Guild Wars 2

Rognik.2579:

We haven’t been given any indication that any races’ senses are sharper than any of the others. The differences are mostly cultural, and somewhat biological. I’m pretty sure your average charr or norn is stronger than most humans or asura, but everyone is fully capable of fighting on equal terms.

It’s more than a slight advantage. Everyone can fight everyone in terms of game mechanics and plot convenience, but there was some older lore that suggested a lone norn could fight off an entire Charr warband at a time. In one of the books there’s a scene of a norn physically overpowering three charr at once using a bar bench. Norn have a massive advantage in raw strength over even charr, and I don’t think there’s anything to suggest they are especially sluggish to compensate.

Outside plot protected named characters, an average norn should ruin an average member of any other race in combat. And they only become more powerful when they transform into a werebear, which doesn’t have a crazy short duration and lengthy cooldown in the lore.

mistsim.2748:

I think we need a trap ult, as in: if you step in it, and don’t have a condi wipe, you die. and for them to have additional functions, kind of like survival utilities with WK. additional charges wouldn’t solve our problems.

It would be nice if you could trait traps to give a small amount of stability whenever you lay down a trap. It would help tremendously with the trapper ranger’s extreme vulnerability to being chain controlled due to the lack of stunbreakers. Especially since you usually want Entangle for traps to keep the enemy in the traps longer and won’t have a stability source as a result.

Asur.9178:

What’s a deadshot?

A supervillain who never misses but somehow never manages to kill a guy dressed up in a bat suit.

Last night something weird happened with dishonor. I finished a match and left, and while sitting in the PVP lobby I went to queue again and it told me I had dishonor. Though I never disconnected and saw the match through to it’s end.

I enjoyed Soulbeast overall, but it did have a few shortcomings.

Dagger was very disappointing. I don’t especially like daggers aesthetically, but the attacks felt weak and the ultra short range meant I rarely hit anything (latency issues).

Stances are pretty boring. I liked the heal well enough because we really needed a condi cleansing heal that didn’t rely on a trait and wasn’t Healing Spring. The rest seem pretty straight forward. The elite shout is interesting when combined with Rapid Fire, but I’m unsure if the damage boost is worth an elite slot.

I’d like an ability to swap my pets in Beast Mode. I already switch between beast mode and normal to utilize my pets independently when needed and to set up my might spam combo, so this isn’t about camping Beast Mode. When I pick a pet for defensive reasons I can’t get to the pet when I need that defense as it stands, which means I may as well not be using a defensive pet at all. Nobody plans their condition cleanses 7+ seconds in advance. I was excited to see my old friend the Marsh Drake gave resistance, but then quickly realized I’d never get to use it.

Some pet abilities are pretty weak. I’m not sure why I’d ever use Chomp or even Tail Swipe as it stands. Long animation for the payoff I could get from an auto attack. Speaking of animations, it would’ve been nice to get something like chomping spirit jaws when using Bite or Chomp rather than… Throwing a punch? That’s a pathetic animation and doesn’t make me feel like I’ve channeled the beast at all.

I love the synergy with the Beastmaster line and how much selfish damage boosts you can push out of the spec. Though I expect that will be severely nerfed in later versions of the class, which is unfortunate. A remorseless Soulbeast with Sic’em is a pretty strong combo.

I made a fairly effective build using Sage Amulet, Primordial Stance, and Stoneheart together to become an uncritable bleed bursting killer. It was pretty fun. Even downed two thieves in a 1v2 from the bleed stacks before they could burst me down (though I lost in the downed state battle).

My main complaint is how low the damage output is when you’re not using Primordial Stance. With this stance you can load up conditions in huge stacks very quick, but without it you’re just not hitting hard enough to be a serious threat to all the sustain out there. An entire elite weapon set shouldn’t feel underpowered when not using a specific utility to boost it’s damage.

I also don’t feel like I quite have the innate mobility to stick to my target. A sword elementalist can’t switch to a ranged weapon like every other class, so above all there is a significant need to outpace your opponent. Right now most enemies seem too able to kite me for the sacrifice in range I’ve made.

I tend to agree with a lot of what you’ve said. I played Soulbeast initially and didn’t care for it, trying to play it as it’s own thing. But once I inserted it into existing builds I started to like it a lot more.

It enhanced my trapper build by giving me more options to keep people in my traps and more tools to keep up pressure when the traps are on cooldown.

It enhanced my longbow build with more control options and more burst.

I also made a pretty nice power axe build that can stack 25 might in a few seconds and get me to 900 condi damage with the right beast mode pet. I think that was my most successful build overall. Still unsure if the condi pet investment is worth it just for a stronger splitblades though, even if it’s just a choice in pet.

I really wish they wouldn’t change this. I like being able to land mauls that actually make the opponent reassess their choice to keep pressuring me.

