Guild Wars 2

The problem with venom related traits aren’t just the traits themselves, venom skills are just sub-par.

Let me ask you this: What good is 1.5 seconds of petrifying someone in PvP? What good will 1.5 seconds do in PvE? What use is there for skills that apply poison other than to reduce healing and how useful is condition damage in general in PvE/PvP?

Anet deserves a second chance if only because even if they make a mistake, they attempt to address it. I don’t expect them to be the knights in shining armor of an MMO developer, but they did a very good job. Plus, they’re offering monthly content, so I can’t argue against that. As far as I’m concerned, things like this has happened before with this team and many other teams. I’m not in the least bit worried.

I’m curious, has anyone tried to calculate what condition damage would be if critical hits were also part of the system?

Basically, condition damage is similar to degeneration in the original GW. There are essentially damage caps and stacking (degen stacked, just not the individual hexes and conditions) which wasn’t great for damage compared to regular skills.

That being said, Anet should take a hard look at healing power and condition damage because the numbers are seemingly meaningless at times (seriously, all conditions use a percentage with the burning being the highest at 25%). There is nothing to indicate to the player how much of a damage increase in conditions the player will see if condition damage was raised.

I wouldn’t mind discounts on the armor skins and character, bank, and inventory slots.

I seem to recall that one of the animators said that they had to use the classic 2D animation technique known as “squat and stretch.”

Ok, so it’s been going on in the thief forums for a while now and we know that something is going to happen to Heartseeker. While the players who have faced glass cannon thieves will attest to, Heartseeker is OP from their perspective (most who never played thieves would agree).

One thing though, Heartseeker was nerfed before, so many thief players wouldn’t want that again (especially a reduction in damage, enemy health thresholds, or increased resource cost).

In my opinion, a straight out damage nerf is crude and inelegant as is an increased resource cost. To me, simply reducing damage or increasing cost without looking at the picture as a whole seems to be just applying a temporary fix to an issue that will grow as time continues.

A threshold nerf seems out of the question because the numbers seem so odd already. Seriously, above 50%, below 50%, and below 25%?? That is some weird thresholds as opposed to thresholds such as below 75, below 50, and below 25.

Now to my point: Address Heartseeker in a smart way. If you two (I assume most already knows there are only two designers assigned to balance) want to make a decision to adjust Heartseeker in any way, how about adjusting the activation times instead of a straight out damage reduction, cost increase, or a threshold change?

Basically, the lower the enemy health (based on the thresholds already in place), the activation times would be shorter IE:

• Above 50% health = 1.75 second activation time
• Below 50% health = 1.25 second activation time
• Below 25% health = 0.75 (current activation time) time

Even better, (and this is just spitballing here) revert the thresholds back to their pre-nerf state and add the different activation times instead. Longer activation times makes players sitting ducks but allows a critical hit payoff to anyone who actually bold enough to stand there.

Bullfrog.1324:

Even if it is just minor bug fixes, I get amusement out of reading them. There was a fixed typo in NPC dialog in Iron Marches? Cool. There was a clipping plane that got realigned in Rata Sum? Awesome. I like to know these things. It lets me know that things are being done and that there is attention being paid to the small details.

I like to read patch notes too. I guess it’s a habit for me. Aside from that, there are plenty of typos I’d like to see fixed whether it’s the description in all consumables (the word “consumable” has no space between it and the period at the end of the description) or the grammar/spelling issue with the Bloodstone Shard (“A” orb of pure power?? It’s “An” orb of pure power).

Tier 3 female human light armor is nothing but a bikini with a few bits of what seems to be metal. Do not want.

“Thirded.”

However, my guess regarding the notes are either:

1. Routine maintenance or emergency maintenance.

or

2. Miscellaneous bug fixes or exploit fixes.

If all blast finishers are gone from evasive arcana, I wouldn’t say this was nerfed, I would say that this trait is now bugged and needs to be fixed ASAP.

I was expecting some big balances for the classes. It seemed that for the most part, these class update notes are bug fixes. There are a few buffs here and there, but there isn’t anything really that big (in terms of PvE impact). Also, is it just me or does evasive arcana seem to take longer to cooldown in between blast finishers?

Three words: Combustible Lemon Grenade.

The reason: You find them from a karma vendor and they’re account bound.

Similar situation (well, 95%), and I have yet to map out all of WvW. It’s not fun, not fun at all. Why couldn’t Anet have removed PvP based exploration and instead added the (vanilla) dungeons to the mix?

I was running HotW recently and I was firing off certain CC skills when I noticed that the CC duration seems to grow shorter with each application. Do bosses have diminished returns on CC duration or is it just me?

I replaced all of the ele’s attunement bindings from “f1 – f4” to “left alt” + (1, 2, 3, 4).

