Guild Wars 2

I like the way the mounts handled but didn’t want to check out much of the map so I could explore at release. I’m just hoping they don’t try and force mount use all the time by making waypoints immensely scarce, mounts are nice but it’s still slower to walk across the huge maps than to WP closer. Also dismounting whenever you talk interact with something is crap.

The elite specs are all over. I too was surprised how much I liked holosmith. Also didn’t expect to like the feel of deadeye as much as I did, but I wish they’d have made a test sooner so they could get multiple layers of feedback. As it is now they’ll get one wave, possibly make changes, and get no feedback on the changes till release. Soulbeast has traits and skills that just don’t function with their new mechanic, terrible balance and swapping pets is a horror show. Warrior has anti-synergy with spellbreaker since traits based on adrenaline get truncated by the smaller adrenaline gauge. I couldn’t even figure mirage out, they made it sound like they were trying to boost clones so you could hide among them but then you have to run around collecting the mirrors that spawn making it obvious which one is you (also being a pain in the kitten. Necro already has boon corruption, forcing it to be convert to torment and cripple seems like a bottleneck, and if all your boon corrupts apply the same condi it seems like it’d be easier to cleanse, also cripple is easy to apply and cap out. Guardian meditations can all be replaced by a current guard skill, especially the elite which seems like a worse version of “Stand Your Ground!” (Half range, less stab, needs channeled, and takes up your elite slot).

Barrier does degen really fast and besides that some of the amounts that traits and skills apply seem too low to effectively do anything. If the damage you prevent can be healed by regen with no healing power in 2s it’s not very worth the effort.

I am happy to finally have an antagonist that isn’t an elder dragon. I’ve always thought following the charr dream of killing the human Gods would be an interesting story. They left enough questions to make for a possibly interesting story finding out why/how Balthazar lost his divinity and what the other gods are doing. Seeing if killing this fallen god has consequences etc… so I’m looking forward to the expac.

Actually according to every subforum their new elite spec is weak and everyone else is getting an OP one. Basically the usual profession based subforum stuff. I do hope for some changes since some designs have anti-synergy with their base class.

I don’t know if we’re supposed to report things so minor but if you have normal camera controls, hold right mouse button and then hold A or D (for normal button lay out) while mounted on a slope you’ll slowly slide down the slope without any animations. It doesn’t look intended so I figured I’d put it up here.

I couldn’t find out anywhere so figured I’d ask here really quickly. Do utilities only convert based on boosts from gear and runes/sigils? With the toxic utilities converting based on power/condition damage do they gain extra benefit when under the effects of Might? It seems like this wouldn’t be the case.

I agree with the theme of the post. It seems unnecessary for you to be dismounted at almost every interaction.

I’m just going to add to this instead of making another post but cliffside is terrible now. There are so many adds on the seals that, with toxic trail instability, you end up with a potent toxin death field that keeps you stacked with conditions making it near impossible to get your hp high enough to pick up the hammer without the initial damage downing you. If you choose flux bomb it reduces the already narrow walkways and stacked with social awkwardness makes ressing someone in combat a deathwish. With bombs going off next to seals and in combat it slows the fractal to a snails pace in some groups. Very melee unfriendly instability combo.

I did get the hammer bug once where killing things didn’t charge it. Also, pulling the chains to turn off traps will kill a necros minions because it strips their skills.

Why do these not stack anymore? It makes them much more annoying to open. I swear they stacked before this update.

Sentinel Whiptail, the npc that starts the event chain to kill the branded devourer queen for the ichor you need for catalyst is bugging. I’ve come to Iron Marches 3 times and he’s been stuck every time just in a different part of the little camp he starts in. Can he be made to start outside or something if he can’t navigate the terrain?

I do use Scepter, and I never considered swapping off death magic it seemed like it’d hurt more than help. You’d lose the minion hp boost and the ability for them to transfer conditions, along with the poison field which can help. And curse being the condition line seemed like it made it mandatory too. I would agree that reapers auto attack is much better with dhuumfire but you’d have to give up one of those lines. When I tried blood it was a bit rough too because the minions steal on attack is next to nothing (wiki says 50 health) I’m not all too sure it helped much.

