Stat swap on Legendary Weapons is pretty much wasted until we can swap sigils without losing one in the process. As with armor it makes complete sense that legendaries particularly the latest generation (account bound/quest only) can sigil swap. Otherwise there is little reason to get a legendary weapon.
Four map restarts and finally got one that worked. Thankful for the events running on that map this evening.
Still though this event needs to be more stable.
I am exactly one item away from HOPE and it hinges on either one of two completely bugged out events. Everything else is done and ready. Please fix either of these events.
BTW, I will happily take a gimmie on the Branded Devourer Ichor if some admin wants to drop it on my account.
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Sorry to hear about your troubles but glad I am not the only one. Such a long journey to be held up by something so simple. I still need ley line sparks so I guess I will do that and hope one day I can progress.
Both paths are currently bugged making Branded Devourer Ichor impossible to attain.
I have tried two patch resets already and still no luck as the events bug every time I have tried. Please fix or better yet just remove this item from the list. There are already a 100+ gopher quests and this one won’t be missed.
On the flip side getting HoT legendaries are going to be a real problem once PoF hits. A good number of the tasks revolve around groups of players and they will likely become fairly empty after PoF.
GW2 classes are better balanced than any RvR game I have played. I think a lot of people are forgetting just how unbalanced ESO, DAoC and WAR were. There is no class in GW2 that isn’t viable. Sure some dominate the landscape (cough… Guardians/DH… cough…) but they aren’t so OP that a player feels like they cannot win regardless of the skill gap.
I won’t speak to PoF until we can really see what gets built out but the meta right now is finding some balance. There are numerous power and bunker based builds that are very strong in the meta. Condi is still a little too prevalent but the condi utility nerf had an impact.
Best I can tell the Necro is the only one with a significantly strong out of the box specialization. I am sure there will be some unexpected builds but after the weekend PoF feels nothing like the seismic shift HoT was.
Changing the face of war? How about 5 guys spending half an hour to hunt down a perma invis deadeye in SM.
Spellbreaker has a pretty a strong recurring reveal that tethers and pulls. Also what is a Deadeye going to do inside SMC. Players can always drop a trap on a corpse and they have to respawn in a few minutes. Generally the most they can do is annoy and they can do that from the outside.
Vastly cheaper and less labor intensive than a single legendary weapon that isn’t bought from the TP.
I have enjoyed being paired with them. They are a bit too strong for T2 and not nearly strong enough for T1. Basically you get a good week of fights but a bit lopsided and then buried by zergs on BG the next. The core still shows up for the BG massacres which is more than most servers can muster.
The rotational defense on a DH is absurd and it will blow up most classes in duels in the right hands.
Evasion Thief builds are very defense oriented and dish out serious DPS. Chorno Condi Mes is basically the same. Ridiculous levels of defense and very strong DPS.
Necro, 3 life bars and some of the strongest spike condi damage in the game.
Stun Lock Warrior… high defense, solid DPS.
There really aren’t many strong offensive builds in the game when you add it up. Most in a zerg run bunker or hybrid. Same with skirmish. Roaming has a solid mix but that is about the only place you find the more offensively minded builds and most of the them struggle against the builds I mentioned above.
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Just do a small amount of your collection each day in addition to your normal play and you will get there before you know it.
If I did an hour a day, every day and didn’t miss a day… I am guessing it would be 2019 before I got it. Seems strange the new legendaries have the money sink of the old ones (around 3k to craft) and a massive time sink. I can buy an older legendary for a what a new one costs to craft right out of the TP and not spend months cobbling together the parts.
Seems very excessive for one item that not every character can use. I cannot imagine what completionists do.
Is it just me or is the time sync to build one of these obscene? I don’t expect it to be easy but for us family folk dumping a few hundred hours for one item is a big ask.
I just started into Hope Tier 3 and looks like I have a few hundred hours to go. I am not a very efficient player in PvE which is probably contributing to the slog but looks like I could easily grind through 500 hours of game play much of which I have already done countless times before.
Whew… ehhh… guess I will shelve my progress for now and hope they one day allow us to earn some of the necessary components from WvW or sPvP. Might be time to consider outsourcing to my nephew.
