Guild Wars 2

Seems like : Team Utility + Pet performs action if specific External Event happens.

I kind of think cool down might make it or break it.
But, I’ll admit, I’m curious to see where they’re going with this.

I’m hoping for something more extensive than slapping some boons on top. Guard, in particular, really needs some core revision.

I think ideally you want to make sure you’ve got enough Healing capacity that you’re not stuck rolling the dice.

You shouldn’t beat yourself up over being unable to heal through sudden major catastrophes where somebody sheepishly admits in voicechat: “Sorry guys, my Bad”. But a low background noise of human error is just the natural consequence of playing with 9 other human beings. If you’re succumbing to a small series of accidents that slowly spins out of control chasing that pyrrhic victory where you have whole minutes left on the clock – you haven’t empowered yourself enough to overcome your squad’s reasonable margin of error.

So some people get stuck rolling the dice hoping for that “smooth run”, when you can build in a safety margin and help be the thing that makes it smooth.

I think it’s fair to consider how your group intends to distribute responsibilities.
This might end up biting us in the kitten in future wings, but for the most part the healing is considered a foregone conclusion. If you go full tilt on it, it’s probably too much and you’ll have some time on your hands. It’s sandwiching in secondary duties and tertiary duties without dropping the Healing ball that seems to be the big question. How much your group needs Group DPS, Personal DPS, CC, or Tanking, is going to do alot to inform your build desicions.

Things may seem wildly varied listed in a whole like this, but once you’ve organized with intention in mind much of these build choices are self evident. There are some open-ended things, but it might be better to approach them as more focused questions. Like, “whats good to slot in for Gorseval ghost duty?”.

That is indeed Sigil of Water’s effect.

For the record, Solar Beam comes up in your log as Regeneration for a value that seems like twice what it should be. I think that’s because it’s basically just a linearly applied Regen that’s half the strength hitting twice as often. So the backend of it is writing to the log every second as though it were a normal Regen, it’s just reporting the cumulative value.

I’m glad you gave that a go, Turtle

Believe it or not, Water Spirit’s actually the direction Dulfy’s guide went.
I’d been curious about how well Nature’s Vengeance handled a low pressure drought of things needing to be healed. Sad to hear it didn’t go so well.

Oh, shoot,
Now that you mention that, I realize I should probably try and phrase things to be more encounter-sensitive. Let me re-state this so I don’t sound like a screwball: I want to get AF quickly even in low pressure situations, but also feel like I’ve got a good amount of high pressure situations under control without using it.

But yeah, I get what you two are trying to get across.
Other people and the situations they find themselves in will do more to determine what my CA experience is like than anything I do personally.

Though, I admit, that conclusion kind of makes me feel a bit…helpless?

I really want to believe I can do something get more solid control over how things play out. I mean, I was expecting to “que sera sera” AF generation/CA freedom choice to some extent, but I find it difficult to accept that outlook for the whole thing.

Thank you for answering that.
For the record I’ve only done that occasionally myself. But it’s just such a good example of abundance, using your burstiest heal for something else, its a nice quick and dirty mental check for what I’m hoping to find in a build.

I want to be in a position where I not only get AF quickly, but also feel like I’ve got the healing situation mostly under control without it – so I can choose to use CA skills for their utility over their healing.

I’m trying to force it by trying to treat 90% as the new 100% and tapering off things that might top people off accidentally while keeping regen on. There is no equivalent concept in this game, but in ye old MMO parlance this was “leaving breathing room for the paladin to heal himself for threat”, except I’m trying to use the tactic to leave my regens breathing room for AF. I have had some success, but not across as many fights and groups as I’d like.

I get from your experiences CA freedom is less about build and more about who you’re with. Is that right? If you were like me and wanted to force the issue what would you try?

@ Tragic
That’s interesting.
With that set-up do you feel like you have freedom to do what you want once you get into CA, or you feel that once you’re in CA you’re playing healing catch-up?

