Showing Highly Rated Posts By Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Is Scarlet a Villain Sue? [Merged ]

in Clockwork Chaos

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I suppose there are two issues that I take with Scarlet:

#1: She’s wholly unbelievable. Preforms at savant levels in everything, evil with no conscious or remorse, and no given character flaws.

#2: No reason why she would be evil. We have no real explanation for why she is the way she is. Just “look, super evil person you gotta fight. Now ZERG!”.

I can understand invoking many villain tropes when making a character. That is all the reasons we love villains. But with Scarlet, we really have nothing to go beyond. Right now, the story is going to diverge into one of two ways, and I hate them both:

#1: She’s amassing a plan so elaborate and convoluted that at best it will look like a bad retcon and at worst just terrible writing overall.

#2: She’s the tenebrouos lord of darky darkness who does darky dark things because the heroes need someone to fight against, and I expect to see her in an 80’s era Saturday morning cartoon.

Unless Anet can pull something from nowhere that makes Scarlet meaningful as a character, then writing her as such has been a bad move.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Constructive necromancer thoughts.

in PvP

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

The defensive problem with Necros in PVE is identical to the one in PVP: We have a finite bag of HP that melts quickly when attacked by multiple sources, or by a champion doing one big hit. Big problem is, nearly every champion has at least one big hit, if not more.

Other classes cope with this in the usual way: they have vigor to dodge more attacks, they use evade skills, they use blocks, and they use invulnerability. Some classes, like the guardian or the engineer, combine the use of protection and massive healing in order to mitigate a lot of damage. Necromancers have none of this, so we end up just taking the hits.

The problem being that you can’t win an attrition war with an NPC just based on HP. Anything above a veteran mob has at least 10 times your HP, and champions frequently have 50 times your HP. Some melee mobs aren’t a problem because you can just kite around them with cripple and chill, but ranged mobs with frequent damaging attacks will blow right through you. The battle ends up being about generating as much Life Force as possible so you can block their next lethal hit, and this doesn’t always work.

Many overworld champions hit for much more than a player’s maximum HP. Every temple boss except Lyssa can easily do this. Originally if you could dodge their other attacks you would generate enough Life Force to absorb a hit. But now that hits overflow from Death Shrouds, this tactic no longer works. This means that necros are now soft-bodied rez bait who’s only defense against ranged damage from champions is to hang back as far as possible and hope they don’t notice the Necromancer.

The “overflow” really wasn’t an issue for PVP, at least as far as I played in it. When not being focused down by 4 players or so, I sustained enough Life Force to absorb a lot of their ambushes from full. The only time overflow might be a problem is if DS is timed perfectly to align with something like Fire Grab or BackStab, which is an occurrence rarely encountered.

I’d just prefer it if they gave PVE necro something to let them fight champions better.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

L2P - I did HOT Why can't you?

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Honestly, I just wonder how people fail.

It is a legitimate question. I see topics/posts with this content all the time:

“This stuff is too hard! I watched a video guide on what to do, but it didn’t work! I watched a build video, but it didn’t work! I got a group together and we still couldn’t do it! Nerf the content!”

And yet, each one of those things is a great asset to me. The biggest disadvantage to these threads is that, I don’t actually get to see the person who makes the claim play. I can’t critique them, and give them specific advice on how to help them deal with problems. I am expected to accept the notion that this player has reached some type of personal skill ceiling of which there will never be any improvement, and thus the game needs to cave to their demands.

And yet here I am, walking through hot in 8 out of 9 different classes, all in full glass cannon gear, and I’m not having a problem on any of them. I’m not exactly a “skilled player” either. In skill I’m rather average. I don’t encounter the problems that other people have. So, to give meaningful advice, I have to actually see the problem that someone is having.

If HoT is too hard, provide some type of evidence. A video of some kind, showing HoT being too hard.. That way, we can actually see the specific problems.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Improving the Game

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

You know, a lot of people like to think that there’s a great plan in the works. But anyone who is in charge knows they are flying by the seat of their pants.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Is Scarlet a Villain Sue? [Merged ]

in Clockwork Chaos

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

So I read the backstory and… I’m not that interested. Most of what she does is about as interesting as a job resume, and probably would’ve been more succinctly written out as one. The whole story with why she went insane seems to be “Yeah, she was hooked up to this device that metaphysicked her brain something fierce, and she emerged from it all ‘you can’t tell me what to do narbs!’ and then started the gnarliest random teenage rebellion tantrum”, and it doesn’t garner sympathy or distaste or even interest. It is like her form of rebellion against the dream state is to out nightmare the nightmare court.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Potential leak of 6/25 changes

in Necromancer

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Just went sPVPing with my necro after not doing so for awhile, and I have to say I’m not sure all of these changes would really save the Necromancer. It seems like it is just bringing us on par with other classes as far as skill use, while not actually letting necromancers exceed.

The biggest problem I’m encountering now is that, with such a high emphasis on evasion, I can never hit anything. This isn’t a problem for my engineer or my thief, however, who seem to be able to control and/or spike down people just fine. But I"m having a ton of problems with my necromancer now.

It took some thinking, and then I’m reminded of something said once by a dev somewhere (could’ve been on the State of the Game) that there are plans to reduce the cast times for necromancer skills. I think that this might be one of our bigger weaknesses at the moment. Even on my MM build, I could rarely ever hit anything, and that build is actually control heavy:

Dagger #3 has a long activation time that is ended when the target goes behind the player.
Warhorn 4 also has a somewhat lengthy activation time: It is a stun that isn’t immediate.
DS #2 is a slow flying projectile with a long activation time that almost always misses.
Focus #5 also has a lengthy activation time.
The activation time for Flesh Golem’s charge seems to be even longer now. Not sure if they changed that or if it was a change in meta that emphasizes this.
Epidemic: also has a really long and obvious cast time.
Dagger #2, Axe #2, DS # 4 are all channel skills that get interrupted easily.
Life Blast has a really long activation time.

While fighting a bunch of rangers and engineers and mesmers, I spent a third of the time stunned, a third of the time missing, and the last third of my time wonder why my skills weren’t working for some reason. I couldn’t accomplish anything because my controls wouldn’t hit, and when they did hit it was like they didn’t do anything at all. The cast times on Necromancer skills are so large that even this list of buffs won’t compensate for them. You can never get a shot off anyway.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

(edited by Blood Red Arachnid.2493)

Thief in PvE compared to other classes.

in Thief

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Thieves are pretty good in PVE.

*Best class for blind spam, giving them high defensive utility for the whole group.
*Access to projectile destruction and reflection.
*Best blast finisher in the game.
*Very high single target damage. Best in the game last I checked.
*A lot of access to disables and defiance stripping/bar breaking skills.
*Group swiftness, fury, and vigor. The group vigor is quite rare.
*Spammable evades. This makes them great at meleeing otherwise difficult bosses.
*High self healing.
*Boon Removal, either a bit or a lot depending on the build.
*Good access to weakness.
*Best access to stealth. This means a lot, regarding skipping to aggro management.
*Though currently not used too much due to how rarely enemies heal themselves, they have good access to poison.
*Their spammable shadowsteps means they can bypass a lot of area effects.
*Spammable condition cleanse.
*On condi specs, decent at might and vulnerability.
*Low cooldowns means power builds can run 3 signets + one utility, and the team doesn’t suffer from it.
*Capable of spamming every combo finisher in the game.

All in all, no one is going to look at you and go “ew, a thief. reroll to a real class plz!”. As for their flaws…

*Weak ranged game. Don’t have far range or that much damage at it.
*Mediocre Combo Fields. Smoke fields are a mixed bag, because while blasting stealth in them is an effective tactic, it can mess things up when one overrides a fire field.
*Melee builds are bad at self-buffing, having little to no access to might or vulnerability.
*Requires being beside or behind enemies to do the best damage. With stealth this isn’t always a problem, but it isn’t uncommon for damage to be kitten by a twisty enemy.

Other than the range game, I wouldn’t call those much of a deficiency.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Constructive necromancer thoughts.

in PvP

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Ok, here’s the deal. I’m hearing different things from everyone I talk to.

1. Necro DS is too much and should be brought down
2. Necro damage is too much and should be brought down
3. Necro survivability is bad

Let me care to explain the differences in opinion: circumstance

Death Shroud can be quite nice in the right circumstances. DS literally doubles the Hit Points of the Necromancer (which is already high to begin with), and with further life force generation it increases their HP more and more. In small engagements, this is ridiculous. I don’t have a video of this, but I have an example:

In WvW I regularly have full Life Force because it is a lot easier to get there. Once while looking at the map and opening TS3, I heard my toon being attacked. It turned out that a mesmer had snuck up behind me and was attacking me. So I quickly changed windows, exited the map, and entered into combat. Sorry to say, this mesmer stood absolutely no chance. Their stealth did nothing against my marks + life transfer + tainted shackles, they couldn’t escape due to dark path, my bone minions and flesh golem bashed on that poor mesmer like they were fodder, and after I began to terror burst it was over.

The fact is that this player didn’t stand a chance: I had so much more HP that in an even fight I would’ve stomped them into the ground with barely a scratch.

