Guild Wars 2

I vote for the ability to rearrange weapon skills. Not just for the Guardians in this thread and all future cooldown changes, but because switching around the weapons skills would make it much easier for me to be efficient when switching elements on my Elementalist.

Imps hit hard compared to most normal enemies. Shadow creatures hit for a ton of damage too. A combination of the two results in a very dangerous enemy type that you should probably only tackle with multiple players. 1v1 is fine, but things can hit the fan quickly if you agro more than one at once.

My like for the towns almost completely comes down to how the crafting services and trading post are organized. Because of that, I’d have to go with Divinity’s Reach out of the two. It probably takes half the time to get from the crafting areas to the TP and back. Rata Sum is my favorite overall.

Well, I guess if I included only MMOs that I was required to pay for, then GW2 would be first. If I include F2P MMOs, then GW2 might be in the top 5. If I include single player games, well… GW2 probably wouldn’t even be in the top 25.

I have to agree with you. I’ve dabbled in every race but Human so far, and I liked the Charr storyline the best for a number of reasons.
1. Rytlock is by far my favorite mentor.
2. Dinky and the other members I recruited were much more memorable than the helpers in the other storylines.
3. I thought the gameplay was more balanced than the other races. There were less instances of so-called “benny hilling”. While the warband members didn’t do great damage, they actually seemed to be effective tanks/distractions.
4. My Charr was an engineer, so building ghost-killing turrets and rifles fit right into my character’s class from the get-go.

I just happened to read a certain post on the fifth page. If any ANet employee is coming in here reading this thread thinking about not doing this because having a crosshair would “break immersion”:

Stop.

It’s worth it. Seriously. Also, anybody who does think it’ll break immersion or otherwise negatively impact their gaming experience can just turn off this totally optional combat feature.

And if I’m being honest here, it’s a little late to be worrying about immersion at this point. I mean, 95% of the game’s immersion flew right out the window when it was decided that the game would be third-person. So a crosshair? No biggie.

So people are saying that at level 19, you don’t have enough skills to be able to judge yet? Lemme see if that would be true… You have 14 skill points from leveling and probably at least 10 from skill point quests. If you’re like me and blow through each race’s starter area getting all of the skill points once you hit 15, you might have substantially more, up to about 40 (7×5 + a few from the 15-25 area). So between 24 and 54 skill points.

5 first tier skills is 5 points, 5 second tier skills is 15 points, and each skill is 6 from the third tier. If you only got like 10 extra points, you wouldn’t have enough to get any third tier utility skills. But if you got more, you could possibly have three or four third tier skills.

Going by the five characters I’ve made and the amount of skills they took, there’s a good chance he could already have all of the skills he wants by level 19. I usually do. It all depends on how much work he put into keeping up with skill point quests – something that isn’t reflected directly in his level. I’m ignoring elite skills, but it’s not like those completely change your gameplay anyway. And traits are nice, but they’re not exactly game-changing either.

My highest character is like 52, but personally I haven’t noticed a huge difference in combat between 20 and 50. I’m skeptical that it’ll dramatically change between 50 and 80.

A few days ago, I posted in another suggestion thread saying that I wanted them to implement the ability to lock the camera and give us a crosshair above our characters. At the time, I had no idea that this thread existed. This is exactly what I meant.

I want this so much! I’m not gonna use a third party program to achieve this, but the fact that such a feature can be emulated on autohotkey gives me hope that it wouldn’t be too difficult to add it as an actual feature.

Please?

Okay, and the TP is back up. And on second thought, I’m not going to spend 30s to get a whole set of hearty green level 35s that are only slightly better than what I have. So I just bought the heartiness trinkets instead and used my regular armor set, which will give me 360 instead of 407 armor, for a total of 1089, according to the character screen. Expected 76.8% damage reduction for hits of around 185. The data:

258, 241, 248, 258, 248, 245, 250, 242, 245, 252, 248, 236, 235, 237, 256, 254, 252, 235, 235, 236, 235, 242, 257, 246, 237, 257, 258, 234, 239, 234, 258, 241, 247, 241, 248, 243, 255, 247, 239, 237, 235, 249, 248, 234, 246, 239, 252, 239, 254, 241
379, 365, 387, 364, 351

Average of 244.86.Okay, so about 25% more damage than I was expecting. 245 is about a 70% reduction from 799, which either means that 70% is the cap of damage reduction or that I’ve hit diminishing returns. I’m going to assume that 70% is the cap. For a level 42 elementalist, that percentage of damage reduction would be hit at about 992 or 993 armor (let’s just say an even 1000?).

So I guess anything over 1000 armor is better spent elsewhere at level 40. For me, a full set of heartiness armor and trinkets and 20 points in earth would bring me to just under 950. So 990 when attuned to earth. So I can pretty much go all out on toughness and not worry about wasting stats.

So all in all, toughness doesn’t look nearly as useless as it did before. It’s strange how completely my experiences differ from the actual data. I have to wonder just how much damage event bosses are dishing out to have been able to hit my thief, toughness spec’d at the time, for over 1600 damage. And that Hyena that only did 100 damage less to my thief after changing to toughness? I can only assume that a Hyena’s opening attack is largely composed of condition damage. Normally condition damage is delivered over time, but I guess it doesn’t always have to be so.

