Guild Wars 2

A couple of other observations from last night’s raiding:

1. Environment design reminds me of why I love GW2. NPCs and little bits of lore scattered around, along with the PC voicing observations is a really nice touch. Also the side island with the pocket raptors for necros to charge their shroud on is clever.

2. Green guardian seems a bit forgettable relative to blue and red, which have very distinctive mechanics. The continuous damage field and the standard mechanic of avoid the red circles make it pretty mild relative to blue’s potential instadown and invuln boon and red’s immunity to physical and having to keep the seekers at bay. At its heart, it’s not a “fun” mechanic in the sense that getting teleported around doesn’t really have a lot of counterplay to it other than the obvious Red Circle Avoidance, and the wasted DPS time is a death by a thousand cuts sort of thing thanks to enrage (you’ve lost, but you just don’t know it yet)

3. It might be nice for squad leaders to have a way to quick reset the fight, or trigger a vote for it. The enrage timer seems pretty tight right now and while it’s possible to recover from a missed lightning column downing some of the squad, the DPS loss is almost certainly fatal to the rest of the attempt on Vale guardian. Guilds are already making suicide pact rules in anticipation that squad leaders will want to force a wipe to speed up the try-fail learning cycle, so it would be a nice QoL thing.

4. Difficulty of Vale Guardian seems good. 3 hours of raiding and we only got him down to about 50% before enrage (phase 3) Based on former events like Scarlet’s assault in LA, it seems likely there’ll be another one or two splits followed by a final burn phase, probably with the additional floor damage twist and so on. Given that we haven’t done build optimizations or squad composition optimization yet, it seems entirely doable with more practice once we figure that out. Really looking forward to it.

A couple of other observations after playing the raid:

- The unreliable nature of Rocket Charge in hitting the target and proccing leaps becomes more pronounced with more difficult content. Scrapper can (almost?) take down the whole break bar with Thunderclap + Rocket Charge, and maybe popping a gyro or two, but that seems to vary on the charge. Also noticed the evade is not consistent during execution of the leaps, which is problematic when there’s lots of red circles and you’re bounding in what feels like random directions. Most confusing moment: using Rocket Charge to close back to the guardian after a lightning pillar, thinking it will evade intervening teleport circles. It does not. Get teleported further away, charging in wrong direction, and ending on top of a Seeker. o_O

- Slotting 1 or 2 Gyros is actually helpful in the raid. In particular, Reconstruction Field blasting with double orbital strike combined with other blasts from the team helped keep a split subteam up in phase 2 with the Druid elsewhere. Blast Gyro’s weird combination of superspeed on toolbelt and a damage spike seems to be specifically useful in this case because of the lightning pillar mechanic and the boss enrage mechanic requiring lots of DPS. Still definitely not good enough to take more than one or two at a time, but certainly utility worth dipping into for specific scenarios.

- Shocking Speed seems like a good trait for the raid, but turns out to be surprisingly difficult to proc reliably. In theory it’s just Thunderclap + Rocket Charge again, but sometimes there are other fields on top of the target already, other times Rocket Charge doesn’t proc it right away or at all (maybe because of cooldown, I didn’t check), or it doesn’t proc close enough to the group. For all purposes I can think of when you want group superspeed (e.g. reacting to a distant lightning pillar or escaping as a group) your reaction window is small enough that cast times for combo already makes it inconvenient and any additional uncertainty on top of that makes it unsuitable. Temporal Enchanter is almost definitely the go-to skill if group superspeed becomes necessary. I think the trait would get more play if it simply shared superspeed with the group (ideally on the larger 360 radius) when you get superspeed, with a really short cooldown (e.g. 1 second) only to prevent recursive proccing on groups of scrappers; superspeed itself doesn’t stack duration anyway.

Overall, Scrapper is definitely one of the most fun specs so far. Thematically and mechanically, it feels like it adds a lot to the Engie class. Hammer is a great addition with its blend of utility and damage. It definitely feels good overall with a couple of rough edges:

- Rocket Charge motion could use a bit of tweaking.
> Without a target, the left-right zig-zag is a disorienting experience.
> With a target, it still seems like it’s a bit erratic; in particular, the second leap seems to overshoot the target a lot of times (fallen off a cliff from it before). I would expect it to behave more like the Revenant’s Unrelenting Assault in its targeting. Also, it doesn’t seem to consistently trigger fields on each leap, even ones centered on you like the Reconstruction Field.
> The aftercast for it seems really long, which is disappointing since it should be usable as a mobility skill.

