Guild Wars 2

TabMorte.5297:

Jinn Kazuma.2163:

What would go a long ways towards helping guilds is a built in voice chat. At this point, there is very little excuse to not have one.

The bandwidth for the graphics and sound and all the other data you’re already getting is huge from them. You want to throw in a voice chat client and almost effective double that? Also meaning they have to divert resources that should be supporting other aspects of the game (all those bugs everyone keeps complaining about) to developing, implementing and then supporting it. Also meaning they add further hardware demands for use of the product and that limits their audience and customer pool.

Graphics and sound don’t affect bandwidth as they are served up client side. Only things like combat data, and actor state are marshaled by the server. Chat is usually handled by a separate server in games like this, and I would assume that voice would either have its own server or be served up by the existing chat server. It could also be managed by the instance server if voice chat were specific to dungeons or whatever.

Probably they would implement it to be peer-to-peer like skype since voice chat wouldn’t need to be regulated by the game’s servers.

Regardless, I personally am pretty intolerant of how strangers sound and act on voice chat and would immediately disable the feature should it exist. I only want to talk to people I’ve known for a while. And there are definitely a lot of people, who aren’t elitist like me, but are insecure or awkward about using voice chat.

The crossover of people who are willing to talk to strangers on voice chat, but aren’t willing to coordinate to talk on skype, ts or vent is very small.

Back on topic: Honestly I think it’d help a lot if one could join multiple guild chat channels at once, instead of only the guild being represented.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I simply feel misled. Why should I stick around and spend time and money on a developer I can’t trust who is taking their game down the same path that hasn’t worked out well for every other mmo to release since WoW?

And it makes me sad because all the core mechanics of Guild Wars 2 are really strong.

It also concerns me because power creep and separation of power levels between pve and spvp will cause a balance rift. Or a scarier version: they start upgrading the gear in the mists and cause scaling issues guaranteeing that the competitive aspect of the game will never be balanced.

Ascii.9726:

Naaa they stated that the increase was not the 1% intended. I did alot of testing and it was around 0.21% after various tests with damage and condition damage.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Death-Shroud-HP-Pool/first#post583355

For all the workings out.

You should really read through the rest of that thread. If your tests were done using a combination of condition damage + direct damage then your numbers are off.

Conditions and direct damage appear to affect life force differently, and every test I’ve done where condition damage and direct damage are isolated show soul reaping having absolutely no affect on effective hp in death shroud.

I agree that epidemic is too good in some situations, but then whenever there is only 1 enemy it is useless. If it were changed to a signet so it had a passive effect and longer cooldown then it would have more universal use and it wouldn’t be overpowered in large zergs.

It’s definitely a gray area and it’s probably unintended, but I wouldn’t call it an exploit.

Usually an exploit is something that is obviously unintended and gives an unfair advantage over other players who aren’t using it.

Considering the easy access other classes have to stability, the fact that the boon is so short and that it is at the end of a broken trait line; I don’t think there is any unfair advantage to be had.

I also don’t think trying to stomp and do something else at the same time is so convoluted.

Anyway don’t be upset if it gets changed, but also you aren’t going to get banned for it or need be concerned what random players think.

Arvid.3829:

This needs to be added to the bug list asap, imo. Several people (myself included) have confirmed this both here and here. At least in my book, having our profession specific attribute doing squat is way up there as one of our most pressing issues. I can’t believe this guy is just getting ignored here…

TL;DR Life Force Pool (aka Hunger) isn’t doing anything: add it, cause that’s bad!

Also in the threads mentioned by Arvid: Results from my tests, and then confirmed by Avrid, suggest conditions do double damage to life force. This additional damage is not shown by the combat log or floating combat numbers. We came to this conclusion because when only taking condition damage the effective health pool in death shroud appears to be half of what it is when only taking direct, power based, damage.

To my knowledge all tests (including my own) were done using self applied conditions (corrupt boon and blood is power) and so this could be introducing an unknown factor.

TL;DR Bug: Condition damage drains life force twice as fast as other damage sources.

Thanks again for confirming. I personally find it distressing if conditions to 2x damage to life force.

You should mention what your goal for the build is.

The jagged horror is your frenemy. Openly be nice to it, but treat it with passive aggression and don’t invite it to your sleep overs.

Thanks for testing kisses. If someone has gasp friends they could test it with that would be beneficial. Right now all the tests I’ve seen are self dots.

Considering how many of the games systems seems to get confused with the difference between life force and health while in death shroud it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a need at one point for a special case to make conditions do damage to death shroud and it was never removed.

