Guild Wars 2

Love the initiative ^-^.
Personally mostly thinking… philosophers stones would be really nice – i always end up with a few left over and i always have to delete them. And other craftsman-bought stuff is in there too.
As for other ideas… would definitely appreciate the base +1 infusions being able to be stored – potentially considered a crafting material for the “Goal” of the higher infusions. And else… perhaps pact scout mapping materials, or legendary insights?
And finally, shimmering/tenebrous crystals would be pretty nice imo. Any of those would be nice to have in the storage :-).

Griffin.5379:

First, there are 3 light, 3 medium and 4 heavy armor
- bladed (light, medium, heavy)
- leystone (l,m,h)
- mistward (h)
- Precursor (l,m,h)

Thing with armor designs, as i understand it, the more diverse, the harder to make, like a lot of sets in season 1 are rather similar (thus can be nicely combined) and it takes not much time to make those.
For Example,
Heavy armor: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Human_male_heavy_armor
Chain = Worn Chain close to Millitia, Scale, Splint and tempered scale
Dark Templa is close to Studded Plate and Armageddon as well as Draconic

if you take your time and lay those pictures over each other you see how similiar the models are,
now later armors, those added with season 2 and the expansion get more and more “complex” and don’t look similar at all, so it takes time

(carapace and luminiescent for example, took probably a long time each since they are not at all similar in any aspect)

On a side note, all gemstore armors are incredible complex compared to “normal” armor.

That is a good point – though honestly, i wouldnt mind a few more basic armours.
I will say that the precursor armours kindof dont count as HoT to me since its again been almost a full year since HoT came out and the precursor armor has only been here for a few months.
And, well, at launch every weight class had those armours.

I do understand the similarity though and how that could definitely benefit the ease of making them, but still… given the long time it takes now it seems.. somehow particularly slow compared to before.
LS updates too. I understand they want to put quality in everything, but how were they able to put out the Nightmare Tower, Flame and Frost, Dragon Bash, the Attack on LA, the Marionette encounter, the Breachmaker fight, and all that with two-weeks period before when now in three-months periods we’ve barely got a few hours of playtime.
Admitted, i can very much recognise how Bloodstone Fen wouldve taken a whole lot of work and can definitely see how it took alot of time. Im just a bit disappointed at the lack of content depth compared to the massive, event-filled LA attack, complete with ruined city, broken buildings, objects distributed everywhere, etc.

First off, this is not a complaint threat. I am seeking information or clarification, not seeking to complain about the slowness. This is just something ive been wondering, but

I can perfectly well get that armour takes a really long time to design. But how come it seems to take so much dramatically longer than it used to? Guild wars 2 launched with, what, 30+ armour sets for every race? With 8 more dungeon sets following very soon after, and not even counting the gemstore sets. Yet an expansion that recieved almost exclusive attention for the better part of a year has… two? We havent even seen any gemstore ones since – only outfits, which are somehow alot easier to make. And while i do appreciate outfits, something more to mix and match would really be nice.

Why is it that everything recently seems to take alot of dev effort that they cant afford to keep up, while everything seems… still slower than what was done at launch and in season 1?
And thats not even mentioning that there seems to be fairly little QA effort put into assuring these armour sets dont have any clipping issues etc.

I know this may be a bit out of the blue, but given this could potentially be something for an expansion i’d want to suggest before its too late..

Could we get some more emotes please? Doing nice things with my character, dressing them up, interacting and seeing them is one of my favorite parts of the game, and i’d absolutely love to see some more emotes. Its not technically very useful content, but ive spent many hours just standing around having fun with friends, and emotes are great for that. I’d love to have some more available. Given all the new combat animations that have come out, it’d be nice if we could get some chat command emotes too.

And, i hate to say it, but… id honestly gladly pay gems for an emote pack

Healix.5819:

The policy is 1 keystroke per action, which is to do something once, not 1 keystroke per keystroke. There’s nothing wrong with using a macro to enter a special character, or even a string of text, such as an emote. Despite their policy, the truth is, as long as you’re not using macros to automate gameplay for extended periods, with the exception of playing music, there’s no risk. Using a macro to spam clicks is technically against the rules for example, yet no one has ever been banned for doing it to open bags. Even if they did, worst case, you get a 72 hour warning suspension.

So… if i’d just use it for characters, and every now and again accidentally have it try to use two skills at once with one button press – would i be okay?
I dont feel this is an offence or anything, but well… im very paranoid about my account in that way. GW2 keeps me afloat, and i’d hate to get it banned for something stupid like this.

Alright – i’ll remove them soon as i can then, just to be safe. Hope nothing bad happens for now :s

Quick question here, hope i put it in the right spot..

I have a fairly simple keyboard, so theres a fair amount of characters that i cant actually type with it without a complicated alt-code (like ä, å, ö). So to simplify this i’ve bound the combination to some of my special function keys, so i can type them easily without having to punch in a complicated code each time.

Now i accidentally hit one in-game, though, and since they do use numpad numbers i think it might make me do two skills at once (say, alt + 124 might make me use an autoattack).
Is this dangerous? Should i get rid of these macros in case i accidentally hit them and make my character do two things at once, or can i keep them? I’m a bit afraid of getting banned now… my account means a whole lot to me.

I’m going to open up by saying that, yes, i have seen, read and replied to the thread about female charr/asura armour.

But, i feel the issue here runs deeper, and i’m honestly feeling somewhat conflicted about the legendary armour in general.

This set of armour is standing to be perhaps the most prestigious set there is out there. While Nevermore requires you to go through a significant amount (read: basically all) of the HoT story, for legendary armour in addition you have to clear the entire three raid wings, along with a host of other stuff. Raids are the pinnacle of PvE endeavours, basically the hardest PvE content there is out there. Added to everything else, i believe legendary armour can carry more prestige than any other set of armour.

