Guild Wars 2

Leo.1593:

Yup happened to me as well upon unlocking Chronomacer and Dragonhunter in HotM. After gathering a bunch of HPs in the open world and unlocking the next thing in the elite spec line, the collection unlocked and I got the weapon drop. So yeah, you could get around this by earning HPs and unlocking the next trait down the elite spec traitline.

Thanks for the tip Leo: that’s great to know, at least i’ll be able to start (and maybe complete) the collection for my thief.
I wish i could do this for the mistward armor collections too: unfortunately they are unlocked by completing the base specs and i can’t even add more points into them now :S

unfortunately you don’t get any collection unlocked if you learn the specialization (doesn’t care if it’s elite or not) while in the pvp lobby (someone reported the same problem while in the tutorial instance)

i didn’t get the staff for my thief after learning the daredevil spec while in the pvp lobby, which means i can’t even start the collection for the ascended staff.
same happened to my revenant with his basic specs: i didn’t get any of the mistward armor collections unlocked..

Hello there,

i’ll quote Irenio’s post here for other people to read: it’s the best way to show that you are either misinterpretating stuff or simply making things up.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I don’t want to defend (or offend) anyone: i believe that if Irenio felt the need to defend himself he could do so more adequately than i can.
I only think that it’s too wrong to write stuff as if he said those things when in reality he didn’t, only to fool people to agree with your arguments/concerns (some of which may even be legitimate too).

OP you should consider the fact that the very sentence you posted can be interpreted in many other ways, many hinting at the hammer skillset just like the decemeber 10th balance changed preview post does.

Also, devs don’t need to prove anything about incoming buffs or nerfs: the fact that they didn’t prove the 2 points you refer to in the 2nd paragraph doesn’t mean that the nerf can’t be based on those two points (it only means they didn’t want to prove those things, or maybe that they didn’t have the time to do so, or maybe that they can’t, but in any case it doesn’t mean those 2 points are totally false, hence the nerf may still have a reason to happen).

Pyroatheist.9031:

CnD can be used on anything: Mesmer clones/phantasms, ranger pets, necro minions, the rock dogs that pop out from runes, random animals lying around, other nearby players….none of that can be controlled by player dodging/blocking skill.

and whats the problem with that?

there are other classes out there (namely warriors and necromancers) who can use said pets, and even critters, to build their resource bar too (and gain quite some advantages off that), and yet i’ve never seen people complaining about that.

add the fact that the majority of thieves run with daggers, and daggers are just single target, while any other melee weapons is AoE by nature (= they hit you and the pet, getting rid of both at the same time at no cost, actually warriors gain additional adrenaline too)

moreover, pets dont lose aggro when the thief stealths, nor do illusions despawn, which means that suggesting to remove CnD stealthing off these targets is out of the question (it’s just a disadvantage of the pet mechanic).

are you suggesting that pets should evade when the owner evades too?
in that case, the suggestion forum is probably the right place to post that stuff (i must confess that i would agree with such a suggestion, even if i can’t foresee all the consequences of such a feature..)

to be honest, it’s quite ridiculous that we’re arguing over CnD, while there are better ways to gain stealth in game that dont involve hitting any target at all.
But even if we considered those ways (i’m talking about d/p), the nerf to revealed is still unreasonable because:
1. those builds are perfectly usable even after the nerf, infact there is already a WvW video around about that
2. those builds hold no place in PvE, and if i can still read english properly, this thread is about PvE

tl;dr: the fact that there are still builds (WvW ones mostly – talking about d/p) which can achieve perma stealth shows yet again that this revealed fix was rushed because devs wanted to do something about all the people cluelessly complaining, and in the end they did the worst thing possible, without addressing the issue in question and only messing up (badly) the PvE side of the class.

only good thing is that they claimed they will split more and more skills between PvE and PvP so, hopefully, we’ll see some changes (some positive ones) in PvE at least..

rootnode.9546:

