Guild Wars 2

Warrior’s have high base health and armor, so if you’re doing a direct damage build you might as well go zerker. An elementalist in full Soldiers is no more tanky then a warrior in full zerkers in a group setting where both are getting Protection. So take advantage of that and go full damage on your gear.
Personally, I often use Knights armor with Zerker weapons and jewelry, though I have zerker armor in my bags for serious stuff.

When you see people constantly calling for “zerker war zerker war zerker war”, they’re actually asking for the specific top dps weapon/trait build which also happens to be wearing full berserker gear. You shouldn’t feel conformist or glass cannon just by using zerker gear, adjust your trait/weapon/utility load-out to how you see fit.
This is, of course, assuming you specifically want a high dps build.

Sindex.9520:

Konig, bobby probably responded because this is the first real lore thread where the negativity about Scarlet has been toned down quite a bit. Since we are trying to be forward thinking about what her actions might be. Also on us keep the speculation below a certain wild and fantastic threshold.

And then I end up reading your final paragraph on Scarlet being tied into the Elder Dragons. For shame Konig. You know they don’t have an outline on Scarlet’s plans, and will just shoehorn our ideas (even the bad ones), so it would be less work for them…… “Just kidding” as Scarlet would say.

There have been a number of forward thinking reasonable threads about Scarlet, this certainly isn’t the first.
I believe he responded to this thread and not the others simply because this thread is speculating about her lore, rather then criticizing it.
They are two very different types of threads.

I don’t view changing mob attack speed as a viable solution.
From a practical stand point, not only would it be a huge undertaking to change mobs across the entire game, it would also be undesirable for many mobs. Some mobs are meant to have slower attack rates, many bosses and champions in particular so that they can properly telegraph what they are doing.
And for all that effort it would take, it doesn’t even solve the problem. Mobs don’t act like humans, nor is it realistic to ever expect them to. You’re still losing Confusion’s best aspect: the decision making it incurs. If in PvE it’s just there to do damage, then just make it do damage in a reliable and easily balanced way.

Not to mention it becomes useless as soon as you start kiting.

dragonkain.3984:

Quoting myself from another thread:

Duh it’s so obvious, she’ll just go and ressurect 6th jungle dragon cos she seems to be the only Sylvari that is still loyal to him.

No no, Zhaitan will revive itself, bestow it’s powers upon Scarlet, and then spontaneously die again. Scarlet will then ride around Tyria with Tequatl as a mount before going to resurrect the jungle dragon and turn it into her minion.

BobbyStein.2315:

Nike.2631:

I’m curious if you have reasons we are missing for NOT doing smaller arcs? Maybe 2 months/8 episodes as an average. I feel like maybe the Frost and Flame arc would have been stronger if, even with unresolved questions, it hadn’t been tied to the mega-arc you’ve been building. I was actually saddened to see Molten Alliance pop up in the invasions – it largely invalidated my previous sense of accomplishment in shutting down that threat.

It seems like shorter story runs would allow for more limited – and plausible – central villains. For more regular pays offs of satisfaction for players at the resolution. For chances at genuine surprise at the occasional unexpected villainous comeback.

One of the best received elements of the LS both posted and in my personal experience have been the undocumented bits of foreshadowing. The unannounced changes in the map that our dedicated corps of Player-Explorers stumble over and bring to the broader public’s attention. These might be made even more effect as catalysts for speculation if we really didn’t know who the next major villain was going to be for the next couple of months.

Having smaller story runs with a more focused narrative is something we’re discussing. One thing that we’ve learned throughout our first year of Living World updates is that the pacing of the overall story was too slow for most people.

EDIT: I just want to clarify I mean the pacing of the story and not the release cadence.

In the case of slow paced story release, I feel it would help considerably if we were able to revisit past story(living story instances) at will.
I can always catch an episodes of a show I missed or want to re-watch at a later date, why can’t this be the case for the LS instances?
Same can be said for personal story missions.

It’s good to see people working through the good sides of her character/story, even with her faults she has always had, and still has, potential to be a good character. The problem is that even if they fulfill that potential at some point in the future, it won’t change the fact that we’ve suffered through a bad story all this time already.
Hopefully Arena Net wraps up this mess of a Scarlet story post-haste, and takes it as a lesson for future story arcs and characters. Because above all else, they dropped the ball on the delivery in this case.

Regardless of which mode GW2 is “balanced around”, Arena Net has the ability to balance things independently for each mode, and this change is proposed as a PvE only change.
Confusion in PvP is interesting because it creates a lot of choices. On the user’s side, it’s effectiveness can vary wildly depending on when you use it. For example, confusion burst right as the enemy starts their offensive is dramatically more effective than using it while the enemy is running away. On the recipient’s end it also creates decisions, all of which are of benefit to the inflicter: either use a cooldown and cleanse, wait it out by not attack (or using less abilities), or continue attacking but take the damage.

