Guild Wars 2

All you need to do in order to make race change viable is to simply reset the personal story back to the beginning and give the same choices as they do in beginning.

Hell, with same effort they could even do class changes into a possibility if they wanted to.

Yea, the player would have to play the personal story all over again, but honestly, I think it would be worth it and it would be a service I most certainly would pay for in order to turn my Norn into something whose weapons and armor don’t clip constantly.

I’m still wondering why don’t they let people re-play personal story with their current characters anyhow.

Totally would love to see some mace/warhammer on engineer.
Also, I’d like to ask those who think that they don’t fit engineer, how exactly does bringin a wrench/screwdriver thingy to a fight in the first place?

Why would he risk ruining precision tools? Not to mention why would an engineer not use his regular shield over a giant cogwheel in the first place?
Let’s face it, using toolkit as a main melee weapon for engineer is dumb.
Toolkit should be a buff/heal tool for turrets, not a dysfunctional melee weapon.

Personally, I use toughness+vitality+power gear.
It may not be optimal for most roles, but is versatile as hell.

You almost never get 1shotted when you use that gear and the damage reduction isn’t that great.
For PvE I recommend using tough+vit+power.

I do have power+precision+crit dmg gear as well, but I prefer the extra survilability.
Of course, if you’re using grenades on PvE, you might as well try to maximize your damage output.

The toolbelt skill has cast time and the mines scatter randomly.
Even if I’m standing on the enemy while I use that skill, it’s still not quaranteed that even half mines will hit if i detonate them instantly.

Well I for one am of the opinion, that we really need a long range weapon on the engineer to begin with.

Pistol needs you to be close in order to use flame shot, which is it’s most damaging ability.
Shield abilities are both used mainly for close range CC.
Rifle has 3 close range abilities: blunderbuss, jump shot and overcharged shot, all of which require relativaly close range to be effective.
Grenades on the other hand can’t hit moving targets effectively at long range either.

Something needs to be done and I’m of the opinion that engineer should have an ability to swap weapon modes.
For example, rifle having long range and close range mode.
Shield for example could have a CC mode and the mode that was originally designed for the shield, which allows the absorbtion of enemy ranged attack and then the ability to use that attack against enemy.
Pistols… I dunno, condition/raw damage swapping?

Worked the last time I checked and I checked 3 days ago.

Torvarren.6295:

Does no one else remember Togo and Mhenlo through factions? And Kormir though Nightfall?

AT LEAST you don’t fail a mission when Trahearne goes down. That was my number one rage reason in Guild Wars 1.

That would make GW2 the most hardest game in existence.

Also, on the matter of personal story.
It didn’t necessarily have to be about you and trahearne fighting dragons, they could easily have been done by dungeons and dynamic events.
Trahearne’s story could have been done via dynamic events and it would have felt much more natural.

The personal story should focus on the story of the hero, it doesn’t need to be a story about how you led an army to beat a dragon, it could be about how your character solves problems that affect his community/factions.

As character joins one of the orders, so should the orders in turn lend resources to help character to solve the problems in his community.

What I’m basically saying, keep the story of Trahearne and the player character seperate. They don’t need to know each other, they may meet briefly and on occasion, but the player character will go on his own journeys before any sort of character developement betweent these two takes place.

Drede.4701:

I would much rather have Sieran or Tybalt than boring old Trahearne. Boringness aside, why do we have a necromancer in the newest race in the game suddenly an expert on all things zomb… err i mean “Risen”? Seems like a conflict of interest having a necromancer killing undead, not that he does much killing anyways since he is worthless in battle and usually dies near the beginning. I think a game of Mad King Says is in order. "Your Mad King Says… say the word “Claw” correctly. Oh sorry Trahearne, time to die!" smh

or as another user put it so well “Your Mad King says… Display emotion! Any emotion is fine, show me that my subjects do not lack passion!”

To be perfectly honest, I’d be much more comfortable having Mad King as the leader of the pact than Trahearne.
He at least was an accomplished leader and all around lovable fellow.

Dead.7385:

You guys just don’t understand the writing of Traehern and his voice over. He is a physical representation of the player. He doesn’t care and we don’t care? See? Were a perfect match together. He is destined for greatness and you are destined for greatness. A match made I suppose.

