Guild Wars 2

Personally for me, the biggest issue with the script/voice acting, is the pace of conversation.

The actual script could be tightened up a bit and different words used to give characters different levels of depth and flare, but the biggest issue is how the voice acting plays off in actual game experience.

Much of the in game conversation is choppy due to coding cues to trigger a characters voice. Lag and poor timing create choppy conversations which kill the feel.

Speaking a line of acting is exactly like telling a joke. If the comedic timing and pace of word is off, then it looses a lot of its humor. So when there is too short of a delay or too long of a delay in characters talking to you or each other, or a separation from one paragraph of text to the next when the character is speaking, then it kills your immersion in them actually acting.

As far as the voice actors themselves, people have different opinions about what the characters should sound like. This is why written text is almost more powerful than spoken text. Each person can “hear” it in a way that pleases them and makes sense personally.

So there are technical and personal issues when “hearing” the voice acting.

As far as the story line itself, I actually find it interesting and compelling as far as ideas and how the world is evolving. The cities interact with each other and the events in the world are making impacts as the game progresses.

The personal story I am ok with, because I’m not so needy in the terms of having to have the story revolve around me. I understand that from a developer point of view it can be ridiculous to have every single player that ever logs in be the hero of the world.

So they took a step back and made you a hero by proxy. A catalyst? to greatness. Also they call you “slayer” or hero" constantly because it is voice acting, and the only feasible way to indicate that they are talking to the player without using the millions of names that we come up with is to give us a title to refer to.

If you take a step back, a lot of what is done makes a lot of sense. I’m not saying they couldn’t have done it better, but I am saying many are not giving credit where credit is due.

As far as for more serious story telling. Yes there is a lot of humor and there is still a lot of grit in this world. This is the first MMO in a long time that I actually laughed out loud at, so I appreciate the humor. I also am interested in the darker aspects and the greater threats out there. This new living story arch with the queens speech being defaced is making for some interesting story telling which will tie back in the separatists of charr and human factions that we have seen all over.

As I said, there is a lot of good story here, they are scattered maybe, but it is there. I have seen MUCH worse.

The other games that have been referenced such as from bio shock, mass effect, and elder scrolls, or what ever else is compared to. Those are single player games that are allowed to revolve around a single player, to tie in better interaction with one person.

This is trying to be all inclusive to everyone that players in a multi user world…..and I didn’t find t hose other games that deep and interesting personally. I think after a while you start to see how every story/movie/game rips off things we have seen in the past. This is old man talk but “nothing is original anymore and everything sucks!”

So the older you are, the less you like new things, because it contrasts with the things you originally experienced and developed a fondness for :p

Fight Analysis for the first half of video, so we have numbers not flashy songs and videos:

1v1 Guardian (Total Damage – 13,874 / Condition Damage – 6,762 / Duration 8 seconds)

1v1 Ranger (Total Damage – 21,656 / Condition Damage – 11,161 / Duration 22 seconds)

2v1 Engineer (Total Damage – 12,015 / Condition Damage – 5,299 / Duration approximately 20 seconds)

2v1 Mesmer (Total Damage – 18,959 / Condition Damage – 9,487 / Duration 30 seconds)

Could do the rest, but tedious. I hope this lets people better evaluate the performance though.

Edited to show total condition damage done.

Dirame.8521:

Why do you keep focusing on one build? There’s isn’t just one build for the Condi Guard. Also why do you think that you can actually figure out how this build works using just theory? You actually have to play it to figure it out.

And about “Time to Burn”, do you truly believe that no one can evade burst multiple times? Conditions on the other hand, when you apply them in so many ways, will always catch your target. And recently I decided to merge a spirit spec to my condi build, just to see how it would pan out. I have faster TTKs (Time To Kill) now because CC is king.

I could show you buildssszzzzzz that “theoretically” shouldn’t work, but just end up working. One of which is my very crazy version of the condi guard.

Who said I only review and test builds on paper and numbers? I have been actively playing these condi builds this past week or two that they have resurfaced to see for myself, as well as analyzing why they do or do not work from both an effective perspective and a mechanical perspective.

Case in point Messiah’s build, I playedthe 6/2/6/0/0 build he posted and it works, downs people without them expecting it, I even got hate tells from mesmer trolling me to the point I had to block him.

It is effective, but not (I hate to use the words) “optimal”.

Biggest disadvantage are the ones I listed. If these builds had more survival to see out the duration of burning, then I think I would favor them more.

There is something to say about sudden burst that downs someone at key points though, which is why direct damage tends to be (not always) better. On demand damage, versus delayed damage.

I feel if more of our condition damage traits that look like they should synergize together were achievable in unison instead of pick one or the other, we would have a better standing as condition dealers.

Also, I really feel survival needs to be looked at. Yes guardians are “tanky” but no they are not in some regards, especially depending on healing power or lack of it.
We only have so many blocks/blinds/dodges.

Compare us to the thieves and elementalists, who we fall within the same tier of health with. Thieves have an overabundance of dodging and evades, as well as incombat mobility and combat resets. If you lock them down they die, but a good thief will dance in and out when needed.

Elementalists also have a good amount of control via stuns, knockbacks, and mobility. They are good at kiting and waiting on cooldowns for huge instant damage, then go back to mobility, with some huge healing potential.

Guardians are supposed to be the “frontline fighters” who “once engaged in combat stay in combat” (to paraphrase what has been said by the devs). Yet a majority of the opponents are not trying to stay in combat with you. They are kitting you and ranging you. I feel we need more frequent and usable blocks and damage mitigatiors. Our healing potential is situationally dependent, and our damage suffers if we spec for survival.

In comes what I feel should work but does not -> Our bunker spec should damage via conditions.

Our traits have synergies all over, but they are often out of reach or in the same line and overlap as to prevent these potentially great builds.

WE are missing something, and I feel the community is finally starting to see that, as I see a lot of hate talk about how useless guardians are in pvp now.

I wonder how long “guardians are in a good place” can last before we finally get some meaningful changes.

Back to the point.

Burning guardian -works-, but I don’t think it is better than standard damage yet

Eclipse.5912:

3 conditions? You clearly haven’t tried condi guard extensively enough to be criticizing it. Let me draw it out for you in crayon:

Condition 1, Blindess: Flashing blade, VoJ, RoJ
Condition 2, Vulnerability: Upon blinding, enemy receives 3 stacks of vulnerability
Condition 3, Burning: If this needs further explaining…
Condition 4, Poison: Weapon swap, 60% uptime
Condition 5, Bleeding: Krait runes give this 100% uptime, 3 stack minimum
Condition 6, Torment: Krait rune elite activation; timing is everything.