And here are the results for the 20 points in Earth while naked test. Toughness and armor at 532.

514, 528, 516, 511, 529, 499, 516, 493, 491, 493, 483, 501, 531, 526, 531, 484, 527, 502, 532, 489, 529, 493, 528, 523, 508, 521, 518, 516, 534, 523, 502, 527, 490, 490, 520, 494, 504, 502, 488, 500, 518, 510, 518, 510, 515, 496, 524, 510, 523, 506, 532, 519, 484, 527, 496, 492, 506, 491, 496, 490, 508, 515, 521, 524, 513, 488, 532, 531
799, 756, 794, 733, 786, 791, 796, 799, 799, 798

An average of 510.3 for the normal hits. About a 36% damage reduction, and about what you’d expect from something slightly more than half way between the first and second test. It seems like it might scale linearly. If that’s true, I should be able to anticipate the damage I’ll take when I decide to go all out.

332 base armor, plus 407 from armor and trinkets, plus 200 from traits, plus 42 from being attuned to earth, plus 155 for Rock Barrier for a total of…1136. So like 80 to 82% damage reduction. So he should hit me for about 160 damage per hit. I’ll find out… just as soon as I catch the trading post when it’s out of maintenance again.

Well, the TP went up for about 5 minutes, then died again. In that time, I learned that a full toughness set at my level (which is to say, at level 35, since that’s the highest crafted toughness set my character can wear at 42) would give 407 toughness. Both armor and trinkets. The TP died before I could buy a set, but I can emulate it by wearing all of my normal armor set except for the shoes and then using a defensive skill, which should give me 409 additional toughness. The data:

379, 363, 366, 362, 382, 380, 354, 351, 354, 354, 351, 374, 361, 355, 373, 366, 363, 366, 365, 372, 355, 371, 367, 356, 367, 380, 376, 350, 363, 360, 375, 379, 363, 361, 370, 369, 350, 366, 376, 364, 374, 357, 354, 370, 378, 376, 371, 366, 356, 350, 364, 367, 360, 357, 370
540, 533, 555, 546, 555, 562, 553, 527, 561

Well, well! This is most unexpected! Going from 332 armor and toughness to 487 toughness and 741 armor has made quite an impact, cutting my average non-crit damage from 799 to 365 on the same Lynx. That’s a 54% reduction in damage. Time for the naked, but with 20 points in toughness traits, test.

Okay, the data from letting a level 43 Lynx just inside Dredgehaunt Cliffs hit my naked level 42 elementalist. The Lynx’s normal attacks are called “Bite” and “Slash”, and they appear to be roughly identical in damage. I have a base toughness and armor of 332.

780, 834, 854, 822, 789, 853, 844, 779, 821, 844, 816, 819, 802, 794, 780, 837, 838, 833, 816, 816, 804, 777, 855, 775, 832, 825, 783, 786, 838, 854, 854, 798,
839, 839, 805, 793, 813, 799, 855, 794, 786, 812, 787, 848, 808, 802, 798, 844, 834, 774, 828,
1267, 1234, 1161, 1206, 1236, 1194, 1242, 1236, 1195

So an average damage of 799 from the 51 non-crit hits. Any data I could have gotten from the crits is probably thrown off by the fact that the Lynx is 1 level higher than me. I want to do the toughness gear with no traits next, but it’ll have to wait until Anet fixes the TP.

Okay. I randomly can’t edit my post or reply to anybody. Again. So I guess they’ll just have to deal with a double post.

I’m going to spend a bit of time doing a test with my 42 elementalist. I’m going to walk out naked with no traits spent and record the damage taken for about 50 hits. Then I’m going to put on a full set of +toughness armor of my level and record an additional 50 normal non-crit hits from the same monster. Then go naked again and put 20 points into my toughness trait and record another 50 hits. Then I’ll put on the armor, have the traits, and do everything I can possibly do to raise my toughness, then record another 50 hits.

It’ll all be from the same type of enemy (probably something easy like a drake or a raptor). I’ll record crit hits, but I’ll keep going until I get 50 non-crit hits. I’d like to see if i get hit for crits less with more armor, but I seriously doubt the sample size is large enough to have a good conclusion. Let me know if you guys think 50 is too small.

For science!

… as soon as the TP is back out of maintenance.

zexion.5842:

Soo what you are saying is 200 toughness reduced your damage by 10%. Um sorry but that is extremely good for 200 toughness.

Even if 200 toughness gave 10% damage reduction, and I’m pretty sure it only gives a fraction of that, it would be terrible. Woohoo, I can use 66% of my level 40’s trait points to negate one of every 10 attacks! It looks especially bad considering that my base armor and toughness are 284 and 332, making for 616 base armor. I could gain maybe 125 more toughness if my armor increased that stat. So if I put everything towards toughness, assuming 10% reduction per 200 armor, I might attain just over 1000 armor base. Plus 155 from Rock Barrier for 1155. Plus 43 for being attuned to earth, so about 1200. So that’s about 60% damage reduction.

