Guild Wars 2

You guys mentioned in this thread

“From a group content perspective, alacrity is so strong that if no other profession gains access to it then Chronomancers would push others out of groups because it feels necessary. As is, they are likely to remain the best ways to grant alacrity to others.”

Whilst alacrity is powerful, quickness is significantly more powerful. Chronomancer can bring 100% quickness to 5 people. Literally no other class can even maintain 100% quickness on themselves. Engi gets close.

If the aim of distributing alacrity elsewhere is to reduce the dependency of chrono and increase the viability of revenant, a much better option would be to give revenant access to party wide quickness. Possibly via a pve/pvp split. Until any other class has the ability to generate upwards of 75% quickness uptime for 5 chronos will remain meta.

Personally so happy that DnT are finally being publically recognized for the arrogant negative influence they have on the community. (Ignoring Nemesis’ comments here before anyone jumps on that bandwagon) DnT have been providing guides that have simplified the mindset of the community into Zerker! Zerker! Zerker! without consideration for the necessary support that is actually required to support this.

They have created a negative atmosphere which Anet have supported, including publically releasing spoilers such as the new Legendary axe, as well as now having a negative impact on the much awaited release of raids. Please Anet, learn from your mistake and never give special consideration to DnT again. There are much more productive guilds out there that are more then willing to humbly contribute to the community, rather than releasing content as a ‘Look at me I’m so amazing’.

The latency is due to the fact that the servers are housed in the US, and its a long way between Australia and the US. Unless dedicated Oceanic servers are released (which sadly will be quite quiet due to most players being US/EU and the Oceanic players will tend to flock to those servers to be with their friends) the latency won’t be disappearing and I doubt anet can do anything to remedy it much.

Having said that, I have consistent 3-400 ping, and I can still get up my reflects/aegis 99% of the time in pve as necessary.(Yup I am Aussie too)

No kidding Don. Theres nothing more fun then being on TS with a couple of mates, prestacking might at Kohler in AC as one of them pulls… and I blow myself into the water…

100% someone goes “Bye Calach”… and thats that. Hilarious though!

If you are ‘prestacking might’ (ie before engaging combat), have bomb kit out, go 2 → toolbelt – switch to flame thrower, then that combo. You can also swap in Thumper, use the toolbelt, then swap it out as well.

As an aside, I like the elixir kit for reasons outside of acid bomb (whcih I still use, and I enjoy its damage boost). Its 5 and 3 are amazing in pugs… condi cleanse, and heals can make or break a fight if your group isn’t fantastic.

I have been running a solo meditation guardian build in dungeons that allows me decent damage and incredibly good at self heals. Why am I running this? Fury. This is the biggest thing the guardian lacks in solo’s, and being able to get approximately 50% fury uptime through the use of my meditations is a solid DPS increase, whilst also helping my survivability.

Given that I am solo, I go for fun rather then pure efficiency so I have been running mace/focus/hammer, in a 2/0/6/6/0 build, where I can literally face tank certain bosses without dodging.

If you wanted to go more efficient, it might be worth looking into greatsword with mace swap, or the alternative I have been considering has been 2/6/6/0/0 to take advantage of RHS. I haven’t worked out yet whether RHS is more of a DPS benefit then writ of persistence on a mace.

Plus fun fact to remember. Ferocity is in the medititation line so its not as much of a loss as other ‘defensive lines’ are. And whilst on a mace, can self stack some okay might through blocks.

I’m definitely going to give 2/6/6/0/0 a try tonight. I think it will definitely carry alot more damage, and if I go with torch offhand on a swap for perma mace….

Yup, this is good!

2 Level 80 Guardians Currently, although thats because I’m decommissioning my charr guardina.

Mace is actually a solid DPS weapon in a lot of guardian rotations these days. Its similar DPS to sword, but the heals/regen/block give it far more utility, which can be nice with certain parts of the game.

It also makes certain solo’s brain dead easy when combined with meditations. Can be full zerk guard solo with amazing survivability, decent fury, and solid damage.

I haven’t noticed this… usually any CC is from Big Ol’ Bomb in the mightstacking phase.

Chaith.8256:

Well, good thing that there is no mace or hammer for Engineer then. Perplexity balance crisis avoided!

No sign of new weapons on the horizon either.

Thank goodness we have you here to point this out. I’m sure the entire community was under the apparently wrong impression that engineers do have mace & hammer, and that there are new weapons on the horizon. Life saving information here!

All sarcasm aside, and responding to the OP.

I don’t roam much on engi, so maybe I’m not the best to comment on whether or not it is OP with perplexity. However, from the perspective of pve, I would like a melee weapon to explore possibilities outside of triple kit. There is tonnes of potential builds out there that really use very limited kits, but fall vastly inferior to kits because they lack a weapon. And Mace is clearly the most suitable for engineer.

Now lets look at Mace on Warrior and Guardian. Guardian has zero interupts. Warrior has 1 interupt (excluding the burst which I don’t consider a mace skill as such due to the nature of it being a 6th skill), and lets assume for arguments sake that we don’t get offhand mace as well, which is a different kettle of fish because it replaces shield which carries more then two potential interupts. 1 potential interupt on mace I don’t feel will make perplexity OP. Especially when you consider that it means sacrificing the other conditions and range of pistols.

