Guild Wars 2

Rodzynald.5897:

It says on wiki that it deals high AoE damage, well I kind of don’t feel it in both PvE and PvP.

-Spec for condition damage
-Spec for traits to increase symbol duration and size
-Take trait to cause burning on enemies in your symbols
-it’s been a while but you might be able to bring the trait that makes your enemies take more damage from you (and your burning) in the symbols too

Boring? Yes, but very practical, you can really hurt things with it.

Mallyx worked as a boss in GW1 because he was a single target brick-s**thouse with spirits in the background buffing him. So he could take conditions (plus bleeding and poison and burning didn’t stack in duration or intensity) and use the whole ‘more conditions I have the harder I hit’ thing.

It really didn’t/doesn’t work for a player character; you pop Pain Absorption at the wrong time and you can get 20 stacks of burning; better hope you can ditch it before your resistance comes off cooldown!
You could give the stance a trait/passive baseline trait that gave condition damage reduction… but then you’re essentially nerfed every condition build against them.

That’s even before you consider all the condition cleansing flying around. I think Mallyx needs to do more torment (make it so the revenant doesn’t bleed targets; it has torment for the condition damage) so instead you absorb the condtions and give enemies nearby torment?

Personally I think it’s a ‘perfect storm’ of a few reasons adding up to one big one.

-The map is very complicated
It’s been several weeks and I’ve had about 5 or 6 days solid in total to play HoT. I still have no idea where the hell I’m going sometimes in this map.

To be clear, I actually like the area. I think it’s my favorite of the lot; but that doesn’t change the fact the map isn’t helpful; it’s not clear how much height difference there is in areas shown, the bits going up and down aren’t very clear and I think that’s just a limit of the game engine, honestly.
Then there’s bits that are covered; mushroom area southwest of Rata Nova? Covered by a cube corner of the city so you can’t see anything in the map. Have fun with that potentially confusing area stuffed with enemies that like crippling and spiking you.

-The Chak are weird and not fun to fight
Aesthetically and thematically they came out of nowhere. Most things have a buildup (watchwork/sylvari for HoT, ect) or make sense; the mushrooms may be a pain, but we’re in a jungle and it’s dead. So the fungi spawn legs and chase you because… reasons. Okay, whatever.

The chak? They’re power/they eat leyline energy because… something? And despite eating the same stuff as the dragon they’re not related to them-okay, but they’re not affected by the dragons because… something? They don’t look ‘correct’ either; aesthetically they just don’t mesh with anything else in the game. They look like plastic.
The hive terrain seems bizzare too, itself not a bad thing, but with the game’s apparent obsession over circles and the plastic looking insects that have open sacs that can generate damage reflecting shields after the totally-not-fingers-on-a-tail wave themselves over it because asgflkjffgjagsjhafdggflfkfj.

Mechanically they’re okay, except for the kitten ed lobbers and that slowing gloop. 10% a hit means in some groups you better be good at dodging and quickly killing them or you’re getting encased (and almost certainly downed). The bigger ones have poorly telegraphed attacks too, especailly that 360 gloop-spray thing that does massive damage and due to it’s size can often be difficult to see. There certainly doesn’t seem to be much gloop being fired when it does it, and you don’t get slowed because Reasons, you just take lots of damage instead.

Then there’s the drone that can only be killed by removing it’s stability. Hope you have a skill that can do that or you’re stuffed and that enemy it’s tagging is unkillable too!

Outside of these, they’re just annoying inconveniences

I’ll skip over audio after saying ’the chirps and noises they make are wheedling and annoying. Even moreso than the GW1 fire imps, which is honestly impressive.

-The event timers
Flogging a skeleton; it’s too long. For a setting like this, it makes more sense for it to be tied to the setup meta events.

-The loot
I can flog this skeleton too, so I will. The loot is terrible, even the currency drops are bad.

-You can take the back door to the next area.
The meta event has no affect on the Dragon’s Stand area (which is good) and there’s a way through without having to faff around with a difficult event with pithy rewards in a hard to navigate map with annoying enemies in a meta event that does not tolerate errors. I tried to stop the stampeding chak going for an aetherlaser/leylinecannon/whatever and because I failed to kill two or three, the event failed, the laser was lost, and the entire lane was gone. Despite the fact I could have easily mauled the last two or three chak to death and it would have been perfectly fine.

I think some of it is unfixable-the map is fairly straightforward once you wrap your head around it, but because of the way the map feature works you’re basically stuck wanderoung around memorising things. Sort of like the undercity in Cantha, back in Guildwars I: Factions.

The meta event needs more players and a bit more leeway to recover if things foul up, in my opinion.

Knighthonor.4061:

How would you rate the HoT Fun Factor?
10 being the most fun
and 0 being the least fun.

