Guild Wars 2

I just wish they would finally fix the quickness issue, it still doesn’t work on the majority of pets. But at least this is a small step in the right direction to fix ranger pets.

Quickness still doesn’t work on most of the original pets (or on the tiger). Why is this still not fixed? I had hoped with the recent improvements to pet attacks they would finally adress this issue but apparently fixing a core profession mechanic is not a priority…
(by the way is there a decent list to keep track of bugs anywhere on the forums? only thread I find for ranger was closed 3 years ago, and the known issue tracker page is a joke)

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Plans change, depending on what else is going on. There’s a huge patch coming on Tuesday; I’d imagine that lots of lower-priority tasks get postponed in the days proceeding the roll out.

Well I hope this to be true.
But the devs said: “You should see the list grow significantly this week”. And it didn’t..
So yeah I was pretty disappointed. The devs know people take issue with the way the page is set up, but they didn’t change anything anyway. At least not yet.

(FYI my original statement isn’t that ALL bugs should be on there, just that many major bugs aren’t on there. Some of them actually were, but they never got fixed anyway.)

OneYenShort.3189:

2: You forget that the you can teleport back to the wurm. This is a very powerful “get out of dodge” ability. Like most skills, situational. But this skill does not need to be changed.

3: The primary use of this one I’ve found is to increase your minion count which can grant additional benefits if you are traited for such. Wish it would summon more than two when you consider that 4 are created when you use Litch form elite skill. (that may be a traited thing as well, I can’t remember.)

Yeah the teleport can be useful, although I think it’s rather strange to put this mechanic on a minion. (teleporting sounds more like a spectral thing). It can indeed be useful in specific situations.

About the bone minions: I don’t think the +20 bonus toughness for having 2 minions instead of one makes very much of a difference :P, unless you really need the condi pull from minions I don’t think 2 weak minions are better than 1 more powerful minion.
The dmg from summoning and exploding them actually isn’t too bad, but the fact you have to resummon them with a long cast time constantly kinda screws this up.

maddoctor.2738:

Sic ‘Em: This skill is rather useful in WvW when roaming to expose thieves and other characters using stealth. The damage buff is actually good (40% extra damage) but the very low attack speed of the pet reduces it’s worth.
Maybe giving Quickness to the Pet while it’s active would make it more worth using?

Yeah as I said this skill isn’t bad, it’s just the pet mechanic holding it back. If you want to use it with quickness: unfortunately quickness is bugged and doesn’t work on the majority of pet aa chains.

PyrateSilly.4710:

All of them are used by people. Not everyone uses the “meta” flavour of the day. I sure don’t. I use what I want at the time I pick it. Even if a lot of people do use the meta flavour of the day, most just copied it off of a website and most of those probably do not understand how it’s supposed to be used and when to push the keys in a battle to make it work like the meta it’s supposed to be.

I’m not talking about meta/non-meta here at all.
I’m just talking about what skills are rarely used, why that is and how they could be made more interesting/flavourful.
If a skill is unpopular because it just doesn’t do the role it’s supposed to fit very well, then that means there is room for improvement. ‘Meta’ has absolutely nothing to do with that. So please stay on topic here.

This is just a list of skills that you never really see used because they are underpowered or just overshadowed by other skills. I am still hoping one day Anet will take a good look at these skills and make them interesting again. (this list is just from personal experience, if you think one of these skills is actually used more often feel free to correct me).

Ranger:
1) Storm Spirit: Since vuln is usually capped out on bosses and the active is ridiculously slow, small area and unreliable, this skill is very underpowered.
2) Water Spirit/Spirit of Nature: Same problems as Storm spirit: passive isn’t strong and active is slow and unreliable.
3) Muddy terrain: been a while since I’ve seen this used. Purely immob/cripple field isn’t very fun or effective to play.
4) Sick ‘Em: This skill actually isn’t bad. The pet is just bad. No use buffing pet dmg if it can’t hit moving targets.
5) Frost Trap: Since trapper builds are usually heavy condi-dmg builds, a trap that only inflicts chill isn’t preferable to a trap that deals dmg.
6) Glyph of Unity: this skill is just extremely underpowered. Probably the worst elite in the game.