- Electrowhirl and Shock Shield both seem to take longer to kick in than the shield or gear shield blocks, making them harder to use reactively. Could just be that I’m not used to them though.

Gyros on the other hand, are in a weird spot for me. On the one hand the toolbelt skills they provide add valuable new utility to the Engie class, but on the other, the actual Gyro skills themselves feel like finicky turrets:

- Medic Gyro: Reconstruction Field + Rocket Charge is a beautiful, beautiful thing. The actual healing potential for keeping it out though, never seems to materialize given its odd AI (Why are you running away from me? Are you trying to heal some guy’s pet?) Particularly since cooldown starts on Gyro death, it seems like the way to play is to pop it, kill it for the daze, and alternate it on 15s intervals with the Reconstruction Field and water field heal.

- Bulwark Gyro: Yay, a reliable reflect field (goodbye Elixir U and your long cooldown)! I just haven’t figured out what a good use for Watchful Eye is. It dies really fast, if you want it to soak a big party hit, but isn’t nearly as effective as Guardian sharing Aegis in that case. It dies really fast in large engagements of trash mobs, where I guess it’s really preventive healing for sustain? So far it actually seems best in solo use to bridge between uses of Medic Gyro.

- Purge Gyro: Poison field + hammer again is nice for Weakness, but not a reason to take the Gyro. I was running with Mortar Kit and being able to aim the field to where you were going to leap into seemed like a much more reliable way of proccing the combo at least once. The nerfing of the mobs in BWE3 makes it hard to tell whether the persistent condi cleansing is valuable enough to burn a utility slot on it. At least it’s an option for Engie’s now, that previously had to scrounge for condi cleanse from a bunch of different sources.

- Blast Gyro: Group superspeed seems nice, but honestly the traits Shocking Speed and Final Salvo seem like much better ways of going about it. I’m guessing the unblockable but destroyable spike damage has some play in PvP, but overall it seems like the weakest addition to Engie because of the value of a utility slot. Also, the name would suggest it is at least a blast finisher, which would give it some play with the fields and finishers mechanics in Scrapper, but even then it would be marginal (since it must be targeted, and there are lower cooldown alternatives such as Throw Mine).

- Shredder Gyro: Another lightning field for proccing traits? Yes please! This is another one weirdly affected by how Rocket Charge doesn’t seem to proc leaps reliably though. I seem to hit dazing attack with the hammer’s Thunderclap more regularly than with Spare Capacitor even though it’s a larger field, because the former is usually target-centered. Using the Shredder though is puzzling: The direct damage is probably too low for a stationary and destructible object, and the whirl combo even placed right in front of a large target doesn’t seem to hit consistently enough to stack conditions that justify taking it. The only neat trick I found was using it with Flash Shell away from enemies to purge conditions quickly – in that sense it’s actually a bit multi-use than Purge Gyro.

- Sneak Gyro: Why can I outrun my Gyro? Seriously. It’s goofy that I can’t even sneak about in PvE consistently with it and any kind of swiftness makes it lose its tracking. I get that if it tracks perfectly then it defeats the point since the Gyro itself is visible, but honestly it needs to feel like the gyro is following me and not vice versa. Either the area it covers needs to be expanded significantly, or it needs to move much faster, or it needs to deliver longer duration stealth between pulses so that you are covered until it catches up. Detection Pulse seems like a nice situational tool for the Engie, but again, not super useful in PvE unless the mobs get more dangerous again. (Oh Mordrem Snipers, even with stealth you are a sad shadow of your former selves)

The Function Gyro was also disappointing. I imagine it’s much more impactful in PvP, but in PvE, it’s kind of hard to use:
– If someone else is rezzing or close by, selecting the downed individual becomes the challenge. Like ally targeting, if you target an ally that is rezzing, it would be helpful if the Function Gyro targets that same person being rezzed instead of requiring you to click on the downed individual.
– There’s no range indicator and it has a weird range (750, I had to look it up) that is sort of unintuitive given the standard 600 or 900 ranges we’ve been trained to eyeball with most skills. Why not just give it the 900 range?
– It doesn’t seem to work on fully downed individuals? Why not? It’ll take way longer as usual anyway and the Function Gyro itself is not particularly durable.

Haven’t had too much of a chance to play with trait builds yet, more feedback on that later perhaps. The only thing that stood out so far was that Shocking Speed and Final Salvo have a sort of anti-synergy: since superspeed doesn’t stack, the lightning field created by Final Salvo specifically doesn’t work for proccing Shocking Speed (at least for yourself).

