Guild Wars 2

I don’t really read Reddit so maybe I’m missing an obvious proof that it’s warrior, but personally I think they’re going to hand them to Engineer or to their almightly Revenant. Sounds like they need stun immunity more than us, although thematically it would fit a berserker nicely and give you that nice juggernaut feeling.

But whoever gets it, it may be a double-edged sword because with a break bar comes a stagger effect when you break it. I guess it depends on how many CC would it take to break a personal break bar? If it’s balanced to be breakable in 1vs1 duels if someone has enough CC (ie: mace/shield warrior) then activating the break bar is going to get you insta-staggered in a WvW zerg. And since it’s supposed to be a trait rather than a skill, it’s possible that we may not even control when the break bar pops up.

Of course I hope the break bar is for warriors elite spec, but I also hope they thought about that kind of problem if we’re getting it.

Taunt is one of the greatest thing coming to the game for me. That said it’s a bit weird that naturally tanky class such as the guardian or its elite specialization don’t get taunt.

If warriors’ elite spec doesn’t get taunt either I’m going to be disappointed. With the warriors’ “burst” defenses like Shield Stance or Defy Pain it would be awesome.

Behellagh.1468:

Actually lots of MMOs embed a 3rd party browser. I still have several that use Awesomium which this game also used until they switched to Coherent UI. Why reinvent a browser backend?

I’m not arguing about reinventing the browser, but while we’re there I have to question their decision to use an embedded browser in the first place. They could have made the gemstore UI in C++ and simply write a Web service to fetch the data and the images. That would have been considerably lighter on resources and performances than querying and decoding full HTML+CSS and executing JavaScript. And the gemstore UI would probably be snappier. I mean if they used the embedded browser to make an in-game /wiki command than that would be awesome, so OK might as well use it for other tasks such as the gem store. But if it’s just for the gem store, I dunno

Personally, Guild Wars 2 is the only game I know that does.

Behellagh.1468:

And I don’t think anyone is talking about mutex-locking hardware, the OS does that for us but objects/data structures. Dx9 library is certainly not thread safe and Dx11 is mostly thread safe except in very limited cases. Umbra is thread safe as it only generates a list of potential visible objects, there is no modification of that data set.

The issue is the main line thread can’t generate the data to the GPU fast enough and the shaders on the GPU aren’t complex enough to make the GPU the significant limiting factor. It’s the code. All Dx11 or 12 would do is allow the GPU to process that data faster.

I was not talking about mutex-locking hardware, the operating system will never allow your app to manipulate hardware in the first place. I was talking about being incapable of issuing D3D9 or OpenGL calls from other threads even if you use critical sections and are careful about race conditions because the call will fail at the API level, and that’s why there’s not much that multithreading can do for rendering on D3D9. (Edit for correctness sake: there is a flag for D3D9 to let you do calls from other threads, but it’s still not thread-safe.) DirectX11 I believe will let you do that on some interfaces but not on others, but in the end all it does is defer the synchronization to Direct3D. Direct3D12 will be the first truly multi-threaded, and if the threading issues are as bad as the reddit post make them be, that could actually be a boon to them.

But they shouldn’t have those threading issues in the first place is what I’m saying. That’s why I suspect that this game’s engine has serious software engineering issues that they have been patching but cannot really fix without a rewrite. It’s obvious that the CPU can’t feed the GPU fast enough (although technically the renderer could be fine and something else in the game loop would be the CPU hog) but why is it the case? Most games are GPU-bound, not CPU bound.

To be clear I’m not assuming anything about Anet’s programmers skills when I point out issues like that. MMORPGs are probably the hardest types of game for a programmer to make an optimized rendering engine for. In a single-player game, it’s pretty easy to know what resources the game will need for a given level, so you can pre-load a lot of stuff and then load some others asynchronously if you know you’ll need them a bit later. If a level is overloaded, you can tell your level designer to calm down and remove stuff to keep the 60 FPS. For an MMO on the other hand it’s harder. You know what resources to load for the level, but then you have an unknown number of highly customizable and highly detailed player characters that are probably all different and most likely won’t batch-render very well, and sometimes you may have 1 to render, and later 200. On top of that not all characters are equal for the renderer. If your character owns a legendary and some armor pieces with particle effects all over the place, and on top of that is a ranger with a combat pet out, he’s likely to be a lot more work to render than a level 1 warrior. And sure they have a limit of characters per map (before they spawn a new map) but if they base the maximum of characters per map instance on extreme situations like everyone being on the same area in top legendaries then the limit of characters per instance would probably be very low and the maps would feel empty, so they’re probably making reasonable assumptions and when extreme situations happen then that’s too bad.