Elementalist:
1) Signet of Stone/Water: These skills aren’t actually bad compared to other signets in the game. They are just overshadowed by the other options ele has and lack flavour.
2) Conjure Flame Axe/ Earth Shield: While Frost bow is usable and Lightning hammer can sometimes be useful, these 2 conjures are just utter crap.
3) Glyp of Elemental Power: Low proc chance, 5 sec internal cooldown and only the burning from fire could be useful.
4) Tornado Elite: Transforming in a tornado isn’t really usefull if it means lower dmg and no increase in survivability.

Thief:
1) Ambush: Summon an npc that deals super low dmg, how very useful!
2) Thieves Guild: same problem: the thieves are just underpowered.
3) Ice drake Venom: 4 seconds of chill isn’t all that great.

Guardian:
1) Spirit Weapons: While the sword can be usful in pve burn builds, the other weapons are pretty bad (bad ai) and have too long cooldowns. Also only the sword actually gains the burning benefit from the trait, whose idea was that?
2) torch #5: while torch 4 is very strong, torch 5 is basically a wasted slot.

Engineer:
1) Med kit: have you honestly ever seen someone use the med kit abilties? The only thing useful about it is the toolbelt heal, the kit itself is terrible.

Warrior:
1) Banner of Tactics: healing power isn’t really useful (bad scaling) and the other banners are just a lot better.

Mesmer:
1) Illusion of life: Yeah basically none of the other revive skills like this is ever used, but this one is especially bad as it doesn’t even fully revive allies
2) Phantasmal disenchanter: never good enough to sacrifice a phantasm slot.

Necro:
1) Signet of vampirism: I guess it has a pretty long cd for the effect.
2) Flesh wurm: It’s immobile. And while it should theoretically do the highest minion dps, it performs worse than shadow fiend.
3) Bone Minions: bad dmg and the explode mechanic is pretty awkward to use.

I think many of these skills could be made a lot more interesting with some slight adjustments. Other skills need a more significant rework (mostly the ones related to AI) What do you guys think?

So the page was updated yesterday, nothing changed in the slightest. If this was the significant update we should be expecting I am extremely disappointed.
Unless they keep their word and do a real update today or tomorrow, my original statement still stands.

Well some the most important bugs that still need fixing are non-functional traits, quickness being a mess (not actually working on the majority of pets/summons) and well, the entire pet system in general (pet attribute increases still do jack kitten and most pet related stuff is bugged since launch)+ a number of aftercast/rooting issues on weapon skills. This way at least the player itself is more bug-free.

Of course game-breaking bugs blocking content also take priority, but you would at least expect all traits to actually function after 3 years. Especially considering many of these issues have been known for a very long time.

Mistakes in skill description are annoying but there are way more urgent things that need fixing.

pet young Karka would be amazing, and pretty easy to implement since its skillset as a creature can be copied almost identical with the projectile attack being f2

I think they can still buff condi thief somewhat without making it too OP in PvP. For example; if choking gass would apply extra poison on the 3th hit. Players are smart enough not to stand still in damage fields, while npcs are not.
Making the thief from ambush deal condis would also only be effective in PvE.

There are more options than just increasing numbers on what we already have.

I was wondering if anyone knows how the priority of the effect from say Sun Spirit works? Does it just give priority to players in the party or does it check who has higher condi dmg? Because if it just prioritises players that would be stupid as my pet with 1300 condi dmg would benefit a lot more from it than a full zerker equipped player.
Personally I think all spirits should always affect the caster AND its pet + 4 more allies. Pets are always so easily overlooked yet they are an important part of the rangers dps.

DeceiverX.8361:

You’re doing the equivalent of trying to make a berserker thief a healer and are saying it’s relatively weak when compared to a druid.

Condi thief isn’t going to get you optimal damage in PvE. If you’re playing for optimal damage in that environment, you need to optimize for it on the build-profession level rather than just how you want to deal your damage. There’s zero diversity in an optimal scheme, because it’s optimum, which is defined as “greatest degree attained or attainable under implied or specified conditions” and thus entails only one (via -est suffix) solution.

