Guild Wars 2

Erik Waananen.6089:

Galandil.9641:

Eolirin.1830:

If that’s the case, then the achievement text needs to be changed, because it straight up says ‘in one season’.

That’s the case, devs stated so. In the end, one needs only to reach Ruby twice and Sapphire twice to get the precursor during all the 4 seasons this year.

So, yes, the backpack is pretty much grindable and that’s it, the League system was thought out exactly with that idea in mind (that’s why the “not-losing-pips-every-rank” system is on up until you hit Ruby).

Hey there, folks! My name is Erik and I’m the newest member of the PvP design team.

I think that there’s still a bit of confusion out there about progress regarding the PvP legendary backpack and so I just wanted to pop in and clarify once again that you DO NOT need to complete all of the legendary backpack achievements in a single season in order to acquire the backpack itself. I think the achievement text that Eolirin is referring to is for the “Primordial Legend” achievement, which, while it does require completing in a single season to finish, is not linked to your Ascension progress in any way. Some players who climb to higher divisions faster than other players will naturally be able to finish their legendary backpacks sooner, but again, the achievements for the backpack can be worked on over the entire year’s lifespan of the Ascension achievement category and do not need to be finished in a single PvP league season. Hope that clarifies some things!

You really need to change the achievement text so that it’s not ambiguous then. It says “during a PvP season”.

Firebird.8324:

No, they finally have an exclusive PVP item that Only hardcore pvpers can get, there is no reason it should be handed out to the masses like candy. There are SO MANY awesome looking PVE skins that I will never have by spending all my time in PVP, so let us have this one item, and get back to killing random mobs.

You do not design an achievement track that is 99% grindable to anyone at any skill level and then gate completion on the very last achievement based on player skill. You either gate the entire system so that it’s clear that you’re only going to get it by being really good at pvp, or you don’t do this. Tournament rewards are an example of that kind of gate. You don’t even expect to work toward them if you don’t think you can win tournaments.

You still have to play a truly massive amount of spvp to get the wings, and especially so if you aren’t very good under the new system. It’s not a matter of being ‘hardcore’ it’s a matter of being skilled; you can get people who play nothing but spvp, who devote hundreds of hours to the game mode over the course of the four seasons, but can’t get out of Ruby because they’re not good enough to get past the players in that division, and get denied the wings because of that last achievement, despite getting every single other one. That’s not cool. Edit: and especially because you don’t even know you need four division level ups unless you take the time to examine the meta achievement list for Part 4 or look at the wiki, as the achievement is locked and doesn’t display it’s requirements.

mimijimi.8537:

it’s my understanding that you don’t need to complete the achievment in one season, so instead of getting into diamond in one season you can get into ruby in 2 seasons and still reach the same goal, the hardcores will be able to get the skins sooner but the casuals will still have a chance, it’ll just take alot longer

If that’s the case, then the achievement text needs to be changed, because it straight up says ‘in one season’.

Spartacus.3192:

Silverwing.8750:

Unless I am reading this wrong, this sounds horrible for casual/low mmr players who will have to face high ranked players at the start of the season, thus putting them off pvp altogether. It sounds like it is best not to play in the first week of the season at all……. I won’t be.

Exactly. If you are a casual/low mmr player i would highly recommend missing the first week of season 2. That way the better players will have moved several tiers already and you wont have big losing streaks on day 1.

I’m not sure it’ll take a full week, given the way the win streak works, though it depends on how many extra pips they get too, but yeah. At the same time, you’re still much more likely to be facing the middle of the distribution rather than the tail, so it depends on how bad you are. The longer you wait, the more Amber and Emerald will only be low MMR players though. There’s a perverse incentive to delay playing as a high MMR player, in that you’ll win streak a lot more once the divisions are more stable.

But it’s all temporary disruption. You’ll plateau in the same places.

jessiestiles.9437:

There’s a paradoxical problem with matchmaking in that if games were perfectly matched it would be impossible to progress. Win a pip lose a pip. Most people wouldn’t win higher than 50%. So how are you expecting people to have a win streak like this unless you are expecting matches will be designed to be biased or is designed with a loophole for creating match bias. I’ve gone for 30 games at a time with a 65% win ratio and never had a win streak like you are suggesting. You must be stacking the decks for premades over solo Q while trying to appear fair and transparent.

I’m sure a large percentage of us couldn’t care less about your stupid premade stomping bunker league. We don’t enjoy it and have told you repeatedly. We’re only doing it for the rewards. Don’t screw us over with having to play 100s of unfair matches just to get this legendary backpack.

That’s not what happens if match making is only looking at division, and it has nothing to do with soloQ vs premade (though, as an anecdote, I’ve had 5+ game win streaks in solo and duoQ this season, so it definitely happens even with the current system). Games will be dramatically less balanced until you hit the appropriate division for your mmr, because the game will be happily matching high mmr teams against low mmr teams, while pairing high mmr players with each other, and low mmr players with each other, if they’re in the same division; streaks will be a lot bigger initially, but things will settle down as the better players rapidly move out of the lower divisions.

Agemnon.4608:

“The analogies you’re making don’t apply here; individual improvement is irrelevant as league progression is based on relative improvement against the entire rest of the player base. If leagues are moved to a place where they’re truly reflective of player skill, some significant portion of the player base will struggle to be able to get into, much less out of, Ruby because no matter how much time they put in their rate of advancement will only match if not lag that of everyone else. They won’t be able to make that up by playing more.”

Since diamond is intended to be analogous to League of Legends’ platinum rank (Top 1.5%-0.1%) then obviously it isn’t for everyone. If you do have those diamond-tier skills then you’ll be paired with players of similar skill and reach that tier.

