Guild Wars 2

My personal 2 most wanted stat combinations are…

Power + Healing Power Major / Precision + Concentration Minor
Power + Vitality Major / Concentration + Expertise Minor

The former I want for my Ranger. I play my Ranger as basically support for my pet, so I need maximum buff uptime and healing to keep it healthy, but besides that I’d like offensive stats so that my own Toughness doesn’t draw enemies to me more than my pet. I was running Zealot’s + Platinum Doubloons to kind of give me that combination, or more accurately I was slowly switching over to that combination from Cleric’s since Zealot’s is expensive as heck, but now that they’ve nerfed Boon Duration I need a bit more Concentration on my normal gear (and it’d be nice to be able to move up to Ascended trinkets). Plus I’d rather have a little more Heal Power on there and a little less Precision.

The second would be for my Guardian. Mix of tankiness and damage from the main stats, longer boons because Guardian pumps out a lot of boons, and longer conditions mostly to keep Burn up for as long as possible for the damage modifiers both on Guardian traits and through Runes.

I realize that both of those would probably not become overly popular with the general playerbase, especially not the second one. Maybe the first one could get some use on certain classes. But those are the ones that I’d switch some of my characters to without a second thought.

“Good” is a matter of taste, really. Some people go for more muted colors, some for complimentary colors, some for opposing colors, ect. There’s a lot you can do with Sylvari thanks to their great variety of colors. You can really get some crazy combinations going, or you can do something more monotone.

Personally, I tend to gravitate more towards bright colors and high contrast. I have 3 Sylvari and their colors are as follows…

My Mesmer has deep green skin, red hair, blue glow, and wears armor that’s royal purple, bright green, and magenta. Armor is meant to be bright and showy for maximum Mesmer-y distraction.

My Guardian has yellow-orange skin, blue hair, white glow, and wears armor that’s primarily orange and green with purple highlights. Originally my armor was brown and green instead of orange and green and was meant to be more nature inspired, but I eventually decided that was too bland and switched over to orange since her skin has shades of orange in it and it looks nice together without looking too similar. Plus orange + green has always been one of my favorite color combinations, and I didn’t have a character using it. Certain armor sets I still use some brown if I have 4 colors available, though.

My Thief has light blue skin, orange hair, light pink glow, and wears armor that’s lavender, purple, and cyan. Armor colors were chosen to look like Starlight Glimmer, because I was already leaning towards something in light purple since its a color none of my other characters wear and her color scheme came to mind when I thought of lavender, so I went with it.

None of my Sylvari really had a “theme” in mind for their skin / hair color, I just kind of played around until I found something I liked. Although I always knew I was going for colors that no other race could have for skin tone, so I specifically avoided anything similar to human flesh or even Charr fur colors. They haven’t always been the same either, my Mesmer had magenta hair at one point (now its bright red) and my Guardian had white hair when I first made her.

Same error message. I actually got errors just trying to log in to the forum for a while, though I finally got through (obviously).

EDIT: Oh, new error message actually. Now its saying “Transaction in progress. Please wait a few minutes and try again.”

Kruhljak.2705:

KarmaKrash.5931:

Rhiannon.1726:

You can’t look at foreign names and try to find words from other languages in it. It wont end well

I wasn’t looking to start trouble. I speak one language, English. I only discovered the irony in the name Fion, when it was filtered by the game. Point being, if the game filters the name, perhaps the npc should not be named Fion.

Yes, this is the core point. IF the name is inappropriate for a player in a game where French speaking people might somehow be offended, then it SHOULD be changed for the NPC for the same reason. Be consistent or drop the pretense. The odds of the NPC name changing are probably far into the noise because someone in charge actually has to do something about it, not just rely on a filter they obviously didn’t apply to their own naming of game characters before the fact.

(Rant below. You should stop here if you value your time.)

I wanted to name a pet bristleback the incredibly clever name of “Spiker” but the game told me I couldn’t because some people in some region of some country used the word “piker” as a slur at some point in history and so I, in this country where probably no one would even know the connotation AS PART OF ANOTHER WORD, much less care have to go with “Spikey” which, so far, apparently is not a slur somewhere in some country to someone or group. Jeez. Oops, sorry, hope that didn’t offend anyone. Maybe “S P I K E R” would have worked, hmmm…..

To make this post even more unnecessarily long, I once thought about naming a Sylvari character with the mushroom head “kittenaki Joe” (the filtered part is the first four letters of the name of a very popular type of mushroom…this is fun, isn’t it?) ‘cause it amused me, but then I noticed the first four letters and said to myself, I sez, “Why bother?” Maybe such shrooms should have their name changed in real life so as not to o-fend the super-sensitive micro-minority among us so us players won’t think of using an otherwise perfectly apropos and legitimate word in a name for a plant person. Or, maybe these stupid robotic filters could include whitelists for legitimate words that otherwise would be filtered due to the inclusion of scary, mind-breaking letter strings? Too much work? There again, someone would have to lift a finger to do it….

