Guild Wars 2

Unfair ladders has a fair and simple solution.

Keep skill rating as is, but introduce a cap to your effective rating.
So, you need say 30 games for your effective rating to break gold; 50 games to break platinum, and 100 games to completely remove the cap on effective rating.

This ensures that all players in higher divisions at least has a decent amount of games to determine their skill rating.

You have just been unlucky in obtaining this specific item. If the drop rate is 2% then we can expect that 1 out of every 1000 will have to kill at least 225 smokescales.

The best strategy is to ignore it. You will get these type of drops by accident eventually. If you can’t wait, then consider making the farm be more than just about farming:

• Practice a different class or build.
• Practice bursts useful for PvP and WvW.
• Kill smokescales by flawlessly countering their mechanics.

Raids will be the first to get legendary armor, but it will probably not stay that way forever. However, the skin should stay exclusive to raids.

Imagine if Anet released an easy PvE option for The Ascension.

I encourage you to believe in the idea that Triumphant and Hero’s Triumphant armors are the T1 and T2 precursors of the WvW legendary armor. It might come true.

Seera.5916:

Players will farm the content that is the most profit per hour. That will ONLY BE ONE event or chain of events. They will not jump from one event to another because that is inefficient use of their time.

There is no way to make players farm a variety of content in one play session. Farmers will ALWAYS choose the content that gives them the most profit per hour on average.

I beg you! Please reread my post.

Anet can easily ensure players will farm a variety of content in one play session by making that more profitable than any repeatable farm.

Seera.5916:

You do realize that the players doing those farms are doing them for the gold they get. You nerf that farm, they will move on to another farm. Then you’ll ask for that to be nerfed. And eventually it goes around in a circle and Silverwastes/Champion farming will be the farm again. Players will farm the things that give them most X per time spent on average where X is whatever they need, be it karma, gold, map currency, etc.

I will repeat what I said:
Those wishing to farm for hours on end should be encouraged to complete a set of reasonably diverse content.

Example Farm-rewards:

• Daily completionist
• Dungeon paths
• Low tier daily fractals (high tier dailies have very high rewards)
• Daily exotic achievement chests
• Hero’s choice chest (once per day per account for each HoT map).
• Ensure that it only drops when you have 100% participation.
• Daily completion of Tequatl, The shatterer, Claw of Jormag, Triple trouble, Vinewrath.

You ensure that the intended farms are the most profitable content. Going through all will take many hours (even when dungeons are excluded).

Whenever a more profitable repeatable farm pops us, like SW chest farming and AB multiloot, then you nerf those to ensure farmers will stick to the intended farm objectives. This is not difficult to achieve:

• You increase the daily rewards of the intended farm objectives.
• You can nerf SW farm by increasing bandit crest cost of bandit skeleton keys and/or removing bandit crests from chests. You may have to increase bandit crest cost of direct loot, such as bags of rare gear, to ensure you don’t kill the farm entirely.
  Hence the farm itself will be highly profitable, but only if you have the bandit crests already. Killing the vinewrath could be one of the intended daily farm objectives, hence farmers would ammulate bandit crests and occasionally do a SW chest run.
• You can nerf AB farm by removing multiloot, or nerf grand chest rewards. If you can’t remove multiloot directly, then you can require 100% participation to be able to open grand and great chests.

Seera.5916:

Silverwastes/Champion farming is not really bad. Some people need easier activities after a hard day at work and it is nice that ANet offers content that fits their needs.

People can kill 1,000,000 dolyaks for all I care, but should it be the most rewarding content? Why should running in circles and opening chests be far more profitable than almost any other style of gameplay?

Having a set of daily objectives take priority over silverwastes chest farming, would ensure that people would farm those first.

The chest farm should be nerfed by increasing the bandit crest cost of bandit skeleton keys. People doing vinewrath for the daily reward would then also accumulate bandit crests, and occasionally do a chest farm. That is how the chest farm should have worked from the beginning.

Raids should not have an easy mode.

Every time the developers release a wing, they would have to waste time on a separate easy mode. Besides access to some lore, what would be the purpose of this easy mode?

That effort is better spent on new living story, fractals, and maps, or improving existing content.

Also, the raid armor should only be obtainable through raids. They can release a low-difficulty legendary armor at a later stage, but it should have different looks.

