Guild Wars 2

I’m just watching the Guild Chat stream and i must say the action camera and new combat options look awesom. Also the bindable option toggle is really nice, but this system has a little flaw.

Most of the times, the way one wants to casts a spell is constant.
For instances i’d always want grenades on engineer on instant cast and definitely not on target lock.
Shadow step on the other hand sometimes has to be aimed, so i’d rather not have it on target lock or instant cast.

So wouldn’t it be possible to have an option file in the Gw2 Folder, where you could specify the options of each skill. You’d just write

“Grenade Barrage” 1 0;
“Shadow Step” 0 0;

Where you put the name of the skill and afterwards the options in a certain order. For instance here the first number is Instant casting and the 2nd one is for “lock to target”.

You’d still have your standard options enabled, but skills which are specified in this file will then use their own settings.

Everybody know it, everybody hates it. Mechanics that are present to try to prevent the horrible AI from beeing exploited.
What I’m speaking of are mainly the following 3 mechanics.

1. Invulnerability for mobs that “cannot” hit you. I understand that this should prevent savespots, but it actually doesn’t. There’s not a single savespot I know where this would help anything. But it randomly triggers if you’re walking over a little stone on the floor. Also if you’re on different environmental levels it can trigger quite often. I havn’t noticed any problems with this in the HoT beta so it was maybe fixed for the new AI?

2. Mobs getting outfight and reset as soon as they cross an incincible line. It’s ok that mobs don’t follow you to every spot in the game, but why do they have to reset , with no chance to actually hinder them? They could simply get immunity from cc/superspeed and run to their spawn, and have the same rules for ooc as players.

3. In some dungeon if you agro mobs and don’t hit them, they just teleport after you to almost infinite distance. I actually can’t see for what this mechanic should be any good for…

And now to the traits… oh my.
Minors that actually just give you protection and speed while overloading are really boring and totally worth the name minor. This shouldn’t be spread over 3 traits. What about 1. Unlock, 2. protection+speed and 3rd: Gain + 20% damage/condiduration for 10 seconds after you overloaded an attunement.

Gale song: Always hated autostunbreaks but it’s comparable to others so it’s ok
Latent Stamina: What does this trait have to do with the tempest? Definite water trait!
Unstable Conduit: A nice trait actually, but isn’t auramancing already spread through enough traits?, I don’t think this will find too much play.

Earthen proxy: In my opinion more fitting to earth or arcane line. I can’t find any reason for it beeing in tempest. It even has Earth in its name!
Harmonious Conduit: Totally legit.
Tempesteous Aria: What about adding Shout Cd, most of the shouts have a rather high cd.

Element Bastion: Another Auramancer trait. Totally fine, worth beeing grandmaster, but wait a minute, heal? frostaura? isn’t this a 100% water trait?
Imbued Melodies: Horrible trait.Stunbreaks almost have to be insta cast. To have the reaction time of 2 people + the cast time is too long if it isn’t for a 5 second stun. Does this skill need an internal cooldown? I can’t see it beeing overpowered, as it’s only a stunbreak for others with casttime. You can’t stunbreak others if you’re stuned and shouts only have 600 range.
Lucid Singularity: This trait has to exist, if it’s baseline or not. But is it really worth of a grandmaster?

There are no damage oriented traits. A lot of this traits are really specific and wont find any use in PvE (maybe for 1 boss or so), but damage traits are always an option. What about +7% for each aura on you? +dmg after overloading? +dmg after you hit someone with a shout?
I can’t think of any part in PvE where I would play this Specialization. If I want damage, the current elementalist is already quite spoiled and will play water/air/fire or arcane instead of water. Both arcane (dodge) and water(heal) actually grant more sustain then Tempest.
The only way to play tempest as I see it now, is a no damage aurashare ele with water and earth/air.

Avador.8934:

Also don’t forget the horrible elite skill.

Still not done^^ Shouts and traits still coming

As much as I liked to play with a warhorn I really hated the Shouts. Most of them feeled like having an aura on a utility slot, which is really underwhelming because other weapons have Auras on weaponskills!
The elementalist has access to so many powerful healing skills. Each one has is advantages and its problems, but they all are nice. To almost half the healing of skill in order to make it aoe is a harsh debuff. It also scales awfully with healing power. If anyone wants to run a healing build, i’d strongly suggest Arcane briliance for blasting. Its casting time is too high, with no base healing and almost no chance to increase it. Wouldn’t it be a possibility to have such low base healing with a high scaling of healing power?
“Feel the Burn” Yep here comes the fire aura
“Eye of the Storm!” Having a Stunbreak on a 45 second cooldown is just horrible for it just beeing a stunbreak. The superspeed can be traited on airswap if you want to. Aoe stunbreaks are just so specific and if not coordinated are almost always waisted.
“Shock and Aftershock!” Well having an actual immobilize on a utility will be rather nice for a fresh air ele (which will probably not play tempest). The addition of a Magnetic aura is not too bad, although I think that the cooldown of 50 sec is a bit too high
“Flash-Freeze!” ok here comes another aura utility. Giving a skill an aura that aplies the same condition as the skill itself is kinda boring. Either someone is running away from you and you can chill him for a the same time as Freezing Gust (Focus4) or he’s attacking you and you freez him anyways…
“Rebound” In my opinion just not worth of an elite skill (and again more fitting to a mesmer). It is wasted far too easy by the 4 other targets and having the Elite skill on cooldown for 60 seconds just to have another skill recharge 25% faster ( longest cd: Glyph of renewal 165s-> 40 sec) is just a bad joke compared to mimic. What about reducing the cd of all skills during Rebound by 25%? It is an elite skill and ele could need another eliteskill that can actually be used.

