Guild Wars 2

Well this thread has been informative.

From reading it, so far I’ve found that if I play female chars then it’s because of feminine aspects of my personality and if I play male chars is because of masculine aspects of my personality.

What this all means that a female playing female chars I’m expressing female personality traits. But I’m spending my time staring at female butts, so… I’m expressing male sexuality? I’m exhibiting latent lesbian traits? But if I play male chars, while I’m now being sexual normative by staring at male butts I’m expressing masculine personality traits.

Hmmmm.

Nowhere in all this contradictory mess am I allowed to play which gender I want based on nothing more than aesthetics.

To all the deep psycho analysis some have made I say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (that is, you’re looking too deep into a shallow choice).

Fallesafe.5932:

Selecting a character is a very personal process.

You really shouldn’t project what you think and feel onto others. I’ve at least one character of every race, and while I do have my favourites, the selection had nothing to do with who I think I am or what aspects of a personality I like.

And men who play female characters are responding to feminine aspects in their nature. Don’t be afraid to admit it.

Again: Unless and until you can present at least one peer-reviewed study, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. The problems with your statement begin with defining what is and isn’t feminine in a personality and escalate from there. Depending on what you define as feminine, I have no problem admitting that I have those traits, if I have them, but none of them are why I chose to play my humans and sylvari as females. The way the males of those races look simply didn’t appeal to me.

I mean, heck, if there was a game with playable female dwarves with beards I’d play them because no game does that. That’s the kind of thought process that I invest in MMORPG characters. Sometimes it’s the voice actor/actress, if there is one, but mostly it’s aesthetics/kittenery*.

I’m really curious now why you think you know the reasons for other people’s choices.

Edit:
*bad donkey-ry. I love the filter this forums has, but sometimes it’s not conducive to communicating one’s ideas.

Fallesafe.5932:

Guys who play female characters are just feminine men in RL (which is fine I guess).

Or maybe they just like the eyecandy?

Not everyone plays this game for the RP.

They didn’t say they would never have mounts, only that they would not have mounts. They also said they would increase the level cap, but then turned around with HoT and said they would never do it. Mounts have been a thing since the beginning of GW1, but only NPCs had access to them, skeletal horses and dolyaks for example. Mounts were added to GW2 years ago, the broom for example, but they’re only cosmetic.

Why are they finally adding mounts now? Mounts are one of the most popular items in MMOs and are easy to sell. Just look at how many people have store gliders. Mounts will be far more commonly used and there are multiple types. They’re just trying to appeal to more people and raise profits after they took a hit with HoT.

I only play male characters when forced to, or because I’ve created a back story for a male character…otherwise it’s all females and I don’t have a problem with it at all. and if anyone else does, too bad. It’s my character and I’ll play what I want.

You shouldn’t be allowed to look in the box……. that breaks the whole premise of the experiment. If you want an observable outcome, I would say have a cat in possible 2 positions (next to each other), and every time you would look away it goes into super position, then collapses back when you look in that direction.

I’d guarantee 4 out of 5 players wouldn’t get the joke without looking it up.

I don’t want to nerf the self damage at all. It allows them room to tune the damage from PF higher. Bigger reward for a bigger risk.

If anything I could stand to see it go up a little if it brings the skill damage output higher (especially in PvE where PF is nerfed due to the way transforms work).

I think when balancing these specs in the coming months the devs should take every opportunity to go further into what makes the spec unique rather than just nerfing the unique things back towards vanilla.

penelopehannibal.8947:

Fallesafe.5932:

Guys who play female characters are just feminine men in RL (which is fine I guess).

Every single one? How do you know this? Does this mean that all humans that play Charr are feline humans?

No-one knows you’re a cat on the internet!

Healing Kit is probably useful if you want to roleplay the GW2 version of ER in the Divinity Reach injured seraph guard hospice.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Think of it this way. Engineer cannot swap weapons and neither can Elementalists. Imagine and Ele with only one Attunement. Similar idea with Engineer. You don’t need to use kits, but at least one is a good idea. Otherwise you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for cooldowns.

Yup, though I’m a little sad there isn’t more use out of the Tool and Bomb Kits. You basically have to build for them if you want to use them, though with Holosmith giving even more of a melee focus than Scrapper, there is going to be more use out of them.