I’m not done yet! So, I wonder if Japanese players have their names rejected if they happen to include that offensive four letter string I noted above in a name, seeing as how that four letter string is not all that uncommon in Japanese names. I would be rather OFFENDED if my actual surname was considered inappropriate! How insulting would that be!? Gods!

The mind boggles at the spaghetti.

They’re called shiitake mushrooms. Two "i"s. I’ve had a character named after them for almost 5 years now. Never gotten a single peep from any person about it being an offensive name nor any forced name change. Heck, I actually kind of WANT someone to be offended by it and force a name change, because the name doesn’t really fit the character any more. As you’d expect, I originally created him with the mushroom hairstyle, but have long since changed it. Someone get offended so I can get a free name change!

I’m fairly certain more people associate the word minstrel with the musicians of medieval times than with blackface, even if we don’t “live in medieval times” (also that argument is silly since we also don’t live in the times of blackface either). I’d never once heard the word minstrel associated with blackface before this topic.

And its clear what Anet was going for with the name, considering there IS a character in the game that IS a Minstrel. And he’s a goofy musician dressed in very medieval-esque garb. Heck, the Ascended version of Minstrel’s gear is literally named after him, so that’s very definitely what they had in mind when they named the gear.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Maklain_the_Minstrel

And that’s not even hitting on how silly it is to not use a certain type of gear because it has a word attached to it that you’re only going to see brief glimpses of on the stat screen. Its not like it flashes a giant neon “MINSTREL!!!!” above your head during actual gameplay or anything. Its not a title assigned to your character, its just a name for the gear itself to make it clear what stats it has. No one identifies their character based on their stat setup, you identify yourself by class, listing the stat name just tells people what stats you’re using more easily than saying “Oh, I run +Vit +Tough +Healing +Conc”.

Yeah, I thought the outfit looked pretty nifty at first until I saw that face. I mean, granted I have other issues with the outfit as well, namely the fact that it seems to take dyes rather strangely, but the face is definitely something I don’t really like as well.

I don’t really even understand why its there. What does a strange shoulder piece shaped like a face have to do with being the dragon-slaying champion of Tyria? It doesn’t seem to match the theme or the rest of the overall look of the outfit, it just seems kind of there for no reason.

Harvestr.6052:

My question is what if I want to level a HoT elite spec, such as Chronomancer, but don’t wnat to play HoT zones? Can I just level it in PoF? I’m guessing yes, but would rather know than guess lol.

You don’t really “level” an elite spec, at least not in a traditional sense of gaining experience. You just spend hero points to progress it. And hero points are universal, there’s no such thing (at least in the current game) as regional hero points or anything. A hero point from core Tyria is exactly the same as hero point from the Maguuma areas, the only difference being that hero challenges in HoT give 10 hero points where in core Tyria a hero challenge only gives 1.

We don’t know for sure how much the PoF elite specs are going to cost and how many hero points are going to be available in PoF total. You should be able to spend the PoF hero points on the HoT elite spec, since we’ve had no indication they’re making a new type of hero point for PoF only. At this point the only question is if PoF has enough “spare” hero points to fully unlock both the PoF elite spec and the HoT elite spec. Unless you don’t want to unlock the PoF elite spec at all and just want the HoT spec, I guess.

My guess on that would be probably not, as even if they keep the cost the same, the HoT specs cost 250 hero points to fully unlock and that’d mean PoF alone would need over 500 hero points, which would be a lot. As a point of reference, the core game + HoT have just over 600 combined. And that’s assuming they don’t increase the cost of PoF elite specs to prevent people who have a lot of spare hero points right now from just starting PoF and insta-leveling their elite spec to max right away.

Oh yeah, nothing says “edgy” like sparkly wings and a princess wand.

More tribal / hunter inspired hairstyles, with adornments like bones, teeth, feathers, perhaps even devourer stingers given how much of a connection Charr have to them. Heck, maybe even stuff like arrowheads. I’d also like to see a hairstyle with some gears as adornments, as we’ve got plenty of mechanical bits and pieces but oddly no gears, despite them seemingly being everywhere in Charr architecture as well as cultural weapons.

