Guild Wars 2

It’s a well deserved change IMO.
I would have moved it to Grandmaster, just like necros.
Be happy they don’t nerf the duration in tourny, just like necros.

And it’s not like Engi doesn’t have enough access to burning already.
Or friggin passive-random-spam-rewarding procs, for that matter…coughnewtransmutecough (<—this one worries me)

The speedy kits change is just as much justified: we’ve been complaining so much about perma-evade that it would be unfair to complain about a vigor uptime nerf. You’ll still be able to get 66%+ uptime anyway.
And you don’t need to spam kits anymore while roaming around. My mouse is happy.

Good. An incentive to play the objective, even in hot-join.

Bad. For hot-join, the more reason to abuse auto-balance.
(And how are we supposed to play the objective in 8v8?)

I wanna be a scrub.

Winning is fine at the beginning, then the feeling fades away.
I actually enjoy the game much more when I don’t care about winning.

Anyway, this article applies to competitive gaming. Which GW2 is far from. And would only concern like 5% of the playerbase. So I guess the 95% remaining has the right to be a scrub.

I got one: “Crying under the rain”

Or “Spitting at the sea”

Yeah, it kinda fits Gw2 pvp.

Well, in this particular case (soloQ), the issue is when skilled players are matched with/against new players.

Which shouldn’t happen. New players should learn the game amongst themselves, and develop their skills naturally by playing more and more, veterans should play against each other. And everyone has fun at his own level of skill.

But matchmaking being what it is, it does happen.

Soooo, no more tickets, okay.
No more gem rewards either I guess? that’s a pity T.T

We’ll see what they implement for them to earn money from pvp players…
They need funding after all, one way or the other!

Custom Arenas Incoming?

Solo queue would be so hard to pull off in the current state of the game, where team composition is so important.

For example, you would solo queue, get against ppl who are in your rating bracket, but the other team got a bunker, or 2, and you don’t.
Or you get the most bizarre compositions ever, like 2 necros 3 mesmers, 4 thieves and an ele, etc, etc, running around like headless chicken without properly defined roles in the abscence of vocal communication.

Those who tried solo-queuing in frees know what I’m talking about. Yeah, it’s not only about pugs vs premades.

In short, to be effective the system would have to insure not only that you play against pugs in your bracket, but also balance team compositions.

Exactly like a normal dungeon LFG tool. Which Guild Wars 2 doesnt’t have.

That would mean acknowledging and validating the current bunker/roamer/support role trinity meta.
Which is, most of tourny players agree, not in a perfect place balance-wise, and will surely be the subject of big changes in the near future.

That would mean implementing tools which would recognize your build as one of the above roles. I know Rift had one of those, but the class/role/build system was designed around that idea. Guild Wars 2 is “supposed to be” the opposite of this kind of role system, and has nowhere near the same tool.

Also, as mentionned above, the time, effort, and ressources needed to only implement the UI, when the pvp team is already working his kitten off on Matchmaking and Ratings, and when the game is nowhere near polished enough.
It would take at least half a year of development in the current state of the game.

Much too soon for a Solo-queue system.

You can with any teleport. There’s a spot. A tiny little spot.

And I’ve encountered strange situations where a class without teleport (rangers, warriors, engis) would just instantly appear in a safe place, or behind me out of nowhere. Right when I CC them and am about to burst. Weird.
Sudden lag spike or Hack? can’t know for sure.

Anyway position in space and mouvement SHOULD NOT BE traited client-side.

Guild wars 2 is the only game where lagging gives you an advantage: You can see the enemy moving but he cannot.

TGSlasher.1458:

This is what we need from a 30 point arcane trait.
1st skill: something that will support whichever trait line your in, such as EA.
2nd skill: The same as 5 point arcane except that all traits from your previous line are carried over for 5 seconds. That means, when I switch to lightning from fire I can also get ever skill cast for 5 sec is fire and lighting (so the 1 might per fire skill 30pointer) 10%extra damage in fire (and the one in air) and anything else I have in fire.

If I change to water the I now have air+water traits for 5 sec.

That…is already the case —>Lingering Elements, Arcane Power Master Trait oO

oh yeah. Lets give bunkers toughness, healing AND vitality on the same jewel. Bunkers are so easy to kill nowadays.
Or lets give necros vitality, toughness and condi damage
Or lets give warriors power, precision and toughness
Or…well, i hope you get my point.

