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I have to strongly agree (and borderline beg) for a reset mote on this encounter. The achievements are very difficult, very annoying, and influenced by a not-insignificant degree of luck. There’s no need to gate the attempt behind a long, slow string of far above average toughness encounters.
Please never do anything like this again.
I only have so much time to throw at PvP. With a season on, I’d rather put that time to working on ranked, but with the temporary Capricorn achievements on I have to divide my time. Half the time another map gets picked (today it was 9 to 1 and still the 1 got picked). If I want some quick dailies done I go to hotjoin, the Capricorn achievements are the only reason I’m in unranked arena. I can’t just leave and try again because it’s unfair to my team to leave in arena, so now I’m just throwing this time away.
I’m not opposed to temporary achievements as a concept, but forcing me to gamble on even attempting them saps any presence of “fun” from this effort. As a solo queue let’s face it, it’s already largely a coin toss whether I’ll be on the winning team or not. I don’t need a second coin toss to make it so that it’s basically a 75% chance that every attempt will be a waste of time for these limited-time achievements.
More variety is always nice, but the clipping issues impact to armor variety would be significant. My Norn male’s nose already clips through the Norn cultural armor made just for that face, so “they could fix it” doesn’t really convince me. And width sliders look terrible to begin with. I think the real issue with adding it, though, is it would require engine changes if you want it to look anything but ghastly, rather than just slapping on a few new body options.
As an aside, it being “unrealistic” because of the character running everywhere is already unrealistic in the opposite direction. You can’t run everywhere, all the time, regardless of how in-shape you are. Realistically my character’s knees would have exploded long ago.
This might be a bit too stupid/obvious a suggestion, but not knowing how new you are, as far as Parasitic Contagion “not working”, I feel I should confirm whether you’re aware that PvP and PvE are given separate builds. The traits and equipment you give your character on the Hero screen do not transfer to PvP, the PvP build has to be configured separately, there’s a button to access it at the top-middle of the screen while you’re in the PvP lobby. I’m not trying to be patronizing with this, but the only possible reason I can think of for Parasitic Contagion not working is thinking you have it equipped when you don’t. As an additional aside, the healing from that trait does NOT count as life siphoning, and so will not work in shroud.
As far as being tanky, most of the damage-absorbing stat amulets have been removed from PvP. Damage mitigation in PvP that’s not dodging is usually based on exploiting things like invulnerability with mesmers or constant protection with engineers, more than straight up damage-eating stats. If you want to play as a tank in PvE, though, it’s certainly possible with nomad stats.
So I’ve been trying to learn to draw lately, and figured I’d draw my GW2 characters as general people-practice since screenshotting references is easy enough. However, for the sake of accuracy, I’d love to be able to position them next to something that indicates height, since the camera isn’t always easy to place reliably. For example, a brick wall, where I could easily see that one character is 7 bricks tall and another is 4. Singular environment objects aren’t great for this unless they’ve got a bunch of evenly spaced lines on them or something, especially with camera bias. Does anyone know a good spot that would fill this need?
So if Double Dragon is getting an expansion, does that mean they’ll be adding hylek as a playable race so we can have some Battletoads?
Upcoming Global Change to Player Minions
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: ExtraCosmic.9082
On purpose. Remember when turret engi was a thing? How “fun” that was? No one wants to play against A.I./mobs in PvP… they shouldn’t ever be meta in pvp.
Not many people seem to realize, but “meta” and “not completely worthless” are not the same thing. People asking to not be useless are not automatically demanding to be overpowered. I can bring a turret engi into PvP and every hammer warrior is one-shotting my turrets without even having to pay attention to them. It’s ridiculous to suggest that being worthless is where a class of skills “should” be, balance-wise, as others have done.
A weaker version of this update, like 30-50% reduction, would go a long way for PvP minions without necessarily making them overpowered. They’d still melt like sugar in the rain the instant any fight is more than 1v1.
The minions are like extensions of their body, influence, and will. Magic is always flowing around; if you move forward vacuuming it up, more will collect behind you. The dragons themselves seem to stay in more or less one place, while their influence spreads all around them, more efficiently gathering magic from everywhere at once. Corruption not only kills opposition, but adds to the dragon’s army, whereas the dragon alone would be a more singular target for everyone to join forces against. Minions are like tendrils they can send out indefinitely, killing and consuming.
Either burn, poison, or torment come to mind as good candidates. one stack of burn for 3s per chill, 2 stacks of torment for 5s per chill, or 1-2 stacks of poison for 5s per chill.
Of course they still need to fix the underlying problems with chill, the 5 cap, and the immunity bosses have. Otherwise the trait still won’t work 90% of the time.