On the first thing: I’m just trying to make a condi thief do condi, so that’s totally not the same.

The whole point of this post is that the only way to play thief in PvE is to go non-condi. Other professions can choose between normal dmg, condi dmg or hybrid, and one of these is going to be better in certain situations. When it comes to thief there is just such a huge gap in damage basically reducing you to 1 choice.
I wouldn’t mind running a sub-optimal build, but there are limits.

I know in PvP/WvW it’s a totally different story. But I’m a PvE player, and I don’t like PvP balance issues holding builds back in unrelated content.

And about the numbers: Those are absolutely not ‘optimal dps’ numbers or anything, I just equipped similar gear on different professions and checked what they could do with it, to get a good comparison. (it’s also the sustained average dps from a 2min fight, so not burst dps)

Of course in PvP it’s not much of a problem, but in the new HoT maps you just can’t use it at all. It would be less of a problem if the roll direction was more controllable. Often your character gets ‘stuck’ for a second after using skills making you dodge in the wrong direction when you use this skill.

Cleansing flame is a terrible weapon skill. There is absolutely no benefit in using this skill. Guardian already has enough options to remove condi’s on allies, and this skill doesn’t even affect yourself.
The damage is lower than just auto-attacking with any weapon, and it only hits slightly faster than scepter auto-attack. So using it for faster virtue of courage burns is also not an option. (you lose to much dps to compensate for the slightly higher hit rate)
The only moment it is ever usefull is if your opponent is reflecting while you use scepter, and even then just swapping to melee weapon is way better.

It would be alot cooler if this attack just hit a lot more times per second so it would be usefull to stack burns. Or if it actually granted a boon to allies or something. As it is, this skill is basically just an empty slot to compensate for the very strong torch 4.

So I did some more extensive testing: I made the best straightforward sustainable condi build I could in hearth of the mists using rabid amulet on every profession, and measured the average dps for a 2-min fight against the indestructable golem (no allies present)
results: (in #damage per second, measured using legal jaxnX dps meter)
Ranger: 8800
Necro: 7900 (surprisingly low actually)
Ele: 8900
Engi: 8100
Guard: 8100
Warr: 8200
Mesmer: 8300 (has a ramp-up time of like 30 seconds :P )
Thief: 4900
Revenant: 4900

Thief and revenant clearly underperform compared to the other classes. It is also noteworthy that both revenant and thief are the only 2 classes requiring to be in melee range at all times to achieve this dps, resulting in lower survivability also. Between revenant and thief, revenant has a clear advantage in group support, while thief has more dodges. Revenant also deals a larger amount of torment damage, so the dps would be higher against moving targets.
When it comes to survivability, ranger(druid) and necro have a clear advantage over the rest
(note: since I main ranger and don’t play much condi on other classes, the dps on each of these could most likely be improved quite a bit. Even so, the gap between Revenant/Thief and the rest is very clear.)

This is quite unfortunate as I would love to play condi thief in PvE.

saerni.2584:

Well, I consider that DPS “viable” even if it isn’t as large as some other classes. Class utility makes up for the smaller DPS on the conditions. And PvE content is easy enough that adding in some extra DPS only slightly effects the outcome. Of course, I wouldn’t mind more DPS on my current build…but it is WvW and not primarily PvE.

If you wanted more condi DPS the best option would be to swap out for Lotus Training in Daredevil and drop the SA line for DA, which will give you more poison DPS. Honestly, if all you care about are pure DPS numbers without any of the survivability or utility then condition damage isn’t for you (at least on thief).

I think you didn’t read my post very well: healing condi druid (almost immortal build) still does more damage than full dps thief with zero survivability. And you actually really need dps since raid bosses have enrage timers. Sure you can play condi thief if you enjoy it, the problem is that any other class easily does it better in PvE with much less effort. The reason condi thief works in WvW is because of stealth. Stealth is not very effective in PvE at all.

Once again people I’m talking about PvE builds, NOT WvW builds, NOT PvP builds. There is a huge difference in effectiveness.