Yes, which is fine, except that the tier 4 achievement that you need to get the Legendary back piece requires having four league division progressions in a single season. You cannot complete the wings if you can’t get into diamond.

Agemnon.4608:

Eolirin.1830:

My only concern with these changes is that they may make completing the league progression achievements impossible for too large a portion of the playerbase. Having to get out of Ruby to get tier 4 is difficult enough as it is. Will you re-examine that particular set of achievements in light of this change?

Why people want prestigious rewards is it communicates, “I overcame these challenges” and, “I completed hard content and am therefore skilled.” That value needs to be maintained. If you’re an average player you’ll become good much faster than a good player would become great for example. The better one becomes at something the higher the diminishing returns. For example if you spent eight hours sprinting (over a long stretch of time not in one go obviously) you might shave three seconds off your time whereas an Olympic sprinter would be lucky to shave off 1/10th of a second. You need bigger amounts of effort for increasingly smaller gains and in fact most RPGs reflect this as well (grind for months to go from level 200 to 201 but spend only a few hours going from 1 to 10).

What I’m trying to say is if you have sapphire tier skills (75th-85th percentile or 32 through 60 ladder points by my estimation) you’ll get ruby tier skills faster than a ruby (86th-98.5th percentile) would obtain diamond skill.

The analogies you’re making don’t apply here; individual improvement is irrelevant as league progression is based on relative improvement against the entire rest of the player base. If leagues are moved to a place where they’re truly reflective of player skill, some significant portion of the player base will struggle to be able to get into, much less out of, Ruby because no matter how much time they put in their rate of advancement will only match if not lag that of everyone else. They won’t be able to make that up by playing more. A lot of people have hard ceilings too, and simply won’t get any better than a certain point.

Currently if one of those people gets into Ruby, they’ll still get matched with roughly even MMR, so while it’s hard for everyone to maintain a greater than 50% win ratio, it’s at least possible, regardless of skill level, because everyone has roughly even ability to achieve slightly higher than 50% inside their skill band. What happens when you stop doing that is that if a division’s median MMR is significantly higher than yours, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose more matches on average. You can still, maybe, progress up the divisions where you can’t lose tiers, if you are very lucky and get a good streak, but you’ll stall out completely at Ruby. Edit: and this is further compounded by the MMR still matching you to your team based on your MMR. Anyone who is at one of the tails of the MMR distribution for a division will tend to be clustered with other people in that tail, and will either win more or lose more on average vs people in the middle. They’ll also see longer queue times.

And that would be okay, except for the fact that every single other achievement you need can be grinded out regardless of skill level. You will plateau at the divison that’s appropriate to your skill level, but you’ll still have a mix of wins and losses, so you can work on every single other achievement. But you will get hard gated on that one achievement. That is kinda terrible. If you want unique really prestigious rewards they should be obviously gated from the beginning behind things like getting into Legendary tier. You should not be able to get 99% of the way there and then be locked out.

My only concern with these changes is that they may make completing the league progression achievements impossible for too large a portion of the playerbase. Having to get out of Ruby to get tier 4 is difficult enough as it is. Will you re-examine that particular set of achievements in light of this change?

Einlanzer.1627:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Azure — I admire your way of thinking and I think that level of thoughtfulness will give us highly valuable feedback. Thanks.

I don’t know. I think that attitude is common but, IMO, it’s actually not the best way to address balance. It seems to be an issue of mismanagement on Anet’s part and I think it’s one of the reasons the forums tend toward negativity.

You don’t want to excessively knee-jerk, but endless deliberation is every bit as counter-productive. Balance will never be perfect – it’s better to accept that and to iterate at a much faster pace than once every 3 months. It makes it less likely things will be overlooked for months to years on end (which has always been a problem in GW2) and would probably help mitigate player frustration while also keeping them engaged by shaking up the meta frequently.

Balance patches should happen monthly. And they should be more comprehensive than they tend to be.

That’s a recipe for absolute disaster. You cannot do comprehensive balance patches monthly. It’s completely unreasonable from a development point of view. You can, and they are, do small tweaks to the bigger updates that’ll happen every quarter when something is completely out of line, but note, even those take time; you’re looking at weeks of examination, design, implementation and QA testing to roll out anything, even really simple stuff. If they’re doing monthly patches they never get the chance to see the outcome of their changes before they have to already be making more changes to be able to keep to that cadence, especially if they’re doing comprehensive changes. 3 months is already a very fast iteration cycle, if they’re doing bigger changes.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Otaur.9268:

@Roy Cronacher, would it be possible to use this same type of system except a maybe 25% damage reduction on pets in WvW? Pets die instantly in WvW battles and it would help immensely to make some class features available in WvW… Of course percentages can always be tweaked until a balance is found.

This is not currently possible. For this change we made creatures, at the base AI level, look at what they are targeting and what they hit to adjust damage accordingly, it has nothing to do with player damage interactions. Doing this for WvW. adjusting outgoing player damage to minions, is not tech we are currently working on and likely would cause some perf issues as well. Players attack much much more often then creatures. So doing checks on each one of the damage targets from a player can become expensive very quickly. Though, that’s not to say that we won’t ever consider investigating it, but for now this change is specifically for creatures attacking player minions and we’ll be balancing it and seeing how it goes.

For WvW would it make more sense to scale minion health based on the number of nearby enemy players by some amount, like how the dynamic event system scales champion health instead? If you kept the check for player count on a moderately long timer, like 30 seconds or a minute, but instantly checked if a player used a portal or waypoint, would that result in any significant performance implications?

It sounds like the best way to deal with minion survivability in WvW is some sort of passive stat tweak, not specifically targeted vs untargeted damage like in PvE, due to those performance implications, but getting that to scale balance wise between zerg and solo fights is definitely hard.

warherox.7943:

If anything, something should be added to Crystal Hibernation with the GM trait. Keep the boon extention on Shield 4 and add something else on Shield 5.