Psyched for HoT so I can finally introduce a hammer-wielding Charrgineer to an unsuspecting Tyria and advertise him as an “artisanal weedwacker” LFG.

Duke Darkwood.4237:

The biggest problem with introducing a new race is that they would have absolutely no way to work them into the original campaign against Zhaitan.

I’m not sure that’s a necessary condition for introducing a new race. The GW1 expansions demonstrated that it’s viable to have an abbreviated starter story for new characters that dovetails only into the new campaign (where the existing characters join the story). And as you’ve pointed out, merely making the older content available can be done via methods that don’t require continuity (i.e. the “play a historical event” model.)

If continuity was really that much of an issue, it’s something that the introduction of the Revenant profession would have to deal with already, since Rytlock is ostensibly the first Revenant based on what was said at PAX.

I do agree that the cost for implementing a new race significantly outweighs the value proposition though. Unlike other MMOs, your character race in GW2 influences the gameplay to a fairly trivial degree (jumping puzzles aside); it’s largely for aesthetics and flavor.

On the aesthetics side of things, a new race increases the incremental cost for a lot of the revenue generating content (i.e. gem store items like new face/hairstyle options, armor skins, outfits etc.). I don’t think it’s insurmountable; a lot of the armors can probably be tweaked parametrically and just won’t look good, and they already use the Charr skeletal model for animations. But given the existing state of the Charr (clipping issues abound, lowest player base relative to other races), ANet probably doesn’t have a strong incentive to invest in yet another PC race with similar issues.

Alas, my macaw Tengu Mesmer will likely continue to remain a pipe dream.

- Shiro Tagachi since we know he was last in the Realm of Torment like Mallyx, so accessible through the Mists (we did kill him there though)

- Master Togo, just cuz GW2 needs an Uncle Iroh character.

- Kuunavang. The dragon other than Glint Rytlock could be channeling in the trailer?

- Turai Ossa. C’mon, they already have his character model

Someone mentioned Palawa Joko, but I believe the lore is that he’s still running things in Elona.

The comparison to Dervish sounds about right. It’s probably not going to be much like a Ritualist except for the aesthetics, I’d guess. The description does say “channel legendary powers” but I don’t think that should be taken as literally summoning legends from the Mist. (A heavy armor class running around with a bunch of high HP minions sounds like nerfbait right there)

The core mechanics of the Ritualist also got pretty effectively farmed out to Engie and Necro already, whereas we don’t really have something quite like the flash enchant (initial effect on cast + fixed duration boon) and sacrifice (attack + bonus effect for flash enchant removal) mechanic.

Revenant sounds like a good lore consistent way to introduce similar ideas without relying on the concept of human gods, which was always one of the sticking points when discussing Dervish for GW2. Imagine F1-F4 as “channel a legend” skills, with an on-cast effect and a lesser ongoing benefit, and then each mainhand weapon having at least one skill that puts the active channel on cooldown for additional benefit.

Avatar (aka transformation) skills might also make a comeback as a feature of a class (instead of Necro/Ele/Warrior getting one each as an elite) and it might be cool to have that be coupled to the class’ core mechanic, for example, you choose the transform based on your active F-skill (a la Ele glyphs)

So looking forward to what they are going to do with this new class.

I really appreciate the changes that were made to the gauntlet areas. Almost all of the issues I had with it the last time round have been addressed:

1. The dome around each arena was removed, which made spectating easier and also prevented a whole bunch of camera problems towards the edge of the arenas. My Charr thanks you for being able to fight Liadri, not the camera.

2. Medic at each respawn really cut down on the die, WP, run back, retry cycle so it felt like I was spending more time doing the fights than wasting time running back and forth. Also, removing the WP cost (in addition to the already removed repair cost) makes it so that it doesn’t penalize more casual players (who are also more likely to die) and encourages them to try more. Kudos.

3. I see people still complaining about the lag from the zerg, but that was not my experience. Maybe it’s because the Boss Blitz is just less popular than the old loot train in the crown pavilion, or maybe the servers I was on just had lower populations, but it was nowhere near the previous frustration fest where rubber banding or skill lag were about a third of the deaths.

Regarding the structuring of the Boss Blitz event, I’m a little conflicted. The good:

1. More interesting boss mechanics. Even though I hate Shurakk, it’s nice to see different requirements being emphasized, and it’s a nice way to discourage the zerg mentality of there’s one optimal build for everything in PvE.