The enemies are (mostly) fun and mechanically interesting to fight, and while it’s quite labrinthine I’m finding the areas fun to navigate aroun, now I’ve got the glider and jumping pad mushrooms.

…which is where the rest pulls it down. The grinding for elite traitlines is just depressing. Due to how events seem to be organised as well, I find leveling up and unlocking masteries is taking a long time. Which are needed to advance the story and even gain access (and some are needed to try!) the hero point events. So a 5/10.

My feeling about the elite traitline’s requirements is a big fat “…eh.”

400 hero points is a massive, massive sink. Even my main, the one that has done silverwastes and dungeons repeatedly, gained two legendary precurses with, ‘only’ had enough points to go halfway into the elite traitline. The hero point challenges give solid amounts of points though, so while it feels obnoxious you’re able to get a little way in fairly quickly. Once you get past that massive 60 point hurdle, of course…

Once you get to hero challenges you don’t need masteries for (and some that need masteries to get to) you start the challenge and… you discover (with no warning) this it’s a group event and if you’re trying to solo it you’re going to be mauled rather nastily. I like that bosses are not solo-able, however it makes trying to unlock them solo a collossal chore at best.
It’s doubly compounded because you need mastery points to get to/attempt some of the hero challenges. I’m finding mastery points are actually pretty difficult to get, because while there are events, there doesn’t seem to be that many, and they’re long/lacking rewards. It sometimes feels I could get 2 tyrian mastery points (themselves requiring you to level up your character again, because… reasons?) in the time it would take to get partially to a single maguuma point. I’ve just managed to get all three of the reaper minor traits unlocked in about… twelves hours playtime, beelining for the hero events. My necromancer had 49 traits to start with, so I’d probably have just unlocked the first minor trait. This is the first time I’m using the ‘new’ skill unlock system from scratch too, and being forced to pick certain traits and skillpoint before I can get the ones I want is another downer. I’m simply not enjoying trying to unlock the elite tree for this single character. I understand the masteries are account wide but it’s still going to be a drag getting all the kitten ed points needed for my various characters.

For my less played characters I think I will just simply not bother trying to unlock the elite traitlines, the current system is so artificially lengthened.

Don’t misunderstand me-I think it’s good you don’t just get it dropped into your lap, it helps you appreciate it, much like going out and hunting down an elite skill in guildwars 1 was. Other people have mentioned, this feels far too grindy for a traitline that is designed to simply offer a playstyle and not actually be superior to the class it’s expanding upon. The effort : reward ratio is far too heavily slanted towards the effort side right now, I feel.

Necro heals are bad, but I feel that’s because they get what is essentially condition immunity and limited damage reduction. A good necromancer can be hard to kill already, good heals as well would be a massive drag

Zenith.7301:

Loki.4871:

As fun as being a snotty elitist may be for you, let me steer you back to the point I was making. If you make heavy use of the shroud, it’s essentially always off cooldown in most situations.

It will always be off cooldown in 13-20 seconds (augury of death traited assumed for the lower range), being in shroud doesn’t hasten its cooldown it only means you relied on shroud to make it to the cooldown.

In this case it’s not a credit to the strength of the heal, you’re surviving because of shroud.

Fait enough, but I personally still enjoy the short cooldown and life force it contributes. I suppose I see it as a way to get some life force as much as a heal, to get back into reaper shroud. The %isn’t much, but I was running full valkyrie during the beta, so it was still a noticeable increase. It can potentially work for a very aggressive player that likes being in the shroud. Outside of this it’s got problems I’d readily agree-and ask why not simply take a different heal? Of course, seeing it buffed would be nice, butas it is I think it still works.

As fun as being a snotty elitist may be for you, let me steer you back to the point I was making. If you make heavy use of the shroud, it’s essentially always off cooldown in most situations.

I rocked full valkyrie to stay in reaper shroud all the time. Paired with spite I could smack things pretty hard .

Myself and friend ended up two manning The Butcher in honour of the waves and I found it actually really good for a heal. Remember that it recharges while in reaper zhroud, so you can do what I did, hang on by the seat of your pants against an enemy by alternating between rs and using the shout when you briefly pop out of it. I managed to melee the fat git because of it.

Aye, I stocked up on sigils of chilling and ice, was very sadface.jpg to realise I wouldn’t be able to use them.

…yet.

If you bring chill oreintated runes (6 runes of ice) you can already permachill things with the autoattack.

It is the same as previous beta for characters
This is annoying because I bought runes and stuff to test things with this time. Is this deliberate or am I doing something silly?

Skill 5 has a bit of poison but oitside that neither the gs or reaper shroud do ANY condition damage without traits, the only two off the top of my head being the reaper on that makes chill dot and dhuumfire.

Anyone know if this problem has been sorted?

My friends are having the same problem-since they’re only really trying it because of me badgering them, they’re not exactly bothered about trying to get it fixed either.