Now lets look at Hammer. On guardian it has 1 single interupt every 20 seconds with a huge windup, that is more useful for Asuraball then anything actually practical (ps anyone up for a game of asuraball later?). Warrior, sure it has 3 + burst potential interupts I believe. So if we stick with 3, its again only 1 up on shield but lacking the utility of the shield, and the range of pistol.

Essentially, my opinion is that they won’t be OP because it will really only add an additional 1 interupt to current options, at the expense of range and conditions. Furthermore, I would expect it to be a largely power based weapon which makes runes of perplexity less good with it, as they are condition damage based. So sacrificing quite a lot to get that 1 extra interupt.

Flipside, for pve, melee options are almost always far superior, and having a solid melee weapon will give engineers options to explore outside of kits. Especially if it offers some sort of utility that would be cool.

If however, we give engineers the option of double mace… well thats a different discussion. But comnig back to perplexity, I still think the shield with its 2 interupts, and block/blast utilities will come ahead.

Ascended trinkets are rewards for the cheevo’s in the new LS with Sinister stats. Assuming it follows the LS 1 rewards, the 4 chapters should get both rings and both accessories. Not sure about amulet/backpiece yet however.

I have 10 80’s… I don’t like camping one class/race and certainly don’t have the time to run living story 10 times. Please unlock this!

I’m all for capes, as long as they are a backpiece that can be not displayed in PVP as well as PVE.

I hated capes in gw1, because they messed with my look and I preferred pvp so I was stuck with capes too much of the time.

I think the more likely concern is that most people don’t need Karma so why complain that there is no karma income from dungeons. I personally get more karma then I need from general play, dailies/monthlies and the odd drop.

Sure, the excessive karma from fotm/teq is nice on the odd run, but I certianly don’t even do these close to daily.

Would I be upset to have it back, not really. Would it be nice to have? Sure. Would I take it over anything else? Nope.

Impale.2503:

Countess Aire.9410:

Not a good idea. It would be nothing but a money sink. The kicker is the drop rate of T6 material. Grind fest Enough said.

How would you feel it being different than BL skin collections?

Trying to get the vibe here, not create an argument

In my opinion its not. I don’t think any ‘high end’ weapon collections are a good idea. But I cant think of any reason not to include this, as the rewards are probably gonna be pathetic anyway. Especially if you own all Leggies.

I would like there to be a seperate tab for point allocation so that I can buff (for example) my elementalists earth spells without contributing so much to toughness. But overall I dont dislike this system too much

7/8 For dungeoneer… its honestly not that bad if you enjoy dungeons. And if you dont, then its a grind cheevo, which is intended to reward people that do enjoy those.

Combine Incinerator and Predator for a new legendary – the BAYONET!

AC – “All Paths Fashion Run – Cultural Armor or get kicked”

Joined on my Ele, and theres a warrior checking me out as I enter the dungeon. Says, you pass. And off I went. Level 40 charr joined next, in non cultural armor. Guy pings the WP in Black Citadel, sent him 1g to buy t1 cultural, met him there, got him to buy T1 cultural and ran the dungeon with this level 40 new bloke.

Wasn’t the worlds best run, but was a good LFG.

I also have a tendency to say stupid stuff in my LFG’s, because generally I don’t care.

The reason I don’t like the concept of reaching a point where your next one is guaranteed through a hidden system is the following example:

I want incinerator. Ive thrown 600 exotics in for it, and had no luck. My ‘hidden guarantee’ is at 99%, but as far as I am aware I could be months away from it.

I do a world boss chain, and end up with 3 exotics that have crap sigils. A trident, a warhorn, and a focus. I toss them into the forge with a mystic shard, and poop out comes the rodgort precurser. My “99% guarantee” resets to zero on a once off, throw away forge giving me something worth about 100g only, instead of the realistic return I deserved of 1300g from Incinerator.

My suggestion for precursers actually moves away from the forge completely. The forging method is perfectly fine as a method of gambling. There is no reason to remove that gamble from the game. The problem is, gambling in the forge is the ONLY way to target a precurser. Flip it around. Have gambling in the force as A means to get it, and have a series of objectives to complete in order to get an account bound precurser from some other means. And this needs to be EXTENSIVE. (Covered alot in the scav hunt commentary so not going to go into it).

Essentially, my problem isn’t that RNG is bad. RNG is fine. However, SOLE RNG is a problem. Why should the only method of my obtaining items be RNG (or buying, which is essentially paying someone off for their RNG).

Assuming you don’t want to double up on any of the dungeons, here is how I would do it:

AC – Ele – so OP on burrows
CM – Thief – stealthing runs makes it so much more fun.
TA – Engineer (The little bit of stealth you can provide is quite helpful for skips, plus good condi, small reflects etc)
SE – Ranger
CoF – Necro (mainly because necro had to go somewhere, and the poison mildly helps on the p1 boss)
HotW – Warrior
CoE – Mesmer
Arah – Guardian

Time wise for dungeons, you are better off running AC path 2 instead of path 3. Hotw is actually usually not worth it, as the bosses take forever to kill. Most pugs range the troll, and primarily range the final boss (I know it can be a lot faster but as far as pugs go).