But this is the ultimate two flaws of Death Shroud: it is inconvenient, and it is finite. You have to build specifically for Life Force generation, with many builds not capable of doing so. In lacking builds, this results in DS being a non-factor in their defense. I don’t have a lot of Life Force generation on my condition builds because I opt for things like Reaper’s Protection and Spiteful Spirit. The second issue is that the finite nature of DS puts a hard limit toward its damage mitigation.

When compared to blocks, dodges, and invulnerability the finite nature of DS is both good and bad. In 1 vs. 1 scenarios, great life force generation or a full bar gives a ton of survivability, because the scale of damage you are mitigating per second is quite small. One player can only dish out so much damage in that 2 second duration that most blocks take up. However, blocks and dodges don’t have a cap on the amount of damage they can mitigate. If you block at the right time, you can avoid a nuclear holocaust This makes blocks and dodges superior in large engagements, consisting of 3 or more players on any one side. Here, the damage and control quickly escalates, and when focused those block and dodges mitigate more damage than your whole HP bar. Death Shroud… does not do this. It is a limited source of damage absorption that grows slowly, so it is quickly eaten up by enemy DPS while offering no direct immunity from any of their attacks. The conditions they apply are still there, the control that hits you still lingers, the damage is taken away from DS, never to return.

In these multiple engagements is where we get complaints that Necros are too vulnerable. Weakness and protection can reduce some of the damage done, but the damage isn’t truly stopped, and those can be stripped away or cleansed quickly. The necro can’t escape, which is another way to mitigate focus fire, and players know this. I can’t count how many times in sPVP or WvW I’ve rounded a corner only to see 4 guys that proceed to kill me quickly, despite Weakening Shroud + Spectral armor at the same time. The necromancer is completely helpless in these circumstances. It is for this reason that in tPVP they always focus on the Necromancer first. Not because they are the most dangerous class, but because they are the easiest class to kill, instantly balancing the fight in the favor of whomever killed the Necro.

The lack of healing on all builds not completely dedicated to vampirism doesn’t help, either. This adds to the finite nature of Necromancer survivability.

As for a fix for this problem, I’m not sure. By default I would say to just give necromancers the tools they are missing and be done with it, but you guys said you don’t want to do that. Instead, we are left with a class where we have to keep ramping up their damage or their durability so they can survive team engagements, but this makes them ever more overpowered in small engagements.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Whats wrong with Necros?

in Necromancer

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

As for where necros have problems, well that comes in two forms.

First is that necromancers have little to no active defense. Active defense being the ability to block, reflect, dodge, move away from, or otherwise nullify incoming attacks or to disable/interrupt opponents so they can’t attack. Most necromancer controls are scattered about different weapons, and most controls are soft controls like cripple or chill that do not actually stop opposing players. Because of this, the necromancer will find themselves frequently disabled or incapable of avoiding the big and dangerous attacks that other classes can easily deal with. Their answer to this is Death Shroud, but it isn’t nearly as effective as it should be. When used for offense, Death Shroud isn’t around to be used defensively. When on condition builds, Death Shroud is never around to be used at all. Ultimately, Death Shroud doesn’t stop the incoming attacks, but instead puts them onto a temporary HP bar that quickly depletes into the real HP bar. In PVE it isn’t as bad since there are almost always enemies around dying that give life force, but in PVP unless you run a power necro you’ll find yourself constantly wishing you had lifeforce to defend yourself with. A good opponent will know not to waste all their big skills on your Death Shroud, making it nigh useless defensively in competition.

Second is that necromancers don’t have good stun breakers. The Flesh Wurm can be interrupted, Spectral Walk just gives swiftness, Plague Signet is just begging to be used at another point in the fight and not be available, and Spectral Armor is on a long recharge and doesn’t prevent the Necro from just getting stunned again. Ultimately you have to choose between Flesh Wurm and Spectral Wall: Either something that can be interrupted, or something that is rarely around to ever be used.

Third is that necromancers don’t have any bursts, sans Bone Minion. All of their attacks are about doing damage over time, and while necros are good at damage over time (for example, the dagger auto attack is 24% more damaging than the dagger auto attack of the thief), in the end the necromancer lacks the ability to seal the deal against most opponents.

These three flaws compound themselves. The necro’s sustained damage is decreased because they’re constantly being disabled with no good counter to this disability,, and they lack the ability to do anything serious with the few controls that they have available to them. Their conditions can be cleansed away, players cans imply walk right out of their wells, and their best source of augmented damage (minions) is killed off quickly in anything that isn’t a 1 vs. 1 fight. The necromancer is best at doing sustained AoE damage over time, and any situation that doesn’t reward this is where necromancers flounder.

Fourth is that necromancers don’t have versatility in their builds. While elementalists and engineers can readily switch tactics with their trait point investments, Necromancers are stuck with what they went with. They can’t switch to healing or support on the fly, and they can’t suddenly become tanky in an offensive build. If you need to do something else than what you’re currently specced in, then you have visit a trainer and get them flipped. This really limits the versatility of the Necro as a whole.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

"This is a skill-based game"

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

The trolls in this thread are so obvious I’m surprised anyone is bothering to feed them.

From what I have seen of MMOs and online games, guild wars adds more functionality as far as juking, placement, dodging, and targeting goes. Many games, if you are in range of a skill, it will go through a hit check regardless of player orientation or speed, instead using auto target or auto-follow to do things. This leads to the game being about build checks, level comparisons, gear checks, clan size… a series of factors that lead to the battle being fully decided before the fight even begins.

Guild wars 2 has less of this. It is not completely gone, as we’ve seen with things like Diamond Skin. But on average, in any given bout between me and another player who has a build advantage over me, there is a series of smart choices I can make to win, and them a series of bad choices they can make to lose.

One of the best examples I have of this was a 1 on 1 battle between me (engineer) and a thief that we had on the Henge at the Forest of Niflhel. I was running a turret control build, and the thief was running some unknown build. Now, normally when I face a thief (especially in hotjoin), they rush to try and burst me down, get caught in the control network of the turrets, and get killed rather quickly. But this guy… didn’t. Over and over again, he would vanish out, attack me a few times, then vanish, then appear quickly on the opposite side of the pillars to snipe me with the short bow, then vanish again. He disappeared so many times and I had no idea how he was doing it. He wasn’t hitting my turrets, either. The battle was long and hard fought, and eventually he managed to down and stomp me. I was so perplexed with how hard to pin down he was that I actually asked him directly how he did that.

And he told me: He saw that I had placed my turrets mostly within the henge, so he decided to use the pillars around the henge to protect himself. Since I had runes of the ogre, a rock dog was summoned and it would chase him. From behind the pillars he would quickly switch to the dagger and use cloak and dagger on the rock dog, causing him to vanish completely without me knowing how. This left me under constant ambush, with the turrets constantly having to reposition and attack him, making it so the turrets couldn’t lock him down. With continued hit and run tactics, he was able to slowly wear me down while also damaging my turrets (who had much longer cooldowns back then), which then left me open for a more direct confrontation that I would lose.

As far as PVE is considered, it is indeed “skill based”, however it falls into the same trap that most PVE games do: everything is ultimately a puzzle The enemies are hard until you figure out a trick to it, and then they become much easier. The tricks themselves have varying degrees of difficulty, but ultimately all enemies in PVE are about figuring out how to beat them more so then they are actually performing the tactic. I can’t really blame GW2 for this in particular, because nearly every game I’ve played falls into this trap.

GW2 does differentiate itself a bit from other MMOs, since it does factor in positioning, motion, and active defense. There are games out there where everything is literally a series of hit checks, defense checks, and damage checks that involve none of the above. At that point they might as well have been turn based.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

RIP power builds in roaming

in WvW

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Times like this I’m glad I run hybrids…

Anyway, the thing with power builds in WvW is that it depends on both the philosophy and the circumstances. For zergs, many people way to run with PVT gear as to avoid being killed or downed by stray enemy fire. This is a defensive philosophy, and it often overlooks the flaws that come with it: in PVT, your stray fire does less damage and is less likely to down someone. A defeated player works as a rez for your own team, so the quicker you can defeat a player, the more quickly you can rez your own team, and the more overall health that gives the zerg.

I personally follow the offensive philosophy: If you get immobilized and run over by a melee train, or if you get focus fired by a small group, you are going to die really quickly no matter what gear you are wearing. By contrast, by having high damage you have a high deterrence rate for being attacked, and make a larger immediate impact on the field. You become less influenced by retaliation and confusion, since you perform more efficient attacks. Hopefully, you’ll be engaging enemies in a position of power (in the train, on the wall, at superior range, etc), where defense is handled by superior positioning and tactics instead of passives.

The problem being that, since I am much squishier, should I find myself in a compromising position, I’m more likely to go down due to ambient damage. Unfortunately it is a tradeoff that works best when assuming Fabian tactics, and always trying to engage at a point of power.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

WoodenPotatoes latest video!

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I don’t know where you guys get this whole “faithful supporter” thing with WP. I’ve seen him rant about bad things in GW2 countless times. He’s ranted about the story in HoT, he’s ranted about gear prefixes and designs (particularly his inadequacy as a healer with a healer spec), I even saw a compilation video where he complained about all of the small things that were added/done to the game. The reason why I watch WP’s videos is because he’s actually fairly level headed.