As much as I can be understanding about the difficulties of creating a MMO though, I’m also severe because the only platform they support is Windows (Mac isn’t supported natively) so I’d expect the game to run better than it currently does.

But the games I worked on are not without their problems either. Perhaps I should keep my trap shut.

TSX is just a band-aid to the real problem. You shouldn’t have to constantly mutex-lock every other thread before they’re done. At least not constantly. Normally, you mutex-lock for resource access or for calling third-party APIs that are not thread-safe. You don’t constantly bother each other thread with mutex locks because otherwise you may as well do it single threaded due to the operating system’s scheduler latency.

So what are the resources that a game may access? There aren’t a lot in the case of video games because of a lot of the heavy work is done in software.

The most obvious resource is the video card, but all versions of OpenGL and all versions of DirectX earlier than 12 will systematically fail if not called from the thread that created the rendering context, so even if you mutex-lock the there is no point to mutex-lock to call graphics API. You must call it from the render thread and that’s how it is.

Other devices on the system (sound card, network, keyboard, etc.) are resources as well but they generally don’t matter.

I’m not sure what third-party they use that wouldn’t be thread-safe. I have absolutely no experience programming with Umbra so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but since it’s a third-party designed for high-end games I figure it’s not too picky when it comes to threading and other performance-related concerns. The only thing I can think of that maybe wouldn’t be so nice about threads is the embedded browser for the gem store. (Because who embeds a browser in their game?)

So not sure why they would need to constantly mutex-lock other threads over and over again. They seem to have a problem of software engineering. They wrote their engine before you had octo-cores CPUs and whatnot, and now their code doesn’t scale with that new parallelism. They have an engine that probably dates from 2004 or 2005 (not sure when Mike’O left Blizzard to found his company) and now they’re just patching it.

I’ll be glad if we’re getting torch. I don’t want pistol, dagger, or pretty much anything else from Thief, really. I mean I’ll take it if we get it but thematically I think it’s lame. If a warrior wants a ranged weapon he won’t take the tiny pistol and be subtle about it; he’ll take the shotgun (rifle) and go in a Duke Nukem style rampage with it.

That said, I’m not a fan of the “Berserker” name because it’s the name of a stat set. If we’re getting comboed with guardian I think a name like “Champion” would make more sense. If we’re getting comboed with mesmer (the only other torch user that’s not already paired) I admit I don’t have a better name for the elite spec.

I’m not convinced 64-bit would make such a big difference here. Sure you gain performance because your syscalls don’t have to pass through the WoW3264 interop layer, but you’re also losing some performance elsewhere because your pointers are now twice the size, which increases the byte size of your code and the likelihood of RAM cache misses when you run it.

Not to mention that the graphics card driver has no choice to be 64-bits on 64-bit Windows, so all the stuff that happens between the CPU and the GPU, which is non-negligible for a computer game, is already 64-bit.

Don’t get me wrong if they can make a 64-bit client then cool I want one, but let’s say that if they have to make a choice between 64-bit and Vulkan or DirectX12 I hope they don’t pick the former. With all the problems their engine has, I don’t think 64-bit is THAT big of a deal.

I think the new slot should come with the purchase instead of being a pre-purchase bonus, but I think this is a good decision nonetheless.

Although I still think it was a mistake to announce pre-purchase while there’s still so many things we ignore about the game and while we have no idea what the release date will be. I will personally hold on pre-purchasing anything until I know more about the product.

But now that the cat’s out of the bag I think this announcement is a good decision.

It’s kind of a shame that the Guild Halls announcements went unnoticed while this whole debacle was raging on.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Bearhugger.4326:

I hope it’s the torch but it’s probably going to be something lame and completely un-warrior like pistol or dagger.

Why torch? Between LB and the new Burning arrow AND Powerful Synergy we’re already going to have an absurd amount of burn potentially. Any more and we become even more like Guardian (which already has torch) which is not something I think many Wars would want (they already get to play zerk better than us in TPvP).

