Guild Wars 2

Elite specs cannot mix with each other, and ANet has said that the PoF elite specs will not be a step up in power, and will not nullify existing content by outscaling it.

But they said that about HoT elite specs and the base game, and that wound up being a bold faced lie. Taking a HoT elite spec into any base game content is like putting the game on infantile mode, and base game counterparts of builds provided by HoT elite specs are laughably worthless in comparison.

So who knows? I’m waiting until post release reviews to purchase, and I’d recommend you do the same. There is no point in buying another expansion of 5 or so new areas and 9 new specs only for it to even further nullify the 30+ existing areas and just as many or more specs than it’s adding.

Why on earth would you use Necro to make this argument? It’s probably the base spec that uses the warhorn the most.

There has been years of constructive feedback on conjures, their mechanic is both contradictory to the very design of the base ele and impossible to balance given the severity of mechanical difference between a skill bar with and without them.

It’s the plain and simple truth at this point that ANet just doesn’t take feedback when it isn’t in line with what they’ve already decided to do; and they decided long ago they are not putting in the work to make conjures work with the attunement system, and that is really the only way to fix them.

If I remember correctly they did make some changes, but I don’t remember exactly what, let me see if I can find a patchnote on it or something.

EDIT: Found it.

January 26, 2016 Patchnotes

General
Supporting your allies will now contribute toward earning rewards for killing enemies and damaging event bosses. The actions listed below now cause a percentage of the target ally’s damage dealt for the next several seconds to also count toward your participation. In addition to that, damaging an enemy’s defiance bar will also grant you some participation toward receiving rewards from that enemy. In order to discourage AFKing with boon-applying auras, you must still be actively attacking targets to receive rewards from them.
Applying boons to an ally (small percentage).
Removing conditions from an ally (small percentage).
Reviving an ally (large percentage).
Healing an ally (percentage scales based on how much healing is given).

TheSlothArmada.6709:

For power warr to actually do good damage. . .

BadSanta.6527:

power ranger actully be viable

You both realize that both of these were not only viable, but considered some of the best power builds in the game, before the release of specializations. They are bad, specifically because powercreep outmoded them.

And fixing them, is not going to come with more specializations, that’s just going to exacerbate the problem by further nullifying base class and base game content in order to make the elite specs and the expansions more tantalizing.

The only fix is for the developers to admit how completely and utterly they screwed up on balancing the elite specs, and fully rebalance them against the base classes and the base game, instead of the other elite specs and HoTS bloated, broken, horribly designed content.

Hibiskus.8294:

Well…Dev´s posted that they have also made some changes to the new elites…but i tested mirage….and it looked like nothing was changed….but a good test…some lags….with more people really interupting lags…but i loved this short time in desert…hope for next elite to have a weapon that heals per hit (or in this desert a sigil that changes like…2 – 10% from the critical dmg to health…) me, as mesmer…well i only miss a good heal^^ (ok, mirror is good…but it is the only good with short CD)….

But what should i say: last test i have missed…this time: wow, just wow…the desert looks amazing…you have done a wonderfull thing with that (just wondering: when i use mirage…can i somewhere read ingame what the ambush skills are doing?..beside hovering with the mouse in this short time over it)…

can´t wait for release…that i must say… ^^

You’ve got it backwards, they said they have made those changes on the private servers, but those changes couldn’t be patched in to today’s test.

And it’s over

Only got to try out two specs

If by broken you mean the developers have, for some unknowable reason, purposely made getting mats suck, than yes, clovers are broken, along with 9/10ths of the games crafting system.

Dawdler.8521:

Sly.9518:

Lol people saying Vitality is Condi damage mitigation, mitigation means reducing FYI. Shows us where vitality reduces Condi damage.

Just like toughness, it make you survive longer. Same effect. If you have 100 hp and someone do 20 dps give or take, you survive 5 seconds. If you have 140 hp, you survive 7 seconds. Not too complicated.

While I don’t like the OPs suggestion, because condition damage is supposed to be the anti-tank damage type, I’m still going to correct you because you’re completely BSing here.

Mitigation is not a direct synonym of reduction, mitigation is specifically reduction of severity, in this case, reduction of the severity of enemy damage. And by that definition, health is not damage reduction, as you are taking the exact same amount of damage no matter the amount of health you have.

Health is an increase in survivability, but not through damage mitigation.

Furthermore, it is an equal increase in survivability against all damage sources, power and condition damage alike.

