Guild Wars 2

Kahrgan.7401:

Pretty game breaking.

Then why aren’t you playing a DH if you think they’re too awesome?

Someone complaining on the forums means NOTHING to the metrics. 10,000 players flocking to an overpowered class does mean something. Go on, be the first. Lead that landslide.

But my money is your assessment is simply wrong.

Toasa.1236:

Its the lowest of the low skill builds
You just place freakin traps and block all attacks until the traps recharged.
I won’t Play pvp anymore until this kittened build is fixed.

NEWS FLASH: Random whining on the forum does not drive game design decisions.

If you want something nerfed there is ONE PATH, straight as an arrow: PLAY IT.

When people flock to a build and the build over performs, then it moves into the crosshairs of the nerfhammer.

You getting you butt handed to you by something does not move that thing it into those gunsights.

And the funniest thing, when you actually play a build you think is overpowered?
You either learn how to counter it from the inside… or you learn the problem was YOU all along.

I’m betting on the later in this case.

So it loses some situational effectiveness, a small amount of CC break bar punch, and DEFANGS 50,000 slavering haters who lose their minds every time they get dazed by a DH trap?

This change is still at least 80% made of win. And honestly, taking away the incentive to drop traps on immobile enemies to interrupt them makes them more like “traps” and less like PBAoE fart-bombs.

You can keep repeating “it doesn’t work” until the end of time — the fact remains it DOES work and we were able to see it work inside this very engine. Yes, it twitched occasionally, but fixing the twitch was trivially easy.

We used to be able to mix and match armor weights in the preview window. It generates some bad color maps sometimes, but re-previewing the piece immediately fixed them, so I find it hard to believe that making this available in live play is really that unsolvable of a problem…

It’s neat tech, but I’m very happy it’s not a style I like, meaning I don’t have to pursue this particular grind.

sorudo.9054:

uhmm, how you hold a scythe and how you hold a greatsword is exactly the same.
look more on how you hold it IRL instead of looking at fantasy movies…..

Really? I had no idea greatswords had a second perpendicular handle half of the way up their length… and were principally wielded to kill grass.

cpchow.7416:

I spent 1000+G on my boonsharing mesmer yesterday and you are going to nerf it to the ground? Well done, Anet.

Well done indeed. Because the fundamental nature of balance passes is to nerf over-performing options and buff underperforming ones. You jumped on a top performing build just in time to see it FIXED.

I’m sure it’ll still be quite playable despite no longer being some sort of apex predator mutant, and at that price, I’m guessing most of what you bought/built is account bound, so pretending its value went away is silly.

But really, what was the point of this entire thread other than begging people to laugh in your face?

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Thanks for the laugh. If you honestly think that your ideas shaped elite specs…

I don’t “think” they ran with my blueprint. I know.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/cdi/CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal/first

You might start around page 38, to speed things along.

In any event I was speaking chiefly to the Revenant changes. The Druid changes are just another example of them doing what many people have suggested: reduce base values and increase stat contribution so that IF you want to be a strong healer you need to gear for it, and if you gear for it, it should be proportionately more rewarding while you’re losing capability in other areas.

The changes to the druid don’t take them out of play, it just forces harder choices, and harder choices are a good thing.

Nike.2631:

Good. The profession has been an OP monstrosity since launch and when merely balancing it to be on par is consider “RIP” then the balance team is doing something right finally.

sophiewhite.3149:

lol sounds like your just salty. OP in pve? your kittening kidding.

You can try to dismiss it as salty, but since my ideas pretty much defined how Elite Specs work, most people who know my post history, including the balance team, know my interest is as a designer and my concern will always be for the health of the game over the sniveling of people who think their kitten is getting snipped.

Revenant was at launch and still is grossly over the baseline, and will still be attractive if not out right overpowered after these changes. GOOD Revenants will stay with it and continue to shine, and flavor-of-the-month reactionaries will jump ship like the rats they are. These are good things and to be welcomed.

Stealth before the shot isn’t the issue. Its that Thief is hands down the SINGLE BEST DISSENGAGE PROFESSION IN THE GAME.

The only thing remotely keeping them in balance is that for the most part they have to dive in to make kills. That’s the risk for the substantial reward. Eliminate that risk, and you deserve NO rewards.

There are MANY reasons.

Not least of which is doing it this way allows the to be an unlimited number of elite spec’s able to reuse weapons instead of professions like warrior running out of new choices very, very quickly.

Substance E.4852:

So we nerf the crap out of heals? That’s supposed to make things better?

