After the April update, all toons will have their current traits unlocked (except the new gran-master traits).
EDIT: I mean toons created before the update.
Which is precisely what I want to avoid, because I’d like to have the option to unlock the traits by playing the game, not have them unlocked already (minus the new ones) when the update goes live.
The way each trait is now pinpointed to a specific task in a specific area is exactly what I’ve been missing in GW2 before, because it makes the world feel less generic, and I’d like to be able to experience that without having to create a new character.
This could easily be implemented by giving the skill trainers a (temporary) option to unlearn all traits, and that option could even be associated with some kind of reward to make farming traits repeatable content and a source of income. All that with the implementation of a single dialogue option.
I’ve quit the game many months ago for various reasons, but I’d be interested to play again, if there was a way to lock traits for characters that are already max level, as is the case for newly created characters come the april 15 update.
I have maxed all classes that I’m interested in playing already and I don’t want to level the same class twice. Any chance this could be done somehow?
P.S.: I also think it’s not a good idea to let people just buy the traits, as inefficient as it may be. IMO that’s too much babysitting and underestimating your customers.
I don’t get why the stat combo is something that most classes and builds don’t want to use AT ALL. If you only want to make one stat combo, why not PVT which most people would find at least remotely usable? That or at least give players the chance to choose between a few popular stat combos when they ascend the back piece.
Behemoth is the coolest looking boss in the game to me, glad to see he will be less weak in the future.
When you revamp these bosses and events please also take a look at their spawn windows (aka the cost/reward factor). Standing around waiting for a boss to spawn for longer than max 30mins is not fun and I already skip Maw and Jormag Claw because of that.
What I like most about WvW is that I can bring my own gear combination which I cannot replicate in sPvP (thus far). I also enjoy smaller skirmishes in non-kitchen sized areas, but these rarely happen.
Zerg vs Zerg battles in WvW to me is the ultimate example of what is wrong with GW2 PvP: it’s a confusing mess of ability spam without anyone seeing anything.
Speaking of “Auto attack problem”, my auto attacks don’t auto attack quite often of late. I attack something and then won’t attack again, even when there’s no interference (LoS, obstacle etc.).
The only reason instagib build xyz isn’t considered OP in teamplay is Downed State and ever present team mates to ress.
Skill will matter once frontloading damage and spamming all your buttons becomes merely a beginner strat and once it’s possible to react to your opponent’s skills properly.
Motion sickness can happen if your brain wants to process an environment that somehow irritates you. I get motion sick in FPS all the time and it’s mostly because the FOV and head/weapon bobbing drive me insane in most of these games.
SAB might cause motion sickness to some, because you navigate a comparatively realistic looking character through an extremely unnatural looking 3D environment which your brain probably wants to “remedy” but can’t.
It would be interesting if killing a Commander gave an Aoe demoralization debuff for a short period of time. Nothing too groundbreaking, since then the harassment would get out of control probably, but as the OP stated: it would be a nice idea to make a Commander kill noticeable for the opposing zerg.
Even if Champs all had a 100% chance to drop at least a green item, would it be fun hunting them? I think not. It would be less of a waste of time, but not more.
IMO Champs (and other special mobs) should drop something that regular mobs can’t drop, THAT would make them more interesting to kill. It was always exciting to me finding Named Monsters (NMs) in Final Fantasy XI, because they had a unique loot table. GW2 could use some of this non-genericness (yeah Chrome doesn’t think this is a word either, but YOLO man!)
Is it safe to assume that these other weapon skins will not use a different currency? I’m asking because I’m not interested in one of the currently available skins but might be saving up some baubles for later skin releases.
Synergy with Guardian is good: Guardian has good finishers to your fields and he can profit from burning condition on enemies. He’s also not squishy while Ele is (while leveling) and his area control helps you with delivering your aoe dmg more easily.
You could try to go for a lot of fields (Healing Turret, Bombs etc.) and Blast Finishers (Thumper Turret yay) and support your group with Area Might and Area Heal. Area Stealth can be nice, too. Engineer has so many Blast Finishers, you can blast all day.
I dunno, to me it doesn’t sound like a versatile solution either to give each class a 25% movement signet or “a swiftness weapon”, because that basically locks one utility/weapon slot and doesn’t help with the goal of introducing more viable builds to the game. I don’t want to feel forced to trait faster movement speed either, but maybe this would be the least restricting solution (if the trait was minor and tier 1).
I currently play a build on my Mesmer without any form of Swiftness and it’s terrible to move around OOC in WvW, but it’s the build I wish to play and artificially adding Swiftness procs etc. to it would make it less effective. Switching to Focus all the time and back isn’t how I want to play either, because I find it super annoying.
