Guild Wars 2

Strategist.6132:

Guys let’s at least be nice to each other:P If I may be free to collect the arguments the OP asked about:

Right now Steal is 35 CD, when traited it is
- 30% from the Trickery line
- 20% from Sleight of Hand
Which makes it ~17,5 seconds if I am correct.

After the HoT release the base CD will be 30 seconds and when traited:
- 15% from Lead Attacks
- 20% from Sleight of Hand
Which makes it 22.75 seconds if I am correct.

So in reality it is actually a nerf instead of a buff.:P
__________________________________

SA: when in stealth, gain initiative regen health cure condi stealth longer reduce dmg in stealth…

We don’t really know the numbers, I think we will get only 1 initiative per 3 seconds and hopefully the heal will stay the same as it currently is. I must agree that this is a powerful trait, but not much better then the current state a thief is in.

Hope that clarifies some things for you!

EDIT: Got the numbers wrong, Thanks Jana.

Just to clarify how the cooldown on Steal works; The Trickery attribute does not reduce the cooldown by 30%, it increases the recharge rate by 30%. Instead of multiplying the cooldown by 0.7, you divide it by 1.3, meaning that the current formula for a Sleight of Hand-traited Steal cooldown is 35/1.3*0.8 = 21.5 seconds. After the changes the minimal cooldown (excluding the new sword trait) will be 30/1.15*0.8 = 20.9 seconds.

Edit: I’m not sure of whether it will work like this after the patch. The wording of the changes actually suggests that it works the same as the other recharge reducers rather than increasing the recharge rate.

Personally I feel that the largos are a relatively generic fantasy race (blue humans with wings attached) that doesn’t really fit into the world and has quite shallow lore compared to, for example, the tengu which have been around since prophecies. Their lore is, as the OP mentions, based mostly on not being known.
However, what actually matters in the end with new races is the appearance – and this is actually another area where i find them lacking. The wings, assuming they are can’t be taken off, would clip through almost every back item (which are the GW2 counterpart of TF2 hats).
So far we haven’t seen what they look like under the mask – would the mask act as their customizeable face in the character creation (meaning that players would have a tough time trying to find a matching armor) or would they get an actual face (thus removing some of what actually makes them largos rather than blue humans)?
Regarding the rest of the largos appearance I’m just wondering what exactly you could do with a largos, that you cannot currently do with a sylvari. To me it seems they’d just end up being sylvari locked to the gray-blue color spectrum when it comes to character customization and variation.
This combined with my personal initial uninterest for a race built entirely around murdering people honorably actually makes me hope that whatever playable race comes next wont be largos. I am honestly fine with the current five races, and might even have preferred if they had stuck with only humans like GW1 – and instead focusing on the various cultures within the race. But that’s just my opinion.

I’d just like to point out that the first known asuran golems in GW1 where originally called G.O.L.E.M. (short for Genius-Operated Living Enchanted Manifestations).
This clarified the difference between the asuran G.O.L.E.M. and other kinds of golems.

Although the personal story has probably got too much voice acting in it to add new ones (especially considering that they’d have to record 10 voice sets to give one new for every race and gender), I’d appreciate if they implemented new combat voice packs.
What I wouldn’t give for a Risen voice pack… DEATH GOOD, EVERYONE COME!

Yep, same for me. The broken equipment filter is really annoying.

Personally I think it would be a nice compromise to reduce the stats of high level players a bit more (especially on the levels 1 – 10) without locking traits and utilities. I want the content to be challenging, but I do still want access to all the customization options that keeps the combat interesting.
Right now I find myself equipping low-level weapons and attack as little as possible when doing low-level events just to make sure that any low-level participants at least have enough time to tag most of the mobs before I kill them.

I do still have my 149 fortune scraps from last year… needed 150 for a backpack.

Well… yes, that’s all I have to say. I miss the GW1 templates, and it would make sense too implement it now that we have free respec in all game modes.

