Guild Wars 2

I’ve been running into this again.

Previously, I was able to correct it by altering the in-game audio quality settings.

I think it will also fix itself if I set the graphical settings to low specs.

But it seems to happen in any audio sequence which is done in the actual game and not one of those personal story cutscene dialog things. Also has a tendency to alternate… that is, one audio line works, the next doesn’t, particularly when they occur immediately after one another.

I was dismayed by the ascended aqua breather announcement too. I thought converting them to skins was just common sense, but apparently it isn’t.

It’s a failed part of the game. Hey, it was tried, but it just doesn’t work out well. Aqua breathers are not suddenly going to be relevant just because there’s an ascended one to get now. Making them skins is just much more sensible.

I’ve been using this p/p in WvW quite a bit since the patch: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAqaVlsMh2mYZTwvJw+EHyEFPHahbwXGHaao3zpIAA-TlyCABAcIEI/ECE++DpovBLlG3o+TiKBp4IEklyspfQAkCAipRA-w

Damage is not that high, but I’ve been having fun with it. Obviously some personal tweaks can be made.

p/p might seem an odd choice compared to p/d, but the use of carrion gear allows me to put out semi-ok direct damage with unload, which also helps proc the on-crit sigils with lower precision. Plus I have an easy ranged interrupt to proc more torment and stop heals or whatnot. BP is useful for the things it’s useful for.

Offhand dagger I don’t think is as necessary because the dagger toss doesn’t add anything, and CnD isn’t really necessary due to all the stealth the build already has. The only thing it really adds is additional torment from the #3, but yeah.

Slapinator.4196:

I hope arenanet treats the currently unbalanced builds like they did with engi turrets.

I would hope not. We need more viable/effective/<insert buzz word here> builds, not less of them.

As much as people complained about turret builds, it was an important style of build for the engineer to have. It was the only kitless build that was genuinely effective in a game mode, and it was the only place that turrets actually did something useful.

But after the nerfs, and now the specialization changes, they’ve been reduced so significantly in power that it’s generally not worth running them anymore. They can now die from simple cleave damage more often than not, and they still have problems like locking out your toolbelt skill while having them deployed.

I’d like to see turret builds see a revival, although I can understand why people don’t want them back at the same level they were at previously. I look at them kind of like the warrior skullcracker builds. They were incredibly powerful and tough to deal with initially, then they were more or less deleted from the game, but were eventually brought back into the mix and provide a reasonable alternative to more conventional warrior builds that is actually effective in some regard without being over the top.

However, I’m not 100% on what the correct answer is in this situation. A lot of people would just like turrets to stay weak, but a lot of people also want global stealth nerfs, kits on every profession, and warriors with all mobility removed. If nothing else, they should either make turrets harder to kill than they currently are, or at least allow them to gain additional damage through things like critical hits or other stat scaling (i.e. healing turret still doesn’t scale with healing power on the overcharge, although I can understand why they haven’t fixed this yet).

I’m not sure why people just want one, maybe two builds that are actually effective in PvP, let alone other game modes. Hell, turrets weren’t even that effective at higher competitive levels. Most of the people raging at them were solo queuer’s and hotjoiner’s (although to be fair I imagine that encompasses the majority of the PvP population).

I’ve done a cleric staff Ventari build as well. It’s good at taking a beating and giving some residual support to allies, but not much else. Has very minimal damage, no mobility, and no real unique utility outside of a potentially permanent projectile bubble.

Would probably be ok in sPvP as a node holder, but maybe only in hotjoins. I was glad to see that I was able to make a very tanky revenant using the Ventari legend, but it’ll need more than what it has now.

Nilkemia.8507:

Well, he stated he was testing out the RNG after reading about how many people spoke of the better loot from the Forge on their Beta slots, so I presumed he also did the same on his own. Also, I don’t think the Beta slot would restrict you to just a revenant..I think.

Beta slot does restrict you to revenant only.

DeceiverX.8361:

Yamsandjams.3267:

I’ll keep trying it out though, maybe I’ll find some combination of traits that will at least make it acceptable enough to kill zergs of keyboard turners with no effort.

Wrong class. And definitely not D/D.

Hm… maybe p/p?

digitalruse.9085:

They do stack, but it does not appear to be additive. I used a stop watch and timed energy regen with vigor, with adrenal implant, and with both. There is a difference, but it is only slight most of the time.

