Guild Wars 2

The new elite training path of major > master > grandmaster > healing > utility etc is much better than the HoT structure, but on Soulbeast at least the grandmaster for the middle line is Leader of the Pack, which is completely useless until you unlock the healing/utility stuff that comes after it.

Its not a huge deal, and still better than the HoT order, but it’d be nice if the middle line on each spec held the traits that have the least reliance on utilities etc if those are gonna be the ones that unlock first. Otherwise we’re still gonna end up in a situation where the spec doesn’t feel useful until we’ve unlocked the whole path.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

My take on a trait redux.

this seems really nice, would really appreciate the poison duration on Predator’s Cunning, and I really like the idea of Oppressive Superiority improving as you weaken enemies, its nice thematically. the twice as vicious change would also be great. the poison duration especially would make me feel a lot better about Essence of Aggression not giving condi duration or damage, as atm there’s pretty much not a lot to choose for condi atm.

maybe LotP should have inbuilt CD reduction for stances though, as I’m sure many other people have said in this thread, ‘cus that’d help that trait feel more worthwhile.

my ocd is telling me Fresh Reinforcement should just do both the entering and exiting boon copy rather than it being on Elevated Bond, just for consistency/clarity though lmao.

I think any people who are airing their thoughts in here should also give this thread on unidentified gear a read and add any feedback specific to that there, as that system is something I completely forgot to mention in my post but was also very worried/confused by. we don’t have as many beta/trial weekends to interact with/report on the new content as we did with HoT, so… yeah I’m feeling a little concerned about all this stuff. :/

yeah, I was really in to the idea of a system that reduces inventory clutter, so I was very surprised by normal blues/greens/bags etc dropping from enemies in the new zone. Literally the only convenient aspect of it is that you don’t get sigils etc. from salvaging unidentified gear, but as others have already said, that convenience is kind of ruined by a few things like;

• losing the potential rares/exotics (an extra shame because the skins are really nice) outright by salvaging them all
• the surprisingly high identify cost which is also locked behind renown vendors
• if you do identify them so you don’t miss rares/exotics, you’re then still going to have to salvage everything and end up with a bunch of sigils again.

all in all what seemed like a good idea originally now seems more like another confusing, flawed system, so I’m hoping it gets some rapid revisions before launch. its a shame we won’t actually be able to test any changes if they/that do get made and give feedback before release though.

edit: a friend of mine mentioned that when they were salvaging the unidentifiable stuff, they sometimes got stacks of up to 30 materials on top of the standard 2-5 stacks? if so maybe that’d somewhat make up for the lack of rares/exotics? :/

I’m trying not to judge yet, but to me the demo so far didn’t feel much different in scale or content quality/quantity to the HoT maps in beta, which is worrying. maybe I just felt less engaged because elite specs weren’t available this time, but I’m not sure on that. Nightfall was my absolute favourite GW1 expansion, so not feeling engaged in a zone so heavily tied to the regions I love is a bit of a surprise to me. I’m also not saying I didn’t like the HoT maps or how they played, but overall I’m hoping PoF proves we’ve grown past all the issues HoT very much did have, so “feels the same as HoT” is not what I was hoping for.

and I mean, I’ve already pre-ordered so I’m gonna play it regardless, but I don’t feel like what we were given in the demo is going to sell anyone on the expansion. I have a friend who was incredibly put-off by HoT and the following 6 months, and we’re gonna jump into the demo together tonight, but whats available is such a limited snapshot (I hope) of what PoF, and this first zone in particular, offers that I really, really doubt he’s gonna want to pick it up. I was playing with another friend earlier who did mostly enjoy HoT, and even they were left feeling mostly on the fence about getting PoF after playing the demo today. I think not including the full map, all its active events, the elite specs and a sample of every mount mastery was a missed opportunity, and I hope this approach to the demos/betas changes in the future.

I also feel like running around on mounts (combined with the less frequent waypoints) just reduces the sense of scale for these larger maps back down to be comparable to old ones, which seems kind of counter to what the aim was for with mounts? surely it’d make more sense to make the maps even bigger and have a couple more waypoints, so then they’d actually feel noticeably bigger when mount speed is taken into account? eh, I guess we’ll see how everything feels on release. I do like how realistic mounts feel, and I think they’re fun in general, but I can understand why people might not like the difference in feeling between mounted and on foot.

