Guild Wars 2

Well i just got back and tried it…..oh dear lord, it’s so amazing, I need Rise! back now for my Condi-minionmancer! It’s so amazing having minions work the way they are supposed to! THEY EVEN MATCH YOUR MOVEMENT SPEED NOW! Granted they will lag behind if you go over bumpy terrain but they are speed demons now! I’m even running with the 25% movement speed on dagger trait!

Man reading that trait description takes me back, using mallyx to absorb all my party’s conditions, copying them all back, getting stronger and feeling more terrifying the more conditions I had on me…..great now I’m sad.

Sir Jensen.2153:

So I take it; the expansion isn’t worth the money?

If you compare the expansion to the base game…it doesn’t add much. Mainly the biggest draw is elite specs and guilds halls. The maps are a wonder to navigate but after that wears off, you have to fight the Megaserver system using LFG to get to a map to do the map meta. You also have masteries, which while I do enjoy, you also have to get mastery points (think skill points in base game) by doing adventures (which are Locked behind events) or get to places to channel, some of which require masteries from other lines.

Overall, I feel the expansion is worth maybe 25 dollars in all. It was supposed to provide a foundation for them to more easily add in and update content, but that was the biggest line of the century.

Condition damage takes ramp up time, plus you need to keep the Conditions applied and in proper rotation. Condition builds also do not gain near as much benefit from crit chance as power builds, power builds it does more damage, condition builds might get lucky and get a 5-10 second long extra bleed. I say might because most minor critical hit traits for conditions are like 66% on crit.

So don’t worry, power builds will more than likely stay the most optimal. Just pure condition might now be able to compete.

Really depends on how much chill you can put out. A bunch of little chills that you can keep putting out are far better than just one big long chill, the long one will get cleansed, but the shorter ones will make the enemy wait until you finish applying them, or cleanse early and still take a good amount of chill, and then their Condi cleanse will be on cooldown as well.

….honestly after reading over the changes again and again, I’m not seeing that big of an issue here. Upgrades will take roughly the time it took before, just now people won’t have to stop and queue them up, as well as spend gold on them (which was a big factor), only for an enemy zerg to appear a couple of hours later and demolish all your hard work. You won’t have to worry about some nooby (don’t mean that offensively) or troll wasting precious supply either for a tower about to be lost, or the keep and the citadel, so all supply can now be used for offensive and defensive siege.

When I commanded a couple of times in WvW and we were getting run over but the nightshift zerg from FSP, I would order a thief to scout the nearest camp/tower and see its supply. If it was enough to get a golem, I’d tell them to order and upgrade to burn it and keep them from amassing an army as easily. So yeah, that won’t work as well unfortunately. Also, dolyaks will still be useful for helping to get your structures upgraded in a timely manner, hopefully they operate on percent bases though, making them more valuable and more worth defending.

Ah it’d be nice, but unfortunately it’d make condition builds, especially necro a little more viable. Can’t be having counterplay now though can we?

I think bringing alclarity down to 50% would’ve been enough. Reducing it by half is just a bit too much. Couldn’t they also just make it a boon unique to the Mesmer?

Gilburt.9146:

CaptainVanguard.4925:

Going forward, GW2 needs to abbandon this “challenging group content” kitten and “e-sport pvp ladder” system and just focus on what MADE GW2 special.

Its a game, people can play at their own leisure for fun, with nothing overly complicated about that at all.

Because screw the players who actually want the game to be interesting and challenging, am I right!!!! Even now most of the game is extremely easy. Dungeons are easy, Low level fractals are easy, Core Tyria is easy. Heart of Thorns is more challenging for the average players, but much of it’s content is still relatively easy and completable with PuGs. The most significant ascended gear is trinkets/rings/amulets which are EASY to get. Ranked PvP, legendary weapons, ascended armor/weapons, coordinated groups, etc. ARE NOT REQUIRED to play almost all of GW2. Stop being so selfish and realize that the hardcore players want something to do as well.

Good luck convincing them, I really don’t get why people don’t want SOME tougher open world content. there needs to be a curve/hill that lets people progress into the tougher content like dungeons, fractals, and raids if they want to. Right now it’s just a wall leading into each thing. And plus making everything easy means that things will require more and more mats to keep everyone from having legendary gear.

Geesus, sounds like the economist went flippin overboard, he just didn’t turn off the gold faucets, he is draining the whole bloody dam!