Also, in general I’d like to see more sensible / understated hairstyles, a lot of the more recent stuff has been ridiculously huge poofy anime style stuff, and in addition to looking goofy (IMO of course) it makes less sense that a warrior culture would be sporting massive bulky hairstyles that would get in the way of vision, get caught on things, and make wearing helmets uncomfortable or impossible. If you want to do longer hairstyles that’s fine, but make it pulled back and longer down the neck rather than massive DBZ spikes that stick up 2 feet off the head and such.

As an example, there’s one male Charr hairstyle that has a huge “cone” on it with chains as adornments (wiki doesn’t seem to have a picture of that particular style, but I’m sure people can tell which one I’m talking about, its pretty distinct). I actually love the chains, but the hair itself just looks so ridiculous and unwieldy that I can’t bring myself to use it. Maybe if it were like, half the size and looked a little less stiff.

For horns, I don’t really have a preference on shape. But I’d like more with carvings, simple adornments like metal rings, and perhaps a horn style that’s just plain metal plated. Kind of surprised that last one isn’t already a thing, just a normal horn style covered mostly in metal. A few more with battle damage might be nice as well, maybe not completely broken off but like chips and scratches.

For faces, some slimmer styles for males with less enormous underbites might be nice. And maybe a couple more older faces for both genders.

Ephemiel.5694:

I’m still wondering why the items have such weird stats [like Healing Power on an item for the Warrior spec]

IIRC, all the random collection-based accessories that dropped for the HoT elite spec weapons were all a single random stat set as well, not specially tailored per profession. Could be the same case here.

They changed every utility item to somewhat standardize them.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Upcoming-Stat-Changes-in-the-Q3-Balance-Update

Conncept.7638:

Electro.4173:

“Conjured weapons are garbage, they need to be buffed!”

“You buffed Conjured weapons? They’re useless, why would you waste time buffing useless things?”

The circle of life I guess.

Nice try, completely uninformed and fallacious, but nice try.

More accurately

Players: “Conjures both defy and deny us our class mechanic, which we have no innate defense or survivability without, to the point that they will never be usable, except as situational cheese.”

ANet: “Lol, we buffed ’em again.”

The way ANet treats these skills is just, it’s an exercise in insanity. It’s like having a car that doesn’t roll because the wheels are square, and when you take it to the mechanic, he fixes the problem by making the square wheels bigger.

I find it odd that in another thread you’re complaining that they changed Guardian Spirit Weapons because it made them less unique in your opinion, and you seemingly would have preferred them to stay as-is despite being fairly bad skills…

Yet with conjures, which are also unique (far moreso IMO, but we probably have different opinions on that), you seem to want them dramatically changed, probably in a way that’d make them much less unique. If you still want access to all your normal weapon skills, they’d probably just become 1-shot skills like “so many other skills in the game”. Or outright removed / replaced. Because they’re fairly bad skills and in your opinion beyond help.

Spraying a cat empowered by a substance that causes crazy powers and aggressive madness with water is a BAD idea? Who’dve thunk.

They’re better than they were. Its the first time they’ve gotten serious changes / buffs in years, if not ever. Can’t really expect them to become mind-blowingly amazing in a single patch.

But that goes right back to my original point. People want them to be good, but because they aren’t good they also don’t want them to waste time on buffs that “aren’t enough”, despite the fact that if they don’t they’ll stay useless (or at the very least highly situational) forever.

Don’t really understand why they ignored Earth Shield though. I mean, I guess that’s the only one that got a serious rework prior to this patch, but that was still years ago, so I’d think another pass would be overdue.

They didn’t change it because of balance. That may be what they said, but if that were the case it would have been changed long ago. They changed it because Scourge doesn’t have a traditional Shroud and the trait would be half useless with Scourge for that reason. They want specs and traits to play nice together, not for one spec to make another ineffective.

They aren’t ever going to revert the trait. Best we can hope for now is for them to lower the decay baseline on Death / Reaper Shrouds.

I don’t for a second buy that it was for balance reasons. They would have changed it long ago if that was really the case. Its clear they changed it because Scourge doesn’t have a shroud in a traditional sense, so there’s no life force decay, and thus that skill would have been mostly useless with Scourge (that’s very likely also why they changed Speed of Shadows to not reduce Shroud cooldown). They want all traits to (for the most part) play nice together and not have one trait / spec make others useless. I’m actually completely on-board with that, I think its a good philosophy. Changing it to Vitality lets it benefit all specs, albeit not nearly as much as the old DP benefited Death / Reaper Shroud.

Baffling that they didn’t make it at least partially baseline for Death and Reaper Shroud, though. At least cut the decay by 33% or something, if cutting it by 50% for free would have been too much. The reason so many people took the trait, hell, the whole Soul Reaping line, is because Death Shroud decays too fast by default to account for using it as an offensive tool while also having it sliced apart by damage. It was bad being pigeonholed to lessen that issue, but not having any option at all and just having it decay that fast by default with no option to reduce the decay whatsoever is worse.

