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Alleged reasoning, and amateur suggestions aside. Here are the facts:
Condition builds are useless in PvE. and No good dungeon party will allow any condition players into their party, because they are a waste of a party slot.
For someone pretending not be an amateur and using such a… “professorial” tone, you don’t seem very well informed. Too many condition based characters won’t work well together if they use the same type of condition. For instance, 3 bleed warriors will easily cap the bleeds to 25 all the time and like half of the damage will be lost. But condition builds are fine if there’s only one or eventually two of the same type.
See, but all the other conditions are hopelessly outclassed for damage. Bleed lets you put around 2.5-3K DPS on a target with max stacks. Burning gets you maybe 800 or so DPS. Poison is difficult to get over 200 damage per tick. That’s it for conditions. Bleed really has to form the core of your condition damage, or you’re going to be doing very, very little damage overall. For that reason, you should only ever bring one condition character — because a “condition character” by definition should be nearly-capping Bleeds to do significant damage.
Individual caps are totally necessary. If you need to make my bleed tick once per second and just tick a bigger number, to reduce the server load, I’m fine with that (even with the incidental effects on overall DPS). But the fact that I built for condition damage and end up doing basically nothing in dungeons because my guild has a Mesmer with slightly higher condition damage who takes all the bleed stacks is insanely frustrating.
So, my suggestions for fixing dungeons are not specific to one dungeon, but rather general rules of thumb that I think are lacking in basic dungeon design.
Dungeons should reward learning (and not in a “I can safely skip this pack of trash” sort of way). Bosses should be difficult because they have avoidable or manageable mechanics that encourage you to pay attention during a fight and use a varied skill set. Boss does lots of big wind-up attacks? Bring interrupts. Boss does increasing damage over time? It’s a DPS race. Boss summons adds? You’ll need a fair bit of AoE. Boss insta-kills with a wind-up? You’ll need to conserve endurance and dodge appropriately. The thing is, all of these encourage you to learn the fight and use your class in new and interesting ways.
The main crop of explore dungeons does not do this, with very rare exceptions (the “wind-up to instant-kill” one is very common, but also the lowest possible skill threshold to pass in a game like GW2, and something that should be layered with more mechanics). The story dungeons often do it better, surprisingly — Ralena and Vassar are an example of a fight that actually rewards you for recognizing threats and responding to them, rather than arbitrarily punishing you because it can. Every boss should have a mechanic that is harsh and punishing, but either avoidable or manageable with skilled play.
Further, dungeon bosses should live no longer than needed to demonstrate mastery of their mechanic. If you can dodge Kohler’s pull-then-spin three or four times, you can dodge it ten times. Giving him heaping mounds of HP does nothing but prolong the fight and make it a hassle. That Butcher fight I described takes some eight to ten minutes. Eight to ten minutes of dodging a whirling attack every 30-40 seconds, and otherwise doing a standard DPS rotation, because you don’t need anything else. I alt-tabbed several times to chat with people, immediately after the whirl, and never went down, despite wearing my DPS gear and removing my best survivability trait (Altruistic Healing). It really is ridiculously easy, and thus ridiculously boring. We had already killed his totems a half-dozen times, and dodged the whirl attack – what more was gained from making us do that fifteen times, instead of six or eight? Nothing but a waste of time.
Next, every fight should be interesting – especially trash. There are way too many fights in dungeons that are just another generic group of gravelings, or (oooh!) some Icebrood Claymores, and there are more reasons than just the bad loot that these get skipped. First, they also have way more HP than they need, in general, to allow you to demonstrate mastery, and second, they tend to be just boring, un-threatening fights. Twilight Arbor actually does this well on one of the paths, having 3-4 different mixes of Nightmare Court with varying target priority and difficulty (Knights I found most difficult, while Duelists never really bothered me, but sometimes they’d throw 2 Knights at you at once and things got hectic between knockdowns).
