Guild Wars 2

EricHanke.1394:

This is intended behavior, this is to prevent mini pets without underwater animations from being used or summoned in water.

Why? What was wrong with that?

Now we have to summon them even more often. You expect to sell us these things. Why can’t they be convenient to use?!

I kind of do when I play my power necro. Sure, I don’t have undead minions following me around. But my character does seem to know a lot about life and death and diseases and she seems to be able to harness that knowledge to prolong her own life while shortening that of others. While she does not summon zombies or skeletons, I think of Death Shroud or Lich Form etc. as summoning spirits to gain their power. And of course she can also travel through the spirit realm :P

Original necromancy was about talking to the dead to see things they knew, not about summoning undead monsters to fight for you. The overarching theme of manipulating life and death and spreading or curing diseases is also present in other fantasy settings. I feel right at home in GW2.

CriSPeH.8512:

Everyone is so quick to point out that Engineers could use Kits skills while tiny.
A more accurate point would be they could use 1-2 skills while tiny.
You all cry how overpowered this is.

You could use kits, and then you could put the kit away and use weapon skills. That was very clearly not intended. Not overpowered, of course, and I hear other games sometimes manage to fix bugs without nerfing stuff into the ground…

Gizmoitus.7241:

I really hope most of you don’t go through life giving up on everything that gives a little resistance, because you won’t make it very far!

I think you got that one wrong. People who still play engineers after getting nerfed in almost every single update can by definition not be the kind that gives up as soon as there’s some tiny amount of resistance? Quitting after eight months of getting nerfed into the ground hardly fits your statement, and those people who still complain also evidently haven’t given up yet anyway.

I’ve been doing the same things you’ve been doing, my engineer is my second most played character because I like the idea behind the class. That doesn’t mean I have to be blind to its shortcomings or that I have to ignore that every single other character I play actively is stronger at everything I do. You’re doing this community a severe disservice by equating complaints with inexperience, many of us have been playing engineers for longer than the game has been released.

ElenaDragon.8401:

I didn’t step on all those clouds, and I still got the achievement.

From what I can tell you just need to visit all the places the path takes you to, i.e. including the stores. I certainly didn’t make a point of stepping on all the clouds, the achievement updates in very specific locations.

Best dungeon ever, please keep it around

Seras.5702:

Quickness nerf supposedly lengthened the duration of all quickness skills right? Did our Elixir U get that? Cuz it is and has been 5s right? Am I missing something?

Nothing in the patch notes, but it won’t prevent us from healing anymore, became an instant cast, and breaks stun. Can’t really complain…

Some things that are efficient as a level 14 thief:

- get level 14 masterwork armor on the TP with power on it; set to level 14, masterwork quality, search text “mighty” (then upgrade your gear as more masterwork quality gear becomes available)
- slot different minor runes for +10 power each
- keep your weapons updated as well (also buy masterwork quality as it becomes available while you level up), slot 1x minor sigil of bloodlust for another power buff
- power is your most important stat, always, but early on you get a huge advantage from focusing on it
- pistol/pistol and shortbow are good for soloing if you like a little range, dagger/dagger is also good but requires more mobility

SilverWF.4789:

All kits have attack power equals to the 80 Exo pistol (at 80)
Not rifle, not two pistols – just one single Exo Pistol.

This is not entirely accurate. Two 1h weapons don’t use the sum of their weapon strength. Kit skills do use the same weapon strength as e.g. P/P. It doesn’t matter though, because each skill has its own damage coefficient anyway. They balanced damage as a whole, not every single individual stat on its own.

Got it in less than 30 mins in that Hylek cave in Caldeon Forest (sw of Falias Thorp waypoint, you just need to figure out the way to open the gate, which I will not spoil here :P).

The (Master) dyes count, other masterwork items count too (trays etc.), but doing this part of the monthly as chef is a really inefficient way to go about it when you can just get jeweler as your second profession and make adorned jewels out of copper and pebbles.

