Guild Wars 2

The Boz.2038:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Champion rewards will be different based on their level. However, like other loot rewards if you’re a high level player in a lower level area there is a chance you’ll receive rewards based on your actual level rather than the area you are in each time they drop.

Is there a plan to use some sort of “the longer it’s alive, the better the rewards” system to compensate for the popularity of some champions?

2 consequences of this:

1. The fewer people the better. Champion takes longer to kill with 3-5 people, any more and everyone gets worse loot. This runs counter to the core philosophy of GW2 – you’re supposed to be happy to see other players.
2. Coordinated prolonging of fights. Which would mean players who aren’t in on the coordination get raged at, etc. Same problem as #1.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

I wouldn’t call that a “stealth buff”, it’s just a mistake.

I’ve set the dredge raidmaster to veteran level since it’s intended to be a soloable event, no ETA on when it will go live, but it’s set for a future update.

I just solo’d this event on my low level mesmer this morning, though I’d probably have to say it would be near impossible to solo on a melee character. Either way, I hope this champion returns fairly easily with scaling.

Ursan.7846:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

The portal is a one-time use consumable that effectively allows you to use a skill that is similar to the mesmer’s portal. We recognize thakittens a very powerful item, so the recipe is quite rare and takes considerable resources to manufacture.

And will we be able to use this skill in WvW/sPvP/Dungeons? Or just open world.

I’m incredibly wary of this. It sounds very close to P2W where you can pay a lot of gold to get access to an incredibly powerful skill.

Uh, since you can’t use most bundle consumables in sPvP and WvW (…anymore) you obviously won’t be able to use this portal thing in those game modes.

If you’re worried that using a portal will be OP in PvE… er, just roll a mesmer, it’s the same thing and you don’t have to pay “money” to get unlimited uses

MokahTGS.7850:

There has always been a rifle available for karma that functions exactly like a mesmer portal skill.

Er, what? The Experimental Teleportation Gun barely resembles Portal. It can’t be targeted, has a 900 range, and lasts for 5ish seconds.

Is Blood’s CD definitely 2s? There’s noise about it actually being 5s, which if true would put it more on par with Leeching (450 HP every 5s vs 900 HP every 9s).

There are zero skills on offhand dagger that require a target (i.e. can’t be cast on stealthed opponents). All of focus’s control skills require a target (Comet, Gale, Freezing Gust). Roaming in WvW feels a lot worse when you can’t actually land hard CC on permastealth thieves. Earthquake and Updraft beat Gale and Comet any day. Swirling Winds and Obsidian Flesh are very nice skills but they don’t make up for the underwhelming rest of the weapon IMO. That said, focus is viable in lots of PvE situations, especially if your party doesn’t have much projectile reflection.

How vital are the trinkets to the build? Do you think maybe celestial amulet and accessories, and cavalier or zerker rings, would work more or less the same?

Awesome video, I really want to try out this build for roaming, but dem ascendeds are tough to come by

Namica.2951:

dronzer.8392:

Charr… Cat… who doesn’t like cats!?!

I can watch youtube cat videos all day long…

I know right! But man, the -only- armor I like for Charr is the Braham armor and the T3. Everything else just looks so… incredibly…. meeeehhhhhhhhh.

Norn though, just about everything looks fantastic.

Welcome to the world of the asura, where the only armor that looks remotely good aside from a couple common pieces here and there is the cultural stuff.

I guess the upside is that, despite everything else looking awful, the cultural armor is some of the best in the game, only rivaled perhaps by some human and sylvari tier 3 sets.

Esplen.3940:

Conditions are already weaker than pure damage.

Conditions are harder to get to deal more damage (they scale really badly).
Conditions have a cap that is not unique to each player, meaning that if you have 2+ condition players in a party, you’re going to waste conditions (either one persons poison/burning will be ticking or 25 bleeds will go off and you’re just overwriting bleeds).
Conditions have a cap on how long they can be (100% condition duration).
Conditions deal their damage slowly and have tons of removal methods.

The only way you’re going to win as a condition damage build is by constantly applying conditions to other players and hoping they run out of removal. They, on the other hand, only have to worry about hitting you, because their damage will do the rest.