The best way to make each fight interesting? Have every fight teach you something about the instance. LOTRO did this well in some of its later dungeons, with each fight having a specific mechanic — and even better, those mechanics were often scaled-down previews of what the boss would do, meaning that you got scaled-down training before you got to the boss in which of his attacks to interrupt, which to ignore, which adds to target first, etc. One fight would have you facing summoners, then a second would have knockback, then a third would have points on the ground that trigger summoners, with lots of knockback so you needed to learn how to avoid the summon-spawns. Then a fourth, the boss fight, would have summons, knockback, and another new trick to learn (in this case, it was shared damage and adds you didn’t want to kill). Layers of difficulty teach you the skills you need, then demand mastery of them in the boss fight, which acts as a sort of test of how well you’ve learned the skills the instance is testing. (This, of course, requires that you have specific player skills you expect each instance to test).
The explorable dungeons lack many of these. Most bosses take 2-3 minutes longer to kill than is needed to demonstrate mastery of their shallow mechanics, and every fight you can skip, you do. Explorables need a revamp to be interesting, to have some mixture of fun, challenge, and reward. Right now, they have inconsistent, uninteresting challenges (mostly staying awake while DPSing), so people just run the ones that get the quickest rewards, unless they want a particular armor or rune set.
First: What’s wrong with dungeons
So, I was in HOTW last night, and did Paths 1 and 3. Path 1 has some changes that have convinced me that GW2’s dungeon design for explorables is fundamentally not working. Specifically, in Path 1, there’s a boss version of an Icebrood Seer who used to be a boring DPS slog because he had high HP and no really threatening damage. Rather than add damage or any interesting mechanics to the fight (the boss literally does not and, by all appearances, cannot move) they just added some adds. All this did was make us move closer together, as the summons also did such low damage and came in such small numbers that we simply grouped up and let the passive AoE we were dishing out on the boss take them down. It was, in short, no different from how the fight used to go – we all stood in one place and smacked the boss as hard as possible.
A lot of the fights in HOTW are boring. The Butcher is easily the worst offender – two of his totems (Protection and Regeneration) do nothing but prolong the fight, even if you do everything else perfectly; the third buff (Retaliation) does so little damage my group safely ignores it completely; and on top of that he has a giant boatload of HP. We killed his Regen and Prot totems some ten times last night, each. The fight lasted in the range of eight minutes. Eight minutes, and the only skill we were required to use was to dodge-roll out of melee range when he did the spin attack. If it’d been eight minutes on the edge of my seat, fine — but it wasn’t, it was eight minutes where I figured out the boss in thirty seconds, and then had to do a bog-standard DPS rotation while our ranger destroyed the totems.
Another great example from HOTW P3 is Fimbul. Fimbul’s got 2 mechanics: first, an easily-dodged knockback, and second, his healing ice shield. He goes into the ice shield, you beat on it til he comes out, but he heals all the while. Again, it’s an unavoidable mechanic that does nothing more than prolong a fight that was too long to begin with, due to Fimbul’s buckets and buckets of HP and the inconsistency of DPS on him due to the need to dodge his knockback. There’s not even a way to say you’ve “mastered” this fight — whether he’s in the ice block or out, you’re best off just doing the max amount of DPS you can in a given moment. There’s no way to interrupt the ice block heal, or force him to reflect the knockback at himself. Compare to a dungeon that’s done right — the Dredge fractal final boss. While still probably having more HP than he needs, these bosses at least let you avoid their fight-prolonging heals. They punish you for screwing up, and reward you for doing well with a shorter, more satisfying fight. Unlike Fimbul, who is going to enter his ice block at least 3-4 times during a given fight. Our relatively low-DPS group had it happen 6 times last night. Six unavoidable, fight-prolonging healing sessions. Great fun, guys, lemme tell you.
Next post: How to fix it.
It will not trigger traits/runes/sigils that trigger on healing skill use, no. You need to activate the signet for that.
I’ve taken the liberty of sorting these in a more sensible fashion.
Underwater Skills
Refraction: This skill is now a light field.
Purifying Blast: This skill is now a blast finisher.
Purifying Blast: Added a radius skill fact.
[repeat] Added a radius skill fact to Purifying Blast.
Light of Judgment: Damage increased by 25%.
Spear Wall: This skill is now a light field.
Wrathful Grasp: This skill is now a projectile finisher.
Spear of Light: Velocity has been increased by 50%.
