Guild Wars 2

I imagine they’ll be in the notes for today’s patch. If I recall that happened with halloween; a few changes went live unannounced before and then they were in the halloween update notes a few days later.

This is a pretty simple idea I think and would help alleviate a lot of problems with levelling in the lower level zones. It’s actually much slower to level now than at release because there are fewer people helping with events (and fewer mobs spawning to boot).

If zones with very few people in them automatically diverted to overflow we’d be able to concentrate a lot more people into these regions and bring them back to life a bit.

Thoughts?

MiniAchilles.4617:

I would settle for the Patch Notes -.-

Same here, I can wait for the patch, I just wanna know what profession changes we’re about to see.

Shinigami.5932:

Actually one question, so it only works if someone is inside it, if your enemy is attacking with the dome between him and the target it won’t do anything?

If the projectile crosses the effect of the AOE it will be reflected. So an attacker outside the effect attacking a player (also outside) on the other side of it would also have it reflected.

In simpler terms forget about the players and just look at the projectile itself. If it travels within the circle of the AOE at any point it is reflected.

Kuthos.9623:

You know this happens in basically every single video game that has multiple classes right? Especially MMOs. There’s always a class that is “hard mode” and one that is “easy mode”.

Usually higher difficulty is rewarded in some way though. In previous trinity MMOs it is typically the tanks and healers that are ‘hard-mode’ and they are rewarded by being highly desirable for groups. It’s either that or they are capable of performing better in some way.

The trouble here is everyone is a hybrid. As a result ele’s do not have anything another profession cannot do. This leaves their difficulty unrewarded and inevitably people think it is unfair.

What a lot of people in these threads don’t seem to get is that ANet sold itself on the concept of picking your profession based on aesthetics and play style. A lot of people find the ele play style to be very fun but find they are incapable of matching what other professions can do. Telling them to play another profession when ele is the one they actually like seems a bit thoughtless.

It’s only the weapon that doesn’t get its stats applied. There won’t be any ascended weapons yet so this bug won’t become any more or less of an issue.

Of the weapon skills only Healing Rain actually gives regeneration. All the others are either pulsing heals or a different effect that does stack in intensity with regular regeneration.

They have some traits that grant regeneration under specific conditions but they only stack duration.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Clones do not have offhand weapons. Additionally, phantasms use their own pistols, using the model called “Ilya”. Do not get quip.

Considering that The Predator actually grants unique graphical effects to some fo the engi skills that don’t even use the rifle (grenades for example) I wouldn’t write it off based on how other weapons effect phantasms. It’s quite possible Quip has a uniqe effect for mesmers, especially considering that it is designed with a mesmer theme.

From the way I understood it you load once onto the map, and then the second load is the client moving you to the correct location on the map and rendering the local area.

I’ve had times when I get a brief moment of control between the loads and basically my character is stood in a huge blue half-rendered map. The second load screen seems to just be window dressing so you don’t watch the game render everything.

You guys do all realise that whilst the ascended tier does have marginally better stats it completely removes your ability to customise them with runes and sigils right?

If you happen to find a piece of ascended gear that doesn’t match your build then guess what? Yup, that exotic is still actually better for you.

It sounds to me like the infusions are solely designed for the fractals dungeon, in which case the overall stat allocation on the items is marginally better at the expense of customisation.

I think it’s quite likely we’ll see a lot of people continuing to use their exotics after this patch (outside of the fractals dungeon) purely because the ascended gear doesn’t have the stats they want.

Most games that avoid the gear treadmill becoming an issue do so by offering more options for things to do at the level cap (or ‘endgame’).

The real issue here is that the only way to progress you character right now is through equipment, and as a result players have maxed out their gear and hit a brick wall as the progress you can make here is finite. ANet REALLY needs to start implementing other systems to allow players to progress in other (ideally open-ended) ways:

*Give us player housing
*Give us an AA system (this doesn’t even have to give combat related stat upgrades)
*Give us ways of unlocking new skills
*Give players ways to create content themselves

Any game I’ve played that has had things like housing or player-created content has seen a massive shift in the end-game focus for a lot of players. In EQ2 a very large number of players played solely to obtain rare items to display in their house. Suddenly rather than just one 6-piece equipment set these players had a reason to collect 100s of pieces, even some they couldn’t use. And this was entirely a goal these players set for themselves.

