Guild Wars 2

The forge could need an upgrade. As it is now I can’t imagine anybody to say: Yea I like the mystic forge you just have to click a million times to get anything done, so much fun!

I don’t have a problem with the randomness, but that you have fixed recipes that you have to repeat every time, which gives the forge an awful feeling. As example two years ago I thought I craft Volcanus. I had most of the ingredients just from playing, not in the form of Lodestones but as Cores. So I thought yea just upgrade them all that’s what they are there aren’t they? Oh what an awful experience upgrading 450 cores is. When I had finished, I didn’t felt relieved. My hand was hurting, and I was so annoyed that I could not get to like it. Ok it didn’t fit my character as much as I though so but still. In the terrible mood I was then I simply listed it on the trading post. When I had calmed down the next day, it was already sold.
Since then, I hoped that they update the forge as it is just an awful experience. When I think about the time when we did not have much option to get upgraded siege weapons and the bulk recipes were not there. Either the forge should give us an option to repeat any fixed recipe or as Illconcieved Was Na suggested just move all the fixed recipes to the crafting station.

Not to mention that some players use macros or scripts to bypass this. I still think it is not a form of botting but just a sign that the forge is bad designed, when players that have never cheated, exploited or used regular bots search for way to skip this dreadful experience.

There must be something changed about the revenant energy system. I never understood why we had energy costs on weapons and utility skills. Having it on both is simply too much strain for one resource. Think about thief, they have initiative on the weapon skills only. Now imagine if the utility skill would have initiative costs too, that would mage managing initiative more or less impossible. But for revenant this is OK, right?

My suggestion is rather radical: Remove the energy gain on legend swap as balance for reduces energy cost overall.

Reasons for this: The developers themselves said, that they don’t like any kind of system that would give energy because it would be a must include without any other choice. But for the class mechanic such a system is magically OK then? This is as we all know the reason why legend swap on cooldown is mandatory, if you want to or not. You have to get back to 50 energy, otherwise you can’t even use your weapon skills or anything at all beside auto attack. Without the energy gain on legend swap it would at least feel like energy management, because as it is now the regeneration of energy simply means nothing.

The removal of energy gain on legend swap would be balanced with reduced energy cost on primary weapon skills and in some cases utility skills. With that in mind you could at least use your weapon to wait and build up energy for your utility skills. And if you had more than 50 energy you could swap without losing the extra energy.

I had only a small amount of time to test Mirage yet. But from my first impression I see the biggest problem with the trait “Infinite Horizon”. I forgot to skill it and wondered for 10 minutes if that’s all Mirage did, as nothing happend. The damage was so sub par it made me wonder. It seems the Mirage class mechanic has no meaning without this trait. I would like to see it get base line because it feels like any kind of energy management trait we had in the past. You have to slot it or else the mechanic is useless. The other option would be to improve the mesmer base Ambush by 2 or 3 times and decrease the effect of clone Ambush under Infinit Horizon to compensate. Even so, I would favor the first option, having a elite spec favoring clones seems like a good idea. Having more options to create clones or interact with them would be a perfect addition. For example if Infinit Horizon becomes baseline we could get a new trait that boosts clones in some way.
Of course just a first impression, but as I have read through the other posts it seems I am not alone with that.

Is it just me or does staff plus weaver fell by far slower than the normal staff builds? It just seems like you are two times slower, probably because of the new cooldown on attunements. And the new skill seem not like a big plus either. The earth/fire combos skill is so extreme slow, not that we already had projectiles that are far to slow when you think about earth auto attack.

While I couldn’t care less about the trait I am more annoyed on how mantras were changed. In my opinion just a small qol thing instead of a real improvement. Now most ammunition skill are what mantras should have been, while we are still stuck with that terrible charge up, which is no fun to use and lets them feel clunky.

Refia Montes.3205:

To be honest the new system is fine. I’ve been thinking if what if the ammo system kept going even when the Mantra charge is on cooldown.

For example we take Mantra of Recovery, CD 10, Recharge 20s. Mantra Charges get filled up 20 seconds over time but when you spend all of the charges the skill goes on cooldown just like usual. What I propose is that when it goes on cooldown, the recharge still happens in the background. When you can cast Mantra of Recovery after the 10 second CD, you either have a choice of charging it up for 2 charges, or wait for a bit and not deal with the pain of charging the mantra again for 10 more seconds for 1 charge. This allows Mantra users to have more flexibility with their 2 charges.

