Guild Wars 2

Yogscast. Just Yogscast. Saw the video they did about it in Beta, liked it, decided I wanted to play it.

#1: What is expected of you depends on how elitist your teammates are. The “meta” changes a bit, but generally this is what eles are expected to have:

Full Berserker Gear of at least Exotic tier
Staff
Fire/Air/Third Line of your choice
Use Lava Fonts for damage, blast lava fonts for might and fury.

The fury is the big thing, since other classes can stack might pretty well. The more pro elementalist will carry all weapons, and then swap through them in the midst of might stacking to buff up the whole party.

To might stack, just use a blast finisher in a fire field. Arcane Brilliance, Arcane Wave, “Aftershock!”, etc. You can still stack might with scepter/x and dagger/x. The rules are only as rigid as your teammates want them to be, and the only people who really enforce these rules are the “pro” dungeon runners who specifically demand it. As far as open world is concerned, they’re just glad you are there.

#2: In general, any class is attempting to maximize their damage no matter what their role is. Nobody should be “just might”.

#3: Celestial Gear is good in PVP and WvW. PVE, not as much. The thing is, most damage can be avoided, and as such toughness/vitality/healing power aren’t as important as skilled play is. The ratio of damage to durability in this game is low, and it is designed like that to encourage preference in play. So, there is nothing built specifically to prevent you from just stacking high damage.

Behellagh.1468:

@Wanze

To summarize it’s a take on Confucius philosophy that those that contribute directly to society are more worthy than those that don’t. In the Edo era the order was Samurai, Peasants, Artisans, and lastly Merchants.

• Samurai are willing to die for society.
• Peasants grow the food for society and also fight.
• Artisans create the goods for society but aren’t needed for basic survival.
• And lastly Merchants who make their living on the backs of peasants and artisans and were looked at as parasites, profiting on the work of others.

And while peasants and artisans were relatively poor, some merchants became rich which reinforced the idea that they were merely parasites.

I suppose that’s why I’m not a confuscist… confucist… conflagarama whatever it is called. I’m going to paraphrase firefly here: Half the world are middle men.

The more technical term for it is entrepreneurship. The ideas and management that bring together and move all other resources are as important as any other job. To use feudal Japan as a reference: while farmers grow rice and samurai need the rice to fight wars, the rice has to get from point A to point B. Someone has to gather the rice, gather the means of transporting it, plan the transport, do logistics on how much rice can move how far and support how many soldiers. For that, you need someone who can do the math (and make no mistake, math is not an easy skill), someone who can talk to the farmers, woodsmen, craftsman, guides, governments generals,, whomever tends to the horses, someone who can see the big picture and has the wit to know what to do. Without them, the samurai don’t get their rice, and the whole system falls apart.

Separate section, not in response to Behellagh

Lets take the in-game example. What does the flipper do? Well, it depends on the kind of trade:

A)A straight flip: buy low and sell high. First the flipper has to compete with other flippers and non-merchants when placing a buy order, which establishes the low end value of any good. This places an offer: “Give me this good, and I will give you this much gold for it”. Here, the tradesman is giving money to other people. who are willing to sell. If the flipper has bought the good, then the flipper places the good at a higher price. This is often based on future speculation, since the flipper has to compete with other flippers and the taxes. Unlike buy orders, changing your mind here is punishing. Then, after the flipper has placed their good for sale, if the value of the good rises, then the non-merchants (or in cases of high swings, other merchants) will buy these now appropriately valued goods. Here, all the flipper is doing is providing: he gives gold to people who are willing to part with their item, and then he gives the item to people who are willing to part with their gold. In order for this to work, the price of the item has to rise on its own. So at the start of the flip it is a fair exchange, and at the end of the flip it is a fair exchange for the now more valuable item.

B)A crafting or conversion flip. This is my personal favorite, since it works under current market assumptions and isn’t based on speculation. In this case, the flipper will either buy low or high the base goods needed to craft a product, and then sell the crafted product later. While a straight flip just gambles on future price, a crafting/conversion flip creates an influx of new goods to meet the high demand of players. They create thin leather from rawhide, soft planks from green planks, small scales from tiny scales, and precursors from random exotics. Here, there is nothing taken. The demand of players is already proportional higher for these goods, and the tradesman is just giving players goods at prices they are already willing to pay.

For straight up flipping, several things happen. The flipper provides large influxes of gold into the economy for regular players, making most goods highly liquid. Competition drives the buy prices up, making most goods have at least some value. Competition also keeps sell prices low, so low that the range between highest bidder and lowest seller is often less than 15%, making same-day flipping impossible. The flipper makes a profit only if the market shifts their way. If it doesn’t, then the flipper loses money, and the people they buy from gain. So, take away type “A” flippers, and you are taking away large influx of gold that keeps the market moving, the high liquidity of most goods, the possibility to benefit from a downturn in a good’s value, the competition that both raises the buy price and lowers the sell price, and the game’s largest gold sink.

Getting rid of type “B” flippers is worse. Due to the differing demands in goods, the prices for things will swing wildly out of proportion, ending up with some goods that are so common no one will bother to buy them, and other goods that are so rare that no one will bother to sell them (at least at a reasonable price anyway). This also removes influxes of gold, high liquidity, convenience, competition, the possibility of non-flipper benefit from downturns, and the gold sink.

The gold sink thing can’t be said enough. It grows in proportion and is ever present. It is ironic that, the more flipping is done, the more valuable non-flipping methods of moneymaking become. “Grinding” has a linear growth in wealth, whereas flipping is geometric. The deflation of gold means that grinding becomes proportionally more valuable.

So my question is this: Who is being robbed? Who is being taken advantage of? What is “unfair” about this system? In type “A” things are being bought at a fair price, things are being sold at later fair price. It is a gamble: if the market turns up the flipper makes theoretical money, if the market turns down the non-flipper makes theoretical money. Heck, that technically isn’t even true for all cases, because if the price changes due to inflation/deflation of gold alone, then technically the item has the same value as all other goods. In type “B”, a flipper buys goods at a fair price then converts and sells them at another fair price immediately. Is the player who buys the finished good somehow being robbed, even though it is the player themselves who didn’t take the time to craft the material themselves?