I can only hope they hear the criticisms and adjust the decay at some point.

“Conjured weapons are garbage, they need to be buffed!”

“You buffed Conjured weapons? They’re useless, why would you waste time buffing useless things?”

The circle of life I guess.

I don’t understand this line of thinking at all.

You’re going to be spending far more time in combat at any number less than 100% endurance than at 100%, even with boosted regen on other traits. Even with the endurance regen boost, it still takes, what, 4 seconds or so to get back to 100% endurance? That’s quite a while in the fast-paced GW2 combat.

If you’re doing something where you can completely avoid dodging for any significant period of time (and that’s what you need to do to keep 100% endurance), you’re not doing content where that 10% damage is actually important anyway. That means either the enemies you’re fighting are so unthreatening that you never need to dodge, or you’re killing them so fast that they never get to attack you, and either way that’s pretty easy combat. Not something where you need to min-max a 10% damage boost.

And even in such a case, maybe you say “Well, I don’t NEED the 10% damage boost, but I WANT it”. OK, so… dodge and get it? If you don’t need to dodge, then what difference does wasting some endurance make? You should have no problem “wasting” your endurance for that 10% if you don’t need to dodge, that’s literally all endurance is for.

Kain Francois.4328:

Faight.9308:

You won’t get annoyed, it’s like once every 15 to 20 minutes.

Which is annoying. It happens too frequently in my few hours since the update.

They’ve got a handy new selective mute feature for legendary weapons. If anything, I’d rather they just apply that here as well. 24 hours sounds absolutely absurd to me, may as well not be there at all with that rarely happening. I welcome it happening every 20 minutes, but obviously different strokes and all that.

You ought to be able to use your hero points for Deadeye just fine.

The devs literally can’t require you to take Daredevil before Deadeye, since they are not bundling HoT with PoF. You can buy PoF without owning HoT, and thus locking the PoF specs behind the HoT specs is impossible, because those who don’t own HoT would be permanently locked out of their respective elite specs. Which would obviously be a huge mistake and result in a ton of bad press and angry players. Not going to happen.

The only thing they can do is jack up the prices on the new elite spec while making all the hero challenges in PoF give more per challenge, making it so that you can only reasonably get the PoF specs if you do PoF content.

But even then, saving your points from HoT means you can get Deadeye faster, even if you still need to do some PoF stuff to pad your numbers.

For example, lets say they made the PoF specs cost 600 hero points, then made the PoF hero challenges give you 30 points a piece. Even with every single hero point from HoTyou’d still fall short of getting the full Deadeye spec (though I think you’d reach that point if you had every point from both HoT and the core game, perhaps). But you’d have a good head start on getting there at least.

They may or may not even do that, depending on how much they want to force / incentivize the PoF maps. I mean, if they do go that route, skill point numbers are going to balloon completely out of control very quickly (the next expansion would need to hit 1000 or something) so I don’t know if they’ll go that direction or just count on the fact that most people are going to want both elite specs and / or will just want to play PoF for the sake of being new content and not JUST for the elite spec.

Didn’t they mess things up by changing Ancestral Grace to a transformation once before and have to revert it back? Or was it that it was originally launched in that state and simply changed? I seem to remember it acting like that at one point and then getting fixed, whatever the case.

I’m not sure I understand your argument. Spirit weapons haven’t been unique for a long time. Heck, they arguably were never particularly unique. Sure, when the game launched they were undamageable, so they had at least one unique aspect to them, but they were still just summoned AI. Half the classes in the game use summons in some form or another.

The only thing really unique about them was “flavor”, the fact that they were sentient weapons which none of the other summons are. And that aspect is still there in their new incarnation as well. Its still the Guardian summoning sentient weapons of spirit energy into the world, they just fly out and do a single attack now instead of following the Guardian around for a bit.

If you just want to argue that you liked the way spirit weapons were, then fine. I did too. I still considered spirit weapons my “primary” build on my Guardian despite the fact that they were pretty bad. I mean, I never stick to one single build on any character, but I always have one that I like the most / go back to the most when I’m not flipping around for variety, and for my Guardian that was spirit weapons.

But to argue they were anything particularly unique or that they’ve made any big change towards making classes “generic” doesn’t really ring true. Spirit Weapons were only unique to Guardian specifically, because they don’t have any other summon skills. But if you’re only talking with regards to Guardian in a vacuum, then the new SW are also unique to Guardian. No other Guardian skills are ammo-based, long-range attacks with varying effects (one offense, one defense, one healing, one disruption / CC).

