Guild Wars 2

I haven’t used KB since everyone was running around as a reaper in PvP. Back then dodging when they shroud to free moa them out of reaper shroud was great. Still, it was an interesting idea for strong toolbelt skills, I loved it and it definitely changed your gameplay.

Also, did you really say dodging is hard and they are “lucky” if they managed to evade an attack? What? Do you know how many AoE skills and obvious tells and kitten you can evade easily in PvP?

Panda.1967:

Nova Pint Kiosk.7085:

Panda.1967:

Nova Pint Kiosk.7085:

we lose 4s of Elixir Shell healing/Water Field access,

Um… no we didn’t… Mortar Kit fields lasted 4s by default, siege rounds boosted this to 6s. They removed siege rounds, but increased the duration of mortar kit fields from 4s to 5s. You only lost 1s if you previously used siege rounds, otherwise we all gained 1s.

If you took siege rounds and HGH elixir shell lasted for ~11 seconds. This was a big deal for healing, as it gave you easy access to a water field to blast for a long ass time, and a ton of healing over time as well. removing around 4s from that kittening sucks, especially without receiving anything to make up for it.

If you were ever getting ~11sec water fields with both traits, then that was a bug. HGH adds 20% duration. Since siege rounds directly adds 2 seconds you should only have had 7.2sec fields.

Now it sould be 6sec with HGH, but apparently HGH interaction with elixier shells is bugged to do nothing. Instead of being bugged to provide apparently nearly 100% duration as you appear to be claiming.

yeah, it was 100% bugged, but that bugged kitten was pretty much the only thing making healing engi worth a kitten since it gave you enough time to access your fields (also lasting forever means it has priority over other fields towards the end of its lifespan so you can time blasts after a while to get it easily). It also added a ton of healing over time , since most of our healing is blasts/targeted AoE, it made sense for it to be particularly strong of a skill if double traited (yes, still bugged but still) as it was the only thing bringing engi healing in-line with other healers at all, and did give us a decent healing build if your group knows how to stack properly, with really good burst healing when you blast your water field to death.

While it was a bug, it was the healing builds only access to a water field (because 33% outgoing healing trait is more important than healing turret, especially now with the re-worked turrets only overloading once.) It also was what carried the healing and made access to a water field possible in pretty much any environment. So yeah, this change alone kittened me off a lot since they did nothing to compensate.

Also, I understand that shield isn’t the worst weapon, but there is literally no use for it. If you’re going tankier/defense oriented you’re going to take hammer because its better. It needed either a buff, or to give a buff to overshield because otherwise its a pointless weapon, even with a trait for a whopping 2 skills which do almost nothing but provide CC on the class with kittenloads of access to CC already.

tigirius.9014:

Nova Pint Kiosk.7085:

All these changes did was give power engi a slight buff with more passive % increases. Woopie. I was looking forward to these changes, because I thought maybe we’d get some good changes to things that don’t see use, but nah, just garbage.

I have to disagree it put explosives back on the board and you can see from my posts and my signature that I don’t play around when it comes to balance of engis on the game but I have to say that even though there are still some things to work on like mine toolbelt positioning and possibly the turret explosion pushback (which I’m confused as to why it was removed if it was, it needs to be restored) and I’m hopeful that their next balance patch will address these after launch, I have to say that over all they did explosive engis good this time! I didn’t have to put on bombkit nor grenade kit I am a support explosive engi which means to me they are addressing our concerns this time.

Which is fair, they did make explosives better, I suppose, by matter of flat damage buffs which is boring but whatever. I do love the charges change, which is really nice, and gadgeteer change isn’t bad either. The energy trait thing is a good change too because having a ton of traits which literally can’t function together in the same line was stupid.

I’m just annoyed that they buffed the one trait line which was used in every build already while nerfing healing/support, which was hardly even an option already, and without addressing some of our major issues that actually need something such as juggernaut, HGH, overshield, shield in general, etc. It just seems extremely disconnected from what engi could actually use.

Panda.1967:

Nova Pint Kiosk.7085:

we lose 4s of Elixir Shell healing/Water Field access,

Um… no we didn’t… Mortar Kit fields lasted 4s by default, siege rounds boosted this to 6s. They removed siege rounds, but increased the duration of mortar kit fields from 4s to 5s. You only lost 1s if you previously used siege rounds, otherwise we all gained 1s.

