Activating Ventari’s legend: “Together we shall gallop.”
Moving his tablet with skill 6: “We must renew ourselves.”
Using his elite skill: “None may harm you while I am here.”
In addition to the usual grunting.
Kits aren’t optimal because of the lack of weapon swap, it’s the ability to have lots of high damage attacks as well as good utilities and the ability to switch between them with virtually no cooldown. If you added weapon swap, you would change an optimal setup from one weapon and three kits to two weapons and three kits.
Kits are optimal because of how kits work, adding weapon swap would change nothing.
64b client will fix ur crashes, but looks like it causes fps stutter at random times, at least happens to me for some secs
I strongly suspect that the random stutters are not caused by the 64-bit client, but rather that these stutters are what are crashing the 32-bit client. Upgrading to the 64-bit client means you’re using enough memory now that the game can keep running while… whatever it is that’s chewing up your memory works itself out, where previously it ran out of memory and crashed right as the stutter began so you wouldn’t even see it.
When you say you “have not received anything for it” do you mean no spore, or no rewards at all?
If it’s the latter, then I suspect that Anet made an update so you can’t get credit for killing the treasure mushroom if you don’t have stealth detection.
I think a spanner wrench would be suitably unique and iconic to suffice.
What I would like is an item, possibly bought with gems, that unlocks all or at least most of the waypoints for a character/account. Maybe make it so it can only be used after you’ve achieved map completion with at least one character.
I don’t care about map completion on alts that much, but it would be nice if my alts could move around the world without having to re-explore it.
Important: Getting started with "HoT" story
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: glehmann.9586
Is there going to be any explanation for why Canach shows up? In the beta he just kind of appears alongside you and the biconics with no explanation and it was a bit jarring.
I was hoping the beta was just skipping some introduction or something for the sake of getting you into the important bits, but this kind of makes it sound like the first few beta story steps are the actual ones and he really just shows up for no reason.
What amuses me about this discussion is that I’ve heard people complain about undercutting by 1c. You make virtually the same amount of money on the sale, but yours gets sold first, so undercutting a high-value item by 1c can be seen as incredibly rude.
By undercutting by a larger amount, you are making a more substantial sacrifice of profits in order to sell first, which is seen as more acceptable.
Anything people say in this thread will largely be speculation. I’d probably wait to make any decisions about changing your profession until after things settle down after the expansion launches.
And if its LEGENDARY because you will make that weapon a legend???
Yea, i know, just blew your minds now.
And yet, didnt weself forged those weapons? How can they have any history?
You didn’t really forge it, though. You threw a bunch of gifts into the mystic forge and Zommoros gave you a legendary weapon in exchange.
You need to define Viability. Otherwise, my answer is going to be an equally vague, “In some situations, yes. In others, no.”
I wouldn’t complain if it was added, but this feature is pretty much at the bottom of the list of things I’d want Anet to focus on.
I’ve noticed that while the Thresher Sickle 5000 has an animation duration as long as any harvesting sickle, it gives you the plant before the animation completes. Using that as my harvesting sickle, I typically cancel the animation as soon as the item shows up in my inventory and move on. All of the limited-use sickles I’ve tried don’t give you the item until the animation fully completes.
The fight that turned the Crystal Sea into Crustal Desert and so on.
I’m imagining an epic battle with Abaddon, and at the end the Crystal Sea has been turned into a vast field of pie crusts, as far as the eye can see.
(edited by glehmann.9586)
I appreciate that they’re trying to tune the difficulty. I definitely agree that it’s swung much too far towards the easy side now.
Maybe don’t make it as hard as BWE2, but it should definitely be more challenging than it is now.
Here’s my perspective, my impressions after a couple hours messing around with it. This is all purely PvE, I rarely do WvW and have not touched PvP in the three years I’ve owned this game.
