Guild Wars 2

Flicking your wrist to turn the camera is easier to do than using the turn around key because you can rotate the camera once you’ve been launched.

Prysin.8542:

There is also another trait called PREDATOR’S INSTINCT, also worth trying.

Under no circumstance should anyone use this worthless trait.

Fairly bad patch content and execution wise. No offence, but you guys can’t seem to handle big patches, there are so many bugs and anemic changes.

I’m thinking you’re better off doing smaller bi weekly changes. Doing small piece meal changes every few months and hoping for a new meta to emerge is not a good way to balance things, when there are so many things that’s broken since launch.

“But I thought you guys wanted PVE and PVP balance split?”

No LB cripple.

No piercing/cooldown consolidation.

No full snare removal on LR.

No ignore range for pet owners on pet F2.

Fail on all accounts in my book.

And LOL on stalker/moa buffs. Get your buff priority fix first before you try to buff F2. What’s the point of buffing it when half the time you won’t get your own buffs in a crowd?

F2 buffs should ignore range for pet owners.

idevourwater.3149:

I WANT Break immob!!!!

why cant we have reliable immob break!?!?!?!

LOL roll a thief. They basically fixed it so roll for initiative functions how lightning reflex is suppose to function, that it’ll cleanse before disengaging.

Sic’em Reveal is LOL as expected.

What’s funny is that all the traits were setup for the demo classes, except for the ranger. That pretty much tells you what you need to know right there.

Very glad I finished up my warrior though. Regen hammer got even better which is hard to believe. Expecting more of the same on tomorrow’s patch.

This is like GW2 ranger porn.

Jae.9682:

I’d absolutely say that it is the sheer unreliablility of the F2 skill that has me screaming at my monitor. An immensely powerful ability that for all intents and purposes fires randomly. About as compelling in gameplay as nightmare runes.

It’s actually borderline amusing how bad F2s are sometimes.

I was doing Tequatl and was trying to res someone while i’m poisoned so I cast brown bear’s F2. Instead of instant casting as it stood beside me, it actually ran towards the finger that I had targeted before it fired the skill. End result with me still poisoned and the bear got a tidal wave in the face, lol.

If nothing comes out of the Oct 15 patch, I hope they’ve at least made F2 buffs disregard range for the pet owner. The F2 buffs are virtually unusable especially if you’re using range weapons.

Terrible looking sets.

Please look at L2 for better inspiration.

mzt.3270:

But a CC can happen at 75% if traited and still be far efficient than the pet and do far more damage. A Guardian can DPS hammer blow with mass damage 100% of the time. Why can’t a pet? If a pet is 40% of our damage I would jolly well expect it to hit 100%. I don’t see the logic of a 40% critter damage as being OP when scaled to what else is out there

You can’t expect pets to hit 100% because that would be working under the assumption that you’ll land your hits a 100%, which you don’t. No class does.

Not to mention balance and the the cornerstone of the pvp in this game is about dodging and mitigation (e.g. aegis/blind etc) and you’re asking for your source of DPS to go up without giving your opponents more chances to mitigate the said damage.

If you want 100% hit rate on pets, your weapons will have to become utterly worthless. To foster a healthy competitive environment, one should lower the instances of automation and chance, which pets have in spades currently. I’ve asked this repeatedly on this forum and hope a dev would actually address this:

If I can’t control whether my pet CCs someone, is it really skill if I managed to beat him because my wolf happens to land a pounce?

I would argue, pets in their current form actually introduce way too much randomness and ultimately skill debasement into the meta. And that’s the last thing this game needs if they want to make it into an esport.

No one wants to play a bot. No one wants to watch a bot either. No one likes playing against a bot, cuz it feels cheap. That’s not skillful, fun, or interesting.

Durzlla.6295:

Leuca.5732:

Aridia.3042:

Leuca.5732:

Remove damage, half the vigor gain, and remove snares. Leave recharge alone.

Problem solved.

And it needs to stun target.

That would be in the OP section if you gave all my aforementioned effects along with it.

Make it only stun if you remove a CC effect, that certainly wouldn’t be OP, and halving the vigor and removing the damage would be PLENTY to make adding a stun and immob break non issue.

Engi Rocket boots is a kittening 16s CD when traited, removes immobs, crippled etc, is a blast finisher, and does damage, so…. How would ours be too strong? It’d be well over double the CD for a slightly stronger effect

This.

Not to mention damage on that skill is utterly worthless. No one would use that utility as a source for DPS. I’ve ran LR on my ranger and clocked over 1800 hours on it and I’ve never killed someone with LR yet.