Torment would be a good fit; the theme of the Reaper is supposed to be slow melee, and they’ve stated that its focus on Chill is to make it harder for enemies to run away. An opponent who’s both chilled and tormented is definitely going to have trouble moving out of your range
As another option, I recall an update mentioning a change to condition damage tracking in that it would now apply damage from the last fraction of a second instead of needing a whole second to apply an additional tick of damage. If they did that in reverse, so that a Chill with 0 duration would apply all its damage instantly, it would allow Deathly Chill to move past the 5 stack barrier.
Chill duration from almost every source is 1-2 seconds too short. Chills don’t stick.
It’s true that most chill durations are very short, but it’s entirely possible for a reaper geared toward it to apply chill perpetually.
Specializations are restrictive enough without insisting each grandmaster only be relevant to one build type. Reaper’s Onslaught seems like a power trait, but combines very effectively with Dhuumfire, for example. Doing something like making Chill also cause poison in addition to damage would keep it a very strong condition trait while also allowing for appeal to other builds who want more access to heal-reducing poison. It can still be a condition trait without further forcing players into set paths. Simply making the trait stronger also doesn’t do anything to solve other issues like lack of condition stacking .
Currently, Deathly Chill is in kind of a weird place. For any build not focused on condition damage, it’s worthless; the damage is going to be way too low for it to be even tempting. For builds that do focus on conditions, the damage is “okay”, roughly comparable to one stack of burning…but a condition necro is probably going to be using scepter, which provides no chill source, and the rest of what Reaper offers doesn’t have much to do with conditions.
While it’s easy to just say “buff it more”, numbers are only part of the issue. In PvP, condition removal is everywhere and even if you can land the hits to apply constant chill, few battles are going to let you keep any sort of damage pressure. In PvE, break bars nullify the trait entirely, and for less mobile NPC enemies pretty much any other damage source available to the necromancer is going to be stronger and more effective than constant chill.
I would suggest giving the trait an additional effect along with the damage, to give it some appeal for reaper builds with lots of chill but low condition damage, and make it more worthy as a grandmaster for condi builds. Some suggestions:
-Applying Chill to an enemy that’s already Chilled causes a burst of damage on impact
-Applying Chill to an enemy that’s already Chilled also Slows them briefly
-You siphon more life and/or life force from Chilled enemies
-Whenever you inflict Poison, you also inflict Chill
-More tiers to the damage; mild damage at high health and lethal at low health
This like this would go a long way to allowing the trait to really “weaponize” Chill over simply giving it some moderate damage. In addition, if Chill will continue to be eaten by break bars, I would recommend giving Deathly Chill higher damage to those bars, so it doesn’t feel wasted against such enemies.
I’m sure it’s come up many times, but I have to beg Anet to make the necromancer’s targeted wells optional. It wouldn’t be that hard; make it like toggling autocast, but with a different button. Testing the Reaper has made me all the more sick of casting delays to find and aim my cursor, or failing the cast and putting the well on cooldown because I targeted diagonally and the game only wants me use skills directly in front of my character’s face. For characters as melee-oriented as the Reaper is clearly meant to be, all the targeting is doing is preventing me from using my skills at moments of need.
Judging by the screenshot, your active trait lines are Domination, Dueling, and Chaos. The shield and wells allowed by the Chronomancer spec require that Chronomancer is one of your active lines to use them.
Noticed this while testing a build in the beta weekend. Not sure if a bug or working as intended, but I figured it warranted a mention: the Chronomancer F5 skill does not dial back mantra charges. I.e., if you have 2 Power Spike charges, use Continuum Shift, and use your charges during it, they will still be spent when the effect ends.
I’m real eager for the reveals, not so much for hype as for practicality. A lot of my characters got exploded by the specializations patch, and I don’t want to rebuild them (and make new equipment for them) only to later find that they’ll be better off remade into an elite spec and then have to spend the resources on a bunch more exotic sets, again.
Why on earth would anyone want to make “sub-optimal” characters?
I totally understand enjoying a large amount of choice, but surely that approach only works if they are capable of balancing it?
I can’t speak for the person who said it, but “sub-optimal” doesn’t necessarily mean “intentionally bad”. It just means “not meta.” If I can take an axe trait that makes my DPS 1000, or a greatsword trait that makes it 1050, then the greatsword is optimal. However, the difference is small enough that the axe character can easily perform just as well in any game mode. If a player thinks the axe is more fun, they’re free to choose that with no real detriment to themselves.