Thing is: Berzerker Thieves finally pay up a little in terms of survivability. And please don’t cry about the health pool. You have a medium health pool, but still medium armor.
I think the patch was not only warranted, but also necessary!
And caltrops from 15s down to 10s? Why on earth would you need them on the ground for more than 10s?

rootnode either you are a troll or you clearly write posts without checking your assumpions/facts, and in the process losing credibility:

1. thieves have no medium hp pool, they have the lowest hp pool a someone else said (next time /wiki thief or google “gw2 wiki thief”)
2. given n.1, your claim of the “necessity” to nerf zerker thieves survivability is a joke, because it’s based on a totally flawed logic (you assume thieves have more hp than they really have, double check your facts/assumptions next time)
3. you say there is no need for caltrops to last more than 10 secs, but you dont explain why: by this logic (or maybe we should say “non-logic”) there would be no reason for them to last more than 1secs, or maybe they should not last at all, and disappear immediately.
N.B. i’m not advocating the old caltrops duration, i’m just showing that even in this regards your logic doesnt work, because you forgot that the burden of proof is on you who claim the nerf was warranted.

there are at least 2 hints that this revealed fix was rushed into the game and doesnt hold any place in regards to the PvE thief, just look at its consequences: the nerf hit both survivability and dps but
1. thieves had low PvE survivability already, having both the lowest hp pool and the lowest armor rating, relying on dodges/shadowsteps to survive
add that in GW2 stealth doesnt prevent you from being hit by AoEs, and it doesnt reset aggro either, and that when you stealth and stay stealthed you are doing only a tiny part of your dps (thats why when you play d/d you use CnD only to follow immediately with a backstab, you dont use it to stay perma stealthed)
2. thieves had not the highest DPS, and the fix nerfed it quite a bit anyway (just see scootabuser’s video for some math about the d/d rotation, posted earlier in this exact thread too)

that should be enough for any logical player to see that if a fix was needed for the sPvP/WvW/whatever perma stealth abuse, it was not the revealed duration increase, which ended up impacting PvE more, where thieves were not the dominant/most wanted class anyway.

come on, it’s pointless to advocate this nerf since we are talking about PvE: stealth was not that useful before the patch except maybe to skip some packs of mobs, survivability wise it didnt add anything to a thief that already used dodge/shadowsteps to their best, and dps wise thieves didnt deserve a nerf at all because their best dps was only single target (if anything that was their true niche, given that warriors are 10 times better at cleaving trash mobs down, and this game seems to be an AoE fest tbh)

tl, dr: this nerf was rushed, it hit PvE a lot more than PvP and didnt even fix the problem in PvP apparently, so it was a total failure, it would be nice if a dev answered telling us what they want to do now, or if they want to revert the fix.

ps: start playing all other classes before asking for a nerf, else you’re just whining and sounding like a troll.
mes/war/engi/thief/ele 80 here, played through most of PvE with each of those classes, with PUGs mostly

Thunderbrew.7034:

The state of the game video talked about more than just nerging stealth.
They also referred to helping with Thief mobility and condition removal.

Interesting how they were quick to implement the first, but do nothing
on the other two. Guess we wait another 3 months for a hyped up patch
that actually does very little again.

2 months ago they also said AoEs were excessive (link), yet they ended up nerfing a single target skill set (d/d)…i’m starting to lose faith in devs/patches and everything else they do really.

if i also consider that the already best dps class out there got his utility tools greatly buffed, and that i have to wait another month to possibly see this fix reverted, then i feel very depressed as a thief player.

maybe i’ve already said this in my previous reply but sometimes (it happens quite often actually) i have the feel that fixes are just rushed (be it to appeal players who whine, or to fix real problems), without testing them extensively and without looking for the best possible solution to these issues (which is indeed hard , if not downright impossible, if one has to balance sPvP, WvW and PvE all at once).

