Guild Wars 2

Druid with mender’s, staff and longbow for kiting, cleanses, and some CC. It’s harder to deal with on point but try kiting and time your dazes for interrupting big skills.

Can we not have the charr take some after the human prisons are full? I don’t want them forging an alliance with the separatists that would be bad news. The only thing worse in Tyria than criminals are criminals who combine their powers yet even further endangering the citizens.

Zenith.7301:

Some day you’ll actually bother to split balancing for the kitten formats.

It’s a disgrace that weak elementalist shouts and mesmer’s already bottom tier DPS are getting nerfed just because of PvP.

Same goes for ranger, nerfing the one pet who doesn’t do absolutely non-competitive DPS.

You hired a raid team, why won’t you hire a PvE balance team, since it’s so obvious your current devs are focused on their beloved e-sports balancing at the expense of all other content?

Flash Freeze is a PBAoE chill that also triggers frost aura and when paired with aurashare gives allies around you frost aura too so I wouldn’t call it a weak shout.

Elementalist is simply the best class in the game due to its healing, mobility and disengage (if taking the proper utilities), zoning, focus interrupts and invulnerability, weapon blast finishers that can stealth the ele in a smokefield or stack might in fire fields, and has lots of chill and burning access.

They could have earned the title in season 1 and skipped season 2 entirely.

Didn’t know if you knew about it or not, but the finisher sort of already exists.
Rainbow Unicorn Finisher

Of course I know it exists, I explicitly referenced it and seen it in action. It only seems to be available whenever I’m taking a big break from the game. :(

I’m overall satisfied with the quaggans and llama though one can never have too many finishers.

Because the lore of the game is based on serious issues and its a war torn world and you, as a character, run around helping people with the nasty enemies causing them problems. That is the entirety of the game.

Adventure Time takes place in a post-apocolyptic era and has a dark history but still manages to be whimsical. Everything tries so hard to be gritty and grit has so oversaturated everything that people started looking for something else.

Cutting PL won’t create more fun build options. Cutting PL won’t re-instate the cancelled new legendary weapon project. Cutting PL won’t give WvWrs the last 8 months of their game mode back, and it won’t do crap to help the game’s reputation.

I think what he was trying to say was the game simply wasn’t ready for a pro-league. The potential was there but unfortunately the game has too many variables at a base level to balance properly. With revenant added we have 8,001 potential matchups not counting the different ways a single class can be traited, weapon, sigil, rune, and utility choices, etc. In other words it’s very easy to overlook adding cheese to the game despite the devs’ best efforts. Sure there’s still some degree of skill and on the fly judgments but e-sports need to be spectator friendly too.

if you are functioning alcoholic and still performing, nobody cares.
Sure .. if you are working at McDonalds

He wasn’t on the clock and didn’t say anything offensive. He just said what he thought.

Usuallyafk.4075:

Yeah……no you can’t.

I mean absolutely no offense to the OP but I’ll have to agree here. Even Abjured/Astral lost some games and they’re the closest thing the game has to perfect. Machines also greatly outclass humans in games (well, potentially since even back in the 90s a computer beat a world champion in chess and AI and hardware have made rapid progress since then) so who knows what kind of builds and combos they can come up with. What if some of the current metabattle builds are actually only higher mid tier and there are best builds we currently don’t know about? What if a Viper Berserker and Mender’s Druid roaming together is the best strat for roaming play (can flexibly and swiftly crash node fights that happen and intercepting respawning healers on the way to a teamfight)? What if a sword/dagger daredevil with this build is the best overall (I say overall of course since “best” changes depending on your own and enemy comp):

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAsYVn0MBNmilOBWOBkmildCbeB+AvgcngNQHYLAUbOQA-TpxAABgcCAmvMAAHCga2fggjAQEPAAA

Or switching shadow arts out for trickery for the daze on steal and extra initiative.

Tl;dr: not even the best players can play any classes perfectly, since no one even knows what “perfect” looks like (yet?)

Canonically I see the Guild Wars 2 hero as a male charr warrior. Hear me out, charr can have lion manes, and lions are the animal of leadership. Warriors are also the traditional leader class in RPG’s (or paladin/guardian and since both can use heavy armor, greatswords, and sword/shield it’s a tough choice between the two). A human might be more likely but it’s too obvious. Maybe there are different Pact Commanders at different stages of the game’s story? Like the HoT Pact Commander is a Sylvari revenant while the Zhaitan arc commander was a human?

Blackhearted.1264:

The performance of HoT was not as expected. We learnt the lesson. A second expansion is in work and will be released as soon as possible.

They’re learned their lesson eh? Does that mean they wont try charging $50 for a very content light xpack again?

The problem wasn’t a “lack of content” but rather that interrupt skills such as air focus 5 have too much precasts so you can’t interrupt skills in line with your reflexes. Distracting daggers almost hit the mark here but needs a slight precast shave. Another issue is too many safety nets and a raised skill floor. The maps actually had a good design, especially Tangled Depths.

Twitch judgment and reaction plays a lessened role in HoT and that’s likely why it hasn’t met sales expectations.

Boysenberry.1869:

I’ll play along.

I’d imagine Lion’s Arch would have a fairly subtropical climate and be quite warm in the summer. The Humidity would be a lot higher than 35% given its proximity to the ocean. It can snow in Lion’s Arch in the winter given past Wintersday festivities but that snow may be purely magical in nature. I’d say it would be say 60s in the winter and 90s in the summer with humidities high year around.

Divinity’s Reach being farther inland would have greater variation in temperature and probably lower humidity than Lion’s Arch. It is still in Kryta which is fairly similar throughout so I’d imagine on any given day temperatures would still be within several degrees of Lion’s Arch.

The Black Citadel I imagine would be much drier than Kryta. Given how much drier Ascalon is from Kryta, the pervailing wind pattern is probably west to east which leaves Ascalon in the rain shadow of the Shiverpeaks. There is still plenty of grassland and some forests in Ascalon so there is still enough of a moisture source coming from somewhere. While it may be dry, it will certainly have humidity higher than 0%. Even Death Valley is higher than 0%. I imagine much of Ascalon to be hot and dry in the summer time, say upper 90s and 20% or less humidity, but quite cool in the winter with conditions maybe in the 40s and 50s and more moisture in the air.

Hoelbrak would be a typical mountain climate. Below freezing during the winter but given how close it is to green grassland it may have some melt and warmer temperatures in the summer. Cold air has trouble holding a lot of moisture but mountains also trap moisture so humidity could be moderate.

The Grove and Rata Sum are probably somewhat more tropical than Lion’s Arch and they are probably humid all year long. 70s-80s in the winter and 90s in the summer with humidity very high.