Warrior+Guardian as our specialization is actually quite possible, and I wouldn’t be so fast to turn it off as a bad pick.

Arenanet want to give specializations things they didn’t use to have. What’s the biggest thing warrior don’t have? Protection! What classes gets so much protection that it comes out of their ears? Guardian.

Torch in that sense would work, but our torch would be themed as a rallying weapon, not as a burning weapon. You could get a skill called something like Rallying Beacon or whatever that would give protection to yourself and all allies.

Then there’s the fact that for 3 years making a bunker Warrior has been kitten near impossible and people asking for it were basically told to reroll Guardian. Getting comboed with Guardian with an emphasis on defense and sustain would fix that problem.

Then there’s the possibility that we get access to taunt, so getting paired with a class with buffier defenses makes sense if we’re going to be spamming that.

For all these reasons I think Guardian would be the best match. I don’t think Thief have anything that could really top protection for us, unless they give us stealth but I wouldn’t daydream about getting stealth on a warrior. The only thing I would like from them would be a taunt shot on pistol.

And anyway I could totally see Arenanet wink at us with a Wa/Mo themed elite specialization.

I hope it’s the torch but it’s probably going to be something lame and completely un-warrior like pistol or dagger.

I don’t think Arenanet saw it coming. They just have an habit of doing missteps with their PR when they have something big to announce.

Thinking of the game’s history since launch, they had a lot of PR disasters:

• The wave of frivolous permabans only a few days after the launch.
• The whole ascended tier fiasco 2 months after launch.
• The complete failure that was Scarlet’s introduction in LW season 1.
• The NPE fiasco.
• The trait hunt fiasco.

I think the expansion’s pricing or packaging is just another item to add to that list.

I seriously couldn’t care less what new players are getting versus what we are getting. Good for them if they get a free game.

I agree with the general opinion that they should absolutely throw in a character slot for everyone, and maybe even an extra bank slot since there might be new items to collect and that will need room in our storage.

However, I think that Arenanet made a huge mistake by announcing the pricing already and starting to take pre-orders. We still know very little about the expansion, and of course we don’t even know the release date of what they’re asking us to pre-purchase. Um, nope. If you’re going to ask me 50$ you’lI have to give me a lot more information about the product.

If they wanted to attract new players I think it would have been wiser to make a super promotion where if you buy (or have recently bought) GW2, you get a 75% cut on the expansion. Or something like that. And keep the pre-purchases for when we actually know the release date and how much new content there’s going to be.

I also think that the editions are lame and uninspired. I purchased the collector’s edition of vanilla GW2 and the bonuses were awesome, but for this expansion it’s going to be the standard edition all the way for me. Sell me a collector’s edition with an art book, a music CD, a making-of DVD, a map or whatever else and I’ll happily buy it, but I’m not interested in paying the premium price to purchase what is basically a gemstore gift card. Completely uninspired and unoriginal.

I’m not versed in either PvP or dungeon PvE so not gonna comment on the actual buffs or nerfs.

But I have to agree that shield not having blocking skills on guardians is just weird. You make a class that is supposed to embody defense and give them a shield icon, yet not only they get to be the worst with a shield but they don’t even get the “fantasy” of using a shield (ie: blocking huge attacks) like warriors do.

Of course you want guardians to equally like all their weapon, but if one has to be worse than the other, it shouldn’t be the shield!

Did they change their mind on the Healing Signet passive nerf? I don’t see any change for Healing Signet listed anywhere.

I admit I wouldn’t mind to keep the Healing Signet passive, especially if poison is going to stack…

Wow, I was expecting a request for Prince Rurik’s legend. Now I think I’m the only one who’d like that.

Engineer or warrior seem like better candidates.

Warrior because I expect them to get an elite spec that buffs their tanking so that would fit.

Engineer because as someone said they suck at dealing with CC.

But given all the love revs seem to be getting, it wouldn’t surprise me if they got the defiance bar too.

meeflak.9714:

The design intent was to create a game where all playstyles are supported by the content there playing. The problem with how its handled is there is a lack of importance in other playstyles outside of meta, I don’t think the goal should be a classic trinity. but I do think that the game should take a step towards making other gear sets and playstyles more optimal so players can feel a sense of importance in there choices as well.

