stick.
From what I’ve seen, many people are complaining that they feel they’re expected to run despite the lack of a carrot. I’m not one of them, but such is the argument…
+1 to “Dodge as One”. The ability to actively protect your pet BY DEFAULT should’ve been implemented the instant Anet decided to make Rangers a pet profession.
I’ve been moaning about Rangers for a while, but the one true problem I have with pets is that Rangers need to spec HEAVILY into pets in order to use them to any reasonable effect. Now that I think about it, basically everything Ranger requires us to dedicate the Traits or they’re terrible…
Gaining additional functionality is a completely different concept from filling missing functionality. I should not have to sink 15 into Wilderness Survival just so I have ANY ability to consistently mitigate damage my pet takes. I should not be forced to fill a Utility slot just so I can tell my pet to stand somewhere, with no other benefit.
The problem with the 50 WvW Kill monthly was that you had to be in a strong-ish WvW server and be capable of logging on at the right times, or you might possibly not get any credit at all over a multi-hour play session.
If it was something like 20 WvW events participated (succeed or fail, barring supplies maybe) then it would probably be more even while still encouraging WvW participation.
I don’t like them either. They’re boring, they’re limited (eg: ONE type of weapon/skill) and they’re basically mandatory if you choose to use whatever the heck they’re CDRing.
If they provide an interesting change, like throwable traps, then the trait is OK. But hurr durr I push teh buttunz moar does little more than shoehorn people into taking the trait.
Crafting is by far the easiest (refine 10 ingots and pow, done. Even ties in to gathering)
Disagree completely. Daily Laurel Vendor is by far the easiest.
I haven’t done Fractals past Lv2, but from what I can tell, Agony is a gear check. Granted, Agony is obtained through doing Fractals, and in theory you’re learning the mechanics anyways so you can progress to the higher levels, but it just rubs me the wrong way regardless since it seems to be the only gear check in the game.
1) Design the world so there’s more than one event that can run for any given “event space”. It’s downright depressing when half a map doesn’t see action because the main chain got bottlenecked.
2) Overhaul Rangers so their Utilities and Traits don’t suck horribly in every given situation. Also rebalance the value of pets so the Ranger themself doesn’t feel like a wet rag compared to other players.
3) Tack Ascended gear onto more progression paths.
4) Make Lv 80 Transmutation Stones available for copious amounts of rare currency. Dumb stuff like 100k Karma for a single stone, or 20 Skill Points or some other outrageous sum.
The reason they most likely will keep dailies is quite simple really, it’s no more than a marketing scheme thing. When the game gives you some sort of reward for playing EVERY single day, it’ll reinforce players to actually play every single day, that way the game has more traffic and more people keep coming back again and again to acquire that reward the game gives you every day.
This happens in many games in many ways, like some games giving you one hour of double XP bonus every day, etc. It keeps people coming back.
Big difference though: GW2’s pricing scheme doesn’t necessarily create profit from constant play due to the lack of a monthly fee. If anything, there is some incentive to NOT make people play every single day in order to save on hardware capacity costs.
Having said that though, this is supposed to be an MMO, and MMOs die a slow and painful death if people aren’t playing them.
I’m pretty sure the Laurel Vendor daily is just there so we can figure out where the heck the Laurel Vendors even are. Only reason I know where they are is because I always use the PvP Asura Gate shortcut to Lion’s Arch.
A really good CORPG.
Although after transferring from YB to TC, population density increases due to the Living Story and what seems to be the effect of Guesting, I’m slowly edging towards finally calling it an MMORPG.
Find any mob that creates a ground AoE, roll through the ground AoE. I’m pretty sure that can be done on choppy dialup halfway around the world.
NO.
80 is already 60 more than we need.
Echoing this statement.
Levels as a whole just feel really awkward in GW2. In the grand scheme of things, they serve no purpose other than to say “Look at me, I’m level G!” There isn’t really any tangible improvement in the open world experience from leveling, and content isn’t so much loaded into the level cap as it is staggered based on time played. Well, except Fractals. And don’t even get me started on my infraction-inducing argument that the level range of any given zone is way too large for an average player to reliably keep pace with.