Some stat combinations are too powerful for certain classes/builds. That’s why they’re not in-game.

And we used to be able to equip rings in early beta——>instagibs all over the place, even more than now.
Not good. Not good at all.

I actually wish the jewels we have were nerfed a bit. That could solve the burst/bunker problem.

I want a viable glass cannon build similar to mesmer and thieves T.T
I would

Nerf:
– Evasive Arcana Water effect: replace it with a Frozen Burst chill effect
or
– Reduce healing power contribution to most water healing skills, not by much, 10-15%
—→nerf healing builds effectively

Buff:
– Overall damage by 10%, closer to what elems used to do in bw1

- Reduce some off hand cooldowns by 20%, like Fire Grab, Frost Aura, Updraft, Earthquake, Gale, Freezing Gust, Fire Shield…

Anything with a cd over 30sec is ridiculous: it gimps both damage/burst capability AND survavibility. Elem really is the profession with the longest cd’s.

- Same with utilities: Most survavibility utilities have a inexplicably long cd for the effect they provide. Ex: Cantrips, Arcane Shield. Other professions have similar utilities with much less cooldown.

- Last but not least, fix Intelligence: bonus % attunement recharge rate with each point in Arcane Power line is not accurate at all. 60% of 15sec is 9sec, not 5ish sec.
Not having to put 30 points in Arcane Power line for a build to be effective would provide soooo much more diversity in builds.
Plus the Grandmaster trait Arcane Precision is so weak…

Tired of having to spec so much in defensive points/traits/utilities to be a little useful, to the extreme of becoming an unkillable, but non threatening, moving punching bag.

You may wanna rebind your teleport hack key.

Yep, they could reduce the number of active servers to a third just by adding a queue system…

Dude, WvW forum is right below

AGAINST EVERY LAW OF PHYSICS.

i’m fine if it hits me while i’m strafing , but i teleported behind him at 900 range.

HE DISTORCED TIME AND SPACE, AND FOLLOWED ME 900 RANGE AFAR, it’s ridicolous.

I may have used a little too strong hyperbole when I said that it was defying laws of physics…
Anyway…

Since we’re on subject of warrior’s, it reminded me of something related to warrior’s I wanted to talk about:
In the last patch notes they tweaked the Last Stand trait of warrior’s so that it actually breaks stun.
Fair enough I thought at first, Balanced stance breaks stun, so should that trait.
Then I went to sPvP and realized my error.

As a shatter mesmer, I used to self divert to daze warriors who managed to “bully” me.
well now, it won’t stop them at all. The warrior will instantly and automatically stun break.
It won’t even put 100b on cooldown. Yet it’s interrupted. Don’t ask me why.

So now, you can’t CC a warrior Frenzy Blading your teamate. Unless you’re lucky and the trait is on cd. Which is quite short (40secs)
And they get a free stun break anyway.

Of all those CC procced traits, like the mesmer’s (cc reflect, 90sec cd), necro’s (fear, 90sec cd), even ranger’s which is one of the best (stealth on a 30sec cd), the warrior one seems a bit OTT because of that little break stun addition.

Makes me really question Anet sense of balance…

Back on subject, I remember when playing warrior in beta that using a charge on a moving target was like playing with fire. You’d often end up further than where you started :p.
The target moving 2 steps to the left would make the charge completly miss.

But there’s a difference between tweaking the path finder a little so that it hits a running target,
and tweaking the path finder so that you can make a complete U-turn if the target teleports behind you…

In one of the early game patches, they changed warrior charge skills to hit moving targets more reliably.
Basically unless you move/dodge/teleport BEHIND the warrior while he’s charging you, the charge will still follow you.
Yes, it often results in situations defying every laws of physics or logic, where the skill hits you when it really shouldn’t.
Like stealth and channeling skills.

This game is full of those. Have fun finding them!

+1 for fixing the macro exploit
-1 for nerfing a buff: it’s admitting their sense of balance is off.
Seems everyone but Anet knew Shattered Strength got overbuffed in the first place.

Plus they don’t realize that it’s also the buff to Dazzling that made mesmers so strong.
In a teamfight getting 20 stacks of Vulnerability on that bunker (and dazing him)>>>>>20 stacks of might on the mesmer.