That’s sub-par even before I consider that 200 toughness only seems to give about 3% DR (I’m not sure where you pulled the 10% from). I guess I’d get about 20% actually.

Or I could put those 20 points into vitality and turn my 4191 base HP into 6191, nearly a 50% increase without even taking into account any vitality from gear. And vitality works against condition damage.

I think the answer is clear to me.

But I’m not sure that toughness works in a straightforward manner at all. I was reading an article on GuildWars2Guru where it was stated that toughness worked on some weird exponential curve. I can’t seem to locate that article again.

I’m sure this has already been said, but I didn’t see a similar thread in the last few pages. It would be nice if we could switch the positions of our unlocked weapon skills on the toolbar.

Normally just rebinding our hotbar keys would work, but it isn’t so simple on an elementalist that switches elements all the time. My staff skills are like this:

Fire: Single target skill, small AoE, single target, defensive, large AoE
Water: Single target, large AoE, small AoE heal, large defensive AoE, large AoE heal
Air: 1-3 target skill, single target skill, defensive, defensive, combo skill
Earth: Single target, large AoE DoT, shield defensive, line defensive, immobilizing DoT.

It would be great if I could put all of my offensive skills on the first hotbar slots and the defensive skills towards the back or whatever I want.

Right now, my fingers are bouncing between the F-keys and then trying to find out which skill I want to use and it’s like “Okay, the AoE skill was on hotkey one for fire, now it’s on… four!” And then I switch elements in two seconds and have to figure it out all over again, all the while constantly looking up and down and up and down from the action to make sure I don’t get smeared by the boss while I try and get the most out of my switching.

Like trying to learn a fighting game, I’m constantly fighting the urge to just start button mashing my attack hotkeys between element switches. I’m trying to memorize an efficient “rotation”, but it would be nice to have the tools to make it easier by arranging my hotkeys.

Edit: Okay, I decided to stop trying to switch between all four elements and do a couple of attacks each. It was nice putting buffs on everybody around me by switching attunements constantly, but the stress from trying to pay attention to a dozen things at once is ruining my fun. I’ll just stick to two elements for the sake of my sanity.

If they were to make it where I didn’t need to hold the right mouse button to look around, it would be great. They could even go the extra mile and let us put a crosshair on the screen above our characters to use for targeting and quick AoE casting. And then I could bind skills to my left and right mouse buttons. If that happened, it would make a huge difference in enjoyment for me, especially when playing characters with a large amount of skills like an elementalist.

Things that have a longer range than you’d expect on their melee attacks. Griffins are the worst. Most risen are pretty bad too.

It counts, but the achievement screen just doesn’t keep track of how much exp you have towards the achievement. Once you achieve one of the tiers (one for every 25,000 exp up to 100k) or die, it’ll update. And I’m not sure about the tiers.

I usually buy things from the TP. No reason not to. Even if I walk out and find a better piece of equipment within the next five minutes, I lose virtually nothing because I can vendor the TP gear for 1 copper less than I paid for it. I almost never craft for gear because it’s almost always cheaper just to buy it.

I always go for stats over looks on armor. I’m rarely zoomed in enough to see the details on my or anybody else’s armor. And yet I frequently decide to go through my dye colors trying to find a good look for my armor. Even though nobody will see it. Yeah.

Hmm…
1. Equipment drops have been reduced by 95%. Chests drop rare crafting materials now instead of cruddy blues.
2. Crafting material drops are now a bit more balanced. Bags no longer drop huge amounts of butter and chocolate, and blue crafting materials are more common as drops from monsters that drop them (scales from drakes, etc.). Most herbs (Sage, Rosemary, etc.) drop one additional unit per harvest.
3. Crafting professions are now account-bound instead of character-bound. No more making four characters to have every crafting profession simultaneously.
4. Equipment decay has been reworked in order to provide a more permanent item and equipment sink, as well as encourage community interaction.
4a.Out in the field, weapons will degrade by attacking and armor will degrade by being hit. Heavy armor degrades more slowly than cloth armor to account for soldiers being hit more often. Items degrade less quickly the higher their rarity.
4b. Slowly, as equipment decays, it’ll lose stats. At 75%, the item is slightly damaged and loses 5% stats. At 50%, 15%. At 75%, 33%. When the item reaches 100% durability loss, the item is broken. The player is amply warned each time an item passes one of these thresholds.
4c. Death imparts a not-insignificant amount of damage on the item with the highest durability.
4d. Repair NPCs have been removed from the game. In order to repair an item, you must bring your item and an ingredient to a player crafter of at least the profession level required to make the item. They can then repair the item using the damaged item and the ingredient from the item’s creation recipe. We’ve designed a system where crafters can repair items without actually obtaining them, so nobody has to worry about getting scammed.
4e. When a normal item is fully broken, it cannot be repaired. It must be salvaged or sold to a vendor. We might add a gem-based item to repair broken equipment. Equipment obtained from dungeons can be repaired by using a mystic forge recipe by putting your broken armor in the forge along with a certain amount of dungeon tokens (a fraction of what it would take to get a new piece).
5. We’ve reworked most of the personal storyline to be less difficult: no throwing half a dozen enemies at you at a time. Additionally, the end reward has been fixed and properly gives an exotic item.
6. Toughness has been buffed. Now maybe people spec’d for toughness won’t still get two-shotted.
7. In order to encourage everybody to enjoy the gameplay changes we’ve made that significantly alter every facet of gameplay, we’ve done a partial wipe. Your characters are back to level one with no money, no items, no crafting learned and just beginning on their personal story again.
7a. Just kidding. But I wouldn’t mind seeing a wipe happen once they make the huge amount of changes necessary. And no, it doesn’t mean anything if only I start my characters over.