Reaper’s Deathly Chill AoE condi bombs are stronger at least in WvW. Scourge abilities are too easily interrupted and the line doesn’t fix the strafing problem. In duels, it simply could not handle stun lock making most warriors, chronos and int thieves a real problem.
That said if you are going up against without very solid condi purges, you are gonna have a bad day. It is also so far the specialization that feels strongest in PoF.
Rifle is clunky. I can get used to it but it doesn’t feel “thiefy” or even “snipery”. Takes a lot of setup to basically do half of what Gun Flame does.
Deadeye is probably stronger with Pew Pew.
Deadeye feels clunky but I suspect once people get the right build with the right rotations it is going to be a seriously annoying class in competitive play.
Prepare to instantly melt in any teamfight, spec brings nothing better for dealing with condis (and there are gonna be a LOT of them)
Whaaa???? There are concerns about the line but this thing can keep resistance up an awfully long time. Featherfoot Grace and Revenge Counter are solid choices.
While I agree with the Healing portion of Sun and Moon being weak the main hand ability is strong. Quickness every 5s is very possible depending on the build a person is facing.
The DPS isn’t low (certainly not high either). The spike damage certainly is low. On rotation it applies pressure constantly with zero downtime on the outgoing DPS. What we are finding is that players going against it under estimate its constant pressure as they are so used to managing big spikes.
Take a DH damage build. They are built to have a high rotational defense with the blocks, invulns, etc and multiple big heals. That makes them a serious problem for spike DPS builds. Miss a shot against them and lights out. Spellbreaker cuts through blocks, rips protection and just doesn’t let up allowing it to fairly quickly grind down even if there are missteps along the way. I think of it as a forgiving sort of DPS.
What this line is clearly missing is any real mobility. That can be offset by the offhand but it does limit the overall potential significantly.
Is it viable for more than 10 seconds as a frontline using a power build? If you compare it with a guard, a staff rev or a vanilla warrior, in a zerg. Or is it a small to mid scaled fights only?
Spellbreaker doesn’t have any useful range and its team synergy isn’t very high. While the Warrior is a natural bunker of sorts seems any roll it could play in the frontline is better served with more specialist rolls.
You can make a strong argument that it isn’t a particularly good in small crews either. Nothing I have seen in the preview leads me to believe that a four man crew is going to switch off of Tempest, DH, Necro and some other utility/DPS class such as Rev or another DH/Necro.
In duels and roaming, I do find it a lot of fun but as some noted above interrupts are a serious weakness. Our int builds on the thief and mes are tearing it apart. Stun lock warrior builds in duels were also a problem. We have to use an offhand mobility weapon to keep strafing classes from being a serious problem. However, anything boon driven gets carved up particularly bunker builds. This thing is a small scale can opener able to drop a DH or Tempest fast… well fast for a bunker build.
Those are my first impressions and can certainly change as people find new/better ways to optimize the line.
In WvW I am finding it is extremely strong in small scale. We were dueling it for hours and it was tearing through builds. Featherfoot Grace is strong. Sight Beyond Sight was also working well with a no Precision build that stacked Power, Ferocity and Toughness/Vit. Bit clunky but I think that could be worked out with DD Runes.
Revenge Counter was melting small groups with condi builds in the mix all night long.
And another “hammer rev op” thread is born…
Rev is a class that in average hands doesn’t feel OP and is often easy to beat in small scale. Give it to a good player and suddenly it can feel very OP especially the condi dueling builds.
Since the stab changes, WvW is pretty much solely about numbers. Back when stab kept players up in the AoE CC, a good 25 man guild would tear through a pug zerg twice its size and then some.
Warhammer was much better at this, and it had a screwed up 2 faction system.
Better in the sense that it only had two realms, way more bugs, more lag (as in 100 players would just about crush the server), populations just as lopsided as GW2, ridiculous amounts of CC, class balance issues that were laughably bad, pointless melee classes and a client that wasn’t secured well making cheating/hacking super easy. It was an utter failure which is why it only lasted a few months.
At least in Warhammer small groups meant something.
Sure people would gather four players together, kit them up nicely, roll out and run into one Bright Wizard that would park them in seconds.