It almost definitely will though. Hopefully they just drop the damage boost in Beast Form to 20% rather than nerfing the skill as a whole.

draxynnic.3719:

@Ehecatl: I’m inclined to agree that having the PC continue to have a set of companions through the personal story (and beyond) possibly could have worked better.
For humans, this simply be an adventuring party, or could be something that varies according to background. A noble, for instance, might have household troops, while a commoner might have reformed gang members.

You could even have had options in the home instance to customise your unit.

You could also obtain new characters as you progress. Your charr unit gets assigned to work with the Priory to help them in the war against the Elder Dragons and as you go you can add Priory characters to your group, adopting them into your warband in the same way charr away from the Legions will often consider people they care about part of their “warband”. Other races will be even easier to explain the additions. Then the Pact forms and you become a mixed unit of various individuals from the different orders and races.

It could make for a far more racially appropriate story that meshes really well with the multiplayer nature of the game. When a friend joins your personal story mission the story doesn’t have to ignore they are there either, they are just another part of your group. It would also give you a lot more sense of individuality, as these people who have come together are there because of YOU. Even if you’re just a single Pact unit of many that brought down Zhaitan, you and your elite team were instrumental in the dragon’s downfall. Even though you aren’t the most important person in the world, you are the most important person to your team. You could even say you’ve created a guild out of them, thus finally connecting the name of the franchise to the actual story for the first time since ever.

Anet could also monetize it by adding different companion skins on the gem shop, which would offset the need for more dialogue boxes from the various NPCs. I wouldn’t expect them all to be super talkative like the Dragonwatch crew, but each NPC could have their own dialogue branches that tell their story, combined with some random reactionary dialogue so they feel a little alive.

Meanwhile the heavy dialogue comes from your interactions with your mentor (who ideally wouldn’t die so early and stay with you for a much longer length of time), your order leader, the members of Destiny’s Edge, and Trahearne.

Kalavier.1097:

You can’t please everybody, this is entirely true.

But notice how in living story season 2 and 3, we became more noticeable important/got comments about how big we where?

After the people who never bothered to read dialogue of PS complained about how “ALL MA CREDIT GOT STOLEZ BY TREEBEARD.”?

Sadly, the people who like stuff tend to be quieter then the insane, loud, small group.

IMO, it did suffer some. Anet’s strength in GW1 was that we were the hero, but we weren’t in charge. PS worked pretty well (IMO) because we weren’t in charge, and season 1 somewhat for the same reason.

however when the commander became “The person in charge” like HoT, things quickly went downhill. Like how the commander does very little in that storyline to actually be “The commander of the Pact” :P.

Hopefully with Path of Fire, we return to that “important, but not perhaps THE person in charge” role.

Indeed. The personal story was mostly fine, though as a roleplayer it does bother me that I can’t name the Pact’s commander because he exists in a weird quantum bubble where he’s simultaneously every PC and none of them. Not having a name for such an important figure is awkward from a story telling perspective.

There’s a tricky balance between giving the players the validation they need to feel like their time in the game was worth while and having the freedom to tell a decent story with actual characters that have a personality. The biggest flaw in GW2’s attempt was that they focused too much on the PC at the expense of their characters, and even then the players still complained about not getting enough credit.

GW1’s way of doing it was over all stronger. Our character was an unsung hero for most of it. Someone doing great things that, like you said, didn’t have a position of power within the world. Another advantage was that the PC wasn’t the sole hero involved. Every step of the way we had an entourage of other heroes with us, to the point the story wasn’t “Johnny Awesome saves the world”. It was “A group of heroes including Cynn, Aidan, Jora, Pyre Fierceshot, and others saved the world”.

I often lament that Anet dropped the companion system from the first game. Even if you can solo most open world content now, it would have been interesting to keep your warband/krewe/gang/hunting party/flower friends on as NPCs that come with you on your personal story missions. That way the story doesn’t go “Johnny Awesome saves the day”. It’s “One of the Pact’s elite special forces saves the day.” The player remains mostly anonymous in the grand scheme of things, but our actions are talked about so that we can feel like we accomplished something.

They could have in turn done something with the home instance mechanic and allowed us to customize it and built it up to reflect the accomplishments we’ve achieved in saving the world with our team.

Kalavier.1097:

Then how much complaining would Anet have to deal with that boils down to “But I do all the heavy lifting, why don’t I get any credit or hero status???”

There’s a trade secret to be used in exactly this situation that many a story writer has used when faced with similar criticism. It’s called “ignore them”.

Most players aren’t writers. Most players have never attempted to make a coherent story or setting in their lives. They have no idea how many issues crop up in a narrative when you shoehorn your player character into the lead role of a multiplayer game. Anet catered to the demand for a more important PC and now their NPCs and the individuality of the PC has suffered for it, causing people to complain.

As was said above, you can’t please everyone all of the time. There will always be complaining.