It likely has summers hotter than 90 because even the North (think New York, Seattle, etc.) has 90 degree summers (edit I was thinking of high points not averages). Hoelbrak I see as a mountain town like Colorado. Divinity’s Reach is not that far north of Lion’s Arch, which has a Floridian vibe to it so we will assume it has Miami like temperatures. So Lion’s Arch would have good weather around the year except for hurricanes though the humidity isn’t to everyone’s liking. The Grove and Rata Sum I envision having temperatures similar to Mexico City.

The impression overall I get from the map of Tyria is within its relatively small window (we aren’t getting the entire picture and we still see the Crystal Desert further south of us and firmly in high temperature territory so we haven’t reached the point where further south equals colder yet in the game) the distance between Divinity’s Reach and Lion’s Arch as 650 miles give or take. The canonically the playable parts of the world are only a tiny fraction of what’s actually there lore wise and the distance between DR and LA could be even bigger than the map implies.

Lordrosicky.5813:

leman.7682:

I’m dropping my diplomatic attitude for a while. Let me tell you that from a perspective of someone who interacts with real-life professionals, nothing, nothing in GW2 is professional. ESL are like kids in a playground – no direction, horrible organisation, abhorrent conduct, thoughtlessly designed ProLeague rules, no balls for taking quick and real action, no proper communication, and absolutely disgusting music on breaks during ProLeague.
Anet? Same – no direction for the game, no balance, no communication, no substantial action taken to fix the state of affairs.
Players? Money-hungry kids using dirty tricks to have their shot at earning their first money in life. Hiding behind stupid rules and terrible design.

Since most people seem not to realize that – people in real life get fired for such behaviour, because the moment things go wrong and customers start complaining, the real professionals at the top start cleaning the mess up. That’s what GW2 is – a total mess, and there are no professionals to clean it up.
I never thought I’d say that but the only ones who deserve recognition are the duo of EU shoutcasters (I don’t watch NA, so no opinion there) who work in this rough environment and somehow manage to keep their kitten together.

I took a 5-month-something break from active playing and I wanted to come back for good for S3. I log in, no one’s online, see people logging in every few days just to chat and bash the game. That’s a major waste of time. As Henry put it – shambles.

Most of the intelligent human beings already quit because there’s just so much rubbish you can take before you notice that it’s going nowhere and the remains of faith for Anet that still linger are not enough to counterbalance the top releases at the end of May. We can always come back since the game will surely live on and there’s no barriers, but one has got to be delusional to think that new games designed bottom-up for PvP releasing in the coming years won’t challenge GW2 to the point of being obsolete. No fun left.

Ohh, and I saw a guy with Chaos Gloves and a sloth on his back spamming quaggans wearing aviator caps and flying attached to balloons. What is this kitten art direction? Your game used to look like a painting, and then you decided to add wings.

Ohh-encore, and writing here is also a waste of time because let’s face it, no one with real power reads it, making it just an echo chamber, and a fight club.

Yup. Spot on as usual dude. The problem with the whole esports thing is that it just displays the game in a terrible light when it is actually a well coded and designed game. But its just not cut out for competitive pvp for money. So in fact, all their 400k does is makes people think the game is a joke. A big reason for gw2s damaged reputation online is the pro league and the esports in general. They should cut it immediately if they want to maintain whats left of the reputation of the game.

And I agree on the games art direction. They added a load of BS for My Little Pony fans into the gem store. It used to have great art. Now it’s just pink quaggan back packs and other rubbish like that. The game in pve and wvw is no longer serious as a result. There is no grit to the art anymore. Its just a load of pink shiny stuff that doesnt fit with the world they created in anyway whatsoever.

I’m still waiting on that Pony finisher and made the Dreamer before it was an MLP reference. Why do you even want the PvE game to be “serious” anyway? I think pink quaggans and all that silly stuff is fun and lightens the game’s mood. If anything they haven’t gone far enough, I want my T-Rex humanoid race riding a skateboard! :D Doesn’t even have to be a mastery could be a simple toy. And what’s wrong with the Pro-League music? Is everything suddenly worthy of complaint now? If the game were totally dull color and design wise it’d get boring, no one wants to see the 10 billionth Lord of the Rings copy people want to see cool and fun stuff too.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Chaith.8256:

Aereniel.7356:

Stand The Wall.6987:

They should seriously abandon the whole thing and focus on gvg/ wvw.

I doubt the Pro League will continue past the current season, unless Anet secures additional investor funding to keep it going. I don’t think there is a business case to justify it, other than as a PR spend with a negative ROI. It’s hard to see how the current season could have met any of the performance metrics Anet has set for it.

To come back to what Leman and Leet0 have been saying in this thread, the Pro League and the core PvP experience are so opposed in ideology that the pairing of the two feels disjointed and even illogical. The design aims are completely different. On one hand we have the core PvP, which is a non-skill intensive and casual experience where all things are attainable for all people, and game design leans towards passive traits and spammable AoE skills. The best builds play themselves and participation is rewarded. A socialist utopia, as Leet0 put it. On the other end of the spectrum we have the Pro League, which should be a very skill-intensive and exclusive affair where only the very best can compete.

It’s not hard to see the issues when the two are combined. The Pro League receives no support from the core game, because the core game’s design is geared towards a totally different audience. Anet is trying to marry a participation-based ladder to a skill-based tournament, which is not unlike putting trousers on a fish. Funny but completely pointless.

To recap what I wrote in a previous post – the Pro League won’t be competitive unless the core game also supports competitive play. Until that happens, the Tokers, Phantarams and ROMs of the scene will continue to rake in easy dough, because there is nobody to challenge them. If Anet wants a competitive Pro League, the core game’s infrastructure has to support fostering new talent that comes in and makes the old guard sweat for their money. At the moment, those guys are not sweating one bit.

Pro League won’t be competitive unless ArenaNet serves us more competitively minded core-pvp?

PL’s competitiveness is completely out of ArenaNet hands, ball is in the ESL court.

I would put that down as a nice to have, not something that’s even remotely close to affecting how competitive the PL is. It’s not quite the problem you’d think.

Creating pro league teams from core PvP isn’t the goal. You’re seeing a marriage where the isn’t one between ArenaNet core PvP and ESL PL. Even if new teams formed, they would very unlikely be top 4, who are also getting better together at the same rate.

There are plenty of players that have, or could have the mechanical/rotational skill at a pro league level. They honed their abilities in the fiery pits of core-pvp just fine, but they just don’t have the desire/drive/skills to succeed at a much harder goal: creating and maintaining a social structure like a team.

Hypothetically, to pose a solution for the problem you are suggesting, ArenaNet could provide infrastructure for players to naturally form into teams, getting players used to socially seeking out players and playing the game as five players.

So again, hypothetically, abolishing dynamic queue, bringing back solo and team queue (slightly higher league rewards for team), would work best.

Right now, core PvP is highly antisocial, all about single player content, or playing co-op with your best friend.