Hammer
Overall, I’m liking the feel of the hammer. Sometimes the second leap in #3 goes a bit wide of the target, but most of the time it works like I expect and is a lot of fun. I actually really like the zig-zagging pattern it uses when leaping forward.
The skills might need some tweaks here and there, but I was pretty satisfied.
Medic Gyro
It has a hard time keeping up with me. If I’m being at all active in the fight, it’s not healing me much. That’s to say nothing of it getting cleaved out of the air because it’s following me around in melee. Add in the long cooldown, and I don’t see much reason to use this skill over the Healing Turret.
On the positive side, I love the toolbelt skill for it. Protection in a large AOE is nice, and the fact that the AOE follows your character makes combining it with Hammer #3 a joy to execute.
Bulwark Gyro
Better than I’d feared, worse than I’d hoped. In small skirmishes (5-ish players up against 5-10 or so trash and veteran mobs) it did it’s job admirably and seemed to have enough HP. It does have trouble keeping up if you’re on the move, but during a fight it’s AOE is large enough that this isn’t really an issue, and it’s during the fights that it really matters, so I’m not too concerned there.
The moment one of those big hylek champions showed up, the bulwark felt like a waste of a skill slot. I’d use the bulwark, the frog would swing its weapon, and the bulwark would die instantly. I think the only time I saw it survive one of those swings was when no one else was in the bulwark’s field to benefit from the damage transfer, and it still nearly died.
Maybe it’s working as intended, but I feel like the major fights where I most want the bulwark gyro to help save my skin are the fights where it works the most poorly.
Conversely, the toolbelt projectile-reflect skill is great. I’d maybe like it to last a second longer, but that might be too much.
Shredder Gyro
Seems to function pretty well as a mass-whirlwind finisher. I didn’t pay much attention to its own raw damage, but dropping it and then placing fields on it was pretty fun. It could die to cleaves as easily as any of the gyros, but it usually got a bunch of whirlwinds off before that happened and I didn’t feel too bad about it’s performance.
It’s toolbelt skill was solid, no complaints there.
Blast Gyro
When it works, it’s a lot of fun. A big AOE launch was pretty handy, and I’d find myself keeping an eye out for clusters of mordrem to throw the tag at so I could single out one of the other mobs outside the cluster.
Sometimes it doesn’t do a great job of getting to the target, like it’s getting confused (others have mentioned this). It also takes like a second (at least, that’s how it feels) before it even starts moving after it spawns. I’d try to hit the big champion hyleks with it to help drop their break bars, and half the time they’d get cleaved down before going off, even though they spawned right next to the enemy.
The toolbelt skill is nice, but feels a bit limited. I feel like it needs a little something extra over just the 3 second aoe super speed. But maybe I’m just being greedy.
Purge Gyro
I haven’t actually used this one at all yet, so not much to say here. I haven’t really felt like I needed condi-cleanse badly enough in the PVE encounters I’ve had to slot it, and if I start to feel like I need condi-cleanse I’m probably just going to drop the medic gyro for healing turret, unless the medic gyro gets some big improvements.
I don’t know how useful the poison field is, but in PVE I’ve been running with the mortar kit so the thought of another poison field feels a bit redundant.
Sneak Gyro
I wasn’t expecting it to be great for PVE, so I didn’t use it much. The little of it I did use did not impress me. It couldn’t keep up with me at base running speed; throwing up swiftness meant that I was outside of the stealth field for pretty much the entire duration of the skill.
Without swiftness, it would eventually catch up with me, put me back into stealth, and stop moving. Then I’d get well out of its range before it started moving to catch up again. As a mobile stealth field, you almost have to walk with the dang thing in order to let it keep up.
I wasn’t expecting much out of the sneak gyro in PVE, but if it can’t keep up with me I don’t think I’m ever going to use it.
Nothing to say about its toolbelt skill, it doesn’t appear to have any use in PVE (not a criticism, just an observation).