CM is also a very quick dungeon that nets quite a lot of gold. With a good pug can run all 3 in 35 minutes. With a GREAT pug its sub 30. With an average pug (if you thief) it is about 40-45 for all 3.

I usually find that P1 – 10 minutes
P2 12 minutes
P3 10 minutes
(with pugs)

I would suggest that a good way to “balance” the RNG of a pug tournament is have the teams rearrange each round.

Ill take the 30 participants mentioned earlier and work with that. Players 1,6,11,16,21,26 are all streamers.

Round 1: 1-5, vs 6-10, 11-15 vs 16-20 etc.
Round 2: 1,13,25,23,29 vs 2,6,12,18,24 (for arguments sake) etc.

Run maybe 3 or 4 rounds to get an even distribution, and apply points to players of the winning and losing team. 2 points for each win, 1 point for a draw (both bug out/wipe (if running no wipe rules which I kind of like for a pug tourny)) 0 for a loss.

After 4 rounds, top 20 players progress and get seeded.

1/20/5/16/12
2/19/6/15/11
3/18/7/14/10
4/17/8/13/9

With a semi final round, top 2 teams go to final round.

I would also suggest that for the “round robin” rounds it be a single dungeon run, not a best of 3 scenario.

Foefaller.1082:

Sube Dai.8496:

Dreadforce.6980:

take a undefended tower-1 point
take a defended tower-2 points
defend a tower-2 points

I think that could help make the scores closer, but the server that can field 24/7 will still win.

The only real solution is for some sort of battle group whereby players from different timezones are evenly spread out.

I don’t think you could reliably tune battle groups to have similar number of players across all times of day; there simply isn’t a large enough server pool to draw on, at least not without mixing NA and EU servers together, and I don’t believe that’s on the table.

Anyway, I think one thing that has to be done to “solve” the coverage problem would be to make caps/holding/etc worth less during early morning/midday than they do during the late afternoon/evening primetime. It would stink for some people finding their contributions are worth objectively less than others simply because they don’t/can’t play during the “best” times, but I honestly think it’s either that or only allowing caps at certain times of day, and that would be kittens for everyone.

You do that and you will have successfully killed wvw for all Non Americans. Its already a problem in OCE times as we actually FACE the coverage issues. Sure primetime players log in and see the score deficit, but we have to actually fight on a losing battle. If you make it so that our losing battle is not only a loss, but when we win we contribute limited to our team then why the hell not just turn off WVW outside of primetime since thats essentially what you are doing.

Theres a difference between not wanting to make a push and not being able to make a push.

Lets say you have 100 people on a server who want to make a push, in a smaller tier. There isn’t much they can do. If each of them recruits 10 people, you have 1000 people on a server who want to push. That requires either each of them to be on 6hrs a day, in succession in order to get full coverage across all maps. Unreasonable at best, assuming that recruiting 10 is feesible. So lets be more realistic, every person can be on for 3 hrs, 3 days a week, and a good distribution to start a push is consistent 100 people in WVW (across 4 maps). So, in the 168hrs per week, you need 16,800 wvw play hours to push (assuming perfect coverage distribution. At 9hrs of wvw time per player thats a requirement of 1867 players. Lets assume randoms joining in with equal 9hrs a week of about 500. Thats still over 1300 players recruited for the push. And its harder to pull in non wvw’ers as they can’t be spam recruited from LA etc anymore.

Plus how do you get these players if you are a smaller? Do they transfer to you? That costs them gold, and is a huge risk for them. So, I guess you should transfer to them. But then you are leaving the server you are trying to develop so screw it, lets just jump in to one of the high servers where we can contribute and join in but don’t have to develop.

Now, lets cut the cap in half. It starts looking more feesible. Lets quarter it. Extreme example, but if you cut the max per map to 10, then 100 die hard fanatics could hold out against blackgate permanently, assuming they had the individual skill to face them.

Now Im not suggesting 10. That is ridiculous. But the point still stands that because of the sheer logistics of building a server, with such a high cap it is too late. (I believe this all stemmed from the initial free transfers, which caused the bandwagon trend rather then server development from the getgo). Reduce the cap, and you get the OPPORTUNITY to develop the lower tiers and rekindle some interest.

Having said that, I think wvw needs a structure revamp akin to my slightly earlier post.

How does this look for numbers? Well currently, considering roamers, havoc groups, zergs/blobs, afker’s/crafters etc there is a max of (if I understand correctly) 320 players in wvw at any one point.