If it only list this very small fraction off bugs and their status it’s pretty much useless to have a page like that imho. Or at least change the name to: small list of some things we are trying to fix…
I wish Anet could let us know if they’re actually working on solving some major problems, but we never get any real feedback on it. Some of these issues received a ’we’re looking into it’ response from a dev on the forums, some 3 years ago… still no fix..

This game has a ridiculous amount of bugs and most of the major ones have been around since launch 4 years ago. On the known-issue tracker page only less than 1% of known buggs is listed. They say ’we’re looking into it’ but nothing ever gets done.
It’s like they’re not even trying….

Already filed several in-game bug reports regarding this matter. But considering it took them 4 years just to fix the pet name bug and all the other pet bugs that have been known for years are still being ignored, I don’t expect a fix for this before the next century.
Really Anet has to step up their game when it comes to bug fixing.

Just compared to any other profession the dmg is just miserable. Just tested it and my druid with cheap rabid gear (no food/utility) that is semi-specced for healing does more than 7k solo dps per second, and it has huge healing/sustain. With full Viper gear a condi ranger can reach 10 k solo dps (no food or buffs).
When going for full condi on thief with a squishy Vipers melee build I reach about 5.5k solo dps…
That’s only about half the dmg of the ranger…
So no not really viable I guess, at least in PvE.

That aside I think any Thief will agree that most condi-based skills are poorly designed, especially traps.

Looks like a tank build with low personal dps…
You could probably kill a champ with it but wouldn’t it take aaaages?
Also I see no way this is usable in raids with a dps that low.

With the stealth it could maybe make a WvW build but for PvE I really see no use.
How much dps does it actually put out? (you can easily test on golems in LA aerodrome)

As a player who usually runs condi builds with necro/ranger, I feel like condi thief just doesn’t come anywhere near that level. I’m interested to know what build you are using though.

I don’t think condi thief is even remotely viable in PvE. In PvP maybe it is, but I’m not talking about that here.

Does anyone else have the problem that using the withdraw heal skill results in instant-death because it drops you in a pit? I mean c’mon a heal you need to have a lot of space behind you for is just dumb. With the terrain in maps/dungeons/… only becoming more complex over time, this heal becomes worse and worse…

This problem can be fixed very easily though, just separate the heal and the roll:
They could make it so that using Withdraw instantly applies the healing, then flips over to the roll skill that removes the conditions. This way you could choose to take the risk and do the backflip, or just take only the heal.

Now does anyone else think this functionallity would be an improvement?

Now this posts is just going to be a summary of the changes I think they shoud apply to thif traits/skills to allow more diversity in builds (and make non-zerker thief not the only option in PvE).

First of all thief needs a condi weapon. Right now we only have dagger, pistol and shortbow which are all hybrid weapons. One of these needs more condi focus. Shortbow and pistol right now are absolutely terrible as ranged weapons and need a rework anyhow.

If they made dagger into the condi melee option, they should probably add condis to the auto-attack. A major buff to the ‘Dagger Training’ trait is also needed. To prevent spamming Death Blossom they could give it a Flip-over skill (the way it works with Sword/dagger)
If they decided on Shortbow as the condi ranged option they should also add condis to the auto-attack (and they could drop the bleed on pistol auto, making pistol a lot better too). Choking gass also needs to be improved (longer duration and maybe make the last pulse deal more poison).

As for traits: Right now thief also doesn’t really have a condi trait line. Deadly arts has condi traits but it also has ‘Improvisation’ (should be in Trickery imo), ‘Excecutioner’ and ‘Revealed training’ (should be in Shadow arts) making it more used for regular dmg builds. First of all ‘Dagger Mastery’ needs to be improved. If they changed traps to actually be usefull they could change ‘Deadly Trapper’ to inflict additional poison instead of vuln.
Shadow arts should probably also have some condi support as it also has the venoms trait. They could probably merge ’Shadow’s Embrace’ and ’Shadow’s rejuvenation’ to make room for a new adept trait. I would love to see a trait that adds poison dmg to stealth attacks, but it should probably be a Grandmaster. Maybe change ‘Rending Shade’ to something like that?