Varqov.6984:

Kit Refinement did not get unreliable. It is a STANDARD 10 SECONDS ACROSS THE BOARD.

That’s what the patch notes said but it’s not what they actually coded. Grenade Kit and Elixir Gun have their own separate 20s cooldowns on top of the 10s cooldown on any Kit Refinement effect.

Daigle.8497:

There is almost NO way that the Elixir gun deals only 10%-20% damage. Tranq dart is on par with pistols, and it has a longer bleed, as well as more stacks of it, with the same firing rate.

Tranq Dart is actually slower than pistol #1, and also doesn’t do AoE damage like pistol #1 does.

Zenith.7301:

There’s no reason to use FT instead of bomb or grenade kit anyways. So EG should never be competing with FT — if you’re limiting toolkits and EG has to compete with something in PvE, it’s either grenades or bombs.

The reason I brought up FT is because the movement style is similar to EG and that was explicitly mentioned in the OP. Additionally, there’s some trait synergy between EG and FT.

Well, that clearly didn’t happen. Every single 2012 patch was bigger than jan+feb combined.

But sometimes plans change. I doubt what we got these past two months is what that person was talking about.

Just increasing the number of trackable achievements would improve this feature even more. I mean I love it as it is, but please let us decide how we want to make use of our screen space

SteepledHat.1345:

Ryan.8367:

actually torch is bugged right now as you can use it on a 3sec cd without breaking stealth , please hotfix asap because mesmers are abusing it like kittening crazy right now.

What are you talking about exactly? Lol, thief has needed a hot fix for a few months.

The bug he’s talking about is that you can glitch The Prestige to go on the interrupt cooldown instead of its regular 30s one while it still applies its effect (notably stealth).

Retiring my Mesmer from WvW for now until all the new bugs are fixed, but then I’ll try if I can’t get rid of my boring glass cannon build in favour of one that involves the torch. The Prestige is indeed much better now (with the normal cooldown :P).

Daigle.8497:

Elixir gun does deal subpar damage, but I’ll say that, for simplicity’s sake, it deals 50%, and it’s traited for extra duration.

It’s more like 10%-20%. I do use the elixir gun a lot and as much as I like it, the damage just isn’t there.

You’re fighting the same creature, 1v1. You have your weakness uptime. It lives twice as long, dealing half its damage throughout the fight.

Deals the same amount of damage as the first scenario, right?

Assuming 50%, which is too high, and that the creature never ever crits because weakness only halves damage of non-critical hits. Even then, you still get half as many kills in the same time. So you would not want to use this against a creature that’s no real danger to you.

It’s a simple model, omitting quite a lot of variables, but with an application to a boss fight, you’ve essentially doubled everyone’s health pool, for a generally small increase in time taken.

Yes. My point was exactly that, in fact. I wrote I wouldn’t use it for damage, but did argue for supporting the party more if you want to be tanky. The elixir gun is great for support all around. It just doesn’t really kill things. If you want to do both, you’re much better off with any other kit. Don’t stay in EG if your party doesn’t need the weakness.

You’ll want another kit anyway because your entire argument about bosses completely ignores everything else you’ll encounter on the way.

Yes that’s what he means.

Also, dungeons with people from other servers was already possible before guesting. You just had to be in the same party. Now you can also be in the same open world if you want to. The only things that are still bound to individual servers are WvW and guilds.

As someone who really likes how the DE system turned out, I’d love if doing entire chains or more obscure events was rewarded more. Not necessarily because I’d want the rewards, but there’s definitely a lack of balance with some events being extremely popular while a lot of zones barely have players in them.

Ideally we wouldn’t just get a new currency that drops from all mobs in a specific region, because that would still make people minmax and only do a small number of events. But requiring bits from all steps of a chain sounds like an interesting idea. It would also add to the legendary feeling of a legendary weapon, since it would literally require you to become a legend – as in, known among people everywhere.

