Showing Posts For Megane.2103:
Anet apparently agrees that games should be tough and not fun.
Anet, for the most part, goes down on record saying that “Get good” is a proper way to plow through content. The game is still not tough, actually adapt for a change instead of just wailing away on keys and you might be surprised at how well you do.
I’d also like to know about this, from what i understand we have a pretty hefty amount of it loaded already (we use the same client for betas, and we could even see regular people while betas were running!) however you probably have a lot of changes, and it would be better to get them to us asap before we have to load at midnight or whatever on Thursday evening/Friday morning.
Reaper, it’s everything Necro should have been from the start. There’s so many build options and so much synergy with the other trait lines it really feels like a direct upgrade, and until Necromancer gets another pass for updating abilitys / making them feel more fun I’d rather just go with the best option for this game’s “dark arts caster”.
I don’t think this game can have a proper trinity at this point, without some serious alterations to targeting players and applying buffs to them.
Trinity games mostly work when they’re tab target, click to heal type combat systems, and simply put, GW2 does not have this. It doesn’t matter if something is more supporty than others, since they’re going to be sacrificing something somewhere (control or damage in this case). Raw healing also isn’t very useful when you get one shot or thrown off a ledge or still have a butt ton of conditions on you.
This whole debacle just sounds like meaningless crying to me.
I’m more concerned that a lot of this will be nerfed. There are some very, very strong combos right now. Which I think is needed, and we’ve always needed, but some of these traits and skills will be incredible in the right circumstances/with the right team/in the hands of the right player.
Holy kitten, the fact that you need to specify these stipulations makes the “very, very strong combos” kind of lackluster and lame. If everyone received nerfs because they were good in the right situation, this game would be absolute garbage.
Excuse me? Why can every profession but Necromancer group support like a boss. Why exactly is this okay with you? Some people just want actual utility that isn’t garbage or actually mobility. we have meother. Our personal utility is pretty so-so and our group utility comes down to a single good well and that’s basically it.
If lifestealing wasn’t a joke in this game, our wells would make sense. Our entire profession would be much more powerful and it might even make up for the lack of mobility, but as it stands everything about our fields and finishers and boon application is garbage, save for a single well that transforms conditions into boons.
I have no idea why they don’t want Necromancer to feel fun. Its going to be really sad when people still just run away from us at five times the rate we could run at them slowly when things go south, or when Necros are still passed up for dungeons, because while they do damage they don’t really stack good boons or have utility an Engineer could do ten times better or an Elementalist just laughs at.
The reason people are upset is that really, the specialization changes nothing that matters. Instead of using a dagger or scepter now, you’re going to swing a sword. Big deal.
Most of those “five portals in one day” people are just flat out lying. The drop rate is too low to get that consistently. I saw some dumb crap in map chat this morning about people linking single portals and telling you then had 5-25 (the 25 was obviously a lie, the 5 is slightly more believable, but really really really unlikely)
You say you see it and you feel it would be easy to do, but understand that in the real world, coding this would be a kittening nightmare. You’ve got over two dozen maps to dynamically control at once with a kind of overarching director that might be separate for each map, while this could be cool, the amount of bugs generated by this would be incredible. RTS AI already has ways to just utterly kittening break it, so why would this be any different? It mostly sounds like you’re talking out your rear here, or that you just don’t have experience in worlds as large as the one GW2 offers.
What you’re talking about is exactly what GW2 is trying to force other games to do, actually. We’ve seen a bunch of games trying to emulate what GW2 has done with its dynamic event systems and just kind of have those systems tacked on to a ton of other games. GW2 was never meant to be the entire revolution, it’s the first battle in a long war to get content created with a different mindset, and each step along the way is a battle in its own right.
I just figured the lack of information was to imply that the expansion is not coming out this year. Why would they frontload everything they can for the expansion when you’re just going to sit on your hands for the next 12-24 months?
I think the reason for Caithe pursing the egg even further was probably to allow the Pale Tree to manufacture its own egg, create a dragon capable of influencing new born Sylvari and grant them lasting protection (and even turning the minions Mordremoth has already when hes finally felled.) and a true rallying point now that the tree is dormant.
That influence is still sort of there, but anyone with doubts in their mind that the Pale Tree can protect them is more than likely a target for Mordremoth’s influence.
Imagine what the Pale Tree could do, if it could just create another elder dragon? On par with Mordremoth? It lacks the ability to right now, but this could be one of the paths that the story takes, fight fire with fire. To a degree, the Sylvari as a whole are already this, they can’t be corrupted into other minions, but come from a particular dragon to begin with, so why not bind them to a -good- dragon instead?