Under this style you can have
40 defenders,
between 40 and 80 attackers depending on what the other worlds are doing, but you can guarantee a minimum of 40 through prioritization of battles between worlds based on positioning. (IE bottom left spawn has priority to attack bay and garri, whilst bottom right has priority to attack hills. Obviously there are no bottom spawns now, but the principle can be applied. IE Green = reds bay, and blue hills, red = blue bay & green hills, blue = green bay and red hills.)
Capture the flag Max 40
Deathmatch 10
King of the hill: 5 (could possibly scale this to 10v10v10 for top leagues)
GVG: potentially unlimited, but requiring presence on other servers. Lets argue 30 for now.
Eternal BattleGrounds: 80

So we have 250 total players in wvw at once right now. According to what I read on this thread, there is really very little of queues the majority of the time. There is a very quick cycle of players through the deathmatch as people are dying quite often, so quite small queues there. This also means that groups forming up are not depleting from the total, and neither are the crafters/afkers/etc. I personally am of the opinion that this is enough people, especially since it can spread to 290 if you are performing full attacks but these numbers/extra instances can be added as appropriate.

This also makes it easier to add new features to wvw as it can be a new style of skirmish, or adding more players/more instances to the deathmatches.
How does this help with coverage issues. The only “persistent” world is Eternal Battlegrounds. 60 or 70% of the point distribution comes from here, and the other instances both support this instance whilst supplying more points to the overall total. If you are heavily outnumbered during OCE times for example you can hold on successfully by focusing your efforts on EB and whilst the other teams will do better, it wont be as significant as during other times.

However, I believe that the other combat styles will pull people out of pve/spvp and rekindle interest in WVW as it has more variety, which will increase population contributing to wvw from across the board, and give more options within the game.

One last suggestion I would like to see in this. Commander tags remain as is for pve, and EB but squads are no longer limited to commanders in citadel/skirmishes so that you aren’t prevented from defendning/attacking because of a lack of a tag.

Quick note regarding the numbers and timing. These can be adjustable if they don’t quite work out.

TL;DR: Get rid of individual persistent borderlands and create a variety of skirmish style battles that contribute points and rewards to the single persistent open world in EB. Styles include capture the flag, deathmatch, king of the hill, defend/siege and GVG. Limits uneven coverage abuse due to being able to focus on EB alone, whilst also allowing contribution, and variety to allow all players to duke it out in various levels of team organisation levels.

My idea is quite long and convoluted, so bear with me as I write it out. As I begin writing this, the idea is still developing in my mind. Basically, what I considered in formulating this idea is
1) My initial expectations of WvW from when it was announced (pre-GW2)
2) Aspects of GW1 I miss in GW2 (FA/JQ/AB)
3) The numbers imbalance

Now, my personal opinion, and obviously the simplest solution to the WvW problem is to cut max numbers to a lower number so that it isn’t a matter of 5/10/15 defending against 50/60 etc. But there would be ALOT of complaint regarding this. So here is my suggestion.

WvW would be broken down into 5 or 6 elements all of them, apart from Eternal Battlegrounds will be formed in the citadel (like the old AB pugging grounds) from where you enter your selected ‘skirmish’ of various styles. Across all of these skirmishes, points are awarded per kill, and for attaining objectives, which are specified per style.

Element 1: Siege: This is a Squad V Squad battle on a map, with 3 supply points (one close to the attackers spawn, 2 close to the defenders spawn but outside their walls). There could be 3 potentials for this Garrison, Hills, and Bay with varying population caps. These are 1v1, not 1v1v1. Garrison would be 20v20, Hills 12v12, Bay 8v8. For this, there would be ppt for supply camps. Points for siege built. Points for walls broken/repaired. Points for kills. There is no waypoints in this version, no respawn. If you die you must wait for res by teammates. Match duration is 30 minutes.

When a world has formed a team for an attack and starts it, if there is no defending team prepared, an announcement goes out across the server (similar to the scarlet events) “Blackgate is marching on your Garrison/Hills/Bay. Head to the citadel to prepare a defence”. Matches start on the half hour, and require 10 minutes notice to force the match. If no defenders turn up, it is considered a win for the attacking team in regards to points. If they call the match at 21 past for example, there is no match up at half past. However the :00 match will either award a win or a loss.

Element 2: Capture the flag. This is a 1v1v1 match, with teams of 5. Pretty self explainatory, its capture the flag/orb/whatever. You get significant points for a successful capture, points per kill, and it goes for 10 minutes. This can have 10 instances running at max, with one starting every minute. In the case of 2 teams waiting for the 3rd team to join, after 1 ‘restart’ it matches them in a 1v1, without a 3rd world competing. Same points apply to the world.

Element 3: Deathmatch. This is a persistent 10v10v10 arena. You die, you get sent to citadel. One instance of this per world. Its a medium sized map (eg the area between Hill/Bay/Garrison). No downed state. When someone dies, the next player in the queue enters. If 10v10v10 is a little bit high could be whatever number suits those servers. Points per kill, and killstreak multipliers.

Element 4: King of the hill. Basically a match up devoted to ruins. 5v5v5. Match goes for 10 minutes. Points every 10 seconds if you are alone/more numerous on the point. Points for kills. Respawn every 20 seconds.