All of this decision making is gone in PvE, because mobs don’t react, nor is it feasible to give them such sophisticated human-like decision making and reaction.
So Confusion just ends up being damage, damage that is highly variable due to the wide variety in NPC ability-use rate. As such it becomes unbalanceable and in this case ultimately mediocre.

Giving it a damage over time component circumvents this, while maintaining some of it’s uniqueness as a condition. And instead of being the weakness of the condition, that uniqueness now gives the Confusion user a small variance in effectiveness, resulting in specific roles they can fulfill in certain circumstances.
Your group’s confusion Mesmer will be effective across the board, but you’ll really want to send him in against those pesky fast attacking rifle mobs, while the rest of your group deals with the melee mobs. (just an example)

A rather straight forward proposition for the Confusion condition specifically in PvE (read: pve only change), make Confusion work similarly to Torment.
In other words, have it inflict a a certain amount of damage over time, plus additional damage when the target attacks.

Due to the stack cap, conditions are already rather unviable in group PvE content, but Confusion suffers in particular do to it’s nature of being dependent on the enemy’s reaction to its application. Or more simply put, it’s weak in PvE. Some might even say “it’s a PvP condition”.
Mobs don’t react to its application, and balancing how much damage it does is rather difficult because it’s so situational: you have caster mobs who occasionally use a skill, boss mobs that often (but not always) have slow attack speeds, physical combatants who typically attack rather quickly, etc. By giving it a base damage over time, at least one component of the damage can be constant across the board, and as such able to be properly balanced and relied on by the player applying it.

Bit of a tangent from the point of this thread, but making Confusion more viable in PvE also helps the over all condition stack cap problem by broadening the pool of usable conditions. We don’t have to worry about condition overlap if we’re using different conditions from our ally’s in the first place. Between this, the introduction of torment, an increase to the bleed stack cap, and perhaps the introduction of one final new damaging condition, we might not have the stack cap problem in 5man groups anymore.

Heinel.6548:

Zenith.7301:

Heinel.6548:

Don’t let the traits dictate your playstyle. This is not Soviet Russia. The game doesn’t play you.

First determine what you enjoy doing, then add traits that compliment it. As long as you have feedback on the bar most groups won’t say anything about your build.

No.

Mesmer damage is low to begin with. You don’t bring it down even further by going into a 48 fractal and putting out no DPS.

There’s no such thing as no DPS. The game is not flexible enough for you to create a build that cannot attack. On top of that, you augment numerical outputs via equipment stats, not via traits.

That aside, at lv 48 player skill comes into play as well. There’s at least some manual dexterity required to succeed in those encounters, and that is more valuable than the non-existent DPS meter. Too many times have I seen zerker warriors that basically have to be carried (read: they’re dead the whole fight) through encounters such as grawl final boss. That is a clear example of the build playing the player, where the player is not able to cope.

Unfortunately true, even if a build has a higher potential (for damage output, or what ever else) the player still has to be able to fulfill that potential, and even in high level fractals you find players who cant(don’t) do so.
While I’d agree the pure dps build is best under good circumstances with a very regular group of skilled players within a certain set of team comps (or being run by someone skilled enough for that not to matter), a build with more leniency that offers support or defense may be more valuable to other groups.
I don’t see what’s hard about playing a pure dps phantasm build in the first place, but people are weird and have trouble with things I don’t expect all the time, so eh.

I would be quiet happy if they just dropped the “Champion” part of the title. Feels like a lot of the titles are made out to be overly epic.
Same with WvW, you’re not a Conqueror, you’re an ULTIMATE CONQUEROR!!!
And the “champion” and “ultimate” parts are so empty, because there’s no regular version of the title. Having the “Champion Illusionist” title would mean more if there were regular “Illusionist” titles running around.

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

If your going to split it by weeks – so one week is pvp, one is wvw etc, make it to each week two topics are discussed. So you have two threads, each for a seperate topic. One thread could be based on player vote, the others based on something the devs would like to discuss.

That would make it far more meaningful – having 1 topic rotate on a three week basis is slow. Two topics could cover more ground and make it more meaningful to the player base as it’s more likely to bring about a topic players want to discuss.

For example, if you did your current system, the next topic for wvw would be skill lag. This is a pointless topic, as there is nothing players can really do or say to change it. So having a topic on skill lag and a topic on rewards would allow for far more discussion instead of the ‘oh, this weeks is not relavent to me, now I have to wait three weeks before something comes up. Anet really doesn’t care about wvw’ opinion and posts that may occur.