Indeed. The range on the bolt attack makes it a lot easier to hit with, but even they can struggle. If the drakes could just turn as they charged the attack it would alleviate a lot of their current problems. At most you’d need to blow an immobilize or stun on the enemy right as the stream activates and succeed in forcing the enemy to eat the damage. As is there aren’t any reliable control effects that can keep someone rooted for the entire charge up and stream, unless your opponent just chooses not to cleanse your roots.

An expanding field would be great. That way you don’t have that… Disappointed feeling as your wyvern flies into the air and rains fire on your enemy and nothing happens for the first couple seconds. I love the animation, I just wish it was more impactful in terms of actual gameplay.

As for drakes, if their cones were a bit wider and if they rotated to aim while charging, that would go a looong way to making them better all around. It can be frustrating when even mobs walk out of the cone or the drake makes a weird turn and faces away because of pathing issues.

The fire wyvern.. I want to keep it’s F2 the way it is animations wise. What it could use is the fire field forming sooner, and maybe some decent damage when someone gets caught in the fire stream. Right now using it feels pretty underwhelming, though I acknowledge it can’t be too strong because of how good the evade portion of the attack is.

To be fair, being a multicultural game would work absolutely find if the story didn’t focus on our character the way GW1’s story did. That sort of storyline just doesn’t work well with an MMO where the main character of the story will have to have no personality, origin, race, or even gender.

It would have been better to not put the player in the role of “single most important person in the entire universe” and just make us a nameless hero who shows up, saves the day, interacts with the NPCs, and then leaves. Have us on the periphery of the story following Trahearne and Destiny’s Edge, maybe with some minor side questlines that involve our old warband or krewe or what have you to keep the feeling of belonging to our race intact.

Bonus points if our warband/krewe/gang/hunting buddies/flower friends joined us on missions similar to in GW1 as NPCs.

I would have felt much better about this story step if I were watching say, Margory join the Shining Blade than my charr doing it.

At the very least we are getting new pets, which in turn adds more options to core ranger. If they are roughly on par with the HoT pets we’ll have a bigger roster of top tier ones.

That is fair. She probably will be an incredible mind in a few years, especially at the rate she’s going. It’s just like you said, I don’t think she’s at that level right now. I can’t really call her the most powerful engineer yet.

Firey Dragon Sword for me as well. I’ve wanted to put that on my charr elementalist ever since I created him at the launch of the game. I am so excited to finally get to do it.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

xcept for in Draconis Mons, where they completely and utterly wiped out Rata Arcanum despite their army of golems, and are actively fighting the Vigil…

Druids were never pacifists, who would refuse fighting no matter what; they were merely passive in their aggressiveness, only assaulting those who assault them or nature.

Dang, I need to go back and explore that zone more. I missed the part about them taking down Rata Arcanum.

As for your point about Scarlet and Taimi, while it’s true Scarlet learned her skills from a variety of sources, she still accomplished a great deal on her own, taking their teachings and going in entirely different directions with it. Taimi is just continuing the research left for her by others.

If Scarlet had received her education from other sources she’d likely still have become a brilliant and revolutionary engineer, though perhaps she wouldn’t have gone insane and become driven to take her work to the extremes she did (though there’s evidence she was already off long before meeting Omadd).

if Taimi never found Scarlet’s notes, Omadd’s machine, and the vast data archives of Rata Novus to exclusively study, it’s unlikely she’d have accomplished much more than build Scruffy by now. All of Taimi’s work is building upon what Scarlet and Omadd did. What she is doing is incredible, but I’m not convinced Omadd or Scarlet couldn’t do the same if they hadn’t died, nor do I think Taimi could reach the level of Omadd or Scarlet with the backgrounds they had.

Unsure how I feel about it right now. On the one hand the core concept sounds interesting, but on the other I don’t want to feel like I am being pressured to go soulbeast to compensate for the pet’s problems. I also worry that being in beastmode might be flat out better than having a pet in most situations, resulting in the pet never being used again.

I’m also not very interested in a mainhand dagger or stances as new skills, but that’s just a preference thing.

And in the game norn barely even get their shapeshifting power. The single biggest reason why I don’t play norn.

Having a toggle for you to not see it player side would be fine. it fading away on it’s own wouldn’t though, since from what I understand it doesn’t have a time limit. There’d be no way to tell if the ranger is in beastmode when they attack you aside from looking around for their pet, which can be an issue in even small group PVP. You’d be screwed if there was another ranger in the area too, because it’s not very easy to tell who owns what pet at a glance in the middle of a fight.

Until we actually see what Isgarren can do, Baelfire should be the top elementalist. Isgarren has an army of elementals and a floating castle, but we don’t actually know if all of that is under his own power or something like the Zephyrite crystals at work. Baelfire on the other hand was almost a god, and has some of the largest scale displays of elemental power we’ve seen. We just don’t know what went into him becoming that strong.