Speaking of that GM trait, Soothing Bastion is incredibly frustrating, since there’s no way to control when it’ll force the activation of Crystalline Hibernation, and if you’re activating a skill or performing another action like a stomp, it’ll interrupt it.

Sure, though you also get 7% just from having fury, so with +50% you get a flat 17%, which is a little bit better (actually, might be a tiny bit higher than that if those bonuses are multiplicative rather than additive). Number definitely is too low, mind, but the real problem is the fury uptime, and that flat percentage bonus traits are kind of boring for grandmasters; there’s not really any play to the trait.

Kidel.2057:

That 10% extra crit damage needs 80% crit rate and fury up all the time to be a flat 10% damage. Not happening a lot.
Not a bad trait, but shouln’t compete with other GM

What extra 10% crit damage? The trait gives an extra 10% crit chance.

ronpierce.2760:

Maniacal Persistance is all around bad too, though. Seeing as how it resets every time you crit, it’s very underwhelming and take too long to churn out a critical hit on low crit chance builds… I’m more focused on Roiling Mist because crit/fury is a focus of Invocation and is at least some what reliable.

That’s easily fixed with some numbers tweaks though; if it went up by say, 5 or 10% every second instead of 2, for instance. Whereas a high fury uptime with large bonuses to fury crit chance fills the same role of making up for low crit, just in a different and mutually exclusive way. Having two ways to do the same thing isn’t a great design choice for traits, one is going to generally be superior, and the other rarely used.

It’s definitely too weak for a GM, but I think people are doing the math wrong on this. The effectiveness of an extra percent of crit depends on a lot of factors if you’re going condi builds, where condition procing, existing precision and attack frequency (only if there’s ICD on those procs), condition damage, and condition duration are all key factors in how much additional damage you end up doing, and for straight dps, you’re gaining a percentage of your critical damage trait, so your ferocity determines how much extra damage each percent of crit chance gains you.

Fury uptime is for sure an issue, that would need to be pretty close to 100% uptime for the trait to be particularly good, and even then it probably needs a numbers buff. Adding a high uptime fury proc and an extra 10% to the trait probably makes it too good in that slot though, so fury procing is probably better off in a different line, or some of the weapon/legend skills would need it added.

Redesigning the trait to do something more interesting is always an option too; since you get Fury on Legend swap, making Fury give different bonuses in different Legends could be interesting, rather than a straight numbers increase, possibly in addition to an increased crit chance. Damage reduction in Jalis, Outgoing Healing Effectiveness in Ventari, crit damage or move/attack speed in shiro, condi damage or condition duration or less condition damage/duration for conditions applied to you for Mallyx. That way when you swap in you get this momentary role effectiveness buff, but you’d need to rely on allies buffing you to get enough Fury uptime to maintain those bonuses, so it doesn’t step on the other two GM traits that much.

Biggest advantage of that kind of approach is that it makes it so that the first two minors aren’t mostly useless when you’re switching to support roles; Invocation is supposed to play nice with any Legend choice, and those first two minors are really only useful if you’re aiming for damage roles. If I’m trying to heal up or soak hits for my allies an extra bit of crit chance and 7% more damage aren’t going to make a lot of difference. Though this is maybe actually an argument for rolling that into the master minor trait, and just making Roiling Mists a really good crit focused option.

It should also be noted that Maniacal Persistence becomes fairly redundant if it’s an optimal strategy to get high fury uptime and run Invocation.

BrunoBRS.5178:

bolded the main subjects of each bullet point for readability’s sake. anything i haven’t mentioned (like mace 2’s atrocious cast time), i agree with OP, or at least don’t disagree.

• my main complaint with the ventari legend is that you have to choose between microing the tablet, and actually taking part in the fight, since all the casts are tied to the revenant. i think the ventari legend’s viability would improve tenfold if all the casts were bound to the tablet, while the revenant himself gets to use his weapon skills at the same time (so exactly how ranger works right now). if the tablet and the revenant were treated as separate entities with their own cast times, i’d wager you wouldn’t even have to change the odd cast times the legend has.

• i pretty much agree with OP’s staff points. one thing i’d like to add is work on the animation. as it is, the auto attack looks like it has less range than a sword or GS, even though it has the same range.

• staff is a good defensive kit. i think with some tweaks to power scaling, and a new #2 skill, it could be a nice weapon for damage. kinda like a different flavor of ranger GS.

• hammer turned out as a pretty decent WvW weapon. in fact, the only one i could make work, since the revenant mobility is so atrociously bad that i couldn’t be part of the melee team if i wanted to, and i was constantly playing catch-up to my group, unless we had stacked enough swiftness beforehand. during WvW i also felt like i was forced to camp jalis, as the other legends just didn’t work well for WvW (ventari mostly because of what i mentioned above)

• hammer #3 suffers from verticality issues. if i’m slightly above or below my target area, my attack won’t connect, which is very frustrating when you’re trying to chill the enemy team and you’re not fighting on a flat area.

• overall my main problem with the legends is that none of them seem to have any synergy between themselves. you want to play condi? you’ll want mallyx mace/axe, and you might swap to jalis to cleanse those condis you stacked on yourself so you can heal. i feel like jalis will be the go-to second legend, and will only be used situationally. the way the revenant is currently set up, swapping back and forth between legends is counterproductive, as you abandon your build’s playstyle for 10 seconds, and then go back to it. camping a single legend instead of the back and forth between legends seems like ignoring half of the profession, and not giving enough reason to justify the fact that revenant has no weapon swaps (which severely cripples the profession, since it doesn’t have the mobility or sticking power, or even the CC, to stay in melee).