I used to merch triforge pendants for a profit. I would buy 1,500 gold ore to make the pendant, usually at seller’s price due to how cheap it was. Did I rip them off? I would buy 250 of each orb, usually placing my own buy order, and adjusting the buy order higher and higher as other people tried to outbid me. Did I rip off the orb sellers then? Or about the mystic coins and crystaline dust, which I would also enter into bidding wars over. Did I rip those people off? How about the person who eventually bought the pendant after a week+ of waiting. Did I deceive this person in some way? Who, exactly, do I owe money to after doing this whole ordeal? Is the fact that I would earn 90 gold after waiting a week an unfair amount of cash?

Flipping isn’t a “free money” button. It is a gamble, and I’ve lost money on the markets personally. Flipping isn’t a deal with the devil, where money magically coagulates from the tears of naive children. It takes planning and work, and if you don’t work smart enough you don’t get money. Flipping doesn’t “take” money from people, or even take away from gaming experiences. In fact, the opposite is true: it adds to the gaming experience and gives people money. I fail to see any sort of inherent evil to buying low and then selling high.

Skeletor.9360:

The fact is that thieves need stealth to stay alive.

You have flooded the game with all kinds of stealth removal in such a blatant and bad way that you might as well get rid of stealth all together. Stealth needs to be reliable. It simply lasts too long and you have given these classes NO other survival method. So you end up with a bunch of cry babies about stealth which you crumble to and bring out the nerf bat.

The approach to balance stealth is way out of balance. Would you put in a remove all armor for 6 seconds skill that only stealth classes could use? Of course not…but yet you have done exactly that.

When Beta becomes non-beta will probably be the start of the end of the game as it was for Shadowbane. Soon as they introduced vampires….bloop bloop bloop…game over.

Here is a challenge to the game developers…ask people if they could choose a non-expansion server would they play on it. I know I would select that server over the bug fest that is approaching.

Do this poll as a sticky and you will be shocked at how many people dread the expansion.

So… you’re saying that stealth is too powerful, but then babies cry… but it shouldn’t be nerfed because thieves aren’t powerful enough? Who are “these classes” when you’ve only mentioned one?

To anyone else who is confused, I’ll explain what is going on. The thief forum is currently the one of the whiniest forums right now. What is going on is everyone is having a gigantic circle pity, where they each compound and reaffirm how bad each other feels until it goes to “END IS NIGH!” levels. Because of this you get a lot of aimless and nonsensical complaints on other forums, many times being factually incorrect or utterly myopic.

So, what is the real problem with the thief currently? Well, this comes from two sources. June 23rds hit thieves hard, due to Anet’s desire to end the dodge spam meta. Several key things were nerfed regarding thieves as a hope to balance out a class that could out-duel any other given perfect play.

#1: Initiative regen was nerfed slightly in many places. These several “slight nerfs” accumulate and make it so all but very specific specs had their functionality cut.
#2: The Acrobatics line was gutted so badly that it is unquestionably the worst line in the game. Again, fear of the perma-dodge meta.
#3: With the removal of damage stats of traits, the normally high offensive thieves are now more in-line with other classes as far as offensive stats go.

This has left thief without many options, given that thieves now have only a single viable defensive line: Shadow Arts. This has lead to thieves being more stealth dependent than ever before. With elite specializations comes the Sneak Gyro, a rather sub par skill but nonetheless useful in exactly one way: Detection Pulse renders all stealth tactics useless for a time. While this skill is useless against most classes, mesmers and thieves are hit quite hard by it. Mesmers, have alternative forms of defense and are capable of engaging at range.

Thieves don’t and can’t. Well, to a degree, anyway. They’ve still got blinds, immobilize, and weakness. But the important thing is, reveal tactics make shadow arts, our only viable defensive line, largely ineffective. The Daredevil helps to alleviate this, since it gives a bunch of dodge-based utilities that thieves had in the previous acrobatics line. While an overall boon, this has left thieves salty over the fact that our elite specialization traits are mostly just giving us back what was taken from us on June 23rd.

Overall, the best way to fix stealth dependent thieves is to make them less stealth dependent. Acrobatics needs to be twice as good as it is currently, and with global initiative regen removed a lot of skills need their initiative costs tweaked, and/or additional initiative regen given.

Slowmelt.8547:

The point has never been that it’s not effective
It’s that it’s not very interesting.
Elite Specializations were, we were told, grand departures from the norm of a class. A whole new way of approaching things.
The Daredevil is a straight upgrade to the core Thief, and will be required for us to be survivable in the new content… if we’re lucky.
And we’re still going to have a much harder time of it than any other Elite, while gaining little extra for the amount of effort it takes us to survive.

#1: I find it interesting. This sounds like a “you” problem. Besides, the appearance problems are already being polished out, so this issue may be temporary.
#2: Where was it said that these were grand departures? I want a quote. Besides, I find its prolonged stun heavy nature and new aggressive dodging is a departure of the stealth heavy burst-and-run thieves of the current day.
#3: Daredevil being required is a core thief problem. I’m not even sure it is required, given that venomshare support and stealth-heavy specs won’t use it. I’m not even sure daredevil is maximum DPS in PVE. Wait until after the balance notes on tuesday to make this claim.
#4: I’m not sure we’re going to have a harder time than other elites. I don’t know where you get this idea, and I would like to see where it comes from.

Even though he doesn’t do it well, con does bring up a good point.

I personally didn’t like the orb system because it is just more positive feedback. What is positive feedback, you ask? Wait.. you didn’t ask? Then shut up then, because I’m monologue-ing here.

Positive feedback is the tendency for a game to reward players who are winning in a competition with more and more advantages, making it easier for them to continue to win. WvW already has plenty of this stuff, from the placement of sieges, control of the map, and availability of supply. The orb system made this worse: whomever had the orbs had a statistical advantage that opponents couldn’t break through, and these orbs served only to make the winning side win more.

I always have to say this, every time this topic comes around: There ARE roles in this game. However, these roles are more subtle, and are not defined by gear. No, gear is largely meant to be about preference in play.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Thief: Defiance stripper, aggro management, defensive utilities, evasion tank.
Guardian: Offensive buffer, Healer, block tank, projectile management.
Elementalist: Offensive and defensive buffer, healer, combo field user/finisher highest PVE DPS, miscellaneous utility
Engineer: Debuffer, high CC and immobilization, Healer, buffer, combo field user/finisher, extremely versatile miscellaneous utility (capable of fulfilling any role to a satisfactory extent)
Mesmer: Mobility, aggro management, high CC, block and evasion tank, projectile management, high miscellaneous utility, and also sometimes healer.
Warrior: unique buffs, self buffer, high durability for sustained DPS.
Necromancer: Debuffer, high durability, miscellaneous utility
Ranger: Rage magnet (seriously though, I don’t know much about rangers)

Running around in dungeons with pugs a lot, I’ll find that we’ll be lacking in the strangest utilities that other classes have. For example, sometimes we’ll fail due to a lack of projectile blocking/reflecting, or a lack of condi cleanses, or a lack of defensive utilities via protection/blinds/heals, or the strangest one which was a lack of range. Different classes have different combo fields, which and different finishers to use in those fields.