2. There’s a spectrum of success for the event. Stuck in a PUG server? You can still do it with fewer rewards, and there’s nothing stopping you from trying again.

The less good:
1. The loot is definitely nerfed, but that’s been pretty systematic across the board (elimination of champ trains in queensdale etc.) so that’s not a blitz-specific issue. If you’re on a coordinated server it’s still totally farmable though (~10 bags every 10 minutes or so) and it seems like the donation trigger is designed to balance this out economically? ANet probably has the data to determine whether it’s working as intended but it suggests an uncomfortable design where the hardcore who can farm the event have yet another way to get richer and most casual, less-coordinated players are stuck paying for an unprofitable event. Anecdotally, everyone I know is either avoiding the pavilion because it’s a boring grind, or doing it constantly because of all the bags. There’s weirdly no middle ground here.

2. The incentive for doing it “right” doesn’t seem to be there. There’re all kinds of factors here, like the PvE population generally believing that PUG coordination is “too hard”, to folks not understanding scaling, to there not being a specific achievement for the gold success (seriously, how many people stuck around for the LA triple threat one just for the achievement?) I’m not sure what can be done here, but better loot doesn’t seem to be the answer.

3. A lot of the event structure is poorly indicated. Most reasonable players will have to learn by failing (standing too close lava wall = instadeath, grenading shurakk with hawks = instadown) Maybe I’m spoiled by Wildstar at this point, but there’s a mess of stuff happening in a large group of people that makes it unclear what you’re doing wrong. Also, unlike marionette where it’s pretty clear who doesn’t know the fight and need to be taught, the unstructured nature of the event makes it tiring to figure out who’s killing kuraii first and spawning knockdowns everywhere, or to tell folks not to converge on a fight to scale it up into a 20 minute zergfest. (No, really, please don’t come to Boom Boom)

4. Megaservers. Well, this would probably still be an issue with folks squatting in the old regular servers, but now it seems you have to know someone to get into a server that’s coordinated, and failing that, no one bothers. Maybe LFG needs some way to spawn an instance with PUGs who all indicate an interest in running a coordinated event? Like a raid channel that can create an instance once the required population is reached. It would reduce the problem of herding cats to at least herding cats who have expressed an interest in being trained.

Overall, how much I like Boss Blitz specifically is less important than the general direction I think it portends, and in that sense I think it’s successful. There’s some interesting things being tried here.

2. Encourage running Alts
Playing alts is really a core part of the horizontal progression for me, and I think encouraging folks to play different classes in particular gives folks a different lens to experience existing content in new ways and a good way of making the most of the live team’s resources. There have been many good steps taken to support alts since launch: Experience Scrolls from achievement chests, accelerated weapon skill unlocking, account wide WvW and FotM levels so kudos on those. I think running alts stills seems grindy to lots of folks though, largely because much of the replayable content is best run at level 80 either because it’s more manageable (dungeons, fractals) or because it’s more rewarding (world events). I think there’re two major areas I’d like to see considered:

-Enhancing replayability of content. Although the promise of GW2 is that the world is dynamic and constantly fresh to re-experience, there’s just not a lot of variance in the mechanics in most encounters to make playing them a new experience with different classes. Many of the complaints leveled around “zerkers trump all PvE builds” are salient here; it’s not particularly interesting to play different classes that boil down more or less efficient ways to kill lots of dumb small things or the occasional dumb big thing. New content like the Nightmare Tower are trying to push the meta in other interesting directions, but again, there’s not necessarily a great variance in how different classes experience it given the group-centric nature of a lot of it.

There’s the option to build multiple paths as in the personal story, but that’s really hard to scale up beyond one or two branches. It would be interesting to see that integrated into the instanced events for the Living Story as well (like the closure of the toxic alliance arc that can be replayed), but I think it would be more interesting to design encounters that need to be tackled differently depending on your class. The GW1 Doppelganger fight at Augury Rock is the clearest example of this, and I think the GW2 Queen’s Gauntlet challenge comes close. In particular, the Tier 3 fights that had interesting challenges but not overly rigid mechanics felt interesting in highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of classes; in contrast, the Liadri and Suriel fights with rigid and punishing mechanics were boring because they largely homogenized the fights regardless of class.

There’s definitely an art to crafting content like this, but as a broad generalization, I would suggest that solo instances are a good opportunity to provide differentiated experiences that add value to replaying with alts. There could also be ways other than as one-off story based events, such as GW1-style challenge missions, to provide such instances.