Edit:

Guided missile technology has been mostly removed from the game. Ranged attacks by NPCs that are “in the air” will now MISS if the target moves out of the flight path. This should allow players to survive if more than one ranged attacker decides its their time to die because, yeah, you’re basically toast right now if that’s the case. And we’re really, really sorry we EVER put this one in the game considering the insane spawn times, health pools and damage output of some mobs.

Oh god, that too. Perfect.

So… they’re thinking of leaving them the same because their experience with one dungeon tells them that in a month or two… everybody is going to magically start having fun with dungeons balanced around near instant death mobs with huge health pools that take no valid tactics except a zerg rush? I think it’s more likely that the people that didn’t enjoy it stopped doing dungeons, wrote the mechanic off, and stopped caring enough to give feedback.

I mean, I haven’t even tried a dungeon yet so I have no place to make complaints, but that must crush the hopes of anybody that doesn’t find the current dungeon setup fun. Hopefully I don’t end up being one of those people when I finally try the dungeons out.

But…judging by their “combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics” line, these aren’t meant to be done by a simple PUG. And I don’t know anybody and haven’t been invited to any guilds (except for the occasional random invitation from somebody who can’t take the time to say hello, which I always turn down), so I might not be able to try them out any time soon.

If you ever need to stop attacking something, you can just hit the ESC button. It’s a bit awkward, but it’ll work when the enemy puts up a retaliation skill or projectile reflection barrier. Sometimes it takes one press, sometimes two, so I usually just spam it until I see the options window come up.

5C.Assassination: If you find somebody by their lonesome, say a lone engineer repairing a leak below deck, you have the option of assassinating him. While disguised, you have an option that, when used on the back of an opponent, instantly knocks them into a downed state (with no skills and no ability to type in chat) and removes your disguise. The downed state lasts 10 seconds. During those 10 seconds, you can perform a finisher “stomp” to kill that opponent. Other than the sound of a body hitting the floor, this kill is completely silent. Once the kill succeeds, you stealth for 5 seconds and attain the disguise of another random enemy crewmate. If you didn’t succeed, either because somebody walked in on you or you failed to hit the enemy in the back, you have a fight on your hands. Skip to 5E.

NOTE: I’m not actually sure how long the stomp finisher takes, exactly. Times will need to be tweaked for that.

5D.Survive: Try not to stand out. When you’re running around on the enemy ship, watch out for the guy you’re disguised as. He’s going to know it’s a saboteur if he sees a copy of himself running around the ship. And don’t stand around by another saboteur with the same disguise (lol). If somebody comes up to you and whacks you, don’t panic! He doesn’t see the damage numbers fly off of you (or any other damage feedback indicating an enemy) because you’re in disguise, but if you take off running or drop disguise and open up on him… skip to the next paragraph.

5E.Fight and Distract: If you’ve failed miserably at your job, you’re just going to have to bring down as many people as you can with you. Or maybe you simply attacked somebody on purpose. In any case, the ensuing fight should be heard by anybody above deck with their game not muted and enemies are going to pour down after you and brutally kill you. But hey, maybe that distraction is just what your teammates needed?

Okay, I wrote out some additional info that I think sounds entertaining. Let me open with a list of general mechanics:

1.Everybody is level 80 with base HP.

2.Everybody has 75 trait points to allocate when they join. Traits don’t add stats, but the minor and major traits work. Most traits probably won’t be effective in this mode.

3.Weapons are all standardized. Every greatsword does the same damage as every other greatsword, though they can look different.

4.Armors are all standardized. Armors from the same class all have the same stats, though they can look different.

5.Players do not heal automatically. There is no downed state. At 0 life, you’re dead. You can only be resurrected by other players. If you die on the enemy ship, you’ll respawn on your own ship in X amount of seconds. There is no gear repairing and you won’t lose a ton of money or achievement progress for death in this mode.

6.Cannonballs, when they hit a player, knock back and always deal 8000 damage (unless the target is under the Protection buff, perhaps?). Most classes will be killed in two cannonballs. Warriors and Necromancers can survive until three because they have higher base HP.

7.Utility skills can be swapped at any time, unless they’re on cooldown or you’re in direct combat with somebody.

I probably lost about 75% of the people reading this, didn’t I? I’m trying to create this mode to have direct player to player combat at a minimum. Because we already get that plenty elsewhere, right?

Activities:
1.Ammo replenishment: Players will run back and forth between the upper deck and the lower deck carrying cannonballs to put in an ammunition stack. The cannons will draw from this ammo stack, and if there’s no ammo, you aren’t doing any damage to the other ship or its passengers.

