Guild Wars 2

An active skill might be the best approach. It could be a new profession mechanic skill (F2). There are a few ways such a skill could work.

The basic functionality of the skill could do any of: heal or regen minions, give protection to minions, give resistance to minions.

It would cost a significant (50% – 100%) portion of life force. It could heal as a percentage of the the amount of life force consumed. Durations could also be affected by amount of life force consumed. Durations would be very short.

If there are no active minions, it could be disabled. Alternatively, it could affect the necro too. It could be another way to counter burst, costing life force.

Another way to implement this new skill would be as an alternative way of leaving death shroud. While in death shroud, pressing F2 would consume remaining life force and function as described above, applying any of: prot/resist/regen boons and heals. The durations would still be affected by the amount of life force consumed. It would function similarly to the trait that triggers on leaving death shroud. Both could even stack in this case.

The goal of this brainstorm is to bring a skill like Blood of the Master to GW2. More sacrifice would likely be necessary, possibly requiring death shroud to go on a small cool down. Unfortunately, there is no precedent for health sacrifice in GW2.

I’m not worried about details like heal amounts or boon durations. I hope this could be explored further. To be honest, I haven’t been able to play GW2 for a while. Would the life force cost be a sufficient sacrifice? Would an extended cool down be needed for death shroud? Could self-applied chill be an appropriate sacrifice? Note the possibility of getting resistance from the skill.

A new profession mechanic skill could better connect minions with the necro profession mechanic.

*Edit: tried to organize it better.

Charr could stand to get more ‘skimpy’ armor sets, in general. They definitely need more leg armors with subligaria (for all armor classes), at the very least. Pants luck ridiculous on charr. Tights are even worse.

GW1 was my first online game. I liked it because I could always go back to it after extended periods. I’ve stopped playing GW2 for a little while now; I can’t stand anything LS related.
I’ve gone back to GW1 for some JQ action and a bit of PvE. JQ was very enjoyable PvP, except for the long delays between matches. I’d really like to play FA too. I remember thinking that FA was a taste of what WvW could be like. The even match-up must be why I enjoyed it more.

I wish Anet still updated GW1. If they were like Square Enix, for example, they would (or could?) maintain both. Content updates could be nice, but skill updates would be amazing.

What legal barriers prevent Anet from releasing GW1 source code so others may develop the game? It’s obvious they don’t give a kit about it anymore.

I admit that my suggestion will not change anything for those that already have lag issues. Please stay on topic. I fixed the one sentence that you read to hopefully clear up any confusion in the future.

TPMN.1483:

As with all online games ‘lag’ will always be an issue. The one-shot kill /wipe unless you dodge is annoying for higher lag scenarios. Not much can be done to change that.
The only thing I can suggest here is watch the boss and look for those early tells/signs of big single hit incoming (most of them have several seconds of build up or a sequence of skills they use- it’s not random).

That’s why you are limited to so many dodges/it’s on a slow regen.

Dodge is meaningful – ‘you dodged that bullet/arrow’ = you got clean out of the way just in time (no dmg taken – makes sense). Having dodge just be a % reduction of dmg you might have taken removes the purpose of dodge. It would mean that people with heavy armor can take even more dmg compared to light/medium further causing more imbalances.

There are normally some skills in each char class which are ‘un-dodgable’ – there are limited for good reason.

Sorry, I meant that I understand why the invuln is there in the first place. I’m not saying that dodge should purely be used to move out of the way of attacks, since lag is the issue there.
Also, in most cases in this game, it’s not quite what you described. It’s more like: you dodged a Lava Font or that move that Subject Alpha does by throwing yourself through it.
I forgot about the disparity between the different armor classes. Maybe they’ll be tweaked to account for this. I’d like to see certain traits that upgrade dodge to a greater reduction in damage and/or condition duration.
I’d like to emphasize that this would be a huge change to the game and would require other things to be changed around too.