-Reducing content gating. Assuming that leveling an alt can be made interesting enough that folks actually care to level from 1-80, it can still be frustrating to have played though the game so many times and not have access to something on one specific character without slogging through a content gate for the umpteenth time. Explorable mode for dungeons comes to mind; so many folks have just never bothered to do story mode that it’s a little embarrassing when a PUG realizes no one can start an instance.

Map exploration is another constant annoyance. Guild missions always seem to run into folks having to switch alts when they realize that particular alt is missing a waypoint for it. There’s definitely a monetization opportunity here: Asura gate maps for gems would totally sell like hotcakes for each of my alts.

More tangentially related is pricing on new skills, which I think of as content since trying out new builds is core to why I have alts. The 25 points price for the new healing skills seems set just to be a skill point sink, rather than for tiered balancing. I would ask ANet to reconsider this, since it is yet another driver of the race to 80 mentality, and creates yet another grind to get a fully fledged class I can experiment with. Using skill points as currency for other things players want (e.g. I’m sure Miyani can rustle up some ascended mats) is a much better way to sink skill points that does not punish alts. I have similar concerns around the cost of ascended gear for alts, but with the time gating there was at least a clear design intent for economic control that is not evidently applicable to skills.

Horizontal progression for me is really about expanding access to new gameplay experiences. Lots of other posts talk about new content already (new skins, lore, maps, story development, updates to dungeons, new skills/weapons/professions/races) but I feel that there’s much that can be done to maximize exploration of existing content.

1. Improvements in build management
The ability to save and load builds a la GW1 has been requested several times before, and I do agree that it would facilitate experimenting with new builds. The effort required to change a build is significantly higher in GW2 given the interactions between skills, traits, weapons, armor, trinkets, sigils and runes. In an ideal world, a build management system for GW2 would be able to save and load all of those elements. This entails being able to save and apply configurations of:

- Skills and traits. This would be a quality of life improvement that would at least benefit folks who choose to run flexible builds with stat allocations that can be reconfigured on the fly (i.e. only required to be out of combat).

- Weapons, Armor and Trinket attributes. A PvE locker as other posters have suggested would be a step in the right direction, but I feel that attribute swapping as seen in legendary weapons would be preferable. It would be a massive quality of life improvement not to have to lug around or bank multiple sets of gear and manually switch each piece out. It would be great if it applied to all ascended gear, as it would make crafting ascended items a far more worthwhile endeavor; I just can’t imagine switching builds on a Warrior with ascended weapons, for example. Alternatives might be to provide gem store items similar to a transmutation stone to merge attribute options into a weapon, or a mystic forge recipe to do so.

- Sigils, Runes, Infusions and other upgrades. Here it might be useful to have a globally accessible locker for every upgrade component, similar to a crafting material bank, that can be freely combined with the saved weapons/armor/trinkets. (i.e. you’ll still need to break the bank for 6 Superior Runes of Divinity, but at least you won’t have to repay that price if you decided you wanted them on a Rabid set instead of the Celestial one).

Tools VII – Packaged Stimulants
Definitely a quality of life issue with this. The targeting reticule is tiny (same issue with Deployable Turrets) which is really hard to see in the heat of battle. The shift from drop to ground-targeting is an even bigger shift for this skill than turrets because you still have to run over thrown things to use them, which is inefficient at best. It seems like it was designed for group support, but throwing it onto a party member doesn’t seem to automatically grant the effect, they need to move over it. If the intent was group support, it would be much better if picking up something automatically shared the effect with allies in a 240 radius. Ranged support might be better served by introducing an Alchemy trait that grants Regen on all thrown Elixirs.

Tools VIII – Power Wrench
Again, not a bad trait just for the recharge duration. The problem is really more that this only affects the Tool Kit, and it’s just a weirdly unfocused kit: It’s got great utilities worth taking the kit for situationally, like Gear Shield and Magnet and recharge reduction really shines for them, but as the only melee kit, it has poorer damage output than FT and requires more risk with no Juggernaut trait to mitigate. Finally, it seems designed to heal turrets, which no one uses because it’s just such a huge opportunity cost to sit there thwacking a turret (which themselves are unpopular).

I would suggest focusing on making it a better weapon kit and ditching the connection to turrets entirely. Even small things: Make Thwack cleave. Give it a 3 sec Weakness proc, so you get some damage mitigation to offset being in melee. Add a stack of bleed to Box of Nails or extend the bleed duration so they stack better. Make the cripple default on Throw Wrench, or better yet, something else to make it not some poor cousin of Personal Battering Ram.