And that clearly illustrates there is a stat source to increase survivability and mitigate enemy dps when it comes to defending against power damage, but there is only the option to increase survivability against condition damage; giving condition damage a clear advantage.

suicidalspectre.8106:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Unfortunately, that is not possible at this time due to technical limitations.

Good luck.

Such a lazy response. They have the capability, just not the desire to write the little bit of code. Heck, the whole system could use a Dx update anyways.

It is something in my opinion that they should do, but it’s less a matter of coding, than a matter of going through each backpack skin and cutting/modifying its existing maps as well as creating new maps for the dye channels. None of which is incredibly difficult, just tedious and very time consuming.

That being said, this would have been a simple matter at or before launch, and players stated so back then, but ANet refused to address the issue until three years in, by which time the workload had basically quintupled with new skins.

They’re only marginally easier because there is no seam to work around.

Game characters are made with geometric planes of only a certain size, in the case of player characters, these geometric planes have seams running in loops at their edges, for each piece of armor and each weight. Armor in a game doesn’t sit over your character’s body like real clothing over a real person, it literally replaces sections of your character body dictated by where those seams are. Furthermore, the fact that these seams don’t always match up between different armor weights, particularly for the midsection, is the reason you can’t mix armors of different weights.

However, I don’t know who told you that, but the difficulty isn’t really the reason they shy away from armors, its the profitability. They can make a single outfit, which is a little less than a third of the work for three armor sets, and it applies to every character in the game, instead of only a third. And time has, unfortunately, shown this to be much more profitable than making armors.

Palador.2170:

Conncept.7638:

They should have taken this chance to do what players suggested years ago.

Engineers don’t have weapon swap, because at some point kits were an integral part of the class mechanic they had no choice in using. When they were disintegrated from the class mechanic, for some reason engineer never got weapon swap back, likely because with so few weapons there really was no point. Adding weapon swap to a class with three weapon combinations would really add nothing to the class.

To fix that problem, reintegrate kits in to the class mechanic. Give engineers a “kit” slot, where the weapon swap is for the remaining classes, in this slot they can choose a single kit to swap to as if it were a weapon, giving them access to at least one single kit at all times.

That’s… actually a pretty neat idea. It may be far too late to do it by now, but I do like that idea!

Yeah it’s likely too late to make anything but very minor changes to the expansion release, but hopefully someday. But then again, they’ve had five years, and have done basically nothing to any of the class mechanics no matter how dire or obvious the need.

They should have taken this chance to do what players suggested years ago.

Engineers don’t have weapon swap, because at some point kits were an integral part of the class mechanic they had no choice in using. When they were disintegrated from the class mechanic, for some reason engineer never got weapon swap back, likely because with so few weapons there really was no point. Adding weapon swap to a class with three weapon combinations would really add nothing to the class.

To fix that problem, reintegrate kits in to the class mechanic. Give engineers a “kit” slot,where the weapon swap is for the remaining classes, in this slot they could choose a single kit to swap to, giving them access to at least one single kit at all times.

Ykfox.3825:

I mean, it’s not unusual for a sculptor to take creative license when designing statues.

Considering it’s likely none of them know what Kormir even looked like…?

Or also that people just tend to make deity in whatever image its worshipers are comfortable with, and the only statue in game was supposed to have been made by Krytans. Every European christian artist from the middle ages knew Christ didn’t look European but that’s still how they depicted him since that is how the majority of his followers looked.

Waste of design space. Tomes have a massive amount of potential and should have been added as a new weapon class. There are only three caster weapons, available to every caster class off the bat. There is zero design space left for traditional caster specializations and we’re already seeing the inherent design issues with that in this new wave of specs.

I mean they’re giving a class of magical lore keepers a freaking axe, the only weapon they could have give that would have read less as the armament of an intellectual was if they had given us a club to smash people with. Was that not a big fat sign reading “We’re running out of ideas” to anyone else?

The game needed for tomes to be made weapons, not just for current but future content to have sufficient design space, and ANet flubbed it because it was too much work.

Testing them both with the exact same gear and their ideal condition builds, ranger comes out on top against a single target by a mile, even when not taking advantage of the facing mechanic. The Revenants only advantages are having much more AoE, and having access to torment and confusion as cover conditions from other weapons/legends.

lmaogg.7325:

Swagger.1459:

Really? …Ok rangers, here’s beast mode, but don’t stay in beast mode!

Beast mode is just a new mechanic. You are like saying necro get reaper shrouds and they must stay in it forever? Or revenant permanently sticking to glint?