The type of gameplay for effective reward farming matters.
This is what the game encourages players to do, and GW2 has some really bad ones:

• Auric Basin multiloot
• Silverwastes chest farm
• Lvl 40 fractal farm
• Champion farm

The following content deserves to offer top-tier rewards:

• Raids
• Guild missions
• Completing (non-grindy) Permanent Achievements.
• Ranked PvP non-repeatable division/tier rewards (assuming decent progression)
• Daily high tier fractals

Well below the top-tier rewards are farm rewards. Those wishing to farm for hours on end should be encouraged to complete a set of reasonably diverse content.

Example Farm-rewards:

• Daily completionist
• Dungeon paths
• Daily exotic achievement chests
• Hero’s choice chest (once per day per account for each HoT map).
  Ensure that it only drops when you have 100% participation.
• Daily completion of Tequatl, The shatterer, Claw of Jormag, Triple trouble, Vinewrath.

Raine.1394:

Vertical progression is one where the power level of the game increases. The mastery system is an attempt at horizontal progression.

I corrected my post. I obviously meant horizontal progression.

Raine.1394:

And, I’m wondering how you know most players agree with you.

I specifically used the word ‘believe’. I believe most players agree with me that the mastery system is good.

• I believe most players agree that the expansion should not add vertical progression, but it should add some form of horizontal progression.
• I also believe most players prefer the current system over a pure xp grind.

The mastery system is far from the de facto progression for MMO expansions. Therefore, I say Anet did really well on the mastery system.

Raine.1394:

The forums present one population of players, chat another. The fact is, we don’t know what most players believe. I don’t agree with you. I believe the attempt at horizontal progression was brilliant, the implementation, not so much.

I haven’t heard about the “impossible-to-obtain” mastery points neither in guild chat nor map chat. I have heard other complaints though.

I think it would be best if Anet had a handful of decently balanced unique maps in a rotation. I would prefer this of the current, EBL + 3 identical imbalanced maps.
Each unique map doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, as long as the total balance is even.

For any given map composition, they can fine-tune the balance by adjusting points for specific keeps and towers.

I think Anet did really well with the mastery system, and I believe most players agree with me.

1. Having horizontal progression depend on completing various achievements is better than just pure xp grind.
2. If you automatically get enough points without even trying to do these objectives, then the mastery points have no purpose.
3. Hence, mastery points are fine as is.

I don’t see why equality of difficulty is a good thing.
The new creatures are more challenging than vanilla creatures. This is primarily due to special mechanics which was lacking in vanilla creatures.

Legendary rank indicates a special boss and the difficulty can vary widely.

Veteran, Elite and Champion is an indicator of strength relative to the creature type.

Most notably, champion creatures are designed for group content. They have high health, and are very resistant to cc. Mobs without high health and breakbar are near-useless against a group of players.

The hammer is very strong for a high-sustain bruiser build.
Skill #2, #3, #4, and #5 all help mitigate damage.
Hammer is not an amazing burst weapon.

The most effective method to reduce the sustain potential of hammer is to slightly increase the cooldown of skills #2, #3, #4 and #5.

Your problem might be a very bad build for HoT exploration.
What profession, weapon and skills do you use?
Do you eat a mango pie every half hour?

All professions can have have a heavy amount of sustain and/or combat avoidance. You should not fight your way through the map. You don’t get map completion or map achievements by killing every mob. You do it by taking objectives.

I find this much more relaxing than some holy trinity mmo where you’re often forced to fight all the mobs you aggro.

Best maps:
SS Tier: Verdant Brink.
S Tier: Auric Basin and Tangled Depths.
A Tier: Dry Top and Silverwastes.
B Tier: Starter maps.

Verdant Brink is by far the best map. I hope to see a map taking vertical exploration even further.

They could consider increasing the radius of Rock Solid from 240 to 360-600. To go further, they could swap it with a grandmaster trait and let it apply 2 or 3 stacks of stability instead of just one.

I would like to see a grandmaster major trait that grants immunity/resistance to retaliation damage.

You went against a mesmer build that counters yours fairly easily. In general the “PU mesmer” is a very strong 1v1 duel build, but you can just run away. It has poor lockdown and chasing capabilities.

Perplexity runes should be strong in 1v1 fights, because that’s where they are good. Runes of strength for instance, are strong in any game mode. However, one could argue that it’s synergy with confusion oriented builds are too strong.

If they replaced the confusion duration with something else, then confusion oriented builds won’t have such a strong synergy with perplexity runes, yet the runes will remain a solid choice for any condition roamers.

Menaka.5092:

Access to gear/stat combos

Although some vague promises were made about having access to more stat combos on the WvW gear, we’re still stuck with only a handful of choices, while access to some stat combos (for example Celestial and Sinister) require a lot of PvE and crafting to get hold of. And let’s not talk about how rare the ascended drops are in WvW. I had like… probably one armor piece and two or three rings in over 2500 ranks. If I were doing fractals I would have been swimming in ascended stuff by now.

