Guild Wars 2

OriOri.8724:

While I see where you are coming from, I think ultimately a better solution would be to change how regeneration is applied. Priority should be given to higher regen ticks instead of longer duration regen sources. Regen on SoI could still be nerfed of course, but that wouldn’t stop problems of a similar nature from arising in the future (where classes with no HP but long regen ticks are overriding regen from classes built for HP but not necessarily boon duration).

The issue with this is that higher ticks over a shorter duration isn’t objectively better than smaller ticks over a longer duration. Just as many people would argue for either taking priority and I think that is a big part of the reason why Regeneration works the way it does.

TL;DR – Please reduce the base Regeneration given by Signet of Inspiration from 5 secs to 3 secs. Due to the frustrating yet mandatory way that Regeneration stacks, it is annoyingly difficult to make the most of it in a group that contains a Chronomancer.

Chronomancers are encouraged to build Boon Duration and it’s pretty uncommon to come across one without at least +95% Boon Duration. At least in any organised content where my complaint is most relevant anyway. Due to this fact, the Regeneration given by Signet of Inspiration (a Chronomancer mainstay) usually has a duration of 10 secs, not 5, meaning that anybody with Healing Power stats looking to apply Regeneration to their group, must ensure that it lasts longer than 10 secs or it will not overwrite the low-healing, stacks from the Chronomancer. Assuming the Chronomancer hasn’t managed to stack 5 instances of their low-healing Regeneration (max number of stacks), the incoming high-healing Regeneration will be added to the queue and could take up to 40 secs (4 stacks) to apply. In the worst case scenario, it may even be overwritten by more incoming stacks from the Chronomancer before it even has a chance to apply at all.

My issue with this is that Regeneration is nothing more than a happy side-effect of Signet of Inspiration and clearly isn’t its main purpose yet it completely steamrolls other class’ abilities to heal through Regeneration. Take Elementalist for example; their primary sources of Regeneration come from the Invigorating Torrents Tempest trait, Healing Rain on Staff and Water Trident on Scepter. These skills provide 5, 4 and 3 secs of Regeneration respectively. None of which are possible to extend over the 10 secs required to overwrite Chronomancer Regeneration. Only Tidal Surge on Warhorn and Overload Water provide long enough instances. The situation is similar with other classes like Guardian for example.

Chronomancers don’t even typically run Healing Power. In the case of Minstrel’s Chronomancers, you simply wouldn’t opt for another healing class anyway and the Chronomancer would still be able to maintain permanent Regeneration even with a base duration of 3 secs so the change wouldn’t affect this particular niche build.

Ultimately I think the 5 secs base Regeneration given by Signet of Inspiration has resulted in an unintended and negative side effect that could easily be fixed without damaging the skill itself while simultaneously increasing the scope for players to make use of Regeneration healing by increasing the number of Regeneration-applying skills capable of overwriting low-healing, unintended stacks without directly buffing them.

“Unobtainable”? I’m talking about making items more obtainable. I don’t understand what you’re getting at.

I didn’t say we didn’t have any unique drops. Plus a lot of those drops are craftable/incredibly cheap on TP or useless exotic trinkets that have nothing to do with skins and are worse than ascended trinkets which are far easier to get…

As much as I love this game and its gameplay, I’ve become somewhat disenchanted with its loot of late. This has now got to the point that I barely even look at loot that I receive from Fractals and Raids and I’m certainly not excited about opening chests/bags or even killing specific bosses – with the potential exception of Gorseval the Multifarious due to his unique and prestigious drop.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason I feel this way is that 99% of the loot I receive either gets sold directly to a merchant or just gets salvaged into materials that I then sell on the Trading Post periodically or, on rare occasion, actually use to craft. Even rares and exotics, which make up the main bulk of “good drops”, are often sold or salvaged after having collected all of the skins.

Essentially, this results in 99% of loot effectively being gold i.e. liquid. This has the obvious advantage of allowing you to spend your hard earned gold however you see fit but comes with the drawback of being incredibly boring and ultimately, feeling unrewarding.

