Guild Wars 2

Loosifah.4739:

The thing you’re failing to realize is for every person who hates this, there’s a person who loves it.

Considering that the change has caused BY FAR the biggest forum thread even seen on the official forums, that 19 messages on 20 are negative, and that it is still growing rapidly, with all due respect I think it’s safe to say that your 50/50 love/hate assertion is flat out false.

The more I ponder about it, the more I think this ascended equipment should only be available as a separate gear set that you may only use in the new dungeon, a bit like how you have a separate sPvP set which cannot be used outside sPvP. That way, Arenanet could put all the power-creep they want for people that like that and it would remain segregated into the bounds of that dungeon. It wouldn’t be usable in WvW, public events or regular dungeons. For people that like the look of the new gear, there is always transmutes.

Khemizt.5104:

There is no other way to make a MMO other than using the treadmill. Theres no progression without a treadmill… How do you guys not see that, how can sitting in the same gear since you turned level 80, and downing bosses that don’t vary in toughness be fun!?

Not really. Over 7 years, Guild Wars 1 had zero power creep.

This really feels like a cold shower after having been so enthusiast about this game. I can’t begin to understand why the devs would turn their heads on one of the core ideas of Guild Wars.

Instead of that power creeping nonsense, I think they should bring back the prestige armor and make them quite a bit harder to obtain compared to the current exotic armors. Then make the new dungeons drop the materials so those that run dungeons can get the items first.

I mean, I didn’t like the first Guild Wars game much. From the absurd skill sets to the frustrating PvE missions that last 45+ minutes and have you start over on the first wipe, I found the game more frustrating then fun. However, ask me one thing that Guild Wars 1 did better then any other MMO and I’ll answer with the lack of power creeping. I absolutely loved working on gearing my warrior with an Elite Templar armor, it really felt like an accomplishment when I was done: my warrior looked awesome (I like “knighly” gear) and I knew that set which cost me a fortune would never become obsolete because gear power was capped.

I wouldn’t lie if I said that “aesthetic” progression is in the top-3 of the reasons why I purchased this game. After having played (and still playing) WoW I can say that Guild Wars 2 felt like a breath of fresh air. WoW’s power creeping is out of control, and getting epic gear doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment because I’ve seen 15 other tiers of epic equipment become deprecated before that.

If ascended equipment is just an additional rarity level above exotic, you would have to be able to get it without running a dungeon because one of the base promise was that anyone can cap their stats with reasonable effort.

And if ascended equipment is the term “legendary” adapted for armors then I’m sorry but legendary weapons don’t have better stats then exotics so ascended gear wouldn’t either, they would just look way cooler, like the prestige armor of Guild Wars 1.

Yes to new content, no to power creeping, and no a thousand times if the only way to get the power is to run a dungeon.

They really should postpone the patch and rethink that one. The official thread about this issue is easily the longest thread I have ever seen on this forum (I mean, even the bug report threads don’t come close) so it’s safe to say that a lot of people have a problem with the incoming patch.

I’d like Shield Stance to be renamed to something like Shield Wall or Shield Cover, because it’s not a stance by the game’s mechanics. I find that very misleading.

I’d like something to be done with Shield Bash. Even if you have good timing, Shield Bash, as a stun, makes it very hard to interrupt anything with, because there is a ~1 second charge animation that plays even if you’re at point-blank range. Considering it has a 25 second cooldown, I think the least it could be is a reliable interrupt. Failing that, make Shield Bash block all attacks during the charge animation. That way, if you miss the interrupt because of the animation, you still avoided the attack.

Also, I’m not a fan of the harpoon gun skills. They seem overly weak compared to the spear, and often lead the monsters to glitch and become invulnerable. I’m not sure what could be done to improve it

In a game where cool-looking gear is the primary reward, this is a serious issue. I picked the most athletic body build for my warrior and her thighs clip through her skirt even when she’s idle, and I consider that a minor glitch compared to the charrs whose entire forearms clip through their shields.