Like, hypothetically; would you feel perfectly fine Lunar Impacting Vale Guardian’s Red Circles to freeze them in their tracks, or would you regret not being able to use the Healing portion of it on your allies?

@ Turtle
Well, I guess we’re both bad, then :p

I’ve only recently started to bump into the cooldown semi-sorta’-frequently, when I was more into Raw Healing it was a ‘when the stars align’ sort of thing. Even now it’s hard to imagine AF gain playing out in a clockwork fashion. There’s a part of it that just isn’t up to me, and I can’t figure how to compensate for people being people beyond what I’m already trying.

Yeah, it’s hard to argue against Cultivated Synergy.
The number of possible targets makes it quite nice from an AF generation standpoint, and the heal really isn’t all that bursty (or so I like to say to justify it to myself). I almost always seem to get 7 or 8 healing actions from it, and a single Vigorous Recovery proc is usually along for the ride too. Om nom nom.

Oh, dropping a Seed of Life before exiting CA.
…You know, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t think of that. Thanks for the tip.

I saw some folks give this topic a passing conversation in another thread, and wanted to chat more on it without pulling a hijack.

Basically; building for consistently strong healing output is the most straightforward way to keep people standing, but given our healing is so burst it also means they end up capped at full health alot. Leaning on Regen for AF gain means you need people at less than full health in order to get to CA.

It seems so natively conflicting; but finding a sweet spot between using Regen and Raw Healing is just so tempting, because being able to access CA more often can help you make the most of it’s utility – but without some raw healing to back you up you don’t often get to use it for that sake.

I’ve done alot of playing around with Regen builds trying to wrap my head around it all:

• I went Windborne Notes + Warhorn for a while, but I struggled with the weapon swapping. If we were in trouble, I’d reflexively camp Staff and ended up hampering my AF generation right when I really needed it.
• I tried Windborne Notes + Clarion Bond to get around the weapon swap, and it was alright but ultimately it just didn’t feel like enough. I added Sigil of Transcendence and Spirit of Nature got swapped in here alot, just because I felt like I couldn’t keep up.
• I added Healing Spring into the mix and tried to manage Outside of CA healing using WaterFields + Blast Finishers for a while. But it handled awkwardly during high movement phases, and I often found myself doing self-defeating things like a waterblast topping off the people I’d just applied regen to.

Where I’m at now is trying to lean harder on the ‘Regen’ side of things. Which has so far been comfy but a bit overly dependant on my heal skill.

Im mostly trying to pre-emptively drop regen on higher risk individuals, hoping not to accidentally nullify AF gain via attached big heal. So I shaved Glyph of Rejuvenation + Support Pets + Spirit of Nature and went “We Heal as One!” + Resounding Timbre + Runes of Dwayna. The struggle to pop my healing skill in the vicinity of high risk squad mates is real, but so far this level of focus on AF-generation is pretty comfy when paired with 10%-20% equipped outgoing healing plus 1k-ish Healing Power.

I’ve been giving this balancing act alot of thought lately, and I’m wondering where other people are at in their build explorations so far. Do you guys wonder much about this sort of thing? If you have, what things have you tried? Knowing what works is great, but knowing what hasn’t worked out is also pretty useful information.

Just generally speaking, I think your build priorities are:

• Making sure you’ve got solid access to Celestial Avatar Form.
• Balancing between group damage buffs and breakbar breaking
• Focusing on your Healing potency, then Damage potency.

Accessing Celestial Avatar Form is based on numbers of actions, not how much you heal or hurt for. So, focus on Regen and multihit attacks until you’ve gotten to a comfortable cadence. I think a good sanity check for that is to be able to make your way through a HoT Map Meta without finding yourself unable to go into CA form when you feel like you need it.

Balancing between group damage buffs / breakbar breaking / healing potency is going to be a ‘what other people need from you’ thing. Some groups are just going to need more of one thing or another. There are some things that are pretty accessible and friendly across multiple groups though, for instance I’d almost always suggest picking Grace of the Land and visiting your local Laurel Merchant to swap your bottom row of Trinkets to Ascended Clerics.

