Guild Wars 2

hannah mee.7925:

I stopped reading right here and I will not read further because this sentence alone makes me think the rest of the OP is going to be bad.

Amended statement:
Players are left on their own, and if they aren’t theorycrafters like the top 5% of us, they aren’t going to be as skilled as the top 5% of us.

This is going to blow…your…freakin…mind…

But the game’s easy. People don’t need to be “Top Ten” and theorycrafters to do the content because the content is that menial. Much like other games, the challenge comes from self-deprivation and personal goal setting. I’ve played a gratuitous amount of games (granted I’ve only touched three MMOs in my entire life, but I digress) and in every single game I can tell you there’s a challenge that emerges from personal handicaps.

What you think is “people knowing how to play the game” is, in fact, an outline of the learning curve – a phenomenon that exists far outside of just Guild Wars 2. As far as most of those examples go, they seem to just be shy of not understanding a certain boon or mechanic, which happens a lot when people are new or they are visually limited by stacking and having a narrow field of vision.

A classic example I’ve always used is the game of BioShock 2. I ran around in Free-for-All multiplayer mode with Slugger and often went 20:0. That didn’t mean I knew any more about the game than other players, it just meant I was better at Sluggering than them and I went further up the learning curve.

Against what some people like to believe, some people really can’t progress up the learning curve because they are incapable. It only seems to echo loudly throughout GW2 though…I guess because the forums on the website allow people to be a bit more vocal.

The biggest problem with your assertion is that Anet has already said that this is a problem. They’re already working on it by idiot-proofing various aspects of the game (sigil rework, and trait rework). They have also said that they are making new content harder, with the hopes that the increased difficulty will encourage players to explore more tactics and options within their own class.

Anyway, there is something I mention in the thread, and I didn’t talk about it much since it delves deeply into balance issues, but it is difficulty dissonance. That is, the drastic change in difficulty between different forms of content. The wider this gap is, the more “difficulty shock” a player gets when exploring different content. This… presents an issue from a designer perspective, because it is hard to design content that is both faceroll and face smashing at the same time. So, the designer either has to cater to a crowd, or they have to try and compromise and disappoint everyone.

I’ve seen stealth done better in MMOs before, through a system that was much more complicated.

The idea was this: each player had themselves a perception stat, and all NPCs had this stat, too. The stealth abilities granted to any player would subtract from this perception stat, and this would give the overall distance at which an enemy can be seen. So, for example, if a character had a perception of 500 feet, and stealth had a rating of 300, then the first character would see the invisible character at 200 feet.

This led to more diversity, with various classes having abilities that could increase their perception, as well as classes getting different and more powerful forms of stealth. There was even a buff item that could increase perception that was quite cheap, making it so should the situation call for it you could always see those invisible enemies should your class or build be vulnerable to them.

I think the biggest problem with GW2 stealth is that it is completely depthless. There is no counterplay other than randomly flailing feebly in the wind. There is no sophisticated method to determine of a player is visible or invisible in different circumstances. There is no active counter-skill that affects stealthed players greater than non-stealthed players, or anything of the sort. The most you can do with a stealthed opponent is to randomly guess where they might be and what they are doing, and unfortunately smart players use things like Blink and Shadowstep to insure that your guess is always wrong.

Anyway, the big problem with offensive mitigation is that, ultimately, the ball is not in your court. On my Engineer when I activate Elixir S, I’m invulnerable for 3 seconds and there is not a darn thing anyone can do about it. Because the defensive aspect of this is wholly in my control and acts irrespective of what my opponent does, you can say that I have full control over this defensive ability. But Necromancers never get this option:

Blind: Only meaningful with near permanent sustain or on critical attacks. Opponents can choose to not stand in the blind field, cleanse it away, or just fire off a useless auto attack before doing something crucial.

Weakness: Doesn’t work half the time. Can be easily cleansed away, or with the new short durations of the skill simply outlasted. Does nothing with conditions. Best use is the endurance reduction.

Chill/Cripple: only effective against enemies with limited range (melee mostly). Does nothing to ranged attacks. Can be cleansed away.

Stuns: Have to hit the target, target must not have stability, and can be broken through with stun breakers. As to whether a stun will work is merely guessing.

Death Shroud: The defensive utility of this skill lies in the assumption that your opponent will waste their attacks on you while inside of it. If they just do something like retreat and wait for the natural degen to take effect, this means that Death Shroud mitigates nothing. Requires the build up of life force in the first place.

Because of this I found most of the QQ about necromancers to be completely unfounded. In any battle, the necromancer is not truly in control over any of their defenses, and half the time over their offenses, either. The person who decides the outcome of a Necro vs. Class X fight ultimately is Class X, and as skilled as a necromancer player can get we simply lack the tools as a class in order to be top tier. So we default to spewing out a bunch of AoEs and hoping they hit, and also hoping that the other classes just happen to not be using one of the many tools that can shut us down.

My biggest contention is that a lot of these complaints are either paranoia, or just not true. I’m not sure thieves are in a bad spot at all, and if they are then other classes are in far worse spots.

I talk mostly from a PVE/WvW perspective, but looking at all of the elite specializations I’d rank Daredevil in the top 3. The Daredevil is one of two specializations where I’ll be glad to use everything: weapons, traits, and utilities. The only other one that holds that title is the Chronomancer, the undisputed king of the elite specializations. Everyone else? My personal rankings:

Tempest: Traits have no synergy and are feeble, the weapon doesn’t provide the necessities for ele, and the shouts are just inferior to cantrips/arcane. Class mechanic is cumbersome. I’m not sure I’ll even play tempest.
Dragonhunter: Longbow is meh. Traps feel gimmicky and aren’t as versatile as I’d like them to be, as do the traits. New virtues don’t go well with all the old virtue traits. Not sure I’ll even play Dragonhunter.
Druid: Its a glorified heal bot. The traits are uninteresting, the staff basically does one thing. The glyphs seem alright, though. Class mechanic is basically if water attunement/ventari had a life force bar. Not sure I"ll even play Druid.
Berserker: The weapon seems gimmicky. Utilities and traits are good, though. I don’t much like warrior, so I won’t be playing this.
Scrapper: Gyros look flawed and ineffective. Traits are a mixed bag, as usual. The hammer looks great, though. The class mechanic is strange and I’m not sure how good it’ll be.
Herald: Basically a buff bot. But hey, its better than a heal bot. Shield is situational, utilities are fine, and only two traits caught my eye.
Reaper: The weapon is sexy. The traits are frightening. The shouts… so-so. I love the new shroud, but wish I had a viable ranged option.
Daredevil: I like everything, and want to use everything in multiple combinations. I hate that it is basically what acro should’ve been, but at least we’re getting what acro should’ve been.
Chronomancer: The world will never forget the day the chronomancer sets foot upon Tyria. Particularly because that day happened twice, but at double the speed.

As far as dev attention goes… that’s how nearly every forum feels. It is easier to name the exception: Revenant. I’m not sure the thief forum is actually deprived, with the most recent red post being from 3 days ago, giving us an update on dash. Were I to personally rank them, the ranger gets the least amount of attention, due to the large number of things that were absolutely broken (I.E. pet condition damage) rather than being broken by opinion.

As far as PVP standings go, I think this is a case of envy. Each class has things they can do better than others, and many classes are envious that thief even has a place. The PVP meta is currently out of balance, though, with D/D ele being so prevalent that it is hard to get a look at anyone else. The state of the PVP game is so in flux that the role of thieves might change after tuesday. I’m not the most up to date on PVP, though.

I already wrote at length about the dodging issue. Without any word of special hit-through-dodge mechanics, I am very certain that the DD will be capable of evading well enough to survive. The amount of dodging available to each class varies wildly, so while something like Necromancer definitely can’t dodge it all, the Daredevil can recover 2.8 times as much endurance through traits alone and gets a weapon dodge every 4 seconds. Unless the content was designed specifically to be polarized against the Daredevil, then the raids aren’t countering all those dodges.

Thieves aren’t as glassy as we’re made out to be. On the statistical side we’re the second to least durable class (next to the elementalist), but our defenses aren’t in our statistics. Our defenses come from our ability to debuff and disable, our personal healing, and our high movement speed. The glassiness might be a meta enforced problem: the thief’s current roles are done best in GC gear, so from the perspective of build specs we’re not as durable as Celestials.

Thieves have received a lot of nerfs in the past. I know why, too. There was old saying: You can’t beat a perfect thief. The thief’s original design left it with so many tools that were powerful, instant-cast, and compounded with each other so well that it was overpowered. When something like Infiltrator’s Strike is instant cast… there’s not much anyone can do other than hope you make a mistake. This leaves devs with a dilemma. You can’t have a class that can beat all others regardless of circumstance just by being more skilled. A class has to have non-trivial weaknesses and openings. So the devs have to make piecemeal nerfs to ensure that thieves are evasive but not too evasive, invisible but not too hard to see, stunning but not too disabling, fast but not uncatchable. With nerfs, you need to look at the overall picture: the amount of nerfs a class receives isn’t a problem so long as their overall standing is still good. Thieves started out far ahead. The fact that thieves are still usable, even after a series incremental nerfs, speaks volumes about how good they were in the past.

Now you’re probably all wondering what I consider legitimate complaints. You’re not? Well too bad, I’m telling you anyway.

#1: Acrobatics is still the worst line in the game. Though I don’t think Acro was butchered just to make Daredevil, it certainly does feel that way. The thing is, old acro gave Feline Grace and near perma old vigor, amounting to a 185% increase in natural dodging. The new acro just gives a 33% increase to natural dodging. It simply needs to do more. Also all the other traits are horrendous.
#2: Weapon Viability. Currently, nearly all thieves use D/P + SB in PVP. We need sword, off-hand dagger, and main-hand pistol to be more viable. This is compounded by other things on this list, such as the acro line being horrible (sword) and ricochet being missing. This will also alleviate other problems, such as condi pressure.
#3: Ricochet. ‘Nuff said.
#4: I think a 4 second reveal is too much. Remember, this was a decision made a long time ago, back when thieves had nearly everything and no class had counters. Nowadays, I don’t think this is necessary anymore.
#5: The Impact Strike chain isn’t that good.