Don’t you mean possible LAST video for gw2 .. he is thinking of quiting now

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4c9r5d/wooden_potatoes_no_more_new_legendary_weapons_a/

3rd post or 2ed if you don’t count the topic

Eh, he said:

“I don’t like the sound of their future expansions at all if this is really where they think they should be, size wise. So in a world where that’s all they put out? For sure I’ll be moving on.”

He said something similar in the video, too. So, if Mo (and/or ArenaNet at large) come out and say “Yeah, we really do think HoT was the right size for a good expansion”, WP will be leaving the game. He didn’t say he’s leaving now or that this was his last video (or one of the last videos).

Problem is, Mike already did that.

Arenanet is an ideal driven company. You must not forget that. And as an ideal driven company, they’re all about the good feels and self esteem and non-judgemental attitudes. Dealing with the failings of HoT is hard because it makes you feel bad. So, to feel good about themselves, they’ll constantly reaffirm with each other that HoT was a good expansion, only talking about its good points. Everyone who disagrees is a hater, or a troll, or they’ll get over it. How can they not get over it, when HoT is such a good expansion?

So when Mike says he takes offense to the expansion not being complete, he’s not being disingenuous. He’s being sincere. Since he is sincere, that is the standard we can expect the next expansion to have. And the next one after that.

Though to be fair, I do think HoT catches a lot of flack where it shouldn’t. It isn’t as bad as people say. It has problems, but it isn’t as bad as people say.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

What have you done to TD meta?

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Supposedly, there was a bug that was causing the Gerent and events to scale up too much, making the event twice as hard as it should be. There is evidence for this, as Nuhoch Lane in particular was hit the hardest by having additional players.

After waves and waves of complaints about the event being too hard, the “bug” was fixed. Which is unfortunate, because I went out of my way to write a zany guide on how to do the thing, all for it to become nearly obsolete.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

New player thoughts

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

It is a good thing that HoT maps are harder than core Tyria. Right now, core Tyria is way too easy. There’s a good chance I could beat most enemies using my nose to play the game. Excuse me while I whip out my old fogy and talk about the past.

The game that you know as core Tyria today is not how it has always been. There was a time when it was much harder (at launch) than it is now, and a time where it was harder than that (beta). Old Cursed Shore was nightmare, with Risen Krait chain-ulling you half way down the map, aggroing the zerg rush of enemis that occupied that space. Everything in general was all around tougher.

Now, this is where you’ll learn partly of my treachery, but partly of the dark truth that is user metrics. I suggest a long time ago that the game was too hard in a specific way, in that the absolute lack of tutorials for things meant that most players had to fight with wikis and numbers in order to actually be good. Apparently this reflected… some kind of survey Anet did. Might’ve been focus groups, or user metrics. But regardless, they ascertained that there was, indeed, a pretty big drop off at the beginning of the game, that people couldn’t build themselves properly, and that the opening to the game wasn’t “user friendly”.

Now, while my idea is to have more tutorials in the game to demonstrate things, as to eventually make the game harder, Anet took it a different way. Combining the “we want to find our skills like in GW1” suggestion and the idea to increase player retention, they decided to make it so instead of getting most stuff by level 30, all of your utilities and traits were going to be spread out along a much larger area, and that everything would be given to you painfully slow. The game was simplified greatly, and likewise enemy encounters were designed assuming you had little more than auto attacks and under-level gear.

With repeated changes to the trait system, leveling, and stat distributions, the game kept getting easier and easier. Add in a bit of power creep and theorycrafters “breaking” the system to come up with optimal builds, and suddenly you melt face by just auto attacking. This has left core Tyria in a neutered state, where dungeons barely pose a challenge and the overworld is surmountable by all but the most incompetent of individuals.

The thing with HoT maps is that, they take advantage of much more of the combat system than core Tyria does. I imagine that it must be quite the shock moving from faceroll to facemelting content, but it is better this way. These are enemies you have to actually play against. Enemies you have to chase, to disengage, to disable, enemies who aren’t completely destroyed by a blind field. The dodge key is suddenly important. These enemies actually encourage you to take advantage of the intricacies of the GW2 combat system. Enemies in HoT are how GW2 enemies should’ve been designed, and not the “smoke field to win” enemies we get in the rest of the game.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

[PVE/PVP]I hate necro traits

in Profession Balance

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

still @Bhawb:

Parastic Bond
Ah.. I could’ve sworn when I checked the wiki last night there was no listed cooldown. This will be my bad, here.

Death into life
This is utter nonsense. Necromancer healing lags far behind what elementalists, engineers, guardians, mesmers, and warriors can crunch out, and that little healing power will never amount to anything in any build, ever. Here, let me show you:

Full zerker DPS: will get about 175 healing power, but won’t be traiting for healing utilities, so other than a 3% boost to consume conditions it goes completely to waste.
Full Cleric Support: will probably not bother putting in 15 points into spite just to get 123 healing power. But, on top of the 1300 healing power, 123 additional extra isn’t even a 10% increase. Most healing skills have 0.1 to 0.4 modifiers, so this means that Death into Life will only increase healing by 1% to 4% in a full cleric build. It isn’t worth sacrificing renewing blast (well, maybe because renewing blast is horrible to use), transfusion, ritual of life, or deathly invigoration for.

This trait is the definition of useless. It can’t be useful. Period.

Chilling Darkness
I guess you can define “niche” as “runs well of darkness”. But regardless, it is actually pretty bad for a chill stacking mechanic: 1 second worth per blind. Well of darkness and plague form have an attack rate of once per second, meaning that without additional chill duration, the effect leaves as soon as the enemy leaves the blind field. Plague form essentially disables the necro for the duration, letting you do little more than tank and decap a point. It is important to note that you can accomplish this without chilling darkness, since spamming blinds is enough of a defense. I’ve run a chill necro before. Chilling darkness is the worst way to go about it.

Full of Life
Soothing mist also has the additional effect of being a large AoE effect. It also isn’t neutralized by the ele class mechanic (much like how Deathshroud is). As I said before, the biggest problem is that it completely lacks potency.

Vampiric Mastery
Agreed. It is a little known fact, but I categorize mastery as a lukewarm trait. I just lumped together the entire vampiric line in one big thing, because the flaws with the system are fairly pervasive. Mastery is the exception to this rule, however.

Gluttony
The big problem is that a lot of lifeforce isn’t gained through skills. It is gained through deaths. Likewise, life force is different from health in that it degens naturally while in use, so the total sum of contribution that gluttony provides is an additional second or two in Death Shroud. In a fight when a player is lacking DS it doesn’t provide enough for a clinch movement (since you’d have to regen up half the bar to buy a single second of time), and unless you have a build that specifically generates a lot of life force through skills the trait contributes little to nothing at all. The total impact of gluttony, can be summarized as “it only provides enough lifeforce when you don’t need it”.

Path of Corruption
I categorize this as a lukewarm trait, because it lies in the shadow of what is IMO a far superior trait: chill of death. Chill of death triggers automatically at 50% health with no need to activate DS, no additional animation or projectile to stop, and also removes up to 3 boons. Now, you can make a case for Path of Corruption, but as an avid necro player I have had a horrible history with Dark Path being dodged, being blocked by terrain, being interrupted, or otherwise failing to work at all. The second issue, other than the infrequency of Dark Path, is that the skill forces players to “belly up”. A large portion of my necromancer play has been about safety in positioning and maintaining distance, since no active defenses results in necros getting thrown around like ping pong balls while in the fray. While spectral grasp can remove someone from the safety of their teammates, Dark Path puts me right into the line of fire, where I am helpless, and will get piled and burst down very quickly.

Because of this, Path of Corruption is a mixed bag. It adds universal frequent boon corruption regardless of any build, but it does so by forcing me to use a skill that I’d rather avoid the vast majority of the time. If this corruption were on something like spectral grasp, or if Dark Path pulled enemies instead of pulling me, then Path of Corruption would get 9/10 easily. The fact that path of corruption is one of the better grandmasters necros have is more of a statement on how bad necro traits are, rather than how good Path of Corruption is.

Dhuumfire
I keep forgetting that tainted shackles exists… darn my head.

EDIT: Fixed a poorly written section.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

(edited by Blood Red Arachnid.2493)

Fixes for damaging conditions (PVE)

in Suggestions

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I posted some of this in another thread, but I figure this is a good enough idea that I can reprint it elsewhere. Though these solutions are simple in concept, they are not necessarily simple to execute.

#1: Bleeding.

Problem: every class and their grandmother inflicts bleeding. It makes any two condition builds in the same location redundant, because of how heavily every class depends on bleeds to do damage.

Solution: spread out the primary condition for damage out more. This will probably require inventing a new condition along the way, but for now I’ll provide a simple example: It has never made much sense to me that mesmer illusions and necromancers inflicted bleeding with their magic at a distance. It seems like this was done not as any sort of theme, but because bleeding is the default method for condition damage. What would make much more sense is if Mesmers and Necromancers, instead of doing bleeding as a default form of damage, used Torment as their default form of damage.

By relegating a class or two to dealing primarily with torment instead of bleeding, this allows other classes who inflict bleeding to work side-by-side with Condi Necros and Condi Mesmers without becoming redundant and useless.

#2: Poison.

Problem: Useless in PVE because it does low damage, stacks in duration, and enemies don’t heal.