Well, we’re missing some legends and weapons, and that’s going to distort the value of swapping, but I also think it’s generally fine to want to stay in one legend and use the other more as needed; think of it a bit like weapon skill and utility bars being flipped, on other classes you don’t want to constantly cycle weapons unless it’s part of your rotation to do so, depending on what you’re doing you’ll stick with one weapon primarily and switch to the offset when needed. This isn’t much different.

As to synergies, having good synergies from multiple legends with the same weapon is a little more important, but there’s a decent amount of synergy between the Legends we have, though some of it’s buried by numbers being off. It’s more that Ventari and Mallyx both work well with Jalis, but not as much each other, so Jalis feels like a necessary swap. With the other legends, more options will crop up. But it’s stuff like Jalis and Ventari can both work well with staff and hammer, so, with some tweaking, you’ll have something like, if you’re going with a defensive/supporty melee spec, staff with Jalis/Ventari is what you go, and you’ll want to take things like Blinding Truths, and ranged support is hammer with the same, but you’ll take the outgoing heal buff instead of the blinds (regen is an option either way depending on gear), etc. Jalis/Mallyx should fit some sort of attrition build, but the condi damage output and uptime needs to be better.

Also, I think it maybe needs to be clearer that swapping Legends puts you back at 50 energy? You’re kind of meant to be jumping back and forth to help with energy management, I think, sort of like weapon swapping to cover cooldowns. Maybe weapon skill energy costs need to be looked at a little more closely with that, but it’s relatively minor number tweaking I think.

DeathPanel.8362:

LouWolfskin.3492:

@DeathPanel

It being an Aura would remove a lot of the ways it could support though. I honestly like moving it around, i like standing somewhere else and giving my allies a projectile counter.
I like being at one end of a battlefield and healing on the other as is needed.

An Aura would remove the Legend from the ranged fight where it actually belongs,
that’s why i said that the Staff-Trait should be moved.
Not that the Staff can’t be supportive, but as it is it would fit more with Invokation than Salvation.

Does the Tablet need some tweaks? Sure it does. But the groundwork, in my opinion at least, is solid.

The way it supports is irrelevant. This game isn’t a trinity so the healing doesn’t really help. Aegis, protection, and blinds are far more useful.

Also, the way it works now with having to constantly manually move the tablet makes it not viable for WVW when you are constantly on the move.

The only place you can viably use it is in pve and in pve most encounters are melee so ranged support is again pointless.

The most important ability for the tablet is basically the shield which would be far more effective if it was always centered around the player so you can move while blocking.

Dude, the tablet provides some of the highest blind uptimes in the entire game if you’re running staff in melee, as well as seriously insane personal sustain; you lose the ability to do all that much damage, but it creates a powerful melee support role. The healing most definitely does help, it’s just not necessary/ideal in most pve content right now. But there are some pretty solid fractal team comps that rely on guardian aoe heals, and this is like that but way stronger, if you’re running Clerics you can do about 5k aoe healing every 2 seconds, with that eventually slowing down when you’re out of energy by a second or two, and that’s not counting potential regen uptime (you can get incredibly high uptime with aoe application with Dwayna runes), or the outgoing heal effectiveness traits currently being bugged for the tablet. HoT content, if it’s harder with better AI, could easily benefit from healing support specs in team comps.

Edit: for a point of comparison, if the outgoing healing traits were working with tablet properly, the maximum theoretical outgoing healing that could be output every 3-4 seconds is on the order of a guardian activating Signet of Resolve. And it’s AoE.

Fiddle Irk.9710:

Have the Tablet “tethered” at it’s 1500 range instead of disappear when you move out of that range so that we don’t have to spam the movement while on the move. Would be nice to if it went into a inactive state when you swap legends instead of disappearing, a bit of a large penalty for utilizing the class mechanic. Example, I have my Tablet out to provide healing for my allies, get stunned by a melee jumpin on me and have to swap legend to break that stun and actually heal myself for a large amount at once or clear conditions and then if I swap back into Ventari, recast the tablet to use any utility skills.
Also, the active movement sincerely needs a 1200 or 1500 range and movement speed increased.

I agree with many of the proposed changes to staff also

They could just remove the already short cast time on summoning the tablet. Swapping legends to respawn the tablet is a pretty effective solution to needing to keep the tablet near you when traveling longer distances too.

I’d also be okay with a move speed increase on the tablet, as long as it wasn’t a huge one. Nothing else is really warranted though.

As far as staff goes, I think it really just needs some shaves on the longer cast times, outside of staff 2, which needs just a little love, maybe a cripple on the first hit to help stick enemies to the Rev. Staff 4 is a fairly strong outgoing heal, especially if you’re traited for bonus outgoing and has a relatively short cooldown for an AoE Condi cleanse, a blast finisher would make it too strong.

DeathPanel.8362:

The biggest thing Staff needs is for the #1 autoattack to cleave 5 targets instead of 3 and increase the range to the same as Guardian or Warrior GS autoattack.

Secondary Tablet needs to be always centered on the player and automatically follow the player like an aura. It’s just unfun tedium to have to continuously spam that move tablet button.

It feels like the mechanics were done for the sake of theme over actual fun gameplay or quality of life. That’s the exact wrong approach.

Spamming the tablet movement is super important to taking advantage of trait synergies, never mind the positioning of the thing. Moving it will proc Blinding Truths, Invigorating Flow, Natural Abundance, and also Charged Mists if you’re below 50%, which you should be if you’re using it to heal a lot, because you should generally be activating Natural Harmony when you’re moving it.