Something that’s really strange in my opinion is that most of the Tempest auras are also on allies by default. Does this mean that the water grandmaster will be made baseline? Because everything else would harm the water trait, but I somehow can’t imagin a tempest playing without water.

Although I almost played warhorn the whole time, I couldn’t get to like it. It lacks the synergy as other ele weapons have.

Fire: The Heat sync skill seem really nice, but it’s a teamplay skill only, but Tempest doesn’t have that much buffs (unless you skill for auramancing, which would need at least 5 traitlines [just kidding], and has already aoe buffs). It also coppies a mesmer skill and doesn’t really fit to an elementalist in my oppinion.
Wildfire feels just like a big firefield with a horrible cool down (even though I like that they added a boon remove option to the elementalist)

Water: I really like the moving water field and it has actually a synergy with Frozen Burst(d3). I cant say much against the water atunement as it is, because it’s actually on a par or better with other elementalist water skills.

Air: Cyclone is just a normal CC, gives swiftness. Compared to other air 4/5s it’s ok.
Lightning orb seems like another vulnerability stacking option, but has not that much else ( the damage is not that great). The moving effect here is more annoying than on other skills, because it makes it near impossible to hit a target efficientely ( the few hits it gets by passing is just not really worth it).

Earth: The Sand Squall effect is actually really nice, although it has the same problems as Heat Sync. The 2 seconds actually are a problem as well. As it is quite op for protection,stability and Quickness, it is totally worthless for every other boon. This could be splitted to give 2 seconds for those buffs and maybe 10 for might/Fury/Regeneration/Aegis/Retaliation/Swiftness and a 5 seconds for Vigor and resistance.
Dust storm is just a horrible version of sandstorm. No duration, ticks every 2 seconds, small aoe, on position cast. But hey here you have more Vulnerability!

Generally the Warhorn offers no blasts, only melee CC, no damage, (almost) no conditions, no auras! Only a water/fire field (which is awesom) and boon manipulation.
There is absolutely no symbiosis between staff and Tempest, and both dagger and focus offer more group support, sustain and damage then warhorn.

As a main ele, I really had to try out the tempest specialization this week-end. And I must say, it’s actually a really fun traitline to play, but it gives the ele nothing new and has only minor improvements to the elementalist.

The gameplay with the overloads is actually quite nice and requires a lot of good positioning and timing in order to get the full reward out of it. But here comes the first problem. Shouldn’t the overload be superior to the acctual skills of an atunement? Or at least comparable? Most of the overloads actually had problem, competing with even the autoattack…
Fire: Probably better than the staff autoattack, but compared to a meteorshower, it loses in every aspect. It will even have problems to compete with lavatomb or the dagger autoattack. For a pure damage overload this is simply too weak.

Water: The only overload that i actually could start liking (as full zerk). If you’re running without the water traitline, this could be a serious alternative, but most water skills have a rather short casting time, which leaves you in the water attunement locked until you can activate your overload. Another issue is, that running water would actually be a comparable heal just swapping into it ( att swap + healing mist *2[+dodge on arcane] in the 20 sec cd of Overloading).

Air: This overload seemed like its sole purpose was stacking vulnerability. If you combine it with a weapon like dagger, which has an awesom auto attack, this skill is just horrible and the field at the end of the cast feels at least like it does decent damage, but it’s way too short for a 5 second cast time.

Earth: I really like the break bar, even though it doesn’t really help that much, because who would interupt a 5 second skill that does nothing. The damage is just ignorable and having a bit of criple and a tiny immobilize feels so underwhelming. What about immobilizing and then after 5 seconds a stronger version of churning earth with a knock down? Even churning earth is bad because of its huge cast time, making the effect worse and increasing the casttime doesn’t make a skill viable.

Some tiny ideas about how fractal rewards should be in my oppinion.

1. I don’t like the fact that you should be able to buy a fractal weapon of your choice. Most of the people only look for 1 skin (for instance sword) and fractals will loose a lot of its charm if you can just buy it for 50 fractal relicts once you’re lvl 50. This can be
compared to the achievement rewards:

You can probably enjoy the first 2 weapons you choose, but after the 20th chest you just choose an ugly skin, because you have to in order to get the chest. Also, there’s absolutely no prestige in this. Compare it to the zenith skins. What does it mean if someone has a Zenith-Greatsword. Eyaxtly: that he somehow managed to get 1000 achievement points.

To prevent this, one could have either have a set order in which skins drop (in fractals and from this chest), or have it randomized. But I think as soon as you own a weapon, its drop chance should be set to 0, while the total chance for a skin should stay constant.

2. Ring drop chance should be at 0% after frac 50. Even if ascended salvaging gets added to the game. Ring drop chance is atm around 50% depending on level and therefor it will always be a minor drop (i mean a lot of people are already hoarding them because of the announcement, the reward for this cannot be super OP). And everyone knows it getting an (uninfused) ring on frac 50 is just depressing.

3. The golden fractal skins should be really, really seldom. The world of Tyria doesn’t need a second Eternity skin…

4. Wow those changes sound awesom!

starlinvf.1358:

So unless existing dungeons get a ground up Encounter revamp, then the new Elite specs are either incompatible, or vastly superior to the existing mechanics that govern it.

Yep, that’s exactly what i’m saying. But the problem with dungeons atm is: Dmg is all that matters and all the elit specialization revealed so far had their focus clearly somewhere else, which means it’s unlikely that elite specs will break dungeons.

flog.3485:

The last patch already greatly increased the damages of every classes of the game, so adding more damage would be too much and wouldn’t make the content of HOT hard enough nor challenging enough….

