Guild Wars 2

Some time in October the Halloween event began and like many people I was one of the first people online. I waited excitedly as each phase unfolded running the activities with my friends and I even made an effort to show up at noon PST to see the big “event” where jack blew up the fountain.

In November I showed up on Friday (I believe) when the Karka first popped up in lion’s arch so I could see what the next event was all about. Unfortunately, what I experienced was a lot of lag and a karka killing event that took me quite a while to understand. After some significant lag I decided that since big “events” weren’t really that interesting and this particular one was far too laggy to enjoy I went about my weekend without GW2.

Sunday night I received a message from a friend of mine that the one time event had just ended and a bunch of people got precursors and other nifty things so I decided I should log on and at least see what the new zone was all about. Sadly, not only was I too late to participate in any event but I was greeted with a dead island, its boss already dead and even more surprisingly PERMANENTLY dead.

I wandered around the island for an hour or so and realized that this event, unlike all the others I had attended, was apparently a big deal. That Anet had designed an entire island to throw away when the event was finished and I started feeling very confused. I clearly hadn’t gotten the message, something had gone wrong. By missing this event I missed a huge part of the November patch and (unlike 99.9% of everything in gaming) it would never come back, I had really missed it forever. The island seemed like an empty crab shell, some small insects crawling around inside but the meat was gone, just wind and sand remain.

So I logged off…

and haven’t been back since.

Tarnished Coast, best coast…

Crab it while you can

I think most of you who are talking about this don’t understand the following:

Third party gold sellers acquire their gold in two ways….
1) Hacking player accounts and emptying them of all value.
2) Using owned accounts and hacked accounts to farm for items.

If you buy gold from gold sellers you are performing almost an identical practice to paying a third party to steal things for you and then paying less for those items than they cost to be made. You are paying an organization that makes a large amount of its money preying upon you and your friends to get you items the organization will try to steal back from you and your friends in the future.

Basically the more you feed it, the worse it will get.

Sword, Greatsword, and Hammer can hit up to 3 targets with 1 but no more.

GS2 and hammer2 have no target cap.
GS4 and the symbol from hammer1 have no target cap.

I found it irritating especially when I got to the top but didn’t know I had to wait…

Then I found out I couldn’t even salvage the stupid exotic I got…

Kinda a waste of my time.

Many monsters throughout the game are still “overtuned” as in they hit surprisingly hard compared to the average monster.

Consistently Dangerous:
Risen Sharks
Risen Hylek

It’s a problem but it may take quite a while for anet to fix these as they have a lot of other things to fix as well.

I think the Greatsword Problem is enhanced by the lack of good offensive PVP utility skills. When thinking about adding DPS to a PVE group fight only two utilities come to mind, Purging Flames and Bane Signet (only one of which is active). Judge’s Intervention is PVP only and spirit weapon’s cast time (and down time) isn’t much fun in PVE. This leaves Guardians with 13 defensive/group oriented utilities and 1 active offensive PVE utility so when we’re roaming around by ourselves we would like our weapon skills to be very active.

The Greatsword change moved away from active and reduced the overall damage of the weapon. It should be retooled toward how players were using the weapon, as a solo and aoe dps weapon.

PS: Hell remove the retaliation from wrath altogether and make it fury or might, then move the cooldown back to 10 seconds and leave the leap cooldown at 15.

—Much—

“We are moving towards retaliation being more of a counter to taking many hits rather than a general boon to keep up all the time. We also wanted to improve the combo finisher of the guardian, so we reorganized guardian greatsword skills to the following:

Skill 2: Whirling Wrath (10 second recharge)
Skill 3: Leap of Faith (15 second recharge)
Skill 4: Symbol of Wrath (20 second recharge)"

What does this actually do? It cuts retaliation to 15 seconds per minute instead of 30 seconds per minute from this ability IF the person attacks the Guardian while he is on his symbol. However you can gain retribution from:

Save Yourselves 10 to 13 seconds.
Stand Your Ground 5 to 6.5 seconds.
Healer’s Retribution 3 to 3.9 seconds.
Retaliatory Subconscious 3 to 3.9 seconds.
Virtue of Retribution 3 to 3.9 seconds.
Wrathful Spirit 3 to 3.9 seconds.
Leap Finisher on Light 5 to 6.5 seconds.
Blast Finisher on Light 3 to 3.9 seconds.

These can all be increased by an additional 25% with vengeful.

So increasing symbol of wrath to 20 seconds and reducing the leap finisher to 15 seconds there is a loss of 15 seconds of retaliation per minute and a gain of 5 seconds of retaliation per minute for a net of 10 seconds per minute difference before utilities and traits.