Next they should fix the currently worthless traps. First of all: make them circular! After they changed ranger traps (and removed the thrown traps ) to make ranger traps and DH traps more similar, one would expect to see a similar change to thief traps. Unfortunately Anet seems to have forgotten Thief actually has traps and has totally ignored them for the past 4 years.
If they change the trap trait to inflict additional poison on trigger traps could actually be usefull for condi builds. Needle Trap needs more dmg, and maybe they could remove the immobilize from it. Tripwire should probably be changed to ‘Snare Trap’ or something inflicting knockdown, cripple and torment (+poison from trait). Ambush can actually stay the way it is as long as they give the summoned thief a huge buff. Maybe give the thief a shortbow and let him inflict bleed on auto + use Choking gass/ cluster bomb? The thieves created with the ‘Thieves Guild’ elite could also use a buff.

If they decided to add the missing trap heal and elite that would be a bonus

Concerning Elite Skills: Dagger Storm would be more usefull if it had shorter cd and shorter duration.

If they would implement all these changes (which are honestly not that hard) I think Condi Thief could become a viable option.

The condition duration increase provided after dodge by the ‘Light on your Feet’ grandmaster doesn’t seem to work.

Probably already mentioned but quickness doesn’t actually work on the majority of pets

I noticed quickness on pets is totally kittened up.
On most pets, quickness does not properly speed up auto-attacks (they just don’t speed up at all).
After some testing I came to the following results:

Quicknes DOES work on auto-attack of Spider, Devourer, Smokescale, Wyvern and Bristleback pets.
Quickness DOES NOT WORK on the auto attack of Feline, canine, bird, porcine, drake, bear or moa pets.

(Note: other pet abilities are in fact faster, just the auto attack is totally bugged)

Pls tell me Anet is fixing this ASAP because it is a major issue.

Am I really the only one who is extremely annoyed by the way mesmer staff auto-attack was designed?
I mean, every cast (of you AND your clones) bounces twice. This means if you are fighting an enemy alone you can bounce the attack between your target, yourself, and then your target again, basically hitting them twice for every cast. If you run a condi dmg build, this way staff can actually do decent dmg (not crazy high but not too bad either).
HOWEVER if just 1 ally is present, all your attacks will bounce to that ally instead of back to your opponent, basically HALVING your auto-attack dps.
On top of that the ally affected will not gain much from absorbing half your dmg (a party has perma fury and high might upkeep anyway)
If half our attacks going to waste wasn’t enough, every cast has only 1/3 chance of actually dealing good dmg (the bleed will deal significantly more dmg than the burn and the vuln is just a wasted attack).

I don’t know who thougt it was a good idea to make a weapon that does half dmg around allies. I think this is really unfortunate as i love playing with staff for solo content (despite its many other flaws), but I just can’t use it for any real content (dungeons/fractals/raids/even group events…) because the dmg just drops instantly when another player or npc is near.

Please tell me I am not the only one who wants to see this changed so staff may actually become viable in pve, and not be crippled just by bad design.

Guess players do actually use them Thanks for the input.
Although everyone seems to agree glyph of unity sucks.
Still think glyh of alignment should do more condi dmg. Because I would love to use glyphs but the poison dmg on it is just so low..
Druid in general really has no love for condi builds imho

Can you tell me in what situation/build in pve they would be usefull then?

I was wondering if anyone in the druid community actually likes and uses the glyphs as skills. Because to me they seem extremely underwhelming and lack synergy.
I mean: how do you combine a very short-range effect with the druid’s main weapon: the staff, wich is ranged? On top of that the effects themselves seem pretty weak to me unless you need the cc (wich is awkward to use due to range). And going in Celestial avatar form only makes them worse…? On top of that they don’t have cool animations or effect either.
I personally haven’t seen any druids actually use the glyphs in Pve ….

So am I missing their usefullness somehow? Does anyone else think glyphs need a buff/change?

Oozes pleaase! They already exist in many variations (like moa’s) so they could add a bunch of them at once.