Just a small note, you can start Natural Harmony while the tablet is in motion, meaning that you can get it to dump it’s healing at the point you send it to the second it gets there. Team mates are going to need to adjust to the tablet’s position though; it’s not that hard to place it correctly as long as they know how to stay still, run in straight lines, or to move toward the tablet when they’re low on health or they see it starting to do it’s charge up animation, but it’s pretty hard to hit people if they’re moving erratically. Also, the trait that creates fragments whenever you use any of the Ventari skills does provide a lot of extra healing.

Energy Expulsion’s big thing is it’s a CC, so using it will interrupt skill use. It’s instant cast, so you can use it while the tablet is in motion as well.

Also, moving the tablet does count as a heal, so anything that procs off of healing will activate when you move the tablet, at least as often as it’s ICD allows; so you can blind in an area around you every two seconds if you take Blinding Truths, or if you’re running something like Runes of Dwayna, you can get maintainable regen.

Quarktastic.1027:

Genesis.8572:

Dead.5829:

How about this?

How about it? Revenant critics have known about this for some time. The issue is having to trait Invocation for a stun break.

Spammable stun break. No other class can boast such a feat.

Necro can trait for stunbreak on Death Shroud, and can trait DS to be on a 7 second cooldown. It’s better than the rev stunbreak; even if you don’t trait the cooldown you can leave it immediately and aren’t stuck with a different set of skills for the full cooldown duration.

Syrpharon.7491:

Cecilia.5179:

The tablet is terrible. There’s very little wifi inside Guild Wars 2, and it doesn’t even have Snapchat. How am I supposed to support my allies without sending captioned pictures of myself making silly expressions?

On another note, imagine these things flying around in a wvw zerg.

If we imagine huge pugs with revenants organized to support with the Tablet, you can stay assured the fights will be all forced to melee because of the upkeep dome which destroys projectiles that can be rotated and moved.

I assume the projectile destruction follows the same rules as other projectile destruction effects in the game, and doesn’t apply to ground targeted abilities. Staff Ele and staff Necro will pretty much ignore it’s existence (the Necro will fear you out of the bubble even). You can also get taunted out of the bubble.

But it’ll make positioning matter more; if there’s no way to flank or surround, the effectiveness becomes a lot greater. It’s still not going to be nearly as effective as the shield generator even then, though, so I don’t think it’ll matter that much to zerg balance.

Arantheal.7396:

Zenith.7301:

Arantheal.7396:

Zenith.7301:

Arantheal.7396:

Zenith.7301:

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One baseless assumption after another.
1st: I play all game modes, WvW, Pve and sPvP. When you want to quote me, do it correctly. I wrote "Who cares about PvE anyways when it comes to discussing AI?
2nd: I don’t particularly care about warrior, nor guardian, nor ele. My main is engineer, and seeing turreteers in dungeons lets me cringe as hard as meeting spirit rangers there.
3rd: It doesn’t matter how good or bad spirits/turrets/minions/spirit-weapons are, they are targetable AI, hence mobs will eventually go after them, therefore they are terribad when you want to stack
4th: Rangers can set their pet on passive while stacking (and should do so) / Mesmers can spawn their clones inside the stack, therefore it’s not necessary to shun them out of Dungeons. Now if clones would run all over the place and pets would always be aggressive, that would be exactly the moment when I’d insta-kick both classes right away.

Banners don’t draw aggro.
Spirits do.
Hence spirits will always be useless in PvE, regardless how over-buffed they get.
Period.

To change that, a-net would need to completely redesign spirits, to become intargetable, unable to do direct dmg (which also includes applying condis, debuffing, interfering with foes in any manner), OR update their NPC-AI to not attack player-spawned AI per default, which would also open gates for AI builds in dungeons (even tho they’d perform horrible and then get hated for that when que’ing up, but w/e)

Please, they don’t need to do any of that; they just need to make stacking not work. Stacking isn’t how dungeons were meant to work, they’re not how the combat system was meant to work, and getting rid of it opens large amounts of build diversity.

The fact that minions can draw aggro doesn’t make a lick of difference if the mobs won’t clump for melee cleave or aoe cc, as long as they’re only drawing aggro after the players do. It can potentially become beneficial if they’re drawing away otherwise unavoidable damage because you can’t CC your targets and kill them before the CC wears off anymore. Minions, pets, spirits, and turrets drawing aggro is only bad because stacking and the current meta exists the way it does.

rapthorne.7345:

given the spec is a support spec, I doubt it will have high damage.

People seem to be highly resistant to the notion that there’s something other than Berserker DPS in the game.

Given that all the specs thus far have a very specific role, is it really outside the realm of possibility that HoT’s content will be designed with more than DPS berserker mindless pew pew involved?

I strongly believe that they are giving us these specific roles because we will be in need of them with HoT

Hell, a very strong argument can be made that there’s already a lot of content in the game that requires something other than full out zerker builds for the 99% of the playerbase that can’t play completely perfectly, it’s just that no one is interested in doing any of it, because it can’t be beaten with the ‘meta’ builds, and the rewards for the content that can be ends up being substantially greater for the same time investment.

Warcry.8914:

I’m just stating that if we suddenly had tools to address our mobility, survivability and group utility I’m sure that’d be the highlight of the preview rather than what we got today. I’d love to be proven wrong and have Reaper suddenly become the answer to all of Necromancer’s problems but I’m not willing to act like some sort of battered housewife thinking that Arenanet will suddenly change it’s ways after three years.

Having lots of chill uptime does help with mobility issues; I don’t think Necros are ever going to be given direct disengagement tools, but if you can maintain more chills than the opponent can cleanse, they can’t chase you effectively and they can’t run away. I think that, along with the gap closer on DS, is the model for Necro mobility; and this might not be enough by itself just yet, we may need to see more ways to apply or cover chill to make it harder to cleanse, but I think it can get to a good enough place.