I agree with this, but would like to add that 2 new topics don’t necessarily have to be added at the same time. A staggered release of topics could be beneficial. The end result will still be that two topics are always up, but by introducing the topics one at a time by staggering their start date, you create a period of greater focus for the new topic while allowing trailing discussion to be wrapped up on the older topic.
Sticking with the “topics last 1 week” example: topic A is started Monday, topic B is started Thursday, the following monday Topic A ends and C starts, the following Thursday Topic B ends and D starts.
The draw back being that this is more convoluted, and could be a minor pain to keep track of instead of just evenly splitting your focus between two topics.

StriderShinryu.6923:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

What do you all think of this proposal:

That we only have one thread per area open at one time, for example, the next PVE one then PvP and then WvW?

I have been thinking about this for a few days and believe the major issue would be the overall velocity of the CDI, and the main Pro being that we will have more time to enter into discussions due to only having to focus on one at a time.

Thoughts?

Chris

Personally, I’m not a fan.

I can understand that it would allow the higher ups who have their hands in a number of areas to participate in each as they became active. I think one issue that the CDI faces right now, however, is momentum. The current threads have already been something of a wasteland for meaningful interaction. Perhaps I’m not the normal player, but I play PvE nearly exclusively (I’ve popped into WvW a few times and haven’t touched PvP at all). I’d imagine many players are in the same boat as me, except maybe they focus on WvW or PvP instead. By alternating areas of focus you’re basically going to be leaving the players not interested in that area of the game in the lurch for two weeks at a time.

There’s already a problem with a lack of interaction, and not really addressing entire subsets of players at all for certain periods is just going to make that worse.

On the other hand, it means they can focus entirely on your issues when it comes to your turn. By ‘your’ I of course mean the area of the game you’re interested in.

The real draw back I see is the potential that, with the 2week release schedule of the living story, some of the PvE CDIs could miss entire patches. Alternatively a WvW CDI or PvP CDI might not match up well with the timing of a patch that focuses on one of those aspects if they adhere to a strict rotation of topics.

Phenomenal, it makes me want to come in and leave a post every time this thread falls of the front page, just to make sure the devs pay it heed.
It solves every problem I have, from the incompatibilities between living world and personal progress and the ability to keep temporary content, to the weaknesses of the story telling itself.
The only thing I would add is a feature to replay Personal Story missions.

Have you considered separating server allegiance from Edge of the Mists teams? By this I mean allowing two players from different servers to play on the same team within EotM.
Edge of the Mists seems like a good opportunity to do so. For starters it does not count towards WvW score, so what happens at the Edge, stays at the Edge.
It would give players who don’t normally get to WvW together a chance to play with each other in a WvW style environment. In the same vein, it would allow you to fight against server mates.
It would also create a more distinct ‘open world pvp’ zone, ideal for running around in while waiting for your queue to pop so that you can join your commanders in serious WvW where it counts.
And perhaps most importantly to Anet, it would solve the problem of balancing teams in the EotM. Some servers just have more WvW’ers then others, so the EotM overflow team sizes are going to slanted to reflect that. As Anet mentioned, there will even be times where an entire overflow is filled by a single server, which is far from ideal.

There’s a variety of ways you could go about doing this, from hotjoin spvp style pick-your-team, to random team assignment and auto-balancing(keeping party members together as a rule), and many more.

Pretty disappointed with Scarlet’s presence in this living story. Would have been much better if she just stayed away and we got some interesting krait lore/story.
Worse, when she did appear she did nothing. Just her usual “Hi guys! I did all this, I’m awesome, bye now”.

We should have gone in there, hit hard, hit fast, and messed everything up. Jump Scarlet, LITERALLY blow off one of her limbs (an arm or something) and have her retreat in shame and anger. THAT would have been satisfying, THAT would dispel some of her status as this infallible and untouchable Mary Sue. And it would even leave her open to some later development, she could come back with some mechanical arm thing she built to replace her severed limb, and anger/motive to match.

Things like this will be the only way to redeem her as a character. And above all else, she better not turn into some cherished anti-hero, she should die a dog’s death like she deserves.

Imagine the rage if they gave us rifle xD
We need a new one-hander!

I agree. You’re only going to really use one or the other in any given build based on whether you’re condi or power specced, it’s redundant to separate it into two separate shatters.
If necessary, the combined “Mindwrack of Frustration” shatter could be nerfed, and related traits buff. In other words nerf the damage and confusion on the new ‘mind wrack’, buff Mental Torment, then make Illusionary Retribution into a major trait and buff it(to compensate for the baseline nerf). This way the baseline shatter isn’t too strong, and you can trait to buff which ever component of the shatter is most useful to your build.