You’re meant to craft ascended armor by using the crafting system. The armor and weapon boxes are bonuses.

You should get all the trinkets you need through laurels. Just select the laurel login reward chest.

For ascended sinister armor, you only need 400 bandit crests to get the sinister insignia recipe, and then change stats in mystic forge. 400 bandit crests is definitely doable for a WvW-er.

The flamethrower is a solid DPS weapon now that burning stacks in intensity. It is also a much more interesting weapon than grenades.

Grenade damage is overrated. The full duration of a grenade #1 throw is ~1 second. It is only the activation time that is 1/2 second.

Any build that could deal high damage with celestial gear, will benefit from Sinister. Engineers dish out both conditions and direct damage, so I anticipate that they will get higher numbers with Sinister gear.

Another advantage of condition builds is that they can more easily keep up conditions such as chill, weakness, vulnerability, and immobilized.

Zealot, Sinister, Nomad, and other gear types were added after the release, and they have a theme.

For instance Sinister gear is related to the last four chapters of the Living Story, which is situated in the Silverwastes. The method to obtain sinister gear is through completing the living story, it’s achievements or playing in the Silverwastes.

I find this style of play to be a bit more interesting than just straight up buying it.

Also, different gear types have the same amount of stats (except Celestial), but depending on your build and requirements, there will always be optimal choices.

If it weren’t already clear you can spam-cancel the utility skill without any energy cost while still gaining the trait boons.

It gives you permanent condition immunity.

Downed state is mostly, a good mechanic.

If you think 5 players, should be able to defend against 30 players, then the solution would be better defensive siege. Not rework the rally system, which would have implications in many other scenarios.

In zerg vs zerg fights, there is a food that turns rallying into your favor. It’s the downed health food (fire salsa, mango salsa, chickpea salad). Only problem is, it is bugged.

I tested mango salsa and it does increase downed dmg, but it has zero effect on downed health. The downed health is what makes the food useful.

Jeff.5139:

I’d like to suggest that disabled golems also be immobilized for 20 seconds or that the pilot be forcibly ejected and the Golem unridable for the duration of the effect.

Absolutelely not!

You can not kick someone out of the golem you build. This change would result in other random players taking over the golems.

It would be especially bad with regards to siege trolls.

Jeknar.6184:

Fergus.4208:

Golems, like flame rams need to be in melee, making them very vulnerable to siege disablers, and even 20 secs might be a bit too much.

Ever heard of Omega Golems and their 1500 attack range?

Yes! Should have commented on that aswell.

At only 1500 range, they can be disabled from within the keep as siege disablers have total range of 1200+450.

With perfect position you could place 6 to attack a wall, or 4(?) to attack a door with enough spacing to avoid the 900 diameter on the siege disabler to hit more than one omega golem. However, many locations have very limited positioning opportunities. Defenders can take this into account, by focusing pre-built defensive siege on the more exposed locations.

Last but not least, Omega golems are by far, the most expensive siege unit.

You can regard Supply Crate as an area denial skill. The engineer is very powerful close to his dropped supply, making it ideal for holding points, or ambushing people in choke points. However, a player can run away, unlike many other elites.

Golem’s are very expensive.

It makes perfect sense that a high-tech and expensive golem, has some resilience to siege disablers.

The very cheap flame rams are the most vulnerable, due to being in range of defender, and you can’t spread them out.

Ranged siege weapons can be spread out, and you are unable to disable them from a safe location.

Golems, like flame rams need to be in melee, making them very vulnerable to siege disablers, and even 20 secs might be a bit too much.

Jessica Boettiger.2563:

Basically removing the achievement requirement during a tournament is an experimental step we took to reduce the incentive for achievement grinding. We want people to play WvW, and not focus too heavily on satisfying achievement requirements.

If we find that players prefer having numerous things to check off a list, then we would certainly take that feedback into account and consider it for future tournaments.

You already have WXP in place for participating in WvW. The WXP per effort is fairly well balanced. Capturing Stone Mist is a single event, but so is taking out a sentry, or killing a Dolyak. I spent 5-10 minutes on the achievement.

A single daily achievement is to gain 2 world ranks. That would be a much better goal. Anything from 2-5 world ranks per week would be very doable

An extra bonus: It would synergize well with your Gem Store WXP boosters.