Element 5: GVG. This is a Keep v Keep style of match, with a new form of seige called a Ladder which allows a player to climb over a wall. Ladders cost 10 supply to build, have 1 HP, and when used are a 10 seconds easily interuptable cast. 1 use only. 8v8, goal is to kill the Keep Lord. Points for gate destruction, player kills, holding the flag, npc deaths, and victory. This could also be adopted outside of WvW as an option so that you can GVG players outside of your current matchup.

Element 6: Eternal Battlegrounds. This is similar to the way it currently is, however you gain slight benefits based on how your team is performing in other skirmishes. If you have unsuccessfully defended your borderlands keeps, you have less NPC’s helping to defend your facilities. Every time a capture the flag/supply match ends, for each flag/supply captured you get some supply at your spawn. Every 10 minutes the current ruins buff transitions to whichever team won the King of the hill matchup.

For EB possibly remove the NPC spawns, although that is something that may or may not be worthwhile.

Continued next post:

Why?

15charsss

quaniesan.8497:

Guardian’s virtue activation is their class mechanic, but they have the option not to activate it. … Mesmer’s shatter is their class mechanic, but they can run other builds that doesn’t involve shatter. Warrior can do built that optimizes based on NOT using adrenaline. Want more? I can do it all day. So please, option to tow it a away and compensate me with …maybe 25% speed boost or something.

Guardian’s VIRTUES are the class mechanic, not their ACTIVATION.
Mesmer’s mechanic is CLONES and PHANTASMS, with the ability to DESTROY them.
Warrior’s mechanic is ADRENALINE which can be used for burst skills.

Guardians CANNOT play without virtues. IE no matter how they build, or set up, they will get small heals, bit of burns, and periodic aegis.

Mesmers CAN play without clones/phantasms but thats just by avoiding using those skills. Which is gimping the class.

Warriors CANNOT play without adrenaline. They will always build it up to max, even if they do not use it.

So, no. You cannot play without a pet, and never will be able to. If you don’t want the pet to attack, you can tell it not to. In fact, pets are one of the most versatile class mechanic as you can bring one to supplement a lot of what your party needs, without infringing on your weapon/utility selection.

Now, if you were to suggest a redesign of the pets functions, I would certainly be more then happy to discuss along these lines, however removing will not ever happen, and makes no sense.

I would like to point out that frost spirit was not, and is not the only thing a ranger brings to a party. Post update, a ranger has huge ability to DPS. Especially in short fights (yes, we arent going to get kills on the same timeframe as FGS, but ignoring that). If a fight lasts less then 10 seconds, I think we have some of the highest potential DPS (due to longbow buffs, & sotw)

… Lots of people use bloodlust. Its fantastic if you can get up lots of stacks early on.

For the sake of this champ solo it may not be worth it as you only have 6 or 7 enemies beforehand that you can build stacks on. And 70 condi damage probably wont add as much as other options.

Trait for reflects on block, and use riposte. 30K damage IN DA RANGERS FACE!

oxtred.7658:

Chris Cleary.8017:

If someone completes the dungeon while you are attempting to selling it, we are not going to take action against that person. If you invite them into your group or list the group via LFG, they are well within their right to finish the dungeon if you decide to leave the boss at 1%.

If they get into my group, am i well within my right to kick them when the boss is at 1%?

As long as you have a reason, and someone in your party seconds your kick then yes. Its a kitten move either way, but its acceptable based on current set up.

If you don’t have a reason, and the kickee reports you then there is the possibility of the full wrath of anet coming down on you.

I tend to find weekends horrible for pugging. A lot of players who play infrequently and don’t have the experience or knowledge or gear for optimal pug runs come out and play on those days. And they either don’t understand what I mean, don’t care, or whatever and end up just cruising along.

Dungeons are easy, so its usually fine, and we succeed but you’ll get people who wont stack correctly, or wont stack tight enough, or are clerics etc. Its annoying, but bearable.

But there are also 3 levels of players.

1) are the weekend casuals, who I mentioned above. They may learn how to dungeon by going occasionally, but they only stack because they are told to and don’t actually know what they are doing. They may or may not be zerker/optimal.
2) are the “meta” crowd. These are people who know the strategies, kind of know why they are done, and are running mostly optimal gear/traits. These are about 85% of pugs
3) are the “speed clear” crowd. By this I don’t mean they only run with full perfect groups or whatever, but they are running optimal setups for themselves. They understand concepts like line of sighting, moving in case of bad boss positioning, blasting correct fields, not placing light fields at start of fight, prestacking/mid fight mightstacking, optimizing vulnerability etc.

Most pugs will be 1 ‘casual’ 3 ‘meta’ + yourself, whichever category here you fall into is obviosuly dependant on you. If you luck into a group of 4/5 of the “speed clear” category you will have an amazing run. In fact, most groups containing even 2 or the ’speed clear" category will have an amazing run.

3+ of the meta crowd is usually enough to hammer out a good, decent speed run.

The problem with pugs is everyone either expects everyone to know exactly what to do, and why, or expects someone to tell them. They don’t often ask for “what should I do” if a little inexperienced. And they don’t often explain if someone is clearly a little on the unsure side.