Not entirely sure what to propose for a new F2, perhaps some sort of illusion protection? For example “All illusion gain 5 seconds of distortion, upon ending they shatter on their target and inflict on-death traits”. I can think of many heavy aoe situations, PvE PvP and WvW, where a few extra seconds of survival for my illusions would be useful. Gives me a chance to shatter(mindwrack), or gives phantasm a chance to actually get an(extra) attack off.

Your mention of 8v8 leads me to think you primarily, if not entirely, play in hot-joins.
The game is not balanced around 8v8, and hot-join is where most beginners/bads play. I can totally understand why 3 or 4 (excuse the term) noobs couldn’t take out what was likely a tourny player mesmer messing around in hot-join in his off time.

I can agree with you about minion builds being lame though. Whether that be phant mesmers, spirit rangers, minion necros or w.e else, they’re kinda cheesy builds.

If you’re not going to trust other people’s math in the first place, why not calculate it yourself?
Also, instead of that passive aggressive opening to your topic, you should have just asked for help in calculating which has more dps between the two builds you like, explaining that you simply don’t want to use 30/25. You would have gotten a lot less flak and this thread would have continued in a much more constructive manner.

Heinel.6548:

Arewn.2368:

What I’m suggesting is that it is buffed (the scaling is increased) only to a point where it is on-par (or at least in the same ballpark as) other stats.

So in other words, you simply want scepter #1’s damage increased. That’s actually a smaller change than what everyone else is asking for, and most definitely should be in the scepter revamp thread as one of the suggestions.

===

Also, do note that condition damage also has 3 stats. Condition damage, Condition Duration, and Critical chance. Most classes that has a condi build also has crit proc condition traits.

When you put it that way it makes my posts seem incredibly convoluted xD Though perhaps they were.
But yes, that’s pretty well it.

And true enough about crit chance and duration contributing to condition builds, they don’t quiet have the same synergy as the DD stats though.

Carighan.6758:

Fair point actually.

Realistically, power-scaling is too high throughout the game. Especially in fully-specialized builds.
Most power attacks can crit. Crit is scalable with gear, via Precision. Critical hits do bonus damage. It’s scalable with gear, via Prowess.

I mean, compare that to say, healing effects. You got Compassion, and that’s it. Even conditions only got Malice and Expertise, and the latter is very rare on gear.

Is this reason to add more Expertise and invent another stat for healing? Hell no, those two scale quite ok. In fact conditions already scale too well with +duration, so it’s good that it’s so rare.
What needs a look at is power-scaling in general. Why do three stats affect those attacks, all of which scale linearly with themselves and compound each other? Why is there gear giving exactly those three stats? Why do so many attacks scale with them in the first place?

Power (direct damage) and Conditions fill different roles and lend themselves to different playstyles. While you can say that direct damage (DD) has higher damage potential then condition damage (ConD) thanks to the synergy between the 3 direct damage stats (power, crit% and crit dmg), you can also say that ConD hits it’s potential faster which allows you to build other stats (defense, healing, or hybrid glass).
Because of this difference in roles and playstyles, I would actually like to see ALL weapons get a DD vs ConD choice. I feel they should remove damaging conditions from weapon abilities all together (effectively making everything a power weapon), but then introduce traits which modify weapon abilities to make them inflict damaging conditions.
For example, picture a mesmer trait which causes greatsword to have a chance to inflict burning on hit, and makes Mind Stab inflict torment.
Not only would this increase the diversity of weapons, it would also help make the trait system into what it was always supposed to be: a way to reinforce and customize your playstyle.

Heinel.6548:

Arewn.2368:

Heinel.6548:

If it’s only about power scaling, that is due to the promise that the classes are supposed to all be capable of self sustenance with well rounded abilities and that the system will not allow you to create a build too lopsided to function (unlike gw1). It’s a design decision.

I struggle to see how the poor scaling on Scepter supports that design choice, if anything it works against it. Currently, by building power and choosing Scepter as a weapon you are making a build that is “lopsided”: it functions poorly and is not self sufficient. On the other hand they have the potential of increasing build diversity and getting rid of that lopsided choice if they increase the power scaling on scepter to an acceptable level. Such balance tweaking would need to be carefully done so as to not make certain builds (such as hybrid builds) over powered, but given the current state of affairs they have a lot of buffing to do before reaching that point.

This is not the correct way to view the situation.

If power scaling were to increase, then power will grant a benefit greater than other stat combinations, this will force everyone to roll high power builds.