+1 for the signet idea. I also like the idea of them having no actual active effect, purely because it really fits the way I’d imagine gadgets like goggles to work. Although I’m not sure permanent fury and immunity to blind is such a great idea.

Even without Defiant, there seems to be no real middle ground between attacks that are so weak you don’t need weakness, and attacks that are so strong that you’re much better off dodging/blocking them.

Weakness is useful on paper especially when combined with healing, but the mechanics of GW2 just don’t really work that way. You’re always better off with DPS. A mob that’s alive half as long also only deals half its damage. That doesn’t make the elixir gun a bad kit, but it definitely makes it bad as your main kit that you’d spam the auto attack of.

Advantages of the elixir gun, as listed in OP:

- Deal damage on the move. But FT can do this also, and does more damage.

- Speedy Kits + Invigorating Speed. But this also works with FT.

- “Two” AoE heals. Actually more in this build since the elixir gun alone contributes two (Super Elixir on #5 and Healing Mist on your toolbelt). The elixir gun is pretty good for this.

So based on the OP’s priorities, it’s actually only the healing that’s better. Damage is much worse. In addition to that, FT works better with crit triggers.

Things not listed in OP:

- Weakness and bleed from EG #1. See above, only good on paper but there are no situations to match in game.

- Awesome condition removal with EG #3 and EG #5. (FT needs Kit Refinement to remove conditions, other kits can’t do it at all.)

- New blast finisher on EG #4 that also does decent damage on stationary enemies. That’s actually a really good skill now, but it has a cooldown of 15s, so you’d not stay in EG for this. It’d be more like blast some combo field, put down a Super Elixir, then switch to something that actually does damage.

In summary, I just wouldn’t bring the elixir gun for damage, at all. For dealing damage while on the move, I’d really suggest looking into the flame thrower. It doesn’t have the best reputation, but it allows for a similar playing style as the elixir gun except it does a lot more damage. You can still keep the elixir gun around. There are at least two traits that affect both that you could consider getting, and the elixir gun is a support beast especially now with the added blast finisher. The flame thrower would also allow you to put in more power and crit if you find that condition damage isn’t working out well enough, which might well be the case depending on how/where you play.

I’ve had some good success with a hybrid power/condition build using FT and EG in open world PvE (although I prefer pistol/shield over rifle for this purpose). Solo survivability is great, tagging is great now too with FT (seems like a huge improvement on #1 with the latest patch, combined with other tagging related changes on the mob/event side of things). I’ve also found the utility useful for certain dungeons while I easily kept up with the damage of a random group. But it will never compete damage-wise with a berserker build, and I would not want to bring this kind of build to a group that expects to speed through explorables or fractals.

Note that being the last man standing in a dungeon can be a little annoying now as your group won’t be able to join you again until you get out of combat. I agree with that change, but I still see it as a huge nerf to survivability. A group of berserker characters that gets it right on the second try is now much better than a group that’s slowed down because all the high dps characters are dead (before the change, you could at least aim to be the guy that kept the mob from resetting while the dps chars run back). For that reason I’d suggest that support builds use more traits that help keeping everybody alive, and less that only help keeping yourself alive. For example, Self-Regulating Defenses can keep you alive for three more seconds once every 90 seconds. Investing those ten trait points into Kit Refinement instead would give you 4.5 extra Super Elixirs during the same time for AoE heal and condition removal.

So much text for such a simple decision. If you’re not enjoying the game, play something else. There. Not every game is for everyone. As much as developers would like to be able to do that, it’s just not realistic.

AuRiley.5287:

I can’t say for sure, but I’m fairly certain that my power and precision does not carry over 100% to my kits when I use them.

They should carry over (now). Weapon strength won’t, though.

http://dulfy.net/2013/02/26/gw2-gathering-storm-patch-total-makeover-kit-new-hair-and-eye-colors/

Kimyrielle.3826:

I would love it if you could get an extra laurel for completing ALL available daily objectives.