Personally,
I’m comfortable with Staff and Resounding Timbre + We Heal as One + Runes of Dwayna for CA Accessibility. For DamageBuffs I like the much popular Frost Spirit and Grace of the Land + Verdant Etching. For BBBreaking I like offsetting that duty primarily onto Pets with Wolf/ElectricWyvern + WiltingStrike + Beastly Warden, saving my control glyph du jour and entering CA form to help break it myself as a last resort. My Armor is Magi, Trinkets are Berserker/Clerics, Staff is Magi my secondary weapons are more dps-y though I’m still hammering out the particulars.

But how do you test someone skill’s in an online game without spending a massive amount of time?

In GW2 the best qualification for Raids, is Raids.

Is it really worth trying to establish a precedent that allows for a hideous misattribution, when you could just hold your tongue for a few months and let the problem fix itself?

I’m not sure if that’s Toxic, or just Frustrated.

You know, it’s topics like this that make me realize People Skills are a woefully under-appreciated skillset in MMOs, but it’s arguably one of the more important determining factors of your success. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I have picked up on some things over the years in other games that seem to help dealing with poor attitudes like this.

• Don’t try to win the argument, try to solve the problem.
  It’s real easy to take an abrasive comment personally, but your teammate took the time to speak because they really did feel something was worth mentioning. Don’t let the fact they have no tact and the social grace of a basement dweller get between you and a possible improvement. Consider what might motivate people to say things, but for the sake of your sanity, only just consider.
  (EX; On it’s face that ‘too much healing’ comment is totally absurd, but in all likelihood he was probably wanting to explore the possibility of greater DPS utility from you, which isn’t an unreasonable request.)

• Do have a clear plan on how you can alter your build to suit the needs of your group, and communicate what you’re doing.
  Don’t ask permission as in most groups the position of ‘leader’ is ephemeral and you’ll be left with awkward pseudo-silence, but do give others a heads-up in case they have to make their own adjustments. In the very least that sort of talking is a papertrail of your effort, proof of your fight knowledge, and sometimes people feel less like they’re hitting a wall if they see adaptation within the group. Basically, head off obnoxious advice-guy at the pass by being proactive and vocal about your effort.
  (EX: “The red circles are giving me a hard time, in this next fight I’m going to switch one of my group-DPS utilities for an AOE knockback one and see how it goes”.)

• Set a Time or Attempt limit once you’ve recognized you’re hitting a wall and you’ve done everything you can think of to get around it.
  This is a hard call to make, as nobody wants to be a killjoy or cause their teammates to lose motivation. But sometimes it’s just not working out, and in all honesty everybody probably knows it. A Clear End-Point can catalyze people to either voice their frustrations before they’ve reached a boiling point or swallow them for good – and sometimes it pushes people to make key communications and improvements. Don’t be judgmental and don’t invent excuses, just let people know how many more times you’d like to try.
  (EX: “Hey guys, I think I have about 3 more tries in me.”)

@ Torolan
I was referring to the history of threads relating to Difficulty, not the history of threads about Raids in particular.

Lemme rephrase to avoid getting caught up in terminology. If folks rebuked the difficulty of Fractals before, Fractals are still rebuked without a major content overhaul. It hasn’t somehow retroactively become a superior product than it is, just because folks are scraping for measuring sticks and a way to justify them.

@ Thread
I get it, using Gear as a shorthand for Experience is a tried and true tradition.
But, I just don’t agree it’s the right fit for this game.

In GW2 there isn’t a nice neat little staircase of progression that directly ties advancing design with higher tiers of gear. After Fractals, much of fight design was advanced through the Living Story. For a while, the design philosophy was maturing without any real connection to higher tiers of gear at all. It wasn’t until recently that Ascended gear started appearing as a LS reward, and even now it’s only a fraction of stat combinations.

