Guild Wars 2

Swappable weapon skills in the same vein as utility . The revenant spear set has two auto-attacks which makes it viable for both power and condition builds, which got me thinking… Why aren’t we doing this for every weapon? Why can’t I have a set of warrior sword skills that have no bleed and deal more damage?

It could look the same for all I care, but I think it could open up a substantial amount of builds and create some variety in playing.

Well thats a shame, though I suppose its my fault for not following it more closely. Guess i’m waiting for a price drop then.

Thanks.

I have googled, i’ve searched, I understand that veteran accounts get a slot if they prepurchased half a year ago. What about veteran accounts who didn’t pre-purchase? Does it still come with one and that compensation for the pricing fiasco was a second slot, or am I just going to have to buy another slot/delete a character to make a rev?

The problem with GW2’s weapon system is that each weapon has a variety of skills that are pre-set, rather than having any kind of focus or specialization. Good for a variety of situations, bad for when those circumstances never arise.

Lets take necro dagger MH for example …

1.) Auto attack
2.) Channeled life drain. Good for if you need a ranged attack or some health back, but less DPS than auto-attack.
3.) Immobilize

So what happens when you don’t need 2 and 3 (Which actually happens very often)?

Coupled with utility being very weak compared to GW1 (Typically 1/8th to 1/10th uptime on any kind of control related skill) and them not working on champs, leads to there being very few skills that are actually useful.

Well, there is Malefic Grasp. This was a warlock channeled skill in WoW that originally caused DOTs to accelerate, but later just caused them to tick whenever it pulsed since making DOTs go faster meant having to refresh them too often.

Necros have low intensity but long duration bleeds. I’ve always felt Feast of Corruption was in an odd place, since its a power skill on a condition weapon. Maybe have it cause all bleeds caused by the player in the last 3 seconds to rupture, dealing their full damage instantly.

Shields have completely failed at actually being shields to me. I thought i’d actually block with it, but warrior shield is the only set that actually has a block in the first place, and its ~generally inferior to the shorter cooldown, single blocks you find on mainhand weapons, or blind vs. non-champs.

I’m kind of wondering how big of a difference they really make though. The bleeds all have a very short base duration (2-3 seconds), the sigils and all other conditions have an internal cooldown.

I think it would be more accurate to say that condi builds lose much less damage from dropping an offensive stat. While carrion will not do as much damage as berserker, it’ll survive longer and doesn’t lose as much from taking time out of combat.

Condi trait lines also tend to give you a good chunk of crit on their own, and proc on crit things tend to have an ICD. Sword warriors get fury + 20% crit pretty effortlessly.

I would argue that specializations increased build diversity because they got rid of the +300/30% stats from traits at level 80. It used to be that I’d take sub-par skill lines rather than the ones I wanted to because 300 precision/ferocity was too much to give up.

Getting to level 20 is not some fix all for it anyways. They still screwed up the trait system.

Logically it’ll have similar up-time to blind then. Like instead of just getting it for like, 1/5th uptime like we have now, it’ll be something on a low cooldown, possibly even with 100% uptime (But removed on each hit) like you can do with blind.

I’m guessing they probably aren’t going to do that though.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

couple of things:
1) not every optimal build is 6/6/x/x/x.
2) if you separate them, then you guarantee people will max power/prec and then take whatever traits without any trade off.

I’d happily run a phalanx war with +300 power + 300 prec + 300 in whatever else.
Would you want the minor stats on each trait line to be selectable separately too?
If so + 300 fero and +30% boon duration please!

Also GL with balance.

Thats more a symptom of the offense heavy meta game than anything else, and the current system often feels like I am just “settling” rather than what I want to pick, because if I don’t go 6 power, i’m out 300 power. Like maybe the power-6 slot for my class is terrible. I’m still at worst, going to 4 or 5.

Speaking from a PvE perspective, giving people control of their own survivability stats is a mistake. It creates situations where a soldier might be tickled and be under no danger whatsoever of dying, and a berserker gets one shot. It makes it impossible to tune in a way such that its threatening to the soldier without feeling unfair to a berserker.

