Guild Wars 2

The fact that you contradict yourself by the second point is pretty indicative of your level of understanding on what should be included.
No timers, but reward people more for beating timers? come on now.
Enrage timers are fine, they don’t encourage full dps compositions. Quiet the opposite, they allow for comps to carry things other then DPS.
The devs who made the encounters are the same devs who put those enrage timers on them. And we know, for a fact, that the devs want groups to contain people who run things other then full dps builds.
The enrage timers don’t contradict their mantra, they support it. These bosses have been explicitly designed to be possible to defeat in X time without having a full dps comp.
The fact that there’s an enrage timer doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a part of the design as a whole.
So when the boss has a 10min enrage, that’s great, because now we know definitively that the boss can be defeated within 10 minutes without bringing full dps. So we can allow ourselves to do so.

Your philosophy for rewards, on the other hand, is something that works against their mantra for raids, and encourages people to run nothing but DPS in order to maximize their rewards.

Point 3 is obvious to the point of redundancy. It goes without saying.
Point 4 I once again disagree with. Those mechanics are not stupid, you just have your priorities backwards. Those mechanics are good fight mechanics which make things interesting. The fact that they don’t make sense from a realism-perspective is irrelevant. Game mechanics trump realism.
For example, bows and guns in this game completely ignore the concept of ammo and reloading. But their fun to play, so there’s no reason to adhere to such limitations as realism.
What your proposed for the Vale Guardian is a complete redesign of the mechanic. It might also be fun that way, but that doesn’t mean the current implementation is un-fun or badly designed. Just different.
Paint 5 is, once again, obvious to the point of redundancy. It goes without saying. It’s not like the devs purposefully leave something in a buggy state.

PVE-context
Been running Strength/Tactics/Berserker, with greatsword mace/shield. Mace shield offers good survivability and melts break-bars, especially topped off with Head Bash and Wild Blow (which help with adrenaline too). GS synergizes well with Berserk, gets those 100Blades off really smoothly. Arc Divider has some nice range on it and is fairly spammable for nice damage.

For groups, you’re pumping out lots of might, Empower Allies, and can bring your banner as usual. Your personal DPS is pretty good with Berserker’s damage traits (7% dmg and 7% prec as fero, plus while in berserk an extra 10% dmg, 15% atk spd, and 14% prec as fero).

There’s problems, but it’s serviceable.

Also, give Bulls Rush an actual animation. No more weird sliding.

Sounds more like something a guardian would get.

Also, gif land spear NAO.

The old Always Angry gave a pretty paltry amount of rage. 10 rage every 25 seconds at best. That’s assuming you have smash brawler and are berserking on cooldown.
The damage is a buff imo.

Choppy.4183:

@Arewn
Why give it an ICD at all?

Greatsword (and arguably, OH Axe) have the highest potential for the greatest number of hits in the shortest period of time, and yet nobody’s saying FG is overpowered, afaik.

The following line is used in the Reaper trait “Chilling Victory”:
(Single attacks can activate this trait more than once before recharging.)
If I am understanding this correctly, and I haven’t tested it so I could be wrong, I think this means that a single skill with multiple strikes will be able to benefit from the trait on all of its strikes before triggering the cooldown.
For example, 100 Blades is a single “attack” that hits multiple time. If the above is correct, each critical hit of 100 blades would grant might, and the 1 sec cd would only trigger after the skill ends.
If all of that is the case, then the 1 sec internal cooldown would help normalize the effect between fast attack-rate and slow attack-rate weapons, but would maintain the interesting synergy multi-strike attacks such as 100blades have now.
You could take mace/axe for example, and not be penalized by mace’s slow attack rate, but still benefit from Whirling Axe’s multiple strikes.

edit: Okay I just tested it. I’m flat out wrong on how that trait works. Single attacks can activate the trait more than once before recharging when striking multiple entities. So one hit that strikes 3 enemies will proc it 3 times on a single cooldown.
Unless the functionality I outlined can be achieved, I guess keeping it as a no-ICD trait would be appropriate.

Something I’d like to see is a change to Forceful Greatsword so that the might component works for everything, but with a 1 sec internal cooldown.
You know how Shield Master’s benefits to blocking works for all sources of blocking, not just shield? Same idea.
Additionally, it would have to work similar to the Reaper’s Chilling Victory trait, so that greatsword isn’t punished too much by the new internal cooldown. This way, 100blades and whirlwind attack wouldn’t be restricted by the new cooldown.

The new trait would read:
Gain might on critical hit. 1 second cooldown.
(Single attacks can activate this trait more than once before recharging.)
Greatsword and spear skills deal more damage and recharge faster.

The changes to the trait would give us a more widely usable master tier Strength trait for non-gs builds. And would also create good synergy with other weapons and traits.
Flurry on sword. Triple Chop, Cyclone Axe, Whirling Axe on mh/oh axe. Volley on rifle. And to a degree Dual Wield(trait) and Berserk’s increased attack speed.

Pestering and begging the devs to respond isn’t going to get you anywhere. Projects, be they game development or otherwise, have schedules and daily tasks that need to be tended to. They aren’t ignoring us, they’re busy. Arena Net, like many devs, have proven that they do listen and take feedback into consideration, it’s just a matter of when they have time.
And as precious as everyone thinks their advice is, it’s not. The warrior sub-forum can harp on about “baseline so-and-so” to the ends of time, that doesn’t change the validity of the suggestion. As great as fast-hands baseline would be, I’m still unconvinced on why exactly it “needs” to be baseline.
Most instances of things being made baseline were to fix the functionality of the mechanic. Traits that were required just to make a utility-type usable for example. Fast Hands can be strong/useful in many circumstances, but that doesn’t mean it fits the above. If anything, I’d say the so called “need” for Fast Hands is a symptom of warrior problems, not a cause.
To go with your analogy, the tower is being built on fairly sturdy ground as-is, the problem is the bricks are made out of feces.
We have so many weak traits, traits in lines that have poor synergy, and utility skills that are either under-tuned or outright useless. Not to mention weapons like off-hand axe that are in a laughable position.