Damage is not needed. It’s a defence utility. The reasons why it needs to change are so obvious that I cannot figure out why it hasn’t worked in this way since day 1.

mzt.3270:

I would be all for the utility source but the practicalities affecting this again are concerning the pet mechanic. The pet would have to be an undying pet to achieve this and considering that a pet when downed can still rez you, this is also a possibility even for the 10% idea. But as a damage source it is useless as it still cannot hit accurately as you can on your own attacks, also all pets also have a long gap between hits and don’t have enough damage to verify those gaps in order to cope with GW’s harsh AOE and hits from both player classes and NPC chaps, lords etc. I am all for Anet to at least trying to fix the pet but I seriously doubt they can without disturbing someone’s feathers ( no pun intended) and people complaining that we would be OP, its bad enough many classes think we are simply " mobile auto-turrets" which is not the case.

It’s not necessary to make pets immortal if they’re going to be a source of utility. You can simply give rangers multiple pairs of pets to hot swap like an Ele changing attunement. e.g.

Wolf/Spider
Jag/Drake
Eagle/Bear
Pig/Devourer

Each individual pet swap is the same 20 seconds when in battle like it is now. When you swap from the Wolf/Spider pair to Jag/Drake pair, the first pair goes to a cool down with the count down timer being lower the deeper you spec into BM. Just like how Ele spec into Arcana lowers attunement count down time.

The penalty for improper management is temporary not having the pet you want to use and not complete pet down time like we have currently when they’re both dead.

The problem with unreliable pet is easily cured, the moment they either hard cap pet damage and standardize pet dmg, or if they let players pick that sliding weapon/pet scale by putting a multiplier into the BM line, then they can figure out what’s the optimal number of times a pet should hit a target (pet should hit harder and be more aggressive the deeper you spec into BM to compensate for the lower weapon coefficient).

And no, we can’t expect pets to hit 100% since that’s grossly overpowered and will make every ranger fight a 2 on 1. The unreliability of the pet is just the symptom and not the real problem.

Fjandi.2516:

Sorry but one year has passed, we have a lot of quaggan backpacks, but ranger pets are still kitten, it’s quite evident they don’t know how to fix the problem, or they are wasting their time philosophizing.

I’m not convinced they realize what the problem is yet.

The problem is they’re trying to make a pvp game with bots as a significant source of DPS. To compound that problem, they didn’t even equalized the damage across the pets so it becomes impossible to balance.

People keep complaining about pets not being able to hit on the run, well it’s impossible to make any sort of balance if there’s no consistency, like if a jag could crit for 6k while a brown bear would crit for 800. Not to mention some pets hit more consistently than others. As a result your weapon scaling is being low balled while your pet damage ratio is wildly fluctuating. Even more so when you start to spec into BM. That ultimately leads to you having an unreliable pet, because they can’t even decide how often a pet should land a hit, and your weapons are kitten.

They need to hard cap pet damage at 10% max or better yet, eliminate pet DPS all together and make them a source of utility. Or they need to make the BM trait line act as a multiplier that takes down your weapon damage and upscales your pet damage the deeper you go into the BM line, while if you do not scale into BM, your weapon damage stays the same as other classes.

I’m all for options. So some kind of passive buff or perma stow option would be nice.

Even if you’re against perma stow, the current situation is not well thought out or acceptable.

The current weapon dmg is clearly factoring the pet as being part of the DPS. When you think about it, HP increase is insufficient as a fix. Pet uptime IMO should be 100% If they’re insistent in going down this route with forced pet usage, they should give rangers multiple pet pairs to swap on the fly, with the penalty being you not able to use the pet you want when they’re down instead of having no pet at all for 60 seconds when they both get 1 shotted.

Like if my wolf/jag is down, I can switch to drake/spider, they go down, I can switch to eagle/moa etc etkittenil the first set is back up again. There should be ZERO pet down time if they’re factored as part of the toon.

Nuka Cola.8520:

wow dat looked impressive, when is it coming out? Reminds me of Dragon’s Dogma combat system which i liked a lot. Or is this another generic 30 hotkeys spam fest mmo?
[/quote]

Closed beta starts in Korea this Winter.

It’s probably the best looking MMO out there currently.

Wow, someone really likes Mika Nakashima at Anet…

Leuca.5732:

Remove damage, half the vigor gain, and remove snares. Leave recharge alone.

Problem solved.

And it needs to stun target.

Cool downs are far too long.

Not enough number of skills and utilities.

Weapon swap cool down is too long and not necessary.

The result is game with very low skill cap, and high predictability that has little rotation choice on PVE and virtually no counter play in PVP.