Spear of Light: This skill is now a small projectile finisher.
Brilliance: This skill is now a whirl finisher.
Staff
Empower: Skill fact has been updated to display the proper amount and duration of might.
Updated Empower’s skill fact to display the proper amount and duration of might. (repeat)
Traits
Unscathed Contender: Increased damage from 10% to 20%.
Resolute Healer: This shield of absorption now causes knockback, but can only trigger once every 60 seconds.
Vigorous Precision: Increased vigor duration to five seconds. This effect can now only trigger once every five seconds.
Strength in Numbers: Now activates more quickly when entering combat, and scales from 0-70 defense instead of being capped at 30.
Blind Exposure: Increased to three stacks of vulnerability.
Shimmering Defense: Increased burn duration from three seconds to seven seconds.
Binding Jeopardy: Increased vulnerability from three stacks at five seconds to five stacks at eight seconds.
My thoughts
So, lots of updates designed to make underwater play less painful, and add a bit of variation with fields and the like. All classes seem to be getting incremental underwater buffs. Some less-used traits got buffed, and Staff got a tooltip fix.
Honestly, my biggest problem with dungeons right now is that the bosses take too long to kill, and are not interesting to fight. Take a boss with a semi-interesting teaching mechanic: the sword-wielding Lieutenant in the middle of Ascalon Catacombs. If you can dodge his pull five times, you can do it ten times. There is no need for him to have so much HP that he can do his pull a dozen times. Once you get the dodges down, that fight is just an incredibly boring tank-and-spank. It’s interesting while you’re learning it, but once you’ve learned it (which is easy in your first fight) the fight is just long, with rare spikes of interest when you have to dodge the pull. And then it’s back to your boring DPS rotation.
Let’s look at another example: Ginva the Butcher, the Path 1 boss in Honor of the Waves. This fight would be amazing with just one change — take away the Protection totem, and add an offensive buff in its place. The Protection totem is basically redundant to the Regeneration one, and is a very boring buff to fight. Regeneration feels like a race – you want to keep the DPS on him, but also take down the totem quickly enough that you don’t lose ground on his HP. The Retaliation totem is so small (~200 damage per hit) that we just ignore it on our runs, preferring to just DPS him rather than waste time on the totem — but that does leave us more fragile, so it’s an interesting choice in how to approach it. The Protection totem doesn’t work like that. If we take DPS away from the boss every, what, 15-20s? to kill the totem, then odds are we’re putting enough DPS into the totem to make up for the 33% difference. So we just ignore it, and the fight is probably the same length as it would be if we killed it. It’s the most boring possible buff. Replace it with Fury, and suddenly he’s a huge threat every time it’s up, and the fight becomes a hectic race against his spikes of damage. A Might totem, that pulses every 3-5s and can stack up to 10 stacks on him, would open a lot of interesting possibilities, though. Do you bring a Mesmer to steal stacks? Or just try your best to take it down when it comes up? Or deal with the extra DPS he does, finding some way to mitigate it? Oh, and remember those stacks would add to the Retribution totem’s power, too, so maybe you take out the Retribution totem instead of the Might? Or alternate? Interesting choices. Protection’s “he takes longer to kill” is just… boring. It’s a good boon for players and PvP, but in PvE fights, you might as well just give the guy extra HP — and he’s got more than enough HP to begin with.
Compare this to my favorite boss fight in that instance – Path 3’s Legendary Fimbul. His iceblock heal is a frantic moment, forcing us to balance DPS against Fimbul and holding back our biggest hits to stop him from healing. An interesting mechanic, and it doesn’t pop up so often that it becomes repetitive, and he’s still a threat otherwise, especially when you’re balancing him and his adds early in the fight. That fight is fun. A bit over-long (all the bosses in this game far outlast what is needed to show mastery of the mechanics of the fight — which is all a boss fight should require), but more fun than most bosses.
Now, for an example of what I mean by “showing mastery of the mechanics.” Every time I kill the [Dredge suit/ice elemental] boss in the Dredge fractal, it takes some 10 to 15 hits from the molten stuff to kill it. Miss a superheat? Have fun watching him heal back all the damage you did on the last one. Why are both of these mechanics together? Not only does it take next to no damage normally and require an effect to hurt, AND have a way of killing you effectively (grenades/summons), but it can undo whatever damage you manage to do with a single heal.