This game has at least 4 -very- powerful healers. That people THINK druid is the only one is a pretty definite sign the class needs to be beaten about the head and shoulders with the nerf bat until you’re look for “a healer” from any of the 4-5 strong choices and not OMGBBQNEEDDRUID.

nsleep.7839:

RIP Revenant in PvE.

Good. The profession has been an OP monstrosity since launch and when merely balancing it to be on par is consider “RIP” then the balance team is doing something right finally.

Armor? Haaale yeah.

Outfit? yaaawnnn…

Ghotistyx.6942:

On the subject of sniping with a Rifle. Early in beta there were skills (Meteor Shower was one) where the skill changed the longer the skill was held down. This mechanic survived in siege weapons like the Trebuchet and Catapults. In fact, such a skill has already been used Sniper Shot

A Thief, upon stealthing, could gain access to the sniping skill. The longer it was held down the more powerful the shot becomes. However, a fully charged shot might last longer than stealth. Such an idea would be both similar and different from Warrior’s Killshot while keeping the theming of the Thief. It would certainly make for interesting interactions with current and future traits.

I have to agree that the sniper spec in the Snowball Mayhem game had some really thematically strong abilities for a “long range rifle”. And while it’s a great place to start, it also DIDN’T have a bunch of the Thief Profession’s strengths to leverage those abilities into an OP abomination.

Really, Elite Spec design is about style more that rocketing directly to the top of the charts.

Ohoni.6057:

Sure, but if it’s not high damage long range then it’s junk and I do not want it at all.

The bottom line is your not getting that and you’re NEVER getting that.

We already know how powerful they want Thieves to be at range. We have two examples of it in fact. If the rifle is built around longer range then it’ll be even less damaging than the tools we have now and that’s even allowing for the tragically high level of power creep that slipped into the first round of elite specs (a game warping mistake I think you’ll see reigned in quite noticeably in round two…).

And remember the basic rule of ALL GW2 is ‘ranged sucks’. It’s a universal constant that reaches across all professions and all weapons. They weight the value of range really, really extremely high when balancing abilities. Plus they’ve recently had a unmistakable lesson in what the most logical ‘sniper’ ability is going to do in practice: the Dragonhunter LB #2. Locked in place, bit of a cast time, high damage. People whined like dogs with their hips crushed by a passing bus at how “unplayable” being locked in place would be… and then they put it in the game, players figured out how to play it (as the early adopters assured everyone they would…), and the Devs ended up having to nerf the amplified damage three times.

Been there, done that, have no illusions about them doing it to themselves AGAIN. And certainly not on the game’s preeminent distance control class…

A quick aside about PvP/PvE splits… They are one of the single dumbest things you can do to a game. Any time you introduce barriers to player understanding between major gameplay modes, you shave years off that game’s lifespan. Its that bad. You want to create every opportunity for players to migrate between your gameplay options so that when they’re bored with one part, they shift to another… without having to re-learn what their skills do.

And ultimately it’s a sign of weakness in the design… that they’ve made the PvE experience so mind-numbingly easy, so poorly executed in terms of hostile AI that a skill that unremarkable in one arena is overpowered in another. That’s how things like ludicrous NPC HP creep get rolling in the first place. Instead of USING all the nuance already present in your game, you tack on an extra 0 at the end of their hit point value.

For all it’s many sins, one thing SWtOR did exceptionally well was present major bosses that on the whole appeared to be using the same skills as the players used. Sure, you might telekinetically rip loose and hurl a boulder once every 8 seconds and the mean old nutjob jedi might string together six of those attacks, one every 1.5 seconds, but at least you felt like everybody was playing with roughly the same deck. And it worked the other direction two – one boss had an awesome double sword toss (whereas players could only throw one sword at a time) that eventually propagated back to players after a level cap increase. Guild Wars is one of those games that would instantly be 5 times better just by having more typical landscape mobs self-buff or cross-buff (yay Dredge!). Not because they ’d be tougher (well, that would help too in most cases…) but because suddenly boon strip, boon steal, and boon corruption would be RELEVANT in more than just SPvP.

Other players represent the apex predator of the game, the enemy that fights back with cunning and a WIDE array of abilities. Rather than split your mechanics, you need to move NPCs upwards towards that threshold. A skill’s PvP behavior is and should be the benchmark for the skill, with its PvE behavior the afterthought even in a predominantly PvE game.

DeceiverX.8361:

If they copy-pasted my idea, that’s about the only way it’ll work.

Now, my ego IS actually large enough it sets up its own series of tides as the world turns beneath it, but that was impressive. But really, anyone who thinks there’s only one workable solution isn’t exactly wowing me on imagination front. It generally takes a lot more agility and flexibility to really catch the Devs’ eye.