At no point in fulfilling any of these roles should a class have to sacrifice independence. This is what the trinity does, though. To have the trinity, you need DPS that is too weak to take hits, heals that are ineffective except with durable targets, and an aggro manager who lacks the durability and DPS to fully survive an encounter.

Ethics.4519:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is some of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. If you are honestly think that the only reason why leashing exists is to encourage people to skip mobs, then you need to think a whole lot harder about what would happen if all the mobs chased you everywhere no matter what. If you don’t honestly think that, then spare us your nonsense and quit trolling.

Then please enlighten us what the reason is.

Don’t say server lag or resources because a dungeon is a very small instanced map. It would be easy to have open world leash and dungeons not leash.

There’s multiple reasons, actually. I’ll list some:

*To limit the potential of exploits. You’ve already seen enemies that can’t attack past a certain rock or a certain wall, and just stand around being melee cleaved to death. Imagine if you could pull the whole map into that spot.

*To facilitate retreating. The leash lets you run away when things go south, instead of forcing party wipes every time a player has a lag spike or something like that.

*To limit the potential of bugs. We’ve all seen strange aggro bugs that prevent rezzing. With no leash, enemies can easily mess up and do something like chase you to a waypoint, then unintentionally camp the thing and ambush you each time one person tries to rez. Let alone having mobs get caught on scenery due to pathing errors.

*To make an “arena” where you have to fight something. Imagine old TA F/U path if all you needed to do was pull all the spiders outside while the rest of the group facerolled the boss, or if they did this with the veteran oakhearts in TA F path. Or imagine the ooze challenge from the Aetherblade path if you could literally just aggro all of the fire elementals out of the room, completely ruining the challenge.

*To limit trolling. You know how much you hate it when some narb gets aggro and you have to chase around the boss? Imagine if they got aggro on something like the Ghost Eater, and just pulled them out of the room and through the whole map, ruining everything.

EDIT: Can’t believe I forgot this one

*Leashes can actually make skipping harder. Without leashes, mobs could just follow one player around mindlessly, so all that skipping would require is one player to run up, get stuff’s attention, and then get the mobs stuck on a rock while everyone else has a clean run. Or, that guy will die in a spot where no mobs stand, so when they all rest the players can just rez him and move on. Though to be fair, this is more complicated than the “just dodge as you go past stuff” method.

Warriors could use torment, too.

So essentially, the problem you have is a set of personal failings that get in the way of normal function. A short temper and poor self motivation is something you should work on, not something everyone else should work around. Likewise, I don’t care what your personal health is. As I write this, I have a fire in my belly and full body nerve pain, spurred from a vicious food intolerance and restaurant servers who lie about the ingredients in their meal. Everybody’s got problems, everyone is miserable for some reason, and the world works because we don’t let our ailments bind us and our shortcomings define us.

Learning to play shouldn’t be frustrating or a grind. Part of the fun of playing a game is learning to play the game. You should like getting better, getting smarter, and out-witting the puzzles set before you. If you absolutely dread having to figure out the extremely basic tactics needed to fight an enemy, then this is a mental barrier imposed by you alone. It is utterly baffling how you can purposefully choose one of the hardest classes to play in the game, but can’t choose to use one of the dozen tactics the class provides that would allow you to get through HoT.

And like I said, a glass cannon build is what everyone should go for when they start the game. The glass cannon is not the deep end. The pool is almost completely uniform in depth.

I see these kind of threads a lot, but no one ever says what clothes they are wearing or what dyes they use.

Anyway, after the new makeover kit, I’ve manged to make my thief look rather dashing in the moonlight. Clothes: anonymity hood (not shown), duelist paldrons, gloves, and chest, whispers legs and boots. Dyes: Abyss, Grapefruit.

Bombsaway.7198:

Engineers have huge build diversity. One of the things that makes them annoying is there are few tells on what build the engineer is carrying until you engage. You would have little clue as to whether I am a tanky/healing/power bomb build or a grenade spamming condi build.

This. It is surprising how infrequently it is brought up, but the scariest thing about the Engi is the unknown. Engineers are the boogeyman of PVP in the sense that, until you see what they can do, it is possible for them to do anything.

I wouldn’t call engineers OP, though. Engineers, for their wide toolbox of utilities, have some pretty glaring weaknesses. Our strongest trait is automated response, and since that is being nerfed into the ground, expect to see engis being thwarted by condi all the time. Engis also have had most of their effective stun breakers removed, meaning that heavy CC counters them.

Outside of sPVP, engineers are just mediocre. They can be used alright in WvW, but without area restraints it is much harder to land bombs or nades. Zergs are dangerous due to Engi’s weakness to retaliation, and without good condi cleanse and stun breakers, engineers frequently get caught and trained over.

In PVE, Engis are good at debuffing and heals, and they are great at immobilizing, but nonetheless suffer from a lack of potency. They have fire fields and can blast in them quite well, but Eles do that better. They have smoke fields for stealth, but thieves do that better. They have projectile reflection and blocking, but mesmers and guards do it better. They have good controls, but thieves strip defiant better. They have some rez skills, but other classes are faster on the draw.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Why is this a problem?

A single zerker GS warrior can do 10k+ DPS under perfect conditions, on a heavy target. That’s 600k+ over a minute, putting your necro in the dust, and warriors aren’t even the top power DPS class.

Until whatever is being fought drops you to the dirt because you’re in melee range bringing your damage down to “nonexistent”. Even if a condi necro gets downed, they’re still dealing damage.

Now then, take your zerker garbage back to the class forums so we can bring the thread back to the discussion of how the game is crippling a perfectly viable playstyle because of arbitrary limits based on “processing” limits.

You do know that people solo Lupi in melee range in full zerker gear, right? Once you get good enough, enemies don’t drop you in melee range anymore.

Anyway, as I understand the OP’s suggestion, it would just make condi damage scale much higher per each individual stack once the cap is reached. This… might have issues of exponential growth in damage. Personally, I’d prefer the simpler approach.