Plus you get the occasional random AFK without warning which is annoying.

Stacking isn’t released yet. Its a feature in the upcoming patch where you get permanently invulnerability and +10,000% damage if you are admiring your heros panel instead of seeing the boss.

Anet are releasing it under the guise: Out of Sight, Out of Mind!

Yeah, not a fan. Dungeon rewards are plenty as is. Plus dungeon rewards can be converted to keys via Gold:Gem conversion. And tokens can be converted to gold through a variety of methods including buying armor and salvaging for ecto/inscriptions buying weapons and forging/salvaging, converting tokens to jewels via the recipes etc.

I would like to see this tied into commander tags, and occuring as an option when you have a full Squad (50 players), or large Squad (30 players). This way IF you have enough people to justify creating a new map, you can do it. And (I think map limit is 150) then you would have 50 people available to taxi in the other people (give the map a 2 minute no non taxi join period).

Could implement the WvW queue dialogue box altered to say "You’re commander has opened a new map. Please select to either Join Your Commander or Remain In This Map. Optional cost, but I don’t think it should be so prohibitive. Making it player reliant means that you would need ALOT of people involved to spam open maps.

Or, as a potential method to stop this map being permanently open, make these maps non accessible via entry, only taxi’s.

I’m pretty sure downed state was stolen from Call of Duty (whether thats its original incarnation I’m not sure). All they need is a hint that pops up. You are downed. Kill an enemy to rally off them, or heal yourself to full HP using Bandages.

Would be funny seeing people trait double damage when downed and killing themselves because double damage is OP!!!

EDIT: New dungeon speed clear challenge. Lupi all downed challenge!!!!

I haven’t read the entire thread, however I would like to point out that anet has successfully developed tiers of bosses. Triple Trouble, needs a highly organised, well equipped team to complete. Teams like TTS successfully do it daily. However, it is marginally beyond the ability of pug maps to complete. I think this is perfect as the “hardest” open world content around.

Next tier is Tequatl. This is doable by marginally organised pug maps, assuming you have the numbers to complete it. Initial strategies required learning but once down, it is easy. Megaservers made this very possible (I regularly get a taxi into a map that succeeds right up to spawn, and occasionally a couple of minutes after spawn).

Karka Queen. This is simply a zerg fest, and imo has its rewards too high. The champion that spawns as one of the events that needs to be completed is harder then the queen herself. Jormag is harder.

The rest are doable with varying levels of difficulty based on players on them, but most of them are how many hits can I get in whilst AFK. And that is fine, and has a purpose.

What I would suggest is have 4 uber boss levels. 1 being Jormag (as is, maybe build some turrets to heat areas (similar to the anti poison turrets) and increase the pain from the icy debuff). 2 being a reworked shatterer, where you need to know the strategy but you don’t really need a full map. Basically inbetween Jormag and Tequatl. Then 3 – Teq, 4 – Wurm.

Tone down the champion in the karka queen event and remove it from the uber boss rotation. Considering it dies faster then Jormag and gives more rewards, is kind of ridiculous. Or give it more of a strategy other then zerg zerg zerg.

OmniPotentes.4817:

Evans.6347:

The advantage of Mawdrey is that unlike the other ascended back items, every part of Mawdrey can be gathered without too much luck involved.

The foxfire clusters are the only random thing, but if you craft everything yourself, and are thus limited by the timegating, then it gets very doable and pretty cheap actually. But that also means it will take at least 3 weeks to finish it.

Absolutely correct. Takes the longest to craft as it’s time gated, but it won’t cost you a penny if you decide to farm and gather all materials required. Which is not such a bad idea since it’s time gated anyway.

Opportunity cost means this is incorrect as you can always sell some of the materials aquired (eg foxfire clusters which are valued at .6g each if i remember correctly). Plus theres time to farm them, which could be spent farming something else. At an assumed rate of 10g/h, 1 hour of farming foxfire clusters has ‘cost’ you 10g.

This isn’t meant to disuade anyone, or say its a bad idea. But saying ‘its free, just run around and collect everything’ isn’t technically correct.

Given that cultural armor is limited by race, I am of the opinion it should unlock similar to the way dragon horns and the gas mask do. That is, it unlocks all armor types for that skin/rank.

Unfortunately, this is a) a different discussion and b) will spark huge complaints from people who have 3 different weights on a single race.

But still, would be a nice QoL change.
AND THEN it would be reasonable to unlock all based on The Emperor.

Oh I certainly agree that TA:A needs a reward buff. Having said that, I think it is the most fun dungeon, probably because it is less run and the puzzles are not trivialized in general pugs yet.

I ran it last night with some pugs, and one of them commented after we completed the oozes (after coordination, and explanation) in the first try that she seemed to remember it being harder. The other pug mentioned that it was significantly better then the last time he spent 1hr at the ooze puzzle.

We also managed to successfully obtain all the achievements for one of the pugs (except grounded because she didnt move fast enough) with a little coordination, and discussion. I think the entire run took about kitten minutes. Its a lot longer then a pro Arah run, but considering it was a relatively inexperienced pug group that was being coordinated it went pretty well.

