Guild Wars 2

I haven’t played WvW in months. It seems like the crafting stations are no longer active. Can someone advise me on what happened to them? Thanks.

The normal Glyph of the Tides pushes foes away while the avatar version pulls them in. Isn’t that the opposite of what you would want them to be?

In avatar mode, you are focused on healing. Your allies are presumably not in the best of shape, and you might want to relieve the pressure on them by pushing foes away.

In non-avatar mode, the focus of the group is back to maximizing damage. Pulling your enemies in at this time would be a great skill for the group (think Temporal Curtain), even if the ranger is personally using a range weapon.

It seems to me the skills are reversed, and we all know how an incorrect use of push (think Longbow 4) will quickly earn the ire of fellow players. I like my ranger, and would rather not see the class find a new way of getting ostracized.

I know that an elementalist attunement swap activates “on weapon swap” sigils, but am not sure about its interaction with runes. The Superior Rune of the Warrior offers “-20% recharge on weapon swap” at tier 6. Does this bonus affect attunement recharge rate? Thanks!

Putting condition removal at the end of the well effect means there’s a 3 second delay between casting and condition removal. How much of a difference does 3s make? It seems all the resistance effects last for about 3s. E.g. Temporal Enchanter. It is almost as if we get a “resistance on demand” effect subtracted from this trait. This trait is still useful, but it becomes more like a passive signet effect, where conditions get removed periodically at somewhat random moments. Condition removal is essential to have somewhere in your build, but I wonder if this trait is good enough to make an all-wells build viable.

BTW, I love the name of this trait, but the cuteness also means there’s little chance its functionality will get changed.

Ground-targeted traps are not traps. At least in this game, they are called wells.

Ranged combatants usually don’t want their foes to come too close, and that’s why even dragonhunters have a pushback trait and lots of cripple. That just makes luring your enemies to you quite inefficient. In solo, you can play it any way you want, even if it takes a long time to kill your foes, assuming you manage to do so. In a dungeon party, the action is always focused around the melee players, and the melee players are just not going to help lure the enemies to a ranged player’s traps. In WvW, there’s little control over where the zerk goes one way or another.

I agree that the synergy shouldn’t be so great that it excludes other builds. I’m just commenting that there’s actually negative synergy among the new elite dragonhunter features. I don’t believe that during the design process, they specifically decided that they didn’t want these features to work well together – it’s just an oversight. Each elite specialization actually has a theme. Shield, wells and chronomancer traits work well together (though not to the extent of making the combination mandatory). Similarly, greatsword, shouts and reaper traits are centered around melee and chill. Longbow, traps, and dragonhunter are conceptually focused around big-game hunting. It is alluring at the conceptual level, but they don’t seem to have worked out the problems at the game mechanics level, which is a pity. I’m not asking them to make traps ground-targeted. Also, given the names “dragonhunter” and “traps”, there is no chance they would change this. I’m just saying they have unfortunately missed an opportunity by (soon) releasing a feature that is not as thoroughly thought out.

The dragonhunter longbow is a long-range weapon and can be traited to with pushback to keep your enemies at bay. However, no range is mentioned for traps and they seem to be centered around the player. I know the player is supposed to move around, but the combination of ranged weapon and melee utility skills means that
1) there is a fair chance that the traps will not be triggered, and
2) even if the traps are triggered, that will happen with a sizeable delay, at unpredictable moments (granting aegis in the heat of the battle is a lot more useful than at random moments), and probably affecting many fewer enemies than you would like.

I previously tried necromancer wells with staff, and quickly concluded that the offensive ones were unusable without ground targeting. The recent update made wells ground-targeted by default. How come we see this same idea resurface in a new elite specialization? I know rangers have ranged weapons and traps too, but at least
1) it’s not a combination that is supposed to work together particularly well in an elite specialization;
2) ranger longbow has stealth, and its pushback is on demand (as opposed to triggered somewhat randomly by trait in dragonhunter);
3) ranger shortbow has an evasive retreat; and
4) I personally treat ranger main-hand axe as a mid-range to melee weapon. (E.g. ranger axe 1 bounces in any direction, not just behind the first enemy as dictated by guardian longbow 1. I also try to get up close before firing ranger axe 2 so that I can get as many of the spread of 5 axes as possible on my primary target.)