Because of that, the next step down in fight-design, doesn’t really yield the next step down of gear. So Gear doesn’t really serve as a good shorthand for Experience.

Look, I’m not saying you can’t abide by this mess if you want.
I just can’t accept a system that glosses over the nuances of acquisition to revere ascended gear for it’s own sake – because I will be goddarned if I let social pressure tell me to put some credit card jockey on a pedestal.

Honestly, the best players I’ve come across have both been curious PvP’ers.

If Fractals and Gold Grinding were adequately challenging enough activities to encourage folks to climb the Skill Curve, we would’ve never gotten Raids.

That’s kind of the crux of the entire years-long campaign for more challenging content; that existing content did not suffice. So why would having those rewards indicate anything meaningful?

Nice to see somebody else rocking the druid shoulders, OP
Those are tricky to find things to pair with.

Like, just generally?

Move Celestial Shadow’s superspeed -> Glyph of Unity
Move Lingering Light’s blind -> Celestial Shadow
Do something AF generation-related for Lingering Light.

I’d do this because:

• Tying the ‘blind trait’ to a controllable event as opposed to being random-ish makes it something you can use for breaking breakbars. Right now Lingering Light is brainless, and adding a control element to Celestial Shadow might make me consider the timing more as right now my in-combat usage of it mostly ends up being to secure a Rez.

• Superior mobility on Glyph of Unity seems like a natural fit to help manage the Tethers of both forms. I’d happily trade off an AOE Superspeed effect for Easier-to-Access-Self-Superspeed, and personally getting it out from behind the AF gate would remove much of my reason to want the contentious OOC AF generation.

• Having a Trait to play with might make it easier to fine-tune AF generation. This seems to be noticeably giving the dev team a hard time.

Also,
A Burst Healing Mode that contains both a Water Field and a Blast Finisher that can’t combo with eachother is super-unintuitive and frustrating. I get wanting to promote teamplay with Rejuvenating Tides, but sometimes the best communication is demonstration.

I’ll admit, my first thought was to ease off Bursts and lean harder on Regens.
Kinda’ seems more like Ventari’s deal.

I’ll reserve my actual judgement after testing more extensively, but I thought it was worth mentioning my knee jerk impression.

Unless you have personally signed Anet’s NDA then you can’t really comment.

…especially if you have, you can’t really comment.

I wasn’t going to validate this whole strawman tangent with a response…
But setting up your point so that countering it involves disclosing your access to a non-disclosure document is a self-defeating logic that’s probably good to highlight, just to make sure folks are properly warned to mind the First Rule of Fight Club when it comes to NDAs.

I’m guessing that was probably unintentional, but that ended up as kind of a mean tactic.

I think this bears clarifying, on the offchance folks aren’t insufferable and simply just missed MMO Trash Talking 101:

The target of Raider-Style Gloating is supposed to be other players.
Because that’s who you’re supposed to be in competition with. Not the company itself. You are not competing with the company. Especially when it means calling into question the challenging content you yourselves were invited to help support.

/sigh
It’s like my GW2 Meta experiences are playing out as a subtle parody of my WoW Raiding experiences.

Some kind of WoW mimickry is happening here, but this game is structured so differently it doesn’t equip people with the means to understand the underlying principals that drives the actions in that Meta. So some screwy cliffnotes version of it is being misapplied to hilarious and tragic consequences. Like your little brother kissing an orange because that’s the fruit he ‘loves’ the most.

Wow Raiders respect being First, that means being First is ‘Best’ in every game!
WoW Raiders are smugly superior, let’s taunt Anet!

Wait- What? No! That’s not what anyofthatmeans-!

I think any advantage it has, could reasonably be achieved in a less irritating way.

Not to be adversarial, but, some of this insistence on keeping this exact precise particular design strikes me a bit silly.

The default expectation with any revision is that you’d still hit all the major points, the weapon would have a skill ceiling, and it would be exciting to play. That’s because having problematic execution on a couple skills doesn’t mean the logic behind the whole build direction is suddenly faulty, Nobody making a game would strive to make an intentionally boring weapon, and design-wise a good skill curve is how you avoid that.

