Guild Wars 2

You can use it in pve anywhere you want provided you don’t have a team/group to be efficient for.

If efficiency is your game and you really want to use a hammer, you are better off rolling a guardian and roleplaying as a technopriest or something. Just remember to equip one of those medium armorish outfits.

You can even use the fixer upper along with a suitable offhand for your offset to really seal the deal.

Are both components of confusion damage (both the DOT and active effects) rolled in together in the damage list? I was thinking maybe the tick damage might be getting represented separately, and engineers and mesmers both have access to confusion…

IMO it’s still not worth building healing power as an engineer (or anything other than a druid, realistically) at present. Not enough ways to consistently apply heals to your allies, other than regeneration and a few long cooldown skills. And for the means available, the co-efficients aren’t worth an investment in healing power.

Bunker down is a bit of fun, but is mechanically problematic in 2 main ways even if the heals on the packs were much bigger:
1 – People have to play chase the satchel when running around at low health, while dealing with all the stuff they already have on their screen in terms of models and effects
2 – Someone who is missing 1 HP is as likely to pick up the satchel as someone who is at 50 HP and has no dodges left. They can never realistically be useful for group healing because of this unless they healed in an AoE.

randomguy.1283:

Movement hurts guardian a LOT more than any other class, that’s just an obvious consequence of the build. Now, testing could be done to see exactly how much dps is lost, but its clear even without testing that it wont be anywhere close to other classes on a boss like vale guardian.

Is it that obvious without testing though? A condi engie will lose like half of his DPS if VG walks out of his firefields just when they’ve been cast. An ele will lose huge amounts of damage if he walks out of lava fonts, glyph of storm, and meteor shower. A condi ranger will lose a bunch of damage if VG walks out of the traps early.

There’s plenty more examples but I’m sure you get the picture. This kind of thing happens all the time in VG’s movement phases as I’m sure you know already, so I think testing isn’t as dispensable as you’ve implied in this case.

I must say that elite specializations effectively killed off any desire to play my alts. I’ve been slowly moving any good gear, toys, consumables or other stuff off of them and have basically just been using them as mules or node farmers since HOT dropped.

For me, it kind of finished the job that ascended gear started (constantly moving gear around between characters is just too annoying to bother with it, plus having to spend charges on any racial armor pieces).

Bit sad since I had a lot of fun putting their wardrobes together.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

2: Due to it relying so much on symbols any movement on the targets end can hurt your dps output quite a bit because symbols are stationary.
.

It bothers me a little when I see this argument, because while it’s true, it’s also a factor that affects the majority of classes in GW2. If a boss starts moving, DPS is gonna start dropping off in most cases.

You can hypothesize that the damage lost will be worse for a symbols focused guardian than an alternate build/class, while taking into account whatever backup weapon the guardian may be using, but it’s the kind of thing you need to prove with testing and data if you want to want to make a proper point.

But why would you destroy such a perfect audio trolling tool?

Welp.

Dead game.

I’ve done a few VG runs where a rev has run mace/shield dire stats for tanking role, seemed to work OK.

Though I’d probably consider trailblazer stats if I was building one of those myself.

I value fractal relics more than the cheap keys/vendor trash I can exchange them for, so I don’t bother even with the cheap keys, only the dailies. But then, I haven’t sat down and calculated what they might be worth when used for other things (backpieces, 20 slot boxes, +7 infusions, etc).

Oh well, at least revs will still be the best class for mining nodes ;_;

DeadlySynz.3471:

How exactly are they drawing money out of the economy?

It’s a transfer of gold, with a big ole 15% tax on every drink consumed via TP transaction. For every 800 gold worth of drinks, you are looking at 120 gold removed from the economy, as well as wealth being transferred generally from the wealthy to the less so in game.

The drink is drunk, the gold is gone, your question’s bunk, I could go on.

Look at it the other way. Think of how much gold players can make from this event if they don’t want to make the item. And the gold acquisition methods are something that most people can do with some practice, with any level 2 character. No gear reqs, no builds or strategies or expensive consumables or organization.

You can take that gold and use it to craft ascended gear for an alt, or something else actually useful in game, rather than another vanity item. Or you can use the gold to convert to gems and pick up additions to your wardrobe for a new look.

And the only reason demand exists for the gifts allowing people to earn that gold, is the demand for these drinks created by the 10k achievement (well, the boxes do contain some other useful stuff of course, but they are the main value to them).