Still have a long way to go….

P.S: You want to fix Shatter Mesmer? Put a 10sec ICD on Deceptive Evasion. Same as Evasive Arcana. Period.

Aleth.9630:

Numot.3965:

The could change it so you always get “revealed” when stealth ends or after any attack (even if you miss).

I have to totally agree on this one. One stealth should only allow one Backstab attempt so if you do hit (meaning if you just spam Backstab in the air it shouldn’t reveal you) a target and miss because of blind, invulnerable or block, you should be revealed.
The current system makes it extremely hard to avoid a Backstab with your invulnerabilities or blocks because the thief just won’t appear after 3+ Backstab fails.

I have to disagree on one point here.
Why would you spam Backstab in the air? Hoping it would hit something somehow along the way? sounds scrubby to me.

Seriously, I don’t understand, in each and every game I have played so far, any, YES ANY skill used would break stealth. Unless it had some very specific tooltip indication.
Gw2 concept of stealth is very very very forgiving. Way to much imo.
You should be only able to move, dodge, and use F-abilities I give you that (stomp, revive, they re not skills after all).
Any other skill should present a risk. It means weapon skills, utility skills, heal skills and elites (Shadow refuge and Thieve’s guild? seriously? how lazy is that?)

About the reveal debuff himself.
Why not make the reveal debuff actually scale with the length of your stealth?
3 secs for most skills, 4 if you have stealth traited for the additionnal second, and yeah, 15 secs for shadow refuge.
50/50 reveal time, whatever the spec.

Edit: oh, and get revealed at the end of the stealth no matter what.

Hey Anet Team, let me try and explain my idea.

I play Guild Wars 2 mainly for its PvP features, but don’t really have the time to invest myself into tournament teams and such. So I usually play Hot-Join and Free Tournaments.

I was happy to hear that matchmaking would be implemented soon in Free Tournaments, helping casual players like me to enjoy the tournament system at their own pace/skill level.

But till then, casual players will still have to play in Hot-join to experience sPvP.
The fps-style server browser is fine, being able to enter or leave a match without restrictions is a brilliant idea, problem is, most matches will end up unbalanced in term of numbers of players in each team, especially since 5v5 servers were implemented, where each player counts much more than in 8v8.
Matchmaking unfortunatly is not enough when a 3v4 or 4v5 occurs in a round.
It is not pleasant to be in the outnumbered team, nor is it to easily crush it.
Your only solution at that point if you are looking for some kind of balanced challenge is to simply leave the server.

My idea is, why not implement a queue system? In addition to the server browser of course.
Players would have the option in the PvP interface to queue for a random server where room is available or has just been made.

The goal would be to more efficiently fill each and every server, instead of randomly joining a half full server. Thus making 5v5 servers actually 5v5 matches, and making sure it stays that way.
In addition it would reduce the number of active PvP servers and maybe (I’m no network engineer) lessen the server-side work.
It’s kinda the same idea than behind overflow servers when you think of it. Instead the overflow server would be the mists, and you would join a match when a player leaves a full server.

I’m aware this concept is already present in the “Play Now” button of the PvP interface.
Personnally, being of high rank (40+), the button would systematically send me to an empty server, the system being unable to find a server matching my rank, being so few of high ranked players.
So it’s kinda useless for me :/ , and I guess it would be the same for any player of a rank over 30.
Of course prioritizing rank matchmaking is important for balance in a match, but why send me to an empty server when there are so many half full ones?

This idea, plus an efficient tournament matchmaking server, would make sPvP much more enjoyable to casual players, and would be a big step towards making Guild Wars 2 a popular PvP game, and maybe further, a popular e-sport.

The next step would be an in-game vocal server, but I think I’m asking too much for now :p

Archaon.6245:

Ppl need to be “educated” to fair play and to play for team also in hot join, everyone just think that hotjoin = honor farming….and it must not be like this, ppl have to play hot join to learn useful things to put in better use into tpvp

+1. I thought 5v5 servers would change that, but I now realize most people entering hot join don’t know or care about objectives and basic teamplay.
People trying to damage downed players to death, people not rezing, capping with 3 or 4 on one point…

The sad part is when they try and enter free tournies with the same mentality and become a liability for their team, already at a disadvantage against premades.