Combined that with the dual stats and linear trait progression system it has basically stagnated the game. It severely limits the number of builds and play style.

They should change the name of the game to build wars because that’s what it is. 9/10 fights, the results are determined by builds and not by skill. I don’t understand at all why the game has taken this direction given how much Sharp supposedly likes counter play when he talks about all this on SoTG.

People are only out at BL to see the map cuz it’s new.

Good luck getting stomps to win a match later on when the novelty wears off and when people realize how futile it is to keep that buff up.

I’ve stopped going to BL after the first night because it’s just a spvp map with even more broken classes. e.g. regen/blunt warriors and perplexity thieves/engies.

Numbers/coverage > everything. Always has, always will be until you get rid of AOE cap and pvd.

Definitely a bug. The smoke that the catapult creates would lock my pc up until the smoke clears.

Protip: Whining about whining is still whining.

Terkov.4138:

Ranger changes look cool, but I still miss 1 very important thing: Longbow users have to choose 2 of 3 Marksman traits (Piercing Arrows, Eagle EyE, Remorseless). No other weapon has such problem – when you want to spec fully into weapon, you always can pick all related traits. I think it’s REALLY needed to either merge 2 of those traits, or move one of them to 1 tier so we can pick them all.

They need to put in a ranger crack shot and merge piercing with cool down.

It’s far too many traits required to max out LB.

I’ve been say this since beta…

jcbroe.4329:

I honestly couldn’t care less about Sic’ Em revealing stealth. I mean, yay for functionality, but it is seems like such a specific function for such a specific situation that it will barely make the skill used more.

This.

Plus your pet already tracks target as long as you F1 them before they stealth. Combined with LB2 that tracks.

I still see no reason to slot sick’em personally.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Ranger

To help Rangers support allies, we increased the ability ranger pets have to support allies. For instance, the Bear condition removal isn’t strong enough, so we’ll be improving that. Moas and Fern Hound will also be improved.

There will also be # changes to some of the Ranger weapons.

F2 Pet buffs should be guaranteed on the ranger owner

F2 support skills should ignore range for the pet owner so that they’ll be guaranteed to get the buff. Then party members, then allies with AOE cap should be the priority in which the buffs get dished out. Go try using F2 buffs in dragons or Scarlet invasions. Half the time you won’t get your own F2 buffs.

It’s counter productive for LB/SB/Axe rangers to cast pet buffs because not only do you not get the buff in crowds, but in order to get the buff, you’re often negating your own range advantage in order to be close to your pet, or it is kept on passive which negates your pet damage entirely. This is especially being a problem with LB due to the range penalty.

Longbow1 needs a chance cripple

Optimal killzone for the LB is at 1k+ range. Problem is that there’s nothing to CC the target to keep them there even for a second shot. There’s no root with that range and the pet cannot close the distance to the target before they get to sub 1k range. (That’s assuming the pet you picked actually could CC.) Your increasing LB4’s push back range helped a bit, but it makes no sense to blow a CC to follow up with an auto attack. You’re pretty much forced to use rapid fire after LB4 because of how long RF’s channel is.

LB1 needs a chance cripple to allow the shooter to take a meaningful second shot.

Alternatives involve reworking Predator’s Instinct so that it procs on crit instead of based on sub 25% HP. Lower the ICD to like 9 seconds on a sigil.

Further alternative is to unnerf LB damage all together so that there’s no range penalty.

Thank you for this, Sharp. Can’t comment specifically on anything ATM, but I think we all appreciate the opportunity to get a chance to preview, digest and possibly provide feed back before the patch hits.

Please keep doing this with every balance patch from now on.

Retaliation needs to be hard capped and it has no business being useful outside of 1 v 1.

It’s cheesy as hell.

I find the ascended weapons to be short sighted and kitten. It’s not grindy enough to give me a power boost like other MMOs but it’s not easy enough to deck out my alts in full ascended gear either. So it really doesn’t accomplish anything IMO. I got my bow after one week, but that’s from play GW2 like it’s a job. (e.g. play with an event web site on my 2nd monitor to hit all the events, repeat temple runs with all my alts and harvest all the nodes with my alts.)

It’s a problem of expectations. I expect to be rewarded for doing something boring in other games. e.g. I grind for better gear to let me kill mobs more easily/lvl quicker/two shot people etc. You don’t get this with GW2.

At the same time, when you play a game with supposed horizontal progression you expect to be able to play alts and deck them out easily. You don’t get this with GW2 either.