Tools X – Leg Mods
It certainly doesn’t feel like a Master trait, particularly when compared to the Adept tier Dogged March for Warrior. Given the fact that we already have two skills that remove only movement impairment conditions in addition to all the standard condition management skills, it feels like a really marginal benefit to deal with movement impairing heavy environments to spend 20 points on. It doesn’t synergize well with anything in particular in Tools, and seems like a good Adept tier candidate for being able to splash 10 points to pick it up if it was necessary.

Bonus round:

Firearms 25 – Target the Maimed
Why is this only a 5% boon compared to the equivalent Warrior trait Attack of Opportunity? Or pretty much every similar trait across the board (Fiery Wrath, Exposed Weakness, even Burning Rage is getting buffed to 10%) If you want to encourage more folks to spec up into Firearms, this seems like a clear buff to make.

Alchemy VI – Protection Injection
This seems to be strictly better than Inventions 4 – Stabilized Armor. (33% damage reduction on wider range of effects for 3 seconds every 5 vs. 20% damage reduction for duration of KD or stun) Will we be addressing potentially redundant traits in the near future as well?

JonPeters.5630:

Master tier traits
Some good suggestions on builds that might open up if we improve some of the master tier traits would be good to see. Here is a pretty decent list of master tier traits that I still find underwhelming.

Explosive Powder, Enhance Performance, Power Showes, Elite Supplies, Deadly Mixture, Potent Elixirs, Packaged Stimulents, Power Wrench, Leg Mods.

Explosives VII – Explosive Powder
It’s a fine trait and would be better in more builds if “explosions” were clearly defined and expanded to include things that made intuitive sense like Rocket Turret attack, turret Detonate, Explosive Shot. It feels symptomatic of the Engie traits to have lots of traits which are just worthless unless you’re using a specific skill.

Explosives X – Enhance Performance
Again, a fine trait as long as you’re using Med Kit. The problem is that it competes with other good Master Traits in Explosives, and if you’re in Explosives, you’re probably going to use Grenadier and Short Fuse/Explosive Powder for condition/damage. It might be better to make this grant Might on kit swap, which opens this up regardless of which heal skill you use.

Inventions IX – Elite Supplies
A reasonable choice for an heal bomb support build for the Supply Crate improvement, but only in comparison to other similarly weak options in the tier. Spending a trait on something you can’t use very often is probably not something folks would take; I imagine the Guardian Elite Focus is even worse off given the much stronger Master traits in that line. This could be replaced.

Alchemy VII – Deadly Mixture.
This trait feels like a way to force FT builds to spend 20 in Alchemy. Elixir Gun doesn’t even benefit that much from the damage boost given its poor base numbers and power scaling. I would just take the 15% FT damage boost and combine it with Napalm Specialist. Scrap Fireforged Trigger. Move the 20% recharge for FT to Hair Trigger and EG to Fast-Acting Elixirs. Add some other benefit like condition duration, condition damage, or extra condition stacks to Deadly Mixture for EG instead.

Alchemy VIII – Potent Elixirs
This really seems to be only good in conjunction with Elixir U for extra Quickness. Also overlaps with the effect for Elite Supplies with Elixir X, which is unfortunate. If you’re talking about Elixir boon effects, the trait attribute bonus already gets up the 20% and it doesn’t help HGH, which is what most folks going deep into Alchemy want; I think they’re more likely to invest in other sources of boon duration, rather than Potent Elixirs.

Tools VI – Speedy Kits. Increased Swiftness duration to 10s. 10s recharge.
I would have agreed with this as a quality of life fix back in beta, but experience with the class shows that how frequently I have to swap to proc swiftness really is a non-issue for me. I really have two modes of kit usage: stay in it as a primary weapon, or dip in and out for specific skills.

For the former, this change is a nice but I tend not to swap on perfect timing, so I’d rather dip into Drop Stimulant or Elixir B as a base and use any kit swapping to extend swiftness. Granted, in a build keyed off weapon swaps, having this on the same timer is nice (e.g. Sigil of Battle)

For the latter, it does break my favorite combo with Invigorating Speed. I don’t really even care about 100% vigor uptime. It’s Vigor on demand or close to on demand that I care about, since Vigor is largely wasted most of the time if you’re playing well (except for folks using Energy Conversion Matrix, I guess). A 5 sec refresh in the worst case is pretty tolerable and you’ll almost always get some use out of it. A 10 second worst case makes the potential benefit of vigor marginal. It introduces the same sort issues having to pay attention to timing of switches that led me to drop Kit Refinement.