6 conditions that stack in intensity, duration, and have nearly 100% uptime. Just because one guardian insists it doesn’t work, doesn’t mean that it won’t work. By the same token, although I say it works, maybe it won’t work for someone else. It all depends on play style, skill level, etc.

Condi guardian does work, and I beat 95% of the players I come across in 1v1s- especially zerker guardians. If you’re not winning with this comp, the problem’s with you, not the build.

Raze Guard

When talking about damage potential of condition builds, you shouldn’t try to include control conditions such as blindness. Also vulnerability is a condition that increases direct damage, not condition damage, so that should be off your list as well.

Lets talk about Burning, Poison, Bleeding, Torment.

Burning we already have established.

Poison is mostly an anti heal condition with fairly low damage output.

Bleeding is a good example, but the stacks are low. Three stacks will only do around 300 damage. When bleeding becomes threatening is when you start doing 10+ stacks for short durations.

Doing a 600 damage burn and maintaining a 300 damage bleed is pressure.

Ramping up the bleed to 10+ stacks becomes burst. Some classes can even ramp up to 20 stacks for decent amount of time. That is going from 900 damage a second to 1600-2600 damge a second. In almost every pvp game, kills are obtained by timing burst appropriately. This game has faster and more frequent windows of burst, but it is still there and utilized.

Torment is an interesting one that allows for low stacks to be as effective of high stacks of bleed “if” the target is moving. This has great potential at low stacks, as everyone tends to keep moving anyway. I have never seen anyone stop moving and stay still cause they have torment on….more dangerous to stay still and let yourself get hit even more than to keep moving.

Last damaging condition we didn’t mention is confusion. Another great condition, and I like how it is inline with the defensive nature of guardians. I also like how it has synergy with retaliation.

Retal will handle the fast multi hitting attacks while confusion punishes the heavy hitting single hit attacks that retal is ineffective with.

On average it seems that burning went from 1 stack for duration into 3 stacks in intensity. That said it may have provided 3 stacks per for 3 seconds, providing about 6 stacks on average and the 9th stack dropping off constantly.

Beyond that WW is prone to multi hit weaknesses, in tune of retaliation. In WvW retal is much more prominent, and getting in the “thick” of things can equal death on top of killing yourself with WW.

Tomes provided some range and averaged out ae target damage with strikes, so you would not kill yourself on retal and you would not be standing in the kill zone while “locked out of your skills”.

l2p? But too late now, its all gone cause people couldn’t see beyond their own nose.

edit:

Just mashing together numbers real quick, a single stack of burning in condition gear now does about 450 damage traited with increased burning damage. 6 stacks of burning would be doing about 2700 damage a second to 5 targets.

Conditions have an increased cap way past 25, so multiple guardians stacking the old tomes on a zerg could be doing stupid amount of damage. 5 guards averaging 6 stacks each would have been 13,500 damage a second to 5 targets….

Damage so stupid it would have been broken admittedly, which is probably what provoked the change of tomes in the first place.

Not because the devs had our interests in mind, but they wanted to remove something they were not interested in or capable of trying to balance, so they put a bandaid patch on it and called it good.

We got less because they were afraid of what we could do in the future…thats like an back to the future nerf :p

I’ll start by saying it is insufficient compared to other things you can do, such as building for damage with gs/hammer/scepter scenarios.

What Symbol of Faith can do is provide an on demand near 100% up time symbol (hammer requires auto attack) to land.

With an on demand 100% up time symbols you can:

• Maintain a steady stream of boon application (good for AH healing procs)
• Maintain vulnerability stacks enemies
• Utilize layered healing with Regeneration ticks/Writ of Merciful ticks/Virtue of Resolve ticks getting up into the 800-900 health per tick with all 3 combined.
• Layer damaging symbols for upward of 1k damage per tick when building for damage (2 symbols 1k+ each for 5 ticks = ~10k damage to 5 possible targets) [if they stay in it…big if].
• Mind game against opponents, since people tend to stay out of red circles (area control via ground effects).

All of the above sounds great, but what you sacrifice to achieve or the net effectiveness of trying to get allies and/or opponents to stand in the symbol is unreliable and self defeatist.

In practice it is not as great, but on paper it sounds pretty cool. I think some symbol buffs could be warranted. In the expansion, we may see symbol damage become threatening with the 20% damage buff…but will it be enough to make them good?

In the past staff and mace were the more reliable bunker weapons, due to application of boons and AH procs. Your mileage in bunkering will vary now a days, but still useful in the right scenarios.

Good point krixis, metas exist for a reason.

The reason is that intelligent people were able to theory craft and derive meaning through multiple choices and figure out what skills/traits/classes are most effective.

What happened is exactly what you described. From GW1 there were hundreds of skills, which many were unused. So for GW2 they stated they limited the skill selection by weapons, to ease the development process and balance.

A few years down the line they again ease the development process and try to streamline balance.

We traded diversity and possibilities of new metas, for a diluted and “easier” time for the developers and/or people who don’t want to be confused by choices.

Is that a positive or a negative? For me a negative, for others it seems a positive.

=( I like the longwinded npcs and the clip scenes. Again to each their own and for the most part you can skip all that talking if you wanted to (skip button or press esc)

I’m going to avoid falling into the disagreement chain for the sake of disagreements with Dirame/Ceimash. I think you really pride yourself in being different so much that you base your identify on going against the grain even if it may be without reason.

Guardian has been renowned from launch to have a huge sacrifice for damage and survivability with large skews to one side of the scale or the other. This was identified as balanced by the community, which is why we are in “a good place” to this day. Guardian’s are the “most balanced class”.

To the point of celestial amulet attempts, I have tried it and we do not have the same impact as the two/three celestial amulet classes have that engi and ele (to some degree warrior) can achieve. Even with Permeating Wrath.

Again this hearkens back to having to go all out on defense OR offense, not both typically.

What do I think is missing? -Leeway- otherwise known as flexibility in the class. We are so polar it becomes restricting.

The cake and eat it issue is more of a point where, here is a trait that, by itself is pointless, but with other traits it becomes usable…but you can never achieve those traits together. I just want the cake to not be a lie.