Then another example would be Mantra of Pain. 1s CD, 10s recharge. So after spending all your charges you can either wait a bit and not deal with casting the Mantra in battle to get one charge or charge the Mantra so that you get 8 might gain and 2 charges ready for use.

Good explanation, that is more or less how I hoped mantras would end up. You spend your charges and have the option to wait for them to recharge over time or you take the risk to recharge them immediately with the drawback of the 2,25 s cast time. Would offer good risk reward play with the changes that mantras get benefits if recasted to max stacks.

While I first thought the overall idea would be good, now that I tested it I changed my mind. While saving inventory space and being able to salvage without getting green sigils is huge improvement the downsides render this system near useless.

- you now have to spend an huge amount of money to get the gear identified
- without identifying you lose the chance of getting rare items
- It is an even worse time waste than the current inventory management as you always have to actually move to a heart npc to get the identification

If the unidentified items would have tiers based on rarity it would work, as you could salvage the worthless things and drop by the npc every now and then to only identify the items that are actually worth it.

And next champ bags drop normal gear instead of the new unidentified items and therefore are contra productive, if the new systems will stay, as you get again the green and blue items that clog up your inventory and drop the useless sigils by salvaging.

Have the same Problem. Started the game and got dropped out after 1 minute, since then receiving this errror code. EU
Edit:

as workaround i logged now in with these settings as always if it crash -> …Gw2-64.exe" -authsrv 206.127.146.73 -assetsrv 64.25.41.2

Can confirm this works

Kazeshini.6710:

Oh for God’s sake stop whining already. The lootstick was never meant to be just a lootstick, it was supposed to be an actual weapon. The nerf was long overdue.

Well and nerfing now made it a decent weapon instead of “just a lootstick”? The key is it should have been changed to something meaningful not blatantly nerfed into uselessness.

It really suprised me that they flat nerved the auto attack with no real compensation. As it stands staff under performs in all aspects and was only used in wvw. It is a support weapon with a little of healing and the only other unique thing was the auto attack as staff is lacking any value for offensive defensive or utility options. I hope they give staff something new, a new unique identity, to bring it back as a decent choice.

At least the auto attack should have a range of 400, 300 is simply laughable. Or maybe they could add something like they did to frost bow: A new buff applied whenever you hit a foe with the auto attack, that buffs the effectiveness of the other skills.

Even so you don’t want to hear it, statt swap on legendary items is nothing but a compromise. They were always intended to be just a cosmetic upgrade from arenanets point of view. Only community complaint made them change it because many could not find use for the statts given on the legendary and skinned them over to other items. And to tell you the truth I hope it stays this way because: Legendary items are simply a terrible solution when it comes to build management. Yes you could change statts on the fly but it is simply not convenient. I rather have them implement a build management tool that solves all issues. Think about it, the only thing legendary items currently can is change statt. But is it fast, no. Can you save your traits with them no. Can you choose your slot skill with them, no. So they only reduce the number of gear in your inventory a little, when it comes to armor you still would have to carry around several sets of runes. And using different sets of gear is probably still faster to change then fiddling with the legendary armor. I would rather have a tool that works like in pvp: You select everything you want, skills, traits, runes, sigills and it overwrites your current gears properties for the time being. And you could extend it to be savable as templates to change everything with just one click.

Next point is, think about how many people have legendary gear? While the number of weapons is there, I would estimate the number of people to have legendary armor not over maybe 1 or 2% of the whole player base. Just a guess here but the number hat will have legendary weapons, armor and the trinkets together will be scarce. Not to mention you would probably end up with just one character who has this kind of equipment. And on the others, you would still be stuck with inventory and build management as we have it now. So, why should only an abyssal small number of people have benefits that would without doubt improve the game for everyone? Why cling to a bad compromise if there could be a better solution?

Therefore, leave legendary as they are, let’s ask arenanet for something better instead.

