Guild Wars 2

Khristophoros.7194:

It’s not surprising that a trans dev was the one who put it there but at the same time it really does end up being a token character because it doesn’t help me learn about or even become aware of this dev’s experience.

Consider that every minority character doesn’t have to be a learning experience packaged up nicely for the majority. If all Sya accomplishes is making a couple of trans folks feel included in a game that previously didn’t really acknowledge them (despite the Total Makeover Kit making magically changing your gender presentation a literal reality in play), that’s still likely serving her purpose.

Note how this thread started, after all: not straight cis people going, “OMG, Sya opened my eyes!” or anything, just some LGBT folk saying “Seeing Sya in the game made me happy.”

I think the conditional recharge traits are a no-go in the long run. They’re cool conceptually but the line between OP and irrelevant is very, very thin.

It’s much easier to balance a static -20% modifier.

Khristophoros.7194:

That’s why earlier I said that the way to create change is to share your own experience by creating your own works or going out and representing your experience somehow, not by asking for or praising token representation.

… You’re assuming no one on the dev team is trans. That’s not a safe assumption to make. For all I know, one of the coders or artists or testers or managers wanted this character to represent their own feelings about their life.

Also, going back to what I wrote earlier, tokenism can be pretty weak, but at least it’s an okay indicator that you’re not going to see a flagrantly hateful depiction in the same work later on.

Deep depictions of characters are nice, but any game with an expansive world is also going to have a lot of background NPCs. Acknowledging that not every one of the random extras is going to be straight adds a bit of depth to the world even if the individual characters themselves are just a name, a procedural face, and a few lines of dialogue.

This post is just about details…

I’m not a fan of the “That’s brave of you” / “Being a mesmer makes it easier” part of the conversation. This is a spot where I think the dev team could’ve used some better writing. “That’s brave” is affirming but it’s also pretty shallow. I felt like my character was a bit clueless when that was the best thing I could come up with. (Actually, the first impression I got with that mesmer bit in Sya’s reply was that she was blowing you off because you said something tacky, heh.)

In particular, might be nice to give the player a few options here, including the ability to say “Me too!” One of the ways to avoid tokenism in an open-ended game is to allow for the possibility that maybe the protagonist is going to belong to one of the minority groups they encounter. (A good example of this from elsewhere in the game: if you’re human there’s a point where you’re talking to one of the nobles and you can say your family is from anywhere — Kryta, Ascalon, Elona, Cantha — instead of assuming a “default.”)

Bloodstealer.5978:

That’s pretty awful I totally hear that… I guess the question that comes to mind for me is.. if that can and does happen in RL why then would we all want that to creep into something we’re likely sitting at home playing away from reality as well, I don’t think I would look forward to logging in so much for sure.

Simple answer, without delving too deeply into how fiction can handle depictions of real-world harm: merely introducing an explicitly trans character doesn’t introduce anti-trans bigotry.

That’s part of the “escapist” appeal, in this case: the interaction with Sya is trying to signal “You can just be trans in Tyria and it’s not a thing people will flip out about.” Imagining and playing in a world like that makes a lot of people happy.

But you need to be able to actually meet someone like Sya because otherwise it’s indistinguishable from “Nobody is trans in Tyria.” And folks have been burned by media that avoids “LGBT issues” (or LGBT representation) only to eventually take some kind of awfully bigoted turn.

It’s the difference between “This world I made up has a place for you and it’s no big deal” and “This world I made up has no place for you whatsoever.”

Sarevok.2638:

They have that choice about their lives, let them get on with it, don’t hoist them up for everyone to judge. The only thing about this topic i can say is “The Road to hell is paved with good intentions” while people want to celebrate this NPC, it is only having the knock on effect of bringing these differences up and making them more visible when in reality, it shouldn’t be! It’s the opposite effect of what the end desire is!

But, actually in reality, being LGBT does make you “visible” and a lot of the attention you attract — especially as a trans man or woman — is negative. Even if strangers on the street don’t know your orientation or past history, lots and lots of people involved in your life do, and trans folks routinely encounter discrimination, abuse, and violence as a result.