Last season (7 weeks) you had 50 world ranks, 600+ specific events, +more. What’s up with these extremes?

To make it a bit more interesting you could add some optional potentially fun/teaching/money-sinking achievements. These wouldn’t be week-bound, or required for the claim tickets, but would reward some AP, give a small reward and be required to earn the title. These could be along the lines of:

• Build/Place a Siege Golem
• Place 10 feasts (food) in WvW
• Unlock a feast recipee
• Use the Mystic Forge in a keep
• Complete a WvW Jumping Puzzle
• Upgrade a location (camp/tower/…)
• Use a siege disabler to disable enemy siege
• Kill an enemy player by knocking it out of the map (EotM) or through fall dmg
• Use a finisher on all 8 combo fields (while in WvW)
• Upgrade a siege blueprint in the Mystic Forge
• Kill an enemy player in Obsidian Sanctum
• Get killed by an enemy player in Obsidian Sanctum
• Die while intoxicated in a WvW map
• Activate a npc commander
• Rally from an enemy player

Chris Cleary.8017:

Dungeon selling is not something that will be officially supported. Listing a group on the LFG tool is opening it up to a public realm and you do so at your own risk.

I don’t mind harsher time for dungeon sellers.

However, kicking players from a party should be achieved by majority vote. It should require 3 votes for 4-5 members, or 2 votes for 2-3 members.

I’ve seen a few occasions where one of the less good players in a party is kicked right before the end of dungeon or last fractal, and right after, a guild member to one of the party members got invited.

In instanced areas, you should have a warning box upon kicking & voting to kick, that this will kick the player from the instance, and that unwarranted kicking is a bannable offense.

Butter.3024:

After 2 years, the 3 main game modes for GW2 (dungeon, PvP, and WvW) which contains most of the population for GW2 had have no real updates.

We sure received a lot of QoL changes for PvP, EOTM for WvW, and 1 extra path for dungeon, but that’s it. And these changes aren’t even that much, GW2 WvW dungeon and PvP right now compare to 2 years ago are almost exactly the same. As much fun of WvW is, as much fun as FGS spider queen down in 2s is, or killing people in hotjoin with hambow, after 2 years it gets….stale.

Dungeons:

• Some balance/bug changes to existing dungeons.
• Aetherblade path.
• Finally fixed FGS exploit.
• LFG system (also important for many other areas).
• Fractals of the Mists.

Fractals of the mists is a massive addition to dungeon portion of the game. The fractal dungeons are generally more well-made than the dungeons. The mechanics forces you to do whatever dungeon is thrown at you rather than daily repeating the most exploitable and easy dungeon paths.

PvP:

• Glorious Armor & Glorious Hero Armor
• Standard enemy models
• Reward tracks
• Courtyard
• Temple of the Silent Storm
• Spirit Watch
• Skyhammer

Less than a third of the players in my WvW-Focused guild haven’t even touched PvP, and most of them have only played a few matches.

WvW:

• EotM
• WvW progression system with upgrades and loot
• Ruins of Power
• Commander Colors
• Stealth & Siege traps
• Shareable Food

Anet should have implemented a proper commander system a long time ago. A squad should consist of a group of parties, and have a suitable interface.

The commander should have the power to invite parties to his squad, or kick if needed. Each party should have party-member icons (on map) of different color. AoE boons/heals should prioritize party members first, and squad members second. Also we should be able to change commander colors without disbanding the squad.

Rewards when defending are lackluster.

There’s probably a better design to the WvW maps, but it is a complex topic with no easy solution. I am no fan of the ruins of power mechanic.

One nice change would be to differentiate the three borderlands map more. For instance, each borderlands map could have a different season (winter, spring,autumn).

Butter.3024:

After 2 years, the 3 main game modes for GW2

They are not the 3 main game modes. They are important, but they are far from the most played (on average) even for a level 80 character.

Butter.3024:

Anet is pretty dumping most of their resources on Living Story, sure it is cool but it just so bland. People always end up coming back to do dungeons WvW PvP after 30 mins on Living Story and never touch it again. I personally have never seen anyone excited to redo the LS they just do it for the achievements. It is a boring and brainless with no skill requires content. It is not even good for playing with friends. Tbh dungeons and WvW are the main reasons I’m playing this game, because they are extremely good content which you can play over and over a lot. And I’m sure most people will agree with me that Anet should focus more on WvW PvP and Dungeon rather than Living Story.

Living Story is a mistake, it is not what most people want. We want update contents on Dungeon, WvW, PvP, new classes, new mechanics, constant class balances, etc Make the game exciting again, wow all of us with your new innovation again, please, no more Living Story.