I’ll say I found them far more useful in the beta-with the handglider it was very easy to set a… dynamic entry, shall we say?

Liewec.2896:

Loki.4871:

Liewec.2896:

i don’t know a single successful MMO that doesn’t have prestigious one-time rewards.
WoW does a great job with them.

Guildwars 1.

until GW2s release gw1 had different rewards each year for the special events like halloween.

The point still stands-apart from the pre-order/collectors edition, the west didn’t get any ingame onetime events.

Since before the skill update in last septermber, my guardian’s been lugging around 4 free trait resetters. I’m not asking for 4 twilights (though I wouldn’t say no) but can the item be replaced with something useful please? :p

Liewec.2896:

i don’t know a single successful MMO that doesn’t have prestigious one-time rewards.
WoW does a great job with them.

Guildwars 1.

I hope one of the families is a raptor.

CandyHearts.6025:

malus.5894:

Still waiting for the butterfly wings that EU have and we(NA) DON’T. But yeah, I think I’ll buy that outfit…

Wait…. they have them and we don’t? ;_;

Wait, we do? Huh. I’ve not seen them.

Behellagh.1468:

Yea! Another mount thread.

Mounts are prestige items, like legendary weapons. They’re the sexy sports car of a fantasy game world.

The only useful thing they do is speed travel. We have frelling Asura Waypoints that can port us across the game world for loose change.

The only use for mounts in this game is to brag how yours is bigger or prettier or cooler than someone else. Do we really need virtual ostentatious?

We’ve got legendaries, cash shop skins… honestly, going off that, why the hell not?

Mounts are doable perhaps but should they be? In the original Guildwars II there’s so many waypoints that you just don’t need them. There’s going to be some waypoint that’s near enough you don’t need it, especially if you can put swiftness or a 25% movement bonus (or even both!) on yourself.

So what about places like the Silverwastes, Drytop or the beta area? Well the waypoints in those are pulled right back to a handful (and in the silverwastes you have… what. Three? And non in the north/northeast) so a mount could be useful there. However (that word again) you’ve got the glider and there’s the ability to harvest mushrooms for a speed boost and so on, giving players a sense of progression. You could tie that to a mount but it’s a lot of work (designing the mounts making them work, ect) when you can ‘just’ give speedboosts and jumpads and stuff.

I personally think the tablet should just be a visual (that is to say, unkillable and uninteractable) thing that follows you like the spirits used to for rangers.

The autoattack doesn’t feel like it has much wallop to it, is my biggest gripe. The cooldowns for skills 4 and especially 5 felt like they’d been build with someone using the gravedigger-reduces-recharge-for-all-skills trait; stupidly long without it. For a gap closer I think skill 5 should have something more like the Ranger III’s greatsword or Warrior’s V’s cooldown. It was fun as heck though.

edit: now Quells mentions it, the lack of life force is a real drag. I suppose it makes sense in a way but it makes you want to take daggers instead for melee lifeforce.

I noticed this last beta, but I feel I should mention it in it’s own thread now.

Currently, picking traitlines can be a bit confusing. You read the trait descriptions and try and work out what the traitline does from that. It would be great if there was a description if you put your mouse over them (like the actual traits) explaining what the trait focused on. For example, Earth Magic focuses on surviability and condition damage. Fire focuses on burning and power. Marksmanship focuses on damage. Tactics focuses on shouts and supporting your allies.

…and so on. Because, having tried the revenant in two betas now, I have to sit down and look at skills in the traitlines (Restoration, Corruption, ect) to work out what they do. Then I realised; this is what it’s like for all the players new to Guildwars II with the current classes!

Loki.4871:

Due to meatspace… {STUFF}

…Reaper next.

After I mention the glider. In total I only did about 4 or 5 hours playing I guess, but I really enjoyed the brief time I had with the glider. I didn’t realise how much I wanted this until I used it. It really made a map that was a chore to move around so much more easy and fun to get from A-B. It also opens up fascinating potential for the falling traits (Death From Above, Descent into Madness, ect) which are normally niche/flavour traits.
It also, as you mentioned you were attempting, gave my a sense of progress after hitting level 80. I found I had something to look forward to beyond a skill point/hero point/whatever to spend on something for the mystic toilet.

Looking out along Lornar’s Pass just before I came to the forums to post my feedback I found myself missing the glider already.

The Reaper is in two places right now. Crappy, and fun as hell.
Crappy, because the greatsword simply doesn’t seem to any welly behind it, certainly with the autoattack. In PoI it was specifically stated the auto attack would be slow and hit hard, but the hitting hard bit doesn’t seem to be there. It certainly doesn’t feel like it. It doesn’t help that the recharge times for skills are really long, except for gravedigger. I feel almost obliged to use the major trait that makes gravedigger reduce recharge times of other greatsword skills. As they stand right now, I think there’s too much cooldown on skills 3, 4 and especially 5. I suggest reducing their recharge times.