There are far too few exceptions to this rule; the best of which being precursors but they have a justifiably low drop rate and while the prospect of dropping one remains exciting, the feeling of doing so comes very infrequently for most and never for some. I miss the sensation of dropping rare/prestigious weapons from Guild Wars 1 and feel like this is seriously lacking in Guild Wars 2.

It is for these reasons that I am proposing a potentially controversial change. Add Black Lion weapon skins as dropable loot to the core game outside of Black Lion Chests. Black Lion Chests have their own problems but the chance of dropping a Black Lion Key from the core game and then receiving a Black Lion weapon skin from it, is even lower than dropping a precursor and the fact is that this chance is so low that it might as well be 0 in terms of player anticipation.

I’m proposing that the skins be added as potential drops from anywhere in the game (much the same as precursors) with varying drop chances depending on the level/difficulty of content – at the discretion of Anet of course. After discussing the proposal with friends, we think that the skins would have to drop in the following form:

1. As an exotic weapon with a sigil (potentially tied to the specific set)
2. Account bound
3. With a drop rate somewhere between that of an ascended weapon/armor chest and that of a precursor

In this form, nobody could be disappointed by receiving such a drop even if they despised the skin they were awarded. In such a case, they could simply salvage it like any other exotic and receive the liquid gold from its materials. The drops would also be unsellable and untradable due to being account bound so the impact on Trading Post prices would be minimal. Furthermore, due to the low drop chance of getting any skin in the first place, combined with the unlikelihood of dropping a specific desired skin, players either in desperate need of a specific skin or looking to collect large quantities of skins, would still be inclined to place buy orders on the Trading Post or buy Black Lion keys from Anet respectively. This should minimise the impact both on Trading Post prices and on Anet key sales.

A change like this would add some magic and excitement back into the game and, to me, seems like a minor and simple way to give players more to look forward to when reviewing their loot. Guild Wars has never been about gear progression and so the pressure falls on gameplay and item skins to keep people interested. In my opinion, the current method of acquiring the latter is too heavily skewed towards grinding liquid gold and doesn’t provide enough opportunity for random acts of reward and, ultimately, that’s what loot should provide in a game like this.

I hope I’ve made my point clearly and succinctly and I hope that people/Anet see this for what it is and don’t see this as a person complaining about having bad luck. If anyone has any information about why a change like this would never happen, I would love to see some official feedback!

Thanks for reading

Did somebody just forget to add Ascended Seraph Rings and Accessories to the vendor in Lake Doric or to the stat selection tables on the Woven Bands & Energized Loops etc. or was it genuinely a conscious decision not to add ascended Rings and Accessories with this genuinely agreed under-powered attribute prefix?

TL;DR Please add the Seraph prefix to Ascended Rings and Accessories to be consistent with the other quad-attributes.

MithranArkanere.8957:

The game needs more tools of balance that let the game balance itself on the fly. New mechanics that could help solve problems that can’t be solved with the current properties of skills like recharges, activation times, damage and healing values.

For example:

• Cooldown reduction on hit.
  • When a skill reduces its cooldown on hit, staying in combat means triggering the skill more often, and missing or avoiding combat means taking longer for the skill to trigger. Since conditions allow players to deal damage and let it tick while they run around avoiding attacks, you can’t let players stack too many of them.
  • Give a skill or trait kitten reduction when hitting with the autoattack, and you make sure they can’t use the skill too often unless they stay in active combat.
• Background cooldown skill charges.
  • While there’s skills that produce stacking effects, and mantras do have charges, there’s no skills with a background cooldown for charges.
  • These require charges to be used, but the charges take much longer to recharge than the skill. If you let the charges accumulate, you can spam them a bit more within a short time, but you lose the skill for longer.
  • So these let you choose between bursting and sustain, without ever having both. The shorter skill recharge lets you use it more often, the longer charge recharge balances things out.
• Event-Triggered cooldown reduction
  • Right now we have a few effects that will recharge skills, like Improvisation, but no skills have recharges or cooldown reductions, which could be used to improve things, like making some skills, traits or upgrades have a bit of of a skill’s recharge reduces when an enemy is defeated, or when being affected by a condition, or whenever you are stunned. Imagine a stun breaker that gets 10% reduced recharge whenever you are stunned. Enemies use CC against you wisely, you can’t break stun. They mindlessly spam CC on you, they waste it because that skill recharges and you get a stun breaker.