Axe auto-attack still has aftercast issues delaying any skill cast after by a full second.

You can go full condi and use axe/torch + axe/dagger. Constantly swapping weapons with quick draw to reduce cooldown on dagger 5 and torch 4 and using sharpening stone +sun spirit deals some nice dmg. I run beastmastery/skirmishing/wilderness survival. Even with cheap rabid gear you can do at least 8k solo dps while also having high toughness. You don’t even have to use any traps. (I personally don’t like them)

You can just incorporate druid staff into this build for the insane healing at the cost of dps, it will still be decent and pretty much unkillable.

Besides the whirl attack wich knocks back, the golem actually does some decent damage with its punch attacks and has a lot of health. It’s a usefull rune when trying to solo stuff cause it can act as a tank/diversion.
Golem can be a pain in some content where people stack though.

Same issue here, they screwed up somewhere

So raids came out today, and man what a joke! The only really difficult part of the first boss encounter (not including finding 9 people who aren’t total idiots) is the part where if you get unlucky the green circle will spawn in the damaging area and on the point furthest away from the boss… If you get lucky its faceroll if u get unlucky you wipe, how is rng driven difficulty like that ever a good idea?

Raids as far as I’ve seen are a prime example of what I think is wrong in the game’s design The first boss and the 3 minions before him are useless damage sponges who do NOTHING but just stand there. Then they throw in a load of ‘game mechanics’ and a timer to make it challenging, and just copy paste that stuff with higher numbers for the boss.
Anything beyond running to the green circles is a faceroll damage race just like we’re used to.

fireflyry.7023:

In HoT mobs do WAY more damage, have WAY more HP, break bars and weight of numbers.

You might call that artificial but not sure what else they could do to keep the vets happy till raids are meta.

They can’t do much about the AI in this engine outside subtle tweaks me thinks and maybe it’s future proofed so they can just scale a few numbers back to make the content easy for scrubs in the future?

Actually the ai system in gw2 is capable of a lot more than we see in game. The problem is most enemies only have about 3 possible actions they keep spamming. (If you want to know more about the ai system in gw2, there are some presentations on youtube from the guy who helped improve it.)

Reading the comments here made me realize the term ‘fake difficulty’ may not be the correct term for what I was trying to say. (A better term could be ‘cheap design’ or something) Also I have no problem with the damage from enemies and I don’t think the game is too difficult. My problem is with the way the ‘difficulty increase’ was implemented.

For example I don’t have a problem with evading enemies. But those hylek just ’evade almost every ranged attack just by standing there. I think that is a very cheap way too lenghten fights and compensate for their artificial stupidity.

Belzebu.3912:

Alexander.6250:

I know racial skills becoming a thing is just a highly unlikely fantasy since Anet kinda ignores their existence, as they do with everything they don’t want to fix. (spirit weapons, thief traps, pets,…) I was just curious if more people would like to see more Asura golems or Charrzooka’s around.

btw do Revenants even have Racial skills?

1 – Racial skills aren’t broken, they just don’t work as you wanted.
2 – Revenant/Herald doesn’t have access to racial skills.

Just concerning you’re statement that they aren’t broken, have you ever used the asura power suit? The channeled gatling gun attack that hits 20 times and takes a few seconds to cast, deals less total dmg than one punch from the melee attack ,wich punches twice in 1 second. That just makes no sense at all. Also elite skills offer engi’s no toolbelt skills. I don’t think any other skills are really broken though (did they fix the crappy animation on hidden pistols yet?)

And yes Revenants don’t have racial skills wich is why I posted it along with the reasons why racial skills will most likely see no changes. (I didn’t really need an answer to that guys…)

Ayrilana.1396:

I haven’t seen anything that seemed like artifical difficulty other that the migraine mode or perhaps upper tier fractals.

For axe master, you’re supposed to break his bar to prevent that attack. That’s one of the primary mechanics of the fight.