This isn’t all, but these are the big 5 that I’m looking at right now. Acrobatics should be dealt with first, because it will have a ripple effect that will change everything else.

The proportional of benefit to cost is horribly imbalanced. When I said “barely any names were used” a few days ago, I get the feeling that nobody knows what “barely” stands for. In all the names that were purged in City of Heroes, less than half of 1% were ever used again. I can’t get the exact number, since that resource was wiped off the face of the planet, but of the thousands of names purged, less than 100 were ever used again.

This is because, and as hard as this is to consider: a lot of the “inactive” accounts had unique names that other people weren’t vying for. For every fanboy who wants to be named Gandalf the Wise or Chuck Norris or Wolverine, there’s at least 200 players who’ve named themselves Diavara, Van Rahl, Morgol Fangbreaker, etc. who haven’t played since launch, and may come back to this game later.

So, lets consider the name purge, both from a historical sense and from a logical perspective:

Pro: A couple of players who can’t/won’t come up with a name might get the option to name themselves what they want.
Con: The players who would be negatively affected by this outnumber the beneficiaries at least 200 to one.
Con: The vast majority of names that get wiped are unique ones that never get used again.
Con: Out of the all the people who do want to name themselves Wolverine, still only one person will get it. It’s not going to be you.
Con: Every person who does come back will have their experience ruined when they find their account gutted and robbed.
Con: Most of the players who would benefit from this have already chosen a name and have moved on.

Really, no sane business would ever make this move. It didn’t work in the past. It won’t work again for the exact same reasons.

TD is a decent concept in theory, but failed in execution. It is a labyrinth that is tightly packed with extremely dangerous enemies, which make navigation hard, except there’s one big problem: You have no reason to go into those labyrinths.

The reality of Tangled Depths is that it is a fairly generic map structure with complicated labyrinths tacked on to the sides. Once you get to Ley-Line Confluence Waypoint the entire map is pretty linear. You just head down the labeled tunnel to get to the respective labeled waypoints. The hardest part from there is figuring out whether you go up or down to get to an event from that respective waypoint.

Oh, there are plenty of confusing paths and mazes in the map, but there’s no reason to go into them. All of the big and important events are usually tethered to Confluence Waypoint, or one of the respective main waypoints in the map, so if you find your bearings there, you’ve basically explored the whole map. The Nuhoch wallows trivialize pretty much everything else from there.

I’ll 4th that opinion.

I hate windchimes. And now all my achievements sound like windchimes. I used to look forward to the old ding that I got from achievements. When doing something hard, it actually felt accomplishing.

These new jingle sounds like something that just annoys you alongside of the game.

danielrjones.8759:

@Sartharina enjoyed you post about your family. Brought back memories for me. Also a mirror image cept Army instead of Air Force and we were a family of 11. I’ve heard comments similar to the poor get poorer and it’s one I complete disagree with, with the exception of the poor get poorer if they choose to do nothing and expect others to make them rich.

Well, technically the poor don’t get poorer in that case, either. Globally the quality of life is increasing everywhere. Food, energy, safety, water, cleanliness, and medicine are cheaper, better, more widely available, and will continue to do so. The total amount of welfare and wealth is on the rise. Now, technically the growth in quality is disproportionate, in that the rich do gain wealth faster than the poor, but the poor is still gaining wealth in the absolute sense.

However I digress: These threads are always annoying, and they show up every week or so. Somebody is convinced that there’s a group of rich players who control everything and scheme to rob the average player, or that free trade is inherently evil, or that gaining money through the TP is evil. And every single time, it follows the same trend: No evidence for their claim, and a lack of knowledge on economics and trade.

So, to answer your questions:

#1: Wealth is monitored.
#2: There is no super rich player who buys all of one item and then sells it for three times the price. If you’ve ever tried to merch on the market, you’d quickly learn that this is impossible, or just plain isn’t true. Players will constantly make new items, and undercut you, or you’ll make a trade and watch it sit for a month before realizing that nobody will buy it for that price.
#3: The prices of things change all the time. It is called supply and demand.
#4: There is probably some top limit, depending on where the decimal is located, but that wouldn’t matter because if there really was an evil overlord who’s robbing the entire game blind, then they’d just take their gold and invest in ancillary items to maintain their wealth. I.E., gems.
#5: Nothing is unfairly priced on the TP.
#6: Working the TP to get money isn’t lazy, either. To be successful requires research, plenty of math, a lot of patience, and plenty of luck, too.

Fenrir.5493:

The problem is not the amulets, the problem is that there is no stat or boon to reduce/mitigate condition damage,

This, again, is an often repeated myth that isn’t true. Conditions have arguably the best mitigation possible through cleanses. Let m give you an example:

On my HGH engineer I can cause a 10 second burn at 1500 malice, easily, doing around 700 damage per tick. This… is of no consolation against elementalists, thieves, or guardians. These classes can cleanse off my burn before the second tick, mitigating 90% of the damage the condition does. So my 7000 damage skill becomes reduce by 6,300 damage from cleansing.

Aside from the fact that yes, my conditions can and do miss often, they can be blocked and blinded and dodged, conditions have an incredibly potent form of mitigation, both from passive cleansing and active cleansing.

I might as well take this moment to talk about another thing: telegraphs. Now, in all of my classes, the least telegraphed weapon in my arsenal is the Engineer’s rifle, which is a power weapon.

There is a big confusion here. People are mistaking “conditions” for ranged. The two tend to go together, since the majority of condition weapons are ranged weapons. However, there are many exceptions to this rule. Take, for example, the thief Shortbow. The thief shortbow doesn’t have a telegraph for any of its moves, with them all having the same animation of “thief pulls up bow an shoots it”. The closest thing to a telegraph comes from the cluster bomb, which flies in a tall, slow arc when fired at distances, but is nearly instantaneous at close range.

Compare this to the Guardian Scepter, the Mesmer Greatsword, the Ranger Longbow, the Elementalist staff. Some of the skills have delayed effects (looking at you, elementalist), but usually you find out if you are being hit by Smite or Mind Stab when you end up getting slapped around or you get a spectral sword where the sun don’t shine.

The advantage that range weapons provide is that, while they have lower damage, they provide reliable damage and they provide safety in positioning. Should your opponent do something, you can react. In the game, I’ve always found that the strongest thieves I’ve fought against didn’t try to kill me instantly with backstab, but instead used the evasion of the shortbow to whittle me down. Because of this, I’m not sure if the culprit is necessarily conditions.

It does help that conditions were anti-meta when they became popular. Having been fed up with fighting bunkers under permanent protection that block every move you made, the players adapted by changing to steady damage that bypassed protection. This meta can easily shift into one were condition cleansing is key, since it neutralizes both soft controls and damage, letting players get up close and pound away with their melee weapons. Even with the new buffs, one of the scariest things to deal with as a necro is a guardian who just chases you around with the greatsword, shrugging off every condition like it is childs play.

Maybe I’m just used to it in college, but I don’t have a problem with a foreign guy talking to me for an hour straight.

Anyway, I can easily tell that Nemesis isn’t as experienced with the guardian. I myself am not that experienced with PVE guardians, but I already have ideas on how to improve on his build and rotation. Particularly by using using smite + shield of wrath at point blank, following through with symbol of wrath + whirling wrath while using VoJ + blinding blade to maintain blinds while engaging multiple enemies at point blank range. Smite is good, but it only hits one target. If multiple enemies are in range (which should be the plan), then prioritizing the hammer or greatsword should be more important. 15 in zeal should make it so burning is nigh permanent on enemies anyway, especially with other teammates providing so much additional burning.

Then again, my current guardian is under level 40, so I only know so much. All I know is that my favorite spec (spirit weapons) doesn’t work that well. There are a couple of things I have to give Nemesis credit in:

#1: This is not a staff in clerics build. That is the build I usually see inexperienced players using in PVE, and Nemesis build + tactics are far preferable. 2438 power, 97% crit damage, and 99% crit chance isn’t that bad. At face value (no additional buffs), it actually outperforms my thief build (5765 EFP vs. 5624 EFP), and matches the damage modifiers. Though the story changes once I get fury going, I still find it hard to criticize that.

#2: At the end of the video, Nemesis goes through customizing the build, and brings up several changes and options that people might go for. Among these he lists

A)Unscathed Contender (and along with it, inspired virtues)
B)Runes of the Scholar
C)Switching out signets for appropriate support skills.
D)Switching torch for focus
E)Reducing precision for power in groups with high group fury and banners.

And it is on this note I watch the rather hilarious phenomenon when people introduce criticisms that Nemesis has already levied against himself.

When Nemesis refers to elitism, I think he is referring to the expectation that guardians should be dedicated to supporting and heals. I do see this on occasion, with players trying to recruit guardians specifically to be heal bot. It is a bit of a “n00b elitism” where players who don’t know enough about the game to know that they don’t know enough about the game insist on certain specs and class roles that, while making sense in a traditional MMO, are nigh rubbish in GW2.

Fenrir.3609:

They are getting “carried” in terms of the anticipated speed of the run. You can faceroll through pretty much all the content (and solo a great deal of it) in tanky gear/builds but it will take a while longer than a dps team.

Now those trying to get into zerk runs in tanky gear are doing so because they want to get through the content quickly, being carried on the back of other players dps, whilst they use suboptimal gear/builds . i.e. they are being carried.

The “anticipated speed of the run” is an expectation that only you have. People will join zerk groups while not in zerk for a myriad of reasons that don’t involve hoping other players carry them:

#1: They hate elitism and defy these extraneous expectations out of principle.
#2: They expect everyone else to just join up in whatever they are wearing anyway, and don’t think the tags have any real meaning.
#3: They factually cannot operate in zerker gear, and thus their higher bulk actually gives them higher sustained DPS than zerker gear would.
#4: They just want experience in the run, but since no one will ever form a “teaching n00bs” group they feel like they have to lie just to get their foot in the door. It is hard to learn the content when you die every other attack, so even if they have zerk gear, they want to run with more durability before going out on a limb.
#5: They don’t know what “zerk” is. Funny thing, berserker doesn’t contain the word “zerk” anywhere, so unless they are in the know they won’t know.