That’s what I thought too, but everyone keeps telling me I’m wrong even though I’m sure I’m not. Wish some red-named dude or dudette would just say one way or another, I don’t think any of them have.

Or they can just make optimized activation like it’s old version that just refunds a small amount of endurance back directly. That way it wouldn’t conflict with adrenal implant.

digitalruse.9085:

It’s listed in the Official Unofficial Bug list.

Did you also put it in the Unofficial Official Bug list?

Kodama.6453:

Yamsandjams.3267:

There was some concern previously that giving it AoE bleeds in conjunction with coated bullets could potentially be too powerful. But now that the latter isn’t even in the game anymore, I don’t know…

Well, I don’t want to change the explosion itself to give aoe bleeds, just give it shrapnel and coated bullets. Shrapnel got a proc chance of 15%, that isn’t really risky and ranger short bow can give aoe bleeds (and more of them) with piercing arrows.

^^ I’m just upset because I was really afraid to spread aoe bleeds with pistol and then it just didn’t happen….

Though they should just add that functionality to chemical rounds if they really want it. Otherwise, someone wanting to maximize their pistols needs to take both explosives and firearms. For instance they could add an effect to chemical rounds to state “explosive shot now has a 25% [or whatever %] chance to inflict bleeding in its explosion radius”. Hell, even make it a 100% chance on an ICD or something.

For things like the grenade and bomb kit, their traits are also in explosives so it’s not inconvenient to take them in conjunction with shrapnel since they don’t compete with it. But anything that is going to buff pistols directly should at least be in firearms, if not tacked onto the chemical rounds trait.

Now I guess it would be helpful to have pistol benefit from shrapnel if you were a pistol using engineer that didn’t take firearms, but then I’d ask why you’re using pistol and not taking firearms. If it’s just so you can use shield, then you probably don’t need strong pistol attacks in the first place.

I think it’s an interesting combo, but it’s use is rather niche. Spending the mimic on that alone means you lose out on things like double blinks, and you generally want to put yourself in a situation where you don’t need to use double IoL in the first place.

Not only that, but it takes up a spot that arcane thievery could be using instead, which is not a utility that should be undervalued.

It’s not that I think it’s a bad combo, but it is definitely more niche. It would really need to be used in a coordinated fashion for it to be effective in the first place. Casting it on some pug who will then waste time typing “ty” in say chat to only be immediately downed again while they were standing still during the process is simply not productive at all.

If they didn’t do that, then builds that wanted to run trickster would be even crappier than they already are.

Of course, they could’ve just left withdraw uncategorized like they did with shelter and mending (!?), but yeah.

Well kitten. I was just going to try this later today and now I read that it’s broken. Crap.

Although on the plus side I won’t waste time that I was otherwise going to.

One of the only redeeming features of A.E.D. was that you could make it interesting with AMR… hopefully this bug will get fixed sooner rather than later.

Although if gadget builds ever get good, I predict they’ll just get nerfed hard… I mean, look at what happened to turret builds, the only kitless spec that was actually a little bit good.

Kodama.6453:

I think they should give it a try. Anet removed the trait which gives rifle 10% more damage, it would be nice to get 10% for jump shot by explosive trait to get some damage back. And pistol 1 is one of the weakest AAs of the whole game. It does aoe “damage” without giving the bleeding aoe, I just don’t get why they do something like this. The aoe is really weak and the total number of bleedings from the skill for 1 target is really low. Giving it shrapnel and coated bullets could make pistol finally an aoe condition damage weapon.

It was because the p/p all elixir kitless beta builds could wrack up 20-25 stacks of bleeds in an AoE in a few seconds.

Of course, this was back when people didn’t know how to use condition cleanses, dodge, combo skills, &c. Ever since then it’s been that next-to-useless auto-attack that you use when you don’t have anything better to use, or when you’d rather go for a more accurate attack instead of missing with a grenade toss.

There was some concern previously that giving it AoE bleeds in conjunction with coated bullets could potentially be too powerful. But now that the latter isn’t even in the game anymore, I don’t know…

Well I’m a moron, apparently.

Likely a bug because it’s a “new” skill. Similar things happened for “we heal as one” and the like, they weren’t procing shout-specific stuff.

Although I don’t know how important that really is, we’re talking about a single condition clear on a 90-some – 120 second cooldown. Don’t get me wrong, it would still be nice, I just don’t think it’s going to have any sort of profound effect on game play one way or another.