Wich just requires a bunch of people, not more skill. I think anything that is undodgeable,unblockable and pierces invulnerability is just cheap design. You would normally be able to survive this attack? Guess again! Random game mechanic! Your invunerability is no longer valid! They basically change the rules in their own favor.

sorudo.9054:

Alexander.6250:

I wan’t to clarify that one of the main aspects I think should be changed is to make Racial skills usable on ALL OTHER RACES as well, so refrain from commenting that racial skills add inequality, that is not the discussion here.

then it would be just the same as a normal skill, racial skills are there for a reason, just letting anyone have them makes no sense.

The diffence with normal skills is that they are lore based skills that are not tied to a profession but rather to a certain culture. Given the way races have a lot of interaction in this game, it is not unthinkable for races to learn skills from one another. (Also they are just cool and have more ‘flavour’ than normal skills imo)
Also they cannot be used in PvP wich gives the devellopers more freedom regarding balance.

I know racial skills becoming a thing is just a highly unlikely fantasy since Anet kinda ignores their existence, as they do with everything they don’t want to fix. (spirit weapons, thief traps, pets,…) I was just curious if more people would like to see more Asura golems or Charrzooka’s around.

btw do Revenants even have Racial skills?

Does anyone else also think that Anet made way too much use of so called ‘Fake Difficulty’ to make HoT more challenging? (Fake Difficulty = adding unfair elements to increase difficulty or just plain boosting numbers to compensate for lacking AI)

Whenever a situation becomes ‘difficult’ in the game. I can’t help but feel the difficulty is artificial or unfair.

Let’s take the hylek shadowleapers for example. They wouldn’t be so annoying if not for their random invulnerability. Or those hero points where you have to kill a boss would be less tedious if we didn’t have to slaughter a damage sponge. Or the kitten ‘headshot’ attack from that one champion axemaster in the canopy that just downs you no matter what. These just don’t feel like they require more skill to beat, just more time or greater numbers of players…

IMO improving the AI would be a way better method of raising difficulty. Enemies that can evade oae’s ,intentionally transfer or cure conditions at the right times and smart positioning would be huge improvements. The game has the technology to do that kind of things, it’s just only used very rarely (or ineffectively)

Does anyone else feel this way, or am I just expecting too much?

I wan’t to clarify that one of the main aspects I think should be changed is to make Racial skills usable on ALL OTHER RACES as well, so refrain from commenting that racial skills add inequality, that is not the discussion here.

Does anyone else think it would be really cool if they buffed racial skills to be at least usable. They don’t have to be strong or anyhting, just not so obviously worthless (long cd for crappy effect, at least in most cases). Because I think those skills look really cool and are fun to use.
I mean; imagine being able to run a build focussed on nearly permanent golem suit usage (wich is possible since chronomancer) without that turning you in a wet sponge.
I honestly don’t know why they bothred to make these skills in the first place if they are so weak and broken, (golem suit gatling fist full channel barrage does LESS dmg than one punch from the auto-attack …..).

Improving existing racials skills or even adding new ones could even be a good way to make PvE more interesting and diverse without having to be afraid to mess up PvP balance. Doing something like that ofcourse would probably require a system to ‘share’ racial skills between characters. (Something that allows you to select wich set of racial skills you want to use on any character once you unlocked them on another).

(I must admit that I mainly hope they buff racial skills somehow just because I love asura golems :P.)

If anyone understood my ramblings here, please leave a comment and share your vision on how Racial skills could play a bigger role in the game.

Engineer with prototype skills, wich also have negative effects on yourself and can combo with each other when u use 2 in a row.
An as class mechanic the option to put all toolbelt skills on cd and summon a robotic minion based on how many skills were put on cd. (5 skills ->enhanced steam ogre, 1 skill-> clockwork moa chick?)

And I’d love to see a death ray skill that functions like the giant beam you can shoot in that mission where u pilot a pact golem suit.

I like the idea of the ‘haunted’ effect and the mantras, (although there should probably be a little more stuff that interacts with haunted).
I do think it would be better to use a different class mechanic change, since alternate deathshroud resembles reaper too much. How about an f2 option to do something else with your lifeforce, like summoning spirits or something?

Also off-hand scepter would be cool, but I doubt Anet will make that happen :|. I personally think we need another weapon with marks. Maybe a bow?