You want to break the power/precision/ferocity triangle, there just needs to be more options. Things like cooldown reduction, attack speed, damage vs. flanking, armor penetration, damage vs. impaired and such.

You’d still be limited to just three stats per item so its not like people would become ridiculously powerful and have all of them.

Its GW2. Resistance boon will probably be something like 3 seconds every 45, stacks in duration.

Its the way they do content, not that we literally get nothing. Its that the content we do get is both transient, and typically only appeals to a certain fraction of the player base. Like people who hate dungeons obviously aren’t going to get much out of Fractals.

And frankly I don’t stand for the pre-expansion wait for Blizzard either, when they stop adding new content and shift their resources to an expansion. I’m surprised that a significant amount still stick around even with all the leavers – I have no idea what they do for those 9-10 months.

It was to show the distortion effect of cloaked units. Ghost against Dark Templars would be like pitting 1st/2nd edition DnD rogues against fighters in mano-a-mano combat.

Still, stealth is already susceptible to AoEs and DOTs isn’kitten Letting you see a shimmer would make it pointless because then people would know exactly where to flush you out.

Although DAOC used a combination – you were invisible while too far away, and if you hung around close to an enemy while stealth they’d see your invisible model.

GW2 is still a race to tag mobs. Its a much more severe and often frustrating race, as during events unless you are soloing them, mobs tend to die in less than a second.

If your lucky, you’ll tag some for exp, but you probably won’t do enough damage to get loot – Only reason you do is because target capped skills mean you might be hitting something someone else isn’t.

That being said, its still got a pretty good leveling experience compared to other MMOs. Its just too bad NPE screwed up progression.

Flitzie.6082:

Lol, there were many Open world MMOs prior to WoW.
Infact even WoW is not fully open world as it has instanced areas aswell.

In games like Lineage and LineageII even the dungeons were part of the open world where you could casually walk into like walking into a cave. Those are probably the prime example of true open world.

And there are many more examples out there where raiding was part of the game but not the non plus ultra or raiding just simply did not exists in the way we know it today.
Not to forget Ultima online indeed.

We really need to go back to those times.
Some game are already going back at it it seems. Archage is fully open world, no? (Havent played it) and Black Desert online(?) seems to have it, aswell. Not sure.
Now make them more hardcore again like it used to be and count me in.

Edit: <- Topic derail master. :<

Not open world in the sense that dungeons are non-instanced. Open world in that there is something to do other than raid. Like in EQ or DAOC, you could not raid, but there was really nowhere else to go. You could hang out and socialize, PvP, and… thats about it.

How about “Popularized” then?

Vayne.8563:

Flitzie.6082:

Vayne.8563:

There aren’t many games (anymore) that really focus on the open world instead of raids.

fixed that for ya

Well, since I’m playing games now (as opposed to the past) what I said still stands. I agree. I think WoW and the WoW model did incalculable damage to MMOs.

WoW created the open world model. Previous MMOs as recent as the mid-2000s had a design of “Raid or GTFO. We do not support a non-raiding playstyle”. A lot of recent MMOs have given an alternative to that.

While its possible that they have different teams working on different things, I dislike the transient nature of GW2’s content because well… it has no long lasting changes. GW2 came out a little over two years ago. In that time span, most games become completely alien.

GW2 is largely the same, possibly worse due to NPE. Its not 100% identical, but if you quit a month after launch it would still seem mostly familiar.

Lynne.8416:

RoseofGilead.8907:

ozmaniandevil.6805:

I’d be fine with auto-WP as long as it was free. As another poster mentioned, the issue is that, at this point, it costs coin to WP. I guarantee that’s why 90% of dead players just lay there.

I strongly disagree that this is the reason why most of those players don’t waypoint. I think it’s more that they just don’t want to take the time to run back. It’s also partially the fact that they’re trained by the game to think they’re going to miss out on their loot if the event ends before they’ve run back and gotten back in the fight. And then there’s that population of the game who still believes that waypointing risks you getting placed on another instance.