You guys still need to admit that Combo Kill had disproportionately awkward and inconsistent requirements compared to everything else. Requiring you to party with a dedicated combo fielder, being careful to last hit with the finisher and then swapping roles in order to consistently achieve 10 Combo Kills? I dunno about you, but I don’t get that from regular play.
Kill Variety happens from just wandering around. Healer can happen from just wandering around. Gatherer happens from just wandering around. Events happens from wandering around. Dodges happen from fighting anything. Underwater Kills happen if you take a dip. Crafting happens if you have any materials at all.
Combo Kills? I got 5 over 1.5 hours from trying to line up finishers in the middle of zergs. I don’t care if you can skype with a guy to complete it in 5 minutes – not everyone has that opportunity. I’m totally fine with being asked to play with other people, but we shouldn’t have to bend over backwards for the results.
This isn’t a big deal at all. It still takes the same X seconds to revive 10 people, no matter where you end up doing it. In your case, you’re dedicating time to farming revives. For other people, they can get 10 just by wandering around DEs.
Tested the combo kill field – works best in a low level area with one player shooting the mob and friend puts down a field over the player when the mob is about to die. Best for the friend not to shoot the mob at all. We used two asuras, a thief and an engineer, both with radiation field. We took turns to shoot icebrood in Wayfarers Foothills, shortbow 1 and pistol 1 skills worked fine through radiation field and we got the 10 kills in about 5 minutes once we got the knack. I did notice several times where we thought we had the kill shot through the field, but the achievement did not increment – maybe a glitch or some sort of RNG, not sure. Certainly best for the field layer not to attack the mob at all, leave it to the other player.
Except there’s just one massive issue: that’s incredibly unintuitive. The rest of the dailies aren’t too bad: making random stuff is varied by nature, killing stuff underwater is just overall kill credit, etc.
Daily Combo Kill? The killing hit must be an ability that’s loaded with a combo, and any other source of killing damage (eg: the Burning from…uhhh…Burning) negates the credit. This daily is so incredibly stupid I’ll probably get another forum infraction from complaining about it so much.
This has nothing to do with being forced to group with people. This has to do with grouping up, getting combo finishers and fields all over the place, and yet still not getting credit.
Just make it “Combinations in Combat” and put the cap higher.
Combo Kills is beyond kitten You need:
- Any combo finisher from YOU.
- A combo field from someone else THAT CREATES AN OFFENSIVE COMBO (eg: Burning, Poison, not Regeneration or Condition Removal).
- The killing blow FROM THE ABILITY THAT PERFORMED THE FINISHER.
All of my what? Please tell me this is a glitch. Of the myriad combinations in the game, only so many of them are offensive. Of the myriad combo finishers in the game, only so many can reliably last-hit a target. And speaking of last hits…do we really want to encourage people to “KS” from each other?
This lone daily is downright painful. The first 4 weren’t too bad (Events, Underwater, Gather, Craft) because I could reliably gain credit, regardless as to Underwater and Craft being annoying. Combo? I spent a good 1.5 hrs running around zergs to get 50% credit. And then the dailies reset under my nose.
Why Anet, why.
Don’t clearly understand this: “the number of uses on this skill’s effect will now decrease if an attack lands or if the attack is negated by Blind, Block, Evade, Obstructed, or Invulnerable.”
How was it functioning previously? Block/blind/evade wouldn’t reduce your uses? So in essence nerfing effectiveness of opening strike and sharpening stone?
If I’m not mistaken, all “For the next X hits, do Y” functionality was expended every time you performed an attack. This is a pretty darn big change for melee users in general because general map mobility doesn’t expend passive procs (eg: Opening Strikes), nor does being slightly out of range. Now it’s only expended when you either hit a target or would hit a target if not for some other effect (Block, Evade, Blind, etc).
Hereth lies Aldracity, Ranger.
Because 1v10ing with Sword/Greatsword is the greatest idea ever.
I think the event scaling is rather scattered, because I seem to be getting identical scaling regardless as to the number of people actually around.
For example, there’s the Rescue > Destroy chain in The Funhouse. Thing is, merely standing in that area aggroes 4 enemies, who I dispatch, but then 4 more enemies come in, which I dispatch…and this repeats over and over again with me downed-reviving so many times I got lucky on the last one when I went down with 10% HP. With the Destroy portion, the very FIRST mob was a massive pack of everything, and then every subsequent pack was a single, lone enemy. This entire time, I was the only player within eyeshot.