I hate to be that guy but… it is in fact an elixir infused bomb. You know, the trait that got removed a while back? Yeah, they decided to keep the icon…

Edit: If you magnify it, the resemblance is a bit clearer. It’s basically an augmented bomb.

Or I could be wrong, and it’s actually meant to be a healing turret.

They all have their own separate internal cooldowns, feel free to use them together if you wish.

The interesting thing about vale guardian, is that in theory you can completely ignore the enrage timer, as long as you have enough/effective health and hps recovery.

I’ve been thinking it would be fun to try a 10 man all druid VG raid

Thorwyn.8469:

That you get tokens even for failing is a really nice thing anet introduced to the game.
In my opinion, it is too nice. People who are able to clear the raid should get more out of it than people who keep failing on the first boss. Clearing the full raid should reward you with the weekly cap of tokens. Not getting past the first boss 25% of the cap, 50% for the second and 75% for the third boss.
As I stated somewhere earlier. We cleared the raid every week now and all I got are some exotics which weren’t worth anything. Together with the small amount of gold you get.
My tokens are capped at 315 which a person who haven’t cleared the raid yet could have reached as well. So in the end, we both are on the same level of rewards and this fair?

I already agreed that clear rewards should be improved. It’s lovely that you/your group are able to reliably clear the wing each week and it’s a pity you have only got junk exotics and gold so far. I also agree that repeatedly failing to clear the boss shouldn’t be a faster way to earn shards than clearing them.

Where I don’t agree is with the apparent notion that people expending the same time and effort to try and clear the boss should be rewarded with nothing for their efforts. Their time and energy is as valuable as yours. If people have the time to keep trying, let them earn a few pitiful shards per attempt and hit their weekly cap.

I think the main issue is that the actual proper rewards are all RNG, and the odds aren’t terribly good. Raids are not dungeons, the incentive to complete them is not the tokens or gold reward provided, the main reward incentive should be the drops.

The problem is that the drops are too rare. If you had a decent chance of getting the drops, the shards would just be the bonus that they are supposed to be.

I wonder if multiple simultaneous uses of chaotic release could be used to secure an SPVP advantage.

Co-ordinate a burst and then drop everyone’s FPS massively to mess up their dodges and skill activations etc.

It’d certainly be amusing to watch on stream.

They could always give it the ele treatment, and change it to a static sprite of a smiling gecko.

I was thinking that well of precognition is probably a really good oh kitten skill for circle group.

Seeker spawns on your face? Evade it until invul wears off and knock it away. Teleport orbs under your feet? Evade them until they disappear. I haven’t had the opportunity to actually play my chrono in a raid though so I dunno how it actually pans out.

Fractal variety comes from the daily rewards. People log in, do the level 17, 35, whatever, and then are free to choose whichever ones they want to play to complete their other dailies.

Because 2 of the dailies dictate certain fractals, you always get a certain amount of variety. Over time, all of the different fractals will end up being played at some point provided people do their dailies. So it’s not like the content is going to waste.

I actually really like the current system from the perspective of time expenditure and convenience.

If you are having difficulties finding parties for higher level fractals:
1.Make your own
2.Run with guildies or friends who are happy to help you, for fun, because they enjoy your company, or because they also want to progress
3.Organise it in advance via forums or other methods if you are still having trouble. There are many people who also wish to progress in the same situation as you.

I personally found it hardest to get parties for some of the difficult fractals at very high levels, as it would often taken an hour or two just to finish a single one. Having hit 100, I don’t particularly feel like going through all of that again. I expect that once you have done it, you will feel the same way.

That may change somewhat once the toughness scaling is altered.

perry.9645:

I’m just gonna ignore assumptions made against my and other peoples play style as this isn’t part of the Discussion, even tho “supposed basement dwellers” sounds more funny than insulting.

Rewards don’t have to be just gold, what about Rewarding Boss kills with Ascended Crafting Materials that are otherwise just found in Content no Raider wants to do but has to do to get Legendary Gear.
A bit of liquid Gold wont do much to the Economy as only a minority of the Playerbase will be able to even complete the Content unlike it was for Dungeons.
Also the Token Reward needs to be changed as its currently more efficient to wipe to Bosses to get Tokens and a Full clear will not even get your Tokens halfway to the Cap. How about Caping the Tokens for Wipes and Fails but add a Daily Token Reward for Boss kills.