Mork vom Ork.2598:

The problem is, they would first have to make turrets be able to stay alive and withstand a reasonable amount of damage. All recent changes in GW2 however have been going in the exact opposite direction, and now turrets keel over when somebody as much as farts in their general direction.
So I don’t think this is ever going to happen, neither do I find it desirable (there is no “stationary” game mode outside of PvP).

Med Kit is now actually much worse than it was before the patch (e.g. it was the preferred heal under water back when it was an under water heal).

And that’s likely the entire reason they’re not inclined to touch healing “turret”. It’s a good skill, and making such drastic changes like I vaguely described could potentially be devastating for the engineer’s competitive viability.

But it is the undisputed king of healing skills when it comes to the engineer, and it doesn’t even fulfill it’s intended purpose by design. It’s supposed to be a turret, you’re supposed to leave it out there and try to keep it shielded.

This is particularly problematic for people that actually want but can’t have that play style, and can be really confusing for newer players who don’t understand that the most optimal way to use healing “turret” is to not use it like a turret at all. They let that thing sit out there and then people just laugh at them.

I believe it does need to be changed to be more turret-like, but that’s a very big change that can’t just be slapped in all of a sudden. Not only that, but the other healing skills would then need to be made more useful to not threaten the engineer’s competitive viability. If med kit is still crap, A.E.D. too clunky, and elixir H just lackluster, then it could make for a bad situation.

If these sort of changes never see the light of day, then they should just change the healing “turret” so that it automatically overcharges and automatically detonates in it’s own water field. We at least need to stop pretending healing “turret” is a turret in its current form. I shouldn’t need 200 APM just to use my freaking healing skill.

See, it used to be easier to handle mesmsers and other zoo-type builds with just pistols because you could opt for coated bullets and keep direct pressure on the target while also harming the subordinates. But of course, they’ve deleted that from the game for no good reason. Rifle would definitely be a much better option in those scenarios if for no other reason than the piercing auto-attack. As it is now, you just waste the IC procs on the clones and don’t even get the single bleed stack like you would have got with coated bullets.

So if they ever put coated bullets back in, it could make your life a bit easier with the pistols, but it will otherwise likely be better to use rifle in your case.

I changed my kill shot build to this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJIQNAsXUjMdQfHW4BOeAnIG6BKLAKgE4mjWY71Ev3DDA-TFCFwAPOlCAOCBXVCiU5ngHEAK1fqt/QG9NkCIilRA-w

Why? Because 5 signets… I can’t really give any better reason than that.

In any case, losing warrior’s sprint made me really sad, and I felt like greatsword was just being dumb. Also, I wanted a signet build, so I had to go into arms, so I figured I’d use the sword to replace the greatsword, and then I thought of offhand axe for some AoE damage and extra fury.

It’s been working an ok amount. I can perform an instant adrenaline fill with signet of fury, and the precision bonus on it isn’t as necessary since I can get a persistent precision boost from popping my signets. In fact, this build can get over 100% crit chance, so I don’t even need something like burst precision or intelligence sigils.

Obviously the kill shot damage is not maxed out, but that’s replaced with things like a large amount of quickness, which means easier to land kill shots and faster damage on follow ups.

The sword has also been surprisingly useful. The auto-attack is good at keep opponents crippled, especially with the enhanced attack speed, and the bleeds ensures the +10% damage bonus. Final thrust is like a Kill Shot Jr. that doesn’t rely on adrenaline, so I can kill shot->final thrust if I really want to. I can also do interesting things like flurry for a long immobilize, swap, pop signet of fury, and kill shot them while they’re still immobilized.

Axe 4 just helps for high crit chance, and the axe 5 more or less gets me from 0 to 100 adrenaline almost immediately, even on a single target. It kind of acts as a 100b Jr. as well, so I can use it on downed people being rezed and that sort of kitten.

Signet of stamina is also nice due to more dodges, and I can full condi cleanse when I need it. Of course it does have a bit of a long cooldown, so it’s only so useful against rampant condition spam.

Brawler’s recovery and restorative strength are also nice options as alternatives to death from above and destruction of the empowered. In particular, death from above is probably useless in everything outside of WvW, although I did once knock a thief out of shadow refuge in PvP with it once and he rage quit on me, so that was kind of worth it.