I doubt sincerely that Grenth is still the source of necromantic powers. Dwayna doesn’t appear to power Guardians, and non-human Warriors don’t pray to Balthazar. It looks like power over Death is just another type of magic now.
I can confirm that this bug exists (Guild group I wasn’t a part of ran it). Moreover, you can get to both other bosses, allowing you to pick up 180 tokens in a single run.
Doesn’t help that the passive is pretty meh. Healing Power is not the best, and +90 is hardly even noticeable.
I’m presuming you’re talking just solo? In a group, 3 stacks of might to 5 allies is a fair bit bigger of an impact than 10 Zeal would make.
Also, I guess technically Vigour adds DPS if you have the trait that adds damage for each Boon.
I had a very similar issue, coming from the Guardian where I very rarely died. I ended up respeccing out of Power into the Vitality line for 10 pts (1K HP), then the Toughness line. It’s really a hugely noticeable survivability boost at low levels, especially with Swiftness on dodge, Blinding Powder at 25% HP, and blind on stealth (I’m D/D, so I stealth a lot). The only thing that’s annoying about it is that your heal skill will heal for a very, very small proportion of your HP (I use the signet, and get ~20 hp per hit, 400 hp when I use it, and have 5K HP at level 36).
So, you need to stay mobile to stay alive. For that, I use Shortbow, as #3 is a dodge + cripple. I used it last night to whittle down two on-level champions in a row (the wasps at the human treaty-talk camp out by Ebonhawke). Very effective, if a bit slow, but SB is also your Dynamic Event weapon par excellence – the bouncing #1 attack, Cluster Bomb, and Poison field are all great ways to get tags. Then do whatever you want for your main weapon set – as I said, I do D/D, but just because I like the big numbers from Backstab.
So my current traits are, at 36:
0/6/10/10/0
with Shadow Arts VI (Stealth blinds foes) and Acrobatics I (fall dmg -50%, and you use Blinding Powder when you take fall dmg).
Great guide. I found out about the Precision/Vit/Healing Power gear just this weekend, and immediately thought of a very similar build (I’d emphasize Protection instead, and carry Staff/Hammer, but did seriously debate Mace/Shield as well). Now to run Twilight Arbor a lot to get both the skin and stats I want…
Yeah, you do need some defense to avoid being a Glass Cannon. Vigorous Precision is 5 trait points (which gives you +500 hp to boot) and makes you capable of dodging far more often, meaning you live longer, and all it takes is crits, which you’re getting a lot of anyway.
@OP: I would drop Pure of Voice for 2H Mastery. More frequent Empower is always, always a good thing. For me, Empower heals a total of ~6K (77 per boon * 3 stacks * 4 pulses + ~2K end heal), which is competitive with some #6 heal skills. Oh, and it’s giving out 12 stacks of Might to your party, to boot.
(edited by Gulbrandr.9047)
Except, IIRC, the difficulties will reset weekly, so your concern is really not that valid. People who are farming fractals will be farming fractals all week, so when the reset comes they’ll quickly burn through them and get back to D3/4 or whatever.
The Selfless Daring fix was needed – a big AoE 1700hp heal that you can spam up to 3-4 times in a row with the right sigil was a bit insane. Orb of Light is faster, which should help some of the scepter hate, though I can already hear the cries of “still not 1200 range!” Empower buff is nice, a good skill gets better.
Other than that, it’s bug fixes.
Agreed that stacking condition damage is inefficient. If anyone else in your group is doing Burning, you’ll be competing with them to do damage. I prefer to use Burning for supplemental damage and to add bonuses from traits like Fiery Wrath. Most Condition Damage builds will have at least two sources (Bleeding + either Burning or Poison, or Confusion + Bleeding), but Guardians only have one, and that means that Condition Damage is overall far more limited in its usefulness. You’re way better off relying on straight damage and boosting Power, Precision, and Crit Damage if your goal is to kill quickly.