There’s many other examples of new mechanics that could be used to solve several balance problems if we had them, by making things balance out on the fly.

In this case, with Venom Enhancement, it could be turned in the Revenant’s Mace-themed trait as they currently have none specifically for it. Something like this:

• Venom Enhancement.
  • 20s recharge.
  • When you apply torment, also apply poison. Poison lasts longer. Reduces recharge of Mace skills. This trait’s recharge is reduced by 5s whenever you hit an enemy with a mace attack.
  • Duration increase: 50%.
  • Recharge reduced: 20%
  • Trait cooldown reduced on hit: 5s.

Son in this example, every 4 attacks you do with the mace, the trait would trigger again and land another poison stack. Which means anyone dumb enough to stand on a Searing Fissure would get a few extra poison stacks as a reward the next time you hit them with any source of tormentm making mace much better at stacking poison.

---

Another example of this. Take Thief venoms. Right now they are ‘meh’. But, put the charges directly on the skill instead as effects so you can trigger each charge on demand, then make the background recharge of the charges reduce its cooldown on autoattack hit, and ding. you have a thief that can spam venoms while staying in combat, thus healing a bit more more often, but can’t use them too much if they spam them for bursts from stealth. You can have a cake or eat it, but can’t have both.

I really like where you’re coming from but I try to avoid making suggestions that require considerable mechanical changes which is why I presented this as a temporary “balance” change as opposed to a total overhaul. Your idea of turning Venom Enhancement into the Mace trait is inspired though. We can only hope…

In PvE though, you’re essentially only swapping to Staff to break so on-swap condition sigils probably aren’t appropriate. I actually think it’s not a bad idea to bring a Berserker Staff with Force or Air plus Paralyzation. Might look into generosity though.

I get what you’re saying about Torment and Poison but think back to the Necromancer. Until recently the powerhouse condition build. They relied primarily on Bleed and Poison and while, I know that Epidemic played a large part in their success, their individual condition dps was still very high so I think there is a precedent there. If this suggestion was to be taken on, I think it would just depend on the degree of how much Poison application is added. It does stack in intensity after all and it’s not like PvE mobs are in the habit of clearing conditions.

Eval.2371:

DUNSTAN.8529:

Despite the build being fun to play, I have been unable to find a way to come up with comparable DPS to competitor builds. The main cause of this, in my opinion, is the Revenant’s over ability to apply Torment (a relatively weak Condition that is reliant on movement) and under ability to apply Poison specifically, but potentially Burning as well.

Ignoring application bugs, and a range weapon you’ve nailed the issue from my perspective.

Condi Rev has good support for terrible conditions: torment and poison. Both are low damage, and the poison is low application. You’ll eventually notice that burning is pretty much all the damage and really only comes from 3 sources(DI, EB & SF) Yet we have no have no burning support.

DUNSTAN.8529:

Additionally, the Mace attack chain could be changed from:
1 stack Torment – 1 stack Torment – 1 stack Poison
to:
1 stack Torment – 1 stack Poison – 1 stack Poison and 1 stack Torment

I think that on 5 stack of torment ->1 burning on a 5sec ICD + 25% burn duration would be a million times more useful and reasonable. It would mean play around stacking up torment and rewarding for keeping it up. In addition give some counter play thought for when to cleanse the torment.

I am all for buffs to improve our dps, but I think the class in general needs a lot of love for our ground target skills which all seem to wiff on any kind of terrain difference between you and the target. Which is really sad because mace thematically is one of the funnest weapons I’ve used in a long time but its such a poor weapon because of the above issue.