The biggest problem with conditions in the game is computation. That is the only reason Anet has offered for the condition cap. With strict computational limits, you would think that Anet would design their conditions around this, but that is not what happened. Currently, for every tick of a condition, the game needs to do the following:

-identify the stack order of the condition
-identify the duration of that condition
-acquire the identity of the user of that condition
-acquire the stats of the user of that condition
-preform a calculation to get the damage of that condition
-subtract the damage of that condition from an enemy
-subtract from the duration of that condition
-calculate if the stack order of that condition has changed, and subtract from that order

And it has to perform these calculations anywhere from every quarter second for duration and intensity, to every second for each tick of the attack. Combine this with every condition a player can possibly be applying, and you get a monstrous amount of growth. A single necro can maintain 25 bleeds, 1 stack of burning, 3 to 4 stacks of poison, 5 stacks of torment, and combining this all means that there has to be 32 damage calculations every second, and 140 duration calculations every second.

Whereas whacking something in zerker gear does one to two damage calculations per second.

Now, there is a very large amount of this processing that seems just arbitrarily large. In particular, the part where the condition damage has to be recalculated for each tick. My idea is to change how the conditions are handled, so that instead of constantly re-acquiring player data to calculate damage, the damage of a condition is set once it is applied. This will change the new calculation to:

-Identify stack order
-Identify duration
-Subtract preset damage from enemy HP
-Subtract duration from that condition
-Calculate stack order

This takes out the largest processes of condi damage, which were acquiring player information and recalculating damage dynamically. If this change cuts the server load of conditions by half, then you could easily double the stack limit for these conditions. If it is cut by a third, then triple the stack limit. Then, the only real limit on conditions in regular play would be something like world bosses, where you get 30 players all attacking at once. But for the majority of dungeons and smaller scale content, the condition problem goes away.

Just gotta figure out something for the world bosses then.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

This is an ultra casual game focused on looks and armor skins, so of course the PvE is going to be shallow and unrewarding. Some people like the game just the way it is, OP. No need to make the game “harder” because it’s not the right environment for it.

When I want my PvE fix, I go to games which do it better.

Hence, why I try to avoid draconian changes. I… think I’m using that word right. With the debate on the casual-ity level of the game aside, the issue with stacking is both in aesthetics and entertainment, and these aren’t without consequence.

Entertainment: A lot of people find the whole stacking thing boring and repetitive. Now, while I find many people who like stacking, this is usually because of reasons tangentially related: they like high DPS, they like the feeling of power, they like the ease at which it is done, and they like the insurance of being less likely to be sabotaged by n00bs. While this can all be accomplished without everyone standing on one spot, gathering together is just so much easier mentally.

The complaints with stacking are also a different issue. Boring and repetition comes from a lack of intricacy in enemy design, which encourages all encounters to be handled the exact same way. This simplicity betrays the game, since repetition is boring, and bored people go somewhere else to be entertained.

Aesthetics: Without the identity and visible agency, players find themselves awash in a sea of unrecognizeable polygons and flashy effects. They don’t look like a hero, they don’t feel like a hero, and they don’t feel engaged. This also makes a large portion of the game ugly and unappealing to look at. From an outside perspective, watching the game looks like this

a)Players stand in a spot
b)Enemies come around a corner
c)Big splash of blinding particle effects and damage splats
d)Everything is dead, and I have learned nothing about the game

This discourages future purchases from prospective buyers. It is a double whammy on the wallet: players get bored and leave, and new players don’t want to join up. So, while stacking isn’t an issue of functionality, it is an issue that Anet should be concerned about nonetheless.

CETheLucid.3964:

Hm. I was expecting some manner of BS or doublespeak. Maybe I’ll pry it out of you yet!

You sure do post a lot about a game you find stale and boring. I find that’s a trend with folks who think as you do.

There’s something you like about this game, something that brings you back here, or else you wouldn’t bother.

Friends? Or do you really just enjoy the forums that much?

Little secret: I’m not actually playing the game right now either. Do not think too negatively of this: talking about the game and playing the game are two different things. Sometimes, people want to do only one or the other. For many reasons, really.

If anything, they should’ve made it so it requires 10 of each material for refinement, and you just get 1/10th what you normally get now.

The radius is unknown, but it is pretty small. I would put the radius at a little larger than old mark size, so maybe 140 around while using the heal or so.

I’ve found the runes to be worth the investment myself. Probably the biggest advantage that tormenting has over perplexity is that the torment heal is an AoE, and can hit up to 5 enemies with 2 stacks of torment. When piling or in a swarm, this can accumulate into a lot of damage.

In PVP it doesn’t hit nearly as many people, but the equivalent 3 long duration bleeds does at up over time.

Another advantage to a conditionmancer is that torment is a fairly unique condition. Whereas bleeding, poison, and burn are quickly overwritten in a zerg, the torment you inflict stands alone, giving conditionmancers a unique offense and thus better way to contribute in a zerg. No class really has access to “good” torment, but necromancers are the best at it, due to the very large AoE attack they get that is independent of builds, as well as Epidemic, which they can use to multiply and spread around even more torment.

The duration increase is nice, making it so both the torment on heal and tainted shackles lasts for 20 seconds quite easily. It doesn’t seem like much against a single target, but in an AoE the contribution can be quite large. The runes themselves give about 5 ticks of torment to Tainted Shackles, which inflicts 3 stacks on 5 different targets, so overall that becomes 75 additional ticks. The heal will give about 15 ticks of torment, which does 2 stacks on 5 targets, so that becomes up to 150 additional tick from the heal as well. This gives probably the biggest bonus, so you will end up using your heal as an offense.

When building, you’ll still want to get as much bleed duration as possible, though, and this is where those runes can be a bit of a sacrifice. I’ve managed to get 100% torment + 100% bleed myself, although it does restrict my builds by quite a bit. All in all, the majority of necromancer damage still comes from bleeding, so unless you are running at least a 30/10/x/x/x build with hemophilia, I’d suggest using something else other than tormenting runes.

Yeah, no. Personally I find it hard to accept the quality of character of someone who’s been specifically tasked with placating and handling me on an emotional level. What Gaile does isn’t necessarily because she’s a good person. She does what she does because it is her job to manipulate the community into trusting and liking her. There’s a difference between being warmly welcomed, and dealing with someone who’s job is to make it feel like you’re warmly welcomed.