I’ll repeat it: armor aesthetism is one of (if not THE) primary rewards in this game, so I absolutely disagree that this should be a secondary priority compared to balance or whatever. This is just as important.

Equipment: Cleric’s Barbaric Coat, Carrion Barbaric Gloves, Cleric’s Barbaric Legplates, Berserker’s Reinforced Scale Boots, Berserker’s Mace of Water, Cleric’s Shield.

Problem: My character’s right leg clips through the leg armor. The glitch can get a lot more obvious during certain animations, including the one of the idle ones.

Info: Character’s body type was the one on the lower-left corner of the list box in the character creator.

(I actually posted about this bug earlier but I only had screenshots of the character creator and I never saw it on another character so I wasn’t sure it was a real bug. Now I’m confirming it with a real screenshot.)

Jabronee.9465:

one word —--> lol!

Really? That’s your only argument?

Look, Guild Wars 1 did a lot of good things such as making gear more about looks then stats and introducing the B2P model, but that game’s skill system was overwhelming and its PvE was attrocious. I don’t agree with every solution they found when they designed Guild Wars 2, especially for dungeons, but Arenanet did what they had to and as a whole Guild Wars 2 is A LOT better then Guild Wars 1.

Sure, there is a couple of things they could do to keep the spirit of its predecessor, such as having you hunt skills and having a pool of weapon skills for each weapon instead of fixed skills (ie: shields have 5 skills and you pick 2 for slots 4+5). I would be 100% behind such a change.

But going back to having 600 skills with 3/4 of them being conditional or near-copycats of each other and the whole system being so complicated that the average newcomer has no choice but use PvX? No thanks.

Jabronee.9465:

“GW2 will be a big mistake. Anet should should just continue with GW expansions and revamp it to a Persistant world.” Yes i’ve said that a long long time ago.
To those who know me in GW knew that i said so

Guildwars 2 is only the name but sadly its not Guildwars.
The main attraction of GW is the Skills Combination, GvG, HA and AB.
But NONE of that is available for GW2.

250 years has gone. Move on people!
Unless the expansion is called Faction 2 lol!

You speak like if it was a bad thing. I would never have purchased this game if it was anything like Guild Wars 1. The only thing I’d like to see make a comeback is the multi-professions, but I can live without that.

Lt Latency.7415:

Because it’s boring, I’m saying they should let you play the style you LIKE.

Some people like ORR let them farm Orr
Some people like Dungeons let them farm Dungeons
Some people like WPvP let them farm Wpvp.
Some people like to buy there gear with real life money let them buy there gear

Some people like Spvp and for some reason we get totally shafted. Why is this play style the expection

They do let you play the style you like, the problem is you limiting yourself to one side of the game but wanting to reap the rewards in all facets of the game. You ONLY have a point about WvW, which I see kind of like an hybrid and you should be able to showcase some PvP gear there.

In both PvP and PvE, this game’s reward system is based on looks. Your gear’s appearance is the only reward you get and it speaks of your achievements, so it would defeat the whole point of the reward system if PvP allowed you to bypass the condition for wearing prestigious gear in PvE, and ditto for PvE dungeon crawlers looking prestigious the second they put their feet in sPvP. (At least in theory, dungeon gear looks bad in my opinion and I would transmute that asap)

If farming Orr and running explorable dungeons take no skill then why don’t you do that instead of trying to convince the devs to change the game?

If you do only PvP you don’t get to look good in PvE, as simple as that. If you didn’t explore any dungeons, you didn’t level your crafting, you never ran events, and you never ran reknown hearts, then I’m sorry but you don’t deserve to look good in PvE.

WvW is another thing though. I think you should be able to export your gear from either sPvP or PvE, however Arenanet needs to consider that PvE players won’t always have level 80 items so that could be problematic for balance.