Cloud Windfoot Omega.7485:

i never understood why they called it berserker, sounds more like a legendary warrior who is hyped up and a unkillable murder machine out causing extreme damage

in the Fate/stay series, berserker is a guy who has a huge weapon capable to massive damage, while also being virtually unkillable.

Should have been Marauder, or Raider, or Ransacker imo. Save Berserker for 2h axe or something.

Just as much as “brutal” and “savage” can describe a warrior, “skilled” and “tactical” do too.
I find the Saurus Lizardmen of the Warhammer Fantasy universe represent warriors really well.
They may outwardly be regarded as dull, they don’t even know how to express abstract concepts, but actually have a very keen intelligence. That intelligence is entirely focused on warfare though. They can come up with strategies on the fly and execute brilliant maneuvers with expert timing. The Saurus are physically powerful and very tough, but that doesn’t mean they’re just brute strength fighters. They’re skillful at arms and tactical, with keen combat-refined instincts.

Warriors (in general, not talking about lizardmen anymore) may not be bookish, but they are by no means stupid. They’re are (or at least can be) very tactical and intelligent fighters.
They don’t have magic or gadgets to rely on, and are instead very physically adept. This doesn’t just mean strong and tough, but agile and dexterous too.
I don’t mean to paint them as super soldiers capable of everything. But I find the contrast with the rogue-archetype often leaves warriors with this “brute strength only” image. In actuality dexterity is much more important to wielding a bladed weapon then raw strength is, and so is a “stat” warriors would realistically have a lot of. It’s just that rogue-type classes focus more on it, or focus on it in different ways.

As far as roles within GW2’s combat goes:
Where the thief is a lightly armored hit-and-run melee combatant with high damage spikes, the warrior should be a sustained fighter who stays in the mix for extended periods of time while putting out consistent offensive action. I feel this “offensive action” can be in the forms of damage, CC, or dmg buffing, and carries with it the means of getting to and sticking on our opponents.
As others have mentioned, we’re the offensive counterpart to the Guardian. Where the guardian is a sustained fighter focused on defensive action, creating a hub around themselves to ward off enemy offensive action.

Darn… well thanks for the confirmation.

I don’t really understand how it’s taking that long. But if you’re really having that much trouble, have you considered LF’ing outside the instance entrance for a second(third,fourth, or fifth) player?

Couldn’t the fact that it doesn’t render builds strong be just as much an argument that making fast hands baseline isn’t necessary?
Nice as fast hands is, and as much as the warrior comunity harps on about wanting it baseline, I don’t really see a great reason for it to be baseline. The rest of the warrior is what needs work.

I tried comparing with some golems, but couldn’t distinguish if it was simply too subtle a difference to notice, or if it legitimately didn’t stack. I assumed they didn’t see I couldn’t notice a difference, but wasn’t sure.
I appreciate any effort to prove it one way or the other.

I’ve gone pure melee on my warrior since the xpac went live. Finished the story, got map completion on two maps, and have successfully participated in most of the major event chains across the new content.
There are some situations that will be easier/friendlier as ranged, and others where you’re left standing back for a few seconds unable to attack as a melee, but overall you should be able to stick to melee if you so choose.
Would be worth keeping a ranged weapon in your bag though.

Pretty straight forward question, does the Dual Wield (15% attack speed) trait stack with the Berserk (15% attack speed) effect?
It’s hard to tell, but I’m under the impression that they do not.
If it’s true that they don’t, should they?
If they don’t stack, that makes Dual Wield pretty worthless if you’re a Berserker. Which is a shame since it’d be a cool combo.

I don’t see it as an ending so much as a tie-in to whatever happens next.

I’m assuming (or perhaps hoping), given the pathetic and inconclusive state of mordremoths “death”, that he’s not actually dead. We still have the raid coming too.

Mordremoth was the opposite of Zhaitan. The fight itself was satisfying, but from a narrative point of view the lead up and defeat of mordremoth (or his avatar, as it is) was pretty underwhelming.
Zhaitan on the other hand had a great build up (the campaign in orr, starving and cornering him) and was really epic, but had an incredible lack luster fight.

Can’t say I’ve had those problems, perhaps just for a lack of the situations you’ve described. I’ll try running it again for a while to see if I do.
Shattering blow definitely needs some work though…

At a cosmetic level: I don’t see how the warrior can “summon” a rock. You should stomp one foot into the ground in front of you, causing a slab of stone to rupture out.

At a functional level: damage is mediocre, reflect is unreliably short.
The skills should be changed into a two-part skill.
The first part creates the rock, which acts as a physical barrier (like a tiny staff elementalist’s unsteady ground, or staff guardian wall) and absorbs projectiles. Duration would be something like a 4 second channel, during which the warrior is rooted in place behind the rock.
The second part of the skill could be activated at any time during the channel, and would essentially just do the current functionality: smash the rock, gaining adrenaline, doing damage/bleeds, and reflecting projectiles.