It’s also possible that players feel that because PvE is considered cooperative play, and all players have the ability to rez even during combat, that the game is encouraging the wait for resurrection instead of the costlier waypoint/run back scenario.

Doesn’t it cost like, 1.3 silver to waypoint after Tequatl? it only starts costing up to 4s when you are waypointing across the world. I realize not everybody has hundreds of gold sitting around, but come on, thats 1/3rd of a single tree.

Rezzing from fully dead takes significantly longer and especially during Tequatl is generally impractical. You not only take 3 people out of the fight for a solid 10-15 seconds, but the downed person can get hit by a circle too.

Correct me if i’m wrong, but…

- Ele range is stronger than thief. Just lava font + fireball is stronger than either shortbow or pistols.

- Thieve’s strongest DPS is dagger/dagger, which is melee ranged and single target. They typically switch out MH dagger for a sword for anything with cleaving, which isn’t as good.

Most stealth games work like that. It often makes enemies seem kind of kitten y as you walk right up behind them and they don’t see you or hear you, as it wouldn’t be fun if they could hear you slicing a guy’s juggular since you’d never be able to stealth more than a lone enemy.

Since enemies in GW2 do not hear you, it would probably seem like that.

On the flip side its also quite frustrating and difficult to do when they can hear everything, or when there are 3 enemies facing in directions that cover each other.

They are typically allowed to overlap unless there is a specific clause that says they will not that tends to be noted in the description. Like if you have 10 warlocks in WoW, everybody is allowed to have a separate copy of their own DOTs.

http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/76972636953/game-development-myths-players-want-smart

TLDR: Its more important to make an encounter enjoyable to fight against than it is to make the AI good.

They probably could make a fight that is practically unwinnable, like say a boss that continually hammers you with a channeled burn/bleed pulsing aura, then when you are out of dodges and condition removal, immobilizes you and kills you.

I also still seem to be dying for no apparent reason, like i’ll be frantically trying to stay alive, strafing around and dodging and still losing health fast with no conditions on me and it doesn’t appear that i’m being hit by anything.

Then I check my combat log and see that Taidha Covington just one-shotted me when I can’t even see her.

But in general, dodging either channeled projectiles or frequent incoming projectiles seems unintuitive to me. Sure there is reflection. That lasts for like 20% of the time.

Well the argument was that there were more, not that the way they did it was better and even then, i’d say there are some pretty great armor sets for the limitations of the engine.

The most glaring issue of WoW’s is that because they use texture replacement instead of actual armor meshes, it can never have skirts or really, any kind of 3D modelling other than shoulders and helmets.

The different salvage kits. Okay, I get that the rarer ones have a higher success chance of recovering your upgrades, but I don’t get what chance of rare materials does. Maybe getting ancient wood and orichalcum? Sure doesn’t feel like a 15% chance though, salvaging my whole inventory gets me 1-3 of them.

Like should I be using my mystic forge kit for blues and greens? Or saving it’s charges.

Galphar.3901:

If I remember my days in WoW, then GW2 has probably 20x the amount of armor/weapon skins as WoW does even w/ their latest expansion. And you basically can change the look of your armor for free by getting transmutation stones from doing the dailies.

http://www.wowhead.com/transmog-sets

1,787 armor sets.

I believe GW2 has 54 per armor type, and though it looks different on each race and gender, there are also a rather significant amount that aren’t regularly available, whether from gem store, living story rewards, or even a game mode you don’t play like PvP for a PvE player or vice versa.

I think the biggest problem with GW2’s sets though is that they are so backloaded. There might be 5 different armor sets per type buyable off the marketplace from level 1-79, as while there are 10 crafted and 6 drop sets, a number of them are only available on exotics.

NCsoft is founded in Korea. They might look “malnorished” compared to american standards.