I went into Guild Wars 2 knowing very well that I would hate the dungeons, because I love tanking and it just doesn’t work that way here. So I guess there was no bad surprise there for me. But I’m already involved in end-game raiding in WoW, so I appreciate my more casual play style in this game.

The only disappointment for me is the personal story. It was supposed to be that the dungeons are the story of Destiny’s Edge and the personal story is my character’s own story, but from level 50 and on, it became the story of a character I really didn’t care for and my character took a background role and this is beyond lame. Now I’m much less interested in completing the personal story, I’ll do it but it can wait. I also have yet to see the effect of having a ‘dignity’ character on my story.

Other then personal story, I think that the game is as great as I expected it to be. Yeah, not much to do at level 80 besides dungeons, but if there’s no monthly fee I can just pick the game back after a content patch or expansion.

I really don’t like this idea. If you make a warrior or elementalist you gotta look like one. It’s not about PvP (although I understand the point) it’s about common sense. The gear we have is carefully crafted (no pun intended) to fit within the themes of the professions that can use them. Medium armors have shadowy leather gear and masks for thiefs and the long trenchcoats of engineers and rangers, but it totally wouldn’t fit a warrior. Heavy armor have a mix of barbaric and knightly armors which fits both warriors and guardians but how would it make sense for your thief to wear knight gear? It wouldn’t.

I agree one hundred percent that there is not enough variety in the armor styles, however the solution is not to do a free-for-all where warriors wear level 1 mesmer skirts and elementalists wear full dark armor, it’s to design new sets of armor with the styles people want but that still look like they belong to their proper armor class.

Also, on a more technical point of view, armor pieces have to fit together even if they’re not from a same set. The fact that you’re limited to one class of armor puts less restrictions on the artists and allows them to make equipment without having to worry about it clipping with pieces from the other 2 armor classes. For example the trenchcoats of the medium armor sets clip horribly with almost every heavy and light leg pieces. (You can see for yourself in the preview screen.) It doesn’t matter because the leg pieces of medium armor are all tight and cannot clip with any trenchcoat, but if you remove the restriction you suddenly have to make every combination works, which will probably end up with more bland-looking gear due to the restrictions this would create to avoid clipping.

Customization is great,I have spent hours customizing my characters and must have rerolled my main something like 15 times until I got the right look, however it must not come at the cost of the game’s artistic integrity.

As a warrior I’m happy with my shield skills. Shield Bash could use some work but Shield Stance is most likely the best block skill in the game and more then make up for Shield Bash’s shortcomings in my opinion. As a defense-oriented kind of player I always carry my shield on my warrior.

Now for guardians it’s another story. It’s not that the skills are bad but they are not shield-like AT ALL. Guardians can’t even block with their shields which I find a bit silly. But they can with a focus??? I think the devs should swap the skillsets of those kinds weapons, I think it would be a better fit for both.

I play on Tarnished Coast and I have no idea. On one day there was literally no one in Harathi Hinterlands and I was soloing events, and then the next day it was bustling with people and we did a lot of events together.

Since it’s the only unofficial RP server it’s probably still in good shape though.

Some events don’t scale that well for 1-player even though they don’t have the [Group Event] tag on them, and even if they did, quite frankly they’re much more fun to do when other players are helping out.

I think Arenanet should use their overflow server system to implement the opposite in low-population zones. If a zone of your server is too empty, you get the option to use another server where every other server with population issues can send their players to. That way, there should always be a lot of people to do events with. (Of course there needs to be a balance too, those event zergs that happened at release were just as kittenoloing events.)

This is basically the solution that Blizzard devised for World of Warcraft in their lastest expansion and it works very well. (Even in Silithus I see other people now!)