Some oddities with Elixir Gun skill 4 “Acid Bomb”:
- You can be hit while flying backwards, which makes this skill almost too dangerous to use for its purpose of getting point blank range, swap into Elixir Gun with Kit Refinement to immobilize and then Acid Bomb away to “safety”, except you’re not safe while still launching and might be knocked down or stunned mid air instead (or at least take a lot of damage while your target might still escape the Acid damage).
Most other movement skills of this kind will give a brief invulnerability period (Thief Short bow “Disabling Shot”, Ele Staff Fire “Burning Retreat”, Charr racial “Hidden Pistol” etc.), so Acid Bomb should be allowed to function this way, too!
- Sometimes you won’t fly backwards at all for no apparent reason (no snares, no stun etc.), instead you will jump straight into the air.
IMO the shared cooldown of the trait is hurting a lot. For instance, you can’t:
- …equip Flamethrower, put down Fire Field, switch to Elixir Gun and use Self Knockback Shot with Glue immobilizing your target inside the two Aoes. This combo would be awesome, but you have to be in Flamethrower for 20 seconds until you can do it.
- …do the same combo as above, just with Toolkit pull and Confusion Smack.
- …rely on Med Kit’s rad Magnetic Aura when using other kits. “Hmm, incoming Unload, my CD should be ready… or not”
Please make these effects work like with the Ele trait Evasive Arcana which gives each attunement a separate CD. Currently, it rather hurts you if you want to use more than one kit with Kit Refinement.
And overall, we want to slow the game down so that new players aren’t dying to certain specs in 2-3 seconds. So the quickness change is one step towards that.
I’m very glad to hear this. I was beginning to wonder if the breakneck pace of PvP combat is actually recognized as a problem or if it’s just Anet’s design philosophy. I’m glad that it’s not. Believe me, your game will open up so much more when combat is slowed down. I can’t count how many interesting builds I’ve made with my toons that didn’t work because they were “too cute”.
To me this patch was yet another small step in the right direction. I didn’t expect the Quickness nerf at all, and I’m very grateful for it, because it makes more room for interaction between players, and that’s what PvP is about.
Other than that, there have been several ease of access fixes and buffs to skills that didn’t perform so well. Polishing. Many bugs and oddities still remain, which is surely one reason for no sweeping balance changes. Just have a closer look at Mesmer traits, most of them were meant for an interrupting/blinding machine but seem quite off with how Mesmer is today (this is just one example, Engineer too still has lots of lackluster traits).
The overall midterm goal (besides bug fixing) is currently to make more builds viable, which is why you won’t see big nerfs to Ele, because Ele has one good option in sPvP. Engineer had the most changes by far this patch and Warrior was hit hard you could say, but somehow I still don’t believe Warrior only has one build in sPvP, it’s just that roflstomping people with 20k damage in 1 second was so overpowered that every other build Warriors could come up with looked weak in comparison.
I like the idea behind these mechanics, because it rewards good play. A problem is however that we move like turtles when strafing, which makes aligning to hit multiple enemies rather difficult.
It lost the pulsating effect on the sword after transmuting. The effect still shows up in the hero panel/preview window.
This is true for my Sylvari Female as well, so it’s likely a general problem with transmuting Peacemaker weapons.
I have a transmuted Peacemaker Staff, 1h Sword and Scepter and the 1h Sword and Staff definitely lost the pulsating effect (not sure about the Scepter since it’s hard to tell)
Edit: Same problem with my Asura Ele and her transmuted Peacemaker Dagger. No pulsating effect.
Problem:
The “eye belt” ornamental part (dark grey in the picture) stands out too far, which makes me look fat. It looks as if the ornament is hovering in the air before my belly, and as you can see in the pictures, it’s easily possible to look through the gap between ornament and cloth.
I noticed this as well. It seems that you need to stand inside a field roughly 1+sec before the blast happens or it won’t combo. Hope this will be fixed soon.
Options that we have working internally, so far, include:
Name
Password
Message of the Day
Max Players
Minimum Players
Respawn Time
Score Limit
Team Size
Time Limit
Respawn Type (Wave or Individual)
Autobalance Toggle
Lock Gear Toggle
Lock Skills Toggle
Ready Button Toggle
Spectators Toggle
No Stats Toggle
Map selection
I’d just like to see what would happen if you added “Downed State Toggle”.