Solution: Make it so enemies in PVE heal. We already see this done with WvW enemies. It should be the standard for anything rank veteran or higher: reduce their HP a bit, give them a healing skill. Poison reduces that healing skill by 33%, ergo poison now contributes meaningfully to PVE.

For example, if an enemy had 100,000 HP, instead give him 75,000 HP and give him a skill on a somewhat long cooldown that heals 25,000 HP. Now, that enemy will have an effective HP of 100,000, but also can be interrupted while healing and have healing reduced by poison, making it meaningful to the battle.

#3: Confusion:

Problem: It is really short duration, and slow enemy actions make it so many times it does nothing.

Solution: Don’t frontload enemies so much. Make it so enemies, on top of their infrequent high damaging attacks, have a series of quick but medium damaging attacks that are not channels or a glorified sequence of a single attack. Their big attacks will have to be reeled in a bit, but this will make it so confusion can inflict a meaningful amount of damage with its incredibly short durations, and also make it so building defensively and for support is more valuable now that dodge doesn’t stop everything.

#4: Burning:

Problem: By stacking in duration, it is quickly overwritten by other players unintentional burns, making burning a non-reliable way to do damage.

Solution: Make it so, while burning’s duration increases on a target, that burning will always retain the damage of the user with the highest malice. Whenever burning is applied, it is easy to do a quick check: Does the new guy have more or less malice? If more, then it is his burn. If less, then it just adds to the previous burn’s duration.

Hopefully, these fixes, however difficult to implement, will make it so condition classes are more potent in the game, and that the game itself will be more engaging and diverse.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Video about Level 80 Boost

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

That’s the point. “Buy our game, get free max level character”. It’s meant to sell.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

PvE Condition Duration

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Well, time to begin.

There is one problem with that math. It isn’t in balance. Algebraically you would need an LCD to compare the two, right, but I’ll use my 6s and 12s bleed as an example:

The full damage of the six second bleed is also written as: 720/6 = 120.
The full damage of the twelve second bleed is written as 1,200/12 =100.

When you compare the two you need like denominators.

Math is not numbers that can be pulled and pushed into a void at will. The numbers must have meaning. You must have units. I don’t know what these denominators are, what they stand for, where they come from, what units they represent, what the units of the operation they perform become, or why it is that the “full damage” that a skill does is being cut by more than an order of magnitude.

If you raise the 720/6 by a factor of 2 you get 1,440/12

No. A factor of “2” is 2/1, which would give you 1440/6. You multiplied it by 2/2, which is equal to 1.

Another proof is just to find when they are equivalent over X time, generally the duration of the lowest unit, which is 1 second so 120/1 = 100x/1 where X is the difference, we do the math and come to the obvious conclusion of 20%, and you could do it backwards too where it’s 120x/1=100/1 to come out with the same result. By the way when you put them in like terms the answer is always consistently 1.2, whether it be 720/600 or 1,440/1,200 or 120/100. This is how you know the ratio is equivalent and the math is correct because there should only be one answer to this linear system.

I’m not even sure where to begin here. Apparently, what you’ve done is taken the entire issue of duration out of the equation, pretend it doesn’t exist, then taken intensity stacking out of the equation and pretended that doesn’t exist, and are saying that because conditions tick once per second, the overall duration of a condition is irrelevant.

I guess I’m going to have to start from basics. For this demonstration, I will give you a few things:

#1: There is a player
#2: Who is attacking once per second
#3: That applies a bleed once per attack
#4: That lasts for 5 seconds, base duration.

So an auto attacking like scenario. Stripped bare and with its most basic premises.. There are few things to look at. First, consider this: if we were to do one attack, that attack would take 1 second, and would inflict bleeding for 5 seconds. Thus, the overall damage that the attack would do is equal to 5 ticks of bleed, and since it takes one second to execute that attack, that is roughly equal to 5 ticks of bleed per second. This may seem a bit odd, but consider this: while that bleed is ticking away, you are capable of performing other actions at the same time, which may add more bleeds or do more damage. This can be considered the “DPS per skill use”, and it is one way of comparing damage.

But there are other ways. Taking into consideration the fact that we can perform multiple actions while a bleed is ticking away, we can use this time to apply more bleeds, using the same “5 ticks of bleed per second”. Over the period of 10 seconds, we would see this happen:

1st second: 1 bleed
2nd second: 2 bleeds
3rd second: 3 bleeds
4th second: 4 bleeds
5th second: 5 bleeds
6th second: 5 bleeds
7th second: 5 bleeds
8th second: 5 bleeds
9th second: 5 bleeds
10th second: 5 bleeds

The crucial part being that, once we reach 5 seconds, the first bleed that we applied has expired, and thus the new bleeds replace the old one. While the overall damage inflicted doesn’t go away, the DPS of this setup is going to be equivalent to the damage that 5 bleeds will do. So, if your bleed ticks for 120, you will be doing 600 DPS, or 120 × 5. This is called many things, such as the stacking limit or the stacking threshold, and it is the average amount of conditions you sustain going through a rotation. You may notice that the DPS we got from the stacking limit is equal to the DPS we got from considering the “DPS per skill” method above. That is not coincidence. The time it takes to reach this peak is the “ramp up time” for conditions.

Now, lets add in a comparison. Lets say that, instead of lasting for 5 seconds, the bleed lasts for 8 seconds. Looking at a 10 second period, we’d get the following:

1st second: 1 bleed
2nd second: 2 bleeds
3rd second: 3 bleeds
4th second: 4 bleeds
5th second: 5 bleeds
6th second: 6 bleeds
7th second: 7 bleeds
8th second: 8 bleeds
9th second: 8 bleeds
10th second: 8 bleeds

See what happened here? The bleed lasts longer, so you get more concurrent stacks of bleeding at the same time. Assuming the bleeds do 100 damage instead of 120, this means that from 8 seconds onward, you will be doing 800 damage per second, which is more than the 600 damage per second that the previous setup capped at.

You can also consider this a DPS per skill use: one attack inflicts 8 ticks of bleeding per second, and even given the weaker bleed, this means that in the long run, you will do more damage and have higher sustained DPS than the 5 second long but stronger bleeds.

Lets take the bleeds in isolation. One 5-second long bleed, and one 8-second long bleed. Lets put their total cumulative damage side by side.

1st second: 100 | 120
2nd second: 200 | 240
3rd second: 300 | 360
4th second: 400 | 480
5th second: 500 | 600
6th second: 600 | 600
7th second: 700 | 600
8th second: 800 | 600
9th second: 800 | 600

The 5 second long bleed stops doing damage at 5 seconds, and the 8 second long bleed stops doing damage at 8 seconds. What happened here is that, at 6 seconds, their cumulative damage became equal, and at 7 seconds, the longer bleed did more cumulative damage. So, even though the 8 second long bleed does more damage in the long run, it has a longer ramp up time, which means that in the short run it does less damage.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

(edited by Blood Red Arachnid.2493)

Traits system does not prone build diversity

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Excuse me while I put on my “Captain Explains Things” codpiece and recount history for a bit.

The original trait system we had was quite free form. Given 70 points, we were allowed to invest any number of points into any line, and once we had sufficient points we could grab any trait along that line. This would also give us status bonuses depending which lines we invested in. This system… was scrapped. Largely because Anet found in testing that free-form trait choice lead to the ability to make some seriously overpowered builds. Having no better way to deal with the horrible build inequality that would arise from the situation, the “adept-master-grandmaster” tiering system was made. This provide at least some form of exclusion along the traits.

However, all was not well. We still had to deal with difficult trait balancing, even more so since physical stats were still tied to the trait system. After awhile, Anet noticed an anomaly among player trends. There was a large portion (I can’t remember the exact number, so lets just say significant enough) of players who, quite frankly, couldn’t build themselves right. One of the most popular builds in the game was the 14/14/14/14/14 build, where players would distribute their trait points evenly across all lines. Back then, the system was designed so you would specialize into different lines, and it gave you a new trait choice for every 5 points. So players would instinctively distribute their points in the literally worst possible way.

After a horrible NPE update and a couple of attempts to lock traits behind achievements, the system before was scrapped almost entirely, and now we have the new specialization system. While the freeform point allocation could work well for players who liked to theorycraft or listen to theorycrafters, the system was too idiot-prone to function. The current system we have now was designed specifically to minimize the chances that a player is going to build themselves into ineffectiveness.

As much as I’d like to see the build system become more diverse, the dreaded 14 × 6 build problem still exists. Any complicated system proposed would have to either accommodate for the fact that players will use it incorrectly, or have to convince Anet that it is O.K. for players to build themselves horribly.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Why still downed state in WvW?

in WvW

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Personally I like the down state. It adds tactics to the game and provides leniency for mistakes.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Do you think Raids in GW2 were a bad idea?

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I suppose the biggest issue I have with raids is that it is a reversal of the “play how you want” motto that Anets had before.

One of the advantages to dungeons was that, unless I was being outright stupid, it was doable. Whether I was on tanky gear or full DPS gear, no matter what class I happened to bring, the problems presented before me were solvable. If not by luck, then by patience, problem solving skills, and tenacity. Yes, there was a “Zerker meta”, but this meta was encouraged only by the players, was hard to enforce, and wasn’t really necessary for the dungeon.