There seems to be some contradictions in your narrative and I don’t feel that your ideas are good for the general population. Let me explain my reasoning:

In your initial post, you say that raids are “on farm”. In your most recent post, you go on to say that additional liquid gold rewards wont do much to the economy because “only a minority of the Playerbase will be able to even complete the Content”.

So which is it – are raids too easy or not? The impression I get from your various combined statements overall suggests to me that you want to be able to continuously farm raids for gold and other material rewards, so you don’t have to spend time earning your gold in other parts of the game like everyone else (who doesn’t have raids “on farm” as it were).

Next you suggest that materials required for legendary crafting should drop from raids. Completing the raids is already a requirement for various legendary collection pieces. You seem to be suggesting that raids should act as a replacement for other in game activities such as material gathering and crafting, is this your intention?

On your final point, you suggest that token rewards should be changed so that clearing a boss gives you a daily token reward and their should be a cap on shards from failed attempts.

While I agree that boss clears should reward more tokens than they do currently (whether this is a once a day or a once a week reward), capping shards earned from failures is a terrible idea. There is already a weekly cap on shards. There’s no reason to punish people who do their best to clear the boss but are simply unable to for whatever reason. They are losing money via consumables the whole time and aren’t even getting a chance at the weekly RNG drops, after all. I’m fairly certain the entire point of the shards is a consolation prize for those who lost out on drops in the first place.

I appeal to your sense of empathy, and urge you to see it from the perspective of all players (including those who do not have the raids “on farm” as you said earlier) when putting forward these types of suggestions in future.

Yeah, I’ve seen seeker’s crit for 8k on squishies. Always fun when a seeker spawns right on top of the green circle, since it spawns with a few seconds of invulnerability but can still attack you

Combine that with teleport traps appearing right on top of the circle and said traps occasionally seemingly spawning invisibly makes it feel like succesfully clearing VG is almost pure RNG (once your group has the mechanics and the right gear down that is).

It’ll be interesting to see how mat prices fluctuate as time goes on. So far the trend seems to be slowly downwards from the initial demand spike caused by all the new mat sinks. Eventually I assume they’ll bottom out at a fairly low point (higher than pre-hot, lower than now by some considerable margin) which will make gathering less profitable and overall gold acquisition harder than ever before for the average non-TP savvy player when combined with the reductions to gold from other avenues.

I don’t think anyone wants the tablet to trail behind them, which as you say would be pretty worthless – I think the suggestion is that the tablet “snaps” to you and stays right on top of you like vengeful hammers, or function gyro.

While some of the on heal traits are neat, since moving the tablet costs energy the blind trait for example is competing with other hard CC skills on weapons and in utility slots so I can’t often justify slotting it. Kind of depends on your rotation and equipped weapons though.

The problem with that approach is that you would lose the ability to flexibility direct project tranquility fluidly in combat – for example, you would be unable to run the tablet ahead of you up the turret ramp in the uncategorized fractal, or to move the tablet from a dead ranged enemy to a downed ally so you can protect them while they are revived, without using twice the amount of time and energy currently required.

From a practical perspective, it should be possible to matchmake australians (or players in other regions if they also have their own servers) with others in the same region and run the instances from that regions server for the duration. Similar systems have been used in a number of multiplayer FPS games.

Note that I’m not trying to asset that the internal server infrastructure/software used for guild wars 2 remotely resembles modern FPS games, or that this would be easy to do in practice even if arenanet suddenly decided to roll out region based servers which I don’t believe will ever happen.

But it should be feasible to do the same thing with dungeons, fractals, raids etc as long as they are instanced and all of the players are from the same region. You could implement a toggle to allow players to filter the matchmaking systems (LFG tool, SPVP matchmaking etc) to play with others in their region or not to get the best of both worlds.

Well anyway, I’d love to see region based servers but I just don’t see it ever happening.

This was unplanned maintenance… if they’d known in advance servers were going down, they would have let us know via various channels in advance.

The client crashes are a serious problem for sure. Close friends of mine who had very few crashes prior to HOT have been getting them very frequently ever since, regardless of client binary.

Particularly punishing for the metaevent maps if they can’t get back in to a full map.

Ah, the story mission vuvuzela. Who could pass that up?

Key’s are just another form of currency IMO. Should just go into your wallet with the others.

Good feedback, and post in general. Welcome to the forums.

I’m sorry you’ve had some bad experiences with guilds. I have been in a few proper guilds, and have been lucky I suppose, in that the guild leader/officers of all of them have been diligent, responsible and reasonable people who have worked hard to make their guilds a good community to be a part of. Anyone displaying undesirable behavior has been kept in check by these helpful individuals.