I actually agree a lot with messaih. The overpowering ability of sustain that the current meta cele comp can provide is hindering growth across the board for the other classes.

So the question is, do we need a buff or do they need a nerf? We have gone through two years of pseudo buffs/tooltip changes where we are pretty much at the starting line still.

Other classes have advanced and fallen back, then caught up. They grew and developed over time.

I do not think our sustain is truly that overly amazing over other classes. I think this was a player community generated idea based off bias and preconceived notion that guardians are “tanks”…then we found out there are no tanks in this game but we continued to try to shoe horn the guardian as the “tank”.

After it was shown that others can tank just as well, we held on tightly to the idea that guardians are the best “support” class in a team fight. Now we are just kind of on the fringe of the meta. Maybe that is good, because it will open us up to change finally.

I don’t think our damage is amazing either. We arguably have some of the highest or “the” highest dps in pve depending on who you talk to. It is actually really good.

Our pvp effectiveness on the other hand has not showcased this. We have a few flashy videos and short lived stars of the dps limelight, but as a whole it has not really taken off. Why is that? Because either

a) we are limiting ourselves as players based on previous preconceived notions

or

b) we are not as effective in dps as other classes are

If it is b, do we need more damage? more survival? more control? At the moment the community feels damage is fine, survival is fine…so we are left with control.

I do feel that condition builds, are effective in potential damage but lack sustain to see the damage out sometimes.

This is why I feel direct damage builds are more “optimal” in a dps flavor, because they front load the damage. This way if your burst lands you survive to see the damage happen. If you miss the burst, then you are dead anyway, but at least you completed your attacks.

….I tried to not get into it, but I feel this ended up being still confrontational with the previous post…sorry. I was just trying to voice my opinions and perspectives with as much reasons as I could. Not trying to pick fights. I voiced it as best as I could and I will leave it alone from here.

Since this has turned into a feedback location that is getting attention, I wanted to mirror the thoughts I had in another post about this content.

I feel you have captured the “action oriented combat” in this little mini game very well as you based it down to its simplest form, old school games.

I would like to see more of this style of “avoid getting hit” style combat integrated to the rest of the game. Faster action, less auto attacking, and more thinking about enemy weaknesses and strengths.

(my original post if more discussion is wanted there in reference to combat)
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/sab/SAB-Combat/first#post1758946

12:35, just ran through the first half after over an hour of waiting. No remarkable respawn of baubles noted.

AFK for another hour for more testing….although at this point I wonder why people get such enjoyment over spreading false rumors…

Also in a lot of martial arts the idea of ambidexterity is key in many things. Like RoterFuchs said if you are only dangerous with your primary hand then your attacks can be read and anticipated.

When I was taking arnis, you were forced to train and use your off hand. There was not supposed to be a disparity between left and right. If all your sides are dangerous then you have a more complete offense and defense as well as more flexibility in stance and positioning while fighting.

I love the random lines from her, and I think my favorite is:

“Cannon balls!!! My only weakness!”

Knocking people off a “point” is well known, to include shadow refuge and spvp point caps.

Pushing people over cliffs also is entertaining, but it is a short lived reward sacrificed for other better mechanics.

Glad you enjoy it, but I’m looking for something better.

As dumb as it might sound, I think we need a “group huddle” with devs AND players (driven by the devs) that explain to us the road forward.

There is a huge disconnect on what we are given and what we tend to want.

That can vary vastly, but overall it seems like curveballs which are aimed at being creative and not low hanging fruit, but it gets convoluted at times.

This was done a long time ago within the first year of release, but I think it is valid to reapproach it. As with any development project, there needs to be regular meetings where everyone can recalibrate and come back to a balance point to stay on track. Possibly we as the community our way off track with who is driving this train (the devs) and if we had a clear message on what you want the Guardian class to achieve, we can better understand and accept the changes that do (or do not) get made.

I think this disconnect is understood by the development team because they recognized the guardian changes were received badly, the guardian specialization overall was received badly, and the handling of the class over the last 3? years? is concluding in negative feelings by longterm players.

This recognition is seen by having devs like Josh run over here to do crowd control as we get upset and they try to throw us a bone with even more shield cooldown reductions.

thoughts?

Yaki.9563:

Healing Signet is a heal skill. We have one too. To compare it to one of our passive mechanics that we get on top of heal skills is very misleading.

AH is great but it is a GM trait. Same with MF.

But what none of those has is the ability to provide group wide healing. VoR can provide ~250 healing per second to the entire group. That far outstrips what those other skills can do. If you want to “heal”, VoR is awesome. Not so much if you’re standard DPS build but then why should it? You get passive Aegis as well. Don’t forget the VoR also has an active use heal.

We have low health not just because of VoR. It’s because of the overall access to heal skills and protection abilities. We can maintain permanent protection. We can maintain permanent regen. We get AH or MF. We get Aegis from multiple sources. We get a few reflection skills. We get things like dodge heal. If we had Warrior level health we’d be insanely powerful.

Couple of counter points first, We have access to permanent protection on hammer and permanent regeneration on mace, we can not have both permanent protection and regeneration at the same time.

Typically it is better to keep protection up and use regeneration on a cooldown basis to keep damage down and give yourself time to regenerate.

Aegis from multiple sources is: VoC 30-40s cooldown, or active 69-90 seconds.
Retreat 48-60s
Valorous Defense, every 90 seconds if you dip below 50% life.

Typical combat you will see 2, maybe 3 aegis activate. If you are bunkering down maybe 4.

Aegis is strong but not as strong as you make it out to be in our survival.

Throw in mace block too for good measure to count to the aegis block as well.

Blinds are much more effective as they stop all attackers in range and not just the next hit.

Our projectile reflection skills are nice, no argument there. We are kind of a mix between engineers and warriors. Warriors are almost all block, engineers are almost all reflection. We are in the middle of block and reflection.

Back to the point though,

I think you hit it on the head on why VoR is so small, and I think a good compromise would be this:

ANet is trying to avoid building a “healer” class, VoR is group capable so it is limited in effect. Although it is group capable only via using a 30 point trait.

What if Absolute Resolution and Battle presence were both 30 point traits in the same tree. Then absolute resolution could be drastically increased in effect to make self sustain with just VoR much higher, but if you want to support your allies you have to drop the high self sustain and get battle presence which would have VoR doing what it can do now, about 200ish heals a second.