It’s a high-fantasy role-playing game, it shouldn’t be about playing what you ARE, it should be about playing what you LIKE. You get this large and detailed fantasy world to explore, it would be a shame to limit yourself to what you look or would like to look in real life. In a MMO, your main character is the closest thing to have to an online identity and you’re going to be interacting with the game world and other players through that character, so it’s important to pick something you’ll want to play as hours upon hours and feel comfortable being identified to by other players.

Personally, my main character is a woman because quite frankly it’s what I want to identify myself with. Ever since I was a boy I always preferred heroines in fiction, and it kind of stayed that way in games. I absolutely love the idea of a strong, heroic and beautiful knight woman protecting the weak with her shield, it’s a really cool figure that I find it exciting to play as one.

I couldn’t care less that my character’s gender doesn’t match mine, I care that I find her very cool and of all the Tyria heroes people can pick, she’s really the one I want to incarnate when I log in. I have absolutely no issues if other players refer to me with a female character, I’m not less a woman in shiny armor then they are male humans who summon meteor showers or command the undead, we’re just playing fantasy heroes we love and feel comfortable being.

I tried making male main characters in RPGs and MMOs including Guild Wars 2 at release, but I just didn’t care about the character and could never relate to them. Make my warrior male and all I’ll see is your typical short-tempered brute and I won’t like him that much. I do play male characters, in fact all my alts are male, but my main character needs to be one I can naturally create bonds with, and it’s just not happening for me if the character is not female. Weird as it may be. =/

^
I agree with this, I love my shield, Shield Stance is probably the best block skill in the game. The only times I don’t carry a shield is when I’m in lower-level zones, and it’s never far in my bags. I’m a very defense-oriented player though. (I refuse to do dungeons because I can’t be full-time defense tank in Guild Wars 2.)

I don’t really like Shield Bash though. Because of the charge animation, it has a delay before the stun, and it happens even if you’re next to your enemy, which makes it very hard, if not impossible, to interrupt anything with it. Considering the 25 second cooldown, it doesn’t feel right. I think it should block or evade during that .5 second charge, so if you miss the interrupt at least you won’t get hurt by it.

I probably should have gone Guardian since I’m more of a defense/tank kind of player and Guardians are better at survival (at least for now), but I find active blocking/stunning with my mace/shield combo infinitely more fun than the passive regens and protection buffs of a guardian, plus their shield skills suck and I just love carrying a shield. (Guardians don’t even block with their shields.) I played a Guardian in the beta and I didn’t like them too much.

There’s too many combinations.

For interesting romance role-play, you need at least 2 choices otherwise it’s not really role-playing. Then, in 2012, after Bioware opened the door to that, you’re pretty much expected to have a same-sex option too, so the actual minimum is probably 3 romance options per race, and per gender. That would force Arenanet to write 30 romance story, and this looks like quite an undertaking.

If the devs are willing to put the resources to do that, I’d be very, very happy. I’d absolutely love to see my character fall in love, but I feel I’d be asking a lot to the devs to make it true.

I’m more a mace & board type of warrior so it’s not a big deal, but I admit that the male’s stance feels better for greatswords. The male’s stance looks strong, powerful and energic while holding his greatsword. The female’s stance, on the other hand, looks weak, like she can’t hold the sword. (Although it might as well be true for 9/10 of the body types, heh.) But she should at least take a defensive pose by holding the sword in front of her.

Personally though, I’m more annoyed by the ridiculous high-pitched “grunt” they make when they use a greatsword. At first I thought it was an error and that they used the asura female voice.

Essentially, my only complaint is that the small chested options all have boy hips. I think they should unlink the chest from the body type.

Are you sure you checked all the body types? Because my warrior’s chest is very flat and I assure you that she still has generous hip curves and looks great and feminine. Men where you live must have quite the curves if you call that “boy hips.”

My character’s body type is also the most muscular body available to human females because I wanted her to look heroic. I guess if you also wanted skinny (so flat chested AND large hips AND skinny) you’re out of luck, but if you start adding restrictions over restrictions don’t be surprised if you can’t get exactly what you want. (Non-obvious restrictions anyway.)