I don’t think you want to put pear skins on your staff. They would eventually rot and get gross and sticky. If you must have a fruit skin, perhaps a pomegranate.
How about a coconut instead? Probably a little bit better for weaponizing anyway.
You have mask twice. Also these options are already available and are commonly used because they fit the professions look and feel.
Actually, this would be a nice change if you could just… smoosh pieces of ascended gear together to get the drop down menu. That’s an extreme grind, and it would definitely be worth it for the extreme player who really loves sinking hours into this game. It wouldn’t really be anything but a convenience for the extreme amount of time it would take to gather all the mats and make full sets of ascended armor for each stat.
I’m just getting a little annoyed at fantasy styled games not having proper spear options, when spears are historically one of the most commonly used weapons across all eras and regions. In games though? They almost don’t exist (unless we’re talking dynasty warriors or something, as there’s like 8 characters that have pole-arms spears or other things that resemble them) just gets on my nerves.
Honestly? I just want to be able to swap to it, immediately on hitting 80 or installing HoT. I’m sick to death of gating mechanics when I don’t care about anything but the reward.
No quests, no far flung areas, no time spent at all, just press a button and boom I’m a Druid, or a whatever names they give the the specializations. You are already, probably, going to be max level before you even get access to them, so why in the world, when its not so weird end tier goal for every character, should they be gated behind anything? There’s no reason whatsoever.
I honestly believe Warrior is going to get a Gunslinger specialization.
So Gunslinger – Warrior
At this point, I feel this is still a holdover from before combo fields and finishers were even in the game, because the Necromancer was actually very close to being finished in late 2009 to the 2010 range.
They have a lot of tools that are just hold overs from that time period that have been gutted or simply taken off the effectivity field since then. No one had even heard of combo fields and finishers until pretty late in the games’ development (At least, if you’d been following it since the first announcement) so it stands to reason that the Necromancer, designed and very nearly finished before these were the in thing around the development team, lacks those sorts of tools.
Since our first initial gut in the betas, we’ve gotten pretty scatter-shot buffs here and there, as well as some much needed band-aids. But are probably due for a redesign on a lot of aspects of this profession. Which ones those are I’ll let the developers decide, but it needs some love in ways other professions don’t. In the past the Necromancer has proven very difficult to balance, so just up and making our skills do more is out of the question. Fundamentals need to change or we’re never going to get anything of substance.
You can imagine how difficult that is when even the best of buffs will have a vocal minority screaming like chickens with their heads cut off that this is clearly the herald of the end times for GW2.
I want to say thank you, I really do. I’ve played with a lot of the devs during a lot of tests, I’ve reported so many bugs on multiple accounts all throughout the betas last year when the game was just budding, and I have to say, I’m never going to touch this profession again.
I played a Necro from launch up until about February this year. I got so frustrated at not being able to do anything in any aspect of the game beyond solo play that I deleted her. I still can’t believe you went through with all the nerfs in the beta weekends. We were pleading with you to look at the bigger picture, and here we are a year later in the most depressing state I’ve ever seen in this game.
It’s not that you haven’t been fixing bugs, or that you haven’t been adding new toys for us to play with, it’s that you created the problem in the first place. If only I could say what I really wanted to say and vent how I wanted to vent, but I’m still bound by NDA for reasons impossible to disclose.
There’s a specific point where you thought Necros would be too powerful, and before things settled you’d gutted half of what makes the other professions great nowadays. (Sustainability, Stability, damage negation, good boon production, working skills, etc.)
I still can’t believe that this profession has practically no access to any current bunker mechanics, despite having a trait line called “Lifesteal” and being defensively focused in general. One or two solitary sources of Retaliation, one ability that grants might, a grand total of two blast finishers (I would kill for something other than projectile finishers, I really would.) and meager fields that don’t really do much when finished, or are extremely short and hard to set up in the first place.
I’m just so disappointed and sad that it’s even at this point at all when it never needed to happen in the first place.
If Necros had everything they had in the beta weekends right now, they’d actually be fairly well balanced, minus maybe one or two things. (Permanent stability was a little crazy, but for a profession with practically nothing for mobility, it honestly wasn’t too bad, we didn’t get knocked around like the pinball we became afterwards, but we weren’t exactly zipping around the battlefield like a robe wearing Thief either.)
I don’t even know what else to say, it’s that depressing. I really hope you learn from the mistakes you’ve made with this profession, and I hope you can be a little humble in realizing that they were mistakes. No one’s perfect, I’m not sure if anyone’s really asking for perfection, but it would’ve been nice to not have been shot in the foot out of the starting gate.