Function Gyro
As far as it’s intended function, it’s a little wonky. It would appear next to my ally, then run around a bit to get into position to start rezzing. It was also hard to spot where it appeared, such that in the heat of battle I frequently wasn’t sure if I’d even used it without glancing through my boons to make sure the “function gyro ready” icon was gone.
It didn’t feel terribly useful in PvE. If an ally went down and I wasn’t standing next to them, the other players around them had usually revived them before I had time to target them to use it. Not that allies were going down often enough for it to have even much potential for use. There might be a place for it in dungeons and raids, but I fear it’s going to have similar problems to the Bulwark Gyro there, where the fights you need a function gyro to help rez downed players are the fights where it’s going to get cleaved out of the air before it can do anything.
And fighting the Toxic Alliance made it not seem terribly great for finishing enemies, either. Not much point in dropping a function gyro when there are 2 or 3 other players all using their finisher. Even in WvW I suspect the function gyro won’t see much use unless you’re out roaming. The only place I see it really making any impact is PvP.
I did have one entertaining moment with it, where I had downed two Toxic Alliance NPCs, and my function gyro and I finished them both at the same time; that made me smile, but unless there are lots of stomp-able enemies in HoT, that’s going to be a rare experience in PvE.
Final Thoughts
The hammer is pretty great. The gyro utilities could use some work, especially the mobile ones. The Bulwark Gyro feels good in the fights where a little extra help is nice but feels a little too squishy in the fights where I felt like I actually needed it. The Medic Gyro can’t keep up in a mobile fight; I have a hard time justifying using it over the healing turret. All the toolbelt skills feel good, though.
The function gyro is a pretty big disappointment. The new class mechanics are supposed to be a big influence on how the class plays, and I don’t feel like the function gyro accomplishes that goal at all, at least in PvE.
You could take the function gyro away completely and I wouldn’t feel like my scrapper was affected at all.
From what I recall, the raid doesn’t require updraft skills, just gliding generally, though updrafts will let you get back into the fight quicker.
Also, I’m not sure the one raid boss they’re opening up for beta testing is one that will require any masteries.
This change reflects a complete and utter lack of prioritization skill on the part of Anet management and whomever is involved with deciding what gets changed/fixed and what doesn’t. This game has hundreds, perhaps thousands?, of bugs that need to be resolved because they affect gameplay, and yet management chooses to waste precious dev time removing something that the majority of players saw as nothing more than cute fun.
It is sickening to think that while they constantly beat the drum of “we’re working kitten the expansion” as an excuse for why they can’t focus on player issues, that they found the time to make the changes to prevent the players from having a little fun with the quaggan transforms.
You have absolutely no idea what was involved in this fix. Maybe it was literally one tiny change that took all of a minute to identify and implement.
Maybe they didn’t even try to fix this, and fixing a more serious bug had a side-effect of fixing this minor bug.
Personally, I prefer the idea that engineers are the rare people who have no magic ability so they use technology to make up for it. Tyria is flooded with magic, such that having no magic makes us more unique.
I might be persuaded to accept building technology with already-magically-infused components, which is kind of what alchemy is anyway.
I’d be plenty happy if they just added some more PVE functionality to what the function gyro can do.
Thief only got a third dodge to be fair. Granted, a third dodge is universally good, but it isn’t very exciting.
It’s telling that this is the go-to example for “Scrapper isn’t the only one with a lackluster new mechanic”.
Daredevil didn’t just give a third dodge, though it looks like that at first glance. Being a Daredevil also forces you to choose one of three GM traits that fundamentally changes how your dodge works. Honestly I think it’s one of the cooler mechanic changes and has the potential to certainly be the most powerful outside Chrono because dodging is something you already do, it doesn’t make you give anything up. It’s purely better than the alternative of not having the extra dodge + damage/removal.
Yeah, playing a Daredevil during the beta, I felt like the new class mechanic was actually a pretty big deal. It actually felt like a bigger change to how I played my Thief than the impact Herald or Dragonhunter have.