You’ve got to realize that the majority of players in the game don’t follow the “zerk or else” meta. They have different ideals, and truly think they are contributing in their own way. It is quite rare to get players who truly think that, because someone is in berserker gear, that they’ll be carrying them. That’s just projection more than anything else.

I watched the videos myself. They’re not as bad as many people make them out to be. They provide a decent baseline comparison.

In part, Nemesis’ videos aren’t really made for the super elite, premade groups, but for the average or lone player. Because of this, the priorities are different, and what many people criticize his builds for in structure play are actually assets in unstructured play. The l33t hate him for this, but his builds and tactics are far superior to what the random pug runs.

That said, I hear the whole “necros have low DPS” thing all the time. Not on the forums, no, but in map and on the dungeons, people think warriors have maximum damage, and guards/eles are permitted only because of their utility. This leaves many classes (ranger, necro, engineer, thief, mesmer) on the chopping block as far as teams go. Players still can’t get past the idea that no, no class was designed to not do damage.

Balance in GW2 can ultimately be defined as such:

The viability of any reasonably made build on any class when juxtaposed to every other build of equal rationality is such that the weighted average advantage of all of the compositions over each other are equal to each other.

Was that so hard? Wait.. you want it simpler? Fine. Let me explain in more depth:

If I make a build that isn’t a joke build or stupidly made (haha power necro with shamen amulet lawlz), then this build would, on average, not be inferior to other builds on other classes. This does not mean that I can beat everything, or that I don’t have an advantage over everything else. No, there are going to be classes and builds who have a clear advantage over me. However, the number of classes and builds that do have an advantage over me should be equal to the classes and builds that I have an advantage over. Likewise, the “advantage” I have, from 60/40 odds to 80/20 odds, should be roughly equal to the odds against me from other builds, coming to a nice 50/50 on average.

It is actually really hard to do with a bunch of incomparables.

As far as dungeon rewards go… they don’t seem to bad.

Something you have to consider is that, although the gold bonus from dungeons can be fairly large, they are also fairly limited in two ways.

#1: The reward is only once per day per account. This puts a throttle on dungeon based inflation that other gold producers simply don’t get.
#2: Dungeons aren’t run by a large portion of the community. Heck, I think its a majority that avoid them…

So, while the theoretical inflation from dungeons might be high, the actual inflation is a lot lower.

This does propose the next question: if the dungeon gold reward were to contribute too much toward inflation, would there be a way to solve it? There actually might be a way to do this: Make dungeon currency more valuable by increasing the amount of things that can be bought from dungeon vendors, and/or substantially increase the number of tokens from those vendors. Then, dungeons could serve as an inexchangeable currency that would only generate profit indirectly via selling the rewards on the TP. This is like what I do with most of my tokens now, where I buy rares, salvage them for mats and ectos, then sell them on the TP.

To match the current wealth of dungeon runs without affecting inflation, you’d have to more than double the amount of tokens received. This all serves as a solution to a problem I’m not sure even exists, though.

Though condis shouldn’t be stronger than power overall, you’re underselling power here. Power damage still has no ramp up time, so it is better at killing anything less than a champion.

Out of the classes I play, the Engineer is always the one that keeps getting hit the hardest. Sure, we get some buffs to skills that no one uses because frankly no one cares, but time and time again we end up getting hit with a nerf that strikes us at the heart of where we were powerful before. It happened twice in this most recent patch:

Elixir R, our best stun breaker, was nerfed into oblivion. It is now useless as anything but a delayed toolbelt rez.
Static Shield lost the ability to counterattack while defending and reduced its stun, making the shield nothing more than an ineffective stall tactic and yet another temporary block, which the engineer already has a few of.

And before that, we had Elixir S nerfed so we lost access to all of our utilities in that period of time. Before that, we lost in-game effectiveness from the proliferation of boon hate. Before that, we had our condition damage nerfed with a new change to incendiary powder that made it less effective. Before that, we had Kit Refinement nerfed into the ground, killing our most effective build at that time. Before that, our grenade direct damage was nerfed after the introduction of sigils on to our kits (finally). Note: these events may not necessarily be in order.

Playing as an engineer has been a continual up-hill battle. It is almost guaranteed that the strategies that you used are going to end up nerfed into the ground with every new patch, and along with that some skills are going to receive nigh meaningless buffs. The balancing strategy Arenanet has employed for engineers has basically been “Nerf the top tier engineer builds, buff useless stuff no one uses, let people figure out some new strategy for engineers that works, then nerf that, too”. Couple that with debilitating bugs that crop up in every patch, and we engineers end up dreading patch day each month. All because their design philosophy in the game is that Engineers shouldn’t do damage, even though damage is king in the game.

I can’t speak for Elemementalists and Rangers because I don’t play them. But I can speak for Engineers, and the fact that we have to stack 25 might in order to play at the effectiveness that other classes play at is a clear indicator of how messed up we are.

If you want to appeal to kids, you need to throw in sex, potty humor, and violence.

Why? It’s because kids, being forbidden from seeing that stuff, want to go out and indulge in it as much as possible to make themselves be all “cool” and stuff. “Dark and Edgey” gets old by the time you graduate highschool, and when you are in college age you’d rather watch My Little Pony.

I noticed a drop in players, too. But… probably not where you guys have. I’m an avid forumer. I pay attention to the speed at which topics and threads move, and for awhile now the forum has been going at a snails pace. It is the slowest that I’ve ever seen it, really.

Although I do have a theory about this. It isn’t so much a “HoT is bad” as much as it is a “HoT wasn’t good enough” theory. Here’s how it goes: the thing with advertising and hyping up an expansion pack is that it can be theoretically anything. It can be the worst thing to happen ever in the history of gaming, but in general people like to speculate about how awesome everything will become. Because of this, the era before the release of an expansion pack is one of the busiest times for an MMO. It is full of people speculating and preparing for stuff that might be fun, as well as those players who are getting a last hurrah out of a game that they will fear to change.

But, once an expansion pack is released, then the infinite possibilities built up by expectations all come crashing down into a singular reality. In this moment, you will loose players based not only on how good the expansion pack is, but how high their expectations were. It doesn’t matter if something is only a minor nuisance. If it isn’t awesome, its the worst thing since EA. So after the pre-pack surge, you’ll get a pack surge when people actually buy it, then you’ll get a dramatic fall off afterward.

#4: There was an adjustable difficulty. While playing the game, you yourself could decide how encounters went. You could make it so you were the “equivalent” of up to 8 players, spawning the respective amount of enemies to fight just yourself. You could increase the levels of enemies up to +4 your own making it so enemies were several times more difficult on an individual level (the level system, like GW2, was a bit inflexible in this regard). You could also make them one level lower than yourself, making them easier.

There was a potion system called “inspirations” which were cheap and allowed you to power up or defense up for content that was too hard to be done for some reason. Ultimately, the game was balanced around using basic enhancements for powers without all of the special effects from higher grade enhancements. This let the game be as easy as you wanted it to be, as hard as you wanted it to be, and it also let you customize yourself to be regular strength, or super powerful.

I’ve never seen an MMO do this before. They all have this “step up or get out of the way” design to them. GW2 Dungeons and bosses are a certain difficulty, and you cannot make them easier or harder, depending on your preference. Because of this, CoH was approachable, and appeased by min/maxers and casuals alike.

#5: It was big. While leveling up my 10 characters, I never went through the same content twice. I never experienced everything, either.

#6: It had a way so you could design quests. There was something called a Mission Architect, which let you design your own string of missions, make your own custom enemies, and write your own stories to fit in them. This. Was. Awesome. Although it was often made just to abuse grinding loopholes (which is hilarious since leveling in that game wasn’t hard), often times you’d come across gems that were intriguing, hilarious, or disturbing. By putting game design into the players hands, near endless content was made, free of charge.

#7: It wasn’t just another fantasy MMO. Look, I gotta level with everyone here: I’m sick and tired of elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, trolls. I’m tired of swords and sorcery. City of Heroes took place in “look out your window” modern day. It combined everything: sometimes you had to fight off wizards. Sometimes, zombies. Sometimes, spec ops. Sometimes, aliens. Sometimes, ninjas. Sometimes, cyberpunk hooligans. Sometimes, eldritch abominations. Sometimes, robots. It was always interesting, and by writing in a modern setting this basically meant everything was possible. You would experience a multitude of concepts and stories without being limited to the generic fantasy setting that everyone and their grandmother uses nowadays.

I was heartbroken when it was shut down. I know games come and games go, but City of Heroes was my game.

DeceiverX.8361:

DiogoSilva.7089:

A good videogame should be about the journey, not only about the destination.

It should be about the journey. A journey I planned on having trying something new instead of smashing my face into effectively the same content as the same character I’ve been playing for the past three years. I bought the expansion ONLY for the elite specializations. Literally, that is the ONLY reason I bought it. No other. I could care less about new maps, new skins, new story, new encounters… nothing. Just something new to actually experience the game in a different way.

Liewec.2896:

why are you in such a hurry to run out of content? XD
for once i’m happy that theres progression!

I’m not is the thing. Unlike people who rush to finish completion and collections, I’ve not even uncovered half of the map three years in and 2000 hours in of WvW on my main character alone. I’m not bored, and there’s still plenty of content in the vanilla game to do. I like to go at my own pace, not at a pace dictated to me by anyone else. To play the game in a fun and meaningful way, however, I have to play in a way dictated to me by another entity, and strictly speaking, I don’t find that fun, and it exhausts content much, much faster than I’d like to.

PopeUrban made a post a few pages back about this game being the most alt-friendly in history or somesuch claim… I’m sorry but I completely disagree. While I came from a ruthless, open-PK Korean “mob grind” game, players could take the level requirements off of any armor, and there was no such thing on armor and weapons as account or soul binding; you could take a literal endgame piece of gear, take out the level requirements down to starter levels and stats, equip all of it on a fresh noob, and go from the starter town right to the equivalent of level 60+ content, gaining full EXP per kill. In the starter levels, going to a high level zone would actually give like 5-6 levels per kill. Experienced players could max an alt with no instant-level effects in under a day given the budget to do so, which came with experience.

The amount of nonsense time-gating apparent for this system is completely absurd and ruins the entire purpose of the expansion for me; to play more of GW2 and explore new systems and ways of playing without feeling the need to be on a treadmill to do so first.