I also agree with your statement. I’m definitly against another dmg buff! What I wanted to say is that I want the new elite specialisations to be on a par with current specializations. Because the current meta ( which simply is about dmg maximization, and only takes support traits if it’s also a dps increase e.g. Water on Elementalist – this kind of thinking will NEVER change, although it may shift a bit) has it’s legitimation. So if you want to take an elite specialisation with mediocre Support and a fun playstile, I at least don’t want it to be a huge dps loss.

From what i’ve seen so far none of the current elite specialization would really make it into the current PvE Meta. I know people always say the meta is changeing and stuff, but the current dungeons will also be playable after HoT drops and there is still a rather big community out there who like it. (Chronomancer maybe, because who could say no to 2 time warps etc…).

A lot of the new traits seem to be really specific and won’t always have an valid alternative to change to. But no matter what you play, you cant say no to damage^^, so why not add some mechanic specific dps multiplyer to the traitlines?

Some ideas:
Tempest:
+dmg for 10 seconds after overcharging an attunement.
+dmg for each aura on you

Dragonhunter:
Well actually dragonhunter already has dmg traits, which are just not usefull (>600 range… so guard will have to play LB + scepter and camp ranged?).
Vs. Crippled foes: guard its self has only one way of applying cripple: knock back, and oh boy havn’t we already had enough ranger LB 4s?
Ok can’t say much about the big game hunter, this one seems quite nice.

Chronomancer:
+dmg while under the effect of alacrity
+dmg while in continuum split

Reaper:
+dmg while in melee range
+ dmg to chilled targets

PS: As it is already quite easy to reach 100% crit rate and anything further is just for nothing, I can’t really start liking the crit rate ups which are too specific. Either they are solid enough to totally relly on them, like revenants improved crit rate under fury,guards 1 Handed mastery or thiefs “hidden Killer”. Or it’s just not worth taking them as a zerk character

We considered grenadier trait as a bug, which is why our engi didn’t use it. His POV will be uploaded shortly but you can see it even in the current POVs, as the grenades have standard speed.

Just as example how I would organize my inventory:

-On the Top some slots for my weapons which are invisible, don’t get filled with loot, get filled with unequiped items. This Slots will be for my weapons.
-A Row with invisible, and no loot with all my consumables (potions, bufffood, harpy feathers etc.)
-Then one slot of green arm/weap only with auto salvage, to get rid of cheap stuff
-One slot with only Luck and autouse^^
-On the right side a row with accountbound, no loot, invis my Salvagekits and other consumables.
- Rest with bloodstone dust and empereal fragments

I really liked the principle of different kind of bags, like invis, crafting mats, fractal bags etc. But it always felt a bit clunky to me. Same goes with the bag combinations. There’s up to 8 bags that have their size displayed separately in the inventory, or just put all together for one blob-like square fest.

So here’s my idea. If you equip e.g. a 15-slot bag you unlock 15 slots for your inventory. Those slots can then be redistributed as you wish ( form like). And each and every of this slots can then be added to a category. For instances:

-Invisible (as the current one but split: No Deposit, No merchant,No compact),
-doesn’t get filled with looting,
-gets filled with unequiped weapons (offhand)
-only green weapons/armor/sigils/Luck,
- auto salvage if something gets droped here,
- auto sell at merchant,
-accountbound (access from all your characters – permanent hairstyle, mystic forge node etc.)
-autodoubleclick
-and many more

Of course a slot could be in multiple categories and set to the current ones at the start of this change.

This would highly improve the quality of life as it would make an easily organizable inventory for every kind of player.

It’s only a little thing I saw in the trait preview and I know that nothing in there is definite. But why does a system in which you can only go fully into a trait line need three minor traits? Wouldn’t it be better to just merge them into one and say for example:

“Your nature as an elementalist which is specialized on water magic allows you to heal allies around you with a [Sothing Mist] as well as healing allies as soon as you attune to water. You’re overall healing effectiveness towards allies is increased by 25%.”

It’s not a huge thing, but I think the new system wouldn’t look like it did in the preview if it wouldn’t be for the current system.

Another tiny advantage of only 3 traits towards 6 in a line is, that you could actually make connecting lines even if you’d choose to play without a grandmaster trait, but with two master, or two adept traits.

Every 10 , 20 or 30 Minutes one has to reapply it. Often it simply gets left out due to oblivion, or it’s not available to your current Character.

Yea right, i’m talking about buff food. In order to prevent this issue one could simply add the buff food to the Hero panel as a personalization option for your character. If you use a buff, the duration of it gets added to the account. Then on the hero panel you can choose which buff to use and the time simply gets subtracted only if you activate it.

The duration of buffs is never synced to the content. Either you need 20 minutes for a dungeon and your buffs duration is 30 or 60 minutes. Or a dungeon needs 35 minutes and you’ve to apply two 30 minutes buffs. The remaining duration is then waisted. Also in dungeons with different kind of enemies (e.g. Fractals) you have to overwrite the buffs after just 5 minutes of use, which is simply a shame^^

Also stuff like e.g. the Birthday buff with a duration of 24 hours is a critical thing. Basically you’ve to stick as much as possible into this 24 hours. A friend of me actually refused to log onto a character he used it on, because like this he dedicated it to WvW.

I have two different systems, which could be added to this new option in order to simplify the handling.

1. (The better one) You can set a save station at any point in the world/dungeons/wvw etc.. If you interact with it, the buff setting you applied to it will be loaded to your character. This system could be perfectly coupled with a yet to come build save option.
If this would take up too much HD space it can simply be outsourced to the players directory.

2. Have a town/fractal/dungeon pre set which you can activate. And as soon as you enter Arah you load up Undeadslaying and your favorite food. If you then Waypoint to LA, you have no Buffs applyed to you etc.