So… you want a ~30% uptime, +50% movespeed buff. And in the downtime, it’s at 25-33% (nearly perma-swiftness). And you don’t see how that’s a bit crazily overpowered?
Do you know how many other kings of Ascalon there were that we never see mention of? How many queens and princes and princesses?
Althea died early. I’m not surprised she’s not here.
Fun fact: Sword Wave is treated as a Projectile for the purposes of some skills that reflect projectiles. In particular, Earth Elementals who reflect projectiles will make you regret using a sword.
I am on a quest to tell people that Blind Exposure is terrible. Super, super, super terrible. Seriously, take anything else. Inscribed Removal is vastly better than 3s of 1% more damage. Searing Flames, Inner Fire, Inscribed Removal, or Shimmering Defense are vastly better than like 5s of 1% more damage on Virtue of Justice.
This was one of my favorite parts of LOTRO – a lot of the more sought-after weapons had little blurbs explaining their names or their history. I’d love to see more of it here.
Now to the important point, As you have noticed there is a popular post here about the theifs range, Sign it, agree with it and love it. We are the only class in the game without a 1200 auto attack which makes our WvW experience very different to most other peoples…
Us and Guardians, you mean. Scepter is 900 range, and so slow-moving and non-tracking that just side-stepping often means it misses.
Verata did not own it. You actually chased him to that point in the quests.
Prophecies was a good story? Enemies showed up and disappeared without reason, we blindly trusted the guy who was clearly an evil dude, the main enemy changed no less than 6 times (charr, Stone Summit, undead/Shining Blade, White Mantle, Mursaat, Titans), oh yeah, and we were totally responsible for the cataclysm we ended up having to prevent at the end. And a genocide of a race so ancient they were around before humanity’s gods.
Disagree with the Mursaat’s methods all you like, odds are that the world would’ve been better off, within the strict confines of the Prophecies story, if the Chosen had all died at Sanctum Cay. Yes, rigid theocracy stays in place, but on the other hand, world-destroying monsters never awaken from their extra-dimensional tombs. Nice job breaking it, hero.
Spirit Weapons were supposed to be a key part of Guardian playstyle, acting as our “pets” and giving us the rather cool choice of keeping them, or putting them on cooldown for a more powerful effect. Great! The problem is, the weapons are dumb as bricks. I had two summoned yesterday as I ran through the northern portions of Mount Maelstrom, and they didn’t do a single thing to help me. Instead, they spent all their time fighting a Risen Hand that I had simply avoided (because I’m done that Heart).
I figured I would pull them off by Commanding them (I was 100% set up for Spirit Weapons, and so had the Command-doesn’t-destroy trait). Nope. They just do it wherever they are, rather than on my target. So that Risen Hand got a walloping it’d never experienced even before it got disembodied, but the pair of Risen Brutes beating on me just kept on truckin’.
So… yeah. I’m back to my old build, and no longer using Spirit Weapons at all, until they’re drastically improved.
Suggestions:
1. Make them only attack your target, while you’re attacking.
Or, at the very least:
2. Make Command cause them to use the skill on your target (can be different for Bow of Truth/Shield of whatever it is, but perhaps those should be party-targetable?).
Sylvari do die, and are the rarest race (in terms of settlements) in the larger world that I’ve seen.
Norn don’t make war, they have fights. Big difference.
Charr and humans have a treaty, explaining why they’re not fighting.
Asura think they’re better than you, but they don’t think you’re bad for being what you are – just that it’s too bad you’re not as great as them. Thus, they’re not Nazis, because they don’t want to kill you for being lesser.
It could be worse – you could have 2 skills that totally replace your skillset. See, e.g., Guardians.
Er, the sylvari were the ones who lead the Pact effort, via Trahearne, and Caithe was the only one of Destiny’s Edge who spent the entire time trying to put the group back together.
I’ll give you norn seeming useless, but the sylvari had huge organizational impacts on the resistance movements.
So, long in the past, the charr fought the humans and lost. Humans moved into charr lands in Ascalon, pushing the Charr out and building the Great Wall. The charr saw that the humans worshiped gods, and decided they needed gods of their own. The Flame Legion discovered the Titans, who they worshiped as gods. With the power of the Titans, the Flame Legion rose to predominance.