The only problem I have with that solution is it doesn’t promote build diversity, it forces us down another tree, if anything it keeps us in honor or virtues still.

Tough problem, but I don’t see the guardians as the almighty gods that a lot of you feel we are. I think we deserve more attention besides tooltip updates.

I am not trying to make us OP, but I am trying to find ways to get us build diversity. I don’t think buffing VoR would put us anywhere near the realm of OP.

From a design standpoint, having slower movement in combat versus out of combat creates an environment where players are encouraged to engage in the fight versus rush past everything.

Also, by limiting the speed of movement, areas designated as high combat zones (pvp maps) can be smaller while still giving the feel of distance to objectives, which creates map control.

Lastly, by creating an incombat/out of combat dynamic you create a mechanic that will cause atrophy to a large zerg group to lose numbers over time in a mobile environment where you want to weaken or delay the combat force that is marching to an objective (wvw).

The downside to these mechanics is that while you may be in combat, others may not be in combat, and they are running at full speed. This makes it feels impossible to ever run away if you have one person tagging, then the rest can catch up with ease.

Also, game play slows down making it feel sluggish as a side effect. This is good and bad, because slower combat should result in more room to make decisions for a broader demographic of people.

Is this the only mechanic that can generate these things? No, and I don’t think it is “needed” per say. I understand why they use it, but I’m sure there are better ways around it.

Clicking to Keying

Overall, I am glad that you guys took the time to stop and read. Also I hope that more people can express themselves the way Mia just did.

I agree, flame and frost felt really well put together on the last half and then they did a 180 and this is causing unrest in the community.

What I think it comes down to is that the developers are failing to take their big ideas and bring them down to connect with the players with the game updates and world development. This is causing unrest within the community and that is a problem.

chaplain,

A lot of people, myself included, feel that Signet of Courage has too long of a tick refresh, and it would be better suited if it was 3-5 seconds instead of every 10 seconds. A lot of damage can happen in 10 seconds and having more health in smaller chunks returning back to you more frequently would be better suited. In addition to it’s tiny radius could stand to go up to maybe 600 / shout range.

Also it still retains a significantly long cast time for the full group heal, which sounds reasonable. Then you realize that the old tomes could be traited to innately provide stability AND increased your stats to provide you with “transformed” health, providing a larger sponge to soak up damage while standing still and channeling for 4+ seconds. As it is now it is too difficult to cast in times of need either

A) people or yourself will be dead by the time you cast it
B) easily interrupted unless blowing another utility for stability, causing even more investment and loss for little reward

I did use Tome of Courage extensively for large group WvW group fights, because being able to maintain a high degree of healing via Heal Area was effective and could push the tide of the war, especially with multiple guardians. NOT because of the full heal which rooted me and was more risk than reward.

Feel My Wrath is perfect….for PvE players. Because incoming damage is not typically an issue with high outgoing dps, easily manipulated fight mechanics, and dodging/blocking/blinding. So there is no real need for Renewed Focus, but it was typically taken in old PvE builds because locking yourself out of a dps rotation of weapon swaps was more negative than positive. Now PvE players have a fire and forget source of damage/group utility. The only thing PvE players used Tome of Wrath for was a precast haste then dropped it back for initial engagement of the fight.

PvP/WvW people are experimenting, but I personally did NOT take Tome of Wrath for the haste. I took Tome of Wrath for conflagrate and area denial/pressure. It surprised many groups of people to be bursted down from a single guard from range, and if you have multiple guards it stacked the effect on a point target.

Single target to target engagements, Tome of Wrath was negative because it locked you out of utility and weapon skills, thus the more survival oriented Renewed Focus was taken ~90% of the time.

Yet when you have Necro wells, Ranger Barrages, Warrior combustive shots and arching arrows, Ele firestorms, Engineer grenades, Thief cluster bombs, Mesmer chaos storms and shatters…..then you had the guardian who could maybe lay a staff symbol down or run into the center of battle and embrace the melee damage and maybe get themselves downed….OR you could take the book and contribute to the ranged point AE.

I admit I ~90% of the time did NOT use tomes, but when I did it was NOT for the effects that were given to us with the new shout and signet. So for me, the new tome replacements are a nice gesture, but I feel they missed the target with what tomes were used for, which explains why tomes continued to suck for so long. The devs didn’t understand their strengths and weaknesses, so they didn’t know how to balance and improve them to useable gameplay.

As a class, we retain a low health pool and not sustainable healing, thus we rely on burst healing and a lot of active defense to survive. Renewed Focus provided a lot to the active defense as well as feeding into our other class mechanic of virtues and group utility, so it made it a superior elite to take.

After the changes, I guess the PvE guys have a fun boon bot shout now for haste? We were not really hurting for crit chance/fury so that’s just a mindless bonus that no one really cares about.

For the rest of us, nothing has changed post tome removal.

So I made it a point to skip this previous event and I haven’t logged in for the last two weeks. I have to tell you, it’s killing me.

I know the temporary content will be gone in a few days and I completely skipped it, making me feel like I missed out on things.

We have had the achievements discussion before, but it still weighs heavy on me knowing I have a full tab of living story content that will never be completed.

This is fairly detrimental, to the point that I almost want to continue “not” playing.

I liked the original idea of the game where I could stop and start again and not miss much if anything at all.

Now in the sense of competitiveness, yes sure I missed out on dailies and laurels or behind on crafting components and such for ascend…and that does not bother me “as much” it can be an issue for others.

I think this problem is/has been a growing issue and needs to be considered for the future of GW2.

How do you make continuously developing content, that does not remain and become stagnant, yet does not punish people for not doing it in time?

I understand the developers concerns of keeping things fresh and active, but it is having a fairly strong side effect on some players such as myself.

For now, I went back to GW1 to experience some of that lore that I missed out on back in the day.

Love the game, but have concerns.

The biggest advantage/use of zealous blade is that it heals for every target struck. So in a large cluster of mobs you can multiple that 25 heal by the number of enemies. The greatsword is one of our faster attacking weapons with good AE so this makes zealous blade, which on the surface look like a worthless heal, into a pretty significant self sustaining ability. Combine Zealous blade with Monks Focus and you have yourself a decent survival build with good damage.

Down side is that Altruistic Healing scales so well with a group that it outshines Zealous Blade and Monks Focus with the more allies you have around you. Zealous Blade reduces its effectiveness throughout the duration of the fight because you are killing things. Altruistic Healing stays consistent throughout the fight because your allies (hopefully) are still alive as you do damage, even if it is less damage.