Also, if you get, say, a Zerker Warrior in your group that wields a Sword, you’re in for a treat because he’s just going to slide on into your bleed stacks and say “HI, I LIKE TO BLEED THEM, TOO!”

Those objections are perfectly valid for PvE but don’t really apply to sPvP, where conditions are generally as powerful as direct damage. That’s why engineers and necros do so well with condition pressure/burst. The beauty of conditions is, once you get them on your enemy, you don’t have to worry about connecting additional hits – the damage, and its accompanying debuff, will continue without you having to do anything further. That’s why curing conditions is much more common than the direct damage counterpart (blocking attacks).

That said, I do think a 33% reduced condi damage boon is too much. Maybe 20%, but I don’t really think it’s needed. If conditions become too strong, they can introduce more ways of decreasing duration or curing them.

I liked the idea of “Freedom” as a potential new boon, which was mentioned here a while ago. Its effect would simply be, “Immunity from movement restrictions,” though chill would still apply its cooldown increase and immobilize would still prevent dodging.

When you perform a channeled sword move and your asura jumps up and waves the blade around in midair for a few seconds (Warrior’s Flurry, Mesmer’s Blurred Frenzy, Guardian’s Zealot’s Defense, Thief’s Pistol Whip). That is the best player character animation in the game.

100 Blades is a close second.

Rickdog.2853:

i just like to play something that isnt press 2 buttons over and over and win

Don’t get a berserker warrior then (Actually I like playing my zerker warrior, it’s a nice change of pace from the hyperactive ele combat.)

And no problem!

Rickdog.2853:

Yea i know lol, i know i didnt want a warrior or ranger cause i level my ranger to 20 and the pet just isnt what i expected, and its not as fun as GW1 ranger was, which is what i always played. The ele is what caught my eye, but is it easy to solo with and not get 2 shot? I understand using my skills to survive is key, but which survives better solo and in pvp between ele and mesmer?

Survivability is usually a function of build rather than a specific class, like for instance a bunker D/D ele can be super hard to take down whereas a S/D glass cannon has to worry a lot more about bursting enemies down before they get killed themselves.

Rickdog.2853:

something that is fun, challenging, and does well in the WvW side of pvp as well as Spvp. Solo’ing is a big thing as well as i don’t have many friends that play anymore.

Hard to think of something that satisfies all of these criteria. I’d say Elementalist is the best fit, it’s versatile, probably has the highest skill ceiling, and is magnificent in sPvP/WvW. Guardian is fun, is great for WvW and sPvP, but can be less fun for soloing and is usually considered one of the less challenging classes.

Tael.5432:

I’d like to see wands for light armour classes. If not, then definitely wand skins for scepters. I feel like the only thing my necromancer is missing is a wand.

Princess Wand Skin not cutting it for necro?

Elementalist: I honestly think we’re covered for weapons here. Staff, scepter, focus and dagger cover all types of combat and mix condi/direct damage well. Plus, we have conjured weapons that cover nearly any type of task you’d want to do.
Mesmer: Main hand pistol, obviously.
Necromancer: Greatsword. It’s what Grenth would have wanted. Barring that, a scythe.
Engineer: Hammer, or mace. Needs a brute-force melee option, tool kit is subpar for this purpose.
Thief: Don’t play it enough to have an opinion.
Ranger: Same.
Guardian: Flail (a mace head chained to a handle, sort of like what the witch-king of Angmar wields in Return of the King). Would combine a strong mid-range combat option with CC.
Warrior: A terrestrial spear, i.e. pole-arm.

I seriously think that whoever wrote this summary somehow misunderstood what was said to them. There are 19 weapon types in the game and it is simply not feasible to give every profession access to all of them, especially if they want to add whole new weapon types. Plus, combinations like Engineer/Scepter, Guardian/Dagger, Elementalist/Rifle just don’t work with the art and lore for professions. Elementalists will never get a Greatsword because it doesn’t fit our lore (not to mention the balance issues and the fact that we ALREADY have the Fiery Greatsword conjure).

What I believe they possibly meant was to give every profession access to at least one NEW weapon type.