Can you think of any reason why these two 1-h weapons do not have access to one of the unique abilities of guardians? It seems to just limit the types of builds available. I’m not suggesting a buff, but simply more options – any skills that get reclassified as symbols can get balanced to compensate for the newly available synergy with symbol-related traits. At the moment it seems swords and scepters are pretty isolated, not to be considered if you are planning to use the many symbol-related traits, or even boon-related traits like Altruistic Healing. Any thoughts on the rationale behind this?

BTW, putting the only scepter trait in a trait line that has 2 minor (i.e. mandatory) traits buffing only symbols is another indication of how isolated these 1-h weapons are. The options seem to be:
1. don’t buff your scepter skills;
2. mostly/partly waste 2 other traits in order to buff your scepter skills;
3. don’t use scepters.

Edit:
I don’t really understand a lot of the objection below. Let me clarify that I’m talking about mostly a reclassification rather than a change of functionality. This would be analogous to the recent update that assigned types to healing and utility skills which previously had had no types.

Someone suggested making scepter 3 a symbol. Instead of the current 2s immobility and 3 stacks of 6s vulnerability, that may mean 2s immobility to the primary target and 3 times area pulse of 1 stack of 6s vulnerability. (If the area pulse is considered a buff, we can cut down the duration of the vulnerability, but you get my idea.) This would make it an offense-only symbol, and there is no need for the player to enter or stay in the symbol.

Similarly, sword 3 currently deals magic missile damage and blocks ranged attack for 3 seconds. Reclassification would mean spreading out the same amount of damage and blocking over 3 pulses. The objection about sword being a very mobile weapon and the player not wanting to have to stay inside a symbol doesn’t apply here either, because currently any movement interrupts the channeling of sword 3 anyway.

I hope these explicit details help move the discussion forward. Please let me know what you think.

I know that illusions deal much less (direct) damage than the player, when they are nominally using the same skill. What about any conditions and boons that the illusions deal out? Do they have the same duration and condition damage as those dealt out directly by the player? Thanks!

I can live with having my old build wrecked and needing to switch to something new. What I am complaining about is that there was this talk about encouraging build diversity, but the reality is that we are being forced to switch over to the more popular builds. I trust that this is an unintended consequence, so we need to speak up to hopefully correct it.

The suggested build is not beyond overpowering. That was what we had before this update, and if it had been overpowering, we would have seen a lot more elementalists with this build. Besides, Anet just moved the aura-generating functionality over to Conjure builds.

Cramming a lot of functionality into a single trait may make it unbalanced compared to other traits, and I am perfectly happy to spend more than one trait point to achieve this build.

Yes, we can read. We knew about the other ways to get aura. The point is that Anet nerfed Signets by moving the aura-generating traits to Conjures instead. Signets were not overpowering or popular to begin with, so this nerfing leaves us scratching our heads. At this point, there is little reason to choose Signets as opposed to other utility skills.

I would be happy with Fire’s Embrace back in any form, if not as part of Written In Stone, then as another trait.

To be explicit, I used to run a signet build with Fire’s Embrace to pop up an aura every few seconds, and Elemental Shielding to gain 3 seconds of protection with every aura. Add in Written In Stone so that I don’t lose the passive gain in, say, toughness when I activate a signet, and my dagger-dagger elementalist can actually survive melee combat. I was just getting excited about having enough points to get Powerful Aura as well to spread some auras to my allies, but now I lose a crucial link to my build. The conjure builds are getting the auras now, but at a much lower frequency. I don’t see the signets builds as viable any more.

Other than just whining about what I used to have, here’s an analysis of the level of synergy of different builds. There is 1 trait on conjure skills (plus 4 more traits that can trigger as secondary effects), 2 on cantrips (plus 2 more traits as potential secondary effects), 1 trait on arcane skills (plus some potential secondary effects), and 1 on glyphs (plus potential secondary effects). However, there is only 1 trait on signets, with no possible secondary effects. Strong as Written In Stone is, you can’t make a build on 1 trait alone with no synergy with other skills or traits. Anet, please consider adding Fire’s Embrace back in some form to make this more balanced.