Couldn’t agree more. The simplest way to explain it is like this:

HoT Story = New book
New Maps = New play area
Masteries = New playpen
Legendaries = Decorations
Precursor Crafting = Busywork
New Specs = New Toys

I want new toys. I don’t want to have to read a book, drive to a new play area and climb a mountain of monkey bars just to get my new toys.

A thought occurred to me: if players spent all the time that they actually spend complaining about grinding to actually play the game, then would they be done with the “grinding” by now?

I do wonder about it. I don’t think anyone here has had experience with an old school MMO before. Let me recount the history a bit: The “max level” was not something you were meant to achieve. Your level was actually the point of progression, not gear or alternative XP or something like that. Because of this, the amount of time you had to invest in things grew exponentially as time went on. And it wasn’t just leveling, either. No, your skills could be divided up into several different categories, and you were lucky if you could simultaneously train them. Getting money, getting materials, training skills, raising your level, and crafting were frequently completely separate tasks.

Here’s the kicker to it: these were all subscription MMOs. Prolonging gameplay was a big thing, so everything was designed to take more than a month to accomplish. GW2, by comparison, is no comparison. You can level things while simultaneously getting money and getting materials. It is all really convenient.

A cheese build is a build that’s too Gouda to be true.

I did a few tests in PVE, mostly for the scrapper. Explosives/Firearms/Scrapper.

The first thing that I noticed is that camping bomb kit has lost quite a bit of power. Originally, in a no-might scenario the bomb kit + hammer combo had roughly equal damage to pure hammer, but after the update pure hammer had higher damage than swapping between hammer and bomb kit. The only consistently added buff that I tested on was fury. In a maximum might scenario, hammer dps and mixed bomb kit + hammer dps were equalized.

On the one hand, this is more convenient for me, since I found constantly swapping between bomb kit for damage and hammer for utility to be annoying, particularly because it made shock shield a much less reliable block. On the other hand, this doesn’t really represent a buff to hammer insomuch as it represents a nerf to bombs.

I also did a bunch of tests to compare the various traits and their damage output. Both with no might and maximum might. Always under fury. The results were the following:

Glass Cannon vs. Blasting Zone: Glass cannon is the superior trait and any level of might, but the difference between the two grows substantially as you gain more might. For reference, a power scrapper has around 2657 attack at base, and 5% of this is the equivalent to 132.9 bonus power. At maximum might this is 3407 power and 170.4 additional power. It beats out blasting zone, so long as you can maintain Glass Cannon for 90%-70% of the time. However, if you constantly find yourself beaten down or you’re not running a power build, Blasting Zone will beat out glass cannon.

Vanilla Engi is slightly different, sitting at 127.9 effective power at base, but this still demonstrates the superiority of Glass Cannon.

Aim Assisted Rocket vs. Big Boomer: Rocket is the superior trait at any level of might or fury. The damage bonus from boomer simply isn’t much, only about 9% crit damage (changing 220% to 229%). The vitality exists, but 1.3k health isn’t really a significant bonus.

I can’t find any game mode where you would take Big Boomer. Power builds will take rocket, condi builds would take short fuse.

Orbital Command vs. Shrapnel: In low might situations, Orbital Command is better. In high might situations, Shrapnel is better with the bomb kit. It is fairly self explanatory: If you have the might to back it up, the bleed is worthwhile. If you don’t, then it isn’t.

Mine Trail vs. Shrapnel. This is where things get a bit more… unusual. For this test I added an additional condition: vigor, dodge when possible. You can debate the practicality of it all later. But, at maximum might and fury, Mine Trail and Shrapnel is roughly equal. At low might, Mine Trail beats Shrapnel. If you dodge at any less than maximum frequency under vigor, Shrapnel or Orbital Command beat Mine Trail, depending on might status.

For Vanilla Engi, Mine Trail is better than Shrapnel, at any might situation, at point blank range.

The grandmaster traits are hard to compare, largely because they are all vastly different in nature. The pure DPS analysis ignores quite a few things. The pros that Orbital Command is an unblockable AoE attack that triggers at range and is a blast finisher aren’t things one can simply dismiss. I can’t dismiss that alacrity helps it, either. Orbital command is really consistent and easy to use, but in ideal conditions it is the weakest option, inferior to Shrapnel in PVE if you have the might. Mine Trail is theoretically the strongest option, but it is also highly impractical and obtuse to use, requiring you to dodge through immobile opponents to get maximum damage. Mine Trail is also excellent in PVP, both for invulnerable damage and area control.

The scales of damage between these are not far. Under a full might + fury scenario, the numbers I’m getting for DPS are 9,190 for OC, 9,599 for Shrapnel, 9,554 for Mine Trail. We’re talking about differences of around 4% in damage total. At max might, pure hammer does 9,101 DPS with OC, 9,498 with Mine Trail.

For a newbie with a sub-par group, I would recommend Blasting Zone, Aim Assisted Rocket, Orbital Command with the weapon of your choice. For an experienced player with a good group, I would recommend Glass Cannon, Aim Assisted Rocket, Shrapnel while focusing on bombs and grenades. Only take Mine Trail in situations where you know you’ll reliably use it (I.E. against Ensolyss where you’ll dodge through a lot of his attacks and he’s always in your face).

For vanilla engi I get about 10,179 with Mine Trail, 9,572 with Shrapnel.

The grind really isn’t that bad. You get masteries by basically doing anything in HoT. It takes awhile, but unless you’re running around in circles killing the same 3 enemies, it isn’t a grind. You explore the map, check out the metas, maybe get parts of your collections done, and the next thing you know you’re nearly full on masteries and the whole world is open to you. No rush, either. The masteries are account bound, so once you have them you’ve got them for good.

Right now, I’d rank Daredevil DPS as #3, behind two other classes: Herald, Tempest. And tempest is a technicality, as there are plenty of situations where Daredevil does more.

Daredevil DPS in my experience is highly variable. It depends on several things:

#1: The location of the target. Next to a ridge or against a wall is preferred.
#2: The size of the target. Bigger is better.
#3: How well paced their attacks are. An even paced moveset is best.
#4: If they have projectiles that can be reflected, and how well I can predict it.

It all comes down to how much I can cut loose with Weakening Charge. Against a near-ledge target or a cornered enemy, I can cut loose a full fury with Weakening Charge, and do just massive damage. Against large targets, too.

Against smaller targets I have to use the Bound -> Vault -> Charge -> Auto to maximize DPS, with Fist Flurry thrown in for good measure. If the target is particularly troublesome, I can tank it by standing in its face and using vault in place to avoid each attack. That tactic is… surprisingly effective against certain enemies. Against enemies with wide sweeping attacks, I’ll occasionally use dust strike -> auto -> dust strike to disable their moves. Or sometimes I’ll just chain my stuns to keep something disabled.

Even against dangerous enemies I can stay engaged for quite the time. I definitely recommened channeled vigor as a heal, because its healing potential is massive and that extra 1.5 dodges means quite a bit of maintained engagement time.

As for the competitors…

Tempest beats Daredevil against large targets, stationary targets, and enemies that must be engaged at range. As much as I like unload, the fact is that font + fireball is better. Tempest loses to Daredevil against mobile targets, or targets that you have to engage at melee range, and also in situations where sustained damage is unavoidable. The glass is real here, but I’ve found the DD more than capable of surviving.

Herald beats Daredevil in most circumstances, except that in which sustained damage is unavoidable in melee. Heralds don’t have a real “heal” as much as they have a few utility skills that grant health along with their other functions, so I’ve found that in bouts where I need sustain, the Herald starts to fall short. Otherwise, the herald does stupid good DPS by just auto attacking with sword. There is a note here: Heralds have to sacrifice a lot to deal with projectiles, but thieves sacrifice very little.

I support the option to hide any piece of armor.

I myself am not one for the boots. But the shirt… that is the one I want. The main reason? I want my male characters to hulk out from time to time. Maybe it is because I grew up with He-man, but I like the combination of Rambo + Braveheart.

Granted, it does look silly on female toons, though.

guardian.6489:

I think part of the problem with teaching the basics is that I think even as the game was being developed many advanced techniques weren’t anticipated by the developers.

I mean we primarily use combo fields for might stacking with blast finishers, healing with water fields, stealth with smoke fields and swiftness with static fields. Otherwise other finishers and combo field are ignored. When was the last time you even payed attention to projectile finishers?

So really I think the seed of the problem is that Anet didn’t even anticipate what the high-end PvE metagame would even look like which meant they couldn’t really make a proper tutorial about it. That being said, they really need to go back and figure out ways to teach players about these especially if they want to continue to increase the difficulty of future content.

This… is utterly true. This is also similar to Anets stance on balance: make a few changes then let things settle for awhile. The whole thing is based around letting players find their own meta, and thus Anet balances via tapping with a 20 foot pole.

This is also one of the bigger flaws with having in-game tutorials beyond explaining the basics. While it is hard to find anyone who would argue about teaching dodge or combo fields, it is hard to find someone who would agree that it is O.K. to teach only specific DPS rotations and structured team roles for the current dungeon meta. This is because the meta changes, and what is relevant back then might not be relevant now.

It is a dangerous line to tread between teaching someone how things work vs. teaching someone a restricted playstyle on a soon dated meta. My biggest fear is that it will be crossed, then a year later I’ll have to make a 5 post topic about “Why the tutorials are outdated and do more harm than good”.

Canakun.8031:

This seems like projection. I was talking about people who detract from the strictness of the meta do so because they want to play how they want. It was necessary to label the group in order to make a point involving the group.

This thinking is backwards. The meta isn’t the norm. It is imposed by an outside force. A person doesn’t detract from the meta. They have to willingly adhere to it.

Canakun.8031:

Err, no. ‘The meta’ in this instance is the most optimal way to do things. It isn’t ‘created’ by a few people, it’s eventually worked towards and found out by many people, over a long period of time.

History lesson: while the meta was being worked out, there was a contradiction of evidence that had to be worked around, which is why the theoretical best meta wasn’t working the best. You may remember this as the “heavies” issue. Basically, 4 warriors 1 mesmer or 5 warriors were outpreforming any theoretically optimal composition. The hypotheses for this were many, and all were true to some degree:

1)People had more practice on warriors from CoH1 farming.
2)Warrior’s inherent bulk allowed a large amount of leeway for mistakes.
3)The playstyle for the warrior was simple to pick up.
4)The ability to constantly rez allies made wipes much rarer.