Yet what we are seeing for the precursors is… unencouraging, to say the least. I was hoping to be dazzled, to be able to wear a unique armour set, one to be truly proud of having created – and yet it feels like i’ve just gotten… basically an adapted set of human armour.

I mean – i mainly play asura, but i sympathise for the charr too. The least that could’ve been done for literally the most prestigious and difficult to aquire set in the game is to make it integrate the ears and tails in some way, and not suffer the same clipping issues our races have always faced. We’ve literally just gotten the human armours copied.

With the amount of time, focus, effort it takes to aquire this truly unique set of armour… i’d honestly expect it to also be the most amazing armour that i could acquire in the game. I really, really appreciate the devs reaching out with the offer to use the male armour on females, and i love how they’ve reached out and reacted, but still… i feel like at least there could’ve been a little bit of attention to detail for the different races, a little bit of extra effort put in, so that for just this one set, this one extremely hard to acquire set, we wouldnt have to face the terribly immersion-breaking clipping issues.

And, the point of what i’m trying to say is… i’d honestly not mind waiting another month on top of the current wait for it if it’d mean i could get a truly amazing armour set that i’ll never run into any annoying issues with. I’d rather proper time be put into this for all races and we get it later, than we get it faster and lower-quality.

Personally… as much as i hate to say it, but yes. Actually, maybe just the coats, but..
I honestly love the design… itd be amazing if adapted to asura. I’d prefer to not have to use the male variant on female asura – i like it being unique on them, and honestly i like that -some- armours do show a bit of skin.
But.. the breast-holders on asura just look ridiculous, and i cant take the armour serious because of it. If it is in any way possible, i’d love to see it changed with a liitle bit of alteration to still be pretty much the same, but just without the blatantly obvious breast holders. But if that is not an option… somewhat grudgingly, i’m going to have to vote to replace the female (chest) armour with the male versions. Without either of these options, I’ll never be able to take the armour serious on my females.

There are a few questions i would love to get answered, personally. I’d enormously appreciate any that can be answered, although i fully understand if some or all are hard to answer.

A. My biggest, burning question relates to mesmers – a common consensus around the RP community seems to be that mesmers can invade and alter someone’s mind, leaving relics in there that force them to do specific stuff, mind controlling or sometimes even downright changing how they are. To what an extent do mesmers factually have power over the mind and other’s magic, and to what extent are they merely using their magic as clever trickery intended to fool people?

B. What prevents any magic user from using some little trick in their magic book to instantly end a magic duel? Say, necromancers pinching off a crucial vein, an elementalist boiling a tiny bit of water inside a vital part of the brain, etc? Is there some form of innate resistance against these things, or is such fine control simply beyond the physical realm of possibility?

C. Is the restriction of magic to certain skills or spells simply a game limitation, or are mages lorewise factually restricted to using or creating spells to accomplish certain things?

And, as a player favoring asura..

D. Its generally known that the inquest dont like anyone leaving, and are willing to kill those that do. Yet there are also lorewise examples of people seemingly turning good and intent on leaving the inquest, without intending to die from such. The inquest also fight the peacemakers regularly, while they seem perfectly well accepted in Rata Sum. How does this factually work? Would someone be able to leave the inquest and go somewhere without having assassins chase them their entire life, or does leaving the inquest mean a life forever on the run?
And, on the same topic… i realise an answer to this may sound a bit far-fetched, but.. what is the lorewise concept and view of the tyrian/asuran people on forceful indoctrination into the inquest?

E. We’ve seen concept art of asura with beards, but no evidence of such in-game, and personally i feel that given their cave-bound origins having hair elsewhere doesnt seem to make much sense. What is the lorewise position on this – do asura grow facial hair, or hair anywhere else?

I’m going to honestly say… i dont like the new skyhammer. The map feels unengaging and boring. It always used to be this completely different map – centered around a massive cannon, effectively a fourth point to fight for that could pretty much dominate a map. It was a huge mechanic, and i thoroughly enjoyed playing it. Right now, especially since i just played thief on it, the mechanic feels incredibly underwhelming, and you can almost safely ignore it at the levels of PvP i play at. So what points get neutralised – they swap hands constantly anyway. Its a few seconds of gain at best, and by far not worth the time it takes to actually cap the thing.

But, more than all of that, its lost its identity.
Skyhammer was “The falling map”. The meta got completely turned around on it, and meta builds could fall off simply because they relied on sustain too much and were easy to end by being solidly smacked on the floor, while many things that are rarely ever used were provided fun opportunities to play. I’ll agree, old skyhammer didnt fit into ranked – but to me, it was fun. I would much enjoy seeing old skyhammer back in unranked, and new skyhammer in ranked. That, i feel, would be a nice system.
But never getting to play old skyhammer again… man, am i going to miss that. It was honestly my favorite map. And with falling all but gone (Skyhammer imo needs at least a few fall-through floor panels, and not have “100% fall-down safe” all across it if you ask me), it just doesnt feel the same.

I know many will hate me for asking it, but at least for unranked.. please, i’d like old skyhammer back. A bunch of my friends concur, too.

I’m mostly left confused.
Im not really upset… i understand important decisions and all. But im a bit confused as to how it takes a 6 man team half a year to make one legendary. Given three of them shipped with HoT, did you have 18 people working for the half year leading up just for those three legendary weapons? And… if so, when the team was reduced to 6, why didnt we hear anything? It sounds like this was a decision one could have seen coming a long time ago, because in this timeframe i’m not sure how anyone working on it could’ve expected to have the full set out in the timeframe i assume it was clear most people expected them to be, i.e. sets of three every few months.