Chill also helps with survivability, especially with the Reaper gm minor trait, and if Reaper is the recipient of the Defiance Bar grandmaster trait, that potentially solves a big problem with Death Shroud.

Group utility depends a lot on what those shouts do, but having more chill uptime is a form of group utility too, albeit less so in pve unless the new content involves more sustain and higher attack rates from mobs.

Vizardlorde.8243:

keep in mind that the strongest DH modifiers are hard to maintain in a pvp setting (UC, SA, Big Game Hunter) and we’ll have to give up either virtues or radiance to pick up DH.

This thread is about PvE, so that’s not overly relevant.

Dadnir.5038:

To point it bluntly :
You can easily see a DH with 55% damage increase against a foe from the very start of the fight.
You can hardly see the necro with more than 30% damage increased and thus when it’s foe is finally under 50% health pool.

That’s the very difference there is at the moment between the DH and the Necromancer. Which mean that the Reaper traitline need to give at least 25% damage modifier to the Reaper to make him on par damage wise with the DH.

And I’m just talking about damage, I’m not bringing utilities on the table.

That makes assumptions about the baseline damage numbers those percentages act off of that we can’t make yet, not just on Reaper skill dps, but also on how the condi changes impact baseline Necro dps.

Silv.9207:

If they chose a Condition to make a entire specializzation I can hardly think about a real accomodation for other builds than that.
SK and GS will inflict Chill, but if you don’t play them both you can’t keep the enemy under Chill and half of your strategy fall down.

For the Dragonhunter Anet focus on Lb and new traits, adding traps. And guardians say that it’s hard to make builds that don’t use a Lb or traps, with that traits.
If you think that ANet chose a Specific Condition to make our specializzation… if we don’t use that condition we can’t really play that specializzation.

You chill on Fear. We have multiple fear generators that work well with just about any necro playstyle. We can also chill on blind with a trait, and there’s a trait that triggers spinal shivers.

There’s plenty of access to Chill, it won’t be restrictive to builds.

Silv.9207:

Chill is a good Idea but a bad choice.

easy to clean in spvp/www and useless in pve. Why i have to spend a entire traitline to obtain something that have already a high efficace counterplay meta that fight against it before it’s released?

If HoT mobs attack more frequently Chill becomes much more useful in PvE; it’s not intrinsically useless in pve, the content just doesn’t work well with it. That may not be true in the future.

TheFantasticGman.9451:

I didn’t specify group vs single because it’s obvious that the individual DPS makes up the group DPS. That’s why I like to run in zerker groups because overall of the group is higher, than say, cleric group DPS. Need active defenses (that’s good support) such as blinds, etc, then that combined with dodging people shouldn’t be dying. Of course, player skill has to be there. So, I imagine that if the DPS is high enough I wouldn’t mind bringing in my Reaper. Think of it this way, why should I bring my Reaper vs Dragonhunter? How will having a Reaper in the group benefit the group MORE THAN having a particular other spec/build for the encounters? That’s what one has to weigh when considering group composition. I need reasons to bring the Reaper over over classes.

If you’re looking at current content, that holds, because there’s minimal sustain and cc and dodges can effectively reduce damage to zero, but you have no idea what new content looks like. Full Zerker may not be viable at all in HoT; if sustain damage from mobs is high enough, that is, there are higher rates of skill activation, fewer big avoidable spikes but lots of consistent damage output, and mobs that can’t be spiked down ultra fast, then blinds and dodges aren’t going to help enough because you’ll run out of them; under those conditions, chills and death shroud provide significant utility.

Necro and Reaper would be able to avoid having to respec as heavily into defensive gear since Life Force regeneration would offset a lot of that need under those conditions, and high Chill uptime would go from being fairly unimportant to an effective replacement for protection.

Group DPS isn’t just a factor of maximum on paper individual dpses being summed, it’s the maximum sustainable dps uptime of the entire group and it depends also on the content design; you can only run full zerker groups because of the existing mob behaviors and skill sets. Under certain content models, having lower dps characters that fill a specific role to help maintain overall uptime will optimize to higher group dps than simply maximizing individual dps.

And to be clear, I’m not saying that’s what HoT content is going to look like either, mind, but until we have a sense of what’s coming with HoT and with the condition changes, it’s pointless to speculate on whether something will be part of the meta or not. We can talk about how the mechanics are good or bad against hypothetical types of content, but not what the meta will look like. There’s too much that goes into determining that that we know is going to change but not how it’s going to change.

They’re also building this spec with HoT content and the condition changes in mind; there’s a lot of stuff we can’t see yet, and attempting to theory craft what dungeon meta is going to look like is really premature until we have a better sense of the overall picture.

Also keep in mind that condis are being reworked, which may dramatically change the dps output of even the core Necro. It’s quite possible that pve viability will go up significantly just from that, by fixing the dps shortfall, even if it still falls short of top tier due to lack of support, and then there may be things in the Reaper traits or HoT content that get the rest of the way.

We have to see everything all together to get a good sense of where things will end up.

TheFantasticGman.9451:

As long as killing things is the goal, DPS will be king. CC/Support might move up in importance but they will not be more important than DPS.

Overall group dps is king, not individual dps. If people are dying because there’s no support, overall group dps goes down. If Necro/Reaper can survive stuff that other classes can’t because, say, mob sustain dps goes up and 100% avoidable burst damage goes down, and Deathshroud and/or chill negates much of that, even if they don’t provide as much group support or another class can spec to out dps them on paper, their dps survivability mix may actually be optimal for that content since they can stay focused on damage. Etc, etc.

I’m pretty sure that won’t work. Cooldowns don’t tend to activate until after the skill animation completes, so you wouldn’t be able to Continuum Shift in the middle of an activation without it counting as being after the Continuum Shift. If you heal with a rift down, you’ll end up losing all of the healing you got, since your health resets to what it was when the rift initially went down.