That’s the loss that many people are mourning. There were many, many build options that were not meta, but could perform just fine, and which naturally had the highest usage among players who weren’t trying to crunch that extra 1-2% of damage out of their build. If character efficiency were on a percentage scale and 1% was the meta, the “sub-optimal” 90-99% are where the variety was gutted.
Last year there was a raffle for the rare Halloween skins like the scythe. That’s an extremely unreliable source, of course, but this Halloween might bring another new way to get them.
The number of viable builds go down.
That is incorrect. The number of ACTUAL viable builds go up.
Any minute I assume you will both provide your sources that clearly number exactly how many “viable” builds exist in the current system and the new system in order to prove that these claims have weight beyond “It’s my opinion and so obviously indisputable”.
While you’re at it, presumably also providing a definition of “viable” that will be accepted by both the “literally every possible build is viable” and “literally only the best possible builds are viable” crowds without them arguing over it for a thousand years.
I’ve had this exact same issue as long as I can remember, likely since launch as well. It seems less frequent than 50%, and I don’t believe I’ve ever had it happen with chests, but it’s often enough to be extremely annoying. I haven’t noticed anything obviously replicatable about it, which may be why it’s been around so long. Every now and then when an enemy dies, there’s coin in the loot popup but I can’t take it. It’s especially frustrating during high-density enemy kills and the bugged money keeps coming up when I’m trying to loot the other corpses. The issue seems to be completely random, from any enemy, with any character, with any amount of loot in my bags.
Can you imagine as a PvP/WvW/GvG player how annoying it is to do map completion every time you need a legendary?
That’s kind of the point, that some effort be exerted to get a legendary. If you’re thinking of them in “every time you need one” terms, they’re likely proving pretty easy for you to get as is.
Yes, but most seem to be network errors, which I’m not getting. Figured a different error was different enough to warrant another topic.
The generational difference is likely because early MMO’s were all subscription fee games, while today the free to play model is popular (and, obviously, used in GW2). Subscription games have an active interest in everything taking you as long as possible, so their leveling is far slower.
I tried to enter the map and got stuck at the loading screen for a time, eventually getting a popup with the above error and the message that the game had to terminate; there was no other, more technical info given. I can load and play other characters just fine, but that one is trapped at the loading screen and gets the same error every time.
The bad news is there is not and has never been any indication of new weapon types being on the way. The good news, I hope, is that separation of stats from traits makes it far more possible to add not just elite specializations, but new core specializations as well. This would be an ideal way to fit in new weapon traits, and if they intend to keep the theme of each elite specialization adding a weapon type unusable by that profession, they’ll definitely need to add some new types. I just hope Anet keeps these things in mind.
Because I can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. It allows me to play female videogame characters, watch movies with women in them, and even write stories with characters who are not all a literal clone army of me without my head exploding.
When specializations were first announced one of my worries was that people would feel forced/obligated to use the weapons and skills related to them, making them all play about the same, and now that we’re getting details, there doesn’t seem to have been much done to prevent this.
I would strongly suggest loosening the tie between the new weapon and skills from elite specializations; having to first unlock their use via the new “hero points wheel” is fine, but having to take that specialization to use them at all is unnecessarily restrictive. Many people like to use more than one skill type in their builds, like a single signet or shout, because it fits their build or they find it more fun, and they don’t always have the associated traits for each type. Likewise, sometimes they use untraited weapons because they find a certain one more fun or a good fit for their build that doesn’t necessarily include the trait.
Forcing people to be a chronomancer to use mesmer shield/wells, or a Dragonhunter to use longbow/traps, etc, badly stifles such builds and doesn’t seem to really give any trade off. The traits and ability being added with the spec, and made accessible through the wheel, is enough to make them feel connected to the specialization.
I’ve got a tanky character that can solo a champion karka, but it would take about a thousand years. I don’t know how much more damage it does than a champ, but I wouldn’t call it impossible…though I wouldn’t expect either having sole access to it or being able to do it in 15 minutes to be. It would also be very hard for a lone player in the first phase to pelt it with eggs faster than it can restore its armor, which would make it even slower for a tanky character.
I’m sorry, I don’t buy that this is a proper use of the term adequacy in this context, because by the same logic, a 0/0/0/0/0 build is adequate. If the skill differential between players is big enough, he will beat meta players, sure. Of course with a meta build, he’s going to own even harder against the same, unskilled opponents. Whereas if he is against equally skilled opponents, he will get rolled, repeatedly, with his 0/0/0/0/0 build.
So you literally have to take skill out of the equation if you want to get any meaningful results. If you don’t, you’re failing at logic/math.