No. You burst, and exit the mode. The devs even explained the cooldowns on beastmode skills are not shared with the pet’s personal cooldowns.

Shroud isn’t their new mechanic, it’s their old one, their new mechanic is the sand shades and you absolutely should have as many out as you can 100% of the time.

hip.8435:

Einlanzer.1627:

Meh. Subjective. I like most of what they went with.

Subjective versus a proven formula in GW1.

I’ll agree that there’s some stuff to like — but like my title suggests, elites are not as good as they could be.

You mean the proven formula that gave it 1/8th of GW2s population at launch and 1/2 of GW2s peak population?

There are a few disappointing things about the expanion.

That expansion being Guild Wars 2, instead of its less successful predecessor, isn’t one of them.

Redfeather.6401:

I really like the soulbeast main mechanic. It’s the stances I didn’t like and won’t use. Their cooldown is so huge and duration so short, and I hate using hotbar slots for stuff like that.

I don’t see why stances don’t work in this game like they do in most, you remain in them until you switch to a different stance, or something knocks you out of it.

But I actually disagree, even with their cooldowns, stances are unique utility people will find a use for. The real disappointment is the dagger, which deals literally a third of the condition damage of our bow, at less range, while less safe. There is not a single advantage to using the dagger.

Good idea. +1

Manijin.3428:

Actually they do work, and in really interesting ways. Traits that modify the Shroud 1 proc whenever your totems Damage enemies, usually in response to using your “shroud” skills. It’s really, REALLY interesting interactions that I was eager to test out, and I love the way they’ve been resolved.

And traits that proc when you enter shroud, proc when you use the fifth skill. So everything actually procs on the scourge that procs on the base class.

Azoqu.8917:

Conncept.7638:

I think everything the guardian has and will ever get is going to have a lot of supportive tools, it’s like Eles having AoE and thieves having mobility. Even the dragonhunter had more than average support to it and it’s a DPS spec.

Everything is support and yet still terrible and never taken for support. Other classes just do it better. Quickness? The mantras are all short range cones on a melee spec, you’re never going to get everyone reliably to keep up 100% quickness that you might as well just run a chronomancer in every scenario.

Guardians were the support class prior to HoT and raids, especially after nerfs to support eles and mesmers. The problem isn’t guardian mechanics, the problem is the reprehensible behavior of GW2s developers, who claimed they weren’t going to powercreep the classes with the introduction of specializations, and then did exactly that to the umpteenth degree.

Jackcreanor.7546:

Guards were lacking a viable condi weapon/spec more than they were lacking support. That said, Firebrand still has a TON of great supportive tools.

I think everything the guardian has and will ever get is going to have a lot of supportive tools, it’s like Eles having AoE and thieves having mobility. Even the dragonhunter had more than average support to it and it’s a DPS spec.

Which is why I still think it’s idiotic that we lost our minion utility skills, if they had ever made them not suck, which was entirely doable had they ever even tried, they would have been the crux to making our massive suite of group supportive abilities useful outside of structured group content.

Map design is somewhat of an improvement, but largely a lateral movement in to a different direction than HoT, which I guess is itself an improvement given the horrible choice of direction of the HoT areas.

Look and feel of the environment is much more interesting, just having empty space feels so nice after the cluttered areas of the previous expansion.

Mounts are fun, love how tactile they feel, not the snappy weightless movements I’ve always hated about GW2 player character models.

Some of the organizational systems like gear identification and currencies needs refining, but are a step in the right direction over GW2s horrible currency/keys/mats/junk inventory clutter. For example, we should not be charged for identifying the average gear drop, specialty gear sure, but the average gear drop should be a free identify, and exist, for that tier at least, solely to give players a more manageable inventory.

That having been said, still not prepurchasing until I see for myself that they haven’t purposely and maliciously powercreeped the specializations like they did last time, even after claiming then, just as they have now, that they would do no such thing.

It looks like the same thought bubbles as the refugees you help. Refugee shark maybe?

starlinvf.1358:

Conncept.7638:

zealex.9410:

I will take usefulness and viability over “flavour” any time of the week.

As would I, the former is indisputably more important than the latter. But that isn’t the point, the point is, was it necessary to remove this functionality? Was there some conflict of mechanics that didn’t allow minions to work on the guardian?

No there was not, they were perfectly mechanically sound. In fact they had the potential, if ever balanced correctly, to fill an incredibly important roll among the guardian skill set as sub-in allies. Guardians have an insane amount of buffs and utility which are tuned to work with a team to the point that they are largely worthless while solo. And all of that class content, enough for a half a dozen builds, instead goes completely unused in anything but structured group content like dungeons, PvP, and raids.

