Guild Wars 2

Choppy.4183:

Apolo.5942:

No it does not. If you care to read my longer previous post you would realize that there is no signet in the game, that has both abilities that work towards the same goal and that the to choice of which one to use is dictated by strategy rather than circumstance. HS is not going to be exception and it will nerf the class as a whole.

In fact what you want is exactly the opposite, is the choice to be situationaly independent, and not dictated by it. This signet as it is, is situationally dependant, being the standard situation better to use the passive and crisis situation being better to use the active.

Under what circumstances would I use the HS signet, thereby dropping my heal output by a lot in order to get a small amount that most dps oriented opponents could undo in the time it takes to activate?

Decreasing the opportunity cost to heal when using the active and giving an additional benefit like condi immunity is absolutely consistent with the active counterplay Anet clearly wants to promote.

When like i wrote above, when you are low on resources and need to survive a bursts, thats the only situation when you use the active.

I know what arena net is trying to do, but they are going about it the wrong way and ignoring their own previous reality where warrior sucked with out it.

Read my original post, signets that have 2 effects that work towards the same end, compete against it self, thus there will always be one more optimal and one dictated by a particular circumstance on which the other effect becomes irrelevant.

2 of the signets you mentioned are not designed this way (thou i would agree the one of the effects of those is by it self pretty underwhelming thus borderline irrelevant). This kind of signets (the ones that have effects that work towards different ends) come down to Judgment calls, to which plays you WANT to do. The bad signets come down to what play you HAVE to do in order to be optimal.

Choppy.4183:

Apolo.5942:

This is stupid, regardless of what numbers they put on it, there will always be an optimum side to it.

Yeah, but bringing it “closer to the line” means making the optimum situationally dependent.

There’s pretty much no situation that would make the active on HS situationally optimal now, whereas that’s not the case with the other signets.

No it does not. If you care to read my longer previous post you would realize that there is no signet in the game, that has both abilities that work towards the same goal and that the to choice of which one to use is dictated by strategy rather than circumstance. HS is not going to be exception and it will nerf the class as a whole.

In fact what you want is exactly the opposite, is the choice to be situationaly independent, and not dictated by it. This signet as it is, is situationally dependant, being the standard situation better to use the passive and crisis situation being better to use the active.

Choppy.4183:

King Noob IV.3560:

why does it feel like this is the only class where the people aren’t happy with the next expansion lol. i feel bad for warrior mains

I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen coming down the pipe for warriors, tbh. And the people whining about healing signet make me laugh too.

Anet’s supposedly shifting the value of HS closer to the line between whether active or passive should be used, whereas right now there’s no contest. Yet people are already complaining without knowing what the end result will be.

Plus, they’re improving the viability of the alternative heals, which is great. I’m already looking forward to running mending on a bruiser build, and healing shout on a shout build is just one of the things that will make shout builds more powerful than they are now.

This is stupid, regardless of what numbers they put on it, there will always be an optimum side to it.

Continuation

This are just a few Signets that have their effects coupled, and the reason of why there is no real choice about when to trigger the active/preserve the passive.

Signet of Renewal
Passive: Cures a condition every ten seconds.
Active: Your pet pulls all conditions from nearby allies to itself.
Passive is always better, unless overwhelmed with conditions flooded with conditions. There is no choice to be had here, if you are overwhelmed you need to stop it.

Signet of Stone
Passive: Improves toughness for you and your pet.
Active: You and your pet takes no damage from attacks.You and your pet are still susceptible to conditions and control effects.
180 toughness is irrelevant, you never think “oh wait i am loosing 180 if i use this” you always use it to survive burst, it essentially works as a regular skill with an almost insignificant upside.

Assassin’s Signet
Passive: Grants increased power.
Active: Deal 15% more damage on your next five attacks.
Passive is always better, unless going for the final burst, Again no choice you should always try to maximize your damage on burst down.

Signet of Malice
Passive: Heals when you attack.
Active: Gain health.
Passive healing is always better unless trying a last ditch effort to survive the burst, if you are dead healing over time is irrelevant, the choice is dictated by the situation.

