Guild Wars 2

AstralDusk.1670:

I see I was late to the party and don’t have time to finish my concept, but I figured I have to at least throw up what’s been done after spending the time to craft it.

I too have spent some time on a concept but never finished it; behold the monstrosity I call the venomancer!

The general idea was heavy poison play (theme – the plague doctor during the black death plague epidemic or something) on the necromancer and the enemies, but with the spec you’d gain temporary resistance for incoming poison while in shroud.
New skills would be venoms with some unique mechanics in combination with the elite venom and the grandmaster traits.

(this is an early draft, obviously unbalanced, a lot of typos, ugly formatting)

I’m kinda excited to see who won, there are a lot of interesting concepts here.

In other news, you can also use the first aid kit when in a golem suit.

Kitiara.2706:

500? Try adding at least 1 zero to that. (Im 400)

You don’t need to be a a level 400 scribe to make dragon banners, only 300 is needed.
500 gold should get you there. I’m basing my estimate on the dulfy scribing guide; it estimates 768 Resonating Slivers for 1-400, but 423 of those are needed for 300-400.

Has anyone used the Cloaking Waters upgrade yet? I’m interested in the duration of the stealth (probably minutes).

Alloy.2839:

How much does a Dragon banner cost? If anyone knows the price for 1 banner, and the approximate price of the guild grind to be able to craft one. Is this P2W?

To get the upgrade your guild needs a fair bit of gold work;

• your aetherium capacity must be 10000 (mine level 2, with level 4 capacity upgrade)
• you need war room level 2
• you need camp, tower and keep claiming upgrades
• your guild needs to be level at least level 27 (so you probably need other unrelated upgrades as well)

The upgrade itself is pretty expensive as well, but compared to other upgrades it’s nothing special.

Once you have the upgrade, you need a level 300+ scribe however, which probably sets one back 500g+.

According to https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator making 1 dragon banner schematic costs ~3.5g at current prices, so once you have all the stuff above done, it’s pretty cheap to make.

Alright, some don’t have experience on how to get to a usable tactivator, here are the steps required from scratch:

1. have a guild with a guild hall (and a wvw scribing upgrade) and a scribe with the necessary materials
2. scribe makes the schematic
3. schematic must be queued up for “processing” in the workshop assembly machine (you need guild permission called “edit assembly queue”)
4. wait for process to finish or spend resonance to speed it up, for which you need permission called “use resonance”
5. once finished the item appears in your guild storage under consumables (if guild siege) or the war chest (if objective upgrade), consumables you get in your inventory if you click on them (must have “use placables” permission to use consumables, I think)
6. claim objective in wvw and wait for the required guild upgrade tier to unlock (must have “claim objectives” permissions)
7. drag and drop guild upgrade in the upgrade slot (must have “spend claimable upgrades” permission)
8. wait for upgrade to construct (normally takes 3 minutes)

At this point the tactivator should be usable, but there are still a few things to consider:

• if the claimed objective has “public tactic activation” ticked then anyone can use the tactivator, if it is not on cooldown
• if “public tactic activation” is unticked then only guild members of the guild that has claimed the objective can use the tactivator (if they have “activate claimable tactics” permissions in that guild)

I still don’t know what exactly the guild permission “edit claimable options” does, since the upgrades are not changeable once they’re put into the objective. It probably determines who can tick or untick “public tactic activation” option of the claimed objective. Cba to test.

Just to clear up a few things since many have not used a banner yet.

When you pick up a banner your weapon skills (1-5) are replaced by new banner skills.
Healing, utility, elite and f-skills are still usable. Your health pool stays the same as before and none of your stats change just from having the banner. And of course you’re blessed with a defiance bar. Also, as the carrier you get a buff that proclaims you as such and gives you an increase in moving speed, essentially giving you perma swiftness without the actual boon.

There are many things that will make you lose your banner:

• getting downed (most obvious)
• swapping weapons
• using a transformation (plague form, mistform, death shroud, etc)
• using siege
• using siege blueprints, stealth/supply traps, siege disablers
• picking up a different banner
• picking up conjured weapons (and sticks from oakeharts)
• probably many more

Basically anything that would swap your skills 1-5 with different ones makes you lose the banner. I haven’t really tried any crazy combinations with various transformations like the ascalonian potion so I don’t know if all transformations (even if just visual) will make you lose the banner.

You will however NOT lose the banner if you go underwater, iirc dragon and turtle banner skill 3 is usable underwater, I forgot about the centaur though.

