Guild Wars 2

Idk I think Lich and the Flesh Golem are alright, they provide some good things even if Lich’s skillset is a bit scattershot there’s some good stuff there.

Plague though is really missing its mark as the “condition” elite. It’s great defensively sure, massive health and toughness boost but that’s it. The offensive portion of the skill is non-existent. The #2 & 3 skills are always the superior choice as they increase the defensive ability of the form. I think plague needs the offensive conditions it has increased in duration and possibly stacks. Additionally #4 & 5 skills should be added to it. Make #4 Gathering Plague from underwater DS and #5 “Contagion” basically a self epidemic that copies all conditions on you to enemies, possibly removing the conditions from you afterwards. Make plague an interesting form to use not just a turtle skill where you switch to then turn on one of the pulses and just sit there.

Muchacho.2390:

Actually it was the bleed from the horrors itself. With a healer you could stack quite a number of those rats. The base bleed is 5 sec long and is applied roghly ever 4 sec. It may not seem much but with a whole army of rats it actually is

Oh weird. I guess that’s a raid thing then? I’m just not used to people have this strong of opinions about PvE metas. o.O

Ok I’ve been away for a while, can someone fill me in on why Mark of Horror was such a big damage source for condi necros? I can’t imagine it was the bleeds from the horrors themselves? Is it just that the death nova x5 would happen pretty fast for condi necros who didn’t have other minion buffing traits?

vanderwolf.7084:

you freaking out over giant frogs to me is strange when we have giant beetles, and giant mosqitos and wasps and stuff.

Well in all fairness giant insects and even dinosaurs aren’t very unusual for Tyria. Varieties of Hylek that absolutely dwarf the largest playable races is pretty jarring however. Especially, as Konig has pointed out, when their size isn’t even consistent.

Calcifire.1864:

it’s nice to have a henchman with me leeching my rewards again

honestly, this time she can have them, I have enough of the stuff

I wouldn’t have guessed she’d be one of the exalted though, “dedicated” isn’t exactly a word I’d use to describe her… maybe she just got really fed up of needing to eat and wanted to have the ultimate nap?

Haha, indeed it does seem strange that Herta would end up an Exalted, but then it was rather strange that she of all the Nightfall henchmen was the one to go to Eye of the North.

I’ve been using full Valkyrie armor & trinkets alongside berserker weapons & Eagle runes to get enough base precision that Decimate Defenses alone gives you a usable crit chance outside of shroud. So far it’s been great.

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

I got 1 after 35 bags or so, no idea what it was used for so sold it for 42G.

Heh I did something similar, sort of kicking myself for not holding on to it a little longer. But really at the time it was just an endless tonic for something I didn’t particularly care to turn into on a regular basis. :-/

simplesimon.2084:

It’s under controls. You have to set a toggel key for it. I set mine to F10 for the time being.

Thank you very much! Didn’t expect it to be a keybind thing, was looking in the gameplay options menu.

draxynnic.3719:

We do actually have a case of a necromancer doing something like that – Naku, the necromancer in Tahnnakai Temple, sacrificed his life to summon an overly large army of minions and send them into the enemy.

Another good example from the Tahnnakai Temple heroes would be the ranger Zojun, he and several other rangers raised an army of charmed animals that were so entirely overwhelming against the enemy that Zojun himself claims he didn’t need to fire a single arrow.

As for who is most powerful in these sort of exceptional cases I’d have to agree with idea that magical professions tend to be capable of large scale effects that are simply beyond the capabilities of martial professions.

That’s not to discount martial professions, history has shown us no matter how powerful the magic involved all it takes to ruin a magical rampage is one good warrior or assassin/thief.

Mara.6782:

They are almost like these http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Enchanted_armor

Yep. Just makes me think that the whole visual design of the Exalted is one big troll on those wanting to see mursaat introduced into GW2. The notes on that wiki page specifically mention the visual similarities between the enchanted armor and mursaat. If people were already getting confused by that similarity what better way to troll people than make an upgraded version of the enchanted armor that’s golden, hovers above the ground, & has magic tendrils coming off its back?

Drow.2081:

If they add another race it would have to be the Tengu. It’s already in their lore and there is evidence that it might have been in the workings once. Tengu is fine but it feels like just another animal race – just another Charr. I’m more likely to play an elfish race but actual elves wouldn’t be added because Guild Wars has their own lore and mobs. People would complain they were copying everyone else if they added elves. Still, if they added dark elves I would play them.