It’s not that I don’t want them to add more choices, but humans already have by a long shot the largest amount of choices available, while races like the asuras and the sylvaris have a rather limited amount of options. I know that people have a much wider idea of what a human could look like than they do for an asura for example, but even considering that, the amount of options an asura has feels very limited. (Their haircuts don’t even fill one page, for example, while human females have 3 pages.)

I wouldn’t mind them adding sliders for full body customization like in Aion, but those sliders tend to allow players to make ugly and deformed joke characters, and the devs seem very strict about the artistic integrity of their games, they want you to be pretty, especially if you’re human. If you can’t even make fat characters I wouldn’t expect them to give us full flexibility in regards to character creation.

I’d like to know when the event ends on November 1st. Tonight on midnight or tomorrow at 11:59 PM? I’ve been too busy to play this game and I have mostly missed the event. I’d like to do the event but I think I’ll need more then tonight to get done with it.

I am wondering the same thing. I loved the world events during the beta closing and I am looking forwards to this, but I am very casual and my highest level character is 57 or 58. Maybe upscaling people to level 80 for the time of the event if the new zone is intended to be high-level.

Blacklight.2871:

Thief is the one profession where skimpy armor would be perfectly reasonable. It’s a profession that relies on it’s mobility more than any other. The lighter and tighter, the better. I wouldn’t say that is necessarily the case for Engineer or Ranger, especially Engineer. But despite that, I sure wish there were some “skimpy” armors for my Ranger, regardless, just for the sake of variety.

Skimpiness has nothing to do with agility, magicians are pretty clumsy and warriors are short on grace and both character types show more skin. (And not only in GW games.) Speed is the point of wearing tight clothes though, which are very limited in numbers. And trench coats are the opposite, which kind of sucks for thieves. (Probably not ideal for rangers either, since long clothes get stuck in branches. and bushes.)

Sexy armor is the least of my worries for thieves, I want more gear that actually look like thief armor. The demo one and the one that exposes the belly on females are the only ones that look like armor that my thief would wear.

I’m not worried though, I would guess that the company got the message with all the complains about the overabundance of trench coats. I’m pretty sure the incoming expansions are going to bring more variety to that armor tier.

Warriors and guardians are hugely popular. Even though there’s only two heavy armor classes I’m pretty sure there are more heavy armor users then medium armor users, or light armor users.

People are confused. What they did in ‘removing’ the ‘holy trinity’ is that they made every class viable for any role. You wanna play a tank ele? you can. You wanna play a healing/support ele? You can. You wanna play a glass cannon ele? you can. No class has any defined role.
Every class is viable in any role. That is the beauty of gw2. You don’t need to spend days leveling a ‘healer’ or a ‘tank’ because your guild needs one. You just need to respec your current character.

Except that a guardian of any spec is a better tank then even a mace/shield defense spec warrior, so I don’t really see the point of specializing your ele into defense because you probably won’t be preferred to tank if a guardian is there. And since guardians are designed to be the class for support-oriented players, they’re way ahead at that role without even trying. (I don’t mean to rant against guardians, they just happen to be way ahead in two roles.) If the design is that everyone should be able to do everything, logic suggests that they would be in a huge hurry to fix what would be an imbalance big like the world.

Yeah I 100% agree, more choice of town clothes would be great. How come a street rat human wears the same clothes as a human noble? We should at least be able to buy and wear everything the everyday town NPCs wears. (Put reasonable gender/race restrictions when it makes sense.) It’s already in the game.

Basically I’d like to have an option to automatically turn town clothes on when I enter a capital city, or at least an easy toggle button when I’m in town. I think it would make town clothes more desirable if you didn’t have to manually turn it on to see it. They’re a cool feature but nobody wears them unless they want to RP or something.