I disagree. The living story (season 2) is surprisingly good. It is much better than the personal story. Also, Dry Top is the best high-level area.

They’ve added some new level gating, unlocked at very low levels. Some skills (utility/elite) has been pushed up a few levels. At the same time they drastically increased the xp at low levels. All in all, this is not a big change.

The increased level requirement for traits had a bigger impact on leveling alts.

Key-farmers may be affected, but they should have removed the level 10 key a long time ago. Shame they didn’t do it this patch. They could ramp it up to lvl 20, and make the lvl 30 key a lvl 40 key.

Old players have 1→20 level birthday scrolls, so compared to leveling an alt before those scrolls, we still have it more convenient.

New players can certainly make use of those extra skills, but probably at a reduced efficiency.

The way I see it, this has as much to do with implementing a more gradual character progression. Leveling can sometimes feel pointless due to level scaling, but unlocking new skill slots, or getting new trait points are very clear power-ups that does not depend on level scaling.

Before, the progression beyond level 30 were very slow. Now the power-ups will be spread more out towards the higher levels.

Now, this is an inconvenience for me when leveling my remaining professions, but I understand why they do it.

vonBoomslang.8296:

1) With the removal of the Condition based auto, now BOTH ranged weapons for the Warrior rely on Conditions. Wouldn’t it be advisable to also change Dual Shot (Warrior Longbow #1) to cause considerably less damage but to cause a bleed? This would synergize with the burn caused by Fan Of Fire (Warrior Longbow #2) and Combustive Shot (Warrior Longbow Burst) and the heavy bleed on Pin Down (Warrior Longbow #5).

In a normal rotation you will spend most of your time on the rifle using volley and brutal shot. These do not apply bleeding.

The #5 skill on longbow alone, applies roughly 40% of the bleeding that spamming rifle auto-attack would.

The longbow is great for bleeding due to it’s high attack rate (auto-attack has 2 hits), giving it a very strong synergy with precise strikes and sigil of earth.

The changes will make the rifle more useful for group PvE. The typical scenario is a dungeon with multiple berserker warriors applying unwanted bleed stacks to bosses. It makes condition builds more viable.

vonBoomslang.8296:

2) While the proposed 20% damage increase sounds tasty, let me look at the numbers right quick: Right now, my warrior with 1 566 power and 828 condition damage, lists Bleeding Shot as dealing 264 damage… followed by a 756 bleed. Changing that to just 317 damage is a 69% damage reduction. That’s massive. Now, yes, I realize this is in large part due to the brilliant synergy with Deep Cuts (Warrior Arms III, +50% bleed duration), but that trait is in the same tree as the Rifle buffing trait Crack Shot (Warrior Arms IV, 20% rifle and harpoon gun reduction + piercing). Again, that’s massive.

With rifle you would typically roll with a berserker build (at least after the changes), whereas you have a mixed build. When you combine higher power, crit chance, crit damage, vulnerability, +% dmg modifiers, possible condition removal, and capping of bleed stacks, the changes won’t seem so bad.

Naturally this will be a damage decrease for condition or mixed builds, but for direct-damage builds it won’t change much, and it will be more useful in group settings due to no maxing out bleed stacks as easily.

Wethospu.6437:

Greatsword and Axe are already fairly balanced in PvE and Warrior definitely isn’t top damage in PvE. So I don’t think big PvE nerfs to HB are justified.

Warrior is definitely in the top with respect to damage (PvE), and that’s coming from the class with highest base health and armor.

The Ele FGS exploit will get fixed.

100b and whirlwind attack combined deals a ridiculous amount of damage. On top of that, those two skills are spammable, and warrior can weapon swap to unleash his other bursty skills while those recharge.

Unless you’re running longbow, Cleansing Ire will be a weaker trait, but on the other hand, the Brawler’s Recovery will now remove a condition on weapon swap. This will reliably, remove damaging conditions (stacked most frequently).

In that regard it’s fairly balanced. Brawler’s Recovery will be more reliable, more frequent, but have less overall conditions removed.

100b has some balancing problems. It’s unreliable in PvP, but it is ridicilously strong in PvE. Instead of just reducing dmg (5% is not much), I’d rather see a large increase to cooldown. The skill is very useful against downed enemies, or to deny enemy players from stomping or rezzing. It would also remain useful if you can set it up, but you won’t be able to make a new attempt every 8th second. By keeping damage, yet increasing cooldown, the overall dps would drastically drop in PvE, yet remain its situational usefulness in PvP.

