Guild Wars 2

Prety much everything that I would suggest if I found the time to write it up nicely like the OP.

Great post.

Ehecatl.9172:

I enjoyed Soulbeast overall, but it did have a few shortcomings.

Dagger was very disappointing. I don’t especially like daggers aesthetically, but the attacks felt weak and the ultra short range meant I rarely hit anything (latency issues).

Stances are pretty boring. I liked the heal well enough because we really needed a condi cleansing heal that didn’t rely on a trait and wasn’t Healing Spring. The rest seem pretty straight forward. The elite shout is interesting when combined with Rapid Fire, but I’m unsure if the damage boost is worth an elite slot.

I’d like an ability to swap my pets in Beast Mode. I already switch between beast mode and normal to utilize my pets independently when needed and to set up my might spam combo, so this isn’t about camping Beast Mode. When I pick a pet for defensive reasons I can’t get to the pet when I need that defense as it stands, which means I may as well not be using a defensive pet at all. Nobody plans their condition cleanses 7+ seconds in advance. I was excited to see my old friend the Marsh Drake gave resistance, but then quickly realized I’d never get to use it.

Some pet abilities are pretty weak. I’m not sure why I’d ever use Chomp or even Tail Swipe as it stands. Long animation for the payoff I could get from an auto attack. Speaking of animations, it would’ve been nice to get something like chomping spirit jaws when using Bite or Chomp rather than… Throwing a punch? That’s a pathetic animation and doesn’t make me feel like I’ve channeled the beast at all.

I love the synergy with the Beastmaster line and how much selfish damage boosts you can push out of the spec. Though I expect that will be severely nerfed in later versions of the class, which is unfortunate. A remorseless Soulbeast with Sic’em is a pretty strong combo.

Basically all of the above, nicely put.

-We really need the ability to change our pets while in beast mode. I will give you an example: lets say you just pet swaped and merged with a damage pet (rock gazzele or smokescale) suddenly the situation turns and you are under heavy pressure, most of your defensive skills are on CD and there is no way to access your other pet (defensive) to use Unflinching Fortitude. Even if the pet spaw is ready, it would still take another 8 sec to acces that ability (jump out of soulbeast->pet swap->waith another 8 sec till you can use soulbeast again->Unflinching Fortitude); which in a pvp situation is way too much time. A defensive skill like that should be possible to be accessed reactivly; simmilar as signet of stone/endure pain, etc. etc.. Same goes for the condi cleanse. I totaly understand and get the pros of swaping in and out of soulbeast; making use of the pet abilites, while beast ones are on cd is jut one of them.

Why not give those of use who want to make the best use of the ranger (soulbeast) the ability to do so, and to those that want to stay in soulbeast forever, also the ability to do so.

-The dagger, it really is way too weak AA and Dobule Arc lack the damage (the gap closer is also somehow bugged, pressing the skill once, trigers the skill 2 times, one after another, same as pressing the button twice).

-Alot of pet abilities are also way too weak. I will give a few examples of those that I remember:
-Bite (feline) is just another sword AA (first in chain->the weakest), basically no real reason to ever use this skill. The damage should be upped by ALOT.
-The bird “Swoop” ability doesen’t go the 1200 range (more like 900 range) and it has a a long aftercast at the end. This makes the ability useless as a gap closer.

My two cents:
-As other have mentioned, we need another way to cancel kneeling. Pressing spacebar would be optimal. I suggest keeping dodge+kneeling the way it is: this opens up more ways to play (it is really useful with silent scope; silent scope→dodge (a melee is on your neck)→burst him down in a few secs).
-This weapon definitely needs more range: 1500 standard and 1800 when kneeling or even 2000 would be good. For example; ranger longbow, even though the range states 1500 range, the projectile travels at least 1800 range, and the ranger can move while shooting (=more range than deadeye kneeling+moving at the same time).
The deadeye SNIPER rifle should have longer range than ranger longbow when kneeling-considering you can’t move while kneeling and all that (don’t go and nerf ranger longbow now).
-Projectile speed is kinda low and the AA damage is too weak.
-Kneeling should be faster.
-Maintaining swiftness out of combat is also a problem on deadeye (spamming traited steal for swiftness on all the creeps is not so intuitive).

bump here, pets still bugged as described in the OP

You can no longer cast Ancestral Grace while mid air.