DresdenAllblack.1249:

MyriadStars.5679:
Give me an example of a game that is truly great, but its forums are full of negative comments within hours of its launch.
^
All of them, because nothing makes everyone happy. Modern Warfare was too different from World at War. Borderlands was too ‘cartoony’. Gears shotgun was too OP. Halo was a knockoff of Golden Eye, etc.

ALL of the greats of had their naysayers.

At this point it’s a rock solid 9. Take away some of the time gating and its legendary.

There is tons of enjoyment here, but its tough to solo.

Indeed, it is harder to solo, but personally I take that as a positive as it encourages people to work together. Last night I ran around with an engi for 2-3 hours exploring, doing mastery and hero points. Then just now I had to run from the Chak hero point and request assistance from nearby players. Was very enjoyable compared to soling everything in the base game.

Kain Francois.4328:

Robert Gee.9246:

On the topic of increasing the cast speed of Life Blast: I think we would need to lower the damage multiplier if we wanted to increase the cast speed. The damage per second on that skill at its current cast time is already about as high as we are comfortable with. It’s a tricky skill to balance because we’d need to also look at adjusting all the traits that affect it.

Hey Robert Gee,

While I appreciate that the devs are finally addressing Death Shroud, I do raise the concern that a Thief simply using Dagger autoattack (not even flanking or might!) will do more damage over time than a fully traited Necromancer with Life Blast and Runes of Strength. That’s pretty pathetic, considering an effortless autoattack completely outclasses our profession mechanic.

Basically, our maximum effort, with highest might possible, and 25 Vulnerability, does LOWER damage than someone else’s autoattack with no might.

I know this, because I recorded a video and took down numbers what happened over the course of 30 seconds. Never uploaded it online, but I am willing to re-record just to show how low damage our Life Blast is.

If ArenaNet is satisfied with the damage numbers, then I have no idea what we are doing wrong with Death Shroud, but it’s pretty low damage.

The biggest reason I can think of is simply that it’s because our DS AA is ranged and therefore puts us at a safer distance than the thief who is as brittle as glass trying to AA us down, but said thief is also incredibly evasive and can port, stealth, and teleport all over the place, and be out of range of our LB as quickly as he can get in our face.

Skady.5916:

Kanto.1659:

I have yet to even see DS’ meta. For a game that boasts of a megaserver I go there, stand around for a while, see one or two persons in one camp.

Kanto, ths is LFG
LFG, this is Kanto

You guys gonna be good friends. You can thank me later

Ehhh to be fair we shouldn’t have to lean so heavily on the LFG to find maps as we do now in HoT. No I’m not saying nerf the events, just something should be done so people aren’t being thrown into maps that don’t have quite the numbers it needs to complete it.

Like I’d rather be forced to drink molten metal….this is either going to be a completely underpowered elite spec as thief has such high mobility and stealth access, they’ll make the damage kitten poor, or as others have said, a long range killshot that you can’t see coming.

Ugh I’m getting invisible halo sniper flashbacks all over again, only with them you could see an outline at least.

Ahhh, good old ANET! Sidestepping core balance issues as always I see!

do we know how cleansing ire will function with the berserker system?

Agreed, but I don’t think just straight up needing SW chest farm is a good idea. I think other content needs to have its rewards brought up to par, like the nebbish terrace centaur assault, that’s one of the most challenging pieces of content I’ve gone up against, but it hardly gives you anything for the reward. Then you go to Orr or silver wastes, and get heeps upon heeps of rewards for just following the Zerg and doing events which can be completed with 3-4 competent players.

But then you also have to take into account what is good rewards and what isn’t, I mean you get already from a lot of world boss events, which translate into gold or Ectos and high tier crafting materials. Do you give more exotic level items? But then that would undervalue exotics on the TP. Slippery slope, slippery slope.

I’ve sat here for about 15 minutes trying to type up a good argument but just can’t bring it together. so I’ll just say this.

Healing signet isn’t op, just the warrior has a lot of defense to compliment the passive heal with its stances, mobility, and CC. It’s also a profession that, I believe, has fulfilled its class concept of being a juggernaut that not only relishes, but grows stronger as the fight goes on. (yes i know it still has bugs, but still, it has fulfilled that design of being a first in, last out type of profession).

I also think its the case of some other profession not reaching their fulfilled design. Necromancer is a good example, like the warrior, its a profession that is supposed to grow stronger, or at least stay constant as the fight goes on…yet it is probably the worst at doing that because of its lack of defense.

So my take, don’t nerf healing signet, just give the other professions ways to sustain themselves in a fight in a way that is unique to their profession, and maybe make the other warrior heals worth taking. Hell, maybe make mending flip conditions to boons.

