Guild Wars 2

Allie, may you do another list of suggested changes at some point? 61 pages is so many, and I don’t want to bog it down with proposals that are copycats of old ones. Plus, it just gives us an idea of where you’re at and pushes through the permastow dialogue for those who aren’t really attached to the idea (and like having pets) and would like to see other suggestions.

Specific Game Mode
PvE

Proposal Overview
This is a pet post, but don’t groan just yet! I’m not going to focus on permastow or AI. Instead, I would like to talk about making pets more varied and interesting. If you think they are varied enough as is, let me just say that there are five pets that apply chilled, and hawk and eagle have the same ability.

Goal of Proposal
While AI is one thing, pets would certainly be more attractive if they were more interesting. Pets should be seen as a large selection of tools to pick from for certain scenarios the player and their allies encounter. They should be helpful, welcome additions to every party. But enough rhetoric. I’m going to look at the active and passive abilities of each pet and make suggestions. Some of them may be strong or impossible, but they might inspire better ideas from the Devs.

MOAS!
Oh yes, moas. The pet nobody really brings or talks about. I want to start here first, as I think they have an interesting aesthetic and really deserve to be able to do more for their beak-loving companions.

In general, Moas seem to have been designed to be the “Support” pet with their boon-applying screeches and healing AoE, but the boons are not great and are delayed, and the healing AoE—while it can be nice—is random. Since Anet has said they’re against giving the player control of all the pets abilities, I would suggest tying the heal to trigger with the Special Skill, or just after it.

I also think Moas should passively give 10% boon duration to up to five allies to reinforce their role

Pink Moa
Dazing Screech. While Daze is nice in PvP settings, this screech is way too hard to use well and has very little application in PvE. Besides that, this is the one moa that breaks from that supporting role. I suggest changing this ability to:

Prismatic Glare — Drops a wall of reflecting a few feet in front of the Ranger. Duration and diameter undefined. This wall would have no field.

Blue Moa
Protecting Screech. Protection is a really nice boon and everyone likes to have it. My change to the Blue would be more minimal. Instead if a screech that other party members have to move towards and have their ears blasted for, I suggest this:

Protecting Screech — The Blue Moa drops an AoE similar to Symbol of Protection/Retalition that lasts 3 seconds and isn’t defined as any field. It applies 3 seconds of protection for every pulse and pulses once every second.

White Moa

Icy Screech — Instead of Chilling Foes, Icy Screech applies Frost Aura to 5 allies in a vicinity.

Red Moa

Furious Screech — For 10 seconds, up to 5 allies in a vicinity receive a buff for 10% increased damage that stacks with similar buffs. Rangers don’t have an incredible amount of damage buffs, so this shouldn’t be too overpowering. But I’m not a Dev!

OTHER BIRDS!

In general, birds are known for their high precision, swiftness, and short cooldown Special Skills. Their damage is relatively high, and their vitality is low. Let’s play more with this.

Since their vitality is low and they are flying creatures, I think this would be the best pet choice to make 100% immune to ground targeted AoEs! I know, that’s probably crazy, but in trade we could make damage directly applied to them stronger (i.e. armor/vita/toughness weaker). Most people think all pets should be mostly immune to AoE, but I think having just one family that is would be functional as well.

Raven
Ravens are a cool, carrion bird aesthetic and I think we should play on that and give them a sort of life siphoning. Instead of Blinding Slash, I propose this:

Carrion Feast — passive: The raven devours a bit of fallen prey, healing itself for each defeated enemy. active:_ Put passive on cooldown and give Ranger a small burst heal.

Hawk
Give hawk Raven’s old Blinding Slash, but make the attack hit up to three targets.

Eagle
Eagle is fine being the sole holder of Lacerating Slash. There is nothing wrong with this ability, as 18 seconds bleeds are huge.

Others!

Murellow We already have pets that apply poison (So many), but a ranger has no access to smoke fields. I find this a little strange and think the Murrellow would be the perfect option to give Rangers one.

I will make another post later with more, if people like this kind of thinking. This should be enough to start to give ideas!

Proposal Functionality
Gives pets more definitive, useful roles

Associated Risks
All the time it would take to do this.

Specific Game Mode
PvE

Proposal Overview
Make greatsword more attractive while giving rangers more blast finisher options.

Goal of Proposal
*Remove the evade from the auto-attack chain and put it on “Swoop,” as one developer once suggested. This takes some power away from that chain while giving us a timed evade.
*Add either an AoE might stack at the end of the chain, or make the first two strikes stack one vuln and the last stack 2-3.
*Remove the vuln from Maul, maybe add two seconds to its cooldown, and make it a blast finisher.

Proposal Functionality
Adding evade to the movement skill would be similar to whirlwind on other greatswords, the short cooldown blast finisher would be similar to Lightning Hammer. The AoE might stack on chain would be new, but I think it would be an interesting supportive ability that would make greatsword ranger more desirable.

Associated Risks
Depending on how this was done, it could make greatsword too strong or too weak

Aggrostemma.1703:

Hi Allie!

Can you do me a favor? Take your ranger to the lvl80 content please! (If you don’t have any you can ask one of the programmers to"cheat" you one)
Equip full ascended with legendary weapon. No-no, gear does not matter, it’s a choice of you!

Done? Great!

Now take this ranger to the new LA event! Do you know what’s going to happen?
1st second: entering combat
2nd second: your pet goes into combat
3th second: your pet dies
4th second: swap pet
5th second: set pet on passive
6th second: pew-pew
7th second: AOE incoming
8th second you dodge
9th second: your pet dies

Great, isnt’ it?

Now head to a random wvw map!