It’s like when you start to think of your psychiatrist as a friend. They’re not your friend, its their job.

I’m pretty sure necro traits being bad and ranger traits being bad are really independent of each other. Both can have bad traits.

Though someone else will have to make the “I hate ranger traits” thread. I have very little experience playing rangers, and thus don’t know the practical applications of the traits.

First, my knight distribution is correct. It is a little known fact that emerald orbs have a 20 precision, 15 power, 15 toughness stat distribution while the rest of the gear is tough/power/precision. Because of this, a true set of full knight gear has the non-standard distribution I listed above.

There really isn’t other sources for stats other than trait lines. You can get maybe a further 120 points from orbs and up to a maximum of 300 in two stats, but the majority of statistical bulk lies in the equipment used. You are also arguing from ignorance here: You say that you have to factor in trait lines because they will improve things, but then don’t actually show this improvement. I’ll argue that the differences only get worse if you factor in traits, largely because power still scales better than precision in the vast majority of circumstances.

And to provide those circumstances, I’ll link to a few other threads where some of us explored this issue:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Finding-the-Diminishing-Returns-in-Stats/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Damage-Power-Precision-and-Golden-Ratios/

Using the formula of

Power > 2100 / (0.5 + Critdmg) + Precision – 832

for when precision becomes more valuable then power, investing in precision only increases damage higher than power when power is at 4284. Remember: Knight gear gives no critical damage, so you are stuck at 1.5 crit damage. Even assuming you have 30% critical damage from traits, you’ll end up needing 2709 power beforehand before precision becomes more valuable than power. Likewise, for standard knight gear to gain more from precision than power (assuming you have 1614 power), you would need 221% additional crit damage. This is largely because precision suffers from a diminishing return, much like power.

So looking at traits and what is provided by the equipment, the best thing you could do in either situation is invest in more power, and pretty much everything else is worthless. A single point of precision isn’t warranted until, assuming 30% crit damage increase, you have 2709 power.

I’ll cut it down in simpler terms, since you don’t understand the math: in damage, power is a basic multiple. Twice the power does twice the damage, half the power does half the damage, and so on. Since base power is 916 at level 80, you’ll have to add 916 more points of power to do twice damage. So, when I wrote down

(916 + 1003) / 916

This is basically finding out how much bigger the new number is to the old once. Since it came up 2.09, this means that with soldier’s gear you are doing 2.09 times the damage than if you had nothing at all. Now, precision mulitplies power by the total critical damage. Because if this, you need power first, then precision second.

But by how much? Well, the critical hit rate is Precision – 832, then all of that divided by 21. It takes 21 points of precision to increase critical hit rate by 1%. This calculation is a little complicated, since you have to take how much it increases by, and multiply this by how often it occurs. So if I had a 25% crit chance with 0% additional crit damage, we would get

Power x (1 × 75% + 1.5 × 25%)

Where I’ll do normal damage (1) 75% of the time, and I’ll do one and a half times damage 25% of the time.. You can take how much power increases your damage, and multiply that by how much precision increases your damage to get a total damage increase ratio, which is what i used to compare damage.

The problem with precision and why it is so worthless is encountered here: at 100% crit chance ( 2932 precision), you’ll only increase your damage by 50%. Or if you have crit damage, 50% + whatever that crit damage is. For comparison, a 50% increase in damage only needs 458 points in power.

So, now that I have explained what those numbers mean, you can run the numbers yourself. But no matter how you look at it, Soldier’s ends up being better than Knights because the raw power it provides is ultimately more useful than the precision Knights gives, and it does this while still giving plenty of toughness + vitality.

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.

Personally the one I dislike the most is the underwater fractal. I hate the dolphin maze and the dark maze. Each time it pops up I have to sigh and be glad I keep repair canisters on my fractal runner.

There is… one issue I have with condi superiority.

Power Advantages:
Instantaneous

Power Disadvantages:
Affected by Toughness
Affected by Protection
Affected by Weakness

Condi Advantages:
Ignores Armor

Condi Disadvantages:
Can be cleansed
Affected by Resistance
Ramp Up Time

The bold parts are what concerns me. In PVE, there are very few enemies that cleanse their conditions or have the resistance boon. However, there are a lot of enemies that have protection, use weakness, or have increased armor. This means that there are a lot of circumstances where power damage receives significant debuffs. Dots occupy the special damage niche by bypassing many of those mechanics altogether.

One would expect that, to balance things out in PVE, we would have power damage hold the throne. There is a myriad of ways to topple that throne and give condition damage situational benefits. But as it stands now, the only advantage power damage has is its ability to quickly kill veteran mobs or lower. When fighting champs or legendary enemies, condition damage is best by default and protection + weakness + armor only reinforce this dominance.

The hardest part about reading this whole discussion is that it is premised on some very incorrect definitions and assertions.

#1: There is a “sink” in the real world. In fact, there are a lot of sinks. Everything you buy will wear and tear and break down, to the point where it doesn’t provide its original function, and thus the item effectively disappears. For example: food. When I buy a meal, I eat the meal, and it will give me pleasure in taste and the pleasure of being full, but that will fade, and I will need to buy a different meal. Thus, my stomach is a food “sink”.

#2: Not all of the game can be considered leisure. Grind, particularly grinding in MMOs, encourages players to play when the game is no longer fun. This is done in part via psychological trickery, which puts some kind of accolade or promise of fun behind a wall to climb. Thus, for many players (most, arguably), most activity in the MMO becomes “work”, where you work toward the part where you can have “fun”.

#3: “Infinite” is very poorly defined here, and also it is not true. The word you guys are probably looking for is “fluctuating”, because while in theory there can be limitless resources in a game, in reality there isn’t. In any game’s lifespan, there will be a finite amount of any resource produced, due to the finite number of hours that every person will play the game for. At any moment in time, there is a fluctuating but finite limit on any resource, and this limit cannot be surpassed by the will of the players. For something to be infinite, it would have to be available instantaneously at any desired quantity. So in any practical sense, as well as in any real sense, the resources in the game are finite, unless the resource is programmed specifically to be available instantaneously at any desired quantity.

#4: Something can be of “no value” if and only if it is not desired. Thus, a virtual currency can have value. And since players do, indeed, desire in-game gold, then in-game gold is valuable.

That all said, personally I am for the soulbound/account bound system. Mostly because I have played games where there was unrestricted trade with no termination points and no hard restrictions on supply, and the end result was predictable: massive deflation over time. Though it is possible for this game to function without binding, several things in the game (I.E. Wardrobe system) would have to be changed to avoid economic problems.