But what I would really like to see is merfolk. Reasoning – it’s not been done in any mmo other than Perfect World and that game… umm lacks. But with GW2 extensive underwater landscapes a mer would fit in well. Of course they would have to have landlegs when they exited the water but that’s okay.

Be nice if we could get some lovely long hairs for both male and fems with a class like mer folk. Also an option to make a few uglier mer folk for variety.

You, my friend, should check out the Largos. They’re basically manta/mer-elves and would make perfect sense to become playable in any sort of future underwater expansion.

Daniel Handler.4816:

I don’t think mesmers banned those spells. What happened was hexes became represented either by conditions or by the phantasm/clones. Skills like backfire they tried to put on the torch but it was not possible. So gw2 mesmer should be combined with gw1 when you assume mesmer ability.

I agree. I think there comes a point where some apparent differences in function between GW1 & 2 professions is simply game mechanics.

GW1 illusions weren’t specifically visible to only the person affected, anyone could see when someone was afflicted by a mesmer’s phantasm for instance, just because it wasn’t a purple entity on the field doesn’t mean the function wasn’t identical in lore.

Likewise I think a lot of the mesmer’s mind affecting/influencing spells are still there just not so explicitly stated through spell names like panic or guilt. Confusion is sort of the catch all for the reactionary hexes from GW1 so skills like empathy are inferred to still be there when mesmers inflict confusion, likewise mesmers interrupt abilities are all mental manipulation as opposed to warriors or rangers who just interrupt someone with a knock over the head. So that is to say mesmers invoke panic, or guilt, etc. in their target to interrupt them.

+1 to this, so many awesome GW1 armors they could bring back, or at least draw inspiration from.

I’d love some of the more gothic necro armors and I think I speak for everyone in medium armor when I say some more assassin styled armors would do wonders to break up the sea of trench-coats.

I really don’t miss her, at least I really don’t miss how she actually appeared in game, her writing in season 1 was really pretty bad, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. The fact that she’s a far more interesting character posthumously thanks to fleshing out in season 2 should tell you how hard the ball was dropped regarding her writing on the first pass.

That said I do miss a lot of the season 1 content, the Battle for LA stuff in particular was so much fun to play I wish we could revisit it in some form.

Alright my thoughts on berserker after trying a couple specs with it this weekend. Let me prefaces this by saying I was very unimpressed by the berserker last beta weekend and was very interested to see how the changes played out.

Eirdyne.9843:

Let’s get serious and have a Legendary Vuvuzela! It’s would be the ultimate WvW Taunt. “Someone kill that guy!”

Reminds me of this

Gav.1425:

This mechanic of losing the 33% when slowed does not balance druids having a better passive mobility trait than any other class in the game.

Why did they add unbalanced mobility to one of the most mobile classes already?

Goodness, if you’re losing it over this I can’t imagine the tantrum you’ll throw when you realize Daredevil has dash that’s on demand cripple/chill removal and stupidly easy perma switfness. Oh, and they still have their shortbow.

Just going to leave my quick first impressions of the scrapper after an hour-ish of play.

The hammer is great! So far haven’t really noticed any issues with it and it is a joy to play with.

Also loving the traits, some really solid stuff here.

The Gyros are…odd.

First off why can we not use the function gyro revive on NPCs in PvE? that alone pretty massively limits its usefulness for about 1/3 of the game. Players don’t go down all that much and there’s only a tiny portion of enemies that have to have finishers used on them.

The rest of the gyros seem a bit fragile and have rather long cooldowns for their effects. Additionally they need to be able to keep up with an engineer with speed boosts, a gyro with a beneficial aura that can’t keep up with the player is useless. I’d say let them share an engineer’s passive movement speed effects/swiftness & superspeed by default or simply give the aura based gyros a very high base movement speed so they can’t be outrun.

DEATHsCLAW.1978:

staff #1: 100%projectile finisher, add poison for 5sec and better power scaling, make it generate 5% Lifeforce on hit so landing it twice lets you enter DS

100% finisher chance on an AA isn’t going to happen & I’d say ask for either poison on it or better power scaling it probably won’t be able to get both. 1% more life force seems reasonable.

staff #2: restore to 3 stacks of bleed

Quite reasonable and overdue imo.

axe #1: needs another dmg increase

I’m more inclined to say that #1 is fine, only thing I would change is make the vuln slightly longer. It’s #2 that needs more damage.

axe #3: blast finisher!