Similarly, there’s the chain involving the Brill Alliance building. The initial step of collecting Skritt was fairly standard solo fare. Then you walk back and suddenly get swarmed by a good 10 or so Skritt all at once, repeatedly, with individual kill credit seeming to be no more than 1-2%.
Rangers are an easy choice. It straight up FEELS BAD to be a Ranger right now because we’re balanced around always having a pet, and that pet doing ~40% of our net output (including utility…). At least with Necroes or Engineers you aren’t forced to run around with a pet, and therefore don’t need to be balanced around that pet (or pets).
Sure if you bust out a spreadsheet and then test based on immobile dummies, Rangers probably aren’t too far off. But in terms of feel, giving an NPC 40% of your power feels absolutely awful for the player, especially when you have even less control over it than comparable systems, like WoW.
I mean seriously, if we’re supposed to be the pet profession, how come even WoW is beating the snot out of our ability to use our pets? How come the only real way to customize our pet is to force ourselves down 30 BM, horribly gimping the actual Ranger in the process, and for a benefit that just adds up to having an extra pet passive or two? Why are our pet utilities are literally just movement commands? Why are half the melee pets incapable of hitting moving targets? Why are pets designed such that only Ranged and Bears stand any chance of living longer than 2s in any given situation? And don’t even get me started on AI and UI issues…
Uhhh…people are only spamming AoE on single targets because they don’t know any better and are used to mashing everything on rotation. Which probably means the grand whopping majority of players.
The main reason why AoE is “OP” in PvE is because it lets you tag everything to get kill/loot credit, whereas you’re SOL if you try to single-target everything down due to contribution scores.
grumblegrumble
Why is the Daily Achievement on a hard, server-time reset? That’s guaranteed to be smack dab in the middle of someone’s daily slotted play session, and in this case it’s mine. I’ve failed the Daily Achievement way too many times to count, mostly because I can’t always get the 5 Events before the deadline.
Could the Daily Achievement please be put on a timer system? As in, you save all your progress until completion, and then it goes on a 22-24 hour cooldown? (22 hrs to accommodate altered luck, like how LoL does it).
First acknowledgement: leveling is pointless. I played GW1 for over 1000 hours over the last 7 years so I honestly don’t care about leveling being pointless.
The problem I have is that GW2 has a relatively high level cap of 80 despite leveling being pointless, and it takes 80 hours of regular play to achieve that cap. Even the crafting method takes 4-5 hours, which is at parity with if not slightly longer than the Factions leveling speed.
So what we end up with is the leveling process just being an artificial wall between the player and player abilities. It’s not even a content wall – the content difference between low and max level is downright negligible. It’s apparently just there because Anet doesn’t feel like letting new players have their Elite until 30 hours in, and a full Trait set until 80 hours in. And don’t even get me started on my “desynced level” complaint that I’ve been moaning about since BWE1.
I sincerely wish that GW2 either had a considerably lower level cap, no leveling whatsoever, or a leveling process that’s so fast it feels as though the cap is either lower or nonexistent. The third option is pretty darn sub-optimal though. Levels are supposed to mean nothing, so why are levels constantly gating me for the first 80 hours of play?
And yes, I recongize that 80 hours to the cap is flipping fast, even compared to today’s WoW. But the objective of Lv 80 is inherently meaningless so I don’t understand why I need to labour my way there. I recall that the idea was to give people the pleasure of dinging…but where’s the pleasure to dinging when the ding doesn’t give you anything?
Mind you, I’ve had the pleasure of being addicted to Ragnarok Online before, so it’s not as though I despise months-on-end grinding. But in RO, you had the tiered objectives of 1 – 1 > 2 – 1/2 – 2 > Lv 99 > Trans > 1 – 1 Trans > 2 – 1/ 2 – 2 Trans > Lv 99 (new: 3 – 1/ 3 – 2, Lv 150). And when you finally hit those tiers, it felt GOOD to get there. Even intermediate rewards like unlocking particular skills felt good. It doesn’t feel good to ding in GW2. Heck, I scarcely notice or care.
(edited by Aldracity.9463)
I know bumps are forbidden, but it’s either this, copypasta into a megathread (is there even a thread on this?) or making a new thread.