Even so you don’t want to hear it, statt swap on legendary items is nothing but a compromise. They were always intended to be just a cosmetic upgrade from arenanets point of view. Only community complaint made them change it because many could not find use for the statts given on the legendary and skinned them over to other items. And to tell you the truth I hope it stays this way because: Legendary items are simply a terrible solution when it comes to build management. Yes you could change statts on the fly but it is simply not convenient. I rather have them implement a build management tool that solves all issues. Think about it, the only thing legendary items currently can is change statt. But is it fast, no. Can you save your traits with them, no. Can you choose your slot skill with them, no. So they only reduce the number of gear in your inventory a little, when it comes to armor you still would have to carry around several sets of runes. And using different sets of gear is probably still faster to change then fiddling with the legendary armor. I would rather have a tool that works like in pvp: You select everything you want, skills, traits, runes, sigills and when it comes to statts it overwrites your current gears properties for the time being. And you could extend it to be savable as templates to change everything with just one click.

Next point is, think about how many people have legendary gear? While the number of weapons is there, I would estimate the number of people to have legendary armor not over maybe 1 or 2% of the whole player base. Just a guess here but the number hat will have legendary weapons, armor and the trinkets together will be scarce. Not to mention you would probably end up with just one character who has this kind of equipment. And on the others, you would still be stuck with inventory and build management as we have it now. So, why should only an abyssal small number of people have benefits that would without doubt improves the game for everyone? Why cling to a bad compromise if there could be a better solution?

Therefore, leave legendary as they are, let’s ask arenanet for something better instead.

Would be nice to have an update on how guild wars 2 has changed over the time. Perfect would be if we could get some infos every year, for example on gw2 birthday. Just an idea: maybe you could do something like a mask that would automatically update itself every year, or month, week with some statistics.

Still, the number one feature I would like to see in the game.

But I really hope they include weapons and armor in a feature like this. Changing utility and traits is in my opinion less of a hazel than changing your gear. And gear is rather important, your build stands and falls with proper equip.

And if I remember correct didn’t gw1 have equipment as part of the build templates on pvp characters? Shows again how important it can be. I rather have a finished system that gives me a solution for everything than an unpolished product leaving 50% out.

Half of the new effects are absolute underwhelming. Overall not one of them fixes the problems mesmer face, with terrible AI, most damage bound on phantasm instead of the player and terrible cleave/overall damage.

While the idea is not bad with the additional effect, I don’t see where the improved constant pressure should be. Those attacks deal simply no damage. Worst is here iBerserker, it feels way more clunky than before the patch. The new attack does not more than 300 damage on full berserker class with a crit. That is completely useless for all the downsides the new attacks brought in to the game. If they really want to get rid of stealth cast, so be it. But then they should proper communicate that and give us some real compensation.

The iSwordsman is the same. The idea here is not that bad with giving it an additional effect if used in close range for more risk reward play. But still another attack of around 200 dmg in with the risk of being in close combat? It again defeats the purpose of even being slightly useful.

Both attacks on those phantasms need a fundamental increase in their damage. And I am not talking about another +7% increase like most balance patches brought to us. They should at least be on par with our auto attacks as bad as they are. And iBerserker needs its animation fixed to be as fast as the old one.

I had not much chance to test the change on the pistol phantasm. My first impression is, that the new effect is again weak. As other stated an unload similar to the phantasm, would fit much better.

At least the new iWarden seems better with the synergy of immobilize.

Yea I don’t get it either, lightning surge is such a trash skill. Hope they completely rework it, as it is now, I don’t see any way to turn it into a decent skill.
The blast in water is nice though.

I see a big problem with the new system. While having a bonus for veterans is nice, it is just to punishing for new players. The difference is just to huge. My concern is that this system will discourage many players. This is exactly not what we need now. The patch did something very important for wvw, it flushed new players in it. Maps are finally populated again. This is much more needed for wvw than all the other aspects of the patch. With the new number of players the game mode feels far better than the staleness we had before the patch. Instead of the pip system we would have needed a system that encourages the players that get into wvw now for their first time to have good experience in it and hopefully stay. Otherwise, we will be at the same point we were two weeks ago with lifeless matches and hardly filled maps.

My suggestion to solve this:
If the pip system is to stay we would need something like a Buff that gives players, new to wvw a bonus. Something that advertises wvw and gives them a good start up so that they may actually get the feeling for it and start being part of the communities. I think something like double or triple pips and wvw rank gain for about a month or two. Only for players that have not much wvw experience like being below rank 50. Even a bonus for returning players would help us in this situation, like giving players that were away from guild wars 2 for more than 6 months an additional smal bonus.