You can build however you want and play however you want yes your right. The problem is playing those roles is a more negative experiance due to lack of proper scaling, the meta, and really just a lack of importance in those roles.

I can see how a trinity is against the design this game was based on, but something needs to be done to improve overall gameplay experience for all roles across the game.

Yeah pretty much this.

I don’t think we’ll ever be forced to play with a tank and a healer of this game. I’m actually surprised with how close to a traditional healer the Ventari legend seems to be. (I personally wasn’t asking that much.) Now I’m a bit annoyed that revenant seems to be the only class to get that option.

I think what we’re more likely to see is a game where there are multiple, different approaches to different encounters, and where the best one is not always the same one. If I want to buff up my defense, take the boss’ attention and play with my blocks, invuls and dodges to stay alive then I will be able to do so, and actually be useful. (In some cases it may be optimal to do that than going with 5 zerkers.) But if nobody wants to do that then that’s cool there are other approaches.

I also think that even if they allow you to play a healy or tanky character in PvE then you won’t have to grab the whole package. For example you can bring a tank but if your tank is good with blocks and dodges you won’t absolutely need a healer because he will take 0 damage anyway, or he will take some but he’ll regen it right back. And if you have a healer then a tank might be superfluous. Hence my example with heroic scenarios in MoP because that’s an example of a game that achieved exactly this.

Guild Wars 2 could break the trinity while still allowing you to play tank and healer roles if you want, and then bring even more roles to the table, maybe people even playing multiple roles at once. You could bring one tank no healer, a healer no tank, all DPS, other new roles, etc. and anything reasonable would work. There is so much potential here, they could completely shatter the trinity and replace it with something completely open and refreshing that moves the stalling MMO genre forwards. It’s a shame it took 2 years to see the devs move on this aspect.

ODB.6891:

There’s nothing that needs to be re-read. What you are asking for is exceedingly clear and what I said was equally clear. You don’t need to specifically say that it would be necessary or preferable to bring a healer…I said it. I said it because it is a definitely and extremely likely possibility of your suggestion. I have no idea of the validity of what WoW implemented as I left that game behind years ago. This is a different game, with different mechanics, and with different developers…apples and oranges. The fact is, this game does not need dedicated roles. In fact, the developers of this game specifically said they were not going to implement dedicated roles in the pre-launch info.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/guild-wars-2-has-no-healers-or-tanks

That’s all the information you could possibly need to answer any questions about the game design and intent. This is what we all purchased.

Way to post a 2010 article about a design that was quite obviously scrapped long before the first closed beta was even opened. Just the fact that the devs haven’t talked a single time about that design for 2 years after the game’s release is quite obvious they didn’t knew what to do with it.

When they broke the silence on it in an interview, I don’t have the exact quote but they basically said that the point they were trying to achieve with their dungeon design was to let players play however they want, not to ban players from ever doing anything other than DPS. Pretty sure Colin also said something in AngryJoe’s interview about supporting variety of playstyles when asked about the zerk meta.

Looking at the revenant class and the elite specializations revealed so far, it looks like they’re actually throwing a bone to players who are tired of the pure zerk meta and are going to try to encourage a larger variety of play styles. I didn’t think they’d ever go as far as what I saw with the Ventari reveal, but it looks like a healer may actually be a thing in Heart of Thorns.

Honestly, the whole rhetoric of “if you want X you picked the wrong game” won’t bring the game anywhere. Game design documents are not sacred and immutable artifacts and if the game goes in the wrong direction the developers should not be encouraged to sit on their mistakes and do nothing. And it’s pretty obvious that their original group PvE design was not a good idea because it’s the only aspect of the game that hasn’t been copied. WvW has been copied. World events have been copied. The more active combat has been copied. Living World has not been copied as far as I know but ex-WoW lead designer Greg Street has said that episodic content is pretty much what he’d do if he were to make another MMO. But there hasn’t been another game that has tried to copy how GW2 does it’s group PvE. That should be a pretty big hint that something is wrong.

ODB.6891:

Bearhugger.4326:

The point is that some people WANT to play a dedicated tank or healer role. It’s not being forced, that’s just how they want to play, and if the game is really supposed to let you play however you want then you should be allowed to play those roles IF YOU WANT. I know a lot of people who said “nope” to GW2 just because it wouldn’t really let them play healers.

