Showing Posts For Damian.6978:
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I’ve found the cooldown reduction on the Mortar 5 skill to be worth HGH actually, as the reduced cooldown synergises well with Orbital Strike and the low-CD leaps of hammer 3. The double orbital strike provides a lot of oomph, and Tools traitline’s other traits don’t synergise well with Mortar or Grenades (remember that all explosions now give 1 Vulnerability stack; it stacks quickly). Grenadier and Aim-Assisted Rocket are also indispensable I feel. You see the latter proc quite often when throwing grenades, and the faster grenades means it’s much harder for an enemy (even a very agile thief) to avoid them for long. Grenade 5 is also unblockable Poison stacks which is very nice.
In terms of conditions, so far I haven’t had much trouble 1v1 against most condi-heavy enemies, except the rare Warrior or Necromancer. I will sometimes swap skills around depending on composition. For example if I see 2 or more necros on the enemy team, I swap out Bulwark Gyro for Elixir C for that extra condi conversion and removal. But more often than not I tend to be able to out-cc them and use LOS to heal myself enough to handle it.
(edited by Damian.6978)
This is currently my favorite engineer build for the amount of CC it provides, and the setups you can do with combo fields and double Orbital Strike.
Hope you enjoy the showreel!
Enjoy (hopefully)!
Let me get this straight. To celebrate four year anniversary of an MMO, the event is not ingame?
How to MMO. Must read.
I don’t want to create another qq post, nor do I want to go into the details of why I think anet’s latest patch is bad for the health of PvP — other people have done that with a lot of elaboration already. All I want is to say that with over 1800 PvP matches under my belt, and playing all the classes after every major patch — not all of them as much as others, but enough to understand them intricately so I can counter them — I just personally feel that the state of PvP is now worse than it has ever been for the past 2+ years. I played since launch, but I didn’t get into PvP until early 2014.
Build diversity and viability is gone, and what we’re left with is a game where so much is going on with passives and so many professions deal extraordinary amounts of damage with little input required that it simply isn’t enjoyable anymore.
I want to just make my opinion heard. I know it doesn’t matter and I know a lot of you won’t agree. But to anet money talks, and I’m taking a break from PvP until next quarterly patch. That means my likelihood of gem purchases until then is significantly reduced.
Good luck to everyone that stays on board o7
(edited by Damian.6978)
I cannot believe this topic has 8 pages. Next we’ll have a petition to have crafting stations in sPvP maps because what? You can’t be kitten d to TP to LA?
I experienced this today as well. There was just no way of knowing in team fights where it was safe to stand… With two guards on both teams, I found myself stepping into what seemed a safe area only to realize it was the enemy team’s aoe traps ticking. Same with mesmer wells.
It’s quite literally unplayable if you at all try to be skillful…
The maps are too big as is, and there’s three of them… There are no servers to fill even one, it seems :/
I don’t understand people who go around saying things like “I lost faith” in a video game.. Like, what?.
Let me clarify then: what I personally mean by this is that for a game such a GW2, the game is constantly evolving. Even before HoT the game had become quite different from how it was when it launched. The skill trees were completely redesigned in function and form, the skill acquisition method has become linear rather than multiple choices along the way like it used to, and WvW has gotten too little love over the years.
An MMO usually evolves over time. Sometimes it changes into something you enjoy less than its previous versions, but you may still hold onto “faith” that the studio behind the game is just feeling their way and may yet bring it in a direction that more aligns with your preferences. The preferences that made you love the game to begin with.
Finished HoT story in my WvW equipment on my ranger, which is Power / Precision / Ferocity. I had to dodge properly and look for tells on NPC’s to survive, and I loved it. It was challenging, yes, but what’s wrong with that?
It’s customary to only head to the forums when one has something to complain about. I did just that recently with the Hero Points which I felt were prohibitive and oddly counter to how the rest of the game has been PvE-wise so far. I was happy you decided to lower the HP necessary to fully unlock the elite specialization, but I still would’ve liked to see another approach to it: masteries feel like enough progression as it is to me.