I would enjoy anonymous dungeon running. Just grab a few people easily and go. Usually any event, even the harder ones, had a somewhat simple explanation on how to get through them. Failing that, I am usually fairly competent with the classes I play, so I could carry the pugs if they were tenacious enough.

But raids are… different. First, by desiring to pull in a hardcore crowed, raids did away with that whole “play whatever gear prefix you want” thing, and the whole “play whatever class you want” thing. Suddenly, those obscure charts located on random guild web pages that supposedly tracked DPS mattered, so much so that groups were failing just because they lacked the right classes and gear. No longer could I have loose rotations to use skills as needed, or could I pick a sub-optimal setup because I preferred defensive utilities over offensive ones. Now it’s “go glass, get it perfect, or go home”. You also had to bring a healer, too.

So, design philosophy dashed to bits for the sake of the “leet”. In theory there isn’t anything wrong with Anet having raids, but personally I am bothered by the whole thing. In all likelihood I"ll never be able to enter into the raids for several reasons:

#1: I an competent in mind only. Not in body. I am captain fumble fingers, descendant from the great mad random pressers when the immigrated over via a typo. “Perfection” is something that I can never achieve, ever, and so round after round will consist of me failing the whole boss because I pressed the wrong button or am in the wrong spot.

#2: I hate elitists. They generally bring the room down, and I’ve seen their attitudes poison and kill entire communities before, ruining games for everything. I was glad that most of the content in the game was fairly anti-elitist until raids. So, I would have to prostrate myself in front of people that I would sooner punch in the face than have try to force a friendly conversation with, begging them to take someone they hate along with them.

#3: Since I pug dungeons and run solo in the overworld, I have gear and rune sets chosen specifically to suit those needs, and not the needs of a 10 man group (particularly, going for group buffs instead of minor self buffs, sigil of strength/corruption instead of sigil of accuracy, refusal to eat food because food is so expensive, etc). So, I’m sub-optimal for raid groups by design, and building myself for raids will just hamstring me everywhere else.

#4: I cannot find a group to play with. The lack of an LFG that is suitable is definitely hindering things, but everyone talks about doing raids with “friends”. Antisocial by nature, I don’t make “friends” in online games, and nobody I know IRL plays GW2. I certainly haven’t been invited to or seen advertised any raid guilds. Also, due to my odd hours, I can’t make any commitments, since my infamous (anti)sleep schedule means that I can be around at literally any hour of the day. Heck, even writing this I’m on prescription strength tranquilizers that I took 6 hours ago, and they have absolutely no effect.

#5: The ship has sailed. Enough time has passed, so that the tolerance for my incompetence at play is no longer tolerable. This was a “get in or get out” situation, and I’m already out. Players are no longer expecting to “learn” at these raids, they are expecting to win.

#6: To be frank, I can’t keep track of all the things that are going on. I’m 1 step from legally blind, and even with my glasses I can’t see through the myriad of flashing colors and objects to discern, at a glance, what is going on and where I should be. Watching WP’s guide for the Sabetha fight literally made my head hurt, and I have no idea how I am supposed to remember, comprehend, and perceive all of that. I’ve played raids in City of Heroes and DCUO, and they have nothing on what GW2 raids bring.

In short, GW2 raids are this inaccessible and unassailable wall filled with unbearable people, and I stand alone.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Zerker problem

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

There’s another problem.

Metabuilds are built assuming other players in your team also have meta builds. If you are alone or don’t have other players with meta builds on your team, then the metabuilds can be quite lacking.

For example, take the Guardian. Meta build can be found here. You can see there are several decisions that are good in an organized group, but not necessarily good elsewhere.

#1: The build assumes large amounts of outside fury, so it takes right-hand strength + retribution. A more newb friendly build would take Radiant Fire and Inner Fire for maximum self fury stacking, and also more flexibility outside of running a one-handed weapons.

#2: It takes Zealous Wrath for a 5% increase in damage (plus minor heal) because the build assume vulnerability will be handled by outside forces. A more ubiquitous build would take Blinding Jeopardy, and then take advantage of the blinds on sword/focus/GS/VoJ to have bursts of higher damage than Zealous Blade.

#3: Unscathed Contender is a very difficult-to-use trait, especially since aegies is prioritized over focus blocks. A newb friendly build would take much greater advantage using either of the other traits.

#4: With the changes from #2, Amplified Wrath would be better to take than Perfect Inscription. PI gives the signet a 36 point boost, which is overall quite insignificant, but maximum DPS builds try to squeeze as much as they can.

#5: All notes regarding honor and the hammer are relegated to a completely different build. The honor line is pretty good for new players, since it gives vigor on crit, might on crit, Pure of Body, and Force of Will. The hammer is also an easy spec to run, giving entire teams permanent protection. This isn’t taken, though, since meta builds assume perfect play and outside might, so there’s no use for these otherwise useful traits.

EDIT: #6: The sigils chosen are force and night, assuming that all other utilities will be handled. But without excess might stacking, sigil of strength’s additional might boosts could outperform both of them.

Combine all this together, and you end up with a build that performs better assuming perfect play and group support. Take those two factors away, and it is arguably sub-par to Zeal/Radiance/Honor.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Why are melee players punished?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

They’ve added more mechanics because, for awhile, melee was outright overpowered. Or rather, the enemies were underpowered. Walking around in the overworld, I can still beat nearly every regular mob and most veteran mobs simply by facetanking and auto attacking. To make ranged weapons a tactical choice, you need to have places where melee weapons are high risk.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Economy Fail: price to high, gold too rare

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Yes, the removal of dungeon rewards was a cash grab. Its not like inflation of in-game currencies is a reoccurring problem in MMOs or that the gold to gem conversion scaled with inflation anyway.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

A Sincere, Serious Questioning of Support

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

It’s over. So. Long. Ago.
Just put a smiley and be done with it.

You know, there’s a certain saying I’ve heard once: “You have no control over the words that have already left your mouth”.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

ANET, thanks for listening to players!

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

The problem I see was that it was becoming doable by pugs just before the nerf, if they had left it another week the problem would have solved itself with players just playing better.

If they were going to do anything the spawn timer would have been best target, nevermind though.

Not really.

A big issue with the difficulty is that players just gave up. It got to the point where guild runs were the only runs, and if a PUG couldn’t ride the wake of a guild they wouldn’t even try. Once a player did managed to succeed, they would grab their mistwalker helmet and never come back.

The PVE community in this game is highly resistant to self-betterment. As much as I would like to think that hard content makes players self-critical and refine themselves, mostly it just gets rid of the people who don’t.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Feel My Wrath a little too much

in Guardian

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

So I was on a 5 guardian party the other day after symbolic avenger was disabled, and this 5 man glowing chainsaw cut through dungeons so fast I swear it was Photoshopped. The only organization it had was “bring a guardian and spam Feel My Wrath”. Running pure of voice was optional.

So, I sat down and decided to look at all of the quickness skills we have, and I’m pretty sure that Feel My Wrath is overpowered. Now, to compare it to other quickness giving skills/traits/blah, there’s two ways to think about it. First is the percentage uptime of quickness, which is a good metric for personal use. Second is the number of quickness “ticks” it gives out, which is the total number of seconds of quickness it outputs. This can be measured in a ticks per skill cooldown, or “ticks per second”. This is important for group use. Now, lets begin:

Frenzy: can be traited to give 7.2 seconds of quickness every 60 seconds. This is 7.2 ticks, or 12% uptime, or 0.12 ticks of quickness per second.

Elixir U: Can be traited to give 7.2 seconds of quickness every 40 seconds. This is 7.2 ticks, or 18% uptime, or 0.18 ticks of quickness per second.

Quickening Zephyr: Can be traited to give 6 seconds of quickness every 48 seconds. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Haste: Can be traited to give 6 seconds of quickness every 48 seconds. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Time Warp: Can be traited to give 12 seconds of quickness to the whole party every 180 seconds. This is 60 ticks, or 6.67% uptime, or 0.33 ticks per second.

Heightened focus: this one is a bit complicated, since it is situation dependent. On a single target it’ll give 4 ticks every 15 seconds, but only half the time. Against a slew of ongoing targets it’ll give quickness as you cut them down. I’m going to use a single target (champion, for example), and say that, since it is up about 44% of the time (half the time, adjusted for DPS increase from the trait), that it gives a total of 4 seconds every (adjusted) 34.1 seconds. This is 4 ticks, or 11.7% uptime, or 0.117 ticks per second.

Instinctive reaction: Not a reliable source, unless there’s some crazy ranger tactic I’m unfamiliar with that involves constantly playing at half HP.

Zephy’rs Speed: Can be traited to give 3 seconds of quickness every 16 seconds. This is 3 ticks, or an 18.8% uptime, or 0.188 ticks per second.

Flanking Strike: Just uses Haste. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Furious Interruptiom: This gives 3 seconds of quickness every 5 seconds. This has a maximum stats of the following: 60% uptime, or 0.6 ticks per second.

Feel My Wrath: When traited, this gives 5 seconds of quickness every 24 seconds to the whole party. This is 25 ticks, or 20.8% uptime, or 1.04 ticks per second.

Feel my wrath has the second highest personal uptime next to the rather dodgy furious interruption, and also is the only skill that gives more ticks per second than actual seconds. This has lead to the unique phenomena where a group of guardians can get permanent quickness by spamming this skill whenever its off cooldown.

