Guild Wars 2

You can’t just make these little tiny bandaid changes, you have to comprehensively reform the system.

- Add a proper in-game LFG system. Like what we had with the Christmas jumping puzzle.
- Get rid of dungeon tokens entirely, or turn them all into one type of currency
- Add a ‘Join Specific Dungeon’ button, with a 24h lockout timer for each dungeon.
- Add a ‘Join random dungeon’ button, no lockout on that.

That’s exactly how WoW’s LFG system works, and that system is the only way to get people to play every single dungeon, instead of just what’s easiest and fastest.
Right now people pick CoF because: It’s easy, it’s good money, it’s got the most popular stat combos (Berserker, Rabid [I think?], Rampager).
I know what you’re going to say, ‘BOO LFG! Then everyone will be a jerk and min/max and leave the second the run goes poorly!!’, well it’s already like that.
You already have “LF3M zerker warriors only!!!”, you already have people leaving the group and causing the entire party to get kicked, you already have people going in with poor gear, and people being asked to link all their gear.
At least with the LFG system you can actually enforce bare minimums, you can punish people for leaving dungeons prematurely, and you can disincentivize running the easiest dungeon.

Why are Necros bad in Fractals?
I switched to Necro after a friend started playing Guardian with me in Fractals, and I feel like my Power / Pre / Condi gear lets me do a lot of AoE damage.
It’s true they don’t have any projectile reflect, minimal friendly buffs, minimal condition cleansing (compared to a Guardian), but if you already have a Guardian or Mesmer doing tons of projectile reflect and condition cleansing, it just seems to me like a Necro is a good choice for damage and debuffs while being more durable than the a Thief or Warrior (you can even DS the Agony damage).

Well, I guess without some way to record combat logs and parse them, we’ll never really be able to intelligently discuss DPS classes

What difficulty level are you doing? The harder difficulties (20+, 30+ something like that?) drops tier 6 crafting mats.
I don’t think it’s more money than rushing p1 of CoF, but not much is other than “playing” the market.

Projectile Reflect (or Absorb) and condition cleansing (particularly AoE party cleanses) almost trivialize this dungeon.

There’s a few “gotcha” bosses like the guy that starts shotgunning people for being in melee, and the Necromancer boss that turns invulnerable while flying around, but otherwise as long as you have constant projectile reflect, constant condition cleansing, you’ll be good

It’d be nice to get a “We’re aware of the issue and looking into it” red post

OP, the manifesto was thrown out the day they announced Ascended gear.

Regarding balance, Grenade Engineer with the traits that cause debuffs on crit seems to be pretty good damage?
I don’t even really know, I so rarely see any Engineers let alone ones that know their class well enough to make a meaningfully noticeable contribution, I can’t really give you any useful tips on how to get the most out of Engie.

And do indeed stay away from the Engie forums, those guys are convinced their class is OP and nerfs are justified.

I don’t know of any testing, the wiki seems to think that flat bonuses don’t stack.
If you want to test it yourself make a Warrior go to The Mists, equip steady weapons, try Sigil of Force and the Sigil of +damage to CC’d targets, then use Bull Rush against a golem and compare against steady weapons with just one of those active

Direngrey.8376:

I start all my dungeons to avoid being griefed out and having my spot sold. And or network errors.

That’s nice that you found a (bad) work around.
ArenaNet hasn’t fixed it because it’s low on their priority list or they don’t even know about it.
If people don’t complain about it, it won’t get raised on the priority list.

Direngrey.8376:

Then you need to start the instance yourself instead of leeching explorable mode from someone whose completed the story. It isn’t flawed at all.

Then if I leave the party gets kicked. Are you going to say it’s their fault for not starting the dungeon?

It’s a flawed system, it’s that simple.

It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s absolutely infuriating!

How in the world can a system like this exist, how do we not all have dungeon IDs assigned to us, how is there not a system to dynamically reallocate ownership of the dungeon when someone leaves?
And this isn’t new, it’s been like this for seven months!

I am so mad right now, I can’t even think straight.

