Guild Wars 2

Celestial stats aren’t all that strong on their own, and do not fit within the current metagame at the moment.

There are two ways I can see Celestial gear becoming viable: through traits, or through runes.

I would vote to make a rune series, something simple and baseline that could help promote these things. Hypothetically:

“Superior Rune of the Horizon”
1: +8 To all stats.
2: If all of your base attributes are equal to each other, +5% Damage and Condition Damage.
3: +12 to all stats.
4: If all of your base attributes are equal to each other, +5% Condition and Boon Duration
5: +16 to all stats.
6: If all of your base attributes are equal to each other, +5% Outgoing Healing, 5% Revival Speed.

sPvP I’m sure it’s alright, but just alright. You’d be better off with Staff and Axe/Wh.

Staff has means of keeping condis off of you and on your opponent, Axe has a boon-corrupt, and Warhorn for interrupts and speed-boosts.

You’d have to pass some of that up for greatsword. The cripple and blind is nice though.

I’m starting to see some weird numbers on how Reaper is functioning as opposed to the whole purpose and context of the specialization. Reaper should be a mix of Power, and Defenses. Being a looming force of destruction.

I’d say close to the next Expansion or next update, I’d like to see Reaper get its condition output shifted to the Curses and Death Magic Specs, while the Power for Reaper’s Shroud is increased to compensate.

Deathly Chill shouldn’t be giving bleeds, but perhaps it could be a %damage increase vs chilled foes?

Also, if the GS and Shroud interaction isn’t up to par, then alternatively I suggest have Gravedigger (GS2) reduce cooldown of Shroud Skills on crit.

Reaper’s Shroud 4 (soul spiral) should just deal raw damage, maybe apply vulnerability instead of poison, but have its base damage increased.

lLobo.7960:

CrimsonRipper.5087:

[…] in all honesty Condi Engineers likely don’t have all that much fun jumping between 5 weapons (25 different skills), to use barely half of them, and that’s before managing tool belt skills. […]

Do not assume that.
If you look on topics of why people like playing engi, the number of skills is a common one.

Removing or merging kits from engi would destroy great part of its appeal to some people.

Bombs and nades are more hybrid than just power or condi sets. And they work fine as they are, as you can trait for the side you want or use the hybrid approach.

I can respect that, my issue with it (same goes for other professions) is that some skills are widely underutilized because they’re laughably weak in comparison.

What is the Engineer’s Purity of Purpose?

The Engineer is a tinkerer, a profession that should be almost as much of the epitome of versatility in combat as an Elementalist is for the Light Armors, and as Revenant is for Heavy Armor.

However, a vast majority of utility skills aren’t even considered for the following reasons, and if they were, players quickly (I hope) find out that those skills are trash:

1. Low Damage/Effectiveness
2. Niche Utility
3. Another skill (often on a weapon kit) does what it’s supposed to be doing better.

Overhaul It: An Immodest Proposition

1. Weapon/Device Kits
Instead of leaving Engineers with 1 Weapon set, let’s do something interesting: a new profession mechanic.

Make Device/Weapon Kits the Engineer’s second weapon, effectively forcing Engineers to consider a kit option before going into combat. Yes it would be a rather disruptive nerf to their builds, but in all honesty Condi Engineers likely don’t have all that much fun jumping between 5 weapons (25 different skills), to use barely half of them, and that’s before managing tool belt skills.

2. Skill Culling: Rolling Weapons Into One
To summarize: for Power Engineers, their bread and butter damage is from the Bomb Kit auto-attack. The rest of that kit has Condi-based skills.

Grenade Kit is in a similar position, a mix of burst damage and conditions. Although the whole kit isn’t used for Power IIRC, just the Toolbelt Skill.

The Solution I have in mind is to give better clarity for what weapons serve which purpose. While at the same time combining the skills of other kits to eliminate redundancy.

A “Power” Kit:
Combine Grenade Kit with Bomb Kit into Explosives Kit

A “Conditions” Kit:
Combine Flamethrower with Elixir-Gun

1. Remove Airblast, add Fumigate, venting hazardous smoke and excess fuel to deal stacking poison damage.

2. Remove Flame Blast in favor of a new version of Glob Shot, fire a bouncing tar substance, crippling enemies, and burning enemies already on fire. (Taking Air Blast Functionality and adding it to this).

A “Healing/Support” Kit:
Combine Med-kit with Elixir Gun, still provides “Elixir” Skills for synergy with HGH.

A “Control” Kit:
Tool Kit serves this perfectly, re-buffing turrets with the condition that having the Tool Kit on hand to maintain them is imperative. I think adding a daze to the Crowbar skill can help add more control aspects to the kit.

TexZero.7910:

CrimsonRipper.5087:

TexZero.7910:

CrimsonRipper.5087:

TexZero.7910:

Feanor.2358:

TexZero.7910:

CrimsonRipper.5087:

I’d much rather Might and Fury be the go-to damage increasing boons, and things that give +10% damage and similar abilities removed completely.

Again though this isn’t needed. You only have to cap how high damage modifiers can go.

If its 10% from food and 10% from any other status/non-boon source, then it doesn’t matter if every class has 10% damage modifiers. People will take whatever works best for them/their group.

A cap like this is bad design. It’s counter-intuitive and obscure – it says X gives you 10% more damage but it actually doesn’t because Y already gave it to you. Not to mention introducing such modifier pooling would require rebalancing pretty much the whole game.

Really it is now is it ?

So our entire boon system is somehow counter-intuitive ? Because guess what, its the same stuff different name working the same way.

If you’re thinking that making a BOON that just gives +% damage you are an idiot. Might is the flat power increase. We don’t need a second one that does the same thing.