As both a Belgian and a former guild member, you guys are still amazing <3. Heartwarming to see this :-)

I know this might sound a bit whiny, and its not something i’m actually intending to be a proper complaint, more of.. a small request?

But, as an RPer, and just someone who likes to make their characters pretty in general, it somewhat bugs me how revenants constantly have their channeled legends’ glowing arm-fire thing, even out of combat and with weapons stowed. Its somewhat disruptive to the aesthetic as a whole, especially since they’re all rather vibrant colours.

Would it be difficult to implement it to be like the elemental wrist effects on elementalists, where the effect will appear on weapon draw and be hidden when you stow your weapon?

On that matter, is there anyone else who would like this, or does the majority like it better as always-on?

Yes please. I would really love some emote attention, and a hug emote would be amazing.

Meetrica Province, hands down, favorite zone in the game. Still hate the nerfs Anet made to it with the NPE to be honest.

The architecture, the design, the look of it hasn’t changed though. I miss the underwater lab, but for the rest, i love asura, their architecture and their culture, and i love to run around in Metrica Province, see the progeny learning, see the labs preforming their different experiments, fighting the inquest. I just love the zone, and few other zones really compete with it, for me.

Chameleon Dude.1564:

• Almost every time I’ve ran into roleplayers, I’ve seen people trying to disrupt them.
• The game has next to no roleplay tools.
• Several updates have even hurt the ability to roleplay.
• They’re an endangered species, slowly fading away.

That would be why they’re often hiding and keep to themselves. As for being unwelcoming, I’ve never experienced that. Quite the opposite. Just need to keep looking, maybe head to one of the roleplay websites to find a group you’ll get on with (I can’t remember the names off the top of my head, unfortunately).

Very active roleplayer here (EU) – and indeed, this is a big problem for us. I’m a Rata Sum RPer – i love asuran RP the most, and that’s likely where i’ll always stay.
First off… the amount of trolls we get is sadly large – much, much larger than the amount of new RPers we see coming in. Somehow… there seem to be many, many people who hate our roleplaying. So whenever we see someone standing around the bar (Plikters bar at the bottom level of Rata Sum, our main RP hotspot), we usually don’t interact with them, leaving them to take the first step. Once they do, we’ll know they’re roleplayers with good intentions, and we’d gladly interact with you. We always do our very best to welcome new RPers to the community, especially because our numbers are sadly waning.

There are still a fair amount of RPers around, but as stated above.. there’s not always as many people – RP has its ups and downs, and without those few of us maintaining a conscious effort to keep the RP organised and going, to set up events and such, our Rata Sum would fade away maybe to never return. The game isnt too friendly to RPers compared to many others, and we have pretty few places where we can find new friendly faces to come roleplay with us, especially because if we publicly advertise, we’re likely to recieve large amounts of hate. On top of that, game mechanics are troublesome – we have very few emotes compared to Guild Wars 1, and have long been wanting new emotes. Any on-going emotes, like /sit for example, also need to be carried out again for people who newly arrive to be able to see them half the time.
In short, life as an RP-er isnt always easy.

That being said, we gratefully welcome any new, friendly additions to our community, and if you feel like RPing in Rata Sum along with us and are on the EU server, i’d gladly extend a guild invite to our hub guild. Just PM me in-game if you should be interested – there’s a big crowd of friendly people in there, and while many may be a bit kitteno invite you over, you’re always welcome to ask whether you can join in, and we’ll always be happy to see you at the bar.

I’m honestly very scared for these nerfs. Not because i dont think they need nerfs, but because they shouldn’t be overnerfed.
In my opinin, though, these conjure weapons -should- be powerful! Any conjure weapon should make your first 5 skills worth more, have some improvement over any regular weapon. Youre sacrificing a utility slot to access a temporary skill bar you cant swap back and forth to with limited uses, so in my opinion this bar should be significantly better than your normal attunement bars, and i’m afraid they’ll just nerf it to the ground. Just like many of the transform elites.
When you replace your skill bar for a fixed one you can’t swap with, and sacrificing a utility slot to do so, you should gain a very significant boost to the power of that skill bar. Or at least get crazy utility or so.

I have two engi’s, and multiple reasons for so.

First off, simply, different characters.
The first engi was my main from the start, is still my PvE main, and i’m very fond of this character. He does all the living story, too, and playing as him i feel immersed in the living world.
I’m also an RP-er, and my second engi functions as a rifle/pistol wielding medium armour alt for my main RP character.

Secondly, builds. I PvE engi, i WvW engi, and i have many different builds for Engi that i dont all want to stack on one and the same. My second engi, i’m currently still leveling, but will likely be more condi-oriented while my first engi is power-oriented.

I’m not saying a nerf wasn’t needed.
But this is just ridiculous – leave some viability at least!
This is a full line of engi utility skills that now see absolutely no usee whatsoever, which is incredibly infuriating. Not only were turrets already nearly worthless in PvE and WvW, but now they’ve been taken out of PvP too.

I started playing engi 50% for the turrets. These things are meant to be -structures- that you can put down and leave to shoot. Not just “overload and then get blown up” things.
Turrets are useless now, and they need a buff back to viability. They needed a nerf, but turrets still need to be viable, which they arent currently.

I don’t get it. I still haven’t found a reply to this from Anet, and it seems such a simple fix. Please, just make the things into standard armour skins, or into outfits even!
Town clothes were brilliant, and it’d be a really big plus for Anet if they were willing to look into this simple fix. But, nothing so far…

That would likely be Speedy Kits for my engi. 1 week later, id start coming here getting a bit annoyed for not having gotten a reply yet to the bug i posted here day 1.
1 month later id likely be upset at Anet for ignoring such a critical and obvious bug in the (probably two) releases since the bug appeared.
6 minths to a year later id probably just be running about with med kit and elixir B again while annoyedly grovelling about it every now and then at Anet.

