Guild Wars 2

I get that the grunt is supposed to make us feel like the legends are physically doing some of the work but that doesn’t even remotely explain why glint grunts on activation… Plz stahp.

Just so you know this kind of list is not actually that helpful for a QA tester. It’s great that you have put in the time to list the problems but without a description of a situation in which they occur that a tester can replicate and use to reverse engineer the contributing factors it makes the bugs take much longer to work out. If you know even one specific example of the circumstances which gives rise to any of these bugs then state it and put it in a bug report ticket. QA teams are ridiculously efficient at squashing bugs if you can help them replicate them.

It looks rad as kitten, 1 shoulder 4 lyf.

The point of changing Mallyx in the first place was to avoid a tension between you as a Mallyx rev and your allies with their condition cleanse. Any proposed change that involves reverting to a system where you want to accumulate conditions on yourself isn’t going to happen, it’s just bad for the game and the game > one concept. Redesign EtD to avoid incentivising condition accumulation or the idea is dead before it gets off the drawing board.

Edit: Everything other than your EtD is ace.

Your team has nailed it yet again.

Burtnik.5218:

Rite of the dwarf has to become upkeep ability. Amen.

I initially thought that this might be a solution but the upkeep cost of skill 9 plus the elite would be so large it would nerf Jalis further. They could make it an upkeep if they adjusted both skill’s costs but that’s a tricky thing to do without over powering skill 9.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Nostredeus.3105:

Jalis is actually very nice in terms of taunt. With traits you can almost perma taunt/slow

Could you elaborate more on this? How did you do it?

The taunt when traited lasts for 4 seconds and has a 5 second cooldown (you could add runes into the mix). The energy cost is 35 and you can regen 25 over the 5 second cooldown period if you use no energy for the duration. That means you lose 10 energy net per cast if you do nothing else. Assuming 50 starting energy that’s close to a 25 second taunt and with 100 starting energy it’s close to a 50 second taunt.

That’s clearly not perma but you have to remember how enemies work, you don’t need to keep them permanently taunted to remove a lot of their damage you just have to reposition them (i.e. facing away from the squad). You also have to factor in break bars here which will be more or less relevant dependent on content, no one has seen enough yet to predict this but I can envision encounters of both types where Jalis will be more or less useful. (Staff also laughs in the face of breakbars)

Rev is fantastic and if released in its current state it would be a satisfying class that is viable without power creeping into other class’ territory. That takes serious work, well done.

Some other thoughts:

Druid healing vs rev healing

Druid is better at burst, ventari rev is supposed to be better at sustain. Because druid can enter astral form after about 3 seconds of build up it is essentially able to sustain heal at burst levels with a staff/staff build, no doubt this will be nerfed on druid but there are still some ventar tweaks which should be considered.

Currently glint’s regen (combined with prot boons) is superior to ventari healing for sustain which makes glint/shiro the preferable healing/support build except in the rare case where you have no guardian, mesmer etc to reflect AND you have no druid.

The simplest solution is to embrace the sustained heal theme of ventari by reducing the energy cost of the ventari heal and tweaking the traits to do things such as provide the ability to pump out regen on ventari skill use and give prot on heal (examples for illustration only). It has to surpass Glint in sustained heal so that the eventual druid nerf makes ventari the preference for sustained healing.

A tablet speed buff would also be good.

Jalis

Jalis is actually very nice in terms of taunt. With traits you can almost perma taunt/slow a PvE enemy, this gives rev a strong PvE niche for upcoming content. What Jalis doesn’t do well is damage reduction. The elite is technically better than a prot boon but in practice you run out of energy far too quickly to have it available when needed. A severe energy reduction on the elite would allow it to actually compete with glint perma prot whilst also allowing skill 9 and the elite to be used simultaneously in situations where you require burst damage reduction. Condi damage would still be the rev’s weakness here and the huge -7 upkeep on skill 9 prevents perma damage reduction from becoming a thing.

The heal could do with a bit of a boost but it’s not the real problem with Jalis, skill 2 is also fine for perma weakness etc alhough the animation could be faster.

Mallyx

Greater range on skill 9 so we can chase/reposition for our elite. More torment on the elite. I don’t have a lot to say on this as I mainly focused on power and support builds.