A similar argument to yours was made about healing power in the guardian forums. The answer to it was the same—if healing power was boosted, then everyone will roll bunker builds to troll the cap circles. The game is balanced around each character being capable of applying damage as well as self sustain together with the same build. You will always need both and while you can favor one stat over another, it will never be like trinity games where you can completely specialize into one to the detriment to the other.

===

If it is as I suspected and you just simply want a scepter rework because you have already chosen power as your stat of choice and cannot fit the scepter into your build (in other words your argument isn’t about stats), then I will again direct you to existing scepter rework threads.

I’ve been seeing suggestions for MH pistol lately, for it would fill that “1handed ranged power weapon” place that a number of Mesmers currently want Scepter to be revamped to fill. I agree with that and would like to see pistol fill that role. So no, as stated and demonstrated, my point in this thread is not a guised “revamp scepter lul”.

Your explanation covers some good points, but it still does not satisfy me. You mention that if power scaling is increased it would essentially become the dominant build do to power’s synergy with other stats (crits), but not only would that not necessarily be the case (building conditions leaves you open to building defense for example, it has it’s own place) it also is not what I’m desiring. The reality of the mater is that nobody uses power scepter right now because it sucks, power grants a lesser benefit than other stats and as such isn’t used. More to the point, it is so sub-par that it isn’t even viable (as opposed to be optimal). What I’m suggesting is that it is buffed (the scaling is increased) only to a point where it is on-par (or at least in the same ballpark as) other stats.

Heinel.6548:

If it’s only about power scaling, that is due to the promise that the classes are supposed to all be capable of self sustenance with well rounded abilities and that the system will not allow you to create a build too lopsided to function (unlike gw1). It’s a design decision.

I struggle to see how the poor scaling on Scepter supports that design choice, if anything it works against it. Currently, by building power and choosing Scepter as a weapon you are making a build that is “lopsided”: it functions poorly and is not self sufficient. On the other hand they have the potential of increasing build diversity and getting rid of that lopsided choice if they increase the power scaling on scepter to an acceptable level. Such balance tweaking would need to be carefully done so as to not make certain builds (such as hybrid builds) over powered, but given the current state of affairs they have a lot of buffing to do before reaching that point.

Heinel.6548:

Well, sword 3 does no damage. I don’t see anyone complaining about that?

Each ability has it’s own function, and it’s not always to produce big numbers (though both scepter 2 and 3 can produce huge numbers, just not in the same build).

If this is another scepter 1 revamp post, please keep it in the existing thread, so it’s easier for devs to see, and also allow others to comment.

As both the title and post imply, this thread is meant to deal with the issue of power scaling, specifically using scepter as an example. I personally would like to see Scepter revamped(which I have talked about in other threads) but that’s not what I’m bringing up here, this is simply about balance/number tweaking to improve build variety, not revamping, and not even limited to scepter.
You’re right that not every ability is about damage, however scepter #2 is a strong means of applying conditions in a condition build, and comparative skill such as Riposte see higher damage numbers for DD, so I did have reason to develop a certain expectation that this skill would deal noteworthy damage.
The main offender for the scepter is the auto attack though, the damage scaling is simply too low for its attack speed and utility.

Heinel.6548:

Instead of looking at the scaling, look at how hard you hit in practice. Confusing images is a ranged, non-projectile, non-strafable, non-self rooting burst on 12s cooldown.

Confusing Images is indeed good, both its base damage and scaling are reasonable, and as you mentioned it functions very well. That skill is in fact what made me start thinking about scepter as a DD weapon. The problem is that the auto attack hits like a wet noodle, and the fact that it’s ranged and spawns a clone is not a big enough justification for that.
Compare it to the sword for example, which applies vulnerability and boon strips, cleaves and does way more damage. Melee will of course do more damage then range, but the difference is far too great.
Illusionary Counter is equally weak. The low base damage is to be expect because it applies conditions, but the scaling is literally half that of Riposte’s, which is disproportionately low.

Why is the power scaling on Scepter skills so terrible? It has the potential to be a pretty decent weapon outside of condi builds: the AA has nothing to do with conditions and gen’s a clone every third hit (good for non-phant builds), it’s got a block(blind) and a potential damage nuke in the form of Confusing Images, but the damage scales off of power so poorly that it loses that potential.
It is forever lost as a phantasm weapon due to the clone gen on auto attack, but that’s not to say it can’t be good in a large variety of other builds if they adjust how well it scales off of power.

Am I misunderstanding the nature of how damage scaling on Power works in this game, or is there some real potential for making this weapon half decent without causing it’s condition build counterpart to become over powered as a result?