There is very little room in GW2 for players to set their own goals. Quite literally everyone is just aiming for a legendary (in PvE). Once they’ve done that they’ve pretty much done everything there is. That fact alone is what ANet needs to address.

Legendaries shouldn’t be the only long-term PvE goal at 80 and getting one shouldn’t be the end of PvE content for a given character. We need other open-ended progression systems.

Jayne.9251:

Something I found yesterday in talking to NPCs .. it’s not much, and has probably been there the entire time, but I think it hints at things to come!

Whilst I’m pretty sure this is unrelated to the Nov 15th update I wouldn’t be surprised if the dragons’ purpose is to remove the magic from the world (as indicated in the Asuran PS) and this will ultimately all tie in to recovering the bloodstone fragments.

All these teasers for the new region are pretty nice though. I’m just hoping for no more risen like everyone else…

You could just combine them into an elite version of glyph of storms, that’d be pretty nice actually.

I doubt we’ll see any new skills until the first expansion though unfortunately.

A lot of people assumed the same during beta, and actually it was quite viable to do so before the nerfs started… the fact that each attunement is described as having a role further supports that concept as you were probably supposed to use earth and water when required to for defense or healing respectively. Instead earth is now generally cycled purely for blast finishers and water is used for a miserable amount of healing to help us scrape by.

The profession got nerfed so badly that the only way to get our damage back up was to cycle all four attunements to use the ‘burst’ skills in each and chain their combos for might stacks. I’m pretty sure it was never intended for us to be REQUIRED to stack might just to have competitive damage.

I’d say the fact some of our traits are entirely counter to our forced playstyle makes it quite obvious the current ele was never the intent and purely the result of badly thought out nerfs.

Now I agree, the current playstyle is much more active and engaging, but the result is we’re a complex profession that has to do more for less compared to the other seven. That’s just bad game design however you look at it.

drkn.3429:

Actually major Arcana traits are awesome once you have ditched the mindset of ‘i am a nuker! ele means nuker!’, which is very wrong in GW2.
We’re ranged controllers and supporters with enough sustainable and AoE damage to keep it at a viable level, but we’re not the primary damage dealers. Once you have dealt with it, you will appreciate the power of Arcana and Water traits.

The OP isn’t talking about the traits, they’re talking about the attunement cooldown reduction. It’s pointless to have that as the line bonus because every ele basically has to take it.

When a build system sees every build use the same thing it means the option is considered essential to the profession and therefore should already be a core part of the profession itself and not a false ‘option’.

I don’t know why tornado doesn’t just reflect projectiles like thief’s dagger storm. It would increase the ele’s defense a great deal without making them specifically immune to damage or conditions whilst using it.

Sadtv.9183:

It isn’t an issue. Yes it sucks that if you use vapor form too many times you basically kill yourself, but if you wait to use vapor form until you are just about to die you gain a lot of health when you fall back down again. Not to mention that any class would probably be dead already by the time you use 2 vapor forms and kill yourself. The only way you should kill yourself on accident is if you are using a #2 ability as you go down which pops vapor form (which imo should be prevented by adding a very small cooldown like 0.5s to vapor form when you first go down). Just watch your downed penalty before using vapor form, if it’s red don’t use it.

Honestly vapor form is the best downed ability by far atm. Being able to get up for 3 seconds from downed state is ridiculously helpful, even broken in some cases. The #2 downed ability for other classes in most cases only is useful as a stomp interrupt, not a stomp interrupt + get up and run to safety.

You realise the health return when using it is part of the bug right? The game treats vapour form as a rally and then deals you damage when it ends to down you again.

The mesmer and thief both have comparable 2 skills in their downed state and they don’t have this penalty. It is a bug. Don’t try to argue that it isn’t.

Agreed. There’s no point in a trait line existing if it’s essential to play the profession. This is all the result of ANet over-nerfing the cooldowns during beta though. They kept changing things without doing anything to compensate which is why things are so messy…

KilgoreTrowt.7603:

NatashaK.9418:

I had to laugh at #3 though. The easiest class to level, by far, is a healing tank – just like every other game.

Um no it isn’t. Especially not in quest-heavy games where grinding does not grant that much xp.

That really depends on what someone means by ‘easy’; is it about speed or risk? Builds that focus on killing speed tend to be easily caught out when something unexpected happens.