I love stealing that 30 second stability on my Mesmer

From a technical perspective this video is really poor. A non-Necromancer is going to have no idea what’s going on, or what point you’re trying to make.

Some constructive tips:

Film during the day cycle, use fewer words to say more, try pausing the video as specific times and pointing things out. There was this great Ranger video (can’t find it now) where two guys in SPvP showed how their pets could be kited without even trying, and how a Ranger’s arrows could be made to Miss while an Ele fired back at the same range and hit.
It got a lot of play and contributed to the arrow speed change for Rangers.

Anyway video aside, MM necros are a joke, I kill their pets without even meaning to. There isn’t even a meaningful punishment for killing their pets (unlike Mesmer clones), and losing them is very painful for the MM (unlike a clone mesmer). You’d think they would be reversed.

I hate how the rarest skins in the game are gotten by being good at the market, not at the game.
So many things in this game are tied to menial grind or gold, so little is tied to difficult Achievements or genuine challenge.

Even WoW nowadays has rewards tied to Achievements.

Magic Find gear is a bad game design concept. It lets a player make it harder for the group to succeed so that he can personally get better loot.

Magic Find should be a difficulty slider at the start of the Dungeon that the party decides on.

The new gear grind isn’t fun, if I wanted a gear grind I’d play WoW.
I’ve basically quit playing GW2 because of the Laurels. It’s very clear to me ANet can’t think of or doesn’t have the manpower to implement things that aren’t a grind.

Sorry, I’m done with grinding. I did a lot of it in EverQuest and WoW; it’s old and boring and I’m tired of it now and I won’t waste my time on it.

I play a Necro and a Guardian (also a Thief in wubwub)
As most people here have said in this thread, Necro is fun and all, but it’s PvE support options just don’t stack up to the ease, reliability, flexibility, and power of Guardian or Ele support options.
They aren’t necessarily bad, just inferior, so it’s better to play to some other role or niche.

To the handful of people saying “Well they’re good to me! I do just fine!” that doesn’t really help the class get better; frankly I encourage everyone (regardless of main really) to make alts of other classes and play them to level 10 or in SPvP a bit, so that they understand fighting with and against those classes and have some understanding of their mechanics.
If you’ve played a Shout Guardian, you understand how much easier it is to constantly cleanse debuffs, provide constant boons, and actually revive people in the midst of super deadly Fractal mechanics by applying Focus 4 and Aegis repeatedly

JonPeters.5630:

Don’t worry we wouldn’t leave you behind. Locust is getting improved as well.

Glad to hear it. Now how about making it more rewarding to activate all signets?
And I don’t just mean a CD tweak, how about reworking the actives to fit the passives (and this goes for all classes).

For example: Locust is about running fast. How about the Active gives me 15 seconds of Swiftness and X seconds of stability.

How about for Guardians, Signet of Wrath passive is currently +Condition damage, how about Active: double that Condition damage for x seconds and your next x swings cause Burning and Blindness.

A creative overhaul to some pretty boring skills, along with a numbers tweak.

You’ll find out in time once you try them at 80 in a dungeon (sooner really, but especially at 80) that Minions are low damage, low survivability, marginal utility, long cooldown, and occasionally behave in uncontrollable / unexpected ways that result in problems ranging from tiny nuisances to group wipes.

In GW1 minions could function as mindless fodder because the spell to cast them just cost mana, which you got back as things around you (including the minions themselves) died.
Since you can’t spend lifeforce in GW2 to summon minions (and they don’t give you any lifeforce when they die anyway except the Jagged Horror), and their summoning spells have a cooldown, they’re basically crappy Ranger pets that don’t heal out of combat.

I’d like to see alternate, skill-based ways to get Rewards. Right now it’s pretty much “spend x hours to get your reward”, you can’t really make it go faster or slower (other than complete failure / technical issues), it’s pretty much just stay on the treadmill for x hours.

What I mean by skill based rewards is hard optional bosses with special victory conditions that give significant extra rewards for doing the boss in a certain amount of time, or keeping x things alive, or whatever.