Now, the Flame Legion had a few differences from the others. First, they placed magic-users and mystics at the forefront of their leadership. Second, they totally excluded female charr from combat and leadership roles. The other groups weren’t so happy with this, but the Flame Legion was so powerful they could suppress dissent. With the power the Titans gave them, the Flame Legion launched the most successful attack since the fall of Ascalon, known as the Searing. They broke the Great Wall and invaded Ascalon.
Eventually, however, the Titans fell — the player characters in Guild Wars 1 totally defeated them, literally killing the Flame Legion’s gods in front of the charr leadership. The other legions, seeing that the Titans were fallible and the Flame Legion was weak, revolted and overthrew the Flame Legion. With the help of a secretly-trained army of female charr, the other three Legions cast down the Flame Legion, and renamed them the Gold Legion, as a sort of insult. Technology came back to the fore, replacing reliance on magic, and the charr determined that any god that wanted to rule them would have to survive their resistance first.
The Flame Legion are still around, still trying to get people to return to the old structure, by force if necessary — because really, that’s Option #1 for a charr.
Note that, in terms of what they can add to the war effort, most of the races are likely quite even. Asura and charr are the strongest, due to their huge technological advantages, but each has serious problems that limits their ability to fight the dragons. Asuran tech is a bit… unreliable, and not all war-focused – my asura’s personal story involved a research project and a magic 8 ball, neither of which is all that useful for killing dragons. There’s also the apparently congenital ego the size of an Elder Dragon, making it less likely that they’d work as cohesively in an army.
Meanwhile, the charr are fighting a war on a dozen sides (ghosts; containing the Dragonbrand which is really 2 fronts because they own the land on either side, Ebonhawke excepted; Flame Legion, etc.). Humans have the ongoing war with the centaurs weakening them, while sylvari and norn really only have their evil counterparts (Svanir and Nightmare Court) to fight, and neither is in a full-on state of war against the race. Heck, Svanir even have a portion of Hoelbrak, so they can’t be that antagonistic.
That would certainly be interesting, and would work pretty well. I guess it will depend on the reasons for the tengu coming more to the fore if they become a player race. Now I’m trying to think of how to twist a bushido/samurai code of honour (like the Inquest twist the progressive science of the asura)…
It could actually make for one of the more compelling conflicts. Imagine a fight where the other side wasn’t outright evil, but just violently disagreed with yours. The Tengu decide to join with the other great races, to help them against the dragons. One of the houses goes rogue and refuses. This leads to dissent, and inevitably in a bushido-driven culture, to duels and bloodshed. This spirals out of control, and both sides find themselves grimly determined to fight the other, even where they would rather not, because their honor demands that they not back down from the insults of the opposing side.
So… what would be their evil counterpart, a la Nightmare Court/Separatist/Flame Legion/Inquest/Svanir? Maybe a resurgence of the Caromi?
And, other shields work on siege weapons. There was a vid a week or so ago of a Mesmer dropping a shield over a cannon, and the cannon killing itself with the reflection.
I gotta be honest, the best thing you could do is take out all of the conversation cutscenes. They’re clunky, they have awful timing (with several-second gaps where one person is supposed to be interrupted, while their interrupter fades magically into view, or worse, a few seconds’ gap and then laughter, which just sounds awful), and they artificially restrict conversations to two people at a time – and telegraph who’s going to say what next. They make absolutely clear that this is no conversation, it’s people reading a script.
GW1 style in-game cinematics were infinitely better. I understand why you can’t do them for some portions (particularly in the new-character zones, where other characters could interrupt things) but for any instanced story step, the “two folks talking against concept art” should really go.
Why would you conclude that, Gurt? I mean, Krytans in GW1 didn’t look significantly different from Ascalonians.
Judge’s Insight. But the bots you see will be doing it 1.) to corpses, and 2.) far quicker than JI could ever possibly recharge.
Note that Empowering Might appears to have a 1s internal, unstated cooldown, so even if your Mighty Blow hits 5 enemies and crits on 3, you’ll only get 1 stack of Might (and thus 1 heal).