With this they could catch up a little and enjoy wvw without the feeling of being left out. And when the bonus ends they may already be within bronze rank and think: “Hey I don’t need many ranks to become silver, time to work my way up”

Amaimon.7823:

didn’t anet say they didn’t want to speed up the mystic forge procession because the speed of which the forge works is directly linked to the value of the items.
If people can mass produce an item in the forge, then the value of the time investment is lost. They don’t wanna mess with that unless they know it won’t affect the economy.
One way around it would be to have system similar to crafting, where you put in a recipe, put in the 4 items, say how many you want, and then a bar keeps filling over 2-3 seconds

As long as it reduces the extensive amount of clicking I am in for everything. If it needs a timegate may it have one.

Mystic forge could really need an overhaul. It is just so much unnecessary clicking you won’t find something similar annoying in the whole game.
Best would be to give the forge a second tab like the crafting stations. First one stays as it is, as a pool to throw random items in it. The second tab would be fore fixed recipes.

phys.7689:

essentially the current build design encourages experimentation, and adaptbility, but the design of items does the opposite, until legendary of course, which is an extremely large investment.

This is probably the best description of the current situation. While build diversity may not be perfect, it is still better than a few years ago. But the terrible system of gear and item management is a huge burden to this. You end up with huge costs, a stuffed inventory, and still lose a huge amount of time just by gear and trait swapping. That’s why I am still concerned with the approach of legendary gear as these items bring more qol then all other tiers (and even here I have doubts, that they are currently more convenient than switching between two sets of armors). But overall the people who benefit of it seems way too small to me to justify the work done on these features of legendary gear, instead of a change the underlying terrible system.

Out of the new season this is my favourite map so far. It really gave me the feeling of stepping in a primeval hidden jungle just like in some films. The design of the story instances was also stunning. And of course, more Taimi is always a plus. I still hope we also get more screen time of the other party members in future releases.

I just looked it up on the wiki. This would be an amazing outfit. I hope we see this some day.

Phoenixlin.8624:

Wasted 10$+10g for 10 keys.
Got elemental sword in 2nd key.
Your RNG arguments are invalid.

I don’t get how you can’t see the problem. But never the less your post is a good example for how bad RNG is. Just because you got what you wanted in a reasonable number of chests, that doesn’t mean other did too. There are people out there who will never see the sword no matter how many keys they buy, just the nature of statistics. And to give an example on the logic in your comment, think about this: Just because you are in the situation to get enough to eat on the table, does that mean hunger famine and starvation does not exist in this world?

Now back on topic:

If they removed account bound from the sword, there would be no problem at all. If we take all the people who want the sword and divide it in different cases, the current system will be not optimal in most of them:

• Player 1: gets the sword in a reasonable number of chest, no problem here
• Player 2: gets the sword but is uninterested in it. Due to account binding he is unable to sell a potential worthy skin. Might be frustrated
• Player 3: won’t buy keys, as it is not worth the hazel. But is still annoyed that he will lose out on the skin.
• Player 4: buys hundreds of keys doesn’t get the sword. I don’t have to say it, he will be extremely frustrated
• Player 5: gets a duplicated sword, which he can’t sell. As I heard the duplicate will get exchanged with a key, instead of being a skin which might be sell able for a good margin.

As it stands 4 out of 5 times players will run into problems with the way the elemental sword is set up. I don’t see how such a stupid system can be justified.
My proposal would be to either remove the account binding so no one loses out or another possibility would be to design skins like this with an exchange for black lion tickets. This would at least decrease the chance of opening hundreds of chests without getting the skin by a large margin.
But as it stands it seems, with so many people buying keys, that anet will likely stay with this system. We might even see a big increase in account bound black lion skins, no matter how terrible the underlying system is for the customer.

@ Gaile:
Maybe it is time to bring a feature for opening multiple boxes at a time, if players are considering macros or other tools as opening them with the default method is just to painful, time-wasting and boring?
And off topic can somebody pm me on how to quote someone like in the post above? I can’t find information on that topic or how to do it.

Edit: I think I found it 5 minutes after posting this. Thanks anyway.

@ Stand The Wall: Think about this, perfect balance will never happen. No matter what arena net will do when it comes to traits, one will always be superior to the other choices. And there is on fact that still stands, the hazel to switch between builds won’t be reduced depending on if we have horrid or good build choices.