The average player is getting zero experience with 5 man PvP content on VOIP, which is purely what pro play is.

PL success is so dependent on super good voice communication, being able to maintain high energy, and theory crafting as a team. If the core PvP incorporated these things, currently incorporating zero, we’d no doubt have a few more PL teams. For the reason I said before, it wouldn’t even be a big change.

The Pro League is highly competitive outside of a few anomalies. I’d argue it would be more competitive with a pause feature and limiting the number of teams a player can ever represent in a season to 1, subs discluded.

Disconnects and team swapping definitely trivialize the EU PL’s competitiveness.

NA PL hasn’t had any interference by those sort of things, and we have a bunch of teams who have shown the ability to take games off of each other.

I’d say it’s clear what the important issues are, ESL rules should be priority tweaked to ensure the results maintain integrity for competitive PL.

ArenaNet should just focus on build diversity in PvP, and improving spectator mode.

I find it hilarious that you people still insist pro league league pvpers are so great mechanical players. It simply isnt true. Gw2 has zero talented gamers. Anyone with a crazy click per minute or micro skill or great timing or reflexes would not play gw2 because its a joke.

And you know how i know this? I never tried in this game, ever. Often played with my cousin just having a laugh and kittening around both in game and on the forums. And i never played against anyone i thought was doing something amazing. And i played vs everyone highly rated . If i go to play the multitude of fps games i play there are people there who are so kittening skilled it blows my mind.

But reaction time does matter:

Did I mention that I’m only Ruby on a monitor that’s only 60 Hz?? A top pro league player would likely score a 150 average or lower on that test. There’s also the precast element especially with elementalist interrupts. You can press air or water focus 5 right when you see a blue glow but due to animation charging time they’ll get the heal off anywhere where if you were on a thief that has distracting daggers activated or a ranger who’s in longbow with point blank shot off cooldown you’d get the skill off.

On one of the uploaded pictures I did very well except blocked a wrong move at one point.

http://www.teyah.net/MilliaBlocker_v0.3.swf

http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

If i go to play the multitude of fps games i play there are people there who are so kittening skilled it blows my mind.

It is unbelievable but fighting games require yet even more skill. Keep in mind it’s a different skillset needed in MMO’s compared to shooters overall. In MMO’s the biggest priority is resource management whether it is your own or teammates’ HP, keeping track of lots of cooldowns (your own and the opponent’s), conditions and boons, and then you have situational awareness, such as should I bail and head for another node or stay in the fight in the hopes I can turn it around with a well timed heal, interrupt, or overload? In shooters it’s more about your aim (especially aligning your crosshairs with where a head would be), situational awareness, and the environment. Overwatch was quite fun and the skill cap seems overall higher compared to Guild Wars 2.

I’m not trying to say that Guild Wars 2 is overall high skill cap, but that reaction time still matters. I’ve argued before and still stand by how the skill floor needs raising so a bad player’s noobishness can be penalized easier and the skill cap raised, especially in a core Tyria base PvE rework.

Yes because competition is inherent in anything ranked.

*Daily automated tournaments restricted to teams to earn qualification points for a monthly tournament among all qualified teams, this is what we need since release. *

There used to be tickets you can buy to enter tournaments. I think that needs to be brought back with official tournaments and teamQ’s purpose can be fighting for better seeding within your league’s tournament section. You could go up in a tournament but never down so a team of emeralds can join the diamond tournament (but be positioned to lose against a highly seeded team so they’d basically be paying to lose) but a team of diamonds can’t join the emerald section. So you can play up ranks if you want but never down.

And even then, when it fits the story to do so. Such as if and when they add Cantha and/or Elona.

I think elites should all follow a common thread per expansion after HoT. Like a Thief elite could be a Corsair while a Warrior can be a Buccaneer and the other classes also having pirate lore themes but still have radically different mechanics from each other to maintain class uniqueness. Or martial arts is a great theme like Thief as a Monk, Ranger as a Nak Muay with close quarters DPS and CC through Muay Thai, Elementalist as a Mahoutsukai, etc.

Wolfey.3407:

This isn’t the first time they have interviewed or invited someone who gave the game a black eye publicly…..

Any other game, would have revoked their rights to shout cast.

On the bright side, you can say that it’s awesome that ANET let’s them invite people to bash their product openly. You can say it’s awesome that shout casters are allowed to encourage negative behavior.

Moving on to Argi, if he is that upset over the way Guild Wars 2 is heading PvP wise, there are more beneficial ways of making your voice heard then being a drunken slob on stream.

Personally, I say suspend Argi from tournament play for next season and move on. There’s no need for drunks to be on stream… there’s no need to advertise non-partner merchandise on stream, there’s no need to bash a game on stream.

Let’s start from the top:

1.The game was made in Direct X9 despite it being very old even by the standards of when the game was made.

2.Serious balance issues taking too long to resolve.

3.Lack of a PvP/PvE split.

4.Homogenization of roles and obsolescence of classes.

5.Too many safety nets for classes

6.Too many charged interrupts and too long precasts so by the time air focus 5 procs the opponent will heal up despite you having the twitch reactions and instinct to stop him. On thief distracting daggers has too long of a precasts but is otherwise a great skill and an example of a potential step in the correct direction, but within the context of too many blocks and passives it falls flat.

7.Other skills aren’t telegraphed well enough.

8.While AoE and CC have their place they need to be cut down across the board. More stability access is just a bandaid on a broken bone.

STIHL.2489:

WvW. Everything else is done to fund WvW.

This guy knows the intended purpose of PvE!

sPvP here with some WvW. PvE may have the canon stuff but the PvP modes are where the real game is at. We can even justify them lore wise by thinking of them as simulations similar to SAB for sport and war training purposes.

I personally find thief easier in PvE since you can stealth and daze from behind as well as lots of dodges and disengages. You have to read animations to get the most of it. Staff is easier than sword and dagger but S/d has on demand stealth if you manage your initiative wisely and may even be better overall due to the daze and shadowstep.

I don’t think they can (or should) add new classes because roles are homogenized enough across classes as it is while it would be harder to balance than just having nine. More elite specs on the other hand are good for build diversity. If they had an elite ranger spec that gives Mesmer like teleports for example it would undermine that unique role Mesmer has or if thief got a defense oriented elite spec that obsoletes warrior.

There really doesn’t seem to be much missing that would make new elite specs obvious. and in fact we have too much going on already.

Vicky.4563:

I really think it would help your team more to focus on some nice support classes like Mercy or Tracer. Also, pick up a tank like Winston at the least.

Everyone wants to be that bamf Mcree or Genji and go full DPS, and then they wonder why they’re gunned down for escorts.

I tried Winston his lightning gun is too unreliable. I really found Lucio quite fun however. McCree is awesome and it’s easier to be accurate with him since you know you have six per clip you want to make those count.