I’m also a little sad you can’t dismount in mid air and start gliding or something, just as a little fun bonus thing if you have both. horizontal progression is all well and good in concept, and its hard to invalidate gliding’s worth completely, but I worry that mounts (and whatever follows in exp3) and map design will make it feel like every mastery is only ever relevant in its own expansion cycle. and that’s fine to an extent, but it means mastery isn’t going to feel like as much of a fluid, expanding growth system as it could?

and I mean, mounts aren’t going to disappear now, so surely any future maps are going to be designed with them in mind scale-wise? and if PoF isn’t a prerequisite for exp3, that scale is going to feel awful for players without mounts, right? I dunno, I hope a few leylines and updrafts turn up somewhere in PoF, just as alternate methods of travel obviously, not required for accessing certain areas.

Sure, we can definitely glide in PoF areas, but only in a very limited sense of what gliding allowed us to do. we spent so long building up the kind of ways we can use gliding to interact with the world that I really hope the full extent of those abilities are still going to feel useful in the new areas.

Just went back to run through HoT on an alt, and it looks like Scruffy’s model IDs might have been messed up by that last patch or something. Its showing up as its Flashpoint model rather than the HoT model, as pictured below. Wasn’t like that yesterday, so just a heads up.

making this post ‘cus I was wondering if I could get some info from the devs. I’m not trying to start any big arguments or riots or anything like that, so please take that kind of attitude elsewhere if you feel like bringing it to this thread. also sorry if this topic has already been raised elsewhere!

for about a week or so my guildies and I had been wondering what was up with the Gift of Maguuma Mastery – map completion in Magus Falls zones only awards 1 Gift of [whichever map], so unless the mystic forge gave you 2 Gifts of Maguuma Mastery, you were going to end up having to do completion a fair bit more than you would have in Central Tyria if you wanted multiple legendary weapons. today, one of my friends tested it out, and confirmed you do only get 1 gift from the forge. I have a lot of alts, so this isn’t a big deal for me, but I imagine for those without that to fall back on it would kind of suck.

so I guess my question to the devs is; is the intention 1 character can get you 1 legendary weapon? are the gen 2 legendaries just supposed to be harder to get, or are there going to be other systems in place to help people get more than one? I’m not really judging this either way, I just think its a little inconsistent that we can make 2 legendaries per character in Central Tyria, but not in Magus Falls.

I could see the gifts for each HoT map being available for a substantial amount of their relevant currency (and a lesser amount of all 3 for the Gift of the Jungle, like the plated weapons) from one of the legendary vendors/each zone’s vendor, and that makes the most sense to me. there’d be no reason to have that kind of stuff in game atm, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that (or something similar) was the intention, and we simply can’t see it yet.

anyway, any kind of clarity on this would be appreciated! I’m just curious, mostly.

Eponet.4829:

All I want is an official addition to the story journal that will tell me which masteries I need to unlock for the full storyline so that I can finish them before I start, thus avoiding the flow breaking mastery grind between each chapter.

in the mastery tab theres a green star on each mastery required for story progression that also tells you exactly what episode number you need it for when you hover over it, do they really need to add more than that?

if I’m reading the Rocket Charge changes right, once you’ve closed on a target the leap will no longer propel you the full distance, and instead just perform a mini-leap next to the target? if so that is an amazing change, won’t fly off the canopy during boss fights anymore haha.

Function Gyro felt good when I managed to get it off, glad to see it being available more frequently. I like the idea of it as the spec mechanic, and never expected or wanted it to change heavily, but I do think it would be nice if we had a bigger visual indicator for it to make it more noticeable/impactful (like some people have suggested, a fuel bar above the endurance bar could be cool).

all of these changes sounds awesome, looking forward to checking them out on launch.

I personally didn’t even feel very strongly about Fast Hands before this last beta weekend, but after trying a sinister burn build against the Red Guardian and other content, it just feels kind of underwhelming?

if you want to maintain your burns properly, you need to either take Last Blaze and slot a bunch of Rage utilities, or Smash Brawler and rely heavily on Combustive Shot/Scorched Earth and Flaming Fury. but even then it doesn’t feel like there’s much of a rotation to it. its just… camp longbow ‘til you can fire off Combustive Shot. Swap to Sword/Torch, blow your cooldowns, maybe pop Berserk if it pops up before weapon swap is ready…. I feel like we should be more encouraged to both use Scorched Earth over Combustive Shot, and actually try to use more than one weapon’s Primal Burst during Berserk.

so, with that in mind, I do think it would be nice if we had Fast Hands baseline, but I’m not going to really get into that as a lot of others already have. what I think we need is an option that would both synergize with Fast Hands and provide an alternative to those who don’t want to take Discipline with Berserker.

what I’m thinking is something along these lines (and sorry if its been suggested before): merge the current effects of Always Angry and Fatal Frenzy (so your first strike when entering combat and after intiating berserk mode grants you adrenaline, quickness and swiftness or something), and replace the current Fatal Frenzy with something like one of these;