I’d also argue Scarlet is leaps and bounds ahead of Taimi. Taimi is only as good as she is because she has built upon what Scarlet and Omadd left her. Standing on the shoulders of giants as it were. Without them Taimi wouldn’t be all that impressive, even her golem pales in comparison to the golems of say, Snaff. Scarlet, on the other hand, made massive innovations that lead to her nearly conquering all of Tyria.

Strongest ranger… Probably the Druids? According to GW2 druid is a specialized form of ranger, and the Druids have used nature magic to fully transcend mortality. They also have some pretty potent preservation magic at their disposal, though we never see them become aggressive because of their pacifist lifestyle so we can’t gauge their combat potency.

This bothered me too. Under no circumstances would any of my charr join the Shining Blade, but most certainly not under threat of magical death. Even the ones who are gladium mercenaries wouldn’t willingly submit to a magical lie detector oath that kills you. Not to mention our character just accepts this demand on good faith and assume the sneaky, underhanded secret agents aren’t going to hack our brain and turn us into a puppet.

Even my Sylvari would refuse. Their first loyalty is to the Pale Tree, not to the Krytan throne.

As someone who enjoys the trap playstyle but doesn’t play a guardian, I have to say that this would gut the funnest and most thematic aspects of playing a trapper build.

The entire point of a trap is to drop it somewhere and wait for someone to step on it. Trap builds lose a LOT in terms of dueling potential because any half decent player will see where you’ve dropped your traps and not approach. The element of surprise is how the trapper gets their kills, and the best way to surprise someone is to lay a trap and then leave.

I absolutely love to leave my traps on a point and see the damage numbers from across the map. But it comes at the cost of my traps being on cooldown when I next enter combat, and if I lay down new traps before the old ones are triggered the old ones go away. It’s a fair trade off.

Darkside.7182:

I wanna ask you all if you disagree. Why you all druids keep using bristleback and smokescale if that pets are not OP?

Because our other pets are largely underpowered. I’m experimenting with the dual drake set up I had before HoT launched and it’s working alright, but my drakes miss their tail swipe most of the time and it’s very, very hard to line up their F2 so that they can fully unload on the enemy. And while I am taking the time to lead my enemy into the right position and blowing control skills to keep them in place, my opponent is just going through their normal rotation and doing just as well as I am with far less effort put in, a far lower chance of failure, and much higher end results.

The drake’s tail swipe hits just as hard, if not harder, than the smokescale’s smoke assault and does it in a wide cleaving AoE. However it’s slow enough that most of the time the enemy will walk out of it’s range ON ACCIDENT before it goes off, where as smokescale’s burst is a multiple hit teleport that will track the target. Smokescale provides less overall damage but is far more consistent in being able to actually hit someone.

The drake’s F2 does less single target damage than the bristleback but has the benefit of bouncing, doing more overall damage to multiple targets. However the bristleback is able to rotate when using it’s F2 attack, allowing it to track the enemy to ensure most of the damage finds it’s mark unless the enemy actively tries to avoid it, where as, again, most enemies ACCIDENTALLY avoid my drake’s F2 simply by staying mobile.

That’s really all it comes down to. Pet damage is really, really easy to avoid in every species aside from the smokescale and bristleback. It’s bad design when an enemy is capable of accidentally avoiding a huge chunk of damage without even being aware a burst is coming.

If Anet improved the other pets’ ability to land their hits reliably you’d see more diversity in pet choices overall. If my drakes had a slightly wider hit box or a slightly faster cast time on his attacks and the ability to rotate to keep their target in line of sight I’d probably favor him over the bristleback due to having similar damage potential while being tankier and having cleave (though sacrificing the ranged auto and bleed stacks).

Then there’s the wyverns… I want to use them so bad but it’s really, really just to justify taking them over just about anything else.

Light Of The Abyss.5927:

Play ranked

You misunderstood him. He wants to play the new map but can’t because other people are voting for the old maps in unranked.

It’s a problem I’ve been having as well. Capricorn keeps getting the majority vote but the dial keeps landing on Foefire or one of the older maps because one or two people voted for it.

Normally I wouldn’t be bothered by this, but given the map has a limited access achievement attached to it I’d very much like to garuntee I get the map I’m playing for each time I queue, rather than wasting 10-15 minutes on a map I have no interest in.

I do want to stress that this is just for the limited time Capricorn is in beta feedback mode. I do not condone permanently splitting the playerbase between map choices.

Finally. I can take down the dozen sticky notes I use to keep track of my rangers’ pet names!

As others have said, there are examples of charr romance in the game. The reason you’re not seeing it is because you are looking for a more traditional human romance, and that just isn’t how charr operate.