A bit of positive visibility, even if it’s rather tokenistic, can be a nice little balm. There’s literally no downside.

Besides, total invisibility is just erasure.

Inspiration is hot stuff.

I am so happy.

Also, too: unicorn!

fluxit.8247:

Unicorns are fabulous. Inb4 mesmers new unicorn transform.

It’s already here:
1. Buy a unicorn finisher from the gemstore.
2. Find some scrubs to dunk on.
3. Stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp.
4. Did I mention the unicorn has your guild logo on its butt?

vorpal.1497:

Also, the cooldown on some skills getting interrupted is brutal, like getting a 6 second skill interrupted makes it go on a 16 second cooldown (in warrior’s case, this means 16 seconds with no condi cleanse because it was your telegraphed burst skill)

That’s a specialty trait designed to force long cooldowns (mesmer’s Power Block). Normally any skill that’s canceled or interrupted gets a CD of 4-5 seconds.

1. Notice that your backpack isn’t ascended yet.
2. Wait til the day after the biggest skills/traits patch the game has seen ever.
3. Start a forum thread demanding a specific unpaid volunteer community-rep respond to your sweeping-yet-nebulous concerns.
4. Come back a mere five hours later and say you’re quitting because nobody listens to you.

gg

I’m sure there’s room to tone a couple of things down after the dust has settled, but I have absolutely no complaints about my new-found ability to punish lazy play without burning up all my own resources to do so. That just seems, I dunno… perfectly reasonable.

Now I feel like I can put most of my effort into doing something fancy instead of just getting my damage up to a respectable level.

I’d settle for some kind of “degen amount” indicator as an alternative if the total predicted hp loss is too annoying to code up or shifts too often to be useful visually.

Like the little down arrows on the GW1 health bar: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Health_bar#Health_bar

It’s hard to see tiny numbers on condition stacks but easy to look over and see “I’ve got roughly this much badness on me.”

Dawdler.8521:

Thieves I usually dont have a problem with, but now it was a death sentence to meet them.

Basilisk Venom gives two charges now (even untraited), so you gotta deal with their opening bursts a little bit differently when you’re fighting a typical zerk SA D/P thief.

The unicorn itself is typically male. He just likes to hang out with maidens. The whole cultural symbolism of young women and horses in Western society is probably outside the scope of this thread.

Also, we did get Lute Guy. Lute Guy is male.

Jackums.3496:

Gender neutrality is possible the moment you choose to stop ascribing things to either sex according to society’s standards. The issue is you, not the unicorn.

#prounicorn

Exactly.
The unicorn is for everyone.

I play something very similar in WvW, with Sword/Torch in place of Sword/Pistol (and slightly different lower-tier traits).

You very easily pick up HM stacks over the normal course of a fight without burning mantras just to get a DPS boost. Good damage, good defense, lots of healing and cleansing. Didn’t miss DE at all post-patch yesterday.

I did find myself needing to trade in Decoy for Mantra of Concentration to beat CI ‘phantrupt’ builds in duels, though (I prefer Decoy for the general case).

Tofu.1978:

No, by gift I meant meet him in pvp and use it on him.

The gift that keeps on giving.

The Inspiration Unicorn approves.

Tofu.1978:

If I gift you a unicorn finisher will you use it?

You can’t gift finishers.

I know because I tried to do exactly this thing to my guildmates.

Quite frankly, if you can’t handle the unicorn, you don’t deserve Inspiration. It’s not for you.

It’s a pretty srs-bsns unicorn. Quite masculine if you choose to interpret it that way.

Also, I hate to tell you this, but like everything you do as a mesmer is pink-and-purple butterflies.

I ran SuperVeils (Veil + Mimic, traited with PU, Temporal Enchanter, Master of Manipulation) for a zerg and it was pretty sweet.