….and if you could read, you’d notice that’s not at all what i said. We currently have status’ that give +% damage(GoTL). All you have to do is make those ubiquitous and make them function the exact same way boons do now. Does it matter who gives you might, prot or quickness ? No. They are all capped. Guess what you do when you add a new % damage modifying status. You do the smart thing and put them all into a status category called damage amplification that caps at whatever number you want to assign (likely 10% given the state of GoTL).

Novel concept….

That’s not intuitive for the player at all though. You’re just telling people that “oh this is a massive power boost, but in secret, either through the tooltip on the buff itself or in the trait, it doesn’t stack with any other increases like it. Or there’s a hard cap.” At that point you might as well just make it into a new boon for the sake of clarity. Effectively Might 2.0 when the game doesn’t need it.

Just Nerf Grace of the Land, and make it stack might, competing with Phalanx Strength. If a new “healing” profession comes out people are still going to bring druid for the most part because of the simple fact their druids are already geared appropriately.

How can you even remotely call this not intuitive ?

How is might from guardian different from warrior or ele or any other class ?

Now then when we get to the point where there’s more global damage amplification status’ they should be treated exactly like we treat boons. It doesn’t matter who applies it they have a cap of whatever the developers decide it goes to. You know what else happens with boons when you apply more than the max stacks right ? If you don’t please refer to the wiki as i’m really tired trying to explain the obvious to the oblivious.

People know when might stacks reach the top. 25.

People would have far more difficulty understanding if you put a hard cap on buffs that grant %Damage that aren’t those simplified boons.

Druid: Grace of the Land, Frost Spirit Aura, Glyph of Empowerment
Tempest: Harmonious Conduit
Daredevil: Bounding Dodger
Dragon Hunter: Big Game Hunter
Berzerker: Always Angry, Bloody Roar

Superior Rune of the Scholar (6)
Seaweed Salad

I’m sure I’m missing quite a few of those %Damage boosts.

Let’s say we add a healing profession, or another elite specialization that provides a buff similar to grace of the land. If left alone as is: raids would take both the druid, and the new buff, creating power creep.

If changed to what you’re suggesting: only one buff at a time, or a % cap on that, then how would the game communicate that fact to the player? A tooltip on the buff/trait? It would not be elegant. Would it be reclassified as a boon? Also a terrible idea. It would effectively be Might 2.0, a completely redundant and unnecessary concept. It would also cause bloat on tooltips, not necessarily a huge problem, but something I’d rather not see all things considered.

Which is why nerfing Grace of the Land into a might-stacking mechanic would both ratchet down the power creep and provide alternatives for raid compositions.

Ozzrel.9825:

The biggest issue with guardian healing is druid. Guardians can heal just fine, but there really is no reason to take anything other than druid, ever.
Grace of the land has to go, or it needs to be made a non-unique buff available to all healers. I’m in favor of the 1st option.

I’d nerf it into just providing might stacks. This means future healing builds can be considered as an alternative to druid.

Alongside this, normalize might generating abilities to compete well with Phalanx Strength so PS Warriors aren’t locked solely as PS/Condi-PS or Pure Condi Berzerker in their builds.

All of Revenant Specs need to be able to stand on their own so that the Rev can do what it is meant to: play multiple roles, one role being the “main role” and another being an “off role”.

The spec lines seem to me at first glance to function like this:

Corruption: Focus on Mallyx, condition damage, with options to provide defenses against incoming conditions.

Retribution: Focus on Jallis, personal defenses and control.

Salvation: Focus on Ventari, healing, boons, and soft control.

Invocation: No Focus, instead based around changing legends consistently. Provides a mix of damage, control, and situational effects.

Devastation: Focus on Shiro, damage, and small splashes of survivability.

Herald: Glint’s specialization, a focus on support and boons.

So why the hell would you buff Jalis for damage? It’s a bandaid fix for much larger problems: the Legends can’t stand on their own reasonably even with their own trees.

We witnessed a patch where the damage of Jalis, the defensive legend, was buffed when there were two Legends that have visual and mechanical designs implying physical/condition based damage builds.

Ideally: a player should be building Revenant like this:

“I want to play as a damage dealer primarily, but my party/raid/squad needs off healing. So, I’m going to use the Shiro and Ventari Legends, as well as use Sword/Axe and Staff as my weapons. I will specialize in Devastation, Salvation, and Likely Invocation to support this. Although I might forego Salvation in favor of traits from other specializations based on the situation.”

Suggested Changes for Legends and Associated Specializations

Shiro/Devastation

Enchanted Daggers
1. Now an upkeep skill, similar to Impossible Odds. Could be a main source of damage regarding this Legend.
2. A trait could be made to proc singular, automatic daggers to deal extra damage.
3. Another trait could be made to increase the healing of daggers. Shares a tier with the previously mentioned trait.

Phase Traversal
1. The Unblockable Attacks buff also deal increased damage on the next 2 hits.
2. The Malicious Reprisal Trait grants this same buff.

Impossible Odds
1. Either baseline or Traited to have impossible odds have a pulsing condition cleanse.
2. Traited to provide self Alacrity on Critical Hits? Likely same tier as above trait.

Malyx/Corruption

Torment
Traits supporting torment allow it to do increased damage ticks per unique condition on foes.

Venom Enhancement
Provides stacks of poison equal to the number of stacks of Torment applies. Could also be changed to proc randomly when torment is applied for balance purposes if this change is introduced.

Banish Enchantment
For PVE, more enemies should apply boons to themselves/allies. A minor, stealth buff that encourages more build options and calling in a need for boon-strip/corruption. Can also buff Necromancers too.