Now, I know that mesmers have low personal DPS, so the quickness for them is warranted. But are guardians in such a state that they need to give the whole party 20.8% quickness uptime to be competitive? Are perma-quickness 5 guardian pugs meant to be a thing?

I wouldn’t ask for much of a nerf. Change it to 6 seconds of quickness every 60 seconds in an AoE, not factoring in traits. That way, when traited it gives the same amount of personal quickness as haste/quickening zephyr/frenzy, but gives it to the whole team, so it is still 5 times more useful than the other skills.

Am I alone in thinking this?

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Elitism harming the game? (PvE)

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Elitism isn’t about efficiency as much as it is about patience and tolerance. The necessities bar for most things in the game is really low, so low that much of the “group content” can be soloed. At that point, extra bodies are a convenience, so it is really about how convenient you see other classes as. Necros and Rangers, sadly, aren’t convenient enough.

Part of it has to deal with newbie issues. Due to the nature of the game, a necro or ranger is more likely to be a newbie player that has to be taught. Some people subconsciously adopt this and become bigoted, seeing the entire class as bad.

Good news is, this isn’t as bad as it used to be. It is quite rare to see a “heavy’s only” party, and only slightly less rare to see a “no xxx class”. Right now the big thing is “80s”, which has actually become nearly obsolete with the recent rebalancing of level scaling.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Egocentrism

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

O.K. Guess I’ll have to be “that guy”. Excuse me while I whip out my ego.

The reason why it is everyone’s “claims” about HoT being good or not included everyone elses opinion, or appear to do so, is because those claims do not cater to opinions at all. They are the discussion of facts revolving around HoT, and the fact that you disagree means nothing to someone else.

While you may be used to a world that is full of “to each their own” and “live and let live”, the real world isn’t like that. The real world actually cares about what works, and what doesn’t. The real world is objective. So, when players discuss what the mistakes are with HoT, they aren’t talking about what is “bad for them”. They’re talking about what is bad, period. If you feel like that you are constantly being looped in with their discussions, then maybe it is your own ego that is to blame. When people disagree, they voice those disagreements, and get into a discussion where (hopefully) something productive will emerge.

There are many standards for which to judge the content of HoT:

#1: Teleologic. That is, what it is designed to do. If something is designed to do one thing (say, the megaserver system is designed to group like players together on maps), and it fails to accomplish this objective (random kicking and gathering onto empty worlds, random undisplayed map closing, forcing guild shards to close at full population, etc), then it is bad design. Not “bad design for me”. It is bad design, period.

#2: Technical Merit. This is what separates good art from bad art. This is the way the pieces come together and compliment each other. Issues like having voice acting that varies wildly in tone between lines, storylines that are too predictable, plot threads that are nonsensical or end abruptly, dissonance between gameplay and narrative, etc. When the tonal flow of the story is abrupt, jarring, or so narrowly focused that it leaves people unsatisfied, it isn’t “bad for me”. It is bad, period.

#3: Basic function. This is the ability for the game system to actually run. This is issues like bugs and memory overload problems, which would cause people’s game’s to crash near the end of event chains. If the game doesn’t function properly, in that pressing space doesn’t deploy the glider or the game can’t load a map that it is meant to load, then it is bad. Not “bad for me”. Bad, period.

There’s probably more, too. But, think of it from a basic standpoint: If you like something, you should be able to explain why it is you like it, and what is good about something. Your opinions don’t bampf into existence from nowhere.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Constructive necromancer thoughts.

in PvP

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

there is so much misinformation about necros in this thread from the nerf callers it is ridiculous…

I know the feeling. I spend two posts doing the math behind the AoE condition potential between Necromancers and Engineers, and then people still follow up by saying grenades are horrible. I get the feeling what is happening is the zealots/trolls have tunnel vision, and are ignoring everyone else other than the specific guy they are fighting with. They enter into this topic with an agenda to nerf/buff necros, and refuse to budge from it.

Sad part is, this is what it seems like for discussions on anything nowadays. From federal politics to inter-office politics. I swear it feels like I’m the last sane person on the planet sometimes.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Mastery Point Refund Option

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

The ability to respect mastery points as needed defeats the whole purpose of having mastery points as gradual progression. Otherwise you just get 20 or so and then you can go anywhere, do anything.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Stacking analyzed, and ideas for mob design

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

The WvW segment isn’t directed at anybody in particular. Mostly because I can’t really find a good person to quote for this.

Now, while stacking in WvW has the similar aesthetic and entertainment issues as PVE, it is a bit different. For one, the engagement of WvW is much higher than PVE, so that isn’t as much of an issue. For two, mass war isn’t going to be particularly organized or pretty.

But… I chose not to talk about it here, for a very simple reason: WvW has a series of constraints and issues that make it so fixing stacking and zerg balls by proxy is often an issue of hardware limitations and class balance. Things like player collision in PVP, AoE damage limits, buff limits, and culling have issues how fast the servers can process information, and how quickly it can be sent to players, and how well player computers can process information.

Running around in PVE doesn’t have this problem. And now for something completely unrelated.

I’d rather have all NPC attacks be cleaving at point-of-impact, just like all/most player attacks seem to be – If you’re all in the same place, you all get hit equally. There don’t have to be particularly devastating, dedicated “Stack Breakers”. Having anyone who’kittenbox is in the same space as an attack box get hit is a simple, intuitive fix to the problem that puts NPCs on the same footing as PCs. Ranged weapons should only pierce a distance equal to the projectile’s range, though, unless full piercing is a trait of the boss. It might still result in player “Clustering” for boon and res purposes, but they’d probably actively avoid trying to be in the exact same spot to avoid focused but still-omnihitting enemy attacks.

I do like that ranged limit idea as well.

In the overworld you don’t see many cleaving attacks, but in dungeons you’ll find that the majority of enemy attacks are, indeed, cleaves. The issue lies in frequency: enemies have slow attacks, meaning that they are easily dodged/blocked/blinded and many times even face tanked.

If the attack frequency was higher, then stacking in one spot would be more dangerous. However, doing this with enemies below champion rank can be quite difficult, as these enemies have a habit of swarming players, and giving them too much of a stack breaker would just mean instant death to meleers in general, and not just stacking. It’s hard to encircle an army, after all.

At the end of the day these dungeons must be run multiple times. Can you see yourself running molten facilty and aetherblade retreat, every day, multiple paths for tokens or money and not get fed up with the mechanics at one point? Cause that’s what happened with the aether path :P

The Aetherblade is my favorite dungeon path, and I like to run it for fun on occasion. I usually encounter a different issue with that dungeon, and it isn’t because players are any more bored with the path than any other.

The Aether path, in all it difficulty, doesn’t get taught or run that frequently. Because of this, any random group that you make on the Aetherpath is going to be full of newbs and n00bs who are undergeared, don’t know much about game mechanics, don’t know much about dungeons, and have never had to follow directions before. Because of this, the players have a bad and slow time in that dungeon, and carry that bad experience with them wherever they go.

Repeat this with pretty much any hard path, and you get a frightened population that regale each other with more terrifying tales. I went and got dungeon master recently, and I got it by actually doing the Arah paths myself. I didn’t want to buy the paths, because I am a MAN despite what all the cheerleaders in highschool who rejected me say. For someone who was new to the dungeon, it was grueling because all the people who are experienced with the dungeon cut themselves off from the rest of the playerbase, leaving only a largely inexperienced group who are undergeared and unprepared for what is to come. In my first runs of these paths, I actually found myself teaching the path to the rest of my n00b armada, because I was the only guy who read a guide and watched videos on what to do.

That said, I think a big distinction needs to be made between good mechanics, and bad ones. Something like the dredge fractal is a pain, because it is poorly designed overall. This poor design incidentally also discourages stacking, and so people come to relate the idea of anti-stacking mechanics with imposing, oppressive game mechanics. But, if someone can make things merely interesting, and not just oppressive, then the community’s reception will be much more favorable.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Hotjoin: it is time to let go

in PvP

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Removing hot join doesn’t encourage players to learn the game. It only encourages players to already know how to play the game, and discourages the ones who don’t without teaching tools. Unless you use a cookie cutter build with a cookie cutter playstyle, other people don’t want you on their team because you’ll be dragging their team down. There is no room for experimentation, learning new rotations and skill usage, generalized practice in using new layouts or equipment. All that would exist is tournaments, and all that would be is elitists being elite and only letting other elitists play the way they want them to play.

I like to hotjoin regularly to try out new things and get the hang of classes I haven’t played in awhile without having to deal with some elitist whining about how I’m not running a bunker guardian when they need one.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Now that I’ve spent 20 hours grinding out my first elite spec, this makes me wonder quite a bit about something: future content.

Currently, most of the hero points spawn a champion + adds, many of which are not the same pushovers they once were. This is fine, assuming that there are other players who are around to help you. But even by yourself, you’ll encounter champions with waves of adds.

Problem is, most of the HoT maps I play are already nearly a ghost town. Send out the call for help, and you’ll get 1 or 2 people in the space of 10 minutes if you’re lucky. After discovering this fact, I had to resolve to burn through all the specialization points before the maps became too dead to function.