This is a problem I see across the whole game, there seems to be a potential to allow greater build diversity (with respects to condition vs direct damage builds specifically) if they increase power scaling on condi focused weapons, and introduced select traits that gave non-condi weapons a chance to apply conditions on attack (sticking with Mesmer for the example: A new trait that give greatsword a X% chance to inflict burn on hit).

If I have a fundamental misunderstanding of how scaling works which would make such changes improbable, I would appreciate an explanation with math behind it to tell me why it wont work.

I’d prefer to see Scepter have the clone removed from the AA chain and have the DD brought up to make it a viable weapon, rather then see a new weapon. We do need more MH weapons, but I think making our current set viable is more important.
Talking from a PvE perspective, the only thing we can really use is sword, which is odd to say the least for a “mage” class.
The only redeeming quality of GS is the strong AoEdmg phantasm. Staff offers some nice boons and escape as a secondary weapon, but won’t do much for you as a main weapon. And scepter is…. scepter: Single target, hits like a wet noodle, the clone gen screws phant builds and makes the AA chain all around terribly awkward do to the drawn out cast of the third hit, and one of it’s main components is confusion which is kinda mediocre in PvE.

The problem isn’t “there’s no raids”, it’s that there is no progressive challenging PvE content. The last thing we got in that regards was fractals literally a year ago. There’s been some challenging content since, but the majority of it was temporary, and the stuff that stayed wasn’t very large and didn’t lend itself to progressive play.
The support update helped PVE build diversity, if we could get a Defiance rework in order to make CC valuable in dungeons, and then get a solution to the condition stack cap causing conditions builds to be un-viable in PVE group play, then maybe they could start releasing comprehensive group content.

The game has been seeing polish and QoL improvements through the LS 2 week patches. Every patch comes with QoL improvements/features, and we see polish such as this patch’s server optimization and other patch’s balance changes as well (depends what you mean by polish, but there’s an example for both the common meanings).
We’ve also seen “broken” or undesirable content revamped, such as the world boss fights/Tequatl, AC dungeon (though that didn’t turn out very well..), and the new Twilight Arbor path.

I wouldn’t be against having a 2 week patch that was purely polish/QoL updates with no LS, but it’s not like we aren’t getting that otherwise with the current patches.

Fallout.1798:

I really don’t get why all the hate for Logan, Queen Jenna, and Trahearne. Even if I can see that a fair amount of it is sarcastic. (really the internet needs a sarcastic type of text for this stuff)

Yamsandjams.3267:

I’m a bit more interested in what the Pact has been doing though. Are they still just sitting in Fort Trinity partying?

From my understand, the pact is not finished with the Risen and Orr yet. As mentioned in the Victory or Death mission (the celebration at Fort Trinity) final part, there is still a lot of risen to wipe out, as we see in Arah explore mode (which is post-Zhaitan defeat).

Trahearn isn’t actually that bad, his VA is just kinda bland, and he came into the story at what is probably the worse possible time: right when you lose you’re “bff” from the order, who had a kittenty death and who is in most cases the most interesting character you know at the time. On top of that, it’s also at the same time the player is being kicked out of their comfort zone again and being moved from ‘order quests’ to ‘pact quests’. So everyone’s set on the wrong foot when meeting him and have negative initial emotions. Then his infamy went viral and he now has an incredibly disproportional amount of hate aimed at him.

Hate for queen Jenna and Logan are hand in hand. All Logan does is whine and obsess over the queen in a generic, bland and annoying manner, which is why people hate him. On the flip side, Logan is pretty cool when he’s not obsessing over the queen, and was an over all cool character in the book before meeting the queen (everything about him literally took a 180 when they met), so it’s the queen ‘fault’ a good character is now unbearably annoying.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Arewn.2368:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Please, no more Destiny’s Edge. Or at least kill off Logan.

Don’t kill Logan, kill the queen. Logan’s actually pretty cool when he’s not being a brain-dead queen obsessed buffoon.

This would actually be the more interesting approach to take since Logan could go through some development stages and it might affect his relationship with Rytlock as well. On the other hand, he might just go completely emo, in which case it might be better off to leave him as he is.

I’m a bit more interested in what the Pact has been doing though. Are they still just sitting in Fort Trinity partying?

So far as I’m concerned, the best case scenario is that the queen brainwashed Logan with mesmer trickery, and he goes back to his ‘normal’ (pre-queen meeting in the book) self

GoddessOfTheWinds.2937:

I hope it’ll work like Map Exploration. Once you reach 100%, even if you fall back at 99%, you still keep the advantages of having reached maximum. I mean, even at 99%, I still had my star.

Pretty sure we’ll keep Hobby Dungeon and title even if they add new tiers.