I also played a Dom/Duel/Insp mantra interrupt build for smaller fights (my usual thing) and, despite the absence of Deceptive Evasion, it was much, much improved. Thumbs up all around. Also, HM > DE.

It’s kinda weird. I felt, like, really powerful. But my friends seemed really powerful, too. Stuff like engie mortar and burst thieves and tanky eles and whatnot. We felt kinda OP. Yet the enemies we were facing (mesmers included) had all the same stuff and… I didn’t feel like they were any stronger than before. So far I think the patch is pretty good at, like, making you feel more buffed-up than you actually are.

It’s a minor. You have more condi cleanse than ever.

EremiteAngel.9765:

I did a PvP ranking here. Wonder what are your thoughts as mesmers?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/PvP-landscape-Upheaval-Rise-of-the-Mesmers/first#post5183292

You’ve been promoting the heck out of that awful thread all over the place. Just stop, please. Nobody’s gonna take the bait and, whoever you are, you’re not nearly amazing enough to predict the whole meta without testing anything first.

I already have a full set of zerk. This is the correct choice. I do not need another.

I may end up crafting a second zerk set so I can have one with Traveler runes for non-Chrono build and one with better DPS/utility runes for Chrono builds.

I feel like this is good for condition players, good for their targets, and good for team play in general. Because convenient access to important information is good while fighting with the UI is frustrating.

The little numbers on the condition indicators are very hard to see at-a-glance, and it’s even tougher to judge the duration of the stuff on you short of just memorizing every class ability (and we’re about to see a ton of them changed, plus get more stacking introduced with the changes to conditions like Burning and Poison).

Raunchy.6891:

My big thoughts are how does this affect pve mesmers, because I saw that they basically combined Harmonious Mantras and Empowering Mantras which messes with pve builds iirc. Will we have to go into more of a boon share/reflect support role now in dungeons/fractals? I’m never going to do a lot of that stuff but I’m still curious lol.

I think Empowering Mantras was a horrible design that needed to die.

If that leaves mesmer DPS too low in dungeons, the solution is to take an across-the-board look at mesmer DPS. That one trait was a band-aid, and an absolutely horrible one since it was literally “throw away all of your utilities to get your damage up to par.”

Fingers crossed, then.

Thanks!

Fay.2357:

ASP.8093:

Can I get a short-and-sweet explanation on this please:

What exactly about Mender’s Purity stacks with Harmonious Mantras?

Mender’s purity acts as though you literally activated the condie removal mantra every time you activate a healing skill.

Thanks for the quick reply!

So it’s a double-dip no HM?

And does Mender’s Purity still trigger off of every use of Power Return? (I.e. no ICD, no stealth change to make it work on casting Mantra of Recovery itself?)

Can I get a short-and-sweet explanation on this please:

What exactly about Mender’s Purity stacks with Harmonious Mantras?

Making Focus reflect baked-in might actually hurt you quite a bit in PvE.

For example, there’s a thread up right now about bosses that reflect stuff, so when you reflect their projectiles they just bounce back at you anyway (with better tracking than the original, according to some posters).

The favored solution is to change your traits for that encounter so that your Wardens are just the projectile-destroying vanilla version instead.

The bourgeoisie.

::rimshot::

My clones will be here all week, folks.

The current dynamic is:

• Offensive arrow carts are needed to counter door trebs.
• The counter to offensive arrow carts is ballistas. Ideally, pre-placed.

I reiterate.

This idea that can be boiled down to:

• Let your enemies control your map queue!
• The game is better if you aren’t allowed to play it!

That’s a non-starter, pure and simple.

Lord of Rings.5371:

With a population balanced game, a match between a top server and lower servers, for example JQ vs IoJ vs ET, should be more of a game of skill and organization than the size of a zerg.

There’s basically two options for the “JQ” server in this situation:

1. Everyone who wants to play queues up and you end up with a random collection of folks. Your guild group that has spent months training together has a hard time even getting more than half of their members in anywhere; might as well cancel their raid nights for the week.