A burst sniper is horrible by design and is totally unwanted. from both the perspective of it not being fun to play against and not very useful to the thief in general.

If only we’d already seen that ANet is willing to treat rifles as shotgun-like weapons with relatively close ranges. I mean, that right there would immediately set up a whole series of possible treatments as 600, 900, 1200, or 1500 range weapons or even some sort of mix. Oooo, crazy talk, I know.

Oh, hello, Engineer.

Personally I think there’s something interesting to be done with a new f3 button that consumes ALL the initiative you have in a single attack (and may even lock out your initiative generation for a few seconds…), producing a beastly huge effect that’s based on whatever your Main-hand or 2-hand weapon is when you click the almighty kaboom. When used with a rifle this f3 ‘alpha strike’ could be some sort of snipe attack even if the 1-5 buttons are otherwise quite different from most expectations.

I tend to run support/command on my Guard in WvW. I like zealot’s armor myself.

I’ve always enjoyed condi-bunker when SPvPing as a thief. It tends to trip up people with the wrong expectations of what the class can do, and when you don’t rely on stealth for survival you can be shockingly difficult to uproot.

nopoet.2960:

First off let me say that rolling powers from the defeated dragons to the new one is brilliant!

I’m reminded of the big X-men vs. Avengers arc where the cosmicly powerful Phoenix Force got divided into 5 people, and as each one was defeated the power was re-divvied up amongst the remaining recipients. Pretty much THE big storyline in comics for 2012. Which would be about the right time to get into peoples’ heads and work its way through an MMO production cycle.

Nah, in most cases the numbers control the power while the descriptions control the cool. Unfavorable cast times, cooldowns and durations can neuter pretty much anything presented here in terms of concept vs. actual impact on play.

Yannir.4132:

Because LB does not make a DH. It’s the improved Virtues that make DH miles better than the base guardian

Oh, that is FUN-NY, in light of the endless wailing and gnashing of teeth when we were tuning the spec pre-HOT and people could not shut up about how weak they were because of the cast time. Now people can’t live without them.

as well as the DH traits. How well does Shield of Courage synergize with Hunter’s Fortification?

Traps bring interrupts, and Spear of Justice brings inherent CC. DH just synergizes so well with base guardian.

So well the class has all but vanished from high tier competitive play. After having spent years as a solid presence.

Buran.3796:

Guardian was designed to perform as a bunker at PvP in the vanilla game.
Along the time his perform as bunker was highly decreased due overbuff of another classes while Guardian did remain mostly the same.

As I mentioned, even base Guardian has gotten better with adjustments to the weapons that have been sought after for years. But lagging behind is lagging behind and hopefully can be seen in the metrics on a scale that will motivate the Devs to act.

After the expansion the Guardian has 0 use as bunker, and his best build (meditrapper DH) is a dps one. And guess what: is far from being the best at that role.

Now this makes a certain amount of sense to me. Which suggests what we might have more luck agitating for a return of the relevance of the Guardian Bunker. With the hope that if the base profession is healthy, the variants like DH become more sound too. Less “oh we needz moar DPS” and more “We needs better sustain in the new Wild West shootout environment.”

Which again makes perfect sense when you have a low health-pool, innate regen class. The shorter time to kill gets for everybody, the less that regen mechanic gets to contribute and regen classes (any regen class) spirals down faster than its peers.

So why would you bring a DH over a plain Guardian?

The base profession has seen steady improvements in several of its weapons, and seemingly the longbow just doesn’t work in skilled play, so why take it at all?

Sartharina.3542:

Because there will always be a “Most optimal Path”, as Elder Scrolls demonstrates.

The game is imbalanced because it’s impossible to properly balance due to just how many factors there are in play.

Ug. Its not impossible to do better. Even if ‘perfection’ is impossible, better balance is better.

And better balance takes the form of reducing the performance gaps between classes and making the “second best” build for each activity 2-3% less than optimal, not 10-17%.

There’s room for improvement and they know it. It’s their job to know it, even if players throw up their hands and wail “alas, there is nothing to be done!”

Oh for heaven’s sake.

Just add a row of six boxes to the characters sheet next to the armor slots . If a rune is put DIRECTLY into that slot it supersedes the rune on the armor in that location. Runes can be moved in and out of these slots freely.

Done.

I think we’re essentially doomed by the “better must mean gaudier” mentality that completely permeates the armor design in this game.

Clean and simple is HARD. But it’s also beautiful and convincing.

If past behavior is any guide, there’s fully a 50% chance legendary means “FLAMEZ!!”

This… is a great idea.