With regards to the OP though yes, at low level shatter builds are much more effective.

Surprised no one’s mentioned that it resets all of your downed cooldowns as well… every time vapour form ends it treats it as though you’ve been downed again so you have to wait to use 3 and 4 all over again.

It’s a mix to be honest. In the southeast there are lots of nightmare courtiers, in the northeast lots of bandits and then the western half is full of inquest. If I had to pick I’d say Asura hold more sway there but it’s not exclusively themed around them.

What is really frustrating is that in a lot of cases they nerfed a skill by increasing the cooldown, then later nerfed the damage making the increased cooldown unreasonable. Eles have a LOT of skills on 30-40s cooldowns that don’t do enough damage to warrant it.

OP this is a game-wide problem that ANet seems inept at understanding. All eight professions are riddled with bugged or useless skills/traits yet ANet completely ignores them and instead just tweaks numbers every patch. The result is that the number of viable build options for most professions is getting smaller and smaller and the bugs are funneling everyone into the same builds.

What I honestly cannot understand though is how ANet can hope to balance professions when half their skills/traits are not functioning as intended. Any number changes they make now will be pointless if/when they actually start fixing things.

Their apparent priorities just make no sense to me.

There’s an event to find fire opals in the cave just outside Rata Sum that I’d never seen before the halloween patch.

Lande.5782:

I’m not sure how many times this needs to be said, but let’s try again:

It’s not a bug, it doesn’t have to be “fixed”. It’s exactly how it’s intended.

If it did apply with weapon kits then the already-powerful Engineer class would be overpowered. Stop spending time complaining on the forums and spend more time getting better at using a very powerful class. If you don’t want to spend that time, go make a Warrior.

Errr what? No this is not how it was intended, don’t make stuff up.

The kits have a damage value like a sPvP weapon but with no sigil slot. The result is that the engineer is missing all the other stats that can be found on weapons, including the sigil effects, when using a kit. This also means the engineer has no means to customise their weapon stats in a kit-heavy build.

They are outright missing numbers from their stat totals when using a kit.

There is no way that’s working as intended.

Back during beta ANet made huge sweeping changes to multiple facets of the ele at once. From my experience in previous MMOs it’s generally a big no-no to alter more than one variable at once as the effect is multiplied and generally unpredictable… but that’s precisely what ANet did.

For some reason post-launch they stopped doing that, but are unwilling to accept that the changes they made during beta were too hasty and ill thought out.

If ANet came out and explained what they saw as issues and what their priorities were I think most players would be a lot more relaxed about the situation.

As it stands currently though there are countless broken and bugged features of this game that haven’t been addressed since beta and we haven’t received any word from ANet that they’re aware or even care. I know it’s up to them how communicative they are but the problem is players are feeling like they aren’t valued. If you were playing a necro, or elementalist or mesmer with traits bugged to hell and zero fixes to them since launch I imagine you’d also be just as frustrated.

The dev team just seriously need to start communicating with the players.

I’d like to open a discussion of the ways in which profession balance is currently being handled in the game. I do not wish to discuss specific professions or specific balance changes but rather how the community feels about the process as a whole.

Personally I’m beginning to grow concerned about something; namely the way in which we’re seeing a number of balance changes to professions who are currently riddled with bugs (and relatively few fixes for said bugs).

The majority of the professions in this game have at least a few major bugs (and at least one has a list running into triple digits). Currently, with each patch, we see very few of these bugs being fixed whilst many new ones are frequently being introduced. There are many bugged traits that were reported as early as BWE1 that still do not work correctly, and there are some that outright do not work at all.

Despite all of this, however, ANet continues to tweak numbers and make significant balance changes (the majority of which are nerfs).

Now, I can’t help but wonder how ANet can hope to balance things when they aren’t currently fully functional. If things aren’t working properly then how can they hope to gauge the current state of profession balance? Any changes they make now will have to be revised if/when the relevant bugs are fixed which is both highly inefficient and incredibly frustrating for the players. Additionally, at the current rate of bug fixing it’s going to be a long long time before some professions even have fully functional traits. So my question is, why are we seeing such a focus on balancing numbers when bug fixing should be of a much higher priority?

Does anyone else have similar concerns?

Leiloni.7951:

Not to be annoying, but a Mesmer can’t get on demand might stacks, healing burst combos and Regen stacks, Protection stacks, multiple CC’s, Bleeds, burns, etc. They have a lot of cool stuff but are not as versatile as we are. Our versatility is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness I think.