In dungeons Phantasms get oneshot all the time, so Retaliation does almost nothing, whereas 5 more points in Domination give you and your Phantasms more Power. The added condition duration might help as well.
Just did a couple of fights on the Mists sparring NPCs with your build, especially since I wanted to test the Confusion on Blind trait myself.
I might have been lucky and these weren’t like 1000 fights (more like 10-15), but boy did that Confusion proc from Chaos Armor. It’s actually insane, because the Thief NPC gave herself 8 (!) stacks Confusion once from an Unload and 1-2 normal attacks, no shatters from me, no active blinds, just Chaos Armor. I have a bad feeling this isn’t gonna stay, because anyone with a multihit attack cannot win against your build (it’s likely a bug anyway, since there are no blinds going on from Chaos Armor, as mentioned by you already)
I just noticed today that upon blast or leap finishing an Ethereal field none of the Aura traits Ele has will apply boons (Fury, Swiftness, Protection). Chaos Armor doesn’t say “Aura” anywhere but it works exactly like one. Could this be an oversight or a deliberate distinction? If so, why?
Just watched vid 8, very good stuff. I’ve got a few questions, if you don’t mind:
- why Manipulation CD reduction instead of 3% less dmg per clone or even the random condition on clone death trait?
- do you have problems with people staying at range when fighting you? (or who just run away when the fight goes bad for them)
- you mentioned dying quite a bit when soloing. are you just getting overrun by zergs who aren’t loaded yet or what are the most common reasons for your demise? :p
It has to do with the frequency at which the swiftness is applied. The pulses are far enough apart that it’s possible for you to walk over the field and not get one.
It would be overpowered if the heal activated on Mantra use and I actually enjoy the effect activating when charging a Mantra.
Currently, I find this trait to be a nice PvE support addition. I haven’t been able to get it to work in PvP, because it’s too “cute” there. Maybe if there was another trait that made you receive considerably less damage while channeling… http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Protected_Mantras isn’t too shabby with 250 toughness, but it’s still not enough for 3 1/4sec thumb twiddling.
I ran Rampager gear with GS for a long time and recently switched to Berserker. Damage-wise I find Berserker to be better, since Staff doesn’t lose much DPS with high Power gear (though I still use Rampager stats on Staff because it doesn’t affect GS). Condition dmg does absolutely nothing for GS outside of illusion bleeds, and Sigil of Earth is not a strong enough converter mechanic.
Could you describe how your team goes about identifying and improving on skills that are either too powerful or too weak or boring? How did you come up with the recent changes to Mesmer GS and Scepter weapon skills for example?
I’m stoked to see how these changes will play out. The problem I always had with turrets is that not only are they weak in damage and stationary (duh!), the Overcharge, which is in theory a super interesting mechanic, is very clumsy to use because of the delay (which is why I like the instant explode blast finishers much more).
It’s a bit odd with Warrior and mobility. If you play GS + Hammer (or 1H Sword) for instance, you fly all over the place, but if you make sth. like a Rifle/Hammer build you’ll miss GS mobility (and Adrenaline gain of GS to fuel Hammer Burst skill). Axe/Axe, too, might be more popular if it had a movement skill other than the Burst skill (which is superb).
Ruby and Beryl are the best price to performance ratio.
120 Power
84 Precision or Vitality
12% crit damage
Getting 12% crit damage usually comes at a heavy cost of another stat. The only way to get crit damage at a very attractive budget is by using orbs, rings, accessories, amulets and capes. Crit damage on weapons and armor is too costly.
This isn’t accurate. Capes have the worst crit%/stat ratio alongside Head and Leg pieces. Rings only have good ratio when they are Ascended, weapons have decent ratio. Shoulders, Hands and Shoes have amongst the best crit%/stat ratio and the best by far are exotic jewels:
@OP: Personally I use Divinity runes, because they have the most stats and Ele actually makes use of all of them frequently, AND they add very high crit%. Ruby Orbs and such are nice if you aren’t in danger of taking damage, but where is that place?
Hi all. I want to complain that the portal allows too many to pass trough.
Out of nowhere we get rolled by 20+ ppl. AND on top of it the mass quickness without penalty to all is even more OP
all aoe (including portal and mass quickness should effect maximum 5 people ! not 9999 !!!) the stealth curtain is the same story… as other skills
and shadow refuge is only for 5 !
where is the balance in this game ?
and the range should be less than 9000km between the portals !!!!
- Portal has already been made inconvenient enough, but not many of these changes really affect portal bombing. I recently did World completion on my Mesmer and for convenience I wanted to use Portal frequently when clearing a map, but the now too long cooldown, the too short range, the too short activation window make it basically useless besides helping someone get to a Vista.