TexZero.7910:

CrimsonRipper.5087:

TexZero.7910:

Feanor.2358:

TexZero.7910:

CrimsonRipper.5087:

I’d much rather Might and Fury be the go-to damage increasing boons, and things that give +10% damage and similar abilities removed completely.

Again though this isn’t needed. You only have to cap how high damage modifiers can go.

If its 10% from food and 10% from any other status/non-boon source, then it doesn’t matter if every class has 10% damage modifiers. People will take whatever works best for them/their group.

A cap like this is bad design. It’s counter-intuitive and obscure – it says X gives you 10% more damage but it actually doesn’t because Y already gave it to you. Not to mention introducing such modifier pooling would require rebalancing pretty much the whole game.

Really it is now is it ?

So our entire boon system is somehow counter-intuitive ? Because guess what, its the same stuff different name working the same way.

If you’re thinking that making a BOON that just gives +% damage you are an idiot. Might is the flat power increase. We don’t need a second one that does the same thing.

….and if you could read, you’d notice that’s not at all what i said. We currently have status’ that give +% damage(GoTL). All you have to do is make those ubiquitous and make them function the exact same way boons do now. Does it matter who gives you might, prot or quickness ? No. They are all capped. Guess what you do when you add a new % damage modifying status. You do the smart thing and put them all into a status category called damage amplification that caps at whatever number you want to assign (likely 10% given the state of GoTL).

Novel concept….

That’s not intuitive for the player at all though. You’re just telling people that “oh this is a massive power boost, but in secret, either through the tooltip on the buff itself or in the trait, it doesn’t stack with any other increases like it. Or there’s a hard cap.” At that point you might as well just make it into a new boon for the sake of clarity. Effectively Might 2.0 when the game doesn’t need it.

Just Nerf Grace of the Land, and make it stack might, competing with Phalanx Strength. If a new “healing” profession comes out people are still going to bring druid for the most part because of the simple fact their druids are already geared appropriately.

TexZero.7910:

Feanor.2358:

TexZero.7910:

CrimsonRipper.5087:

I’d much rather Might and Fury be the go-to damage increasing boons, and things that give +10% damage and similar abilities removed completely.

Again though this isn’t needed. You only have to cap how high damage modifiers can go.

If its 10% from food and 10% from any other status/non-boon source, then it doesn’t matter if every class has 10% damage modifiers. People will take whatever works best for them/their group.

A cap like this is bad design. It’s counter-intuitive and obscure – it says X gives you 10% more damage but it actually doesn’t because Y already gave it to you. Not to mention introducing such modifier pooling would require rebalancing pretty much the whole game.

Really it is now is it ?

So our entire boon system is somehow counter-intuitive ? Because guess what, its the same stuff different name working the same way.

If you’re thinking that making a BOON that just gives +% damage you are an idiot. Might is the flat power increase. We don’t need a second one that does the same thing.

CptAurellian.9537:

To me, it feels as if you miss the point of CrimsonRipper’s 3). I don’t think it’s about damage reduction abilities (like protection, distort etc.), but about reducing or eliminating damage increasing modifiers like GotL, Scholar runes and all that stuff. That would probably be a worthy endeavour, but I doubt ANet will ever do it.

As to the uniqueness argument – I agree, that one should be buried, never to be resurrected.

Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. For example: the Daredevil has 3 traits that give him nearly 30% bonus damage dealt.

Everyone will take Druid because Grace of the land gives 10% bonus damage. On top of Glyph of Empowerment, which is another 10%. THEN Frost Spirit, which gives +10% damage procs as well! On top of Scholar Runes and Seaweed Salad, both giving ANOTHER 10% each for individual players too.

If you add another specialization with that sort of power, guess what? Raids will take BOTH the Druid and the new class. Then everything will have to be balanced around that fact.

I’d much rather Might and Fury be the go-to damage increasing boons, and things that give +10% damage and similar abilities removed completely.

I really find it odd that Warrior is the only class that has no limitation on might-stacking aside from critical hit, and how they generate might to begin with.

I suggest the future approach to profession balance and elite specializations would involve the following:

1. Homogeny amongst similar effects/traits: Phalanx Strength, Shared Empowerment, Empowering Might.

2. Change Grace of the Land to grant Might Stacks, perhaps 3. A similar ability: HGH for engineers, should produce similar results.

3. Reduction/removal of %Damage traits. Increase the baseline power of various profession skills to compensate. Then consider scaling of various abilities.

4. For Elite Specializations: have them supplement or expand upon roles various professions don’t normally cover or have trouble covering. They should be designed with niche roles in mind. Scrapper is somewhat a great example of this: Great in WvW/sPvP, not as strong in Raiding/PvE

zoomborg.9462:

As things stand right now there is no reason to use anything but chronotank. Its way too efficient atm. Ofc u can tank with anything but it’s a rare sight these days.
Two ways to change it are :
1) Make tanking braindead so classes can do full rotations while tanking without needing to dodge or kite or anything.
2) Increase chrono dps by a lot so it actually loses dps potential when tanking.

Both options are terribad tbh. Feels like we hit a wall….

Chrono DPS IMO is probably really good considering it’s a class designed around continuum shift and split. It’s just used for tanking because it’s super effective at it.

Early on it was Necromancer that was the tank, being able to summon minions and gain all the toughness plus 2 health bars made them really strong at the job. Plus condition damage/viper stats made them good for dps on top of that.

Guardians have almost always been damage. Every class since launch has effectively been damage.

A-Net ripped up the Holy Trinity of MMOs, but forgot to properly implement their new philosophy into it.

Guardian is not going to tank/support/condi/heal because elite specs like Chronomancer and Druid do what any possible build does except better in every way.

Want to tank? Chronomancer. They get perma-evades, dodges, blocks, and the works. Then they get to rewind and do it all over again with minimal upkeep.