So I recently made a second necro to make condi, and the current go to seems to be reaper, curse, and death. But I was wondering do you ever swap trait lines. I don’t raid yet but I understand why this would be the go to in them, with a druid healing your minions and a chronomancer giving you alacrity your minions would last longer and you’d be able to use lich form more often. But in other content when you’re not guaranteed to have even one of those things is it better to switch out a line to help make up for it?

For example I’ve been doing constructs/guardian/justiciar to get rubies for my trinkets. But most of those bosses are the only enemy you’re facing so epidemic and rise aren’t super useful. There are druids there I’m sure but my minions still don’t stay alive too well, and I can’t even remember if I’ve ever gotten more than 2s of alacrity. So is it better to swap out reaper for blood so minions can heal themselves and you can use quickening thirst to spam enfeebling blood more often, or would slotting Soul Reaping help by reducing Lich cooldown and giving you access to a burn?

If I keep the same trait set up, by the time the jade dies I’m left with maybe 1 minion and still have lich on cooldown. Was just hoping for some advice to make the build more useful for stuff like fractals/dungeons/world bosses.

Just some requests for fractals I’m hoping could be added.

First, could more stuff to buy with fractal relics be added. Right now they have almost no use since they buy rings (the easiest to acquire ascended trinket from drops), fractal skins which are easy enough to finish, the capacitor back item and it’s upgrade component, and fractal potions. Once you’ve finished off your trinkets and skin collection these things just build up with nothing to spend them on. They aren’t even used for the new infusions.

Second, make mobs in swampland fractal ignore minions/illusions/elementals when they’re in spirit form. The champ oakheart that spawns after the spirit waves will decide to play with a bone horror instead of the group into the wisp so we can kill it.

Third, make it so minions and ranger pets don’t activate the laser bar trap in uncat fractal. When pets and minions take damage from them the splash damage hurts the person they’re following and sometimes others trying to run to the consoles.

Change Thaumanova reactor fractal. This is just a bias since I hate this fractal. It takes too long and it’s boring, because the bosses main threat is to destroy platforms so you fall to your death the actual boss mechanics are just as hard at low scale as they are at high, since the boss isn’t much of a threat himself the only thing making it harder at higher tiers is that it takes longer. He never uses the break bar mechanic, and makes the best strategy to spam any npc allies you can because then you can just run around as they kill him.

This is probably a rant thread since I’m not sure any of these changes will happen.

I was wondering if anyone knew exactly how the buff after air overload works.

Does the field that is left after the overload give you the buff or is just finishing the overload itself that does?

Does it hit your target or the first thing to get hit by one of your attacks? (if you cast aoe on a group without a target which one gets struck?)

If you can get the buff more than once per overload what’s the maximum number of lightning strikes you can get?

Is there a way to have it so when you interact with a craft station all the panels are minimized by default so you can just open the one you want to use (you open obsidian refinement if you want to make some ascended mats for example). And if there isn’t could there be an option added to do this?

Basically look like the picture below every time you open.

I like the way life steal feels in GW2 and I’m a fan of some of the Reaper GS skills too, but life steal here tend to be small heals so it works best with fast attacks. Since GS operates on strong hits with but slow attacks life steal with it is garbage. Even playing with the life steals you get from blood magic you’ll notice just how much healing you lose when you switch from dagger to GS at 50% health. They should remake the trait to something more suited to GS attack speed since at the moment it’s almost counter synergy.

I didn’t even know they were considering this. I’ve never done any part of the raid because most of my characters don’t have ascended stuff yet. I’d be for easier settings to increase access to more people. It wouldn’t split the players at all I’d imagine since people who can run it now wouldn’t have any reason to do easy. And people who can’t could try easy.

I’d just hope they’d do it by maybe changing hp or armor on enemies and/or increasing time limits. If they remove mechanics it wouldn’t serve to help new people learn the place and wouldn’t serve much purpose. And as someone who would like to get into the raid I’d be cool with them gating rewards so you couldn’t get them in easy.