Everybody should have noticed, that a lot of new content has quite a lot of bugs and exploits in it. Whether it is that one idea is not completely thought through or has simply a little loophole that’s exploitable. Also a lot of “zerg content” doesn’t really seem to be tested. I know that all of this is really hard to get rid of, but i think a lot of it could be improved if you’d have a better contact between devs and player before the release.

What i’m speaking of is more public test servers, that you could apply for. Then probably like 300 experienced people get to test the content before release. There could be a bugbounty. For every Major bug, for every tipping error etc. that you report as first, you get a set amount of Gems or a skin from the living story or anything else – /Bug will finally find it’s destination^^.

It’d also be quite important to get not just a pre made basic account (there are quite a lot of streamers, which complain a lot about the basic chars they’re given^^) for testing (or if so it should have access to EVERYthing).

Elite skills are getting continuous debuffs (despite ranger), for many classes it would be better to equip a 4th utility skill then an elite skill (PvE Ele, Thief, Ranger, Ingi etc., PvP: probably not such a big problem, but in some builds…).

Since the balancing of elite skills is really hard, and it’s not possible to keep usefull elite skills for any build – with only that few skills – the easiest way to increase the diversity of slot 10 would be to make Elite skills voluntary as in GW1!

The Idea is to change the Daily achievements in that way that all can be achieved in PvP, WvW and PvE.
This would work really easy if

-all Kill achievements would be combined.- Of cours killing a player in WvW/PvP is not the same as bashing a random mob in PvE.
Therefore you’d need some weighting. Killing a player in WvW gives 5%, killing a player in PvP 8% and killing mobs 2%. To maintain the amount of daily AP that are given to players, one could add 3 stages (every 33%) that each reward 1AP.

-Kill variety: as long as different Class/Profession combinations count this shouldn’t be a problem for PvP (WvW + PvE it shouldn’t at all [if you’re not an Arah addict])
-Gatherer: Well this would be harder in PvP, but one could probably count opening reward track chests as 33%

-Events: combined group/WvW events/PvP Caps/Mentor: just count everything as event, probably scale it right.

-Slayer achievements: simply remove them from the game

-Personal story/Dungeon/Story dungeon/Frac: combine those dailies, add a castle or tower capturer and Ranked PvP game (or with the new PvP just arena)

-Skillpoint/Leveler/WvW leveler: Simply combine (rankup scroles in PvP make this also really easy)
-Karma Spender / Wvw spender / Feast/Laurel vendor / JP: Simply remove from the game. The first 4 are simple 2 clicks achievements and therefor not worth being called achievements. And the JP is really repetitive… the only way I could imagine this being fun is by naming a special JP in the world for daily and you have to speak to a NPC at the start, where you get a buff which gets removed as soon as you use a portal.

All Dailies that were not mentioned would probably work fine.
The good things about this changes is, that it would totally work with the current UI. Not much would have to be changed and it would increase the feeling that the game is one and not divided into 3 sections.

Iavra.8510:

There are MF recipes that need luck essences…

Yep there are. But that shouldn’t be an argument. Those things can be changed…
Or you could simply keep the possibility of an artificer crafting essences of luck by reducing your account Luck.

Furesy.6935:

NinjaEd.3946:

I definitely thought this thread was going to at least list damage vs X enemy type sigils, such a wasted MF result :/

It is kind of ironic to have such sigils in a game that does everything they can to dissuade players from ‘farming’ at a particular location

That’s why I wrote that I may have forgotten some items^^, I totally agree with you. But calling +10% dmg useless wouldn’t be correct so I would have to rename the thread. It’s just an unnecessary mechanic.

Danikat.8537:

If I understand it correctly the main reason for loot bags, champion bags etc. is to make loot tables take less memory and make them easier to balance.

Without them they have to add all the items that could be in the bag to every enemies loot table individually…..

But it also saves space in players inventories when you’re doing something where stopping isn’t convenient.

1. You could still keep the game architecture of the Champion bags, so you have a “this champion drops this bag.” = roll in this item pool for loot System.
2. I don’t really think that the Space saving part of champion bags is so valid. Because a champion bag has usually 1 Material + 1 Weapon (+ skill scrolls which take up 1 space) and Bloodstone dust which is another problem…
The Material can be auto deposited and compared to normal loot of non champions the 1 additional weapon for a champion shouldn’t be that much of a problem (if champion loot is comparable to normal mobs’ loot in quantity something in the balance is wrong anyways^^)

By Useless i mean e.g. items whose sole purpose is to double click em. like
1) Luck – could be simply added to your account if you salvage
2) Dungeon bags ( those who reward you with cash and dungeon tokens)
3) cash bags
4) Account bound Collectible Items. E.g. spoons.
5) even Champion bags (the collection doesn’t work anyway, and you could be finally happy again if a steel chest droped^^)
All those items’ drop pool can simply be added to the chest/Mob that dropped it

Then some fractal related useless crap, whose sole purpose is to get sold/deleted…
6) Remove rings from EVERY (also PvP, WvW) drop pool if your fractal level is above 40, i actually don’t care if it gets replaced by something or not because getting a ring on 40+ fractals is always depressing (i actually do prefer nothing to a ring xD)
7) Fractal skins if you’ve already unlocked them.

It might still be that i forgot to list some useless items, but the concept should be clear^^

Proposal Overview
My idea is that every Player is able to build up a little town in the mists. There he can gather Materials to send to his Guild in order to Upgrade the Guild Hall. In the start this would be controlled via a mind craft-like crafting system to go over in late game to a Anno-like gameplay in the later game.

If you’re more interested in this Idea I wrote a Tread about It “[Suggestion] Towning”.

Goal of Proposal
I think this System would increase the team spirit of a Guild and make you identify with your guild more then simple Guild Merits and Influence which you actually get stuffed in the “random inapropriate word”. You could actually make this system as complycated as e.g. dwarf fortress xD so you’d really have to plan it.