Want to heal? Druid. Through the mere act of existing, they can bring upwards to a 30% damage boost to the entire raid. The only time another kind of healer is brought in is to handle a single mechanic to make the druid’s life easier.

Even if you make those changes. No one will take a guardian over a Druid.

Mostly because of these two skills right here:

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20% damage boost from that alone almost merely from existing. One of them being raid-wide.

You want healer guardian to be a thing? We need to have the rest of them normalized first.

Sure, A-Net could do the dumbest thing ever and give Guardian healer something similar, but guess what? That creates a new problem of creating a system where half the raid might be taking up these weird %damage boosting classes that would cause the whole game balance to disappear entirely.

Poutanaki.6215:

Hello everyone!
What are the healing classes in GW2? Which is the best/worst? What are the perks of each healing class?

As many people have said: Pick ranger and get the Druid Elite Specialization. Especially for raiding.

Elementalist can off heal and do decent damage.

Revenant is useful for precisely one fight in Wing 4 for the most part.

It’s the druid’s Grace of the Land. Literally the only reason aside from its decent burst healing that makes it so that no other healing spec could be considered/experimented on.

I still think GotL needs to be nerfed into just stacking more might, akin to the engineer’s HGH trait, or like Phalanx Strength. Or else there will be 0 other healing builds considered.

I’d much rather make the “easy” to play dps classes more complex to play. Likely by nerfing the damage of say: Bomb 1, but at the same time buffing the damage of the dodge-roll bomb, because that thing is on a far-longer cooldown, but is not even considered all that good, but is the best choice for power dps.

Might be a concern of having those two stack.

I don’t like your suggestions for Revenant, self-inflicted conditions should be a Necromancer thing only.

Sublimatio.6981:

CrimsonRipper.5087:

2. Seaweed Salad. No.
Sorry, call me a whiny casual, but constantly jittering around in one spot for massive damage boosts is silly.

You are a whiny casual. Constant movement is another layer of difficulty applied to the combat and the reward is worth it for making you focus more on hand movements

Does it really? Rapidly dancing from side to side is only a layer of complexity that only occurs in a couple of phases of Matthias. Otherwise it’s almost 0 effort and honestly a hassle for players.

I don’t like it, and from the initial design I can only safely imagine this being useful for mobile fights. If you don’t get rid of it then implement an internal cooldown or something that prevents the buff from being active. Or perhaps change it to +10% damage against moving targets. I would find that more situationally interesting.

Guardian:

1. Honor
Grandmaster Traits: They all seem really attractive in their own rights, but I feel like there’s a conflict of interests with the Writ of Persistence and the Force of Will traits. Both are effective for support. Yet Writ of Persistence is also useful for damage.

Force of Will to me should be a decent go-to choice for healing, and Writ of Persistence could perhaps grant increased boon duration while standing in symbols, moving it off of the Staff cooldown, freeing up weapon usage for staff.

2. Spirit Weapons
Some QoL improvements are needed, same as necro minions. They could be an excellent supplement to a possible condition Guardian.

3. Staff
Needs love. Badly.
Staff 2 recharge reduced, Staff 1 could add healing if traited perhaps (Altering Honorable Staff). Staff 3 is fine too.

4. “Receive the Light”
Reduce the recharge to 20s?

Thief

1. Venom Share…
At first glance I see why Venom share was only a small blip of a thing. Then sharing venoms became baseline for venoms, but the output isn’t enough amongst 5 people. Somewhat bursty, but not enough.

I think it would be interesting to make Venoms permanent/maintainable buffs for the individual Thief. Not sure how, but keeping your own venoms maintained while granting some extra conditions to allies would make for some interesting gameplay for Condition thieves.

Necromancer

Hard to say, but I’d like to see some changes to the Blood Specialization to help them actually heal raid members easier. Otherwise I’d give the ability to heal and/or grant Aegis and such to allies in an elite spec.

Not sure how to change them without making their condi damage late fight ridiculous (like Sabetha).

Not covering all of the professions, but I will say that the current state of raiding while not horrific, we can always do better.

Alright. I’m gonna put out some ideas here, mostly for elegance of playstyle here.

1. Change Grace of the Land
Have it give stacks of might instead of a flat damage buff. Why? Because otherwise other healing builds will NEVER be viable or considered. Sometimes Tempest gets to Off Heal. One instance where Ventari Healer is okay for one moment in a boss fight. It’s also a pretty huge “reward” for doing the basic task of bringing heals to the raid when they could use it.

2. Seaweed Salad. No.
Sorry, call me a whiny casual, but constantly jittering around in one spot for massive damage boosts is silly.

3. Ventari Healer…
It was a nice thought, but the Alacrity boon on a high-energy skill is just not feasible for their play-style. It also doesn’t help that Glint is the only thing that keeps the profession held together, and why are you buffing Jalis’ damage when Shiro appears to be the one you’d pick for damage?

PROFESSION SUGGESTIONS:

Engineer:
1. Profession Mechanic: Weapon Kits
Tool Belt Skills: GONE

Insane I know, but both meta Engineer builds have almost exclusive Weapon kits. Power Engie, winds up ONLY USING BOMB KIT 1, THEN TOOLBELTS. Condi Engie has to learn to play the piano in order to do the same thing Condi Warrior and Ranger can do with virtually half the effort.

The Change to Weapon Kits would function like a secondary weapon to compliment your weapon choices. Perhaps 2 weapon kits at a time, to allow for similarly complex rotations and combinations without causing the Engineer to develop Carpal Tunnel syndrome to be decent in raiding.