I’m quite disappointed by this change. I used to run a signet build with Fire’s Embrace to pop up an aura every few seconds, and Elemental Shielding to gain 3 seconds of protection with every aura. Add in Written In Stone so that I don’t lose the passive gain in, say, toughness when I activate a signet, and my dagger-dagger elementalist can actually survive melee combat. I was just getting excited about having enough points to get Powerful Aura as well to spread some auras to my allies, but now I lose a crucial link to my build. The conjure builds are getting the auras now, but at a much lower frequency. I don’t see the signets builds as viable any more.

There is 1 trait on conjure skills (plus 4 more traits that can trigger as secondary effects), 2 on cantrips (plus 2 more traits as potential secondary effects), 1 trait on arcane skills (plus some potential secondary effects), and 1 on glyphs (plus potential secondary effects). However, there is only 1 trait on signets, with no possible secondary effects. Strong as Written In Stone is, you can’t make a build on 1 trait alone with no synergy with other skills or traits. Anet, please consider adding Fire’s Embrace back in some form to make this more balanced.

If you agree with my analysis, please keep this post alive so that it gathers more attention.

Much appreciated.

My mini map (i.e. compass) used to always have “North” pointing upwards. About a couple of weeks ago, it started rotating around my character whenever my character turns. I presume I pressed some button accidentally and changed the setting, but I couldn’t find any information in the “Options” menu or on wiki about this. Can somebody help me change this back? This is really confusing. Thanks for the help!

Thanks! I overlooked him because I was expecting an icon above him. I finally got my reward chest.

Will you help a newbie find the Battle Historian? Wiki says he’s right near the Asura Gate, but I only see the Instructor there. I also tried all vendors in the area, as the Battle Historian is also a vendor. Do I get to see him only under certain circumstances? I don’t think I missed the window for picking up my WvW reward for last week. Thanks!

Good point about being less reliant on the basic attack once I have more kits/skills to swap to. Also trying the “look behind” trick. Thanks.

I like Grenade Kit (and Bomb Kit), and totally understand that AoE attacks have no targets and therefore cannot be set to auto-attack. However, the long and short of it is that I found myself not just sacrificing a lot of attack speed in order to remain mobile during combat, but also on the verge of developing Carpal Tunnel Syndrome if I continue to use it, particularly when the basic attack is controlled by my little finger. :-) I guess I am not good enough to press both “wasd” for movement and “1” for basic attack with my left hand at the same time. This is probably just a matter of play style and personable preference, and I am not hopeful of a solution, but am just checking if I missed something before giving up my Grenade Kit. Thanks. – New Engineer

Unlike the trading post for items, I don’t see any indication of supply and demand at all, which makes me wonder how the exchange rate is determined. Does anybody have any insight?

I seem to recall that, when the exchange rate was about 5 gold for 100 gems a couple of months ago, the spread was about 1 gold (i.e. 5 gold for 100 gems, and 100 gems for 4 gold). That means you lose about 20% if you exchange from gold to gems and then back. Right now, it’s about 7.5 gold for 100 gems, and 100 gems for 5.5 gold, which means you lose about 27% on a round trip exchange. Price fluctuation aside, I wonder why the spread also increased substantially within this short period of time.

Thanks for the advice. I should have made it clearer that I was only questioning single-target, single-application blinds. In fact, I’ve been meaning to get a necromancer and use the Well of Darkness skill – with AoE and multiple pulses, it seems like an awesome defense. In the mean time, I’ll save the single-target blinds for neutralizing opponents’ elite skills.

I feel like I am missing the point here. Only the next outgoing attack of the blinded target is negated, regardless of the duration of the blind effect. In effect, you spend maybe 1 second to blind a foe, and he/she needs to spend around 1 second on a wasted basic attack in order to counter the effect, so you don’t come out ahead in any way. In the mean time, you have wasted a precious slot in your skills or traits for this effect. AoE blind is better. What am I missing here? Is single-target blinding really meant to be useful only when your opponent is channeling a spell with huge damage, and you’re using it as a form of interrupt? Thanks for the input.