Charr don’t make a big deal out of being together. In fact they seem to keep it pretty private and don’t make it obvious. There was a short story about charr way back before the game launched that told the story of a male and female Charr who were constantly at each other’s throats and argued all the time, even coming to blows. But at the end of the story when the male is killed in battle the female reveals they had a child together, takes said child to the male’s fahrar (they were from separate legions). When the Primus asked who the father was she said “He was a coward and a fool…. Tell our cub to be just like him.”

Charr aren’t a touchy feely race. They are hard, strict, and disciplined. And while there is room for love in their lives it doesn’t mean they are going to faun over one another and treat each other like precious snowflakes the way humans do.

Daddicus.6128:

Can you explain further? One of the big reasons it has taken me so long to get where I am in HoT is the prevalence of interrupt bars. They’re bad enough on regular bosses, but putting them on veterans is really hard. Soloing with any character (mine, anyhow), it is absolutely impossible to break those bars.

A wyvern’s wing buffet can almost take out most breakbars on it’s own. Or a jungle spider’s double immobilize combo. Add that to things like Path of Scars or Point Blank Shot and it’s pretty easy to smash basic break bars. Want to break more bars? Run Glyph of Equality and Glyph of Tides. Want to break even MORE bars? Bestial Warden gives your pet’s F2 a taunt. Don’t feel like using glyphs? Spike Trap is pretty effective too. Especially combined with Ancient Seeds which turns every knockdown into an immobilize for extra bar breaking goodness.

Druid is lousy with control effects. I can pretty much shatter a breakbar solo every time the breakbar turns blue again.

FriendlyInvader.3126:

I’ve swapped to tempest for open world stuff, and I find it pretty laughable that I can out perform my ranger, a profession that I’ve put over 1k hours into, by a profession I’ve only put less than 30% of the time into.

Survivability is not a valid reason either, learn to use your active defenses on other professions. And again, for the sake of outing the problems with this profession, the damage is NOT decent. Buff the damage output of all our weapons by 50%, and we would barely be mid tier in the DPS department.

On the contrary, I feel like I’ve been handicapping myself with the druid.

I play both ranger and elementalist actually. Elementalist was my main first, and I have over a thousand hours on him alone. And yet when it came time to farm HPs it was a brutal, difficult experience that I otherwise breezed through on my ranger, and there were a few HPs I could solo only on my ranger.

Tempest isn’t as good at dealing with breakbars as a druid is, which is a big part of it. Less natural defense so you need to spend more time dodging and dedicate more utilities to defense. Druid’s pet can tank for you to remove the necessity of dodging at all if you time your pet swaps right. Druid’s self healing is just as good as the tempest’s healing with 0 Healing Power. Tempest’s main advantage is raw damage of course, but the sheer ease of surviving as a druid makes up for it in my opinion. I still kill things plenty fast.

I also have two different druids with different builds. Both were able to clear PVE content significantly easier than my tempest even after everything was unlocked. One druid is a power longbow build (though I often go sword/axe for cleave) and the other is a condi trapper druid.

Animism.9803:

Yes, forgotten most of that because it is so underplayed in the realism of the world.
The gods make no such mention of course, and if I remember rightly, actually took forms that almost mimicked traits by gender. Of course this goes into a different topic, but it did make for a more fitting world which was to be portrayed.

I mean… where are the xenophobes in GW2 hellbent on ridding the Sylvari from the world? It should be present given the nature and story surrounding the Sylvari. Everything is just presented as a ‘given’, attitudes of the notorious Asura and Charr are worlds apart, yet you rarely hear dialogue highlighting the juxtaposition – which is typical behavour.

Not that underplayed. The charr personal story shows the Flame Legion trying to recruit a female of the Blood Legion by telling her she could be a cook, and there’s a huge statue of Kalla who lead the revolution of females against the Flame Legion. The Sons of Svanir are VERY open about their misogyny in the norn personal story, especially if you play a female character.

And again this is a world where there are a HUGE number of intelligent races. Why would Sylvari be focused on any more than Hylek or Kodan? Most of the xenophobia humans have is rightfully directed to races that have actively antagonized them like the charr and centaur, which is quite prevalent in the story and NPC dialogue.

As for Sylvari hate specifically, look around Lion’s Arch. There’s a murderer on the loose specifically targeting Sylvari. Then the HoT story line does have NPCs mistrusting you for being a Sylvari, and you have the option of mistrusting Sylvari as the PC. In fact there’s an event chain in Verdant Brink where a group of Vigil soldiers go out hunting and killing innocent Sylvari and you have to stop them.

Do charr and asura have large breasts? No? Then why the heck would you put breastplates on their armor? That makes absolutely no sense from a biological perspective. The only reason a charr woman would wear something like that is if she wanted to look human, which in charr culture is an INSULT.

Crowley.8761:

So what you are looking for is a way to force people to make a match last as long as possible even if you have no real chance of victory?