Lazy fix Anet and you know it.

It is just an ranged AOE spammable backstab, that doesent even need to hit from behind for max damage. It Is perfetclty balanced guys, its all OK!

Hammer damage is ridiculously OP, to name one thing I noticed:D

OGDeadHead.8326:

Afaik, this was never an intended mechanic at all. If I’m right in that, crying about nerfing an exploit feels more than silly, especially since druids got an incredible boost to AF regen this last patch.

That said, I wouldn’t mind if they go ahead and change this so that it would actually be possible to target allies with the beam .

The main problem is that they removed the ability to cast the AA whenever you want. They removed the “freedom” that every other weapon in the game enjoys. Reminds me of some old school MMOs where you couldn’t cast your AA without a target.

They obviously did that to remove the OOC astral force regen, which doesn’t make any sense as they introduced more OOC astral force regen elsewhere.

The saddest thing of all is that instead of doing some proper programming, they resorted to the laziest fix ever, by simply locking out the auto attack.

Other basically said it. Auto attack on druid staff is now the ONLY auto attack in game that can’t be used without a target.

There was no reason for this change as other pointed out, as there are still other ways to regen astral force out of combat… If you felt that the astral force regen on staff out of combat was out of place (which it really wasn’t, it was practical-instead of spamming troll unguent constantly, we had an alternative). If anything, you should have changed that the proper way, not with LAZY PROGRAMMING.

If the reason for the change was the kittened auto attack sound, this still doesn’t warrant the change, as you had a perfect-non annoying sound effect on staff 1 in the one and only beta weekend for druid already. Oh wait, druid is still going through beta phases with such kittened changes! /s

After the AF degen out of combat into the smoke scale fiasco, it feels like you guys want to throw some kittened kitten at us each month now. I am getting seriously angry/sad. Druid now feels like a kittening cripple (no offence to cripples), not being able to cast the AA whenever I want.

I am generally a super calm person, but this is just way too much. We don’t want to deal with kittened changes each month-I would much rather spend my energy playing the actual game. kitten you ANET and look at the “No offence…” post again pleas, while you are at it put it on replay, thanks.

Jim Hunter.6821:

That problem is as old as the game, people just got tired of bringing it up.

Currently it is 10x worse than it ever was.

It is by far the biggest issues I have in WvW atm. I get this mainly on longbow-it seems to mainly affect projectiles. I am not over exaggerating If I say that in some fights my longbow has a 80% obstructed rate-it is frustrating.

Pet HP should be same as it is in pve currently. It is just a too big of a punishment when a pet dies, as alot of times you can’t do anything to prevent that, especially in wvw. Reducing the cooldown for pet swap would also help-CD for the dead pet is way too huge, leading to the death of the 2nd pet, as you can’t even pet swap (for 50 sec I beleive?) after the first one died. Keeping the cd at 20 sec, even if a pet died, would also make total sense (not like there are tactics to focus down pets) they ussualy die when you can’t do anything to prevent it.

vespers.1759:

LionZero.3479:

Projectiles are currently a mess anyway in HoT, things obstruct a lot more for no reason specially on lord npc’s, yet at the same time projectiles can partly hit through walls and portals, just another feature in the long list of features.

Longbow ranger is a frustrating experience. OBSTRUCTED! OBSTRUCTED! OBSTRUCTED! oh a gentle slope? OBSTRUCTED!

I haven’t played ranged in so long i wondered if it has always been like this… but it is really just the expansion?

This is a huge problem, especially in WvW since expansion. Getting obstructed on flat terrain, often is really annoying. It used to be alot better, like 99% better some time ago. Would be great if they fixed it, it is kinda frustrating.