So take your pick. Maybe solo go monks/zealous blade and maybe grouped do altruistic healing.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/quick-look-at-the-patched-blink/first#post4883054

Everything works fine, if anything they fixed it so you don’t waste a port if it is an invalid port (i.e. a buff/fix)

I really don’t think its the burn that is the problem, but a combination of burn + bleeds.

Bleeds can spike damage pretty high with 10+ stacks.

Burn on the otherhand works like a moderate stack of bleeds, I think it was 4 bleeds = 1 burn?…..but as pointed out above, you see burn stack into the 25+ second range…..remember it takes 25+ seconds to see those burn ticks.

The burn is not what is bursting you down, it is the burst of bleed caps “ALONG” with the burn.

When bleed isn’t there, burn is around to provide pressure, then combine that with high bleed stacks and now you have the 1k+ bleed ticks per second as well as the 500-700 burn ticks.

That puts you at 1.5k+ damage a second.

Then factor in that we have a lot of AOE condition spam, so now everyone in that area is getting bursted down with conditions that are readily available to reapply.

Then combine the condition damage with the weapon attacks, you are easily at 2k+ damage a second…meaning most people will die in 5-10 seconds.

All the while, it is more difficult to time dodges and blocks against conditions than it is to avoid the old physical damage burst builds that had visible tells and cooldowns.

In time sequencing, they gave us Kindled Zeal as they combined Zealous Blade into what it is now (used to have a trait that provided healing with greatsword strikes and a trait that increased greatsword damage by 5%, now they are all in one).

A few months after that they came up with Amplified Wrath, thus negating any “benefit” that Kindled Zeal provided power/condi users.

It is useless trash that hasn’t been cleaned up and probably forgotten about by now when they tried to give us options and put a stamp of “good place” on the cover.

And Radiant Retaliation apparently is broken and does not change your retal damage at all, or so reports are made. I have not used it myself as retaliation is not significant enough to try to “buff”. (You can argue in wvw zerg scenarios, but I argue again, that isn’t the tipping point).

You know that feeling, when you have your happy little continue balloon and you are on your way to the happy little continue cloud, who wants to raise a happy little flag, and you are happy…..then some spikes come up and pop your happy balloon….and your face

That’s the thing with gambling. The more you do it does not increase your odds at winning. The odds are the same every time you open a box, not better.

interesting, was able to recreate it too and I get the added bonus of being stuck in a whirling wrath animation while I walk around…. :p Good catch!

on a side note, oh thank god a dev looked at the guardian forums!

For sake of accurate information, there are more than one trait that increases hammer effectiveness in different ways beyond Glacial Heart.

Hammer is a symbol synergistic weapon that actually gets a majority of its consistent damage from the auto attack + symbol it places, so doing any other skills beyond auto tends to decrease it’s dps. I think even mighty blast decreased dps, but decent small burst dmg to land in pvp, with fast refresh.

These five all help hammer damage in different ways to include more ticks, ease of hitting more targets, 10% damage buff, or extra proc of damage.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Writ_of_Exaltation (sure why not if getting persistence)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Writ_of_Persistence (consistent dps increase)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbolic_Power (good, but far into zeal, third hit gets 10% dmg as well as symbol ticks last I knew)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Glacial_Heart (meh at most, but I think it provided a aoe dmg hit along with the chill application)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbolic_Exposure (each stack gives 1% extra damage, up to about 4 with consistent auto if I remember right)

You also have some healing abilities on it to pull some defensive ability out, but not normally needed in pve dps type content.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Writ_of_the_Merciful (layer with other heal effects for best return)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Altruistic_Healing (multiple targets in range give more return, also blast finisher buffs apply heals as well, which hammer is plentiful)

Hammer actually has really good dps, but with cycling between greatsword/sword, you are able to use cooldowns of greatsword for bursts which heighten the dps, then camp sword auto for decent high dps on auto attack, as well as providing blinds and projectile blocks which are good utility (as well as vulnerability stacks if traited).

Hammer normally isn’t advised in group content because the constant light fields interfere with fire fields that provide might stacks in combat, but honestly, if your group is that organized, they wont need that many might rebuffs mid combat.

@ Blackwolfe

Inspired would mean welsh/gaelic “sounding” names and words, but the OP pointed out that they use actual words.

Sylvari do have gender differentiation as seen in character creation, voices, body types. They are not bound by gender roles though and will mix male male or female female relationships.

Apple castle doesn’t make complete sense, but it isn’t out of this world either. It sounds like two randomly picked words to make a name. Think of it this way, how ridiculous do you find it when you see people name their kids things like: Blanket, or Pilot Inspector (real names look them up).

They are not wrong, but just sound random and dumb to some people, much like Apple Castle sounds dumb to the OP.

I think the OPs concerns are valid and the points he brings up can be distracting. Think about all those Japanese “Engrish” memes and how that would be distracting to real english speaking people to see someone use “Engrish” as the language of a race in a game…..on second thought that might be amazing.

But back to my point. Your response to the OPs argument is “no it isn’t”….no value or substance to it, just blind and deaf shaking of the head and ignoring anything he said.

(I have tried to speak on what I saw as design intent before, will repeat here)
I feel the guardian shield’s “supposed” strength is the damage mitigation and not negation.

I’ll elaborate, warrior and engineer shield both work on two different ends of the spectrum.

The warrior shield operates at a more hard stop on damage with physical blocking.

The engineer shield operates more as a CC device that focuses on ranged blocking/reflecting.

Come back full circle, the guardian shield seems to want to be the middle ground between engineer and warrior with both CC/ranged protection/damage mitigation.

So the idea on how the guardian shield “blocks” damage is via protection boon. We are supposed to take “less” damage on demand (not negate damage), as well as the ability to pushback/heal/block projectiles.

I feel the lapse in effectiveness is the short duration of protection and inequality of ranged defense with wall of reflection.

Cooldown reductions help fill the ranged projectile blocking some, but that is only half the picture. Higher uptime of protection with longer durations of the boon will bring the shield to where it is seemingly “supposed” to be.

Yet there is an adversity on the devs side to give us a ready supply of protection, outside of hammer. So much so, they nerf the duration of shield protection in pvp.