Another leveling tip: Stay at your level. XP gain scales, but as a level 40 you still get less XP from completing a level 10 event than you would get from completing a level 40 event – so, as you mapcomplete, after finishing a lower level zone, pick the next one close to your level instead of another one in the same level range as the one you just completed.

Can we have turrets crit too then, please?
If they’re going to act like mobs in taking damage, they ought to act like mobs when dealing damage too.

Turrets are already completely lackluster in PvE, and its extremely difficult to find a viable spot to put a turret so that it’s useful. My guild has had a few niche strategies in WvW using these, but like this even those will be cancelled out.
With this change, they’ll become flat out unuseable, even more so than the significant level of uselessness they already have.

If you make them act like mobs, go all the way and give them proper critstrikes and boon-ability so i can use them in some form or way. ‘cause right now you’re taking 4 utility skills away and making them blatantly unuseable anywhere but PvP.

Okay, first off – i’m not just here to complain about the new hairstyles. I think there’s quite a few lovely hairstyles been added, and i like the fact that there -are- actually new hairstyles.

But… i can’t help but ask myself questions as to why they are as they are… i play pretty much exclusively asura, and… some of the hairstyles are just strange, and.. i couldn’t see myself wearing these in everyday goingsabout without looking.. almost silly. The one male hairstyle (“number 2”) points up as if it defies gravity, and one of them just looks plain weird (“Number 1”). The female pigtails also look so big and out there that i couldn’t imagine anyone really wearing those in normal life. I’ve heard that things are much worse for the charr, even (A tree? Really?).

And, besides expressing a bit of discontent (and only a bit, because i do really like some of the new hairstyles), this is more of a request.. i can’t help but ask… why does it all have to be fancy and big, or just weird, to the point of being silly? The new hairstyles look awesome, but i like my asura to.. look kinda normal, in a way. And… i find those kind of hairstyles a bit lacking – styles you might see someone wear in the real world. Especially on male asura, i’d like to see more hairstyles that are just.. well, hair. No fancy accessories, no excessive amounts of gel and such. And preferably without seeing his skull.

That being said, once again… i would like to express my appreciation for some of the other new hairstyles – the first one for females looks absolutely precious, and the second one and last two male ones look great too. They just… almost all look way too ‘out there’ for me.

I’m gonna post my controversial opinion here…. but i love double daily fractals – i give an internal squeak every time i see “Daily Fractal” and “Daily 1-10 Fractal” pop up at the same time.

I just saw a post from someone where they save Greeza and Chibb in the thaumanova frcatal and get a buff for it.
Ive read up a bit, and somehow, after checking both the wiki and dulfy, Thaumanova apparently has a story mode with a prompt, with 2 colliders needing disabling, and a fractal mode with 3 colliders that need disabling, 4 starting at fractal level 40.. and supposedly, in any fractal mode you have access to 4 rooms, of which you need to disable 3/4 dependant on level. Story mode being doable once per account.
But ive done the thaumanova fractal multiple times, and everytime, id only need to disable two colliders, and both asura were dead as soon as i entered, the dormitories being plainly sealed off.
How does this all work, and how do you save them?

I believe most players in OCE play on the English-speaking servers. You should read up on Megaservers – theyre an intriguing new system that makes that it essentially doesnt matter on what world you are – everyone gets nicely condensed into maps so you almost always see people.
Chinas servers are seperate though, i think, and theyve probably also got seperate forums, so you should check up there instead :-)

I run a (likely suboptimal) nade FT build in the silverwastes. With healing turret and rocket boots, usually i can get myself out of danger fast enough to warrant wearing my werk still. So currently, i’m sticking to my zerk (although im also planning a rabid set somewhere), although ill switch to my Knights gear for places where i die easily (i only have one set of trinkets, so those stay zerk).
Traits setup is 66002, 64022 or 62042. Speedy kits, i never leave out anywhere except WvW zergrunning. Top line, standard nade running. Then, variably either firearms with rifle mod, juggernaught and modified amunition or points in alchemy with invigorating speed and deadly mixture. It all depends on how much i need to be survivable and have dodges, and how much im going to use the flamethrower for cone-shaped targetted torching versus the nades AoE attacks (which is the very reason FT is in the build – it allows me to be much more mobile while using the autotargetting, while nades i have to continuously aim myself, and they arent as easy to AoE far-from-eachother targets with).

Its far from optimal, but for me, its fun :-).

I love playing engi – it was my first character, and even though i now have 7/8 classes, its still my favorite and my overwhelmingly most played PvE and by a fair margin my most played WvW character currently.
I find them really fun because they can fill almost any role adequately. Engis have water fields, fire fields, AoE poison (for WvW), heals, a fair amount of blast finishing, projectile negation, high, AoE power DPS potential, high conditions potential (engis have access to almost every condition in the game, iirc the only exceptions being fear and torment), liberal condi cleanse, extremely high utility, and even a bit of stability.

Of course, many of these roles can be preformed more effectively by other classes, but its the all around versatility, combined with high-end damage, that makes me love engi so much.

For race, i personally only play Asura, so maybe im biased, but i think Asura fits engi particularly well. Out of all the races, your engi hobosacks look the least bad on Asura i think, as well as that i think the idea of engineer kinda fits Asura.
In lore though, engineering started with the Charr, so id definitely advise you the charr too if you want an engi. Theyre too big and stompy for me, but thats just my personal opinion. Engineer naturally synergises with the charr’s steampunky style, and you get to wield absolutely massive rifles.