RashanDale.3609:

Toroquin.3605:

the sober ninja.6539:

Sigil of paralyzation will only increase stun duration, not daze duration.

Although the description only mentions stuns, Sigil of Paralyzation does also affect dazes and has always done so.

but didnt they change that some months ago?
when they changed sigil of paralysation increasing fear duration?
and changed the increased daze/stun duration from +1second(rounded up) to the actual value (15%, i think?)?

Yeah I thought so too but I tested it with the necro warhorn daze (2 sec) and it worked, so it seems that they didn’t change that.

the sober ninja.6539:

Sigil of paralyzation will only increase stun duration, not daze duration.

Although the description only mentions stuns, Sigil of Paralyzation does also affect dazes and has always done so.

Skile.1384:

I didn’t know the workaroud, thanks Toroquin.

I hope Anet can fix this anyway.

You can also bind a key to PvP build to access your sigils and thereby allowing you to re-slot them. I don’t know if you can do it in yolo and team queue though.

Sigil of Water and Sigil of Air was said to have had their ICD reduced in the feature pack (water went from 10 to 5 sec, Air went from 5 to 3 sec).

I tested Sigil of Water many times in HotM with different multi-hit attacks (within 360 range of the target), but I didn’t once get it to trigger more than once every 10 seconds.
I did also test a combination Sigil of Fire and Sigil of Air on ranger shortbow auto with near 100% crit chance. They did always trigger at about the same time. Although it was harder to measure than Sigil of Water, Sigil of Air did never ever trigger more than once every 5 sec (should be 3 sec).

tl;dr: The internal cooldown of Sigil of Water and Sigil of Air was probably not changed. Please Anet run some tests yourselves and have a look at the code, as RNG-based ICD procs are difficult to test as a player.

Same goes for all the other condi duration sigils. A temporary workaround is to re-slot the sigil before the match starts, although this is not always possible (such as when joining a hot join mid-game).
It would be nice to get a red response acknowledging this issue, because it does greatly affect condi-related builds (loosing that 20% increase is kind of a big deal), especially for the players that are not aware of this issue and slot a sigil that does absolutely nothing.

Sorry for all the seriousness in my post but I agree. I know it’s sort of a bug fix, but tossing flowers to everyone around you was the entire point of buying the roses, regardless of what the description of the item said. Why do you nerf your own cash shop in this way Anet? Your customers get angry and you make less money. It’s a lose – lose situation.
Is this item included in the feature pack refunds? Just like with the town clothes, it’s no longer the same item that I bought.

“No one helps no loves” – mighty meak.6387, December 11th 2013.

I believe having chest, leggings and boots equipped gives you their corresponding level 80 exotic armor values. So nope.

Interceptor.2653:

^ That doesn’t make sense as an explanation. You have at least 30% boon duration with a GM trait in Acrobatics, so if they made a transcription mistake it should have been 1.3 seconds instead of 1.25.

I didn’t have a chance to pick up this up last night, but I’ll look at it later if nobody else does.

It shows up in-game, when you have 30 Acrobatics, as 1¼ (1+¼ = 1.25) because all boon and condition durations, at least in the in-game description, are rounded up or down to the closest ¼ and the rests that don’t fit into whole seconds are expressed as a fraction. For example a 1 sec condition becomes 1½ seconds with 150% condi duration and 1¾ seconds with 185% condi duration. 30% extra boon duration does therefore make the description of Assassin’s Equilibrium state that it gives 1¼ seconds of stability.

The bleed duration synergizes very well with P/D as it does otherwise have such a quite short bleed duration. With 2p (10p) Deadly Arts and sigil of agony you can boost it up from 4 to 7 seconds. As a cover the 6th bonus is quite nice apart from the fact that it applies conditions that you do already have easy access to.