So far my take-away here is “don’t change it, because things can go wrong!”.
Well, yeah, but isn’t that always the case?

I get having worries, but why should that stop us now?

That’s a good point, aB.

Sorry, should have specified, I’m talking the old tech as well. I’m very much interested in the property of it that singled out individuals with low HP in an area.

“Where am I needed, and how does my PBAOE-happy-self get there?” are prettymuch the constant questions of my Druid playtime.

And, now that I think about it, Guardian’s Merciful Intervention more or less tackles them both. I was wondering how folks felt about sprinkling that functionality somewhere in the often commented on #1 and #2 of Celestial Avatar – Cosmic Ray and Seed of Life.

Like;
Cosmic Ray
Call down energy onto the most damaged ally in the area around you or your pet.
Cast Time: Immediate
Healing: 500
Radius 120
Range 900

Seed of Life
Summon a seed that cleanses nearby allies of conditions and blinds foes when it blossoms.
Cleanse: 2 conditions
Blind: 4 seconds
Radius 260
Range 1200
→? name of chain skill ?
→ Expend the energy of the seed of life before it blossoms to transport to the targeted
→location and heal nearby allies.
→Healing: 700
→Radius 180

-ish.

Sort of turn Cosmic Ray into a way to take a quick survey of the battlefield, turn the existing timing elements of Seeds of Life into a condi clear/breakbar vs. respositioning/heal decision point, and just for spice give the pet a role during CA as a ‘second pair of eyes’ to help spot ailing allies and an extender for what would be our only ranged heal (pet leash range +900).

So you’re still exercising battlefield awareness, it’s just instead of minding the UI you’re looking to see where your Cosmic Ray landed. And you’re still aiming to get your major heals out, you’re just aiming yourself.

How do you figure, Ashfiend?

I think of all the adjectives I’d use to describe the last month ‘slow’ wouldn’t be anywhere on the list.
It’s been so impactful a desire that’s been a constant refrain on this forum for years is almost relegated to a footnote because we actually have other things to be excited about other than Pet AOE reduction. This is leaps and bounds stuff.

brave but volatile > stable but slow

I think I’d rather get occasionally stung by having shiney things dangled in front of my eyes and snatched away, than improvements happening at a pace so glacial it never really managed to outpace general powercreep and could be interpreted as inaction for months at a time.

Comparing Adrenaline to Astral Force is a bit apples to oranges.

Damage is infallible, Healing is situational.

It makes sense a Damage-based resource would be Tactical, and a Healing-based resource would be Strategic. You may not want to use your Burst Skill just then, but it’s always going to be relevant. You just can’t say the same for Healing in this game, so having the resource be about managing how it fits in the bigger picture of multiple encounters seems it’s really making the most of sporadic usefulness.

Thank you kindly,
I believe removing or mitigating Degen is a good area to focus on, and I appreciate keeping the lines of communication open.

This is the first time I’ve played Druid,
the only thing I’ll comment on right now is Astral Force, in part because that’s what I feel I’ve got the best grasp on, and in part because it’s colored all my other impressions of the spec.

Astral Force feels more promising as a Strategic resource, but decay tries to make it a Tactical one.

Unlike Damage, the usefulness of Healing is very situational in this game. With decay the game is basically stepping in and deciding for me which battles need CF Healing, when I’d argue there’s real value in letting that choice be mine.

For smaller strings of battles or defend events I’ve resorted to pushing the existence of AF out of my mind. It’s reasonable to assume those moments might not need healing, but, that doesn’t mean I should never think of my profession mechanic except in Boss Fights. "Do I use my CF for utility on an easy fight, or should I save it in case we have trouble soon? If I keep saving it, will I have passed up opportunities to use it? ". These are thoughts worth having, and I’m currently nowhere near having a second thought about when I press that button because fights are rarely long and damage varied enough to evoke these deeper considerations on the tactical level.