No…. the problem was, and always has been, that AI unreliable due to a mayrid of issues ranging from response time, path finding, and power scaling. For the longest time, Necro minions were not viable due to being incredibly fragile against even vet levels of AOE damage…. much less Champs or PvP, where they’re collective damage could have a notable impact. Ranger pets also suffered this same problem, except 25% of the class’s base line damage was rolled into the Pet by design.

With the Untargetted Damage reduction change, they become a source of sustain damage. But look at how the trait enhancements work for both Ranger pets and Necro Minions. Rangers had a whole trait line dedicated to boosting the base line stats of pets, making them perform better….. still poor by comparison to other classes, but not a total waste of time. Necro minions are weak individually, but collectively do respectable damage, and have a multitude of passive support effects that directly benefit the necro besides doing damage.

Spirit weapons have a weak base line damage, and plagued with the usual AI path finding problems. Their utility functions were slow and unwieldy, and consumed the weapon in the process…… so you had to choose between sub-par damage/support of the auto attack (which was slow to cycle, and couldn’t timed or directed), or use it as a consumable utility with a longer cooldown to other comparable, stronger, and traitable skills at their disposal. The utility functions of the weapons were arguably its only competitive aspect; yet it was never worth slotting given the huge number of better options a Guardian could run.

The only way to make Pet AI viable is to make its benefit completely passive, or to tune up their response time with an extensive control suite that would have to exceed what the Ranger has…. because as it stands, the controls on Ranger are barely adequate to keep the pet from becoming a liability. And to even accomplish that, it effectively monopolizes their primary class mechanics.

To “Balance” Spirit weapons, the whole companion/control system needs a complete overhaul and a whole new control scheme…… and if lead designer for Rangers, whose class mechanic IS Pet AI, can’t be kitten d to find a solution for the central theme of his design caused by a globally systemic underlying issue ….. then its just better to just migrate it to one of the 5 system that have proven to do a better job, and revisit the whole thing later once Irenio pulls his head out of his kitten and starts addressing an issue should had started addressing in 2013.

I, just… what?

You admit, in the very opening of your post, that minion necros have been balanced. Took a long time and a lot of work, even changes to the very system behind pets, and you even cite several of the changes which made it happen yourself. But it happened.

And then you proceed to dribble out four inexplicably contradictory paragraphs of changes Spirit weapons “must” have to be mechanically functional. While failing to address the fact that you yourself admitted to several pet mechanics have already been balanced, without receiving any of your suggested changes, which can’t be true given that one of those balance sets is the Necromancer Minions, which are functionally identical to the Guardians old spirit weapons.

I’m sorry and I’m sure that you would enjoy these changes, but none of what you’ve listed is necessary for balance or mechanical viability. It’d be neat, but not necessary.

zealex.9410:

I will take usefulness and viability over “flavour” any time of the week.

As would I, the former is indisputably more important than the latter. But that isn’t the point, the point is, was it necessary to remove this functionality? Was there some conflict of mechanics that didn’t allow minions to work on the guardian?

No there was not, they were perfectly mechanically sound. In fact they had the potential, if ever balanced correctly, to fill an incredibly important roll among the guardian skill set as sub-in allies. Guardians have an insane amount of buffs and utility which are tuned to work with a team to the point that they are largely worthless while solo. And all of that class content, enough for a half a dozen builds, instead goes completely unused in anything but structured group content like dungeons, PvP, and raids.

Electro.4173:

Conncept.7638:

Electro.4173:

“Conjured weapons are garbage, they need to be buffed!”

“You buffed Conjured weapons? They’re useless, why would you waste time buffing useless things?”

The circle of life I guess.

Nice try, completely uninformed and fallacious, but nice try.

More accurately

Players: “Conjures both defy and deny us our class mechanic, which we have no innate defense or survivability without, to the point that they will never be usable, except as situational cheese.”

ANet: “Lol, we buffed ’em again.”

The way ANet treats these skills is just, it’s an exercise in insanity. It’s like having a car that doesn’t roll because the wheels are square, and when you take it to the mechanic, he fixes the problem by making the square wheels bigger.

I find it odd that in another thread you’re complaining that they changed Guardian Spirit Weapons because it made them less unique in your opinion, and you seemingly would have preferred them to stay as-is despite being fairly bad skills…

Yet with conjures, which are also unique (far moreso IMO, but we probably have different opinions on that), you seem to want them dramatically changed, probably in a way that’d make them much less unique. If you still want access to all your normal weapon skills, they’d probably just become 1-shot skills like “so many other skills in the game”. Or outright removed / replaced. Because they’re fairly bad skills and in your opinion beyond help.