2.Healing and protecting: Because players don’t heal naturally, can be killed easily, and have to be resurrected, player healing and protection makes a big difference. Classes that are good at healing, such as water elementalists and guardians and engineers, will be loved. Also, during a strafe when the cannonballs are flying, utility skills that reflect or absorb projectiles will come in handy in guarding your cannoneers and other important areas against enemy cannonballs.

3.Shooting the cannons: The cannons can either be AoE target-type or aim-and-fire type, depending on what the devs want. Other than that, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Aim at the enemies themselves to damage/kill them, or aim at the enemy ship to deal damage to it.

4.Repairs: When your ship takes damage, noticeable cracks appear in the wood that your allies can use a repair kit to repair. The repair kit is received from a certain place on the ship and replaces your weapon skills. Repairing a crack uses a channeled skill that slowly restores some (but not all) of the lost HP from that part of the ship. Also to be aware of are fires that start above sea level and leaks that start below sea level as the ship takes damage. Engineers need to seek out and plug/put out these leaks/fires, as they act like slow DoTs in the parts they’re on. Slow, but eventually deadly.

5.Infiltration: When the two ships are within close proximity to each other, an individual can go to the mast. The mast has a rope hanging from it that he can use to swing to the other ship. That doesn’t actually happen, because he’d be killed instantly! Instead, the player in question appears at a random place on the deck, stealthed for 10 seconds, and disguised as a random enemy crewmate. The stealth is used entirely to find a place to pop out that won’t give away his arrival. After successfully slipping into the enemy crew, there are several activities:

5A.Ammo Sabotage: When you sabotage ammo, there’s no noticeable change. Except when the enemy cannoneer goes to fire it, it explodes inside the barrel, dealing the cannonball damage to him and anybody around the cannon and knocking him/them back.

5B.Repair Sabotage: Whenever you find an area with a leak that has been plugged recently, you can remove the plug so the enemy ship begins taking damage again.

Continued next post.

That sounds amazing. Two huge warships strafing each other while the players from either team try to shoot cannonballs and destroy each other’s ships.

*People lug cannonballs up from below deck to put in a pile of ammo that the cannons fire from.

*People grab toolboxes and stuff to try and (slowly) repair damage done to the ship.

*Players hopefully have a way to disguise or stealth themselves and get onto the enemy ship to sabotage their operations (or simply attack them if they’re suicidal).

Bonuses for certain classes for certain activities, like engineers repairing, fast classes get an inherent bonus to the speed they retrieve cannonballs, thieves sabotage things faster, and I guess they’d have to come up with something for the other classes.

Although it might get boring for the people lugging cannonballs and there might need to be some additional activities, I could see this being absolutely glorious and a really fun alternative mode of PvP to play.

Edit: Actually, it doesn’t sound very great by reading what I wrote here. I’ll have to make a more substantial post with some more detailed mechanics.

(Why do I only see “Permalink” options below posts? Would have been nice to have quoted the entire post I wanted to respond to.)

Every mission.

Every single one.

Pretty much this. Every time I try a character’s personal story quests, I spend nearly the entire time running in circles trying not to get destroyed when the game spawns 7-8 enemies to attack me at once. I’ve pretty much given up on my personal story quests. Aside from the issues others have mentioned, here are a few spots that stood out to me:

-On my Norn Guardian, I was doing my story quest to get back the stolen heirloom horn. When I got to this dude’s inn, I got a cutscene where this guy blew the horn to summon monsters. Okay, end cutscene. I am now surrounded by 7-8 Ice Imps that deal 300 damage per hit. I have 800 HP. My first death happened very quickly.

As I discovered, the only way to complete this mission is to, before the cutscene plays, RUN AWAY! Now the enemies will spawn and not own you instantly. Now you have to wait for Eir, Garm, and the Inn owner guy to get killed. Then, you can pull each monster individually.

I expected the mission to be over after killing the Ice Imps, but no. Next, I had to deal with 7-8 Ice Elementals. After that, 7-8 more Ice Imps and a Veteran Ice Imp. All one or two at a time. Eventually I got it done, but that was not fun at all.

-Later on that same guardian, there was a quest that involved some Dredge sonic weapon. I was at the Priory headquarters and to kill some Dredge attacking the Priory. It was difficult, but doable. I still had to run around for my life a couple of times, but that’s not the real issue.

I was tasked with killing the leader, whose name was Russian-sounding and I don’t remember. I had to cross a bridge to get to him. There were mortars firing at me constantly, each hit doing about 30% of my life and with a HUGE AoE. On the bridge, I kid you not, were about 30 dredge in formation. WTF?

So I was like “Okay, I’m obviously not supposed to go across the bridge. I’ll be killed instantly! I’ll see if I can find a way around.”. There was a path down the mountain that led to another path up the mountain behind the dredge forces that seemed like it would have made a good solution EXCEPT it was barely outside the bounds of the instance. Fail.

Eventually I gave up and decided to simply run through the dredge forces on the bridge and hope I could get far enough away from them on the other side that I could lose agro. It worked. But it didn’t work because I’m some sort of godly blockade runner, but because none of the dredge other than the leader even agro’d me.