Signet of Restoration
Passive: Grants health every time you cast a spell.
Active: Heal yourself.
Same as before

The better designed signets are the ones that do offer a choice depending the situation and have its effects decoupled.
For instance:

Bane Signet
Passive: Improved Power
Active: Knock down and damage your foe.
More damage vs Interrupt/snare. This are 2 different things and there is a real choice to make, want more damage or want to know down say a fleeing enemy, or an enemy going for a revive or stomp?.

Dolyak Signet
Passive: Reduces incoming damage.
Active: Gain stability.
Want to take less damage or secure a stomp/burst.

In essence, when 2 effects compete towards the same goals, the environment, singergies and so on, will always dictate that one is more optimal than the other. That is how metas, combos and so on are born. Signets are not immune to these realities.

This is a bit of a wall of text, but i think it merits discussion.

This comes from another post related to the incoming nerf to the warrior`s Signet of Health, but that is just an example of poorly a designed signet and not that the passive healing it self is too strong thus the active rarely used.

The real problem is that both the active and the passive effect are coupled.

What do i mean by coupled?, i mean that both effects, the active and the passive are coupled in one skill and work towards the same goal or same effect. This makes it that in essence both effects compete against each other, which in theory is what we want, but in practice what actually happens is that 1 of them is more optimal 90% of the time and the other is only actually better in the remaining 10% of the time which default to forcing you to use it on those situation.
The real draw back is that it removes choice from the player, the best player will always choose the optimal effect for the situation, and that choice is defined by the parameters of the effects which both work towards the same goal.

To illustrate lets take the warrior`s Signet of Health, the only situation where a little burst of healing is actually better than a significant steady healing is when you are close to death, being burst down and in need of pushing through the burst to stabilize, that is because at that point the number on the passive healing becomes irrelevant(baring something ridiculous). There is no choice, passive is always better unless you need to survive at witch point passive becomes irrelevant.
NOW Lets say they changed it and the passive was terrible and the active was amazing. The same would still be true, when you needed to heal a significant chunk of hp (not necessarily dieing) you would always trigger it because the active would be more optimal than the passive.
The point is that in either case choice is removed from the player wanting to do the optimal play.

Further down is an incomplete list of Signets that have effects coupled and a description of why they are not real choices, as you will come to realize by the sheer number of them, most of the signets in the game are coupled.

The better designed signets are the ones that are decoupled. This are Signets on which the passive effect does something completely different than the active or that work towards different goals.

To illustrate lets take the Guardian`s Signet of Resolve which incidentally coupled with base stats and default passive healing heals for about 75%-100% (depending on stats) as the warriors Healing signet (its just less transparent and people for some reason dont complain about it).

This signets effects are A burst healing and a condition Cleansing over time. These effects do not compete against each other(save extreme cases), the choice is there, do i try to aegis, roll, run and try to keep that constant cleansing that i really like and is useful or do i want to get my health up and try to keep the overall HPs of signet as high as possible.
This is a real choice between 2 different effects where one is not more optimal than the other because they do different things (even thou in flavor yes they are both “defensive”).
Or the Necromancers signet of vampirisim, do i want to keep that damage mitigation or do i want to try a play of me and a couple of team mates bursting down an enemy?.

These choices come from what is happening, what play i want to do, what is my situation awareness of the battle. They dont come from which is the optimal solution for this situation. They define game flow from the choice made, instead of the game flow defining the choice which is what happens when both effects compete towards the same goal.

Continued on next post.

Toxsa.2701:

Hyo Jin.5630:

As a player of GW2 from the beggining of its launch I can say for sure that the warrior class had been through a lot of trouble before this state.

From a Warrior point of view, Healing Signet is what makes you stay alive in a melee fight. Don’t mention “it’s about your skills and your ability to avoid burst by dodging and using blocks etc” your argument is irrelevant. I can mitigate all direct damages without even paying attention to the fight (but Warriors are supposed to be more tanky than other classes right? even though they cut off the Holy Trinity basics).

• From a Thief point of view : The way I kill warriors (build tank or zerk) with my thief is full zerk D/P + stack blind = easy victory. But if I make a mistake they can easily burst me down in litteraly few seconds (in zerk build), while they can mitigate all my direct damages, so it’s a lot more about timing et right time to burst while they’re being blinded.