Well when you take the two conversations entirely out of context, yeah I can see that, however upon exercising the particle of common sense necessary to not do that, the reasoning is completely obvious.

The two skillsets were in literally opposite states of each other prior to this patch. And it is therefore only sensible to not treat them the same.

Conjures issues were (are) mechanical, their function prevents the use of 4/5ths of the elementalists skill bar, does not activate with the majority of elementalist traits, and is contrary to the intended function of the class mechanic. And there is no amount of balance changes that are going to fix that.

Spirit weapons were merely imbalanced, while their mechanics was perfectly sound. In fact more than sound, guardians have an always present class mechanic, and a copious amount of utility and weapon skills, which scale with the amount of allies nearby. And those skills are incredibly weakened in soloist content with no allies to apply to. Spirit weapons filled an incredibly important role as sub-in allies so that all those group-centric skills could see use in more content.

Electro.4173:

“Conjured weapons are garbage, they need to be buffed!”

“You buffed Conjured weapons? They’re useless, why would you waste time buffing useless things?”

The circle of life I guess.

Nice try, completely uninformed and fallacious, but nice try.

More accurately

Players: “Conjures both defy and deny us our class mechanic, which we have no innate defense or survivability without, to the point that they will never be usable, except as situational cheese.”

ANet: “Lol, we buffed ’em again.”

The way ANet treats these skills is just, it’s an exercise in insanity. It’s like having a car that doesn’t roll because the wheels are square, and when you take it to the mechanic, he fixes the problem by making the square wheels bigger, and bigger, each time he claims he is going to fix the problem.

Electro.4173:

I’m not sure I understand your argument. Spirit weapons haven’t been unique for a long time. Heck, they arguably were never particularly unique. Sure, when the game launched they were undamageable, so they had at least one unique aspect to them, but they were still just summoned AI. Half the classes in the game use summons in some form or another.

The only thing really unique about them was “flavor”, the fact that they were sentient weapons which none of the other summons are. And that aspect is still there in their new incarnation as well. Its still the Guardian summoning sentient weapons of spirit energy into the world, they just fly out and do a single attack now instead of following the Guardian around for a bit.

If you just want to argue that you liked the way spirit weapons were, then fine. I did too. I still considered spirit weapons my “primary” build on my Guardian despite the fact that they were pretty bad. I mean, I never stick to one single build on any character, but I always have one that I like the most / go back to the most when I’m not flipping around for variety, and for my Guardian that was spirit weapons.

But to argue they were anything particularly unique or that they’ve made any big change towards making classes “generic” doesn’t really ring true. Spirit Weapons were only unique to Guardian specifically, because they don’t have any other summon skills. But if you’re only talking with regards to Guardian in a vacuum, then the new SW are also unique to Guardian. No other Guardian skills are ammo-based, long-range attacks with varying effects (one offense, one defense, one healing, one disruption / CC).

They were one of only two classes, out of nine, to have true blue summon skills.

The remainders all have hang ons like not being able to move, or attack, or even actively participate in combat in some cases. I don’t know what your bar for unique is or what you expect but that rates pretty high up on mine, especially in the context of an enclosed system like a game engine.

And as for not making them generic. What? They are now mechanically exactly the same as the following:
Deceptions
Mantras
Meditations
Physical Skills
Shouts
Wells
Consecrations
Most Legend skills
Rage skills
Elixirs
Gadgets
Gyros
Most Tool Belt skills
Pet skills
Survival skills
Stolen skills
Tricks
Arcane skills
Glamours
and Spectral skills

Those are all the utility skills in the game that operate on: You activate them, they fill a casting bar, and then you get an effect, without any other mechanics. And that’s not even going over the weapon skills, the majority of which would qualify. The number of skills in this game that are differentiated solely by a flavorful tagline, which only exists in reference to a single trait that effects them, is overwhelming, and frankly, a little bit ridiculous.

Meanwhile, real minion skills, were at a whopping total of nine, not sets, just skills. And now they’re down to five.

Lokki.1092:

Blood.5607:

zealex.9410:

Because spirit weapons were legit garbage maybe?

^ +1 to this. They are trash to begin with.

Seriously, spirit weapons were barely useful and the number one requested utility line to update. The idea that someone is complaining that they are now a bit more useful…

Actually it’s not surprising at all.