If you have to ask then elementalist, preferably tempest. They have good disengage if you take the proper utilities, excellent support via healing, can sucker punch an enemy with chill and interrupt a rez with water focus 5 (canceling out of a rez is hard so if they have the sense to dodge likely won’t anyway), good condition pressure and fire aura with fire, and earth for gap closing, further stacking immobilize, and sharing reflect via earth attunement and the aftershock utility. You’ll want to switch out aftershock for flash freeze depending on the enemy comp. If you see some rangers nearby don’t be afraid to lightning flash to them if possible, lightning flash doesn’t cancel your overloads and even if they get the rez people are rezzed at half health while the rezzer and his pet will have to eat your overload. Revenant can do this strat with phase traversal and staff 2 or 5 depending on the environment and potential buffs the rezzer has.

Dueling is hard but still possible especially against DH’s and some rangers and skills don’t smoothly link or cancel into as lots of stuff worth doing is charged.

Take either cleric’s or mender’s. I personally never run cleric’s but it’s the most popular.

If you must decide between the listed classes it depends. Use thief if you find yourself in a low mobility comp or against something like two guardians and three necros so you can backcap forcing some of them to retake that node, bail, then plus one someone’s duel. Overall however I’d have to say engineer. Despite the nerfs they’re still a great class and is an excellent point holder and team support. They can lay combo fields that others can trigger for great healing. Thief has some good combo fields for blind and stealth (on a revenant or ele I love using blast finishers like water dagger 3 or revenant staff 4 on a thief’s pistol 5 field) that can be useful too, but is typically powerless to generate good AoE cleanses and heals if the team needs it.

2: Koda, kind off the same as above, but harder lore wise since they are a bunch of self-centered, arrogant spiritual creatures. (i don’t like them that much) But i suppose they could work too if some lore develops around them. Though i wonder their popularity.

I kinda like them but at the same time think they’re somewhat comically pretentious, like the annoying friend who bothers people with the sound of one hand clapping question. Like the intention is to seem deep but comes across as silly instead. “Wait! Why are you running away!” “Am I the one who is running away?” “Yes you are! You are deliberately going in a direction that’s away from me when I need important information from you!”

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I say bring in a whole new race, one that’s never been seen before and has arrived in Tyria after being unsettled by whatever the next dragon turns out to be.

If that’s the case then T-Rex humanoids! :D The face, feet, and hands would need tweaking on the armor meshes though. Male T-Rexes can be voiced by someone who can do a convincing original Boba Fett and Female T-Rexes voiced by someone who can do a convincing Kim Possible.

…Or a T-Rex helmet from the gemstore to look like I have a big lizard head with sharp teeth.

Xanctus The Dragonslayer.2318:

Shadow Bane.9362:

RIP Burn Guard too? It was a fun distraction. In the right comps it could even work. More of a toy build but now less fun options for guardians again. I have a swell of pity for everyone who mains guard right now not necessarily because of this but in general they’re in such a kitten situation in almost all game modes.

Glad I’m not the only one. Wow. There goes my kittening burn guard. Had some promising results in unranked. I was like maby. Just maby this could work. But nope. Guess i won’t get the chance to find this out in ranked. On the other hand necro’s and mesmers are a lot squishier now. So yeah. And how funny, to do change this right before the season starts.

Have you considered Viper? It has expertise and burning while having a high damage modifier lasts a short while, so expertise and burning go really well together.

Shocking aura being wind on a sizable cooldown means it’ll come late in the battle, and an early air overload is going to get interrupted even traited for stability, avoided and waited out (though lightning flash fortunately doesn’t cancel it) or at worst bursted down during the animation. I’ve defeated some DH’s, Reapers, and Druids well enough but all the Chronos seem to know when to pop their blocks and stack confusion. I do some stuff in fire but the lack of condi damage means the burning provides minimal pressure while water is good for chill or even an overload heal if I have the time.

I find myself in this 1v1 a lot. I’m using this build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAodn0XCNYiFYCeOAcYilNAb4BEAKgu71A7hl4DcBqAA-TJxGAB2XGAgTAA5PAAf2fAA

While not 1v1 oriented by any means I still need to find a proper rotation that doesn’t end in me being downed or disengaging. Sometimes I’m the only one who cares enough to take back home and sometimes I even get the Chrono’s health down by a decent amount but can’t seem to complete the downed. My stats typically follow these scenarios:

1.Rushdown. Just use all the skills I can starting with the ones that link more fluidly and try saving Earth for when I’d need obsidian flesh, otherwise ending with lightning for the attunement. Interrupts like air and water 5 are camped. This strat however runs into issues as it leaves too many gaps due to Tempest’s charge nature.

2.Passive Aggressive. Since Chrono is specced for damage they’d win an autoattacking race, but otherwise this involves waiting for the absolute safest moment to burn skills.

In either scenario I typically wait until at least 8 stacks of confusion before cleansing, but this means I need to spec into earth for the cleansing skill and water to cleanse anything additional, meaning these attunements are on cooldown and I have no significant offensive pressure under earth. On Druid and Revenant I seem to cope just fine but Tempest vs. Chrono is just a big uphill battle. I’d rather just support in teamfights but I sometimes find myself getting teams that just scatter all over the map not caring for objectives and even turtling 2 or 3 at home when no enemies are even approaching it.

XGhoul.7426:

Bad;

Along with many of the responses, providing a band aid fix to balance by not allowing class stacking shows how dominant some classes are over others (and still are without proper balance).

Class stacking should be bad since two of something means you aren’t taking something else. It’s still allowed in leagues however. An overall simplification should help. Some of the best games like the Street Fighter series and Chess have simple base mechanics but great strategic depth can stem from them.

Pakkazull.6894:

Agemnon.4608:

Maybe a potential method of balancing could be running some sort of adaptive AI programs.

I laughed.

I don’t mean players botting, I mean devs making bots that outclass even Abjured/Astral competing against and learning from each other for data gathering purposes. Metabattle builds are typically made and discovered by pro players, people who are already very skilled to begin with, so the simulations eliminating skill gaps between teams could isolate why certain builds and classes outclass others by eliminating differences in skill. Data will track:

1.Duels.
2.Abilities used in all scenarios.
3.Strat success.
4.When they go for objectives. This could be tough to program to avoid blindly zerging, maybe add some sort of class to location priority ratio or calculate distance and objective HP for daredevil or druid steals?
5.Interrupt/interrupted ratios for each class and build.
6.When they rotated and where.

Slight delays need to be added however to account for the human need to press a button to activate a skill whereas an AI wouldn’t share that handicap.