Have I been liking it? I guess. Kill shot is always kind of that fun “BOOM HEADSHOT” kind of build. I wasn’t liking it when I was still running greatsword, but I think switching to sword/axe made it a lot more fun for me since it was new and interesting.

I did try an axe/axe variant in PvP that seemed to work pretty decently, although I felt the lack of mobility would ultimately be too crippling (no pun intended). That and there was no good option for arms master if I wasn’t using a sword.

EDIT: Also forgot to mention that I get an auto signet of might proc which syncs with the auto quickness proc quite nicely, so I don’t have to run signet of might separately. Of course, it does mean I can’t specifically control it, but I can always swap out signet of fury for signet of might if I want to, for a fairly long string of unblockable attacks.

I haven’t been getting my d/d build to work anymore. Just doesn’t seem to do anything useful.

Mind you there’s still some room for tweaking. But unless you’re going insta-gib it doesn’t seem like a good option.

For reference, I’ve been trying to get something like this to work: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAoYVlsMhqnYpTw7Jw+EHDF1eLLtBgHALQD0XhRYMB-TlSBwAPeQAmVCiV53s9HQpvRyBQYxRIQzhAIn6PAOhAECQ3YA-w

Here’s some of the reasons it’s bad:

1. Specializing in deceptions removes the most reliable source of condition clearing and gives me the useless garbage that it smokescreen on downed (why the hell is this still in the game?).

2. I have to spec into blind on stealth or heal while stealthed, not both, whereas d/p builds don’t need the blind on stealth trait since black powder will blind for them, giving them better options.

3. Mobility even with the traits in acrobatics is poor, and the movement speed in stealth costs more condition clearing and vigor.

4. Difficult to lock someone down to hit them a bunch of times.

5. Longer steal cooldown means less setups for CnD combos and stealth in general.

Obviously there’s still many ways to tweak the build, like ditching smokescreen which I was trying to use for extra stealth, blind, and projectile defence, or using basilisk venom for better bursting, or ditching acrobatics for something like trickery. But the point was to be some sort of deception specialist. Maybe this sort of build would work better with d/p, but then again it seems pretty much every build you can do with d/d works better with d/p.

I’ll keep trying it out though, maybe I’ll find some combination of traits that will at least make it acceptable enough to kill zergs of keyboard turners with no effort.

Will probably be dagger, if you ask me.

Unless they just say “F-it” and start giving everyone staves.

Or maybe main hand shield. Then you can run dual shields.

I have a full gadget kitless build I use, mostly for funsies since anyone who knows anything knows that kits are the thing to know…

Anyhow, I have to say I enjoyed the 20% flat reduction much better. I used to set up a nice thing with the mine granting aegis every 14 seconds, but that’s gone… Instead I get a slightly larger trigger radius, so instead of people completely avoiding the mine, now they’ll only slightly miss it… yay…

It kind of has the same issue kit refinement has. Too inconvenient to control what it procs on. Maybe I want the 1200 leap on rocket boots, but I need to use my heal. Well, there go my charges.

I haven’t played around with my all gadget kitless build too much yet though, still tweaking it a little. Trying to get those AMR→A.E.D. combos, although I would again just prefer the 20% flat reduction across the board.

Obviously that trait is useless in any serious build though, but that’s partly due to more than one gadget being more or less useless in any build.

lorddarkflare.9186:

Yamsandjams.3267:

Part of the problem is that med kit just isn’t really good at the moment, but the other part is that healing “turret” is simply too useful in a general sense.

Note I say “turret” because it’s not a turret. It’s just a glorified water bomb.

IMO, they should change healing “turret” to function more like an actual turret, where you’re actually incentivized to leave it deployed and even protect it, rather than immediately picking it up or detonating each and every time.

This would at least allow med kit to have more of a presence since a healing “turret” modified in this way would require a particular playstyle to use. It doesn’t mean med kit shouldn’t still be buffed or changed, but it would mean that healing “turret” would dominate it as thoroughly.

Of course, they also need to make toolbelt skills useable when turrets are deployed, but that’s a whole separate issue.

I am not sure that design is a good idea for the heal skill.

You do not really want your heal tying you down to a specific location.

That’s the whole point of turrets though. They’re used in localized areas. I pop my turrets down in a spot and that’s where I try to keep the fight at. If they wanted turrets to be mobile they wouldn’t have made them how they are.

Of course, that’s part of what prevents them from being useful outside of anything but PvP at the moment (and not really even in there anymore), but that’s a separate, broader issue.