Yah, this change is baffling.

The skill’s one and only advantage was hitting such a wide area that it let you hit enemies who were spread out at mid-range. That’s literally all it was good at.

Now, don’t get me wrong, that wasn’t a particularly good advantage in terms of combat. It got you good tagging, but that’s not really a positive for combat effectiveness, that’s a utility advantage at best. I’m not saying it was GOOD and that it shouldn’t have been changed at all.

But to change practically nothing about it except halving its range… that’s just removing the only thing it had going for it and giving it nothing in return. The wider arc is not helpful at all.

No one thought it was broken before. It was just stupidly designed, and still is, now even moreso.

Bash.7291:

Electro.4173:

I’m a bit disappointed that despite hitting 4 times, it only procs one Burn when traited, not sure if that’s intended or bugged. Old SW proc’d burn on every hit.

The trait doesn’t actually work atm, that’s just your own Virtue of justice going off. I posted about it in the bug forum.

I see. That makes sense. Gives me hope that it’ll proc multiple stacks of burn once they fix it, then.

Is Ancestral Grace just not functioning as a Blast finisher at all on any field, or is it strictly the Smokescale’s field? That’d be an oddly specific bug if the latter.

Good luck with that. I don’t think 40 seconds (even more considering charge cooldown) of nearly 100% uptime projectile blocking in an AoE is very likely to happen.

I mainly just want the cast time reduced a bit so you can use it on reaction better.

They finally added that function that they talked about when Rev was first revealed?

I thought it was something that’d never happen. I need to go play my Revenant now, because I always thought it was a cool concept and made a lot of lore flavor sense

Having a cast time and zero animation whatsoever on your character is weird as hell. Makes it seem like your character is locking up for the duration of the cast. Almost seems like they were originally going to have no cast time then they realized that’d be broken and forgot to / didn’t have time to add an animation before shipping the update. Either way, it ought to be addressed quickly.

Also, the skills have no range facts listed in their tooltips. That needs to be added as well. All in all the changes feel kind of rushed out without full implementation / polish.

Sword seems pretty nice. Burst AoE damage and a nice chunk of vuln as well. Seems to have 900 range, which will separate it nicely from Procession of Blades. I’m a bit disappointed that despite hitting 4 times, it only procs one Burn when traited, not sure if that’s intended or bugged. Old SW proc’d burn on every hit.

Hammer is kind of a mixed bag. On the positive side, having an on-demand Blast finisher with 3 charges is pretty awesome. And the CC will be good for break bars. On the negative side, its single-target only, which feels kind of strange considering its a hammer slamming down. Also, the functionality seems kind of… interesting. Like, it seems to prioritize blasting finishers over hitting enemies. I was playing around with it targeting enemies at long range, but with a light field / symbol active on my position, and instead of hitting the targeted enemy it was hitting my finisher instead. Which… maybe its preferable if you want it as a finisher, but? I dunno, like I said, it seems a tad strange.

Shield seems OK. It seems to cast a version of the Shield 5 skill, so it knocks back enemies briefly (synergizes with some traits and CC’s) and of course blocks projectiles. Duration is short, but that’d be expected due to the fact that its a skill with charges and stuff. The shield “shards” it shoots out that do damage and weakness seem to have a 900 range, while the shield itself spawns on you. Decent enough defensive skill, pretty unique. I will say that the cast time is probably too long on this one, keeps it from being a very good reactive skill.

Bow… I dunno, I’d have to play around with actual people to see how useful it is, since its clearly a more group-oriented skill. Its a 900 range ground-targeted heal with multiple charges and creates a light field, so at the very least its pretty unique, nothing else in the Guardian’s kit is too similar.

Yep, the pet will not do anything at all for a few seconds after being swapped. Not even if you command it to attack or use its F2. Has to be a major bug.

Euthymias.7984:

I sure hope so.
I made the Dreamer just for the occasion of opening the portal to Equestria while raining fire on others.

The world of Tyria shall bow to its true god, Daybreaker!

The whole point of elite specs is to provide different options and more variety to overall mechanics and gameplay for the class. The way that is going to be accomplished is not always going to be exactly the same. And I’m perfectly fine with that. More than fine with it actually, I prefer that new elite specs differentiate themselves.

So no, I don’t feel Mirage feels “empty” without a F5 or think it needs one. Its getting a unique dodge mechanic instead, and that’s just fine. Its going to be something to adjust to for those who have stuck to Chronomancer since its release and have gotten used to it and only it, but I don’t see anything inherently “wrong” with a new elite spec requiring a bit of time to get used to.