The thing is Mesmers effectively have all that baked in.

A Mesmer’s damage is much higher than an ele’s by default, the ele needs those might stacks to break even or push slightly ahead. Same goes for the protection: mesmers don’t need it as they have distortion which is far far superior. Everyone constantly rattles off a list of boons and other things the ele can give yet overlooks the fact that the other 7 professions don’t even need them to be effective.

The people pulling the ‘versatility’ card seem to be overlooking the fact that the ele’s cooldowns are so high that they actually aren’t very versatile at all.

To compare: an engineer can switch kits to be versatile and has a regular set of cooldowns on each kit; a common build switches back and forth between flamethrower (mid-range AOE damage) and elixir gun (support and healing) as needed and each of those are ALWAYS available when needed.

Ele’s, however, have such steep cooldowns that they cannot reliably fall back on the role they need if they’ve used it any time recently. It doesn’t help that each of our skills are also substantially weaker than a single skill of another profession too. Eles do not have 20 skills, they have 20 half-skills that require combos to be even moderately effective. eg. Healing Rain is pretty mediocre on its own compared to the AOE healing skills of other professions, its only value comes from the blast combo which means it requires 2 skill uses to actually be useful. In terms of relative power they are the equivalent of 10 skills on another profession.

Why do people always overlook this key difference?

The ONLY reason eles won’t get weapon swaps is because of the combos it would give them access to. It has nothing to do with the (false) ‘versatility’ the profession is purported to possess.

Nice suggestions, and I agree with most of them. I still think the real issue for eles is the cooldowns though.

Back in beta one of the devs stated that they balanced the ele’s versatility with longer cooldowns. IMO this has always been a flawed system though as there are many many times when we simply don’t need the extra versatility and thus are left waiting for the long 30-40s cooldowns on some of our more useful abilities in order to actually do what is needed at the time. The unreliability of some of our skills is enough of a tradeoff in my opinion; the longer cooldowns are unnecessary.

Our damage skills are effectively designed like a thief who builds for his 40s backstab burst combo… except the damage isn’t there and is much harder to pull off. When firegrab misses it is nothing but infuriating to see it on a 40s cooldown for nothing.

If they simply reduced cooldowns across the board the unreliable nature of many of our skills would be more acceptable and more forgiving.

Kaizer.7135:

Pro Tip: Go to Heart of the Mists in sPvP and to the right of where you enter the area is a PvP locker. In the locker it has every skin for every armor and weapon (except for legendary’s).

It’s actually missing quite a number of regular and exotic skins as well, but I agree it’s a good place to check out what’s available until they let us preview on the TP.

This is essentially something the mesmer used to do in GW1 with the original arcane thievery.

To be honest I prefer it in its current state as it’s more predictable and, therefore, reliable. If it were changed to depend on what skills the enemy actually had on their bar it would be out of the Thief’s control and not particularly dependable for anything.

Instead of the size of the weapons I’m actually more bothered by the way some of them inexplicably clip through the floor.

For some reason certain two-handed weapons are always sheathed lower down your back than normal on an Asura and the tip goes right through the floor. This is quite common with greatswords and staves; hammers less so. If they were simply sheathed in the same place as other weapons of the same type they would be fine, and other races don’t seem to have this bug either. No one ever seems to pick up on it though…

The problem with venoms is that it’s pretty clear ANet balanced them around the grandmaster trait to share them with allies. Without that trait they are very underwhelming for the length of their cooldowns. With the trait they’re only great if you have 4 other players to make use of them AND wouldn’t otherwise hit the condition caps without them.

IMO venoms should have that grandmaster trait baked into their basic functionality. Warriors, guardians and rangers don’t have to trait to share their banners, shouts and spirits. I see no real reason why thieves couldn’t work the same way. It would also improve the thief’s group utility and make room for a new support option of some kind.

Dagerstorm IS powerful, but I’d say if anything it’s what other elites should be balanced around. Three quarters of the elite skills in this game are worthless, and thieves are probably the only profession in the game that actually has three useful ones.

Rather than call for daggerstorm to be nerfed I’d call for the other profession elites to actually be brought up to par.

I agree with this. Just as a simple example, I don’t understand why the halloween scavenger hunt rewards couldn’t have been account bound. It’s been a bit of a chore to repeat the quests on all of my characters.