I figure the kits we’ll see the most use out of with the Holosmith are those that can apply Conditions like Blind and Cripple, even in power builds, plus the Elixir gun for mobility and the Elixir X + Acid Bomb healsplosion. Likewise we should see more use out of Slick Shoes in PvE/PvE. On a Scrapper it was super nice. On the much more nimble Holosmith there will be a lore more attacks you can squeeze in.

Hurts mine, too. I don’t know that I’ve taken the Grenade Kit off my bar in over a year.

Vagrant.7206:

Sathus.7532:

I was just wondering for someone who just wants to casually raid/dungeons/solo/WvW/pvp is there a need to swap kits constantly? Is there a lot of swapping for holosmith or scrapper?

I don’t mind that part of the class but I would like to know what I am getting into before I level one, thanks!

You will almost always have at least one kit on your bar. Anything less is hurting yourself.

If you’re in high-end PvE (fractals, raids), you will probably need to learn to play the piano (4 kits) for high DPS. If you’re in PvP, you will need at least one kit, usually elixir gun. WvW you’re probably going to have mortar kit, maybe elixir gun.

As for holosmith — the elite mechanic is functionally a kit. However, it locks out some of your other kits. No idea yet on what the meta for it will be, but it’s highly likely you will still have elixir kit in PvP, and grenade or bomb kit in PvE.

See all those cool utilities with interesting ideas? Forget about them.

The last sentence hurts my soul.

It is very true, but it still hurts.

I would legitamitely be happy if every kit and healing turret were nerfed into the ground. At least then, some of the other interesting aspects of the class would get looked at.

I have been playing Engineer since beta, and I went from liking, to tolerating to loathing the Grenade kit.

The only Gyros that never disappoint me:

http://yummiestfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Greek-Chicken-Gyros-with-Tzaziki-Sauce-and-Pita-Flatbread-001.jpg

So you want 20 minute queues because you forgot this is supposed to video game.

Cool.

Because ANet tried that in the past, and what happened was that so few people showed up that it was waiting in queues for an average of 10 – 15 mins, or you ended up fighting the same few people over and over (and woe be to you if you happen to get bots or someone with whom you’ve had a fight and they just decide to afk or feed the enemy points).

You want a higher standard of competition. I get that, and respect that. There’s the Daily Tournaments, but I expect that’s too infrequent for your satisfaction. So the next best compromise is basically reverting the game modes to Solo/Team Queue, so you can form a team that meets your standards. However, be prepared to once again end up in the same situation of long queues/too few people.

You get 3 pips for losing (4 for play, 5 for legendary) and 1 additional pip for top stats.

If you’re put on a team that has lackluster players but you do all the right things from rotating, reviving, supporting, and dealing damage, and get 5 top stats, that’ll mean you’ll get 8 pips for a loss.

To say that the effort you put in carrying a team goes unrewarded in a game is ridiculous. The pip reward system is a linear track that is meant to incentivize winning because you get gold and ascended shards quicker.

What should matter most is your rank as you gain for winning and right now it doesn’t feel rewarding when you do win and gain rank. But the pip system is nothing more than an experience bar that fills up for winning or losing which is perfectly fine.

Wethospu.6437:

Why would you support having your time wasted?

A question asked of people that spend hundreds and thousands of hours playing a video game.

If you are trying to maximize your DPS, kit swapping is essential at the moment running the meta Raid/PvE build (which isn’t Scrapper; it’s core Engi running Viper’s and Pistol/Pistol).

Holosmith seems primarily DPS oriented, so you won’t need to use kits really (though Photon Forge is sort of a kit?)

You can get through dungeons nowadays no problem without much use of kits.
You can solo with Scrapper without kits.
You can WvW without kits, but you will be kiting a lot…real challenging fun though.

Current PvP meta at least requires swapping through 1 kit. May change with Holosmith…also may never change.

Crinn.7864:

Why did you continue queuing into the loss streak?

Never queue after multiple losses you just get tilted and play worse which makes you lose more.

I always stop after two losses.

You forgot to add that you’ll queue into the same pool of people, and will probably end up with the same teammates that caused you to loss.