Sigil of Agony stops working in PvP when you join a match (I have only tested it in hotjoin), and sometimes randomly in HotM. Re-slotting the sigil in the PvP build temporarily fixes the issue in HotM but if I’m not mistaken you can’t do that while in a match. Death does not fix it. Sigil of Earth works while the sigil of agony does not. The slot which I use the sigil on does not seem to matter.

I have one Sigil of Agony (20% bleed duration), Rune of the Krait (45% bleed duration) and 10 points in Deadly Arts (10% condition duration). The total bleed multiplier of this is 75%, which boosts my 4 seconds pistol auto to 7 seconds. It works correctly in HotM, both in the description and when testing it.
When joining a game the description suddenly changes to 6.25 seconds. I tested it against an afk player in hot join and it did indeed tick 6 times (although the player could have been using condition duration reducers). Sigil of Earth worked against the same player.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

I like how they increased the stability’s base duration from 1 second to 1.25 seconds. Not quite something I personally prefer (1.5 base would be just right) but at least they acknowledge that 1 second duration was not worth the GM trait.

Actually it seems they didn’t – it’s a typo they made when they looked at the trait in the trait UI with 30 acrobatics (which gives 30% boon duration). So the base duration is still 1 second but 1.25 with the boon duration from acrobatics.

Yenrah.8532:

Lishtenbird.2814:

4. Make dynamic events worth doing.

• Directly increasing rewards looks like an evident solution, but there will always be something needed to offset inflation which comes with it.
• So probably cosmetic rewards is the way to go, and this can be done with PvE regional reward tracks which lets you gather several types of map tokens in these zones which can be than traded to unlock unique non-tradeable map gear and/or dyes, and possibly traded for other materials (laurels? karma? ascended mats?) once you have too much of those.
• More entertaining (harpy love buff!) and useful (fire elemental powder!) consumables introduced every now and then may increase the interest for events just a bit more.

Nice, but doesn’t seem likely. They apparently can’t find the time to fix events that were constantly bugged since i can remember, not to mention something like that.
But there is an easier way to achieve that without much risk for the economy.
Yes, directly increasing rewards, but making them one time per day for every specific event. Just like it is for the worldbosses.
When you’ve done all interesting events in the area, you have to move to another map or change the character.

This pretty much. I don’t understand why they haven’t introduced a daily reward for each event already. It doesn’t need to be huge, and if the daily event rewards would turn out become the new champ loot, it would probably make players spread out in the world and find new events to do rather than farm the same area/boss over and over again like the champ trains.

(I’m unsure of whether this a bug or an intended mechanic meant to improve performance, which is why i post it here)

The hair textures “in-game” (Left image) does not look the same as the hair textures you see during character creation, character selection and when using Makeover kits (Right image).
As you can see if you click the attached image, the in-game texture has had its transparent fading edges simplified so that they end very abruptly, which IMO looks very ugly.
The screenshots below are enlarged (about the same amount), which is why they have such a low resolution, but other than that I had High textures, High shaders, Supersampling and High resolution character textures (although that option does not actually change you own characters quality) when taking them. Anti-aliasing reduces the problem but does not solve it.
Also, literally every screenshot i have seen, including Anets screenshots, has had this issue, so i doubt it is a computer-specific issue – but if you know a solution to the problem, feel free to post it.
Anyone else who wants to see this changed?

Honestly I’d personally prefer always moving in combat speed over having this huge difference between combat and out-of-combat, especially considering the unreliable and clunky reset-system we have.

The selection aura for the auto-targeting system (which displays a red/green/yellow/white aura around the object that the auto-targeting system will select for you if you use a skill) is still visible when using Shift+Ctrl+H to hide your interface. It makes it much harder to take good interface-free screenshots as you have to angle your camera in weird ways to get rid of the aura.
Also, the aura shouldn’t be visible when the auto-targeting option is off, as it does then not serve any purpose and in my opinion is quite annoying.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

I’ll switch auto targeting then…
but as this is still a bug, it still needs a fix!