Why does it bug the op so much that ppl can solo content? What’s it to him…

Because it means the content is too easy. While there should be varying degrees of challenge for different groups ranging from solo to zergs and from easy to hard someone solo’ing 5 man content in a game with level scaling suggests the content is way undertuned. Keep it easy, but still hard enough for only three players at least. One guy doing the job of two is impressive, one guy doing the job of five is just plain silly.

Aeolus.3615:

Cut down boons would damage guardian even further class rellies to much on them, and sacrifices to much one thing for another already

Some of the boons or condis should be specific class only.

You’re forgetting that other things would be brought up or simply substituted to avoid a nerf. Guardian is underpowered so they need an overwhelmingly net buff.

I agree on almost everything except removing stealth. That, to me, is good for the game and is what thieves are mainly built around.
What I think needs to be addressed is the duration of stealth you can achieve.

Maybe replacing it is too extreme. I figured since stealth is balanced around it would mean more staying power in fight to compensate while still being weaker the bigger the fight (2v2’s alright and 1v1’s strong, but weak in 3v3’s and above to maintain its thematic playstyle and role) while still keeping disengage.

Adjusting stealth duration but more 1v1 sustain could work so nerf stealth but give something else to avoid a net nerf.

With an overall simplification the game becomes approachable for new players while increasing the depth and tight windows for more skilled players. I was point blank shotted twice today out of…lightning whip, a “1” ability with no cooldown, which gave me information that going for an overload was safe.

Maybe a potential method of balancing could be running some sort of adaptive AI programs. They can have entire games sped up by 1,000’s of times to get a lot of data in a relatively short period of time and if certain traits and abilities stand out in certain situations they’d be marked with red indicating it needs nerfing or green indicating a buff. People being less than perfect aren’t as home in systems as an AI would be. With adaptive AI they can easily solve optimal skill and map rotations while still only having access to information a player would on the map (so no knowing where enemies are on the map unless they’re in combat) and even be allowed to form their own comps after playing a certain number of matches (since they’d need statistical data in their decision making process).

The adaptive AI would be stronger than any pro and a weaker version of it could even be used for future PvE content as an externality. This translates into tons of high level matches where skill gaps are taken out of the equation so purely class and build strength can be looked at. Who knows, maybe we’ll discover that daredevil is the most overpowered class if coordinated with the exactly perfect comp or Chrono not being nearly as good as its reputation? So much information could be retrieved with such research. Maybe balance is much better than we think but there’s not a sufficient amount of high level practice to confirm it? I personally believe generally accepted tier lists are accurate with Tempest in S-tier instead of A due to its very strong support and sheer interrupting, zoning and disengaging options. Revenant may be S-tier, and it is undeniably strong, and can block, interrupt, gap close, and burst quite effectively and passively gives boons at the expense of energy regen, but due to Ventari being unwieldy and poor self heals I’d place it under A.

Such “perfect play” metrics especially past their 10,000 games and at least two would be biased towards support initially. One for each group and that sounds like a lot of games but keep in mind a chess engine can calculate millions of moves per second and a chess game typically lasts 40 or 50 moves, which can be many hours between top players so those 10,000 matches might be a couple of days or so of sped up simulation. Given that there are 8,0001 potential matchups however maybe the number of matches needs to be vastly bigger to account for different builds and those repeated to weed out flukes?

This means balance, since if a totally objective AI never picks warrior or any base class for example that should be data worth investigating. After a balance patch with the given information simulations could be run again to see what can further be tweaked. It isn’t realistic for humans alone to balance 8,001 matchups especially where each class has a plethora of rune, weapon, sigil, and traitline combinations.

I forgot above however:

• Make having more than one class suboptimal. So two of a class should never be better than only having one, but that would be quite a challenge itself. I don’t mean a forced algorithm making the stacked classes weaker in some way (that would be artificial balancing) but make it so two of the same class can’t sync well.

I want a new race of T-Rex people. They can use the human meshes for all armor sets but the helmet and maybe gloves and shoes. The voice actress for Buttercup can do the female T-Rex voice while the male T-Rex can be voiced by someone who can do a convincing Boba Fett.

In Ultra Street Fighter IV you have 44 characters yet despite this huge number of match ups they remain mostly unique (Even Ken and Ryu have distinct feels to them despite very similar move sets) and balanced.

For match ups we have to use this formula and plug in 44 for x as that’s the number of characters:

y(x) =x(x+1)/2

44(45)/2=990 match ups!

In Guild Wars 2 however it’s more complicated with teams of 5 so we’ll need a different formula to accommodate it:

(9 nCr 5)² / 2 + (9 nCr 5) / 2 = The need to determine (9C5) first:

9C5=9!/(5!*(9-5)!)
362,880/(120*(9-5)!)
362,880/(120*4!)
362,880/120*24
362,880/2,880
=126

Now that we have solved the combination:

126²/2 + (126)/2= 8,001 potential match ups in Guild Wars 2.

What about Street Fighter? This brings me to the second part of my tl;dr book: it is a game with simple mechanics, but from those simple mechanics comes deep tactical, strategic, and psychological play. You have multi hit combos where due to their complexity you risk getting frame trapped and countered if your precision isn’t just so, like missing a cancel or a link, and in chess you also have simple mechanics where genuine complexity and deep strategic play branch out of.

What makes RPG’s potentially great is the more complex base mechanics means potentially richer and deeper gameplay where even supercomputers can’t solve (if chess can’t even be solved and that’s a static turn based game within an absolute and established system then…) but usually degenerate (PvE wise and single player wise) into stacking damage and speed (in turn based games where it determines your turn) and hitting things really hard while saving MP and limit breaks for bosses. What this leads to is an unsatisfying experience in the long run going, “That’s it?” disappointed that the systems weren’t utilized to their full potential.

In this game there’s five man content that people solo successfully even without exploits. Now why? Why can’t they be scaled high enough where even a random Abjured/Astral member can’t solo, since five man content shouldn’t be solvable by just one person even the exceptionally skilled?

The solution I fear, while temporary, is a going back to basics. The base specs were mostly formed before elite specs entered the game and a simpler game is easier to balance. Get rid of most of the passive procs, cut down the number of utilities, and up the cooldown on powerful AoE’s like Mesmer wells (why isn’t well of action or recall meta?) or Tempest overloads. This would mean smart use of skills get rewarded while inefficient use of such skills get punished. Chess and Street Fighter have simple base mechanics and are very well balanced, and are designed in a way where skill plays a big impact. Skill is timing and tactical decision making.

Here’s a checklist of ways of potentially simplifying the game:

• Replace stealth with a reverse taunt that doesn’t allow the player to be targeted while still having the same effects in PvE. Stealth denies information to the opposing team, but that creates so many balancing issues. Without stealth classes can be rebalanced properly and makes the game closer to a complete information game.

• Cut down AoE’s, boons, and conditions.

• Get rid of most runes and eventually replace them with active proc runes.