• Reduce recharge of weapon swap by 50%
• While under the effects of Berserk, weapon swap has no recharge time.
• While under the effects of Berserk, weapon swap recharges 50% faster.
• Hitting an enemy with a Primal Burst skill causes your next weapon swap to have no recharge.
• Hitting an enemy with a Primal Burst skill causes your next weapon swap to recharge 50% faster.
• While under the effects of Berserk, weapon swap recharges 50% faster. Weapon swapping while under the effects of Berserk grants 30 adrenaline.

idk, I’m sure there’s more creative options than these, and some of these ideas/numbers are probably broken as heck (33% recharge reduction wouldn’t be powerful enough to sub for Fast Hands, 45% is probably about right, 50% would maybe be broken paired with Fast Hands) but they’re just ideas. I feel like an option that can both substitute for Fast Hands and also work well with it is what we need at the moment, that gives the devs more time to think about Fast Hands and baseline Warrior before the next big balance patch hits.

also I’m not A Maths Person, but a potential weapon swap cooldown of 2.5 seconds doesn’t actually seem like a big deal to me. yes, it might be harder for opponents to play around in PvP, but iirc we don’t have very many useful weapon skill cooldowns that are that low enough to really exploit that??

mostly copied from a post I made on reddit:

has there been any discussion of Nourishing Roots’ effect becoming baseline for the tablet? I enjoyed the Centaur Stance play-style, but I kind of felt like having to choose between the regeneration and Tranquil Balance’s boost to healing in general was unfortunate.

perhaps Nourishing Roots could instead cause the tablet to create a water field with a rather limited lifespan after its been moved? imho that’d combo well with the new blast finisher? like moving, blasting, and re-summoning the tablet for even bigger heals in moments of need, when the other utilities aren’t quite enough on their own? I also think that’d better fit the nature theme of the stance, rather than just adding a water field to one of the utilities, where the animation might not quite fit. gives further incentive to keeping on top of moving the tablet around too.

using that new combo-field-in-motion tech could also be pretty cool, but I think it’d feel a little out of place with how the tablet plays. that might just be me though, I’m unsure.

as it is, if you don’t have Nourishing Roots selected, Facet of Nature’s upkeep seems pretty useless for the Herald personally while in Centaur Stance. seems doubly unfortunate because Tranquil Balance + the regen from Facet of Light should in theory be pretty nice, unless I’m misunderstanding how that trait functions.

I guess I understand if the intent is for Centaur to be very heavily focused on active healing, with Dwarf and Dragon having more in the way of passive mitigation and heals, but idk. Centaur/Dwarf don’t have regeneration/protection unless traited, and that feels a little bit weird for what these stances seem to embody.

anyway, Revenant/Herald was a blast to play last BWE, looking forward to giving it another go with all the listed changes during the next one.

edit: although yeah the added cooldowns on some utilities seems a little weird.

I’m one of the people who was pretty frustrated by The Lost Shores, due to living outside the US and having a job/school to try and fit these events in around. A lot of my friends were very disappointed with this event from the outset, because it again requires you to be avaliable for a rather short window of time, and dedicate yourself pretty hard to it if you want to ensure you get the rewards you want. Another friend only realised last night that because they’d missed the first few rounds, they wouldn’t be able to get both sets of armour with the limited time left for the event. That changed things from “I’ll just have to work hard” to “oh” pretty fast. You guys learned a lot from The Lost Shores, it feels weird to see you slip back into those mistakes again.

I do think there were some good ideas with this event. If it wasnt for the stress of limited duration vs the bloom aquisition problems everyone else has already gone into, the small invasion events themselves would be pretty relaxing and fun because of their scaling and design. Brining back old items as event rewards is fantastic, even if I doubt I’ll be able to get the toxic skins I’ve been wanting since their original sale. Most of the nastiness of the Scarlet invasion events was avoided too – most of it.

Anyway thanks for being as honest and on top of things as usual Gaile. It probably sucks for you guys that this kind of smaller event didnt really work out, but hopefully this kind of transparency will help a lot of people swallow their disappointment, myself included.

Daevas.6943:

Anet needs to make it were you can two and three man these dungeons. Finding groups to run dungeons is hard on my sever and if you can get a group going and a couple die they will leave and then you’re screwed. That’s one thing i liked about gw1 is you didn’t need a lot of players to get anywhere.

You can totally 2 or 3 man these. Did the Svanir Fractal with my level 65 Ranger friend earlier tonight, and a few others with a level 80 Necromancer and Elementalist.

Edit: I should probably also point out that the Necro and the Elem ended up taking on the Jellyfish alone, because I died in the dark water section, and they still pulled it off.