Leaving aside the delicious tears of the embittered whiners, you aren’t necessarily weaker without HoT. You are locked out of some builds though, and certain HoT-requiring builds are currently strong.
As others have mentioned, some of the elite specs are over-tuned at the moment, but they’ll likely be brought into place within the coming weeks.
As a warrior, you’re not missing out on much by not having Berserker. I personally like the spec from a fun-perspective, but it is not very strong. So as a warrior, you don’t have to worry about not being competitive by not having access to your elite spec.

- Westgate: The Way Has Decayed Unless You Fly
It’s a cave nestled into the side of the main westgate building thing. From Forgotten city waypoint, go to the west plaza. Stand in the center of the golden circle on the floor in the west plaza, facing the direction of the teleporter that brings you up to the city’s west exit (aka facing west). Now pane your camera up until it’s looking over top of the arch/door where the teleporter is. Now look about 40 degrees to your right. See the the 4 fires? see the stone platform above them? That’s where you want to go. Be original, use your glider.

- Luminate’s Throne: The Jungle Grows Even Up Here
Enter the city through west gate, go down the stair, take a right, go down the stair. You’re in a room with a bunch of pillars, on the right side you’ll find a bouncy mushroom. Take the mushrooms up and you’ll find yourself in a hallway, go through the hall and up the first flight of stairs. Turn to your left, you’ll see some foliage/bushes in the corner. It’s behind there.

- Trial Rooms: Heavy Foliage Hides This One
In the underground section of the city, there’s a closed door. After a successful octovine run, the door opens. Should be pretty easy to find once you’re in there. Don’t take your time though, it kicks you out after 5 or so minutes.

Bad idea. Imagine being at 20% health and popping berserk to save yourself?
Plus berserk gets consumed when Dead or Alive procs, you DONT want it to proc early, you want it to proc at the last possible second to save your life.

Setting a health threshhold would be a nerf, and would ruin its functionality.
The cooldown also shouldn’t be changed too much, it has good synergy with berserk’s cooldown and duration as it is.

Eponet.4829:

Comparing a single quality of life skill to the elite specs is hardly a fair comparison, it’s not a major playstyle change like several of them are. Berserker, tempest and daredevil seem to be the only ones that don’t completely shift the focus of the base profession.

A better comparison would be if you had to reach the new level cap as a paladin in order to unlock marksmanship hunter. (Guardian to dragonhunter)

We should be able to unlock the archer spec as an archer class, melee spec as a melee class, etc.

I mentioned heroic leap as a specific example, but they added several skills. Usually significantly changing each spec’s rotation in the process, with the new skills being necessary to it functioning, or an important cooldown. You’re essentially incomplete or broken as a class until you reach the new level cap. Or at least that’s how it was in the TBC→ WotLK and WotLK→Cata transition (after which I stopped playing). Similar can be said for FF14 ARR→HW, and many other MMOs.

And that’s a complete nonsense comparison lol
But if you want to play that game: Level as a ret pally and then switch to Holy or protection when you reach cap. Bam, same kitten thing. Some specs can level more efficiently then others, and it’s common to play those while leveling, even if it’s not what you plan to play at endgame.

At any rate, that’s for the most part a cherry-picked non-essential point to my argument.

Acetone.4793:

Since when does GW2 require players to grind for hours just to be able to access a new way to play? I thought it was all about options – with gold, skins, achievements, legendary gear being the long term goal. Not the base mechanics themselves. It’s comparable to grinding a whole new profession. Elite specs are essentially new professions, I don’t know why people allowed themselves to be tricked into thinking otherwise.

You do have options.
What do you have in a typical MMO expansion? increased level cap, and a linear series of maps, usually containing a fairly linear series of quest hubs, which you have to level through in order to get your so called “base mechanics”.
My warrior in WoW didn’t get heroic leap as soon as cata went live, I had to play for several hours before I got it. He didn’t have access to most of the dungeons or any of the raids, had to level up or be at cap for those. Standard fair.

What do you have in HoT on the other hand? right off the bat, you can play in any of the new maps. Travel might be rough without your initial masteries, but is reasonably possible. Plus the first tier masteries for each line are both the most important, and the fastest to get. Most of the inconveniences and gates related to masteries will be overcome in a few hours of gameplay (provided you’re actually being productive). Not “comparable to grinding a whole new profession”, just a few hours.
What about the masteries themselves? well you have the option to pursue which ever track you like, and can switch freely between the tracks. Think gliding is wicked awesome? focus on that. Interested in the Exalted daily challenge? go for it.
Want more options? Well you can log on to any of your characters, because unlike traditional level cap increases, masteries are account bound. You can pick up where you left off and keep on progressing your masteries on any character.

With regards to elite specs, if you really want to compare them to being classes themselves, then you’ll have to stick to your argument and be consistent. Classes require you to level them, you don’t get everything upfront. Not in other games. Not in GW2. There’s no argument to be had about “but base mechanics!”, you level up by participating in content to progress and unlock your abilities and traits, and other game features/access to content.
Unlocking(the initial) elite spec is fairly trivial/quick, and beyond that you’ll have to progress them by participating in content just like you would in any other class-like system.

Nobody is being tricked, you’re just misrepresenting the situation. It seems like you view it as grindy/lacking options because you’re comparing it to this unreasonable expectation that you should just be handed everything upon logging in.

With any other MMO on the market, when a new expansion is released you have to spend many hours leveling through the new zones in order to gain access to your classes’ new abilities.
It’s the same kitten thing, except leveling has been subbed out for hero challenges.
Why people take such issue with having to do a bit of content in the new zones to finish unlocking their elite spec is beyond me.

You made hasty preparations based on early release, vague, non-finalized information.