Healing “turret” is not a turret by any means. You use it, overcharge it, then pick it up or pop it. Think about the other turrets. Would I pop rocket turret, overcharge it, then pop or pick it back up? I guess I might if I just wanted a quick CC, but then that thing is just dead space on my utility bar the entire time. In most cases, you’ll want to set rocket turret up so it can shoot at stuff. That is, you want to use it like an actual turret.

With healing “turret”, it might as well not be a turret. Sure, you can use it like a turret if you want to, but it’s severely suboptimal. They might as well change the name to “glorified water bomb” as it would be more accurate to what the skill is and do exactly the same thing. Even a healing “turret” with no buffs from traits is generally more useful than any other skill the engineer has access to.

I believe the only reason they’ve left it as is has to do with the fact that the past buffs that made healing “turret” what it is today actually helped engineer be much more competitive in PvP, and they simply didn’t want to mess with a good thing. But it’s basically pounded out all the other healing skills to a point of near obscurity due to how useful it is. In fact, when they were first implementing those buffs, the main feature they advertised is how engineers would now want to deploy and protect their healing “turret” since it would be an extremely valuable group healing source. How did that turn out? When’s the last time you saw someone leave a healing “turret” deployed on purpose, outside of the one in supply crate?

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind one healing skill being more generally useful than another, but even “elixir builds” or whatnot will take healing “turret” over something like elixir H, even though they’re specialized in the former and not the latter. If a utility line’s own healing skill is not an attractive option over a different healing skill even when you’re specialized into that utility line, it’s quite possible there’s some tweaking that needs to be done.

Not only that, but don’t forget the fact that cleansing burst on the healing “turret” is actually bugged and doesn’t scale with healing power. That is, healing “turret” is actually supposed to heal more than it currently does, but they’ve just never bothered to fix that.

So unless they make some seriously crazy buffs to med kit, I don’t see it truly outdoing something like healing “turret” in any form of gameplay outside of some possible niche scenarios.

kitten , didn’t even notice this. Will have to find some time to test this. That really sucks if true, as if people really need yet another reason to only run healing “turret”.

Did you notice it in any particular situations? For instance, underwater elixirs have a history of being buggy, but they’ve usually been fairly consistent otherwise.

It’s still viewable in the wardrobe because it’s technically still in the game, it’s just not acquirable anymore. It’s like how you can preview things like the wintersday outfit even though you can’t actually acquire it now.

They’ve been saying they’d put them back into the game ever since they took them out, but I imagine it’s a very low priority item for them at the moment. In any case, I would not expect to see it any time before the expansion release when they’ll maybe have some of their internal resources freed up.

As far as I know, the shout from runes of the pirate will not trigger traits related to shouts. I believe this is because it doesn’t actually function as a shout, the tooltip just calls it a shout. Really, it just applies the AoE might, and that’s all.

Einlanzer.1627:

What I think they need to do is set the health of all classes individually instead of having only 3 “classes”. Thieves really should have more health than elementalists, but less than rangers.

That’s technically true because they have higher base armour values, so they can take more damage in general.

Of course, that’s irrelevant for condition damage.

I don’t think they’ll be touching the thief’s base vitality though as it’s low by design. High burst, but low potential to survive a burst by being hit directly.

Perhaps, but not necessarily. The rifle would get you some actual CC and better AoE and burst potential, but that’s about it. You’d miss out on some useful things from the pistols, particularly the blinds and easy poison. Although you would have an overall more useful auto-attack, which might be key since you have no kits.

You might also want to post the actual build of what you were using, maybe there’s some adjustments that could be made to the traits.

You also might want to consider elixir X if you swap to a non-rabid build. If you get rampage, that can be quite useful in beating people up, and the moa toss can be extremely effective to counter lich necros and rampage warriors.

In any case, you’ll probably run into the same situation because you’re going kitless. Not only does this (stupidly) prevent you from accessing powerful on-swap sigils, but you also lose a lot of the things that make engineer good, such as a powerful shield block, a pull, more condition and AoE pressure, extra healing and might stacking, &c. But ultimately you’ll just have to test it out to know for sure. I haven’t tried doing a pure elixir rifle build before.

There’s no way it could be made to proc HGH, it would be so much spammable might that it wouldn’t be funny.