The reaper shroud is fun as hell. You feel powerful, you feel dangerous; it’s what I’d hoped death shroud would be in the buildup to Guildwars II. I honestly can’t think of much to say beyond pairing it with Spite gives you 25 stacks of might with breathtaking ease, so much so I found it impossible to justify taking Blood or Curses instead and I regret Soul Reaping has two very good traits for the shrouds in the same (master) tier.

Due to meatspace I didn’t really get to do much. I took the Shiro stance for a whirl and I found it really fun to play. I was initially very skeptic of the jade daggers healing skill (after the first beta I’ve been worried about the Revenant’s self heal a fair bit) but after a few hours I felt it was actually quite a solid heal so long as you kept attacking. I remember PoI mentioning Shrio’s stance was very agressive, and it certainly shows.

Whining time: I don’t like how Sword skill III ‘holds’ the camera back while you teleport around. It can be a bit disorientating, because you watch yourself in the distance and then the camera moves over to you, so I found myself looking the ‘wrong’ way or even in the ‘wrong’ place to where I expected.

I assume it doesn’t follow your character because it would make the camera snap from angle to angle furiously and that made the playtesters disorientated too? If not outright ill?

I suggest when it’s activated, the camera follows you to the initial target, and then stays on the target-that way you can watch yourself teleport around and causing bother, and the camera doesn’t have to snap behind you so aggressively. If the final position is precalculated, you could simply snap it up to the target with the first blow, then as you pop around smacking things, the camera could rotate to the ‘correct’ position.

I also suggest as a nod to Factions’ Shrio’ken, the jade daggers behave like the Shiro’ken warrior’s blades/attack. Complete with a similar/the same sound effect. Make them bigger and call the skill ‘Jade Swords’ or jade blades or whatever, even.

The ‘barks’ when selecting the stances were fun. I enjoyed Shiro’s “I demand you release me!” line, one of his lines from the end of Factions for those of you who don’t know. Jalis sounded like he’d been woken up and was hungover. I might be mistaken here, but I think Shiro said “Together we are unstoppable!” after I murdified several enemies once. If that’s true, I want to hear it and that sort of thing more often. Sort of like the job-o-tron backpack, but a bit less regular. It could be fun hearing Mallyx snarl in satisfaction as you get conditions (and the stance stronger) or Jalis bellowing something when you use the taunt abilities, Ventari saying something suitably altruistic (or quoting something he wrote on the tablet) when healing, ect.

Or even just Shiro/Mallyx saying something catty when you land flat on your face from a fall Yet Again.

Reaper next.

meow one twenty.4376:

Which form would Unholy Sanctuary transform us into?

Could take the Revenant stance system (so you can pick which form is in which F1 and F2) and code it to take the F1. So if you want reaper, put that in F1, the death shroud, put that in F1 instead?

For what it’s worth, I think ‘weak’ revenant skills should be cooldowns while others could be buffed up and then with an energy attachment. For example, sword 3 doesn’t have an evade-it makes sense mechanically (you don’t want them to be unkillable with it) but logically it’s a bit weird-they’re teleporting around, they should be a total nightmare to hit with anything outside aoe.
If the cost was bumped up and it had evade, that could give revenant players something interesting to work with.

However, you could easily argue that would make what is already a potentially complicated class (weapon swap gives the class essentially as many skills as the elementalist) already that much more tricky.

xarallei.4279:

I find it hilarious that the smokescale mobs in the new map seem to have an unrelenting assault like ability, only theirs has an evade. So trash mobs have a better version of the skill than us.

It’s identical-they also have an aoe ability that gives them evade while standing in it.

ArchonWing.9480:

Well, I don’t know, but it’s heavily outdated. Karma armor can at least be forged.

Certain stat combos you can get for less gold on the TP, for no badges, and is salvageable.

I think it’d be nice to provide ascended gear with badges too; in those cases I wouldn’t worry about being salvageable.

Of course the ultimate problem comes in two forms:

Upgrade Extractor where the thing is usually more expensive than the runes
Badges being too common and thus of questionable value as a currency.

It’s really easy to get a full set of exotic with the badges though. Like, really, really easy. And fast. Karma takes quite a bit of time and crafting takes lots of dosh or time for materials. If the requirements for the armour were pushed up (2k badges per bit?) I’d be more inclined to agree, but I suspect people already have lots stacked up.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Evans.6347:

aspirine.6852:

I miss battle scars and Impossible odds

Not to mention meditation of the reaper.
What is this jade dagger shenanigans anyway? Meditation of the reaper already was an offensive heal skill.

From what it says I’d say it’s a watered down version of Battle Scars, in which while it’s active your attacks gain life-steal, except it’s not dependent on incoming damage.