Proposal Functionallity
The starting could be made with a Mystic forge interface, while if there’s not a new UI available, the second part could be merged into the Guild Pannel via 2 Possible mechanics:
1. Each building has it’s destined place and if you Build/Upgrade it in UI it apears/Changes
2. If a Building gets Finished you get an Item that you can Place via an (I hope improved) Siege Weapon like droping
3. A New System where you can Freely Place Buildings like in e.g. some Handy Buildup games (would be an ideal place to add a Guild Wars 2 App xD)

Associated Risks
As I’d like to have Guild halls as freely designable as Possible (2.) this could lead to serious balancing Issues in GvG.
Also it could be a real challenge for smaller Guilds.

This idea actually came as I saw some PvE dmg tables which once again proved that Necromancer is totally useless in PvE. Conditions just aren’t viable (and zerk nec has lowest damage). The only dmg important conditions are vulnerability and bleeding (maybe you can count burning as well).

But with most zerk teams you have absolutely no problem with keeping 20+ stacks of vulnerability, permanent burning (mostly for dmg traits) as well as quite a lot of bleeding. So why should you actually have any need for a condition based build?

My idea is a new Stat: Persistence which modifies condition duration, combined with a change of basic condition duration. The new conditions should scale linearly with Persistence, starting with almost 0 duration (like 1 or 2 secs). This way a zerk group will have ca. 0 stacks of vulnerability. If you add a condition based build which can keep up 20 stacks in average, this actually buffs the team damage by 80% of a full zerk player. And the last 20% can easily be compensated by bleeding/burning and supportive conditions.

Some conditions like Blind, Fear, Weakness and Immobilize (maybe also Cripple and Chilled) should be less strongly affected by this scaling (higher start duration and less steep scaling) because they have a wider usage in builds, are not damage oriented and represent the CC part of conditions, which in my opinion should still be available to all builds.

To PvP: In my opinion one problem of condition builds is that condition damage is a solid stat on its own and unlike power where your damage is also dependent on ferocity and precision it does decent damage on it’s own which leads to condition bunkers which have the durability of a bunker and almost the damage of a dd. This change would equal out the damage of condi bunkers and soldier/cleric bunkers.
In order to keep condition builds still viable the over all damage of conditions with condition damage and persistence (so you still have 1 defensive Stat available) probably has to be increased.

Has anyone ever tried Merciful Intervention underwater since last update? If you ask yourself why I was using such a crab skill (yea right it uses ground targeting if you’re underwater).I was running some Aquatic Ruins Frac with my homie zoidberg. I know that underwater combat has been fully neglected, but you can’t do this as long as you don’t have some lore explanation like a Global Jormaging which leads to every drop of water being frozen.
PS: Sorry for the tiny contamination with sarcasm

Most of the used supportive abilities are capped on a 600 range (e.g. Banners, Retreat, Call of the Wild, For Greater justice, Save yourselves, Spotter, EA…) and combo finisher have even a lower range of effect. It is by far enough if you stack in a corner, but as soon as you spread out a bit this starts to loose effectivity.

My idea is to leave the range for non party members as it is (I guess this makes it easier to detect targets) , but to increase the range of skills and combos for members of your party to 1500 or even more . This makes it similar to the GW1 system where Group-affecting Skills had compass range.

Well housing and Guildhalls have already been spoken about so here’s a little idea about it (I hope it gets added befor the start of GW3^^) because I personally don’t want it to end like the (un)personal story^^
I came to this idea, when I thought about the GW1 Guild halls: It’s only a standardized unpersonalized block. You had almost nothing to do with it (unless you waited there for your group, but I’m not speaking about this) even the upgrades were only bought with gold and had no further influence on game play, fun etc.

“Abstract” if you’re too lazy to read So here’s my Idea: There’s a mist instability and a Portal opens: When you go through there’s an idyllic landscape (which is a personal instance for every player). You start to like this isolated Peaceful place and decide to stay there for a while.
Mean while in Tyria there’s war against the elder dragons, chaos etc. As you move through the world you find many friendly NPCs which are sick of this and you decide to tell them about your idyllic, peaceful mist place. They decide to give it a chance and start to colonize this little Town (Via Quests which are treated with the new UI) .

Building your town: I think it’d be really cool if this would be some kind a “Mine craft-like” starting, where the NPCs first builds up a Tent and after a certain Time it decides to stay there and builds a house, which off course needs Mistwoods Miststones etc. (which could be handled as separate currencies to have no impact on the TP), which can be gathered in this little World. With time, there are NPCs like Miners and lumberjacks so you could change the setting to a strategy game-like play style where your NPCs gather things on their own and you could build up a little town etc. This would have an immense personal character and it would feel more like a “home” then the set up ambiance of a “home” instance.

Alive!:You could then have many little events where for example there dies a Rat in the town spring and you’ve got to remove it and find a cure for the sickened people (well i’ve never been capable of good story telling). Or Bandits managed to get your Town, a smaller dragon attacks etc.(well it mustn’t be THAT idyllic^^).

UI: All the building could take place in a guild-panel like UI and – if you’re really scared of any progress- you could make the building Phase, like the blueprint placing in WvW… OR You really make a UI which can be prepared to any strategy game UI like Starcraft, WC etc. It could also be linked with the GW2 Handy App ( I mean who knows^^) where you have a Hay Day/The Tribez/The Simpsons Springfield etc. like Surface. And who ever played such a game knows, that there are A LOT of possible Gem-mechanics so there’d be even an ecological reason if NCSOFT ever runs out of player-milking-ideas.

New PvP Mode: We are in the mists and therefor it should have to do something with PvP to favor the gods. There could be a PvP Mode where you invade others Towns and defend yours etc.