Basically, the theoretical best composition only worked assuming perfect play. In real circumstances, the factors that people weren’t considering (bulk, ease of use, newb friendliness, allowances for mistakes) were overpowering the mathematical advantages that theoretical comps had.

This is still true today. The theoretical best performance doesn’t always match the actual best performance, both on a personal level and a global level. Not all factors are accounted for. The meta as you know it is an elaborate work of fiction that people have chosen to believe is true.

Canakun.8031:

And nobody has forced you to do anything – and I’d love for you to stop using the term oppressive. Your victim complex is your business, but please respect that this is an inappropriate use of the word.

You have already demonstrated that the meta is so ingrained in your head that you see it as the default orientation of all players. Given the unwavering devotion, along with the readiness at which “detractors” are categorized and treated with hostility, along with the subtle non-intellectual prevalence over the population as a whole, then I’d have to say that oppressive is the perfect word.

Canakun.8031:

PHIW mightn’t be against the existence of ‘a meta,’ but the PHIW crowd in this game have refused to acknowledge the freedom they’ve had for the past three years to play the game however they darn well want to and instead just complain about people who clear content faster than them.
Even with a ‘new meta,’ there will be people who want to play how they want, and how they want may not necessarily fit in the meta, and they may be removed from a meta group, and they may moan about it on the forums, again.

“To clear content faster than them?”? First, superiority complex. The fact that players want to play as tanks and healers is self-evident. It is not dependent on them being contrarian, inferior, or envious. Second, for the sake of reward balancing it is a legitimate concern. Third, it is freedom only in the sense that there is no physical limitation that prevents a player from doing it. The societal pressure of the meta is much more severe than you’d think. There have been many threads on the forums of players sharing their experiences where their casual parties get ruined by other players who wanted to metazerk.

The problem with the zerker meta is more complicated than you think. The zerker meta has an inherent (and relatively unique) problem in that common roles aren’t enforced. If that is changed and tank/healer are enforced, then everything else just becomes class balance issues.

Canakun.8031:

You’ve developed this idea of me and my opinions in your head and you will stop at nothing to prove that I’m that way.

The biggest problem is, you’ve done nothing but reaffirm this assumption. You’ve demonstrated that the meta is so ingrained in your head that you think it the default. You’ve demonstrated both your superiority complex and how readily you’ll categorize demonize players who disagree with you. You already went out of your way to announce that you are winning the argument, which itself is just barbaric posturing translated into language. You’ve already started this thread with the bad caricature aimed at anyone who criticizes the zerker meta. So, what evidence is there to the contrary?

I already quoted the appropriate definition of grasp in parenthesis. You’re also using the ambiguity of “some” to change the meaning. If you wanted to express the variability of reasons, you would’ve pluralized reasons. In a singular reason, “some” expresses degree or scale, not an unknown proportion of non-implied variability. BTW, “difficulty grasping or understanding” means “mentally incapable”.

Canakun.8031:

I certainly could do with better writing skills, and you can consider me an elitist all you want.
I like to think of myself as more of a realist, though.

I feel the necessity to quote myself on this: I’ve never met someone who didn’t justify their prejudices in experience. That’s why bigotry is so pervasive: no bigot thinks they’re a bigot. They just think they’re “right”.

I personally find the idea that people couldn’t understand the gem store conversion system to be horrifying. I don’t know about anyone else, but by the 4th grade I knew about fractions and rounding and rates. I was 10 years old when I learned everything I’d need to know about the gem and gold conversion system, and I was a poor kid who went to a public school in a poor neighborhood.

I can’t remember where I read this (probably before the the full release from the game), but the cash shop is operated by an independent company. One that is probably commission by NCsoft themselves. Thus, the actual development team for pretty much everything else in the game doesn’t have that much control over how gems are handled. It makes sense when you think of this change as one that is done by the management of an out-of-touch company.

Seriously, the complete removal of a customized conversion system was a bad move. It’s like removing all the cents from the U.S. dollar. My simple suggestion: put it back. You can keep the whole pre-made deal thing, but you must have an option for customized purchases. Put it behind a second screen if it is such a problem.

Another note: a person’s inability to interface with the system isn’t necessarily the system’s fault. Something my award-winning (not an exaggeration) website design instructor told me is that no matter how simple and brain dead you make something, someone will always be deader in the head area.

Personally I like the hybrid nature of D/D. Poison on auto, bleeds + whirl finisher spam, and a trait that gives a proc chance for more poison per hit.

My suggestion would be to make dagger training 50% better (either 50% chance to proc or increase the poison duration to 3 seconds), and increase the evade time on Death Blossom to 1/2 second.

Well… I wouldn’t really call it a gear grind. If you have ascended gear, converting sinister to viper is pretty cheap.

The fact is that, as Anet introduces more gear prefixes, there will be some that are better than others for different circumstances. Players will want these, so they’ll go out and play the content to get them. Most of the gear prefixes released, aren’t exactly better than the others. Take Marauder, for example. All it is, is berserker with some valk pieces thrown in.

Viper and Trailblazer are the exceptions. Particularly because they introduce a new type of offensive stat. Expertise is pretty big. Concentration, the other new stat, isn’t as important, since most players already built around permanent fury and might.

Jia Shen.4217:

Now for the other issue. You DO NOT have to have ascended everything gear to be successful at this raid. You do however need everything exotic. So this isn’t for the very casual player who doesn’t even bother to gear with something other than random junk that they picked up in loot. Right now my guild has gotten the boss down to 40% health and we only have ascended weapons and about half with ascended trinkets. That extra 1-2% in stats isn’t going to cover for anything here.

See. that’s where you’re wrong. having full ascended weapons and trinkets means you’re doing 10% more damage than exotics. That’s equivalent to 43 additional seconds on the clock. That’s a pretty big chunk right there from gear tiers alone.
Ascended armor itself isn’t necessary, but the trinkets and weapons are.

The type of gear you wear is a big factor, too. The difference between damage of something like Knight and Berserker is around 50%, which is 146 seconds on the clock. Add that on to the previous, and being inefficiently geared at the exotic level would be equivalent to doing the fight efficiently geared, but with a 4.8 minute enrage timer. Don’t forget, this is also with specific builds and classes.

What you’re doing here doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that you don’t need to be optimally built to succeed at raids, but the only thing you’ve brought is evidence against your very own claim. “You don’t need to be optimally built! I mean, we don’t do it, and we can barely get the first boss past half HP…”. You can’t wait to do it either, because in months when everyone else has it down pat nobody will put up with newbs anymore.

I hate negative reinforcement. Allow me to explain how this works with an example:

In another old school MMO the developers introduced a now infamous online item: the party hat. The Party Hat is much like any kind of limited skin or item in this game: cosmetic only, released only for a brief period of time near launch, never expected to really amount to anything other than a way to say “hey, I played the game at this time!”. However, they made one mistake: they made party hats tradeable.

Now, why is the party hat infamous, you ask? For the unaffiliated: the party hat is one of the most valuable digital items you can possibly possess. Specific colors are so expensive that they are literally more valuable than the maximum amount of currency the game can physically process. I believe in real world currency, the party hat is worth something like $1500 in real life cash, making it a cash cow for real world traders.

The jetpack being tradeable, limited edition item in itself is actually more than just cosmetic. Far more, actually. For you see, the price will rise. Maybe in 3 years, 5 years, 8 years, however long the game is running, the price will rise. So, when a player receives the molten jetpack as a random drop, they aren’t receiving a cosmetic item. They are receiving 8,000 gold. Because that is what these kinds of items will be worth in the future.

I have to ask if Anet is happy giving out 8,000 gold randomly in extremely rare circumstances to players. Yes, it will make players feel special. They’ll feel special because they’ll eventually become obscenely rich from a random drop of a cosmetic item. So, whenever there is an item that is limited distribution, tradeable, and a randomized drop, then GW2 is baiting players with a lottery: play our game, grind whatever hamster wheel we put in front of you, or else you will lose out on the chance to be obscenely rich in the future.

I hate things like this, and not just for their economic impact. Whenever I make an alt, I come up with a concept on what they’ll be like. Currently I don’t have a desire for any of the temporary items, but what if that changes in the future? What if I decide that, with how a particular toon is designed, that the molten backpack would look great on him? Do I have to grind every event that gets released for fear that, one day, I’ll suddenly care about those rare limited-edition items?

That’s one of the reasons why I quit playing another online game: for a contest, I came up with an idea and design for a weapon. It didn’t win, awhile later (during a period in which I wasn’t playing the game), a similar item was released for a limited time. I came back later to find that this opportunity had come and gone, and was never going to return… it still makes me sad just thinking about it.

Alright, I decided to do some number crunching, again. This is obtained in PVP while wearing no amulet, runes, or sigils, so this is basically the base damage of each skill. This time I’ll lead with the reference materials:

Lightning Whip: 448 damage, 300 range. 0.95 seconds attack speed.
Dragon’s Claw: 137 × 3 damage. 400 range. 1 second attack speed.
Vapor Blade: 117 × 2 damage, 1 × 6 vulnerability (x2). 1 second attack speed.
Impale: 178 damage. 1 × 8 bleed. 300 range. 1.04 seconds attack speed.
Fireball: 332 damage. 1200 range. 1.4 second attack speed.
Lava Font: 1,252 damage. 5 targets. 4 second duration. 1200 range. 180 radius. fire field.

With that out of the way, lets look at overloads.

Fire Overload: 426 per pulse. 1 × 3 burning per pulse. 10 seconds of might per pulse. x 8 whirl finisher. 11 pulses. 180 range. 4.5 second activation time, 20 second cooldown. Total off 11 × 10 might, 11 × 3 burning, 4686 damage total.

BUG: No target listing on fire overload.

Water Overload: 392 per pulse. 0.2 scaling per pulse. 3220 final heal. 0.75 scaling on final heal. 8 seconds of regen at end. 1 condi cleansed per pulse. 360 range. 20 second cooldown. 4 pulses + final heal. 2.75 second activation time.
Total of 4788 healing.