That would just invalidate the entire idea and people would feel obligated to do all nine again…

Sylosi.6503:

I’m sorry, but the only “noobs” are those who are so bad they don’t realize how this affects every multi kit build. In PvP I have no choice much of the time when I have to use a kit, for instance if I get immobilized and am about to get bursted, then I need to combat that, so if I have toolkit I swap to tool kit and use the gear shield, or if I have FT I swap to FT and use teh knockback or blind, etc.

Or you just hit the weapon swap key and use the block on your shield. Ohh, you mean you wanted to block on demand without a shield and no other drawbacks?

Unfortunately true, video mostly shows #1 on smaller groups or players running away. That’s fine really if that’s how you like to play but it doesn’t say much about the viability of your build in general.

IMHO a tanky engineer build would be much better suited to being commander. One of the worst things I’ve seen commanders do is rush in, die instantly, and then complain on /map how they died because they solo charged. People don’t listen to orders quite as much as they like to simply follow your badge, so being able to take a little heat is a huge advantage. A P/S engineer with Tool Kit and Elixir S could literally stand in the middle blocking and invulnerable until his group catches up, while not so smart enemy players would likely target him first and waste their attacks as they’re getting murdered.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Specifically the official response, which starts with:
“The short answer is that new content is not going to drive people away from the game. There is absolutely no evidence to support that it would.”

They may simply believe they can do no wrong.

The thing is, they would be right if it was only new content. But their new content so far has both been gated, and offered unique best-in-slot gear. Fractals being the big one, dailies to some extent with laurels (improved now but still bad), and now guild missions. Content alone is never going to drive away players, but herding them into specific play styles like this absolutely will as it obviously changes the game’s target audience.

Skyro.3108:

It was never clear to me if the devs meant a skill that actually behaved identically to portal (e.g. multiple people could travel through) or if they just meant some sort of long range teleport skill would be added to some classes.

I’d love if they added a long range party teleport skill that teleports your entire party. Shame it would have to be restricted to your party though to prevent trolling.

Softspoken.2410:

Warriors, rangers and mesmers would like to say hello.

Well, at least mesmers didn’t have any underwater elite at launch.

Engineers are really versatile though, most of their kits work, turrets work, elixirs work in a way. Some stuff is even more useful underwater, e.g. all the grenate kit skills just hit your selected target. Really I don’t understand how engineers can have all those combo fields but necros can’t use their wells.

I actually think necros are really strong underwater. They do lack synergy, pretty much every land build has to give up a significant number of skills underwater, but they’re still both powerful and easy to play. While it’s annoying to see that there’s apparently no clear design for this class, at the same time I don’t really feel like complaining. My necro is pretty much my favourite underwater character.

Rypo Falem.8913:

The terrain issue is a bug that happens not too often anyway. Besides, how often do you get stuck in terrain and happen to have a mesmer nearby to fix you? Just Waypoint and move on.

As someone whose most played character is a mesmer, I’ve had to rescue someone from terrain exactly twice since head start. In both cases they willingly jumped into a space with no way out. In one of these cases I was able to just walk in the same way and portal them out without having to cheese it.

Anyway, skills shouldn’t act as bug fixes or workarounds. Portal is still an incredibly useful and unique skill and it absolutely doesn’t have to be a way to fix game bugs as well to be this awesome.

This nerf was sorely needed. Come on, a consumable that can keep you permanently invisible even during other actions or channels with no cooldown and that also instantly removed you from aggro tables? You want this in game? Really?

I’d pay real money for kit skins. It would be even nicer if they were available in game in some way.

I’ve been making a point of stowing my kit whenever I’m not actively using it.

My wife and I play together a lot, and I also agree with Pandemoniac. Any pair works. Although you could try to go for a completely different playing style, in that case, elementalist has already been mentioned. Or if you want to confuse both your enemies and your wife, you could try a mesmer. If you want to melee with a different class, guardian might be an option.