• Many animations last slightly longer especially heals. This will increase scope for counterplay while still requiring skill to interrupt said abilities (slightly means slightly).

• Interrupt skills like distracting daggers have faster precasts.

• Nerf overall burst damage and healing. This gives people a chance you bursted down a chance to fight back. Even with best play they’d still lose but the onus would be on the attacker to skillfully finish the job and if he screws up his opponent can reset to equality but never to a big advantage like scrapper pre-patch unless the attacker screws up enough.

• Remove in combat speed and rebalance ability speeds and ranges accordingly.

• On Daredevil you can chain staff 1’s first two autoattacks and staff 2 successfully in a seamless transition while others are clunkier (You can’t dodge cancel out of staff 5 and the third autoattack, which we’ll call staff 1c.) You can also chain staff 1a, b, and fist flurry since staff 1c has an aftercast delay and the fact you can’t dodge out of staff 1 c means you’re vulnerable for that window with the exception of projectile attacks. This I feel is good game design and promotes skillful ability usage and completing an autoattack chain isn’t always best. All classes should have such seamless combos and clunky attempts that leave gaps in their play. This makes mechanical precision more important and accepting temporary vulnerability as a calculated risk.

• Ask ourselves, “What feels tacked on or forced?” And remove superfluous elements.

• Understand that much of Guild Wars 2’s mechanics stem from old turn based tabletop games and RPG’s that are turn based. Mechanics originally intended for turn based battles don’t always translate well to an action game where movement and positioning is key. There’s no evasion stat so Guild Wars 2 already took a step in the correct direction on this front.

• No hard counters, but soft counters. This ensures that while a match up may favor one class there’s still a decent chance for the countered class to win if he’s more skilled mechanically while equally skilled players means the soft counter will win most of the time.

Fluffball.8307:

I don’t really know what you’re talking about, but I assume someone intentionally crashed the price of wood because a kitten ton of people want wood for legendaries. The community at large benefits from this, as we all get cheaper crafting prices and the 30 people farming wood suffer.

Farming mats is not enjoyable for anyone, and I can’t imagine many people want gold badly enough to keep things like this secret.

Not secret per se but we kinda assume everyone knows. Oh well it’s no big, I was logging all that before it was cool.

Hmm, so why is silk dying anyways?

Higher supply relative to demand. As more people achieve level 80 and discover HoT zones and Silverwaste they open bags and salvage gear, resulting in more silk on the market.

Scipion.7548:

Often the two actually seem to go together because they’re people who don’t care about the story or lore, so when it comes to the game mechanics they view it strictly in terms of what works best, instead of choosing skills and traits to fit a theme or backstory.

I have experienced the opposite most of the time. People with bunny ears and stupid wings are often -18 year old people.

Isn’t 18 old enough to be in college or at least a senior in high school? Even when people aren’t mature for their age they’re usually immature by only a few years so an immature 18 year old may as well be 15, which is still high school aged.

Often the two actually seem to go together because they’re people who don’t care about the story or lore, so when it comes to the game mechanics they view it strictly in terms of what works best, instead of choosing skills and traits to fit a theme or backstory.

It’s a game, it isn’t meant to be taken seriously. Who says they don’t care about the story and just wanna play within it in their own way? The great thing about games with options is we get to craft our own lore and fit that in the universe.

I’m mature and get creative with what the game gives me, and that’s intended. My thief is currently a Sonic parody called Sornic the Human. If we can’t have fun in a game and focus on improving our skills within the game then why bother playing? Character customization is just the light, fun and fluffy part and I’ve seen a great dragonhunter modeled after Wario last season in PvP. Just because they’re designed in a fun way that might offend lore people’s sensibilities doesn’t make them bad players. I’ve seen great and poor Norns in bright pink with funny colored mustaches and it’s always fun to see them.

1.Tengu. 2.Pengu (Penguin Tengu but penguins are distinct enough from tropical birds for Pengu to be a different race while still keeping the same meshes). 3.Quaggans. 4.Humanoid Dragons. 5.Kodan. In all real life bear colors in addition to green, pink, and blue, who would come from tropical areas and hunt pythons and anacondas and some NPC green, pink, and blue Kodan in the northern forest areas would comment on the cold springs and tiny bugs.

My choices are the Skritt, Kodan, Tengu with the possible inclusions of the Quaggen. Hylek and Dredge.

Dredge are immune to blind while the Hylek are immune to poison so it’d be quite gamebreaking.

I know this raises the issues of hoarding the currency and spending it when new skins are implemented.

Why is that an issue? A problem with WoW honor is you can’t save it for the next season. If you played enough to earn 1,000 tokens why shouldn’t you have them?

What about breaking down all the classes to their bare essentials (behind the scenes on a test server not necessarily in the live game) then starting from scratch all over again with elite specs in mind? I’m not familiar with engineer or scrapper apart from playing with and against other players so I can’t comment there specifically but each class should have something entirely unique to it or at the very least feel different on a mechanical level than other classes.

Like I mentioned elsewhere there are five players per team and since class stacking is allowed we use combination instead of permutation for the formula. In 1v1 a formula would look like this:

y(x) =x(x+1)/2 and let’s say that x =3 since it would be easy to validate 3 with a concrete example afterwards:

3(4)/2=6 potential matchups: Ryu vs Ken, Ryu vs Belrog, Ryu vs Ryu, Ken vs Ken, Belrog vs Belrog, Ken vs Belrog

But in a 5v5 game with countless class combinations we have:

If there are nine classes in 5v5 then the number of combinations is obviously much bigger. The formula could be read as follows since classes can be repeated combination formulas apply rather than permutation and put some factorial operations to work:
(9 nCr 5)² / 2 + (9 nCr 5) / 2 =
9C5=9!/(5!*(9-5)!)
362,880/(120*(9-5)!)
362,880/(120*4!)
362,880/120*24
362,880/2,880
=126

So 126²/2 + (126)/2= 8,001 potential matchups. I posted this over the weekend (but carelessly forgot to factorial the four leading to a grossly inflated number) in another thread but it’s relevant here too. With all those combinations it’s hard to balance just one class individually as it’ll have a big unintended impact on other matchups. Ideally, diminishing returns on a class should go past one, meaning two of any class should be a liability compared to five different classes in general. This would be easier to achieve if classes were simplified across the board and complexity built on top of that wouldn’t invalidate the initial goal and would be careful to avoid homogenization and power creep.

What if Einstein played tic-tac-toe with an average person? They’d continuously tie because Einstein’s genius would be redundant in solving the game’s problems. However, in chess Einstein would destroy the average person because his exceptional problem solving skills would benefit from the game’s strategic depth, but in chess rules are simple, it’s the relationship between those mechanics that adds complexity and genuine depth.