If you took siege rounds and HGH elixir shell lasted for ~11 seconds. This was a big deal for healing, as it gave you easy access to a water field to blast for a long ass time, and a ton of healing over time as well. removing around 4s from that kittening sucks, especially without receiving anything to make up for it.

Shield gets zero changes, we lose 4% boon duration, we lose 4s of Elixir Shell healing/Water Field access, we have zero changes to the trait lines that actually need it (Inventions/Alchemy), we get garbage might stacking in the power trait line, juggernaut is still pointless(ahh yes exclusively take the burning weapon without the buff to burning!), especially with yet another self-might-stacking trait and abilities on holosmith (cuz we totally need might stacking for only our selves everywhere! Scrapper! Holosmith! Juggernaut! HGH (yeah we can stack a whopping like 6 might on allies, woopie). Thing is even with what we can do (experimental fire turret, HGH, kittenty blast finisher trait) for might stacking on allies we can’t get close to 25, but I could AFK and get 25 might stacks on myself and yet we’re constantly given more solo-might stacking options.

All these changes did was give power engi a slight buff with more passive % increases. Woopie. I was looking forward to these changes, because I thought maybe we’d get some good changes to things that don’t see use, but nah, just garbage.

Can we PLEASE get the option to set up buttons to do what we want like we currently have with the combat mode mod? I am talking about setting left click & right click to what we want them to be, and also allowing shift+left click, shift+right click, etc.

Hammerguard.9834:

So now, we have to go through a cooldown and reach max Astral Force to use our transform. Two gates is completely unnecessary, Anet. Even if you wanted to lock players out of Astral Force for longer you only needed to balance more around the original gate and adjust how much Astral Force is obtained from healing and attacking. Adding a cooldown is just clunky and pointless.

It works exactly how lifeforce/shroud works now. I don’t see a problem with this at all, I do think the 10s change when they do let us keep 1/2 our remaining bar left a bit off, but eh.

I don’t understand why the two good grandmaster traits have been reworked, but the one that is 90% useless (as it has a 10s ICD) gets no changes? Thats literally the only one I saw that REALLY needed to be fixed. It is the only thing that have any synergy with a condi build (Apothecary is nice to use instead of clerics for a change) and it is stuck on a 10s ICD period, which makes it completely useless in a multi-target fight, not to mention the fact that in a one on one fight its hardly useful and would force you to space out your CC as long as possible to actually get any use from it.

I think everything for the fight is mostly extremely well done, however, I find healers are definitely going to be necesarry, and we cannot be stuck with the current healing situation. Druid have like 5 billion heals, and their base healing is ridiculous. Eles have a good amount of healing in water attunement, and their base healing is also a bit ridiculous. Engineers have medkit, which is literally the worst skill in the game. It is literally worse healing than standing there and only applying regeneration and doing literally nothing else, yet it was designed as the engineers answer to be a healer. Please, looking into healing scaling, and base healing for every class, and give us at least a couple of options (guard, engi, and ele would seem good options) that are on-par with druid, but please require healing power to actually be useful.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Nova Pint Kiosk.7085:

The druid beta has showed me one thing: Healing Power & Healing needs a MAJOR rework across all classes.

Compare Engineer Medkit #1, which forces you to actively follow someone to heal them, and give up 100% of your damage for the entire time. This healing does about the same hp/s as regen does. You give up 100% of your damage to do something a herald can do with their healing skill. while still doing anything else they want. Hell, if you’re both full healing power builds the revenants regeneration would outheal your medkit, thanks to the bonus healing % a revenant gets.

Off topic, but…

I don’t see why healing needs a MAJOR rework. Obviously, Engineer is not supposed to be as healing support oriented as a Revenant who is not as healing support oriented as a Druid. What’s the issue? You want homogenous classes where everyone can do the same thing?

Also off topic… but…
I don’t see the big deal with Herald, Ranger core can already do 90% of what it does. Although, you do have the Legend swapping.

My reasoning is mostly that since we have raids starting up now, and only one specialization that is healing focused, you basically HAVE to use a druid or you are useless, due to the ridiculous healing disparity between a druid and literally any other class that wants to focus on healing. I bring up the engineer because that kit removes literally all damage that you do and turns you into a 100% healer, and its literally useless. It needs a rework, and that is not the only healing focused build possible that is sincerely not balanced.

EDIT: Not to mention how unbalanced the healing power stat in everything is, especially druid with how much base it pulses and how useless it is to invest in healing power, this is a fact across the board, not just with druid. The Healing Power stat needs to go up and base (non-selfish) heals need to go down. Self Heals (#6) are typically fine where they are but AoE skills do not stack for kitten with healing power making being a healer almost useless.