Dresden.1736:

gaspara.4079:

As I am also a software engineer hear out this possibility. To prevent user lag, all conditions are managed on the server but reporting continuously to the client every detail regarding the conditions of the object the user has targeted. Therefore for each condition stack on the targeted mob you are sending back to the client a full detailed object for every single server tick.

While this seems like a wonderfully accurate system it requires sending multiple extra objects of data to to the user every millisecond which if left uncapped could add up to ridiculous amounts.

Imagine if you got to 500 bleed stacks on a boss, depending on the size of the condition objects they use and how they are serialized we could be talking a ton of bandwidth use purely for those conditions.

Now if this is expanded to sending complete details for every entity in the viewable area that could get astronomical.

As I said, they packets are already being sent and received, even if most of them aren’t doing anything. There would be nothing changing in terms of bandwidth if we just raised the effective cap on CD, save some relatively small amounts of extra metadata. The only change is on how many calculations the server has to perform, and that shouldn’t be the user’s burden.

I don’t think the issue is data being sent to players. Mobs in the game already have to update their HP continuously to all players around them due to direct damage changing their HP a theoretically limitless number of times a second.

Though no one commented on it, I think the issue might be that the calculations for conditions on the server is needlessly complicated. The server refers back to internal databases in order to continuously acquire the identity of the condition user, as well as their level, their malice, and then use this preform the condition damage calculation for every stack every second. It is because of this that condition damage updates the moment a player changes weapons, gains might, or gains a level.

If they just made condition damage so that it is calculated ONLY when the condition is first applied, then that damage data is stored in the condition itself, this could easily cut down the processing needed with conditions by a substantial amount. If the servers only needed to preform half of the operations they do now, then the stack limit can be doubled and maintain the same load.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

Finisher Total
Blast One triggers only if an enemy wanders into the mark
Whirl None
Leap None
Projectile One *20% chance to proc

The reaper gets few more finishers

Soul Spiral: Whirl Finisher
Death’s Charge: Leap Finisher
GraveDigger: Whirl Finisher

The big one is Gravedigger. As you know, it recharges instantly when striking an enemy at or below 50% health. This means that Reapers get a highly spammable whirl finisher.

For the necro inclusively, this means quite a bit. By just having reaper, necros get access to dark fields and ice fields. If you have the trait Bitter Chill, each of those ice bolts will inflict vulnerability. Combine this with nearly every other trait we’ll get, and necromancer vulnerability stacking is going to be quite good. Dare I say, worth it to bring a Reaper just for that.

Darkness Fields are another useful one. The leeching bolts do a special kind of damage that bypasses protection effects, and also heals. So, while under a darkness field, Gravedigger will spam damaging + healing bolts in addition to its own damage.l

If running well of blood, reaper’s also get to use cleansing bolts in a light field. This isn’t too useful, but it does mean that well of blood gets an additional cleanse mechanic that it lacked before. The poison fields aren’t that useful, and the ethereal field is too hard to use. But this is still group synergy: Any fire fields that get laid down will result in endless stacks of burns being applied by the necro.

Personally I don’t get a lot of the QQ from the PVE side. Yes, shouts are sub-par, but that is the only bad thing about the Reaper, period. The Greatsword is awesome, Reaper’s Shroud is awesome, the traitline is scary good, and the chill gimmick is fun to play with. We get plenty more finishers, better fields, insane vulnerability stacking, the unique ability to get 100% crit chance without a single point invested in precision, an AoE pull that was previously reserved for guardians, and a pulsing stability skill.

My biggest fear now is that regular Necro will be completely obsolete once the reaper hits.

Guess we’ll start this again.

Necromancer
1)You stated necromancers can inflict every condition at 1200 range. You just proved they can’t. Epidemic also has a much longer cast time and aftercast than staff skills
2)I use stun break, then move out of position for spectral wall. Now the necro can’t chain fear anymore, and since every necro trying to chain fear is going to go for broke, you dodge and then their reaper’s mark or doom misses. This is both the defense I use against fear chains, as well as the tactic I see used against my own fear chains.

1)Unless they’re in your face, Enfeebling blood has an extremely delayed cast time, making it hard to hit without great prediction skills.
2)DS doesn’t counter burst, it absorbs burst. DS has a finite HP pool, which is quite easy to burst past. Hence, the reason why it is necromancers are focused down first in group combat.
3)Assuming some player doesn’t just neutralize the point, or disengage and go somewhere else while you are helpless to stop him, or just DPS right through plague form because even with that gigantic bag of HP a necro can sill be killed.

Engineer
1)A whole lot more than class cannon can hit for 6K. An extremely common practice in the game is to use Valkyrie Equipment, which gives enough power and crit damage to hit as hard as a GC. Then, players just use traits to build up precision and fury, so then they do a lot of damage while not being a glass cannon. True glass cannons, however, can hit for a whole lot more than 6K.
2)Burning being OP was never a fact in the first place. What is a fact is that it only stacks in duration, and the class who uses burning has the worst access to bleeds out of the popular condition classes. Every class in the game except necromancer and thief can have permanent burning on a target. Therefore, it isn’t OP.
3)Half of poison dart volley misses.
4)Again: engineers don’t get good access to confusion. The only reliable confusion is from static shot, since concussion bomb and pry bar miss too easily.
5)Yes, the bomb kit is hard to use. The reason being that opponents don’t have Parkinsons Disease, and they just get out of the way of bombs in the long delay before they fire off. To use the bomb kit well, you have to predict your opponents movements and force them into colliding with bombs, all the while not being trained down due to being in the fray. Ergo, bombs are a lot harder to use than, say, something like shatters or marks.

1)You don’t get protection if you don’t get stunned.
2)Considering that every other revive is instantaneous, yeah 20% is slow. It can be out DPSed, and knocked out of.
3)Guardian: Vigorous protection gives permanent Vigor by itself.
Mesmer: Critical Infusion gives permanent Vigor by itself.
Elementalist: Renewing Stamina gives permanent Vigor by itself.
Ranger: Primal Reflexes gives permanent Vigor by itself.
Warrior: gets 50% vigor from warhorn. Vigorous focus gets 8 seconds per every stance used.
Thief: Vigorous Recovery gives up to 50% vigor uptime by itself, and gives vigor right when you need it. Bountiful Theft does similar.