So for now I really want to have build templates, all that switching when you jump from pve to wvw is so annoying. Not to mention you could have frontline, backline or roaming builds, but at the moment managing even to builds with two sets of gear and skills is already time-consuming enough. Managing three builds is more or less impossible. And it might even become a bigger issue in the future with more elite specs to come.

For me this new phantasm mechanic looks more like a nerf with reveal than an actual buff. I get where the idea is coming from. Several people discussed something like that, here on the forum, to change the way phantasms work. When I remember correctly the idea was that the Mesmer does the attack the phantasm does now and afterwards just summoning a clone. It was meant to bring more damage to the player and being less reliant on AI as well as to get a better cleave as Mesmer still suffers against multiple enemy’s with your phantasm constantly dying on target death (pve problem).

The effects furthermore seem to be not really strong either, a little bit of cripple or the additional staff out attack, perfect, not that anyone likes the slow attack of staff anyway.

We still don’t know how the other phantasms work out, but from the current situation I would say it doesn’t change any of the core problems. The idea is not that bad but what we got seems totally underwhelming, I wouldn’t mind the reveal if the effect would be worth it.

Last the evade on block is really nice.

Your idea for the inscription trait really sounds interesting. With so many traits just giving boons I have the feeling that they don’t change the way an elementalist is played much. It is all about boons and not about unique mechanic’s. Even though I have small doubts on how this trait would work, would the storm be summoned around yourself? Or would the glyphs become ground targeted? Furthermore, could glyph of storm become too strong with summoning a second Storm?

For the conjured weapons a rework would be better in my opinion. As some have suggested more like engineer’s kitts or replace only one attunment so you could still switch. They are simply not good enough to replace all 20 weapon skills.

I’ll add a view of mine suggestion as I can’t comment on all of your suggestions yet:

When we talk about buffs, how about shock Wave? Now that guardian’s zealots embrace was buffed in speed shock Wave really feels outdated. It has twice the CD and only half of its speed. The cooldown should have been reduced a little and the speed increased to that of zealot’s embrace.

Then the next offender in my opinion is gust. This skill is so freaking slow. Just like shock Wave you have to stand in more or less point-blank range to ever get a hit. Not to mention with the big amount of stability, at least in wvw, this skill is in my opinion unless now. It should be more like mesmer great sword 5. A smaller cone of course but an instant explosion. It is named gust but doesn’t feel much like it, a better name for the current version would be mild spring breeze.

Ice spike could also use a little buff or an overhaul. As the only water skill with damage on it, it could do a litter more. As you are supposed to switch attunments you are most times better off not using it at all and switch back to fire. I wish this wasn’t a fire and forget skill which is most of the time not even noticed by your opponents. Here I have no idea so fare how to make this skill better.

And last, for lightning surge: I hate this skill with passion. It is so bad, even if I get nothing in return I would want it to be off my skill bar, I rather run around with an empty slot. 1,5 channel time for an absolute pathetic damage and a small blind. Furthermore, as the blind is not on demand it is useless.
But I have a suggestion for a new skill here:

Make it a 3 level channel skill. First level is a single target low damage blind. On level two the damage on the selected foe is increased. Level 3: a single powerful lightning strike on the target with a ¼ second daze and ¼ second later, in 180 range hit additional foes with the level one lightning strikes. For the last level I think we need an 20% increased base dmg and 20% increased coefficient to the current lightning surge.

I also hope they change the way attunments work. Because always having fire and lightning as dps, water for heal and earth for defense is getting boring. As we have it now it really gets dense, you stay 90% of time in fire for the damage and only switch in other attunments for a short time to use one or two skills and switch out of it as fast as possible. Staying in any other attunments beside fire for a longer time is completely pointless and I hope this is changed in a future elite spec (Only exception is of course dagger with fresh air)

There is one more fact you should consider. If team B from your example is loosing and players are dropping out, switching sides gives an automatic win. It was implemented this year. So if a player switches teams and then leaves, he is giving up a free win. I can’t understand why you would do something like this, probably it is just not known jet by most players.

As some people already stated the meaning of legendary weapons is and was always the skin. As Danikat told the ability of legendary weapons to swap statts is as best to describe as a side effect. From arenanet’s standpoint they were meant as pure cosmetic item. They introduced the switching solely because many complained that their fresh legendary had completely horrible satts and they could not include theme in their build. So most skinned another weapon with better statts and never used their legendary.