We’ll probably get more but I think we should at least have access to the clothes of town NPCs right now. It doesn’t really make sense that my level 1 street rat girl wears a fancy pink dress, if characters don’t start with a fitting set of town clothes, we should at least be able to purchase more basic sets, even if they’re plain and basic town clothes.

I could be wrong but I believe there’s no fixed aggro mechanic and that it’s in each monster’s AI script. Some will prefer melee, some glue on the first who attacked them, some prefer low-armor target, some deaggro when you dodge, etc.

If you’re positive that it’s not a dye issue you should file it as a bug since they probably applied the wrong material or pixel shader.

Sorry for the guys who rolled a female thief in hope to look like FFX-2 Rikku, but Arenanet seems to care about the themes of the professions that will wear their armor sets when designing them, and for the sake of thieves and rangers, it makes perfect sense that the majority of the medium armors are not skimpy. While engineers also wear medium armor I don’t really see them much more fit for that kind of gear.

You should have seen this coming too. Look at Guild Wars 1’s armor sets, Assassins and Ranger gear had the least revealing armors by a long shot.

It works for light armor because they’re not supposed to get hit, and it actually makes perfect sense for mesmers.

It also works for heavy armor because of the warrior profession, which is the epitome of fitness, strength and with a “come at me bro” attitude. Just think of the movie 300.

But for a trapist or a criminal kind of character, it doesn’t really fit.

Yes Windows 8 will run it. The desktop mode of Windows 8 uses nearly the same software infrastructure as Windows 7. Take Windows 7, remove the start menu, put “ribbon” menus to Windows Explorer and that’s basically Windows 8’s desktop.

It won’t run on the ARM build of Windows 8 though (which I believe is called Windows RT) but it’s only for tablets and smartphones so they wouldn’t run the game anyway.

Hellmood.2097:

The strangest part is, the only body shape of human females that looks remotely curvy has a TINY bust. I’m not asking for Norn milkbags here, but it simply looks unproportional as kitten.

I actually like that body a lot. Large hips and healthy-looking legs is all I’m asking for. =)

I agree that more options would be desirable, but as is the case for their hairstyles, human females have a lot of options compared to many other race/gender combinations, so I don’t think the devs are going to focus on them for the time being.

Human females are just incredibly glitchy. Basically, if your character is not anorexic, her hips and thighs are going to clip through most skirts. Go in the character creator, pick a warrior, pick any body that looks remotely healthy (like the bottom-left one) and hit back to see the high-level armor preview.

As an example of what I mean, here’s my character in Pit Fighter gear. =(
[IMG]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50466051/gw024.jpg[/IMG]

For human females, a lot of skirts, kilts or chest pieces that go below your waist (like the long vests of starter medium armors) are going to clip through your hips if your legs don’t look like toothpicks.

I’m not going to attach screenshots because there’s a lot of cases, and you can see pretty bad ones just with the gear available in the character creation screen.

The easiest way to spot the problematic bodies is to go in the character creator, choose engineer and then cycle through the different body types. If the bodies of the first row are #1 to 5 and those of the second row are #6-10, bodies 2, 3, 4, 6, 9 and 10 all have moderate to serious clipping issues. (That’s 6 out of 10!) You can do the same with warrior’s high level preview set if you hit back after choosing a body. They most likely also clip through the armor set posted by Only He Stands There. (At least body #6 does because that’s my warrior and she definitely clip.)

You probably need to make those skirts and mantles extend just a little bit more outwards on the sides and in front so it spouses the curves of characters with thicker legs. (Please don’t fix the issue by making these bodies thinner, other then body 6 they’re pretty much all anorexic already.)

EDIT:
Here’s an example of my own character clipping through the kilt from the Kessex Hills karma reward.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50466051/gw024.jpg

Here’s the default warrior clipping through her leg armor. I just changed the skin color to make it as obvious as possible.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50466051/gw031.jpg
… and how it looks on heavier bodies.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50466051/gw032.jpg

Also happens on the long coats often seen on medium armor.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50466051/gw033.jpg

Eh, no. I picked the most muscular physique for my warrior and believe me she is as flat as a girl can get. I think there’s also a few skinny physiques that are that way.

