Guild Wars 2

the idea of skirmishes is fine, but the victory point distribution needs to be adjusted. the 3/2/1 distribution doesn’t really prevent a runaway scoring spree, since the 1st place server would essentially be ticking with 50% of all available points for each skirmish. even in off-hours coverage wars, this doesn’t happen often.

instead, consider a different victory point distribution, like 4/3/2, or 5/4/3.

mixed borderlands: yes, with red BL always being desert.
world relinking: every 2 months
everything else: no.

I think 0.75 seconds is too long.

the main purpose of the stab change was to prevent people from losing multiple stacks of stability when they hit layered area hard CCs, like the old hunter’s ward, multiple statics, unsteady ground, etc. however, those skills are changed alongside stability: hunter’s ward no longer interrupt anyone who tries to cross the rings, aoe CC’s now have target caps. as such, a shorter immunity duration, like 0.5 seconds, or 0.33 seconds, would work better.

a shorter immunity duration would also benefit skills like shocking aura and aura share, which was adversely affected by the stab change.

1) keep current stability stacking, but make it so that you can only lose one stack of stability every 0.25-0.4 seconds.
2) keep desert borderlands, but:

• adjust terrain and objective placements to reduce (but not eliminate) the number of narrow chokes.
• move the overlook cliffs on the north east/west closer to garrison keep, so trebuchets placed there can attack both inner and outer walls of garrison keep.
• make the teleporters on those cliffs be controlled by whoever that owns the north east/west towers. this adds tremendous value to those towers, without having to actually move them.
• add a mechanism that allows players to turn off shrine effects completely, one for each type of shrine (air/earth/fire)

3) split consumable (food/utility) usage from PvE, make consumables used in WvW last forever, until the player uses new consumables. this would drastically reduce the cost of running certain builds; some of which literally cost over 1 gold per hour to run.
4) add new meaningful rewards, like new stat combo gear, ascended gear boxes, ascended trinkets that are currently raid only.
5) bring back periodic tournaments, perhaps automated.

BrunoBRS.5178:

moriz.5473:

BrunoBRS.5178:

it’s not redundant, it’s stacking defense on a profession that sorely needs more defense. if you’re more resilient against foes that have weakness, a condition that already tones down damage, then you’re very resilient. last thing daredevil needs is more damage modifiers

damage reduction in this game is multiplicative, which means diminishing returns. additional percentage damage reduction on something that already drastically reduces damage, means that the new damage reduction will have very little effect. as such, reduced damage from weakened foes not make the daredevil very resilient: it will have almost effect at all.

on the other hand, directly modifying the weakness condition on nearby foes to be more effective will lead to bigger damage reduction numbers, and since it is AoE, it also allows for more teamwork.

weakness only has a 50% chance to deal 50% damage, so it isn’t affected by your personal damage reduction even when it triggers. so yeah, a 5k crit that fumbles will hit for 2.5k, but with extra 10% damage reduction, for example, that’s 250 health that you saved yourself. in a single burst, it sounds like nothing, but you keep shaving damage from weakness and damage reduction, it adds up, much like shadow’s embrace’s 300 health ticks.

that effect is negligible, even on something as fragile as a thief.

my second suggestion (increased fumble chance, increased endurance regeneration penalty on weakened foes near you) would have a much bigger, and actually noticeable, effect. not to mention, a percent reduction from weakened foes is a purely selfish trait, while mine can be used on teammates as well: choking gas+blast = that melee push on your teammate just fizzled into nothing.

BrunoBRS.5178:

it’s not redundant, it’s stacking defense on a profession that sorely needs more defense. if you’re more resilient against foes that have weakness, a condition that already tones down damage, then you’re very resilient. last thing daredevil needs is more damage modifiers

damage reduction in this game is multiplicative, which means diminishing returns. additional percentage damage reduction on something that already drastically reduces damage, means that the new damage reduction will have very little effect. as such, reduced damage from weakened foes not make the daredevil very resilient: it will have almost effect at all.

on the other hand, directly modifying the weakness condition on nearby foes to be more effective will lead to bigger damage reduction numbers, and since it is AoE, it also allows for more teamwork.