Just remember that it will still happen as long as you have a target selected, regardless of whether it was acquired by auto-targeting or not (I play without auto-targeting and still have this issue).

Viking Jorun.5413:

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Viking Jorun.5413:

We’ve already explain it to you. The time between the first and second part was reduced to 0, making it so that you cannot move into position after the initial stun. Stop using your movement keys during pistol whip, as this cancels the action.

Read my text again please. I am not moving…

The game faces my character to the target after the first part of the skill. This is counted as “movement” and so the skill is interrupted as I was unable to move due to Immobilize.

Try it in the game, press 3 while immobilized against a moving target . This will interrupt your PW if the target is not right in front of you.

So… This is a bug as It is not player cancelled

It doesn’t affect me, and I’ve been running S/P for months. In fact, I just went roaming for 3 hours today and didn’t have any issues with it while immobilized. It’s just you, sorry.

It is not just him, I’ve had the same issue and it is very annoying. If your target is not right in front of you, the second phase of the skill will try to turn you, but since you are immobilized you can’t turn, which instead interrupts the skill.

You can after all customize the X-axis position, so it shouldn’t be that much of a problem to give the same option for Y-axis.

You can also dodge forever.

As thief is what I have most experience with:

• Increased the base rate of initiative gain from .75/second to 1/second.

Honestly, 33% might be a bit too much. You are basically increasing the thieves thieffectiveness by 33% and withdrawing any initiative-related nerfs doing so.
I don’t really see why it’s a bad thing that we need to invest trait points if we want that extra initiative – you can often play without it if you play carefully.
From being sort of a requirement, many initiative management traits now looks quite useless, since you reduced both their effectiveness and their demand.

• Shadow Return on Sword. Renamed to Infiltrator’s return. Added a 1/4s cast time.

Good change for a start since it makes CC a bit better at countering S/ when timed correctly, and it will certainly raise the S/ skill ceiling since it will require you to predict and react faster to your enemies actions rather than just noticing that you couldn’t spam 3 any more. The problem of teleporting out of line of sight (as in, for example, teleporting from under the Clocktower to the control point and back again) does however remain.

• Pistol Whip. Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.

Good change, but it might not be quite enough to compensate for halving the stun duration with the global stun duration fix.

• Shadow Arts V – Infusion of Shadow – This trait functionality has been changed to “Gain initiative when you enter stealth.” 2 init.

Great change, as it will make D/P stealth spamming less effective (since I have hard to believe that was intended to be possible in the first place) while hardly touching thieves that are actually fighting.

• Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery. Reduced Vigor duration to 4s from 8s.
• Trickery VII – Bountiful Theft. Reduced vigor duration from 15s to 8s.

I can see where this is coming from, as you want to reduce the general vigor up time and you want to decrease the evades of S/D, but first of you left a number of Vigor on crit-traits (such as Critical Infusion) unchanged, and both of these seems quite pale in comparison. Secondly, on the thief we do at the same time have access to Feline Grace (15 pt acro), which IMO is our most effective endurance trait, and that was not changed. This change might result in evasive thieves getting concentrated more to S/D with high acrobatics, which was what started this whole evasive thief problem in the first place.
While I’m on it I’d just like to mention that the Bountiful Theft-boon steal was not updated to keep stacks and duration with the Larcenous update. Updating that could compensate for reducing its vigor duration.

• Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.

Interesting, but I hope you are aware of that this trait is bugged so that Cloak and Dagger does only heal for 5 initiative, despite costing 6 initiative.

• Trickery 5 – Kleptomaniac. Reduce initiative gain from 3 to 2.

I’m not sure about what harm Kleptomaniac ever did. I hope this is not just a part of reducing the need for initiative traits, because this was IMO a very well balanced trait.

And then finally we have that non-thief trait that has been discussed greatly…

• Earth XI – Diamond Skin. This trait has been redesigned. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%.