Edited: removed some non relevant stuff.

I’m in two minds about this. I think that it’s important for classes to remain thematically different and multiple classes already have good innate support for Burning. I think that the condition focus for Revenant should stay on Torment and Poison and that Burning should just be an added bonus. I used Smoldering sigils and am considering Malice sigils though to make the most of the, as you pointed out, relative high ability of the Revenant to apply Burning.

OriOri.8724:

DUNSTAN.8529:

Additionally, the Mace attack chain could be changed from:

1 stack Torment – 1 stack Torment – 1 stack Poison

to:

1 stack Torment – 1 stack Poison – 1 stack Poison and 1 stack Torment

I would love to hear what other people think about this and whether or not there may be a better place to officially suggest this.

I disagree with this proposed change. Even though many of them do, I am not a fan of having autoattack chains apply condis or boons. Its just too convenient and requires no thought. Ideally, condis and boons would be removed from autoattack chains in general (with the possible exception of allowing each class to have 1 auto chain that is comprised of 3 skills apply a condi or boon on the third attack). To fix Rev’s lack of poison application, I would rather see other attacks/utility skills/traits changed to apply poison instead.

I agree with you to some extent and I’d like to see other skills applying conditions as well but in the case of the Revenant with it’s fixed utility skills, this would entail a huge overhaul. The fact is that the attack chain already applies conditions on every hit. I’m just suggesting a slight rework to said chain

Venon Enhancement is one of the Major Adept traits in the Corruption line and does the following:

“When you apply torment, also apply poison. Poison lasts longer.

Poison (5s): 168 Damage, -33% Healing Effectiveness
Duration Increase: 50%"

I recently decided to approach the current Revenant issue from a different angle. Instead of trying to make a viable direct damage build, I opted for a condition damage build for niche usage in Fractals and Raids.

Despite the build being fun to play, I have been unable to find a way to come up with comparable DPS to competitor builds. The main cause of this, in my opinion, is the Revenant’s over ability to apply Torment (a relatively weak Condition that is reliant on movement) and under ability to apply Poison specifically, but potentially Burning as well.

At first glance, the above trait looks like a fantastic method of addressing this ‘imbalance’ and it could be, if not for the 20 second internal cooldown it suffers from. My question is this; why bother even giving Revenant a comparatively massive 50% Poison duration increase when, outside of the trait itself, Revenant only has a single innate terrestrial method of applying Poison i.e. 1 stack on every 3rd auto attack (assuming you don’t interrupt the chain)?

Now in sPvP and WvW, I can see how this might be considered balanced. The Poison acts as a covering condition to protect the Torment (which is much more effective in PvP) and is generally more effective in a PvP setting anyway due to the effect it has on healing (which is basically inconsequential in PvE).

While I think that Revenant would also fairly benefit from having additional methods of Poison application in general (to be in keeping with Venon Enhancement), I propose that this trait would make an excellent candidate for a split. It may be overpowered to remove the internal cooldown completely (due to how much Torment a Revenant can put out) but honestly, given the relatively weak Condition damage output that the Revenant is currently capable of, that may not even be enough!

Additionally, the Mace attack chain could be changed from:

1 stack Torment – 1 stack Torment – 1 stack Poison

to:

1 stack Torment – 1 stack Poison – 1 stack Poison and 1 stack Torment

I would love to hear what other people think about this and whether or not there may be a better place to officially suggest this.

As much as I enjoy raiding in GW2, I have a serious problem with wing 3 and I find myself dreading completing it every week. While I’m not the biggest fan of the Xera encounter, it is Keep Construct that is the primary source of my despair. Before anybody starts telling me to “git good”, let me just say that my problems with KC have nothing to do with the level of difficulty and I have killed him multiple times a week since release and have over 300 Legendary Insights to my name.