Example change to 100b:
20 second CD
Strikes 1-3: Reduced damage
Strikes 4-8: Increased damage
Strike 9 (Final strike): Unchanged damage & 0.25s daze.

Utomneian.9013:

i am not 100% sure what you are talking about Fergus, but if it means i have more incentive to do a dungeon i hate, then i’ll agree with you xD

By Daily Dungeon, I refer to a system where every day, one of the dungeons is selected as the daily dungeon. This would mean that the daily rewards for completing the dungeon paths are much higher than usual.

This would would encourage players to do the daily dungeon paths rather than only grinding the most speed-run friendly paths every day.

I like the downed state mechanic. Revival, one of the two ways to get out of downed state, should stay as it currently is. The second mechanic, Rally, is too strong.

If a tagged enemy dies you rally. The problem is that when lots of stuff are dying (trash mobs in PvE or large battles in WvW), you rally way too easily.

What I’d like to see is a cool down between each time you can rally (say 120 seconds).

Ynna.8769:

Fergus.4208:

Concerning signets. I believe signet-focused builds should be good options for newbie players, but weak options for any averagely skilled player. What’s frustrating, is that the easy-to-play warriors have access to strong sigils.

I personally find that a horrible design philosophy. There shouldn’t be a major skillgroup dedicated to newer players. Sigils should be easier to use for new players, but not that effective, but in the hand of a good player, they should become even more powerful. Making the trade-off between the passive and the active should be a hard decision.

Just to clarify. I meant signets. Not sigils (I have now edited my post).

If it’s hard to decide if you should use the active, then would imply that keeping the passive is almost as good as not using the active.

There is a big gap between playing an elementalist and a warrior, and making signets strong for the most straightforward class just makes it even more easy to play.

The conquest mode is fairly static (compared to say Dota matches), and a big part of the PvP comes down to the actual combat. That also means that it’s troublesome if some professions are much easier to play than others.

Dungeon rewards aren’t bad and they don’t need to be the most profitable way to play. Dungeons are by their nature repetitive, and they shouldn’t be the most profitable way to play. It is important to also consider that dungeons offer tokens, which you need to unlock dungeons skins (and that takes a while).

Implementing a daily dungeon with raised rewards for all paths of that dungeon, as some suggested, is a much better approach.

Relentliss.2170:

Whoever is chairing the Dev team for warriors knows what he is doing. Look at them.
Banners – work fine, do what you’d expect
Sigils – also really strong
Shouts – awesome
Stances – awesome

Compare to Guardian
Shouts – work fine, do what you might expect
Meditations – really strong
Spirit Weapons – weak
Sigils – weak
Virtues – weak
I don’t expect any changes to Virtues alot of other people percieve them as fine. But I can see some serious issues with Spirit Weapons and Sigils.

Our Sigils when used are just plain pathetic. Compare this to Warriors and you see what I mean.

Guardians are fine. Some skill types may see little use, but there are certainly very viable skills and builds.

One way to buff spirit weapon usefulness would be to introduce a useful spirit weapon elite.

Concerning signets. I believe signet-focused builds should be good options for newbie players, but weak options for any averagely skilled player. What’s frustrating, is that the easy-to-play warriors have access to strong signets.

I don’t find virtues to be weak, but they are at their strongest in a group setting.

Guardians have weak escape abilities, and they aren’t good at lock down either. These are very important in WvW. Giving them an elite gank/lockdown skill would be pretty cool.

A couple things on my wishlist for for guardians:
1. Ascended and exotic gear with power, vitality and precision stats.
2. Spirit Prison elite skill (counts as a spirit weapon). Create a prison around you potentially trapping other enemy players. Trapped enemy players would need to destroy it to escape. Either that or some other elite with gank potential.

They should definitely nerf the damage potential from fiery rush. It’s an exploit that only works against npc’s.

Saying this makes dungeon runs longer is a poor argument. Many bosses are being trivialized because they can be bursted. FGS greatly increases the potential to burst down bosses.

At the beginning of a boss fight, players have a large amount skills with long cooldowns, that enables them to survive face tanking the boss the few seconds it takes to bring it down. This burst strategy requires preparation, but it comletely lacks in-combat reactive decisions. Hence it trivializes boss fights to a very rigid sequence of actions, which is a bad thing.

There are ways to make the weapon viable without making it OP against bosses right next to a wall.

Conditions does need a rework, particularly against high ranked mobs (champions and world bosses). Here’s some suggested changes that should not change conditions much for one condition applier, but make condition builds more viable when there are multiple condition appliers.