Like I said: nearly every class has permanent vigor. The thief and the warrior require more than just a single skill or trait, and the only class with no reliable access to vigor at all is the Necromancer.

Ranger
1) No, I just don’t sit still.
2)SB only inflicts bleeding while flanking. Otherwise, to get 10 stacks of bleeding, they have to use their weapon skills and utilities and pet skill all at once.
2)Please write more coherently. I don’t understand what you are trying to say here.
3)The HP update changes nothing. The ironic thing here is that everyone complains about AoEs and passive damage, then complains about a class with a bunch of summons that are weak to AoEs and passive damage.

1)The HP change means nothing, again. Dodge protection isn’t reliable protection, since they get only 1.25 seconds of protection after the end of the roll. That is not permanent protection, either.
2)Other players having the ability to rez other players changes nothing in class balance and is not overpowered.
3)You can weapon dodge in root, however the dodge itself is rooting. Because of this, rangers are one of the few classes I can reliably hit with the bomb kit easily.
4)Again, I have no idea what you are saying here.

The big problem is, these condition builds you are complaining about aren’t bunkers. They’re offensive condition builds. You can’t bunker with a terrormancer, or an HGH grenadier.

Chilling Nova’s original incarnation was quite strong when combined with Bitter Chill. It was going to get a nerf eventually, but I do think it was drastically overnerfed.

I spent most of the weekend with the reaper, so I only have a few ideas:

#1: Merge Lucid Singularity and Speedy Conduit as the adept master trait. This leaves an open spot in the master tier.
#2: Add a 20% cooldown trait to Tempestuous Aria.
#3: Increase the protection duration of Hardy Conduit by 2 seconds to 5 seconds base.
#4: Unstable Conduit needs to use 2 auras. First when the channel is started. Second when the channel ends. That way, the ele has 10 seconds of continuous Aura.
#5: Double the base healing and scaling healing of Elemental Bastion.

That’s all for now. Still not sure what to do with Earthen Proxy or Latent Stamina.

I want the evade on Death Blossom to be longer. Though the skill isn’t ideal for a pure power build, on my hybrid and condi builds it is awesome. 3 × 10 bleeds in an AoE is great, and the whirl finisher is decent, too.

No, they are not.

I believe it is Tarnished Coast that is the RP server.

That’s odd. I’ve been playing since beta, and I haven’t been ripped off. Maybe you guys just aren’t doing it right.

sephiroth.4217:

Having played the game for 6-7 thousand hours and investing over $1000 into gems, it’s hard to walk away from that.

It is things like this that infuriate me. You have no idea what kind of luxury you are in to afford such a disposable income and also afford the ignorance on the nature of investments as a whole. Sit down, grab a pen, and take notes, because I’m about to dump a whole bunch of real world advice on you.

#1: Any transaction places no further requirements on the traders beyond the immediate exchange. What this means is that, should you buy something, unless the product has been explicitly misrepresented or the terms of the trade were not fulfilled, the seller doesn’t owe you anything. For example, if you paid for 800 gems, but only got 600 in the mail, you’d have a case. But, because you bought 800 gems and received 800 gems, you have no legitimate reason to complain. You were not ripped off, you just have buyers remorse from your own bad investments.

#2: The reason why it is legally like this all over the world is because the markets are dynamic, chaotic, and unpredictable in the long term. You can’t place a long term guarantee on a product, unless that long-term guarantee is explicitly part of the product (I.E. a warranty or insurance). There is no gem insurance in this game, and if you feel that there should be gem insurance, then you shouldn’t have bought gems without it.

#3: Virtual economies are even more chaotic than real ones. Because of this, nearly every MMO or heck even multiplayer videogame has a lengthy contract that you sign to play. I’ll give you the brief of this contract: you don’t own jack squat. The game is licensed to you for use. The characters are the game maker’s property, and not yours. You have no entitlements to what happens to these bits and bytes. If Anet wanted to, they could replace each of your toons with a .png of a kitten stain, and there isn’t a thing you could do about it. You signed the agreement when you purchased the game.

#4: Virtual economies are a bad investment overall. Nothing you buy in the game is liquid. It is all immediately perishable, with no returns on investment. Everything will capsize; it is a matter of “when” not “if”.

#5: Any compensation that Anet provides to you for their changes is out of courtesy, and not because they are legally indebted to you. If you make a bad gamble, no one owes you anything for it.

This isn’t just a problem with videogames. All the time, people will complain that their investments are “worth less than they owe” because the market downturned. That is the nature of capital investments: while you can make a killing, there’s no promises. Just be happy that there are players out there who have benefit from the way the market has changed.

Game mode? If in PVE, use Viper. Other modes, don’t know.

I encounter this problem sometimes, too.

The biggest issue I’ve always had with running D/D 6/6/2/0/0 builds is that it just doesn’t survive that well. I have to hope that bosses don’t preferentially target me or I can stay behind the mob to avoid cleave. When that happens, sure it does a ridiculous amount of damage. But too often I find myself kissing pavement because I’ve run out of dodges.

S/P and S/D are great for survival. They have longer dodge times, weakness on auto attack, and a built in condi cleanse. S/D can tear boons, and S/P can blind mobs and combo stealth.

It is one of the issues I’ve noticed with meta builds. They operate under the assumption that everyone else on the team is also running a meta build and doing meta strats. If they aren’t, then the weaknesses of meta builds start to shine through.

Broadicea.8294:

well with thief you don’t just spam backstab, it’s based on positioning (be behind them), and work backstab into your rotation. I believe above 50% target HP the proper rotation is C&D, backstab, then a full dagger auto chain, then just the FIRST hit of dagger auto, then C&D, etc. Below 50% I’m pretty sure it’s just heartseeker while above 6 initiative. Correct me if I’m wrong, pro-thieves.

That is the sPVP rotation, where revealed lasts 4 seconds. In PVE, reveal lasts 3 seconds, so you can fire off C&D immediately after one full auto attack chain. Though I haven’t done a full DPS check between HS and BS…

Anyway, I’m surprised the OP dismissed HotW so quickly.

In path 3 of HotW there is a champion so easy that the strategy for him has been “don’t bother” since release: The Champion Icebrood Goliath. His attacks are slow and incredibly low damage for their speed, meaning that nearly anyone in any gear setup can facetank him for incredible lengths of time. Certainly long enough to get an accurate baseline for DPS, even if he does have quite a lot of HP.