It’s just that the big majority of people (or at least the male players) will automatically pick busty physique when making a female character.

Which is fine it’s their character they should make them look good. At the very least a character should look good to the player behind them.

I made a human warrior commoner who wanted to join the circus and went with the Vigil.

I really like how my character started as a simple barmaid who never cared or dreamed about glory, and slowly got dragged into a giant plot to overthrow the queen and the seraph.

I picked the circus because I thought it would be funny and lighthearted, but other then fighting mad carnies it was kind of serious. The story was still nice but I think I should have picked the lost parents instead, I’m sure it would have been more personal.

Then I picked Vigil. My human is only level 44 but so far it’s too militarist for my tastes. I thought they were more your knights in shiny armor type. I feel I should have picked the Order of Whispers. I think Vigil has the best armor sets though.

Wait those squeeks are intended??? I thought it was a bug and we were hearing female asura grunts when using a greatsword. I can’t think that our human girls are really intended to make those sounds when using a greatsword. It also doesn’t sound like their voice when using any other kind of weapon, and even less in one-liners and story dialogs.

My issue with the shield is not that its skills suck. Perhaps they do, but that’s not the issue.

No. The problem is that those skills are just not what I want my shield to do. I equip a shield because I want high defense, and I also want to LOOK like I have good defense, because my character’s physical appearance is important for me. Shields are a very symbolic piece of equipment that signifies defense. So in light of that, I find it very problematic that the guardian’s shield skills are not his best defensive options. Basically, the guardian has to choose between being tanky and looking tanky. That’s just not right.

And it gets even stranger when you consider that the guardian’s shield can’t block anything while a mace or a focus can. Nevermind that blocking is the reason d’être of shields in the first place.

Look at the warrior in comparison. If she wants to go all-out on defense, the shield is by far her best off-hand option, as it should be. If you look at it only from a defense perspective, Shield Stance is without question the best block skill in the game, if not the best defensive skill period. There is no limit to how many attacks it can block for its duration, and the cooldown is shorter then every other big block skills (ie: Shield of Wrath) and can be made even shorter with traits. (Actually, the engi’s Gear Shield is even better but it’s on a fixed skill bar and uses a utility slot while the warrior can use a main-hand like the Mace and have even more defense skills.) So yeah, the warrior’s shield is used exactly for the reason you want to use it.

Now, I’m not asking for Shield Stance for guardians because they already have enough defense as it is, but the shield SHOULD be the guardian’s off-hand of choice for defense, (or at least equal to the focus) and it should have something to do with blocking Personally, I think a skill like “block next attack, give protection to allies on a successful block” would be perfect. It would reward the guardian that can time his block, and the party buffs would fit well in the profession’s support-oriented gameplay

Sure Footed doesn’t seem to affect Shield Stance’s duration. I’m not 100% sure this is a bug since the ability’s description doesn’t start with “Stance.”, but if it’s not considered a stance I would really like to see this ability renamed to something like Shield Cover or Shield Block because this is hugely misleading. I didn’t verify if it works with other stance traits like Vigorous Focus.

Also about Shield Stance, the buff that appears while using it lies about the time left: it thinks that the buff lasts for 6 seconds. (I wish… =P)

Is it intended that Counterblow doesn’t end when it reflects something with Missile Deflection? Because right now it works as a 1-second long missile deflection barrier on a very short cooldown.

Lumines.3916:

Warriors may be able to block pretty well with their Mace/Shield, but it has nothing on Mace/Focus (Focus alone can negate 4 hits). Guardians also have the most liberal access to Protection, Regeneration and Stability relative to all other classes; it also packs Blinds across multiple weapon sets. If they have both highest base HP AND armor with all this mitigation, wouldn’t that just be a tad OP?