CF usage in a fight seems to always be “As soon as it’s ready” or “Never”.
And that’s just not interesting.

Making AF Strategic may not alter my actual physical use of CF in practice much; but it makes sure it’s on my mind even in situations where healing might not be useful because I’m still thinking of it’s cadence in the overall travel, and it gives me a sense of empowerment in that using it perfectly as it’s needed or blowing it at the wrong time is my call.

1) I don’t think camping is the right fit for this game, but I miss having the ‘dangerous open-world’ those sorts of games tended to have.

2) & 3) Group-based Long term goals.

4) GW2 is like a Pizza. Even when it’s bad…it’s still pretty good.
For every feature it has I can name another game that did it better, but rarely do you come across a game that does everything pretty reasonably well.

Also, if you could get Roy to issue a public apology for capping the might in the first place, then I’d be REALLY impressed ;P

‘Nerfing it to a safe place’ is a pretty reasonable normal response to keep something from destabilizing the live game while you work on it. It seems like the plan was genuinely to get back to it all along, so, Roy’s fine.

Between this and the staff #3 change, there’s been alot of talk of interfacing with Programming on our behalf. I like that you guys are making that interaction public, it makes me feel less like leftovers and more like resources are being directly dedicated to improving the Ranger’s gameplay experience.

I’m impressed with the quick traction on this, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it to see how it feels.

Oh come on.
World Firsts?

World Firsts are meaningful in WoW because bosses are Classic-RPG Puzzle Bosses, figuring out the tactic and safety dance was so much a determination of your projected success it was meaningful to ‘figure it out’, and because their concept of content accessibility includes a difficult introductory phase and then nerfing for broader appeal accomplishing it sooner was something worth being proud of. Being the First to defeat a Boss was tracked by their servers by awarding people with a specific prize or achievement, and this was publicly verifiable via /inspect features and later a website where everyone’s character information was made searchable.

Not only should your expectations for infamy in Action-RPG lean more in the direction of Excellence in Execution (which has no time limit) and less in speed-puzzle-solving, but also player recordings are a shoddy stand-in for an impartial judge.

If we really do get a competitive community going, you have to find the Bragging Rite that makes sense for this game in particular, not clone it wholesale from somebody else.

My Ranger is going to be using the ever loving crap out of this feature.

Holy cripes,
This is a heckuva’ thing just sort of being squeaked in at the last minute of the PR cycle.

Thank you Mr. Helmich.
As somebody whose got alot of Action-RPG and FPS games under her belt; this game’s targeting scheme has been a frustration I’ve never quite made peace with, and was one of the major reasons I could never quite recommend GW2 to my action game buddies.

I’m more excited for this one dev’s pet project QoL change than whole official features of the expansion.

@Labjax

I’ve always thought the whole thing was somewhere in the Fundamental Attribution Error/Self Serving Bias neighborhood.

The reason I’m more likely to put it in the “blamey” section of Cognition is because, in my experiences, people focus the conversation on low meter output when they’re Losing and not when they’re Winning.

Technically, just because you’ve won doesn’t mean you don’t have room for self improvement. You don’t have Schrodinger’s Skillset, being simultaneously both N00b and Pro until you beat the boss. You’re on a certain point on the skillcurve regardless of winning and losing, so you should be pushing yourself all the time.

I don’t bring that up to imply people taking a self improvement stance are being disingenuous. Meters are totally valid tools for that, if not underwhelming.

The Space Information it can’t record hopefully ends up being very important in the Raids of an Action-RPG, and generally speaking improvement via competition operates vs. superstars – not vs. your teammates. Comparing to a recorded high performer across the entire server is a much more stable clear long-term goal, than an indicate your personal growth based on some ever-shifting random sample size of 9.

I do bring that up to conclude:
I think as ‘Self-Improvement Software’ a Meter could really use some improvement, but it’s absolutely flawless ‘Finger-Pointing Software’ straight out of the box.