Though if the ooze is as good as you say, then there is only one advantage the Goliath provides, and that is being an Icebrood. You can use the Powerful Potion of Icebrood slaying to get a full 10% damage bonus (and 10% off of his attacks). Unfortunately it is still a day dungeon, though.

You know, I actually crafted a sinister set with for my mesmer before June 23rd. I think I put it on maybe 3 times after the update. All the traits and skills I was looking forward to were changed, nerfed, or bugged. I think “maybe its not so bad”, but then I put on the sinister gear again only to be disappointed.

I loved what they did with mantras for awhile, but now I’m just waiting for the chrono.

The Gyro certainly does sound nice. To think, all they have to give up for it is Elixir Gun, with its condis and cleanses and stunbreak and movement and blast finisher and damage patch. Or the bomb kit, with its point control, blind fields, fire fields and blast finishers. Or the flame thrower, with its burning pressure and own combo fields/finishers with its awesome traits.

I’m seeing a lot of QQ on the forums from other classes, and other classes simply do not understand the issue. The competition for engineer utilities is incredibly fierce. Kits are hands down the best utilities in the game, and to switch out a kit is essentially losing an instant weapon swap. That is far more than what any other class has to give up when they change utilities.

To compete with kits, a utility needs to do either one of two things. Be unique, or be extremely powerful. So while everyone is complaining about drones being to strong, engineers are skeptical if they are even worth a slot.

The biggest problem for build diversity is that, currently, everything is being balanced around highly specialized builds. It is at the point now where skills require traits to be useful, and traits require other traits to be useful, and sometimes the necessary trait for a particular skill or other trait is dependent on yet another trait.

Any dependence on another skill or trait is a constraint to using that skill or trait. The more constraints you throw on, the less diversity you have. And no, nerfing popular builds doesn’t lead to diversity. It just leads to frustration and quitting.

Under ideal circumstances, I should be able to randomly pick out any skill from any class, and by itself that skill should be useful with no additional context or required supporting traits. The same should be said about independent traits. Then, when you have countless things that are useful by themselves, you will have build diversity. Likewise, anything that is not built this way is bad design.

It is big, so I’ll have to snip it up. Just remember that I’m responding to trains of thought, and not only the snippit I quote.

Vargamonth.2047:

Lets imagine enemies performing multiple small autoattacks between big spikes which are meant to be fully avoided by active defenses (common to every character).
The viability of zeker wouldn’t be just about a perfect use of active defenses, but absolutely reliant on downing the boss before the constant pressure (unavoidable, just mitigable through protection) kills players.

This, I have to disagree with. Running zerkers in place that has a steady stream of attacks, such as PVP, makes zerkers an extremely high risk set. Replicating the circumstances would lead to the results. Likewise, the solution is multi-faceted in that enemies will do a whole lot more than just attack rapidly.

Combat does have a bit more depth to it. In particular, the steady stream of damage is meant to do two things to squishy builds:

#1: Increase risk to offset the higher kill speed of zerkers
#2: Increase disengage time. Disengage time is when the player backs off to heal and buff, attacks with ranged weapons, and also tries to lose aggro from the enemy they are fighting.

By doing this, bulkier builds can stay engaged longer (thus doing more damage) and draw enemy aggro for longer (thus letting others do more damage). Support builds that use heals will be more valuable since they recover the damage others have suffered, allowing them to stay engaged and do more damage. Protection is more important since the long-term mitigation actually mean something, weakness will be better for the same reason, regen will be better since the heal to damage ratio will be much higher, retaliation will worthwhile since enemies will suffer greater damage, confusion will also do more damage, and to help with disengage against melee enemies the soft CC from cripple/chill/immobilize will also be more useful.

The exact amount of damage is ambiguous, but that is no reason to assume that it will automatically be too low to be meaningful.

Vargamonth.2047:

That’s because vitality is basically an anti-burst stat that just offers:

There is a bit more to that. Vitality has another use, that I call “Healing capacitance”. It is a little abstract, so bear with me. In short, the more damage you can take, the more capacity you have to be healed up.

It isn’t uncommon for a player to take a big hit, then heal themselves up to maximum health, and then sit on their heal skills at max health for awhile. The player is locked into a maximum number of hits they can take before they go down, and despite how infrequently they take those hits, this limit will never change. But, with higher maximum health, when the player takes additional hits, they have that additional spare healing on hand, making them last much longer.

It is kind of hard to explain, but it is the main reason I even bother with valkyrie on my thief. In full zerker gear, my thief will die in 2 to 3 hits. In full valkyrie, I can buy an additional 1 or 2 hits. I use the signet of malice, and I spend the majority of my time either at maximum health with the signet doing nothing, and if I’m not at max health I’m kissing pavement (wherein the signet also does nothing). But, with valkyrie gear, I can survive longer and heal more. I end up surviving an additional 5 or 6 hits instead of 1 or 2, since I can heal up so much more damage without dying off. This also makes team heals more useful for me as well.

Paralux.6714:

Dude, it’s been ONE day. :P

Its called extrapolation. It involves math, but one day you’ll understand. Hopefully.

I love this map. It has officially replaced Temple of the Silent Storm as my favorite map. This map accomplishes something that so many of the other maps failed at: it is fun in a tactical and chaotic way.

So far, I’ve only played on it with a conditionmancer, and I loved it. My fears now have the potential to one-hit kill people, and also the counter-control can easily save me from one of devastating environmental effects. Positioning is more important than just “how far away you are from an enemy zerg”. Swiftness is now meaningful as movement and as a form of escape, and movement skills as a whole can be used tactically now.

For example, I was once one-shot by a thief who shadowstepped onto a glass pane, used scorpion wire to yank me in top of it, then shadow-returned away immediately the second it broke. It was awesome. What was also awesome was that I saw another thief attempt that trick on me again, but I dodged Scorpion wire, and he fell to his death.

I’m seeing people rocket jump all over the place, banish other players into oblivion, lay down traps around gates and glass, accidentally ride the lightning right off the edge, and snipe other players from above. Heck, with all of those launch pads half of the fights feel like they’re aerial.

This map accomplishes a very simple goal. Ultimately, the PVP in this game isn’t about how big your manhood is, how much you can pwn n00bs, who can 1 vs 1 better, who can win harder, or other things like that. It is to have fun. This map accomplishes fun in a big way: by being unpredictable, chaotic, different, and making players aware of their surroundings. IMO a lot of the QQ I hear about the map reminds me of a video I saw once:

And the end of that video sums up how I feel about it.