Weapons

Perfect, you’ve nailed it.

Glint

Perfect, there are no necessary changes now that we know the might on pulse trait is working as intended.

tl;dr: Nice.

Malchior.5732:

That’s cool, but you don’t have to supply Phalanx-like Might to be good. Being so versatile and still being unique(+50% outgoing boons) is enough to be wanted.
Herald might not be mandatory, but no one should ever complain about having a Herald; it’s always going to be nice to have one. That being said, what they should change is how our Might on boon trait works. Right now, if you activate all the facets, you only get like 1 stack of Might per 3 seconds because of how the pulses work. You can’t properly time the facets to maximize this trait or anything so it usually ends up only giving you a couple stacks of Might.

I would be equally happy with that type of change.

Edit: In fact having done the numbers changing the pulse frequency to 2 seconds would be a fantastic change. I love that idea and agree entirely.

Malchior.5732:

Nostredeus.3105:

Malchior.5732:

Nostredeus.3105:

whilst the phalanx can pump might without sacrificing anything is a bit meh.

He sacrifices personal DPS while the Revenant sacrifices nothing to get the perma 11 Might.

The DPS drop is worth it hence why phalanx is mandatory right now. Either way no-one is running the might upkeep outside of badly organised groups where you have to carry hard. Also it’s worth bearing in mind that the upkeeps have an energy cost meaning there is an opportunity cost sacrifice there, if you have to pick between perma regen, fury or protection and 11 stacks of might it’s clear which you will run. Not only that but the might upkeep works differently to the fury, regen and protection because might is stackable; it takes time to build up such that 11 stacks perma is very optimistic on my part.

Just my 2 cents.

Well that’s kinda the point. The Phalanx Warr spreads a ton of Might, but the Herald gives +50% outgoing boon duration, Regen, Might, Fury, Prot, or Swiftness whenever needed without sacrificing much of anything.
Then, say you don’t have a Phalanx Warr: you still got 11 Might by yourself that pulses even OoC. No Ele? You got Perma Fury. Got both on your team? You can pulse Prot if needed or just help wveryone out by giving them Might and Fury before the fight even starts or swap to Ventari for Projectile Destruction duty or swap to Mallyx for max DPS potential.

The only time you’d run the might upkeep is if you have no phalanx warrior and no other other source of might. That’s the definition of a badly formed group really. But let’s say you are in that position, or you just want to be able to use the might upkeep in other types of groups, in either case giving the might upkeep more stacks is still viable without encroaching on the phalanx warrior due to:

A) the trade off with other upkeep skills, you want 20 stacks of might? You can’t have perma fury, regen or protection.

B) the fact that it takes time to build might means it’ll likely not hit 20 stacks before the encounter ends anyway.

C) warrior can run phalanx with a small dps decrease, I’m talking about 20 eventual stacks on the upkeep if you run boon food, boon traits, the facet of nature and strength runes.

I think really what I am saying here is that the rev is a great pug carry but meh (for might) in an organised group. I want to increase the might stacks to a decent point without kicking phalanx warrior out the meta (It’d be wrong to kill another build). I’m also saying that 11 eventual might stacks with a long build up whilst they stack is pretty meh even in pug groups.

Malchior.5732:

Nostredeus.3105:

whilst the phalanx can pump might without sacrificing anything is a bit meh.

He sacrifices personal DPS while the Revenant sacrifices nothing to get the perma 11 Might.

The DPS drop is worth it hence why phalanx is mandatory right now. Either way no-one is running the might upkeep outside of badly organised groups where you have to carry hard. Also it’s worth bearing in mind that the upkeeps have an energy cost meaning there is an opportunity cost sacrifice there, if you have to pick between perma regen, fury or protection and 11 stacks of might it’s clear which you will run. Not only that but the might upkeep works differently to the fury, regen and protection because might is stackable; it takes time to build up such that 11 stacks perma is very optimistic on my part.

Just my 2 cents.

So on a different topic (than Ventari v Druid and Mallyx generally):

The perma regen, protection and fury (not all at once) in Herald is nice. The might seems nice at first but has to compete with fire fields and Phalanx Warrior.