It does NOT mean that it has to be mandatory to bring a healer or a tank in the future. It could be better in some fights, while for other fights the zerk meta might be better, and other fights might prefer totally new strategies. There’s a lot of things Arenanet can do here.

You do realize, that the moment it becomes necessary or even preferable to have a healer or a tank, then that becomes a mandatory role in groups? That means forced roles…even if not forced by the game itself…but forced by meta. As it is now, there is literally nothing stopping anyone from clearing any content. What exactly is broken about that? What part of that needs fixing? If you want to roll up into any content with 5 nomads…you can…and you can clear the content. If you want to roll up into any content with 5 zerks…you can…and you can clear the content. If you want to build your character based on healing….have at it. If someone wants to build their character based on all damage…the same applies…not sure why people have a problem with this fairness? This expectation that a group should be forced to accept your play style or choices is pretty ridiculous. Groups are made of players…not AI, and therefore should be free to make their own decisions on who and what they want to group with. This game is about fun…fun is not being forced to reserve group slots because you need a healer or a tank to survive. By the same token that players did not buy this game because of the lack of forced roles…there are lots of players that bought this game because they were not going to be forced into these same roles. The minute I log in and see that I can’t clear content because I have to wait for a tank or healer to join….or that I cannot get a group slot because they need a tank or a healer instead…that’s pretty much the end of me logging in to this game. I’m pretty sure there is a large population of players that feels the same way. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, ANET, by trying to cater to players who failed to read the original game description or to players who can’t/refuse to adapt to a new game and its mechanics.

Re-read my post. I never said that it should be necessary or preferable. I said that it should be one way to play the game, among many others. From the moment you have several strategies available to you then of course sometimes one will be better than the other for a specific encounter but that’s how it should be. It would be a lot more interesting than zerk meta for 99% of the encounters.

And don’t tell me that it’s impossible because Blizzard (of all MMO developpers!) did it just fine when it introduced heroic scenarios in Mists of Pandaria. In those there were no role restrictions so you could bring whatever you wanted, and guess what? All DPS was not always the most optimized way to go. Bringing a tank or a healer was sometimes more efficient, sometimes not. And if Blizzard could pull this off with a game so deeply rooted in the tank/healer/DPS paradigm then Arenanet can definitely do it too.

The point is that some people WANT to play a dedicated tank or healer role. It’s not being forced, that’s just how they want to play, and if the game is really supposed to let you play however you want then you should be allowed to play those roles IF YOU WANT. I know a lot of people who said “nope” to GW2 just because it wouldn’t really let them play healers.

It does NOT mean that it has to be mandatory to bring a healer or a tank in the future. It could be better in some fights, while for other fights the zerk meta might be better, and other fights might prefer totally new strategies. There’s a lot of things Arenanet can do here.

piano man.1672:

Belenwyn.8674:

If all classes can fill all roles with the same efficiency – it could be the goal to be reached with specialisations – we will not have a traditional Holy Trinity.

You’re right. We’ll have an untraditional, unique holy trinity that not only fulfills GW2’s goal of “all classes = any playstyle” , but also fulfills the hopes of individuals who want to see this system in play while still having a system that promotes roles.

If the specializations cause every profession to go this route, I’m all for it.

I’d love to see the day where any profession can fulfill any role.

Amen to that!

Although I’m a bit worried that revenant will be the only class to truly support all roles this well. I have no interest whatsoever into the revenant but I happen to love playing tanky characters in groups so I might be forced to play a rev. Revenants get to be tanky AND get a taunt; not even guards get that.

jheryn.8390:

1. Mounts would add to the amount of AI and Characters on any given map. Thus reducing the amount of players that could appear on any given map.

No, that’s not how it works. Mounts are not their own entities, they are a “mod” for the player’s appearance with a % speed increase. They only have to be their own entity if you can dismount them and have them follow you, but that’s not what most people are asking for.

jheryn.8390:

2. Many people already have FPS issues with the game and that could make it worse.

Might as well cancel the expansion and start removing content from the game if we’re going to let FPS dictate what gets into the game. And by the way I’ve seen FPS issues on an overclocked GeForce GTX 970 so the game’s gonna be pretty barren when nobody has FPS issues.

jheryn.8390:

3. We have a waypoint system that allows quick transport to almost any area of any map. Even if a point is contested there are usually more than enough close by to access something just as easily.