I honestly hate skills you cant trait for like our elites
It’s a botfarm. People are exploiting to get the teleport behavior you report. Guessing they’re using the scepter solely because it’s ranged (most bots I’ve seen use ranged skills).
My theory, which has no basis whatsoever in reality:
So, let’s presume that you beat Nightfall with a Prophecies character. There’s just under a decade from the Searing to the end of Nightfall. That means that you’ve gone from barely holding back and eventually retreating before the Charr armies, to straight-up murdering a god that even the Gods couldn’t permanently defeat in less than ten years.
Now what’s to stop you from pulling a Kormir or a Grenth and taking their power? Oh, right, some distance. So they ran, not from the Dragons, but from us.
Ahhh, OK. Makes sense. I was a bit annoyed by that, since it seemed to imply that my actual Wyld Hunt was against the Court, rather than the Dragons. Thanks for clarifying.
Sylvari Guardian here. Just hit 60, but I swear the best group support skill in the game is Healing Seed. Passes out Regeneration to allies, heals you for a bit to begin with. Combo it with Altruistic Healing and laugh as the numbers roll in. Does require close grouping, though, which can be a problem with AoEs. I haven’t tried any of the other Sylvari racials.
I felt bad for you guys til I made an ELE and facerolled sPvP.
in Elementalist
Posted by: Gulbrandr.9047
I really liked the part where he swapped to Water only after spending a few minutes randomly flailing and hoping for his heal to come back up. Then he used Water for DPS while staying at full health. I just… I can’t even.
Illushia – it’s actually implied that the Nightmare Court did have something to do with the dragon in your Dream. I played the Green Knight storyline just last night, and at the end of it, Caithe makes a mention about how the Court is trying to corrupt the dream, and what you fought in the Dream was one of those corruptions. I’m trying to find a video of the conversation – I think it was during the convo with the Pale Tree after the fight with the Green Knight, but I’m not certain.
Well, that’s a disagreement with their story choices, not really a legitimate point for the actual lore discussion, though, since the lore is necessarily put in the context of their story choices. As for the Foefire being out of place… I don’t think so. What changed him? You see him at one point during the Titan quest, and he says the following:
“A long time have I fought for Ascalon. First as a soldier blessed by Balthazar, now as its king. Though I have survived one more battle, and I will see another day, it will not make me any more wise… only one day older. I have lost all that a man can lose. All that I have left is this antiquated set of armor and the remains of this tattered kingdom. I thank you for your help today. Rurik would have been very proud of all you have accomplished.”
“I have lost all a man can lose”? That sounds like someone depressed, with literally nothing left to live for. Someone who’d consider doing something rash — terminally rash — just to spite his lifelong enemies.
Now, for the more interesting question: Why did Glint send you to save his life? Did she need the Foefire to happen, in the same way she needed you to wipe out the Mursaat before destroying the Titan threat, despite the Mursaat being the most powerful enemies of the Titans out there?
You think Adelbern redeemed himself by fighting the Titans – an existential threat to his kingdom? Well, I disagree – even Pawala Joko fought against the Margonites, and he’s a psychotic lich. But even if Adelbern redeemed himself there, he re-condemned himself when, rather than surrender or retreat, he committed genocide himself with the Foefire, killing his entire kingdom and binding their tortured spirits to the land to continue his war for eternity. Adelbern is just as bad as Joko, and Rytlock was right to realize that there’s no negotiating or reasoning with such madness.
The rest of it comes down to the Flame Legion vs. the other Legions. Modern legions are not the Flame Legion, which caused the Searing. Other than that, the charr and humans are like Turkey and Greece – each sees the other as invading, ignorant and evil. Who’s right? Depends on which side you’re on. We got to see the humans’ side last time, now we’re getting a glimpse of both.
Resurrection Shrines are still problematic, though, as several characters die permanently throughout the course of GW1, and so far as I know they are never mentioned. Apparently Rez Shrines were explicit gifts from Grenth – things he allowed to occur. So, when he’s withdrawn, why does he still extend his power to allow us to revive at waypoints? That said, Rez Shrines are clearly not gameplay mechanics – in Factions, different groups would take control of them, and you sometimes had to bribe them if you weren’t on their team to use the shrine.
This just complicated things further.
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