I’ve seen discussions related to my suggestion in the past. Did a search using the forum search tool and found nothing, as expected. For those curious, I got 5 unrelated posts searching with “dodg”. I’m just curious, has my suggestion already been discussed?

Dodge affects all areas of the game. It is a good, active mechanic. However, the invulnerability it gives is very powerful. It tends to trivialize certain encounters. I am not suggesting that the invulnerability simply be removed. Incoming damage could just be reduced by a given percentage. My connection isn’t always the best, and others certainly have it worse. I understand how frustrating it is to try to dodge an attack, but fail due to lag.

I’d like to include skills that give evade as well. Maybe the amount of damage reduction could differ depending on whether it’s dodge, evade(by skill), or distortion.

Conditions would be tricky to deal with, but maybe a similar reduction in duration could work when dodged.

Knockbacks and such would be even more tricky to deal with. I’m not sure of a good way to deal with this situation. It might require that each type of CC affect a dodging player differently. The more powerful CCs may need more visible tells.

This suggestion would mean that some non-projectile attacks, like necro scepter 1, will always hit the target. They may need to be changed around a bit. It would be interesting to see some skills unaffected by dodge. This would not be a simple fix, by any means. The whole game will require tweaking to accommodate the proposed change.

Off topic: I personally don’t like what dodge currently does to encourage stacking in dungeon encounters. If it were a damage/condition duration reduction, then the defensive and supportive stats could actually play more of a role in fights. This fix certainly won’t solve all issues with dungeons, though.

TLDR: The invulnerability from Dodge could be replaced with an effect that gives damage reduction and condition duration reduction.
(Suggestions for CCs?)

When? When there are writers who care about actual gw lore.

How? If Mursaat phased out of existence, then not all may have phased into existence as of their near-extermination in GW1. The rest phased into existence much later than events of Prophecies. No one can see them because no one has ascended since GW1 time. (No [2nd] profession changing and the like.) These newer Mursaat are cautious because they learned about how the others were defeated by humans. They’ll do what the others had done: subtly affect events to their benefit. New areas: Crystal Desert and Isle of Janthir.
It requires that they be the focus of the story! No ED/Scarlet as the big bad! If an ED must be involved, then have the Mursaat manipulate the PCs to get rid of it for them.

*Edit: Oh, and they wouldn’t be at the Ring of Fire. No need; titans were gone for centuries. PCs would be led to Crystal Desert for ED (subtly, by Mursaat). Discover Mursaat exist, but can’t see/fight them. Mursaat would guard Augury Rock, which still holds the power of the gods. They’d ascend, discover passage to the IoJ, and take the fight to them. There! GW2 first expansion.

The home server borderlands have everything (mystic forge keep is often taken by the home server). Saves lot’s of silver. I’d never play ZvZ though.

I really enjoyed making interesting builds in GW1. Skill update notes kept me checking the wiki every week. The Me/Rt/E major updates were especially cool.
I didn’t really get into GW1 until I made a fun and interesting build for my Necro. This build brought me from start to finish of Nightfall. In GW2, I’ve yet to experience this feeling of creating something functionally unique in my character. The armors were great to collect, but what truly made my characters unique were the builds that I used.

I get what op (and some others) are hinting at. I want Scarlet gone asap. If the Scarlet arc is completed, we’d likely never hear of her again. Thus, I’d like to propose a solution to the lore debacle:
Literally retcon Scarlet. Have her go into the mists, and somehow cease her entire existence. Better yet, have the PCs and possibly Kiel do this. Have people forget her and make all that she did never have happened. That would be a most satisfying end.
In the new fractal, for example, dialogue relating to her can be removed. The npc and her monologue can be removed.
The most tricky thing would be to explain those big zone invasion events, if the devs still want to keep those in the game.

I always thought that Scarlet could have been a stronger character (or non-existent), but now I understand why she is as she is.

I tried looking for a similar topic but couldn’t find very much related to this. Sorry if someone discovered this earlier. I tried a search ,but not even searching: Scarlet yielded any results. Go figure.