Also it’d be nice to think I could get some of the 4 stat jewelry before I tried the normal mode raid (vipers or commanders trinkets).

I’m more glad for the change to the reward structure where doing the T4 version gives all chests under it. It’s nice getting 14 daily chests for running 5 fractals than getting 5 daily chests for running 9 of them.

I hadn’t made a condi reaper as of yet but I was planning on it. But this does take a lot of wind out of the sails even though I mainly play PvE.

One stack of bleed is crap. They could’ve at least applied 3 bleeds so it’d be closer to the original chill damage. And to be perfectly honest I wish they’d make it a few stacks of torment since for some reason necros have terrible access to that condition and it’d be effect since targets would have to spend more time moving with the slowed speed which would give increased damage. Having it apply like 3-4 stacks of torment would be a much less bitter pill than a single bleed.

Would make sense thematically as well.

There doesn’t seem to be a wardrobe slot for this? Will it be added before the festival ends?

Just looked at the wiki page: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bloodbound_weapons

Since they scale to the level of the character using them (and they have two upgrade slots!), these would be useful for leveling new toons – equip it at level 1 and use it all the way to 80.

If you’re familiar with WoW, these would be like the “Heirloom” gear in that game.

The wiki shows me that only 2 handed weapons have 2 upgrade slots, which is the same as all other weapons.

And I’m not too sure you can reset the stats, I think you can just bind it to another character. Which itself is pointless, they should just get rid of the reset item and make them account bound like ascended weapons are. It’s like they wanted to show they had a neat idea but didn’t want anyone to use it so surrounded it in garbage.

I was in AB and just now noticed the vendor for these. Can someone tell me who these are for? They’re gated behind a time and money gate that would require someone be brain dead to buy one.

Each vendor takes 1 lvl 80 rare a day and gives you 1 token in return. Assuming about 30s per rare and 250 tokens for 1 weapon it’d take 75 gold to buy a single weapon. And with the wiki showing 12 merchants you’d need 21 days to get it as well. The fact you can bind them to other characters is neat but that takes 10 tokens which is another 3 gold to do. It also takes 5 crystalline dust which is another gold.

Even if you were leveling alts these are useless as it’s cheaper just to pay for upgraded gear. Also there’s no weapon you could buy that would be useful on every class so if you only have the one character from HoT you’d need to get this thing you wouldn’t get to use it on every alt you made (unless you skip the classes that couldn’t use it).

Lastly 1-hander and 2-hander weapons cost the same which makes little sense as well. All the skins are available on other weapons as well. Has anyone actually bought one? I don’t know why these are in the game.

To chime in on this.

Core gliding is great, I had problems trying to glide in core Tyria anyway after getting out of HoT maps it’s just nice to be able to do.

Shatterer changes, I can only hope you guys plan to change alot of the meta bosses so they at least don’t just involve standing in a blind spot and auto attacking. I like that there’s more to do now and the fight feels more realistic at least.

Profession balances. Good and bad, I like some of the skill changes but honestly I made the mistake of letting my hopes get raised when I heard ele scepter was getting improved, 2 skill changes hardly worth mentioning, and the auto attacks weren’t touched which seem to be the worst part of the weapon. Also no ranger sword auto change though I’ve stopped thinking that’ll come, just sucks because it’s one of only 2 weapons that let you use off-hands and it’s auto attack is a liability.

As far as the encryptions go what is the best option with them?

So far I’ve been opening the ones I get keys for then selling the rest. But is it better to buy the 30 keys you can get a day and open them all? Or even better to just sell the encryptions and ignore the keys completely. I haven’t paid enough attention to the loot from them and all the drop rate discussion I’ve gotten from looking seems to be before they “improved” them. Also is it worth trading the matrices you get for keys or selling those?

Basically which is right?
1. Buy all discounted keys and enough encryptions to open with them.
2. Buy enough keys to open the ones you get but don’t buy more encryptions.
3. Open the ones you have keys for and sell the rest.
4. Just sell all encryptions and throw the keys away.