Only things like the Heal Well, where the effect persists in the world, would let you do anything like this, and you’d still lose the initial portion of the heal when you Shifted.

Ele is not being nerfed nearly as much as you think.

They’re changing, and some options and combinations are going away, but new ones are coming up too. Just for instance, you can take tempest defense at the same time as lightning rod, or as a more fleshed out build, you can take burning precision, burning fire, blinding ashes, soothing disruption, cleansing water, and stone heart, park yourself in earth attunement, and have stupidly good blind application with great condi cleanse, immunity to critical damage and a 20% damage reduction against foes at <600 range, making you a crazy tough condi build.

Should also be noted, Necro survivability is really strong even before siphon, thanks to Death Shroud and high base health. If siphon is made even just a little too good, necros become impossible to kill, so comparing them directly against other classes isn’t the right way to do it.

I do think Blood Magic needs a bit more help, and that should probably come in the form of some other effect rather that simply boosting healing on siphon (maybe this can be where we get pve group utility), but Necro siphons should not be as strong in healing as other classes’ sustain as we have lifeforce for that.

rager.4963:

Eolirin.1830:

Something to note, until we see exactly what the condition changes look like, it’s going to be hard to really figure out where Necro is going to end up; stacking damage on poison and burning, the removal or increase of the cap on bleeds and the ability to consistently apply burning from Dhuumfire are going to change the dps calculations a lot for condition builds.

Ya, but i really never consider necromancer problems to be really on damage you know?

For me the two main problems are.

Pet AI
DS is not good enough for some specs, to make up for the lack of defense/ult in others.

What would have been so hard for them to say.

Ok we know some of the feedback Necromancers have been having, and know the problems with Blood, or pet ai. So we made some changes and gave good reason on why they did it.

I love Necromancer spells, I love the weapon skills, I love the pets. I hate with a passion death shroud. It is not fun, I can’t heal while in it if I went a vampire spec. The skills DS has are not that much fun for me. Yet, it is forced on me and I have to live with it. If I want the other great stuff from the class.

That’s what the elite spec is for.

Making Tomes into Consecrations means that taking the Consecration trait would have to increase the duration you kept the Tome up by 20% or it’d become confusing. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’d certainly need to be balanced against.

I think a case can be made for Shouts as well, and having an AoE condi to boon conversion go on when you pop those elites could be nice, and would certainly lead to fewer balance considerations.

I think Zealous Scepter having a proc on VoJ passive is cool, especially since you can, if you also take Supreme Justice, get scepter 2 to potentially proc 5 times by itself, but that it gives you might on those procs makes it really situational especially paired up against a flat 10% dps increase. If it did something more interesting than might stacking, it might be a more worthwhile choice.

Also, I think a lot of the retaliation traits are completely fine, except that retaliation itself isn’t. So the fix there is not to change the traits, but to make retaliation worth caring about. There’s a lot more build diversity if retaliation is something that makes sense for pve. Same thing for stuff like Spirit Weapons and Signets; the GM traits for them become very powerful choices if those are more viable even before the traits, and that’s something that really needs to be addressed at the level of the skills, rather than piling on more trait buffs to lackluster abilities.

Crossplay.2067:

Personally I don’t use shatters much because they still feel clunky. I propose that, on pressing a shatter button, all illusions should blink to the target and then shatter one second later. That will give them more of an aoe feeling and give opponents time to react. It would also make them very affective against zergs as you could target the middle and be sure to hit 5 people no matter what shatter you use.

I think that’d make a really cool Grandmaster trait, idk about core functionality though.

You can fear people into the spectral wall if you position correctly can’t you?

Something to note, until we see exactly what the condition changes look like, it’s going to be hard to really figure out where Necro is going to end up; stacking damage on poison and burning, the removal or increase of the cap on bleeds and the ability to consistently apply burning from Dhuumfire are going to change the dps calculations a lot for condition builds.

And it should be noted, you may actually want to be looking to change your upgrade slot items and not your gear itself. It’s hard to say how much will have to be changed because we don’t know what the point increases are going to look like, but you’re definitely looking at either a shift in runes/gems, or changing out a few but not all pieces of gear.

I’m going to second the need for a return to jewels to offset the loss of the ability to round out the amulet stats. Having the extra stats built into the amulets themselves like what happens with ascended gear would seriously bloat the amulet list, and being able to pick a set of +300 stats to add to the base amulet would give us all the build flexibility we need.

Unless the goal is to rebalance the amulet stats to avoid super extreme builds, like giving Zerker more defensive stats while overall bringing down the current max dps a little.

Ashen.2907:

Eolirin.1830:

Talonblaze.3175:

phys.7689:

if you werent playing a meta build, there is a very high chance your build will die.

To add to this, it also kills the “play how you want” philosophy.
My builds may not be ‘optimal’ but I play them, I find them fun.

If I can’t play how I want and enjoy, I won’t be playing at all. I most certainly won’t be encouraging others to either.

That’s great until they start making actually hard content where your massively underperforming, but “fun” build cannot function and you’re denied the ability to play it

The whole point of the ability to adjust builds on the fly is having the option to adjust your build to the content you are playing. One does not need to remove the ability to create non optimized fun builds in order to provide content that requires a more focused build.

Being able to adjust a build does jack all when the combinatorial space you need to navigate is full of trap builds that’ll suck and there’s no way to tell whether your new choices are good or bad except to die a lot, and then end up with yet another trap build on the next go round. Smaller decision trees are better at signaling and are far easier to navigate.