… really? After all complaining about Automated Response (Immune to conditions while under 25% health), you’re considering making this?
I’ll admit that I’ve been quite annoyed by AR in 1v1, but it does have clear disadvantages, and it required active gameplay if you where to use it, because of something that your Diamond Skin idea misses; the risk.
To gain the immunity to conditions with AR, you needed to go down below 25% health. First of, this didn’t just not work on, but directly exposed you to raw damage – if a power thief found you in this state you where instant bacon. Secondly, because of the way conditions works, a condition user could wait for you to automatically heal up above 25% hp (because of a minor trait called Transmute, which you intend to nerf) and then condition burst you. When you then drop below 0% hp you’re done with.
The difference when it comes to Diamond Skin is that it has zero risk involved, and condition users will never get a chance to every apply their conditions unless they have a power based friend with them. If or when you manage to get rid of that 10% of their hp, the elementalist will activate the fabulous powers they where known for before the warriors got even better at it, which is healing.

I know that you don’t want to balance your game around 1v1, but really, this is too much.

Hmm… looks slightly familiar…

…What if you did this with two mesmers?

One mesmer reflects the other mesmer’s auto attacks after already making max clones. Do this by using Mirror (healing) and Feedback. Then shatter and see if it shatters all 98234923746 or if it only lets you shatter the maximum clone number.

It doesn’t work on mesmers, simply because mesmers are the only class with a clone cap.

I think it can add additional depth to the PvE. If done right it could make CC more useful in dungeons by adding the task to keep the mobs apart to stop them from rezzing each other.
The watchwork finishing had the problem that the rezzing mob only needed to reach the downed mob to reconstruct, even if it was interrupted during the long animation, but this time it feels a little more polished.

Luckily turrets are useless in any other parts of the game too, so at least you wont need to respec from them.

Yeah, I was afraid this would happen… honestly, there are many broken (as in OP) things about the thief, but Pistol Whip isn’t one of them (Although it was a bit lame when it had 25% more damage and could be combined with a 100% quickness. But that was a while ago.). Seems that the devs were only thinking about the longer stuns when making this change, even though they are the least affected ones.

Shadowstep away and give swiftness (4s) when you are disabled (stun, daze, float, knock down, launch, knock back, sink, or fear). This effect cannot occur more than once every 8 seconds.
…and make it shadowstep you a distance of 120’ in a random direction instead of shadowsteping a random distance in a random direction.
That would confuse the enemy and cause it to miss a lot of attacks if they don’t react quickly. It would also make it change the way you play a little more with a low ICD, as I think a grandmaster should, instead of just being a get out of jail free-card every X seconds (although that might be the point of most ‘On CC’-traits).

Of course, there are definitely horses in Tyria! The only reason that we haven’t seen them so far is their natural camouflage.

Yeah, that last armor shader makes everything look as if it’s made of the same material and it conceals all the other shaders. I’d be so happy if they extended the graphic options so that we could pick the effects we actually like. Same thing goes with the selection aura for me, since I unfortunately can’t keep the other post-processing effects while getting rid of that one (it’s really annoying that it sticks even with hidden UI).

Yes. Message Body length must at least be 15.

It looks very much like match manipulation to me, but on the other hand Anet might not want to ban or upset those who supported them by renting custom arenas.

Just ran into this issue again when trying to level up my engy. As soon as there is a Veteran involved things begins to respawn faster than you can take them down. I was trying to get the chest at Wyrmblood Lake in Dredgehaunt Cliffs, but when everything started to respawn over and over again I ended up popping Snow Leopard form and using its 5 sec stealth to open the chest without being attacked.
A simple fix for this issue would be if you could make the respawn rate scale depending on the number of players present, or at least tune down the respawn rate for mobs guarding chests and skill points.

Hmm… not sure… might be because the entire personal story and most events in Orr is focused on showing how awesome charr tanks an asuran superlasors are.