Anyways, human females already have a dancer body type, to the point where they are not completely flat chested but pretty small and are just thin instead of curvy. Going any further wouldn’t be teenager, it would be 9-10 years old.

My human female mesmer is just a step away from being a magical girl.

I’m disappointed that there is no spear flurry skill on land. It could totally work with swords. Or great swords.

For the most part, customizable weapon skills seems like they could work to me. That is, you could use any weapon and pick your slot 1-5 skills. Considering everybody uses cooldowns except thieves, I don’t see why a great sword Mesmer couldn’t replace Mirror blade with Hundred blades.

To that extent, a elementalist could use a rifle and pick out of all the possible rifle skills or something like that.

The primary class would always use it better because they have the traits to support it and while it might seem odd that a warrior is creating illusions, he won’t really have any use for them.

So, pretty much how GW1 was.

The biggest difference is that each skill is heavily flavored – all necro skills are very necro-ish, all elementalist skills are very elemental and so on, while all melee skills in GW1 except dagger were just a sped up auto-attack swing.

Arkinos.7245:

Especially because 1-2 of your attunements are usually worthless depending on your build.

This is really important. While you may theoretically be able to have 39 different weapon skills, each attunement is highly specialized.

Earth attunement to a power build is much less useful than another class either being able to alternate between two power weapons, or a melee and ranged weapon.

Elementalist are best in melee ranged. You can do okay mid-range with fiery greatsword, but if you just wanted to sit in the back and chuck fireballs from max range all day, it tends to only work on large, stationary targets.

Generally speaking if you want to stay as far away as possible, you are just going to have to accept that your DPS isn’t going to compare with melee range.

There haven’t been a whole lot of changes since launch. Like aside from arcane brilliance, wouldn’t might stack then hammer, or the burst from scepter/fire/arcane blast work if not exactly the same, pretty similar back at launch?

Ruppeslang.5401:

Why would you need to switch weapons as an elementalist?
You have 16 active skills,30 if you use 3 elemental weapons as utility.

Elementalist can’t switch on the fly between melee and ranged like other classes, which seems like it would be important for a paper class. You use D/D, you can’t go range on demand. You go scepter, you’ve got no sustained damage.

Attunements instead let you switch between power/healing/condition/control rather than melee/range.

Granted, Conjures help a lot to supplement your weakness but still – weird design.

GW2 still has some okay variation. I mean, all human females are skinny, but you can still choose between athletic (Muscular, small breast), more curvy with bigger breast and anything between those, which is more than a lot of games offer.

I suspect the reason you don’t see drastically different body types is because if you want equipment to look good, you can’t simply scale it up or down. The games that do allow that tend to have clipping issues or look like the clothing was clearly designed for one body type.

Warriors have 18,472 base HP at level 80, highest tied with necro. Guardians have 10,905, lowest tied with thief and elementalist.

In terms of survivability, I think that is a consideration.

From both a PvE and PvP perspective, its better to have CC with diminishing returns than it is to have really crappy CC with no DRs. Like when fighting multiple risen brutes, its pretty easy to just get knock-down locked to death.

Like rather than Jormag fearing for 30 seconds straight, the first fear might last 8 seconds, second 4, third 2, fourth would just give an immune, or something like that.

2% per second, + (Healing power)(.00x)%. 1% would be a nerf to the lowest HP bracket.

On second thought, this would probably be absurdly overpowered.

A warrior cleric would end up healing faster than you could damage him and would only be susceptible to high burst. On the other hand, you pretty much surrender any offensive capability for it.

You are getting double of regeneration at 1040 healing. In a relation to how much it normally heals, thats quite a bit. In relation to the max health of a warrior or necro, it is not.

Its like this for most utility and skill heals. Just not for the actual heal skills, because their base value is quite high (And again, relatively low compared to max health).

I would say that skills should heal a percentage of maximum health (So regeneration might heal 1-2%/second) but that would probably encourage vitality stacking more than healing power.