Guild Halls: Back to the Guild Hall -your Guildhall doesn’t get built on its own. So every player in the Guild can send resources and NPCs in order to build up a huge castle for the guild. You could still couple this with influence and guild merits – Your guild requires a certain influence so NPCs are willing to help the guild and merits as payment. Then you have like certain rules how to build a Guild Castle. Due to it’s usage in GvG you cannot allow everything. Of course there would also be the easier, lame possibility
where you have some kinds of Guild Hall-patterns available and you build it up 1 by one. But I think that some creativity should be possible.
The NPCs that are in the Guild Hall could be coupled to guild missions. E.g. if you complete “Save our Suplies” an NPC comes to your Guildhall and enables the research of mines and Turrets (either only as decoration or as a weapon in guild fights?).

Evan Lesh.3295:

We absolutely want to make build templates. They could work similar to GW1, but there are more components to a build now. Using the old string-code method may prove to be unwieldy.

Why not make it exactly like gw1? It was actually quite awesome. You could make a link option, where you could say load this equipment with that traits and that utilities. And if you don’t have a link activated – e.g. only equip + traits – it coppies your current skills.

I’d also appreciate the same functions as in PvP – the build options – in PvE and WvW. You could make all Stat combos for Equip/sigils/Runes (ofc. you’d need 6 runes to unlock t6) etc. unlock able (ofc. soulbound). Like that it would be better combined with a save/load function. Because anything else would cause quite a mess (e.g. if you change main and offhand through a 1 handed weapon).

In my opinion it wouldn’t even need a “representative” (an actual item) of your equipment, a simple drop down (and ofc load) function would be quite nice and save a lot of time^^.

It would also be a possibility to have Buttons – like the GW1 weapon swap – where you could save your 3 favorite builds ( A gem item with + 1 slot would be really obvious at this place cause when I look at the +1 crafting licens I think you start running out of ideas xD) and load them as soon as you’re ooc.

Dusty Moon.4382:

That is the point. Why should you have the stacks from a weapon is not active? I think if you switch away they should be gone and degrade for a certain amount per time until it is zero. If you switch back to it you get the stack back minus the degradation.

Quite nice summary of the current situation… That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. I’m just saying that killstreak-reward shouldn’t be bound to weapon, which you usually change quite often (with some small op-builds as exception, where this would be just senseless…). It should at least be changed back to the pre-patch version, where it stacks as long as you have a stack weapon equipped (maybe remove underwater weapons from this check cause that would in fact be the same as putting it on the back piece).
I personally think that it’s not needed to have an over time degeneration of stacks cause it’s quite nice balanced with the on downed removal and the cap at 25 kills.

I think no one is really happy with the current stack sigils. As soon as you switch out(EDIT… sry wrong word – it’s obviously reequipping and not simply pressing weaponswap, originally: swap) a weapon… it’s gone. Even if that weapon has a stack sigil on it. – That probably works with the current gs-camping warrior build, but a lot of other builds live from weapon diversity.
I really like the idea behind the stack sigils, but in my opinion it just doesn’t mix well with the purpose of other sigils cause it’s just completely different.
So here’s a little idea to get rid of this issue: simply remove the stack sigils and add a back item-slot where you can stack kill streaks. Usually you don’t change your back at all and if you do, you could easily make a check if it has the same Stacks on it or none -> keep or other-> remove so you could stack new.
This would have a huge impact on the prize of mainly blood lust – it can’t simply be salvageable from exotic back-pieces cause they are rare as kitten (ahh i love the GW 2 censorship). So I guess a craft able version would save the day^^

babazhook.6805:

I do not see the issue. As far as I am concerned more might still favors power users.

I totally agree with you about the second part. It may have been not 100% clear but this topic is not about if might can be removed, but about the condition dmg which especially power users get from might.

Little example from a 1v1 I had lately vs a berz Ham/Bow at the end I died with around 15k Burning and 8k bleeding dmg (ok that was quite embarassing xD) in the first 2 spots then ways lower the Hammer/Bow dmg skills with a total of about the same.

The powergain from might may be quite op but compared to the direct dmg of a conditioner with might, the condition dmg of a dd with might is just insane and in no relation.

maha.7902:

there will come a day when people realise boon stripping exists

The boon removes are actually quite focused on necro and mesmer, all the other classes can often not remove more than one boon at a time.

Exceptions: As I sayed nec /mes which have boon remove in almost every build
An elixir/mines spaming engi? and thiefs who traited 30 on the last line and/or are spamming Larcenous Strike.
The only other class which at all can remove boons is the guardian… 1/10sec
The Sigil of Nullification is not really helping, cause it has 1. a 10 sec cd and 2. it’s just 1 boon and is therefor quite rarely used.

It’s quite seldom that someone has only might and no other boon. And the fact that you can easily keep up at least 1 stack of might let the might get covered by all the other boons. However the balance between sigils/traits/skills that give boons and the ones that take them is not given at all!

This is an Issue that has been present all along GW2, but now with the Rune of Strength it has even been increased. I’m not speaking about any condition builds – that’s another topic.
The problem is more, that the Condition damage through might has become too powerful. There are currently a million builds (mainly ele and warrior) which can easily keep up 20+ stacks of might and therefor without having skilled on any condition damage making an enormous amount of damage through conditions. This comes mainly through the different scaling from the condition damage. Whereas Power based damage has the weapon damage as well as a higher base stat. Condition damage is at 0 if not skilled, as well as not modified via a weapon.