When he reacted to the death of his friends in a motionless and definite nonchalant way I too acted in the same manner.

See were not all that different! We can get along with him.

He is only destined to greatness, because the game won’t allow you to ditch him.
Without you, he would die in the sight of the first disgruntled Moa bird and even if he was dead, the entire campaign could still have been a success.

Trahearne’s leadership could easily have been done by making the 3 factions be lead by a council that largely function autonomously.
The whole magic sword into heart of Orr thing… Well, can you quess which group happens to have an extra holy human sword charged with divine power? (hint: you helped them fetch it)
It would also make more sense that the human holy land would be cleansed with the power of human gods instead with saladbolg.

I really wish they’d fix the whole “throwable turrets” trait.

Completely idiotic build.

For pity’s sake, replace elixir B with elixir gun and get yourself that kit refinement trait.
That’ll give you 3x more AoE heals that stack granting you much MUCH more survilability not to mention if you pair that up with healing turret detonation you’ll get retaliation + a crapton of healing.

When I went to metrica province with my lvl 80 character in almost full exotics, I destroyed everything in my path with 1 or 2 shots except veteran mobs, which took 4 shots.

There is absolutely no reason for further buffs.
You’re almost indestructible with lvl 80 exotics.
You’re either an unstoppable force or an immovable object depending on your stats.
Pulling 6-8 mobs at a time was no problem, since I mowed them down so quickly.

Your complains are irrelevant.
If you truly want to faceroll everything in your path, then all you need is better gear in sync with a good build.

It’s not nearly as powerful as you make it seem.
More often than not you still get killed by the guy in the downed state, even if you manage to land it perfectly.

Just keep attacking and he will die regardless.
Sometimes they can even use FINISH HIM before I get back up and I have absolutely no way of stopping them from doing that unlike certain other classes.

And considering how pretty much 90% of our damage and survival comes from utility skills, it’s pretty hefty sacrifice to give up an utility slot for an unreliable resurrection which is the main reason why I never use it.

Having Elixir S is simply so much better and more reliable.

The problem with the story isn’t the fact that they had to give credit of slaying Zhaitan to another lore character.
The problem is that that they did it in the worst possible way.

The existence of Trahearne just isn’t necessary. There were way better candidates for doing everything he achieved by a character or characters who actually makes more sense.

Let me explain why.
The pact doesn’t need a marshal to begin with. It could very easily be 3 completely autonomous orders fighting for same goal with an agreement of co-belligerence as every order already has a leader to begin with.
Every order gets attacked by Zhaitan at one point + the claw island incident, after that the threat should be enough to motivate all 3 sides to sign at least a co-belligerence pact, if not a even an alliance.
You could still shovel everybody to Orr AND your order would still maintain its identity, as it’s still being led by it’s original leader. (not to mention the focus of the personal story could still be kept on you)

Now to the next point.
The cleansing of Orr
It could have been easily done with Destiny’s Edge and it would have made more sense in lore standpoint.

Well known band of heroes, introduced to every player at very early stage in posession of not 1, but 2 Legendary human swords having divine power in them performing the cleansing of Orr, a human holy land?

Absolutely no reason to invent a new character to perform this as the Destiny’s Edge is quite clearly the more sensible choice.

Why does Trahearne exist? The only real qualifications he has is to become an advisor and even then there are people who have studied the subject longer than his entire race has existed.

There simply is no other reason for the existence of Trahearne, except the fact that somebody fell in love with their own character so much that he thought “You know what? screw the other characters, this is about this guy now.” They literally shove him to your face and expect you to think that he is the next best thing since sex, despite never been given a single reason to like the person.

The real kick in the teeth is the fact that every NPC constantly praises him like he is some sort of holy man and how with him they finally have a chance. Completely disregarding the fact that whenever he goes to fight ANY enemy 1 on 1, he dies.

EVERY SINGLE TIME

Not underpowered, but certainly the most limited and probably one of the most broken.

This is going to be a massive wall of text, but bear with me.
There are only like 3 or 4 viable builds I’ve seen for engineer as it is now.