I strongly disadvise using metabattle for leveling, exactly because it says meta. Play around with the class, learn how every single part of it works, and learn what kind of things you like to play and do as an engi. With metabattle, youre missing out on a whole lot of fun stuff because engis have sooo much diversity. I almost never run a fractal without changing my build at least once.

For leveling – most important would be that the Flamethrowers AA is 33% more powerful, so FT is now not only fun, but also pretty viable, to play around with.

For dungeons – swap around. You can use the metabattle builds for optimal efficiency, but i wouldnt blindbuild. Learn to use a few different builds – something nades and bombs, something FT, something nades and HGH elixirs, you name it.

For WvW, i like condi grenades alot, but i dont have much experience in WvW so youre better off waiting for more advice there.

For dungeons and fractals, my personal build favorite is grenades with HGH and my choice of two elixirs, although ill often also play grenades and bombs together with a single elixir or utility on top. Varying between pistol/shield (engi shield is my favorite offhand in the game) or rifle.
Say, Sorrows Embrace P1, by far my most often run dungeon – i run grenades, a rifle, and then Elixir B and U. Elixir B and U are great for stability + reflect, adding might and quickness too, and nades and rifle top up the damage.

I find your utility skills a bit odd. Utility goggles have very little use in this build, seeing as you’ll be applying ample vulnerability with your grenades, and you can get the same amount of fury (and other useful boons) with Elixir B.
On top of that, Elixir B synergises great with rifle because the stability from your toolbelt skill allows you to deal reasonable damage with pretty far knockback and long CC without the knocking-yourself-down that usually comes with it. So i’d seriously advise you take Elixir B instead, but it’s your choice in the end.
If you’re using this weapon/kit set specifically, the abovementioned traitlines look very good – it’s a crit/rifle based trait build, and with your grenades you’ll be getting plenty of crits. Not exactly sure why FT and Elixir gun are in there, but just ignore those and look at the traits, and use them for your weapon/skillset instead.

Well, i use them in a combo usually because FT is seriously the only decent target-locking autoattack i’ve found. The grenades have much less capability for hitting non-clumped up targets together, and the power scaling on the pistol, rifle and elixir gun just plain sucks. Plus, low-cooldown blast, fire field and push is always nice.
Buut if i just run rifle-FT i find myself having a pretty short array with a rotation of only 5 skills or so – rifle 3 and 5, FT 2 and 4, and then just autoattacking till any of them come back off CD. But i suppose it is indeed not the best combo.

I still don’t understand though… why the elixir gun? What does it do? It has pretty much no power scaling on the autoattack nor it’s only really damaging skill, and condi damage is sadly just not meta.. nor is much healing, really. Everyone seems to want damage.

Also, what traits do you use when running nades/bombs?

Hello there to all you engi players,

I main engi, and i love playing the class – i almost exclusively run engi in PvE. i have.. two questions i’m sat with though.

First, is the elixir gun kit… i see many people and many builds run this, yet it’s use eludes me… in PvE i’m almost always running power, which makes the elixir gun’s damage pretty much completely irrelevant to what i can put out with the grenades/bombs/flamethrower, and in the current meta, applying weakness and cripple to enemies seems fairly useless. So, why do people seem to run this kit so often?

Now, my biggest current issue.. for a large majority of the time, i run around with a single kit, complemented by usually two elixirs for their various utility effects. This kit is usually either the grenade kit or the flamethrower, along with a rifle most of the time, traited 6/0/0/6/2 in the fairly standard grenadier/HGH build, along with one of my favorite traits in the game, speedy kits.

I would often like to use a two-kit build though, either because i’d like to have my shield skills, or simply to have the extra kit.. but this is where it confounds me.
Take Silverwastes – running the Silverwastes, i’ve found myself loving a Grenades/Flamethrower/Rocket boots setup. Rocket boots are -brilliant- for mobility, and FT has a nicely damaging autoattack once i rattle off the rest of my rotation. However, i have no idea how to trait myself for this. Keeping Grenadier seems a logical choice, since it’s practically needed to keep the grenade kit relevant, but after that, i’m not sure. I’d like to keep Speedy Kits, but after that do i take the 15% FT damage increase from Deadly mixture in a 6/2/0/4/2 build, or do i go for the extra might provided by Juggernaught in 6/4/0/2/2? Or is there an even better option?

A second situation is my bomb, usually dungeon running kit – grenade kit + bomb kit. I love my healing turret, so i like to keep that.. it just heals so much more, and AoE too, than elixir H. But then, that final slot… traiting for elixirs just for the one elixir i can carry seems silly. I obviously keep the grenadier trait, as well as going for static discharge or speedy kits in the last line most of the time up until now, but where do the rest of my traits go? And what utility skills are nice to run in the last slot then?

All advice is appreciated, however small :-)

I mean for this to be a very civilised remark, but… i think it’s becoming a bit silly, how much it costs to actually transfer between worlds (i’m from the EU servers). When i joined, i had no-one i was playing with, so i picked my own world.. now i’ve met a few in-game friends, and i’d like to swap worlds to be able to WvW with them, which sounds very fun to do. My own world i know few people from, however, and being in gold league WvW mostly consists of laggy big zerg fights in which i seem to be very insignificant.

However… i find the transfer costs to be a bit ridiculous. The majority of the worlds, i think somewhere between half and two-thirds are now labeled as “very high” in population, which means i have to pay a silly 1800 gems to transfer. That’s 20$+ in gems just for me to be able to switch worlds… surely the amount of trouble involved in swapping my account between worlds can’t be -that- huge?

So, aside from a hopefully well-mannered complaint, i’m wondering… why isn’t anything being done about this – why isn’t the standard adjusted or anything, so the worlds aren’t just all high or very high?

