Guild Wars 2

Cheshire.8761:

Are you going to address how you forced characters to train into builds using their hero points without their consent? :o

Why not. Basically there were two options, both with a large number of edge cases.

1) We wipe your stuff and let you respec as you see fit. Because so much had changed this was our initial plan. Here are problems it ran into.

• People return from a long hiatus and don’t remember what they were running
• People log in and the first thing they have to do before they can play is learn both the new unlocking system and the new build system.

2) We look at what you had equipped and unlock the necessary skills and traits to re-equip you. Here were some discussions points around that:

• We might give you stuff you don’t want
• at least this won’t matter for lvl 80s if we make all the unlocks possible by just reaching lvl 80.

There is a third option which I’m sure you will bring up.
3) let players choose
Here are some reasons we did not go with that:

• Its twice the work
• Its actually more than twice the work because it would have required temporarily saving both options until you choose which is more complex technical work.
• People who were unlikely to understand or want to explore the new system were going to be potentially more confused by the choice.

At the end of the day we wanted to ship this build so we had to decide. Based on instinct we erred on the side of helping people we thought would be more overwhelmed by the opposite choice, and I would make that choice again because it has less edge cases, impacts more expert users, and leans towards over unlocking for free to benefit most of the edge cases anyway.

Hope this info helps you understand our process a bit more.

Thanks,

Jon

Wanted to run a potential idea past you all. Comments welcome.

Tome of Courage -> Signet of Courage
Passive: PBAoE Heal every 10 seconds.
Active: Light of Deliverance

Tome of Wrath -> “Feel My Wrath”
Shout that grants Quickness and Fury

We like the idea of tomes and if we did this we would hope to bring them back in a future Elite Specialization.

Thoughts? Comments?

Thanks,

Jon

Hey Everyone,

As you may have noticed bleeding stacks go above 25 stacks when playing in the demo map. This is not a mistake, rather as we have said for a while now, we know that the current stack cap creates problems for condition players who want to work together. What you saw today was the first test in solving some of these problems. Keep in mind, it is not necessarily final and absolutely not the entire plan. I see many questions about how this will work and how it impacts other conditions, balance, etc. Rest assured that as soon as we have a final plan we will be revealing it and letting you all know exactly how it will work.

Jon

The reason we went with heal skills first is that we actually believe this is the highest impact area for build diversity.

1) it is a small pool to begin with so adding to it increases choice by a large %
2) it sees a lot of use
3) it heals you which is pretty important

As time goes on we will also introduce traits, utilities, elites, and potentially other stuff.

Jon

Thank you guys for finding this. I have a fix ready. It will take about a day but it should be in tomorrow.

Jon

I vote fix. We have a proposed change that should be coming in about 4 weeks. Wish it could be sooner but we need translation time and testing time.

timidobserver.7925:

I have a couple of serious questions.
1. Did the person that came up with the math for this graduate from high school.
2. To prove it, please upload a copy of your high school diploma.

How about just a copy of their resume. I don’t see his high school experience on there. Hopefully the other stuff can count as relevant experience for your assessment.

http://www.glicko.net/cv.html

Ok we found a good repro case. It has to do with how death shroud and downed used to interact. I will get someone on it today and try and get a fix to you all asap.

Ok Necro staff is 22% faster than this skill. I think we just missed upping this when we did our pass to up projectile velocity on skills that were absolutely too sluggish. That being said it looks like you can fire one of these orbs every .8 seconds whereas Necro staff fire rate is 1.3 seconds. Grasp does pass through targets in a line so I feel that differential is fairly warranted. I can’t promise when this is going to be fixed, but I can say I WILL fix it.

I think the passive might need to come up in non-healing builds. If I run a clerics tactics build this signet can hold its weight, but it currently has NO place in a berserker build. Not sure it should be as viable in a seeker build, but it needs to see some play in soldiers, and certainly Valk and Shaman builds. Really signets are still going to have a hard time without a stun breaker (particularly in PvP and WvW). Obviously Dolyak signet is the most likely candidate here. Our next balance patch will absolutely be looking at stun breakers and spreading them out on all professions to make more categories of utilities viable. I’ll probably post this in general later as well but this was a larger balance pass and we will likely let this meta sit a bit longer than previous ones while we work towards taking time to push more less effective builds towards viable status.

Jon

I’ll take a look at how it compares to Necro staff auto. I will say that when this does hit it is the highest DPS #1 skill in the game. We wanted it to feel this powerful but difficult to land but the effect may be too exaggerated. I’ll play some PvE and PvP scepter Guardian later today.

Jon

As we have stated many times we have tried many modes and there is a reason we ended up where we did. This is not to say we will not introduce new modes at some point, however a few notes on death match.

1) You can obviously have it without a healer.
2) Even games people consider to be DM have tons of secondary objectives (Quake 3, counter strike, Starcraft, etc.)
3) Objective based games tend to be both more total noob friendly AND more esport observer friendly as players/watchers can go/look at where the action will likely be.

Deathmatch without other objectives lacks things like a reason to engage, a way to break stalemates, and a tie breaker. It also creates much wider blowouts when someone on your team doesn’t know what they are doing (does this ever happen to you that you get a clueless teammate? Heh)

Hopefully that clears up some of our reasoning for future discussions.

Jon

The description of this update was pretty unclear, so let me clarify. The change to portal made it so that you can’t interact with a portal that is on the other side of a wall from you, but that a portal whose entrance and exit are on opposite sides of a wall will still function.

Agreed. Signet of the hunt needs to and will go to 25%.