• From an Engineer point of view : Kite until the warrior does mistakes to punish him badly (with full conditions or burst from zerk / cele stuff). The trick is to stack poison on them ; luckily engineers have access to a lot of skills to apply pressure on opponents with CC.

NB : Heal Turret (low CD + dispell conditions + burst heal + regen) from Engineers is far more OP than Healing Signet for Warriors, just saying

The problem is not the healing comparison, but the passive nature of Warrior’s healing. For example, healing turret heal for about 5k + regen a few secs, so around 6k on a celestial build with a 15 CD. Healing Signet heals around 5900 within 15 seconds. But the problem is not about healing amount, but about when you trigger the effect. For healing turret, if you activate it before you lose up to at least 5k hp, you waste the healing potential of healing turret, meaning you achieve less than 6k heal withing 15 seconds.

Then the solution is not to NERF the passive and buff the Active, but to decouple its effects.

Change its name, call it “Berkeserker signet”, keep its passive and change the active to give you high burst damage over a short spam, like condi inmunity, remove stun etc and flat % extra damge. There you would have a significant choice, sustain vs burst down.

And not Sustain vs More Sustain.

In fact it is only the signets that dont have coupled effects (meaning to effects that do the same thing either stronger vs over time) that are real choices, otherwise the coin will always land on one side either the passive is more important or the active is more important.

Signet of Renewal
Passive: Cures a condition every ten seconds.
Active: Your pet pulls all conditions from nearby allies to itself.
Passive is always better, unless overwhelmed with conditions flooded with conditions. No choice.

Signet of Stone
Passive: Improves toughness for you and your pet.
Active: You and your pet takes no damage from attacks.You and your pet are still susceptible to conditions and control effects.
180 toughness is irrelevant you always use it to survive burst.

Assassin’s Signet
Passive: Grants increased power.
Active: Deal 15% more damage on your next five attacks.
Passive is always better, unless going for the final burst, Again no choice you should always try to maximize your damage on burst down.

Signet of Malice
Passive: Heals when you attack.
Active: Gain health.
Passive healing is always better unless trying a last ditch effort to survive the burst.

Signet of Restoration
Passive: Grants health every time you cast a spell.
Active: Heal yourself.
Passive skill spam healing is better than small burst unless again trying last effort to survive burst, no choice.

I could go on and on, on every signet that has coupled effects, when both do the same thing, it is always going to be the case that one is better except on a particular situation when you have no choice but to trigger the other.

The better designed signets are the ones that do offer a choice depending the situation and have its effects decoupled.

For instance:
Bane Signet
Passive: Improved Power
Active: Knock down and damage your foe.
More damage vs Interrupt/snare. This are 2 different things and there is a real choice to make, want more damage or want to know down say a fleeing enemy, or an enemy going for a revive or stomp?.

Dolyak Signet
Passive: Reduces incoming damage.
Active: Gain stability.
Want to take less damage or secure a stomp/burst.

This are real choices depending on the situation, which is different than one being default optimal save in a particular situation where you have not choice but to trigger the other.

BlackTruth.6813:

Apolo.5942:

Please consider that passive healing and the ability to sponge damage is what defines the warrior. I play warrior and not a guardian because of the damage it can soak, beacuse of its passive healing, that is what we look for in the warrior.

Do not do the guardian shield vs focus treatment to the active vs passive effects of the signet.

If you want people to use the active more, buff it, do not nerf its passive.

They’re giving it resistance. That’s good.

Not if they nerf the passive healing effect it isnt.

For Christ sake, some one has to have a video of the disaster the warrior was like before the signet.

It took the combination of Dogged March AND the Signet to make the warrior viable.

I really wish my googlefu was stronger and i could post a link to a warrior video from back before the healing signet.

Luckily we just had the world championships. Dont know what the numbers were, but if advertsed on their site the feed did not go over 20k spectators world wide, then yeah i would state spvp as an esport is essentially dead.

No idea about the number of views thou, they might have gone over it.

Knighthonor.4061:

Where is it mentioned that this is nerfed?

It was mentioned during the new trait system unveiling.

lighter.2708:

People need to realize that before healing signet, when warrior used active heal

warrior was dead, unviable, unused, free kill in PvP.

if they can make any active healing actually viable some how with w/e magic they using then sure, go for it.