For expansions, I’d like to see the next rewards tied to completion of stuff. Completion of every Dungeon, every zone, every personal story quest (with an option at the end to redo the ones you didn’t pick first go around, like in GW1 Nightfall), and every achievement (with extra hard ones added in).

That’s a lot more fun than grind 1 million karma and 800 gold, or grind 1830 fractal tokens.

It’s insanity that Robert Hrouda has to spot a random forum post on the subject before it gets changed.

Where is the QA, where is the system to bring this sort of thing to your attention without needing a forum post from the community weeks after it’s already live?
And this isn’t even the first forum post about the Simple vs Versatile infusion.

Get a Public Beta Environment going already so you can get proper testing!
World of Warcraft has one, League of Legends has one, everybody has one but us!

What you’re talking about is aesthetics and the aesthetic of the Necro is largely based on how it was in Guild Wars 1.

In GW1 (and in GW2) you don’t control the dead. You are granted the power of Grenth in exchange for the energy you steal (“Soul Reaping”) from the dying.
Necro minions are made of corpse bits (corpses are “exploited”) but they aren’t zombie or skeletal undead.

Those undead are an abomination, as they are the souls of the dead confined to a rotting shell (whether flesh or skeletal), and are basically the work of evil magic.
It’s a deliberate distinction that our enemies in GW1 (Shiro, The Lich, rogue Necros, etc) used zombies and skeletal undead, just as our enemy Zhaitan uses zombies in GW2.

Those creatures are slaves, while our minions are but the power of Grenth loaned to us as mindless fleshy constructs, though fueled by death and the power of the soul, they are not the souls of the dead themselves.

Anyway I’m sure you don’t care about any of that and are just trolling, but for anyone else that feels like Necro minions border on the kitten bits from different corpses floating around side rather than the horrifying undead zombie side, well it’s deliberate.

I read a great suggestion the other day that really should be repeated here:

Change the trait so that if your Bone Minion dies (due to detonation), it spawns a Jagged Horror (that behaves the same way it does now).

That gives you some measure of choice and control, which seems to me like the core problem of the ability — it goes off randomly and behaves unpredictably. I’m not saying its AI and other stats shouldn’t also be tweaked, but I think the trait as it stands is pretty unimaginative and unfun.

It’s also, in my opinion, a better homage to the skills from Guild Wars 1, when your fleshy minion died and turned into a pile of walking bones that were quickly falling apart.

Asura is clearly the correct answer for all classes, as they are vastly superior to all other races on Tyria.
All of the Asurian colleges agree on this fact, even the Inquest agree.
Any statement to the contrary is most likely Bookah propaganda and should be disregarded.

The ICD is pretty annoying, considering it only appears while you’re in combat and the dodge bar is already a limiting factor, I can only contribute it to a design philosophy of deliberately keeping Necromancers complex and with limitations, but that ultimately results in them just being flat out weak.

I don’t know which one is better from a numerical “paper theorycraft” perspective, but I’ll tell you that as a Guardian, your support skills are a lot less of a hassle to get people to make use of.

As a Guardian no one has to stand in a Well to get healed, or be near a Mark or a Well to get cleansed, or anything of the like.
If you want to cleanse someone you just get within 900 units of them and use a Shout (with Pure of Voice trait).
If you want to heal people and apply Regeneration you just use Hold the Line, or your healing Virtue, or your auto-attack from Mace, or drop the Mace 2 symbol on top of a melee (people generally know to stack on Guardian symbols anyway, since Guardian Hammer symbol gives Protection, and people group with Guardians way more than with Necros).

Also, there’s just a social stigma against Necro. Part of it is that people don’t understand the class, don’t know what it can do, and because it’s a high skill ceiling low skill floor class, they’ve likely often grouped with underperforming Necros while at the same time not realized what benefits a good Necro actually brought to them (a real double whammy).
As a Guardian everything I do is very flashy and obvious; it’s very obvious when I put down a wall and reflect projectiles, it’s very obvious when I’m reviving someone and a big bubble is surrounding them, it’s very obvious when I shout “STAND YOUR GROUND!” and no one gets knocked away by a harpy bolt, or when a big blue shield crest appears on your character and the word BLOCKED comes up across your screen after some boss was winding up a huge whack but instead you took no damage.
I’ve heard “Phew thank goodness for Aegis!” so many times. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “Phew thank goodness for that carefully timed Darkness well!” or the like.