Honestly, there really wasn’t much in the way of “preparation” that needed to be done for Heart of Thorns. It’s mostly busy-making.
You basically made up work for yourself to do, spent time doing that work, and then were disappointed that the work didn’t pay off as much as you wanted it to.

For example, “making 2 legendaries” has nothing to do with preparing for Heart of Thorns. And preparing mats for the new legendaries before we even knew what they were, let alone what they’ll be made of, is risky no matter how you look at it.

And the hero point situation was handled fairly appropriately. The priority should be on systems that will have you actually play the xpac, not cater to people who “prepared” prior to it’s release so that they can skip the xpac’s content. You aren’t being punished for preparing, you’re just not being explicitly rewarded for it. Which sounds right to me.

My advice would be to be careful of hypetrains, make informed decisions, and keep in mind that things which are in-development are very much subject to change.

I get where you’re coming from. There’s nothing wrong with being excited for the new content, and it’s natural to look for things to do while you wait. I just don’t think your expectation on how the developers should handle it are warranted.
I do however admit that not knowing the cost of elite specs for so long left us in a bit of an awkward situation.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

This thread is explicitly about a cosmetic change.
Suggestions to “fix” the cosmetics by nerfing Chronomancer are offtopic.

Such suggestions have already been entertained and discussed ad nauseum in other threads, so it’s not even a case of discussing a new point, so such posts are simply attempts to bring in your personal hobbyhorses into places they don’t belong.

So I think it wouldn’t be out of order to start reporting anymore such posts that you make in this thread, yeah?

You’re right, my bad. For reference though “You’re offtopic” alongside the gif would have helped get that point across earlier, I interpreted it as “I don’t like that change, so get out”.

It is nice to see the UI fixed. It was really awkward having f5 above the shatters. I kinda think the illusion circles should be one over top of the other to the left of the weapon swap button though.

Fay.2357:

Arewn.2368:

In some cases that isn’t feasible, but in the case of chronomancer it is. There’s no balance concern here, because they can tweak the numbers to make it balanced regardless of which way they do it.

I’m highly curious as to how you’re concluding that removing the most potent and useful defensive skill that mesmers have is “no balance concern”.

But that’s not what I said, now is it?
I did not say “just remove it, no worries it’s still balanced!”.
I said they can achieve a balanced state for the class regardless of whether they make the change I proposed or not, because they can make compensatory changes to accompany it.
Look, it’s right there in the thing you quoted, the bit that says “they can tweak the numbers”. And it can go beyond simple number tweaks, they aren’t limited that way to achieve balance. They could (just a random example) give chronomancer alacrity on shatter. There’s a whole host of changes they can make to keep it balanced while replacing distortion.
That was my point. Changing it doesn’t necessarily mean nerfing it, they can compensate negative changes with buffs, and as such balance was not a concern within the frame of the point I was making at the time.
For example, a lower cooldown on Continuum Split, which itself can be used in a defensive capacity and as such helps compensate the loss of Distortion. They could increase the duration too. They can balance CS to be vastly more powerful then Distortion, making it entirely worthwhile to go for it. So that’s not my concern in this case.

Fay.2357:

I’m glad you’re able to eloquently articulate the reasons you feel that way.

Oh wait…

Thanks for the passive aggressive reply. My own passive aggressivity being rather ironic in this case. I won’t mention your own post history
I didn’t give reasons because I had already done so some time in the past, I was just echoing the sentiment. I realize it’s an unpopular opinion given the general state of the mesmer forums, but felt I should speak it none-the-less. The devs do check the forums to get a feel for the playerbase’s views after all.
Simply put though, I think it would be a better design direction to change the functionality of profession mechanics when creating elite specs (similar to Guardian’s Dragon Hunter virtues or Necro’s Reaper Shroud) rather then layering extra on top of the existing. In some cases that isn’t feasible, but in the case of chronomancer it is. There’s no balance concern here, because they can tweak the numbers to make it balanced regardless of which way they do it. Similarly, fun/interesting gameplay can be achieved either way, since fun gameplay isn’t dependent upon having a bigger number of abilities. So that’s also not a concern to me. It is simply my preference that they handle elite spec prof mechanics in this way. I feel it better upholds the identity and characteristics of both the elite spec and the base profession (the reasons for which are fairly self-evident) by doing so.

Hunter.4783:

Then you probably shouldn’t be commenting or rebutting my argument.

Did you try more then a single raid boss?
No? Yet you’re making arguments about raids as a whole based on such an incredibly small amount of raid experience.

The thing is, people can still have worthwhile perspectives and ideas even if they haven’t tried something themselves, or have had little experience with it. You can understand the rules of baseball and know what a good play is even if you’ve never touched a baseball bat in your life.
There’s no need to be dismissive like that. If you take issue with the point someone made, address that point. Don’t ignoring it and attack them instead.

I still think Continuem Split should have replaced distortion, rather then being added as a 5th shatter.
I eagerly hope for the day that happens. I don’t care if it’s a nerf, it just makes more sense to me.

Nooooooo nonononono, No leap on the AA chain, anyone who’s played sword ranger knows how terrible that feels to use.
The projectiles being unblockable would be cool, and #3 needs some work.

I actually liked the root on the LB skill, gave it a nice feel. As long as it is balanced to compensate, I’m fine with it.

People without the expansion will be able to enter all guild halls. However they won’t have access to expansion-specific guild hall features such as the arena.

To claim a guild hall you have to go to maguma, which will require the expansion. That said, an officer with appropriate permission and who owns the expansion should be able to queue it and lead the expedition with the rest of the guild members who own HoT.
Once claimed, you’ll be able to teleport straight into the hall, even without HoT.