I don’t think they meant it as that, but I do agree, the fact this wasn’t something seperate you can opt out of is just bad. This should’ve been in EoTM, or a mode in PvP, or maybe even a game in PvE where you and a player face off against each other. This event was fun for a bit, but…the novelty has kinda worn off.

Fade to Black.7042:

Arm glow is fine.

If your dye doesn`t fit the glow, change the dye…

PS: You can never go wrong with black

Shadow abyss for the win!

I am really resisting the urge to go on a rant right now…It’s not the fact they did this to death shroud, it’s the fact they keep nerfing us for no dang good reason, and giving us NOTHING in return.

I was reading that and about people using gyros and I’m just thinking “what game are they playing?”

pepsis.5384:

Deified.7520 your posts are on point and your points are valid and eloquently made. Lets hope there are still folks at Anet who listen and understand.

Everytime I think they are they prove me wrong. Only time they even relatively listens was with elite specs, and that was just with reaper and Chronomancer I find. After that SILENCE when it comes to anything other than PvP, with the occasional “soon”.

Seriously I have gone from being an ANET fanboy to an ANET cynic. I have no confidence in them anymore if it isn’t grinding or gold sink related.

Ehhhh, not really feelin that, think it just needs a cast time reduction. I can land scepter 2 pretty consistantly, but enfeebling blood I have a hard time with. Also I think changing it to torment would actually hurt us since bleeding has a 6% coefficient. While torment is 4.5% with 9% if moving, and it wouldn’t get the free 20 % dduration increase from curses.

I can see where changing the bleed to torment would help but I don’t think it’s significant enough to warrant said change.

XxsdgxX.8109:

And wait for the biased cancerous players come defend thief.

Guarantee this will be the defense

“We’re squishy.”

I follow this motion, really want it for my rev and even my necromancer but that bundle price….nope.

I am really having trouble understanding people’s definition of a grind. Was the content we were doing before not a grind?

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

no just pets i think , this was done Ages and ages ago before the WvW seasons last year.

due to pets dying in 1 hit vs World bosses and some champs for fractals and dungeons they added bonus health to pets to help them survive.

WvW stayed the same as they wanted this to be more even to the Spvp health levels of pets.

Couldn’t they strike a happy medium between the two for WvW though considering WvW has more and stronger build variation than PvP?

Shinigami.4051:

I didn’t like how abrupt the ending was either. I understand that they want to leave it open for the next living world season but they could have had a little closure.

Also I’m very upset about Trahearne’s death. He was my favorite plant man. I guess Cannach is now. Why couldn’t they have killed Caithe instead?

I tell ya, after playing through the story again as a sylvari, I actually have a little tiny bit more respect for trahearne….and agree Caithe needs to be fed to a Vinetooth.

MMO’s I think just feel a lot less personal, least that’s how I feel in GW2 compared to say dark souls. But I do enjoy the player to player interaction a lot more in GW2. Plus, a lot of people nowadays love instant gratification, think we can thank CoD for that….MMO’s can sometimes feel very Grundy and take forever to do things sometimes. Like in Skyrim, if I wanna get level 100 crafting, it’s just a few gold and maybe half an hour and I can make use of all those dragon bones. MMO’s require a lot more time, effort, and money because…well not like you can pickpocket a merchant in this game.

I will say I do agree with the change, but in response have to say that the other heals should be buffed or have their cooldowns lowered. 30 seconds is a bit much for everything and while ventari can heal a good bit, unless the tablet gets instant cast and appears when you switch, I just don’t see the point in using the bigger. It’s got great potential just it’s so unwieldy.

Zoso.8279:

TheLastNobody.8319:

Zoso.8279:

TheLastNobody.8319:

Zoso.8279:

spoj.9672:

Patience only lasts so long. Reaper looked like an improvement despite not addressing any core issues. Then they basically nerf everything good about it before it gets released. Can you really blame us?

Your slaves to numbers and don’t understand concepts. From my POV.

You’re right. We are slaves to numbers.

We have 0 blocks, we have 0 mobility, we do mediocre damage and I believe we’re still last on that. We have 3 blast finishers, 1 on staff which requires an enemy to trigger, and 2 from MINIONS. Our big bad OP elite lich gives us only 1 stack of pulsing stability, the only elite to my knowledge that does that when it comes to transformations. We have incredibly long cast times on our skills, but have 0 stability on base necro, and the stability we get on reaper is walled off behind reaper’s shroud. They put a 5 second ICD on chilling darkness it seems SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF REAPER. Hey! Least we got 2 health bars right?