There you could blame the game for not implementing a proper in-game tutorial, most people will just skip it, or for that lousy point/glory system (they’re working on it apparently), and there’s not even a sticky “sPvP guide” post in the forum or elsewhere.

I don’t have the technical means to make a proper video myself, but I would love the community of top team players to each make a video tutorial on the build they use and how to use it, and post it in the PvP forum.
Two birds one stone, it would teach the community about commonly used builds and therefore help the meta evolve.

Or maybe some kind of “Gw2 sPvP for dummies” video series….

Nice Explanation Archaon, but I’m talking about casual, hot join, sPvP. ^^
tPvP is totally different and much less accessible to a casual player unless you like being roflstomped by organized teams (blink matchmaking Anet please blink)

To fully appreciate Mozart’s music, you need some musical knowledge and, well…the taste for it.
Bieber’s just more accessible to the common people.
That’s sad (I’m a musician) but you can’t deny it.

In short, yes, casual players watch this kind of videos instead of your stream.

Heck, I remember Moldran, or Teldo’s youtube videos with lots of commentary, lots of explanation on what-to-do and not-to-do, their glory moments and their complete failures…I miss those guys.

All you can see on internet nowadays are guides made by beginners, or “epeen instagib clips with bad music and a link to the build”, and “endless tournament streams with half an hour afk’s in the Mists in between”.

So yeah this video is not that bad. But…

We can do better to promote casual sPvP.

You mean, there are more casual players videos than pro streams?
What a surprise…

On a serious note, I’m actually watching the nifthel video of the guy, and I’m kinda surprised, some advices he gives can be very useful to beginners (back capping, fighting on points, killing bosses…)

I wish the so-called “pro” players of this game would try and make the effort to do the same kind of lame guides for beginners, it would actually promote the game much more than watching tournies endlessly.

Don’t be mean guys…
This kind of video actually promotes casual sPvP. You know, the kind of casual gamers you want your stream to be watched by…

Link some quality warrior stream instead of trolling beginners, he’s only rank 15 after all.
PvP in this game is already unfriendly to casuals enough, make an effort for the community please.

- A casual pvper.

I tried it earlier. I haven’t been using ranger much but I’m pretty sure this pet change greatly affected their attack speed too…

Troll-full-evade-full beastmastery-soldier’s amulet spec Inc :p

I’m thinking of “Beware of Dog” or “Proud Pit Bull Owner” for a name

Let me recapitulate those patch notes in practice:

- D/D Bunker eles have now even more boon duration (it’s a bug, but still)
– Mesmer shatters are now even stronger, and phantasms were fixed
– Thieves have their only unviable weapon set (so thieves say anyway) buffed (p/p)
– Rangers pets do now more damage than their master, will still follow you to the other side of the map, and no more strafe-dodging their arrows from 1200 distance.
– Sigils apply to Engi’s kits, which changes…next to nothing for them.

Really guys? Really?

Well, go to the mist with a friend. Join an empty server. Ask your friend to spam dodges and try a phantasm.
MIRACLE! IT SPAWNS!

Second test: get into a hot join server with your guardian/warrior friend. Try a phantasm on Aegis, Shield Stance or whatever block ability.
MIRACLE! IT SPAWNS! AGAIN!

Once again, dodge and block don’t nullify a phantasm skill. Anet never stated it would in those patch notes, and it never did. Which is a pity imo.

Only an invulnerable state (like Elixir S, Mist Form, Renewed Focus…), blind or los.

Illusionary Duelist, Phantasmal Swordsman, Phantasmal Mage, Phantasmal Defender, Phantasmal Disenchanter, Phantasmal Rogue, Phantasmal Warlock, Illusionary Mariner, Illusionary Whaler, Phantasmal Berserker, and Phantasmal Warden: These skills must now be cast in line-of-sight of the target. These skills now behave as normal attacks that the mesmer must connect in order to summon the phantasm, and they will fail if the mesmer is blind or the ability is cast on an invulnerable target.

Phantasm wins. You know why?
Cause you only need ONE dodge to nullify a whole shatter burst.
How many dodge do you need to evade each and every phantasm attack?
And kitten if you tell me you can dodge the summon, you have never pvped.
YOU CANT DODGE A PHANTASM SUMMON. NOR BLOCK IT.
And don’t try and kill them, they have waaaaaay to much health with trait+signet.