I don’t have screenshots of the centaur banner but you can check descriptions of the skills on the wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Centaur_Banner

Dragon banner skills with full ascended zerk gear below. Each one of the 3 charges on skill 2 has a separate 8 second cooldown.

Jski.6180:

It takes a lot to get just one of the banner your not going to see them that often and when you do you out right kill the person holding it making sure they do have another for some time. The problem atm is with chron who can double up the banners effect (though i must say chron and its effect has destroyed a lot of balancing in wvw and i guess spvp).

You have to understand that scribing is a very expensive craft to level. At level 200 (when turtle banner is available) you have a few options on how to get to 225, namely:

• decorations (very, very expensive)
• scribing thesis (expensive low level feasts which aren’t really useful nor would they sell)
• guild karma and exp banner (cheaper to buy with commendations)
• guild ballistas (cheaper to buy with commendations)
• guild arrow carts (cheaper to buy with commendations)
• turtle banner

So your options are either something useless, something expensive or a turtle banner, that costs around 4g each so you end up making ~20 of them to get to 225 (iirc).
You ask me, that’s a lot of turtle banners. Of course I leveled up my scribing back when the guild siege was ridiculous expensive to craft, but even at current prices, buying guild arrow carts and ballistas is comparable or cheaper than making them.

My end point is that any guild who’ll invest seriously into a guild scribe for the purpose of chasing WvW upgrades will make a lot of banners.

One thing I forgot to mention about the turtle banner is that skills 1-4 are castable while moving. While skill 5 does not have a cast time, it has a ~1.5sec animation during which you have to stand still for it to cast, but since the aoe circle is so big it doesn’t really affect much.

I think it’s safe to say that we all agree nerfing banners is a must. Unfortunately I don’t expect anet to do anything till the big overhaul is out.

There are major issues with banners atm.

Starting with the break bar, it is not working right:

• afaik the bar is not affected by blind and weakness (needs further testing for other soft cc like cripple and chill as well)
• the regeneration after getting hit with cc starts about 1 second after last cc and appears to be as fast as health regen out of combat
• once the bar is broken, you can stunbreak out of the stun and stay immune to all cc (hard and soft) while the bar is red and regens to full (needs further testing)

The break bar needs heavy work to balance/fix or needs to be completely removed. Bar regen should be 50% slower in combat. Once the bar is broken, the stun should not be breakable and you should be affected by cc as long as it is red.

Moving on to gear and traits:

• power definitely scales with banner abilities (need further testing for other stats, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they do)
• needs further testing, but sigil of fire definitely works with the banners
• certain traits work extremely well with banners (guardian with turtle is unkillable etc)

Gear and traits (and food) should not scale/work with banners. Your other skills (util, healing, elite) should. Alacrity should also not work with banner skills.

Problems specific to turtle banner: (look at image below, skill 1 starting on the left)

• skill 1 is fine (the projectile speed is very slow)
• skill 2 needs: a longer cd (10-15sec), allied target cap (15 or less)
• skill 3 needs: a longer cd (20sec +), shorter duration (3sec or less) -currently most broken of all, can make 10 people perma invuln if there are 4 banners present
• skill 4 needs a longer cd (40 sec +), shorter field duration (8sec or less)
• skill 5 needs: reduced duration of boons (15sec or less), allied target cap (20 or less), enemy target cap (20 or less), reduced radius (currently the area of effect is about as big as a keep lords room in EB)

This combined with removal/balancing of break bar and making gear(stats, runes, sigils) and traits not work with banners should tone the banner down enough to still be usable but not OP as it currently is, making it what is should be, a viable alternative.
I am also of the opinion that you should only be able to have one banner of each type per map.

The carrier should also be more noticeable, especially when using skills.

And as far as the other two banners go, the changes needed are much like this one.

Also note that I might be wrong on a few things (especially about the break bar and how stats/gear affect banners), these things are hard to test for and what I’ve written here are really mostly observations.

Yes, in our guild storage there is one guild siege golem (1 of 25 maximum) that has been there since day one of the expansion.
This is not the golem I bought from the vendor, and even if it were, I asked another guildie to buy the same item, so if it had been deposited in the guild storage we should have had 3 of 25 maximum.

[&AgFTIgEA] – Normal Guild Golem Blueprints
[&AgGAUgAA] – Item guild trader sells for 1 guild commendation.

Upon purchasing the item from the guild trader, the blueprints do NOT get deposited in your personal inventory, guild bank, guild storage or the workshop processing machine. The commendation is still spent, but as far as I know the item is never obtained.

I’ve ran out of ideas on where to look for the item, and now suspect it’s bugged. Does anyone have any info on this?