I hope they do the opposite.
The Dungeon Master title would be that much cooler if you actually needed to ‘master’(complete) new dungeons to keep it.
Actually, I wish they’d do the same with map exploration/the star/the title. When new locations come out, you lost it until you have 100%

Lord Kuru.3685:

Please, no more Destiny’s Edge. Or at least kill off Logan.

Don’t kill Logan, kill the queen. Logan’s actually pretty cool when he’s not being a brain-dead queen obsessed buffoon.

Someone in a recent thread suggested that mantras build charges over time instead of requiring casting, I thought that was a really cool idea to make mantras more viable.
For example, every 10 seconds gain 1 charge, up to a maximum of X charges.

I really like the mantra casting animation and chant though, so perhaps a way to have both? cast it once for one charge, then they auto gain a charge every few seconds up to a maximum of 3. You can then use 2 charges without having to worry about manual re-casting(because they would auto build charges over time so long as there’s at least one charge left), and the trade off for using all of them would be having to recast (Anet could then re-increase the cast time to balance it).

We already have glamours for AoE utility.

I’m not sure about integrating off hand sword into the auto attack animation. Dual wielding full sized weapons isn’t as good as fantasy games would have you believe.
Go find 2 sticks of what you feel is roughly “sword” length, hold one in each hand and try swinging them about. It’s cumbersome (the weapons get in each others way), slow (you might think it’s faster, but delivering a full blow requires putting your entire body into the swing) and requires extra energy(two heavy blades instead of one), and to take full advantage of it requires you to be highly ambidextrous(which isn’t that common/simple to achieve).
It makes more sense as it is now, with the auto attack chain purely using the main hand weapon, while the off hand is used for specific moves.

If this happens, make sure to come back here and post a video of it

I can understand where you’re coming from with staff (bo staff/combat staff and all that), but nearly all the staves in GW2 are notably casting weapons which would probably break if used to smack people around.
Just make spears into a land weapon.

Main hand torch would be kinda neat, I really do picture it as more of an offhand though.

I fully support anything that gives us a land spear!
And Arena Net actually makes different attack animations for different weapons (vs swinging everything the same way as a sword like in many other games) so we could potentially get some really good looking spear combat.

And I’ve always thought it would be cool to have an ability where you throw your spear, knocking down your opponent. Since.. ya know, having a large heavy spear chucked at you would probably knock you over lol.

Olba.5376:

Arewn.2368:

I like stance dancing and would be in favor of something like this, I just don’t think it’s realistic. Warriors are already in a good place, if you give them extra kit they’ll be OP and require nerfs elsewhere to compensate.

If you like stance dancing, go play an Elementalist.

One of the biggest reasons I like Warrior is because of our Burst skills. It’s got more use than Steal on Thief, it’s not as situational as the Virtues on a Guardian and it’s not as complex as the attunement swapping on an Ele.

If you want to add more F skills, I think that giving F2 and F3 that give each weapon set a single skill that is damage/support/control would be cool. Of course, the F2 and F3 skills would have to be weaker than similar F1 skills to prevent things like having Skull Crack as an F2/F3 skill.

As for the OP: I don’t really like your idea about the stances. Most likely it would result in people using the Power Stance to use a burst skill/100b/Final Thrust, then swapping to the Precision Stance to regenerate that adrenaline and repeat this process.

And honestly, transfering conditions is extremely powerful, as is evident from Sigil of Generosity being the most expensive Sigil in the game and not available in sPvP.

Additional, but toned down, F abilities would be cool too. And I’m not keen on ele’s version of ‘stance dancing’ because it’s a complete ability swap(akin to having extra weapon swaps), I prefer a stance dance system that changes the way you use your current skills (generally through statistical adjustments) rather then swapping skills altogether.

Wanna know why stun warriors work?
Because the condition spam meta. The strong condition builds aren’t running with stun breaks and stability, leaving them completely vulnerable to hard CC.

More necros complaining that they can’t beat something that was built to counter them?

Stow Banner would be the single greatest change they have made to the warrior yet. Maintaining that only the warrior can stow his own banners and I think it’d be really solid. Aesthetically it also makes sense, standard bearers and back banners are a thing after all. I feel it would also be quiet balanced so long as it’s limited to one banner at a time, it’s not like with Ranger spirits where they have an entire group of them following the ranger around. The effects are also rather tame compared to most “summons” other classes have (spirits, minions, turrets, spirit weapons, elements).

Cripple/chill will completely wreck rush/whirlwind attack’s movement

I like stance dancing and would be in favor of something like this, I just don’t think it’s realistic. Warriors are already in a good place, if you give them extra kit they’ll be OP and require nerfs elsewhere to compensate.