It does feel like every other elite spec’s new mechanic will see extensive use, while the function gyro is mostly a PvP/WvW tool that will only occasionally get used to rez downed allies in group content (and it’s completely worthless when soloing).
If you used the Scrapper elite spec without using the hammer or gyro utilities, you could go through an entire dungeon without your allies ever noticing you were a Scrapper and not just a core engineer.
It’s probably the least impactful profession mechanic change of all the elite specs, at least as far as PvE goes.
The game’s not really free to play, it’s still buy to play. The free accounts are loaded with so many restrictions that I’d compare them more to a trial account without a time/level limit than to an actual free-to-play account.
Kill. Them. All. Don’t go comparing icy Svanir to a stalk of celery.
Don’t go comparing Sylvari to those mindless, brutish apes.
The hardest part of crafting a Legendary is getting the precursor, since that is completely random (unless you buy one, which is very expensive). Once you have a precursor, it takes a few months to get everything you need.
You won’t be putting your gold towards anything but the legendary during that time, but you can still work on other things as long as those things earn you gold.
And with Heart of Thorns, you can unlock a Mastery to craft precursors, so you won’t have to rely on the luck of the draw or earning a thousand gold to buy one, which will make it much easier to get a legendary; the only reason many people don’t have a legendary after three years is because they haven’t had a precursor drop for them and they aren’t willing to spend tons of gold to buy one.
Daily Fractal (without specifying the scale) just requires you to do one fractal dungeon, not all four for a full run. Just find a PUG to do the Swamp for the daily without doing a full fractal run.
Alternatively, you can check the WvW dailies; there’s often one or two that you can easily solo like Land Claimer or Caravan Disruptor. As long as you’re at all careful and aware of your surroundings you can do those quickly without encountering enemy players.
Or just skip the dailies for that day. You miss out on a writ of experience, 3 spirit shards, and 10 AP, it’s not the end of the world.
There’s no clarification needed. In the first BWE people were mentioning that Sylvari players could hear Mordremoth when the mordrem guarding the captured Sylvari NPCs calls for help, while players of other races could not.
You’re the only person I’ve seen call it bad design. Literally every other comment I’ve seen about it was talking about how awesome an idea it was.
And why aren’t you complaining about all the Sylvari players who will have to make a non-Sylvari character just to experience the full story? Sylvari characters are going to miss out on experiences the non-Sylvari characters have, too.
They need another LFG tool for those selling rides. I hate seeing that listed crap as well. Makes me think I am playing a Pay2Win game….
I don’t hate it, but I do think it would be useful to add a new LFG channel specifically for offering/seeking those services.
Firefly season 2 confirmed. :|
Now I’m sad…
I picked up about 1500 dragonite, about 600 empyreal fragments, and 800 bloodstone dust after running through the SW chest farm 3 or 4 times a couple days ago. Which took maybe an hour and a half.
I have no doubt whatsoever ArenaNet trademarked Braham’s likeness (which is NOT copyright btw). Thing is, no one can trademark “all muscular dudes in vaguely Nordic dress with woad/tattoos”. You have to be much, MUCH closer to the specific character, and humans are VERY good indeed at facial recognition.
Eh, I think they’d have a stronger case for copyright here than trademark. IANAL, but my understanding is that trademark is for things that identify a company brand, like names (e.g. Nike), phrases (e.g. “Just do it”) and logos (e.g. the Nike swoosh). Logos can often fall under both trademark and copyright, but something like Braham’s likeness, since it’s not really being used as an image for identifying ArenaNet in the market, would almost certainly just be under copyright. You only see a person’s likeness being trademarked if that likeness is an identifying part of their brand. And if it’s a fictional person’s likeness, that would very likely still fall under copyright as well.
And i doubt that Anet copyrighted Brahams appearance.
You own the copyright to any work you create, regardless of whether you officially register your copyright or not.