If there is a thread on the specific topic of Anet’s deployment of the patch, then please point me in that direction.
1) Nobody told us. Anything. Not even a whisper.
Alright Anet, I get that you want to keep a special one-time-event under wraps. Fine. However, an entire tier of progression and an entirely new PvE feature? Why on earth would you say jack squat about it and then spring it on the playerbase? Certainly there were long, loud, lengthy discussions about gear treadmills that have been happening since the dawn of gear treadmills, but as far as I could tell the only thing we might possibly imply was that there may possibly be a treadmill sometime in the future.
What we can’t have possibly hoped to know are things like how to obtain the extra tier, the possiblity of new stats (Agony) etc. All of this was kept completely under wraps and was revealed TWO DAYS before the patch. No time for us to think about it, no time for us to talk about it, and no time for anybody to consider changing it. I fully recognize that there are arguments for every side of the issues, but it just seems wrong for such a big change to appear so suddenly.
With every other change I can possibly think of during development, people were told MONTHS in advance that things were changing. The removal of Potions/Energy. The Sylvari rework. Hearts instead of all-Events. We had TIME to digest the changes, TIME to deliberate them, TIME to consider alternatives.
This is not Beta, Anet. You can’t just throw content onto the server and then have us mess with it. In Beta, broken content gets reported, and you fix it. In Retail, broken content can quickly result in a complete mentality shift for the entire community. Which leads into my second point…
2) The implementation was brutally kitten
Again, I don’t have a problem with Ascended gear existing. I’m not even particularly hissy about Agony. What I do have a problem with is that you can only get Ascended gear with Infusions from FotM.
“But wait, they’ll add additional progression paths eventually!”
So what? The damage is already done. This lone move more or less completely invalidated every form of Exotic tier content in favour of shoving everyone into FotM. Even if Anet put Ascended gear into every existing Exotic source tommorow, that wouldn’t undo the damage of people having already mass-migrated to FotM. After implementation, the problem of people now being familiar with FotM and less familiar with the other content will still cause FotM to be the default source, as it would be easier to find competent groups to run FotM than it would be to find groups for specific dungeons, etc.
Of course, the alternative is tearing FotM rewards to shreds in order to force people away, but I hope I’m not alone in believing that such a decision would be a terrible mistake.
So, put simply, Anet has just dug a massive hole for themselves not by the nature of the content, but by the nature of deployment. Scarcely any advance notice for a patch that couldn’t even be considered as complete. Anet will need to work extremely hard to repair this damage, as it is both a systemic problem and a community relations issue.
Mods will probably can this thread as complaining, but I’ve said my piece.
The underwater fractal was somewhat irritating in the extremely dark cave where you die instantly if you aren’t carrying the plants. The rest was just the product of the overall sluggish nature of underwater combat.
The Shiverpeaks fractal’s Bonfire is just annoying because it’s not immediately obvious that the bonfire comes in 6 parts and needs to be constantly relit in order to make the wall melt faster.
But the colossus turning around to bow at the party…THAT was awesome.
Citizens! You are now reading this in my voice! Courtesy of…The Consortium!
I’m not gunna lie, letting #4 work as a 3s Projectile Block was absolutely amazing. That alone dramatically altered the feel of the Greatsword as a whole. Giving #2 extra damage is just icing on the cake.
It just feels amazing when you can block the entirety a boss’ Cone/Gatling attack while on the move.
I like FotM as a set of challenges. It’s basically what ToC in WoW: Wrath wanted to be, but without the fail. Very little in FotM wastes your time – some of it certainly takes more time than others, but you’re constantly in a state of achieving something.
What I dislike though is that FotM gear is…well, FotM. I have no idea why Anet decided to put FotM a full tier above Exotic, without providing this tier to other progression paths. I don’t especially dislike gear treadmilling, but what I do hate is content progression, especially when there isn’t a gated requirement. I’m running around as a GS Ranger in Vigil gear with some Lv71 blues and I did just fine in FotM. And since gear stats don’t have THAT big of an impact, I don’t see this changing any time soon.
Problem is, by having something be explicitly better than anything else, you’ve also auto-marked the content as being the only thing relevant. If anything, this actually turns all prior content into cash grabs via transmutation stones.