1st and the most prominent being the grenade engineer, which only becomes available to you get the grenadier perk. It does lots of damage at pretty long range, but can’t really hit anything that moves.

2nd being bomb engineer, which I don’t know too much about. It’s basically a PvP built around gluing a bunch of guys in place and dropping all your bombs on them.
I hear there is a “tankish” build based around healing bombs as well, but I cannot see this being viable without lots of toughness and +healing gear, but at this point you won’t do any damage and you’re kinda useless if your team doesn’t have at least 2 melee guys.

3rd is what I use and that’s basically a glass cannon Tesla engineer build, which is entirely built around getting as much power, precision and +crit dmg gear as you can.
For this build the utility skills are pretty specific.
1. Rifle turret, 2. Toolkit, 3. Personal battering ram.
These 3 have short cooldowns which means you’ll shoot lightning from every orifice.
You’re pretty free to pick whatever you want with your traits as long as you pick static discharge, which allows you to fire chain lightning whenever you use a toolbelt skill.

I’m using 10/30/0/0/30 build, because I wanted that extra crit dmg, 50% faster endurance regen and that AoE cripple on the wrench throw along with having a better firearm and more crit chance.
As a weapon I use the rifle, because it simply does so much more dmg than pistols.

The way you use it that you just keep your toolbelt skills of cooldown as much as you can.
If you use healing turret as your healing skill, you can have up to 5 chain lightnings ready before every fight + the turret detonation. You have lot of burst and the amount of AoE you put out compensates the rifle’s shortcomings rather well.

4th one… Dunno really. There was a flamethrower build where you can stack over 14 stacks of might temporarily on yourself, but once I tried it, I found it to be pretty bad in comparison to the other 3.

I’d also like to point out some traits that do not work as intended or at all.
- Deployable turrets does not allow you to throw all turrets. It only works with healing turret and rocket turret and as such this trait is useless.
- 20% reduction on bomb and grenade cooldowns doesn’t work on grenades
- Extra damage from Explosions, Vulnerability on explosions and frankly anything that procs on explosions doesn’t work with pistol’s explosive shot, thus making pistol pretty weak choice of weapon.
- 20% Extra elixir duration doesn’t work on Elixir X
- The entire stat that’s supposed to reduce the cooldown of engineer toolbelt skills doesn’t work and fails to give any benefit.
- Elite supplies claim to grant mortar extra range, but this is a lie. It does nothing to it
- Scope traits claim to give you 10% increased crit chance while standing still, but this does not show in your stats, nor does it show up as a buff. That means that it’s questionable if it works or not.

There are also some others I think, but I can’t recall them as of now.
Another thing worth of note is that while a kit is equipped, you lose all stat benefits from your weapon. This means sigils are useless if you’re not using the tesla build.
It also means that the juggernaut trait, which grants you 200 toughness while flamethrower is equipped gives you infact less toughness than a shield with 90 toughness trait + it’s own stats.

The problem I have with the new Magg defend is that it requires very specific kind of team to do reliably.

Either you need a very VERY high offense, which melts the enemies down or you need MANY guardians.

The Legendary Flame effigy needs one thing fixed.
The crystals fall at such speed that by the time you spot the circle, you’re flying faster than you can possibly dodge.
There is no reaction time on those knockback AoE attacks.

It’s not impossible as it is, but it’s using somekittenunfair abilities.
We managed to kill him although our party wasn’t in full exotics by purely nuking him down to 60% with syncronized (he stops healing at this point) and then we dps:ed him down to 31% (you normally can’t get him below this without nuking) and waited till all of us were at full health and our elites ready and did the synchronized elite drop again.

This does NOT work every time, because the boss sometimes decides to be really unfair and chain knockback you guys while you try to sync your nuking.

POISON IS A MUST!
The boss is almost IMPOSSIBLE without poison on him.
Chill and Vulnerability is very good too.

They need to have an entry level dungeon for lvl 80 gear imho.
The amount of effort you have to go through in order to swap from one spec to another gear wise is such that people will just rather stick with their current gear.

That isn’t the only problem though.