Soooo much this, i remember when the best advice to play warrior in pvp was “bring a rifle”…

The good old days of kite wars….

Mikkel.8427:

The passive on the signet should be conditional. Have it scale off of their adrenaline. example- 70hp/sec at full adrenaline, 362 when empty. This way it rewards active play (using burst skills).

It absolutely needs something done to it though, its ridiculous that it heals more than the Mesmer’s signet when mesmer’s need to keep and maintain 3 illusions for their passive.

Because that is what warriors do, they have no dps, they have interrupts and the ability to soak damage that is it, and that is the way we like it.

The real problem is that both the active and the passive effect are coupled.
What do i mean by coupled?, i mean that both effects, the active and the passive are coupled in one skill and work towards the same goal or same effect. This makes it that in essence both effects compete against each other, which in theory is what we want, but in practice what actually happens is that 1 of them is more optimal 90% of the time and the other is only actually better in the remaining 10% of the time which default to forcing you to use it on those situation.
The real draw back is that it removes choice from the player, the best player will always choose the optimal effect for the situation, and that choice is defined by the parameters of the effects which both work towards the same goal.
To illustrate lets take the warrior`s Signet of Health, the only situation where a little burst of healing is actually better than a significant steady healing is when you are close to death, being burst down and in need of pushing through the burst to stabilize, that is because at that point the number on the passive healing becomes irrelevant(baring something ridiculous). There is no choice, passive is always better unless you need to survive at witch point passive becomes irrelevant.
NOW Lets say they changed it and the passive was terrible and the active was amazing. The same would still be true, when you needed to heal a significant chunk of hp (not necessarily dieing) you would always trigger it because the active would be more optimal than the passive.
The point is that in either case choice is removed from the player wanting to do the optimal play.
Further down is an incomplete list of Signets that have effects coupled and a description of why they are not real choices, as you will come to realize by the sheer number of them, most of the signets in the game are coupled.
The better designed signets are the ones that are decoupled. This are Signets on which the passive effect does something completely different than the active or that work towards different goals.
To illustrate lets take the Guardian`s Signet of Resolve which incidentally coupled with base stats and default passive healing heals for about 75%-100% (depending on stats) as the warriors Healing signet (its just less transparent and people for some reason dont complain about it).
This signets effects are A burst healing and a condition Cleansing over time. These effects do not compete against each other(save extreme cases), the choice is there, do i try to aegis, roll, run and try to keep that constant cleansing that i really like and is useful or do i want to get my health up and try to keep the overall HPs of signet as high as possible.
This is a real choice between 2 different effects where one is not more optimal than the other because they do different things (even thou in flavor yes they are both “defensive”).
Or the Necromancers signet of vampirisim, do i want to keep that damage mitigation or do i want to try a play of me and a couple of team mates bursting down an enemy?.
These choices come from what is happening, what play i want to do, what is my situation awareness of the battle. They dont come from which is the optimal solution for this situation. They define game flow from the choice made, instead of the game flow defining the choice which is what happens when both effects compete towards the same goal.

This would not be up to Arena net but their NCSOFT overlords.

Yeah, honestly, it is terrible the game shipped with this AI it is even worst they have no bothered to fix it.

If you got fed up with it a year ago, nothing has really changed. Unless you are into grinding, i would wait until the exp.

You do know this discussion is pointless right? people hated the change to the current system and Anet did not back pedal, what makes anyone think that we have the least amount of influence in altering what they have already decided on doing any way?.

Short answer, NO.

Long answer, it never pays off to do something over time which is susceptible to changes in the environment vs doing something on demand, when they are both balanced to do the same amount of damage.

On demand will always trump over time, it happens in GW2 it happens in real life.

Conditions are ill conceived in this game, they should not be about damage, they should be about utility/buffing and debuffing. Condi builds should not be about trying to do the same damage stacking bleeds or what ever, they should be about trying to keep 100% up time freeze/weakness/poison or what ever on your opponent, the kind that alter the flow of the battle not the kind that runs Direct damage for DPS, but to do that you need a complete re design of the condis.

In summary condi build should be the inverse of what traditional RPGs call buffing/support(not meaning healing here). This was much more noticeable in GW1, but you had a much larger variety of skills there.