Once we’re dealing with players of EQUAL skill, then we can talk, and it’s obvious that a meta build will provide a very significant advantage over an “average” build, which will produce a very significant advantage over 0/0/0/0/0, etc. – so yeah, some builds are clearly better than others, and many won’t even be “adequate”. You will NOT be able to “get the job” done against equally skilled players with many builds.
I never claimed meta builds weren’t “better” performance-wise; that’s the whole point of them being meta builds. What makes a non-meta “adequate” is that a player doesn’t NEED a new build to play the game. If players were all of equal skill, using stronger builds for an advantage would only really matter in competitive PvP. But it also wouldn’t matter at all, because everyone has the same skill level, and once they have the same builds it’s an infinite standstill. I’m not sure what your point here was other than disagreeing with me for the sake of disagreeing? Yes, from a purely mathematical standpoint higher numbers are higher than lower numbers. That wasn’t really disputed.
This is just over-dramatic rubbish.
As I said, other games doing this have produced better games for everyone. People who moan about the good old days are generally moaning about the fact that they can no longer use out-of-game knowledge and tricksy builds to gain an advantage over other players.
Also, no-one is getting “shot in the back”. That’s drama-student nonsense of the worst kind. The game is being improved for everyone, and more genuinely competitive (let’s use that word, as you seem keen to run “viable” into the floor) builds are being made.
“Better games for everyone”, except for the people arguing against it who apparently aren’t part of everyone? Moaning about no longer having tricksy builds to take advantage, which would make more sense if this were about the loss of meta builds instead of the loss of everything else?
Competitive builds have little point outside of competitive PvP. In large-scale PvE or WvW, or small-scale solo play and story instances, you don’t need a competitive build; at that stage you’re simply talking about balance. If they were making this change for PvP only, I’d drop my complaints right there, but applying large changes universally to very different game modes is not “improvements for everyone.”
there is only one facet of this change that seems to promote more builds, and thats removing stats from the equation.
Unfortunately even that will probably end up doing the opposite, because none of this changes the reasons people take berserker stats in the first place. Before the desire to pick certain traits in non-damage lines diluted stats at least a tiny bit, but now people will just condense their stats even further with equipment.
Another imaginary “traits no one used anyway”. What exactly do you think the people opposed are actually complaining about, since they apparently don’t exist?
Making a build “easier” does not make there more of it. That’s not an increase in diversity.
If you feel meta builds were ruining diversity, I have bad news for you. This system will not remove or even reduce that effect. There might be fewer meta builds total as a result of there being so much fewer builds in general, but for people only interested in maximizing DPS, that will only get easier. Their trait choice will no longer be restricted by trait line stats, so they will be free to choose entirely based on what traits give them more damage. Since there’s less flexibility, there will be even less variety in meta builds, as fewer choices will make the “best” choice that much more obvious. They’ll then keep their berserker gear and be even more DPS-focused than ever.
The beta connection doesn’t seem real concrete anyway…I got a chest (and golem banker, for some reason), and I didn’t even try to get into the first HoT beta.
Well, the official statement was that beta people were the ones who got the heroic chest(s). So, odds are you DID get into it and simply overlooked your invite email.
I never signed up for the newsletter that I vaguely recall was part of qualifying, but, who knows.
You’re wrong to claim every single build is viable by that metric. There are tons of builds, by that metric, that are not viable, in that they are inadequate and perform poorly, and struggle to the point where normal, decent players can’t complete content reliably if everyone (or even most people) in the party have builds along those lines.
With other games where we’ve seen them vastly cut down on “build diversity” in order to improve balance and accessibility, it’s typically been a resounding success. WoW is a good example – they ditched the old, wildly complicated and fiddly talent system for an ultra-simplified one, and guess what? Their game got both easier to play for non-experts and vastly more balanced for everyone.
Anyway, you’ve scored a double-fault with your reasoning. Balance isn’t about “money”, and not “every” build in GW2 reached the level of adequacy.
Viable is an iffy word to apply in general, as I would argue player skill is more important on either end. Players who can’t figure out how to dodge out of orange circles are going to get wrecked by both monsters and other players, regardless of build. I’ve seen people say they completed PvE content with any traits at all because they never bothered looking into the system, which is far less “viable” than even picking at random. Yet they got by just fine, apparently.
There is in no distinct border between meta and random nonsense builds. There are many, MANY builds that are made with thought and synergize and function just fine, but are not meta. The top 1% may be the “best” builds, but are they really that significantly different from the top 90-99%? What about 80-90%, who will still perform as well as or better if the players are better? How far down does it go until a build is “inadequate”?