250 years is a very large amount of time to pass. The events that we know occurred between the end of GW1 and the beginning of GW2 were the major world-changing events.
Anything left unmentioned was likely on the same scale as (or smaller than) the Living Story things. The only difference is that the PC didn’t participate in the older events. These minor events were solved by average people making a difference to return Tyria to the status quo.
It was either that, or events that did occur were so insignificant that they didn’t need to be mentioned.

In GW1, Draw Spirit was a useful skill for moving single spirits around. Summon Spirits was a similar skill that made things more manageable in PvE, since Ritualists dealt with multiple spirits. I feel that this mechanic would really help spirits in GW2 in a way that would not make them op. Unfortunately, there is not an ideal way to do this, considering spirits already have an active follow-up skill.

The idea is to allow for you to draw the spirit out of harm’s way or to draw it into a group of enemies for a Call Lightning or something. This level of control over spirits would be a great addition to Ranger.

Ideally, I would like an individual Draw Spirit for each spirit current summoned. This is impossible unless one of two things happens:
Ranger gets an additional key(s) to draw the spirit (or all spirits) to your location
or
The active ability of each spirit is replaced with Draw Spirit, with the active effect either discarded or automated on a timer.
I wouldn’t mind if they used an additional key for Draw Spirit, but I know Anet doesn’t do that sort of thing. I don’t think it’s a good idea to automate or discard the current spirit active abilities, since these abilities can be useful in certain circumstances.

It could be possible to have the active ability teleport the spirit to your location, in addition to the current active ability of the spirit. The only issue is when the active effect occurs: before or after the teleportation. It could possibly be split up between these two. A trait could be used to specify when the active effect occurs. This is how traits should act: not necessarily improving abilities, just giving some additional options to skills. (Sorry…tangent.)

I’ve ignored the mobile spirits trait. Draw Spirit could replace this trait and be used in a more effective way.

Given pet AI is still/has always been a big concern, they’re probably waiting on making changes until that step is complete. If/Once they figure this part out, things should feel a lot better for rangers.
Everything must be put on hold until pets are fixed, since pets are so integral to the profession. Any intermediate fix to ranger at the moment is a short-term fix (costly and not profitable, long-term), given the current state of pets. Since spirits are least related to pets (similar to traps; unlike shouts and signets that work directly with pets), a fix to these would be a wonderful thing.
A brief progress report on pet ai would be nice. A strong pet (and general NPC?) ai would do wonders for this game. I hope they are sufficiently investing in this!
Side note: Would it be better to allow most pet skills to home in on the pet’s target, like speeding up or adding range and movement to most pet skills? This could accommodate an ai that did not hog system resources. It might not work well on cliff edges, though (sees dog jumping off a cliff to attack a rabbit). It could be messy near swimming areas, too.

I would have definitely liked more of the pet customization elements seen from the 2010 demo. That depth would have added a lot to Ranger.
I liked how the arrows fired from the shortbow felt more like arrows instead of a steady stream. The targeting direction for the spread shot seems unnecessary; I can understand why they removed that. However, I have mixed feelings about the rooting from the skill. I can see some small value in a sort of rooting mechanism for some skills. Perhaps a slight movement speed reduction could be added to a few frames of skills that originally had a root.
After watching the video, I noticed a slight transition from a more action-oriented game to a more mmo-friendly game. It explains why I originally had incorrect expectations that GW2 would be more like Monster Hunter in that regard. In retrospect, this should have been obvious; selecting a target of your attacks is not at all a part of MH.

Have torches give that reveal effect to adjacent foes. It could be quite an interesting mechanic. I’m not sure if the torch environmental weapon has its own consumable, but this would give it another use.
I know this is along the lines of Orpheal’s idea, but it could be a solution. Ideally, the stealth mechanic on its own should be fun to fight against.