Actually, if you want to compare a similar trait from Engineers, HGH: All Elixirs (Regardless of being thrown, or simply consumed) grant 20 seconds of might. This stacks with both boon and might duration to add a whopping 30ish seconds of might every time you use an elixir, and trust me HGH Engineers pop Elixirs like the bad drugs they are.
A great majority of traits from most professions are in need of some serious overhaul and have been for more than a year now. There are far too many that are just no brainers to never use at all in any build and some that are so strong it’s hard not to use them in the vast majority of builds that you come up with if you happen to be placing traits along those paths anyway.
I like that idea Daemon. I’d also make #4 a charge-up skill, that way we can get our own Killshot…plus make it do more damage the closer the enemy is. Enemy coming your way? Charge up #4 and release it to knock them back and do massive damage.
The only thing I don’t like about this is putting lots of control on a weapon with lots of damage.
Despite how silly I sometimes think the weapon is, look at Greatsword for Warriors. It’s got a perfect theme going, modestly mobile no holds bar damage from the sky. It’s a reckless weapon and to get the most out of it… you need to play reckless (Or at least be able to calculate risk vs reward for using it in any given situation) lest ye suffer the consequences of not really using the weapon well.
If we wanted to make the Longbow into a straight up control weapon, it’s already got the fixings, which might help it find its place among our arsenal. We don’t really have a weapon for “control” like the hammers or maces from other professions, it could be a great option. I see it as a sort of “pin down” kind of theme, you’ve got barrage for larger groups to control, you get a sort of explosive shot to cripple or daze, the auto attack can have varying conditions that reduce the damage dealt from the target (Or perhaps a chain on it?) with cripple being another option. It’d be a cool idea to get it rolling with pure cripples and knockouts.
I’d really love to look at the Longbow as a go to option to control the battlefield, it sort of does that now already, but it’s not particularly good at it. The more I think about it the more I like the idea.
The only issue I have with the interrupts on the Shortbow, is how long it takes them to go out. By the time you actually finish the winding down animation… the target is already back and swinging at you (A one second daze or stun is just so short it isn’t even worth breaking nine out of ten times)
It just feels funny to stun yourself for almost as long as you stun someone else with no real gain (It’s not high damage, it doesn’t go through block or anything, you just kind of get a cute little interrupt?)
I’m really just looking for things that feel better, even if they are not mathematically better. It feels weird for the Longbow to have Rapid Fire when everything else but Barrage is slow and calculated. It could be our really heavy hitter instead of the mess it is now.
And I had never thought of that Bean, Rapid Fire legit shoots just as fast as the auto attack from Shortbow, and that’s a crazy glaring problem. “Rapid Fire” shouldn’t mean “Shoot as fast as your other weapon!”. If they made it faster with less overall damage but also shaved some recharge off of the skill it might make it feel better, but then it still wouldn’t fit with the auto attack because Rapid Fire is the only skill that goes fast on Longbow.
Is there any way to change the auto to both not be so boring and also have the same sort off effectiveness with a different theme?
Don’t get me wrong, neither bow is awful, I’m not here to tell you that everything sucks and that Rangers are in serious need of buffs, I’m just honestly wondering why our bows feel worse than the bows from the other professions that can use them.
Both Warrior and Thief bows take a look at Ranger bows to draw inspiration from, and then spin it on its head to come up with something that isn’t just different, it’s just better.
I drool for my Thief’s shortbow on my Ranger, I really do. It stacks bleed faster, over an AoE, stacks poison faster, has a better evade (Only through the Thieves resource though, since their evade has no recharge rate and instead relies on their Initiative.) and far more mobility than anything else in our weapon sets through Infiltrator’s Arrow.
And then you’ve got the clear cut design for the Warrior’s longbow. It set out to make a multipurpose weapon that goes well with its own theme. It’s got double shot for twice the chance at triggering a burn from the two fire fields it can lay down, it’s got an immobilize to stick people inside fire fields for a longer time its got a quick access to burns over large areas while also having a blind to take the heat off! (Oh the irony)
What do our bows have that preform on par with the theme of these weapons? Both bows seem like a mishmash of weapon skills tossed together because they vaguely fit together on a general theme of “this is a bow” rather than goals for the weapon or rolls for it in general.