Fast travel is only half the point. Waypoints don’t make your characters look cool like a good mount does.

jheryn.8390:

4. There are speed boosts galore in this game. Including built in ones after combat.

See above.

jheryn.8390:

5. There are skills and abilities that grant speed boosts and it is the decision of the player to utilize them or not. No one is forcing a player to use them but they are there if you want.

See #3. Also, lasts 5 seconds, increase run speed by 33%, 30 seconds cooldown.

This is my main issue with revenant.

The devs realized that a non-negligible portion of their playerbase prefers playing tanks, supports, healers, etc. than pure DPS and it is probably a big reason why this game’s dungeons are such a failure, so OK they are adding a new class that can do all this.

But the other classes don’t seem to get much in the way of non-DPS roles. Even guardians who were intended to be a crutch for players who play tanks or healers in other MMOs are getting completely demolished by revenant legends.

And nevermind other classes. For example I wish my warrior could be a competent tank/bunker because warriors actually have good shield skills, but if even guardians are demolished in tankiness by revenant then I have no hope for warriors (or any other class.)

I dunno, I was hyped for GW2 a year and a half before release, and I had never played GW1 at the time, the hype came from me reading the dev blogs and then looking at almost entirely positive commentaries on Youtube. Even if the game’s launch is farther than we think, I think they could do something.

Mounts would be a great addition to the game, I don’t think the naysayers make very good points against it unless they mean flying mounts.

Well elites seem to be themed around bringing skills from another class and ranger has already been paired (with guardians) so I don’t think warriors are getting survival skills.

I think warrior are more likely to get something reminiscent of the classic “WaMo” warrior from Guild Wars 1 so they’ll probably get paired with mesmers and get mantras, or guardians and get meditations. Such an elite specialization would probably buff warrior sustain and support, and given that the most popular suggestion for bunker warriors is to reroll guardian (lol) I think it would complete the class nicely. A lot of classes are getting access to new buffs so I’d also expect warriors gain access to either protection or taunt.

Would probably be called something like “Knight” or “Champion” although Arenanet could always go “high concept” for the name. Guild Wars class names are pretty hard to guess. Probably not “Paragon” though because it would take the spear.

For the rest I think you’re correct. Warriors are probably getting torch and an off-hand burst. Dagger or pistol would be boring and completely “un-warrior.” I mean do warrior players actually want to be pirates or swashbucklers? That would be dragonhunter 2.0.

If we get off-hand burst I expect 2h weapons to just get a 2nd burst to be balanced with 1h+shield or dual-wield.

OP whatever HoT turns out to be I’m not sure how you could ever call this an overhyped pack. I think it’s actually underhyped right now. Let’s just say that there are two big MMOs that are releasing an expansion this summer, but looking at the gaming media you’d think there’s only one. (And no it’s not Heart of Thorns.)

If anything I think Arenanet should double the marketing effort with Heart of Thorns because I’d like to hear more about it in the gaming media. I think they offer an interesting alternative to the traditional MMOs. For example there’s no other MMOs devs that spend the majority of their PvE working budget on casual content like the Living World. GW2 will probably never ring well for hardcore PvE players but I think they have an interesting product for more casual players.

I see Arenanet’s name on the E3 panel for PC gaming. I hope they’re preparing the coolest trailer they’ve ever made because there’s no better place to hype a game than E3.

Anyway, back to the actual topic, I’m personally more a world PvE and story-junkie kind of player so my expectations is a continuation of the LW season 2 storyline, insteresting world events including group ones, lots of stuff to do with mastery, lots of exploration and jumping puzzles, things like that. I also hope for good elite specializations for the classes I play , obviously. Not super interested in revenant but meh, might try it out a little.

That’s about it.

Druid? Looks like they ARE following the order that the professions are listed on the main site. I thought it was just a coincidence.

So next are Elementalist and Warriors, then break, then Thief, Engineer and Revenant?

But I’m sure Arenanet can still troll me with that!

What I’d like to know is what happens with melee attacks if your foe crosses the barrier.

If you’re still blocking melee attacks from a foe that has crossed the barrier then it’s very counter-intuitive to your allies AND your opponents (if PvP.) But if the guardian is not blocking melee attacks across the barrier then it might as well not block melee since there’s a good range between you and the barrier.