I guess what I’m trying to say is the game should just simplify where appropriate but increase the scope for meaningful decision making, risk, and make bad decisions less forgiving. This would mean skill plays a bigger role in outcomes.

You got a free 500g dye and it’s your worst day?

reikken.4961:

The only mobs that use notable boons are those dredge gong player dudes, and they spend like 10 seconds buffing up

They’re why I run sword/dagger whenever I gather in Dredgehunt Cliffs.

Anyway I don’t think more boons is the solution but more offensive abilities, interrupts, AI, and removing levels entirely and upgrading all gear and mobs to level 80 (it’d be a stat hidden from the player’s view) and then rebalance drops to accommodate the new challenge and lack of levels (so all tiers of mats drop from all maps).

Ashen.2907:

Most five year old musical prodigies don’t have anyone trying to chop them into pieces with an axe while they play the violin.

My nephew was determined to be a math prodigy in grade school. Not sure that it would have qualified him for a SEAL team position in Afghanistan.

He’d certainly be a great asset since such talent is rare. Talent isn’t some isolated thing, it’s a grasping at something deeper. The same thing that makes them have amazing abilities will make them see tactical holes in the enemy’s attack and prepare to avoid such situations. It’s a basic intuitive understanding of mechanics and how systems interrelate to each other. Music and math are both orderly systems with underlying principles behind them so Taimi’s understanding would translate into personal safety and helping the Pact Commander with strategic and tactical tasks. She’s even two degrees removed from Snaff directly: Zojja worked under him while Taimi is apprenticed by Zojja so her education was very solid, and she was chosen in the first place due to aptitude.

I’m really digging the new dyes, maybe more like them in other shades or dyes with different patterns and colors such as normal tiger dye (carnage orange with shadow abyss stripes), electro green with electro pink stripes, crushed bone with golden sheen stripes, etc.

Armor pieces:

-Sunglasses
-Boxing Gloves

Outfits:

-School uniform (male with blazers and khakis, girls with flannel skirts with their hemlines three quarters down the thigh so not quite a knee length skirt but almost, nice leggings, and a classy dress shirt and cardigan)

-Medieval skater. The cut and style would be the same as a skater but with materials lore appropriate to the GW2 setting.

Toys:

-Skateboard, can do ill ollies and opens up various tricks and achievements in the major cities as well as skating parks. Skate boarding park passes are permanent and come with the skateboard.

-Endless titanium potion. Transforms your character into a titanium statue with the juggernaut effect with murky gray dye all over the body.

New dance: /Mordrem Stalker. Imitates Mordrem Guard Stalker attacks (just leaning forward and moving your right hand side to side then forward and back) while shouting, “I am everywhere!”

I remember before the patch I’d always stalemate scrappers with my tempest only winning very occasionally while my revenant and druid needed precise timing to finish them off after their invulnerable superspeed phase before the big heal so beating them was satisfying. However, if you miss that precise window you’re at a disadvantage since you’d need to blow some cooldowns to reach that point. On druid it was especially tough since longbow against a projectile hate class on top of a nine second weapon swap window made scrapper duels hella precise. The onus of precision is on the druid, the scrapper has a few reflects and lots of sustain. The druid also has lots of sustain and nice dazes and AoE slow, but the longbow single target damage seems to be missing. At best you could bait out reflects with autoattacks or rapid fire against a better scrapper so the bristleback skill can be activated with much less risk after baiting the reflect and stowing weapon. The problem with such a matchup however is if you’re dueling on that node you’re taking yourself out of the game, and since it’s usually far the +1 will likely be his.

I have run into so few scrappers lately so this feel for timing I’ve developed for fighting them might atrophy :( By the time scrapper become meta again the proc duration would likely be different obsoleting it however.

Don’t know if this counts, but Sornic the Human:

Gotta go fast, gotta go fast, faster faster faster faster faster! :D

Moving at the speed of sound I’m the fastest human around… :D

This is for all intents and purposes, a disabled child, that granted has a golem following them, but is able to survive the harshest jungle environments basically on her own.

You mean where asura (and humans in real life) are naturally from?

How can anyone feel threatened in a world where children wander off perfectly fine in unexplored areas.

What I took from it is Taimi is just exceptionally brilliant and well prepared. She’s a prodigy even by asura standards. You know those five year old musical prodigies in real life? The ones who play music it took many adults many years of practice to play? Those are human beings, and humans are inherently dumber than asura.

I wont be able to take any part of the upcoming story seriously.

Why do you want to take part in a game’s story seriously? Not everything has to be plausible, what’s wrong with just having a fun story to play through?

It’s too ‘new age’ for me to feel that a child should be making unilateral important decisions.

Not everyone who plays the game is an adult so it’s empowering kids who play the game too. In real life kids very rarely ever make big decisions so kids playing the game can live that through Taimi in a way.

Aeolus.3615:

Powercreep in gw2 is created by the spam of condis, tons of cleave and aoe skills, if they reduce that would be much better process to balance and notice what is broken, and then improve and make true AOE skills that need more tactifull casting to compensate the less spam from classes, it would make the gamemuch more player skill based, gw2 is know for awfull pvp game i think Anet needs to change this, it would get more viewers more players streaming more revenews.

Every class should be AA single target, with some or none cleaves/aoe, but i guess that would be make gw2 way to hard for some players.

@glorius.1235 as much i hate mobas, got tired of that when playing WC3,i kinda agree with you on the CC category for classes.

I think making autoattack single target is a good idea, though the game would have to be rebalanced totally around that.

Someone once said Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away and Einstein himself said everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. However, this is a cheap form of “perfection”, it’s easy to avoid going wrong if you don’t have many steps in your goal after all, but I fear that Guild Wars 2 has taken a direction where it’s better to take things away and at least temporarily revert to a bare bones state, at least so they can look at how to genuinely increase the skill ceiling with complexity that adds mechanical depth to the game.

In Street Fighter for example the mechanics are deceptively simple; linking normals and canceling into a multi-hit juggle and combos ending in supers are a big part of the game, but a simple block and punish combo could put the breaks on any imperfectly timed step in the multistep combo, so there’s a layer on top of the mechanical skill, such as split decisions on when to poke, hit confirm, mix-up game, or a risky but highly rewarding rushdown (you’ll know your opening worked if your opponent can’t block your links and cancels).

Are there levels? Well, there are account levels and character “levels” have no impact whatsoever on the character’s performance so we’ll say no, the closest thing fighting games have to “leveling up” is the player himself leveling up, since your IRL dexterity and intelligence (game mechanic and matchup knowledge in this case, as opposed to an RPG character’s magical knowledge) improve with matches and training.

The skill ceiling in Guild Wars 2 however isn’t genuinely high, but artificially high, with safety nets that masquerade as complexity. The build feature has some great potential, but needs to be cut down so roles are still at play but always allow room for the player with the better reflexes and tactical thinking to win his 1v1’s, even against counter builds and classes if the skill gap is high enough. Because of builds and different weapons and amulets a player is a scientist in the lobby but a sportsman during a match.