Is there a plan to add a channel for raids in LFG like there is for dungeons. Open world channel is meant for odds and ends that don’t fall into the other categories, but so much falls into that with the new update it’s completely fuster clucked. It’s where people post for the meta events for the 4 new maps, and SW still, raid groups, group heropoints, the wintersday stuff, and the occasional mispost still. Raiding really needs it’s own channel at least if it’s going to have multiple raids latter on.

To be honest I don’t like many of the skins you get for any spec. Aside from Scrapper helmet and Reaper hood they’re all bland or ugly.

This is great new! I was one of the people who thought they’d get their elite specs early on, but with so many of the hero points being gated by masteries and taking groups of people to complete the furthest I am is for reaper which I still need 50 points to get the last 2 skills. I love how reaper plays but playing it was kind of gimping yourself because when the game launched I was basically walking around with 2 traits on. Being able to do the HoT content WITH the elite spec instead of FOR it I’m all for. Any news on when this update is going to happen?

I submitted a bug report on this but wanted to post here too.

Whenever a ranger uses a glider, when they land they have their first pet out. Maybe to motivate it being fixed a bit faster it’s exploitable. If your first pet dies you can swap pets, do a small glider hop, and get the first pet pack and it’ll completely wipe the recharge for pet swap.

Mash Hog.5672:

They fixed this.

Really? Because I still can’t get it to blast might. Tried probably 20 times and phoenix refused to apply a finisher on wildfire.

I think it’s completely broken. I was standing right next to a party member and used:
Dragons tooth, wildfire, phoenix, arcane brilliance, dragons tooth again to give myself and the party member 12 might, then I used heat sync and all it did was put me at 15, ally was still at 12. Doesn’t seem to share anything, skill basically gives you 3 might, worse than if it were just a blast finisher. It should share the other common boons I agree about just blacklisting stab/resistance/quickness, but it doesn’t even do what it says correctly right now.

I tend not to name them either since changing them resets it. But right now I have a Reef Drake named Halitosis and a Siamoth named Juvenile Mole Hippo. I used a pig way back when named Pre Bacon. And a Red Moa named Big Red.

When does the key reset? Isn’t there still one reset on the 17? Or do you level a character to 10 and then run the key on reset?

I’m glad to hear at least the slow gyro speed and spotty hit rate of hammer is getting looked into. I think it’s a bit foolish they gave any of the elite specs only 1 BWE given how much the other elite specs changed during the ones they had. Reaper was almost hated on it’s first BWE and was still getting some feedback on this last one. They should’ve at least all got 2. The thing I’m most wondering right now is why is it that the 2 specs that only got 1 BWE are both under the same dev? At the very least if you’re only going to give them 1 week make it so the same dev doesn’t have to work through the loads of issues and feedback that are destined to come in on their first run. I’m sure there are a lot of people working on the fixes but still.

Hoping the gyros will have some decent function to them after the fixes.

I didn’t test many elite specs during any of the weekends since I want to save the enjoyment of learning them for release, but I did test out reaper for a bit and I found a few shouts useful.

I actually like “Your soul is mine!” it has the lowest cooldown aside from the minion, and when traited and hitting 5 targets it’s 13s and since it gives you life force for shroud I feel like it could really increase your ability to stay in fights if there are multiple enemies.

“Rise!” would be nice for MM’s but also just as a damage alleviation for tanky builds.

“Nothing can save you!” has some use in fractals now, you can use it to put some CC on the Grawl Shaman through his block to make it easier to prevent him from getting to the civilians on the sides, you could use it with GS 5 pull or a fear to CC the Ooze in the reactor out of his blocking phase too I’d imagine. Also hopefully navigating through active defense will become more prominent in newer content. You can use it on the groups in Urban fractal to corrupt their might stacks from monks too on a lower cooldown than the well of corruption.