Its hardly something that only affects Mesmer either, its pretty much across-the-board that most of the new elite specs are handling their mechanics changes in a different way than the first. Weaver isn’t getting “burst” skills on their attunements, Soulbeast isn’t getting a resource-using form change, Deadeye isn’t getting another on-dodge mechanic, Scourge is getting normal skills that use resource rather than just getting a new set of skills on a normal Shroud, ect.

While its true that virtue passives haven’t been changed by elite specs up until this point, that doesn’t mean they can’t / won’t ever be. The devs seem more willing to change a lot more with these new elite specs compared with the old ones. And the different virtues ARE different skills as far as the game engine is concerned, even if the passives have stayed constant with Dragonhunter, so it’d be very easy for them to change one and not the others. Mechanically, it’d be no issue at all to do so.

Dragonhunter’s virtue skills were 1-use skills, same as how core Guardian’s virtue actives are 1-use skills. Changing the passives probably wasn’t deemed particularly necessary since they filled similar functions.

Tomes are bundles, however. Multiple skills, multiple uses at a time. That could very well require some different balancing.

For Justice in particular, you’re getting a lot more condition burst from the Tome active than you ever did with Virtue or Spear of Justice and their active effects. With a higher potential for condition burst, they may need to tone down the sustained condition application of the passive to make up for it (especially since you can trait to keep the passive running). But they’d only have to tone that down on Tome of Justice, not the other specs.

That’s not to say its impossible that they could nerf the entire class, and if that does happen it’d be pretty bad (unless they buff the Virtues / Radiance lines to make up for it). But saying “virtue passives don’t change” based on one single other instance is jumping to conclusions.

Dagger auto-attack animations on many classes already have 4 hits, in terms of animation and individual hits registering. Its just that the 2nd and 3rd hit (or is it the 1st and 2nd? I’m blanking on exactly which) are generally packaged together into one attack, with that attack being a quick back-and-forth slash. I’m assuming they just separated it out into 4 distinct attacks for Soulbeast’s dagger, maybe tweak the animation just slightly so that its more spaced out between those two.

Yes, this is a downside to Weaver. And that’s exactly what it’s meant to be. Its the price you’re paying for access to even more skills and the ability to mix attunements . You get even more variety than core Elementalist, but that variety isn’t going to be quite as “hot-swappable” as core Elementalist.

Letting you swap only the right side, while it would solve the “problem” you’re describing, would create an even bigger one. It’d allow you camp in a single attunement for your auto-attack and #2 skill (typically low-cooldown) while cycling through your #3, #4, and #5 skills, essentially letting you keep your best low-cooldown skills active at all times while gaining access to pretty much all your other longer cooldown spells at will. Camp Fire attunement for permanent access to Fireball and Lava Font, while still being able to use all your other powerful staff skills, for instance.

And if you just reversed the “slide” so that you couldn’t camp any attunement permanently, then it just becomes confusing and overcomplicated with stuff like on-attune / active attune traits. With the way it works now, whatever your newest attune is is going to be the one that gets both your on-attune traits and also the one you’re in for purposes of constant attune traits and stuff like glyphs. Want Fire, attune Fire, and you’ll activate all your associated traits and be able to use Fire glyphs. If you had a “reverse slide” button then all of a sudden you’re tapping Fire, getting the Fire trigger effects, but your “active” element becomes whatever you were in before, because now that one is on the left side.

I doubt they’ll abandon the HoT masteries completely in PoF. I mean, one of the best ways to encourage people who only buy PoF to also pick up HoT sometime in the future would be to throw those mastery abilities into the new areas to show people some of the stuff they could get if they also grab HoT.

They just won’t be required for anything of major importance. They can’t have any of them required for stuff like map completion, hero points, story progression, ect. However, they could still have hidden areas accessible only by, say, updrafts. Or alternative routes where you can use either PoF masteries (mounts) or HoT masteries.

It’d pretty much be the same way they have stuff like the ley line gliding set up in new maps. Very rarely is it ever a requirement (because its such a high-level mastery ability) but it can be very useful as a shortcut, alternate route, that sort of thing. The only difference is that instead of “very rarely” being required, it can never be required. Doesn’t mean it can’t be there and be useful though.

Holland.9351:

Very disappointing, but will first wait and see what the 3rd skills are.

So no on-demand stealth with Jaguar. No on-demand fury with Tiger/Red Moa.

At this point you’re probably better off with a pet than to enter beastmode.

Or you’re better of merging and de-merging to use both your merged abilities AND your pets F2? That’s probably the idea. Or part of the idea anyway. They don’t want you to just be able to merge with your pet and that’s the end of it, they want you to actively be swapping between merged and separate.

Or, we just jumped to conclusions about the wording and it makes perfect sense.