Not sure such a feature heavy skill needs more features but it’s something a lot of people want and I wouldn’t be opposed to it. It would also make Spiteful Spirit more appealing as well.

focus #4: adjust pathing&bouncing to be similar mirrorblade, reduce cooldown to somewhat like 10s (to match axe better and looking at mirrorblades cooldown 16s on focus#4 is kinda funny)

Both focus and Dagger #4 should have faster projectiles, so that sounds fine. Not sure about cooldowns, I wouldn’t be opposed to a shorter cooldown but I think I would more prefer the regen be replaced with a more useful boon like fury.

DEATHsCLAW.1978:

focus #5: reduce cast time by half

I can certainly agree with this, a shorter cast time would do wonders for the focus.

scepter #1: AA still not good enough.. could use a 2nd blood stack on the 2nd part of the auto chain and maybe an attack speed increase

scepter #2 and #3 should get a cooldown reduction to 6 and 8 seconds to make them usable twice until swapping weapons or going back to DS

I’m reserving judgement on scepter until I get more time to playtest the current iteration.

DEATHsCLAW.1978:

dagger #4: maybe adding some LF gain because both other offhands provide LF (at least in theorie)

Offhand Dagger does need some LF generation it’s true, not sure if this or #5 should have it though. It could also use the QoL change of a faster projectile (as I mentioned above) to make its use as a condition transfer more reliable at range.

dagger #5: the time until the attack hits needs a huge decrease because its almost impossible to land in pvp. maybe 3 bleeding stacks instead of 2

It is a bit on the sluggish side and one extra bleeding probably wouldn’t be unreasonable.

castlemanic.3198:

I have a question regarding shades. Are shades created from corpses or are they summoned from the underworld like there are portals they come out of in queensdale?

As for the idea that binding the souls to the body’s of the dead being taboo, why are ritualists accepted in GW1 if the following is true:

“Ritualists channel other-worldly energies that summon allies from the void and employ mystic binding rituals that bend those allies to the Ritualist’s will.…..Where the Ranger lives as one with the spirit world, the Ritualist can and will be its master.”

As Kalavier pointed out Ritualists primarly summoned and bound spirits of various concepts such as pain, rejuvenation, etc, not the actual souls of the dead. However I can think of at least one example of a Ritualist forcibly binding the soul of a person. So it was entirely within their power to do so but they didn’t employ it often.

Can confirm, crashed twice in the last hour from hero points in Dry Top

Sephiroth.9053:

Keep in mind the fact that you’re in the middle of fighting VW when your runes have built up so much that you cant do anything with them. You can’t go merch them because … well… you’re in the middle of VW…. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s very common, as silverwastes farmers will know.

Not to be argumentative, just observing, but what are you doing that you end up with a full inventory while in the middle of VW? In my experience with SW stuff it’s quite difficult to actually fill one’s inventory before VW is complete. That is unless you’re actually opening and salvaging every loot bag as you get them, which seems a bit silly given that you get a good 15 min after VW to deal with inventory and vendor at Camp Resolve.

On topic however, I’m not sure what more can be done about runes while you’re in the field. You could make the salvageable I suppose, I’m not sure what effect that would have on the economy of shards/rune mats (assuming they would salvage into dust/the materials used to craft runes).

On the flip side I would personally love to see rune upgrading recipes int he mystic forge, similar to those for materials, take like a half a dozen or so minor runes of one type + some random mystic forge mats and upgrade to a major of the same type, and likewise for major to superior.

Forviassi.3514:

Indeed, the skill’s visual effect could have the poison cloud domes around the mordrem recaptured forts in Silverwastes. This would convey the skill much more better.

This actually sounds like the perfect graphic to use for the new CPC, very clearly a big poison AoE but has clear boundries and doesn’t completely obscure visuals like other poison cloud effects (marsh drake breath comes to mind).

Chameleon Dude.1564:

I’m surprised Berserker is so low. I feel that if the poll asked us to put them in rank order, it would move further up. It’s not the most exciting thing, but it’s a solid trait line that actually has synergy with the class as a whole… which is more than Tempest and Dragonhunter can say.