But with that said, that’s not why I decided to make a thread this time. This one is just simply to say that I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the expansion, even counting the whole HP thing. The new maps are truly amazing, even Tangled Depths which I still get lost in continuously. I love the designs, the verticality, the events and the inherent challenges in navigating them.
I never finished the “original” personal story on any of my characters. I got very distracted early on with WvW (my favorite gamemode which I hope could see a resurgence in players) and PvP. But I did go through the HoT personal story because I really enjoyed how it was told. It felt more interactive and “alive” to me, with dialogue happening as I ran along with my crew instead of stopping everything up (like the previously used dialogue scenes did), and the scenarios were simply a lot of fun to play through. So in short the PvE content has dragged a primarily PvP player back into that aspect of the game and I’ve been loving it.
I’ll be honest: I had sort of lost faith for a while. HoT didn’t sound like something I would enjoy. But knowing the history of the game I took the chance, and I am so glad I did. I might be what you’d call a veteran, with 1 000+ hours logged in game since launch. I know that’s not much compared to many on my friends list, but at least it can’t be said I’m new to it. But I’d just like to for once come to the forums and just say that I loved what you made here, and I hope you keep going with this kind of conviction and confidence in what you’re making, because you know what you’re doing.
Thank you for all the hours of fun so far and for all the hours to come.
Well thought out review, and I agree with it a lot.
I am what you would call a “veteran”, I guess, having logged 1k hours since launch. Which I know is little compared to some, but I can still say I’ve played the game a lot. I didn’t think I’d enjoy HoT, I felt like what they were advertising didn’t sound like it’d interest me. But I was dead wrong, and I’ve loved my time in the jungle. PvP is still my main focus, but I’m finding myself being drawn to PvE now too, not least because it’s actually hard but fun to play. I finished my personal storyline and I’m looking forward to unlock more masteries.
(edited by Damian.6978)
Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Damian.6978
I just wanted to add my voice to this. I was hesitant about HoT because I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting. Long story short, I’ve been positively blown away by it. It’s absolutely fantastic and has got me actually really enjoying the PvE again. Something I haven’t since a few months after launch. I used to hide mainly in WvW and sPvP, but this is just tremendous fun. And it looks stunning.
My one and only substantial criticism at this point is what seems to be a very common one: 400 hero points for my elite specs on every single character? Really? It is extremely excessive, and it tarnishes an otherwise excellent expansion so far. I love everything about it, except for the specialization cost. It’s absurd.
X not buying it. From what they’ve shown of the expansion so far it’s not worth the asking price even if I were into PvE. As a primarily WvW and PvP player, it’s just nope all the way, not least because the trait patch that ruined the fun of it.
I don’t trust ANet to deliver a game I’ll enjoy. Simple as that.
People leave, people join – nothing new
You tend to find that the people who leave would leave regardless but they feel that they have to assign blame to the game manufacturer rather than their own inflexibility.
Every thief has access to the same skills and weapons as every other thief, every engi the same access as every other engi, etc.
Observe, adapt and overcome(sometimes).
The only time this isn’t true is when your opponent is somehow cheating such as the time I met a Mesmer who was able to generate 6 active clones at the same time in WvW.
Yeah no. I loved PvP. I used to love WvW until they just ignored it and its myriad of troubles until every single person in the guild I played WvW with left the game sans maybe 2. Now I’m leaving the game itself because PvP has become utterly inane. To anyone who enjoys the new meta and combat flow and imbalances, good for you. Really. But don’t go saying I would’ve left anyways: I wouldn’t. I’m leaving because the game is not one I enjoy after these changes.
I left PvP because it just isn’t fun anymore. The change into the current specialization system and restrictive “traits” just made the imbalance problems way too pronounced, and now we’re even more at ANet’s mercy for them to fix it, since we can’t make creative builds to build around shortcomings of our professions, or the strengths of others.