It is perhaps on the weak side, but it is not backwards.
The point of extra toughness while above a threshold is to counter initiations/opening bursts.
It could use a buff in potency, but not a change in effect. Above the threshold is fine.

You know how mesmer uses double sword (eg. sword/pistol & sword/focus)?

Has anyone considered double axe build with dual wield agility?
Same trait setup for the most part, except dual wield agility instead of furious, and weapon swap to gain adrenaline. Use Axe+axe for maintaining fury (which you’ll need to make up for the loss of arcing slice) and then axe+sword/shield/mace/warhorn depending on your needs.

This goes for all professions, not just warrior, but I think the trait system would work a lot better if weapon traits were decoupled from trait lines.
Weapon traits, especially for profession that have a lot of weapons such as warrior, really kill trait line options. If you’re using the weapon, they become near auto-picks in many cases, and if you’re not using the weapon they become completely dead options.

They should make it so that either
a) All weapon traits exist as an option at every trait tier of every trait line. For example; you can chose to slot in the sword trait in the adept tactics slot, or the grandmaster defense slot, or the master arms slot. They effectively act as filler traits to be selected when you have no good options for that slot for your build.
or
b) Weapon traits are complimentary. You get an extra “weapon trait slot” allowing you to take 1 of your choosing, regardless of your build.

In both cases, this opens up a bunch of trait slots that can be filled with more build defining and interesting traits that aren’t limited by weapon choice.

glaphen.5230:

They said no gear grinding or whatever before launch and then proceed to ignore that and make better gear that was only obtained by grinding stuff you may not have wanted to grind, then around a year and half~2 year later they released the armor parts that was only obtained by grinding crafting for obscene amounts of gold, don’t know how it is now since I haven’t played in a year but it’s still entirely ANets fault and probably still extremely expensive/annoying to grind, especially on more than one character.

“Or whatever” demonstrates your understanding of the situation quite well.
Their entire “no grind philosophy” was vis-a-vis things like gear treadmils. The idea that you’d be trapped in an endless cycle of get gear-> do content->get better gear->do better content->get even better gear->do even better content, every time they release new content. It wasn’t to the exclusion of any and all grinding. Grinding is subjective to begin with, merely playing can be considered grinding. The idea was to avoid forced grind as a requirement for content participation as much as possible. Notice the caveats in that sentence? it wasn’t a blanket “never ever no grind, at all, ever, zero”.
The initial addition of ascended gear didn’t ignore that at all. They added what has for the past 3 years been an optional tier of slightly stronger gear that was a fair bit grindy to acquire. But heck, you could gear a toon out in ascended in a few weeks if you chose to pursue it, which is a fairly standard pace of acquisition for high-end gear in most MMOs.
They added it because they found exotics were far too quickly acquired, and large swathes of the player base were looking for something to do, something to make them stick. A mid-term goal to pursue. And for those that didn’t want the extra grind, exotics remained more then sufficient for their needs anyways.

And you know what? 3 years have gone by since then. Exotics someone got in October of 2012 would have served them well all the way up to October of 2015. And could continue to serve them even for the first couple raid bosses of each wing, and the entirety of Heart of Thorns’ content outside of raids.
That’s assuming your exotic jewelry hasn’t already been replaced, given how easy it is to come by ascended jewelry over time. Ascended rings rain down from fractals, and between laurels and guild coms you’ll inevitably get ascended amulet/trinkets.

Granted, the crafted ascended gear is expensive. Granted you’ll likely want ascended gear for raids. And yes, granted, that is a bit of “forced grind”. But with all the time that has past, the progression of the game’s development and it’s playerbase, and the nature of ascended gear (i.e it’s the highest gear tier, and will stay that way. You won’t have to replace it, therefore still no gear treadmil), having a small amount of content that favors, not even requires, just favors having full ascended gear by virtue of being tuned around those numbers, isn’t bad.

I’ve already mentioned how my mains are geared; full exotics with some welfare ascended I picked up along the way. I also don’t want to grind out ascended armor either, and likely won’t. But I still think it’s for the best that they tune hard content around the highest stat tier, and I still think ascended gear was, and continue to be, a healthy addition to the game.

There’s an easy solution to this, just make Ascended gear way cheaper, so that players can reasonably gear many alts.

@Ohoni.6057
That defeats the entire purpose of adding ascended gear in the first place.
Conveniently, exotics are easy/cheap/quick to get, and very close to being as good as ascended. Wearing full exotics means you are viable and ready to tackle nearly all of the game’s content, including the first couple raid bosses.

Ascended gear exists because exotics fell short. They were too easy, too cheap, too quick to acquire, and the game needed something that would require greater investment from the player to get. Exotics were short term goals, and legendaries long term goals. They needed a mid term goal for players to strive for, to keep the market spinning and players motivated.
To make ascended gear “way cheaper” is to forget all that.
It helps the market because a lot of material goes into ascended gear, and there’s a high demand for them. That keeps the economy alive and combats gold inflation through TP taxes and the like.
For player motivation, there’s a lot packed into that. There’s the basic “I want the strongest gear, and will play to get it” motive.
There’s also how players view different gear rarity.
Look at green, yellow, orange, and pink rarity gear drops.
Green is salvage fodder, yellow’s a standard reward and gets me ecto, orange is fairly rare and will fetch a pretty penny, and pink is precious.
But what about the difference between green and blue gear? Is there an appreciable difference?(4s on the tp from the rune in green gear I guess?) To most players at 80, the two likely blend together, it’s a redundant gear tier at this point.
While it wouldn’t be as bad as blue/green gear, making ascended “way cheaper[to get]” is similarly making it redundant.
Ascended gear occupies an appreciable space in the game. As someone who hates grinding, I am definitely behind the sentiment of not wanting to grind out ascended armor. But the game has done everything it can to cater to me on those grounds, and continue to do so under 90% of situations, so I don’t think ascended’s inclusion, implementation, or “requirement” in raiding is a bad idea.
On the flip side, I’m actually kind of worried about the effect legendary armor will have. Since legendary armor has ascended stats and the ability to switch stats on the fly, how will that impact the value of getting new ascended sets in the future?