7. Hype. You get to try before you buy.
On FA most maps had a pretty big q and for a while they all did. I assume other servers had a significantly higher population which most likely contributed to their overall server load.
Spellbreaker if it doesn’t get nerfed before release is extremely strong. Resistance uptime is very high, can copy condi stacks to multiple targets, strips boons making DH a nuisance at best, super tanky and dishes out a strong stream of constant damage.
Most Dire Dare Devil condi builds are still strong and have the best mobility.
4 man groups probably won’t change too much. Tempest + Condi Necro + DH + Another Necro/DH or Rev is still going to wreck pretty much everything. Nothing this weekend made me think PoF is going to bring much new to that table. Maybe the new Necro variant but otherwise same bunker, cleansing, grind em down and blow em up setup.
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Spellbreaker makes stacking condis dangerous. I melted a good number of Necros and Mesmers the last few hours with the condi copy.
Aside from a patch, played from 10pm EST to 7:30 EST with nary a crash. FA Server.
Holy crap the q’s… wowsa. Well wrecking people is going to be fun if I can ever get in.
The strong builds at this point are a good mix since the food nerf.
At the end of the day given what is working in the meta it is really hard to call condi the be all end all like it was a few months ago. Players have adapted, skills have been adjusted, condi food took an arrow to the knee. It all adds up to a fairly balanced meta compared to months ago IMO. I get blown up by power as much as condi these days.
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Straegen.2938, imo hack n slach is the way to go, if i reccall that was one of ANet’s options instead the 11111 system.
Gut tab targeting, limit AoE, make sure every class has a built in counter ability like dodge (not a toolbar skill), short runs to fights and layer the gameplay so group organization matters. Make that game along with a fun progression system that has great loot drops and you couldn’t pry me out of it.
GW2 hit several of those but missed on tab targetting (mostly), too much AoE and created a loot engine that is one of the worst I have seen from an MMO.
MMOs have lost sight of the basics in PvP. We don’t need a complex environments for PvP/WvW/RvR. What we want is depth of play that feels rewarding. Bascially make a Team Fortress style game with leveling, loot drops and much larger maps.
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that wasnt my point, what i meant was that a game in alpha and beta stage today typically means the game is about 80% finished which is why players have this unrealistic expectation on game that is in real alpha stage of developement and thus leave dumb comments such as “the game looks bad and is buggy”
I have been playing CU for a while during their tests. Don’t care about the graphics or the bugs as they will smooth that out in time. What I don’t like is the “old school” combat. The game design plays like a game built 15 years ago. Some people like toolbar MMOs, I like action based MMOs. CU unless they plan on completely overhauling the combat (doubtful) is basically another iteration of DAoC for better/worse centered solely around RvR (a good thing IMO). I want to like the game but every iteration of testing just reinforces how old timey the combat feels. Basically macro the toolbar rotations and win.
Crowfall is my hope at the moment. It isn’t much of a hope but it is hope.
As a note, I didn’t like GW2 combat that much until the Combat Mod and later the Action Camera. I tweak the Action Camera but it makes GW2 playable for me.
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Yes we all know why the game is tolling the hardware so much. But if you find the bottleneck and give the machine more of what it needs for the task at hand, then you extend the threshold. Machine is lagging because a resource is running low? Allocate more. But we have no idea how these servers are established or what they are running and it’s not something they would tell us.
It is up to them to solve the problem how they see fit, but it would be nice if something was done after all this time.
The bottleneck is in the threading architecture. At some point threads have to synchronize to effectively validate what is going out to the client. No matter how much iron they throw at it, it won’t solve this basic problem.
This leaves ANet with a few options:
1. Limit the number of skills, traits, etc firing (AKA start gutting AoE and passive ability triggers). This is how a game like Planetside can have so many players. They have extremely simple mechanics and very little AoE.
2. Limit the number of players able to fight on a map (GW2 has one of the largest pools of players that utilize “complex” combat). This is how most MMOs manage the issue and most have this exact same problem.
3. Spend months/years re-writing their thread synchronization model trying to balance security, performance and not break anything. Given they already have one of the best out there for such complex combat and the RoI on this virtually zero, not going to happen in GW2.