The current damage model is also just completely off, and obviously burning and shatter mesmers don’t help much either. As was mentioned earlier, it now feels like each battle is way more a “luck of the draw” than before.
I was considering going back to WvW but things are even worse there, I left the game. I still check the forums and updates in case things change.
What Ashen said.
It’s been one “small” thing after another for years now. At some point it just becomes too much.
They simply refuse to acknowledge that their PvP has totally failed and that WvW is their customers’ preferred player vs player mode.
WvW supports a multitude of playstyles, giving almost every type of player what they want out of player vs player. It’s perfect for the kind of PvE that GW2 has.
What a waste.
It’s sad, because WvW is such a unique gamemode right now. If they went all out with it, they could really make a splash. Instead they’re trying to compete with MOBA’s and other small-scale structured pvp games, and if you look at twitch viewer rates on the official tournaments, it’s safe to say they’re not competing at all.
And then they go and bork it all up with the specialization restructuring… Sigh.
The reasons queues are getting longer is because people are leaving due to a broken game. They really need to fix that first, I think.
I’ve lost all faith for now so I’ll just return in a year and see how things are. I was so excited for HoT, but none of the changes implemented recently and the contents of the coming expansion are good for the game — in my personal opinion. And I am talking about my own enjoyment of it, which is zero now. I loved PvP and WvW. Now they’ve managed to just mess up both.
It’s so vastly unbalanced, arenanet doesn’t seem intent on fixing anything until HoT, and the “speed” of the new meta is just players thinking their unbalanced classes racking up kills means they’ve got skills. I left because it’s absolutely horrible to play pvp now. No, I didn’t lose; my win / lose ratio improved significantly by exploiting all the stuff everyone else is exploiting. But that’s not fun.
I’m not sure I’ll come back this time; first they let WvW die, now they’re letting PvP go to the gutters. All we’re left with is HoT’s PvE, which never interested me to begin with. If I want PvE, I’ll play that other MMO whose expansions was half the price of HoT, upgraded the whole engine to DX11 (improving performance while looking stunningly better), and brought a whole boatload of new content.
I’ll miss GW2, but I won’t stay just out of nostalgia.
FF14 introduced DX11 with its Heavensward expansion. It now uses vastly less CPU and performs far better on any DX11 card, and it looks incredibly nice with the new ambient and direct lighting models. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but Square Enix seems to understand — together with other far smaller devs, like CCP of EVE Online that keep updating their engine and also recently implemented DX11 — that keeping your engine more up-to-date, improving visuals and not least performance for the playerbase actually /makes people enjoy it more/. You can’t balance it on a spreadsheet, so maybe this is why arenanet’s recent actions are so atrocious; maybe the beancounters are running the operation a bit too tightly?
At the same time they probably don’t want the game to bleed it’s entire population and have them “forget” about Heart of Thorn.
If we’re going to have more than 6 months before the expansion, I think they would need some content to keep people interested. Even if it pushes the release by a couple of weeks, on half-a-year wait that doesn’t make a huge difference to me.
This is why they want us all to preorder, so we don’t leave bored before HoT. I didn’t fall for it, and I left already due to the trait patch after weeks of testing it out: it does not make me look forward to what they have in store in the exp at all. Not to mention I don’t see the point as I primarily play wvw and spvp anyway. I’ll just wait until they balance this again (hint: not going to happen until after HoT, of that I’m sure).
I thought so too, but after having spent a lot of hours ingame, adjusting my builds, experimenting and experimenting over and over, I’ve found it seems to actually work out pretty fine. Mesmers are the new thief on the 10/10 annoying scale for me, though.
Going up against a 2 mesmer 3 necro team yesterday… I missed my grenades ;_;
Still orbital lazored them and shelled them from 1500 feet though, so I’m content.
Eh, it happens. Ragequitters really quit eventually. You win some and you lose some. Just use that round to practice against super unfair odds, maybe you’ll learn something, maybe you’ll get steamrolled. I do agree there should be /some/ retribution for ALT+F4’ing, but it’s not critical.