So here are a few solution to this issue:
1) Make might scale with your basic power/condition damage. I’m thinking of a simple multiplication of the might-stats with “Your power/condition”/“Exotic gear max power/condition stats”. But it could also be more complicated to work out balancing.
Actually with this change all power/conditon builds would have a buff compared to the others, therefor you could change might in that way that this formula affects all stats and simply buffs the stats your build is relying on ( for instance Soldier-stats get a buff in power, as well as a minor buff in Vitality and Toughness). But it would also solve the allstat-Ele damage problem…

2) Make someone choose if his/her weapon buffs power or condition ( or maybe both? with a regulator where you can set a Number between 0 and 100% power/condi). If you set the new gained weapon condition damage + max condi stats to the same damage as now, the scaling of the condition damage via might will be decreased without affecting any condition builds. This is clearly a minor change compared to 1).

3) Simply set condition damage gain from might lower than the one for power.

yep it’s indeed Sunday 01:00 UTC+1, but because 1 is befor and 1 after I think that shouldn’t be the problem

A guild I know has quite the same Problems you’re speaking about with Missions not counting and players not reciving anything for completing the events. So I personally think that certain Guilds are buggy (they had alot of other strange stuff going on too).

If you compare the points you get from Living Story and dailies, to the fix standard achievement you’ll notice quite fast, that there’s absolutely no balance. There are “Walk-there and speak to this”-achievements in Living Story which give about the same amount of points (ca. 10) as the “Kill 5000 creeps with this weapon”-achievements (11). Also the daily gives you a constant 18 points/day (14 PvE/WvW +4 PvP) what has absolutely no time consumption compared to the standard achievement points (Like dungeon master etc.).
There are a few ways to solve this problem:

1. Cap the daily at maybe 4 or 5 points both dailies combined (4 for PvP logic, 5 for PvE)
2. Lower the newly gained Achievement points from Living Story ( almost 500 points from “WvW Season 1” seems to be quite overreacted for a temporary event)
3. Increase the standard achievements, at least the “like diamonds” ones (sry it censored it to ?kittenes? wtf [the word between the ? is actually not kittenes…])

Olba.5376:

1. So you want the game to function on your individual whims?
2. Just because you have completed the achievements does not need you cannot participate in the content. Not a valid complaint.
3. Why should you not? The very purpose of those categories is to get you to other parts of the world.
4. Because ambient creatures are literally everywhere in the world?
5. Pointless because fun for no tangible reward is pointless? Not a valid complaint.
6. Because new people should be nudged towards the existence of the thing in the first place?
From the looks of it, all of your complaints center on not wanting to play the game nor spend any in-game currency. That kinda means you want the daily for logging in.

1. Yes I do want Gw2 to be individual: if players don’t want to play some content, because it’s too easy and they already played it over a million time, the game should not force them in any way to do so…
2.The Living Story is not that good that you would want to play it 2,3 or even 4 times. Having completed the achievement= played through all aspects of LS
3. If it should lead you to different places in the World, why does it then not work like guild travel, which would lead to more variety and to a really “different” view. Instead of: " oh btw. you have to randomly kill 40 worms in kryta". I wouldn’t consider that as pointless!
4. No matter what you say about ambiance Killer. This achievement is and will always be skill less and a vast of time.
5. Pointless because you should play it whenever you want and not because the game says: Well today we’ve got Kegbrawl up… go play it.
6. Well if it should only lead new people to the mystic forge, then why don’t add another pointless “Talk with this NPC” award? I’m OK with this achievement like once a month, but as it is it’s as pointless as the Laurel-cat

Olba.5376:

From the looks of it, all of your complaints center on not wanting to play the game nor spend any in-game currency. That kinda means you want the daily for logging in.

If they can’t make up a daily from the poor Endgamecontent they have. I consider it as a real bad idea to just send people back to starting areas. I’m definitely against a reward for your login, but i’d prefer that to the current system. And no i’ve absolutely nothing against Dailies which include ingame currency, because they can at least be done really fast. I just don’t see the point in them, because this already comes close to a Login-reward.

Olba.5376:

The categories on the daily already achieve the same thing, except that they’re on a rotation. The reasoning for the rotation is probably rooted in the previously stagnant daily, which caused a lot of complaints.

I just want the daily to be 100% achievable while you’re doing the things you like. You shouldn’t have to play something you hate just because you want the next achievement chest or whatever. In my opinion the daily could be made much harder with the system I proposed (The amount of points you need can be set to 10000 with same scale…).
Meanwhile almost every player who does the daily more or less regular is like
“Oh 3 Maguma Veterans”-> i’ll go to this position and there are 3.
or
“Juhu Mystic forge”-> 1 Achievement Point for 1 Silver… why isn’t there more of this
or
“Wuhu Crafter”-> There’s always something to craft….

I just don’t see why you should get anything for this.

jsduke.6537:

PVE Daily is already “doable while playing.” Your suggestion would turn it into a mindless automatic achievement, which misses the point altogether. No need to change it.

What’s so “mindfull” about crafting 10 items, Speaking with the Laurel merchant, Buying something for Karma etc?

Well you can ask yourself what’s the Point of a daily achievement system and there’s actually no other purpose then rewarding player for playing and in my opinion a daily should be done fully while simple playing, no matter what you do if it’s wvw, dungeons, fractals or simply lvling alts.