Side note on Invigorating Speed: I’ve always regarded it as one of the defining characteristics of the Engie, given the traits that synergize with endurance, and one of the few clearly intended synergies in an otherwise bafflingly structured trait layout. It’s also one of the primary sources of damage mitigation for Engies in high-end PvE content given that Defiant negates many of the CC options that Engies get that make them pretty resilient in PvP (not to mention in the cases we could use CC, it can annoy team mates because of positioning issues).

Tools XI – Armor Mods. Changed this to now trigger on struck instead of on critical hit incoming. Reduced the cooldown from 25s to 15s.
On paper, this is pretty strong pressure mitigation now given that it causes Engies to proc Aegis readily and more frequently than Guardians. Still does nothing for those massive one hit kills though. It’s interesting and maybe there’re some half-zerker type builds to come out of this.

Inventions V – Energized Armor. Increased conversion: 5% to 7%.
Alchemy V – Blood Injection. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
Bonus stats are nice, but until you hit about 3 stacks of might worth they’re just not hugely interesting to build around, particularly since Engies don’t seem to have a great deal of things focused on power-scaled damage relative to some classes.

Blunderbuss. Updated the ranges on this skill so that it is at 100% effectiveness with anyone in melee range. Increased range 200 units. when using the trait.
This feels like an overdue fix rather than cause for excitement. Really, anything with less than melee range should be a bug.

Explosives V – Incendiary Powder. Moved to Master tier.
This will totally get me lynched, but Incendiary Powder is really too good a trait for Adept tier. Sure, it’s been nerfed before and Engies do have pretty broad access to burning anyway, but it’s still the most generally useful damage trait, in a game where damage is still king. Two issues:

1. If the stated goal is build diversity, bumping it to Master really only encourages folks to just push more into Explosives, which is already a really popular trait line thanks to Grenadier; it just creates more contention in the Master tier of that line, which already has one good general damage trait (Enhance Performance). Given the synergy with the precision from Firearms, it may be more beneficial for build diversity to move this into that line instead, which has no good general damage traits at Master (seriously, does anyone take Go for the Eyes?) Of course, FT builds will scream bloody murder at that, but given their access to burn, it may be better to sweeten Napalm Specialist to compensate.

2. Making this change because it’s simpler and can be done right now without a corresponding damage buff elsewhere feels unfair precisely because so many builds already rely on it to shore up fairly weak damage synergies in the Engie class design. Whether the change is righteous or not in the long term, it will be judged in the context of just the Dec 10 patch, and as such, will feel like an unjustified nerf.

Explosives VI – Exploit Weakness. Increased the health threshold. 25% to 50%
This change makes it minimally viable, but it still seems like a weak trait. Given the broad access Engies have to immobilize/chill/cripple effects already. If you care about cripple, you probably already have it in your skill selection, and the additional 33% uptime cripple that requires getting the opponent down to 50% seems marginal. Also, while we are talking quality of life improvements, why is this not the same as the change to Predator’s Instinct? Not a criticism, just a unclear on the reasoning for the difference.

Explosives IX – Accelerant packed turrets. Moved to Adept tier.
This trait needs to be redesigned. It has shorter than melee range (120 vs 130) when it really needs the same boost that bombs and mines recently got (180) to be useful. At the same time, being able to get two 20 sec cooldown AoE knockbacks for an Adept trait brings them into a space that devalues Throw Mine as a skill.

Firearms XI – Modified Ammunition. Now works regardless of equipped weapon.
It’s a good buff, but it’s weirdly non-synergistic with the Firearms trait line. You ideally want condition duration and power to maximize the effectiveness of this, so you might just end up with a bunch of Grenadier + Modified Ammunition builds instead of fostering build diversity. If this was in Explosives though, it creates an interesting tension at the Grandmaster tier, and makes Explosives more than just The Grenades and Bombs Line.

Inventions X – Autotool Installation. Increased healing percent from 1% to 5%.
Decreased interval from 10s to 3s.
It’s a good buff but it seems only worth looking at for some PvP bunker builds perhaps. In PvE, it’s not going to save turrets from massive damage in boss fights, which are really the only time you want turrets in a fixed location for any duration (other than the autoleveling thing which has been nerfed.) It’s been suggested before that picking up turrets should not put them on cooldown, which I agree with, and in that case, having turrets that heal faster while in your possession could be pretty valuable.