If you decide to try to find a new one, I’d recommend doing some research before joining a guild. I’d also recommended trying to find a larger, well established guild because many guild related activities require the resources and manpower of a lot of people and a certain modicum of organization to achieve. I’d recommend finding one that is most active in your timezone. Good luck!

Would be nice if unlocking lvl 500 crafting unlocked it account wide, recipes too. But with crafting licenses and things it’s not a realistic option I guess.

Summoning automatically when swapping into ventari and sticking to you until you direct it to move somewhere would be a dramatic QOL fix I feel.

While I like the idea of upkeeps and I think it could work for natural harmony, I prefer the current bursty condi removal provided by purifying essence since I often have to removal cripple and immobilize etc at the same time.

IMO apart from the mechanics (and the radius of the tablet feeling a too small) there’s a few other main issues that come straight to mind when I use ventari – Natural Harmony really feels too weak for it’s energy cost, and Energy Expulsion too slow, unreliable and time consuming to be useful either as a personal heal or a group tool. It is kinda fun blasting fields and knocking stuff around with it though.

I have found myself using project tranquility surprisingly often, as I seem to find myself playing quite frequently with people who have can’t be bothered to slot their reflect skills since they now have traps and wells to play with.

I don’t really care what raid rewards will be. I’ll give em a shot and try to have some fun with my guildies while doing them.

On the other hand, if raids end up being as rewarding for the time/effort invested as high level fractals, it’s gonna be hard to get people together to do them quicksmart after the shine has worn off.

Unintentional ping checks. There needs to be enough warning in animations or other tells that savvy international players can beat encounters when playing with latency upwards of 300 ms.

FYI, buying the skin again from the fractal vendor does nothing. Applying a skin to a weapon and breaking it down also doesn’t work.

Just have to wait for a bugfix by the looks.

The same big gyro that gives away your position in pvp scenarios, and aggros nearby enemies in PVAI scenarios, and explodes when destroyed, and does damage to enemies when it blows up, revealing you if you are stealthed, yeah…

Glint seems like it should be one of the easier ones to put underwater compared to most other classes really, at least the passive versions of the skills. Dunno about the actives, but it seems like most of them shouldn’t have to change much from their land version.

For melee sword mainhand is your best bet. Offhand situational, probably doesn’t matter that much damage wise due to energy constraints.

I found staff damage to be lacklustre other than surge of the mists (though surge does hit hard, had a few pvp matches where someone running jalis+shiro ate through my entire healthbar just using surge+sigil procs, longish cooldown on it). It’s more of a defensive/support orientated weapon though, so I guess it’s to be expected.

Personally, I think a ranged weapon is always good to have, even if you don’t have it equipped all the time. It’s useful in too many places not to have it when you need it.

Sword/something (haven’t decided yet) and hammer will probably be the first two weapons I make for my revenant.

Doug Whisper.2465:

The timer is essential to protect your hands from injuries. Flighting this boss is like playing an arcade shooter in which you need to constantly move around to avoid damage from orbs with different colors and pick up power up for mitigating damages from instant wipe. There are no pause button , no resurrection, and break from combat in this encounter. Slow burn will put too much stress on your hands before you notice it hurts. The timer force you to take a short break even you don’t want to.

Doing something over and over again due to the failure of a specific condition is not going to help anyone with RSI.

I don’t think it hurts to ask for oceanic servers. A number of big game companies have set up server farms in australia in recent years, including some companies that most aussie folk thought never would.

Maybe it’s worth re-evaluating the business case for aussie servers.

I voted no, but tbh I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend playing one. I kind of want to get more familiar with the class, and since it’s new there’s a good chance I’ll spend a fair bit of time over the first few weeks at launch in the invokers seat.

But it probably won’t take too long to get comfortable, and at that point my revenant may end up a slave to a rich ore node like a lot of current alts.

Did some testing this morning and it looks like medical dispersion field does not proc on any heal effects except heal skills (bandage, or elixir H for example, I assume AED also works).

That means blasting water fields, the regeneration boon, super elixir, elixir shell, medpacks, and traits like backpack regenerator or soothing detonation do not apply additional heal effects to allies via mdf.

Unsure if this is a bug or intended behaviour.

The mobs leading up to maw used to drop good loot, once upon a time…

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I still hate the dredge with pug groups. You’d think that players at 30+ would know that the thief with shadow refuge should interact with the switch to open the door, but apparently that idea never crosses their mind.