“You are all weaklings!” could be used for an initial burst for trash, it’d weaken them to negate some damage but if you put the 2 dps wells down and use it for might to increase their damage without having to stack it though the auto attack.

“Chill to the bone!” Gets a bit of a bonus for me for not being a form or a minion. It’s cooldown is lower than everything but flesh golem, and the burst of chill and stun help you with some other traits.

They’re definitely not good in every situation, and I’m sure I’ll still use wells quite a bit but I do like some of the stuff they can do. I’ll probably at least try using the heal and elite since I’m not fond of 1 spam in lich form.

It’s sweet getting the dungeon and labyrinth at the same time. I hope that we can see Reapers Rumble come back, and I hope there aren’t any ridiculously scarce lotteries like the ghost puppy from ToT bags or shiny wrappers for skins.

HoT content will have to be on delay, unless the process to unlock elite specs is relatively painless. I’d really like to get the elite specs and then get used to the skills as I butcher things in the labyrinth.

New skins are nice too, I’ll have to look into snagging those back items, and some minis if the mood strikes me.

I’d have to agree that over healing isn’t as much a concern here as it would be in other games. Other games tend to make higher health heals take more of a resource like mp or mana and they have longer cooldowns so you don’t want to be caught with them down. We just have the cooldowns and they aren’t terribly long. Also it’d have a certain appeal to hit someone in your party with a heal that boosts them up from the brink of death into a safe range. If people running dps are still going to be using scholars runes and other health dependent modifiers making sure you can keep them in the bonus range is a plus.

I didn’t think about how water rune would heal with outgoing healing modifiers, that actually may help healing ranged players since right now druid staff heals feel more focused on melee.

As far as healing power rebalance, they’d have to make it so it’d only take a minor healing power boost to get to decent healing because if it’s all healing power or basically no heals it destroys any chance of making a hybrid damage build.

Maybe they’re all stealthed.

Mercurias.1826:

I was looking at a sneaky, supporty apothecary trapper Druid with short bow for WvW. Trapper runes for little stealth jaunts when you lay traps down to help survival everywhere you are, plus a lot of annoyances that would keep people locked down for concentrated fire from friends. Healing for friends and bleeds for enemies. Probably not ideal damage, but fun as heck for roaming and helping your side out.

This is kind of what I was thinking when I’d considered going condition damage. Celestial shadow gives the same effect as trappers runes for leaving celestial form. The traps would help you with survival from stealth and help your party with a bit of extra degen. I’d still go with moment of clarity for double daze duration though especially if I was taking trait to daze when switching to staff. At the very least healing spring would give you another water field, AoE heal and condition removal.

So sword/warhorn for extra survival and support I guess warhorn boons would make the monks boon duration more worth while. What about sigils? If going full healing would you use benevolence or life to increase healing further? Water for on hit heal, or energy for extra dodges?

The damage on full heal would be terrible as expected but how are you planning on getting any kill credits with staff auto being like 100 damage unless it’s buffed.

It’d be nice if they added new stats/runes/sigils with HoT that helps with these kinds of builds. Like monk runes but have outgoing healing instead of boon duration %’s, on heal sigils or something like that.

Just want some ideas of what others are thinking. Which stat combo, rune/sigil set, traits, and alternate weapon do you think would work well with druid?

I ask because there are only 3 sets that have healing power as the main attribute and I can’t seem to think which one would work well or if having healing power major stat would be that important.

None of the rune sets seem like they’d be all that great for druid either, they don’t really provide boons which is what a lot of healing power rune sets seem to give as secondary effects.

Also what weapon do you think would work along staff? I heard a lot of talk about longbow during beta but I was wondering if trying for condition damage would work so you could apply conditions between heals and it would require less stats than direct damage, but ranger doesn’t have that great of condition weapons from the looks of it. Staff being a healing weapon did pretty terrible direct damage, and all druids access to conditions are non-damaging.

All in all I can’t figure out where I’d want to go with building a druid so I figured I’d ask. It’d be nice to have some damage addition since pure healing won’t give you credit for anything.

How do you make alphabet cereal for quaggans?
Mix it with cheerios.