Way too many complainers here. I hope you do quit playing your Rangers. You are giving it a bad name. If you can’t make your Ranger work ‘as is’ then your problem isn’t the in-game mechanics, sorry to tell you.
…have you actually bothered doing a side-by-side comparison of Rangers against anybody else? It would be one thing if we were competitively sub-par at everything. It’s another if we’re objectively the bottom of the heap at everything.
The physical mechanics of the Ranger aren’t obscenely broken. The biggest one is Pet AI being unable to hit moving targets, but otherwise you can just trim a few animations and up a few projectile speeds here and there. But the numeric balance? Too many resources expended to obtain obscenely poor results. There is absolute jack squat that makes us even so much as on par with any other profession in the game.
- Oh joy, Spirits proc more often! Too bad it’s STILL A PROC, and the spirit will STILL DIE INSTANTLY TO A STIFF BREEZE. Which basically boils down to having a slightly better chance at the first coin toss.
- Hurray, underwater weapons now have combo finishers! Wait, do underwater combo fields even exist? I’m not even kidding: I have NEVER seen a SINGLE underwater combo field the entire time I’ve played this game.
- Bug fixes to things most of us didn’t actually care about. Tooltip changes might as well be called non-changes.
- If only Throw Torch was actually useful for chasing opponents. Then the increased projectile speed might actually mean something. But throwing a Burn at someone isn’t exactly going to help you chase or finish the target.
- Splinter Shot does +150% damage? Cool, now the ability actually does more than apply a bleed…but it’s still pretty darn terrible.
- Counterattack is the only substantial change.
I’d just like to comment about the Beta difficulty thing…
I played first beta, the best way to describe it was getting killed and having no idea why.
If you were in a DE with a large amount of people, things could one hit you.
I also played the first beta and after about an hour I could confidently solo packs of mobs, even in crowded DEs. Heck, right as I got out the starting block, us Lv2s zerged the “Defend Shaemoor Garrison” event…which is Lv4…and the mobs were scaled to Lv6…and it was BWE1. It was a chaotic mess but I remember doing just fine once I got my bearings.
Again though, I recognize that newcomers were getting absolutely slaughtered by the early game, which is why the consensus was to tone down the learning curve, while still keeping the later difficulty intact.
I’m not sure what half the people here are complaining about. If I spend 2-3 months of hard grind trying to piece this thing together, I don’t want to be forced to drop tons of gems every time I feel like using a different build.
All he’s saying is for Legendaries to have the option to “self-transmute” the stats. After all, what’s the point of having a fancy skin if you never find a time when you want to use it?
I’d just like to comment about the Beta difficulty thing…
I thought the general consensus was that early zones were far too steep of a difficulty curve for new players, NOT that the game as a whole was too hard. Personally, I remember 1v10ing several times in BWE1 and BWE2. Apparently some people managed to hit Lv80 by the end of BWE2. However, I also recognized how many Lv2s were running around Queensdale stark naked because all their gear broke.
The problem I have is that Anet didn’t actually take that advice. Instead, they nerfed difficulty across the board, so while the issue of the starting zones being too hard was solved, many subsequent zones were rendered a tedious mess. Basically, the challenge of combat was drained, but actual combat time remained the same. For me, this basically resulted in “Hold D while mashing 1” combat 99% of the time.
I dunno, I’ve found Rangers to be reasonably respectable in point siege/defense. Throw traited traps at key locations while using your pet as the single longest range harass tool in the game. You can also split your damage between keep doors and enemy defenders by sending your pet at the door and the Barrage/Trap Throwing at the enemies.
If you’re nuts like me, you can also go 30 Marks for the Signet traits, then Swoop > Entangle + (Spike trap/SoS (invuln)/SoW (stability)/SoR (condition removal)) for zerg initiations. I’ve caught several people off guard with that combo before.
I’m mildly curious to see if I can somehow pick up “Kirigaya Kazuto”. Although there’s no chance in heaven or hell I’d actually ever use that name.
I think the core problem with pets isn’t that they’re a large part of a player’s contribution, but rather that they specifically contribute 45%+ of our damage.