Again, none of this necessarily means that Necro is intrinsically bad; but you’ll certainly have to work much harder, receive a lot less praise, and often go unrecognized. Meanwhile even a mediocre Guardian is an asset, while a truly great one (one that uses Aegis skills to block important things, cleanses, uses Stability smartly, revives people quickly, provides constant AoE healing, etc) will really shine.

If they “fix” this, they better fix:

Rangers using Haste to stomp.
Guardians using Stand Your Ground to stomp
Warriors using Haste or Balanced Stance to stomp
Thieves using Stealth to stomp
Engineers using Elixir S to stomp
Elementalists using Mistform to stomp

Seriously, every class except Mesmer can do some form of uninterruptable stomp and I’m sure Mesmer can too with Distortion or Mass Stealth or something.

The TL;DR of this post is don’t both with Sigil / Runes, just pester a Guardian to keep activating Virtue of Justice

A Guardian activating Virtue of Justice with a full party will cause a Burn whose duration is equal to the cooldown of reapply it (on one target), so as long as you’re with a Guardian you’re doing Burning for free.

If they aren’t activating the Virtue they’re bad and you should pester them, there’s no reason not to activate it especially if someone in the party is using +condition damage, plus if they have at least 5 points in Virtues activating it gives everyone some Might

This is a pretty simple “Quality of Life” fix that should have been in all along, just like the sorts of fixes Ranger pets have received.

It’s clumsy and stupid to have to rely on Well of Blood / Mark of Blood / etc as an out of combat regen; playing the class for five minutes should make that apparent to anybody; that people have gotten used to working around this oversight doesn’t make it any less of an oversight.

The lack of a 75 token Offensive Simple Infusion seems like a simple oversight that can be easily corrected either by adding an Simple Offensive infusion, or changing Versatile into Offensive.

The whole current implementation of “Versatile Infusion” makes no sense anyway; when something costs hundreds of tokens or hundreds of T6 mats, you’re going to craft precisely the stats you want.
Now if Infusions could be switched in and out of items, or if they provided a small amount of two stats (one damage-oriented, one defense-oriented) maybe then it would make sense, but that’s not how they are right now and even if they were, 225 tokens vs 75 tokens is an absurd disparity in price.

OP and others, you can twist words however you like, but I feel betrayed by ArenaNet.

The fact is, I and many others feel betrayed. There’s a video from a convention where they flat out said there would be no gear chase, no power creep, no carrot on a stick. I can’t find the video for the life of me, so I guess you’ll have to take my word on it.

But regardless, I feel betrayed and while I don’t want a refund, as I’ve gotten my money’s worth, I absolutely no longer trust ArenaNet and will never pre-order anything from them; I will never trust anything they say.
It feels like Guild Wars 2 is slowly being turned into an actual WoW clone, to try and get the WoW audience I guess? I don’t know who’s doing that whether it’s ArenaNet, NCSoft, or what but frankly Guild Wars 2 is good at being Guild Wars 2 and it needs to stop trying to be WoW.

You can disagree if you like, and pick apart my words, but that won’t change how I feel. I feel betrayed, and I suspect deep down you do too, even as you perform these word games to try to convince yourself otherwise.

Encouraging people to use Magic Find gear in dungeons is not good, Pickup Groups will be even harder now.
This is not good for the health of the game.

More importantly, when is this going to be added as an optional feature to the game (that’s a rhetorical question that only ArenaNet can answer)?

The script LITERALLY just holds down right click, with a small dot in the center of your screen (no more obtrusive than the ugly color changing cursor).

ArenaNet, you can’t tell me your artists can’t come up with a good looking stylized circle indicator (reticle). You guys basically put in TERA-like combat then backed out, which is why this simple mod works so well; you’ve already done 99% of the work.