“Unique abilities”. Abilities, plural. That’s referring to the 2 “family skills” on the pet. The two abilities that it can activate on its own. It actually makes more sense if that’s what its referring to, because there’s only one F2 skill so the plural there would be meaningless.

Archetype ability is the last ability, the one that seems to depend on some category we’ve never really had associated with pets. The fact that they use “archetype” instead of “family” hints that its a new grouping, and the archetype is probably also what determines what buffs you get from the merge.

I’m quite sure its meant to be cumbersome. Some of the pet abilities seem rather powerful, and they’re completely additional to utilities and weapon skills, its basically 3 free additional attacks available at all times (as well as free buffs depending on which pet you merge with, it seems). Being able to swap between 2 different sets of skills with zero cooldown or delay of any kind would be too much, that’d essentially be 6 extra skills free to use.

Plus, as much as its a requested thing for a 100% petless ranger, I don’t think they actually want to go that route. By forcing you to exit merge to swap pets, they’re at least keeping the pet involved, even if its only for brief spells between merges.

“Legendary Charr” is too generic and precludes them from ever adding a second Charr legend in the future. Dwarf and Centaur are small enough races that they’d probably never add another legend of either of those races anyway, so it doesn’t really matter, but there are other Charr they could potentially add. Same reason why they went with “Assassin” for Shiro, probably.

And it makes fine sense for it to be called Legendary Renegade stance and have the Espec also be called Renegade, because Renegade is a title for both the player using that stance AND the actual legend itself. Kalla was a renegade, and the player becomes a renegade by channeling her and following her footsteps.

For Glint, the player becoming a follower of Glint makes them a Herald. But Glint herself is not a herald.

Sarrs.4831:

I’m sure we’ll be able to get them when the expac comes out, they look cheap enough to basically be the PoF version of Reclaimed skins.

I dunno if I’d say “cheap” personally, but the generic name and the somewhat basic look does make me suspect that these are just going to be normal skins of some sort in the expansion and this is just a way to get an early “sneak peak” skin.

If you just want the one shared inventory slot and are OK with keeping the 2nd one occupied for now, you don’t actually have to do anything.

The two level 80 boosts actually stack. I still had my first one from HoT as well, and just now when I bought PoF I went into my inventory and saw that boost had hit 2 stacks and I now just had a free open shared inventory slot available where the 2nd boost would have gone.

The streamers got the footage at an event designed to give a select few press people and popular GW2 youtubers early access to the expansion. And both WP and BO hit upon the fact that some of the development team were also there having discussions with them as they were playing and showing them different things.

So they weren’t exactly sitting around at home free to take as much time as they needed to meticulously mouse over every little thing.

Oh, that floaty plant thing might be a new pet? Awesome. I saw it in the WP stream but figured it was a tonic or something. Hope that it does end up being a new pet. Its probably the closest thing I’ll ever get to a pet Reef Rider, and that has been my #1 most wanted pet since forever.

Between that floaty thing and the plant snake, I’m already more excited about the PoF pets than I was about the HoT pets. Outside of the Wyverns nothing in HoT really struck my fancy all that much, and at the time of release Wyverns were god-awful anyway (thankfully they’ve been fixed since). That’s not to say that the Smokescale and the Bristleback are bad by any means, other than both being really ugly aesthetically, but these new plant pets are a lot more interesting to me.

As much as I’d like to see it happen, I’d say its probably not very likely. It seems they chose a relatively minimal amount of skins in such a way that every class could use at least one of them. Which to me implies that they don’t intend to make any more, and made just enough to be sure no one who did the quest would end up empty-handed because of what class they were playing.

Your math is a bit off.

For one thing, order doesn’t matter for the attunements, Fire / Earth and Earth / Fire are the same skill. So that drops it down to 6 base combinations. F/A, F/E, F/W, W/A, W/E, A/E.

But then you also missed that each “pure” / double attune counts as another potential combination, so that’s 4 more for a total of 10. Granted, all the double attunes are the old skill 3 attacks (other than Sword obviously) so maybe you were only counting new attacks.

Assuming you’re talking only about the combination skill (3), of course. Order DOES matter if you’re just talking about the entire weapon kill bar.

From the footage WP showed, only the attunement you currently have on your maindhand half / left side counts in terms of traits and stuff. So yeah, I would expect that Glyphs would react the same way and work off the left side of your bar / mainhand.

I always have multiple weapons on my characters anyway, but for my first one I’m probably going to use Breath of Jormag. I already have that skin on my Mesmer, but I’ll probably take it off him (he has too many sword skins anyway) and put it on my Ele instead.

Probably going to be exactly like the first elite spec weapons.