I couldn’t believe it. Apparently that legion of dredge was content to simply sit there while I walked through them and killed their leader. There’s no way that could ever be how they planned it, there’s just no way.

-On my Asura Elementalist, there came a time when I had to rescue krewe member B after krewe member A betrayed us. Going through the complex to retrieve the code for the jail was difficult, but fortunately I let Mr. Sparkles draw agro while I finished them off one at a time. And then came the end.

As soon as I freed my krewe member, the area boss came in with his two companions. Senior Inquest Engineer, a ranged enemy with some powerful ranged attacks. He was level 10. I was downleveled to level 8. You all know what happens when you have to fight something two levels above you when you’re that low of a level, right?

So after dying once, but managing to kill his cohorts, I attempted three or four more times to kill him, but ended up running away because his attacks took a huge amount of life because he was higher level than I. I thought I was going to have to give up for the first time, but by some miracle, he suddenly decided that he would stay agro’d to Mr Sparkles and I was able to kill him.

That engineer had a tendency to appear out of thin air next to you after you ran away. I’d be like “Okay, I got away, time to start rezing Mr. Sparkles again”, and then he’s appear out of thin air next to me and I had to run for my life again. Eventually I got him rez’d, but it was a real juggling act. You could not PAY me to go through that again. I dread to see what lies after that.

Edit: While I was writing that, Dee Jay came in with his post. I think we’re talking about the same guy. Maybe.

Durzlla.6295:

Actually…. toughness and vitality scale BETTER at higher levels then lower levels… so you’ll have to do the testing with those ones at max end to get accurate results, and if you’re getting hit by hyenas for 900 damage i’m assuming that it’s in the charr starting zones… because i know my ranger pet hyena does significantly more then 900 damage, more around 1300 give or take 200…

I’m assuming that you mean that when you get to a higher level, your base HP is higher, which makes vitality’s 10 HP per point not make as big of a difference as it would in the lower levels and that that reduction in effectiveness makes toughness look better?

Or do you mean that, like, when I’m level 80, 200 toughness from the 20 trait points reduces damage by more than it did when I was level 40 with the same 200 toughness? That would seem totally backwards.

In any case, I’m a bit skeptical that toughness is going to increase in effectiveness as I approach the cap. Still, it’s possible that it’s totally okay at level 80. Even if it is, wouldn’t it be nice if the stats were valuable throughout the game instead of just at max level? Especially since this game is apparently about the journey and not the endgame?

The Hyenas in question were in the Fields of Ruin area, level 30-40. My guy was slightly over 40 at the time.

My testing wasn’t exactly extensive, but I almost didn’t notice a difference after my thief spec’d into toughness. The opening attack that Hyenas use did about 900 damage (straight damage, no condition damage) before putting 20 points into Shadow Arts (toughness). Afterwards, it did 800 damage. That’s such a small difference that it’s probably within margin of error (IE: normal damage variations).

I then went to a nearby group event and got hit by a normal attack for more than half my life. I could have at least had a good chance at surviving two hits if I’d dumped those 20 points into vitality.

So… I don’t know. Somebody is gonna have to do some more extensive testing. At best, it seems to either reduce damage by something like 3% per 100 toughness or like -1 damage per 2 toughness. Not counting any kind of level scaling.

Maybe defense doesn’t reduce straight damage or a percentage of damage like it does in other games, and instead does something a little less tangible like reduces enemy crit chances against you and/or increases the chance of a glancing blow against you.

Quoted from an earlier post:

We also added the new Healing attribute to take some of the pressure away from toughness being the most important defensive attribute and to create an additional option for players who wanted to emphasize a support role.

I can’t believe they actually said that.

There was a thread in Players Helping Players (before the subforums were created) where players, including myself, were comparing vitality and toughness. I myself have experience switching characters from one extreme to the other: tons of toughness to none and vice-versa. There was also some guy that spec’d into toughness and went to test it in that thread.

In the end, we found that toughness actually did very little to reduce your damage taken (especially since condition damage ignores it) and that vitality was pretty much better in every way. Vitality is really the only way to go if you want to survive longer.

So since healing is also worthless, I guess that’ll make finding the best builds easy: focus on one that uses power, precision, and vitality. Coincidentally, I think almost every character I have is already running that kind of build. Meh.

I’m glad I’m not the only one annoyed by the slowness of the base movement speed. My Elementalist has air traits constantly so I can switch to it to get around faster. My Thief has Signet of Shadows on the bar constantly. My Guardian has Retreat and Save Yourselves! on his bar so he can juggle those for swiftness. I’d like to have those trait points and/or utility bar spaces for something else, but it just detracts from my gaming experience too much to be moving around at a glacial pace. I’ve even taken to calling combat mode “Molasses Mode” because of the slowness of the movement.

There’s an optical illusion that makes it worse for larger races. Running around at base speed on my Asura seems much faster than it is, but running around at base speed on my Norn and Charr just feels painfully slow.