The problem is that they’re “fixing” the dungeons before fixing the problems that plague the classes.
Yes, I understand they may be different teams working on different pace, but right now it just feels they just don’t want people getting that gear, but can’t block the actual entrance to the dungeon.

Unless they intentionally bug the dynamic event so that nobody can get in.

They already did deviate from their design philosophy when they released an incomplete game.

I can name over 6 traits on my class that either don’t do anything, or do not do what they claim to do.
Hell there is an entire STAT that doesn’t give ANY benefit on engineer. (the one you get from tools trait line)
The way the dungeons are designed? Jesus Christ how horrible.
Don’t get me started about Zhaitan.

The way I’ve seen it over 80% of the criticism is valid, if often poorly articulated, 15% is apologist stuff like this and 5% is the trolls and moronic posts.

You’re the sidekick, not Trahearne.

The problem isn’t that we didn’t get to be the chosen one.
The problem is that the personal story is about Trahearne, not you and that the game expects you to like this character so much that they’ll shove him on your face constantly.

Trahearne’s story wasn’t even well told. There was no strife or problems with to his rise for power, everybody just willingly gave the control of their orders to this guy despite the fact that he didn’t have the motivation or the qualifications for it.
I’ve said this once and I’ll say it again. All that this guy has proven worthy to be is an advisor at best.

Trahearne was a completely unnecessary and akward plot device.
Everything he did could have been done by somebody else in the game with more character developement and it would have felt more natural.

The story would have been over 8000 times better if Trahearne would have been replaced with a Quaggan.

Now THERE is a Marshal I can get behind!

To be honest, I really hope they retcon the whole Trahearne thing and make the cleansing be performed by Destiny’s edge with Magdaer and Sohothin, while the pact is ran by a council where each order acts largerly autonomously and you act as a member of it or something like that.

To be honest, just about anything except Trahearne is an upgrade

My problem isn’t the whole “you don’t get to be the hero that saves the universe”
My problem is that “Why exactly does this guy get all the credit despite being so boring and useless”

If you’re going to make a rule that no single player can be this hero who wins the war by himself, then why should you allow NPCs to reach that kind of status?
Wasn’t the whole message of guild wars from the beginning that “Cooperation is the key to success?”

Instead the game falsely glorifies a completely useless and unlikable NPC that you know nothing about.

Basically, I’ve been rolling with grenades and my fingers can’t take it anymore.
So, I need a functional build that works that doesn’t use grenades or bombs.

I tried turret build, but throwing turret trait doesn’t work and turrets don’t crit and die easily.
I tried making elixir build, but the trait that reduces the elixir cooldown doesn’t work on Elixir X and offensive abilities were very limited.
I tried making a pistol build, but explosive shot didn’t gain bonuses from explosive traits.

So, can somebody please guide me to either a tanky build or a dps build that actually works properly.
Would love to use guns if possible but the bottom line is NO bombs or grenades.

Deployable turrets works currently, but only in the heart of the mists, which psd me off massively, as I wasted money on retraiting on the build I wanted only to find out that it doesn’t work outside the mists.

bad link, cannot view

Ranger is very close to nature in this game.
Guns on the other hand are a symbol of industry and thus contradict with the Ranger’s theme.

It’s kind of like giving a focus to a warrior.

I would say that it’s allright as long as it doesn’t give any ingame benefit like on Ragnarok online that would try to give you an incentive to do it just for the benefits.

But only AFTER they’ve put in an official RP server.

You know, every staff on necro turns into a scythe automatically.

You know, at the very least they ought to put your order’s armor vendor in your home instance.

They could at LEAST do that.

You could just put them on rotation and adjust the range at which you can hear them. (Though I’ve noticed that there are problems with this in the game right now)

It’s obvious nobody wants them talking all the time and at the same time.
Otherwise it’ll be like that norn who has seen creatures of metal and steam times 20

If you’ve visited Hoelbrak you know who I’m talking about.

Basically, what I’m suggesting here is giving voice acting for every npc, that does that talking animation, but doesn’t say anything.

For example, in the Queen’s throne room there are bunch of people who come in, bow, and then do the talking animation, but don’t say anything.
It just feels VERY unnatural when you see these NPCs “talking” and there is complete silence.

