Guild Wars 2

I rather agree with what you say. Frankly i am one of those who tire of seeing swamp all the time. It is run purely because it is short and you can avoid most extra effects from the instabilities. Since the rewards for the other fractals are not good enough to make up for the difference they are not ran nearly as often (or ever). Changing the instability system would be a boon to a lot of the fractals that basically need to be run by a team that dumps into condition removal (which most people are not willing to go through the effort to change their build/char for a run) and may actually make it where they are truly worth running.

One issue i see is they might have to nuke the base rewards a bit to actually encourage people to use the gambits you suggest. Maybe make the rewards fairly similar across all scales on a per fractal difficulty basis, then pack more rewards in to the gambits so people might actually run them. That would make it higher scale=more gambits=more possible rewards, maybe to the point that 75-100 with 4 gambits would give significantly better rewards than they do now. Also might actually make some “challenging” content that so many(*few) people complain (very loudly) about the game lacking, if someone truly want challenging then just pick 4 of the worst gambits for that particular scale (of course they would also get rewards significantly better than if they did it with reduced or easier gambits).

Another idea is making some gambits only available for certain fractals so we can have some actual variety instead of just 5-6 general ones that apply to all scales. For example you could have a projectiles cant be destroyed/reflected gambit (that they brought up at one point but never did…) but it would not be usable in places like swamp where there are no projectiles worth reflecting. You could also make the rewards of the gambits varied depending on the fractal, like running with out projectile hate on upper scale Uncategorized should be worth more than say running it on volcano.

Those are some of my current thoughts, if i have any more i will post them later.

I searched the 1st 4 pages of this forum and didn’t see any of the topics similar to this. I don’t know if i am in the wrong place or if they all got merged somewhere. Never the less…

Starting off, I know that anet messed up the mastery xp situation in the labyrinth and don’t intend to fix it because it might cause more problems than it solves. But I wonder if there are alternative ways to give xp. How hard is it to alter the loot tables of the mobs there? Could they not add in a drop (from the mobs, not the bags so as in not to be able to buy mastery xp) that is similar to writs of xp but give mastery xp instead.

Hell I would be very happy if they simply added a place-holder item that they later (after the event) fixed to provide an amount of mastery xp determined to be the proper amount of xp for the event. The amount would likely have to account for not being able to get xp from the events inside the labyrinth but I don’t imagine that would be too hard (especially since most of the events are murder/loot parties anyways). Added bonus of a place-holder item is if they find that they made the drop rate too high/low than they would simply have to adjust the xp received per item after the fact.

I feel like this is not terribly unreasonable and would be a better alternative to just leaving it broken until after halloween ends.

I would give it around an 7-8/10
maps- I rather like the maps, the mastery gating is rather annoying but once I got updraft it was rather fun just exploring (while still getting rewards because my credit had not fallen off yet). The event density/flow bothers me, this is partially due to the maps feeling empty at times but also to do with that a lot of the events are so spread out/hard to find. If there was some system that told you where event chains were going on it would be much better (like scouts that say the pact is having a hard time over by blah).

HPs- I strongly dislike how many are gated by champs/impossible by solo player, the mastery gating I find ok I just wish it wasn’t so prevalent. The out-of-the-wayness of a lot of the points can make it had to get a group together of killing champs but not much to be done about that.

Mastery- I like the idea but dislike the huge amount of xp you need for them. I don’t want them to be handed to me and I feel low lvl mastery require an ok amount of xp but the xp required ramp for getting the higher ones could be reduced significantly IMO. Additionally/alternatively you could put more xp in other places like exploration, so people actually explore instead of encouraging a massive event grind purely to be able to explore in the 1st place.

Have not progressed much in the story so I don’t have anything to say about that at the moment.

Honestly the biggest thing that irked me about release is that halloween not providing mastery xp. I was really looking forward to leveling up my masterys while participating in the event but that is a separate issue.

Having play a couple hours in PvE i can agree with most of the posts: greatsword aa and gravedigger are rather disappointing.

aa is rather slow and the damage doesn’t make up for it. The chill at the end is also too low to be useful. I some what understand not wanting perma-chill to really be a thing (hence the worthless chill increase trait being only 10%, which only effectively adds any duration to the ult chill and staff 3 chill) but come on. Chill is suppose to be the reaper’s thing but they can’t reach any decent up time with the low durations on most of their chills and the chill stacking cap being reduced to 5.

Gravedigger is rather disappointing… basically ditto to what everyone else has said: too slow/low damage to be worth using and it has terrible flow.

death spiral is nice, some people might not have notice but it is 2% per hit, per target so if you hit 3 targets with it you get 36% RS, which can be rather nice.

nightfall is cool, overall I am fine with its as is.

grasping darkness can be nice when it doesn’t kitten out, which seems to do so on any ground that isn’t perfectly flat =/.

I like reaper shroud but the damage on 1 seems to be slightly low and 2 is slightly annoying to use. the other RS skills seem good to me. I would like to see 3 to be a stun-break but that might be asking for a bit much.

For the shouts I have only used “you are all weaklings”, “suffer”, healing one and the ult, so I can’t say much about the other 2. They are definitely best for groups of targets and not really worth their cast times single target. I found that using blighters boon (oh no, you would lose some dps on RS if reaper’s onslaught actually worked) YaaW can generate 20% RS against a full group of targets. Combining that with chilling force and suffer (suffer cast 1st then YaaW immediately after it) it bumps up to 30% RS. The ult shout takes way to long to cast for its effects. I feel like it could use either a moderately lower cast time (1 second isn’t terrible) or a decent chunk taken off of its cd (90-100 seconds, with trait and max targets that would be 58.5-65 sec cd).

Over all the entire kit seems to be aimed completely at always hitting 5 targets to be truly worth it. On a slightly good note if you are hitting a lot of targets with your stuff you can achieve a rather good up time of RS but with the kind of meh damage on the aa it isn’t as good as it could be. I also love the animations of everything but give the slowness of the greatsword skills the animations make it really easy to tell whats coming and therefore easily dodged/walked out of.