The fact that sylvari are immune to dragon corruption strongly implies that they are already corrupted themselves. You don’t see an “uncorrupted” state because the corruption’s been built into them from the beginning, all the way back to at least the Pale Tree’s seed. If you want to see an uncorrupted state you’d have to go back to before Mordremoth created those seeds.
You missed it entirely.
I never questioned sylvari being corrupted. But what’s the form before sylvari/Pale Tree? That’s what I was saying – there’s nothing, so we’ve been indicated. Particularly for sylvari.
No other champion just plucks a piece of their body and it transforms and grows into a dragon minion. Only the Blighting Trees/Pale Tree(s) do this.
How about the Destroyer Queen? It lays eggs, and since the destroyers are literally just animated stone and magma, those eggs are literally just parts of itself that is is separating and growing into new minions.
As for what the sylvari’s form was pre-corruption, who knows. We haven’t seen what the pale/blighting trees’ seeds were like before Mordremoth’s corruption. Maybe there’s no pre-corruption form and they are literally plant seeds that he grew from his own plant-like body, the same way the wiki describes destroyers as being “forged from the molten heart of [Primordus]”.
The fact that sylvari are immune to dragon corruption strongly implies that they are already corrupted themselves. You don’t see an “uncorrupted” state because the corruption’s been built into them from the beginning, all the way back to at least the Pale Tree’s seed. If you want to see an uncorrupted state you’d have to go back to before Mordremoth created those seeds.
Technically, every race grows replacement commanders. It just takes them a couple decades.
Bear in mind that the Sylvari are mistrusted because they are dragon minions, not because they can be tempted by Mordremoth. The other races can succumb to draconic influence, but none of them were created by a dragon to be its servants like the Sylvari were, and so none of the other races will ever deal with the mistrust the Sylvari will.
Far from being a fearsome beast of war, the Charr simply resemble rat-men with cat faces. This image is promoted by the very unfortunate hunch-backs, skinny legs and arms, the rodent-like stride when doing the run animation — I suppose it is supposed to look cat-like, but due to it’s glacial slowness it just reminds me of a rat. The one feature of the race that doesn’t remind me of rats, besides the cat-faces are the….
Tails.
Wagging tails.
Wagging tails EVERYWHERE.
The extremely prominent swishing of tails, jammed in your face at all times, does nothing except remind me of a happy dog. Swish, swish, swish.
What I’m getting from this post is that OP has never actually seen a rat, a cat, or a dog.
Reminds me of the time my friends and I told a guildmate in WoW that he could leave his PVP arena team by typing /gquit.
Good times…
If you’re going down in 2-3 hits, it sounds like your defenses do matter, because on those fights I was going down in one hit on my zerker-geared characters.
- Currently using an elite spec requires players to get rid of their old builds by replacing 1/3 of their current specializations with the Elite Specialization, pretty much changing their builds up completely just to gain the benefits of an elite specialization. For some players this is a great benefit, but sadly for others its more of a detriment. It forces the player to make a choice, they can either make use of what you developers have spent so much time and dedication making, which may or may not be to their advantage in the end, or they can ignore the specialization and stick with their old builds, completely neglecting all that hard work. Neither option seems like a result that either the player or the developer truly benefits from, but if we could use 4 specializations at a time, 3 normal and 1 elite, this problem could be averted.
That’s the entire point of putting the elite specs in the third slot. Anet wants players to have to make a choice. Do you sacrifice a part of the core build to add an elite spec, or do you stick with the core profession and use 3 core spec lines? “Neglecting all that hard work” is explicitly one of the options the developers want players to have.
What you are suggesting is not a minor change, it is a rework of a fundamental design choice regarding elite specs.
I don’t think she invented the ship, just the big gun it uses. Or maybe one of the components the big gun uses? I don’t remember specifically, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the whole ship.
Imagine these new specializations did not get tests….
This is a strawman argument. I didnt say they shouldnt get tests. Thats not what I said. You’ve made an argument against a position I didnt present. There are plenty of people who want to test them.