2. You enforce discipline and basically tell 80% of the server to sit it out. Your population advantage allows you to cherrypick the ideal players while the “ET” server in the matchup is stuck with whatever they’ve got, so your best fight guilds and havoc teams absolutely trash the average enemy anyway.

So, yeah, it’s a test of “organization,” but it’s unfun for a ton of your players, and the way you win is just a different kind of stacking.

Any purported solution to Coverage Wars that gives your enemy control over your map queue is very bad for the game. Map queues are a necessary evil to maintain server stability and discourage hyper-blobs, but creating situations where players should game them is a terrible idea.

On top of that, I’d much rather face an uphill battle in Coverage Wars than have an algorithm tell me I’m not allowed to play with my friends.

It also seems terrible for morale. However burned out I may get defending in an undermanned timezone, creating a game mode where “Get the hell out of the map, you scrub, because your mere presence is helping the enemy!” is a reasonable thing to think, like, all the time, is going to be much, much worse for player experience and server culture.

Lightsbane.9012:

you’re not going to find many fights in EoTM. Best bet is to group with a few like minded individuals there and find new and creative ways to troll enemy zergs.

People do GvG in EotM sometimes. It’s not as convenient as Obsidian Sanctum but you can make do. They’re not dedicated EotM guilds, just guilds that make use of EotM.

Short and sweet, yo:

Alacrity.
Amazeballs interrupt powers. Now that Power Block is being merged with a bunch of other stuff it’s actually looking pretty good.
Undisputed mastery of the Slow condition.

Moreover, the core mesmer stuff is getting so much better.
More shattering!
More quickness!
More reflection!
More stealth!
More mileage out of your phantasms!

You’re not gonna find me sitting in the corner clutching my toys and shouting “NOBODY ELSE CAN HAVE THIS!” A profession isn’t just a set of special gimmicks; it’s a package deal. And the mesmer’s getting a significant upgrade that’s focused right at some of the most interesting and unique parts of the profession.

Dawdler.8521:

Besides, what would the flags be? Who decide?

Well, there’s an obvious answer to that: Anet, based on the preexisting flavor of the names. (Presumably if you join a server called Seafarer’s Rest you don’t mind a little picture of a ship in the logo somewhere.)

They could design some kinda-innocuous somewhat-abstract logos in-house, or just do a community thing — IIRC they did a community thing to design new guild logo elements in GW1 and it turned out pretty well.

(None of this is to say this idea is necessary, but, practically speaking, it is feasible.)

HoT tries to address the thief issue by giving you Weakness-on-interrupt. Which reduces their burst damage and their ability to dodge. (It also stacks pretty powerfully with Chaotic Interruption’s conditions, helping to make the Immobilize harder to purge.)

Typically the best place to look is the server’s central WvW website. Here’s JQ’s.

MailMail.6534:

Keeping my fingers crossed!

Restorative Illusions, Shattered Conditions and Menders were in decent spots with maybe the first needing to be AOE.

I am with you on this.

My modest wishlist is:

• Better Compounding Celerity.
• Flashier Temporal Enchanter (or move it down some tiers and add a new GM).
• A Mender’s Purity alternative for folks who like longer-cooldown heals like Ether Feast. (I’ll probably be rocking MP all day every day, but it doesn’t hurt to have options.)

Fingers crossed for non-awful Compounding Celerity…

Malediktus.3740:

Again that does not work with random people. You cannot expect random people (pugs) to move as a unity as soon as the leader is dead. It just turns instantly into a cloud formation and most people will try to get ooc to waypoint. The rest will die helplessly.
To profit from the 5 people aoe cap you have to stick together or are you heavily disadvantaged.

additional commanders are also no solution (not to mention very few people are good enough to start commanding on the fly) since you will not see their tags if you joined the squad of the 1st commander.

Don’t join squad. Ever. There’s really no reason to, especially now that different-color tags exist. (In b4 /squadinfo: /supplyinfo is vastly superior to /squadinfo; don’t use /squadinfo!)

