Guild Wars 2

Okay, so, I’ve been playing around with staff-Ventari for a good long while now. The main thing that I’ve noticed is that it’s lacking, which makes sense given that it’s a beta.

The auto-attack is amazingly pretty and beautiful. At first it felt rather slow, but after a good chunk of time playing it seemed to speed up for some reason? I’m wondering if someone made the cast time shorter The whirl finisher I get with it is nice as well. As for the baubles I spawn when traited, why is there an internal combo on picking these up? And why don’t I get told how long that is?

[Punishing Sweep]‘s animation reminds me of one of the gemstore sickles :P It’s very satisfying being able to whack something while it’s using a skill, get off [Debilitating Slam] and then making the enemy rather useless. I just wish I got an interrupt to go along with it…

[Warding Rift] is amazing and I love it to bits. Go blocking!

[Renewing Wave] is really rather underwhelming. It’s animated like a blast finisher, similar to the banner placements, but does nothing of the sort. It has no damage whatsoever, and its healing and condi clear are meh at best for its 14sec cooldown.

[Surge of the Mists], important! I don’t care bout no walls nor obstacles, like how fiery gs used to be. But I can knock-back things, and darn is it fun to headbutt.

My heal skill…. Okay, as for my tablet I dislike the channeling I have to do to get it to move. I spend enough time trying to figure out where to put it, making me spend more to actually put it there is a bit mean. The healing while it passes you is nice indeed, but as I said I spend enough time trying to position it…

[Protective Solace] Ahhh the dome. It would be a good idea to tell me that it’s a light field! I would also love it if it gave me an extra boon of some-sort…. or pulsed extra healing?

[Natural Harmony] combo’s amazingly well with [Warding Rift]. Wish that it healed for a bit more but eh.

[Purifying Essence] isn’t something that I’ve really used all that much because I’m silly and I keep forgetting to… Mainly because I have it in my head (Even though this is false) that my tablet hitting me in the face counts as a condi-clear.

[Energy Expulsion]… This doesn’t do enough for me. The only reason I have to actually use it is when I’m switching back over the legend that I’m using for damage, in this case, Jalis. Otherwise I’m simply left with little baubles that I’m forced to go chase around to heal myself, (Which is made worse by the fact that I don’t know where they’re going to end up!) and that’s it. I get far more out of simply leaving my tablet there…. Now I do understand that I could be running the trait that dazes, but I need that healing.

All in all, now that I know how to actually use Ventari and Jalis with a decent amount of skill, I can pretty much keep myself from dying. Once I get low on health, switch to Ventari and use my healing skill to get the tablet up. Use the upkeep skill asap, and hit myself in the face with it a bunch of times. Or, if I’m really low, [warding mists] and [natural harmony]. Now to figure out how to apply that skillset to my allies and I’ll be set!

Well…. there was my thought dump of a feedback.

tl;dr, Ventari feels like its missing some things, a tooltip needs to tell me it’s a combo field, it’s very pretty, and oh god I can recover from almost anything!!

Tiny Doom.4380:

From the “Reimagining Progression” post:

“The ability to train Masteries is unlocked at level 80 for all players that own Heart of Thorns…Because the Mastery training bar completely replaces the experience bar, players who’ve reached level 80 will no longer gain levels but will instead train Masteries. This means characters that have reached level 80 will no longer gain skill points through leveling.”

Simple question: what happens for accounts that don’t have HoT but do have Level 80 characters?

Do they continue to gain xp but not skill points? Both? Neither?

If the answer is they still gain Skill Points I would strongly consider not buying the expansion just to retain that facility.

Ahh…
“Skill points will be added as rewards across high-level content to offset this change.”
The next line in that paragraph states that you can still get skill points, and I’d be willing to bet a gold or something that skill points will be easy enough to get if you need to get them. Don’t forget that Anet has a vendor that takes skill points as a commodity, and Anet realizes that those things are needed to make a legendary. You’ll most likely get many more things by getting the expansion than keeping a way of getting way more skill points than you’ll ever need.
Honestly though, I wouldn’t mind skill points having some value again. I liked the feeling of finally grinding up the 200 skill points I needed for my unicorn bow. I also likes knowing what my utilities did, now whenever I make a new character I just spam scrolls of knowledge. I think I have 113 of those in my bank now….