Suggestion:
Add an option to show crosshair for standard aim mode, while holding down the right mouse button.
This way you would be able to free aim easier when in standard mode. Currently, free-aim can be quite hard at times, and the camera has to be moved really far down for the projectile to fly parallel to the ground.

Honestly, the best option would be to implement 2 player usable abilities to pets. Every one would be happy (apart from those that are never happy:D).

12 seconds seems a little OTT:D 8 or so would seem more balanced.

Thinking about it, a toggle as OP is suggesting would actually be great, if having a target would affect this:
Switching target and pressing F1 would always prioritise attack and after that it would cycle: come back to me→attack→come back to me→ attack → new target →attack, and no target obviously would just function as “come back to me”. Although maybe a toggle between “attack nearest target” and “come back to me” without a target would make sense.

This is a great idea, and there are actually more options how to implement this. I personally would add the second ability to a quick double press of the attack button.

This would also fix the smoke scale problem: assault attack and smoke filed could be both used on demand!

Either way, getting control over both main pet abilities would be a great improvement for ranger pet control, and I am sure it could be done without losing any of the existing pet control.

Thanks for communication Irenio! I guess we are gona write this alot of times down, but this is also a problem in pvp (smallscale) not just pve.

The main problem by far is that the energy depleats out of combat. It is not fun at all compared to BWE!

Celestial avatar should be availible when first entering combat and it should stay at the position it was when you get downed. The way it worked in the beta was perfect, and the needed nerf to base heal and a CD for celestial avatar have been added! Note: the way it is now reaching the avatar CD is only possible in large scale with staff, where you can hit 5 allies+5 enemies constanly, thus gaining alot of celestial energy. In small scale (spvp, solo pve, roaming, few friends runing arround) the auto depletion of celesital energy, combined with harder to fill up the bar, makes it not fun at all and a problem! This can lead into many fights back to back, where you can’t use celestial avatar, because the time inbetween fights depleats the bar, while the fights alone lasted too shortly to be able to fill up the bar and use it!

I didn’t want to say it, but I had high hopes in Irenio, and this is a huge let down. Please revert this change and don’t wait months fort he fix.

Great expansion otherwise Anet, at least the new pve zones, they are actually a blast!

EDIT: If this is not Irenios fault I apologize.

My feelings are pretty much the same as the poster above. I am writing primarily about the astral force nerf.

In HotM you need to kill 9 golems with longbow (nb1+rapidfire) just to fill up astral force. Than you go out of combat to test it on another mob and loose all of it before being able to do anything. Now translate this into small scale pvp-it does not work well. The main problem is the auto depletion out of combat, and partially slow astral force gain on single target damage.

This is not something people expected after the one and only beta for druid. This is a huge and unneded nerf and a huge letdown. Astral force needs to not auto-deplete once out of combat. The way it was in beta was fine! It was fun, it was usable, it was almost perfect! The way it is now, it just makes people sad. Whats the point of having a 10 sec CD on the avatar, when you can’t even achieve this CD in most normal situations. The base healing reduction was needed, adding a CD to avatar was needed, agreed. These were the two main things needed changin, auto-depleating astral force was not needed.

Please look into this. I was actually hyped for druid (druid was great to play in the one and only BWE), now I am just sad. Yes I am sad. I couldn’t wait to get home after work at launch day until I read the forums.

What the hell : (

EDIT: I was hoping this was a silly “joke” but this change seems like such a silly nerf if it is really true. Hopefully, hopefully it is an unintended change. One can hope.

Great changes and QoL improvements!

Some people look too negatively at the avatar CD, 10 seconds seems fairm considering the energy will be now easier to build with other weapons, and we don’t lose all the energy if leaving CA.

And as you are obviously still working on changes-#2 is the most lacking ability on staff by far (probably the only lacking ability now).

Also please look into bristlbacks spike barrage-in the beta it had huge problems hiting moving targets-even slow moving ones.