Well, maybe it’d be a little funny, but the fact that acid bomb, super elixir, and healing mist can do that is already more than enough. People would just pump out elixir Fs at nothing just to rack up the might.

Unless they made it so that the elixir had to bounce to you to proc the might, it which case it would be a complete waste of time because you can barely hit anything that’s completely stationary with it, not to mention anything that’s actually fighting you back.

Been using skullcrack with the following configuration: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJMQNApeRnUJCthgVhAehAkighigCLhWIFsB4BCAtLa9oA-TlCCwAROEAWV6NWJojjAAgHAAN1fqqMok+mc7Pc5EAQGAmxA-w

Works pretty decently, but I don’t think it’s as good as the other more serious builds. I just like gimmick or themed builds, so going full into stances made it fun for me. In PvP I just use berserker ammy.

It can still get the job done though. I’ve been using defiant stance to counter other rampage warriors, and it basically takes me from 5% to 100% health almost immediately. Just have to be careful not to waste it though.

One of the kind of annoying things is that the auto endure pain can kick in and counter defiant stance. It might be worth not using the defy pain trait and taking sundering mace instead for the vuln stacking or just a power boost.

I also suck at using frenzy properly, so balanced stance might be a better option, especially since the auto balanced stance is on a long cooldown. It does make for a lot of quickness with heightened focus though.

The peak performance trait might also be worthwhile just for the rampage damage boost, although I did like having the extra might on restorative strength. Sometimes in WvW I’ll use the death from above thing just for convenience or annoying people on rams.

Brawler’s recovery is also a decent option since you swap a lot with this build, so just depends on whether you think the condi clear or extra damage. Not having cleansing ire is a bit annoying, especially with the lower adrenaline gains.

It might as well heal for 0 for all I care. The fact that it applies resistance is the only true reason to ever pop that thing in any normal situation.

Even then it’ll be popped quite rarely as it takes away almost all your sustain for at least 10 seconds.

Healing signet does not counter burst damage by design. That’s the entire point. You maximize its effectiveness by either drawing out the battle or by avoiding the burst in the first place.

As weak as explosive shot (or is it still fragmentation shot?) is, I’m not sure that explosive traits should apply to it. Rather, any additional quirks that should apply to pistol should be contained in the pistol trait. Otherwise it’s too much spreading out of traits across two specializations for someone that wants to maximize the effectiveness of pistols but not use any actual explosives in their utilities (i.e. actual elixir builds).

As far as coated bullets goes, I don’t know why they’ve simply just deleted that. It should have been made baseline, or at least packaged into the pistol trait. Explosive shot was already fully inferior to tranquilizer dart, so I don’t know why they had to take away one of the things that gave the former more niche usefulness. Unless they really just want everyone to shut up and run grenades now, I dunno.

Part of the problem is that med kit just isn’t really good at the moment, but the other part is that healing “turret” is simply too useful in a general sense.

Note I say “turret” because it’s not a turret. It’s just a glorified water bomb.

IMO, they should change healing “turret” to function more like an actual turret, where you’re actually incentivized to leave it deployed and even protect it, rather than immediately picking it up or detonating each and every time.

This would at least allow med kit to have more of a presence since a healing “turret” modified in this way would require a particular playstyle to use. It doesn’t mean med kit shouldn’t still be buffed or changed, but it would mean that healing “turret” would dominate it as thoroughly.

Of course, they also need to make toolbelt skills useable when turrets are deployed, but that’s a whole separate issue.

Alright, who put that trait on and went dev hunting? Look what you did…

But in all serious, I don’t know what kind of Kool-Aid they’ve been mixing over there, the trait is just not that good to begin with.

I just wish they would make them circular, even if it doesn’t make “sense”. It would make them a lot easier to use since you wouldn’t end up with orientation problems. They can just have a smaller radius to compensate.

I’ve been using a shield for some time, but it’s simply not as good as focus. The fact that focus can now give you protection is nonsense as it takes away one of the special things about shield in the first place.

I mean, cooldown reductions are always nice, simple buffs, but it needs to have something else added to it’s functionality, something that makes it more unique.

The shield trait could also use something to make it more interesting, like having the abilities give a bit of stability or something. The passive toughness increase is nice, but it doesn’t really help you help other people too much.

The thing with the med blaster is that it’s better to damage and CC enemies than it is to just spray healing on your allies.