BUG: No target listing on water overload.

Air Overload: 302 damage. 1 × 10 vulnerability. 3 targets. 3 second field duration. Attack interval 0.25 seconds. 360 range. Lightning Field. 14 pulses total. 4.75 second activation time. 20 second recharge.
Total of 14 × 10 vulnerability, 4228 damage.

Earth Overload: 266 damage, 1 × 3 cripple per pulse, 1 × 4 immobilize at the end. 1 × 1 second of protection per pulse. 5 targets. 1 second interval. 240 range. Blast Finisher. 4 pulses + final hit. 20 second recharge, 5 second activation time. Provides a break bar.

BUG: Does not list the break bar in the tooltip, or what happens when the bar is broken.

Note: with Harmonious Conduit and Elemental Enchantment, the recharge of each overload goes down to 14 seconds.

A lot of people have usage complaints regarding the overloads. I’m not going to be looking at that, since as a PVE-er I probably wont’ have much issue using the overloads. What I’ll be looking at are the statistics.

Currently, Fire and Air overload are fine. Air overload has a tooltip DPS of 890, not factoring in vulnerability. This is higher than the tooltip dps of 718 that fireball + lava font will give. So, if there are 6 seconds of available time between fights, Air Overload is worth using. Fire Overload is even more monstrous, doing more damage and buffing while also burning. The activation time of Fire Overload makes it blend almost seamlessly into the duration of Lava Font, making it basically additional damage over just auto attacking in that timespace.

The kittenes to balance are Water and Earth. Water is a tough one. Whether you are using staff or D/D, you’ll be sitting in water attunement for 3 seconds after going through the standard rotation. Unlike Air, it isn’t wise to sit in water to pre-charge the attunement, as healing is an on-demand skill. This puts water in this strange spot where you would need to have additional healing, but it isn’t so necessary as to cause your teammates to die. I can still see use for it, though, so for now I won’t touch it.

Earth Overload is, quite frankly, nigh useless. It doesn’t do enough damage to warrant use on that side. The ele is at the bottom of the AA war, so 8/9 times enemies will be chasing you down. This makes the PBAoE cripple and immobilize nearly useless, only keeping chasing enemies at slightly longer than arms length. It gives AoE protection, but less than elemental attunement or sand squall. The blast finisher at the end is the most difficult to use blast finisher in the game, having a delay of 10 seconds, so it might as well not even exist.

It is so broken, I’m not even sure how to fix it. Immediately I’d say triple its damage, and add a blast finisher at the start of the overload. Back-end the damage for counter-play.

Now, Warhorn Skills.

Heat Sink: 3 × 10 might, boon duplication. 600 range, 600 radius. 0.75 seconds activation time, 30 second recharge.

Wildfire: 211 Damage, 1 × 2 burning, 8 pulses, 180 width, 600 length, fire field. 0.75 seconds activation time. 30 second recharge.

Tidal Surge: 323 damage, 1203 healing, 8 seconds of regen. 240 knockback. 35 second cooldown. BUG: No range indicator.

Water Globe: 470 Healing, 4 pulses, 1 second per pulse, 180 radius, 750 range. Unblockable(?). 0.5 second activation time, 35 second cooldown.

Cyclone: 288 damage. 10 seconds of swiftness. 180 pull. 9 Impacts. 3 targets. 240 width. 750 length. Unblockable. 1 second cast time. 25 second cooldown.

Lightning Orb: 115 damage, 1 × 10 vulnerability per hit. Interval 0.25 seconds. 1200 range, 300 radius. 25 second recharge. Does 9 hits against a stationary small target.

Sand Squall: 2 seconds of protection, 2 seconds of duration increase on all boons. 600 radius. Blast finisher. 30 second recharge. Actually self applies about 8 seconds of protection.

Dust Storm: 96 damage, 1 × 10 vulnerability, 1 × 2 blind. 5 second duration, 2 second interval. 180 radius, 750 range. 0.75 second activation time. 30 second cooldown. Hits a stationary target about 6 times. Makes a series of storms along its path.

Notable Warhorn Traits: 20 second cooldown reduction + group stunbreak on use (10 second recharge.

I can appreciate what the devs are trying to do here. But it doesn’t work that well. The devs are making a glass buffer. I’ve seen this concept done before, and it rarely works. On the relative side, the ele is incredibly squishy, even when built for durability. Because of this, the ele needs utilities in order to survive. The off-hand dagger provides these utilities via movement and control. The off-hand focus provides it via control and invulnerability/blocks.

The warhorn does not have movement. It does not have invulnerability. It has paltry control. What we are left with is a buffer that can’t support itself. A lot of these skills by themselves would be great. But without the ability to defend themselves, the warhorn using tempest is left as fodder.

The Fire and Earth Warhorn skills are fine. So I’ll concentrate on the water/air skills.

Water Globe and Lightning Orb are interesting ideas, but “interesting” doesn’t make it good. These skills are essentially moving wells. They suffer the same weakness as wells, but magnified. When one is confronted with a well, they simply walk out of said well. But with Lightning Orb being mobile, “walking out” is now accomplished much more easily. Water Globe in particular is really bad, because it is a support skill, and to make use of that support skill your allies have to drop what they are doing and run along with it.

This problem exists in both PVP and PVE. Now, there are a couple of ways to solve this. #1 is to make it so instead of a traveling projectile, they behave like dust storm and wildfire, and just linger along the travel path for its entire length. #2 is to make it so these skills are not multi hit skills, instead just cause their effect once to whatever target they hit.

Cycle and Tidal Surge are the control skills, however they lack any defensive utility. Cyclone exists solely to pull enemies in line with the other warhorn skills. Tidal Surge is basically a heal with a long delay knockback. Both have a cast time, then a long delay for using. Immediately, the first solution I see is to make their control effects instant along their path instead of on a long delay. I would also make tidal surge cleanse conditions, as currently tempests don’t have that much condition cleansing. Likewise, it would be very beneficial for one of those skills to have a block/invulnerabilty attatched to them.

So I guess in short, the warhorn changes would be the following:

#1: Tidal Surge’s control effect is instant after cast.
#2: Water Globe is converted into a 180 × 750 area, and pulses a heal + condition cleanse in its entire area 4 times.
#3: Cyclone reflects projectiles for the length of its animation.
#4: Lightning Orb now hits all targets once, but discharges a large bolt that does 920 damage (at 100o power) and 8 stacks of vulnerability for 10 seconds.

And now for Shouts.

Rebound: already being changed so I won’t cover that.

Wash Away The Pain: 3560 heal, 0.3 scaling. 1.5 second activation time. 25 second cooldown.

Feel the Burn: 266 damage, 1 × 4 burning 600 radius, 5 targets, 20 second cooldown. AoE Fire Aura for 5 seconds

Flash-Freeze: 186 damage, 1 × 3 chill, AoE frost aura for 5 seconds. 5 targets, 600 range, 25 second cooldown, 0.25 second activation time.

Shock and Aftershock: 398 damage 1 × 6 cripple, 1 × 2 immobilize. AoE Magnetic Aura for 5 seconds. Blast Radius 240, 600 range. 0.25 second activation time. 50 second cooldown.

Eye of the Storm: 1 × 5 AoE super Speed. 600 radius. AoE stun Break. 45 second cooldown. BUG: Number of targets isn’t listed.

Notable Traits: Tempestuous Aria: 2 × 10 might per shout, 1 × 3 weakness per shout.

The shouts are a very mixed bag. It is hard to have a frame of reference. In general, I’d say the problem with shouts is the same problem with warhorn: Glass Buffer. Good news, however, is that shouts aren’t exclusive with other utilities, so it isn’t as bad as the warhorn.

On the PVE side the shouts are in competition with arcane skills. With Elemental Surge, the arcane skills become just as powerful and versatile as the shouts do. For comparison:

Arcane Wave: 372 damage,+150 ferocity for 15 seconds, 24 second cooldown, instant activation. Blast Finisher. Causes either 1 × 5 burning, 1 × 3 chill, 1 × 5 blind, or 1 × 1 immobilize.

Traited, Feel the Burn does less damage, has less versatility, and is less controlled. The only things that it has that arcane wave can’t do better is weakness. So, my suggestion is a 33% increase in the direct damage of Feel the Burn.

Shock and Aftershock is good, mostly because it is an AoE Magnetic Field, which makes it a life saver. Flash Freeze is alright I guess. I’m comparing it to Suffer from the reaper. Suffer has condition transfers, the same damage, same chill duration, longer recharge but shorter activation time. Flash freeze has AoE frost Aura, might stacking, and weakness.

Eye of the Storm is good relative to Ele’s other stun breakers, but not that great globally. Eye of the Storm should provide a Shocking Aura to make it more useful, and to complete the theme.

Finally, the traits. Probably the biggest turnoff with the tempest are the traits. They are highly focused, often times accomplishing things that should be baseline quite frankly. They are uninspired, and exist mostly to deal with flaws that are innate to the classes other abilities. As such, they contribute very little.

On the Minor Side, Speedy Conduit isn’t that good of a trait. Eles generally aren’t lacking for speed, having many ways to apply swiftness and many movement skills. Speedy Conduit basically exists for those who want to have speed, but don’t want to apply it properly like everyone else. Hardy Conduit is better, but it still leaves you vulnerable for 40% of the Overload’s animation. My suggestion here is to increase the duration of Hardy Conduit’s Protection to 5 seconds base. Likewise, merge Lucid Singularity and Speedy Conduit.

In the adept line you have Gale Song, Latent Stamina, and Unstable Conduit. Gale Song is good. Latent Stamina is meh: it is trying to replace the role that cantrips provided by giving water swap a vigor buff, but compared to the defense and long duration vigor, it just doesn’t compare. Unstable Conduit is pretty bad. Most Auras are clutch maneuvers, and giving an Aura at the end of the overload is 5 seconds too late.

Increase the vigor duration of Latent Stamina to 5 seconds, and make it so Unstable Conduit casts the Aura at the start of Overload, and not the end.