I still can relate to your problem, but I would like to have a different approach here. Changing your statts on the fly is a feature that 100% of all players would benefit from. Therefore, I am strictly against any measures that includes only legendary weapons/equipment including a legendary sigil.

Why creating a system built on a bad compromise solution? Why build a system only a few percentages of the player base would benefit from if it would help everyone? I can’t find any arguments to support this.
Especially when you think about arenenet’s approach on legendries lately. They cancel the project and only gave us the already finished ones because the development time is not worth it, as the number of players who will get them is far to low.

There is a better solution for this. Build templates. A system where you could change your skills weapons, runes, sigils, and armor statts wherever and whenever you like. This would include legendary, ascended, exotic and if you want even all the other tiers of equipment. You would no longer have to buy a sigil twice for one character, once it is added to your wardrobe just change it as you like. How to build this system is of course another question, probably with some kind of character based unlock feature to not crash the market.

Lastly would this devalue legendary weapon? Only slightly, but in my opinion nothing would be lost here. They would return to their status as pure cosmetic item with special look as they have always been intended. But you could always compromise here giving them the ability to unlock all statts at once maybe.

Wow heaven’t heard of this one, I had something different and more vague on my mind. Sounds promising to me, if it was just not two years old.

Yea we really need a feature like this. When I think about how much time I lose just by switching between the two most needed builds I have on my main character. It would be so much better to have more QOL here. Furthermore, those builds are not optimal but a compromise. Luckily I can use the same statts for WvW and PvE as back line player. But with the choice of runes I always feel that I am lacking in things like fractals as it is optimized for wvw. Therefore, I really can’t understand the original approach, there is no build for all occasions. You will always be sub optimal, especially when it comes to pvp encounters like wvw were optimizing your gear can make a difference between success and loss. When I think about it I can come up with three different builds alone for wvw, back line, front line and roaming. Then another one for pve or even two if you want to specialize for things like raiding. 5 builds in total and with the current system managing more than two builds seems already more or less impossible.

At least I can remember a few statements that a systems like this might come in the future. From my perspective the sooner the better.

+1 for build templates

So in the end the Chest got a drastic nerf, at least that it what’s it feels like. Down from 3 guaranteed Black Lion items to two guaranteed items while the third slot now contains blanks most of the time. This is really a huge kick in the balls. A nerve of 1/3 of the possible items and only a single ToT bag as new item slot, one of the most common item this game has to offer. And on top of that the remove of the boosters, now that they really got interesting with the buffs they received.
Even if it was never worth buying keys, at least it was really nice to get them in game and receive a few of the gemstore only items. But with the recent change the chest feels absolute underwhelming. I will probably save my keys as well and wait for the Chest to become something again I can look forward to open.
As last words:

• And please remove the annoying message for deleating Black Lion Chests

Mesmer vs. Thief, a gaming specialisation

When I think about mesmer and thief I get the picture that both would make invincible opponents in games as both are master of deception and tricks.
So I had thought up an idea about a specialization which is based on gaming or more precise on a game of cards or gambling in general.

A new ability for Mesmer would be Bluff a new F5 ability:

For the next 3 seconds your attacks won’t do damage while you are under the effect of “Bluff”. If your target tries to block or evade in one of your attacks while “Bluff” is active, he has fallen for your Bluff and will take the damage you would have dealt in theory wile bluff was active over the next 3 seconds with a bonus of 15% damage. This damage can’t be evaded or blocked.

As example you hit your opponent 3 times with 1000 damage:
Activate “Bluff”:

• (1s) Hit 1000 dmg
• (2s) Hit 1000 dmg
• (3s) Attack blocked (1000 dmg)

Bluff ends. Your opponent has not received any damage yet but over the next 3 seconds will receive your former attacks:

• (1s) opponent receives 1150 dmg unblock able and not dodge able
• (2s) opponent receives 1150 dmg unblock able and not dodge able
• (3s) opponent receives 1150 dmg unblock able and not dodge able

This would make for great bursts as when bluff ends you can attack your opponent normal and he would receive the above stated damage additional to the damage you dealt.

As for the weapon I would suggest a new one, fitting to the ability “Bluff” and the gaming theme, a deck of cards would be nice. In different games or films we have characters that use cards as weapons so the idea is not new but depending on the skills I am certain we could have something different and fun.

I am still thinking about skills and an idea for the thief specialization.