I’m strangely comfortable letting the Chinese market tell me if GW2 will fail there. And I have the strangest feeling there’s actually a whole building full of people… maybe 2! That watch the metrics every single second of every day while pondering what if anything needs to change about their strategy.

It appears they’ve come to different conclusions than the OP, for which we should probably be thankful.

Thinking you know another character’s build better than the person playing it=Bad.

If you’re playing with them at all, the matching making thinks they’re roughly as skilled as you are. You want to show how to play a ranger, PLAY ONE.

Abelisk.4527:

GW2 is not a fashion game either.

Sez you.

My characters look awesome.

I’m entirely expecting HoT to be a pack-in with the full new release.

There’s simply no percentage in dividing your player base. The reasons the core game was presented as “included with HoT” have gotten no less true and valid than they were then.

“Nay, NAY! Dear sheaf of pages/ We miss you dearly so.”

Then look forward to disappointment. Because they’re not going to take away its central downside just so you can have a non-situational always-awesome boonstorm.

The point of Save Yourself is there’s a component of risk. That’s why its a strong as it is. Resistance isn’t even on the table for discussion.

If you’re being killed by conditions maybe you need to carry more/better cleanses and not to try and buff the elite that already makes the rest of the Guard’s choices largely obsolete.

If you’d suggested putting resistance or a cleanse on one of their OTHER elites, there might be something to discuss.

nerovergil.5408:

Like kitten wth… freaking tanky and can spam huge aoe nuke…wtf anet? what balance spvp team thinking? what fun in playing op class? this isn’t esport at all!!! i never meet an op class like DH in all my 20 years of gaming.

If they’re so awesome, why aren’t you playing one?

I mean, it seems clear enough with your vast skill you ought to be able to single handedly bring their metrics down to a more acceptable level.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I think these instances are pretty rare, for I play the game for hours every night, and a lot on the weekends, and I can’t remember this happening more than once or twice. I also happen to believe that many if not most are accidental, and not a form of griefing.

Can you imagine someone who accidentally spawns a banker or other element getting suspended? Really?? “Dear player — you put your golem banker in the wrong place, so welcome to SuspensionLand™.” That just doesn’t set well in my mind’s eye.

If someone does this to grief others, well, why not just move on and let it go? I cannot see the team investing the time to show spawners’ names, and I really don’t believe this request has a high level of priority. If a dev decides to take on this request, I’m sure they will post to indicate that.

Does rarity have ANY BEARING WHATSOEVER on giving us the tools to report deliberate doucebaggery?

You of all people saying “oh, just let deliberate griefing go” is actually kind of terrifying.

Funny… because reality says neither one is ‘a must’. Or even desirable.

I’ve bought keys-with-cash before when I’ve been more pleased with ANet’s behavior (this ‘outfits, outfits everywhere and let armor rot routine’ needs to die in a fire).

Its not hard to come away satisfied – you just need to have the correct expectations. If you go in staring only at the grandest of grand prizes, you’re doing it wrong. And getting something interesting in only 2-3 tries is also far form the norm. But I’ve gotten nice skins, some neat minis, a black lion weapon ticket or two (counting all the scraps),and even a permanent orichalcum node to go with the various boost that are the only thing you should expect. Out of maybe 40 keys over the lifetime of the account. Or it could be RNG likes me better than the people who feel compelled to come and announce their perfectly ordinary outcomes as if they’re unusually bad.

tobascodagama.2961:

This, pretty much.

The power creep between Elite Specs and No Elite Specs was pretty much inevitable. But the power creep between One Elite Spec and Two Elite Specs should be negligible, while still giving players something to work toward every expansion.

It wasn’t inevitable when I designed them, but the original proposal had the new trait line fully replace the core-profession’s class mechanic line. In the Guardian’s case that means the Dragon Hunter would NOT have had access to the Virtues line AT ALL. Which would have done a lot better job of limiting the “everything the base profession has and more” power creep we ended up seeing. Each base profession would have its own strong essential identity and tools the offshoot lines lack. I also later advocated for the elite specs to lose one of the core profession’s weapons while gaining one of their own. In the absence of either of those restrictions (and there are good arguments for not doing those things) then yeah, the ‘new hotness’ could have been much more carefully corralled. And I think it was for many of the professions. but the ones that slipped the leash have gone on to make a MOCKERY of the game’s internal trade-offs and balance. That you could predict which ones would over perform just by knowing which designers they’d been assigned to made the impending train wreck all the worse.

((shrug)) The core of the idea – the nigh infinitely extensible ‘pick one among many’ survived the final in-house adaptation, so ultimate I got what I wanted, but yeah, I’d have liked for the to be less blatant creep along the way, and it WAS DOABLE at one point earlier in the design process.