I do personally like a more technological world (I prefer it over high fantasy), but my primary issue with it was the simple and unrealistic distribution of it between the races at launch.
The asura had all magitech in the game that was usually explained as one simple word. On the other end we had charr who had all the steampunk in the game, and everything charr-made was made of iron and no small amount of gears for obvious reasons. None of these tech types where caught up by any other races and the closest thing to reverse-engineering that I’ve seen in GW2 was an event in Dredgehaunt Cliffs where a human engineer steals some dredge blueprints and makes a personnel carrier of his own.
I think the reason for the watchwork theme was to balance out the technology between the races and that along with the Zephyr Sanctum was meant to show that the humans are a jack-of-all-trades race in a positive way (quite good at everything, not necessarily the best at anything) rather than a negative way (plain bad at everything). Their role at launch was mostly to ask stupid questions to asuras in Lion’s Arch, and I’m quite thankful that we are moving away from that.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

From my understanding, you can’t used Ranged attacks (bow, pistol, rifle) to kill the orbs.

While I never got a successful pistol shot at them, I can tell you for sure that I’ve sometimes hit them with my shortbow. The randomness in this bug does however not become obvious until you try to rally on them – I throw one projectile at them, obstructed. I throw another projectile on them, from the exact same position at a target in the exact same position, hit, rally.
Whether you’ll hit them or not I think depends on the exact starting position that your projectile is sent from, which is randomized (try guardian scepter 1, as the most obvious example, and you’ll see that some of the projectiles come from you left and some from you right). The slightly randomized projectile path combined with an odd hit box makes projectiles randomly miss, and since most of them do… well, they might want to take a look at that.

Also, that charr seems to be Rox (and in the full image you can also see Braham by her side), so i think she represents the F&F arc more than the charr as a race. Would have been fun to see some more depth in the human and charr treaty though.

Hmm… The Tome of Knowledge…
While I don’t at all mind that they sell level-boosting items (even if it would take you all the way to 80), “Using the Tome of Knowledge will grant the character one level and all associated benefits” sound very much like it would reset your health too, just like normal leveling. This only happens randomly otherwise, but if you get an on-demand level up it would also mean that you get an on-demand reset (which also means that carrying a number of them can make you potentially invincible).
I know, it’s silly, they might have already though about and restricted it from being used in combat, and it’s probably too rare to be used in that way anyways but still?

ColinJohanson.2394:

We feel like our fractals dungeon is the perfect fit for this kind of “historical” experience, similar to the way the BMP worked in Gw1. Even better, it already exists and has explanations behind why these slices of time are available to discover and experience within.

In the future, you’ll see certain types of content that was part of larger story experiences be updated to work within the fractals dungeon and return there where it makes sense to do so. Of course, the specific rewards and achievements will not return since those are intended to be completed as the story unfolds, but the content itself will be used to expand out our fractals experience and serve as a place to continue to experience great (and strange) moments in history.

I think what they are looking for is actually something more similar to the Scrying Pool in the Hall of Monuments, which let you replay missions and quests that you had (or in this case hadn’t) done before. I personally don’t want you to create a new F&F-themed dungeon for the fractals, I do just want the possibility to replay content wich is already there, but not available anymore, and I consider it an unnecessary waste of resources to make content that not all players ever has the chance to experience.
If I was away from GW1: Beyond for a few months I’d be warmly welcomed by a chunk of new content waiting for me that I could play at any time at my own pace. If am away for a month from the Living Story I will be not so warmly welcomed by seeing all the content which I missed while the world hasn’t actually expanded a lot. This is the reason why so many players dislike the focus on temporary content.
It should be quite simple to add an npc in the home instance allows you to just replay the instanced Personal Story or Living Story steps without a reward, since some players actually want to do them for fun rather than profit. By only rewarding players that where there under the event they will still be motivated to log in and play if they can, which I assume is the fundamental reason for the whole temporary content focus.

darkace.8925:

I won’t play a Mesmer because it’s not a Mesmer. This butterfly-wielding, clone-creating Illusionist disguised as a Mesmer isn’t a Mesmer.