Personally, I find outrageous that such a simpleton spec (Spam phantasms, hide, spam gs #1) can be in any way better than a spec using the mechanic mesmer was created for (aka shatter skills).
It’s so passive it becomes boring. I’d be just disgusted to play a spec where the AI does more than I do.

Fortunatly shatter mesmer is way more useful in a team, huge aoe dmg and boon removal ftw.

For some reason Anet decided instant cast abilities and only those, can be used while stunned (and stun breaks of course).

Not only Phase Retreat, there are a few others of those: ele’s auras (Shocking Aura being the worst), Necro’s Doom (DS fear), Engi’s Smoke vent (flamethrower blind), and I probably forget some.

Phase retreat just strikes as the most effective, especially on a such low cd.

The truth is, CC is supposed to keep you from using skills.
Except for those.
Find the logic.

Once I won a 1v2 without losing a single hp.
(but they were bad, i feel a bit guilty :p)

Agree with OP.
After playing a bit of all other classes, i finally created an ele. D/D was so popular in sPvP I had to try it myself.
After an intensive week figuring out traits, runes, sigils, getting used to attunement switch, etc, my conclusion is:

- It’s soooooo much fun to play: it’s really an explosion of particle effects on your screen, and once you manage your attunement switches, it feels very rewarding to use the right skill at the right moment.

However:
– It’s soooooo sub-par damage/burst-wise compared to other melee classes (thief, warrior, even guardian), and so much harder to pull.

And more importantly.
It’s soooooo hard to stay alive when you have few armor, a small hp pool, poor avoidance, just control, but not that much either.
At some point you realize the only way to remain in a fight long enough is to trait in full def. Or you just reset the fight every time you’re in trouble (Ride the lightning ftw :p)
Heck, when you see how glass canon mesmers or thieves manage to survive so much more easily while dealing way more damage, you just…sigh…

Makes me wonder why Anet gave so few melee damage capability to the most fragile class in the game. Please i want Bwe1 elem damage back T.T

Very interesting video.
You should post this in the pvp section, many things they say in this video apply to pvp balancing, for all those cheesy Instagib combos this game offers: shatter combo, 100b, bs combo, pistol whip…
Pop cooldowns, smash your keyboard and watch your opponent health bar drop.

I just hope all of this gets nerfed to the ground, and that Anet proposes us something REALLY challenging and skillful…
Not something you can macro on your keyboard…

What I don’t get in the concept is why every class doesn’t have equal amount of access to it.
It’s giving only certain classes access to an easy <2 sec TTK.
Talk about balance…

Like everything they buffed about thief in BWE3…
Initiative regen, caltrops, damage, etc…
Still haven’t toned down any of it.

I’ve noticed this as well. iBerserker still doesn’t hit reliably (sometime missing a stationary dummy completely). Also, the delay is quite a disadvantage to the mesmer. Against all other professionals a player gets one dodge. Against a mesmer phantasm, they now get two, and the second one is easier.

Actually it competly messes up my timing against GS noo…err, players :p
Before it was like, you see him lift up his sword, bam dodge, whatever dude.
Now it’s like, you see him lift up his sword, brainfreeze for 1sec, then dodge…

No seriously,
I think they tried fixing the iBers bug by adding a delay after the phantasm appears, so that every hit gets registered
OR
They want to make it easier for new pvp players to dodge phantasm attacks.

Anyway, it’s not very effective, and pve noo…err, players complain again

Nero play high lvl tournament, I play wvwvw where there is no high lvl place but I play it alot and kinda sure I do ok. To call ppl trying to giving advice and show there is ways to make it work bad just cause we dont agree the fight is lost premature is as wrong as it would be for us to call ppl with a problem vs thiefs bad instead of help. But sure, again I claim there is many ways to counter thiefs and we dont have a special problem vs em, so guess I need to face facts, I am a bad mesmer ;-)

I didn’t say you were bad, I said the thieves you’re facing may be.
Plus W3 kinda is a different setup.

But if the BS thief wants to stay in a fight where he failed his opener, he sure is bad.

So yeah, once in a while you get instagibbed without the time or ressources to react. Once again, that’s what they’re for.