One small bump to smoke scale would also be great. His active ability-add a slow pulsing blind to it, so it won’t be just usefull for blasting!

Thanks Irenio.

I am even more HYPE HYPED now.

hype.

Ehecatl.9172

I am glad that Celestial Avatar is getting more damage, which may alleviate some of my following concerns, but I can’t stress enough how important it is that Celestial Avatar remains a valuable mechanic without any healing investment at all.

I fully understand and support the notion that to have the best healing you should have to invest in healing power. It’s only logical. However the fact Celestial Avatar is so completely devoted to healing means that if you lower the base healing of the skills too much the form will be outright useless to anyone without healing power on their gear. Celestial Avatar is a class mechanic and is not optional if you spec into druid. It would be a shame for it to only have value if you’re sporting healing power.

Like I said in my first paragraph, adding more damage to the Avatar State may alleviate some of my concerns as a more damage oriented build could compensate for lower healing in exchange for the ability to pressure people off them as they heal up more slowly. I just don’t want to see this mechanic make you weaker than base if you try to use it without the right stat spread.

No one should spec into druid for the glyphs, Ancient Seeds, or other abilities and find Celestial Avatar useless to their build.

If I was able to express myself as well in English as Ehecatl, my words on the matter would be pretty much the same as his-please do don’t make celestial avatar healing meaningless without healing power.

1387 healing power (compared to below 40 healing power)
ancestral grace (staff 3): 3130 – 80% more
Cosmic ray (celestial 1): 1130 33% more
Lunar impact (celestial 3): 3700 – 22% more
Rej. tides (staff 4): 1225×5 – 20% more
Troll:1057 – 19% more
Water blast: 1661 20% more

30% more healing on allies is not counted in: 20% from Natural Mender and 10% from monk runes-both need allies to work.

40 healing power:
ancestral grace (staff 3): 1736
Cosmic ray (celestial 1): 852
Lunar impact (celestial 3) 3039
Rej. tides: 1016×5
Troll:889
Water blast: 1382

20% more healing on allies is not counted in: 20% from Natural Mender-needs allies to work.

All testing above was done on myself that’s why natural mender/monk runes are not counted in.

If you strictly look at the numbers, the base healing is not so much out of the line. Don’t forget that Celestial Avatar doesen’t provide the druid any additional survival utilities in the form of stability, slows, evades, gap closes, other defensive boons, thus making the druid really vulnurable in this state-if the enemies know what they are doing! (speaking about pvp ofcourse)

Decreasing the base healing by 10% or so and increasing the scaling by 30% or so would make the healing power scaling meaningful, same as it is already for Ancestral grace. We are basically concerned that Celestial Avatar, without any aditional healing power, will not be similarly meaningful as now.

ProtoMarcus.7649:

• Possibly Unintended Behaviour – Can be cast while falling, which can give access to some interesting areas (can be cast while falling after stowing gliders for example)
• Possibly Unintended Behaviour – Can be cast when there are no valid paths (for example, across gaps)
  _____________________

Please let this be intended! This is a huge part of why Ancestral Grace is such a fun skill. Not being able to cast this skill after a jump would mean that you wouldn’t be able to cross any gap with it in the game and that would be a huge . Many for the druid otherwise, gj!

My opinions on Druid:
Staff 1: bump up the damage by a little/possibly add short burn as suggested before.
Staff 2: really lacking, definitely needs much faster travel speed and more damage/healing/adding something like a cripple. Should be a threat-currently there is only nuber 4 that needs to be looked out for, and even that skill is lacking.
Staff 3: great skill, adding a evade for the duration would be really great though. Also it needs some polishing-the cast ends at 90% and
many times you get stuck for a short duration at the end of the cast. Also if cast to a short location,
the cast time takes full duration.
Staff 4: lacking a little bit-cast time seems a little long and travel time a little short for the effect (1 second immob duration is pretty weak)
Staff 5: it has a water field built in but the field radius is really small(radius of 240 would be nice), also increasing the cast range to 1200
would make this a really nice combo field for staff 3 (cast 5 max range into number 3 at 1200 range, that would be epic).