I’m sort of surprised Battle Scars isn’t the heal skill, but it does make sense; unless it’s the same in all but name (the Mallyx stance skills are quite close in functionality) you get walloped for lots of damage you don’t get much healing, and if you get walloped for lots of health you can gut an enemy (or pve boss) in a few blows. It would be a real drag to balance. A more obvious shiro-ken style was what I was expecting, rather than a jade daggers appearance. I won’t be throwing my toys out of the pram, I want to see this stance in action before I say anything.

SeaMonsterGuy.5032:

They really should add variation utility skills. When I’m building my Revenant it would be much more interesting to be able to choose from 1 of 2 (or 3) Shiro themed heals, utilities, and elites. It would be cool to be able to choose which skills from Shiro’s vast power I want to use. It would allow for much more Revenant customization, and allow me to be different from every other Revenant.

That is assuming each weapon is thematically tied to a Legend and trait line, making a staff Shiro/Mallyx Revenant not viable. For example if Shiro/Jalis were to become meta, I would be forced into 1 or 2 weapon sets and the same 10 utilities forever. Variation on “meta” would be very small, since maybe everyone will want to run Shiro, everyone has the same exact 5 Utility skills and similar traits, so every Revenant is the same, I can’t feel unique. Although it could be very fun, I find it short sighted in long term design. Maybe Elite Specializations could fix that problem, but I don’t see them releasing new ones too frequently.

Of course, I’m very open to being proven wrong. I’m now finally excited for a HoT beta. So please prove me wrong community.

I think the bolded bit is what will make or break the class, going off the last beta. If the traits give wildly different abilities then against two revenants using the same weapons with the same stances could be fighting essentially two different classes.

rapthorne.7345:

I do feel like they’re trying too hard to make a unique GW1 throwback class and have sacrificed good functionality and actual usefulness for that, which kind of sucks.

Hopefully the devs will respond to our feedback and we’ll see a much improved Revenant in future beta weekends, because without drastic changes, I have no intention of ever actively using a Revenant except to get one to 80 just because.

Perhaps-I wasn’t especially bothered with a lack of ranged weapons during the beta, because Mallyx had a teleport with a decent cooldown (pity about the displacement) and even Jalis had stability.

Loki.4871:

(continued…)

Mallyx’s stance is… it’s got problems. For those of you who didn’t really do GW1, Mallyx was an endgame boss who buffed up when you put conditons and hexes (debuffs) on him. Hence why the Mallyx stance gets more powerful when you have more conditions on you. This was the most stance I spent time in, so here’s my big thoughts:

1. The descriptions are complicated.
“When you meet the threshold you do additional damage.” After reading the actual skill facts, I discover this means 2 or more conditions does another few stacks of torment. Why can’t you just say “When you have 2 or more conditions you do additional damage” instead? It feels a bit… I dunno, pointlessly hiding information?

2. Condition ‘holding’ works in theory.
In practice, less so. Necromancers can get away with it thanks to Plague Signet and minions hoovering them off the necromancer with the right traits, but for the Revenant what I found usually happened was I’d hoover off all the burning or poison, go “Oh, that’s a lot of health deg-” and become downed. The heal feels too weak or has too long a cooldown, because of this-if you pull conditions off and you get a good stack of burning, poison, bleed, or even all three together, you fall over so fast it isn’t even funny, resistance or not.
I’m not really sure what to do with it though. Resistance is a really powerful skill. Perhaps make it last 1 seconds on the elite stance and refresh every 2, essentially halving the damage you take while suffering all these condtions? Or perhaps hard-code in health regen for every condition you have? I know using the demon form giving you torment along with any bleeding or poison or burning inflicts seriously punishing health degen-and when you use your healing skill, you don’t lose said conditions either.

3. That. Ruddy. Displacement.
History lesson here for non GW1 players: Mallyx had an attack that would make the victim shadowstep when he punched them in the face. Or kidney. Or butt. Or anywhere, really. While it’s nice seeing the skill with the same name pull the same trick, it’s also a royal buttpain, because if you don’t have the axe offhand, it’s your only gapcloser, which then creates a gap-and pushes them away and out of the field any allied aoe!

4. It seems to have poor synergy; Ventari removes conditions, the Dorf removes them on yourself (one way of sorting problem 2, I grant you) the staff can remove them, and if there’s multiple mallyx stance using Revenants in one place what tends to happen is one revenant falling over very quickly due to getting all the conditions on themselves.

So, in conclusion; eating conditions is terminally bad for the Mallyx stance in it’s current form, it needs a buffer and/or better condition removal.

Weapon wise, the mace seems a bit slow but torment is a powerful condition. The axe as an offhand is pretty fun, and got some powerful stuff going for it.
Staff is lots of fun despite the pathetic damage it does-something that could do with being buffed up, or perhaps an animation change. Seeing it use hammer animations (even if it’s just for the movement) makes me automatically think of the guardian and warrior’s hammers-something good at protecting allies and/or good at controlling/smashing enemies. Currently the staff doesn’t really do either, though the potential weakness is nice, as is aoe condition removal. The healing orbs are, however, not that useful. They just don’t do enough healing to really be noticeable.