I have a lot of problems with the fight but for the sake of simplicity, I shall focus this suggestion on the biggest i.e. the way spirit aggro works. This mechanic requires a fair amount of precision in a small, unforgiving arena and while it is mostly pretty easy to deal with, it is often the culprit of some incredibly frustrating situations.

What’s wrong with it:
1. It allows very little time to react
2. Spirits are clunky
3. It is often difficult to see if you are targeted (during green circles and when stacked)
4. It is difficult for teams to make calls since you cannot easily differentiate between targeted players

Simple solution:
1. Have different colours for spirits from each side
2. Announce the name of the player that is targeted to the entire squad(including by which colour spirit) in a similar way to Slothasor fixation

This QoL change alone would be enough to improve my opinion of the fight but I personally, I think that several of the mechanics of this boss in particular need total reworks. Otherwise, good job raid team and keep it up!

Awesome but I still won’t be able to do this properly

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/All-I-wanted-to-do-was-get-creative

It’s a great suggestion but I don’t currently have enough to make a good go of it plus I love the aesthetic of a genuine hedge maze ya know

Against my better judgement and in light of the ridiculousness of scribing costs and recipes, I decided that it might be awesome to build a maze in my Guild Hall for me and my guildies to enjoy!

The plan was simple; use Hedges and Hedge Corners to construct a large-scale maze in the largest, flattest space I could find in Gilded Hollow (which ended up being the plateau to the North of the Cavern Mine Waypoint).

Given the current cost of such decorations, progress has, admittedly, been quite slow but the suspense has only made the project more popular within the guild and many members have been making donations towards the cause.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/kILsxXWl.png?1[/img]

Last night, after crafting a further 10 Hedges, I went to expand the maze and my heart sank. Yeah, you guessed it, I had reached the local decoration limit. In order to get around this, I am going to have to seriously kitten the project by massively reducing its size and complexity (despite the fact that I don’t think its particularly excessive) or by widening the lanes to such an extent that I will likely run out of space or require even more decorations who’s cost is, frankly, obscene.

With that said, I am writing this post not to complain about the complexity of scribing recipes or the hugely inflated costs associated with the mechanic but, instead, to plea that Arena Net reconsider their local (not global) decoration limits so that I, and others, may have the flexibility to fully indulge in decoration and unleash the creativity of this community on our guild halls.

In you agree, please support this thread with your own tales of decoration woe and share it with others so that it might receive the attention I think it needs!

TL;DR I wanted to make a maze but I couldn’t due to local decoration limits. If you’d like to see these limits reevaluated in the future, support this thread.

Yukiatsuruko.3784:

Chaos.5072:

Yukiatsuruko.3784:

Anet wants people to stop playing dungeons. Why can’t people just accept this?

Because they’re fun?

They’re still there for you to run, so…

If you just want easy gold, it is highly unlikely that Anet will ever increase the liquid rewards from dungeons, even slightly.

Did you even read the post? I said nothing about increasing liquid rewards.

Like many people in Guild Wars, I enjoy dungeon game-play and have found it difficult recently not to make the assumption that Arenanet would rather we didn’t. On the off-chance that this is not the case, and Arenanet are, in fact, intending to continue to support dungeons, I have a suggestion to help revitalize the scene and to give players more reasons to play the instances without needing to increase liquid rewards.

I got the idea from Guild Wars 1 of all places. Some of you more veteran players may remember armor sets that used to be commonly known as “15k” or “elite” armor but I believe the correct term was “prestige”. Essentially, they were more elaborately designed versions of standard armor sets which were thematically similar to their standard counterparts but more expensive and hence harder and more prestigious to acquire.

So without further ado…

My suggestion is to extend the existing dungeon collections to provide a way for players to acquire newly designed and more elaborate yet thematically consistent (with the relevant dungeon lore) armor sets. For example, upon completion of an existing dungeon collection, a player could unlock an elite collection that will reward armor (and potentially weapon) skins for considerable quantities of dungeon tokens.