But they are putting BETA content on LIVE servers, rather than testing BETA content on BETA servers (such as opting into the beta test by a simple checkbox in the pvp window)
This is not OK.
He did not make a strawman fallacy. He said the elite specs need to be tested, and that he cannot think of a good way to do so outside of the current method. At no point did he make the claim that you were saying they shouldn’t get tests.
My position was that I want an option not to play with beta content. My position was not that beta content should not be tested. You can do both seperately.
Since he was arguing against a argument that I never made (beta content shouldnt be tested), yes, it is infact a strawman argument. If you don’t think so you either dont understand my argument or you dont understand what a strawman argument is.
Again, he did not say you were arguing that beta content should not be tested. He pointed out that failing to test it would be a problem, and that he can’t think of a better way to test it than what is currently being done. He was, in effect, arguing that you cannot “do both separately”. He was arguing that not testing it the way it is currently being done would mean not testing at all. I think his argument is nonsense, but it’s not a strawman.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a person correctly point out a strawman argument in an internet forum, and this is no exception.
I wish we were getting mace so I could use Fixer Upper
Or torch for the welding torch
Imagine these new specializations did not get tests….
This is a strawman argument. I didnt say they shouldnt get tests. Thats not what I said. You’ve made an argument against a position I didnt present. There are plenty of people who want to test them.
But they are putting BETA content on LIVE servers, rather than testing BETA content on BETA servers (such as opting into the beta test by a simple checkbox in the pvp window)
This is not OK.
He did not make a strawman fallacy. He said the elite specs need to be tested, and that he cannot think of a good way to do so outside of the current method. At no point did he make the claim that you were saying they shouldn’t get tests.
I’m pretty sure the Pact has built more airships of the same class as the Glory of Tyria, it’s not the only one anymore.
My dodges on my daredevil didn’t have a delay, sounds like a bug to me.
- “There’s no way the GM would trap us in a room without some way out.”
- You encounter a monster for the first time that you as a player read about in some source book so you know its weaknesses and strengths, even though your character has never heard/read about them.
- You need to send someone to scout ahead, and instead of asking “who’s good at sneaking?” you ask for everyone’s stealth skill so you can send the person with the biggest number.
- Heck, even min-maxing a character is a form of meta-gaming.
All of these represent knowledge you have about the game as a player that your character does not have.
I think maybe the most applicable part of the wiki link I gave is the “About (its own category)” bit. At it’s core, the meta-game is “about the game”. In roleplaying games, it’s taken on an additional context of using knowledge your character doesn’t have because your character isn’t supposed to know that they’re in a game. Conversely, in games like GW2, it’s taken on a context of finding the optimal builds because that is a very common thing for people to do with their knowledge about the game. In competitive games, it takes on a context of reacting to your opponents in an optimal way because that’s the goal of those games.
What they all have in common is that you are, in essence, playing the game a level of abstraction above the actual game.
You are wrong. I do understand it would take a little more work than changing the looks of a projectile as you argued back against my argument, yet I also understand you are making a few tall assumptions on things you (and I) really know nothing about regarding Guild Wars 2’s capabilities in its systems, which from my understanding are capable of a lot more than we know that Anet hasn’t blinged yet.
Furthermore, you never did answer the question in my argument against your argument, and the question is: Would it makes sense or would it not make sense if a gun was sold in the shop that looked like a laser gun, sounded like a laser gun, yet shot projectiles that did not look like lasers? If the answer is “No” then neither does it make sense that a Greatsword is sold in the shop with a sheath that has no functionality, yet that has the sound of the Greatsword being put back into the sheath. I call that unfinished work!
And even if no such coding existed, I could just as easily make the argument that adding 2 animations for drawing the Greatsword from its sheath and putting it back in its sheath is not going to break Anet’s diamond-spangled wallet, because the animations do not need to be different for each class. The most Anet would have to do when it comes to different classes (like the Asura) is resizing during the animating process, not create different ‘drawing’ and ‘sheathing’ animations for each class.