There are likely a few other options but I would have to see their architecture up close to know for sure. Being a developer in this space solving high volume threaded transactions in a scaled environment, I can say with some certainty from the outside that if there was some easy solution they would have done it. If throwing several k at hardware solved the problem they would have taken it long ago. 10gb backbones with multi TB RAM and top of the line processors are cheap these days.
Scary that it used to hit for substantially more.
Nice idea but wouldn’t work. Strong servers could just log off during periods of bad coverage (like OCX) to ensure their T3 objectives remained at T3.
Most don’t care about the score. What most people abhor is getting constantly run over by 3x plus their numbers. Stop that from happening and WvW solves 90% of its non-technical problems.
Look at T1. A mercenary group probably cannot stop BG from running up the score so they win but at least during BG’s peak hours the fighting would be me more competitive.
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Outside of giant three way fights WvW runs pretty smooth in the states most of the time. If you are seeing massive lag, it is either as noted above where a VPN will likely help/eliminate most of the issues or you are logging on as a giant battle is raging in SMC.
I still believe allowing guilds from other servers to temporarily fill out a map is their best solution given their limitations. Pretty much anything to help balance the scales would be welcome.
Would be nice to have variations of sPvP finishers for WvW.
Wide but not deep. GW2 has a lot of items, stats, etc especially in crafting. Unfortunately none of this has ever translated into a great depth of play.
GW2 grinds in all the wrong places making much of the more interesting elements locked behind hours and hours or mind numbing boredom. GW2 needs a real loot engine and more complex fighting outside of PvP.
GW1 is too wide with too many skills but its depth of play is substantially greater.
Short answer is P/P with Invigorating Precision and Unhindered Combatant. If you are dying with that setup, you need to practice a bit more. We call it god mode on team chat.
Viable, yes. Efficient, no.
Long range stealth class… in the right hands this has a high potential for large scale OP in WvW. Probably sucks in PvE though.
The PW change is partially a nerf. The stun duration is nice but going down to 4 hits instead of 8 means fewer chances to proc on crit sigils and a reduced effect from IP.
GW2 is by far the best on the PC and there isn’t anything even close. Free and even with the expansion cost still cheaper than anything decent out there.
ESO, its advantage is that it runs on a console and has a much bigger audience there. ESO recently has started to get better RvR but early on it was a complete disaster. Still laggy, still grindy, greater population imbalance issues, LONG runs to good fights that don’t last long enough.
DAoC the more or less original is solid but far too old school and dated. Warhammer was a complete unbalanced mess with tons of bugs. Way, way, way worse than any other major title. Planetside is effectively a shooter not an RPG. CU is far too old school for my liking and still fairly buggy in the betas.
Allods, Rift, WoW… not real RvR.
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So in your 2-3 years playtime of gw2 this trait was useful once, thanks to crazy coordination of a group…
LOL! now go compare it to traits that are useful for you any day and in any situation.
The thief trait “Cloaked in Shadow” is an underrated trait. Small drops trigger it allowing for an easy escape or a nice BS setup. The secondary effect of blinding players when they go stealth makes a Steal extra safe.
I get your larger point as on most classes it is a wasted trait. These falling and downed traits should have been WvW and PvE masteries or secondary abilities to augment lessor used traits. Nice perks but not meaty enough to take on most builds.
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Roll a meta DH, practice a bit and faceroll most stealth builds.
Since HoT, no average player in a meta build should be going down fast outside of multiple attackers. HoT upped the defensive capability tremendously. Three years ago, a thief could burst down even a tanky player fast. That doesn’t happen anymore outside of poor play, bad builds or overly specialized builds caught in the open.
Yeah I more ask because on HoT release things were set up specifically so no one could quickly unlock the elite specs without running the new zones.
Several guild members and myself had them all unlocked via WvW in the first week before they eased up on requirements. It was a bit of a grind but it did go fast.
I hope they re-use the heroics as I am sure many players are sitting on 10k plus but if they implement a similar system it likely won’t take long to unlock quickly.
Please, please no.
There’s so much significance in seeing the weapons and whatnot your opponent has before engaging them to know what to activate and what to expect and when to expect it.
Tonics f’d that up since jump.
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