Tbh if I was to rank them in order Berserker would be pretty darn low, was not impressed at all by it in the last beta. Overall just felt extremely clunky and not terribly rewarding for using the berserk mode. :-/

Can confirm, getting the same missing timer issue. The ((numbers)) type thing tends to show up when an item or tooltip does not have it’s information fully implemented. You can see this a lot if you get chat goes to preview hidden items like the elite spec weapon skins.

So I’m thinking that the timer’s ID# was changed somehow so the crafting display tries to pull the old ID and gets nothing, or vice versa.

Tim.6450:

Also please stop my human female necro trying to gently swap away some bees.

So much this^

fem human necro main here, used A/F for a long time to support minions through vuln stacking, the anim change finally put me off the weapon. It is so kittening horrendous, she looks like she’s cowering while feebly batting at something, it’s beyond pathetic.

Across the races the anim really needs help, generally it needs momentum, it feels slow and weak right now. It needs fast, hard, deliberate swings, it’s a two strike skill so have the anim do two fast swings to match it.

On the topic of mechanics, I’ll have to test the new axe (if I can stomach making myself look like an incompetent ditz for any length of time), but my gut tells me at 900 range with a 10% boost the axe AA should be acceptable.

The main issue then is #2 Ghastly Claws, this is supposed to be Axe’s burst, currently it’s only really good for generating life force and pretty notably underperforms next to a lot of other rapid attack weapon skills. If axe is supposed to be our ranged power weapon it needs to hold up the damage end of that. I’d say improving the damage on this should be a priority, give axe the bite it’s supposed to have.

At this point unholy feast is fine, it’s AoE and a ton of utility, cripple, retaliation, & boon corruption. This has been axe’s best skill for a long time. And thanks to Spiteful Spirit I don’t even need an axe to have it, which puts the pressure once more on Rending & Ghastly claws to sell the weapon.

Gotta agree the animation is as horrendous as the day it was changed, still a very uncomfortable weapon to use.

Hmm, less extensive changes than I was hoping for.

Axe range increases are nice but I don’t think a mere 10% buff to the AA will change it’s situation much. Will give it a go but I don’t expect much.

Scepter on the other hand does seem to be a quite nice, boost to #2 and #3 finally being condition based is great. AA change seems like a wash but not bad, would prefer it if the AA was just sped up a touch. Still overall good.

The change to CPC to projectile defense is great but was hoping they were also looking at the other corruptions as well.

I see that they did clarify that this is just the first of a series of balance changes, I say that’s fine as long as they take fewer than three months between them. I’d like the core profession specs to be tuned up across the board before the next expansion drops.

I’ll second this suggestion! Could these Taste of Tyria episodes on youtube or something so we can enjoy them later as well?

Loving these so much!

Ojyh.9842:

Your vision of the Druid applies to the real world druids.

You don’t even know that Druids already have a specific lore from GW1 and that’s what people are referring to when they say the Druid spec shouldn’t be so heavily focused on the ceslestial aspect. Not to mention that all the theme we were expecting to see with the Druid was partly present in the Ranger (not the astral stuff) which would have been a great (and probably the only) way to make a strong link between the profession and its specialization. I am curious to know how you can efficiently explain why Rangers could become Druids through the celestial theme !
Also the astral/celestial theme is already very important in Canthan lore.
Mixing those two things kills both of them at the same time.

Before trying to “educate” people you should make sure that you really know what you’re talking about.

There’s a similar thread in the lore forum about this, but the basic gist is we know next to nothing about the GW1 druids. There’s nothing in lore that states that they couldn’t have had celestial emphasis as well. They might have even started out as disciples of Canthan celestial practices, they were human after all.

lukejoe.1592:

Standing still and mashing a rotation is exactly what you get with the trinity.

Standing still and mashing a rotation is what we already have with stacking and blasting fields.

Yeah…gonna need some context here.

Oslaf Beinir.5842:

That’s it for axe? I thought the big rework would be more grand than just a range increase though….

I get the feeling there’s more changes in store for axe & scepter both, they were really rushed for time with this balance preview so they didn’t even get to elaborate much on the few changes they did choose to share.

Calcifire.1864:

Lord Trejgon.2809:

Calcifire.1864:

(in much the same way that ritualists in GW1 became mesmers in GW2)

I disaggre on that part – gw1 rits became gw2 engies :P
[turrets are new spirits :P]

don’t be silly

spirits were useful

Ritualist was one of my favorite GW1 classes but lets be realistic here, spirits really weren’t very useful until they added Summon Spirits and axed the casting times on them.