The druid beta has showed me one thing: Healing Power & Healing needs a MAJOR rework across all classes.

Compare Engineer Medkit #1, which forces you to actively follow someone to heal them, and give up 100% of your damage for the entire time. This healing does about the same hp/s as regen does. You give up 100% of your damage to do something a herald can do with their healing skill. while still doing anything else they want. Hell, if you’re both full healing power builds the revenants regeneration would outheal your medkit, thanks to the bonus healing % a revenant gets.

Few things I found:

Hammer is fantastic. Honestly I love it. Good amount of damage, not too much for how much utility it brings, but not too little either.

Gyros: Literally useless. kittenty following speeds, wonky AI, bad game design in almost every single case. The healing Gyro is too long of a cooldown for almost no utility save for the toolbelt. The blast gyro doesn’t even use your perception so it won’t crit 90% of the time. The spinner is absolutely useless outside of ethereal fields as a condi build, which is still fairly pointless as you’re taking one full skill for a few confusing bolts. I’ll admit I didn’t try the bulwark because I didn’t care for it, but its a good idea if it works well, but idk how its lifespan is.

One of the non-scrapper things I think we need for this is increased damage for Toolkit, it doesn’t do very much, the last hit is way too slow for it to do less damage than bombs or nades when it only hits 3/3/1. It has the same feel as Reaper greatsword but the last hit can only hit 1 person and the damage payoff for such a slow hitting combo just isn’t there. Toolkit+Hammer+HGH makes for an awesome melee zerker build with lots of defense, but Toolkit should be doing more damage than bombs/nades/hammer, but currently it is sitting around the same damage as the hammer. I understand the Hammer getting slightly lower damage, but it also gets stacking might on hit, it also has an AoE stun, a great movement skill, a block, and a reflect. Toolkit has a pull and a block, and applies cripple on it, but it has lower damage on the auto, while it takes longer.

Tested damage in the mists, each AA chain gets 4 other than toolkit since its #3 is 1 full second instead of 1/2 second. None of the traits for the 10% bonus damage were used.

Toolkit: 6,318
Hammer: 7,421
Bombs: 8,260
Grenades: 6,660
Rifle: 5,312
Pistol: 2,484

The #1 skill needs a major buff, 250 hp/s on a 3 part chain, with the chain providing multiple buffs throughout the chain. Something like protection for 3s, vigor for 3s, 1x condition removal. This allows us to follow our target to heal and give them perma protection and vigor if we can stay on them and if we are dealing literally 0 damage. Once we stop, the boons would fade very quickly. This also gives us 1 condition removal every 3 seconds for allies only. Plus, would let you use something like 3 different fancy mist effects to make it look totally cool. We would be doing close to what Ele water staff auto healing does, only ours is a smaller cone, does not effect us, and applies boons to allies instead of damage to enemies. I think this is more fair than what it currently is. [Note: this assumes a 1s normalized total cast for each part of the chain, where as it is currently longer than that. something like 1.5 seconds or 1.25 I forget]

Skills #2-5 should act as the throw mine does, throw it down in an area and have a detonation radius and effect radius that is larger. Allow us to press it again to detonate it. Currently throwing to throw them at someones feet is hard, and honestly getting them to correctly pick up while running sucks too. A larger activation field, being able to blow it up if they’re in the range but just outsitde of activation, and it being AoE would make these skills very useful tools, which they should be since we are giving up literally any damage while using this.

I feel that with these changes, it would actually be a powerful tool available to keep our allies alive.

the guards do way too much damage to the doorbreakers, and too little to players, not to mention how easily they die, and the fact that they have almost no real mechanics. There should be a way to heal your minions through their attacks, or a way that they might actually kill a player, or at least make it take longer so that you can’t just easily kill them and then focus on the actual player attacking you. Give them some kind of mechanics, be it blinds, knockdowns, or etc. Please learn from the monsters you’ve been making for silverwastes/HoT and use some of those mechanics where specific CC is important to stay alive.

I would like them to be fairly large, large enough for there to be 1 portal for each city (including Lion’s Arch) each with its own entranceway decorations (think like a large college’s grassy entrance… whatever those are called… apparently called Quads?) This large entranceway with a portal to each major city (and decorations for those cities along their path to the building) could harbor activities, critters, merchants, or whatever.