Eh, I actually think it’s better if someone else channels the door. The thief can drop shadow refuge on the channeler 5 seconds or so after they start, so the stealth lasts for the entire channel instead of running out near the end, whereas the thief can’t drop it on themselves while channeling (and it’s risky to try to pre-stack stealth with smokefields with all the mobs running around).

As for hardest fractal, tbh it depends on level, party comp and aggregate experience.

I think snowblind is probably the most annoying for me. It’s quicker for most groups just to grave rush the source than it is to take down the constantly spawning ele groups (often of which multiple are pulled due to where people get teleported) even if everyone brings the right skills along and uses them correctly which feels a bit off.

Some fractals are worse than others if you or your party members are a bit laggy (cliffside is probably one of the worst for this), and volcanic fractal is generally very painful if you are short on projectile defense for example.

Eh, toss elixir only copies utility skills at the moment. Hey, maybe they’ll add corrosive poison cloud to the rotation >.>

I’d recommend stockpiling the required mats or boxes and crafting what looks the best a week or two after launch, rather than making a best guess now and wasting craft or conversion mats/tokens/gold down the track.

Phineas Poe.3018:

because you can already use the bomb kit or grenade kit for damage, the hammer should be designed and taken for something else.

It’s nice to have options. I don’t think hammer should or will replace bombs or grenades anywhere (not that it could ever replace bombkit in any case, the finisher and smokefield are too useful). But is there something wrong with hammer having an AA chain that is even vaguely competitive? It’s not as black and white as you seem to imply, and as I said I feel that toolkit tier is too low. We’ve heard the damage has already been increased though, so there may not be any point in talking about this anymore.

Phineas Poe.3018:

I don’t really care if the hammer auto does more damage than the rifle auto, but the hammer overall should not outdamage the rifle or else there will be no reason to ever use it. I am happy that we now have a bona fide melee weapon in the hammer, but I’ll still want to have reason to use that Predator skin I invested thousands of gold making.

I want a decent damage autoattack on the hammer for the flexibility, so I can actually MAYBE slot something in my utility and elite slots other than a damage focused kit from time to time without forgoing almost all of my damage potential. The hammer is being compared to defensive kits, which is fine and all but there’s no way to equip kits as your main hand weapon, you can’t just equip grenades or bombkit there. Especially with the addition of drones which take up a skill slot each, it looks like there’ll be even more competition for those skill slots in specific situations now.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily think it should be better than grenade kit or bomb kit AA. But I think toolkit tier is too low.

Since it is being compared though, how often does the toolkit auto chain actually get used? Why bother having an AA chain that no one ever uses? You can only use one at a time.

You also seem to be ignoring the fact that equipping a hammer requires an entire traitline to use, which puts a limit on build flexibility. If you aren’t taking the elite spec, your weapon choice is back to p/p, p/s and rifle. I don’t see rifle disappearing from SPVP any time soon regardless of hammer AA damage.

Rifle in pve is basically just 2 skills in your rotation (one on longish long cooldown) in most places. It’s not like anyone gets to see you use your predator that much as is because of that unfortunately, though I see where you are coming from.

So far the hammer appears similar to existing engie weaponsets. You’ll swap to it, use the useful skills, and then swap to something else to do damage. If your big hitters are on cooldown and you’ve got nothing left, you’ll swap to a kit which has better co-efficients on auto’s until those cooldowns are back. I just don’t see the engie hammer AA chain getting much play in SPVP other than maybe cleaving downstates.

Well, I’m not trying to be a negative nancy. It could be nice to slot in Elixir X, 2 elixirs and the elixir gun and pack an AoE cleave in our mainhand now. It certainly seems like a competitive choice compared to rifle, although I’m not sold on the traits we have to take to get access to it.

Bringing D/D ele into the argument is probably spurious, but then I didn’t raise that particular comparison, I was just responding to the previous comment.

BlackBeard.2873:

A brawler works by having lots of sustain (and you have some great trait combos for that), lots of defense, and stacks might to do damage. The auto-attack is PERFECT for that role.

Who is going to just let you leap up to them and smack them in the face with the hammer long enough for AA chain might and vuln stacks to make any difference? More importantly, it applies no damaging conditions, you wouldn’t run cele ammy if you are building around hammer.

Do you seriously see yourself fighting and winning against a D/D ele as a hammer/anything engineer in a melee fight?