Yes, I’m sure WoW got more balanced and easier to play. No one is really arguing that side of it? I bet GW2 would get even MORE easy to play and even MORE balanced if you removed character builds entirely and gave every profession identical stats and skills. Yet I don’t think many people would call this an improvement, even if it is a “resounding success” for the intention of increasing balance and simplicity.
Adequacy simply means “good enough to get the job done.” So yes, very nearly every build, even deliberately random ones, would be adequate. In PvP yesterday I joined a match with a ranger whose build was something like 0/0/6/0/6. I forget the exact placement but the last 2 weren’t even allocated. One of his two adept trait slots was completely empty. Yet at the time I joined he had the highest score on his team and appeared the most effective in combat.
Unfortunately, I do believe it’s about money, but not because balance = money. Because simplicity is money. It’s the same reason that game in general have fewer options and complications than earlier installments in the series, because they want to appeal to the broader market that isn’t as willing to put in the time or effort. It’s the same reason the NPE patch came into existence, an update that seemed to confuse and annoy much of the player base with changes nobody was asking for, but instead was clearly meant to make things “simpler” for new players. This specialization system is no different; it’s not about whether the gain is better than the loss, but about one group of players being shot in the back to make room for a group with more money to give.
The beta connection doesn’t seem real concrete anyway…I got a chest (and golem banker, for some reason), and I didn’t even try to get into the first HoT beta.
I just got one and never even attempted to get into either beta. Wasn’t in the Silverwastes during the entire key phase.
Because I like making characters, basically. I make them like I’d be making characters for a story; their appearance, name, and build are all part of “who they are”. I don’t swap traits or equipment for one character, wanting to make a new build means making a new character.
I’m losing a huge amount of “synergized” builds as well. In many cases this seems to be a deliberate intent of the new system, or at the very least a side-effect of having so little flexibility/trait options that some are inevitably shoved into the same tier. Forcing a condition mesmer to choose confusion OR torment, for example, many traits they were able to take at once before.
“In essence we’re not losing traits or diversity,” you say immediately after acknowledging the loss of traits and diversity. Honestly, even whether you’re looking “purely at figures”, it seems obvious to me that the number of good/meta/obvious builds that people keep claiming are the only ones that matter are also shrinking. You can move into a shed after your house burns down, but just because the shed has most of the belongings you could save condensed in one place it doesn’t mean you actually have more, regardless of the illusion that you do.
Individual player skill accounts for a lot more than how meta their build is. Once everyone on the team is exactly the same it won’t save you from people who don’t know how to dodge.
in the end, the actual diversity is going up on both high level play, which is all that matters on the long run, thanks to more trait fombinations reaching the potential of the current few meta ones. the PHIW crowd also gets a relief thanks to no matter how they choose, they will likely be more effective with content than before.
As for actual, optimal combinations: it’s going to be 3 per trait line, 3 traitlines per build out of 5 possible, thats 2520 different builds per profession. (sans elite specs)
How is high level play “all that matters”? Should they orient balance around the fraction of a percent that makes up the top professional PvPers?
Even if we’re ending up with more meta-grade builds, and honestly I don’t even believe that much, there is a huge gap between that and more diversity. The “high level players” are just going to zero in on the top couple builds anyway, regardless of whether that’s the best out of ten or the best out of ten thousand.
“the PHIW crowd also gets a relief thanks to no matter how they choose, they will likely be more effective with content than before.” The fact that their choices don’t matter anymore is kind of the point of a lot of those complaints.
The thing with “playstyle defining” is that by definition, people have different playstyles. Not everyone played their character based on the traits they chose. Some went in with a play style already in mind, and picked traits based on that idea. That’s being eliminated in favor of telling you what play styles you can have.
It continues to baffle me that people keep saying “we actually get more options” apparently based on the idea that another two meta builds outnumbers a thousand lost other builds. They say “viable” as if only the meta builds are playable, when I’ve seen more players comment that they didn’t use ANY traits at all because they thought they were just an optional decorative thing, than I’ve seen players complain that they can’t progress because their build doesn’t work.
We’re not getting “more viable diversity”, considering that almost any build was viable in almost any gameplay. Frankly I don’t think we’re even getting more meta diversity. They’re adding a few new pre-made metas to replace the at least as many being cut, and adding nothing to replace the absolutely everything else being cut. But the metas are being made superficially stronger, and that’s enough to intoxicate people who didn’t play anything else.
I’m not certain I understand how the question is separate from that info, but, the current 5 trait lines per specialization are not different from specializations; they are being turned into the specializations. It’s basically a new name. There is only the Strength specialization for Warrior, not the existing Strength line AND a Strength specialization as two different things. You can only choose up to three, there are no points to divide between specs. You might be able to choose LESS than three, if you wanted to for some reason, but no more.