Concerning the engineer Gear Shield risking a nerf for having a 20 seconds cooldown, I wouldn’t consider that a sign of an impending nerf for DH F3.

Notice that the warrior Shield Stance does exactly the same thing as Gear Shield but has 30 seconds cooldown, so that’s probably why Arenanet would consider a nerf. Personally I justified it by the fact that the warrior can carry any main-hand with her shield AND can trait it to not only have 24 seconds cooldown but also reflect all projectiles so Shield Stance is far more versatile than Gear Shield, but maybe Arenanet still doesn’t consider Gear Shield balanced vs other blocks.

uhohhotdog.3598:

Better than wow for sure. I think the way the game is designed leads to that. It’s more cooperative than competitive.

As someone who plays both games I unquestionably agree with that.

GW2 doesn’t have monthly fees so I don’t feel that they have to constantly pump out content constantly like those P2P MMOs. Although of course new content is always appreciated.

WvW is this game’s huge hit and has been copied in other MMOs. Obviously, they must put new maps to keep the game mode fresh, but I don’t think they need to overhaul the whole thing.

In the meanwhile this game has been very heavily criticized shortly after launch for having almost no serious content for PvE-centric players. It makes sense to me that Arenanet would focus more on PvE to make GW2 worthwhile for PvE players. I’m not convinced that their attempt at making that PvE experience in the open world instead of raids will work out well, but at least they’re trying something.

Cyninja.2954:

How does passive healing define the warrior? Explain please.

If at all I’d give that card to guardians with their class skills and utilites. Warrior is more of an high mititgation, temporal kill/damage immunity class.

Warriors are not high mitigation at all, they don’t even get access to protection. Warriors take a lot of damage and survive by having a lot of health, but it only delays the inevitable if you can’t heal the health lost.

Enter Healing Signet: now warriors still take a lot of damage but they regenerate it quickly so it gives them the sustain they need.

I don’t really care that they nerf Healing Signet’s passive regen because it’s not super good game design to put the sustain of an entire class in one skill and a couple of traits, but they’ll have to compensate the loss of sustain elsewhere when they do.

Personally I’m going to wait until I see the warrior specialization before I worry about my warrior because they could very well nerf Healing Signet but give warriors a defense-focused elite specialization with skills, traits and passives that easily make up for the nerf on Healing Signet.

I’m interested but I wouldn’t say I’m hyped.

I was super hyped before and at launch and I thought it would become the next “big thing” in MMOs, but after I dinged level 80 and saw that the PvE endgame looked like I lost interest and 1 month after launch I purchased Mists of Pandaria and I really only came back to GW2 for the Living Story updates.

I think Heart of Thorns is going to be a good addition to the game, but I don’t think it’s going to be a game changer or make Guild Wars 2 super popular and triple the playerbase and whatnot.

Me? I’ll probably get the expansion, the real question whether I want to get it at launch or later at a discount.

What would hype me a little bit would be some info on how they’re going to make PvE more relevant. In the Angry Joe interview, Colin said that group PvE would be a big focus, that they were aware of the problems and all that, but so far we haven’t heard much about how they intend to make PvE better. But I suppose a really cool warrior elite specialization reveal could hype me as well since I main that class.

Arantheal.7396:

warrior on the other hand has not the slightest info getting leaked about. and the remaining weapon-pool is very small since one of warris strengths is its access to most weapon-types.
So either a-net has planned something big that they want to keep hidden under any circumstances until they reveal it, or they themselves have no idea yet.

Well one thing that has come out is that we seem to be getting an F2, and since we’ve been asking for an off-hand burst forever that’s probably what a F2 is going to be if they didn’t scratch it. It has been hinted by the devs that we’re getting “another way to spend adrenaline” so I’m pretty sure it’s that off-hand burst people have been asking for a long time.

So you can suppose that we’re getting an off-hand weapon to go with it, and probably an off-hand only weapon since giving us off-hand pistol or dagger without the main hand would be a little odd.

They could give both a main-hand and an off-hand but I don’t think they’ll give 5 new weapon skills to to the class that already has access to the greatest number of weapons when mesmer only got an off-hand, so I really think we’re only getting an off-hand, and that removes pistol and dagger from the list.

Of the remaining weapon candidates, the most likely one seems to be torch. Unless revenants use the torch that would match us with either mesmer or guardian. So I guess our new skills could be mantras, meditations, conjures (yuck) and so on.