You get a “basic” weapon skin upon training the first skill of the Espec. You get a single armor piece (helmet, shoulder, gloves) for completing the entire Espec. Then you get a collection that unlocks a fancier, ascended version of the Espec weapon, requiring various pieces of loot from different areas of the expansion.

As cool as an entire set of armor would be, considering how long Anet says full armor sets take, getting 9 unique armor sets (plus whatever normal armor sets are available in the expansion) seems extremely unlike, especially with how quickly the expansion is coming up.

Highly doubtful they’ll retroactively go back to stuff like the Blood Ruby or other LS3 items and add new stat combos to them. The biggest reason for that would be that would be allowing players without PoF to get those stat combos, which diminishes the value of the expansion. “Detecting” whether the player has the expansion or not and offering different stat combos based on that seems overly complicated. They’ll do it for Legendaries because they kind of have to to justify the work required for those items, but normal Ascended stuff isn’t that big a deal.

What the WILL probably do, however, is introduce new rewards in LS4 (if they aren’t already in the expansion itself) that work similarly and have the new stat combos. Since LS4 will, I assume, follow suit and require PoF the same way LS3 required HoT, that wouldn’t be stepping on the toes of the expansion and giving players those combos who haven’t bought the expansion.

Far as I’m concerned, the “magic death bomb if you tell secrets” thing is all nonsense. I mean, its a fantasy setting and all so there has to be some suspension of disbelief, but how the heck does some spell “know” you’re telling secrets? How does it even “know” what qualifies as a secret? How does it “know” you aren’t talking to members of the Shining Blade, and if it does somehow “know” that, then what if an imposter gets in, do you still die even if you think you’re telling secrets to a trusted source? Heck, mind reading / control is a thing in Tyria, what if you get mind read, does that still count as you telling secrets, and the spell somehow “knows” that too?

My point is, that’s an awful lot of sentience and intelligence to attribute to some random spell. Too much for me to believe its a real thing. It seems more like a simple tool for the Examplar’s to stress just how serious these secrets are, one that’s gotten “ghost story” levels of infamy over the years.

At absolute most, I can see there MAYBE being some kind of spell that would alert the Exemplar to the fact that one of their agents may have been compromised. And maybe they can act so swiftly and secretly to dispatch such a compromised agent that it SEEMS like there’s a death spell.

Yes, I know there’s that one Blade that’s like “Well, if you need to commit suicide just start blabbing secrets”. No, I don’t think that’s evidence of it being real. I doubt Anise or any Exemplar specifically told him that, that’s just his own interpretation of the supposed “spell” based on the reputation its gained. He thinks there’s a death spell, so his own thought process is “well, this is what I could do if I ever get captured and need to commit suicide”. Not that he’s ever been told it actually works (at least not by anyone in a position of power, if anything just other normal agents) or ever heard any credible reports that’s how it works.

Even if it IS actually real, my Charr wouldn’t actually believe that to be the case. Charr are skeptical of magic by nature. So in my Charr’s eyes, he’s doing what “has to be done” at the time with no real threat beyond “Keep our secrets or we kill you!”. Not that he’s looking to betray the Blades or specifically looking for secrets to bring back to the Legions, but if it comes down to Kryta vs the Legions he wouldn’t hesitate to side with the Legions, with no second thought to some silly “death spell”.

Though I do wish they would have written the story in such a way that it didn’t have to join the Blade and take some oath in the first place. Like, someone earlier suggested to just have your character reluctantly go along with the plan and let Lazarus reveal Livia on his own. You’d eventually get the truth without needing to force the player to join some secret society cult thing. I mean, you could argue they wouldn’t have let you come along without joining first, but with all the talk of “prophecies” and such that Livia starts spouting, it makes it sound like they needed YOU specifically, and if that’s the case I’m sure they aren’t going to throw that away just because you refuse to join their club.

AlcatrazXIII.8532:

Am I the only one disappointed that the tomes don’t actually stay visible after they are summoned ?

Definitely not. I loved seeing my tome hovering in front of me back in the day when they were still elites and was expecting that to be the way they appeared when I heard rumors of them as an Espec. Not sure why they’ve decided to go with this new “pages circling around you” approach instead of the floating book, it looks a lot less interesting IMO. I could see it if the tomes weren’t acting like kits any more, since they’d still need to show your weapons if that were the case, in which case the page circling would make sense. But since they do seem to be acting like kits and replacing weapons, I’d definitely rather see the book.

Still looking forward to Firebrand though. Tomes sound like they’ll be fun and I like the axe visuals a lot. Mantras I’m not too excited about, mantras are probably my least favorite skill type in the entire game, but it fits the specs “lore” at least.