I don’t even… where do people like you come from?

There isn’t a single word anywhere claiming they were “good” or balanced.

The very simple and clear point of the post, that you completely and inexplicably missed, is that, first they were enjoyable and unique, and second, all evidence points to it being possible that they could have been balanced without removing the original functionality that made them unique and enjoyable.

Not even a single mention of their own state of balance as an issue, at all, anywhere, anywhere at all. As in not mentioned anywhere. Nada. Nunca.

Is it clear enough for you to understand now?

Haishao.6851:

Conncept.7638:

Haishao.6851:

Because people think balance is the most important thing.

I too think balance is of utmost importance, but pets exactly like the spirit weapons are balanced on another class, there is no reason they couldn’t balanced on the guardian.

There’s no balance until everything are the same.

You’ve… completely contradicted yourself. Now only one class has multiple pets from utility skills with an active ability, who directly participate in combat. By your logic the game would be closer to balance with the guardian having pets, as now there is a class more unlike any other than it was before.

did absolutely nothing.

Haishao.6851:

Because people think balance is the most important thing.

I too think balance is of utmost importance, but pets exactly like the spirit weapons are balanced on another class, there is no reason they couldn’t balanced on the guardian.

As per the title, yet another set of skills this patch, which previously had a unique functionality, are now unique in name alone. Why does ANet do this?

I loved spirit weapons the way they were, I loved having a summoner build on my guardian, it’s something not every class gets and now one fewer has it, for no good reason.

And what precedent does this set? And how low a bar for skill design?

If the changes from conjures don’t work out, are we going to see a patch in a few months where they too are changed to skills that you activate on a CD with no unique mechanic to their name? Are traps in danger of being genericized if players don’t pick them up more often? What else is in danger of being made vanilla just so it is easier for the developers to deal with?

Please stop doing this ANet, please retain the unique properties of our skills when balancing and redesigning and stop removing class content.

Ephemiel.5694:

Balthazar is a GOD. Do you really think it would be easier to handle him WITH every Elder Dragon’s powers than just trying to handle the Dragons themselves?

Two of his brothers had their kitten handed to them and their godhood stolen, at the height of their power, by a guardcaptain, and someone so unremarkable and innocuous there is no record of him existing prior to his ascent.

zealex.9410:

Ok if we kill another dragon the magic gets released and rip tyria. But balth will absorb said magic so why is it bad?

You know, it isn’t really clear.

In the fight where you are trying to stop Balthazar from sucking primordus dry, Taimi indicates that what Balthazar is doing would kill Primordus, which is exactly what we do not want at this point. And in the end we basically stop Balthazar from taking the last little bit necessary to kill Primordus, and Primordus slithers off and back to sleep.

And here, is where it isn’t clear what the heck our character is doing.

The reason we don’t want Primordus to die, is that the resulting release of magic would destroy the world, but Balthazar absorbed the magic, preventing said cataclysmic release. And since that was exactly what Balthazar planned from the beginning, we can assume that would have happened just the same if we hadn’t prevented Primordus’ death. So we basically just saved an elder dragon, for absolutely no reason.

And finally, while Balthazar certainly isn’t a good guy, he’s not actively trying to destroy us or the world so far as we know, he just doesn’t give a crap about mortal life. For all we know, we could just stay out of his way, let him kill all the dragons, and nothing bad would happen, or at the very least the world would survive him, while it won’t survive the dragons. Our character is acting based on giant unfounded assumptions about Balthazars motivations.

Furthermore, even if Balthazars intentions are to destroy the world, a small group of largely unremarkable shmucks have killed and/or imprisoned three different Gods before him. Killing just two of the dragons took the largest and most advanced military alliance in the history of the world, and was still only accomplished at a massive cost of lives.

Even with the power of several dragons absorbed, Balthazar would be significantly easier to deal with than the Dragons themselves. Let him kill/absorb the dragons then we can ship him off to be Dhuums roommate in the underworld if we need to.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Cloud Windfoot Omega.7485:

they should just bite the bullet and let us dye weapons

They’d have to entirely redo the parts of the game that cover weapons to do that, recolor all the existing ones. And, it would add to the ongoing maintenance, so slow down production of weapon skins

One reason we get a full new set of weapons every 6-8 weeks versus 9 months between armor sets is that they are simpler to create.

That is incorrect, dye channels are handled by a mapping system, all it would require is that someone go through each existing weapon and draw out a new set of maps for each. That would be time consuming, but the creation of maps for new sculpts is quite intuitive, and would be a hundred times easier than they are for armor anyway, it would add virtually no development time at all.