Finally, the request I have for elementalists too-let them have a second weapon slot that they cannot change in combat. Going from hammer to staff out of combat via menus was a massive drag.

KronosBaelfire.6289:

My only complaint, and I’m sure someone has posted this already, is that I wish Anet would decide for the skills to have either CDs or energy bar but not both. It’s somewhat frustrating to want to do something and that skill can’t be performed unless both the CD is gone AND the energy bar is full enough.

I’m okay with this so long as the skill justifies it-if it’s noticeably more powerful that another proffession’s utility skill, it makes perfect sense for it to be this way.

One thing I discored during this beta is how confusing the revised trait system can be to a new person; I’m familiar with the other proffession’s traitlines, but I had to sit and read and think for the revenant’s. It would be nice if all proffessions’ traitlines had a tooltip if you hovered over them, explaining the general theme (eg: ‘Marksmenship focuses on dealing direct damage to the target’ and ‘Tactics is for supporting allies’ ect)

Anyway, my impression of the Revenant, in one word:

“…eh.”

I think I see what you devs have in mind but it’s not there yet by a mile (not meant to sound like a whine-I understand this is a real beta).
My impression is you’re going for a class that, instead of swapping out weapons on the fly, swaps out the utilities-because you’re locked into utilities, they should be really good, hence many of them are, like for like, stupidly more powerful than other proffessions, and giving a mana bar and a short/non existant cooldown instead of just a big cooldown is a really fun idea.

Firstly, and I’m convinced this is due to a glaring lack of the Shiro/Glint stances: the ‘power’ DPS on the class stinks. Mace with the Mallyx stance can get some pretty vicious condition damage set off, sure (more on that later) but with the weapon lineup in the beta simply running up to something and smacking it in the face to see a big number seemed impossible. I wasn’t sure about hammer as a ranged weapon, but the skills were fun and I liked them, though the auto attack of the hammer is… you can tell it’s a re-purposed melee animation.

Also, I came away with the impressions, in terms of stances, is that:
The Great Dorf (Dorf from here on) is the tanky one
The Centaur is the healing/support one
Mallyx is the condition applyer/eater

I can’t really say much about the dorf-I didn’t get to play much of the beta, in all honesty and I didn’t especially focus on him. I enjoyed the road skill however; being able to get so much reliable stability was fun.

Ventari’s is a nice idea but it’s too poor. This is a game without a dedicated healer and this is a stance that makes you try and be one. The tablet’s micomanagement is fiddle, the self heal while you’re in this stance is poor, the knockback for the elite has too much of a warmup, and the only thing I remember positively about it is the AoE condition removal being fantastic.
As this is a game designed around having no dedicated healer, the tablet’s AoE healing is naturally very poor. Because of that, it’s also just not worth bothering with. This game suffers from the same ‘problem’ that D&D 3.5 has-the best way to reduce damage isn’t actually from healing, it’s from having really good dps. In that light, the only way the tablet is going to be worth bringing is if you can negate damage people take, which means you get a dedicated healer, which undermines one of the tenants of the game.
This is a rather roundabout way of saying that as well as the healing, or even just instead, the tablet should give people boons (regen as a baseline?) like regen or protection.

(continued…)

Chaba.5410:

notebene.3190:

Curae.1837:

HiTandMayhem.1378:

I’m just going to leave this here.

http://cleftlands.cwru.edu/gallery/weararmour.html

Hah, that’s brilliant. XD

On that note, I’m very thankful we don’t have chainmail bikinis. <3

Hypothetically, what if they did? And you still had the existing choices and options, and they added more choices and options for things you’d like to wear. What would be wrong with that? Something for everyone?

THAC0 20!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

God I feel old, I get that…

Flogging a skeleton here but to heck with it, I’ve read this thread so I may as well add to the pile.

Wearing something that’s for titillation rather than protection really doesn’t matter in this sort of context. Especially when there’s perfectly practical/functional heavy armours. Look up ‘Samantha Swords’ (not her real name obviously.) She won the world duelling tournament (longsword catagory) and her armour does/did have boob plate, so it’s even not that far fetched in real life, let alone in guildwars 2.

Chain/plate bikinis don’t matter for a very boring reason; this is a fantasy game. Your characters never sleep, eat, drink, go to the toilet, can fight at 100% all day every day, dive around in very heavy armour as easily as in clothes or naked, jump heights a normal human would at best find difficult-before you put on a few dozen kg’s of metal-fall from heights that should kill them and get up without a scratch, fire lightning out their bottom, create zombie-rat things with human skulls, get stomped, squashed, slashed, stabbed, spiked, poisoned, set on fire, frozen solid, eaten, bludgeoned, acid spat on them, die and pop up back to life and they’re perfectly fine. Finally, spoiler alert, men are physically superiour to women for running around in armour and hitting things-like for like, a man will always be able to become stronger than a woman can be. Arguing otherwise is like arguing a man can become pregnant. So if we’re really complaining about lack of realism and plausibility the female characters should do less damage with non-firearm and non magical weapons too.