But if she figures out what the Deep Strike trait does for a warrior between 20 and 60 then it might become a little boring to watch her whirl through her enemies while you have to work for your kills. :P

1. Warriors get an awful lot of benefits out of very little player skill. For experienced/skilled/PVP/ADHD players I’d say Mesmer or Elementalist.

2. None are really underpowered, but honorable mentions go to rangers who can have pretty much half their damage killed very quickly, and engineers, who are the least played class and still get at least one nerf in every update.

3. PvE, in particular high end gearing is completely messed up right now and somehow manages to punish both casual players and hardcore players at the same time. I would also mention PvP, but that seems to be a very small community anyway now and there’s no simple fix.

4. Around 3 or so, too many currencies, too much farming, cosmetic items are too rare and stat items are perhaps a little too common (to the point where the entire tier of rare gear is basically reduced to forge/salvage fodder).

5. Around 3 as well. There certainly are some very prominent bugs but let’s be honest, after playing video games for 25 years, GW2 is very playable and one of the least obviously buggy MMOs I’ve seen in the last few years.

6. I would probably get into sPvP more if it wasn’t a waste of time as far as my PvE/WvW progress is concerned. I enjoy building characters, and while I don’t need or want benefits from gear in sPvP, I have limited time and don’t feel like playing the entirely separate game that sPvP is right now when I can work on my character instead.

7. Around 8 or 9, but I don’t do dungeons much so I get to choose who I play them with, and also don’t have to put up with speed run groups.

Definitely B or maybe all of them

I don’t really need my two RL friends guild be able to do guild missions, but I hate seeing the effect this is already having on small-but-not-tiny guilds. This is basically free rewards for large guilds which is the last thing we needed to save multi-guilding.

IMHO it’s not a huge nerf. It mainly affects builds that try to get all their procs at the same time. One condition removal less isn’t a big deal either between switching to EG, casting Super Elixir, comboing off of it, and using other skills such as exploding our healing turret (remove all conditions). If you’re not trying to proc everything at the same time, it’s mostly more annoying now but not less powerful. Yes, that’s not a good thing, but also not really cause for despair.

I still hate how this makes multi kit builds less useful. Engineers were in a good spot in that regard before, being able to choose how many kits, elixirs or gadgets to use, and this change removes some of that flexibility. Not as bad as elementalists where 30 Arcana is pretty much mandatory, but I’d hate to see engineers go down that route. (Also, hidden cooldowns are just bad usability, we didn’t really need the least played class to be even less transparent…)

Everything else in this update was a buff, so I’m definitely not despairing. I have multiple 80s and I liked my engineer before. Although I have to admit that some of that is because I like the idea of it, not so much the implementation, but if it was impossible to play as an engineer I wouldn’t play that character in the first place…

google.3709:

Atunement switching has stupidly strong effects tho lol and can be traited to be even more stupid, like gettin protection and stability for going on earth ? remove conditions, heals and gives AoE regeneration for switching to water? all we have is a box of nails.. lmao

Attunement switching is also solely responsible for 95% of all elementalists running 30 points in Arcana. The trait you’re referring to is a grandmaster trait. If you don’t do this as an elementalist, people will openly call you out for playing badly simply because so much of an elementalist’s power comes from attunement switching. Be glad engineers aren’t like that and don’t have a semi-mandatory build.

As for your comparison with water, EG engineers also get condition removal/heal/aoe heal on switch (just buffed with this patch, too), but they get it from an adept trait, which IMHO justifies that it’s not quite as efficient (20s vs 10s cooldown). Engineers can also get swiftness and vigor permanently from switching kits via adept traits, and we never have to wait for a cooldown before we can switch to a specific set of skills. This is incredibly powerful.

Something similar applies to the Mesmer comparison I saw somewhere. They need to focus their entire build on shattering often if they want to use their profession mechanic often. Be glad we don’t have to do that.