They should just have all bound items be account bound and soulbound on use. Sure it might lead to some degree of ‘twinking’ but with the way stats and equipment work in this game it’s not going to really have any negative implications.

I would also love to see something like this.

I used to play EQ2 where they had heritage quests that were essentially epic quest chains that spanned the entire game world in search of a unique piece of equipment. They all usually had a special effect of some kind that gave them a major prestige value.

They also had the prismatic quest chains that were essentially the means of unlocking a special boss encounter with a major storyline villain. Think raid progression but have it done through a series of epic quests as opposed to sequential raids.

IMO this is how the legendary weapons should have been done.

Part of the issue for eles isn’t just the cooldowns themselves but the amount of downtime it leaves them with. I sometimes find myself waiting a few seconds between fights when soloing just to ensure I have all of my skills readily available; no other profession needs to do this and it adds nothing but a waste of time for us.

Aside from a small tweak to a few of our 4 and 5 skills (alongside a few utilities that were nerfed during beta but never had their cooldowns reduced to match) I think ANet should accelerate weapon skill cooldowns outside of combat.

I find it hard to take this thread seriously… Warriors are far from bad or broken as some here would like to imply. They may have problems, sure, but so does every profession. To be fair, of all eight professions in this game the warrior is the least in need of urgent attention.

I’ve been saying this since beta. The Asura already have equivalents of all the engineer tech. The inquest even use their own turrets.

It actually would make a great deal of sense for the Asura to have a unique skin to some of their kits and turrets.

What really sucks is that, just like the labyrinth, those who are able to play now can take advantage of this before ANet inevitably nerfs it to be worthless.

I hope ANet has the sense to leave this one be; they’ve already made enough changes in this event that effectively rewarded exploiters at the expense of everyone else.

I’ve also noticed this, it’s been like it for a while. Can’t remember when it disappeared but they did used to have it.

Whilst the male version doesn’t look as good as the female one the broomstick alone is worth it… I have endless amounts of fun watching it drag my asura around, legs trailing in the air, when he tries to fly on it.

I’m pretty certain there won’t be any special rewards for it as ANet already knows that would cause an uproar. This probably has nothing to do with the ‘Attend the Party’ achievement too.

As others have said, the fountain is probably going to explode/implode/crumble and reveal something. King Thorn will likely make his entrance, play his old GW1 mini-game again and kill everyone that fails. Following that he’ll leave to hunt for his body parts, at which point the Act 3 scavenger hunt will begin wherein we have to beat him to said body parts.

The reason this is a one-time thing is simply because it’s going to be a permanent progression of the story in some form (and likely whatever happens to the fountain will be permanent too).

You don’t have to kill them from the doors. The skeletons that spawn in the Queensdale graveyard when you use the scanner count. There are eight per character per day and you can get credit for killing the ones other players spawn too. Just take a few people to Queensdale graveyard and take turns spawning them for a few minutes, or just cycle it through your alts (they’re level 5). Easy.

Whilst Asuran technology is seemingly eco-friendly (their magical power sources don’t appear to produce any waste products) the Asura themselves are not: they do dangerous experiments on wildlife all the time as we see in a number of dynamic events.

A ranger does make sense for an Asura though if you think of it more as focussing your research on wildlife and such. There are a few labs about that are dedicated to wildlife research. Rangers use nature magic as well anyway which they’d certainly invest some study in.

I don’t know of anyone that has actually completed any ‘halloween events’ yet so my guess is they’re not in yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some underworld invasion or something as part of one of the phases.

I’m guessing the clocktower is in the Mad King’s Realm, which as you note isn’t available yet either.

Ryuujin.8236:

“How do you escape an elder dragon?”
“Just make sure you’re running faster than Snaff”

This one is both hilarious and wrong at the same time. Zojja would not be happy. :P

The update notes actually contain a lot of hints and clues about things, including where to start the scavenger hunt and two dynamic events in other zones. One of the key selling points of GW2 was the exploration element and it’s no different in the events. It’s a surprise you’re meant to discover, don’t expect more than clues for new content like this.

If you can’t be bothered just wait for someone to compile a list which will happen soon enough, the scavenger hunt already has multiple guides.

As for the quest reward… pretty sure it’s intended for you to transmute it, like pretty much every item in this game.