I’d rather they give it a cooldown and make it more of a bursty heal. For instance, multiply they healing amount by 10 and put it on a 10 second cooldown. This would let it do the same sort of healing per second, but you wouldn’t have to stand there and do nothing productive while you fail at saving your allies because you were too busy wasting time with med blaster instead of killing the enemies.

For the med packs, they just need to remove the throwing on them. Either that or implement a system for targeting allies directly, but that’s a much more extensive change.

How the hell was 10 seconds fine… are you people serious?

90 seconds is always what it was. It’s exceptionally powerful to have your healing skill automatically renewed, it needs that sort of long cooldown on it.

You can debate over whether that’s too long or what (i.e. maybe 60-75s could still be appropraite), but 10 seconds is extremely low for such an ability. No way it should ever have been that.

As far as that flickering issue goes, that’s a rather common symptom associated with SLI problems.

As such, it might be worth your while to try each card individually to ensure that they can function alone without any issues. If that is the case, then it’s more likely the problem is related to some SLI muckup that ended up being part of the latest update.

Zelulose.8695:

Yamsandjams.3267:

What are these creative builds that have been “stolen too quickly” and need protection “for the sake of balance”? Mind posting them? I could show you why they’re not actually creative and worth “protecting” if you do.

Me posting them would defeat the purpose of this thread. By sharing a build, it would no longer be creative or worth protecting. However, if you want to share a build, there are threads that builds can be posted on rather than spectating them.

But then how can you demonstrate that the build is worth “protecting” in the first place?

If you can’t prove that these builds are what you claim, or even show that you actually know any builds that fit your description, then for all we know they’re just average cookie-cutter builds. Some people could then infer that your real purpose it to prevent people checking out your build to subsequently counter-pick you.

Are you suggesting we just make large alterations to the game on nothing more than faith in your claims? I don’t believe many people are going to be convinced without something more substantial to reinforce your point.

What are these creative builds that have been “stolen too quickly” and need protection “for the sake of balance”? Mind posting them? I could show you why they’re not actually creative and worth “protecting” if you do.

Shouldn’t it be “Good Riddance Grenadier bug”? I mean I know it was good for a laugh, but no one is actually going to mourn this thing… well, anyone with any sense of self-respect won’t, at any rate.

I read some research in a different post that invalidated all research presented here.

We require additional data.

I think the OP is trying to state that ANet is just fancying things up to look nice and pretty, when in fact they really aren’t. People are under the spell of the “WOW!” factor and are overlooking certain problems in the game. Once the “glitz and glamour” of the new stuff wears off and they have to balance out all the changes they put in, people are going to be extremely disappointed in what is left over.

That’s what I THINK is being said, at any rate.

I’m more interested in what this “real truth” that still has to be revealed is. Maybe it will finally give an explanation as to why hot dogs are sold in packs of ten and hot dog buns are sold in packs of eight.

posting this because of forum weirdness

EDIT: Ok that seemed to unbreak the thread

Well… at least it’s actually good now.

What this really means is that there’s still hope for tornado… there must be…

That’s how they’re supposed to be though, aren’t they? Loose fitting? I’m not well-versed in world cultures, but I believe they’re supposed to resemble a traditional Asian garb, or something of that sort.

Although I suppose without proper cloth physics on the pants, it might make them look a bit bloated.

I don’t know what shocks me more… that this thread was necro’d, or that people have been Googling “engineer speed”…

It’s probably a similar case to how certain interrupts cause other interrupts to be… well, interrupted.

That is, the ability starts to pull them, but then the stun takes effect, nullifying the pull. Similarly, if you had a situation where, say, and engineer was channelling magnet on an enemy and you stunned them with basilisk venom just before they were pulled, the pull will nullify the stun state.

Noobish warriors that decide to use mace often do things like skullcrack followed by pommel bash, in which case the long duration stun they just applied is overwritten by a shorter duration daze.

As to whether it’s “working as intended”, I can’t really say as I don’t know the intentions of the developers. However, I believe it is “working as it should” as far as programmed interactions between game mechanics are concerned.

You can, although they can be a bit difficult to reflect due to the ground targeted nature of the abilities. The actual projectile attacks will have to collide with the reflective ability at the correct position and angle, or else it may just hit the ground beside it.

Even if the grenades and mortars are reflected, they may or may not be reflected back in a direction that will reliably hit the enemy throwing or shooting them.

So in short, you can, but it’s not a reliable way to counter them.