As for the building itself, i would like it to be possible to make multiple stories (bank in the basement, maybe upstairs could be special rooms for high ranking officers or whatever) and there needs to be lots of customization (choice of building type, furniture placement, etc.)

Would you consider making traits account unlocks instead of individual unlocks? This will lead new players to content through requiring them to do it, but keep it from annoying the kitten out of people creating alts. It makes sense with how the NPE is now, and would be amazing.

Please remove the Black Lion Key Farm

There has been a ton of commotion about the possible removal of the BLK farm (aka, moving the key to level 20 instead of 10.) Please do so, for the following reasons:

• The key farm takes you out of the game. You literally have to log out every 20 minutes just to do this farm.

• It is extremely repetitive! You are doing the same 15 minutes of content a million times, running the same exact route, and everything. It is horribly boring.

• It is almost 100% a waste of time, as you need to spend 10 hours farming for maybe 1 weapon.

• It inflates the number of Keys in the game by quite a bit.

• It literally forces you to erase progress on a character, use up a character slot, and put effort into this exploit. (Yeah, I would call it an exploit, essentially.)

So now, once we have removed the BLK Farm, that leaves us with a whole hell of a lot less keys, OH NO! WHAT WILL WE DO? Fix the price of keys (yes), or fix the drop rates in the chests (no.)

Please lower the price of Black Lion Keys

Why lower the price of keys instead of fixing the drop rates in the chests? simple!

• You won’t reward those who have stockpiled keys from farming them.

• It is MUCH less work, and if you already think chests are balanced RNG wise, you’re all set!

• It will give a good option for a gold sink & an option to spend money on that isn’t a HUGE waste!

What price should they be?

• 25 keys for 800 gems. This gives a nice package of keys to someone for $10, which is a very reasonable price to pay, say, once a month, to get a weapon skin. This also puts it at just above 100g to get 25 keys, which isn’t bad at all.

• 5 keys for 200 gems, giving you something to spend that 200 gems on after buying a weapon skin for 600.

• 1 key for 50 gems, allowing you to pick a couple up with gold to complete that ticket if you are off a few scraps.

Why do I suggest these prices?

Well lets look at it right now, currently it is 125 for one key, 450 for 5, and 2100 for 25 keys. It takes at least 25 keys (this is lowering for sure, but makes it fairly easy for calculations) to get one weapon ticket from scraps. These weapons sell for 100-50g. So you have to spend 2100 gems just to get the chance at one weapon skin. You sell weapon skins for 600 gems. Thats 1500 more, thats almost $20 extra, just for a chance at a weapon skin. So what should it be? Well, since you can get lucky, we don’t want it super low (we don’t want 30+ keys, which guarantees 1 skin to be 600 gems), but since you can get unlucky, we don’t want it super high (like it is right now, its literally useless to ever buy keys, ever, unless you want to literally flush your money down the toilet). We need a happy medium, where $10 gets you a decent chance at a skin.

I name all of my characters after those from Chrono Trigger, mine aren’t particularly exact as I could get, but these are the two which do have a cosplay outfit for currently (2/3 of my 80s).

First up is Magus, aka Janus:
http://i.imgur.com/9QheRMN.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Py2blFH.jpg

He is a master of the elements in game, but uses a Scythe. I decided on Elementalist instead of Necro to stay true to the feel of the character. Maybe one day I’ll get the scythe staff skin, but currently I don’t use a Staff, and I don’t have that much gold to drop on a skin for something I don’t use. Maybe soon!

Second is Lucca:
http://i.imgur.com/3KpDBFO.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/eMvfZQ4.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8PLs7Af.jpg

This one is my main! She is fantastic, and an Engineer as true to her in-game love for science. The second photo you can see her in what I use this outfit for (healing gear) her Pistol/Shield with her normal shoulders/backpiece as well which I disabled for the first shot. Again, not exact, but I really love the way the outfit looks and it being pretty while being reminiscent of the original is important. (I wish the aviator helm/aetherblade helm/etc didn’t cut out hair and look crappy, or she’d have one of those on. Also too bad I don’t have a pic of before I changed her hair, but oh well!)

I would love to be able to swap skins, dyes, & outfits between builds for sure. i have 3 sets of gear with 3 completely different skins currently, and if I could use those+different dye jobs for different builds to show which one I am currently in, that would be really cool. Visual cues so I know if I’m not in the right build are great, plus friends I run with can learn which is which too.