The Longbow in particular feels odd. Your auto attack is slow moving and rewarding for a longer distance between you and your target, but Rapid Fire shoots fast and doesn’t care how close you are at all, neither does Hunter’s Shot. Point Blank Shot does care, but doesn’t knock back to the point where you pass the second tier of your auto attack and Barrage feels awkward to use because of its channel time and AoE centric nature. Rapid Fire and Barrage just feel like the odd ones out here, even though by themselves they’re great, I just feel like they don’t really fit with the weapon as a whole, or that the weapon is pulling itself in too many directions theme-wise.
The Shortbow is a little more consistent in that all of it’s abilities apply conditions and are vaguely single target (Lets be real here, how many times have you lit up a huge group of mobs with Poison Volley?) but all of the conditions applied are very short duration and counteract the “Yes! I just flanked this guy!” feel. It was a weapon that seemingly had its sights set on being great for flanking or attacks of opportunity, but then fell short when it didn’t have a real way to keep flanking once engaged. Yes, your pet will generally do a decent job of making sure things aren’t hitting you, or have their back turned to you, but when that fails you just kind of end up circle strafing. The daze / stun helps a bit, as does the cripple, but it’s not really ever enough unless the target’s attention is pulled elsewhere (Like a Thief popping up and he has to be dealt with quickly, so you can plink away at your target’s back, or your pet pulling aggression away from a teammate in a dungeon so you can both have a shot at it’s rear.)
TL, DR: Can we start a discussion on the different themes for the bows in this game? (Not relating so much to power, but a lot more to feel and execution) Some of our traits can fix a few things, but that speaks leagues for the design of the weapons themselves as a whole, quick fixes are never preferable to better design and execution.
If DS had an attack that applied Conditions like bleed or poison it would be functional, as is it will forever remain a power based aspect that really is nothing more than a way to tank some hp for conditionmancers
But, it does. In fact I’m looking at it right now; Dark Path. It applies three stacks of bleed for five seconds and a five second chill.
The only problem with DS is that it’s really only good when used for soaking damage. There’s no reason to build power so it does a piddly amount of damage. It’s got a single target fear on a twenty second recharge.
Death Shroud feels weak because it doesn’t allow us to kill our opponents any faster at all, only outlast. Outlasting isn’t rewarding unless the other opponent is actually trying to outlast you as well, but in most cases he’s just burning through your secondary life pool that you’ll probably have popped after getting knocked down (Because we can’t have nice things like Stability in Death Shroud without going thirty points into Soul Reaping, now can we? No, that was deemed far too powerful, or rather it was an acute design choice because we were pretty powerful in PvP, I’ll at least admit that.)
The entirety of our trait lines really really suffer from outcries, bugs and the redesign of traits into tiers. It’s a cascade of events here, you’ve got the bugs which don’t help, the placement which is pretty awful for key traits, and the generally uselessness of a lot of minors that don’t help many builds, or even potential builds. They need to be more generalized and less specialized. Specialized in terms of line, yes, such as minors that deal with conditions in the tree that increases condition damage that much is perfectly fine and fits with every other trait line in the game. However, many of the minors are completely pointless, especially the percentage increases in Curses.
Condition damage, at this point in time, hits for so little that even if the percent increases worked on them (And many people report that they do not, and have not for an exceedingly long time) You could never notice them. Your bleeds would literally tick for one to five more points of damage. Don’t even get me started on Death Magic’s minors, the final one is fine its a trait line about getting harder to kill, the previous two are hold overs and probably going to be changed.
As for major traits? They don’t really seem to do anything, they don’t feel game changey like they do for various other professions. (Many of whom have their own problems, so lets not get into those.) For Curses, we have a hell of a lot of percent increases and percent on critical effects, which might be cool if the crits from a scepter or staff crit for more than 500 when you’re fighting anything max level while stacking condition gear.
Your absolute best example for traits would be Warrior. You know it is, you’ve actually expressed that you want everyone’s traits to be like theirs. Consolidated, efficient, fun to use. You can see them when they happen, even the recharge reducers, because those cascade into other effects like doing twenty-five percent more damage to disabled foes with a hammer, a weapon built for control. And that’s not a small increase 1/4 more damage whenever you disable someone is pretty huge for a hard hitting weapon like the hammer, and it’s all rolled into the recharge reduction.
I would absolutely do anything, even sitting on jumping puzzles trolling my allies if it meant I got access to the potent, cascading traits that Warriors have.
As it stands, Necromancers have bugs upon bugs, traits that I can scarcely see with a microscope and scaling issues that leave us feeling like a grape left out in the sun. I know most of you guys haven’t slept since launch, but try and level with us here, we both want the same thing: For Necromancers to be a fun profession with a cool theme and all the fixings. (Some literal, some more gravyish)