The game is poorly written, it does not matter what you put under the hood, if you crank it up, high player count scenes will kill your FPS. It not a matter of the hardware its a matter of the software, to the point where changing your settings will affect your FPS significantly regardless of what is actually being rendered.

If you step into the support forum you will see this has been reported since day one.

Short answer NO.

Long answer, the game engine is poorly implemented and it wastes resources tremendously. There is a problem with the player cap for rendering, the same scene will plummet your FPS if you set the your player cap to high REGARDLESS OF WHETHER IT IS RENDING 1 OR 100 PLAYERS. I am sure there are many more problems with it, but this is one that with no technical background you can easily test yourself.

Further problems come from the fact that newer cards are designed for multiple core processing and optimized for it, directx12 is taking this even further. Sadly there is no hint that GW2 will be optimized for it, which leads me to believe it wont.

Ok after the Vlog yesterday, i am not so worried, “long” appears to be manageable.

What is a concern thou i life force generation while dueling or in 1v1 situations. GS and Reaper Shroud, have a way too wide Life force generation spectrum and it is bound to suffer the same way altruistic healing does on guardian, where it is used nowhere except on Zerg v Zerg.

-GS Has literally NO consistent life force generation. The skills you do have to generate life force are on long CDs making them 1 or 2 offs in real fights and have massive variance in respect to the amount of life force they generate.

To offset this your only real option is to trait into chilling force and blighters boon, which again have the massive drawback of locking the spec into a specific build for pvp. Even when traited the variance is extreme.
Death spiral goes from:
-0% life force, if you miss or they doge or they dodge your chilling attack, which will happen often since dodging the last hit of the chain severely gimps the reaper skills.
-12% life force, if you hit your 6strickes during the 1s casting animation (again very unlikely 6 to 8 % is a more realistic number if you ask me.
-24% life force, if traited and you hit a single chilled target all 6 hits, again 12% to 16% is more realistic.
-36% life force, if untraited and you hit 3 targets with all your 6 attacks.
-72% if traited and you hit 3 chilled targets with all 6 attacks.

While this “sound” awesome, like i said before, most pvp fights boil down to duels, very rarely you get the chance to strike several enemies at ones with a melee strike, essentially never you can do that repeatedly and consistently.
In practice you will be generating 6 to 16% life force every 10 seconds, assuming you are not interrupted dodged and so on.

This is not a concern on pve, where monsters bunch up and stand there for you to hit on them.

We for those like me, concerned about long casting time skills, this does not bode well at all:
From an interview with the devs, a question concerning this exact matter.
“Jon Peters, Game Design Lead: It’s all relative. We are trying to get a feel so I believe instead of taking a total of 1.5 seconds to complete the 3 part combo like the warrior and Guardian the Necro hits a bit harder but his combo is somewhere between 1.75 and 2 seconds long for all 3 attacks combined. In general, he has attacks that tend to be in the .75 to 1 second time frame instead of .5 to .75. In reality it’s a small difference and these attacks hit hard enough to make up for it. We feel like this is a really nice combination to go along with the Chill effects that reapers bring to the table.”

We still have to wait and see, but it is rather surprising that after the fiasco the guardian hammer is/was, they insisted on this aproach.

Specially since they seem to be out of touch with the fact that casting time, does not account for animation time, so the REAL casting time for the skills is much longer as stated in their own wiki for the guardian hammer
-Actual attack speed is once every .83 seconds for the first two swings, then 2 seconds for the symbol. The full chain completes in 3.7 seconds.
VS the stated casting times on the skills which are 0.5, 0.5 and 1.25 for a grand total of 2.25 vs the actual 3.7 hence why nobody uses it. And keep in mind hit or miss you still get the simbol with the hammer.

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Yeah, I’m thinking the first time a thief or some other GC jumps on mid and two of these necro hit them with blasts of chill and other condi they can’t easily cleanse and are more or less rooted while the nightmare of blows come in, there will be a big outcry of "they are too tanky and do so much damage nerfynerfnerf.

Who knows though.

I look forward to seeing new metas born from the new specs. Might make for some interesting counter play and seeing how people react to their routine being upended.

Well that is the problem of extremes, if the class has long casting skills with fairly long CDs like 20s or so. Then they will have to be fairly resilient to compensate the fact that they are extremely easy to dodge/interupt.