With the low life pool and the emphasis on boons for guardians, you would think the natural idea would be to let us flourish in boons, but they keep them away from us. Balance is one thing, but being at odds with the class mechanics is another.

Some more number crunching, this time on our heal abilities. All the heals were based off of the stats I had at the time which was 50 healing power from armor and no traits selected while in the Mists. First the numbers:

Heal Name
cooldown / heal ammount (Healing done in 180 seconds)
-additional notes-

Signet of Resolve
40s / 8213 (32852)

Shelter
30s / 4590 (27540)
-Blocks all attacks for 2 seconds-

Healing Breeze
40s / 6575 (26300)

Virtue of Resolve
1s / 87 (15660)

Virtue of Resolve (activation)
60s / 1663 (4989)

Virtue of Resolve (w/ Absolute Resolution)
1s / 109 (19620)

Virtue of Resolve (activation w/ Absolute Resolution)
50s / 2479 (7437)

Sanctuary
120s / 1883 (1883)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 2690 (Possible bugged)-

Merciful Intervention
80s / 2252 (4504)
-Only heals others-

Hold the Line
35s / 816 (4080)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 818 (Possible bugged)-

Save Yourselves!
60s / 1360 (4080)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 1363 (Possible bugged)-

Bow of Truth
60s / 4032 (12096)
-42 arrows heal for 96 each, does not scale with healing power-

Symbol of Faith
8s / 680 (14960)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 545 (Possible bugged)-

Faithful Strike
3s / 344 (20640)
-Tooltip says the heal is for 468 (Possible bugged)-

Tome of Courage
180s / 18690 (18690)
-14 casts of Heal area possible-

Empower
20s / 3055 (27495)
-Ticks twice, one for 1550 and another for 1505(Possible bugged)-

Altruistic Healing when traited provided 75 health for each boon applied, the following is a list of each boon heal possible with Guardian skills:

Empower
20s / 300

Swiftness
15s / 300

Shield of Judgement
24s / 75

Symbol of Faith
8s / 300

Save Yourselves!
60s / 525

Hold the Line
30s / 150

Stand Your Ground!
35s / 150

Empowering Might or Vigorous Precision (with 35% crit)
4725

Total heals from boons in 180 seconds = 21900

Heals via Meditation by taking the Monk’s Focus Trait:

Smite Condition
20s / 2019

Judge’s Intervention
45s / 2019

Contemplation of Purity
60s / 2019

Total heals from meditations in 180 seconds = 32304

While OP gets it and understand the difference, I want to point out that warriors may not have a lot of blocks/blinds spread throughout the class and weapon skills, it does have access to a highly effective passive healing signet, good condition removal sources, large bouts of mobility to allow passive healing to tick, good refresh on evade dashes on greatsword, and a shield which blocks.

They have effective means of active defense, as well as “better?” (depends on who you talk to) healing, for self at least, and good condition removal.

Guard, well we like being told that we are special and can do things with less hp?

A few “make x race playable” posts and ideas have come up and I was thinking something along these lines but for a different reason other than that I want to play a fun race.

What if players could play the bad guys. We could see the otherside of the story if players could be orrian undead players, the jotun or the skritt or inquest.

Now imagine WvW combat. Instead of server versus server of humans, asurans, sylvari, norn, and charr you now have good versus evil with more of a storyline driven reason to fight. A third faction would have to be figured out though so maybe some of the more neutral races that are neither good or evil.

This idea came to me after listening to the story line about the mouth of the dragon eating magical items to send the power back and the transport ship of dead bodies being sent to a "factory" to be turned into abominations

All of the quests out in the dire straits were military WvW type objectives of resources and gaining ground. This can easily be translated into a WvW type game play.

For the sake of input/output.

Guardians have been lacking in:
- Ranged attacks
- Soft CCs
- Mobility
- Condition builds (some may argue)

Devs tried to provide Guardians with
- Long Bow
- Immobilizes
- Another leap
- Modified burning mechanics

So they met each disparity with a response, just not the way we expected. Does it make it wrong? I don’t know yet.

somsom.5201:

So am I doing double dps when I don’t die on my dps spec?

1 * 1 = 1
1 * 0 = 0

hold shift or alt and try drawing on the map or minimap.

You can set waypoint, draw, and ping the map for those in your party.

What if they revamped spirit weapons to simply work like our actual weapons to provide that utility without wielding the actual weapon.

Scrap bow as we don’t have one.

Make sword work as is and tweek numbers, high auto attack damage. Activation blocks projectiles.

Hammer now provides symbol of protection on auto. Activation remains the same, but blast finisher (as they are doing now).

Add staff, this provides swiftness to nearby allies and activation is empower for 12 stacks of might.

Leave shield as is, maybe provide pushback on shield pulse, but could be OP.

They don’t have to be new and fancy, they just need to have a reason and work. This would allow more “utility” without wielding the weapon.

Another thing that always bugged me is the cast time to summon, if they were permanent, then I’m fine with it. But since they are so temperamental and some what supposed to be summon then activate to some degree, the extra cast time to summon and then activate makes for a long ability cast time.

Arken.3725:

… all i’d like to see is a bit more sustain for those builds outside of bunkering.

Here is where I think we hit the biggest road block.

If we add sustain to the guardian profession, it needs to be in the form of traits that are not viable to obtain at the same time as picking up other “bunker” type traits.

Otherwise you run the risk of making bunker even more of a problem for balance and further pigeon holing us even more.

The other option is to keep sustain where it is at but increase damage potential in one of two ways.

Either increase damage or increase CCs to allow current damage to take full effect.

Most are proponents of increasing CCs to some extent because we are pretty much in agreement that guardian damage is pretty good when set up appropriately.

For dps specs to be more viable in pvp they either have to finish fights quickly or survive fights long enough to do damage potential.

Mass condition spam, ae attacks, and a plethora of incoming CCs and avoidance mechanics have become a detriment for many guardians in trying to be more damage oriented.

So we are left with bunker…but everyone is tired of guardian bunkers…even a lot of guardians themselves.

Meta is bunker for guardians, as much as I try to avoid playing it.

There are a few variations on weapons, and some are map dependent.

Getting people off the point to cap or make it contested is crucial in buying time in the game. As far as them getting back up to burst you down in 13k, no one can handle all the damage in this game. You “will” die.

Trick is knowing how to read and avoid some of the tell tale attacks that will set you up for a lot of damage.