Direct answer: No. We CAN’T turn them back to invulnerable because in general MMOs can’t turn ANYTHING back to what it was previously. You can move sideways, you can move forward, but directly retracing your steps is PR suicide.

In fairness, the fact Dragonhunter’s aren’t particularly stand out is a sign of them being amongst the better designed too. Hard as it is for players to grasp “Fun gameplay — Mediocre performance” is just about the crowning achievement of class design.

Given the way people sniveled about DH virtues not being insta-cast, I’d say the exchanges Guardians make on their f1-3 are pretty close to on par with Necromancer/Reaper tradeoffs in terms of significance.

While rising in the ranks a little by buffing stuff competitive Guards/DH’s use by 5%-10% would be nice, the biggest thing holding the DH back is the whole cycles of middling to outright bad traits and utility abilities the Guardians have to endure. All the usual suspects + “come on already” when it comes to spirit weapons.

Come on already. They’ve been cripple-ware for 3 years now. And the problems are well understood: they scale appallingly badly to level so by the time you’re at endgame they pop like balloons. The AI is moronic. And because they’re split between offensive and utility functionality the traits boosting them are a basket case. They don’t need a do-over, they just need real, sincere ATTENTION for a couple days. Maybe a week or two. Then put the results of that cogitation into the testing process.

One thing to realize about the structure of Elite Specializations is they’re entirely exclusive – so the “new weapon” can be reused when giving you a new set of skills. While it hasn’t been done yet you can also substitute a new set of skills on a weapon the base class already uses (which might actually help with some of the balance issues they seem to introduce). Using those two tool they’re never going to run out of new weapon possibilities even on Warriors.

Also because of the way the game animates whips (as an fx effect rather than a morph of a weapon’s geometry), you can do ‘whips’ by having a character equip a scepter to act as the handle, while the skill itself caries the ‘lash’ fx.

Lets get to the real issue – there is no market you can invest in and profit heavily from that ANet won’t eventually deliberately destroy.

The system, by design and active shepherding requires agility. They want market barons moving on to new content just as much as any other segment of the playerbase.

If you sit on it, you will lose it. Simple as that.

Breaking from the tradition of endless complaining about WvW, I just wanted to say I spent about 5 hours following around a commander, hopping maps, storming keeps, defending towers, getting killed in bold charges and desperate defenses, managing my inventory, and peeling off occasionally to spread chaos, divert the enemy from the real attack or just plan run supply.

And it was FUN.

I banged out half a reward track, got my second piece of Triumphant armor, earned a couple WvW levels/points, probably put one of my alts about a quarter of the way through Elite Specialization school and actually cared enough to used food and XP multipliers (which I almost never do).

Thanks for a nice evening, WvW. I look forward to doing it again sometime.

Armor sets are by far the most expensive reward we can make. A full set includes heavy, medium, light, times five races, times two sexes, so it’s like developing 30 sets. It takes nine months to develop. (That’s for a normal armor set — legendary is much longer.) It’s not something we can do for Living World episodes. Individual pieces are good rewards for Living World episodes; full sets are more something for expansion packs.

Oh man, there’s just nothing disingenuous about saying that while doing outfits that are built on the same frames as armor for five races and two sexes and turning them out tediously close to twice a month for a while there… Especially since it’s BLOODY OBVIOUS the “five races” is BS since it’s the same assets run through a standardized stretch/morph (hence the endles clipping on charr) and the Charr and Asura don’t even necessarily have different looks for their two genders!

But (ANet thinks) player’s are all too stupid to have noticed that, so sure, let’s make it sound like armor’s 30 times harder than outfits.

Djinn.9245:

So the WvW Proof of Heroics will unlock a random HoT HP that is not already unlocked?

Yes.

Can you pick the zone?

No.

Generally I take a fresh 80 and do about 12 “low hanging fruit” HP I know of in HoT (the ones that would annoy me to unlock randomly because they’re so easy…), then burn the rest down with Proofs of Heroics.

If you’re really diligent about central Tyria HPs its really, really fast to pick off the last 50-80 points with a combination of tactics.

You can also get HP through WvW play. Every time you level up in WvW you get a chest with proof of heroics in it, Turn them in 10 at a time to unlock a random Heart of Thorns hero point. Proofs are a shared currency so you can earn them on any character (like a fully kitted Ascended-everything death machine) and spend them to advance any other character (like a freshly mintes no-Asecnded-at-all cannon fodder.).

I usually get 8-10 proofs per level in WvW. It is a LOT less annoying to me than wandering around most of the HoT maps going “crud, I can’t even get to that one… or that one… or that one…”