I’d like to see some mounts too. There may be fast travel via waypoints, but GW2 is much like Skyrim. In both games, I didn’t like to fast travel that much because there are always interesting things happening along the way. There are other parallels. Skyrim has fast travel, we have fast travel. Skyrim has sprinting to get around short-term, we have speed boons. Skyrim has horses for getting around longer-term, we have… nothing.*

*Here’s where the trolls are reaching for the reply button to tell me that I should go play Skyrim instead. Please, try and restrain yourselves.

Things not rendering properly doesn’t just affect stealth for thieves.

Trying to deal with certain skelks is a huge pain because they go in and out of stealth so often. They make the “poof” effect that means they’re coming out of stealth, but it takes 2-3 seconds before they finally render on the screen. They can be damaged before then (and damage you), but cannot be targeted. The worst part is how you only have a second to get in damage before they go back into stealth again.

I think this delay is also happening when enemies are respawning. More than just a few times, I’ve had an enemy respawn next to me already within a split second of finishing the cast of a skill, which implies they’ve respawned and been there long enough to agro me and start a skill cast before rendering on the screen.

Rendering in this game needs work in general. There are a lot of events that feature so many enemies that the game doesn’t render them all. One event stands out to me, which is the event in the Norn starter area where Ice Wurms attack a nearby lodge. There are always huge delays in things being rendered in that event.

I thought there was just a cap on the amount of things that could be rendered around you at any given time for performance reasons, but there don’t seem to be any options for it. Maybe it’s a bug?

It would be great if a few things could happen to the discoveries tab that would allow crafting discoveries to be attempted easier.

At the moment, for my cooking guy, I have to take every ingredient out of my collections stash before I can find new discoveries. There are so many, that I have to take some out, identify the ones that don’t have available discoveries, put those back, take some more out, identify the ones that don’t have available discoveries, put those back, rinse and repeat until I’ve gone through all of the ingredients I have. This takes a significant amount of time.

I suggest that there be a gear on the discoveries tab, similar to the one on our inventories. Clicking on it gives you three options:
*Option one is “Show Higher Level Recipes (Off/On)”, which will make it where items that are “redded out” won’t show up in the discoveries panel.
*Option two is “Derive List from Collections (Off/On)”, which will let the game populate the discoveries tab from what you have in the collection tab, eliminating the need to sort through them manually.
*Option three is “Derive List from Bank (Off/On)”, which will let the game also populate the discoveries tab from things in your bank tab.

Alternatively, a way to know if there are available recipes for an ingredient by looking at the tooltip would work. There are colors for not having the crafting profession at all (white), having the crafting profession but not enough skill (red), and having the crafting profession and enough skill (green). Maybe two more should be added. If you have the crafting profession and the skill to use the item and: there’s a discovery to be made and you have the skill level for it (yellow/blue?) or there’s a discovery to be made but it requires a higher skill level (purple?).

The tooltip method would have the additional benefit of letting you look at a crafted ingredient’s recipe tooltip to see if they have available discoveries before you actually craft them. No more going “I wonder if this Simple Dressing has more recipes. (/crafts it) Nope, wasted ingredients. (/toss)”

We can already craft items straight from ingredients in our collections tab, so they seem to be open to these kind of conveniences. I imagine a lot of us cooks would be grateful for this.

Edit: Wasted thread. Just saw the Sept. 8 update:

· Players can now do the production portion of crafting without having to pull the resources from their bank. Note: Discovery still requires use of the bank. This is something we would like to change but decided that getting part of the way there was better than making players wait for the entire fix.

Sneakier.9460:

Toughness improves your heal efficiency

I don’t really think so. Toughness might improve healing efficiency when you consider healing amount versus damage dealt by enemies, but the ineffectiveness of toughness means the difference will be minor to the point of not being worth considering.

On the other hand, after taking a good hit or two, there’s a good chance the guy sporting toughness is going to be eating dirt, whereas a guy with vitality would likely still in the fight. I’m pretty sure in that case, the healing efficiency on the vitality guy is infinitely greater. I’m not sure healing even affects downed people.

Currently, I’m aiming for a stealing and stealth build. I’m a bit short at the moment, but eventually I’ll have 15 points in Deadly Arts and 20 in Shadow Arts (with Mug, Cloaked in Shadow, and Hidden Thief major traits). When I use Steal, I’ll:

1. Steal a skill
2. Deal Damage to the opponent and
3. Weaken*
4. Poison and
5. Blind it.
6. Also Cloak Myself

All at the same time. It makes a great opener, and the stealth gives me a moment to check what I stole and decide if I want to use it in that fight before I backstab the enemy and proceed to tear it up. A good amount of the time, single normal enemies don’t even get a chance to attack before they die.

It is kind of squishy though, despite all of the toughness from Shadow Arts. Don’t expect to be very successful 1v1 against veterans or especially champions in melee. I keep a bow on switch for AoE for events and a pair of guns in my inventory for single target damage for event bosses.

-* I can’t be sure this will apply because of the poison inflicted from Serpent’s Touch, which poisons the enemy during stealing. It might mean “poison” as in the poison-type utility skills, but I’ll find out. Gotta hate ambiguity.

People keep saying that toughness is better against raw damage, but I’ve only seen evidence to disprove that.