If you get immobilized or knocked down, expect a lot of burst coming your way. Use a stun break/stability/condition removal and get out, dodging if you have to, and if it’s really bad use shelter or renewed focus if you need.

A lot of attacks have a wind up animation, or a set up move before the burst, so know how to see and anticipate those as well.

Recent example tonight, i was holding mid point (was a hot join, nothing special) and a rifle warrior was rushing me. The burst move on a rifle warrior can knock your health down really low if you let them land it.

I was playing around with sword/shield, so every time he stopped firing and just stood there pointing his gun at me, I would use a projectile block. The rest of his attacks I could survive through with little to no effort. (can’t the move when using the aimed shot?)

Other examples are if fighting thieves. If they invis, they typically have a couple of second before they attack, as they are setting up a rotation of hits/evades/invis. You can get a feel for it and anticipate the next hit and screw up their rotation with a block.

If people are about to do a multi hit, mutli target attack to a group, use retaliation and watch them kill themselves.

Little things here and there add up.

You should be able to bunker against 1 target and sustain. If you are not then you are getting out played. Although some condition heavy builds like necro or some of the engineers can give you problems.

Two targets, is doable, but over time you will find yourself struggling. Three targets or more you will want to get help quickly, unless you can severely out play them all. If you can then rock on

Also, in hot joins, bunkering is really under rated. The zerg will typically just mow you down, and normally your team will not be there to help you. This is played different in tournaments that are organized.

Right now I see guardian as less of a solo bunker and more of a team fight/bunker hybrid. I think they excel more when around other team members. Other classes can solo bunker better than a guardian with longer survival rate and more ability to kill.

To answer your question about another meta you can play for solo, Look at the triple meditation builds. Those are typically damage oriented with good survivability through monks focus and meditations. You will not be doing zomg 20k burst like a warrior or crazy backstabs, but you will be more aggressive with some good survivability.

Thiefz.3695:

So let’s review something. Symbols give vuln AND burning when they pulse. Traited, that means you get 10% from the symbol, +7% against burning foes, plus whatever vulns you put down which is at least 1-2% . That means you can get about 20% increase in damage to people you can get in your symbol. Plus if you can stack burning (easy on a guard) you can join that with getting fury which means +20% crit chance. With GS5 plus wrath of justice you can nuke your opponent pretty easily.

For PvP, where people need to be on point, symbols are the counter to warriors. Against mesmers or Rangers is where you have issues.

Go ahead play it, film it, let us know how you like it. Please do report back

Ars Valde.8693:

Arken.3725:

Black Box.9312:

10% is pathetic for a grandmaster major trait. It needs to be at least 15%.

Still wouldn’t touch it at 15%(needs to be 20). Hell, even if this was 20% I probably wouldn’t use it due to how difficult it is to make a symbol build in spvp(You’d need Zeal, honor, valor).

Symbols aren’t something you build around, they’re a tool available to weapons with them. Shouts and Meditations are a line and build because of their universality, symbols will never be something more than an area control tool and damage source like any other ability weapons have.

Especially in a game heavily about mobility. You can use them for area control and punishment for fighting in tight spaces, but attempting to center a build around them rather than accepting them as a unique additional mechanic guardians have is, I feel, the wrong way to approach them.

I agree with you, they should contribute to area denial in pvp. Meaning they should be punishing if stood in, not easily laughed at and ran past. Would that mean they should do more damage? I’m sure no one wants to see that after what happened recently with the stacking bug, but a compromise in sustain and/or in damage to make them useful in mobile fights may be what they need.

Right now, even if you stand in a symbol it is not that bad. Necro wells work “well” because they can be layered on top of eachother to do stacking damage in a short duration of time. Guardian symbols tick at the same speed, but you can get 2 or 3 decent overlapping ticks, versus necro wells that have 3 damaging sources and additional ranged aoe ticking in unison, all contributing to burst damage.

At the moment necros “area denail” far better than the advertised frontline first in last out “punish the enemy for ground” guardian….

Excuse me while I sterotype generic class comments :p

Necromancer – “You think thats bad? What about necro!”

Guardian – “In a good place? Throw us a bone or something!”

Warrior – “We are not that strong, buffs pls!”

Mesmer – (silently stands in shadows to avoid nerfs)

Thief – “we are forced to disengage a lot, l2p we need buffs”

Elementalist – “we can do everything, but we have to push so many buttons #skillcap”

Ranger – “Yeah we can do damage, but really we still suck and die easy..more mobility pls”

Engineer – “l2p, it’s not that hard to beat us really”

(didn’t really have anything for ele or mesmer, make up your own!)

Well, been playing since release, posted similar stuff before, but was resurfacing this concern for the sake of the game.

While I am amazed at how much they have done and highly appreciate it, the living story thing has had back lash for a while, but again, it causes these problems.

Up till this point, I have 100% everything for the living story. Some of the events really stressed me out on the difficulty but I got them all finished and I felt really accomplished.

While I worry about the quickness of the content, I admitidly finish the achievements in the first day or two and then the remaining week+ is mostly a free ride.

Yet in the midst of all that, I have this heightened state of stress that I need to “keep up”.

Yes, this may be a personal thing and a lot of people say “ignore it, you will feel better if you stop trying to keep up and just play for fun”.

So I did….and it’s not going well for me. #withdrawls

As far as a backpack and 25 achievement points, I don’t care about the “points” or the skins too much, but its that sense of “doing it all” that is causing lament.

I want to do it all, on my own pace.

If anything, they gave Merciful Intervention a small buff/nerf.

Previously you could put it on your bar and use it as targetless instant heal from ability and a second heal from Monk’s Focus trait. This was pretty much a second heal skill like using shelter.

Now we can’t activate it WITHOUT an ally nearby, thus nixing some of that sustain it previously provided BUT giving us a shadow step IF allies are in range.

Some trait and skill synergies are seemingly a no brainer to go together, then you find that they are broken out of sync when taken together because cooldowns change and do not match up together.

Communal Defense + Invigorated Bulwark
I understand the need to buffer the outgoing healing/damage that can be applied by Communal Defense to a group of players. Innately that occurrence of aegis application would be limited by cooldowns, save for the healing skill, shelter.

Beyond that Mace was the seemingly best choice to go with Communal Defense as it provided the most consistent blocking and a decent refresh of cooldown. Yet now there is a 15 second cooldown to Communal Defense, and if you take Invigorated Bulwark it will not trigger on mace every rotation, as mace protector’s strike changes from 15 seconds to 12 second cooldown.