Well, it’s pretty simple really… the harp has it’s noted mapped. 1 is your C, 2 is your D, etc. as far as i know. So, just settle your song into the octave with the least amount of sharps and flats needed (often this’ll be switching it to C major), and play your song normally from the sheet music.

So far, i use exclusively the master race, and hence if a new class were added, i would probably still play the master race.

Rangerdeity.5847:

Trevor Bennett.3691:

Well, since I’ve already done 3 Asura master-race. I’d probably have to go with a Human. I haven’t done join the circus yet, and I hear it’s pretty good, so I’d have to check that out.

WHAT a red post that isnt an automated “behave yourselves” message?

It’s been a while since the forums have felt like this – there’s a few dedicated arenanet employees going around now, who very much interact with and listen to the community. Take a peek around the CDI, for example.

I’ll just say, i love my engi’s shield in many situations, and i consider the engi’s shield skills to be the most useful out of the three professions that can wield shields. It’s by far the most representative of what wielding a shield should be like, for me.
Yes, the engi’s shield 5 isn’t the best skill in the world, but honestly, its not bad. You have to look at shield as a whole, and as such i think Engi shield is definitely still strongest, because warriors and guardians have an equally weak shield skill, if not weaker.

First off, i believe i should mention, i run a condi nade/bomb build, with elixir S and pistol/shield.
Now.. shield 5. As an engi, at least in my build, i spend very little time not wielding a kit, so the relative use of shield skills is very high compared to the other options.
Then.. It’s a block, for starters – 1.5 second block isn’t particularly good, but it’s not bad either, especially if you can see a particularly annoying attack coming. It also stuns your attacker, giving you plenty of time to chill them with grenade 4’s or catch them in your bomb 5, usually, making them easier targets afterwards. On top of that, it’s a double daze, allowing you to interrupt stomps from a distance even when faced with Aegis.
Plus, wielding your shield brings your shield 4, which is honestly one of my favorite skills in the game. 3 second reflect on-the-move plus blast finisher and knockback. I love it, and i save people from stomps in the most heroic fashion possible with it on a daily basis.

I have one very, very big problem with the new dailies, and that’s the Daily Completionist. To me, it’s only a bit annoying, but i know a whole lot of people i care about that have a strong dislike for WvW, PvP or both. Essentially, to profit from the achievement points from the Daily Completionist achievement, you’re forcing my friends to play game modes that they don’t like, ranging from simple dislike while some i’d need a straitjacket to get into sPvP.
I personally don’t like doing PvP daily, either. It’s something i do every now and then, but primarily, i’m a PvE player, and i seriously don’t appreciate being forced into PvP everyday for my daily achievement points, when up to now it was just casual for me, something i’d do whenever i felt like it, which wasn’t too often.

Besides that, i don’t really have anything against the new dailies. I really like the fact i can distribute the XP to my lower level warrior to level her up, rather than having it dumped on my level 80 where it’s almost useless to me, and i like the fact that the Black Lion chest rewards you occasionally get are now on a more fixed rotation rather than being random and rare. I just.. get a chest right now every day, and i’m reasonably excited every few times i open it, because i know it’s gonna have something nice. And, during normal play, i’d usually complete my daily achievements anyway.

I’m kinda sad to see monthlies go though, but i think the new system offers adequate replacement.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Kasima.8143:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

1. creates a split community. The people who participate in the farm quickly gain wealth, while those who don’t are left behind. This leads to a rich get richer, poor get poorer scenario where the community is fractured.

2. Mats become too common, continually falling in price until they eventually hit vendor price. This may seem like a good thing until you realize that the only thing that keeps most people playing the game is having long term goals. If they can suddenly buy every awesome skin they want in one day the game quickly becomes stale and boring and many players leave. This was a major problem in the beginning of the game and is why ascended gear was introduced. Devaluing ascended gear like this farm did is going to end up with a lot of players quitting and they may need to add in a new gear tier to bring them back.

There is no split. Stop looking at gold. Gold is absolutely and completely irrelevant. Gold isn’t the end, it is a MEAN to buy stuff. What you should be looking at is how easy it is to buy things and with farms, it becomes super easy. When mat prices hit vendor price, it means that it’s super easy to buy them. So everybody wins and the poor aren’t actually poorer, because their purchase power increases too, due to the lower prices.

If you only look at the very specific items supplied by the farm sure… if you look at the economy as a whole then what happens is exactly what I said would happen.

Certain mats get cheaper, everyone can buy those now. The people farming collect large quantities of gold, the people who don’t farm do not have this gold. The people who farm now have much greater purchasing power. All items not related to the farm increase sharply in price as the wealthy compete for these items and drive the price up. People who did not participate in the farm are completely priced out of the market and are much worse off than before.

But thats the point of the supply and demand curve. You have to look at “value in players opinion” rather than “value in gold”. If many more people farm, the materials will become more common and worth less. Gold will be worth more, in turn increasing the amount of “value” those running dungeons acquire, keeping their purchasing power up.

Right now, farmers are already pushing everyone else out of the market. Except, in this case, the commodity being farmed is pure gold, rather than items. But it has the same effect.

I main both engi and ele, and honestly, i like both really much.

Engi only has three weapons – a 2H rifle, a main+offhand pistol and an offhand shield. But their kits make up for all of it.
Engi’s are incredibly versatile, and have some competitive DPS at the single longest autoattack range in the game, i.e. 1500 units, when traited right. Although Engi’s arent the best for any particular role, i.e. they cant combo-field like an Ele or burst-DPS like a warrior, but they’ll very much manage. You can heal, you can have projectile negation, you can have loads of CC, and if you armour and kit yourself right you can even be a decent tank.
They’re not too hard to get into though. They have a pretty high skill ceilling, but the skill floor isnt too high.
Animations on an engi are.. so-so. It really depends on your race, as mentioned above. Engis spend alot of their time either holding a barrel (Rifle, Flamethrower, Elixir Gun) or moving their arms to place or throw things.
Nontheless, if you play Asura, the pistol, shield, weapon kit and so animations are pretty awesome :-).