The hard part would actually have nothing to do with the artistic pipeline for weapons, but would be the creation of the back end systems necessary to support the new functionality.

Still worth it in my opinion, 90% of the end game content rewards in this game are solely cosmetic, you cannot cheap out on such an important system.

Have you checked out the tormented weapons? They have a glowy magic effect to them but the actual body of the weapon is jet black.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tormented_Staff_Skin

Cloud Windfoot Omega.7485:

they should just bite the bullet and let us dye weapons

Agreed a thousand times over, they never should have launched without weapons and back items being dyable in the first place. Not the players fault the developers lacked the foresight to see such an incredibly obvious hole in such an important game system. Just put in the bloody work and give us weapon dyes already!

What about: The projectile must target within 900 range, but will track its target to a much greater range (1500-1800 maybe?), and gives might to the caster for every 350 range it travels.

You are now rewarded for people running away from the projectile. Alternatively you could also make it apply a condition that scales per distance traveled, but ANet seems to be very against giving the base guardian any condition beyond the justice passive effect, still have no idea why, our condition builds royally suck.

phokus.8934:

Rikimaru.7890:

phokus.8934:

They’re completely different from the original tomes. How about you actually read into them first before making such silly posts?

You are missing the point, I know they are different. What I mean is that the new elite spec is not exactly introducing a new feature for the Guardian, but rather bringing back an old feture that was removed from them.

You’re clearly missing the whole point because they’re only back in name and not by functionality.

You summon them, they give you five new weapon skills for a period of time, sounds like the exact same mechanic moved to a different spot on the skillbar to me.

If PvP is your main draw to a game, I’d recommend finding a PvP game, not a PvE game with a PvP gamemode, which pretty much rules out the entire MMO genre. And I’m not going to lie, among MMOs, I find GW2 particularly bad in this area- classes and individual mechanics may be balanced for PvP, but the overall system was clearly made for PvE, and that’s true of any MMO but this one more than most.

A couple good ones I’ve found lately are Battlerite, Gigantic, and For Honor. If you’re looking for expansive build strategy similar to GW1, Shardbound is a new TBS game that fills that niche, but I know turn based games aren’t for everyone.

Battlerite is more MoBA and RTS like, for honor is a new unique take on a traditional fighter game. But I particularly recommend Gigantic, has a very deep build system, a unique win condition that rewards tactical play, and a reasonable but rewarding amount of twitch-based gameplay like dodging and aiming. It’s also third person perspective similar to most MMOs, and has an absolutely gorgeous art style. It’s by far the best PvP game I’ve played in years.

I plan on making just such a build, if/when I pick up PoF, but I’ll probably stick with the scepter as my main hand.

Would love to see this, and the only thing I can think of with the tunneling tool would be the removed spider mount, which I would assume to have a climbing ability that would work perfectly with the tunneling tool, a shame it was removed as the tunneling tool is my personal favorite of the cosmetic mounts.

Pretty much everyone warned ANet about this when they started making maps entirely filled with group content.

I feel sorry for all the future players that are going to feel like they were suckered in to buying HoT when they find it’s 99% group content with no groups running it.

ANet stated in the previews for HoT that elite specs were to be equal in power to the base classes, intended to solely provide variety of play, and not to invalidate any base game content by making it significantly easier to complete than it was with the base classes.

This was not only patently false, but was false to such an extreme degree that no argument could be made that it was done by accident, there is no way anyone could screw up that bad, especially a bunch of paid professionals.

And now almost two years later, the elite specs are STILL sizable increases in power compared to the base specs, only having been reigned in compared to each other, never to the base classes or the base game content. They still dominate PvP, raids, and nullify a massive amount of the base games PvE encounters.

So why exactly should players believe the developers claim that the PoF elite specs won’t result in powercreep? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Balthazar didn’t reveal himself, we ripped his disguise off by force.

Arnox.5128:

Conncept.7638:

A suite of new and revamped features, intended to fulfill the original design intents of the games combat system.

• Get rid of dodge. Yes, you read that correctly, trust me, keep reading, I am not suggesting the removal of active defense.

snip

Hm… This is actually a pretty interesting way of doing things. More variety in the combat is great so I think this could really work.

HOWEVER, this may require a complete rewrite of the AI, combat, and netcode.

Not as much as you’d think.