Avatar 1: Seems OK the way it is-some pre hit indication where the heal will land would help though
Avatar 2: The healing should be same or more as number 1, animation seems kinda kitten as some others mentioned
Avatar 3: Great skill, but it is bugged as people mentioned – doesn’t blast and doesn’t seem to land where it is supposed to,
daze duration reduced would also make sense
Avatar 4: Again a great and useful skill
Avatar 5: Really situational-seems to lack something.

Smokescale is great-finally a pet with some damage, and not totally squishy! The smoke field it has is also really useful, but it seems to lack something-a pulsing blind! That way it would be more useful than just a blast field in pvp.
Bristle back is pretty great too, especially its looks. His active ability is quite lacking, changing the current active ability with spike barrage would be great!
Also spike barrage the way it is now has ALOT of problems hitting moving targets-need faster projectile speed.
Electric wyvern is also pretty great, it just seems to lack a bit of damage compared to the other two pets above. Overall some nice new pets.

Overall I am impressed with what you guys have done, keep up the great work!

Video showing the issue:

Basically after you cast Plague, it immidiately than exits Plague, as if the game would double click it. It is a rare bug that happend to me a few times before, but I could only confirm it now, that I captured it. As I explained in the video, even if I spammed my keybind (which I don’t) that shouldn’t be possible to happen. I only noticed this in the past weeks, not once in the 14 months before that. It is a rare bug, as I said, but its a huge one.

Also I don’t believe my key is broken as I tested it on different things, and again I shouldn’t be able to bypass the 1 second cooldown.

As OP said, this game is doing the gear thing completely different than what they promised us .“There will be no gear treadmill in our game, cause its bad” well you have gear treadmill in your game now, and thats what we call being a hypocrite. To top it off, ascendand weapons, and probably also armor (when it is released, yay) are obtainable only through the most boring grind ever (while the accessories are laughably easy to obtain, time gated yeah, but still boring and easy to get).

SaruTen.9531:

Well so TUP has a good mesmer, but your roaming team is very bad

I loved wasting your time, focus your reroll, kill you, well you got me at the end, GG guys xDD

We didn’t waste our time, we were doing our daily:) I would had you with my ranger several times but sadly you ran away with your great sword. Well at the end you charged us like a headless chicken and died, as your screen shot shows. So all good:)

tetrodoxin.2134:

Thanks to all the duelists I’ve met today on Kodash BL, especially some guys from TDS and that insane TUP ranger! Quite entertaining fights

Really enjoying this matchup so far. Lots of 1v1s, 2v2s and 3v3s. Kodash and AG, I think I love you <3

Thank you 2, for the duels! I just remembered by your RAGE tag (and your nice colors), that we allready roaming-dueled a few days ago. Big fun. : )

Parthis, yes! One of the best fights in EB I had! Couldn’t belive it lasted so long, and without interuption though: ) What retaliation? my poor ranger has none: D

climbatize.8729:

Oh well im in for the 10v10’s mainly since im sure i have that many interested.

Would be nice if i get some action with you TuPies this week , looking forward to see the 2 TuP groups runing about on a bl that some GH reported to me!

And , soz but cant ressist :p

Medozorz.5920:

I think that is a bit unlikely to happen, as we consider 10v10 to small for our setup(kinda). All our builds etc. are made for a little bigger numbers.

Thats an unlikely way to run away from a fight!!

No, you run away, because you don’t wanna do 20v20. See what I did there? (I am sure you have more than 10 active members.)

On a serious note; Its just the fact that our guild doesen’t really do small scale stuff like 10 people (we do it after raids some times with the remaining people online, in troll mode).

On the other side you probably run 20+ rarely or never, and thats why you don’t wanna do 20v20(im just guessing).

climbatize.8729:

how about you shrink a bit and do a 10v10 with us? :p

I think that is a bit unlikely to happen, as we consider 10v10 to small for our setup(kinda). All our builds etc. are made for a little bigger numbers. (we go down to 15v15 but 20v20 or a little higher is the sweet spot for many guilds). But hey it all depends on the raid leaders: D

multivira.7925:

That video made me spit out my popcorn

Exactly:(

But The show must go on!