Rin.1046:

Donari.5237:

I’m concerned about a long windup needing large groups of foes for full effect. I don’t see it as a bad thing, just not my general play style. I know that any slower skills I have are just about completely useless when I have others around me because the enemies die before my shot even lands (I’m staring at you, Thief Shortbow 2). And I seem to face one or two mobs far more often than groups of five or more when I’m fighting on my own. So this spec may not meet my personal needs. Which is why it’s good there are so many professions and spec versions thereof! Because some people are going to revel in this.

Tomorrow’s live stream will help a lot, if it’s run like the DH ReadyUp was. That one made DH look far more viable for how I play than the blog/video had.

This is not me saying I think the Reaper is lame, bad, or in any way uncool. I’m just unsure it will fit into how I play. I still have a necromancer with 100 skill challenges done just in case!

So long as you can keep moving while you ‘windup’ your attacks, I don’t think it will be a problem for me. Once you get used to the timing, slow attacks are not a problem if you can keep moving while casting, much like the guardian hammer 4 skill.

Of course, like you say, it will come down to each player’s preferred playstyle.

That is not true, mechanics wise Hammer is much better suited for the point capture gameplay of spvp, yet no guardian uses hammers there.

Long casting time skills are inherenly at a dissadvantage in a game based around movement with, dodges, CCs and interrupts.

It IS a concern, we will have to wait until tomorrow and see what they mean by “long”. 1s in this game is an extremelly long time but workable so long as it only applies to aditional skill and not the auto attack, if on the other hand we are talking 1.5s+ for everything that is simply an eternity and essentially unusable.

Yup what would actually have been better is a moving aoe skills centered on the character. much like every paladin has in justabout every fantasy game.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

messiah.1908:

trap should be ground targeted (as it seems it isnt)
the cd is too long 45 sec… make it 30 sec

make 1 trap proc burning some way
make 1 trap clenase condition like healing trap
make 1 trap to be stunbreak
make 1 trap to proc some support boons like regen, vigor,protection

no taunt skill?

this way traps can be use in any build type. condi, zerk, hybrid, range or melee.
otherwise
in pvp you maybe see 1 trap in used and maybe the same in wvw
in pve you can see them as no support utility much needed.

Traps definitely need to be looked at.

The cool downs are all excessively long.

None of them do damaging conditions at base. (have to trait for that and trait only effects traps)

The heal trap purification doesn’t even remove a condition.

The elite trap dragon’s maw does a ward which is basically useless in PvP given the wide spread use of stun breaks, stability & teleports.

As for the taunt skill, I’d rather they add taunt to shield number 4 & resistance to shield number 5. That would make the shield worth using.

In all honesty traps much like simbols are already useless, who actually traits simbols? so why on earth would you dedicate an entire trait line to them?. I said this before, static elements in a game based around moving action are non starters.

I imagine most people will play DH to get access to bow and some actually useful virtues but i dont expect to see many traps like today i dont see them with hunters or rogues.

Morfedel.4165:

I’m not saying it IS doing this. I’m legitimately asking, curious whether others think this may be true.

I ask the question because, first of all, the Revenant: isn’t getting much skill selection from what we have seen. Weapon sets, and two legendaries which pretty much seem to fill slots 6-10 for you.

Second of all: it was that you could mix and match traits from several lines. Now, you get three. Or, two and an elite specialization. So I can essentially have three trees fully chosen, not 6 that I can pick and choose (to some extent anyway)

As such, it concerns me; it looks to me at first glance that we are having our build choices reduced for all classes, and very little choice for the Revenant at all.

But I’m not saying I’m right here, and I’d love to be proven wrong. So tell me, what do you think about this?

Er… What build diversity? you have to have it first to destroy it.

I7 3770k
gtx 970
ram 16gb

Everything maxed out exept model count and detail i get about 45fps in cityes.

The performance dip is not related to models drawn but to the setting i can be in an empty sceen and making a quick 180 camera turn will freeze my screen with may be 10 characters on the screen outside cities. performance dim reduces if i lower the max model count and detail on the exact same scenario.

I would at least like to see them consolidated, chest through interphase and chests through items in the world should be 1 thing either one or the other.