As much as I hate to be that person who says this, if you’re not the one who isn’t carrying their weight on your team, then someone on your team is causing drag vs someone on the enemy team carrying. As long as your dealing DPS and taking objectives, you should be okay for yourself. However, the downfall of Solo queue is the 4 random people you’re going to deal with every single game, and spoilers: These people are picked from the same pool of people you were playing with during this 2-3 hour period, so its highly likely you had someone on your team who just wasn’t doing enough and you were unfortunate to have that person on your team several times in a row. You’ll probably get a lot of “get good scrub!” hate cuz you’re complaining about losing, but sometimes, no matter how good you are, you can’t carry a sinking ship.

Simple Answer: Solo Queue has “those moments” – Especially when you’re pulling from the same queue of people over the 2-3 hour time frame you posted.

It’s been happening to me too: The worst parts are when my gains only give me +13 point score, but my losses give me like -20 point score, meaning despite me having an approximate 50% win ratio this season, I’m still losing points.

I had the same thing multiple seasons in a row. Quite unexplainable. I also felt that I got matched up with teams below my skill level, which often caused that loss streak. Im also around the 1700 MMR normally. Like the algorithm determines that you have to carry bad teams in order to climb up the ladder. And no, Im not a guy who blames his team for every loss. I just observed it.

Everybody knows that if you want to really compete in the season, you NEED to duo queue. Every top player refuses to solo q because of the disadvantage of doing so. U can take 200h of sind’s stream and you’ll not find 1 minute of ranked solo q. The same for EVERY single top streamer out there.

Solo queue only is badly needed for yesterday. Or at least make that solo queuers dont lose as much as they get for every victory, because since you (ANET) forces a 50% winratio with blowouts matches, it gets really frustrating.

You forgot the mighty function gyro…

- which was promised additional functions in pve at release.

Even a simple interact at range ability when your function gyro is ready would be more a gimmick than a real mechanic but at least it would do anything…

A.I.

it will just kitten you up, regardless how you design it.

they should closely orbit us, as the function gyro does in its idle animation.
shredder, stealth and blast should be throwable directly like mines, although with a greater range (since rotors’n’stuff)

Everything that involves autonomous aiming / movement will always be broken.

Remember what happened to turrets:
- they were trash at launch since random aim.
- then a-net changed them always focus fire our targets
- suddenly they were OP and the forums full of salt
- then they got nerfed into oblivion by making them squishy a.f. and removed key-traits that weren’t even part of the issue

And a-net “learned” from this, and gave us squishy trash right from the get go, that moves in random, uncontrollable patterns and can’t keep up with us, so we often don’t even profit from our own utilities.

Even if you increase their survivability, half of the time you will be out of range when they pulse their effects, and since they can’t dodge, nor actively avoid red circles, they will eat all the aoe-dmg and condis that are flying around, which forces you to either make them invulnerable completely, or so tough that you could make them invulnerable anyways.
Sure, you could change them to always avoid red circles, reducing the dmg they eat, but this would make them move even more frantically, decreasing the chance to get their effects while they’re up, even more, and the more complex AI gets in this game, the more likely it is to fail due to pathing errors.

No more A.I.!

• Purge Gyro is one of the most ironic skills in the game – it’s supposed to be anti-condi, but dies to condis in a couple of seconds unless you purge it.

• Healing Gyro has a decent toolbelt: long-lasting, large, mobile water field that pulses protection, but the Gyro itself isn’t even remotely as good heal as Healing Turret, which has a large water field too.

• Stealth Gyro is almost alright, if not for the kittened AI – just make it stick to you god kitten it, I’d just grab the kitten thing and keep it in my hand.

• Bulwark dies way too easily, it’s okay if you are in 1v1 situation, but with more players it’s almost insignificant. I love toolbelt skill tho.

• Shredder Gyro has a decent damage, both Gyro itself and toolbelt, but only if you can stack NPCs. It’s not really worth taking if we’r in player vs player situation; it’s easy to dodge and/or destroy. It expires after a couple of seconds anyway.

• Blast Gyro is bad. Easy to dodge, stuck on the terrain really often, and sometimes will randomly switch targets. Drop Mine is waaay better, especially after recent update. Blast Gyro’s toolbelt is usefull only to speed up dollies in WvW.

Generally, in my opinion Gyros should be reworked to work like an aura around scrapper, without spawning a kittened entity.