MSFone.3026:

Also, how are you dumping hundreds of gold on infusions? I buy mine with laurels and badges.

I’m assuming they mean the ones that grand Agony Resistance rather than WvW infusions.

The former require 250 Passion Fruits/Karka Shells and 100 of a T6 mat each.

It’s a mistake to think pulling more and more formalism out of thin air is actually going to bring clarity to this discussion.

If you’re talking about s timezone where a server is consistently stronger than its two rivals, the “double-team” is the result of the other two trying to stay afloat. It’s not coordinated or particularly purposeful, just a natural result of map politics:

If I reduce the two other servers to just their keeps in EBG, for example, then the only place they have to expand into is me. Ditto if I’ve got enough people to push-push-push constantly they pretty much have to both be pushing me back to stop my “extra” people from ktraining/backcapping.

Basically even pugs fighting whoever’s available to fight and pushing back against the people pushing them will result in a natural “2v1” when one server is riding high.

~

Everyone who’s ever played WvW complains about “2v1.” When a real 2v1 happens, though, you can feel it. It means constant fights. Not to mention you see two enemy blobs from other servers moving past each other without even a lick of caution. You may not quite notice it right away, but the realization is, eventually, undeniable. Just having getting pushed by both servers once in a blue moon isn’t that. (The thing is, coordinated 2v1 is very hard to maintain for any length of time beyond, like, two buddy-buddy commanders from rival servers deciding to smash up a garri waypoint together. It’s often a huge morale drain for the servers doing it.)

StickerHappy.8052:

Yes point taken, but you can also be Moaed when the you still haven’t popped lich and die and never get a chance to use it.

Sure, but the timer to respawn is much lower than the cooldown on Moa.

StickerHappy.8052:

ASP.8093:

StickerHappy.8052:

Ever tried running Moa in a coordinated team?

I’ve pin-sniped with it in WvW for funzies.

I think the main value of Moa is that it preemptively takes away access to skills like Blink and Contemplation of Purity. Makes it much easier for the team to pound on one target. But I’ve seen plenty of team fights where just spamming a crapton of Immobilize had the exact same effect.

I see. This is what most people are missing, on a coordinated team, Moa can basically take out/KO a player. That is the big deal maker there. Coordination is the key, Even If you cast Moa on someone in the BEGINNING of a fight, if a team using it is coordinated, chances are the Moad person will die.

“Missing” only in the sense that this has nothing to do with how Moa should interact with Lich form.

I mean, one of the things I’ve been saying is that going Lich at the start of a fight is typically a bad idea…

StickerHappy.8052:

Ever tried running Moa in a coordinated team?

I’ve pin-sniped with it in WvW for funzies.

I think the main value of Moa is that it preemptively takes away access to skills like Blink and Contemplation of Purity. Makes it much easier for the team to pound on one target. But I’ve seen plenty of team fights where just spamming a crapton of Immobilize had the exact same effect.

TyPin.9860:

In my short experience with Moa I usually Moa’d the targets, pulled them with Focus #4 before they could even attempt to run, immob them and just killed that pesky Moa.

You’re talking about blowing nearly all of your control abilities to set that up there. Which is a thing you can do when all of your skills are off cooldown (and you’re hoping a target won’t dodge). The best use of Lich usually isn’t at the very start of a fight, it’s after your enemies have been softened up a bit but you’re running out of powerful cooldowns and really just want to buzzsaw through their hp ASAP while they’re already low on endurance and control abilities. I think someone popping Lich against a team that’s got all their cc and burst skills ready is doing it wrong to begin with.

In my short experience on the receiving end of Moa (I, personally, run Mass Invis 99% of the time), the CC you need to apply to make it a guaranteed kill is really the powerful part of the combo, and Moa is just there to preemptively take away a couple of “oh kitten!” buttons (but the combo sans Moa would kill many players, or force them to use all of their “oh kitten!” buttons anyway).

It’s also been my experience that scrubs who pop Moa and then just spam their skills willy-nilly because they’re expecting a free win get a beak to the face.