This is ridiculous, this is the literal equivalent of battlefield having 1/3 of the guns from a class broken and not shooting, who in his right mind considers this to be acceptable 2 years after lunch?.

This happens more often with melee ones but i see it on ranged too. They stand there and not engage while i am engaged in combat. They also remain passive after forcing their skill. This is not related to pathing, same behavior is observed with the practice robots in the pvp area.

I actually love signet of vampirism, it does not work with every build but it offers same healing pluss some interesting offesive burst we ganging up as the warriors healing signet, and that is no small thing.

Lil Puppy.5216:

They say it has to do with pathing now but it used to work fine.

Pathing my kitten , they dont even work propperly in the training bots and that is as plain surface as you can possibly hope for.

Kal Spiro.9745:

I feel like they should treat necro minions like elementalist summons. Give them an extra power that they use on your target. Then you could force them to act even if they weren’t.

They have, you can force the cast and after the cast the minion still does nothing.

DeanBB.4268:

While I don’t specifically know how hard it is to programmatically improve minion AI… the monsters don’t have any difficulty targeting me, so why can’t the <insert AI ally here — minion, wolf, hound, pet…> target whatever I’m targeting?

Should be more like
Player status change (in combat) ->send Minion Status change (in combat)
While Minion Status (in combat) -> follow player target.

There, ill be expecting my gem cretdit compensation…

Half the time they stand there doing nothing while im in combat as a minion master necro.

Personally i appreciate the fact that outfits are a cross class full skin, its what makes them special. Take the Regalia, what makes it special to me, is that it will be the first set of “proper armor” available to the light classes. That is what i like about it, if it were a skin it would be heavy and there for loose what makes it special.

Algreg.3629:

Uuni.3561:

If you want good PvE you must make the mobs function like other players, using the same mechanics and tools available to the players with enough AI to not stack in corners.

But hey, increasing hp and damage and making more stuff unblockable/undodgeable also makes it more difficult! :^)

hm, I think I remotely remember a game that did quite well with such an ambitious approach. I wonder which game that is…

As for the Zerker meta, Mirta got it right – there will always be a “meta”. A child bawls and whines for the world to change according to its expectations, an adult adopts and tries to take advantage of a given scenario. The incessant complaining about zerker pretty much shows how a society can be infantilized within just one generation.

Meta does not equal 1 option. Just look at MTG, you certainly have a meta, which is comprised of a handful of different decks. Here everyone is running the same deck.

Paradox.1380:

Mirta.5029:

Well they’re changing conditions caps. With Silverwastes having high armour mobs that should be ideally killed by conditions, the meta might change depending on what boss mechanics will be.

I run a hybrid necro as my fractal toon with high health pool and I’ve yet to be one shooted by anything in as high as 49. Is the difference between 49 and 50 really that bad?

No. The only thing about 49 and 50 that is annoying is that 50’s Instability is random Agony. Its annoying but not going to one-shot you with enough AR. Honestly, I’ve very rarely been one shot by anything in Fractals, because I play Active Defense.

That is exactly my point, you dont get 1 shotted because you dodge/blind what ever, but when you miss, then they 1 shot you, that is the problem, if armor is not going to prevent that, then it is a useless stat, rising difficulty makes it only more useless.

People use Zerker builds because the damage in fractals is so kitten high (on the upper end) that everything one shots you, regardless of what you are wearing or what your build is. There is literally no point in using anything other than zerk.

I have heard talks about expansion content being more difficult and upping fractal levels, this will only result in further reinforcing zerker builds. For the cicle to be broken, ARMOR and HEALING need to actually matter, not the other way around.

Does this mean tanking? NO. But it does mean that bosses will not 1 shot you, may be 2 shot you or 3, but in between you have time to react and adjust, something that zerker would ideally not allow.

Necro GS: Melee Aggressive power oriented, the i was hopping the abortion that was the mesmer GS would end there but they repeated it with Revenants Hammer.

Honestly, even if they did, why would you bother?, easier to do 4 fractals 3 days, than grind the kittened amounts of materials the accessories/rings etc will need.

Monkey Fritz.9052:

edgarallanpwn.8739:

simplesimon.2084:

As long as you keep it one key press one action you fine. Now if you set it up to hold done the button and keep swinging that is not allowed because that is a repeatable action.