I mean, I agree that it’d be nice if they didn’t nerf multi kit builds like this. But it doesn’t hurt the main cheesy build (100nades still works, just have to be careful when to switch). EG builds with Kit Refinement get the benefit from the buff to Super Elixir twice, and they now have a blast finisher on EG #4. The toolkit buff on Pry Bar isn’t bad either, great for tankcats. Everything in this update was a buff except the Kit Refinement change, and that only affects builds that tried to burst all their procs at the same time (they all already had 10s to 20s internal cooldowns before).

This is probably not going to help, but at least my engineer isn’t red :P But on a more serious note, medium armour is a lot like leather in real life. Brown-ish colours, black, red, and so on, do work well with it while bright ones can appear a little dull and usually aren’t as bright as on other materials.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

These items are mainly earned through guild content, we included them on the laurels vendor to give players the opportunity to earn them if they are not in a guild but they are priced high to encourage players to try and accomplish them via the guild content.

Can you please just stop forcing us into specific playing styles already. TYVM.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

This is obviously a faked SS. You can’t even HAVE 75 laurels yet, not for quite a while actually.

Look, this is a level 80 mesmer called “Mesmer C” who is still on the first intro mission and likely being played on a test server… of course he can have 75 laurels.

When you mouse over them in the laurel vendor window, it says “account bound”, so I guess not.

In real life, conspiring to not undercut each other would be called a cartel, and is illegal. Free markets don’t work if you remove price regulation via supply and demand.

I get lag spikes every once in a while, I’ve gotten into the habit of dodging randomly when running around because stamina is 100% server side. If the stamina bar doesn’t react to your doges and/or doesn’t fill up smoothly afterwards, you have lag.

Load screens aren’t an issue for me, but my friend who doesn’t have an SSD can literally go and make coffee for us while Lion’s Arch loads. Anyway this probably means it’s mostly the sheer number of players there, and perhaps amount of textures to load. Players congregated in LA before, but fractals probably added to this.

Forgot WvW badges

Also, skill points technically act as a currency for some mystic forge stuff.

Zaxares.5419:

Wurm projectile attacks DO sometimes count twice, if you dodge at exactly the right moment. I think it’s because their attacks actually have two potential hits; one when the projectile hits you, and another which is an AoE splash attack when it hits the ground.

This is accurate, and actually applies to many similar attacks since several ranged attacks have this AoE component.

But then if you want to cheese that achievement, just dodge into a WvW zerg, through fire, or into a group of mobs that AoE (grubs, oozes, greatsword berserker type mobs etc.). No need to actually try and see what you’re dodging :P

Rangers are fine in the open world (and no you don’t need to run around in circles, melee rangers are actually quite strong). Their problem is just that in dungeons or pvp, basically half your damage can die very easily. That doesn’t make it impossible, but rangers don’t bring anything particularly strong that people would remember them for, so they hate on them instead.

Elementalists are well rounded, they have a very strong tanky build for PvP, and they can add some great support to a party, but they are harder to play in open world PvE – which doesnn’t mean anything because 99% of open world PvE is really easy. However, your plan of playing an air/fire elementalist is not going to work. The most efficient way to play an elementalist currently involves switching between attunements often. Also, you might find that a staff is not actually the most used weapon on elementalists and many prefer dual daggers instead.

(Note: There are rumours about an upcoming AoE nerf that might hit elementalists. If you’re worried about this sort of thing, wait for today’s patch before you finalize your decision, that way you have at least one month without another major update.)

Alternatively, if you want to try the play style of both classes before putting work into a character, you can go to the Heart of the Mists (PvP lobby) and check out their traits and skills at level 80.

1 2 3 4 5 6 R T G B

I don’t use Q and E for skills because I prefer having all movement options available for that rare case where I want to turn while my mouse is tied up in the TP window or something (Also, my hands aren’t exactly tiny.)

One of these days I want to try my G13 on GW2. I used to use it in Rift and SWToR, but GW2 doesn’t nearly require as many different keys.

I don’t wear shoes at home…