(Now, Necromancer with Greatsword would make me throw out everything I ever believed about balance and feasibility)

Flamewall needs to have a reduced cast time and apply more burning, Comet should have a much larger AoE, there should be a healing spell instead of Freezing Gust, reduce recharge time for Gale (perhaps at the cost of shorter range), and Fire Shield should be scrapped for a leap finisher (because then you could lay down Flamewall and leap over it to get a Fire Shield anyway). As a kiting/control weapon, Focus is far worse than Staff, and as a damage weapon, it’s far worse than Dagger.

A Dagger/Focus combo should be more viable as an offensive set than it is currently. I can FEEL it.

For the record: APs are not as easy to come by as some people make it seem. The sum total of all Living Story/Special Event APs is 1525. If you have every single PvE achievement the game offers other than Living Story/Special Event, that’s a base of 4226. I’m not sure about PvP, but I know WvW has a pitiful maximum of 891, and nobody’s come close because those achievement tracks are ridiculous. The rest is dailies and monthlies. Anyone can do that. If you’ve been a dedicated player since launch you’ll probably have around 3000 AP from those.

It would not be incorrect to describe achievement rewards past 6-7,000 as bonuses for regularly logging in since launch. Once you max out your PvE AP, you only gain significant amounts of points by doing Living Story (anywhere from 100 to 400 AP per month, though this is starting to creep higher with rapid releases) and dailies/monthlies (likely 250 per month).

This means, once you hit 6,000 AP for a shoulder skin, it will take 4-5 months until you unlock a helm skin. Most dedicated grinders take less time than that to acquire a legendary weapon. I don’t think these are going to be “goals” for people to go for: right now, they’ll just be rewards for veteran players, and in the future, they’ll be an incidental bonus you pick up once in a while. I have 4.3k AP; personally, I’ll be much prouder of my legendary when I finish it than my shiny gauntlets, because something like that is a much better indication of my dedication and achievement in this game than wearing “Masterful Achiever” under my name.

I mean the sylvari don’t reproduce so they have no need for much sexual dimorphism. Their genders are only aesthetic, really. It seems part of the reason why sylvari seem to lack a “sexual orientation” as such. I would think it would not be out of place for some sylvari to switch and blur genders.

(Though tbh it’s probably the case that Sareb’s canon gender just got swapped by the developers accidentally or for some small reason between that story, which was written IIRC very early in development and release.)

If you actually wanted to grind all the materials for a piece of exotic crafted armor in the same manner as the new celestial gear, you’d get 1 glob of ectoplasm and 1 t6 material per day. It IS rather silly. The charged quart crystals are basically a new form of laurels (get one daily, eventually you can get 30 for your gear).

That being said, if you want your full celestial set on the first day, I’m sure you can spend a metric ton of gold the moment they become available on the trading post. (People who bought the holographic dragon wings for 40g can tell you it’d be money well spent.)

I use Snow Leopard situationally. For instance, when I PUG Sorrow’s Embrace path 3, there’s a part where you have to skip a ton of mobs over a bridge (right before the NPC starts spamming “No, No, No!”), and having the stealth and the charge makes it easier to not die when I have aggro – which I usually do, as an anchor guardian. It’s also useful for getaways in WvW, as people have said.

I’ve thought distantly about using Wolf in a terror build for my norn necro, but 240s cooldown for 1s of fear is just silly.

None of the other spirit transforms are worth mentioning. I suppose some professions with weaker elites or elites that don’t do much for a particular build could bring Snow Leopard for the easy disengage or sneak attack, but it’s a stretch.

Einlanzer.1627:

The females look more like human females than the human females do …

This. Most norn male and human female models look ridiculous. Then again, GW2 has never been big on “immersion” – if people want their comically buff norn men and eternally bored supermodel human women, there’s little reason from an aesthetic/realistic point of view to change them or significantly expand the customization options.

Personally, I’ve decided not to try to craft my favorite legendaries (Bifrost and Meteorlogicus) for this very reason. I’ve seen various asura toons with both and it’s kind of sad – for the person with the scepter, I had to double back, zoom in, and make sure I was actually looking at Meteorlogicus, which isn’t the kind of thing you want when you make a legendary weapon (and I play the game on max graphic settings). You want to show it off as much as possible >:] but on asura this just isn’t feasible. I pity whoever makes Incinerator or Quip of course, but even big two-handeds like Bifrost are practically unnoticeable while sheathed.