Gold isn’t much of a motivating factor for me, so my personal perspective on dungeons is unchanged.

That said, much like Thaddeus, I’ll be distracted for a while.

Anet has been bombarded for 3 years about dungeons and their lack of development which pretty much shows the community WANTS dungeons. Sure, John is telling us straight up he doesn’t want us playing dungeons. Yep great he’s communicating, woohooo! Except instead of communicating which involves listening, Anet pretty much through an F-you to all dungeoners. We are telling anet what we want, they are afraid that their fractals and raids won’t be as fun as dungeons, so they are clearly telling us that they will force us not to play dungeons by removing rewards.

I get that, I’ve been one of those voices over the years too.

It’s just…
I’m still trying to parse what a Fractal even is now. Much less how it interacts with Raids, which is itself a black box. I’m stretching my imagination to redefine the value of Ascended gear, given that it now has an entirely new context to have value in. And I think on a really good day, I might have some idea as to the implications of reward track legendaries and map rewards, and how that makes me feel about all of the previous things.

Right now all I’ve got is the corner pieces done on this jigsaw puzzle of a bigger picture, and even a whole handful of darker pieces is nonsense without knowing their place.

I have got to give this guy some credit.

He’s got a clear idea of what he’s after.
He announced it, immediately followed it up with a Q&A, and has so far answered questions in a straightforward way. However you may feel about the change itself, this is actually pretty solid community interaction.

Ohhh. 1080, nice upload.

Not to come across as ungrateful…
But, I can totally see what people are saying about the particle effects. That was not exactly super spectator friendly, in a way that wasn’t at all your fault.

It’s kind of like:

…If a Meter is actually useful, I’ll be deeply dissapointed in Raids.

In a vanilla RPG we’re used to seeing the context of a situation as easily extrapolated assumptions based on the summary numbers of an encounter. But in an Action game the numbers are only half the story, only worth noticing in the extremes of massive and minor quantities because it lacks the context 3D Space provides.

Adding Meters on the basis of them being honestly valuable, basically amounts to an omission of continued failure to engage space meaningfully and deliver on this game’s action game elements in PvE.

And good gravy that sucks.

I do not want to see Meters. Not because I think Raids would be more entertaining if they weren’t around, but I think them not being around indicates Raids are probably more entertaining.

/edit: whoops. missed a ‘not’ there. sort of muddy’s the message a bit o.o

You know, all this fuss over Water Fields just makes me wonder if they need a looking at.

Those circumstances aren’t all that unusual for a game with Raids, Harper.

But I get what you’re after.
Your pessimism may end up being entirely warranted, but I’m less interested in hypothesis and more anticipating the experiment in vivo.

Raids might help with this a bit, by shifting the meta conversation to a space where it’s more appropriate.

Technically you could have a meta for everything, but realistically people just don’t have the bandwidth. So most meta conversation takes place in a very specific area of a game, where the time invested in conversation feels like it’s giving the most return. I think I’ve seen a game have a Meta for more than a single PvE activity, like, once.

I’m actually kind of interested to see what happens to player dungeon behaviors once the meta microscope refocuses on Raids and there isn’t quite that same social pressure obsessive refrain of “everybody’s” expectations. I’ve seen this sort of voluntary segregation between newbies and metaffectionados work wonders when Raids and Dungeons are introduced at the same time, or even up to a year later.

But three years?
I wonder what the statute of limitations is on that kind of baiting technique.

Oh, this is probably worth adding to my already sizeable amount of chatter on this thread:

I did want to thank you for engaging us, Mr. Calmon-Huang

You posted at what would be the end of a typical work day and implied you’ll be soldiering on, so you’re probably taking some time out of Crunch to write to us. I do appreciate the clear effort you’re making, here.

LegallyBinding.4937:

Most important druid change:

Make ally health bars visible!

omg, this. Please. Please make this something you can toggle on and off. That way support folks can see people’s health bars without hovering over people with their mouse.