I’m so glad people like you aren’t in charge of making games.

To be fair, you can’t know the outcome of a match 100%. Just the other day I was in a game and our thief looked at our team composition and the enemy team’s composition and declared that we were definitely going to lose this game.

Fortunately she still did her best, and we ended up winning 500 to 350. Solid victory.

If she had gone AFK because she assumed we’d lose we would have simply lost rather than getting two delicious pips.

@Tragic Positive

I don’t wanna get too far off topic, but basically we’re both right on this.

Anet has a tendency to leave the method used to perform out skills as rather vague and open to interpretation. If you go into the lore page of this forum you’ll see a Q&A with red posts where the developers were answering some of our lore questions. One of the questions was about warriors and whether or not they use magic, since a lot of their skills are blatantly superhuman and some don’t really make sense as an exercise of sheer might. The response was basically “Some warriors use magic, some don’t. It’s up to you to decide how your warrior uses the skills.”

The same can be applied to the ranger. You see a character with no magical ability at all who merely borrows the power from the land. Personally I see a survivalist with a strong enough connection to the land to control it with some innate magical skill. Not a true mage, but someone with a strong enough spiritual connection that he can tap into these primal forces and the spirit world and harness their power.

So from my perspective on the ranger and their skills the druid is a natural progression of that. Someone who went from merely being a strong spiritual person with a deep connection to nature to having studied magic and harnessed that formerly blunt use of magic into a fine edge. A ranger who has specialized in nature magic.

I also disagree that the stars and Moon don’t fit the nature theme. The sun gives life to plants and the moon controls the tide. Stars give light to the night sky so creatures can see. These forces are far away from the earth, but they still are a part of the overall ecosystem. Judging by the glyph names druids are very much about balance and unity, and historically the druids of Maguuma have been VERY into the whole “We are a part of the greater whole and all things are one” concept.

When my druid enters Celestial Avatar form I see it as him tapping into the cosmic forces of nature that he was previously only able to scratch as a ranger. A state of enlightenment where all aspects of nature respond to him in his time of need.

From my point of view the ranger is the rugged survivalist who has developed a close, supernatural bond with nature and can call on it in his time of need with some instinctual understanding of magic. The druid is the old sage who has grown so close to nature that he can fully understand the scope of the world he lives in and uses it to defend himself.

It really would have been nice to have something in, like, The Falls in Auric Basin where an ancient druid spirit is tutoring a group of young rangers and explaining his philosophy about how the earth and the stars are all one. I honestly can’t fathom why Anet completely cut the druids out of Heart of Thorns. I was so psyched to see the druids again, as they were the most interesting part of Prophecies for me by far.

I use glyphs excessively in solo PVE. Glyph of Equality + Glyph of Tides and maybe a pet taunt will obliterate almost any break bar, making soloing champions incredibly easy.

Tragic Positive.9356:

@bearshaman

This is just my personal opinion but…
… How in the world does a traveling skirmisher trusting only his pet connect to the outer space, black holes, solar magic and spiritual world of wisps?

A traveling skirmisher that frequently calls on the power of animal spirits to enhance his physical strikes, calls upon the elemental power of lightning to enhance his reflexes, can create a literal whirlwind to reflect projectiles, can summon masses of thorned vines from the earth to ensnare his enemies, and who can commune with and summon elemental spirits to magically aid him and his allies, one of which is a spirit of the sun.

Rangers already have a strong spiritual connection to the realm where wisps likely come from. They could already call upon the spirit of the sun and water, which explains the solar and water based magic they have access to. Is it really so much of a jump from the sun and the ocean to stars and the moon? To me a druid is just a ranger who has attuned so highly to the spiritual and elemental world that he has achieved a form of enlightenment, and can harness celestial forces far beyond merely summoning a spirit of the sun and earthly powers.

Though I do agree with you on the second part. We really did need more druid lore to flesh out the specialization from a story perspective. But then the same is true for ALL the elite specializations. I really don’t see why they couldn’t have added a lone druid spirit from GW1 who has special dialogue with ranger players explaining the source of their newfound druidic power.

Really that is my main gripe with HoT. Not enough lore. But that’s an entirely different discussion.

Unless you think that ONLY the 100 rated builds are viable there’s actually some pretty solid variety in metabattle builds. From my experience the great and good rated builds do just as well if played correctly. They just aren’t necessarily the easiest builds to faceroll with.

I tend to make a lot of my own builds, but I also go on metabattle and play the various meta builds to see how they tick. And quite often I find them to be very fun too! So I’ll take the build off metabattle and then tweak it to my liking until the build meshes better with my playstyle. You’d be surprised how much of a difference a few skill and trait swaps can make.

Admittedly it is incredibly annoying when you have three teammates burning the beast and the enemy is just plinking away with auto attack and, by sheer luck, their auto attack is the one that gets the final kill, winning his team the entire game. Or when an enemy condition gets the final tick. Pure RNG.