On the Master line we have Tempestuous Aria, Earthen Proxy, and Harmonious Circuit. Tempestuous Aria is fine, but it is lacking that oh-so needed cooldown reduction. Earthen Proxy is not as good as it sounds. By changing the damage reduction from -33% to -40%, you are increasing the effective health of an ele by just 9%, and given how low an ele’s health is, that isn’t much. Harmonious Conduits is fairly generic, but it isn’t that good. I would merge Harmonious Conduits with Unstable Conduits.

In the Grandmaster Tier we have Imbued Melodies, Lucid Singularity, and Elemental Bastion. I already merged lucid singularity with another trait. Imbued Melodies is one of those traits where, I appreciate what it is doing, but I don’t actually know how effective it might be in practice, so leave it there. Elemental Bastion probably should’ve been part of Powerful Aura, but as it stands it is far inferior to just blasting a water field. It is a pretty paltry heal, so at base I would double the amount of healing that Bastion provides.

So, in summation:

#1: Merge Lucid Singularity and Speedy Conduit as the adept master trait. This leaves an open spot in the Grandmaster line.
#2: Add a 20% cooldown trait to Tempestuous Aria.
#3: Increase the protection duration of Hardy Conduit by 2 seconds to 5 seconds base.
#4: Merge Harmonious Conduits and Unstable Conduit. Make Unstable Conduit Grant the aura at the beginning of its use.
#5: Double the base healing and scaling healing of Elemental Bastion.
#6: Increase the Vigor duration of Latent Stamina to 5 seconds.
#7: Change Earthen Proxy to be a 52% increase in protection strength, making Protection now cut direct damage in half.

You may notice that this leaves two open trait spots. One at the master tier, and one at the grandmaster tier. This is where my analysis fails me: I don’t have the creativity to come up with new traits that will help out the Tempest. Currently the Tempest is the class with the most changes proposed, so with all of the above I’d be frightened of adding anything too strong.

“Guild Wars 2 is the worst MMO ever released, except for all the ones that came before it”.
~ Winston Churchill… ish.

You know, there is a minecraft mod called Iguana tweaks. This is a mod I hate, since basically all it does is make the game inconvenient. You move slower, you don’t heal up, food sucks now, your inventory space is shot, mining takes forever… just a horrible mod. And yet, some people just plain love this mod.

Why am I talking about a minecraft mod? Because it epitomizes why many people hate GW2: There are a lot of features that GW2 removed from standard MMOs that players absolutely loved. To these people, it wasn’t an inconvenience, but a way of life.

*Grind. Worst game I played had 30+ skills, 99 levels in each, and each can take weeks to level even if you no-life. Now, some players like this, because it gives them a simple goal they have to work for, and without a carrot on the stick, a lot of people lose meaning in a game.

*Disproportionate PVP. Same game as above, each level of gear cost 10 times more than the last, with the best gear in the game costing more money that the gold cap. Some people like this, because they don’t want an even playing field. They want their endless slog to amount to sheer statistical pwnage in PVP.

*Fixed combat roles. The most recent MMO I’m playing has something like this, where you need one of tank/healer/resource management/ DPS in order to do pretty much anything. The fact is, some people like being necessary and crucial to their team due to their role, and like that everything hinges on a proper role performance. This provides a sense of guidance to players and their playstyle.

*P2P trading. Fact is, some players like to pretend they are in a foreign bazaar, trying to haggle their rares. They like the thrill of finding deals, and making big bank through sheer audacity alone.

*Harsh penalties for death. One game I played had it so death made you lose all but 3 of your items and your entire inventory. Some people like that thrill of danger.

*Long travel times and mounts. Some players like the remote and exclusive feel of different areas. The convenience of the WP takes away the experience from the journey.

*Additional resource management. Some players like having to deal with mana, or attack items. since it provides more depth to build around. The more factors you can adjust, the more depth you have to build around.

*Likewise, large build depth. GW2 is fairly locked in with classes and traits go, but some games have such large build diversity that it is nigh incomprehensible. Personally, this is one I like. Give me a hundred things to tweak, and you’ll keep me occupied with just theorycrafting for days.

*Limited crafting and inventory resources. Some players like competing for resources, since it brings value to obscure corners of the world, and strange monsters to fight. Managing inventory can be another “resource” players have to deal with.

*Animations and dodges. Some people want the game to be lower maintenance, and don’t want to have to deal with dodging or placement with uber attacks.

*Instances. Many players want to be isolated from other players, and hate having to deal with randoms who might come up and interrupt what they are doing.

I think GW2 is a good game. The way things run are extremely responsive, smooth to play, easy to get in to but hard to master, and there is a lot of anti-hassle measures. The update philosophy, balance frequency, balance methodology, story writing, and the gem store focus are crap, but this makes GW2 stagnant, not bad. But, the fact is that GW2 has many features that players don’t like or want, and GW2 is missing many features that are present in other MMOs.

Heck, I listed a boat load of features I miss from CoH in another thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-do-you-miss-from-other-games/page/2#post4055272

There is no such thing as unintentional design.

One of the issues with the Thief is that the whole idea behind the class has a pretty big limitation. Much like how Reapers have to be the most formidable in a straight up brawl, thieves have to be the weakest. Let me explain:

The Thief is a class that has countless escapes and the ability to approach in stealth, so they always have the first strike advantage and they have high burst. This makes them both evasive and aggressive, and changes much of the fight to be not about necessarily killing a thief, but fighting one off. Considering that, if there were a class that was overall weaker in a straight up fight (basically you both whipped out melee weapons and went right up into each others’ face), then that class could never be played. It would auto-lose to the thief, who would approach from stealth and kill the class on the Thief’s own terms.

The Thief class inherently “unfair”, in that sense. While it is fun to play Thieves, it is not fun to be killed by Thieves. So, to balance the theme of a “invisible high burst” class, they have to make everybody stronger. Strong enough that they can fight off a Thief even with their first move advantage. The ability for the Thief to pick and choose their fights mandates this kind of balance.

This puts Anet into a sticky wicket. Thief players want to be stronger, but thieves have to be the weakest. If you increase Thief damage or durability, you run the very real risk of making another class obsolete.

I wouldn’t mind more group buffs, myself. I don’t PVP anymore, so I wouldn’t be able to say what group buffs are needed, but as it stands thieves have to trait pretty heavily to get any sort of team support. An idea I heard once was to make the AoE effect of venoms baseline, and roll the recharge reduction into Leeching Venoms. Restoring some of the lost boon stealing and adding a few more methods of boon stealing is another.

Maybe I am doing this wrong. I just timed reaper’s shroud to find out how long it takes to preform 20 auto attacks, and came up with 1.01.5, coming to a total animation time of 3.075 seconds. I think the issue is pacing: The last hit of Shroud Knight actually takes forever, it is just all in the aftercast. This is wtih reaper’s onslaught, btw.

Reaper’s AA: 320 DPS.

Death’s Charge: 1.5 seconds
Infusing Terror: Instant
Soul Spiral: 4 seconds
Executioner’s Scythe: 2 seconds.

Death’s charge’s DPS is way too complicated to calculate.. Its a utility skill anyway.
Soul Spiral: 283 DPS. Not including poison.
Executioner’s Scythe: 513 DPS at maximum, 308 DPS at minimum.

here is a caveat, though: While shroud has only 320 DPS, this comes with substantially more buffs. A 50% increase to crit chance, namely. While in the PVP lobby I have 47% crit chance and 216.6% crit damage, so this is a modifier of 1.55. Shroud Knight would get a 97% crit chance, coming to a modifier of 2.13. If we factor in these modifiers, this will give dagger a scaled damage of 758, and Shroud a scaled damage of 682. This means that the Dagger AA is only 11% stronger than Shroud Knight, and that additional barrier can be overcome with various other traits (vulnerability, might stacking, etc).

Overall, shroud knight is pretty bad, unless you specifically trait for it (reaper’s onslaught, mainly). The big mistakes, it seems, are in how Soul Spiral and Death’s Charge are executed.. Death’s Charge is unreliable, and Soul Spiral takes twice as long as it should. Were Death’s charge targetable, and Soul Spiral accurate to its description, then Shroud Knight would actually be good.

This is moot, however, as Shroud Knight does not directly compete with dagger.

So far, it looks like the top DPS rotation will be something like this:

#1: Drop Nightfall
#2: Swap to dagger and carry on as normal.
#3: When the enemy is low enough, use Executioner’s Scythe and quickly leave shroud.

With basically all other reaper skills being ignorable. On a pug build, a reaper’s shroud build would actually be good to use, but in a premade the group precision and might stacking make those bonuses useless.

Vargamonth.2047:

Valkyrie achieves similar results while keeping a lot more damage output, and a high enough toughness, which works a lot better as sustain tool, can also work while freeing room for damage (knight, cavalier) or proper sustain (healing power).

I think you confused Valkyrie with Knight, since Valkyrie gives vitality, and knight gives toughness. Regardless, I actually find Soldier to be ineffective when compared to knight, since the secondary power/precision is only equivalent roughly to the primary power of soldier.

Vargamonth.2047:

PVT will almost never be a viable alternative to berserker not doing enough damage to kill this kind of enemies in time. In fact, it’s quite similar, just being slower and next to incompatible

I did the math on post #2, and it shows otherwise.

Vargamonth.2047:

If berserkers are reliant on downing a boss fast enough, any party member being replaced by a PVT one just increases the risk of failure. Any berserker getting downed too soon on a PVT is not as dangerous, but still can achieve the same result.

This is still *true now. It is the zerkers curse, and why running zerker is hard in pugs, but easy in full zerk groups. That said, it isn’t completely true, since the zerker can still disengage, and the more durable players can take aggro while the zerker hangs back for a bit. The more durable players can also raise the downed easier, as they are not dependent wholly on active defense for their survival.

I run zerker in pugs the vast majority of the time. The zerkers curse is more a product of habit and mindset than anything else.

Vargamonth.2047:

A change like this would benefit mainly 2 setups or a mix of both:

The in-between of the extremes is an intra-personal mix of both extremes presented here. That said, this idea is too simplistic. A single healing guardian/engineer/elementalist/mesmer is more than capable of bolstering the sustainability of a group. The more you have, the longer GC can maintain engagement. But, the fewer you have, either the less they are needed because the other builds are either more durable and don’t need as much heal, or they do more damage and the enemy dies quicker, thus doing less damage.