though i definitely agree that Weakening Strikes needs a buff, i don’t particularly like the proposed changes. “receive less damage from weakened foes” is kinda redundant, since weakened foes already deal very little damage. and, inflicting a damaging condition like torment/bleeding only benefits condi specc’d players.

instead, how about:

• you deal X% more damage to weakened foes, and your conditions last 50% longer (maximum 1 second) against weakened foes

or

• weakened foes within 360 range of you suffer 67% fumble and 67% slower endurance regeneration (instead of 50% for both).

these changes are disappointing. instead of addressing the actual issues (warhorn skills moving too slowly, overloads not worth their opportunity costs), anet does what it does best: MAKE BIGGER NUMBERS!!

this is a pathetic showing.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Overloads are comparable to Signets, in a sense, and they come with the same basic design constraint: if the signet active and passive have the same purpose then you’ll be able to math out which to use at any given time and there ceases to be any real decision-making involved. There’s a good decision and a bad decision, end of discussion. This is what happens in the case of badly-designed signets. On the other hand, if the active and passive have slightly different effects, then you can have good reasons for preferring to use or hold onto it. The Signet of Air, for example, is a well-designed signet: a useful passive effect, but popping it for the effects is useful in different circumstances as well.

this isn’t a good comparison, since overloads don’t have much in common with signets. signets for example, don’t lock out multiple skills on activation. overloads also don’t have passive effects, unless you want to count the attunement skills as their passive effects.

what your comparison did actually do, however, is illustrate just how powerful the overloads need to be. signets by and large have relatively mild passive and active effects, since the relative cost of using or not using them is also small. if we treat overloads as signets, and attach attunement skills as their passive effects, then the resulting active effects also needs to be really powerful, since the attunement skills are collectively powerful. would these active effects be powerful enough to be overpowered? i don’t know, but experience tells me that it’s more likely that they’d be overpowered than not.

also somewhat unrelated: overloads as transforms, yay/nay?

Leo G.4501:

moriz.5473:

first, a definition:
“A benefit, profit, or value of something that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else.

First of all, opportunity cost is more the other side of what you’re defining. I mean, what you say is also included in the context, but opportunity cost is, by definition, what you lose by choosing a specific alternative.

In the context of the thead, the opportunity cost is the things you sacrifice to have the option to/cast the overloads.

i think you’ve basically said the same thing using different words. opportunity cost is always about what you give up in order to use another option.

Leo G.4501:

The point you don’t touch on too much about opportunity cost is that, it changes from scenario to scenario and from person to person. What I may think isn’t worthwhile you might think is totally worth it. I may think it’s a rip off to pay $5 for a taxi to the store a few blocks away but feel it’s more worthwhile when it’s pouring rain and I need food for dinner. You might feel putting all stats up into offense to kill enemies quick and rely on blinds, dodges and utilities is worthwhile while I feel doing so isn’t when I just want to goof off and not need to concentrate fully or to be able to support allies in various other ways.

again, this is basically what i’ve been saying all along, but coming from a different perspective. your examples have choices and consequences that are roughly equal and are all relatively mild. the choice of using an overload or not is by comparison gigantic. the loss of either 5 or 20 skills for the cost of one skill is NEVER worthwhile, unless that one skill is incredibly powerful. this reinforces my point, in that overload cooldowns need to be decoupled from attunement cooldowns.

Leo G.4501:

While I do find your idea for an F5 interesting (although it’s been suggested before when Tempest was revealed), I don’t think the current implementation is necessarily a dead end (heck, your suggestion partially proves that).

I also don’t think the overloads have to be decoupled from the attunements. It’s one way of improving the Tempest’s mechanic but I feel it’d be more in line with a straight upgrade (just giving Ele more skills to use) when this is suppose to be a different way to play the ele.

actually it won’t be a straight upgrade, because you’ll have to use the tempest traitline, a rather difficult decision, because the default elementalist traitlines are all incredibly useful, and the tempest traitline is relatively bad. the mere act of equipping tempest is a DPS loss to elementalist, not to mention the loss of various useful traits.

also, my suggestion (assuming you’re talking about the transforms one) doesn’t prove that the current implementation is of any use. it is actually an alternative that is better than the current implementation.