This ascended stuff serves absolutely no purpose. It’s not hardcore enough to make it worth your while but repetitive and annoying enough that you likely won’t do it for all your alts.

Figure out what you want and go with it Anet. It’s completely half-455sed right now.

I’m calling it.

Lineage 3.

Yes, swapping stats would be good. They can let you swap sigil instead for Legendary to keep it unique.

But I’d be happy to be able to swap colour only at this point.

It’s asinine to have built in gear check and having to craft a second item to transmute the skin for color.

Nope, something has been changed.

It’s like some kind of broken motion blur that shows up once in a while. And it’s much more apparent when you disable player name tags. I’ve been running SweetFX for months so it’s not the ghetto FXAA that’s causing that.

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship…”

I guess, it’s that day now?

Nothing to see here, all rangers go back to your woods, lol.

Anet is doing a duck and cover routine. Conveniently not mentioning Celestial gears on the blog and completely ignoring the thread by merging the threads so it’s easier to bury it.

So yeah, they’re not going to do anything about it. Noticed how fast Colin commented on the Karma thread last time and got it fixed within a day, compared with this? I don’t know why they don’t just give people the option to switch Celestial into another stat. It’s almost like they’re doing it out of spite because this whole magic find issue created another bunch of work items for them.

Mistro.3059:

Essentially the Deldrimor Steel Ingots, and Spiritwood Planks (and their pre-reqs Mithrillium and Elder Spirit Glob). The Bloodstone Bricks, Empyreal Star, and Dragonite Ingot are not time gated, already made 21 of the bricks today. Pretty much the only stumbling point is time, which is a minimum of 10 days for the least time invested Ascended Weapon.

Are the time gated stuff one per account per day, or one per crafting discipline per day? Like can I craft one for lvl 450 huntsman and one for lvl 450 weaponsmith?

Shiren.9532:

It’s been over a year. Do you guys honestly think this is going to change? For 12 months pets have been insta downed in WvW and several dungeon encounters (the same for spirits) and they’ve not fixed it.

Does anyone honestly think after all this time it’s going to get better?

It’s actually getting worse lately, in the way that the class is completely ignored when new content is being designed.

Aetherblade, Liadri, soon Tequatl = guarantee dead pets.

And to add to the conversation, no, pet downtime is not balanced.

If you tell me it’s part of the class and that my weapon damage modifier is affected by it, it should have 100 percent uptime. Otherwise it’s just double dipping the penalty when combined with downtime, and lack of scaling now with ascending weapons.

Give people the means to call multiple pairs of pets via macro so there’s always a pet up, the penalty being if your pet dies, you don’t get to use the pet that you want while it’s on cool down.

Randomize the first attack so people can’t chain canines leaps one after another.

http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/gw2-ascended-longbow.jpg

Argh…another ugly weapon in GW2. Surprise!

Not looking forward to grinding for something that I don’t even like.

Can this be used to get just the skin back? Like if I used this on my quiver, will it spit out Rox’s skin and my regular quiver again? And is that quiver soul bound still?

ColinJohanson.2394:

We have folks constantly working to improve performance, we’ve actually made quite a few perf updates this year. You’ll see more perf updates in the upcoming releases, we have a team working entirely on performance at all times that won’t be going away any time soon.

Please look into Gendarran Field where the centaurs are firing their catapult. There’s something seriously wrong there. When the rock hits the ground and it creates a buff of clounds, it would kill my fps and then lock up my pc before it returns to normal when the smoke clears. Running the game on i5 with gtx 670 so it’s not the pc.

I suggest you go long on SPY between1560 to 1580, around the 200 day moving avg, and take the profit and buy gem and convert into game gold.

That’s far more productive than speculating on a video game market.

Aberrant.6749:

Aridia.3042:

Aberrant.6749:

So you’re saying that BUGS are SUPPOSED to exist? I disagree… a bug in a game/program by definition is something that’s not intended.

It has NOTHING to do with everyone having the same skills.

Balance also doesn’t require everyone to have the same skills. There have been many wonderfully balanced games where the different characters have different skills, yet overall they remain balanced.

It might do you a lot of good to read into some game design basics.

Some of the bugs made this game better. Ever played on the week when ACs didn’t work and people were forced to fight open field? Funnest week in WvW for a long time.

If this is a bug, then please get more bugs into the game.

And again, quit dodging the issue, if this bug is such a huge problem, why are FEATURES, aka guard killer/def in the game emulating the features of this “bug”? You yourself said a page back that it’s easy to stack 25 stacks so the barrier to entry is extremely low. Why should builds be hampered because people are too clueless to get a second weapon and sigil?