Experienced players already switch seamlessly from melee engagement to ranged engagement to disengagement. The difference with these changes is that glass cannon setups will higher risk, and thus more likely to, without additional support, have to switch to range or disengage. Also, I would suggest giving more mobs ranged attacks, as well as making melee enemies more capable of chasing players.

Vargamonth.2047:

In short words:
Berserker would still be the prefered option as long as the damage output could be achieved. Non berserkers would have even a harder time joining groups since their presence doesn’t slow down the dungeon run anymore, it simply makes it fail (already happens with some bosses and tactics).

The point is that damage output would be much, much harder to achieve. The need for disengaging and the much more severe threat of downing and defeating counterbalances with builds that have more durability, and thus higher engagement and less down time.

Ashen.2907:

If you are looking at this from a technological perspective the real questions should not be, “where’s the crossbow,” but rather, “why is anyone enough of an idiot to use a bow in a setting where automatic firearms are fairly commonplace ?”

Bit of an interesting trivia, but the prevalence of firearms wasn’t due to their superiority on the field. The bow and arrow had several distinct advantages that put it well above the standard musket or pistol that was used.

*Faster to reload and fire.
*More accurate for seasoned archers.
*Easier to make arrows/bullets for.
*More reliable and less likely to jam/break.
*Easier to make bows from local materials.
*Could be fired reliably from longer ranges.
*Made little to no noise.

Once, when a general asked a native american chief why he didn’t switch to guns, the chief responded with “In the time it takes you to reload, I’ll have 3 arrows in the air”. I can’t find the particular source for that quote, though.

So, you’re probably wondering why, instead of bows and arrows, we use guns now? Well, the two advantages that guns had were just too important.

*Higher lethality on impact
*Much easier to learn a gun than a bow.

And that was it. To become a skilled archer, capable of hitting a bullseye from a football field away, you’d have to have grown up and used your bow your whole life. You can get a similar performance out of a rifleman in a few weeks training. So while it takes a lifetime to make an archer, it takes a month to make a rifleman.

GW2 takes place in the bridge between technology, where rifleman and bowman stand side by side. This overlooks sonic weaponry and laser cannons, which are also in the game, though.

sid.9870:

And no, I didnt read your full post,

I stopped there. You are arguing with someone whom you are not paying attention to. Because of this, you yourself are a greater argument against yourself than anything I could ever say. You just lost without me having to lift a finger. Bravo!

Harper.4173:

But the disadvantage is that a guardian who doesn’t want to do that will have little room in the new content since that build is very necessary.
I mean sure – you could spread out the healing over multiple classes but why would you bother when you could force your guardian to play Cleric’s or replace him with one that will.

Not necessarily. For the ambiguous “that” to be true, a guardian would have to both inept at other roles but skilled at healing. If a guard is capable of both healing and damage, then both a healing guard and a damage guard could be in the same party.

The problem with this complaint is that it is far more specific, and thus it applies to far fewer people. There is a big difference between “I want to play a certain role” and “I want to play a certain role on a certain class”. The difference being the latter just changes classes, where the former just stops playing the game.

Harper.4173:

No – what you don’t get is that from an elitist point of view it does not matter why you are not playing the meta build – it doesn’t matter that you don’t play it because you’re not skilled enough or because you dislike it.

If it didn’t matter, then elitists wouldn’t spend time trying to come up with theories to explain someone else’s opinions are illegitimate.

EDIT: Fixed code

It probably won’t get nerfed. Why? It’s quite simple: That isn’t overpowered. It is awesome.

There’s a difference. A small one, but there is a difference.

I actually don’t know where to get most marauder recipes. For now, I’m assuming that it is done via recipe discovery like the other sets, as the only recipes I can find anywhere are for the exquisite jewels and base insignia/inscription.

Viper’s sets are gathered from Auric Basin. You have to gather Lumps of Aurillium to buy the base jewel, insignia, and inscription recipes. Then, you can get the specific recipes for each armor piece by opening chests underneath of Tarir, or buying them off of the TP.

For specific materials, Ebony Jewels and Black Diamonds are found in chests on these maps. So you’ll need Chak Acid, Pact Crowbars, and Exalted Keys.

Is it wrong that I find it more interesting what people are doing here instead of what people are saying here?

I suppose the big thing people seem to forget is that I didn’t write this as some kind of justification for making all power builds, or as an act of condemnation for anyone who doesn’t run a glass cannon. I wrote this because I sincerely believe that toughness (and by extension vitality and healing power) need to be fixed so they provide the same efficiency in attribute investment. It would help if I had come up with a solution to this problem, but unfortunately one still eludes me.

Now, as to where I came to the conclusion about tactics and dodging being capable of sustaining an active defense even on glass cannons, it stems from a video I saw:

When I watched this, it melted my paradigm. For those who do not want to click on a link, it is a video of a berserker build warrior soloing Arah path 2. Long story short: he succeeds. This knife into the heart of what I believed made me curious: why is it that someone would run an incredibly frail setup to solo dungeons? Were I crazy enough to even attempt the task, I wouldn’t have done it unless I were in full soldier’s gear under the belief that it would take so much just to survive basic enemy encounters. It brought me back to some theorycrafting I read about in City of Heroes awhile ago, and then it clicked that offense = defense and vice versa.

So I puzzled and puzzled until my puzzler… was stuck in second gear at late night, so I wrote this whole thing as I came up with it, not knowing what would happen as I was writing it. It was a peculiar thing I had witnessed in game a few times, where I was capable of soloing certain champions in yellow magic find gear just as well as I could in exotic knight gear.

In my musing I had already come up with most criticisms levied against me. I’m not sure most of them are even worth a response when I can just refer to one of the three topic posts where I covered it already. Though there is still plenty to add:

On the increased efficiency of heals, I have only very briefly touched on it, so now I will elaborate more on survival thresholds. The best formulas I can come up with are these:

(Heal amount – damage sustained ) / (heal recharge) = adjusted enemy DPS

It is healing per second minus DPS sustained from an enemy. If this is greater or equal to zero, then there is a limitless amount of fight time in which you can be engaged to the enemy; barring any mistake they will never kill you. If this is less than zero, then the total fight time is

maximum health / adjusted enemy DPS = Player survival time

Which actually tells you how toughness and vitality truly interact with an enemy encounter. Toughness reduces the damage sustained from direct attacks, letting you get a longer survival time and also lets many builds reach a certain threshold when they are undefeatable by an enemy. Vitality never pushes the adjusted enemy DPS, so a finite fight time stays finite, but the duration for for which you can stay in the fight can be increased greatly depending on the class. This makes coming up with my “solution” even more difficult, since the change in healing power has to be considered.

There are two problems when factoring in healing changes with toughness in the offense vs. defense debate. First is that there is no circumstance in which you will realistically know how much damage you’ll sustain in a fight. It is all an abstract, and all we can say about it is that player skill decreases it and toughness decreases it. The second problem is that there is another important factor to include: enemy survival time.

Player survival time – enemy survival time = success factor.

Where enemy survival time is their HP / player DPS. If the success factor is above 0, the player wins. Below 0, the enemy wins. At 0, it can go either way or even tie. The end of the line in the DPS debate is this success factor: all it ever needs to do is be above 0. Any toughness or vitality higher than what is necessary to make it positive for the majority of relevant situations is just excess. Since players are fully healed between fights, all that matters is survival and not really how well a player can survive.

I suppose a side effect of improving the effectiveness of toughness and vitality would be that less is needed as an investment before going full DPS. But… this all hinges on whether or not there are a sufficient amount of enemies in the game that can still pose a threat to a player with improved toughness stats. We don’t want to make it too easy to just tank champions, but we also don’t want to make players who invest in durability to be little more than handicapped distractions while the real DPS players get the job done.

It is actually quite hard to accomplish, so I applaud arenanet for coming as close as they have.

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.

Personally I don’t mind the grind. I mind the fact that basically it is just buying the precursors in a convoluted way.

I expected to use alternate currencies karma,, tokens, or achievement bars of some kind (kill so many grawl, etc). Then you could eliminate RNG and market forces. You could make a set exchange: so much time = precursor.

This kind of protests speaks more about you than it does about the map. If you want something changed or improved, the worst way to do it is to appear as whiny as possible.

rebellion.2473:

Hello.
As i noticed,some use forums as a tool for negative speech,unconstructive “feedback”,and worst of all,political and ideological beliefs

Please try not to post such stuff,it hurts us as community and Anet devs.

I can’t help but think that this itself is an ideological belief Particularly an extension of the moral relativistic duty that sees expression of “ideology” of any kind (though usually it is targeted against one side) as wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it should be censured. Therein lies a cruel irony. Telling other people not to express their beliefs is itself a belief that is being expressed.

Lesson of the day: nobody who actually believes something will call it a “belief”. They refer to it, both outwardly and inwardly, as fact. So really, you’re telling everybody not to express facts that are inconvenient for Anet, and likely yourself.

Shirlias.8104:

You want to get tanky with thief?
You Can’t.
You just have dodges and teleport, but no sustain, no protection, no healings, no invul, etc…

Your definition of “tanking” is a bit narrow. A thief’s job is never to take blows to the face, but insofar as distracting an enemy indefinitely, a thief is really good at that. Just ration dodges and skill evades and you can survive for a long time.

All that said, I’m not sure this is really an issue in the game. Soldier’s and Dire gear are still some of the most efficient sets, point for point, because of how toughness and vitality scale geometrically. With a toughness minor you’re taking 67% of the damage you would have normally, which buys you 50% longer survival time in a fight. Just because enemies do more damage doesn’t make this advantage go away.

Andele.1306:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Dagger auto attack does 940 base damage in 2 seconds, coming to 470 damage per second.

Axe #2 dos 968 damage in 2.25 seconds, coming to 430 damage per second. Here’s the kicker, though: factor in axe training for an additional 15%, and you get 495 base damage per second, which puts it higher than the dagger, and gains twice the life force in that time. Of course, now that axe training is 10%, this puts it only equal to the dagger at 473 damage per second.

This thing called math that everyone seems to ignore, its not 430 (then axe 2 would be 860) its 480 and 530 if traited (last numbers rounded ofc because of weapon damage variation and simplicity).

2.25 seconds. Not 2 seconds. You have to divide axe damage by 2.25 seconds.