Arguing the semantics of exactly how many possible combinations are in either system isn’t really the point; obviously no one is literally making hundreds of thousands of characters. It’s more like the face portion of character creation, in that some people just pick a pre-made face and go, and others poke at the sliders to customize every detail. The proposed change is basically removing the customization in exchange for a few new pre-mades. For people who only use those, it’s more variety with no real loss. For people who customize, it’s losing almost everything in exchange for almost nothing.
The case here is similar, in that the new system is very clearly catered to one part of the player base while very indifferently screwing over another. Claims of “we’re actually getting more variety” are not likely to be heard as anything but “I’m the one who benefits from this coin toss and that’s all that matters.”
Anet is destroying build diversity now so they can add much greater diversity later. We’re going to get more Elite Specializations in the future and each elite specialization will provide us with an entirely new trait line, a new weapon, new utilities, and a new elite, as well as fundamentally change how we interact with our profession mechanic. This will create far more build diversity than a bunch of weak traits almost no one used to begin with.
Three years into the game using a system that was advertised as “made to be easy to add more to later”, and we’re ending up with half as many traits. I’d rather not wait another ten years to theoretically have as many options as we have now, in a system still far more restrictive in letting you use them.
There are an awful lot of people saying “no one used” the non-meta traits. You personally interviewed all the many thousands of players on that, then? Or did Anet release a graph of detailed trait use information that I missed? I should think a lot fewer people would be having differing opinions for you to disregard if they weren’t losing out in this deal.
If there’s a jar filled with jelly beans and they remove every color but red, it’s sure going to LOOK like there’s a lot more red, because now it’s all you can see. But it doesn’t mean there’s more, and just because red is your favorite doesn’t mean the jar is now therefore better for everyone than it was.
There’s also an unnamed newlywed couple in Ascalon Settlement that can’t stop gettin’ it on.
That guy sure hates fresh air…
Summary: you have more diversity because you now have more VIABLE options than before.
Having more OPTIONS does not equal more diversity if no one uses them. Having less options in total but more viable options means you will actually experience build diversity because people will actually be using different builds.
The most DPS option is going to have large slot gaps that can now be filled with a plethora of non-DPS options, increasing diversity overall.
It’s like having an ice cream store with 50 flavors, all of which are terrible except 1. You take a step back and relaunch your ice cream store with 25 flavors, with 5 being great.
In your old store, you had more OPTIONS, but the customers only bought one of them so your cone diversity was non-existent. In the new store, you have less options overall, but because you have more than 1 good flavor now your cone diversity has gone up.
You’re making the assumption that “flavors YOU like” and “flavors that are good” are the same thing. People wouldn’t be angry over losing things if they weren’t using them. Many players are naturally going to look up whatever is best and pick that, but those are not the only “viable” builds, nor are they the only ones anyone ever uses.
Let’s say a character can use either greatswords or axes, and by some miracle the weapons are perfectly balanced and equal. They each have an improvement trait; one that raises greatsword damage by 10% and one that raises axe damage by 11%. Though small, this is an obvious imbalance where one choice is better. As a result, more people will take axes. However, there will still be players who use greatswords because they think the skills are more fun, or they just like the look of them better. Likewise, the axe advantage is small enough that competitively, individual player scale is going to by far make a bigger difference. This new change solves the imbalance by removing greatswords entirely; you, as an axe user, are declaring that this is perfectly fine because it hasn’t personally inconvenienced you.
Using the same metaphor, it was more like out of 50 flavors, 5 were best, 25 were good, and 20 were kind of confusing and weird. Half your customers only order 2 or 3 of the best; they only have so much time/money for ice cream and so never even bother with the other 2 or 3 “best” because they don’t bother digging for them, and just go with what they know is good. The 25 good ones are still regularly ordered, and the 20 off ones have a small fanbase.
Now the store changes and only serves the top 5. For someone who only ordered that 2-3, to them, they have more best options they never even knew about. Life is great, they have twice as many choices and they’re all good. The other half of customers has been screwed over because their choices are gone; their only options are take the popular kind or get out. You telling them they have more variety with 5 than there ever was with 50 is not going to convince any of them. (I’m using vague ‘half’ numbers because let’s face it, neither of us has any idea what actual percentage of players used what variety of builds)
One of my main PvP characters is a ranger with a non-standard hybrid build. It is in no way meta. I have beaten other players using meta builds because I was better than them, and been beaten by other players using even more out-there builds because they were better than me. Forcing everyone into a meta build won’t change that, and will have almost no impact on PvE or WvW. It will simply kill diversity for the unfavored percentage, not as a side effect of improving the system, but simply because it is easier and more profitable to sell the 5 most popular flavors than to stock 50 for everyone.