First off, if you were smart enough to use distortion (which seems like half this thread doesn’t know enough to use it) you should know enough not to stand still while you have distortion up. MOVE AWAY. Obviously you know he’s there. He’s aiming to backstab. I don’t understand why that’s so hard to understand.

2 words: Basilisk Venom.

I envy all those trying to give advices to the OP. Seems like you play against bad thieves all the time.

A good tourny thief will just kill you in less than 1sec. You can’t react most of the time, he’ll take you off guard. Your only chance is to anticipate his combo. And even if you see it coming, you may not have the right cd to counter him.

I was watching some TP stream sooner, where this thief was instagibbing them.
They were discussing about counters, something like this:
“- OMG I was seeing him! There was no way I could have avoided that…
I need to dodge when he does it but it’s pure luck.
– Yeah you just have to get lucky…”

That pretty much sums it all up.

Far from me to complain about it, it’s just…what thieves do. And the actual entire combo is on a pretty long cd anyway (around 40secs traited), it’s not like doing 8-10k damage on a 11sec cd

Nero.8623:

It should read like this:

5,754steal 2,826cloak-dagger DISTORTION

No, it should read:

5,754steal 2,826cloak-dagger DISTORTION 11k Backstab

They don’t care if you invu, they can just try again 1sec later, a missed backstab doesnt break stealth…

Not in the patch notes:

- Fixed Arcane Thievery tooltip: it now specifies the number of boons and conditions removed – 3
You can remove that from the bug list (Yay!)

- Fixed Illusionary Duelist projectile combo chance: It is now 20%

Transparancy is bliss.

Edit: Another minor tooltip bug
- Damage Tooltip on Blurred Frenzy is incorrect: It indicates the total damage of the channel instead of the damage of a single hit.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow_Assault

It just needs a queue system imo.

The “Play Now” option should allow to enter a queue, filling the gaps left by leavers.
Atm it’s a “Join empty server” button.
It could be integrated to the PvP panel too, so that you don’t have to wait in front of the server NPC (mostly wait for the “Full Server” error message to pop up each time you try to join a 9/10 server -.-)

Finally, if it works as it should (matching you with players of the same rank), it would lessen the chances to have unbalanced teams.
Atm hot join is full of Free Trial event rank 1: Not fun for them, discovering the game getting instagibbed, not fun for you, there’s no teamplay at all.

Thanks Chap.
A game mechanic abnormality now removed.

Now please fix stealth.
– Make it that any, yes ANY (maybe not dodge) action breaks it, not only damage.
That would make thieves l2p: “You miss your backstab, you’re screwed dude”
– In exchange, stop that channeling nonsense: any channeling ability should get interrupted if the target stealthes.

Anyone could confirm phantasm skills fail when evaded btw? I couldn’t get a single dodge on my casts in hot join…

RinKyu.4317:

Prelude.3817:

Why just iBerserk? All illusion summoning skills ignore los afaik…
Sure Berserk spawns right next to your target, but every other illusion will just run to it anyway, if there’s a path of course.

Summoning a Phantasmal Warden can be prevented by aegis, los and dodging.

Lol, I didn’t know that.
The only illusion skill working properly. I wish they were all like that.

Why just iBerserk? All illusion summoning skills ignore los afaik…
Sure Berserk spawns right next to your target, but every other illusion will just run to it anyway, if there’s a path of course.

I mean, it’s so easy to abuse, apart from the keep example:
I am/You are hiding behind an obstacle, I have you in target and spawn all my illusions.
If I’m not in combat I can even swap/equip weapons to get more before they actually hit you MWAHAHAHA
I wait for them to do their job, patiently watching you struggle with pathetic AI’s (MWAHAHAHA, again) then maybe shatter before they die.
There, half your HP is gone (at least), and you haven’t seen me yet. Maybe you even popped some cd’s. Best case scenario (for you) your endurance bar is now empty. Then I show up from behind the rock.

Does it sound fair to you?
Sounds way worse than thieves BS combo to me…
I mean, there’s already enough AI in this game, but this…

P.S: I’d never do what I just stated, but I’ve seen it done in a Mesmer tournament clip I won’t link to preserve the integrity of the player :p

I’d rather have that than Mesmer being the only class able to ignore the basic game mechanic that is los.
Cause this affects much more than attacking keeps in WvW…

Kuruptz.4782:

Is GS Berserker really that OP?