Lets be real here, ascended gear was introduced within 3 months of launch. And it was to remedy the problem of exotics being acquired at an unforeseen easy and fast pace, and to create a system for fractal progression.

You talk about “betrayal”, when the reality is that the addition was a quickly deployed post-beta adjustment. One that they have stayed true to for the 3 years since, and for the foreseeable future.
That’s not a betrayal, that’s run of the mil game development.

Of course they are going to balance raids, which are supposed to be demanding and difficult content, around the highest stat tier. To balance it around a lower tier would be to set the system up for failure from the get-go. People with the higher stat gear would encounter lesser difficulty as a result. And given the nature of these raids, most people interested in them likely already have mostly ascended gear already.
Heck, most people who play regularly should have full ascended jewelry (which accounts for 5 gear slots, roughly 40% of your total stats), given how easy it is to come by.
And, as others have mentioned, it being balanced around ascended stats doesn’t actually require you to have ascended to complete it. A 12%ish(for full exotics, less if you have that ascended jewelry I mentioned) stat difference can be overcome, especially in a game like GW2.

And do you realize how ridiculous some of what you said you did is? So you made exotics for all your alts, even spent money to do so, but then ascended came out and you didn’t feel like making it, so you deleted all your alts?
How is that even a sensible thing to do? Exotics were more then good enough for all the content that was in the game at the time, and remained good enough for all the content that has been added in the 3 years since. Ascended weren’t even that big of an upgrade, and at the time they were first introduce were only out for literally 3 gear slots.
Imagine buying 5 cars, and then a new model comes out. So you have a hissy and destroy 4 of your cars. Yea that’s reasonable.
Not to mention how easy the ascended jewelry slots are to fill. Heck, if you actually played those alts over the past several years, you probably would have gotten full ascended jewelry by happenstance, just by playing.

Also, your car analogy is bad. It doesn’t encompass the situation at all.
You’re salty because you don’t feel like grinding ascended armor. I’m pretty sure that’s all this comes down to. And you know what? I don’t feel like grinding it either. You can just say so, it’s not a big deal.

My two mains have full exotic armor, exotic weapons, and ascended jewelry. That’s what they’ve been wearing for a year or two now. And I have enough resources stockpiled to gear another 5+ fresh characters that way easily.
I likely have enough stuff stored to churn out a couple sets of ascended armor too. Yet I probably won’t. The ~5% stat increase (from a full armor set specifically, not a full gear set) doesn’t seem worth the effort/resources. So I’ll try out raids with what I’m wearing now, maybe grab some ascended weapons at most.
If I’m into it, maybe I’ll gear my main raiding character in full ascended. He’s the only one who’ll need it after all.
Whatever weird OCD you have about gearing alts is your prerogative. It’s not ArenaNet’s problem or fault.

Imagine you could interrupt a warrior’s burst skill?
Or a ranger’s pet skill?
Or an engi’s toolbelt skill?

Oh wait you can.

Robert Gee.9246:

Scepter is difficult to balance because of the clone generation on AA. As a mesmer player I’d like it if the last attack wasn’t so slow too, but increasing the speed of the final attack risks imbalancing mesmer DPS by increasing clone generation speed.

Could you speed it up, but add a 4th attack to the chain to compensate?

Don’t blame this on introversion, that has nothing to do with it.

ReiCH.6273:

Hardly competes with full set of legendary armour, minis, other skins, titles, guild decos if you’re a pve’er though… fair is fair, they need as much love as the raiders

And if you’re into WvW .. well … tough luck huh?

WvW gives exclusive rewards through tournaments.
“Fair is fair” has to be considerate of the breadth of the content. There’s more PvE content in the game, and as such PvE offers more exclusive rewards. You can view this as being a matter of percents rather then of absolute values.
You could argue that the amount of content each particular sections of the game gets is unfair, but I think the amount of rewards relative to the amount of content each sections gets is fairly well balanced (though strictly speaking, WvW and PvP could use a bit more rewards).

Furthermore, you have to consider the relevancy of the rewards to the content type. Legendaries are, in essence, skins. They also have the ability to change stats. But why would PvP have any use for such a thing? Just give skins as rewards.
Things like that.

Basically, the concept of “fairness” you presented is too childish. It lacks nuance. “everyone gets one” doesn’t necessarily make things fair. There are the points I mention above, as well as things like the number of players doing a particular content type. PvP has less players, so would it actually be fair that it gets the same amount of rewards as PvE, which has many times more players? There are multiple perspective through which you have to evaluate “fairness”.

You also have to consider what affect it has on the game. Sometimes unfairness can enhance the game by creating psychological and social motivators. Sometimes you want to add a disproportionate amount of rewards to a piece of content in order to attract players to it, for example. Though that’s kind of getting outside of the scope of what we’re talking about here.

Palador.2170:

You know, I keep seeing people say that, but… is it?