Its still terrible value though for 2g, especially considering that you only get 3 champ bags for the entire run. Each puzzle should offer a champ bag, since beating a puzzle is similar to beating a boss. And the champ bags should be given the ability to drop the Aetherblade Exclusive skins. And 3g. But thats the only change I would make to the rewards.

So heres what I read as the new troll option:

Join party of Arah Seller with friend. Kick Arah Seller. Sell instance yourself, or complete for free arah reward.

Congratulations, I believe you just ended anyone running Arah to sell it now.

moiraine.2753:

In my opinion every explorable path that is not played right now by the majority MUST be revamped.What i mean is rewards have to be buffed and everything from trash and bosses has to be redesigned like AC was.

Here is my list of what has to be revamped like AC was:

• SE – p2(to long path with such little reward)
  HotW – p2/p3
• CoF – p3(not hard path with sucking rewards.Compared to other dungeons like CoE for instance CoE is defenitely better)
• TA – return F/U and revamp the last boss in it.I have no i dea why the path was removed when only the last boss was buggy.Couldn’t Anet fix it?Also Aether path needs huge buffing.Right now it’s long and boring path.

Whilst I agree unplayed paths need a revamp, the reason they aren’t run is more to do with difficulty/return/reward. I agree with SE2 and HOTW2/3 but I disagree with cof3 and TA:A

CoF3 is actually faster then CoF2, as it isn’t slowed down by timesinks. However, it requires coordination for certain parts, and that is a problem for pugs. Why organise when you can run P1/2 with no communication outside of “I’ll gate” and I’ll run lava".
The issues stems from the simplicity of current dungeons rather then the complication of other/new dungeons.

TA:A is actually quite fun when you learn how to handle the puzzles and bosses effectively.

LordByron.8369:

I don t like your suggestions at all

1):
We play a game with offensive and defensive skills.
Making skills like reflection and block useless is just wrong.

1)
This change doesnt render reflects useless, just alters the mechanic so they aren’t as gimmicky and OP as currently. Which means anet has an alternative to unblockable projectiles.

2)

Thats not entirely true. If you are all new, and are taking things carefully and ranging, yes it will be hard, but it is definitely doable if you can avoid red circles and learn to dodge when she glows.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree that bosses should be nullified by experience, but unfortunately anet has designed the game to avoid the trinity, which means you cant have skills that MUST be protted against, or you something that needs to be healed through since they don’t want dedicated healers. Etc. Consequently, going into a fight the first time, and having enough sustain to work out what is necessary to avoid, what are tells etc is not possible without a full ptv/clerics party, at which point it takes so long to kill that you get frustrated at the HP Time sink involved (such as the complaints at the beginning of the game).

3)

Considering you have a problem with OP bosses, I don’t think the fractal design bosses are that well designed. And again, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “as intended”.
Mossman most parties just end up ranging and kiting him.
Bloomhunger: trivialised by dps and reflects
Aquatic – Underwater combat timesink.
Uncategorized – Champs becomes a kitefest. Final boss becomes hide behind reflects and burn down, Old Tom is only interesting boss here, and is gimmicked by untraited wardens.
Ascalon – The NPC’s do a lot to trivialise this boss, especially when combined with warbanners.
Cliffside – Okay, this is actually reasonably well designed as the hammer mechanic is pretty cool
Molten – Whilst the concept is cool of avoiding the traps, its beaten by simply quickly destroying the final boss.
Dredge – This is a cool mechanic as well, however largely trivialised by simply ranging him.
Maw & Mai are both cool fights, mechanic wise.
Molten Duo is essentially same commetn as molten fractal. That is to say that they can be DPS raced out, or largely trivialised by ranging.

The only “reason” you see these being played more to their mechanics actually has nothing to do with their mechanics being better. It is to do with their HP and Damage they put out. They generally can’t be out dps’d or burnt down in 10 or 15 seconds, and as such their mechanics get the opportunity to come into effect.
Mechanic wise lets look at AC (as it currently is). For arguments sake, boss’s have 10* the HP so takes about 2 minutes to burn them down, instead of 10 seconds or under. Kohler has a highly telegraphed pull that is easy to dodge, but if not will do ridiculous damage when followed up by spin.
Howling King summons loads of mobs that will eventually kill you all unless taken care of. Kite through fields to beat mechanic
Ghost Eater is protected by a shield which summons mobs that can be used to charge a trap that temporarily removes his shield, and allows a short term burn phase. Currently, he is simply burnt down in one burn phase. If he took longer you would have to pre-charge all traps, and probably in combat charge another 1 or 2.
Collossus Rumblus has a dangerous AOE fall which is protected by grasts shield. If you are out in the open and get hit they are high damage, knockdown, and cover large area. Protection is in his shield.
In each of these cases the encounter is completely trivialised by DPS before the mechanics can be enabled.
A lot of dungeon bosses have cool mechanics. Yet 99% of the time they are trivialised by DPS. (

4)I dont believe this is relevant to this discussion but I will briefly address it:

The large issue describing there is HP. And I agree that there needs to be less of a difference between low HP and high HP classes so that warriors arent inherently so tanky. However you are looking at incomparable builds.
Im not quite sure which elementalist build you are assuming. But lets talk about a spec that can do comparable dps to a warrior – D/F Fresh Air. This build offers without touching any utilites:
6+ party might (and firefields to be blasted)
gains advantage of on switch sigils as often/more often then a warrior
5/50 seconds invuln
6/30 seconds projectile defence
2 stun/kd’s + shocking aura
2 blasts,
a dodge skill on a 10 second cooldown
a small party heal
condi removal without consequent projectile defence on multiple skills
immobilise
chill
decent vulnerability stacking
comparable DPS to a warrior.