I have a thief in his 40’s. My thief went from being totally about precision and vitality in traits, armor, AND accessories, to focusing on toughness and power in his traits and gear. Despite the huge increase in toughness, the difference in enemy damage was seriously minor. So minor, that I can’t be sure that it wasn’t just variations in damage. My guy has 3600 life with all that toughness. The first event boss I tried around my level, a Queen Bee, hit him with an attack (and not like a special charge-up high damage move) for more than 1800 damage. If I took everything in toughness and threw it into vitality, I could probably reach around 6000 hp (5600 just with 20 points in Acrobatics instead of 20 in Shadow Arts), which would at least allow me to survive two hits.

My guardian tells a similar story. My guy was trying to be a tank, going for toughness on almost everything including traits. In his 40’s, I decided it wasn’t working out and respec’d him from max toughness traits/armor/accessories to vitality-based traits/armor/accessories. Again, I didn’t notice a big difference in damage received when going from one extreme to the other. But my health pool was much larger, which translated into much greater survivability in almost every aspect of PvE.

And yeah, I’m talking strictly PvE. Maybe toughness works better in PvP, but I don’t have any experience with that yet.

I think it would be better to just pump vitality. From what I can tell, toughness doesn’t have much of an effect at all.

My thief just switched from a ranged build to a melee build with his toughness trait maxed and a bunch of toughness on his armor (instead of pumping damage stats) and I honestly didn’t notice a difference in incoming damage. Hyenas in the area still hit for 800+ damage per hit. I still get hit for half my health or more by any group event boss’s attacks (and even some tougher veterans).

I had a similar experience when I switched from a toughness-based guardian to a vitality-based guardian: the damage I take didn’t noticeably change, but my survivability actually went up dramatically from all the extra health.

It’s almost like armor is completely broken and doesn’t do anything, but I find that hard to believe. But on the other hand, a lot of things would suddenly make sense. Whatever the case may be, the lack of effectiveness combined with the fact that it doesn’t affect condition damages makes vitality the best choice by a large margin.

Svenn.5209:

1) People aren’t going to pay much money for non-max level stuff. Leveling is VERY fast and easy in this game, so people just aren’t inclined to spend much money on crafted stuff when they will out level it in a couple hours. I bet that some of the max level crafted items will sell for quite a bit.

Yeah, people don’t really need crafted gear because of that and the way equipment drops are all over the place. Even if they did need it, there would probably be a glut of equipment around simply because people need to make so many pieces to level their skill, and every single person can craft everything.

Regarding level 80 exotics, I’ve seen some complaining that those aren’t worth crafting either; that the price that the finished product sells for is less than the combined cost of the materials.

2) There is plenty to work towards to improve your character. Traits make a huge difference. Unlocking new utility skills lets you try out a variety of builds. Unless you’ve got max level exotics there is better gear out there to get.

Outside of just pure character improvement you’ve got the personal story to complete, achievements to earn, map completion, and more. There really is no lack of things to do.

Traits are nice for the stats, but a good amount of the time the perks aren’t useful. Kind of like utility skills. I kinda wish the perks were a bit more general, because while I want the power from Shadow Arts, practically none of those perks are useful for my ranged thief. That kills a lot of the enthusiasm for me.

I try to avoid the personal story. There difficulty of these quests is far too inconsistent. It has the tendency to throw tons of mobs at you at once, and most of my characters can’t handle it. Too often, I find myself running for dear life because suddenly a bunch of mobs spawn (especially right after cutscenes). I usually have to run until they de-agro, then return and pick them off one at a time, which isn’t very fun. I’m also trying to get the Experience Survivor achievement, which means I need to avoid high risk activities.

Achievements are nice, and they’ll be even nicer once I find out what to do with these points I seem to be getting from them.

I have one character focusing on map completion. She’s currently at 41%, but most of my other characters don’t bother completing maps. There’s only so many times I can run around towns and complete tedious chore hearts before just the thought of doing them again has me reaching for the “exit” button.

My interest is waning as well. I have four characters, three of which are in their 40’s and the other is 15. I think the lack of motivation is stemming from a few different things:

1. I like crafting things and selling things. As we all know, currently the market isn’t much of an economy, with crafted gear selling for less than the cost of the materials to make them. That drives a stake between two things I’m fond of. Either I can sell the mats and make a profit, or I can craft with them and take a loss. People say the economy will straighten out over time. I hope they’re right, because I’m not so confident.

2. Skill woes. I’m not too fond of the way you can have every weapon skill for a character by level 5 (or sooner). I’m hoping that there’ll be more to work toward later.

By level 20, I’ve pretty much got every skill I’ll ever use. By level 35-40, I have the elite skills I want. One problem here is that half the skills of any class aren’t worth putting any points into. Am I going to put 15 skill points into my thief’s elite skill that gives me venom that turns one enemy to stone for one second and has a 45 second cooldown and a casting time? Dear god, I want to burst into laughter just thinking about it.

So they’ve driven a wedge between two of my favorite activities, and after level 35, character growth is limited almost entirely to traits and gear. So I pretty much lose motivation shortly after hitting level 40. I might start a warrior soon, since I’ve seen other people using them and they seem incredibly strong, but I’m not anticipating going through the same areas again (or coming up with a decent name for the character).