We have new players coming in due to F2P, and perhaps more due to raids. Is there a guide to easily getting the exotic gear they need? If not, should someone (I call “not it”!) make one?

It won’t matter how easy it is to do, if they don’t know that. This is a problem we might want to deal with now, before it bites us.

Crafting and the trading post are both accessible and relatively cheap ways to get them. A full set of armor+weapon(not jewelry) will run you about 30 gold, an amount you’ll probably amass on the way to 80 alone, especially if you sell some of the mats you gained along the way.
WvW tokens, which you get from achievement point rewards (unless they’ve changed it), will net you a few pieces of gear at least.
Karma can buy you a full set in Orr, which you can likely afford by the time you’re 80, or will take a small amount of time to gain running event trains (which still happen to this day). The stats on them may not be ideal but they are exotic and it’s a good start.
And then there’s running dungeons, which give you both tokens for gear as well as gold to buy gear with. A full set of level 80 masterwork (green) gear (weapons, armor, and jewelry) will only cost you a gold or so on the TP, and will suffice to get you started for running some dungeons. Just partner up with some of the other new players, who will be looking to do the same thing, or find a guild like Anet has been encouraging people to do.

I don’t intend for this to be seen as a guide, I’m just providing backup for my assertion that it is pretty quick and easy to get full exotics. You’ll have amassed most of the resources to do the above just by leveling to 80, and many activities will allow you to get gear pretty quickly.
I agree that up to date comprehensive guides are a good idea. That said, you can find a few guides just by googling, and gearing in GW2 is fairly straight forward compared to some games.

If GW2 was a game where gearing up took a long time or a lot of effort, I would agree with you.
But it’s not.
It’s very easy to get full exotics, and ascended is a fairly marginal upgrade beyond that. Plus, it’s also easy to get ascended jewelry, which account for nearly half your gear slots.

Harper.4173:

No – to build locking I say No.

Guild Wars 2 is a fast paced game that encourages a flowing, organic combat – just like you’re supposed to adapt to all sorts of things during combat the game encourages you to tweak and change your build as you move from encounter to encounter in order to improve your performance and get better results.
This is intended and it’s fine – build locking is a silly mechanic that forces you to bring a build that’s catered to one role and one role only – you can’t change or adapt to the flow of combat or the encounters themselves.

What if you’re getting knocked down too much? Being able to bring more stability or swap out some traits to bring more support is crucial.

Build locking is a tired and old mechanic – there’s simply no point to limit player freedom. Adapting along the way is certainly what I believe the devs have in mind with raids – and is certainly what they’ve encouraged with the game so far.

I mean – we had build locking in the game at release – to change traits you had to go to a vendor and buy an item that allowed you to do it – it was tedious and the community wanted it changed – so the devs listened and agreed it was an impractical system – so it was changed to what we have today.

It would be a step back in a wrong direction to introduce it now – as far as I’m concerned.

Yes – to build locking I say Yes.

Guild Wars 2 is a fast paced game that encourages a flowing, organic combat – its mechanics allow you to adapt to all sorts of things during combat through weapon swapping, your utility skill choices, and a general flexible array of abilities. Having to tweak and change your build from encounter to encounter is cumbersome and disturbs that flow. GW2’s combat is flexible enough that it allows you to fulfill multiple roles even if your builds is very specialized, allowing you to change and adapt to the flow of combat or the encounters themselves without having to change your build each fight.

If you’re getting knocked down too much? In a group of 10, surely someone in your group will have the tools in their build necessary to deal with that mechanic, and any group with any sort of origination will have brought some form of AoE stab to deal with the eventuality of CC. Being strong as a group, not as an individual, is the crux of challenging group content.
Not to mention “build locking” doesn’t necessarily prohibit everything. Traits and gear could be locked, but not utility abilities, allowing you to switch those for more stab. There’s more to the discussion of build locking then a binary “yes/no”. There’s “how much should be locked”.

Build locking is a tried and true mechanic, operating within limited parameters is the defining characteristic of any challenge. A sport is nothing more then a list of limitations that you must operate within. The same for any game. A jumping puzzle is only challenging because you can’t fly to the end. Surely the devs recognize that GW2’s innately flexible combat is what needs to be leveraged. Changing builds at every encounter promotes “build wars”-style min-maxing, something the devs have discouraged with the game so far.

We had build locking in the game at release – to change traits you had to go to a vendor and buy an item that allowed you to do it. It was tedious and the community wanted it changed because it was a senseless mechanic in the open world environment. So the devs listened and agreed it was an impractical system on those grounds, and it was changed to what we have today.

It would be a step in the right direction to introduce it in raids – as far as I’m concerned.

Since it cannot crit and is balanced around that fact, that means a build focused on its use would be less dependent on both precision and ferocity. This could, potentially, allow you to build power alongside defensive stats and still do reasonable damage.

You could potentially build a cc-oriented daredevil wearing soldiers gear, giving the build good survivability through CC, dodges, and tanky stats. All the while still (potentially) putting out decent damage thanks to pulmonary impact from the Palm Strike utility skill and the Impacting Disruption daredevil trait.

Physical skills really do need work. My only complaint with berserker is that rage skills, cool as they are, overlap with physical while physical are in such need of help.