Hexes

For future specializations I have another idea. You might remember the ability called Hexes from Guild Wars 1. My idea here is as we have fields that follow your character, as example “Flames of War” the warrior torch skill that creates a fire field which follows you, Hexes could be fields that follow an enemy.
How would that work: Imagine a field like that from “Flames of War”. If the enemy dodges while you cast the Hex, nothing happens. If the cast was successful, your enemy has now a field around him that will continue to follow him and damage him and all of his allays that touch the field. Should he dodge now, the field will continue to follow him, only the damage/effect will be cancel on him for the duration of the dodge. All other enemies continue to suffer from the Hex if they stand in the radius.

Off topic:

This could be a good new category of utility skills. But at the same time there is one skill that would be perfect to be redesigned as a Hex, Elementalists “Shatterstone”. This is in my opinion one of the most under powered skill we have in this game. My main problem with this skill is that even after all the buffs it feels underwhelming. Even if the damage of it would be buffed by 3000% I still would have the feeling that it is a bad skill, most of through the bad design and the 3 years’ history of an absolute laughable skill. This history won’t vanish through number tweaks. Therefore, I thought a redesign could bring a new feeling to this skill and solve the problems attached to it.
Shatterstone could be a new Hex. On the initial cast the target opponent and all enemies standing around him could suffer from an ice explosion dealing about 50% of Shatterstones current damage. Shatterstone would follow the hexed enemy and explode after 1 or 2 seconds dealing again damage to all enemies standing in the field. It would no longer be a skill that misses the target with 99% chance and force the enemy to either re position or accept that he will bring his allays in danger, giving it a new combat aspect.

I had similar thoughts over the last years while playing my Mesmer, as winning always feels more like losing. You defeat a single enemy out of a horde of monsters and in the exact moment you lose all your summons together with most of your skills being on cool down, which leaves you wide open and vulnerable. For the next time all you can do is kite or use our auto attacks, which we can all agree on are absolute garbage.
Especially in some story instances you really feel hopeless as hordes of enemies attack you. For example, “Taimi’s game” is one of those instances where every other class feels way better.
For PvP it would be a bit too much. I can understand why having 3 phantasms permanent active would be a bit of overpowered, but for pve I don’t see a problem here.
I have another idea in mind, our clones could leave a small aoe if they shatter through defeating a target, not through shatter skills. Then defeating an enemy would at least feel somehow rewarding.

Is it just me or is the animation of the glider bugged? In 50% of the times I use the glider it is flipped 30° to the right, like doing a right turn, even when I am gliding straight forward or doing a left turn. Can anybody confirm this behavior? It is so far only appearing in bloodstone fen to me but it really looks ridiculous.

So when I heard the crystal arbiter outfit made a return to gemstore I was exited only to see that it is still sold as bundle. So why is it not sold separate? When I remember correct the ironclad outfit and glider where to purchased separately after the community wished for a split of gemstore bundles. Does anyone else find it strange that we still don’t have an option to buy these items apart from the packs?
I really thought we would have had a turnaround here but it doesn’t seem like it. I still think many people would buy the items if they were sold alone and not as bundles. As for me I really would like to have the outfit but I can’t get myself to spend 2000 gems on it as I am not interested in any of the useless clutter that is stuffed into the package.

I really want to see more female armor for Asura and Charr instead of the male on. There have been so many sets and outfits where the female one looked way better than the male one but as Asura female you only got the male outfit. I see the problem so. The breast plate just doesn’t look good here and would probably not fit in many other cases. That’s why I want to stick with the lore to not have breasts on Asura and Charr. Therefor I think the best approach would be to give Asura and Charr female the female armor with slightly altered chest piece.
But I honestly don’t think this will happen. It would be so nice but if it was that easy you from arena net would have done this long ago. I still hope this will happen someday.
And here I have a question. Did I understand this correct that in this case the approach would be to keep the female version of the armor and only exchange the chest piece? If so I am now curious how the result would look like. Maybe this would be an option for future armor to give Asura and Charr a feminine version without breaking lore, of course depending on the result of the change.
But again as stated I would wish for future and even old armor to have the female version with adequate changes to the chest part to fit Asura and Charr females.

As stated above, I also would like to see a mini Taimi.
But beside this there is one mini I absolutely want to see. Back in the times of Guild Wars 1 I got the mini Kuunavang as a present from a friend. It was a really expensive minipet back then, needless to say it is and was my all time favorite. I would really want to see this mini to reappear again.