Makai.3429:

Also, we’re named after Mesmerism, which is derived from Franz Mesmer who theorized animal magnetism. His secondary passion for astronomy may also have a connection to GW2’s Mesmer and its ability to manipulate space and time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer

As for butterflies, the designer of the profession may have researched Project MONARCH: a supposed CIA program, which involved mind control.

Some believe butterflies also symbolize metamorphosis and mimicry:

http://www.magicoflife.org/symbol.html

“The Greeks likened the butterfly’s constant flitting from flower to flower to the restlessness of the mind: constantly changing from subject to subject. Indeed, the Greek word for butterfly is ‘psyche’ from where we get our word ‘psychology’ – the study of the mind.”

Right on there, the Mesmer name was very deliberately chosen for it’s link to mesmerism and by extension hypnosis and the mental manipulation that comes with such things.

I didn’t know that about the butterflies but that does seem like one of the strongest links I’ve seen for that symbolism.

As for the style choices of mesmer it mainly comes from a few different sources, first and foremost is actors and theaters. The very first mesmer you could meet in all of Guild Wars was Lady Althea, who could be found near her own theater just outside of Ascalon City. The second major style mesmers have is the masquerade mask, in GW2 these masks are just generic light armor headpieces but in GW1 they were exclusive to the mesmer. Both of these fashions are very heavily tied to the idea and practice of illusions, deceptions, and false realities.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

3. Facing horror of fighting old comrades turned mordrem

These dragon minions present a personal threat to the remnants of the Pac

[…]

Although they’ve undergone physical changes to make themselves hardier and larger, Mordrem Guard maintain some aspects of their previous identity; members of the Pact may experience the horror of recognizing their former comrades among Mordremoth’s forces.

Again, so what? This is not new.

This is the Pact we’re talking about. They’re the veterans of Orr, where as that very article states their dead companions came back as dragon minions. With mordrem, they might be fighitng their old comrades – or more often miniosn that copy the appearance and potentially knowledge of their old comrades… but hours and days after the old comrade’s death (except in case of sylvari).

But this was true in Orr too. And even worse in Orr, they could be fighting former comrades SECONDS after said comrades’ deaths (as shown in both Edge of Destiny and Sea of Sorrows, as well as some story instances and events, corpses can turn into risen fast – before hitting the ground, even).

So why is this such an experience of horror? Only the greenhorns of the Pact would really see such as an ‘experience of horror.’ Yet it seems even Orrian veterans do.

So again, this feels like the plot is making a huge deal out of old stuff or things that rightfully they shouldn’t know.

So can someone explain to me why old situations are suddenly “omg drama!” and why the sylvari and Mordremoth are black sheep amongst dragons and their minions? Because as it stands, this entire plot we’re being told feels like “we did it cuz its cool, yo, forget consistency!”

I think the thing you’re overlooking with this is that is new, at least for sylvari. Up until now sylvari have been known for being “immune” to dragon corruption. This comes up several times in Orr, it’s one of the reasons the Pale Reavers were formed in the first place. Generally speaking the sylvari’s immunity to corruption wasn’t really questioned too much and was seen as a major boon for Pact forces.

With that in mind I do think the quote could have been worded better and makes a lot more sense if it’s intended for the point of view of an uncorrupted sylvari.

Consider their situation: Everything you knew about yourself and your capabilities when fighting dragon magic just dropped out. You’ve dealt with comrades being corrupted in Orr, sure, but as a sylvari you were always certain that should the worst come to pass neither you nor your allies would have to deal with you turning on them. Now you’ve got dragon siren songs in your head and you see your ally sylvari corrupted into monstrous forms and have to deal with the fact that this could be you. This is a facet of the horror of dragon corruption that no sylvari has had to face before.

Ravezaar.4951:

The self-condi stuff I can understand, Gw2 is an MMO and grouping is a part of the game hence AoE cleanses totally mess up this mechanic abit strange tho that u still DONT remove this from Necros Corruption skills ?

As a necro main gotta admit these Mallyx changes do sting. Mallyx was essentially Corruptions done right, self inflicted conditions with a good payoff and synergy for hurting yourself. I really was hoping to see some improvements to corruptions based on how well Mallyx worked, and now…. not looking good for an overhaul to corruptions once again.

Sicarius.4639:

The class was a mash together of left over ideas with the term Ranger slapped on it. Nature magic, longbow man and beast master come together to create this Ranger for GW2.

