Showing Posts For Cavernshark.8957:
The blast effect on Tail Swipe appears to trigger at the start of the animation as well, which makes it a little more responsive than I’d expected.
Edit: Actually, I just looked a little closer – the blast notification flashes at the beginning of the swipe, but buff doesn’t appear until the end. Not a huge lag, but it at least makes it easier to see when he’s doing it in a combo field
So excited for this… I’ve wanted to use drake pets for awhile now. Can’t wait to get in game!!
It hardly sounds like the programming challenge of the century, how hard can it
be to extract the data for the default equipped weapon and apply that to skills / your stats when using a kit.
Probably a lot harder than you think, both from a technical and a design standpoint. Other classes have the flexibility to apply different stats depending on which weapons they have equipped. Forcing the equipped weapon stats onto some kits wouldn’t make sense. For instance, if I have a rifle emphasizing power, I may not want that on my elixir gun.
To me it looks like they tested out one approach on the Elementalists by placing default buffed stats on their summons. There’s more room there to mess something up since those are just utilities and not core mechanics for the profession. My guess is they are evaluating how that worked out and trying to decide if a similar approach can/should be applied to Engineer kits. If so, then they just need to iron out which combination of stats goes with each kit without pigeonholing the kit into one role when it may support several.
We already have a lot of fields and finishers. When you add in that you can select pets to add more fields (Poison anyway) and finishers (mostly leaps… at least until they fix Drake blast finishers) we’re pretty well off compared to some other professions.
That said, I wouldn’t mind adding an ethereal field to Muddy Terrain. It’s already cosmetically a lot like the Throw Gunk effect. And is somewhat boring otherwise.
Buffing off-hand axe to either let you use the Whirl on the move, or making Path of Scars have a secondary effect might encourage use of the whirl-finisher we have as well.
The cripple would make sense if it had a chance to proc from the basic attack rather than the F2. In that capacity, it would compliment and enhance the control aspects of the canines and spiders, rather than hinder it.
Not going to lie, one of the builds I’d be absolutely interested in playing is a Spirit ranger. That said, I’d have to agree with DEDEN that they have a very conflicted nature. On one hand, traiting them seems to encourage you to run with them at range, but all of their activated abilities are small point blank AoEs. To get the most out of the AoEs, you have to go into melee where they’re almost bound to die immediately. Further, in that mode, they’re essentially inferior traps with passive buffs attached.
Vigorous Spirits (+50% health) and Nature’s Vengeance (activated effects are larger and trigger on death) could honestly be rolled into a single talent. This would support their use in melee combat by giving them a little more ability to survive and also encourage their active effects.
Spiritual Knowledge could be enhanced to support use of spirits as buff bots from range. The 15% boost to chance to proc is odd given the internal cooldown. Maybe also allow their activated effects to be ground targeted (900 range?)
Spirit’s Unbound needs something more. Giving them the ability to move is both a blessing and a curse for either ranged or melee use since you can’t toggle the follow on or off to safely place the spirits and then move on. I’d suggest a 20% cooldown reduction be coupled with this talent.
Ultimately, ANet may be looking for a more substantial rework that would make most of these changes useless or potentially ridiculous. But I think they’d be very useful to make spirits feel more versatile / competitive given the other options.
P.S. Circle of Life should trigger on spirit or pet death… not the ranger’s death =P
As many of the others expressed, feedback comes in a lot of forms. It’s not a question of one type being better or worse than another. They have different strengths and weaknesses. If anything, this discussion is missing out on other channels they probably have at their disposal that go beyond what happens on this forum or in game metrics (e.g. gaming reviews, sales data, support feedback) .
Just forced my way through this after a failed first attempt. One thing I noticed was that the tank most often ejects you when you try to push and hold 1 or 2 for continued movement. I found I could stay in the tank longer by pushing and releasing the movement buttons (1 or 2) multiple times to get to my desired angle rather than holding. I’d still get punted out from time to time, but sometimes I wouldn’t. Was able to at least zero in on the giants and take them down to complete the quest. Hope that helps some others get through it too.