It is also annoying how much of the map specific features are dependent on ill-timed global events. Especially when they lock away hero points behind them. Heck, the only reason why I was able to do an e-spec in 20 hours is because someone else made a guide on how to do it, and I got lucky and had a somewhat coordinated hero-point train running map at one point.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

[PvE] Zerk meta is "done", what now?

in Thief

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Zerker gear will still be useful. Don’t believe the hype. If anything, PVE thieves will just have to change from No Quarter to Invigorating Precision, and heal themselves for 700 per hit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…..

700 per hit HAHAHAHAHAHA…..

Ok, I think that’s out of my system….

No, wait… HAHAHAHAHA….

So a bit of math. On my dagger auto I will frequently hit 5k on the second and third attack. Invigorating precision recovers 15% of crit damage, and 15% of 5k is 750 health. Likewise, I also regularly hit 14k backstabs (2.1k heal) and 12k heartseekers (1.8k health per seeker), 4k-4k-7k with the sword auto (2250 health per chain per target hit), and 18k pistol whips (2.7k health per target).

This is all with No Quarter, which is exclusive against Invigorating Precision, so the actual numbers you’ll get are toned down a bit. This has two interesting behaviors. First is that a thief gets healing proportional to their crit damage, so the more damage you do coughzerkercough the more you can heal yourself. Second is that against multiple targets, the healing is so high that unless the thief gets one-shot, the thief will quickly heal up to maximum again.

Personally, I don’t think it is funny that you can’t do math. I just think it is sad.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Make Gadgets the Engi Signet?

in Engineer

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I guess my issue with this is that, if they’re making gadgets just like signets, then why don’t they just give the engineer signets and be done with it?

I’d rather have something unique to the class instead of a retextured signet.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Oh you 'elite' players you..

in Fractals, Dungeons & Raids

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I like to show “elitists” just as much respect and tolerance as they show other players. If they kick me for something stupid, I block them then tell everyone in friends and everyone in the guild to also block them. Seriously, their prejudice needs to end.

Players enjoy playing the game in different ways. I’m not usually one for speed clears either, but you gotta respect people’s group adverts and such, and not join those who are looking for a very specific type of player.

It is a shame that certain players feel the need to be so rude though, but eh, such is life in an MMO. Gotta take the rough with the smooth.

There’s two problems with that:

#1: These players enjoy the game by dumping on other players and being as self-entitled and selfish as possible.
#2: These players don’t advertise that they are looking for specific types of players or are doing speed runs. They just form these things, grab a few PUG players to fill their gaps, then QQ about how those PUGs aren’t playing exactly how they wanted them to.

If someone makes a post on LFG saying “CoF p1 Speed LF1M Zerk Mesmer Plz”, of course I don’t join up. But when someone says something “LF1M TA F-F” in Lions Arch, then kicks players because someone got left behind watching a cutscene while everyone else ran forward without saying a word, then that person ends up on my block list even if it wasn’t me they kicked. Heck, there’s even a thread on the dungeon forum where someone was kicked from the party because they assumed the mesmer was using the wrong elite when he really wasn’t.

Although rare, that kind of crap happens often enough that people take notice. So when it happens, I respond with just as much understanding as they give: utter blacklisting.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

How to push "weak" builds closer to the meta?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

There is a lot of misconceptions on this thread… I’ll have to address them:

#1: The meta is pure DPS. This isn’t true. Ultimately, in any game you play where there is some kind of “damage”, the goal is always trying to obtain the maximum amount of damage possible within certain constraints. That is, having just enough heals and durability to survive, and nothing extra. It is rare to find any circumstance in the game where players forgo all active defenses and just go for raw, stand-in-your-face damage.

Anets design was not that you sacrificed damage for utility, but that you sacrificed damage for durability. How tough you are is ultimately to be a preference.

#2: Passive defenses are useless. This also isn’t true. Passive defenses can be quite powerful, and even in small amounts they can contribute meaningfully to survival. So many of the One-Hit-KO attacks are just so only because players run around in glass cannon gear. Even running in Valkyrie or Knight gear will result in you taking substantially more damage.

The issue is that, as skill level increases, passive defenses become less meaningful. Since there is a very low amount of ambient, light damage coming from enemies, the majority of enemy damage can be blocked, dodged, or interrupted. In situations where this isn’t true, or for inexperienced players, passive defenses mean a whole lot.

#3: There are no builds. Again, this isn’t true. The “zerker meta” is about just that: gear. Weapon choices, utility choices, and trait choices still have a meaningful impact on the build, and even denotes how that build will play out in the large run. Some builds are quite defensive and supportive, despite being in full glass cannon gear. For example, on my ele I have 2 builds: 30/20/0/0/20 staff DPS, and 0/30/0/20/20 dagger/fresh air support build. The difference being that one stacks a ton of AoE might and fury with a lot of AoE damage, while the other stacks AoE regen/protection and regularly pulses heals/cleanses and uses more support skills. Both can wear full zerker, but these builds barely resemble each other in both playstyle and overall team effect.

#4: Anet isn’t improving the AI. This also isn’t true. Scarlets minions are a fine example to the contrary, as they employ more ambient damage and more complex maneuvers than what most players are familiar with. Mobs in the rest of the game get updates on occasion, such as the risen mobs and various boss encounters in dungeons (most recent being HotW path 1 troll). The zerker meta issue is likely one of those issues that will simply fix itself over time.

#5: This is about bad players/good players, or smart players/dumb players. This, again, isn’t true. This is about respecting preferences of players. I, personally, like to run hybrid condi gear and non-pure DPS gear in PVE. The problem is that, with the way the game is currently designed, these builds don’t get to show their strength in the vast majority of PVE. So, I run pure zerker most of the time.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Suck at Love (Banned)

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

It is hilarious and sad that this isn’t the first I’ve seen of stuff like this.

In another MMO I played awhile ago, RMT was extremely popular, and also extremely illegal. On a daily basis, someone would go to the official forums and make the following very specific complaint:

“I was banned unfairly! Someone random person I’ve never met ran up to me, gave me a bunch of gold, and said ‘your order has been filled’, and because of that I was banned for RMTing!”

You’d be surprised how shameless people can be. A conscience isn’t something everybody has. It is something you choose to have.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

The tax on bank space

in Black Lion Trading Co

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

That’s the purpose of refining most materials. The problem is, other materials don’t clutter your bank.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Low level more powerful than down scaled

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

The thing that I find troubling is the implication that “AC P1 80s only exp” is the preferred mode instead of just “AC P1 exp” for so many people. But I digress.

We’re not looking at the whole picture here. We’re looking at just power. What also should be included is versatility and defense. But first, a little history lesson: What you’re seeing in lowbie dungeons now is closer to how it originally was in the first place. The utter faceroll that 80s could pump out in sub CoF dungeons was the product of the scaling changes that occurred awhile ago. It was roughly the same time the ferocity change if I remember correctly. Yes, this scaling change made it so high levels utterly plowed through everything at lower level, so much so that there are videos of Ele’s soloing Ascalon Catacombs in 8 minutes.

So, lets take a look at a more direct comparison. I’m going to be using the two necromancers, since that set of images actually has similar classes.

Power: 17% lower
Precision: 75% higher
Vitality: 60% higher
Toughness 60% higher
Ferocity: Some vs. none
Malice: some vs. none
Healing power: some vs. none

Armor: 33% higher
Health: 75% higher
Crit Chance: 73% higher
Crit damage: 4% higher

Effective Power: 102.5 (level 80) vs. 116 (level 2) = 12% loss
Effective Health: 140,732 (level 80) vs. 60,003 (level 2) 135% gain.

Now, this is limited, but there’s another thing to consider: At higher levels, the necromancer gains access to all of their traits and utilities. A lower level necromancer doesn’t have those things. So, no fury in DS, no 20% increase against half dead enemies, no self might stacking against half dead enemies, no piercing life blast, etc.

The end result is that toons at their appropriate level have, on face value, more power at the sacrifice of everything else in substantial quantities.

Now personally, I wouldn’t mind if lowbies were as strong or stronger than scaled down 80s. Leveling up to curb stomp lower level competition is an antiquated model that Arenanet purposefully built away from in the first place. At higher levels you still get more gear choices, more build choices, more utilities, more access to the game, and more skins. Downscaling exists solely to make it so higher level players can play alongside of lower level players without being overpowered.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

HoT is not challenging

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

I’d like the see those claiming HoT is not challenging link videos of themselves soloing stuff like, say, some of the Hero Challenges, maybe the one in VB with the Vet Teragriff, pack of wolves and mender. We might learn something.

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not but isn’t that one the easiest one to solo?

Forum warriors can claim anything. If HoT really offers no challenge to the OP, surely posting such a video should be trivial for him.

But posting that doesn’t prove anything. That is literally one of the easiest HPs to get in VB. Now if he had a video of him soloing it back when it was a champion then that would be an entirely different story. Or pick any one of the other champion HPs.

I disbelieve his claims, and I’m inviting him to prove me wrong. I’d accept a solo of that point as a modest declaration that he possesses some skill. If he believes that a greater challenge would be more informative, then he can have at it.

Look, I can solo that point, but I’m not going to go out of my way to make a video to show disbelieving players that I can solo it.