What is more noticeable is the loss of around 5100 aoe damage per minute from the symbol itself which is not covered in the patch notes. Shouldn’t the damage the sign deals be doubled or the damage added into a different ability? Will GS Guardians get the damage back in the future or were they doing too much damage? (Excuse me while I laugh hysterically at that thought).

So is hammer 2 next? Should we make it 10 seconds, 20 maybe? It alone can allow 100% uptime on retaliation right now. A single backstab or heart strike can hit for 6k or more and returns maybe 400 in retaliation. Maybe I’m confused by this because it is a partial change but at the moment it seems unfocused. I hope we can get more comments and clarity in the future.

Ok as a Guardian who doesn’t like the Thief class much I will go against my own sensibilities and tell you how to fight a Guardian:

Guardians are designed to absorb and counter other class abilities, if they succeed at doing this they are tough, if you circumvent this ability they are very fragile.

Guardians have base health below 11,000 at lv80 it’s something like 10,818 which makes them by default extremely susceptible to condition damage. Guardians also have innate healing per second (when geared can be as high as 300 a second, usually around 60), all Guardians will have an aegis up (blocks a hit) when you first attack them (so don’t backstab first if you see aegis buff) and can heal at least 1200 at will (second virtue). Even offensive Guardians have heals tied into using their abilities (heal on attack, heal on ability of X type use) as well which means in general every Guardian you fight has more total health than what is in their health bar as long as they are not CC’d.

How to mess with a Guardian:

Some Guardians can remove conditions well (based on ability and trait choice) some can’t. Most Guardians that are offensive will have Judge’s Intervention (gap closer teleport) a CC of some type utility, and an anti-stun/anti-condition utility. Almost every Guardian runs the Healing Book Elite cuz it’s OP. If its an offensive Guardian attack him, stun him, get him to pop his counters then stealth and run away. Regen yer initiative then attack him again now with his abilities down.

Defensive Guardians come in 2 basic flavors, high support and high defense. High support Guardians will attempt to heal the damage you deal so try to poison them repeatedly (once will not work). High defense Guardians are a hard counter to thieves so don’t expect to win, but if you start to lose run. Guardians suck at chasing you down particularly if you can cripple them before you leg it. If they remove the cripple or teleport to you just re-cripple or stealth and try again (Guardians have only so many tricks).

MOST IMPORTANTLY: Learn what the retribution boon looks like. If you attack a Guardian with retribution on you will lose guaranteed. If you see it either run away or remove it or kill the Guardian in the next 5 seconds before ret kills you.

EDIT: As far as the healing book ulti. If you see a Guardian with a book watch for casting animations and interrupt them with something. If you interrupt these long cast spells the book is wasted.

I’ll pull up with some “shield hate” for you :P

No I don’t really hate shields on Guardian because they do have uses but…

I like focus more as an offhand defensive weapon because of the focus 5. It can be used while stunned or knocked down and absorbs 3 hits. AKA saves your life when things go bad in dungeons or pvp. Shield cannot do that.

Shield is better in WvW or throwing people off a point in spvp. But shield will not save your kitten when things really get bad.

EDIT: I would like shields more if one or more of the following:

Shield absorb prevented aoe damage in the area (red circle damage)
Shield cooldowns were reduced.
Shield Armor was drastically increased (factor of 300 to 500%)

I honestly don’t have a problem with mobs hitting hard in dungeons particularly when I was given an ability that makes me invincible (rolling). However, what bothers me is that many damaging abilities (particularly in dungeons) are not telegraphed.

Couple Examples:

Ascalon Catacombs (I think thats the name, first dungeon) hunter ghost’s spike trap stacks 8 bleeds, cripples, and deals significant damage. It’s also instant cast and invisible until it hits you (at which point it is too late).

Cad Manor first boss (Golem) missile barrage is not telegraphed, is occluded by the camera when you are in melee, strikes incredibly fast, and one shots everyone I’ve ever seen it hit.

This lack of warning also extends to unavoidable attacks that I have experienced with event bosses. I had a high toughness character take 20k damage from a boss in an Orr event with no warning. Sadly I had 12k health.

Basically, I believe that if an attack is gonna hit extremely hard there should be an animation that telegraphs that it is coming. A good example of this are the giant boss characters that stomp. You can fight one of those without taking any damage because he raises his foot before each stomp telling you to roll.

Still bugged on Tarnished Coast as of 9AM 9/14/2012.