Just wanted to toss my hat in on loving this idea. I know it’s been beaten to death but… maybe it’ll happen. I kind of fell for the ranger during the Beta Weekends, but gave up initially. After doing the rounds on the other professions, I found myself recently back on the Ranger and still loving both the aesthetic and the play style… but I would totally dig a staff (or scepter or mace… or anything really) with some more indirect Nature magic type abilities.
Overall, I like the skills the original poster put up there (since they are designed to synergize with a couple trait lines). However, I would suggest that Bramble trap replicates Entangle and Muddy Terrain type functionality (but more powerfully). I like the idea of brambles though… maybe create a ring or wall of destroy-able terrain that absorbs projectiles and prevents enemy crossing until destroyed.
I can’t say my experience is as bad as yours, but there are definitely some nuances to keeping your pet active.
For F3, I find hitting it a few times until you get the pet back to you completely works. As someone else noted, pets seem to need to finish their current animation before they start to move.
The only command I’ve ever noticed any latency on was F2. This isn’t the cast time… but a delay before the cast time is even initiated. I’ve never been able to isolate exactly why or when this happens because it’s definitely not all the time.
Okay, I’m sure there is a thread on this, but I can’t find it anywhere. Does anyone have any idea when it starts on European servers?
All we know is it will start sometime today Pacific Standard Time.
Source: https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/279676797229101056
No, I get what you’re saying – I just don’t think you have a reasonable appreciation for software development. I’m not saying the current amount of bugs is or is not acceptable, but telling them to stop producing content (which is, again, probably an entirely different set of people with different skill sets and backgrounds) isn’t going to speed up their ability to fix the issues you’re experiencing. All it will serve to do is make is so we have less content.
Don’t forget all the utility skills. Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave are also good for comboing.
When I’m using staff, I like to drop Eruption (earth-2) on an area, swap to fire (fire-2) on top of it, jump into the field myself and also hit Arcane Wave. My current build has Elemental Attunement, which grants buffs based on Attunement swap. The two blast finishers + the swap to fire gives me and those near me 7 stacks of might and does a fair amount of AoE to enemies.
Different teams are different? You can’t simply repurpose entire teams on a project this large. The people developing content probably use custom tools for world editing and do less fiddling with the inner workings of the game’s databases. The skill sets for both aren’t necessarily interchangeable.
I, for one, like the fact that I can expect to see a new puzzle every month or so. It’s one of my favorite things to do in the game.
It would seem to me that if any conscious decision was made by the developers to give Ranger’s less stun breaks, it has to do with the fact that a decent portion of our damage and utility can continue to function when we’re stunned (at least on paper).
You could argue that it doesn’t work in practice, but I imagine they expect us to use pet abilities to respond (eg wolf fear, moa daze). Reducing F2 activation times might move more towards that goal given that stun response is inherently reactive, but the cast time on most pet abilities means they can only be used proactively.
Quoting another player:
So please don’t say I am making up stuff when in FACT what I said is true and that you are just blinded because you love the game. That is great you do but please at least take off the rose colored glasses sometimes.
Your statements aren’t facts any more than anyone else’s. They’re conjectures built of anecdotal evidence submitted by an individual who’s stated they are biased against the subject matter. I’ve been leveling a few alts in few zones and have had lots of other players around, but that doesn’t mean that’s evidence that average player activity is up.
The original poster put forth a single data point. While it’s analytically unsound to make sweeping generalizations about the meaning of that one data point, that is one more data point than you’ve provided. Guild Wars 2 has a fairly unique player engagement model that they seem to be experimenting with still. “Active” and “inactive” players don’t have a hard and fast definition. The no-subscription model gives this game a relatively low barrier to reentry for people who decide to stop playing it. With each new content patch, ArenaNet has the potential to reactivate subsets of that player base. Even some of the “doomsayers” on the forums admit they may try the game again from time to time. I doubt they’d be willing to do that in a subscription model.
The reality is that we have no idea what an healthy average player activity rate for this game or even what the average player activity rate actually is. Only ArenaNet has that data. Until they decide to share it all we can do is conjecture and spin around the few data points we do have. Personally, I think any “decline” you’re seeing is more akin to many people stabilizing their play time. This will balance out and the overall population will continue to grow with highest concentrations of player concurrence occurring during content releases.