My suggestion is to overhaul the nature of pets. Maybe do stuff like give certain pets player buffs on-hit, others being given Blast combo finishers, etc. in return for severely reduced damage numbers. The idea is for pets to become a meaningful bonus for the profession without irrevocably tying the profession to the mechanic.
Warriors are still effective without Adrenaline. Elementalists are still effective even if they only sit in one Attunement. Necros aren’t bricks if they don’t use Death Shroud. Mesmers aren’t forced to spam Shatters to be effective. Only Rangers absolutely, irrevocably need to depend on their pets just to achieve parity with the bottom end of everyone else.
Ranger Utilities in general just suck horribly. Probably the only ones I tolerate are 3x Signet (for braindead play) and traited Traps. And even then, the latter doesn’t actually accomplish much apart from a 1s AoE Immobilize being useful from time to time.
- Signets have average passives, and their actives are ENORMOUS cooldowns for effects that only work on your pet…unless you decided to trait 30 Marksmanship. Why the heck should I be forced to take a deep trait just so certain utility skills stop sucking?
- In that same vein, Spirits are extremely crappy Banners/Wells. No mobility without traits, no durability without traits, effect radius is pathetically small and the effects themselves are % chance procs, making them really unreliable at best. The only way to make them tolerable is to trait 30 Nature and take BOTH Spirit traits, and even then they still fall short of comparable group buffs.
- The shouts have obscenely long cooldowns for what is effectively an extra pet command. The only tolerable on is Search and Rescue, and even then it’s a tradeoff of sacrificing half your damage so you can res a random nearby ally. These shouts should really be built into Pets, perhaps shifting “Heel” on top of F1 (no target = Heel, target = Attack) and then making F3 a shout of your choice.
- Traps are at least marginally interesting, but the Traited version once again reeks of “Why the heck aren’t traps like this, standard???” Trigger and effect radii are absolutely pathetic if not traited, although it’s less pathetic than Signets/Spirits because at least you can still cast them on the move for local AoE with less annoying targeting requirements.
- Wilderness Survival is probably the only set that isn’t objectively fail, but these skills are more or less boring. Muddy Terrain is just an AoE cripple/immobilize, Quickening Zephyr is the profession Haste, Lighning Reflexes is the extra dodge roll. Sharpening Stone is kinda terrible unless it’s the 75% HP trait, but at least that trait can occur very frequently.
I’ll just chime in on a few points here.
- I don’t mind the myriad of currency systems. Gold is a base currency, used for the open market, and Gems are the cash shop currency. Karma is a currency that’s (supposed to be) proportional to your time spent playing. Dungeon tokens apply to dungeons, WvWvW tokens apply to WvWvW.
The only thing I mind about these systems is how messily some of them are implemented. Gold and Gems are alright, and it appears as though Anet spent a metric crapton of time tuning this. However, Karma isn’t really rewarded proportionally to your time spent playing, as it basically is only granted for Events. Dungeon tokens are irritating because you’re forced to run a single dungeon multiple times over to get a particular set, but the flip abuse case is everyone just runs CoF because you can farm that the fastest. WvWvW currency is only granted for enemy player kills, meaning that you better hope you get a Cannon and a high pop server or you’ll be starved forever.
- The core issue with combat in my opinion is customization. There are plenty of editable buttons all over the place, but none of them really do much of anything. Traits other than the T3 ones are painfully boring (%CDR, %Damage, %Mitigation…zzz) and the stats end up being a detriment to themselves after Lv20 due to exponential base stat scaling. Utility skills are all over the map, with a handful being mildly interesting, some being useful but extremely boring (Signets in particular) and the rest just being skill point traps. Elites are caught in this really annoying situation where they’re not powerful enough to feel Elite, but are also too powerful to have their cooldowns slashed.
The only real difference to be had is Weapon Swapping. Yes, I’m even throwing the Ranger, and Engineer profession specific skills out the window because those basically just amount to another set of crappier Utility skills. Weapon Swapping is at least mildly meaningful because you can shift to archetypes like Melee AoE, Melee Single, Ranged AoE, Ranged Single, etc. But even then…these particular archetypes usually aren’t interesting at all. Far too many abilities feel like they’re supposed to be used on rotation, and the ones that don’t either have absurdly long cooldowns that prevent the abilities from properly fulfilling their purpose, or they’re so situational that you may never get a chance to push the button.
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