Anyway, just thinking out loud for my curiosity’s sake.

It’s not offense should > defense, but damage > healing.

In a perfect meta even two bunkers would kill each other eventually.

I’m pretty sure at this point that death shroud takes 2x damage from conditions.

I did tests similar to yours with blood is power and corrupt boon (for self conditions). With 18k base hp (naked) my effective hp in death shroud was 10k, and with 27k hp (Knight’s amulet) it was 17k. Considering you did your tests with 24k and got 15k it seems to line up.

However when I did the same tests while taking damage from a non-condition source (the engineer training npc in my case) effective hp in death shroud worked out to 22k while naked and 34k with Knight’s amulet.

Also I did my tests with and without soul reaping and it made no difference on the results.

Arvid.3829:

I am doing some more testing but I wanted to share some intermediate finding that had been messing with my results for a few hours: there is apparently no 96% tick? Starting from 100% life force, I can leave DS very quickly and stay at 100% or I can wait 1 tick and I’ll be at 92%. The same is not true if you start from 92% for instance.

That also means max DS is 24 seconds instead of 25…

I think the first tick is hidden. If you wait 1s and leave DS you’ll go down to 96% and you won’t have seen an actual tick happen in the life force meter while in death shroud.

No one else did tests while only taking condition damage?

LastDay.3524:

Life Force is just messed up much like Soul Reaping was in GW1.
Sometimes there’s tons of death everywhere and you get so much Life Force that it goes from 0 to 100% in 5 seconds after you exit Death Shroud.
(I’m not exaggerating, by the way.)

This actually bothers me a lot. I can’t help but shake the feeling that life force generation on skills is the way it is because they balanced around large zergs in pve/pvp giving a ton of life force outside of skills.

I don’t gauge fun by how much stuff I get out of an RNG chest…

Heh. The funny part is our strongest build, conditions, has absolutely no synergy with any trait line outside of curses.

So even ignoring the bad/more broken builds, our best build has garbage gear available (precision, power, crit damage, and healing are all sub par secondary stats for a condition necro and there is no cond/toughness/vit), and 4/5 trait lines have a plethora of useless or broken traits, and useless/broken passives.

But sup it’s my favorite class anyway, and once everything is fixed… Necro OP ’13.

So I did some testing of my own.

Methodology:

Condition tests: In mists, naked with staff, get to 100% life force and cast blood is power/corrupt boon to self dot, and jump into death shroud at same time. Wait until dot stops ticking, record time and round down (because decay only ticks every 1s, so there are no fractions).

Tested with 916 vit and no traits, 916 vits and 30 soul reaping (+30% life force), and 916 vit 1839 vit. I also did tests with 0 condition damage and 750 condition damage.

Power damage tests: In mists, got 100% life force, then went to the engineer npc and aggro’d her (auto attack with scepter), then immediately hopped into death shroud and started a stop watch awaiting the first attack. Canceled death shroud and stopped my stop watch as soon as I took the first hit.

Tested with 916 vit and no traits, 916 vits and 30 soul reaping (+30% life force), and 916 vit 1839 vit.

For the power damage tests my results were the same as ascii’s. Effective hp in deathshroud is about 20-22k (I assume rounding to % on server side causes the error), and with 1839 vit somewhere around 32-34k effective hp.

But when I did tests using blood is power, and corrupt boon for getting condition damage on myself effective hp while naked was closer to 11k and with 1839 vit it was more like 17k.

I was suspicious that with larger dot ticks the effective hp I was seeing would increase because of how damage was rounded to life force % (i.e. every tick of damage converts from float to int, but that would be a dumb rookie computer science mistake), however increasing condition damage didn’t affect the result.

It seems like we take 2x damage in death shroud from conditions. Can anyone test this to confirm my results?

Also wanted to add that soul reaping didn’t have any affect. That trait line is completely broken.

Ayestes.1273:

I’m defensive because I enjoy the downed state as it is. I understand that others don’t enjoy it, but I want others to understand that I enjoy it as well. I used to hate the downed state as well in the beta, but once I had some tPvP under my belt I fell in love with the strategy around it.

I flat out disagree with many of the reasons why people dislike the downed state as well. It’s not impossible to win a 1v2. To me it increases the level in which skill has to do with the outcome of a fight, because it requires manipulation of different “phases” of combat. Other games to me had different mechanics (Primary Healers) that made winning outnumbered fights even more difficult then what the downed state is now, and to me it doesn’t even produce that much of a factor. I’ve pulled off frequent 1v2 and 2v5 fights. I don’t even consider myself that good. It’s just a simple understanding of the downed state as it is.