With our prof mechanic running, boon duration food and strength runes we get ~11 stacks perma. Being realistic for a moment, no-one is gunna run that for meh might. Can we get some more stacks up in here so that a boon support spec can start to compete with phalanx warrior? It doesn’t have to match phalanx but only being able to be like 50% as good when specced for boons whilst the phalanx can pump might without sacrificing anything is a bit meh.

Considering the other stuff rev brings can I suggest a boon specced build is tweaked to pump like 20 stacks if you run the upkeep and the prof mechanic permanently? (The energy upkeep cost will ensure there is a trade off between might and other boons)

Much love <3

(Ventari skill 6 having no CD a movement speed buff and 1200 range would be nice too)

Three quick thoughts:

1) Removing the condition transfer on Mallyx was the right move. That said it now removes a significant disincentive to stacking conditions on Rev. I understand that conditions are our weakness, and I honestly love that, but can we get a Mallyx themed way to reduce the incentive to stacking them on us? Perhaps the elite could apply an additional stack of torment for every condition on us? If that is still in conflict with the cleanses then how about psudo-condi-reflect, if a condi is applied to the rev it applies to the caster too?

2) Healing and condi removal aren’t really meta support options right now; the knockback and shield on Ventari are the big reasons to take it. The knockback is fine as it is. If the shield had its upkeep reduced by one or two pips, say -6 instead of -8, it’d allow it a bit of access into the PvE scene without totally unbalancing the WvW scene. In addition, a trait that causes the tablet to teleport to a location instead of travelling would be interesting, perhaps with a misty animation?

3) “What do you all think?” Sure, increased Torment damage is nice. Alternatively, “when a torment application runs out it causes X damage”, forcing opponents to deal with the condition since it is the only one we apply a significant amount of (it also has counter play, there’s no point making us OP).

Some people missed the comedy I see.

As a fun little experiment / bit of feedback I am going to collate a lot of the thoughts on the Necromancer changes in the December patch into a set of alternative patch notes.

Necromancer:
For the necromancer, we felt that a few traits and skills were too powerful, while others were lacking in efficacy. We recognised that the overriding problem with the necromancer currently is Dhuumfire, we wanted to change this trait whilst maintaining the viability of the condition Necromancer. The necromancer’s mobility will remain where it is currently, as we want the Necromancers to be focused on sustaining themselves through death shroud, siphoning health, and slowing down their opponent’s ability to act; we did however recognise that without other means of sustaining themselves the Necromancer is relegated to “facetanking” so we have made a couple of key changes.

• Dhuumfire: Now applies 3 stacks of Torment rather than Burning.
• Dhuumfire: Gets an appropriate name change, maybe “Dhuum’s Torment”.
• Dhuumfire: Now a grandmaster trait in the Curses line.
• Withering Precision: Now an Adept Minor trait in the Death Magic line replacing reanimator.
• Panic Attack: Panic Attack is a new trait added to the grandmaster trait slot in the Spite line that Dhuumfire has now vacated. It functions in exactly the same way as Panic Strike from the Thief Deadly Arts line. In short it immobilises targets under 50% health on hit.
• Dark Armor: Dark Armor now causes the user to be immune to damage whilst channeling, crowd control effects still break the channel and therefore the immunity. (Alternatively Dark Armor could apply protection, or a much higher amount of additional toughness; See: 4 figures)
• Dark Armor: Dark Armor is now a Grandmaster trait.
• Dark Armor: Dark Armor does not function when downed.
• Death Nova: Death Nova is now an Adept trait.
• Protection of the Horde: This trait now reads: “Summon a jagged horror whenever you kill a foe and +20 toughness for each minion under your control.”
• Protection of the Horde: This trait is now an Adept trait.
• Protection of the Horde: The ex-reanimator portion of this trait now has a decreased cooldown from 30s to 15s.
• Shrouded Removal: This trait is now a Master Minor trait in the slot that Protection of the Horde has now vacated.
• Deadly Strength: Increased conversion from 5% to 10%.
• Blood to Power: Decreased health threshold from 90% to 75%. Increase Power from 90 to 120.
• Vital Persistence: Increased reduction of life force drain from 25% to 50%.
• Reaper’s Protection: Decreased the cooldown from 90s to 60s.
• Banshee’s Wail: Increase cooldown reduction from 15% to 20%.
• Chill of Death: Increased trigger threshold from 25% to 50%.
• Death into Life: Increased conversion from 5% to 7%
• Main Hand Axe: This weapon will now have a cleave effect.
• Siphons in general: Siphon skills will now work in Death Shroud.