I think what they need more is a timer that shows estimation of how long you need to wait in order to get into the battle.

Also, the ability to queue as a group and the ability to queue on all the battlegrounds simultaniously is required.

The overflow system… I can’t see how it would work properly on WvWvW

To be perfectly honest, I prefer it the way it is, though when I first heard that all trading happened in Trading Post, I thought it was a terrible idea.

Now, I’ve grown to like this system better.

There is actually gambling in the game already.
In charr area, there is one Cow race thing, where you can bet 25 silver for the victor.
I think it was like 1/4 chance in winning.

Teleporting costs over 2 silver per trip easily on lvl 80, but it’s so easy to deal with these goldsinks that you realistically should have no problem if you just bother selling stuff to vendors and auction, instead of salvaging everything and hoarding them to your bank.

You expect to get rich by not selling anything? Well, you kinda should have seen that one coming.

Could have something to do with the bugged skills and traits and the fact that many engineer skills are completely useless.

The only viable builds center around using bombs or grenades and once get bored or the finger pain starts to be too much to use these builds any longer, this class has NOTHING to offer to you.

So basically what you can currently do with a toolkit is minor heal on a turret by bashing it with wrench on a toolkit.

Due to the fairly expendable nature of the turrets, it’s more often than not better to have an extra turret than to have the ability to repair them.

What I’m suggesting is giving toolkit the ability to apply temporary buffs on the turrets, making them more and more powerful the longer you keep hitting them with your wrench.

This would give an additional turret fighting style, that instead of concentrating on many expendable turrets, concentrates on a single powerful one.

Of course, this might or might not be a terrible idea, if turrets start scaling properly with the player’s stats.

What are your thoughts?

Yea, I know that feel.
The grenades simply do the best damage with grenadier perk and it obsoletes everything else in terms of range, conditions and raw damage.

It’s so good that it obsoletes Mortar and Elixir X because both of them do less dmg than grenades.

Only thing that I find capable of competing with the damage that grenades do is the piercing 1h pistol bullets, which only is good enemies are bunched together in such a way that you pierce through all of them, while they’re still in the range of the explosions they cause.

The single target damage on that spec is absolutely horrid though, where as with grenades it’s still VERY good.

Wasn’t Apatia in Claw Island as well? Not too sure.

There is a way to get the order skins for a guy not in the order I think if the transmutation stones don’t soulbind the gear.

Basically, you get a non-soulbound item that has the stats you want. (crafted probably)
Transmute that to look like the order item.
Then you put it in bank and ship it to whomever is going to use that.

Though I kinda have to say that once you’ve completed the entire story quest, it would be nice to get access to the gear.
After all, you kinda are an authority figure to all of the orders, so it shouldn’t be too much to ask to get the standard issue gear from them.

I quite frankly see no point in Trahearne being more than a side character.

He is not an inspiring military leader.
He does not have the voice or the appeareance of a military leader.
He sucks balls in combat.
His only utility is the few rituals that he performs.
His voice acting is very poor for a guy that’s not a side character.
He doesn’t even wear proper clothing.

The entire pact leadership could have been done with military council, instead of making them being run onder a leader that overall does Jack.
Instead of making you tag along with quite probably the most boring character in the game, they probably should have gone along with the line that every order does more or less their own thing in the war and your role in it is dictated by your order of choice.

Just because Trahearne happens to know few rituals useful in Orr doesn’t mean he should be the leader.
At best he should be an advisor.

I say that for dual pistols, the character should be using both pistols on the attacks instead of just one.

Also, do something about the mortar.
It’s completely useless and obsoleted by grenade kit and the elite supplies trait doesn’t work on it. The range stays the same.
I’d also like to point out that the trait that allows turret ground targeting doesn’t work either.

It is absolutely horrid.
The whole “pull the enemy towards you” thing is suicidal.
It should be something like “pull yourself towards towards target location” or something like that.

Would honestly love to see engineer use hammers.

Turrets are weak imho, but I use them regardless, because I got bored of grenades and I kinda despise the bomb kit as a concept.