Why is necromancer such a bad job choice?
It’s a profession with no stability.

Played it a bit, didn’t check out traits much so won’t mention them.

Hammer: I like it but rocket leap shouldn’t try to do the zig-zag thing when you’re already in melee, most of the time it causes me to hit them, leap sideways hitting nothing, then jump back to hit for third attack. Even worse slightly out of melee I can occasionally miss 2 of the 3 attacks.

Gyros: Function gyro may as well not even be there, sure it allows a ranged res or stomp but those are 2 very narrow uses. It shouldn’t be a class mechanic to pick up downed team mates (It’s one of the issues I have with necro traits that heal downed I don’t like planning for my allies to fail. Or become useless if they don’t.)

The gyros themselves look good but that’s about it. They have a hard time keeping up, and unlike the people above I wasn’t uses ANY speed boosts they just run to catch up then stop randomly so stealth gyro with normal running speed had me only catching every 3rd stealth pulse.

Stealth: Can’t keep up so you constantly unstealth, since this game isn’t made around standing in place it makes this pretty lame.

Blast: One cosmetic issue it has that it shares with mesmer clones (at least for me) is sometimes it blows up and it’s corpse is left floating there for a while. Sometimes it has to think about what I told it to do and won’t chase the enemy right away, and this was pve so were it another player the last thing I’d want was to give them more time to react to it. Also I tried using it to knock back a husk in silverwastes and the stupid thing ran past the husk then came back and hit it in the back knocking it closer to it’s goal which was the opposite of what I wanted it to do. Lastly, I think this one just feels out of place since the rest are minions and this one is an attack.

Heal and cleanse: I’m putting these together because I think that’s part of the issue, healing turret does what both of these do in a single skill, placing a healing turret will give you a much larger healing radius, a condi cleanse if you keep it out, a water field you can blast, and it applies regen. While these gyros follow you it hardly matters since they have durations and you can just as easily move and place another turret since the cooldown is less. Healing gyro has crap range.

Shredder: This was honestly the one I was expecting the most out of. It’s damage is terrible but I figured that was because of it’s combo ability. The thing is it’s 12 separate whirls. It should either be 1 constant 12s whirl or have a higher damage (Or both I guess) because once the field you place it in expires you’re left with it’s crappy damage if it were a constant whirl it’d still be throwing projectiles.

Bulwark: Same as phantasmal defender, since these take damage from people around them and deal none or almost none themselves they really should be immune to taking damage themselves or have very large HP pools, they melt in no time. In group settings a single mob with an AoE that hits all 5 allies and the defense utility will kill them instantly. I’d like it if this one couldn’t be attacked but couldn’t attack either and just died from the damage it was being shared since that would happen quick enough.

Toolbelt skills

Heal: Water field that follows you and pulses protection it’s pretty nice but doesn’t make up for the gyros poor range and recharge.

Bulwark: Reflect-y bubble that follows you, I like it but again doesn’t make up for the gyro.

Stealth: Didn’t pvp so didn’t try reveal, sounds powerful though.

Cleanse: Didn’t even try the gyro

Shredder: Good extra damage and another lightning field which is nice since you can combo it with shredder for brutal bolts but again since it’s not a constant whirl once field runs out it’s use drops to nothing. I like this toolbelt skill I hope shredder is buffed so it’s easier to justify bringing it.

All in all I like the hammer quite a bit, the idea of the spec too. Maybe not the common view of it but I think the utilities could be useful if buffed correctly but right now they have too many issues to justify like poor targeting, small ranges, low health, etc… I really wish that there scrapper and druid would’ve gotten at least 2 beta weekends for this very reason, first weekends are usually for major changes needed, then they need more for tweaks.

I only jumped on to play it a bit in WvW since I though throwing green numbers at a zerg would be entertaining. I will say that it was (at least for me), but there are some obvious problems.

These may be a bit unrealistic and I’m not a min/max person so none of this is for values I’ll leave those to others, they’re more for overall class feel.