Just… don’t bother trying to bring realism into this sort of argument for goodness’ sake. Please.

Another thing I suspect people forget is how other classes to the ones they are looking at are changed.

That is to say, for example, a burning elementalist build may appear nerfed (I can’t stick playing Elementalist really, it’s not my style so I won’t comment if it has or hasn’t) but remember that every other class has been changed; the changes those classes have may mean it’s still very viable, to just use one example.

Obviously some are gone, like the grenade-erm-trapper ranger, but you get the idea.

Lightsbane.9012:

Master:

Wilting Strike: Your pet inflicts 4s weakness when you activate its command [[f2]] ability.
Two-Handed Training: Greatsword and spear damage is increased by 5% and those skills recharge 20% faster. Greatsword and spear hits have a 50% chance to gain 3s of fury. This trait has a 10 second internal cooldown.
Natural Regeneration: Your pet gains natural health recovery and their healing power is increased by up to 450.

Grandmaster:

Beastly Warden: Your pet’s command [[f2]] ability causes 2s of taunt to foes around it. This trait has a 15 second internal cooldown.
Zephyr’s Speed: Combat Only. When you swap pets you and your pet gain 3 stacks of might for 15 seconds and 3 seconds of quickness.
Honed Axes: Gain up to 150 ferocity while wielding an axe in your main hand. Winter’s Bite is now inflicts its effects in an area at your target’s location.

i’d really like to know why the axe and greatsword skills were moved to a healing power and pet skill line. I currently run both of these on my ranger and have absolutely no desire to spec into this line at all. not only that but the axe trait is GRANDMASTER now? seriously? the axe isn’t even that good at all for rangers!(or anything but warrior) my build just got completely annihilated. completely.

Remember that the actual points are being partially divorced from the traitlines. So it’s not a healing power line any more per se, your berserk weapons and armour will (probably) compensate for it. Besides, the traits you recieve are hardly bad; you can take a trait which gives buffs when call of the wild is cast, and one of the marksmen traits is to trigger call of the wild when you swap pets.

They tend to crop up in the beastmaster builds more anyway; since the pet does much more damage than in other builds, you want/need the survivability of the greatsword and you often see the axe for a ranged option.
The traits I’m narked about personally is having to choose between two handed training and natural healing.

Throwing this out here for those who didn’t watch the stream: the developers made a point about the new bark skin. The specifically stated that it halves any incoming damage while active. That is to say, if you have 10k health and someone wallops you for 5k, you will only take 2.5k. This system extends to the pet.

Wuselknusel.4082:

How the heck to you expect Rangers to do that? Traps now have a trigger delay, so you just chase your oponent and hope that he wont run out of your traps fast enough? That is a stupid change and it limits the effectiveness of traps tremendously.

Trigger delay is slightly misleading-on the stream they explained it was actually an arming time. When you put it down, it will not instantly trigger. After the arming time has expired though it will instantly go off-an enemy better watch their step. Spike Trap also got a knockdown, so god help the sorry gits who stood on a flame trap stacked with spike trap.

Sadly the stream ended just as we got to the beastmaster stuff, so this pet-related question didn’t get brought up.

Player stats are now divorced from the trait lines. Are the pets? Currently, if you go up beastmastery, the pet gets stat boosts. Are the added pet stats mentioned in the changelogs additional, or replacing the ‘lost’ stats from the current Beastmaster trait line?

Obsidian.1328:

If someone wants to have big numbers with a bow, wtf would you have play a Warrior for that? It makes no sense.

But it makes perfect sense, because they’ve made it clear since it was announced as a class that the warrior is the class that is designed for “Use weapon, recieve big damage numbers” class.

Does anyone think we’ll get a living world story to reclaim Orr? With Zhaitan dead, and the heart of Orr purified, in theory it’s ‘just’ exterminating the remaining undead. I’d like to explore the place without getting mobbed by half a dozen undead every ten ruddy steps, and it would be nice seeing it recover properly.

For the missions; well I imagine that would carry on as normal; walk to the instance marker and be told you’re doing events that occurred in the past. Or… something.

Durzlla.6295:

Not to mention warriors and rangers have a totally different theme (nature dweller) than warrior (soldier). And that rangers in GW1 didn’t NEED to use a pet.

Guildwars 1 is pretty limited for comparisons. Remember, the warrior in Guildwars I is still the standing joke; anything it can do, other classes can do better. Anything.