Regardless of the cause, it seems like the number of players in a given zone should be reduced. If that means fewer locals can partake in the event, so be it.
Before the events started, I was playing on the opposite side of the zone. I knew the events were starting when I started experiencing lag. It should be possible to play in the zone without lag/whatever caused by the dragon event.
*Edit: Reworded for clarity

Fine, would you suggest another term? I like ‘exploit’ because I don’t believe the devs intended it. Zones with these events running get terrible lag and the boss goes down in a couple minutes. Also, the behavior is caused by players wanting to get rare stuff an easy way.
I don’t think ‘bug’ is the correct term, since the issue is more about players’ behavior.
‘Issue’ may be a good alternative, though it seems a bit vague.

Limit the number of guesting people in any given zone. The excess numbers can be placed in overflow servers. In this way, the exploit will be discouraged and greatly reduced.
Sure, people may still attempt to do this, but it would be a gamble. They’d have to come well in advance to benefit from it.
More importantly, people that do not do this exploit will not be placed into overflow.
The trick will be in finding a balance that does not affect those that simply want to guest with friends. Unfortunately, it’s probably going to cause problems anyway for these people in zones with dragon events.

I think part of the problem is that they don’t always use the skill when you command them to. Sometimes, it even goes on full cooldown without yielding the environmental weapon. Additionally, it seems that whenever you try to pick up an environmental weapon while on the move, you get stuck moving in that direction for a little while and don’t pick up the item.
Porcine pets can be really good to have and fun to play with, but these bugs need to be fixed. There are other bugs that also affect pets in general, of course (they are probably slightly higher priority).
I especially like the warthog (pve) and the boar (pvp). Getting gunk with the warthog (or skull with boar) is always a wonderful thing. The other items are fine, but they’re a bit more situational.

Just expressing a few ideas that I thought would be kind of cool.
Cantha in GW1 was more advanced, in that Kaineng City was a sprawling urban landscape. It was ugly in most spots, only have a few nice places. The palace was especially nice, but there wasn’t much reason to go there.
I was thinking that the city could have advanced even further, perhaps having even taller buildings and hovering cars. There would definitely be slums and sewers, but it wouldn’t make up a majority of the city, as in GW1. They would hopefully look better than in GW1 as well (this should be a goal, regardless).
As in GW1, this would be an explorable area, with an urban center to be used as a hub. I’m certain that this can be done right, and this could be done very well. I did not enjoy this part of Guild Wars Factions so much, likely because of the slummy landscape and the afflicted. Implementing this or a similar idea while addressing the issues I mentioned could produce a very fun and interesting area.
I was originally uncertain about a return to Cantha at first, but I would fully embrace the idea if it were given an all-new, fresh look. I am most excited about Kaineng City; I can’t think of anything interesting to do to update the Echovald (Forest) or the Jade Sea. Perhaps these areas could be more wilderness areas since the Kurzicks and the Luxons would have likely integrated with the Canthans in Kaineng City.
There can be a lot of freedom when it comes to how futuristic to make the city. There are tons of people in Cantha. They have been cut off from the continent most people are familiar with. Even though the humans there have not been influenced by the charr printing presses or the asura gates, there would still be advances made. If there is too much incredulity about how they advanced so quickly, there could be some outside influence of some kind, perhaps the steam creatures.
Note that by ‘futuristic’, I don’t mean in the same style as the steam creatures or the Black Citadel. I believe the look could be derived from blending technology and magic. Note the attached picture. Though I don’t particularly like the game shown in the picture, it had pretty good visuals, especially the imperial city. Airships or hovercars could be some possible common transportation.
As Anet has shown already, hi-tech stuff can be integrated into the Guild Wars setting very well.
As far as linking the tengu to Cantha, there can be npc dialogue relating to this, but I feel that nothing more should be done about this. I would love to have tengu as a playable race. However, they would be better to have in a Primordus campaign/exp pack. Since their town, Dominion of Winds, is already affected by destroyers, this would only make sense. They should not be forced into a Canthan expansion simply to fit into the lore.

Summary:
Let Cantha be a futuristic/magically advanced city.