Staff: The main heal weapon feels like it requires too much “Enemy participation” to heal. If your allies aren’t near an enemy then you’ll only hit a few with skill 1 and none with skill 2, so you’re left with 3 if you want to toss someone some HP. Also as others have said druids hold staffs like they way 100 lbs I hope it’s changed.

Skill 1: could use a more impressive beam.

Skill 2: I’d personally like it better if the wisp just patrolled an area you cast it on hurting enemies and healing allies. It works on healing melee but again if people are at range you can’t use this to help them at all.

Skill 3: this is the only one you can use for people who aren’t in melee range of an enemy and that’s an issue. Also I’d like it if it ended when you got to the destination, if you try to use it to heal nearby ranged players you’ll sit there as an orb for the 1s cast unable to do anything.
Skill 4: I don’t have much to say for this one.

Skill 5: Again with enemy participation, if there aren’t any projectiles being exchanged this skill loses a ton of use. It’d be nice if it gave a medium size heal for allies that walk through it so you could place it down and have people help themselves by strafing through it.

Avatar: The energy was all over the place. Alone it takes forever to get up. When surrounded by damaged allies you can go from 0 to full in a second or two. The form itself ended somewhat fast in my opinion. Also is it only possible to enter the form with a full bar?

Skill 1: I’m in the camp that this should have at least a small amount of damage with it, unless events are going to change then you’re actually getting punished taking time off your dps to heal since you’ll tag less (less loot and less participation credit) with a low damage value at least you’d build up some credit passively. Also it has a delay that makes it so hitting someone who’s moving is pretty unlikely in my experience.

Skill 2: Delay once again makes it likely an ally is likely to move out of range before it heals, and the thing is ugly as sin would prefer it to be a bloom or something it looks like a fungus to me right now.

Skill 3: I like this one.

Skill 4: I like this heal channel too would be nice if it applied regen if you channeled it all the way or something so that it gives a bit more extra healing if you don’t have to dodge out of something.

Skill 5: It’s okay, I had a hard time judging the range on this one but that may just be me.

Utilities: Not much I can say here either. The glyph radius felt a bit small, and the elite duration is a bit short for me. The heal form of the elite didn’t feel like it gave me much time to pump healing into them before it ended, it didn’t take long till I forgot to use it entirely.

Traits: Didn’t play around with different ones much, seemed okay.

Pets: Likes a lot about them.
Tiger: Can almost perma-fury nearby allies if you can keep it alive.
Smoke: Strong
Bristle: Long range I felt ranger needed more ranged pet options.
Wyverns: For both of them I feel they’re on the slow side. I used fire wyverns ability once to see it then never slotted the pet. It looks cool but takes along time to finish. Lightning I can’t say much on because I couldn’t keep track of it but it seemed like it was inferior to the other 2.

I like the complete change of gameplay this brings but since healing doesn’t count towards event participation and loot rolls I feel, even for a healing class, most skills should do at least a bit of damage so you can get your rewards and not be punished for going full support. Looks like it could easily be a blast in open world events and WvW stuff, if I don’t feel like bringing a dps build but I don’t want to lose my loot.

They are both pretty different from each other, I tend not to even compare them because I like them both for different reasons. If they were from 2 different series I’d honestly hold them both in high praise.

GW1 has a more static combat system with little exploration to it compared to GW2.
But GW2 can’t hold a candle to GW1 build system, GW1 had thousands of skills, and with the ability to have 2 professions and have any profession wield any weapon.

If you’re one who likes to make builds (Both character and party comp) then GW1 is amazing. The issue being it’s old so it’s not very populated.

You probably chose the class that will most hammer home the need to dodge. Thieves don’t have a very tanky build set up and the best you’ll do to survive damage is by hiding in stealth a bunch. But since hiding doesn’t let you kill you have to use blinds and evades from dodges and your skills to stay alive. They can do pretty insane dps but they put the glass in glass cannon because you will be downed by a single hit from higher difficulty enemies.