(edited by ExtraCosmic.9082)
I didn't want to say it but(post spec stream)
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: ExtraCosmic.9082
There seems to be some lack of understanding between people seeing more/less diversity as to how the other side could possibly see it that way. Think of it like this:
Let’s say they change it so that when you choose a warrior, you have 5 distinct types to choose from. Greatsword signet berserker, mace and shield shout tank, whatever. Each one looks and plays different, but they are presets; you don’t choose anything about their appearance or traits/skills.
Most people aren’t going to make 5 different warriors, I’d say most aren’t even going to use 5 different builds with their one warrior. This system is more choice and variation than they even saw before. With all the professions, that’s 40 different character types, far more than most players will use.
There are many choices with this system, but there is zero customization. You select a character, you do not make one. Alternatively, think of the armor set vs outfits argument. Imagine that Anet declares that they are removing the wardrobe system so that there is no more mix and matching, and no more dyes. All armor appearance will be outfits. As a result, there is less clipping and most armor generally looks better, but most people always look about the same. Again, there is no customization.
Different games have made systems like either choice work just fine. Before you can even look at whether a system is “good” or not, it needs to be recognized that they appeal to completely different types of players for completely different reasons. The problem arising is that the proposed specializations seem to dramatically change course from something for everybody to everything for only one side.
People argue about outfits because this is human nature; they want to change things more toward their own benefit and preferences, it’s just how it goes. We have some degree of both options and it works fine, players can choose whichever they prefer. With traits, “complete” builds aren’t immediately clear and distinct, but they’re there. Some players can choose those and others can choose to sift through the parts and customize as they wish. Large player bases are diverse, and people play differently.
People are getting so angry because the specialization system completely favors one side. Those who are being favored naturally don’t see any problem, it looks great to them, and they don’t understand how people can see it as anything but improvement. Those who are not feel like Anet is acting like a parent telling their kids “I know you normally both get a slice of pie, but…I’ve suddenly decided I like your brother better so he gets everything. In exchange you get nothing.”
No discussion is going to get anywhere if people don’t look past “it’s good/bad for me so it obviously must be right/wrong for everyone.”
The trouble is that they’re abilities with extremely limited combat use, taking up space in a system that determines your combat build, and soon has extremely little space to spare.
What seems like the obvious solution is the upcoming Masteries system. Fall damage reduction seems like it would be right at home in these gliding or mushroom-jumping or comparable exploration masteries. There’s no real “advantage” it would give anyone over newer players to make initially locking it behind that wall a problem. That way it can still be a “thing” for you to earn without it eating valuable trait space.
I really can’t be bothered with the streams
You can also view the trait info at this site without having to dig through the long stream: http://dulfy.net/2015/04/24/gw2-specializations-ama-livestream-notes/
The necromancer minion-master build seems to have been weakened (which it certainly didn’t need with their buggy AI), due to a master trait (Training of the Master) being integrated into a grandmaster that already shared space with another minion trait. There is also the strange choice of forcing minion effects into minor traits, which they seem to have done due to cutting their options in half. Past updates actually removed these minor traits that existed before, and for good reason, as forced utility-related traits causes builds to bleed into each other and reduce distinction/variety. We already have two minion grandmasters in Death Magic, considering the forced focus into three trees how many options are left to non-minion necromancers in that area?
My vampire-build necromancer, focused on health siphoning, is badly crippled by having to choose between siphoning on critical hits, and the new Quickening Thirst trait that integrates dagger recharge, the primary weapon of choice for siphoning as it’s the only one that has a siphoning attack, and attacks fastest to actually take advantage of those criticals in the first place. Additionally, the Curses line (the necromancer’s main critical hit tree) now has only condition-related grandmasters, which seriously leaves behind a necromancer there for critical hits in the first place.
Banner traits seem to have vanished almost entirely, which leaves my planned banner-using warrior nowhere to go. The new Furious trait is less debilitating, but confusing to my dual sword warrior; a warrior’s only real condition sources are swords, for which I’d want that dual wield attack speed to build up the criticals and bleeding, and the longbow, which hits slowly for a build-stacks-on-critical trait…the trait ends up mainly benefitting the enormous fire-field burst and confusing hammer interrupts that people already complain of making hambow warriors too common/overpowered.
I’m out of time to keep rambling, so that’s all from me for now.