Malchior.5732:

Ideally, they would do something the attunements could never do before in exchange for something else. Can’t make them a direct upgrade, but can’t leave them with the current drawbacks either.

my point is that it doesn’t change anything. without decoupling the cooldowns, the same opportunity costs will still apply, with the same results.

also, anet is missing a perfectly good opportunity to introduce something completely cool and awesome, and i can’t believe that they aren’t doing it: TRANSFORMS.

combine with my idea with decoupled cooldowns and F5, we can have something like this for air overload:

Air Overload: Transform into an Aspect of Storms, giving you and your allies 3 seconds of superspeed. While in this Form, all of your attacks inflict vulnerability

skill 1: Arc Lightning. strike your foe with a bolt of lightning, which then strikes up to 3 targets behind your target. 600 range, 0.75s cast time, 600 range per bounce, up to 2 bounces per target

skill 2: Backdraft. pull foes in front of you towards your location. foes that are successfully pulled are then dazed for 0.5 seconds afterwards. 600 range, 100 degrees spread, 1.25s cast time, 5 target limit

skill 3: Shocking Armor. you and your allies gain Shocking Aura for 2 seconds. for 5 seconds, foes near you are periodically struck by lightning

skill 4: Blinding Speed. charge forward and leave a trail of static behind you. foes struck by the trail takes damage and are blinded. 450 range, lightning field

skill 5: Nova. leave Aspect of Storms. Sends out a ring of lightning that stuns and damages foes. allies near you gain swiftness for 10 seconds.

just an idea. will require thorough balancing, but i think it sounds cool.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Alternately, the effects could be changed to incomparables: currently, Fire a) deals damage, b) applies Burning to foes, and c) applies Might to allies. These are all things that can be accessed with your standard Fire skills, so the Fire Overload is always going to be competing with them, so it’s never going to be worth using unless it gives you way more of those three things than your basic skills.

However, what if overloading Fire also caused you to destroy projectiles, burning them up before they hit anything? What if overloading Water also reduced allies’ healing skill cooldowns or pulsed Slow onto enemies? What if the Air attunement caused you to rise up into the sky, moving you out of range of melee abilities? What if Earth created temporary terrain behind you which opened up for allies but blocked enemy movement and dash abilities (or if that’s too difficult to code, maybe just leaves behind unstable terrain that does something similar)?

Then, Overloads are an interesting option because they give you new effects which were unavailable/difficult to access before, and they might actually be worth the time.

Malchior.5732:

Good ideas, but like Blaine said, I think it would be MUCH better if Overloads weren’t competing with the attunements themselves.

these are good ideas, but if we do not decouple overload cooldowns from attunements, overloads will be competing with attunements no matter what effects we attach to overloads. think of it this way: we can completely reassign the current overloads onto different elements, like air to fire, earth to water, etc, and it still wouldn’t change the opportunity cost analysis.

until we decouple overload cooldowns from attunements, there’s no point in adjusting the overload effects themselves. they’re guaranteed to be either useless or overpowered.

with all that said, here’s how i would fix Overloads:

• 1st, decouple Overload cooldown from attunements. i’d do this by adding a F5 key for Tempests that functions as the Overload button. every time you switch attunements, the Overload F5 button changes to match the attunement, and goes on its 5 second chargeup cooldown. once you finish channeling the Overload, F5 goes on its 20 second recovery cooldown, and your current attunement isn’t affected. this removes the opportunity cost of either losing 3/4 or 1/4 of your weapon skills, making Overloads capable of being balanced without having to compete with attunements.

• 2nd, make it so Overloads aren’t channeled abilities. instead, make them work similarly to Armor of Earth, or Arcane Shield, in that they are fire and forget abilities. their overall effects can stay as is, but will require tweaking since they won’t be competing with skill usage while they are active. ALTERNATIVELY: reduce their channel time by half. either way, this change is to either eliminate or reduce the opportunity cost of not being able to use other skills while the Overloads are channeling.

• 3rd, implement different cooldowns for each Overload. for example, water can have a 15 second cooldown, fire 30 seconds, earth 40 seconds, etc. this removes the need to balance all Overloads on a common cooldown, which allows for greater freedom when designing their effects.

by decoupling Overload cooldowns from attunements, Overloads can now be balanced on their own merits, and not having to compete with a ton of other things.