Nature Magic, Marksmanship, Beast Mastery & Wilderness Survival were literally the Ranger attribute lines from GW1. The GW2 ranger uses almost 1 for 1 the same things the GW1 ranger did, it’s not a mash of left over ideas. The only major difference is the GW2 ranger has beast mastery as a core mechanic where as it was a side thing in GW1.

On topic, the core GW2 ranger doesn’t have guns, that’s not going to change, they have more naturalist leanings. Now with Druid being the first elite spec the nature magic side of ranger is getting really played up, so there’s nothing stopping future elite specs from playing up the marksman side of ranger and giving them a gun.

The only hard part will be making a rifle or pistol interesting and unique among the Ranger’s other weapon selections, it’s no good to make the rifle another 1500 range pew pew weapon just because you like the aesthetics more than the longbow.

Crysto.7089:

Asura = Everything

To be fair though, warrior asura tend to be oddballs by asuran standards, see Brikk & Warmaster Efut

Overall though every race does fit every profession to some degree even if some are uncommon, but if you want to go full iconic then I’d recommend:

Charr: Warrior, Engineer & Ranger (with devourer pets specifically)
Norn: Warrior & Ranger
Asura: Mesmer, Ele & Necro
Sylvari: Ranger & Guardian
Humans are too diverse and well established to narrow them down to a couple professions.

There are also some fun synergies of racial skills that I’ve found as well:

Human Reaper: Reaper of Grenth has great synergy with all the chill based stuff on Reaper
Norn Necro: Wolf Form is a pretty solid elite for a condition based necro
Charr Engineer: Outdated now, but Charrzooka was the mortar kit before mortar was a kit, also shrapnel mine is a fantastic skill
Sylvari Ranger: I’m not sure if it’s still the case but at one point spirit traits affected the Druid Spirit elite summon

While Necromancy is overall socially acceptable it is still rather creepy/disturbing to the uninitiated. In the Ghosts of Ascalon novel several of the main characters have notable squick reactions to their companion necromancer making a minion of a soldier they just killed.

Also, historically necromancy is a school of magic that was more regulated than other schools do to it’s potential for misuse/abuse.

So while necromancy is fine to practice openly there are limits on what is socially acceptable and even then necromancy is still generally viewed as a bit creepy.

Axe/Dagger is not a very good weapon set as axe is power based damage while offhand dagger is best for condition focused specs.

That said Greatsword & Axe/x was what I used on Valkyrie stat Reaper build I tried last beta and it worked quite well. Axe isn’t super long range but it does let you get some breathing room when you need it and feels like a decent ranged option to pair with greatsword.

Also note that Axe and Scepter are going to get some revisions and improvements soon so it might end up being an even better pairing than it is now.

This is something that’s been bothering me for some time as well. And it goes beyond shroud skills, tons of skills don’t appear on the hero panel; auto attack chains, Thief stealth attacks, transformation skills, etc.

Penguin.5197:

Imo too much stealth can ruin an otherwise fun game. Gw1 had a perfect amount of stealth, but Gw2 went a little overboard with it.

So yes, please no more stealth.

GW1 had no stealth mechanics, only blocks & evades, you could never hide from enemy targeting.

Lemondish.3268:

• Like with engineers, switching to the elite spec with tomes would disable weapon swap. This is made up for by the more physical manifestations of the virtues that already makes up the Dragonhunter. The longbow option would also be a perfect companion here because it encourages the more backline style gameplay that can be augmented by kit choice.

I’m not sure if I’m misinterpreting this, but you are aware that you will only be able to equip one elite spec at a time, yes? So anything the dragonhunter offers won’t be usable with any future tome-based elite spec.

Anyways, my thoughts: Making tomes into kits seems like the most straightforward approach, but thinking about it a bit it might be a bit excessive from a design standpoint. When you give kits to a new profession, assuming you fill the standard loadout of utilitly skills, thats 5-6 kits, or 5-6 entire weaponsets to design. That might be a bit much to ask of a single elite spec.

I think an alternative would be to have the tomes become the active effects of virtues. That is, activating a virtue allows you to equip one of the tomes. This would make them more akin to elementalist attunements than kits, but it does open up other utility skill types like glyphs for example.

As for a weapon and name I’d say a warhorn or offhand mace might work alright, and a name like scribe or prior might fight the more scholarly theme of such a spec.