In most cases they are not even properly disguised as a mesmer. They have just taken the name and color theme. What a shame.

God Of Fissures.8627:

Do you remember when…

…characters had a energy (mana) pool?

…there were health and energy (mana) potions?

While I miss a lot of things from the demos, I can’t say that energy potions are one of them. The GW1 energy system was IMO very well done, but I can’t say the same about what they had intended for GW2. Neither do i miss the time when 60 seconds was considered a very short cooldown for a utility skill (while most of them had at least 120 seconds) and 12 minutes was the default for elites, which they changed about the same time that they got rid of the potions.

Just gonna pop in to show a Jade Sea-inspired Warcraft 3 that I’ve made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Hao3DCgwfzA
I’ve also posted a thread for it in the Fan Generated Content, but I though someone here might be interested in it too.

I’ve always loved creating custom maps/levels in the map editor different games, Warcraft 3 in particular, which some of you might know has a very powerful editor.
Anyways, two years ago i decided to try on a real challenge; recreating the Jade Sea from the original Guild Wars: Factions. Or well, perhaps not exactly “recreating” since doesn’t take place in the same locations, but close enough.
So here is how it looks today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Hao3DCgwfzA
And in case you wonder, it’s not just made for the visuals – it’s also very much playable by up to 8 players.

Origin and Gameplay:
Since a few years back me, my brother and a few friends have had regular LAN parties, where we’ve often played custom Warcraft 3 games. The problem rose when some of us wanted to play Risk games (where you take over territory to earn income used to train units), while others wanted to play more single unit oriented games like DotA.
This map was an attempt to solve this issue; you have one “leader” in each team – Kurzick and Luxon – that uses large armies to control the map. The rest of the players each controls a single powerful “hero” unit which they can use to turn the tide of large scale battles or sneak into the enemy territory to take over or disable key locations.

What has this got to do with Guild Wars 2?
Well, the simple answer would be that I and many others would really like to see a canthan expansion, and I suppose this is my way of showing support for it. I know that it wouldn’t be quite the cantha we knew (Cough Ascalon Cough), for several reasons, and that for example the Jade Sea will probably be a normal sea once again, but I’d still really like to see what they could make with the new engine.

Anyways, as tl:dw for the video i’ll also show you some screenshots below.

KarlaGrey.5903:

Scepter: The auto attack on scepter is just OK. The poison on it should last longer and/or be applied earlier in the chain. I even think the attack speed could be raised 10-15%. I think number 2 grasping dead should have a 2 stack of bleed on it and not 1. Number 3 is only valuable in a hybrid/power based build. This needs to get reworked to benefit condition users.

While I agree with many points, IMO the scepter is just fine and would have been over the top if it hadn’t been for the overkill condition removal that some classes have access to. It is completely projectile-less, which should not be underrated. The auto, while it has low base durations, can be improved by a lot of traits and runes (I use to go with +45% bleed duration from 2x rune of the krait, centaur and afflicted, 20% from Hemophilia and 33% from Lingering Curse), although this may be removed quickly anyways by many professions.
Grasping Dead does also already apply 3 stacks of bleed, although the description only says 1.
Apart from that one should not forget about epidemic. You can even target a pet just to build up bleed and then use it as a target for epidemic since it doesn’t evade.
Also I do personally use skill 3 for life force rather than damage.

DanH.5879:

simple, the a-net morons fail to understand this:
the venom share range is TOO SMALL !
300units is crap
that’s why venom builds will NEVER be on par with raw damage
not with random pug parties anyway…

The funny thing is that the elementalists aura share has a larger radius, while IMO granting better effects (at least in pvp) on shorter cooldowns.