I could see the combat system taking some getting used to (I was a fan of original GW so I followed development of this game and knew what to expect when it launched). Though for me personally once you get used to it it’s actually really good. If I go to play a different game I’ll find myself trying to cast while running or using my dodge keybind and wondering why it didn’t do anything. The combat is very mobile and reflexive and is pretty fun once you get the hang of it. I have to agree with others too having passive avoidance stats are boring, it’s much more fun to know you timed a pistol whip to survive something that should’ve destroyed you than it is raising a % high enough that you happened to avoid it.

You may want to try Guardian, Warrior, or Necromancer if you want a class that can take a few hits before needing to dodge while you’re learning the game. Thief along with glass builds on the other classes really require you know your damage avoidance.

Fixing over powered dps for things like FGS when you could rush a wall and ice bow 4 is fine and all but could anet look into buffing earth shield and lava axe so they can see the light of day at least? As far as I know these skills never see use because they don’t really offer anything. Wish anet was more willing to change functionality when something doesn’t work out, but I can’t remember them even trying to tweak these into viability.

I like some of what Anet is trying with the elite specs mechanic wise. A prime example is that druid wall, instead of destroying or reflecting like has been done converting them into something else is a neat idea. Even if some don’t work out I like their experimentation with different things skills can do. That wall is fill with hilarious possibilities. If you’re being focused at range you can put wall down then celestial elite glyph and become a heal battery. You can stick the wall under lupi and turn his phase 2 AoE into a healing sprinkler (Though since the dungeon won’t change reflects will still win for this just saying). In zerg vs. zerg battles you can use that when all the reflects have been burned through and just have the enemy zerg heal yours.

Also new pets definitely look sweet, letting them set up fields that aren’t poison, and a smoke field that doubles as a pet god mode while they’re standing in it. I’ll definitely be taming all the new pets when HoT is out at least.

Oh and 2 AoE dazes, with 100% duration trait you can lock down 5 people for 10 seconds assuming you don’t have mesmer runes on. Actually just noticed that lunar impact has 5s cooldown with 1s cast, with 100% increase on the 3s stun you can lockdown someone with one skill as long as you have enough time in “Life Shroud”.

I was in a group fighting Mai Trin, since she pumps out so many bleeds I tend to bring well of power to put on people to cleanse them, but when someone’s downed and she’s cutting every vein in their body I place the well down and nothing happens. Is this intended? I mean the well doesn’t have a tremendous number of uses as is so having it completely void in helping downed allies survive conditions seems a bit over the top.

One I like is the chef in silverwastes
“I’m not crying, it’s the onions. Don’t look at me!”

Getting rid of the downed state in there would just cause people to be even more skeptical about letting new people in since they’d be more of a liability. Also it’d negate the use of a few skills, part of the functionality of warbanner, the res signets, illusion of life (as if anyone ever really uses that).
Downed state is a core mechanic in the game to where some traits and skills are built around it.

I’m sure everything has already been said, but this event is pretty illogical.

It’s made in low level zones as if to give new players a taste of what the events can be like, but give no exp, karma, or money to help them out as events in the past have. The rewards are all so expensive they can’t buy anything if they do participate.

The event itself encourages tag and run so you can get the 20 stacks necessary for max reward. Because of this the events closes to waypoints get zerged and the ones far away from them are almost ignored.

Also they events themselves are inconsistent in time. The shield blossoms can be destroyed in 40-50 seconds while the catapults will sit there for ages because there aren’t enough people to defend those that man them.

I hope for better in the future. But for this one it’s kind of unrewarding and gets boring quickly.

I just pre-purchased yesterday which means I could do beta weekends stuff, but I learned from doing the beta weekend events for the original game launch that it wasn’t really for me. It takes alot away from the game for me knowing that everything I do will be erased eventually. Additionally I’m not a fan of testing unfinished specs. We can’t see forge or druid which, if I were to beta, I would want to test them all out at once. And if the specs they do have are under powered it won’t be much fun using them, but if they’re over powered I could be spoiled for the inevitable nerf before release. So I’m at the very least skipping betas until all the specs are in there.