As for the ranger, it’s quite telling when Anet were doing the pve updates that gave the classes (except warrior) some Very Silly skill buffs for pve (Signet of Spirits for the ritualist, for example) that the ranger’s focused entirely on the pet; only a handful of skills outside the Beastmaster trait line got touched. The team were very clearly trying to get rangers to do more than bring the pet along for some kitten or for a corpse.

It was pretty much ignored, of course. Everyone wanted to be ‘teh snipar’ with their bow. I’m really not sympathetic to this problem; you want to grab a bow and see big numbers, just play a warrior already.

For a beastmaster ranger it was a massive chore; until the pet levelled up it was only good for a port-a-corpse for the necromancer.
Remember the Zaishen Menagerie? It was essentially a storage area for pets and you could unlock evolutions or pets. Unlocking certain evolutions required highly specialised builds in specific areas the ‘natural’ way, and what would eventually be the menagerie was a heavily requested thing from rangers back in the day.

Not that anyone ever seemed to do a barrage build in my experience. I counted two other people who did a 16 beastmastery build in over six years playing guildwars 1 and one of those was my brother….

Nostalgia trip aside, I suspect that was the original idea behind the different pet types; the bears for example, all are tanky, but then there’s the Arctodus with it’s bleed, so it does a bit more damage than the other bears. The polar bear has a chill, so it’s a bit better at durability, since it can slow the enemies attacking it (in melee anyway)
Then you have pets like the birds for high damage on single targets, ect.

It could be something interesting to see as a trait, perhaps; some traits boost the power at cost of toughness for the pets; ‘Dire training’ and ‘hearty training’ perhaps…

Allie Murdock.8152:

Hey everyone,
STUFF

Reading it over, I really like what you’re discussing in the office/lab/workshop/whatever. The only nitpicks I’d have are:

-the removal of spirits, but that’s more nostalgia than anything-I won’t be sobbing or grabbing pitchforks if they go.

-Combining Rending Attacks, Intimidation Training and Stability training
It’s definitely a good thing, however I reccomend you consider going even further, and restore the first public beta effects which were more specialised (For those of you who didn’t play it, pets had a permanent passive bonus depending on your trait; spiders did greater poison damage, bears had permanent stability, ect) because part of the problem is a single stack of bleed on a cirtical hit for a drake, or a bit longer cripple… isn’t really worth bothering with usually.

-Make Sword II a gap closer
I personally have reservations about that, but I can also see why you’d want it that way so whatever.

Outside that I really like what I read there. Hope it makes it in.

Daemon.4295:

Intimidation Training (BM IX): Activated (F2) abilities for canines and spiders cause cripple.

Am I missing something, or is this just a really poorly thought out trait? Below is a list of all canine and spider pets and their F2 abilities, cripple is partially or entirely wasted for 5 of the 9 pets this trait affects.

Alpine Wolf: Chilling Howl
F2 chills for 4 seconds. Cripple is wasted.

Fern Hound: Regenerate
F2 grants regeneration. Cripple is useful.

Krytan Drakehound: Intimidating Howl
F2 immobilizes foes for 2 seconds. 2 out of 4 seconds of cripple are wasted.

Wolf: Terrifying howl
F2 causes fear for 2 seconds. 2 out of 4 seconds of cripple are wasted.

Hyena: Howl of the Pack
F2 summons an additional hyena. Cripple is useful.

Black Widow: Paralyzing Venom
F2 immobilizes foes for 3 or 4 seconds (according to wiki). Cripple is wasted.

Cave Spider: Weakening Venom
F2 inflicts weakness and vulnerability. Cripple is useful.

Forest Spider: Deadly Venom
F2 inflicts poison. Cripple is useful.

Jungle Spider: Paralyzing Venom
F2 immobilizes foes for 3 or 4 seconds (according to wiki). Cripple is wasted.

EDIT: Weird language filtering

Imo all the mid-tier traits for beastmaster are pathetic. Some pets get stability… right after they needed it, but not on some things (such as knockdowns) while others get token bleeding on critical hits, ect.
The beta’s were perhaps too specialised (bears and ONLY bears got stability with one for example) but while they’re more accessible now, they’re really not worth considering imo. I take two minor traits I think that little of the master traits right now.

zTales.4392:

I have a question…

My pet dies a lot in AC, mainly at the bosses. I’m working on learning exactly when to call my pets back before they get hit, but still, it’s annoying and that won’t fix everything. I’m only level 37 with 10 points in BM, and I also have Signet of the Wild. I use my wolf and my devourer for dungeons most of the time. My question is, will the next 20 points in BM make a difference in the low level dungeons, or will it scale badly?

It makes a hell of a difference. Stick with it because as you say, you’re still learning, but also because of the 15 point minor trait (faster swaps) makes a huge difference. More importantly, the Grandmaster beastmaster trait Natural Healing. Coupled with a signet of wild your pets can take eyewatering amounts of damage.