I mean, frankly I think many of the complainers will change their mind eventually. Not everyone, and perhaps not you. I respect other people’s opinions, I just hate it when other people won’t open up their mind to how it is now instead of simply hating it for absurd reasons.

I like the idea of the downed state, and I’m ok with the idea of rally, but I find the implementations flawed.

I don’t mind downed players having abilities, doing damage and continuing to contribute to the fight, but mostly a downed player is either stomped instantly (or as close to instantly as possible depending on their class), or res’d asap. And usually it depends on which team has more people to which happens.

It also creates another axis of balance among the classes that so far seems to have seen little attention from arena net. Some classes are simply better at getting a stomp/res or surviving during downed state.

Rally just has a lot of quirky issues from rallying off pets/mobs to rallying off the kills of an opposing player. If rally was an aoe heal for your team that prioritized, and gave extra benefit to, downed players then pretty much all the issues with it would be fixed.

Ayestes.1273:

Vadren.9045:

Rally is also really horrible. Stomp one guy, rally 3.

Learn to deal with downed state then? If you are letting 3 opponents rally off of one downed guy then you have problems with how you are fighting. Notably, you should probably be reviving someone.

Why are you so defensive about this? The situation I was thinking of I was the one who got the stomp and rallied 3 players and I couldn’t tell you what they did to all go down. However I don’t think it’s fair that I just happened to get a stomp at the end of a lost 3vs2 that almost instantly turned into a 4vs1.

Obviously many people don’t find the current implementation of downed state and rally fun. What makes the current implementation so fun for you that you don’t want it to change? Can you at least understand how it exponentially increases the disadvantage facing a smaller force in pvp and why some people think this is bad?

Rally is also really horrible. Stomp one guy, rally 3. Or letting yourself get put into a downed state, because you know a stomp is incoming and you can rally off it. Hey free condition removal and small heal.

Even though it’s a pve example this shows how silly rally can be: when you fight two mobs and one is almost dead, but you let yourself go down so you can take a breather and let cooldowns come back up before rallying off the near dead mob, because if you killed the mob before going down the other one would just finish you off.

Both mechanics greatly favor the team with more people. As if being outnumbered wasn’t a big enough disadvantage already.

I think I would be happy with conditionmancer if they just added cond dmg/vitality/toughness gear.

I find deathshroud to be very strong in pve and wvw because you’re more likely to get life force from kills, and you can guarantee every fight starts with 100% (thanks critters). In spvp/tpvp building life force can quickly become an issue. Maybe if they nerfed life force from kills and buffed it on everything else it would feel more evenly balanced.

Other than that if anet fixes bugs then I can patiently wait to see what they have in mind for power and mm builds.

Clever.7918:

Well i dont do sPvP so i cant say but for PvE and WvW this is a buff.

Because in WvW and PvE you can count on having 100% life force at the beginning of every fight because of killing critters for 10% life force a pop.

In spvp you start with 0% life force and 20% from Blood is Power was a good way to make up for it. A necro with 0% life force against a competent opponent is at a severe disadvantage.

Angry Flying Squirrel.3041:

Pookzob.4975:

Dibrom.6408:

Pookzob.4975:

Are you running scepter? The #3 actually generates pretty well for me..

2%? You would have gone nuts with the skill that used to generate 10x that amount.

For me it’s well over 2%. If there’s conditions stacked on a target I see centimeters of lifeforce at times. Or maybe I’ve been fooled by something else generating LF.

Its only 2%. You are seeing something else.

It’s 2% per condition.

Ugh. I’d rather have the life force.

@They are hashes,

I already posted this, but I wanted to reiterate because it seems my addition was overlooked.

Regarding:

Scepter
Feast of Corruption
(NB0010) Does not give Life Force.

Feast of Corruption currently gives 2% life force per condition on the target, so it gives 0 life force when no conditions are on the target, 2% life force for 1 condition, 4% for 2 conditions, etc… I’ve tested with signet of spite and it gives 12% life force for 6 conditions.

Likely this is working as intended and just a tool tip error.

Extra info on Feast of Corruption:

It returns 2% life force per condition. So 0 conditions gives 0% life force and 4 conditions gives 8% life force.

Extra info on Deathly Swarm:

Always adds 3 conditions to 1-3 targets (+blind), but only removes 1 condition from you per target.