2. Change Weapon Kit Functionalities.
They should be more clear-cut like you’d see in an Elementalist’s abilities:
Bomb: Damage + Control
Grenade: Damage + Condition
Elixir Gun (Yeah, Bet you forgot this existed): Boons/Support
Med Kit: Healing (Which the Mediblaster skill could use a buff perhaps?)
Tool Kit: Turret Maintenance + Damage
Flamethrower: Condition + Control

Not sure about the Mortar Kit, my initial thought was to roll Orbital Strike into it, and give it some flexibility in combat. Or perhaps change it to somehow empower your other kits with Orbital Strikes?

3. Replace Weapon Kits with… Weapon Mods.
I think weapon mods can work similarly to Signets, passive buffs that modify your attacks, and actives that grant temporary effects to help the engineer.

4. Turret Auto Attacks
They need to happen more frequently, and need to be slightly stronger. Ranger Pets are in a better place, as are Necromancer Minions and Mesmer Phantasms, so I don’t see why we can’t do the same for Turrets. Their targeting should prioritize the engineer’s target first, or the closest target second.

Revenant:

1. Shiro
Enchanted Daggers: Change it to be an upkeep skill akin to Jalis Hammers, have them do more damage than hammers, and focus on the first target the revenant attacks. Maybe reduce the healing throughput if it’s too much.

Phase Traversal: Grant a positional damage bonus akin to the Infiltrator Runes. Side or Behind causes your next few attacks to do additional damage.

Impossible Odds: Not really necessary, but the original got rid of hexes and such right? Maybe it could be traited to give resistance?

2. Sword (Main)
Unrelenting Assault: Animation needs to play faster or be changed a bit. It looks cool, but I can’t help but feel it’s not swinging fast enough for what it is.

3. Devastation
Assassin’s Annihilation is pretty much the thing that could be changed in regards to the Enchanted Daggers change above. Perhaps have it spawn additional daggers that strike once, and buff the damage they deal a little.

4. Corruption
Venom Enhancement: Maybe have it apply 2 stacks of poison, or an equal number of Poison stacks you do for torment stacks?

Yearning Empowerment: Torment is a tricky thing, great for mobile fights, but useless everywhere else. Perhaps have it give Torment the ability to do its full damage regardless of movement under certain conditions? Like maybe if it’s also affected by a movement hindering condition?

Bolstered Anguish: This really feels like a skill belonging to Necromancers using Corruption skills. I guess it’s okay for WvW/SPVP, but I think there needs to be something more to it.

5. Ventari/Salvation
If you want to give Ventari as another source of Alacrity, then Natural Harmony is too expensive to do that reasonably as a Chronomancer can for Raiding. They need something more to compete with Druids. Perhaps move it to the healing orbs on Staff? 1 Second per orb?

Let me ask you this:

Who uses Healing Power?

What class benefits most from it? Elementalist? Engineer.

Not really.

Everyone uses either Berserker’s or Assassins stat spreads for PVE, or Soldier stat spread for PVP/WVW.

I’d much rather see GW1’s stat system make a bit of a come-back. Where armor in the old game had stats such as +10 Axe Mastery or Discipline for Warriors:

GW2 could have something like X amount of power could improve a Necromancer’s Signets by a certain degree. (Of course it wouldn’t count stat gains from the signet passives). Something along those lines would make the other stats much more valuable, and actually open up for builds.

GW2 Attributes Enhanced Proposal

The idea behind is to enhance player build options in the game. Right now the most popular attribute spreads on armor and equipment Are Berserkers, Assassins, and Soldiers. With the occasional offshoot of Carrion for budding condition builds.

In the original Guild Wars: professions were restricted to their own armor. Characters were built using a Primary Attribute (something that increases the effectiveness of their core skills), and a series of Secondary Attributes.

In Guild Wars 2: You have Power, Precision, Toughness, and Vitality for the four primary Attributes, and a series of secondary attributes. Three of which show up on armor. Condition Damage, Healing Power, and Ferocity (Critical Damage).

Right now: Damage stats (Power, Precision, and Ferocity) are favored over the others outright. Even after Ferocity was nerfed, it was still favored over all others.

However: the system in place already converts the four attributes into other scores for your character. Which is why it should be possible to push this further for each class. Let’s see what this proposed system could potentially do:

Attributes enhance other utility skill types and aspects of your character’s profession.

Necromancer

• Power: Increases the effects of Signets (Save for attribute modifications).
• Condition Damage: Has a chance of adding “extra stacks” of outgoing conditions.
• Precision: Adds more stacks to damaging conditions from Corruptions.
• Vitality: Increases Well durations and size.
• Toughness: Increases number of Minions summoned per cast.
• Ferocity: Increases Life Force generation from Spectral Skills
• Healing Power: Siphoning Effects and life steal is increased, as well as life force degradation is reduced (?).

Guardian

• Power: Enhances the effectiveness of Spirit Weapon attributes.
• Condition Damage: Reduces the number of hits required to activate Virtue of Justice.
• Precision: Increases the effects of Signets (Save for attribute modifications).
• Vitality: Meditations gain additional “Charges”. These charges are accumulated over time equal to 150% of their recharge.
• Toughness: Increases duration of Consecrations.
• Ferocity: Reduces Virtue Recharge.
• Healing Power: Increases the effectiveness of Shouts.

Elementalist

• Power: Increases Charges on Conjured Weapons, and their duration. Fire attuned weapon skills recharge reduced.
• Condition Damage: Increase condition stacks or duration based on your elemental attunement. Fire: Burning, Water: Chilled, Air: Vulnerability, Earth: Bleeding.
• Precision: Glyphs effectiveness increased. Air attuned weapon skills recharge reduced.
• Vitality: Cantrips increase in power. Water attuned weapon skills recharge reduced.
• Toughness: Increases effectiveness of Signets (save for attribute increases). Earth attuned weapon skills recharge reduced.
• Ferocity: Arcane skills increase in effectiveness, such as increased duration or multiple charges.
• Healing Power: Increases Attunement Aura range.