This way, I’ll be able to use all my skills via naga’s normal buttons, or switch attunements via left thumb pressing “left alt” and right thumb pressing 1 – 4. Works very well for me.

Zelot.8276:

wts 2 bank tabs full of these tools….

oh wait…

2 Bank tabs? It would be much easier if they could stack with each other so you can carry more than 10 sickles at a time in one slot…

In the original GW, you could at least see a name floating above some empty space. There have been no mentions and not even a single name has appeared.

Also, nice one!

What ever happened to Gum Drops, the Mad King’s Invisible Steed? Will he/she/it be making a comeback or appearance during the next act?

I have a pair of logitech speakers and occasionally, while in environments where there are a lot of spell/attack sound effects going on, the game’s audio seems to make a strange alarm-like sound.

I searched online and found out that many others have had the same problem and that this problem tends to happen to people with logitech audio products IE: speakers/ headphones.

My questions are:
1. Will this be addressed (and when)?
2. Why is this happening?

IIRC, the NPC isn’t implemented yet. They (Anet) are going to add the NPC in the next full build. When the next full build will be, though, I don’t know.

We do have krytan, profane, and primeval armor skins from the original GW1 on the gem shop, but what about the other armor sets? I personally would love to have the elementalist and mesmer FoW armor sets back.

When can we expect more armor skins on the gem shop and would it be possible to have a poll for players to decide what armor skins will make it?

Wow, and all this time I’ve been standing next to it hitting it with AoE only to find out it’s AoE attacks also target me at close range. How did you guys do that?

I finished path 2 a few hours ago. Is it just me or is alpha’s attacks worse in path 2 compared to 1? His ice bursts look like they have 2 circles: the actual hit radius, and a larger radius which does nothing. That’s really confusing when you run through it the first time.

Also, his earth spike rings aren’t so bad. It’s the ice bursts that I found annoying. I think I might not want to do path 3 now.

Ender.3508:

Yeah, we stacked 4 people in the face of the boss so if anyone went down we could res them before the next attack hits.

Another tactic which would be interesting but a havent tried, is to mark a tendril as a target, have the ranged player get it down to low hp so if anyone gets downed all they have to do is press ‘t’ and attack to rally.

That… I can’t believe I never even thought about that before! I’d probably have to test it out when I run through the other 2 paths later today!

Wow, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but WOW, Subject Alpha is… not what I would consider challenging. Rather, it’s frustrating if not annoying at times.

It seems that in all the groups (4 total, 1 succeeded) that I’ve been a part of all say the same thing: grave rush it.

I know about the post detailing strategies on how to deal with it’s attacks but still, but not everyone visits the forums and it took the team 40 minutes just to deal with him during the final fight in path 1.

Also, yes, I know that the giganticus is much worse than Subject Alpha.

In terms of difficulty, I think this particular fight needs to be looked at a few times and then a few more times over.

Good luck to everyone!

I decided to buy a piece of the karma armor found in Orr. The chest piece is really nice but the pants piece doesn’t look that great (I don’t like the frilly things on the upper thigh):

DonRobeez.3560:

The current elite’s are pretty strong and can be game-changing, but it seems like you all want a ’’godmode’’ skill.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “godmode” skill. All we want is just a skill that will properly give the enemy team an “Oh kitten” moment when activated and puts the enemy team temporarily on the defensive. Once those skills enter cooldown, it should put the defensive team with a slight advantage because that’s 1 less elite that can be immediately used.

In short, we want the elite skills with the power and psychological effect that Anet claimed they have when Anet introduced it in one of their video clips.

The elite skills functionality that we have right now are far from the claimed “game changers” that Anet stated once in a video clip.

Anet claimed that testers were afraid to use their elites in pvp because the activation of an elite meant it would have changed the battlefield. At the same time, once 1 elite is on cooldown, that means there are less elite skills on standby for one team. This supposedly created tension (or something along the lines of that).

Yeah, non of that exists on launch (at least, from my observations). Perhaps it will be in the future, but at the moment, nope, nothing.

Please, remove the WvW requirements, there can be only frustration when trying to reach the areas in WvW.

Acerbus, that would be pretty nice too, but considering that armor skins would become locked out to characters that don’t belong to a specific armor class, I’d rather have town costumes instead. This way, players will be able to have more options for their town clothing and they’ll be able look like whatever gw1 hero they want.

Early on, Anet was considering adding heroes in GW2 and by getting the elite armor skins of said heroes in the Hall of Monuments, we’d be able to have them in GW2. However, since the hero system has since been scrapped, why not add the heroes into GW2 as town costumes? This way, Anet would be able to take a scrapped idea and bring it back in a whole new light.

Imagine, running around town dressed up as Koss, or Jurrah (aka: GW1 Master of Whispers), or even as MOX, the world’s first dual core golem!