The ranger is a really easy first character, and you have a whole bunch of things to choose from, so youll definitely have lots of fun with animations. Contrary to engi’s though, your utility skills are kindof lacking, consisting largely of traps, shouts and spirit summons, none of which really have interesting animations.
Playing them.. is really a like it or you dont though. I personally dont like rangers :P. But theyre still a pretty nice class.

Ele’s.. Once again, the asura animations are awesome here. Everything is so exaggerated for them, theyre practically doing a little pole dance when channeling meteor shower. You can also choose between assasin-style close range or artillery-style long range. Very squishy though, and a reasonably high skill floor with all of your rotations, but nontheless i enjoy playing ele very much.

Feel free to add me in-game if you want to know more about the engi and ele professions and how they handle :-)

Are you kittening kidding me? That game was brilliant!
The NPE just ruined the starter areas in my opinion. All the fun items are gone, replaced by silly bags that dont fit anything more than the merchant ones do, and now this?

Superior Rune of Lolwut
(1): +10 Vitality
(2): Do a random emote whenever you use an elite skill
(3): +50 to a random stat that changes everytime you use your heal skill
(4): 10% chance to equip a random weapon from your inventory when struck
(5): +75 to a random stat that changes every 10 seconds
(6): 10% chance to turn a random person in Tyria into a costume brawl monster when struck

Superior Sigil of the Internet
10% Chance to summon Rick Astley to distract your oponents on crit

Also, guys, can we have a bit more.. just having fun and a bit less reminding everyone of issues you have with the game, community or Anet?

Edit: welp, i should have realised that would be censored. Sorry! :P

Top three priorities, for Raids as a general topic? Awesome :-)

1. Interesting, well thought out mechanics – things that make people think, that allow a variety of different roles to flourish. Also, preferably something to prevent zerk+reflect cornerstacking or similar strategies.
2. Unique, desirable rewards – something that would make want people do the raid instead of just grinding more dungeons – a reward that isn’t the generic gold amount + golden chests, that remains useful end-game.
3. Large-scale. A feeling distinct from dungeons, where people work together as a group with multiple roles – enough people and activity around to require co-ordination of the effort of individuals.

I really like the idea of multiple teams working together. However, the 15 man thing has a charm, so i also like the suggestions that have been around of a “culmination” type of thing where everyone groups together to finish off the raids.
Here’s a… i dunno, i suppose i’ll call it a template? Encounter proposal i was thinking of. Note that this is for the.. ‘smaller’ variant of raid, more dungeon-esque, of the “half-hour-to-complete” type.

I was thinking of a split up raid. The raid starts, and the group progresses through a guild-puzzle esque start with a few smaller encounters, a few things to solve, perhaps a champion mob or two.

Then, they meet the big boss, at which point the group splits up. I’ll base this around 20 people, but it’s easily adjustable to any other size.

This is where the encounter gets split up, both in team and in multiple stages. Half of the team engages the boss, trying to keep it occupied and slowly whittle down its health. In the meantime, the other half of the team has to complete individual, smaller problems, in order to let the main boss team advance, potentially being pestered by thrash mobs requiring some of them to defend those doing the puzzle. If the secondary team doesn’t manage to complete their objective in time, the boss regenerates and deals out a large, but non-lethal, AoE damage, forcing the attackers temporarily on the defensive and forcing them to recover while the other team attempts to complete the puzzle.
Once all puzzles are completed, the boss gets to a final room, where it grows in size and power, and the full team reassembles to take it down.

I think this gives interesting opportunities to implement mechanics. I think it’s very important that every profession gets to play to their strengths here, so we don’t see the exclusion of necromancers and other professions with poor (AoE) DPS. Rather than just plain DPS the boss, the main fight would also focusses on endurance and outlasting the boss, giving much more use to support builds, healing builds, and condition builds, without taking away from the usefulness of DPS builds. It creates an environment where berserk and full-on glass cannon isn’t the best way to go anymore, and making people strategise and choose between the different skills they could be using.
At the same time, the puzzle aspect makes it so that even those who enjoy kitten combat less get to be productive in the raid, and gives a boost to utility-based professions like mesmers.

As for actual boss mechanics… i think nice idea’s for mechanics would be those where you’re taken away from the usual idea of combat, and forcing you to do other things than you would in normal combat to deal damage or avoid damage. I’m thinking of things like phases where the boss goes invulnerable and you have to complete something specific in order to deal a chunk of damage and get on with the fight, like Tequatl. Another interesting idea i thought of would be a mechanic where the boss starts channeling an incredibly powerful, near-lethal AoE attack at specific points in the fight, unblockable by traditional means, and instead people have to do something (say, for example, mine power crystals around the area and place them into dampeners) to reduce the power of the attack to easily tank-able levels. Environmental weapons could work well with this too, giving you a replacement set of skills that you need to use instead of your normal ones to damage the boss during specific intervals.
Of course, all of this would be alternated with normal combat. I really like GW2’s normal combat mechanics and they should definitely be part of the fight. I just think this kind of mechanic would make for a more interesting fight, and further increasing the potency of defence and utility over the major advantage that full DPS holds right now.

Clerics in PvP, as above, i would disadvise due to the low damage you’ll be doing – you could be doing alot more damage with a decent condi build.

In dungeons… its all about your internal battle with the meta. If you’re good with following the meta, that’ll just leave you running zerk and hide in corners under the reflects of a guardian. I personally don’t like the meta though – it takes the fun of combat away.