But it’s the best way to do it, as it allows kill stealing and counterplay.

On the topic of Boon Hate, I feel you could have Hunter’s Call on warhorn also rip boons off the target to give that weapon some more value. Warhorn needs a little more something to make it competitive with dagger and torch, and Hunter’s Call is pretty much universally considered a lackluster skill.

I often feel like I’m handicapping myself if I am soloing open world content on anything but my druid. The pet is a life saver and the amount of healing you have on top of decent damage output makes you very hard to kill. You also have perma swiftness from a druid trait so you don’t need to waste utilities building for mobility.

That is the dumbest system I’ve ever seen. I quite often wear PVE titles to PVP matches, or use PVP titles that are below my “rank” just because I like the word better. Generally I just pick a title that fits the character and stick with it and never think of my title again.

So yah. I’m not the best PVPer in the world of course, but I am considerably better than the “Mad Carver” title over my necro’s head implies. You would basically be going into the match with low morale expecting a loss for NO REASON.

I greatly prefer it to Conquest. The PVP fights are more engaging when tactical mobility isn’t handicapped by forcing you to stand inside a circle when fighting, and AoE is still just as potent because of it’s ability to wipe out groups of doorbreakers. You also get to make use of the terrain more in your fights since again you aren’t limited to standing in a circle.

It also feels like it offers a bigger chance for more big plays. In Conquest you pretty much take two points and start rotating to hold them, and the biggest play you can make is capping far or going for the map side objective. But in Stronghold you can suicide bomb some doorbreakers to halt the enemy’s progress which is IMMENSELY satisfying and can change the flow of the entire match if you can pull it off. Or you can double cap the champions for a really big push against the enemy’s team. Big fights in the lord room are also a lot of fun, both on offense and defense.

Every fight I win and every battle I choose feels more rewarding in Stronghold. More importantly it feels like a BATTLE with a clear cut objective at the end of a short campaign rather than running around capping points until the time runs out.

Fortifying Bond becoming baseline would be a huge boost to pet survivability and usability, as well as open rangers up to greater overall build diversity. Investing in Beastmastery to get the most out of your pet just makes sense. That is what the trait line is there for. But currently we need to invest in both Beastmastery and Nature Magic to get the full benefit of our profession mechanic.

Pets being able to hit a moving target reliably is the next big thing, as it effects every aspect of being a ranger in every game mode. Making pets resistant to slow effects, increasing their attack radius, and increasing their animation speed on attacks are all viable methods for making them hit their target before they waltz out of the pet’kitten zone.

As far as giving pets a designated role, I am in full support of Shadelang’s ideas. I suggested a while back that bears be turned into an aggro managing tank pet with access to a taunt of some kind, which would give them their own unique niche that separates them from other pets.

Where we differ however is where moas should be. He suggests they are meant to be brawlers, but I personally envision them as our sole support pets. They all have a passive heal and most of their F2 skills provide an AoE boon. To me this screams “support”, and that they should function in a way that makes them desirable to keep set on passive at the ranger’s side.

To support this I’d make their heal skill activate periodically while in combat, allowing the moa to provide small but meaningful heals to their ranger without engaging the enemy. This would encourage the ranger to keep the moa nearby and to use the F2 for boons, effectively giving us a pet designed to be held back with us rather than thrown into the front lines in WvWvW.

I feel categorizing what role each pet family should serve might help, so I’ll throw out a list of my personal views.

Canine – Control brawler/peeler
Bears – Tank
Moas – Support
Feline – Sustained DPS
Bird – Burst DPS
Spider – Ranged control/trapper
Devourer – Ranged condi DPS
Drake – AoE Brawler
Porcine – Brawler with foraged item shenanigans
Bristleback – Ranged burst
Smokescale – Melee brawler
Wyvern – Combo Field producing brawler

I have a lot more to say but will stop here in the interest of conversation and not making a huge wall of text, but I will return later.

Shadelang.3012:

I can make a thread for pets if people are interested. Itl be up the community as a whole to post in it and give feedback however. And I would also appreciate if people helped me gather information on the subject (there was a post in reddit at one point about the time to kill of pets on moving targets that would be useful).

I’d post in that thread until the ends of the Earth, Shadelang. Especially one where an Anet dev is actually confirmed to be reading it.

Animism.9803:

I actually just thought about the possibility of adding more realism into the story. Sexism and chauvinistic behaviors. This isn’t meant to resemble a modern society, and is somewhat an ‘older’ fantasy world. It’s just a random example of how the story doesn’t feel very realistic. It’s not meant to encourage it, just like adding a couple lesbians into the story for effect doesn’t encourage behaviour, it is just a game after all.