[Suggestion]

The new shared inventory slot is in theory one of the best qol feature and many have wished for this since the beta. But as it is the slots are way too expensive and to limited in numbers to be of benefit if you don’t own gemstore items.
That’s why I had the idea to bring another slot in the game:
Of course the shared inventory bag slot. We have so much stuff we need on all of your toons that even a full bag of 20 items could probably be not enough, but it would help. So the idea is an item you can buy in the gemstore which unlocks a merchant, where you can buy 20 slot inventory bags. For the start maybe you could buy a t1 one bag which you could use one per character. With this, more bags and containers could be added in the future.
But what for the inventory slots that are now to buy?
My idea is to change them so that they still have their use. Separate this slot from the inventory and make them into slots you can pin to your interface, for example you could pin this slots over your minimap. Items laid in there would be permanent visible to have quick access. This idea would separate the shared inventory slots strong enough from the shared accountbag, so that they still have use and give us the shared inventory we desperately need.

When I read the patch notes, I couldn’t believe it. After all the negativity on the visual clutter issue they reduce effects even more? That is just terrible. Especially as elementalist I feel now as if I am playing a total different class than two years ago.
With the Auras they really overdid it. They might look better and you are better visible but there is on big Problem:
YOU CAN’T SEE IF YOU HAVE AN AURA ACTIVE!
I could live with the new design if it wasn’t this extreme transparent.
But in the End when I look at all the other visual nerfs there is only one thing to say: Why is there no slider or other option to customize this by your own? It makes absolutely no sense to how these changes are forced on us.
Give us back our beautiful animations!

Like most others I also had the feeling that scepter auto attacks are underwhelming. An idea I came up with would be to give them something like the combos other classes have ore to give them additional functionality.
Flamestrike for example reminded me of the skill searing flames from guild wars 1, as it has low physical damage but a long burning. For example if an opponent is already burning with 2 or 3 stacks then give it a new function. The target is hit with high physical damage instead including a small aeo around the target but it only gives a short stack of burning, for example 1s.
I must admit I still miss ideas for the other auto attacks. Also, I am not sure if it would interfere with potential condition builds.

So when I first saw the Tempest concept I start wondering for what game mode it was built. “Bring the Elemntalist to the front line” as it was stated I could only think about wvw, as Elemntalist already is mostly close combat in pvp and in pve you also stay close to your party. Even in wvw small scale you mostly chose D/D close combat. So the last thing left would be wvw zerg, because this is the only place where you couldn’t go to the front line as Elementalist. Maybe it will also be useful for the new group content, but we don’t know much here.
Maybe I was mistaken by this assumption, but I don’t see a way Tempest will ever be a front line zerg spec or be useful in any other situation beyond 5v5. It misses everything you would need there. Movement, evades, invulnerability and stability. Even with the high protection, frost aura and the good heals you stand no chance to survive. Most irritating in Tempest in my opinion are the overloads. These are obvious made to be set up in close range, but the risk is far too high to ever use them. They don’t support the front line play stile at all, as they don’t offer any kind of active defenses. Using them feels the same as with Tornado. When you try to use them you lock yourself out of your skills, which is pretty much inevitable death. So you can either cancel the Overload and run away or you are focused and killed within seconds.
So as summary I think Overloads are interesting but just don’t fit together with the Tempest close range/support play stile. Use them on another elite spec and give us something that actually works together with the role we should fulfill.

I don’t think we will ever get infinite tools other than from gem store. But the idea of dungeon specific tools is good. How about going in another direction, like adding dungeon specific skins for the tools? And as addition, when you buy the skin you could get also a stack increase for the tools. So whenever you unlock a skin you could get +25 capacity for this tool, adding up to a 300 in total, when you unlock all “dungeon tools”. As example, how about a pickaxe in the style of the “spirit weapons” like Azureflame as reward from ascalon catacombs?

Your location: Germany
Time and date of incident (plus time zone): I have this issues now about 3-4 weeks.
Game World: Elona Reach
Brief description of what you’re seeing: Enemies stop moving and other players run straight forward from their last known direction until they hit a wall. I can still move and cast skills but they don’t really activate. About 10-30 seconds later I normally disconnect. Sometimes I can still write in chat during this period.