This is just my thoughts on how to bring back some of the fun the original Guild Wars had into this game. Right now builds aren’t as varied as they CAN be. Yes Guild Wars 2 “dealt away” with the holy trinity by making it so that every class has offensive, defensive, and support options, but so far everything is being built towards doing as much damage as possible.

This attribute enhancement system ideally will provide different ways to do or enable damage as all berserker gear would.

I believe an often touted mantra I’ve heard was “bring the player, not the class.” The inverse is true with the still prevalent Berserker/Assassin problem.

I am still waiting on a solution to this broken as hell launcher. I can’t even install the game now. There is something wrong with your launcher that is preventing it from running properly. It constantly gets stuck at certain screens at one point or another.

I tried running a diagnostic and everything seems fine connection wise, so my only assumption is that your launcher is broken and will not function.

I am currently attempting to run the client on Windows 7 64-bit.

EDIT

Vyr.8569:

Control Panel > Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings
Make sure “Automatically detect settings” is UNchecked
That fixed it for me as well, thx!

I unchecked Run Automatic Configuration Scripts, and that fixed my installer issue. Don’t know what the patch will do after that.

http://puu.sh/bsCOV/24a6c143d3.jpg
http://puu.sh/bsCZR/30120c2d98.jpg

See this? Yeah, this is what happened after several attempts at trying to reinstall the game. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling after my client locked up after downloading the patch. I can’t even reinstall right now.

Stuck at this non-responsive client.

Your patch broke my game. I can’t even reinstall it now. Fix this.

Henge of Denravi, and other bandwagon servers that just pile in and consistently have full server attendance. So coverage does help.

I still call bullkitten though. Arena Net should have disabled server transfers at the time the WvW Tournament was announced to prevent this behavior. Now they just created a scenario where a bunch of people paid to win.

Buy a server transfer, stack it up with sheer numbers readily available 24/7, and place high in the tournament by effectively coasting off of those who actually compete for their server.

Whoever thought this was a good idea should politely resign from their position.

Tanked? What do you mean by Tanked? Are you accusing us of the same? Then if that’s the case it’s unfortunate. But it’s also on the fault of Arena Net allowing the same thing to happen a second time, whoever was supposed to be involved with such decisions should be moved to a position on the team where his or her failings wouldn’t have as much impact.

Alright. Fort Aspenwood representative here.

This is the second week in a row we’ve been grouped against Henge of Denravi. As far as I understand, that server is full of several WvW dedicated guilds that mass transferred over to that realm to gain an edge.

That’s team stacking as far as I see it. You allowed them to effectively buy an advantage over others.

In short, I’m tired of being outnumbered constantly and not being compensated for it. Their success is just simply having a lot of people.

This game format should be dozens of times more sophisticated than that. What’s more despicable is that you decided to continue to allow people to pay for server transfers across worlds. At the time of the announcement, you should have disabled all transfers all together. There is a fairly large imbalance in this situation.

Some remedies to the current obnoxious zerg game-play:

1. More traps. Such as a damage + knock-back mine deployment or something. Imagine forcing enemies off of choke points careening off the ledge. But how would such a thing be countered? Having someone with stability run through? Sure that’s plausible.

2. Outnumbered buff needs to actually be useful.

No. Magic find is not useful. It does not change the fact that you will still be obliterated on the spot by a zerg of 10+ players. Nor does increased experience.

Give us increased health, literally ANYTHING other than fake stat boosts. Yes, it is fair make the stat so that the fewer people are in proximity to one another the more potent it becomes. Just something that lets players fight a zerg.

That’s all I have to say about this.

LastShot.4762:

1. I thought we already know this won’t work due to condition cap, during tri-wurm fight, there are husks basically fits what you describe, and they are more of annoying to the zerkers than making condi build look good.

2. Not necessary bad idea, but you have to take into account the current format:
Bleed and Vigor, if someone with bleed on its AA, then its target can never have vigor.
Burn and Aegis, do I need to explain why burn counter aegis is stupid.
Swiftness and immobilized, which pretty much make immobilization a joke if swiftness counters it.
Stability and Fear, stability are immune to fear, the suggestion will make fear remove stability.

A rework I thought of concerning point 2.

Vigor vs Burning: Rolling with Vigor will extinguish seconds off of burning. Single application of Burning shreds time off of vigor.

Regeneration vs Bleeding and Poison: Poison remains slightly the same, bleeding stacks get removed periodically by regeneration.

Retaliation vs Torment: Torment does a half tick for each time retaliation procs.

A crit damage boon of some sort vs Blind: Blind will make first attack miss, subsequent attacks fall under the glancing penalty from weakness.

Fury VS Confusion: Attacks that would crit during Confusion will cause double confuse damage to the player.

Stability vs Fear: Fear will shred some time from stability on application, Stability Breaks fear.

Swiftness vs Cripple: Cripple gets endurance regeneration debuff? Applications shred time off each other.

Aegis and Immobilization: If target under the effects of aegis, Immobilize will stay longer based on Aegis duration. Guardian Aegis is flat capped at 1.5 seconds or something.

That just leaves Chilled… hmm…

Setz.9675:

Getting really tired about all these posts asking for a zerker nerf, please start using your brain just for once.

melee= high risk = high dps
range = low risk = low dps

3 dps stats = low defense/high risk = high dps
2 defense stats = high defense/low risk = low dps

The very core of the dps system in this game is based on what is written above. I will agree that condition stacking in dungeons is trash and that there shouldn’t be a condition cap in PvE but conditions should NEVER be on par with direct melee damage.