JonPeters.5630:

As we played with the stealth changed mentioned in the SotG, we recognized that in conjunction with the change to culling this was an unpredictable change to make. We also felt that it was too big of a hit to these stealth professions, so we ended up pulling that change in favor of just increasing revealed duration by 1 second.

Hi Jon, i wanted to share my opinion with you, so here it is.

I think it’s time you devs start to split skills into PvE and PvP versions, like it was done in GW1.
I bet it will be a lot more work for you, but if you keep going in this direction, and keep skills unified, you will never ever achieve a good (or even decent) balance in both aspects of the game, and you will actually ruin one or the other aspect in the process too.

Take this fix for example: i have no idea why it was needed in PvP or WvW (i dont play those anymore), but it surely messed up the PvE rotation of thieves very badly, and its not like PvE thieves were the best DPS out there, or the best at anything actually, so there was no reason for this fix to be applied. (it also has consequences on survivability)

PvE is already messed up badly in regards to class balance, i’m sure you are aware of the CoF p1 mes+war spam, or the fractals guardian syndrome: i dont think these phenomena are a sign of classes being totally unbalanced, because it’s totally true that you can run any dungeon with any class combo, but they surely show that some imbalance exists!

There are classes who are given the top DPS/utility, at the cost of almost nothing: warriors have the best DPS out there, and they also have the highest base HP pool and the highest base armor; guardians have the best utility for fractals instead (no other class has that many projectile-reflecting walls); mesmers are wanted mostly for timewarp (and feedback).

I’ve never advocated for a warrior/guardian/whateverclass nerf, because nerfing classes makes them unfun usually: i’d prefer if you improved DPS/utility/whatever of the other classes instead, i’d like if you made PvE more interesting than just a DPS race where only 1 class can realistically compete and win.

As i said, i have no experience in sPvP, and my experience in WvW is totally outdated, but if there is no balance between classes there, then splitting skills will do good for those aspect of GW2 too.

tl, dr: split PvE and WvW/sPvP skills and try to achieve a separate balance in each aspect of the game, skill unification is doing no good at all if you end up nerfing the PvE side of a class to achieve a balance in PvP (or viceversa), especially when that class was not even remotely OP in PvE/PvP.

i hope i didn’t make too many errors, english is not my first language :P

asura warrior racial T2 armor bug

race: asura
profession: warrior
armor: heavy asuran T2 chest & legs (i think the name is “electroplated”)
the rest of the armor is AC pauldrons + HotW boots

i never noticed this before, so it may be a recent addition, but there is an empty space between my character legs and his chest.

just to make it easier to spot the bug i highlighted it on paint and also i took the screenshot when facing a npc i was hovering my mouse on (this way it’s quite easy to spot the discontinuity in the armor)

on a side note, i’ve noticed that the discontinuity goes away if i equip Heritage leg armor (the heavy leg armor skin from hall of monuments) instead of T2 legs.

desolation (EU) temple open

Race: sylvari
Gender: male
Class/armor type: mesmer/light armor
armor: Honor of the Waves light armor shoulderguards

the issue is that during most (if not all) animations these pauldrons seem to behave wrong: instead of following the shoulder they end up higher or in front of it, resulting in some clipping problems.

1st screenshot shows the issue in combat stance (it gets worse when using skills)
2nd screenshot shows the issue during /sit animation, as you can see there is an empty space between the left shoulderguard and the shoulder itself

Race: sylvari
Gender: male
Class/armor type: mesmer/light armor
armor: Honor of the Waves light armor gloves

the issue here is about the metal band circling the character’s wrist

3rd screenshot – as you can see that small jewel-like part of the metal band is not aligned with the rest of the glove, it’s a bit to the right

thanks!