You know, you could just straight-up make that a feature of the Celestial Avatar State, so you’d be privy to that information when it’s most relevant.

…Asymmetrical information is such a neat thing, and so very underutilized in this game.

I think you’re in the right for wanting to make sure healing power building is rewarding, but at the same time, if there’s anything my past frustrating experiences of trying to play healer in this game has taught me:

Nobody appreciates infinitesimal butterfly-kiss heals, not even me while I’m doing them.

So, you know: “I agree….but please don’t go crazy.”
I don’t want to have to bust out a calculator and chant the math like a mantra to try and make myself feel good about what I’m doing.

I think most of us get where you’re coming from, Anduriell.

There is a point where hyperbole starts to get hard to spectate, though, and while I’ll readily sympathize with the things you say – I’m having a hard time making it to the end of your posts lately.

Let’s just take things one step at a time.
Even if we had proven developer traction, they’re not going to fix everything overnight, ya’ know?

The sticking point with me about using Targeting as the determining factor is that it doesn’t really account for the fact AOEs can be intentionally aimed to hit multiple targets and target-less fighting is possible.

I’ve mentioned this before, but, if I had to segregate Intentional from Incidental damage I’d grab the ‘Regenerating Energy Shields’ concept from FPS games.

If a Healthbar is like a litmus test of your opponent’s Force, a Shield is a test of their Attention. Basically for this game I’d say a Sheild is when the Healthbar is only exposed to receive damage after the target remains under constant enemy attack for a short fixed period of time.

I like that solution because:

• it doesn’t increase micromanagement (like how a dodge solution would).
• works the same across all game-modes
• normalizes pet survivability across gamemodes because it relies on ‘time spent under enemy pressure’ and not amount of damage being delt.
• Flexible enough to suit the spectrum of intended pet survivability we have in this game. Hearty things can get longer shields and maintain their current healthbars (Ranger Bear Pets), Fragile things can get shorter shields and go straight into death afterward (Mesmer Clones).
• balance-wise, it’s like “dodges; but in bar form and it can only dodge damage”
• It could make a ‘skill with health’ feel less like a handicap and more like an opportunity, because it can be a resource you use in a positive way and not there solely to be used against you. One way I’ve seen a game use shields as a resource is ‘amplified effect the lower a shield is, but once the healthbar is exposed no additional benefit at all’. I think this sort of thing could really elevate things like Spirits/Turrets/FleshWurm.

What made this sincerely interesting once you outgrew the stacking gimmick was the risk vs.reward desicion you experienced to sacrifice your heal for offensive gain, and the way it made me value my living pet.

I’d prefer to see a fix work off of the appealing part and narrow the build possibilities into something more focused, than keep the broad applications and end as something so featureless.

I can forgive limited, but there’s just no forgiving bland.

Something more like : Limit WHAOs transfer effect to In Combat Only status and only for Offense Buffs but their full or near-full duration.

This really focuses on the risk vs reward by removing your ability to undermine the risk with things like transferred protection and regen, and removes silly stacking tricks that may be encouraging unwanted behaviors by removing your ability to persist them from one instance of combat to another. But it keeps that heat of the moment judgement call, the new highly refreshing reason to value my pet as a boon cache, and the pet class staple of encouraging your enemy to target your pet.

I think what makes me fine with this (beyond what everybody else has been saying), is:

The counterplay is highly highly accessible.

Buffing specs usually have a counterplay of ‘have boon stripping/the opposite debuff’ which is pretty build and sometimes class specific. In this case, it’s: ‘put pressure on pet’.

The longstanding complaint of our class mechanic is it’s inability to hold up under even accidental pressure, just imagine when people actually start doing it on purpose. I can’t say I’m super worried here.

You can get higher in the silverwastes with the boons you get during the vinewrath event for some reason.

^ that, however, seems like a straight-up bug. It seems like boons should hardcap the same everywhere.

Cautiously Optimistic?

I can’t really pass judgement on something without playing it first, but I can see alot of sound reasoning and creativity.