Post-patch, if you want to survive you have to get better at dodging and reading telegraphed attacks. Yes I know there’s quite a few burst skills without telegraph (and stealth attacks obviously don’t telegraph), but that’s another thing: you also should — if you want survivability — sport some sort of protective skill somewhere in your bar.
Rampage is easy to evade; the characters git huge, all their attacks are well telegraphed, they’re slow, they /do/ deal more damage and /do/ take less damage, so what do you do? Avoid them for 20s, come back, spank, move on.
Speak for yourself. I’ve had a ton of success using HGH elixir might stacking and the new Mortar elite. Together with the 6s stealth from Elixir S toolkit skill, and stability from Elixir H toolkit skill, I can also stealth knockdown (rifle 4) + rifle jump (5) + rifle 3 for crazy burst. I kill thieves in one such hit combo. I’ve actually been using this build as my main build now to just get used to not having useful grenades in the future.
So I’ve had multiple fights now with obviously cheesy op mesmers, necromancers, and thieves. And I did /not/ go ‘nades because I thought I’d see how engi plays when ‘nades get inevitably nerfed to oblivion. Oh and a warrior that just didn’t die, and two of our team members lagged every time they fought him, no idea what that was. Anyway, my point stands: Not using grenades means I’m gimping my team when we come up against other op setups. So I’m going ’nades until things are balanced.
Engineer is my favorite GW2 profession, hands down. It’s the profession that kept me playing WvW, which was the gamemode I played all the time until I went to sPvP, and I love it to death. After this latest patch, either you purposefully choose a build that is vastly underpowered when you meet the inevitable other engineers or mesmers that use their profession (and their overpowered traits and skills) to its fullest, or you don’t kitten yourself and fight fire with fire.
In unranked I’ve tested all the things that don’t really work anymore; in ranked I play to win. Mesmers, engineers, necromancers, warriors, thieves (and probably the rest) have vastly unbalanced traits and skills at this time. I won’t kitten myself to satisfy anyone else’s concept of “honor”.
“The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win”
? Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy
@Brian: As a veteran player (955 hours) I agree with you; PvP isn’t fun anymore, it’s not skillful, and it’s not balanced. I hope they go back on this design philosophy, because I’m going elsewhere for my pvp until they do.
I’ve got 955 hours logged in the game, at least a third of that in spvp and the other third in wvw. I wholeheartedly agree with OP here, it doesn’t work the way it is now. Sure you can spec around it, go more tanky, survive longer, but high burst skills need to telegraph so you can react. Otherwise there isn’t skill involved, it’s just who presses attack first.
Another veteran (2 months after launch) player pitching in and saying this patch pretty much has killed my interest in the game. I take it this is the direction of the mentality behind the expansion too, so I’m not getting that either.
Really disappointed you just roll out something like this without letting the community pitch in. I’m sure you’ll get enough new players from the marketing campaigns to make good bank though. A disappointed player isn’t too much to worry about in that sense.
I have no strong feelings one way or another. I enjoyed aspects of the old system, and I enjoy aspects of this one. My feelings aren’t really important, though.
The simple fact of the matter is, they put a LOT of effort into this, and the entire design of the game going forward is based on this system, therefore there is absolutely no way they can go back, let alone would.
If that is true, there is absolutely no way I’m going to pay for or play the expansion.
(edited by Damian.6978)
I have to agree, this is just horrible overall. Cele meta was perhaps getting “old”, but there was far less reliance on passives and procs to do the damage for you. Now you walk out and suddenly your hp drops by 10k in the blink of an eye for some reason. And then people tell me the skill ceiling has been raised now — really?
The new Lion’s Arch can be summed up in one word: meh. It’s like typical RPG southern city trope boring. And so flat with tons of pointlessly large areas everywhere.
Did anet fire their old map designers?
I think anyone’s that angry right now is angry at marketing/pr/finance department, not the devs. The devs aren’t responsible for this ridiculous decision.