Male Asura racial T3 light armor chestpiece

The right shoulder part of the armor (which is incorporated in the chestpiece skin) has some visual glitch during any animation involving the right arm: this happens both in combat and out of combat, both when using emotes and during the idle animation (in the 3rd screenshot its possible to see that a part of the shoulder armor seems to clip in itself, the character was idle during that screenshot)

i dont understand how some people praise this RNG system: it’s boring, unpredictable (obviously) and unrewarding, you may run the dungeon few times and get nothing/something useless to your build (because after you are so lucky to get a drop, you have to pray the RNG to give you something useful to your build!)

it’s not about getting guaranteed drops, nobody is asking for free loot here, it’s about having different ways to acquire those rings: they could have added them on the fractal shards vendor to lessen the pain of having to farm dailies, they did this with the old dungeons, it was the basic idea of GW2 dungeons from their manifesto, there is no real reason why they shouldnt do it with fractals too (actually it’s outstanding they havent done it yet)

after all one would probably do the daily each day anyway to get the fractal shards and especially rings for alts (given the current difficulty level system it’s unlikely that someone will want to run the lower tiers again on any alt)

and for those people loving and praising the RNG: if they added rings through vendor they could still go through RNG and not buy the rings at all (i would say that’s masochistic but to each his own..)

William Fairfield.1428:

This is not a bug. This is a random drop from the daily rewards. The vials also have a chance to randomly drop from every creature in the zones.

So as Azelroth suggested.. Loot everything!

Hello William Fairfield,

could you please explain why you chose to go with random drops for those rings instead of adding them to the token vendor (or a 100% drop chance since they are account bound anyway)?

RNG as a “gating” mechanic doesn’t work at all in my opinion: it will tear up your party (sooner or later) and “it is unfair” (everyone is doing their job, but some people are getting rewards while others are not). it’s not a matter of rushing the content or taking it slow, it’s a matter of avoiding unfair and boring systems and aim for pure fun like in the rest of the game.
the fact that you went with a token system for all your dungeons clearly shows you agree (if not totally, at least partially) with this: thats why i dont understand this decision.

if i were asked to give my opinion on the fractals, i’d say that the idea behind them is great and the fractals are really nice (both mechanic and design wise), but the actual implementation is far from GW2 average level: you could have avoided lot of things (eg. did you really need increased stats in ascended items for the sake of progression? RNG also doesn’t make the instance any funnier than it is) and done a lot others better (eg. the difficulty mechanic makes it hard to find a group – every level is like a separate dungeon when you look for a group)

what do you really think about the fractals as a game designer and as a player?

ehtom.5047:

If anyone could join anything it would make pugging this absolutely impossible.

i’ve left the first part of your post because i partially agree (reaching level 11 is indeed an indicator of the player’s chances to reach level 12), even if i think that if i trust someone to run FotM at level 11 i should be able to enter at that level (given that someone in the party has already reached it)

regarding the quote i think you should consider this: allowing parties to run FotM at the highest possible level would let people to party with anyone they want and run the instance at the level they “deserve”.
also, and this is imho more important, it would remove the urge to play FotM, and also (but partially) the fear to be left behind by friends (partially because ascended stuff/infusion would still be there, and if they dont fix the RNG the problem will be back at levels 10+).

with the current system:
1. you probably dont want to play with anyone who isnt at your level
2. you are urged to play FotM as much as you can because you can be left behind

and if we consider the RNG being a factor in ascended rings drops:
3. you cant even be sure to stick always with your group (assuming you have a fixed group)
but thats being discussed in other threads too, so lets leave it out.

levels = another gating mechanism on top of agony and luck (because rings are dropping randomly too)
imho this is a bit too much..

i agree with the OP: the current implementation of the fractals, while being fun and all, urges every player to be selfish and look only for the current level he has to complete.

imho merging levels into some “stage” or whatever would probably lessen the pain: for example, if levels 1 to 9 were just “stage 1” and you needed to complete x runs at that stage to gain access to “stage 2” (being levels 10 to 19), it would make it a lot easier to find team mates.

something like that, and/or letting parties start the dungeon at the highest difficulty attained by any member would help a lot.

after all agony, and not levels/difficulty, is intended to prevent people from farming content they are not equipped for (yay for equipment gating, i hate it).