NO! We like the bug!!

Hey guys, greetings from TUP. We are stuck with 2 german servers (again) so we tryed to make the best out of it at reset, when things are paper! : D

The rest of the week is solid, but no where near the reset action.

Video from reset. Best time to fight german servers, as towers and keeps are paper. Hope you like the video.

Video from this reset. Hope you like it guys. : )

Hey, our little last stand in bay:

Hope you like it:)

The video is blury, which makes it hard to see what you are fighting. Or even how many there are, because you can’t read anything. Even seperating clones from players is hard. You can’t even see guild names(if there is a guild group on the other side and being able to judge the fight).

But I like your gameplay, but it looks like you are playing on a gamepad, which makes the ground targeted stuff a bit slow compared to mouse. You can’t even look behind you when moving away from enemy without being forced to strafe.

I should go sleep probably:P

+1
Message Body length must at least be 15.

Here you go juno.

juno.1840:

Medozorz.5920:

Getting 1k+ kills (probably being modest here, it depends from class to class) after a good raid is nothing unusual for top organised guilds. So that 133k kills number must be correct:)

hehe “…must be correct” — This made me laugh a lot. How about this: “It’s not unusual for a player to get less than 10 kills an hour, so the 900/day number must be incorrect”.

I think anything less than a screenshot is just wasted text at this point.

Guess you will just have to wait for a screenshot than. Our guild leader must be somewhere up there with the kills 2 *not quite as much but still

Getting 1k+ kills (probably being modest here, it depends from class to class) after a good raid is nothing unusual for top organised guilds. So that 133k kills number must be correct:)

bump, jumping is broken

The French are taking revenge for the reset day.

Kirby.4951:

Shrinkshooter.6715:

Medozorz.5920:

You just don’t know how to use it.

I don’t imagine mashing a number is all that difficult.

Sword jump is superior to the one greatsword has, as it has a longer jump, lower CD and a cripple at the end, you just need to use it properly.

The “sword jump” is not anywhere close to being as far as the GS jump. Swoop has a range of 1,100 while Monarch’s Leap is 600. This is on the wiki but also stupidly easy to see in any tests you do. Swoop is by far the longest jump we have.

The differences are mainly that while Swoop has a very long range and is instant, it has no cripple and the cooldown is longer. The issue with Monarch’s Leap is having to do that godawful dodge roll backwards first, which can make positioning and timing a bit stupid sometimes, especially for combo fields that don’t last long, and it doesn’t go quite as far.

You can use the 1 handed sword as a double jump. You roll away then turn, untarget, and use the leap. Moves farther then the gs jump with more control and an evade during the jump.

Thank you to explaining that for me, I was not clear enough.

If you learn how to use swords number 2 (not just button mash), it is more usefull than greatswords number 3, as it has a greater range useful for both chasing and escaping(if you use both sting and leap in the same direction), despite the tooltip saying otherwise (about the range). There is also a lower CD, an evade and a cripple all in one skill (sword).

Greatsword only has a lower range jump with a greater CD.

I totaly agree with OP, the greatsword damage is too weak, compared to the other weapons.

And regarding the greatsword versatility, it is easily beaten with sword+horn.
The best distance closing ability for rangers has One handed-sword., and not Greatsword. You just don’t know how to use it.

Sword jump is superior to the one greatsword has, as it has a longer jump, lower CD and a cripple at the end, you just need to use it properly. Plus call of the wild is jut all around great(horn).

BIG +1 to the OP
Regarding the pets; the dogs/wolfes do roughly the same dmg as cats/birds, but are quite more resistant do dmg.
Plus the most annoying thing besides the pet unresponsivness, is the sword skill number 1, because it stucks you in place/on your target, even when you HAVE to use dodge.