I get HoT for €45 since I’m an existing player, and what I’ve seen so far is not worth that. For a new player it’s a steal.
(edited by Damian.6978)
Fine, but for 45€ what we’ve been shown of HoT so far isn’t worth it. For a new player it is, sure, since you get the base game “for free”. For me it’s 45€ for dubious amount of content. No, I’ll wait thank you very much.
Also, why should I want to pay you in advance of any kind of release window and for the “privilege” of testing your beta for you? Get real, anet (and all the other devs doing this stupid stuff).
HoT Price Feedback + Base game included [merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Damian.6978
Just chipping in and saying that I’m really disappointed by this. I’ve gladly spent a lot of money on gems for cosmetics over the years I’ve played since launch; money isn’t the problem for me. But I fail to see the value I’m getting here as an existing player since launch. €44.99 for an expansion that, for all we know, has extremely little content. And not just that, you ask us to pre-order while getting nothing in return for it (sans a title and getting to beta test your game for you) nor any tentative release date.
Was your marketing department asleep on the job? It should be obvious your fans would react severely negatively to this.
No, you don’t, actually. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade you should have known something stupid would happen today. That the thing would be all day long and that it would not be optional. That is how the day works.
It is all on you to come up in here and cry about the devs having one day of fun, regardless of what difficulties and possible bugs it might bring with it. It is for one day only. It is not killing you. If it’s ruining your fun, TOO BAD. Get over it and get over yourself. It will all be back to normal in about five hours.
Amen. Have my brownie points, whatever they are!
Best and most hilarious April’s fool’s update since forever. Good job ANET! Don’t let all these dried up prunes tell you it isn’t fun; it’s absolutely hilarious. I’ve even taken an exception to my rule of never ever posting on the official forums just to let you hear that there are plenty of us silent majority that love this!
I’m outraged that people are outraged about people that are outraged at them being outraged. Nay, I am triggered!
I never ever use these forums, but I’m making an exception to let ANET know that, as a loyal customer, I loved this silly update when it hit in WvW in the middle of a huge battle. It was amazing, hilarious, and everyone went running around — including our super serious commander — and had fun with it. This is hilarious; if you can’t stand having silly fun for 24h, take a break and go out in the sun and reconsider your place in life. We all need to be reminded of being a child from time to time, lest we act like children and cry and whine while pretending to be adult instead.
Actually, I have this problem too, but it varies. Sometimes a character just won’t get wxp from towers and sometimes not at all. A relog fixes it sometimes, but other times not. I know I should get wxp because I get xp for killing players, capturing and loot bags. I have no idea what this is about, and nobody in my guild has this problem.
Protip: If you’re playing in a dimly lit (or not lit at all) room, decrease the brightness on your monitor accordingly. Sharp contrasts get sharper for the eyes in darkness when you look at a strongly backlit monitor. SAB has really sharp contrasts – unlike most of GW2 – and so you’ll notice this effect strongly playing it, especially Zone 1 World 2 where the rapids “flicker” alternating bright colors.
I’m willing to bet this is the problem for a big percentage of the people complaining here. This why people say “the retro pixel graphics make my eyes hurt / makes me nauseus” and so on. Nintendo games used to have a lot of bright colors – that was the color scheme used in a large amount of games – and old television sets had really bright backlight, thus people got sick by playing in dark rooms. I have someone in my family get epilepsy from this; the chances are drastically lowered if you just tune down the brightness in accordance with your environment’s light levels.
You can still do it once per character per day though, I believe.
To me it looks like a graphics driver glitch. Tried uninstalling then reinstalling or upgrading your graphics card drivers?
Bump. This is a big problem for turret builds…
I’m seeing the same issue. Now, here’s a funny thing; if you go to the Hearts of the Mists, all turrets can be ground targeted, but outside that area only the Rocket Turret and Healing Turret can be ground targeted. I haven’t tried in sPvP though.
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