Bleed

Bleeding stacks in intensity, and provides the primary condition damage. It is the most widely available type of condition damage.

They should increase the number of bleed stacks (25), but implement a system where a larger number of stacks, either drastically decreases the bleed duration, or the bleed damage.

High ranked mobs have high toughness, which mitigates physical damage. The proposed solution will mitigate condition damage for targets that receive focus fire (a.k.a. champions and world bosses).

Burning & Poison:

Burn and poison, stacks in duration, and they will have a limited damage potential against high ranked mobs. They can stack in duration up to nine times.

For each stack, the victim receives increasingly better poison/burning resistance. This will work such that it will easily resist burning and poison from opponents with weak condition damage, but a low chance to resist burning and poison from opponents with strong condition damage.

The proposed solution will ensure that the strongest burns and poisons will be applied, and that the condition damage dealers will have a much higher chance off dealing damage through their conditions. In solo encounters, burning and poison won’t be stacked many times so the opponent has a low chance to resist the condition.

The problem is the rewards they introduced for killing champions. It’s not just the large gold reward, but the bloodstone dust crafting materials that are mandatory for ascended crafting, and they are accoutn bound. Champions are the only enemies you can get this from.

Champions are designed as group content, but they are not designed to be difficult for a group, and they haved the disadvantage of not scaling to very large group, making it trivially easy.

The advantage of making champions rewarding is to encourage group play. If they want to keep this, then they should ensure the same champs aren’t farmed over and over again.

One possible solution, is to let a champion only drop exotic loot bag once per player, and reset this every month (effectively forcing them to play across most/all maps).

Another solution, is to reduce rewards for large groups, having a cap on number of champion bags (based on champion max difficulty).

tigirius.9014:

Fergus.4208:

Some stuff about retaliation

Absolutely not! Some classes rely on this for tanky builds and since there is no block mechanic in this game like other games and protection is only 30% defense there’s really no other option. There are plenty of ways of taking retal off your enemies and or letting them use them up and be on CD before you all out attack them you just have to pay attention while fighting.

If you bothered to read my post you’ll see I’m discussing how retaliation steamrolls characters with multiple hit attacks. There’s very very little to justify why damage dealt from many small attacks should get such insane amounts of retaliation damage.

If I play engineer, and throw grenades into a zerg, I will receive way more damage from retaliation than I deal.

A single grenade barrage throws 8 grenades (traited), so with 5 foes, it hits 40 times. If average retaliation damage is 300 (requires average of 1400 power), I will take 12000 armor ignoring damage. That’s close to instant suicide.

Retaliation is very easy to keep up in a zerg. It’s just a matter of spamming some light fields, and damage dealt is passive so it’s a very simple tactic. Very simple tactics should not be very powerful.

Alter retaliation

Retaliation can be kept at 100% quite easily (for some classes), and it’s not hard to give a zerg constant retaliation. Retaliation deals fixed damage per attack, so it’s extremely effective against multi hit attacks. Many classes/builds will have to avoid using most of their abilities, because they receive much more damage than they dish out. Casting a few grenades into a retaliation buffed zerg is suicide.

Fast attacks don’t have any massive advantage to make up for this. Critical hit effects all have long cooldowns, which most slow hitting weapons with some crit chance will close to maximize anyways.

Blindness and Aegis is another advantage where fast attacks are ideal. However, you can counter aegis by simply not opening with one of your best attacks. Blindess can be countered by using #1 attack a single time.

Retaliation have no real counters (boon stripping is very limited), and they give a too big buff to zerging.

Possible way to fix retaliation:

1. Retaliation should be based on damage dealt. It does not need to be proportional to damage, but the fast weak attacks should in no way get the kind of retaliation damage they currently get.

2. It should also be harder to stack retaliation for a large group. This could be achieved by distinguishing single target stacked retaliation from area stacked retaliation. Keep that retaliation can stack 5 times in duration, but that only 2/3 of those can come from area retaliation. Either that, or give area boons a limit to how many can be affected (this may introduce some unwanted rng factor).

Why Retaliation is not like Confusion
Just before people start arguing that confusion is not OP and basically the same as retaliation, so reta. It’s not. Before you cast an ability, you can check wether you have any confusions on you. It’s alot harder to check the enemy targets if they carry retaliation (AoE), and conditions are feasible to remove. It is very easy for a zerg to have perma retaliation. The “opposite”, which consists of applying confusion to enemy, is much less effective.

Looking at what some of the other classes has got, you’ll notice how ridicilous it is to nerf this, while not nerfing the others.