It wasn’t just AC’s that were bugged, it was all siege… and that was a wonderful day I agree. However it wasn’t intended to be that way, so it was fixed.

I didn’t dodge any question. As far as why sigils are getting fixed but no change (that we know of) is in the works for guard killer/def IDK. That would be a question for some one in the WvW balance team (which I am not a part of). As I said before I feel those could use some tweaking as well, but they are intended.

I don’t have to agree with everything A-net does (like guard killer/def).

My point is (once again…) that the sigils leaving their stacks are and have been a well known bug for a long time. Bugs should be fixed. If balance changes need to be done after, then balance it. Unintended bugs shouldn’t just be left there though.

The gist of your argument boils down to characterization of the issue. You keep saying it’s a bug, and therefore bugs should be fixed without addressing the nature of the issue. The issue is and should always be: Is it balanced? Is it better for the game? People have shown you in past posts that it is already.

And it’s hard to believe it’s a “bug” when they go reproducing it as a feature in the game. That to me seems more troubling…

We’ll just have to agree to disagree.

Aberrant.6749:

So you’re saying that BUGS are SUPPOSED to exist? I disagree… a bug in a game/program by definition is something that’s not intended.

It has NOTHING to do with everyone having the same skills.

Balance also doesn’t require everyone to have the same skills. There have been many wonderfully balanced games where the different characters have different skills, yet overall they remain balanced.

It might do you a lot of good to read into some game design basics.

Some of the bugs made this game better. Ever played on the week when ACs didn’t work and people were forced to fight open field? Funnest week in WvW for a long time.

If this is a bug, then please get more bugs into the game.

And again, quit dodging the issue, if this bug is such a huge problem, why are FEATURES, aka guard killer/def in the game emulating the features of this “bug”? You yourself said a page back that it’s easy to stack 25 stacks so the barrier to entry is extremely low. Why should builds be hampered because people are too clueless to get a second weapon and sigil?

Aberrant.6749:

That’s an ideal for any game design regardless if it’s an MMO or streetfighter. It’s not actually obtainable, nor do I expect it to be.

It’s not doable because it’s not suppose to be that way or everyone would have the same skill. It’s only an ideal to justify a bad argument.

Aberrant.6749:

Lets look at this from another angle as well… if I use this bug will it give me an advantage over some one that doesn’t? Yes. For sure. In multiple ways. Thus the bug should be fixed.

If this is the metric you use to balance games, don’t play MMOs.

While you’re at it, ask Devon to take out guard killer lines, guard defence and ban all sub lvl 80s with no exotics from WvW.

I’d be happy with a full mats/laurel refund at this point. Getting an Anet fix is like 2 steps forwards 3 steps back most of the time.

Leuca.5732:

Depends on where you are. (WvW/SPvP) I’d argue that because you get so much crit damage from investing 30 Air, you can afford to get a little survivability from your equipment via a small amount of soldier and/or cleric stats in PvE/WvW (probably just runes in SPvP)

I was thinking WvW only. So something like half knight, half valk?

Leuca.5732:

No, numerically it was that eles (when theorycrafting doesn’t include other professions/the meta) gained so much from celestial stats that everything else seemed silly. However, in a competitive PvP/WvW context, they start to fall off because eles don’t take advantage of the condition damage well due to an inability to cover damaging conditions.

What’s a good min/max set for fresh air then that has good crit dmg?

DevonCarver.5370:

We are aware of this, but it is a non-trivial fix. We are hoping to make changes to this by the end of the year.

Are you guys actively trying to limit and hinder creativity in builds?

Everyone can do this easily by getting 2 weapon sets. If you think this is an issue, then why are guard killer and guard defence line even in the game?

You have bigger fish to fry tbh…

Boomstin.3460:

Well, considering he wasn’t working on bug fixes or class balance but was a dungeon designer i kinda doubt there will be anyone :P

I question whether he even designed dungeons after that abortion Aetherblade mid boss.

I expect more for someone who supposedly mained a ranger.

bradderzh.2378:

I hope its not just limited to the standard zerk, rampager’s, carrion, cleric, knight’s sets because turning my magic find sets into stuff I already have plenty of doesn’t feel like much of a compensation tbh…

I’m thinking that’s exactly what we’ll get.

Take a look at the WvW vendor…we’re getting screwed one way or another.

Martin Kerstein.3071:

• Celestial will stay as it is minus the MF bonus on it.

You’re screwing a lot of people with that. People crafted that to have some MF and not be completely useless to their party instead of going full out MF. I see Celestial as MF lite. You should compensate people who crafted Celestial given how much more time gated it is to make.