As you can see we have made Siphons viable, Axe is now viable, Dhuumfire is now fixed and the torment stacks can be adjusted as necessary in future patches, the Spite line now contains a Grandmaster trait that allows the Necromancer further control and therefore mobility, Reanimator is no longer giving your opponents free rallys in WvW whilst still being an option for MinionMasters, the Death Magic tree has been rearranged such that going fully into it is a viable choice for additional defence and attrition at the expense of offense, and there are a huge number of Dark Armor + Stability trait/skill builds now opened up including a fun bunker build involving Axe, Dagger, and Foot in the Grave as well as one involving minions.

Basically I wouldn’t have bought the game, I’m not keen on being robbed you see.

Flint Allbright.9236:

This is a relatively unknown/completed event from what I understand. It fits with the catacombs/“final resting place” theme:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Flame_Temple_Tombs

Just a thought. The chest is individually named apparently.

I just went all the way through it, this ends in a grand chest which isn’t named.

Sekundes.2376:

well I like the idea, since there are a lot of mobs on higher fractal level who can one hit me (I’m a glasscannon) but I doubt that this will ever happen…

Your suggestion would make us able to jump down any cliff using DS and just stand up at the bottom of it like nothing happend because it only strips the LF bar =D

If you are a close-range fighting Necro in the fractals then you are just going to have a bad time during some fights…

And to be honest, I have no idea on how to help us stay alive from those 1-hit-kills without making DS overpowered…

Well yes, obviously it wouldn’t apply to fall damage for the reason you’ve stated.

To be clear: I don’t run a close range Necro in Fractals; I run the standard cookie cutter well support build, aka the only build a Necro can convince – with way too much effort- someone to take past level 10.

A DS skill #2 teleport would also be appreciated but wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to compete with the ‘usual’ FotM etc classes.

How this changes things.

The Necromancer now has the ability to mitigate an attack much like the Mesmer with Distortion; the Necromancer can even do this repeatedly by dancing in and out of DS with a dagger draining life force or a staff’s marks doing the same. Suddenly the Necromancer isn’t gimped, nor is it a liability in FotM at later levels; it opens up the door for melee Necromancers that dance in and out of DS applying vulnerability to opponents or healing allies. In short it fixes a kitten tonne of things, please, please, implement this ASAP.

Balance.

The ability to only absorb an attack (Where attack means one which would strip away all remaining life force) has three possibilities:

1) Absorb an attack every 10 seconds without stability.
2) Absorb an attack every 10 seconds with stability.
3) Absorb an attack every 5 seconds without stability.

All three are very clearly balanced and have upsides and downsides.

Thanks for reading.

PS: After that there are loads of other things that would help also, feel free to implement some of them.

-A cleaving attack as axe 1.
-A buff to spectral wall.
-Minion AI fixes.
-Remove that sodding minion from the 5 point Death trait… Seriously it slows down jade fractal runs hugely when it gets hit by the 1 shot beam.
-Change Flesh Wurm so it doesn’t get destroyed once Necrotic Transversal is used; hello there secondary damage mitigation skill that can be placed carefully and repeatedly used.
-Rejig some traits so we can get decent wells on top of other things instead of choosing between options.
-Dagger #2; make it fire and forget.
-Life steal in general needs a HUGE BUFF, like crazy through the roof style buff. It should be possible to damage mitigate almost entirely with careful and clever use of life steals, a heal, dodges, well placed wells and the skill to keep enemies in them. Currently it isn’t in the slightest; I recommend a trait that makes Marks steal life and or a huge increase to the life steal that traited wells do.

I could go on for hours, I wont though since I have a FotM group to convince to take me.

Hey guys,

Before I start I just want to say that the chief balancing objective in PvE for A-net currently should definitely be making sure all classes have the ability (when set up right) to avoid damage equally, in different ways yes but with equal effectiveness on average.

Anyway back on topic:

So there’s a bit of a problem with Necromancers not getting selected for FotM and dungeon groups. I think we can all see what the problem is, and there is a really simple set of solutions, but before that.