[edit: vulnerability is already highly desired since it can improve direct dmg up to 25% and might stacking causes a serious dmg increase as well, your suggestion to interactive boons is simply a strain on every players cpu]

At no point did I say nerf. I’m talking about making Zerker less necessary to do damage. I’m talking about condition builds. There is a condition damage stat you know. However conditions aren’t as strong in PvE. This is why I proposed that, to make other builds more viable.

How would interactive boons and conditions strain the cpu?

Why shouldn’t Conditions be on par with direct melee damage? If you put forth the effort to lay down many stacks of torment, bleeding, burning, confusion, and poison. You should see them compete with direct melee damage.

adubb.2453:

I don’t mean to be contrary, but no. Across the board, no.

Your suggestion to “reduce” hp and increase toughness would make battles (some of which are already quite lengthy) take longer and would make my numbers, as a player, go down. That’s almost never a good thing

Or, you know, they could make battles last shorter. The Assault Knights for example had huge hp pools from what I could tell. The reason why they took so long was because no conditions could be applied to them for large chunks of the fight.

It could end up making fights end up lasting the same amount of time. Only in this situation your conditions would become more effective. Zerker gear is favored because enemies have high hp pools and low toughness. You’re just doing raw points of big crits without having to worry too much about anything other than raw, flat damage.

People choose that opposed to thinking about making a build that tears away at a boss’ defenses to effectively do the same damage as other players would. Because that’s what’s easier right now. Warriors, Guardians, Mesmers, and sometimes Elementalists are valued over everything else because of this. Warriors especially work well with berserker stats.

Anything to increase build variety. Rather than having to rework traits across the board, the enemy design needs to be looked at first. Then we need to look at how boons and conditions interact with one another.

I’ve played this game on and off up until now. I largely missed out on the Tower of Nightmares arc. However, that’s not why I’m writing to you.

While I am curious to see the changes to berserker gear overall, myself and several other players whom I’ve discussed the topic with agree that this is merely alleviating the symptom of a much larger problem.

First and foremost, the largest part of why people choose that stat-spread over several others, is because it offers raw damage to tear through high-hp enemies.

The first proposal is this: Make Toughness on enemies more effective, and reduce enemy health pools across the board.

Normal Enemy hp at 80 would have the smallest reduction. Veteran Enemy hp would have overall less hp, and so-on.

Enemy Toughness levels could stay the same with making the toughness stat overall more effective. This means that something like Vulnerability, would hopefully become much more desirable, and condition builds could become much more viable with this change.

Secondly, a major, sweeping change to how boons and conditions work and interact with one, another.

While I like the concept of necromancers, guardians, and mesmers being able to manipulate them so freely. I’d like to see it become less binary and more of a tug-of war.

An example of what I’m talking about would be this:

Might = Increases Power Per Stack. Each Stack applied removes a stack of Weakness.
Weakness = Changed to Decrease Power per stack. Each Stack applied removes a stack of Might. The Endurance regen reduction and glancing blows would be moved to other conditions where they’d make more sense.

The concept of using a boon to counter a condition, and vice-versa. This could mean as a rule of thumb each boon has a condition that oppposes it in some way.

Imagine an enemy, let’s go with a Dredge shield-banger, whatever they’re actually called doesn’t matter. They’re the guy that bangs on their shield to buff himself and allies nearby.

Initially, a player would have to resort to using a binary boon removal to deal with that situation.

With this change, a player could apply weakness, poison, and or Vulnerability to shred away the duration and stacks of those respective boons. Effectively removing them.

Each tick of Poison would grow stronger as it tears away at regeneration, each stack of might is replaced with a stack of weakness, and each application of vulnerability shreds some time off of protection.

Looking at this, this would likely mean having to rework several professions that rely heavily on boon and condition manipulation, if not all of them.

Why these two changes? Because it would hopefully free up more builds involving conditions and while keeping them viable in PVP, would make them much more valuable in PVE as well.

Thoughts?

Blood Magic

This is supposed to be a healing/support line. I imagine the way a necromancer would heal would be through more indirect, offensive tactics. He can kind-of do that, but at the cost of clearly more useful traits, and the pay-off isn’t as much. I would imagine 30 points should help a player be a master of blood manipulation: draining his enemies vital essences to empower himself or heal his allies.

• Full of Life – 5s Regen @ 90% health.
  This is okay. I don’t think I would care if this was changed or not.

• Dagger Mastery – 20% Dagger skill cd.
  Merge it with something else, merging with Bloodthirst seems to be the right idea.
• Bloodthirst – Siphoning 50% more effective.
  Merge, and moreso we need more means of siphoning health/lifeforce.
• Mark of Evasion – Mark of Blood on dodge.
  Decent, bleed on enemies, regen on allies.
• Ritual of Life – Well of Blood when reviving allies.
  Also useful. I can see this as a viable option for pvp, as long as it can heal downed allies faster.
• Vampiric Precision – Siphon health whenever you crit.
  Maybe this should be the new 5-point. Move/Merge.
• Transfusion – Life Transfer Heals Allies
  Weak, it’s reliant on Deathshroud. A wasted Trait overall when there are better ones. I think the best thing I can suggest for this is to allow it to also apply on health siphons.

• Vampiric – Siphon health whenever you hit.
  Never Mind, roll Vampiric Precision into this and go from there. Crits can grant more health siphon and heal nearby allies?