This will give players who have already completed the existing dungeon collections for, frankly, menial rewards, a reason to start running the instances again while simultaneously giving everybody else a meaningful and prestigious target to aim for.

(I’m going to take this opportunity to add that people are going to be disappointed if Arenanet does choose to run with this idea and makes people pay gold in addition to dungeon tokens in order to unlock the aforementioned skins. Given the now lower liquid rewards received from dungeons, people are likely to react badly to having to give up their hard-earned gold in addition to the tokens that will undoubtedly take a considerable time investment to unlock.)

In addition to giving players back an incentive to run dungeons, this will give Arenanet a fantastic opportunity to answer another commonly cited request made by players. That is to say, to make more non-gemstore armor sets available.

In conclusion, I think that dungeons are in desperate need of a second look and potentially a total overhaul. They are a staple and popular part of this game and they deserve some attention. I am not naive enough to miss the fact that the implementation of this suggestion will be costly for Arenanet and will bare no direct fruit. It will however help to keep players interested, motivated and ultimately, playing. This, in turn, will contribute towards higher future cash flow and a more sustainable future for the game.

If you agree with me or have any suggestions based on my own, please take this opportunity to voice your opinions/concerns and maybe the idea will reach the relevant decisions makers.

Thank you for reading.

TL;DR Elite dungeon collections that reward elite versions of dungeon armor/weapons for dungeon tokens could provide an incentive for players to return to the scene en masse.

I once wrote a bug report concerning the defiance bar of the Grawl Champion in the Volcanic fractal; stuns appeared to not affect the bar so I wrote the report to ask whether or not this was intentional and to ask that if it was [intentional], would it be possible for the devs to add a tool-tip to that effect.

To my surprise, within a few weeks, a tool-tip icon was added to the champion’s bar explaining which control effects would affect the bar and which wouldn’t. Even if this was a coincidence, I want to say thank you for that!

Now I’m writing to ask that such tool-tips be added to all creatures with defiance bars that work in unique ways. Bloomhunger and Mai Trin come straight to mind but there are many, many other enemies out there with unique defiance bars. Maybe it’s unfair of me but without the tool-tips, I can’t be sure whether or not these are bugs that I’m coming across or, in fact, intentional differences.

For the record, I actually think that certain bosses behaving in different ways in response to CC is a fantastic way to make an already incredibly improved system even better!

I hope this gets some attention and I thank you for taking the time to consider my request.

I’m messaging here after spending a fair bit of time researching the issue to find out whether or not it is actually a bug. From what I can see, the game is not working as intended.

I have noticed that the breaker bars of some bosses appear to react differently to some control effects. More specifically, stuns (e.g. the 3 second stun from Headbutt) seem to have no effect on the breaker bar of the Champion Grawl Shaman in the Volcanic Fractal. I’ve tried to used stuns from multiple sources to deplete the bar but am always unsuccessful even in cases where the champion has no source of Stability.

If this is intentional and certain bosses are designed to react differently to control effects, then tool tips to that effect should be shown under their breaker bars in the same way that certain monster mechanics are displayed below certain monster health bars.

If it is not intentional, this requires some attention.

I look forward to finding out one way or the other!

This post is essentially a question as well as a suggestion. I would like to know why exactly a player must pay to reassign trait points. What is the purpose behind it? What are you trying to encourage or discourage?

In my opinion, a player should be able to reassign trait points whenever he or she sees fit, much like you could under the old attribute system in Guild Wars and can now do within the PvP system in Guild Wars 2!

I think this would open up yet another dimension is character customization and will allow PvE players more freedom to change their play styles in order to adapt to the various challenges presented by Guild Wars 2. For example, as a Guardian, I find that in groups I would love to take a more supportive role. However, when I’m questing alone, I require a different play style, namely, more damage and survivability! Under the current system, I am unable to fulfill either of these roles to the best efficiency and am instead forced to spec myself as a kind of Jack of All-Trades.

I’d love to hear some official feedback on this and look forward to your reply.

Dunstan The Divine