I’ll try not to bury the thread with mass-detail reviews of 20+ builds, but here goes. The post had to be split for length anyway…
One of the recurring issues this Specializations change seems to have created, ironically, is the inability to specialize. This was a common idea when I made characters; “I want to make a flamethrower engineer, a chaos mesmer, a vampire necromancer, etc.” I don’t know how much this was a conscious design choice to avoid overpowering with the stronger traits, and how much was an inevitable side effect of drastically reducing both the number of traits and freedom in choosing them, but I found myself unable to repair various “theme” builds because of inability to take multiple traits that synergize.
As a first example, the flamethrower engineer. It’s difficult to comment on this profession from the AMA since its new traits seem to be the least complete, but Fireforged Trigger and Deadly Mixture appear to be gone without reintegration, and Juggernaut and Napalm Specialist, either of which seem vital to a flamethrower build, have been moved to the same tier. On a confusing sidenote, napalm seems to have been integrated into Incendiary Powder to make it stronger, a trait that I already saw complaints of as being overpowered.
The proposed structure of the Guardian Radiance grandmaster tier is confusing, and a large part of the knife into the three builds I was looking forward to. There are exactly two reasons that a guardian, who has only one damaging condition, would make a condition damage build; to specialize in burning, or to specialize in retaliation, using the Radiant Retaliation trait. Placing both the burning and retaliation grandmasters into the same tier along with signet mastery, one of the only means a guardian has to increase condition damage as well as a source of retaliation, is stifling to what is already their most constricted build avenue. If Amplified Wrath can’t be moved back into Zeal, I would recommend swapping Perfect Inscriptions into it in the place of Shattered Aegis.
My Elixir Engineer is wounded by the apparent removal and non-integration of Potent Elixirs and Acidic Elixirs (the latter of which was one of only two means engineers had to remove boons). My turret engineer had a support build using Experimental Turrets and an outgoing heals rune, but will have to choose between that and heal-splosion for support.
My Arcane elementalist was about being element-neutral, using rapid attuning to apply many boons and conditions and using arcane skills for a lot of damage. I’m not hit by the separation of evasive arcana and boon-on-attune nearly as much as between attunement and elemental surge, over the already-weak Elemental Contingency now separated from inherent boon duration increase.
My condition-damage mesmer is going to be severely hobbled by having to choose between Maim the Disillusioned and Blinding Befuddlement (the confusion duration being formerly an adept trait), considering that confusion and torment are almost the entirety of her conditions, especially with the new scepter trait seeming to encourage both.
Cont…
I hardly know where to begin. I love making characters; for the most part it’s what I “do” in this game. Currently I have 19 of them, and the only reason it’s “only” that many is because I don’t build and then put aside my characters. I make one and then play it until it has full PvE map completion and has finished all of its personal and living story, and only then do I move to the next. I swap between them all regularly for PvP, world bosses, WvW, and other activities. I’ve spent a lot of time with all of them, and am attached to all of them. I don’t swap between builds with a character, ever; their name and appearance are all tied into “who” I made. If someone is a minion-master necro, that’s who they were made to be, and if a different necromancer build looks fun, I make a new necromancer.
Along with the 19 I have, I have at least that many again planned for the future. I’ve regularly bought gems, often for character slots, and have saved up a ton of them eagerly awaiting the next time slots go on sale. I genuinely worried about someday hitting the 64 character limit and having more planned, because I didn’t want to delete a single character. I’ve played almost every day since the headstart, I can easily name all my characters and many of those planned and their builds and personalities and what I like or dislike about them…but what I’ve heard about this update is so devastating to the way I play that for the first time, in all its ups and downs, I find myself seriously considering leaving the game. And that truly saddens me.
Character customization has been gutted. Roughly half of my builds, existing and planned, are destroyed. Am I supposed to just throw these characters away? Another half of those remaining can be at least partly salvaged, but I’m not happy with many of them. I’m left with maybe a quarter of my characters that survive. Worse, the three characters I’ve looked forward to creating most for months, eagerly watching the store for character slots to go on sale, one of which I’ve created my first legendary for, are gone. Their builds are no longer viable. Worse still, I have little to look forward to in character-building, what has been my primary passion in this game. What’s there to build? I can’t “make” a character anymore.
I don’t know what I’m really contributing here beyond needing a place to moan, so I’ll hasten this to an end…I could make suggestions (not here, this post is long enough), but honestly this feels like corporate oversimplification to increase mass appeal as much as an actual response to game issues (much like the NPE) and it doesn’t make me optimistic about the ability to actually make a difference.
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