And you’re also right in us not understanding concepts. We don’t understand the concept of us being a selfish class, but being barely self sufficient. We don’t unstand why we don’t have reliable stability with our big slow casting times. We don’t understand the concept of hitting like a limp kitten on attacks that have giant animations and tells. We don’t understand why chill and cripple were nerfed into oblivion, almost right after reaper was announced!

GJ your really smart. TY for helping. Now I’m playing a better build and being more effective in the game. Turns out it was all my controllers fault.

Yes yes, L2P issues, it’s always that, right? Class is OP you need to learn to play against it, if it’s UP you need to learn to play it. Ahhh, I love that argument. Ah well, least you’re enjoying necro, wonder how long that’ll last.

If you can’t land Focus 5 then yes it is a learn to play issue. If your attacking barrels and crates to get LF yes again a L2P issue. Lots of L2P issues atm. A complete reliance on one guy in one team (who dominate every week) to show everyone viable builds again L2P issue. Rangers as a group it looks like are doing it better.

It’s a L2P issue that I can’t land a skill that has a 1.25 second cast time and has an obvious animation, when other classes have access to extra dodges through vigor, on demand blinds, blocks, extra dodges through weapons, stealth, teleports and leaps to get out of range, stuns, and dazes? I mean, yeah, sure I can just pop in DS and flash 3. Maybe I can hit them during one of their long casting time skills as well, maybe chain a reaper’s mark from staff into Focus 5….Bah, arguing with you is useless, you remind me a lot of myself from about a year and a half ago. Hope you last longer than me before the anger sets in.

Miki Zu Heltzer.4018:

The Desert Borderland would be much better with gliding as well, imo. It is a mess to navigate through on foot currently. Except they should let WvW players unlock WvW gliding through the WvW mastery point system (if they ever plan on adding it to the desert BLs).

At least no more dying to fall damage in central Tyria because you’re used to gliding I guess.

I do think it’d be funny to imagine like an air raid from the top of a structure onto attackers below, or retreating and jumping off a cliff to see gliders unfurl as the enemy tries to blast them down with CC and other attacks. If put into WvW it could open up a lot of things….or break them.

I’m a little worried mesmers are going to be thief food again. I don’t play Mesmer, but I don’t think it’s fair when one class/profession completely shuts down another which seems to be a major balancing problem in this game.

I also think reducing alaclarity to 50% would’ve been enough. 33% seems a bit low.

All the professions need a total rework and ovehall. Anet has done this see saw balancing act for so long that we constantly go from one end of the spectrum to the other and it’s just tiresome. It’s bad for PvP and PvE.

BURN IT ALL DOWN! Redo the professions from the bottom up.

Raziel.4216:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Raziel.4216:

We don’t know for how long she was starved before the fight, no matter how special she is if she’s starving she won’t get to do much.

That might be true if she was Human, but she isn’t, she’s a Norn. They have entirely different physiologies to Humans. Also, the assumption is from the time of the crash to then, so a handful of days at worse.

Handful of days? It’s not the first chapter, we’ve been out there looking for’em for a while so what part of the story implies that? It could be a week.
“She’s norn so she’s special” doesn’t cut it, Norn eat and drink too, Norn will get weaker if they don’t do it for a long period of time.

Plus the fact she’s been through a horrible crash, probably did not receive any medical treatment, and lord knows what else. Seems people are getting too hung up on and only focusing on the fact she said she hasn’t had food or water.

Looking at its kit and what some people could do over the weekend, it seems strong but, PvP wise, I’m still sorta unconvinced with what it can do. Still has the problem core necro has with being CC’d to death.

PvE…maybe some viability, I’m still a bit unconvinced. Barriers just don’t seem like that strong of a group defensive mechanic.

I shall not hold out hope.

Ok I lied PLEASE GRENTH LET THIS BE TRUE!

Burtnik.5218:

Yep.. pretty much sword is not viable anymore nor pwoer rev in general. Atm condi is the way to go as they completely broken sword. Its the only weapon in game that deals less and less damage when more than 1 target shows up. You can also forget about shield or hammer. One patch ruined viability of 3 weapons which leaves us with mace/axe being the only viable set now. Build diversity ftw

I do agree, which is why I again don’t understand their reasoning when they say they want sword to be good for single targets when it seems to want to be a multi target weapon, but doesn’t have the damage to do so since it relies on multihit skills. Heck sword 5 only really goes with their philosophy because of its ability to drag people out of position.