Sorin.4310:

Control does not need a buff. Control is one of the reasons zerker, the highest damaging, least defensive gear, works. To what purpose would buffing control serve? (Side note: not antizerker. I run zerker myself, but it doesn’t need to be any easier than it already is.)

I don’t think that is because of control. Even without the silliness of defiance, most hard crowd controls only last for 1-3 seconds and have a cooldown proportionate to the duration (1/25, 2/40). There are obviously exceptions.

As it is, it serves as little more than an interrupt. Other MMOs, not just the one you are probably thinking i’m talking about use a ratio of anywhere from 1/3 to 1/10. Like a 3 second stun with a 20 second cooldown.

- Mesmer GS has their best ranged auto-attack damage
- Ranger it falls a little behind other weapons, but its easier to use.

Maybe people just like how it looks? Personally i haven’t used transmutation charges on staves, scepters or blunt weapons because I just don’t care what they look like.

There is not optimal, and there is terrible.

Sigil of Blood, or Intelligence is not optimal, but perfectly usable for a low budget alt.

Sigil of Celerity is terrible.

Has anybody played a Nexon game since 2006 or so? Terrible customer support, yes.

Vindictus and Dragon’s nest are both largely gambling, or cosmetic. While you could theoretically get something good from gambling, you are probably looking at hundreds of dollars worth of doing it to get something good.

Otherwise you could sink 25$ into it or so and get nothing of any consequence. Get dyes, sell them on the market place. Same thing here would completely gear out a character.

Meanwhile you could just play the game.

Even before the NPE, it typically took more than a single zone to get past a level range because experience rate assumes you do a rather significant amount of events.

You scale down to whatever content you do, and you still get nearly full exp from doing lower level content up to a certain degree. Like an event/heart your level should give 7% of a level. Doing a level 1 heart still gives you 7% of a level until you are 30-40 levels higher than it.

http://www.kylehebert.com/?page_id=241#1

According to Kyle Hebert’s FAQ, voice actors are payed poorly. Good hourly rate, but they don’t work regular 8 hour shifts. Like even if they pay 200-300$ an hour, it wouldn’t take more than two hours to get all the lines, as story NPCs probably don’t have more than 20 minutes of spoken dialog cumulatively.

Granted this is for anime not games, this seems to echo a lot of what i’ve heard from other VAs.

So I don’t think Troy Baker or Felicia Day are going to be budget breakers. Maybe if they wanted to get Liam Neeson or something.

Then they need to find a way to make it work. Like rather than bleed rolling 25 separate numbers that have their own duration, each should just increase a single number and refresh the duration, with damage being decreased to compensate.

So rather than keep track of 25 different entries of bleed, each player could just have a single bleed that goes 70 , 140, 210, 280 … 1750.

It shouldn’t be acceptable to just say “We can’t be bothered to fix this” in the same vein that it would be seen as unprofessional to ship a game with lots of crashing and freezing and just not release a patch for it.

You may have 20 weapon skills, but only a handful are useful on a regular basis. For a significant amount of weapons, they either just use one skill on a cooldown and auto-attack, with the rest of the skills being miscellaneous utility you probably aren’t going to use in open world PVE.

Things like cripple, immobilize, knockback and such. Ele can honestly get by fine just hitting 1 with mainhand daggers. The enemy will die before you do.

The most unyieldy thing about GW2’s controls, is probably using utility ground targets while moving.

@Deam

Every class but guardians has a bleed on crit trait. A fairly significant amount of bleeding comes from that + the earth sigil – A single weapon on it’s own tends to only sustain about 6-7 stacks of bleed, before sigils, traits, swapping and utility.

So i would say that precision is pretty important to condition builds.

GW1’s skills were much more powerful though. Like you could completely shut down someone who wasn’t prepared, while here you might be able to interrupt every 30 seconds or stun for 1 second every 45-60.

While this was probably a deliberate choice – when none of the utility do anything meaningful, you can’t do anything grossly overpowered of course, it also makes GW2’s skills less exciting.

Oh, I can teleport every 45 seconds. Thats kind of nice I guess.