Inventions XI – Elixir Infused bombs. Increased healing scaling by 50%.
Bomb heal builds running Clerics/Apothecary seem to have been in decline, and it seems like this would give it a needed boost.

Inventions VIII – Power Shoes. Will now function outside of combat.
This is definitely a better quality of life improvement compared to the Speedy Kits change. I don’t know if it’s enough to convince folks to trait into Inventions though, given the relative weakness of this line in general. If I’m into this line for either of the Grandmaster traits it might be worth picking up, for instance, it might be good with Elixir-Infused bombs, but otherwise Speedy Kits or Infused Precision are just so much more accessible.

Alchemy 15 – Transmute. Increased % chance from 8% to 100%. This effect can now only trigger once every 15 seconds.
I welcome the removal of RNG from this trait. Given the furor over Diamond Skin though, I suspect there will be a lot of complaining about this in PvP because it breaks snare and gank alpha strikes. It’s something that folks can adapt to though (like dealing with blind: don’t pop your big guns too quickly). It seems reasonable for a minor trait, but not something to go into half-tier builds for.

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I don’t post much, but this thread struck a cord with me and I will say that Liadri was a turnoff. I don’t particularly care about minis or the award, but having tried and failed Liadri ~100 times, it did alienate me from the game because it seemed to crystallize the trend of ANet equating “frustrating” to “challenging”. GW2 has flaws, as all games do, and most of the time, when things are easy, most of the issues can be overlooked. The Liadri fight seems to choose to amplify the aspects of the fight for false difficulty. Going by http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty:

Bad technical aspects make it difficult:
- Small dome makes camera control awful. ANet also did this for the Aetherblade JP dive goggles where the camera clipped through the ceiling, forcing you to make a blind jump. Please stop making this a “feature”.
- Terrible lag because it’s in a zerg farming map.
- Ranged weapons can’t kill orbs.
- Sometimes uses of the orb don’t count.
- Previous fights in the same arena can affect your Liadri run.

The outcome is not reasonably determined by the player’s actions:
- Orb spawns add an unwelcome random component for a fight largely dependent on memorization and execution. This works in both directions: my best run rallied off 3 orbs, and I’ve died in way too many pulls to AoE then Visage of Mortality.

Denial of information critical to progress:
- Floor texture makes AoE circles difficult to see.

The outcome of the game is influenced by decisions that were uninformed at the time and cannot be undone:
- Not technically undoable, but for cash-strapped or new players, the mechanics definitely favor damage builds. Thankfully not strictly zerker, but the hard two minute cap means there is a gear check, and in general, one-shot kills as a mechanic favors damage heavy builds since the faster you kill, the shorter the duration you have to sustain a perfect performance. Again, this seems to be the meta for all the coming events (Aetherblade dungeon: kill golems before lasers get you, southsun cove dungeon: soft enrage boss).

The game requires the player to use skills or knowledge that are either incorrect or have nothing to do with the genre:
- Blind effect used on the player. Really, if the standard advice for the fight is to turn off post-processing effects, it should not be part of the design.

And this is just coupled with a couple of design decisions that are just annoyances:
- Tickets are soulbound, so switching characters to try requires farming with each character.
- Each failure costs a little less than 3 silver (~1.5 if you don’t need to waypoint) and no reward at all. It doesn’t even teach you about playing the game in general better, it’s just this weirdly specific memorization routine for this one fight.
- Queue or run back to arena on each failure takes about as long as the fight itself.

To look at the parallel with JPs, it’s these kinds of decisions make the difference between Spekk’s Lab (more challenging jumps, checkpoints in between) and Dark Reverie (easier jumps with terrible camera problems and having to do an entire other jumping puzzle and clearing vet mobs to retry). Looking at the Aetherblade JP and Southsun Skipping Stones JP, ANet certainly seems to be leaning in the direction of increasing frustration as a proxy for increasing difficulty.

This isn’t a question of casual vs. hardcore or masses vs. elites for me, it’s simply a question of whether the game makes me feel like I’m wasting time and getting frustrated (GW2) or whether it’s challenging and promoting a sense of mastery (Rayman, Halos on Legendary)

Liadri just seems symptomatic of the direction that ANet wants to take when increasing difficulty, and the lesson for me is that I will not be the target audience for a “more challenging GW2”. That is the aspect I find alienating.