So its been 2 years since Scrapper came out and Gyros have been in game but half of them are still rarely used: Purge, Shredder and Blast Gyro.

This is coming from a mostly WvW and PvP perspective but my suggestions would help PvE too no doubt. The effects of these gyros and their toolbelts are lackluster and for some of them the toolbelts are also the reason they are not good. They also suffer the same fates of turrets in that they can take ALL damage 100% and have low health so they die extremely quickly. So to start:

• Purge Gyro – As it is it’s a mediocre cleanse at best. The sheer amount of conditions present in WvW and PvP though overpower the gyro and considering they follow you any AoE pressure will also kill them before they can even get a second cleanse on you. so the fix should be to be remove 3 conditions every 2 seconds (up from 2 every 3) and the Toolbelt should be an AoE cleanse that cleanses 2 around you and the gyro if its up. The current poison field is useless.

• Shredder Gyro – They have buffed the damage significantly but the main issue was always its easy to avoid (even in PvE) its immobile and the radius is small (180). I’d like to see this become an effect around the player (not following like other gyros but an actual effect, sort of like the Holosmith Laser Disk). The Toolbelt is alright for the daze but I’d like to see it daze on every pulse in WvW and PvP for better area control. Also it would be nice to be able to cast this from 1200 range.

• Blast Gyro Tag – This is probably the most gimmicky of the gyros, the damage appears huge but in reality Engi has a lot of high damage abilities that don’t waste a utility slot just for 1 ability that will miss 90% of the time. I’d like to see this gyro become a sticky bomb of sorts. So you will still have to throw a tag to mark the target but if successful you will mark them with a debuff that will explode and launch foes the same way it does now, similar to Timed Charge underwater skill.

As for Gyros themselves I’d like to see them either get greatly increased health and toughness or a trait change to make them take % less damage or heal over time. We are engineers after all we’re supposed to be smart with building stuff.

What do you all think?

Dunno how long you’ve been playing this game, but we had this state of turrets already.
They weren’t viable enough to be played in high rank pvp, but extremely punishing against lower skill-ranks, resulting in months on months of salt in the forums, which has lead a-net to nerf them into oblivion.

In open world pve / wvw, their long cd’s coupled with their immobility made them obsolete, in dungeons their (compared to other builds options we have) low dps made them obsolete as well.

Turrets never had a satisfactory state of balancing, simply because they have a single checkmark, that – if filled – makes any build on any class in this game impossible to balance: A.I.

Either it is OP, nor complete trash. We’ve never seen anything A.I.-related in between.

In their current state any nerf to them would just be another nail in the coffin.

I may be mistaken on this, but the general consent around here seems to be to get rid of them entirely in exchange for something new, like “aoe-pylons” (think wow shaman totems)

On the other hand, healing turret is one of the best healing skills in the game, and a cornerstone to most engi builds, and s/d builds certainly would miss the low cooldown of rifle turrets’ tb.

Beyond that, extreme squishiness, and high cd’s make most of them a completely wasted slot. thumper turrets only merit f.e. is its stunbreak on the tb, but when compared to other stunbreaks of engi (elixir S / utility-goggles / elixier-gun), it is almost always a waste to pick it.

But i think there is a way to make turrets viable without making them OP.

1. their dmg really needs to scale with our stats.
2. decrease their maximum uptime to 10 seconds.
3. decrease their individual cd’s drastically (15sec should be max, exception being heal-turret for obvious reasons)
4. flame-turret should fire more frequently or apply 2 stacks of burn
5. picking them up should halve their cd
6. turrets should profit from boons

then they could keep being squishy, so enemies get rewarded for focusing them down, and we can replace them far more often. Ofc turreteer builds would still feel like sitting ducks in a pile of junk, but with these changes they actually could pack a decent punch, while still allowing reasonable counterplay from enemies.

Just have seen it a second time, for holosmith: Heat MUST affect others weapons, and add dual sword, but make the second sword skills powerful. Just tone down power a litle bit, for me it’s okay, engineer were always week for me: I always played this class: Too long time to charge skills with hammer and not extraordinary rifle power, surely increase the rifle power with heat could be great. About photon forge bar, maybe a little bigger, some skills are just pit of heat.

-So: Okay with Holosmith but can be improved.