We really need a post from Jon Peters already with a with a post saying they acknowledge the community’s desire for this feature and that they’ll work on it.

It’s really not sufficient to leave this as an AHK script and leave it at this; this is a must have feature to a lot of people, that will never work as well as a proper feature added directly to the game.

Keep posting guys, ArenaNet needs to acknowledge this as something players want. Maybe we need to start posting on their twitter and their facebook page or something.

No way, the armor skins aren’t even that great, but I worked hard to get them.
If you want them, go put in the hours in GW1 to get them. Sorry that you don’t have a Black Moa, but it doesn’t even mean anything to you if you didn’t play GW1, to you it’s likely just a Moa with a weird collar that you can’t get.

This mod actually makes combat a lot like TERA, especially if you bind M1, M2, and mousewheel to keys (which btw totally needs to be added to GW2); it’s so much easier to circle around a monster as melee and avoid their big attacks.

Rinon.5402:

I find this hilarious because in the making of book, it states that they had originally planned to make the game just like this. Then they decided not to because they didn’t like having a reticule in the centre of the screen.
It seems like the functionality is still there, but not activated.
Anet, I say just turn it on and be done with it.

The functionality is 100% already there, if you look at the AHK script all it does is literally hold down the right mouse button, and turn itself off if you press H, I, M, or G

It also lets you bind stuff to mouse wheel up, mouse wheel down, left click and right click, which should be options by default as they are in most games.

Mr Magoo.9065:

I wouldnt worry about people not trying it.

This third party addon gives a measurable advantage and if more people use it, there is no way to play without disadvantage without using mods like this.

It makes using grenades so much better – agreed. Because it makes it easier. Kind of sad to say Anet is allowing things like this, then again I would not exactly call it surprising.

If by “measurable advantage” you mean you can actually control your character extremely well and avoid damage while queueing up abilities with ease because you don’t have to hold down the right mouse button all the time, then no you’re still wrong.

This improves the combat IMMENSELY. You can do everything this mod does already by holding down the right mouse button, the mod just makes it less of a chore.
It doesn’t play the game for you, it doesn’t fire things for you, it’s just a simple dot in the center of your screen and holding down the right mouse button.

If you guys haven’t tried this yet, do it; the mod is fantastic.

Just download AHK and follow the directions in the readme (turn off some in-game settings, change keybinds, etc) and then just double click the .ahk file (a text file you can view in notepad that AHK reads for instructions)

It makes using Grenades so much better!

Are you kidding? Is this a joke?
Go to some SPvP on your necro at rank 10 or better then compare it to SPvP on your thief, or better yet to a Warrior or Guardian.

The lack of speed and Stability is by far the Necro’s biggest weakness. If you’re doing a ranged-centric build, you have no tools to kite; if you’re doing a melee build, you have no Stability or Blocks.

Death Shroud should be a stunbreaker, and probably grant stability. Plague needs to be turned into Aspect of Grenth; it’s absurd that AoG is everything Plague should be and better.

Seriously, AoG you get poison and chill at the same time and you get to use your other abilities; Plague you just have three buttons and you can’t even use them all at once, they are just toggles. It’s so badly designed.

That’s great that they’re sort of letting us use the mod, but we can’t stop there. They need to add this as a full fledged feature to the game.

Everyone, keep posting your support!

I hope ArenaNet adds this to the game the way Blizzard added CTRA Raid Frames to WoW

Chrispytoast.3698:

I do not think it would take to long to implement, or at least allow use of this mod without being banned

In beta people asked for a feature like this, and they gave some response to the effect of (paraphrasing from memeory here, not a real quote) “a crosshair would be an intruisive immersion breaking UI element” or some such nonsense.

I suspect the best we can hope for is if we use the AHK script, they’ll look the other way for awhile.

Where is the red response on this already?
If this just gets ignored, I’m going to be pretty unhappy.

Awesome looking improvement.
As long as it’s something people can turn on / off, it seems like a win / win to me.