If you’re going to do “normal” dungeon runs, i.e. not abusing combat mechanics to your advantage, clerics can work very well as support. Engineers have some of the best healing in the game, while still being able to manage sustained DPS.

For PvP, i find Rabid to work pretty well, or even Dire if you’re going full-on condi’s.

I personally have an Asura, but then again, i love asura more than any race and 80% of all my characters are Asura xD. I love everything about them.

From an objective point of view though, compared to the Charr body i run as in Fractals, the Asura have the big bonus for me that the hobosacks look better on them than on the other races, and lets face it, you’ll spend a whole lot of time with a hobosack on your back.

Although this is up for debate, as mentioned above, Asura also seem to have a slightly easier time picking nice medium armour (unless you’re looking at a female asura, in which case while the armour is still nice, many people are disappointed by the armour being the same as male armour) compared to charr.

Crystal Reid.2481:

Leablo.2651:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Leablo.2651:

Chris, can you provide a baseline definition of “raid”? What exactly is the intention behind creating “raid” content that cannot already be expressed in terms of existing dungeons or fractals? Is it about creating another category of content that is gated to guilds?

Here you go:

‘…instanced co-operative group based ‘challenging’ content…’

Chris

This seems to conflict with the title of the thread, which implies “instanced co-operative guild based ‘challenging’ content…”

I would just like clarification on that.

Should raids be restricted to the guild level that require some form of guild activity/currency to activate/enter, or should they be accessible by anyone? What are your thoughts on that specific?

I’m in favour of having a sort of raid that needs a high amount of coordination and cooperation. This would make it innately easier for guilds to complete, while still making it possible to open it up to the full public.

Zanthrax.6538:

Concept (5) – Reward Structure.
-snip-

5. Reward system

I love the ideas you put out here. First of all, having the reward pieces distributed over the entirety of the new content sounds like a nice idea, and gives an incentive to visit it all.

What i’m mostly worried about with the reward system is it actually being fun rewarding to do. Currently, whatever boss i do, i will always be greeted with the same generic golden chest which may contain a good reward but usually contain very little rewards, most of which are even almost useless to me.

I like the idea of the combined token-RNG system. Each time you defeat one of the bosses, you could have an RNG chance at the special reward piece, maybe only once daily. But aside from that, i think it should have a specific drop table with other nice things in it. The raid should remain rewarding, even if you dont happen to get a special piece or something. This is why i love the idea of having crafting materials on the drop table. This would keep the raid rewarding even if you dont get a suit piece, and also important, keep it rewarding for those who already have a full set of the gear.
This could work in tandem with the token system – perhaps every first time daily you do it, you get extra tokens and a RNG chance at the special thing, and from then on you get tokens? This would keep the first-time-of-the-day bonus in, while also keeping it fun afterwards and doesnt make your party disband immediately. Also, this would make that you could work towards one of the suit pieces if RNGesus isn’t in your favor this month.
But, to be honest, its not even particularly necessary for me, the token system. If everytime i do the raid, i get a fun reward i can use like crafting materials even if i dont get a special piece, i wont really mind having to do it many times to get my gear piece. But itd still be a fun addition.
Perhaps this reward system could be a source of lower level materials like linen and cotton, which we currently kinda lack?

(Also, i will never learn.. lost my entire section 5 of this and had to rewrite it compactly -.-. Hope its useful feedback though :-) )

Zanthrax.6538:

*Concept (4) – Progress and Gating. "

-sniop-

Another typical gating method in traditional MMO’s was always gear, GW2 is amazing in that assuming no additional vertical tiers of gear come, every raid ever made will still remain relevant in difficulty for new players etc. If you take a look at what WoW is now 80% of its raid content is outdated and any new player coming to the game misses out on the experience of beating lich king or illidan etc. The lack of gear treadmill is a massive massive positive for GW2’s raiding if it were to be implemented.

While ill agree there needs to be some sort of gating, i really dont think it should be done in the form of timegating. If you timegate this kind of thing to only be doable once a day, you’re limiting players who only have access to alot of game time at specific times of the week. Also, very importantly, youre forcing parties to disband after every single completion. Unless raids are made to take an hour or more to finish, it’d be incredibly disappointing if we just had a fun raid, only to have to immediately split up again because the game wont allow us to be rewarded for it again.

Now you mention it though, currency doesnt seem like a good idea either – people and guilds with less currency available shouldnt be blocked from accessing enjoyable content.

I like the other idea you put forth though. Some form of… pre-required activity that needs to be finished, maybe a pre-boss you need to defeat, before you can enter the raid. Either inside the raid or from around Tyria, like maybe a key acquired at the end of each dungeon or at the end of a jumping puzzle being required to fight the final boss?

I’ve let part of your quote in specifically cause i feel pretty strongly about this. It also ties in a bit with point 5.
Guild Wars 2 has a horizontal rather than a vertical progression system, which is a big part of the charm. The raids remain relevant to new players and veterans alike. It prevents raids from getting outdated.
I still think the raid needs a unique reward though. There should be a reward you can work for when going from this instance. Not something thats stronger than the gear we currently have, but something thats different on a horizontal level. Currently, almost anywhere i go, the reward is always nearly the same generic reward chest that might have something good for me, and this is a mechanic i dont really like.
I propose raids have a specific set of weapons and/or armour, perhaps sigils, that are unique to each of them. Items, preferably account bound (preferred by me, at least) that have unique effects only obtainable within these raids. This would add actual rewards, benefit, to doing this raids. The effects wouldnt have to make the armour or weapons superior to what we currently have, to maintain the horizontal progression and keep the raids relevant, but should still be unique to the raid, and not something i can just buy or that id be much better off farming Tequatl for.
Continued in point 5..