Yes.

Solution?
Replace its Whirlwind attack with Bladetrail and make it spawn next to the mesmer.
Still aoe, still snares, but no Los-ignoring exploit.

Oviously a bug.
I noticed taking a 5k lightning strike hit once too.

I believe there are some issues with damage % bonuses sometimes.
I think, but it’s just an hypothesis, they would give the inverse % bonus in some weird cases.
20% bonus (a fifth) would sometimes give 5 times the bonus instead.
50% bonus (a half) would sometimes give twice the bonus instead.

Like that Mesmer Signet bug that gave 200% bonus health to illusions instead of 50%. (1/2 is the inverse of 2).

Nothing really sure, it’s just weird stuff happening from time to time I experienced.
Like taking an 18k backstab (twice the normal damage) when under 50%
Or Throwing rocks (downed autoattack) for 3k oO
Or that lightning strike…

MLieBennett.9031:

New Bug as of Oct 7: Illusion Trait for Shatter Reduction at 30 no longer gives 30% off CD for Shatter skills. Its around 23% off >.>;

Not a bug, it’s the way the game calculates % increase and decrease. It’s not added, it’s progressive. 1% per point makes it:
100%-1%=99%
99%-(1% OF 99%)=98.1%
98.1%-(1% of 98.1%)=97.119%
etc…

basically you “lose” a bit each time you substract 1%.

That’s also the reason Mesmers get only 36% cd reduction on illusion summoning skills with both cd reduction traits (Illusioninst celerity and any weapon specific trait)
100%-20%=80%
80%-20%=64%

That’s also the reason Elementalists don’t have a min 6sec cd on attunement swapping, but 9ish
(should be 60% of 15sec=9sec reduction)

But it works the other way too!
% crit damage bonus is also added as a progression, so you get more than you should (around 34.5% for 30 points in the appropriate trait line, instead of 30)
% condition duration too
% damage too (oO)
everything percentage-y
And it affects traits, runes, sigils, everything with %x added

This is highly uninstinctive and can lead to weird unintentionnaly overpowered bonuses.
They really should change that.

Oh, and clones created from the trait ’Deceptive Evasion" will target the nearest target instead of yours.

Little condi duration tip: duration bonuses are added one after the other, as a progression.

Ex: Each point spent in the Explosive trait line increases duration by 1%.
So it’s actually 100% + 1% + (1% of 101%) + (1% of 102.01%) + (1% of 103.0301%)…
Total bonus for 30 points is around 34.5%.
You can calculate yourself if you remember your math lessons on series from high school.

Any additional bonus from runes or traits is the same.
Ex: 30 points in explosive+Napalm specialist=134.5% + (20% of 134.5%)=160ish%

Add some rune bonuses too and laugh.

P.S: Any % bonus in the game works like that. Problem is for reductions, like Tools trait line cd reduction. You get less than what you’d expect.
100% – 1% – (1% of 99%) – (1% of 98.01) – (1% of 97,0.299)…

Imo most kits are meh cause they’re a mix of direct damage AND condition damage.

Like Toolkit: Why the kitten would I want to apply confusion to enemy with an obviously direct damage designed kit? gimme a daze instead plz.

Or Flamethrower: Good utilities, but damage wise, either you spec power/crit and use only #1 and #2, or you spec condition and never use 2. And as someone stated above, #4 will just be a combo field for power/crit specs, gaining some might from it maybe.
Clearly a bad balance just in the middle of condition and direct damage.

Or Elixir Gun: ok #4 is useful to gap escape, but but but…DIRECT DAMAGE AGAIN! (and pitiful damage), whereas the rest of the kit suggests a condition design.
Gimme a combo field at least plz.

Except for bomb kit, which is obviously designed for condi specs (or again, you will never use #2 and #3, just a waste compared to #1), and grenades which are perfectly balanced (conditions applied are useful whatever the spec, and the bleeding one is more powerful than #1), the rest seems undecided as to the type of damage delt.

There’s an issue with the skill queue sometimes.
If you spam skills one after the other, it will sometimes “forget” one, or interrupt it.
And sometimes the skill will get stuck: you press the key, the icon blinks, but nothing happens. Probably related to lag though.
Happens with most toolbelt skills and a few others.
Not only for engis, be relieved.
Annoying.