When I play my engenier I have my one skill set to left ckilck and toss grenades like crazy.

This doesnt even need to happen as you set your 1 attack to autocast.

Though realistically even with lag you only need to press it once, if you’re having issue with that… there’s plenty of solutions in place.

Never played grenade kit, have you?

Also, does no one here know about Combat Mod? It’s actually approved for use in game, since it offers no definitive advantage and actually makes some skills harder to use (which is why the game is not designed that way).

Far as I know the latest patch broke it, but it’s bound to get fixed.

Mmmm… care to share any link that says Combat Mod is Kosher?.

Sorin.4310:

I don’t understand why you are mashing 1 skills. Why not just use autoattack?

For ranged attacks it does not really matter, but for melee attacks the “auto attack” feature is affected by, the range at which it actually triggers, the movement speed and latency. That is why melee pvper mash 1 instead. For pve it does not really matter, but in pvp where things are more hectic, it will usually happen that your enemy will enter and exit the area where the auto attack was supposed to trigger and due to latency it does not.
When you mash 1 reasonably close to your opponent, you are overriding the auto attack detection. Does not look as pretty but is several times more effective.

Mainly 2.
1- Include an option for keys to spam its function when held down.
There is no skill i can think of that has a “REAL/CAST TIME” CD lower than 0.5 seconds. The skills that do not have a CD listed, like say the thiefs dagger auto attack chain, still have to wait for the animation to be completed before triggering the next “skill/step”. In fact the fastests individual non chained attcks, like orb of wrath (which has a real cast animation of 0.8s) and chained attacks which have a total cicle of 2.5s are much slower than what the we can mash, a simple 2 mashes per second, way out speed these. So there is no practical reason for us to keep destroying keyboards/mouses over this.

2- Give us control over camera and mouse click configuration.
Right click+Left Click moving forward(in addition to camera control), serves no practical porpoise, i would much rather it retained its camera control but trigger a regular attack.

insanemaniac.2456:

Apolo.5942:

They might as well include

theres that slippery slope.

Er no it isnt, everything in the game that is to meant spammed has the a default CD with its animation length, and since we are focusing in combat, none that i can thing of is shorter than 0.5 seconds?, so if you can click twice in half a second, which i think we can all agree everybody can do with out much effort, then the only difference is that this is more comfortable.

Not to mention the fact that we could already do this through hardware solutions, i could use a usb dumbs stile pedal to use it to auto click with my foot. This sound ludicrous but it is just to point out, this is only the logical software step.

To address Gailes quote above, this behavior is neither more effective nor faster, it is only more comfortable.

insanemaniac.2456:

its a slippery slope and its in their interest to just criminalize it all because they definitely dont want to legitimize it all

Not really, if what you want to prevent is automated decision making/combo, they you make it so that 1 button can only trigger 1 action bar slot. Presto. They might as well include a hold down multi cast toggle option.

simplesimon.2084:

Being able to swing constanly would give an advantige over people. Also there are acivments which having a repeat key setup would give an advantage

Not really, we are talking about getting bonus strikes, Cooldowns/Animations are long enough that you wont get additional strikes even if you have it clicle every 0.0000001 seconds. Even if the skill has no cooldown written on the tooltip, the system still waits until the animation is done (most dagger attacks for instance), so they are hard capped at X amount per second already, and they are easily attainable by mashing, the only difference is if you like to mash or rather hold down the key.

simplesimon.2084:

As long as you keep it one key press one action you fine. Now if you set it up to hold done the button and keep swinging that is not allowed because that is a repeatable action.

When I play my engenier I have my one skill set to left ckilck and toss grenades like crazy.

This is a policy that they need to revise. The logic behind multiple clicks for repeating the same action vs holding down 1 key to repeat the same action is the same the only thing that changes is the physical motion of it. Further more, skills have built in cool downs and animation times thus spamming “111111111” vs “11” in say 0.3 seconds gives you no benefit what so ever, the exact same number of “1” skills will be cast either way, the only difference is that you wont get Arthritis at 40.

Im fully on board against macros that cast a sequence of different skills. But i see no advantage what so ever in “dumb” buttons. In particular given the fact that they have similar functionality built in into the client.

Any chance a RED might sanction this “Officially”?