Mitch.4781:

Actually, I revisted it just 2 days ago simply to open up more points for the hall of heros which allow you exclusive skins etc for your GW2 characters.

I was really surprised at how busy Kamadan was. It was a lovely game and has so many features I wish GW2 would implement, but GW2 does indeed make it feel very dated. As you expect.

I recently went back to GW1 for a bit as well, working towards finishing off some old titles and I was surprised just how active the game was, even Kaineng Center was relatively busy. If you’re worried about playing alone, don’t be, the game still has a pretty strong community and lots of active guilds that would be happy to have you.

Mechanically GW1 is of an older style to be sure but honestly for a 10 year old game it’s aged better than many. Graphically as well, the game is still beautiful, Anet has always had an amazing art team.

Bercilak’s armor didn’t so much render him invincible as it did automatically resurrect him, and even then the armor’s abilities were only ever shown against traditional combatants. There’s no telling if it would have been able to save him from say being crushed by a dragon champion. For that matter there’s no indication that the armor would have protected the user from dragon corruption, the last thing you’d want is to lose control of a powerful artifact like that.

Ayrilana.1396:

Varonth.5830:

.

The thing is, Guild Wars 1 got more balancing update in the months leading up to major standalone expansions than Gw2 gets in years of development time.

So you prefer a game that’s so out of balance, or can quickly become out of balance, that it requires frequent balance updates?

In all honesty…yes. I really did enjoy the constantly shifting metas that GW1’s constant heavy balance changes introduced, it hurt sometimes but it also meant that there were new things to try even if there wasn’t technically any new content introduced.

Overall GW1 kept it’s basic gameplay fresh through it’s constantly changing imbalance, GW2 on the other hand has plenty of imbalance of its own yet the basic gameplay has become incredibly stagnant because Anet haven’t done the same sort of aggressive balance passes this time around.

The revenant and eltie specs are so freaking exciting for me because it’s the first time in three years we’re seeing any sort of major shake up of GW2’s basic gameplay.

The article is very pointed on profession issues, ranger specifically, however I think the issue is more than simply communication with the profession devs. It’s more communication with devs in general.

Maybe it’s changing times but in GW1 Anet seemed a fair bit more personable, they didn’t have an official forum but their community team was rather active in game and on third party forums. The general rate at which balance/bug fix patches came out felt faster and more substantial as well.

Since GW2’s launch however communication has really dried up to the point that shortly before the reveal of HoT many people were questioning if there was any development going on for GW2 at all. It’s gotten better since the reveal of HoT but it’s still relatively tame by many comparative companies’ standards.

Bug fixing/sweeping balance passes similar to what GW1 saw are more or less off the table as well. Despite their adherence to an iterative design philosophy they don’t seem to let that into class balance all that much and changes have historically been very minor as well as being rather few & far between.

Idk if anything will change, I just wish they would be a bit more aggressive on the bug fixing and class balance fronts, and being a bit more up front about it.

Killyox.3950:

conversely a single chill takes about 50% of revenant’s #5 shield defiance bar ;p

Don’t count on that being the case at release, all breakbars were extremely weak in the last beta weekend. Expect soft CC to have a lot less effect/breakbars to be stronger across the board next time around.

And on topic, I do really hope this is addressed as it does basically neuter all reaper chill traits, as well as Terror. Not to mention numerous traits across other professions that rely on these CC conditions to function.

I’m not sure what is said about Humans, Charr and Norn having different firearm mechanics, however just looking at the guns in game reveals there is more or less three main varieties of guns in Tyria. There’s the true to life mechanical firearms, magical guns, and the odd ones that seem to be a hybrid of mechanical and magical.

The vast majority of guns are muzzle-loading firearms with true to life firing mechanisms (flintlocks, matchlocks, wheel-locks, etc.). There are several that use rather advanced looking revolver mechanisms and are the rare example of a breech-loading gun in Tyria. However I don’t think there’s any evidence of cartridge based ammunition so these revolver chambers are likely manually loaded with powder, wadding and bullets like other guns.

The magical guns are those ones with no mechanical barrel and are generally asuran in origin. They’re basically a self contained spell casting device that’s designed to be used like a comparable firearm.

The one’s I’m calling “hybrids” have mechanical barrels but no visible firing mechanism (hammer, flintlock, etc.) and/or have heavy magical affects on them and likely use a magical method to ignite a standard gunpowder charge.

These are just my observations on the guns in game so take it with a grain of salt I suppose.