Here’s my elementalist with her full set of magic find armor! I couldn’t stand most of the armor sets that looked like skimpy bikinis so I transmuted her lv 80 Masquerade armor with the lower level acolyte armor.

TA light armor reminds me of Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty and Magda from Diablo 3: Ugly.

In terms of narrative, I honestly thought that Anet would have learned from Nightfall that you shouldn’t have an NPC take the spotlight from the player.

Playing on an alt because I’m waiting for the risen to have their respawn rates/aggro range to be nerfed. My main is an ele and it’s not fun in orr.

Phantasms = DPS is fine by me but they take too long to attack. Seriously, 5 – 14 seconds depending on the phantasm? Hell anything that takes more than 4 seconds is already a long time to perform an attack!

The fact that the risen respawn very fast, are so densely packed together, and have a seemingly large aggro range makes it difficult for me to engage in a prolonged fight and succeed.

For the record, I play an elementalist and yes, my toughness is above 1400, yes, I do use glyph of (sand)storms via earth attunement, yes, all my equipment are level 80 (some of which are exotic), and yes, I do have condition removal.

I also kite really well and am capable of letting loose 3 blast finishers at the same time (if that matters to anyone who wants to respond with “play better,” “DPS better/more*” or “lrn2kite”).

The Orrian area, at least to me, isn’t fun. What was fun (to me) was completing all the renown hearts, finding PoI, and just exploring an area in general.

Fighting hordes of undead who can pull you, inflict bleeding, poison, cripple, steal your health, and teleport to you (or a combination of three out of the six things mentioned per enemy) just isn’t fun.

If anyone has advice that doesn’t involve zerging (aka: mob rushing) or exploring with guildies (most of my guildies are underleveled or don’t have the time), I’d like to hear it.

• Someone actually said that to me in a dungeon run before. That, without a doubt, was one of the stupidest comments I had ever heard from someone. You can’t really “DPS more” if you’re skills are spammed on cooldown already, can you?

To me, end game means more dungeons, explorable areas, and more challenges. However, to me, it doesn’t mean pvp or anything related to it.

The one NPC song in the lv 15-25 human area that ends with “…chickens croon/chicken’s on the table soon” basically made my day.

Wait, 5-6 hours?? Ouch, so pugging CoF to complete my armor set is out of the question. My guild isn’t that hardcore/serious about dungeons too…

There’s one part where you have to defend her as she tries to hack a console. The problem that I’ve encountered after running through with 3 pug groups (and numerous deaths at this part) is that she’ll often get killed quickly or the part dies from the large onslaught of golems.

Also, during this part, I tried to activate to healing blast combos only to discover that it doesn’t heal the NPCs! How are we supposed to pass this area?

For the record, all 3 of the groups mentioned never experienced any problems or complications up until that point.

level 80 human ele: 7/10

All in all, having started out as a hardcore ele in GW1, it would be natural that I play an ele in GW2. My problems though, range from some skills being too weak, having too long of a cooldown, or the traits being lackluster. Especially the grandmaster traits.

I’d like to know where the OP got the idea that something big is going down on the 25th.

EnochDagor.6185:

I am now lvl 80 and I’m beginning to review my stats more carefully and compare them to a friend (who is a lvl 80 engineer).

So far, I gotta say we are lacking a LOT. So… I was wondering what everyone’s stats are and what everyone considers to be good stats.

So, please, reply with what you would consider a good target level for stats or what you currently have. Which ever.

As I am the one asking the question, I don’t know what is a good target level.

Here are mine configured as “glass cannon”:
Power: 1897
Precision: 1950
Toughness: 1410
Vitality: 916

Attack: 2685
Condition Damage: 100
Critical Chance: 53
Critical Damage: 54
Armor: 2165
Health: 11237

Thanks!

How did you reach 1400 toughness? I’m lv 80 and I only have 1167!

The weapon type you’re thinking of is a reward from collecting enough Citadel of Flame tokens (it’s also commonly mistaken for being a Destroyer weapon). While I don’t have the sword, I know you can preview it when you speak to the dungeon rewards NPC at Lion’s Arch.

3. While I do know my way around the elementalist very well (I’m by no means a master), I think there is a lot of room for improvement of the class.

Traits (in particular, grandmaster traits) are rather weak while some spells take either too much time to cast/charge up or the damage is too inconsistent (I’m looking at you Meteor Shower).

Some skills need improvement (Focus skills could do with some changes or buffs) and of course, bug fixing would help out a lot too.

25%? The current cap is at 33%. I wouldn’t mind if Anet boosted the cap for PvE. there are times in combat and exploration where it feels like 25-33% doesn’t do much to me.

Is glyph really that useful for healing? I play a human ele and I use prayer to dwayna since it heals much more at once. Is there some combo or strategy that I’m missing out on??