Err, there IS sexism and chauvanistic behavior. Are you forgetting how the Flame Legion have enslaved their women and use them as maids, cooks, and sex slaves? Or how the Sons of Svanir insult you if you’re playing a female in your personal story, refuse to allow women to join their ranks, and constantly talk about how weak and nagging women are?

In fact the literal fight for equal rights was a big part of the Charr civil war and why the other Legions are fighting the Flame Legion right now.

Also keep in mind that just because their technology is in an older epoch than ours does not necessarily mean they are culturally behind us as well. Our modern world has never had to deal with entirely different species trying to wipe us out (humans tried to wipe out the charr then the charr tried in kind), nor have we been pushed near extinction by massive dragons that can wipe out entire kingdoms in a day.

In a world where the apocalypse has been on our collective doorstep for the last two hundred years and in which entirely different species have been trying to literally eat us for the last thousand years, doesn’t it make sense that we stopped caring about what parts you have between your legs when deciding who is the most capable for a job?

Not to mention humanity had real, physical gods who shaped all of human culture. If Balthazar himself told me it was okay for women to fight I wouldn’t argue.

Just play a Sylvari and you’ll never have to wonder if it’s night time or not again.

They have added new maps since launch. But the community took what Anet gave them, pooped on it, and threw it back screaming it wasn’t good enough.

So Anet’s PVP resources have been going into fixing the old new maps in hopes of salvaging the resources it took to make them, thus preventing them from adding any new new maps.

penelopehannibal.8947:

RoseofGilead.8907:

penelopehannibal.8947:

Another thread that’s a symptom of Instant Level 80.

No thanks.

Well, this thread was created 6 months ago, so . . .

A symptom of amassing Tomes of Knowledge then.

Well spotted. Should have seen it myself.

Jasher.6580:

Honestly, I would probably start playing the game again if they made this an option.

So basically, you’re necro posting your own thread to say you won’t play the game until there’s a way to not play the game?

You’re looking at the problem wrong. This person DOES want to play the game. So do I. I just don’t want to spend a couple hours running around each and every map six more times. I did it once with my first character and it was a nice experience, but I don’t want to do it again for EVERY character I make.

I want to take my alts on guild missions and have fun with my guildmates playing the profession I feel like playing that day, but I can’t because I only have all the waypoints on one of my seven (soon to be eight) level 80s.

Obviously things like the hearts, vistas, and points of interest shouldn’t automatically unlock, but the basic ability to move around to areas I HAVE already visited, just on a different character, shouldn’t be locked. All it does is force me to waste several hours doing something I don’t want to be doing or limit my character choices when deciding what content I want to do.

InsideousWaffle, it’s entirely likely the “glory class” ships, as you call them, were designed specifically as an anti-air vessel meant to fight aerial opponents. The airships were designed to deal with Zhaitan specifically, and of all the Elder Dragons he seemed to use flying creatures far more often than the rest. There were entire fleets of Risen dragons filling the skies of Orr, after all. So it makes perfect sense to have a ship class dedicated entirely to aerial combat.

The reason they chose that as their flag ship is likely because Zhaitan himself was a winged dragon and was fully capable of flight. So was Kraalkatorrik. We haven’t met Jormag yet but his concept art involves wings. So that’s three out of four Elder Dragons that the Pact knew had flight capabilities, with the last dragon being subterranean anyway. It makes sense to choose the anti-air vessel as your flagship and mount your Elder Dragon killing weapon on it when you are facing a foe you know is capable of taking to the air.

As for bringing anti-air to Modremoth, that just makes sense. They didn’t know exactly what Modremoth was packing, so they brought their full kitten nal. Given every other known dragon makes use of flying units, even Primordus with his Destroyer harpies, it makes sense to assume that this dragon is also capable of fielding aerial units that need to be countered. Plus we knew Modremoth had things like Shadow of the Dragon which was capable of flight, and like Zhaitan it was entirely likely he had more back home waiting.

They just weren’t expecting a massive assault from the ground the likes of which no Elder Dragon has ever launched before.

Edit: What? I can’t say kitten nal? It just means a store of weapons…

draxynnic.3719:

Ceara might have been tragic, but she was never good. She was borderline if not sociopathic all along and showed no consideration for others or for society, and it’s worth noting that she worked with the Inquest before her encounter with Omadd’s machine.

This is the point I was going to make. Ceara displayed sociopathic tendencies very early on in her career and continued to get worse as she got older. Even going so far as to join up with the Inquest.

Ceara may have been corrupted later on in her life, but she turned away from the Dream and refused what the Pale Tree had in mind for her all on her own. It was her choices that lead to her mind becoming susceptible to Modremoth in the first place. In fact I find it plausible that her mental illness may have been what attracted Modremoth to her in the first place. Her lack of stability could have made the opening he needed, and Omadd’s machine just threw open the doors.

An innocent victim Ceara was not.