Hammer, nerf again is understandable, except for the can only be hit once every .5 seconds thing. That has to be a bug….as for giving it more gap control, I’d say make 3 and actual leap and hammer 5 to be more like a home run hit that sends people flying back instead of the knockdown it has now, and of course lessen the cast time to something reasonable.

Khisanth.2948:

TheLastNobody.8319:

Ah I hate quartz crystals so much. Everything else my guild could cooperate towards getting but these stupid celestial recipes are really screwing us up because it all pretty much relies on one person! If it was just getting the crystals charged I’d be fine with.

Why is it relying only on one person?

Because once we charge the quartz crystals, they become account bound.

I played around a bit with rise yesterday and honestly…I think it might be my favorite shout now. Really just reduce the cool down to 30 seconds and give ALL jagged horrors death nova by default, and boom, you have a great shout for scaling encounters with massive stacking bleeds, AoE on death without having to invest in the death magic tree, great sustain for blood magic and even curses, and good AoE and cleave discouragement. And since the horrors spawn immediately on the shout hitting, there usually isn’t a problem with them not attacking.

Can I have your stuff?

As a necro:

You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, ya do the hokey pokey and you send it all back out.

Here is my question, first, has it been finalized that rise will only summon jagged horrors? Second, I can’t remember, but do the jagged horrors grant life force. I do agree the deathnova trait alone will do nothing really to help rise, but if they grant life force I can see it being very useful as a life force battery.

Honestly, I’d just remove the ICD on the passive, and let it and other signet passives work in DS. When you activate it, you and allies get maybe…10 stacks of signet of vampirism, which heal 400 whenever you hit someone. It would synergize so well with DS and other vamp builds in general.

cranos.5913:

TBH I agree their attitude towards instanced content is extremely weird. Currently it’s somewhat favourable, but I’m pretty sure that’s gonna be rather short lived. After wing 3 and 1-2 new fractals we prob won’t see a proper update anymore for years.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Einlanzer.1627:

you need to bring dungeons back

But let’s make sure we understand who killed dungeons: we did, when we decided that 70 silver less made them not worth our time.

Right, it wasn’t purposefully chosen by the economy devs to make it feel unrewarding.

I tell ya, economists are quickly becoming one of my most hated people. Added in a ton more gold sinks and time gates into the game, made ascended harder to achieve, course the dungeon gold nerf. Then in the real world I got them telling me gas being less than 2 dollars a gallon is a horrible horrible thing.

I feel axe is starting to lean more to the side of boonstrip/corruption. But as others have said we currently have no ranged power weapon other than DS. So, here are a couple ideas.

Increase axe range to 900 except for the third skill.

Axe skill 1, does the same damage it does now, only it applies vulberability 2 only if you rip a boon from the enemy.

Axe 2, steals 1 boon per strike and gives it to you. Each boon taken gives you life force. Say….4%? 2% per strike if no boons?

Axe skill 3 is fine I think as it is, jut wish it gave a biting lifebforce, but eh, aoe corruption works as well.

I only played a bit of PvP, but…well even I can see we’re nowhere near top tier. No mobility, no team support, can take an honestly good condo build because we have to dedicate at least 2 of our utilities to survive focus fire.

Deathshroud has no way to deal with CC chains, so easily focused down. No stability, so easy to interrupt, the changes to movement skills made it so we have no way to actually lockdown our opponent, and our CC is tied to a condition, that can be cleansed with any normal condition cleanse, and lasts shorter than a traditional hammer smack.

We have the potential to be top tier with the right buffs, but anet has shown that whenever they give US a buff, directly or indirectly, they have to do something to make it meaningless. Probably don’t even mean to, just the way things work ou. Ah well PvP in this game is a joke anyways.

Knoxxius.1524:

What the hell has happened to the PVP in this game? I’m an old player who has just returned and the introduction of the elite specs has completely messed up my beloved pvp… the hell…

Guardians are insta killing with TRAPS! Now I’ve seen everything… And Necromancers are just some devil spawn of pure aggravation to fight now.

Meanwhile warrior is complete kittene as always…

Can someone explain to me how current PVP is balanced?

You know that one episode of South Park where stan’s dad buys a margaritaville after the economic collapse and goes on a magical journey and in the end the government decides his margaritaville is valued at a billion dollars based on where the body of a headless chicken landed on a board…

I think it’s like that. One the bright side, necros are a threat! Yay!

It might possibly because it’s flesh golem doing the interrupt and not really you. though I’m not sure, never used perplexity runes before.