- Our quickness Elite only affects 5 targets, but yeah, quickness is stupid and should only affect autoattack aka skill #1 IMO.
- Mass invisibility and especially Veil are only too strong in combination with swiftness IMO. Veil should also activate just 10 times, like Mass Invis only works on 10 players, to avoid stealth bombing with a big zerg.
First of all: good job everyone. This episode was very informative.
I especially appreciate the very direct questions. When the Thief discussion came up, it already looked like people wanted to move on, but then Xeph managed to bring to the point what thousands of posts on these forums and elsewhere talk about: “WTF is going on with 16k dmg from stealth???” It still baffles me that this isn’t acknowledged more as a big problem by the devs and I can only imagine how many more players, casual and competitive alike, you would draw into PvP if it wasn’t for ridiculous burst damage. Just because we have a (not fun) Downed State and someone who has been instagibbed can be ressed right away doesn’t mean it’s fun or fair or a “L2Play issue”. Speaking of L2P, I see pro players on streams get smashed by Backstab/Mug the same as everyone else and they say the same things: “How is this still in the game?”.
Besides that I’m quite excited about some of the profession changes mentioned. Going through every profession like that was definitely a treat. Of course not every issue got tackled (like Mesmer runspeed, too long casting times of Ele Conjures or Mesmer Phantasms etc.), but that’s probably asking too much, and there will hopefully be more SOTGs with devs in the near future.
Overall a very good episode and I would like to encourage you to keep up the structure of tackling each profession one after another.
If you look closely, it becomes obvious that many traits were designed for a Mesmer with more interrupts. In Beta times, GS #3 for instance, was a single target daze if I remember correctly. Even the 6 piece bonus of the Mesmer rune has daze duration, which is not a very desirable bonus for Mesmers as of now.
In any case, I don’t really desire having more dazes unless combat evolves in a direction where you can make conscious decisions whether to interrupt something or not (the same is true for dodging btw, which is mostly done after the maxim “looks like a good time to dodge now, I guess”)
In general, don’t run zerkers with this build in the Wub, run as much Knight’s as you can.
The extra damage is NOT EVER worth the toughness that you would loose. Phantasm builds better suit drawn out battles, and with this you can generally poop out swordsmen and heal yourself and everyone around you while doing pretty great damage.
That being said, in dungeons feel free to throw on a few zerkers pieces and float around the back end of your group healing while discovering the Treasures of the Deeps but remember that your Phantasms benefit from toughness, its a very important stat that you should gouge as hard as you can.
This was my reasoning as well. Toughness is good for this build, because you 1) have lots of heals, 2) Phantasms play a big role and benefit from your toughness.
I grudgingly decided against gear with main stat toughness however, because it bugs me too much having no points at all in the toughness trait line and then trying to go for a lot of toughness… that just isn’t so great :/
I also would have liked to try Staff with Phantasms, because the synergy is great, but you can’t make a S/S + Staff Phantasm build because you can’t go 20p in 4 trait lines for all the mandatory traits (Phantasm Fury + Sword spec. in Dueling, Staff spec. in Chaos, all the good Phantasm Minor traits in Inspiration + Mantra heals, Additional Bounce in Illusions). Illusionary Elasticity really should be a Tier 1 trait IMO…
This thread has so much win in it. I would likely never have figured out that Mimic works with friendly projectiles and I also didn’t know that reflected stuff uses the reflector’s stats, so big thanks for sharing this!
OK, so after some further testing I found out that:
- Outside sPvP Phantasm retaliation damage actually does scale with my Power, meaning it should be a bug in sPvP (or deemed too strong there? I doubt it.)
- The Warden and Swordsman Phantasms do more retaliation damage than the others. This is true for sPvP and PvE.
- If a Defender is out with another Phantasm and the mob attacks only the other Phantasm, then retaliation will proc twice thanks to damage sharing of the Defender (which is what I was hoping for when testing the Defender). I haven’t been able to test if there are three procs when the mob hits both Phantasms, but this should be the case.
I made a new build for my Mesmer including this “http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vengeful_Images” Minor trait and was testing gear setups in the Mists vs the sparring NPCs. Regardless of my Power my Phantasms would always retaliate for the exact same damage once hit, which is 331 (449 + 331 with 2 Phantasms, if one is the Phantasmal Defender).
It would be good to know if this is a bug or if it is intended that Phantasm retaliation damage does not scale (although their Power does scale with mine!), because I’m about to buy a new Ascended amulet and this will affect my stat choice.