Believe it or not, there is not a single AI string that reacts to dodge in the entire game, it is as removed from the AI system as it is from the stat system, and while there are attacks that ignore blocks and non-dodge evasion, nothing ignores dodge, it is a true blue catch all skill, the game pretty much treats it like it isn’t even there.

As for combat, your average mob would be relatively the same, it would mainly affect bosses and mobs from large group meta events who deal a lot more damage to offset how may players they face, because those attacks would frequently use up the entire endurance bar with one skill. But even that wouldn’t be too extreme, since there is no damage spillover, it would mostly function the same as now, just with a slightly smaller uptime and a harsher punishment for poor placement and poor use of your defense skills, since as a squishy in a meta event your first priority should be staying away from the mobs in the first place.

Plus I failed to say so, but the idea behind there being a difference between toughness and agility, is that agility skills would have higher baseline but scale less, the principle being that dodge and evasion skills would be more for backline characters who can drop out of combat and have more space to move, while block and parry and shield skills would scale much more from toughness, and be more for frontliners who want to stay in combat and don’t have as much room avoid attacks by strafing and placement. Of course there would be exceptions like the thief class.

Nonetheless, you’re probably right and the games existing encounters would require some form of a repass.

A suite of new and revamped features, intended to fulfill the original design intents of the games combat system.

• Get rid of dodge. Yes, you read that correctly, trust me, keep reading, I am not suggesting the removal of active defense.
• Add in a new stat called Agility
• Add in a new “defense” skill slot to replace dodge, with three selections per class and one additional per specialization, basically just like the healing and elite skill slots. Like dodge, this skill would have no cooldown. Your defense skill slot would scale with either toughness or agility, the general idea being that damage mitigation skills (blocks, parries, shields) would scale from toughness, while damage avoidance skills (dodges, evasion) would scale from agility.
• The endurance bar still exists but functions differently, when you use your defensive skill, any damage absorbed will take points from your endurance bar. The amount taken is reduced by your stat investment into whichever stat your defensive skill scales from. If you use the last of your endurance bar, the remaining damage does not spill over, everything is still blocked for the duration of the skill, but your defense slot skill will go on a significant cooldown while your endurance regenerates. The endurance bar would also begin to regenerate passively after eight seconds of not using the defense slot skill.
• Defensive skills found in your utilties or weapons would also now scale from either agility or toughness, and would take endurance points by absorbing damage, however they would, on average, scale significantly higher than the slotted skill to offset that they have a cooldown for their use.

The initial idea behind the game was that everyone be a self sustaining trinity to a small degree, but that’s never been true for the tank third of that trinity, everyone has a defense skill, but speccing into any defense stats is worthless in nearly all content as it has no effect on that global defense skill, dodge, and all other defense skills are worthless compared to it. Even raids have slowly moved towards soft tanks instead of true tanks in nearly all encounters.

Dodge trivializes the majority of the games stats, homogenizes every encounter to the same skill check, and provides so little advanced play that high tier “combat” is just the same old boss fights with mini-games, timers, and higher HP pools tacked on. There is very little strategy to team comp, no advanced combat tactics, and very shallow depth of play. Dodge cannot be this untouchable “counterspell” catch-all solution anymore, it not only has no build or play variance itself, but nullifies very many play options from the build system that would otherwise be viable and compelling choices.

Zaxares.5419:

It’s weird that Asura even HAVE hair. They evolved as a subterranean race, and subterranean races generally do not need hair as insulation because a) geothermal heat keeps the underground warm to hot, and b) without inclement weather, there’s no rain or snow to pose a potential threat to body temperature.

What? Moles. Voles. Gophers. Prairie Dogs. Woodchucks. Asura are not lizards or bugs, they are mammals as stated by a developer, and nearly all subterranean mammals have hair.

Venatorn.7619:

While I understand what you are saying, Elite specs are supposed to be better than the base class (and most are, with a few build exceptions), but the issue is there is only 1 for each class. Later, when we have 2+ elite specs to choose from it will be much better because they will be situational. It will go from a guardian always taking dragon hunter, to taking Dragon hunter when a ranged pressure/trap aoe is needed, or taking Cleric (just throwing a name out) when they need to heal.
As far as weapons, I will miss not being able to use a great sword on my necro when not taking reaper, but a lot of weapons you really can’t (or wouldn’t want to) use without their corisponding traits anyways.

Incorrect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG5oUKqbIVM
Streamer/commentator/reporter Angryjoe directly asks in the above interview if specializations are supposed to be a step up in power over the base classes, and the developer states no, with no hangups, hesitation, ifs, ands, or buts. And it is far from the only place the developers stated so.