The Problem:

End game content in GW2 is based on the principle of doing a lot of damage to players and in high level fractals having one shot abilities. This creates a situation where the classes in high demand are Mesmers, Thieves, Guardians and Warriors, the reason being that they not only put out a fair bit of damage (Thieves / Warriors) or have decent utility skills (Mesmers / Guardians) but they have a special ingredient that some other classes don’t: Damage Avoidance, and lots of it.

Mesmers have skills such as Distortion and Blink.
Thieves have stealth, Roll for Initiative, Steal, Shadowsteps, Refuge.
Guardians have more ways of avoiding damage than an army of Romans in a turtle shield formation.
Warriors have all kinds of similar stuff.

Anyway, the point is they have a special ingredient that other classes are missing, none more so than the Necromancer.

How does the Necromancer avoid damage?

So the Necromancer works differently to most other classes when avoiding damage; instead of flat out keeping away from damage it absorbs it, it out survives the damage dealer if you will. You guys at A-net call this, and other related concepts, attrition. It’s fantastic and hugely unique, it’s the reason my main is a Necromancer and I love the concepts behind it. The trouble is in places such as FotM it has no real value, you can’t survive 1 hit kill attacks, you can’t life steal through them, and you can’t Death Shroud them and that’s the real issue here.

How is Death Shroud the main damage avoidance and how is it failing?

Death Shroud, as you guys will no doubt know from PvP etc, is the main way for Necromancers to avoid a hit; it absorbs the damage without it hurting the Necro’s health pool and it becomes mitigated in so far as the Necromancer can simply acquire more life force. It fails in FotM and other key areas however, this is due to DS not being robust enough to absorb an attack without damage bleeding through to the health pool of the Necromancer. Instead the 1 hit kill attacks out there strip away the death shroud of a Necromancer and then punish, if not remove, the health pool of that player.

How do we fix things?

Simple; tweak the Death Shroud so that it stays the same but upon an amount of damage that is greater than the life force remaining it absorbs an entire attack regardless of damage done. Instead of having damage bleed through simply say “If the attack does enough to remove the Necromancer’s death shroud then it stops its damage application there and the Necromancer only loses its DS instead of taking damage on top of that.”. Simply put don’t allow damage to bleed through the DS into the health pool.

Basically:

[Life force remaining] – [Damage done] = X

IF X <= 0 THEN [Life force remaining] =0, DS ends and the Necromancer takes no further damage from that attack.

IF X > 0 THEN [Life force remaining] = X

I have no idea what Mortal is, it isn’t one of the “stat groups”.

What stats does it have on it and I’ll classify it, although that list is just an introduction there are obviously crazy builds (usually not very good ones) that differ from that.

Physical damage (Dagger MH / Axe MH / Focus / Warhorn / Staff):

Beserker’s or Knights armour.


Condition Damage (Sceptre MH / Dagger OH / Focus / Warhorn / Staff):

Carrion or Rabid armour.


Hybrid Damage (Everything):

Rampager’s or Carrion armour.


Physical Damage + Healing:

Valkyries or Clerics armour.


Condition Damage + Healing:

Shaman’s armour.


Defensive + Physical:

Soldier’s armour.


Odd one (two) out:

Celestial… Because why do that. :/

Magic find… Because you can take the above but swap in magic find.

Hey guys,

I don’t want to spend ages describing problems and such, needless to say the last boss of the seers path seems to be functioning incorrectly; after 4 hours we still couldn’t do the puzzle fast enough to beat Simin.

I am not looking for the solution, I simply want to know if Simin is bugged or if she is working as intended and we’re missing something.

Thanks

PS: Giganticus Lupticus is a piece of cake, don’t nerf it.

Just did a run, put her down to 30%ish, couldn’t get her any lower.

I’m totally fine with a dev response that says “This dungeon path is working as expected”, if you can hand on heart say that a-net I’ll go and sink another 5 hours into the dungeon and make it happen but I want to know that you’ve tested it.

Alternatively if it isn’t working a response of “this dungeon path is not currently functioning” would be appreciated so I don’t waste more time on it until it is fixed.

Thanks guys, and loving the dungeon.

I love the game, so does WoodenPotatoes, I honestly love the storyline and the lore as much as he does but he nails the problems here.