I think you are mistaking your position here. He doesn’t need to prove to himself that HoT is too easy. He experiences it. To him, making a video of himself soloing a Hero Point is akin to making a video explaining why the sky is blue. If anything, you should make videos of yourselves failing that HP, so then the OP can understand why it is so hard for others.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

How GW2 spoiled me with (100% opinion)

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

A lot of the things GW2 does well is remove a lot of the hassle that comes from other game design. If you think that dungeon kicking is bad now, you should’ve seen how bad it was in some of the other games I’ve played. Phantasy Star Universe had different item acquisition modes (round robin, random, first come first serve), but it also had a “leader decides everything” system along with a bunch of random drops at the end of each mission. So, if the leader ever found an item he wanted, he would just quickly kick every other player in the team so he could get it. Given that most of the game was gear based… it wasn’t a pretty sight.

But in general, the thing with a lot of conveniences is that a lot of the content of the game is in dealing with these inconveniences. For example, no roots while casting means that everything becomes spammy, with less emphasis on positioning and timing. The gameplay is certainly different, but better? I’m not so sure.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Zerker meta: Possible solutions

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Right now, the only ways to make other builds “remotely viable”(as in, why not zerker) in PVE are:

  • nerf dodging
  • Add special conditions to mobs (silences, unavoidable X attack, etc)

etc. where “punch it in the face” is not the sole objective required to win.

(of course, this probably wont be received well. Any content that veers from “punch it in the face” is outright ignored in many cases. i.e. Ghost Eater Path)

This… sort of. I’ve been saying since before the zerker nerf that the zerker meta is a symptom of a problem: unintuitive mob design. The way enemies are designed in this game is the same way you’d design them in a non-action MMO. Throw in active defenses, and that whole system goes out the window.

But… there is something that this post kind of brings up, and that is something a lot of players really hate: cheap effects. The way unblockable attacks are done in the game is really horrible. Currently, the only way to know if an attack is unblockable is to try to block it, then get smashed in the face anyway (Troll in HotW P1, for example). No one likes this, because it means you have to develop special tactics just for that one segment of the game, and this creates severe class segregation due to how that class handles particular situations.

Anet can make a diversified PVE meta using gimmicks and cheese, but these dance around the problem, and aren’t fun to play against at all. The correct way to do things is to build around a mechanic, not in spite of it.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Visual Clutter

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

While many of my concerns are being addressed, this is a topic that no one really brings up, in spite of how important it is.

To be blunt: I can’t see. It is worse for some classes than others (I’ve practically gone blind playing ele a few times), but in group content this issue always rears its head. While there are options to reduce the amount of particle effects, the sheer amount of flashing lights and glowing flames can make things nigh impossible to see. See attached picture for reference.

I am wondering/hoping if anything is being done in the HoT expansion to reduce, or at the very least give the option to reduce the blinding special effects further. If not, then you should do that.

Attachments:

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

DPS meter really?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

You’re looking at it oddly.
When you do well you’re rewarded with being accepted into a group that does well. That’s the reward.

Oh please. Joining your group is not a reward. Not only is the quality to the group irrelevant to how elitist the players feel, but groups do not have preliminary trials before accepting others into their ranks. They simply expect you to perform, regardless of their own skill. You are “rewarded” for nothing, and punished for everything.

It has been my experience that the groups who demand the most performance out of their players are often the most terrible. They get frustrated from their failures (both in game and IRL), and become gameplay fascists as a response. They attempt to dictate every little thing in their lives in an attempt to counteract their impotence, but this doesn’t make them better players. It just makes them insufferable. Likewise, some of the best groups that I’ve been on are chill. I got the Be Dynamic achievement on a team that didn’t even try for the meta comp. No druid healer, no CPS warrior, and the only reason the team had a support chrono was because I brought it.

I know you would prefer (like anyone else) to be accepted into a group that does well even if you do poorly – but that’s not really fair to them is it?

It is fair to them. It is called tolerance. First it recognizes that people are people and they have feelings. Second, it recognizes that there are a myriad of reasons why even the most pretentious players will fall by the wayside in performance. With those two things recognized, it postulates the following: forgiving bad play fosters a positive community that will, in turn, forgive your bad play. If you are tolerant of the failures of others, then others will be tolerant of your failure. And you will fail eventually. It is a two-way street, where if I am forgiven then I am expected to forgive.

If you want to play with people that do well – you should be like them and do well yourself. It’s only fair to them that they gain as much from you as you gain from them when you play together.

Your view on this is warped. Other players do not take from you by joining your party, for there is no debt that random people are expected to fill.

I understand your fear – it’s normal. I have nothing against being kicked if I’m performing poorly. Why should you or anyone else?

Kicking a player is the worst way to solve an interpersonal problem. No negotiation, no forgiveness, no instruction. It breeds hostility and doesn’t fix the long term issues.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Luck Sink past 300%

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

There’s got to be an optional sink for luck essences. That, or make it so essence of luck stop dropping once you reach 300%.

And no, this isn’t a “rich player problem”. This is your problem. You will reach 300% magic find one day. Most players just aren’t there yet, but we are all marching down toward that inevitable cliff of inconvenience that useless luck essence carves out of the mountains.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Healer + Tank, ever a possibility?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Personally, I kind of like the way the game is designed now, with each class being a wholly contained unit. My biggest issue with the trinity system is that it isn’t a system of strengths. Its a system of weaknesses.

DPS: Too frail to stay alive.
Tank: Too feeble to do damage, still too frail to stay alive.
Healer: Too feeble to do damage, exists only to make the tank more frail, too frail to stay alive.

And so on. I’ve only ever liked one trinity game, and that is an asterisk because it was really a dodecahedron game where the various classes weren’t inept at everything else.

GW2 isn’t without issue, though. With the way that stats are set up, a player is still highly restricted in their abilities. Your condition damage sucks unless you specifically build for it, your party healing sucks unless you build for it, boons and debuffing conditions require particular investments in order to be truly effective, etc. and so on. You can still build yourself into total ineffectiveness.

Were I to design an MMORPG, I would initially start with a normalized offense, and then diversify classes on additional functions they provide. I would never take away from damage, except to exchange it for another unique kind of damage. That way, a class can only be defined by its strengths, and not its weaknesses.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

This video sums up the game for me

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Anet really has to learn that boredom doesn’t encourage players to learn anything.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

Why should I play engineer?

in Engineer

Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

What an engineer offers in PVE is simple: quantity, and combos.

You see, while other classes can do a few things that support the team and can arguably do them better than the engineer can, the engineer has a sheer volume of things they can do that is so massive that no other class can really compare:

Condition cleansing (elixir gun, healing turret, cleaning formula 409)
Cripple/chill (Glue shot, glue puddle, sitting duck, freeze grenade, Elixir F, Battering Ram, Box of Nails)
Immobilize (Glue shot, glue puddle, net turret, net shot, net wall)
CC(Overcharge shot, Both Shield skills, Every turret with accelerant packed turrets, battering ram, throw mine, Big Ole’ Bomb, Magnet, Electrified Net, Exlposive Rockets, Thump, Elixir X, Supply Crate, Air Blast, Slick Shoes)
Blocks/invulnerability (Both Shield Skills, Gear Shield, Elixir S, Toss Elixir U)
A ton of blast finishers (every turret, throw mine, Big Ole’ Bomb, Magnetic Inversion, Thumper Turret in particular, Supply Crate)
A ton of AoE Healing (Healing Turret makes 2 water fields, and with a ton of blast finishers this can heal for massive amounts, Cleansing Burst, Super Elixir, Elixir Infused Bombs)
A ton of might stacking (repeat above in fire fields for massive AoE might, H.G.H., Enhance Performance, Juggernaut)
A ton of retaliation stacking (Repeat blast finishers in light field from Super Elixir)
A ton of stealth stacking (repeat blast finishers in smoke from flame turret or bomb kit, Toss Elixir S)
A ton of weakness stacking (repeat blast finishers in poison field from poison grenade, also Elixir Dart for single target weakness).
A ton of AoE damage (coated bullets, grenade kit, bomb kit, static discharge. Nearly everything they do is in AoE, actually)
A ton of AoE burn damage (Blowtorch, Fire Bomb, Flamethrower, Flame Turret, Rocket Turret)
AoE blind (smoke bomb, flash grenade, static shock, toss elixir U Go for the Eyes for single target blnd)
Vulnerability stacking (Steel packed powder, Utility Goggles)
Projectile Reflection (Toss Elixir U, Magnetic Shield, Air Blast)
Permanent Vigor
Boon Stripping (Acidic Elixirs, Throw Mine, Mine Field)
1500 max range on attacks (grenadier)
Confusion (Static Shot, concussion bomb, Pry Bar)
Incredibly high precision stacking + fury (scope, elixir B, Med Kit, target the weak, when combined come to upwards of 40% crit chance from nothing)
Self protection application (Elixir H and Toss, Protection Injection, Protective Shield)
AoE rez (Toss Elixir R)
And finally are the #2 choice for condition pressure following behind Necromancers.

I bolded the parts where, arguably, engineers are the best at it out of any class. Just flip your utilities and maybe exchange your weapon for whatever you need to do up ahead, and there is literally no problem in this game you cannot solve as an Engineer. A good engineer is flexible, capable of changing their role based on what their teammates need, while still preforming fairly well regardless.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.