Adjust Communal Defense to have a 1-3 second internal cooldown to allow steady application of group aegis on intelligent usage of guardian blocking mechanics. Otherwise the skill provides little to no benefit to take and is a broken synergy.

Wrath of Justice + Virtue of Justice
I’m astonished at this one, Wrath of Justice’s sole purpose is to synergize with Virtue of Justice. Previously Virtue of Justice had a 30 second cooldown untraited, now it has an innate 25 second cooldown (and somehow a 21.25 second cooldown when virtues is a selected trait line).

This simply does not work with Virtue of Justice at all. I “think” I understand the want to limit successive immobilize stacking done by a group or repeated aoe kills refreshing Virtue of Justice on kills….but 30 seconds is a huge buffer of saefty against those two things from happening.

Again, lower the internal cooldown for Wrath of Justice to about 1-3 seconds (5-10 would even be acceptable if they are that afraid of quick successive procs from this trait). At least make it work on a baseline usage of the centralized guardian mechanic….virtues.

Rune of Resistance + Perfect Inscriptions
This one is less specific to guardians, but still has a limiting factor. Rune of Resistance applies aegis on signet activation with a 30 second cooldown. Baseline the fastest signet cooldown is 20 seconds for elementalists, 25 seconds for warrior, and 30 seconds for guardian, thief, necromancer, and mesmer, and ranger (sorry engineers, no signet for you).

Traited, the fastest signet cooldown is 16 seconds. I understand the fear of being able to proc multiple aegis applications in quick succession, yet at most people would be able to proc 4-5 signets, be out of passive abilities for a significant amount of time and then become vulnerable after blowing all of their cooldowns.

This rune become useless if any traits with seeming synergy are taken together with it.

I understand that the developers are trying to curtail overpowered effects or simply do not understand the synergistic application of multiple skills/traits/runes/sigils taken together and did not foresee the severe limiting factors.

Bottom line, there are a lot of things that punish and discourage you for traiting into a gameplay style and using skills and traits together, so much so that only few “builds” work and it creates less build diversity. Nothing should encourage players to do “less” with their builds in order to make mechanics work.

I am sure there are more broken synergies that I do not even realize, and far more beyond the guardian class. Share if you have more!

Here, I’m a failure story. I have played the game since launch with a break or two in the past six months. At most I think I had 300g, but that involved having excess gems from purchasing things like infinite pick axe or other temporary/seasonal items.

On average I hover around 50g in my pocket. right now I have 20g and it does not move very far.

I do not farm to any huge extent, I salvage everything as I am still farming mats. I upgrade full stacks to higher tiers when capped out on lower level mats.

I salvage yellows for ectos and bank or use them myself and I save exotics to try to mystic forge on the off chance for a precursor.

I have gotten a few random exotic items I was able to sell for short term boosts in gold, but nothing concrete.

I have “tried” to play the market. Flipping I fail at and investing never pays off, so I fail at understanding how to do it….buy low sell high? I use gw2spidy and look at trends, I buy low and sit on things but after a week or two I give up and sell it back to break even or minimize loss.

So I either need to farm for hours and do large community events, or I need to learn how to trading post better….or both

Majority of my time is spent in spvp and theory crafting builds.

Am I the average player, or is everyone else way better off than me?

Don’t have the energy to go into long in depth posts like I usually do, but wanted to voice I agree with Dom and Arnath on this one. Besides the “wow it’s new” factor everyone else is raving about, I’m not mechanically seeing the advantages.

It will be effective and probably entertaining enough to play, but we will have to see it for ourselves in the long run. Right now my opinion is low though.

While we wait for an answer for Master of Baubles, World 2…I give you Rytlock!

http://youtu.be/Z6qEESY4x4U

Oldie but goody

Trying to keep it short of a TLDR, so I’ll list the traits as:
Traitline (1/2/3) / (4/5/6) / (7/8/9)
For ease of reading and less text.

Overall I feel Zeal has few good choices and no variations. Raw damage increase and symbols is simply it.

Radiance has opened up more possible crit options for gear with low crit chance, but requires good burning sources. Grandmaster choices are weak.

Strong traitline, but shiled still needs some work.

The traits in here are mostly uninspiried, but the grandmaster traits compete against eachother too much.

This traitline makes virtues worthwhile, almost manditory I feel, as we rely on virtues for our basic class mechanic. Virtue passives need to be stronger I still feel.

OP, Take a second to step back and evaluate what you are saying.

You said that you:

• can’t be bothered to level right now.
• were spared a grind due to being lucky with the mystic forge.
• have everything you could think of to ask for in terms of loot.
• You said you want a gear grind otherwise there is no incentive to log in.

The root of the problem is that you don’t have anything to do, and you are unsatisfied with the prospect of grinding more levels or gear.

Yet, now you are asking to for the game to give you new gear to grind.

When you get that new gear, you will run out of things to do again, so another set of gear will need to be released to keep you motivated. Hence the treadmill effect.

Remove gear as your incentive and replace it with another thing:

• Looks
• Wealth
• Power
• Fame

In fact, lets attack this problem from another angle…

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg

In essence you have satisfied your physicalogical and saftey needs.

So in order to make you feel satisfied I think one or more of three things needs to happen:

• Your physiological needs have to resurface
  (introduction of new loot to gain)
• Your safety needs have to become threatened
  (harder content and which challenges your characters ability to survive)
• You need to move onto the next tier of needs and find a core group of friends in game which give you incentive to log in
  (find people you have a real connection with in game, not just random friends or guild mates you don’t talk to)

This can then continue on with

• Esteem
  Feel good about yourself and respected by others. Maybe even a public figure.
• Self Actualization
  Play the game simply for the sake of enjoyment and not have a need to play.

Now self actualization is one of those things that almost no one ever achieves, in real life or in game. Realistically these needs are in a state of flux at all times as we play a sort of “root beer tapper” game trying to satisfy them.

Some people also start to apply the needs of others around them onto their own personal needs. So if I feel that I am safe, but those around me that are in my person circle are not, their needs of safety become my needs as well. Until they are safe I am not satisfied.

So to sum it up, you have satisfied your needs and wants, but there are more ways to keep on “needing” something beyond a gear grind.

tldr: Gear treadmills are a means to an ends, but they are not the core of the problem.