The worst part is that the 10% is hidden.
You aren’t even told about it, in fact you’re lied to; when you loot the money from your sale, the money that is listed and that shows up as looted on the right (as if you’d picked it up from a mob) shows that same amount as well, but the 10% sales tax is deducted from your character’s money.
An unwary / unsavy player can easily lose money due to a badly designed UI.

I’ve tried a build like this in SPvP and it didn’t seem very effective due to only healing for about 128 or so per Boon even with Cleric gem and Guardian Runes.

Yes you get a lot of those 128 ticks, but once you’ve activated all your shouts that’s it, and if you’re going Crit to proc the AoE Might, we can only get like 58% crit at most (not counting the 6 seconds of Fury once every 40ish seconds) and with that much crit you’re pretty susceptible to dying inside a stun.

The build I’ve had the most success with (though am getting bored of) uses Block on Burning, and all our weapons that can Block

I would love to have your problem, as I am an extremely experienced Kiter (from other games) and we have a lot of sources of Swiftness, Stability, and total damage immunity in the form of Blocks, so I would very much like more information from you and your friends if wouldn’t mind providing it.

So if your friends are willing, would you kindly compare your different armor, toughness, vitality stats and maybe each of you solo some champion mob and time?

One theory I’ve heard, and this is sort of how threat worked in GW1, is that Monsters try to go for the easiest target to kill which means the person with the lowest armor, lowest current life #, loaded with debuffs like Cripple and Poison, and not using “martial weapons”).
So if you compare your survivability stats, that might help.

Another thing that generated threat in GW1 was how many debuffs you were applying to the enemy, and how many buffs you were giving to your allies. If your allies are getting Retaliation from you all the time, and Shouts, and so on then that might be significantly contributing as well.

I figure the damage is calculated one of two ways, either:

1) A kind of “Rolling Ignite” system
like in WoW whereby the person with the most Condition damage is used and each time Burning is applied, if a new source is higher then it is used instead.

As an example, say you have a full party of a Thief, Warrior, Ranger, Necro, and Guardian and here’s how much Condition damage they all have:

• Thief (200),
• Warrior (50),
• Ranger (100),
• Necro (700),
• Guardian (800)

They all hit a monster at the same time and all proc Burning at once roughly simultaneously. Here’s what a combat log parse wherein 10 seconds of Burning once per second is displayed (made up numbers):

800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage

The optimal situation in this case would be one person stacks Condition damage and is able to apply short duration Burning very often (to constantly keep the damage of the Burning always at max), the rest stack Burning Duration

2) A stack or queue, as it were, for Burning
Whereby each person adds ticks based on their own Condition damage

Using the same group, I would expect a parse like this (made up numbers):
200 Damage, 200 Damage, 50 Damage, 50 Damage, 100 Damage, 100 Damage, 700 Damage, 700 Damage, 800 Damage, 800 Damage

This would be pretty bad if that’s the case as in this situation you have periods of Burning where you’re burning for low damage (or lower than max), and have to wait for the weak Burning (or Bleeding, or Poison) dots to fade until you get to the strong ones. The ideal setup to take advantage of Burning here would be for whoever can apply Burning continously (say, an Engineer with Flamethrower and Traits) with the most Condition damage to apply Burning / Poison / Bleeding and no one else to apply those dots.

However, I haven’t done any sort of testing, so I really don’t know how it works exactly.

The staff is certainly a weird weapon, it’s too bad it doesn’t have a single target or bouncing projectile finisher like the Necro’s staff or the Thief’s shortbow, then you could actually combo with your Light Fields (staff 3 and 5) the way a Thief / Necro can combo with their poison, dark, and smoke fields.

Staff 2 is a bit frustrating and unintuitive; the best damage from it comes from not detonating it, and ideally firing at a target near a wall / uneven ground at minimum range.

Staff 3 is okay, I like that it’s a light field and that it benefits from being a Symbol; same with Staff 5 (despite it being called a Ward in the tooltip, its a Symbol and gets Symbol trait bonuses like causing healing, vulnerability, size increase, etc) but without a projectile finisher, and without staff 4 doing a Blast at the start and the End (like most other channeled Blasts), you can’t do anything clever with it.