Stomp is just too limited in its usefulness. You’d think “aoe launch? awesome”, but it doesn’t actually end up coming in handy that much, and the benefit of its effect is often overridden by the fact that it just launched your target several yards away from you. “Fear me” gets away with it because a) it’s instant cast b) the target is running away, so you can easily keep up and continue attacking. Making it work like seismic leap would at least increase it’s tactical use and give it some value as a short gap closer. Or change it to a knockdown instead of a launch, give it a “the ground shakes and people fall over” type reasoning.
Kick is just… what? If I’m melee, I don’t generally want to send my target away from me. And when I do want to knock them away, either for tactical reasons or because I’m ranged, the knockback is so paltry that it’s hardly of value. In essence, it’s an awkward and inconvenient-to-use interrupt. At least boost the knockback distance and fix up its usability. The awkward jerk forward, while good in assuring that it lands, can really screw up your aim. Or go the opposite direction and just make it a true interrupt, a daze or what have you. Maybe throw in a cripple for good measure.
Throw Bolas, I want to say it’s okay, I like that there are simple/straight forward abilities, and it does have some trait synergy, but I just can’t help feeling it’s underwhelming. The damage is nearly non-existent, and it’s easy to avoid. Boost the damage and give it a 4 sec cripple or something, idk. Redundant as that may be for a skill that immobilizes, at least it’ll hamper cleansing.
Bulls Charge I would argue is the only one in a good place right now. It has some buggyness and trouble here and there, but overall its in a good place functionality and numbers-wise.

Rage skills feel very “physical skills 2.0”, both thematically and functionally.
They have a focus on CC, including a frontal melee knock back, gap closer, and stun(knockdown).

They’re all cool skills, and I’m excited for them, but it leaves me thinking “why didn’t you put these ideas towards fixing our under used physical skills?”

Atticus.7194:

Yes it does matter, just getting minor variations of existing skills passed off as major changes is not really that exciting. I want to see how creative ArenaNet can get with warriors, give me something that’s new and innovative and makes me want to play not just more of the same in the form of the most played out literal interpretation of the word “Berserker” possible.

Yes, yes it does. When the entirety of a elite spec is “more of the same” it’s not exciting, its not innovative it’s not something that is going to make players want to play. I mean so far we’ve got: minor updates to burst skills (both of which include strange “upgrades” no one really asked for), physical skills that grant adrenaline (oh boy), a new offhand weapon that provides with another ranged cripple (of which we already have 5), a way to cleanse conditions with fire (something guards and ele already do) and a mobile fire field (kind of cool actually). Finally we come to the berserk mechanic which is seriously the most straight forward cookie cutter interpretation of this spec possible, did they not even try to think outside the box?

They haven’t really given us alternatives though, it’s more like warriors now with spinning rims! Just a little flash to distract us from the lack of substance. And I’m also curious what this “new playstyle” you’re talking about is because none of these updates changes how warriors will function and play at all.

When you log onto an MMO, any MMO, do you look at all the damage classes as being exactly the same?
I’d think not. Despite the fact that their roles all consist of doing the same thing, dealing damage, they can still be unique and have distinct playstyles that are each individually worth delving into and trying.
That is my argument here.
That the same role is being fulfilled does not automatically mean it’s being fulfilled in the same way. There can still be new, exciting, unique, innovative additions that still fulfill the exact same role.
If we are still playing the same way, the playstyle is unchanged, there’s no unique or innovative mechanics being introduced, then that itself is a problem. But not because it fulfills the same role.

Your argument falls apart when you consider that there are other classes in this game. Let’s say the new spec gave us really strong group support, it brought that as a new role for warriors to excel at. But guardian can already do that. In GW2, such a thing is not unique, or innovative, exciting, or worthy of making players want to play. It already exists, you’re just changing the skin by bringing it to the warrior.

It is my argument that it is not the role that is fulfilled which makes or breaks a spec fun-wise, but rather the playstyle and mechanics it bring to the table. Role and playstyle/mechanics are often intrinsically connected, but distinguishing which is the relevant factor in a particular situation is important.
And here, it is the playstyle which I think is important, not the role which is being fulfilled.
Granted, unique roles are important in avoiding homogenization and assuring a feeling of importance in the players.

Berserker mode gives X benefits
One of the costs of being in berserker mode is constant health loss (damage per second) Compensation for that health loss is increasing life steal as health decreases

What I think this would do is create a situation where personal hp management is an important mechanic, but receiving health (regardless of source) is never impacting non-health related benefits.
In other words, if I’m at 50% health and an ally heals me, the only thing that’s negatively impacted is my life-steal. But that “negative” impact is okay, because the purpose of life-steal is to heal me in the first place. My ally healing me is still a benefit, or at worse neutral, because it’s just speeding along the process.

The purpose of having the health cost and attached life-steal is that it pushes you into an aggressive playstyle (in-theme with something like the berseker), a play style dependent on attacking enemies to sustain yourself, and one where you get harder to kill as your health decreases, but where you are incredibly vulnerable and die quickly when you’re denied the ability to attack.
Being CC’ed, kited, or poorly managing(timing) the berserk state would all be downsides to berserking do to the health cost.
While the berserk buff (attack speed, primal bursts) and lifesteal making you progressively harder to kill would be the up side.

It would have to be balanced in such a way that when you have high health (60+%), the life steal does very little to help you, when you have a medium amount of health (40+%), the life-steal can somewhat sustain you there, and when you’re low on health(10+%) the life steal is strong enough to bring you up a bit.

I think this would be interesting because it turns the warrior into more of a glass-cannon. Similar to damage-focused ele builds, if you’re not careful to sustain yourself and protect yourself with cooldowns, you can very quickly and easily get bursted down due to your low health pool. But in the berseker’s case, instead of your health pool being small, you’re just constantly low on health, bringing in a similar risk.

I also like Hammerguard’s idea of providing a secondary benefit to healing while in the berserk state, so that unexpected outside sources of healing don’t become a detriment to your buff.