Actually mace/shield warriors win the block game hands down and it’s not even close. 10 second cooldown Counterblow (8 if traited) is ridiculous, and Shield Stance is unlimited blocks (basically invulnerable) over 3 seconds on only 30 second cooldown. (24 if traited.)

The way balance seems to work in regard to defense is that guardians are hit more often but for less and whatever they’re hit for, they’ll regen it much faster. On the other hand, warriors have no access to Protection unless it’s in their gear so unless he’s buffed by another character he’s always taking the full hit. So it’s easy to say why the warrior needs a bigger health buffer, while the guardian does not. (And it would be overpowered if he did.)

Also, another thing I like with my guardian about defense is that I can easily share a lot of his defensive skills with other players, so if I’m not being actively attacked by a mob, I still have a lot of ways to protect my party, while a defense warrior would probably have to pull his off-set and do damage or support if he’s not being attacked because there’s no taunts.

Yeah I’m not going to bother with explorable dungeons either, I’m a semi-serious PvE raider in WoW but from what I hear about those dungeons, it’s probably not something I’d enjoy. It’s alright though, the rest of the game is top-notch, I don’t like the dungeon sets anyway, and that gives me an excuse to keep my WoW subscription despite GW2 existing. =)

Also, as a very defensive player, I prefer being a full-time tank and manipulate aggro, so I actually like the trinity.

I play a defense mace/shield warrior and it fits my playstyle handsomely, but from what I hear from other players, if you want to play the defense/tanky card in a dungeon, it’s go guardian or go home and I don’t want to be a “poor man’s guardian.” (I hated my guardian in the beta otherwise I would be playing one.)

Same deal but with Divinity’s Reach. I’m stuck in front of the loading screen.

EDIT: I can load my alt on Black Citadel though.

Nokturnal.8973:

no tanky class wants to run in to melee stuff (cause they’ll instantly die and be unable to dodge anything because THERE ARE NO ENEMY CAST BARS… <- another major BUG… aka problem)

That is why I said there could be a problem with the viability of defense specs because whatever you do, you can’t survive, so why go defense? As someone who likes defensive playstyles, I’m worried that I won’t like exploration mode dungeons because I won’t be able to go in melee to use my block/counter skills without risking to be one-shot.

I understand that there’s no tank but when a boss decides to aggro me and I invested my points into defense, I shouldn’t be 2-shot as soon as Shield Stance falls on cooldown. This isn’t to say that I should be able to picnic in front of a boss and just take damage, there are plenty of games with tank/dps/healer and GW2 doesn’t need to be one, but I think that when they decided to trash the trinity, they didn’t seem to care a lot that some players enjoy defensive playstyles.

But once again, it doesn’t mean that dungeons are too hard, just that maybe defensive players are gutted in dungeons.

First, this isn’t a game bug. I would make a request to be moved to players helping players?

Also, these dungeons must be seen like 5-man raids. Those are intended to be rock hard and take a lot of time for groups to overcome. It would be disappointing if Blizzard released a raid that could be completed in 2 weeks. (Dragon Soul, anyone?) Same deal here, I don’t think Arenanet wants us to clear their hard mode PvE 2 weeks after the game’s release, especially not with all the pre-release worries that this game would lack in PvE due to no 40-man raids and become a PvP-only game.

I do have some worries about dungeons, especially with the viability of defense specs since it seems that defense or not you get two-shot in melee anyway and nobody has enough blocks, dodges and interrupts to stay alive, not even mace/shield warriors. It doesn’t mean that the dungeons are too hard though, just that a spec or two might need help.

I have a really ugly clip issue on my character that prevents me from using the leg piece of the heavy armor set sold by Kessex Hills karma vendors. That sucks because I like the art of that set. I made a post about it with the screenshot and the details, just mentioning it here since it’s a graphic glitch thread.