Guild Wars 2

So… more than a year later, and still nothing has changed? This is really the only thing stopping me from rolling an engie (yes I know I’m vain, but vanity’s half of this game), and it seems extremely silly that this hasn’t been fixed yet. Like, wtf? Has ANet given an actual reason for this?

Does anyone know whether ANet has said whether or not they’re open to/working on something like that?

I must admit that I secretly kind of like grinding and then having an awesome weapon to show off for it, but none of the Engineer legendaries seem worth it to me (especially when you run kits all the time).

Give me grenades that explode with rainbows, and I can die happy.

Specifically logged in on the forums for the first time to post here.

ANet, you seriously need to do something about this.

For many of us, our characters are our virtual dolls. It might be stupid that we care so much about them looking nice, but we do; a LOT of us do. There’s absolutely no good reason why those idiotic backpacks should not be able to be replaced by something less stupid-looking. Back items should override backpacks, period, and if at all possible it should be possible to use different skins for backpacks as well.

And to those who compare those backpacks to conjured weapons… No. Just no. There’s a big difference between a “Conjure Lightning Hammer” skill that gives you (who would’ve guessed it) a lightning hammer, and a “Grenade Kit” skill that gives you a bunch of grenades AND a ridiculous backpack everyone hates. Also, it’s pretty much universally agreed upon that those conjures look decent, whereas backpacks make us look like hobos. Even if you think backpacks ought to stay, they should’ve been reskinned LONG ago to look less ridiculous.

Edit: Huh. Apparently I did post on the forums before. Who would’ve thought.

airstu.2579:

I believe that means your stats and skills are up-scaled to lv80 stats (abilities, health, etc) however your gear stays at the current level you are wearing – unlike sPvP where all gear is max gear. In a nutshell, while you can function in WvW, you are extremely squishy esp compared to a lv 80 in exotics and ascended gear.

That’s what I thought, too, but it turns out to not really be the case. To use my level 26 ranger as an example: when I join WvW I get 1832 precision. I’m also wearing a Precise Seeker Mask that adds +5 precision. When I remove the mask, my precision drops to 1805. That’s -27 precision, much more than the 5 that’s actually on the mask. So gear does seem to scale, at least to an extent. My question: how big is the ‘to an extent’ thing, and indirectly, how much does leveling actually matter?

Specifically, which parts of the character equation determine the comparative attributes of lower- and higher level characters?

I find this confusing, because on the one hand it appears higher-level characters are significantly stronger in WvW: I’ve done quite a bit of it on my level 25 ranger, and whenever I get into a few-vs-few fight, they always seem to do much more damage to me than I do to them. This could of course be because I’m still learning to play my class, but I doubt the differences would be that noticeable over that many fights.

On the other hand, when I went to the Mists I noticed that the stats on my character there were actually lower in many regards than when I went WvW. Only condition damage was significantly higher. This appears to be due to some amulet, since armor has no stats there, but it seemed there wasn’t any big difference in stats otherwise. Also, when swapping out low-level gear in WvW, my attributes are lowered by much more than is stated by the item. So gear seems upscaled, too.

So my question is this: other than missing utility skills and the like, are there actually any differences between lower- and higher level characters in WvW? If so, what makes these lower level characters weaker than the higher level ones? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Personally, I’m fine with the way elites work in this game. I wouldn’t want to base my entire build around a single skill, or even have that single skill be very important to said build

That said, I would’ve liked if, instead of a separate ‘elite’ tier, these elite skills would simply occupy tier four. In other words, that you’d be able to use that elite skill slot for another skill if you so wanted, but are still free to pick those (often quite a bit more powerful) elite skills if you like. No actual nerfing or buffing of skills required.

On the other hand, being able to fill all utility slots with elite skills may cause some OP GC problems, so I’m uncertain about whether it would be wise to allow these skills to go in any slot. That would be a question for the balancing team to answer if they’d choose to implement it, though.