Guild Wars 2

DH is frontloaded, is the thing.

With two low-skill players playing with berserker builds, DH will probably win because traps are inherently more dangerous to people who don’t know what to do about them.

DH crumples to more tanky builds due to lack of defensive and escape abilities and isn’t especially difficult for higher-skilled players to deal with.

I don’t have the skill or knowledge to say whether it needs adjustment, but the “broken” aspect melts away once someone who knows how to use dodge shows up.

It’s a common way of increasing difficulty in an RPG. By increasing the level of the monsters without increasing your level, they create something that’s extra dangerous and rewarding without being a slog to fight like elites are or simply upping the difficulty without increasing the level, which would reduce your rewards. If they ever do raise the cap, it’s almost certain that the level 80 zones will all reduce your level to 80 to keep the same balance.

You can never have too much treasure! …unless you run out of bag space.

Save Yourselves! ….for marriage!

There’s nothing unskillful about trinity-style play, DPS-only play, or any of the other usual variations of play. They’re all just fine and dandy.

Guild Wars 2 is designed for a mixed, non-focused type of play that appeals to a range of players, and it does it fairly well.

This type of play is neither better nor worse than hard role-based gameplay. It’s different.

They’re all good.

GW2 is just a different good than EQ.

The functions are still present, but whether they are concentrated between players or spread out between them is now optional.

You can build a guardian that’s all about support, all about burning stuff to death, or you can go 50/50.

Your elementalist can focus on fire, or it can focus on water, or it can blend them for some steamy fun.

If you have one DPS, one Tank, and one Healer, or three characters with equal parts DPS, Tanking, and Healing, you’re still working with the same amount of each, just with less laser focus and more flexibility.

You can absolutely form a team where people specialize heavily. I just made some Cleric/Dwayna gear for use with my Staff on my elementalist – I’m not going to be outshining the DPS builds when I’m using that, but you better believe people are going to have hit points for days.

I think that “Rebound” is supposed to be the “Arcane” utility, rather than a proper elemental one, and as such suffers from Arcane’s more meta theme.

The Shouts all apply the generic Buff and Debuff options for their given element, making them pretty easy to design.

Arcane focuses on the following, both as a trait type and as utility abilities:
Crits
Attunement Recharge
Emergency Defenses
Attunement-based Boon/Condition
Combo Finishers

It looks like they sort of went with “Attunement Recharge” for Rebound. Of course, the whole point of tempest is that Attunement Recharge is harder to achieve, and attunement swapping is the equivalent of weapon swapping, so the more direct way to act on this would be to make this a weapon-swapping cooldown reduction… which… probably wouldn’t be that interesting.

With that said, the least complex “Arcane Shout” I can think of would be for everyone to get Arcane Shield.

Edit: Another method would be to just make the Elite a penalty-free instant Overload of the current element.

As a general rule, it’s a bad move to cover up a character’s appearance for an extended period of time. It reduces interest in investing in the many hours it takes to get really amazing-looking gear with just the right dyes.

It’s possible that they focused on damage for this patch partly to get the Tempest to where its damage output was closer to equal to the other specs, so that the function of the class wasn’t muddled in the raw numeric output of the class. Low-hanging fruit, perhaps, but it’s still useful to work with a baseline of effectiveness.

That said, given the nature of the spec, maybe instead of increasing the damage they should increase the boons granted and make the overloads even more combo-oriented than they are now.

In fact… if you make each Overload create a combo field… and have it set off a blast finisher when it stopped… or at least ensured that the warhorn 5 ability always had a blast finisher…

Am I the only one who finds that the condition for cripple on Puncture Shot is a problem?

If you are fighting a single creature, it is not crippled by this ability, so anything you do that relies on cripples requires you to be fighting multiple enemies, which means you become weaker specifically versus immobile bosses such as dragons, especially those with barriers such as Jormag. Granted, someone else will probably apply cripple, but that is less certain in dungeons and fractals.

I get the idea of the traps. Traps work as a way to keep minor enemies from wasting you in melee while you plink the boss off in the distance, or allow you to get some distance from them so you can use your range. I do see how this is a problem with a stationary range-oriented boss (again, Jormag).

Since outside of Jormag-like situations, traps are often going to be quite useful, it may not be a good idea to buff traps directly. Instead, perhaps a trait could add a boon to you and/or allies either when you are within the trap’s confines (like a banner), or when it expires without being triggered. This would have the bonus of reinforcing the supportive nature of the guardian, and could lead to interesting strategies like trap stacks being laid out during a fight as banners are now.

Making changes that aren’t numbers is extremely expensive, not just in dollars, but in time, so changes are easiest when they can be implemented without changing animations or interactions between abilities. Work with the available structure, and your suggestions can be more easily implemented.

For example, while the Rebound could possibly be easily fixed by adding a button to anyone affected by it that lets them trigger it, this could create some terrible complications with UI that would make it likely cost-prohibitive. So, a better solution might be to change it to affecting only elite skills, so that you know it’s at least going to be used for what should be a decent skill.

I’m okay with the traps – they make sense for keeping nearby minions off of you while you focus on the distant target. I’d generally want to go with Cleanse+Some Trap+Wall of Reflection, I think, probably with greatsword as my other weapon for when I can’t ignore the minions anymore.

The weapon, though, is way too focused on crippling groups of units.

The trait Zealot’s Aggression (+7% damage to crippled targets) seems like it would make an okay damage boost even for bosses who are functionally immune to cripple… except that the cripple on your auto-attack ONLY works if you hit two targets. So during a typical boss fight, you only get that +7% damage if you use your 5 or someone sets you up for it, because your cripple-happy traps are for the things you aren’t targeting with your bow.

There is, of course, making cripples apply to single targets anyway, by using Dulled Senses+Heavy Light… except now you’re reduced to Range 300 instead of 1200 and you’ve burned all three of your choices in the line to get +7% damage, and negating your +10% damage for being 600 away.

So, realistically, if you’re fighting a dragon, you’re only really reliably working with Burning and maybe Vulnerability*. Neither of which are boosted at all by your trait line.

On the plus side, burning is a big thing for the class, so there’s plenty of benefits to focusing on Burning. Just uh… avoid fire elementals forever.

*Obviously, in a world boss fight, chances are SOMEONE has applied every condition in the game… but less so with other types of boss fights.

I expect it has to do with the heavy 3D and tons and tons of special effects going on all over. Really puts a strain on systems that aren’t built better for 3D gaming.

The moment I moved to a nice boring cave in the normal part of the game, everything is perfectly fluid again.

I do find the HoT areas are quite overwhelming for lower-spec machines, though I haven’t had a chance to try it on my gaming machine.