• Vampiric Master – Minions siphon health and transfer it to you.
  I guess this is okay… decent if you want to use minions to tank a boss.
• Ritual Mastery – Well 20% recharge.
  Decent, though I think it could be moved to Adept Traits.
• Deathly Invigoration – AoE heal on leaving DS
  DS has a 10 s cooldown… I guess this could work. Perhaps you could copy boons onto nearby allies as well? Or perhaps grant vigor/regeneration?
• Quickening Thirst – Move faster when wielding daggers
  Okay. I don’t have too many complaints… don’t know what to do with this if others say it should be changed.

• Blood to Power – 120 Power increase when above 75% health.
  Perhaps you can gain might whenever you siphon health?

• Fetid Consumption – Minions Draw conditions, 10s icd per minion.
  I think it would be interesting that on a 10s internal cd you transfer up to 3 conditions each time you siphon health. Like an infected bite.

• Vampiric Rituals – Wells siphon health every time they pulse.
  Roll this into Ritual Mastery. Make a new trait.

Guardians supposedly had a Longbow skillset very early on, data mining showed some evidence of it.

We could definitely use a longbow, but I think we could use the following: Another damage weapon, and another control weapon. I think we’ve got plenty of support.

1: Shooting Star
Justice: Your arrows gain increased range and whenever your Virtue of Justice applies burning, you also apply cripple.
Retribution: Your arrows lose range, but fire much more quickly.

2: Searing Star:
Justice: Wind up a long-range piercing shot that applies up to 10 seconds weakness onto targets it hits.
Retribution: Wind up a long range piercing shot that applies up to 5 seconds burning on targets it hits.

3: Comet Dust:
Justice: Rain down a barrage of arrows that apply chilled on enemies.
Retribution: Rain down a barrage of arrows that reveal stealthed enemies and apply 6 stacks of vulnerability.

4: Symbol of Truth
Justice: Places a ground-targeted symbol that grants Fury to allies.
Retribution: Places a ground targeted symbol that strips boons from enemies.

5: Justice / Retribution:
Channel your energies into the bow to empower it with damaging or controlling effects.

Here’s what I think are somewhat interesting:

ADEPT:

Immunotoxin: For necros that like using corruptions, this is really useful. Perhaps having it reduce the duration/stacks of self inflicted conditions?

Last Breath: I like this one because I’ve always wanted to make good use of main-hand dagger skills, being able to kite and life-drain with Dagger 2, this seems somewhat useful. Not to mention DS’s 4 skill. Multi targeted Chill is something I can get behind.

Spectral Armor: Simple and elegant, it could help necros become a more viable anchor/controller in PVE scenarios.

MASTER:

Undying Flesh: This one seems a little strong. Maybe, but I think there would have to be a good trade-off, like you can’t gain life force from weapon skills.

Hypothermia: Why not have it read as: Whenever you chill an enemy, you also Weaken them?

Swarm of Discord : This one needs to be re-written the effects seem too obtuse to me. These should use the conditions that exist in some way, not create new pseudo conditions.

So how about we make it into: "30% Chance on crit against targets that are afflicted by Chilled, Crippled, Weakness, Blind, Immobilize, or Vulnerability will also be struck with an additional condition (This trait applies to the condition with the longest remaining duration):

Chilled: Also applies Weakness for 4 seconds.
Weakness: Also applies Bleeding for 3 seconds.
Crippled: Also applies Torment for 3 seconds.
Blind: Also applies Chilled for 4 seconds.
Immobilize: Also applies Burning for 3 seconds.
Vulnerability: Also applies Poison for 5 seconds.

I reluctantly agree with OP, I liked Bazaar of the Four Winds, I liked the Aetherblade Dungeon, heck I even liked the Haloween jumping puzzle with the slipshod camera on release.

This update however is a mess.

My connection with the game is fine, but this instanced zerg is somehow gives me the absolute WORST lag I’ve ever experienced. I don’t like it because it’s “difficult” but in that it’s unplayable.

I’ve experienced horrendous lag from the zerg down below. I’ve only been able to defeat the first champion in the gauntlet.

This has to change.

If you were to make something in terms of an expansion in the future, I would love to see an expansion of weapon selections for certain classes, perhaps with the addition of two or three new weapons? Perhaps a new class that gives players a third Soldier profession to toy around with?

Anyways…

I. Hand-wraps:
These long rolls of bandage-cloth may seem ordinary, however, the magics weaved within amplify the physical strength of the wearer to rival or even surpass those with the mightiest of weapons.

Guardians could use Monk-style abilities, quivering palms and chakra bursts.

Warriors could use rapid punches and kicks, perhaps a flurry of blows style move as their adrenaline burst.

Thieves could use grapple moves that disable, or allow them to make high-flying kicks for escapes or gap-closers.

II. Whips
A rather-difficult to wield weapon, and in most situations its damage is questionable. But in the hands of a master, it yields devastating results.

Thieves can expand this from their scorpion wire move. Perhaps a means to pull themselves to a foe, or to coil them up in a binding move, or using the whip to trip opponents.

Rangers use it to both damage the enemy and use the crack of the whip to signal their pets to attack with extra ferocity.

Elementalists could imbue the whip with wide-arcing mid-range fire swings. Charge it with lightning to electrocute and daze their foes. Water whips could be imbued with frost to make freezing bursts at the end of the whip-crack. Earth whips with added bleed and knockback.

I don’t like the puzzle because of how poor the camera is, whenever I hit certain parts of the puzzle the camera forces itself in to where I can’t see anything, and I then fall and have to take it from the top. Otherwise It wouldn’t be as hard as it is. Maybe make the green slime rise up slower. Maybe.

Orb hacking?? I wasn’t aware that this was actually a thing?
I always assumed it was just a bunch of guys just stacking onto the server that was winning and face-rolling.

Honestly to combat that notion I propose that if you want to do WvW, you go in once and you are locked onto that server until the next matchup. It only makes sense.