TL;DR: Overloads need to have their cooldowns decoupled from their respective attunements in order to be properly balanced. also, F5 button for Overloads.

first, a definition:
“A benefit, profit, or value of something that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else.

Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/opportunity-cost.html#ixzz3iW41tZAt"

in the world of GW2, opportunity costs appear whenever you can potentially choose one option over others, in the form of the potential loss of the other options while you are doing the one you’ve chosen. this applies for skill usage, trait/traitline selection, equipment selection, as well as the topic at hand: Tempest overloads. using the concept of opportunity costs, i’m going to argue that the current Overload implementation is a design dead end, and should be scrapped.

so, for those who don’t know: Overloads currently are abilities that become available to a Tempest when they’ve camped in one attunement for 5 seconds. there are 4 Overloads, one for each attunement. all Overloads are long channeling abilities (5-6 seconds, IIRC). all Overloads have effects while being channeled, and and another set of effects that appear when they’re fully channeled. all Overloads are put on a 20 seconds (14 seconds traited) cooldown once they end, and this cooldown is shared with their respective attunements. this means that for example, if you channel fire overload and it ends, your fire attunement is placed on a 20 second cooldown, making it unavailable to you if you choose it leave it.

now, let’s consider the opportunity cost of using an Overload:

• you first need to stay in the respective attunement for 5 seconds. depending on the build, this attunement may or may not be the one that you should camp in the first place. there’s also the opportunity cost of potentially doing something else in the 5 seconds that you have to camp in this attunement, especially in cases where the skills you need are in ANOTHER attunement.
• then there’s the channeling itself. Overloads are long channeling abilities that stop channeling if you try to do any other action that isn’t an instant cast. the opportunity cost here is that this effectively locks you out of most of your weapon and utility skills while you are channeling
• lastly, there’s the shared 20 second cooldown after channeling. the opportunity cost here is on two fronts: 1) you are either forced to stay in the current attunement for 20 seconds because you don’t get to go back to it for 20 seconds, thereby costing you 3/4 of your weapon abilities, or 2) you are forced to leave the current attunement, thereby locking yourself out of that attunement and its skills. this becomes doubly bad if you are specced into Arcana, since you also lose your “on switch” effects like protection on earth, might on fire, etc.

and here’s the crux of my argument: by examining the various opportunity costs of Overloads, the times where using said Overloads vs their opportunity costs is… NEVER. the Overload effects simply aren’t powerful enough to be EVER worth using.

and it gets worse: Overloads also cannot be buffed so that they are worth the opportunity costs, because they’d be ridiculously overpowered. imagine a fire overload capable of out damaging a fire staff attack chain, one of the most damaging damage rotations in the game; and not only for the channel duration, but for the potential 20 seconds afterwards that you might be forced out of it, thus locking you out. or, how about a water overload having to AoE heal for over 12K health to compensate for the potential loss of the powerful water utility skills, or being forced to camp in water for 20 seconds a losing the other potential abilities in other attunements.

so basically, the Overloads are at a dead end. they aren’t worth the opportunity costs to cast them, so they’ll never get used, which is not good. if they are buffed, they become gamebreakingly overpowered, which is also not good. as such, it’s time to start over.

for those of you debating whether the tempest is frontline or not:

keep in mind, our group setup doesn’t distinguish frontline/midline/backline. we’re a roaming group and fields small number of players, and as such, our combat roles can switch rapidly depending on what’s happening. as such, debating whether the tempest is a frontline class based on Marsee’s video footage is missing the mark.

what i CAN say, is that tempest can very well serve quite well as a frontliner in a zerg group. we might have to build the character more tanky for it to work (Marsee was running celestial in this vid), but the character itself has some good tools for use as a frontliner.

human female, stalwart jerkin

character’s neck is shaded improperly in darker/shadowy areas.

the only thing i’m disappointed about, is that now everybody can run around with a hero’s mistforged weapon. WvW doesn’t have many “unique” rewards, and the hero’s mistforged weapon was the one exception, and now it isn’t.

maybe make the mistforged weapon only unlockable through a different achievement, one that’s harder to accomplish?

nuts, i can’t send PMs until two days from now -.-