Warrior’s greatsword has two mobility skills.
1. Rush: Covers 1200 range in 2 seconds, just as RTL. The difference is that RTL deals damage in a 180 radius, whereas Rush deals nearly double damage to one target.
2. Whilwind attack: Covers 450 range in 1 second at a 10 second cooldown. Hits 4 time, and typically 2-3 times on player in path, so much more damaging than RTL. It’s also a 3/4s evade.

Just by looking at rush alone. If RTL is 40s CD on miss, then why has Rush not been given a 40s CD on miss aswell?

This is only the start though.

There’s a master trait in arms, that reduces CD of greatsword and spear for 20%, so Rush and Whirlwind attack gets a 8s and 16s CD. As if that were not enough, that trait also grants you might on critical hits with your GS.

There’s another master trait in Dicipline which will make all movement skills immobilize breakers.

Elementalists, D/D does not even come close to this, and to reduce CD of RTL and burning speed you must use master trait in both air and fire. Elementalits also have no way of being able to spam immobilize breakers, like the warrior can.

If you go D/D you’re bound to melee/close quarters, whereas a warrior can use a bow or rifle as a second weapon.

DarkKnightJin.6372:

..If I want to play as pure Fire mage, shouldn’t I have that option and not be penalized for it?

It’s called elementalist, and the class is designed as a master of all elements. If you had that option, then you could specc for a very simple playstyle. Elementalists are designed to have a complex playstyle, and they should rather look at how they can make the other classes more complex, rather than making elementalists more simple.

I played it similar to you in the beginning, and I didn’t like it at first. You’ll get the hang of it eventually, and you may also notice how this playstyle is more fun than the others.

Knote.2904:

You don’t see Engineers dealing with cooldowns for swapping kits and locking themselves out of dmg or important cooldowns like toolkit block/pull etc.

Engineer toolkits uses a utility skill, and they only have 5 weapon skills. I also find that toolkits typically contain some special case skills, that are mostly useless. I’ve got a lvl 80 engineer. Engineer is among the more fun characters, but the elementalist is more fun.

Kaleban.9834:

It seems that the Attunement Swap mechanic really just adds artificial complexity in the form of more mental gymnastics by forcing Ele players to memorize rotations and multiple hidden and layered cooldowns

Every build has some degree of rotation. Most other classes have 2 weapons, and has rotations based on switching between those. Elementalists tends to have 1-2 very potent skills in an attunement, and with free weapon swapping, they would have rotations that consisted of starting with these. Currently that doesn’t happen because then you’d end up with all attunements on cooldown, and that can be dangerous for a squishy mage.

With free attunement swapping they would have to nerf elementalists (particulary their powerful skills), and the ideal rotations would very likely mean switching attunement for every skill, doubling the number of button you’d have to press. Elementalists would loose their “punch”.

Elementalists have many skills, but they don’t require you to know lots of keybindings to play them effectively. It relies more on correctly swapping attunements, which is made harder because an elementalist must handle four weapon skill sets, instead of just two.

Ride the lightning uses 2 seconds traveltime, and you can be damaged.
It is a very visible skill, that clearly shows all your enemies what direction you’re going, unlike the various teleport skills.

Elementalists are squishy, and they don’t deal insane dmg either. As a tradeoff they need good escape mechanics.

It does seem a bit strange to make such extreme “balance changes”. They should make stepwise changes, such that they can get some information on the results, and then change it even further if necessary.

Giving skills 50% more damage, 66% of original damage, 15s coldown to 20/40s cooldown are very drastic changes.

Elementalists are by design supposed to use all four attunements. The proposal here, would make elementalists play more like other classes, which we have enough of.

Having to wait before you can switch back, is a mechanic that makes the elementalists interesting, and it requires some tactics.

Elementalists should be balanced around this though. A problem with trait lines, is that they only buff one attunement (except arcana), and you will stay within one attunement a shorter amount of time, compare to having two weapons.

A comparison:

Warrior’s have a 10% damage bonus master trait for spears and greatswords.
Elementalists have a 10% damage bonus master trait while attuned to earth.

An warrior may be specced to use greatsword as primary damage dealer, but regardless this trait will count for half his weapon abilities. A warrior may also have most damage tied up in one weapon, with the other weapon being used more for survivability.

For the elementalist however the damage will only count for one attunement, and the elementalist can’t rely on one attunement alone for damage to the degree that a warrior can.

The conclusion that can be drawn, is that a warrior will be able to benefit more from this trait, than an elementalist can.