Also, keep in mind that the trait merging is effectively reducing the number of major traits you need vs what we currently have, that we’re getting two more major traits, some things that are currently traits are being turned into general skill features, that there’s a decoupling of stats from trait lines, and there’s a general rebalance to everything, including moving some major traits to minor traits. It changes pretty much everything about assumptions you work under in the current system, and a number of those changes should make it easier to mix and match weird things that you currently can’t.

So even with these changes there is plenty of room for non-optimal fun builds in the new system. There’s just much less space for completely useless and broken builds. The delta between best and worst comes down a lot and each trait line’s “purpose” is tightened up and more clearly signaled. The end result of all of this, especially over time as balance is easier to do with the simpler system, should result in more viable builds, not fewer.

And please, don’t try to apply the way current builds are set up to the new system as if you can just drop in what you currently do to the new system; so much is changing that you just can’t do that. What you need to look at, and you won’t be able to until we get our hands on it, is what you can actually create with the new system, and not what you could create if you had the new system and exactly the same traits we do currently. Some builds will definitely be gone, but new builds will be created, and others will be changed in big or small ways.

That the total number of combinations of traits has gone from a stupidly huge number to another much smaller but still stupidly huge number, or that the number of lines you can pick has gone from 5 to 3, or that you can’t put an adept trait into a master trait slot doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is if the underlying playstyles people are using are still adequately represented and whether more viable options open up for each profession than currently exist. We can’t really know that yet, but given what’s been shown of the Water line, there’s not a ton of reason to be panicking about it right now.

bargamer.1762:

With the increased(-again) emphasis on gear choice for stats, will you be taking another look at the drop rate and/or lower crafting requirements for Fine Crafting Materials?

Old thread, but the majority of my concerns are still valid: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/crafting/Fine-Material-Crafting-Revamp-please

Isn’t this kind of covered by the changes to map rewards that were discussed along side the precursor crafting reveal?

Talonblaze.3175:

phys.7689:

if you werent playing a meta build, there is a very high chance your build will die.

To add to this, it also kills the “play how you want” philosophy.
My builds may not be ‘optimal’ but I play them, I find them fun.

If I can’t play how I want and enjoy, I won’t be playing at all. I most certainly won’t be encouraging others to either.

That’s great until they start making actually hard content where your massively underperforming, but “fun” build cannot function and you’re denied the ability to play it. Especially when most of the new content being added to the game starts to function this way.

They can’t fix the issue with there being no challenging high end PvE without making it easier to know how to fix a bad build, because you’ll just bounce off the content and not have any sense of how to adjust. You’re basically asking them to permanently hobble the game so that you can have bad builds; what they need to do is support multiple diverse playstyles in each profession so that there’s something you’ll enjoy that doesn’t suck while also being able to make content that’s challenging with the assumption of a certain baseline of non-sucky build. The current system results in way too large of a delta between worst builds and best builds and if that’s not brought down a lot of other necessary system and content changes get really hard to do.

Are racial skills going away?

steelpenguin.1860:

why is this being done is the 1st question, the current system isn’t broken to any great extent…
getting rid of skill points, fine, but id better not end up with any “odd” points left over, like I did with the transformation points fiasco, ive still got a couple in my bank I cant do anything with.
and any loss of build choice is bad, making it “easier to build” isn’kittens taking out choice, as others have said above, I build my build, for me, for what I want, it may not be " the OMG elite super cookie cutter build" that’s on all the websites, as If wanted to do that kind of thing id play a game with real exploitable stuff ( why Hello there D&D 3rd ed with all the other producers feats and prestige classes) and really make a total OTT nasty.
As has been said in other conversations “12 is the minimum age to play the game, not the target age”

Under the current system, there are fewer than ten core builds per profession that actually work. And by work, I mean taking anything else is a significant reduction in viability, not just a minor one.

Under the new system there are 27 trait combinations per line times 6 lines arranged in sets of 3. That’s more than enough to give us at least as many viable build choices as we have now. The things that are going away in terms of choice are bad options. Letting you be a special snowflake that dies 5x more often or takes 3x longer to kill something is not a healthy trade off for the game to be making.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Simplification does seem to be the path most games are taking these days. I’m guessing its because it just makes the game easier to manage overall, but who knows.

It’s also because the complexity ends up generating useless builds that no one ever uses if they know how to play the game, resulting in options that present only the illusion of choice, while complicating balance, and screwing over less savvy players.

There are currently only a handful of viable builds per profession, and using anything else isn’t just mildly suboptimal, it’s generally massively suboptimal. After a game’s been out for a while and those better options are clearly understood it makes sense to pare the system down to something that’s built off the scaffold of what works with some additions to round out viable builds to cover the design intent for that profession.

So easier to manage, yes, but also much better for players; tighter build focuses, better signaling of intent, etc.

Traced.3495:

Lemondish.3268:

Traced.3495:

I don’t think this new one is going to be tolerable in any way.

Says the guy who didn’t actually read or understand it. Here’s a summary:

Tolerable to me means the original system or something equally accessible.

The new system involves leveling to 80 and doing the existing skill point challenges (to be renamed hero challenges) currently in the game; these are the only way to unlock things. Instead of unlocking traits at fixed levels and unlocking skills individually, both will be unlocked progressively by spending the Hero points you earn doing those above two thing in the respective tracks for the trait or skill line. It’s equally accessible to the original system.

How are the current Elites going to be normalized to the new skill tracks? Will professions like Guardian have both of their Tome Elites placed into a single line? Will everyone be getting a fourth core Elite to round out the skill tracks, or will there be a track with no elite in it, and if so will there be something to make up for that lack?

What’s being done about things like boon duration that are difficult to get on gear, and come with large opportunity costs for choosing those few options?

I notice the fall damage reduction trait is gone from the water line. Are these being removed, and if so, are there going to be other options than snowfall runes for wvw and the existing content?

I would hope that means less than half, but that’s a good question for the live stream.