Kontrolle.3514:

Srsly there is almost nothing else then warriors out there, mine is level 80 and full equipped for WvW too, i play this charracter quite often. Everyone who doesnt agree that this is the most broken class in gw2 history, then what is it?

And there’s very logical reasons for this outside of their viability in PvP.
First and foremost, they are THE archetypical class type of the fantasy genre, right next to your classic wizard. Warrior is just a default pick in fantasy rpgs, so they’re played a lot.
Warrior are also really strong, and have been since release… in PvE. What happens when there’s tons of warriors because they are strong for PvE content? a lot of people bring their 80 warrior that they’ve been playing and are comfortable with over when they PvP.
And you’re just plain wrong about “there being almost nothing else then warriors”, there’s good representation for most of the professions. You’ll probably see 2 to 4 (a generous estimate) warriors in every game (of 10 people in each match), but that’s hardly “almost nothing else”.
And heck, they’ve only really been viable in tpvp for a couple months, prior to which they were rarely played at a competitive level at all.

Many people in this thread(and in general) don’t seem to understand what a healthy Meta consists of:
A healthy meta will have many builds that are strong, but only a few that are currently viable at any one time. As players get used to what’s “current” and learn to counter it, the meta will naturally shift over time (which can take a while), eventually coming “full circle”.
A perfect Meta that does this all on it’s own is very difficult to make though, so in most cases, developers will “artificially” alter the meta by making balance changes(NOT changes to balance the game. Changes to change the game’s current balance).
You saw this in the later years of GW1 when pvp was getting stale, Anet introduced their little system to shake things up. League of Legends also makes incredibly liberal use of this because the game’s balance is frankly crap (with 100+champs though, it’s not entirely their fault).
How does this tie into this thread? This warrior build isn’t OP, it’s just strong in the current meta, it’s really as simple as that. Maybe it could use some slight number tweaks, but in general, it’s strong because it’s a functional meta counter.
A bit on the ‘cheese’ side? perhaps, OP though? no.

I would be disappointed beyond measure if they introduced throwing Javelins without first giving us proper melee polearms/spears (on land).

gebrechen.5643:

Arewn.2368

If there’s no challenging content in the game, places for people to prove themselves and feel growth and improvement as a player, you’ll lose an import part of your core player base.

Which part of the player base is more important? Is there one?

Even for “casuals” or people who don’t generally partake in particularly challenging content, players gain a certain mastery of the game and need content that can stand against that. Even if the rate of personal improvement is painfully slow, people get better at the game over time, and to keep those people you need to give them content that will challenge and engage them. These player who stick it out and slowly (or quickly) improve make up the core of your player base, who log on all the time for months and years to come. And even if this “core” is smaller in number then the ‘come and go casuals’, they need to be tended to as well, because they’re the players who stick to it in the long haul. So you need to offer challenging content where these players can demonstrate their acquired mastery and feel fulfilled as a player by it.

Ignoring all that, there is a portion of the player base who just plain likes harder content.

And I’m not saying one part is more important then the other, I’m just saying this part needs to be tended to as well. Gw2 has the makings of a pretty good combat system, shame to see it wasted by making all the content require little more then standing and pressing ‘1’. They can still have tons of easy content, they just need hard content as well (which is why I don’t want the few scarps of actually challenging content to be nerfed). Fractals is a great example since it’s super easy early on, but scales for those who want the challenge.

If someone can’t beat it and/or get an achievement as a result of it being too hard, then too bad. It’s an ACHIEVEMENT, it demonstrates that you achieved something, not that you were handed it as a consolation prize for showing up.

Warrior with greatsword/longbow going 0/20/0/20/30 picking up the greatsword and longbow traits.
Greatsword for killing orbs and for the clutch dodge (whirlwind attack). Longbow for killing Liadri in phase two, the blind is also great.
Healing signet, FGJ, SIO, signet of stam, signet of rage.
Exotic Knight’s armor with soldier’s runes. Exotic berserker weapons. Half ascended, half masterwork berserker jewelery. No food buff or sigils.
Great fight, actually took some time to learn and master it before getting the kill, really wish there was more challenging content like this in the game.
Now I just need Light Up The Darkness.

Please for the love of god, do not reduce the difficulty. There is already a huge drought of challenging content in this game, don’t let a few whiners scare you off from adding more in the future. If there’s no challenging content in the game, places for people to prove themselves and feel growth and improvement as a player, you’ll lose an import part of your core player base.

The camera is a legit problem though, the walls should be invisible for the contender to alleviate this.
The limited nature of the content is also a problem. This is fun, challenging content that people can really work at, and there is literally no reason to remove it, even with promises of it “returning in the future”.
Want to add more bosses/tiers to it later? Cool that would be great. But there’s no reason to remove it in the interim.