1, pew-pew
2, zerg incoming
3 your pet dies
4, you swap pet
5, your pet dies

Even if you keep your pet full passive on the ENTIRE content it dies.

Try this and tell us the story about your experience. Until you did not try our shoes you have no kittening idea how frustrating this bullkitten is.

What exactly does your post accomplish?

Specific Game Mode: PvE

Proposal Overview
Change functionality of Beastmaster II adept trait — Master’s Bond.

Goal of Proposal
Make the trait more attractive while better aligning it to the overall mechanic of the profession. It is a fine trait, but the one thing that keeps it from being used more is that stacks are lost on pet swap. Generally, the profession encourages pet swapping, especially in the Beastmastery line with traits like Mighty Swap. To have a trait that encourages to not swap in the same line is counter-intuitive. My proposal is to keep everything about the trait the same, but allow for stacks to be maintained with pet swapping.

Proposal Functionality
In relation to the rest of GW2, stacks gained from elements like Sigil of Bloodlust or Sigil of Perception are lost on player being downed or defeated. Changing this trait to work on just pet downed/defeated would correlate to that precedent.

Associated Risks
A player could use this to build the stacks for themselves, and then keep the pet on passive to have stacks that would be hard to remove. This is mostly why this isn’t a PvP suggestion. I think there is some counter to this inherent in the fact that having your pet on passive lowers your DPS.

I have to wonder if people are serious about some of these suggestions or if it’s just an emotional reaction. You can’t suggest good design on an emotional, upset premise. You have to think about logistics and the developer’s core goal with the design. I think the problem Allie faces is that the OP didn’t draw the line solidly enough to curb posts born of bitterness and resentment instead of clear-headed design.

Having a CDR Ranger Balance thread chuck full of emotional outcries doesn’t help the Ranger profession, guys. The best way to have got results from this was to simply suggest great, REASONABLE design changes or buffs. Or playing the ball in the court they want and talking more about what you want from the pet AI instead of trying to kick it aside. There are many no-pet suggestion threads you could have gone to respectfully.

Note: This is something applicable to ALL races, but with five level 80 Sylvari, I felt most comfortable talking about Sylvari physiques.

Why more physiques?

We have seen new hairstyles and new faces for all the races thus far, and while that isn’t any kind of argument in itself what we know is the reason those were added was to deliver more diversity and combination potential to our character models. But why do that?

Having a unique avatar appearance is crucial to how an MMO feels to the playerbase. Your avatar is the end result of all your many hours of leveling, dungeoning, pvping, achieve hunting, ecetera. They represent everything, and are our direct link to the world of Tyria.

So why physiques? Because they change everything about how an armor sits on a character, and your armor/clothing is a lot of what makes up the unique appearance of our characters. Ever notice some armors you try to mix on one character don’t work so well on another? Or how one physique can look great in a set of gear, but another wont? It’s all about how the armor maps over the character model.

In GW2, each race comes with a set array of body physiques instead of scalars to customize their own. I think this is actually a great limitation because it respects the lore of each race, and prevents people from making really preposterously proportioned characters.

However, that boon comes with the con of having a lot less options for body physiques. I think this can be remedied by adding more options. I know for Sylvari females and male, there’s a lot of options for skinny framed Sylvari, then a single medium/curvy option and a single big option.

My suggestion for Sylvari would be to add more options that is between the default physique (top left on the creator) and the medium/curvy physique, because after the four skinny options, have have these big gaps between the default, the medium, and the big. I do think it’s possible to add more physiques without betraying the lore that makes Sylvari unique (i.e. giving female Sylvari too much chest).

Okay. There’s probably a good guide on doing it somewhere. I might go ahead and do it before I sink $100+ on a replacement.

There isn’t a way to replace the GPU memory is there?

Edit: True about a needed upgrade!

Hmm..

So I uninstalled my GTX 280 and ran in normal mode and it is running smoothly. I’ve run memtest on my RAM, and Window’s hard drive check. I think it is my GPU now. Which is a bummer considering how costly that is to replace.. There goes my chance at Emmisary of the Mad King >.>

Of course! You might think me crazy, but I have heard success stories of people baking their GPU’s in the oven to resurrect them. Apparently it can remove those artifacts I’m having. I’m not sure if I should do this, or keep testing for what else the problem could be, but I am only damaging the rest of my computer with these forced shutdowns, and it won’t fix itself.

Sit down with me a while, fill your tobacco pipes. Let us discuss what I have come to call.. a graphical mystery.

Whenever I boot up my computer in normal mode (I am currently in safe mode w/ networking and things run fine and smooth), my screen will. within a short interval of time, become prone to symptoms very much like those you see with an overheating video card. Black screens with red, blue, and green lines. Or colorful lines that outline the shapes on my wall-paper and desktop icons.

Immediately, I cleaned the fan on my card as well as I could. But there was no fix. I then got curious and ran two programs that check temperatures on my video card, and I was shocked.

51 degrees Celsius idle. Normally, that should be fine. But for some reason it is not. Whenever I open a program, be it GW2 launcher, or another launcher, or Chrome, or even those lightweight GPU monitoring programs, I lock up and freeze.

I was only able to get the temperature checking programs to work by Ctr+Alt+Dlt, and letting the program load in the background.. and letting the menu fade back to the Desktop on its own.

My driver, by the way, is also up to date. The card is a Nvidia GTX 280, I have a quad-core i5 2.67 Ghz processor, and 16 GB’s RAM. There is plenty of space on my hard drive.

I would invite some insight, my dear Watson and others whom are listening, some clues as to possible suspects and culprits at play here. For once I am feeling quite clueless, and I need this working by the 31st to get that title!