Warrior has 1 3/15 block, slightly better vuln stacking, and a 1/10 dodge on skill. Heal signet is strong, but thats not to completely discount ele’s heals.

But yes, I do agree the health separation is over the top.

I would like to see it changed to “all your current illusions become your the next phantasm you cast”. 1/2 second cast with obvious tell. Gives people the opportunity to destroy your current illusions to make it have little effect, or if it gets off an incredibly powerful effect. Probably still broken when combined with mass invisibility.

I’m actually in agreement with Penguin here. Desireable legendaries are extremely expensive. Undesirable ones less so, but still pricey. However, on these undesirable ones, the expense associated with them is to do with the common components (t6 mats etc) that drive up the price of the overall legendaries. And these are driven up by the demand for those desirable legendaries.

If anet buffs torches (because they are unanimously terrible across the 3 classes that can use them), and fixes underwater combat so its good, and consequently adds more quality underwater content then these legendaries and precursers would increase in value as they become more desirable.

The point of this thread as far as I can tell is to point out that the problem isn’t that precursers supply is too low, its that precurser DEMAND is too high. This can be seen by the April feature pack price bump as more people demanded the desirable legendaries. Even these ‘cheap’ precursers got bumped, but not to the same extent (well, in absolute values. In relative values it seems like they went up 2-300% rather than 150%).

Part of me wants to be optimistic that the New Start part of the feature pack will be a fixed underwater system, and invest in these ‘cheap’ precursers. But the realist in me is too pessimistic of UW combat to take the risk.

Taku.6352:

Axelwarrior.9084:

Wethospu.6437:

Necro should get the old FGS.

I was thinking that too, but unfortunately it’s more likely that our Lich Form will get the same treatement :P

Lich form will most likely get the same treatment as tornado did. Lower overall power to prevent well bombing but increase skill dmg to be at the same dmg levels as before.

I believe they already stated that it will.

stachekiller.2591:

P3: What if the lover’s crypt gave you the option of speeding it up. Say Tzark does his little spiel and then you have a dialog that asks “How quickly should we retrieve the essences?”. Then on some sliding scale (1-5 with one being current timing) you can choose, but the faster they collect the fast the mounds appear. Basically this would offer an option to reduce the time gate but in return would up the difficulty.

I actually doubt this would be too hard to implement for ANet developers. The pattern could remain the same even and the timing of the spawns would just get shorter.

This is actually borderline implemented as it is. The burrows spawn at certain percentages, and if one of the collectors is destroyed it slows down. I noticed this recently when I went afk at the beginning of that part (apparently along with 3 others in the team), and the remaining player got slightly overwhelmed by gravelings. They killed one of the collectors before we all came back, smashed the gravelings and caught up. Then I was shocked at how slow the development of the % was, and that the burrows were spawning really slowly.

So I think this would be a good idea, or possibly trigger a 4/5% (whatever the percentage is they spawn at) boost on the death of the previous burrow.

There is very limited “trash” in the dungeon, and its all very quick. Stack up, pull, dead. Every single trash mob in the dungeon takes very little time overall, probably less then 5 minutes total from beginning to end. The time sinks are in the complicated puzzles which require coordination, of which there are two.

Easiest way to do ooze (imo), have 2 people pull flame eles to far end, (including a reflector). 2 people start running oozes. Kill the flame eles as the oozes start being run. Done. It takes 2 minutes of explaining and coordination, and done.

The other puzzle is the electric floor room which, if you can’t work out the patterns and avoid the electric floors, is doable in about 1 minute, solo, as an elementalist.

I run this path alot, taking pugs with me and trying to teach it as I go along. I rarely have hold ups on trash mobs, or the puzzles. Its the bosses that ruin pugs. Bosses like slick and sparki who cause massive degen debuffs if not controlling the ooze correctly, and the foreman who’s spin is devastating if you don’t get far enough out of the way. Plus his tracking, along with the gears on the ground to punish ranging, and limited area from his shockwave.

I like these fights because they reward good dodging, good use of utilities, positioning and blocks, and team support from things like stabilities, condi clears etc. Yes, as rT proved its possible to destroy these bosses very quickly using FGS (which will be dead in 2 weeks), and other high burst damages. However, your average group wont be able to facetank, and out DPS these bosses. (Not saying its not possible to melee them, just significantly harder and very pug unfriendly).