You might be confusing me with someone else. That was my first comment on this thread, so the question in your argument was against someone else, not me. I was just responding to point out that if ArenaNet made a gun that looked like it should shoot lasers, but didn’t, expecting them to change it wouldn’t be all that unreasonable. Custom projectiles are something they have already done multiple times.
Yes, I am making assumptions, but I am doing so with a background in software engineering as well as things I’ve seen in the game. Asura stow their greatswords with a different animation than Norn, it’s not just a scaled down animation. And even if they decided to use the same animation for all races, it would likely need some tweaking on Asura and Charr so they aren’t sticking the sword through their head and the like. And even if we assume they will just make one animation and apply it to all five races, you still have other backend programming issues to deal with. It would be more work than just making the animation.
It’s nothing the devs at ArenaNet couldn’t do, but it’s enough effort that it very likely won’t ever be considered worth the time unless they start adding lots of sheathed weapons.
I think this link might be useful here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta
In this case, metagame is more referring to the abstraction of the game. You are making a “theoretical consideration of its properties”, in this case the game’s rules and design, as opposed to just playing the game and running around attacking monsters and playing through the story. It’s not an incorrect usage, it’s just not what you’re used to.
In fact, I believe using meta to refer to the game’s rules and design happens in the competitive game genres you mentioned as well. Part of responding to what your opponents bring is having a deep understanding of the rules and design of the game you’re playing. I would actually argue that the “meta” in RTSes and MOBAs refers as much to this understanding of the game as it does to responses to what your opponents do. A “metagame strategy” is how you use your knowledge of the game to make strategic decisions; what your opponent does is just one part of that knowledge (e.g. knowing to grab some +armor items in LoL is as much about understanding how armor and AD interact as it is about noticing that your opponents are stacking AD).
My first encounter with the term “metagame” was in pen-n-paper roleplaying games, over a decade ago, and there it absolutely referred to considering the game’s rules and mechanics when making builds and decisions, instead of doing things with only the knowledge your character would have.
tl;dr: “metagame” is an abstraction of the game; using it to refer to considerations of what your opponent will do and using it to refer to considerations of the rules and design of the game are both correct usage.
I see what you did there, except what you argue regarding those ‘other’ effects and skins comes completely down to mere aesthetics, because GW2 would not sound like or be GW2 with a bunch of laser-sounding guns like you’re in a Star Wars MMO. That is different!
Furthermore, Anet did create a half finished weapon given that the sound Belinda’s Greatsword makes when through with combat is the sound of the sword being put back in the sheath with no animation! That there calls for an animation by default.
Let me put your ‘laser-sounding guns’ argument on its head… Would it also not make sense if Anet did advertise a gun that looked like a laser gun, sounded like a laser gun, yet shot projectiles that did not look like lasers? That’s my point with the sheath that came with Belinda’s Greatsword. The sound is there where there is no animation.
I take it you’ve never been in a battle where a bunch of players are using the Predator?
Anyway, your attempt at inverting the laser sounds argument isn’t very effective. Changing a projectile wouldn’t be too hard. You’d need a new model and/or some particle effects along with an audio file to attach to the projectiles the gun fires. It’s relatively simple to do.
Changing animations will take a lot more work. Not to mention the fact that you’d probably need different animations for each race, and potentially for both genders. On top of that, you have to keep the sheath on their back without replacing their back item while the sword is in their hand, which likely requires a lot of new code since normally a weapon is either visually in your hand or stowed, not both at the same time. And I’m guessing the game is designed to just use a generic stow/draw animation for each weapon type, so adding a custom animation means implementing a whole new system for custom stow/draw animations that they didn’t have before.
I really don’t think you understand just how much effort it would take to do what you’re asking. It’s not just a trivial matter of making an animation and sticking it in the game files.