Sornac the human:

Okay not his “real” name but just having fun with the new dyes ^_^

Redenaz.8631:

On one hand, I like the filter. It’s usually not hard to understand, and it blunts some of the harsher language people might use.

On the other hand, no one can type “Redenaz” “is” because the forum thinks they’re supporting the fascists. Whoops.

To be fair though that word is strong enough to be considered a swear. Still, it’s like the other guy’s example of a hat.

I don’t believe in censorship in general and think filters should be on the user’s end for people who care about that stuff while directly insulting someone should still be punished.

What I was talking about more was the type of language such as, “kitten you.” It adds nothing to any conversation on the forum and many people find “kitten you” more offensive than “you’re an idiot.” Regardless of how many people want to say that ’it’s only words’, words are how we communicate and how we affect each other’s thoughts and emotions. For that reason words have a power beyond their simple meanings and some words have far more of a ‘punch’ than other words because of how they affect the emotions. The filter is there to decrease the power of the more powerfully negative words by converting them to the mental image of a kitten, and by decreasing their power it keeps the forum more civil and keeps conversations from heating up.

Therein lies the problem with the filter. If the poster didn’t want that level of punch he wouldn’t use that word in the first place. We mentally envision the word anyway so it still has the same effect. “Kitten” here has a meaning vastly different than it does in the real world or elsewhere on the internet.

We need to keep in mind the original sources and contexts behind the progression mechanics:

In very old school RPGs like zeroes-ninties Final Fantasy games you’d have turn based battlescreens. Vertical progression isn’t a problem in these games because they’re noncompetitive single player games. The first Final Fantasy despite the ability to grind was still very hard since lots of the dungeons were maze like, you could fight up to nine things, some of which can turn you to stone or one shot you, and some enemies had very hard hitting and even instant death AoE’s. The second Final Fantasy had no levels so you gained stats by hitting your own teammates, not very intuitive. The best system I think came from Final Fantasy V, where stats were based around your class and if you had no classes equipped you’d have the highest from the highest class you’d master. In this way mastering thief and monk for all characters was ideal. Final Fantasy 10 also had a great system where you had no levels per se but could logically progress on a sphere grid. Has the best boss battles of the series through the optional challenge bosses.

However, Guild Wars 2 isn’t some noncompetitive single player game but has PvP gamemodes where balance and keeping power creep in check suddenly becomes a top imperative. Power creep can be good in some cases, like with hardware, Dragon Ball, and singleplayer games, but it can also be bad like what we’re seeing here.

Guild Wars 2 and other MMO’s borrowed mechanics from RPG’s without understanding the reasoning and context behind them. In a game with freedom of movement during combat do we really need mechanics designed with static abstracted combat in mind? Why not just get rid of levels entirely and have references to our increased power mentioned in later parts of story mode?

There can be superior gear progression without levels but ultimately have everything in the game scaled to level 80 but hide levels. Crafting would become more important and you could unlock different stat combinations and tiers. Eventually however I think we should move away from stats entirely and have fixed stat values and move sets attached to certain weapon types like Dark Souls (ignoring upgrade levels of course).

Anyone ever solo a champ? They have one hit kills and a huge HP pool so they can afford to make way more mistakes than you can, so taking away mechanics that allows us to be on the champ’s end would help players in the long run. Mistakes should be meaningfully felt at any stage of the game, and getting rid of levels would help, even if you’re in full ascended in a starter zone (where full white tier armor is assumed) you would still need to be careful.

MokahTGS.7850:

I’ll leave this here…

I want penguin tengu if tengu ever become playable! :D

Also, I like the parrot wings.

Balancing is very tough. In a purely 1v1 setting you’d go by this formula for potential matchups:

y(x) =x(x+1)/2

We have nine classes so that would be:

9(9+1)/2 = 45 match ups.

That is for 1v1, for 5v5 we surely have many permutations. There are five players per team and nine classes from which to choose.

If there are nine classes in 5v5 then the number of combinations is obviously much bigger. The formula could be read as follows since classes can be repeated combination formulas apply rather than permutation and put some factorial operations to work:

(9 nCr 5)² / 2 + (9 nCr 5) / 2 =

9C5=9!/(5!*(9-5)!)

362,880/(120*(9-5)!)
362,880/(120*4)
362,880/480
=756

So 756^2/2+756/2= 286,146 potential matchups. As you can see that’s very hard to balance and doesn’t even factor in possible trait, gear, and rune combinations between them.

I don’t care much for underwater combat even though it had potential. Admittedly some of the hero points were fun but overall lots of mobs with four second float and sinks just isn’t fun. For a complete revamp (at least in whatever new hypothetical maps for that expansion) I suggested switching to a first person shooter mode (as in a whole other genre’s mechanics) for underwater or possibly even a railed shooter during part of the meta boss battle. The “underwater” expansion I proposed in earlier threads would mostly be on 16th century Caribbean inspired tropical archipelagos with maybe some volcanic islands. Each map in that expansion would have to be unique in some way but boating or surfing would be a common theme for travel such as a hurricane mastery to navigate in those conditions.

Boating/surfing could even be brought to main game Tyria and would simply be faster swimming in those maps. And who can forget quaggans? The krait are a slaver race and that should be explored further as there are many dynamic events where you have to stop their slaving. That I can see tie into a water expansion. That and lots of puzzle like areas like the base game story mode quest with the Largos Lady. Even if actual combat won’t be in water (out of respect for its lack of popularity, that or with revamped FPS mechanics I mentioned earlier) areas the puzzle solving and swimming part are fun.

I can switch out water but it’ll feel awkward gaining an aura to share it but my teammate doesn’t get it. Different combo fields give auras.

I could switch to mercenary’s for survivability since the runes already give increased burning duration and maybe switch out water for air or arcane.

While the social progress angle is a noble one I just wanna have some left main handed characters (especially my elementalist, guardian, and thief, my warrior, revenant, and druid can remain righties since they’re based off right handed characters). Just look at the technical sophistication that went into the HoT cutscenes, if you can make a big detailed dragon made of plants then I’m pretty sure you can make a toggle to mirror our characters into lefties. Nintendo did it for Twilight Princess (they flipped the entire game) since most people are righties and would feel more comfortable with Link as a righty. I didn’t buy Twilight Princess for this reason as a traditionally lefty character swapped just for the majority’s convenience. It’s really no big if a character is right handed usually, I’m used to playing as righties (shield being used as a weapon in Dark Souls if equipped righty and left handed swords being kitten was disappointing especially given you’d need extra coding to kitten his left but I got over it) in games. It’s only a big deal if a former lefty becomes a righty.