The focus is on the while! If you compare the pve daily with the pvp daily, you have great fluctuations in the time that you need to accomplish it. The Pvp daily is no matter what you do done in 3 games.
I’ve to addmit, that the pve daily can sometimes be easily done in under 5 minutes: For example you’re taking over a tower, kill 10 invaders, 5 veterans + the champion and you lvl up-> 5 daily categories done in no time.
But at another day:
-You don’t feel like doing wvw: -3 daily categories
-Living story has been done for 2 weeks…: -2 daily categories
-Why should I travel to ascalon/maguma etc. for killing veterans/mobs: -2 dailies
-Why should i (pointlessly) [well pointless is actually the wrong word cause you get Points for it] harm all those cute little Bunnies? -1 daily categories
- Daily activity is pointless anyway: -1 daily categories
-And why should I waist any of my items to the Mystic Toilet? -1 daily categories
So now we’re down to 4 daily activities which can be done with no focus on it (maybe reviver[ why should i get points for a bad team?],kill variety, kills, Gatherer…).
My idea is to make a System where you get Points for almost everything you do ( just as a usual daily…) and you have to reach a certain amount of Points to get your daily.
An example:
You have to reach 1000 points in order to get your Daily+achievementpoints:
-Killing a mob 5 Points
-Dungeons 200 Points
-Reviving 15 Points
-Conquering a Castle: 300 Points
-Killing a bunny -1000 Points
You could also cap the Amounts of Points at about let’s say 200 Points for each category, so it’s similar to the daily now and to prevent people from Farming things too intense.

The idea is to make skins and gathering tools from the gemstore like the skins from the achievement chests so you would simply unlock them in the gemstore and then you could get as many of them as you want.
1. For me it’s quite hard to define a mainchar. Therefor i play with quite a few chars and it would be ways too expensive to buy for example all the gathering tools for them (5*1000 Gems*3=1200g=ca. 200Euro)
2. Most of the skins etc. are only available for a set amount of time. If you want the skin after that period of time and you already bought it there’s no way to get it.
3. This could also be applied to the reward items from the Living story/fotm weapons etc. because sooner or later that is simply gonna waist a lot of space.
4. Why not use this already existing System which in my opinion is not really helpful for the achievement system, and would better match up with the gemstore and Living Story? I bet there are buyhistories for the store which could simply be used for this.
5. The influence on the money gain from the gemstore won’t be that big, because not so many people buy things multiple times.

TriggerSad.2597:

Considering that people weren’t meant to get to level 80 in the first place, and more often than not took advantage of loopholes to get there, I personally don’t see a problem.

Well loopholes like “beeing able to play with friends who are higher in fotm then you”, which came after the Patch which actually added this “you shall not get to lvl 80” to the game, before it only spooked around in the forums? Sorry but this can in no matter be seen as a loophole.

Faux.1937:

Wuman.9132:

I’m pretty sure they did this so the people who abused bugs at jade maw to level up (using ranger pet revive, revive orbs, or that trick to res someone before Agony killed the team) wouldn’t have an advantage over those who were capped at 49. But those who did hit 49, is an issue I guess…. And those who used people to level up over 49 after those bugs were fixed got screwed over pretty much too…

Those arnt bugs, they are actual game mechanics that players found and used in way Gw2 Devs didnt think about, Just b.c a few players where smarter than the makers doesnt mean everone should be punished.

If they said ALL players will be revert back to level 49, then it would be a different story.

Well that was first when the only way to get past lvl 50 WAS this let’s call it exploiting. But with the patch where you could join any frac lvl you didn’t even have to use any kind of “bad e word” you could simply join an odd frac higher then 50 and there was nothing (it wasn’t even demanding just hard for your nerves…) that could have stopped you.

Well it’s actually a quite small point which think could need a change: If you craft something first items in your inventory then bank then colletions get used. I’d at least appreciate if you could destine that^^, because it’s annoying if you collect matsstacks in the bank and then they get partly used and you’ve to refill the stack… I know it’s not a big deal but it would be nice^^ and this order makes absolutely no sence…

afatpaws.7810:

What’s the point of automating all that? Like I don’t want my items auto sold cuz maybe I want to salvage them.. That just sounds like a disaster.. I don’t know. I’d rather just sell all my stuff and repair it on my own..

If you want your item not to be autosold then don’t activate it for that item? That’s the point of it. It would save a lot of time for a lot of people

What about an automation of certain activities, like an autorepair armor button, which gets triggered whenever you walk by an armor smith. Or an option on every single item to automatically trigger an action like salvage this, autosell it to a merchant when you find one etc..
Maybe you could even add a programming language which has arguments like: When you pass this point activate this item, change skills to wtf so ever, equip this and that etc..

Actually that does happen on some parts of the maps, like in orr. There’s for instances an event that spawns up to like 30 champs in 10 minutes, which in my opinin is just stupid. I mean why should a normal deff event spawn a champion, while the CHAMPION event next dor gets simply ignored (unless it can spawn other champs as well, like the aetherblade events).
Cleare against that idea, i’d rather have the Champions be excluded from all scaling, the “event-fun” should definitely not be coupled to 30 loot bags. ANET did a first step as they included the silver-NPCs to the scalings on the new event, but not enough consecuent at all. There are still events with a parall 4 champions or more.

Yep i think too that there should be a cap at 5 points per day (or around that), but not only cause more is time consuming but also because most of the other achievements lost the balance of Achievement Points rewarded: All the Slayer/ Weapon achievements ( and still many many more for instances pvp, dungeons usw.). I mean 16 points for 1000 kills, 11 points for a 5000 kills? and then 14 points for a daily?

I totally share your opinion when it comes to the difficulty of the achievements. But i think the “walk there and watch this” achievements arn’t really the problem. I’ve more problems with the "walk there and do this, then walk there and oh what a surprise: do that again and again, and again and again and again, which are totally skillfree and only time consuming.

I think the last update messed around with the balancing. The popular 5 man grinding in cof (which at least needed a bit of skill) was replaced with Zergfarming. The fact that some “boring” events suddenly become lucrative as you come back with your 100 friends, because the event kicks out one Champion after another, is just stupid. And I still didn’t figure out what this “hot-fix” ( slighly reduced champion spawn rate) should have done: You still see events with a paralel 4 Champions! I mean why are there champion events at all if each random deff event can spawn 4 times as much champions with 4 times as much loot! Oh wait i just forgot that champion events can spawn further champions…