Funny, with suggestions of us maybe getting a ‘knight’ themed specialization (since war/guard is still a possibility) I thought what if our new elite skill gets us a pony to ride. Then we get a defiant bar to throw us off of it.

Unlikely, I know…

I’m not sure why you guys want hard content in open world, that’s asking for a nightmare of logistic. A bunch of casual will stumble onto open world hard content, wipe the group because the boss will scale and then the casual players will spend the rest of their gaming evening receiving salty insults, death threats or whatever other nonsense angry competitive gamers can do.

WoW has hard content but they put it in raid instances so guilds can deal with people not pulling their weight. But with world events, the hardworking guilds have no control over who gets to do an encounter so this is just going to ruin the community and promote elitism.

I think it’s about time Arenanet kills the “zerk-only” meta and introduces raids to their game so people who want really hard content can get it without ruining the community because an open world event was ruined by a bunch of newbies.

I don’t want conjures, kits, and pretty much anything from Thief except shadowstep.

I wouldn’t use it but given how Arenanet doesn’t seem to care about RP players I don’t think they would care to do something like this.

I think it’s Guild Halls too.

witcher.3197:

cam.8712:

ive been using warrior since game was realeased and seriously , a warrior using daggers ?

Well there were really effective dagger warrior builds in GW1 – you CC the target with hammer, switch to dagger and land a lengthy, lethal burst chain. It was fun :P

a pistol for a warrior would mainly be an engi or thief with heavy armor(without stealth or turrets)

That is wrong on so many levels. Is a GS warrior the same as a GS mesmer just with heavy armor?

The problem with dagger and pistol is that those wouldn’t bring anything new to the warrior class.

What could dagger bring to warrior which would be new? Melee damage certainly isn’t new. A block on the off-hand would be plausible (the “main gauche” and “swordbreaker” are known as parrying daggers) but we already have a block on another off-hand (sword) so that would be a little redundant. They could give us a shadowstep but we have plenty of mobility already. We could get stealth but I don’t think it would be reasonable to give that to warriors, plus warriors are those big, tough and loud guys so stealth doesn’t really fit.

Pistol would be a little more interesting but the problem with pistol is that since we’re rumored to get a F2 skill for off-hand burst, it’s more likely to be a pistol off-hand if we get pistol and we don’t really have a good main-hand ranged option, so not sure what we could get with pistol that would be useful. I also find pistol thematically conflicting with the warrior concept. A warrior doesn’t go at war with a puny little pistol. For range I can see them grabbing the huge shotgun (rifle) and optimize the decibels per second. Or they’ll grab a huge longbow and shoot fire arrows and set everything on fire. I think the only good thing we could get out of pistol is a taunt shot.

Of the weapons we’re missing and that haven’t been given to other specializations, the only one that I think could bring something new and still look thematically correct is torch. The torch could be used to give boons (like a war rallying beacon or something), and give us access to the protection boon for example. Or as a taunt weapon.

Just for the thematics, I would personally be disappointed if we get dagger or pistol because it just doesn’t fit with the warrior concept… although with guardians getting traps and becoming hunters I can’t say I would be surprised if Anet mangles the theme of a second class with a specialization.

Torch would mean that we get “matched” with either guardian or mesmer. Guardian would make more sense (GW1 WaMo would be nice) but Engineer would have to get matched with Revenant instead of Guardian. (We know Engineer are getting hammer and there’s not a lot of choice.) Mesmer would be okay too, especially if we get mantras.

Dragonhunter fixes a lot of problems with Guardian. It just doesn’t have the cool factor of the reaper or the chronomancer, but it seems to be adding good things to the class when you look behind the lame name.

I think the problem is more that a lot of guardian players aren’t really interested to play at range with traps like a ranger; they picked a guardian to play a paladin archetype, and the new skills bring them to the opposite of that playstyle.

I wouldn’t mind a staff because quarterstaff-style combat sounds fun, but with druids getting staff our warriors probably won’t touch it for the time being. Personally I predict that warriors get torch.

Danikat.8537:

I think the game looks fantastic as it is. Sure it’s not the most hyper-realistic graphics you can get, even in an MMO, but it’s beautiful. (See below.)

And because a lot of that is down to the art style rather than simply making the most realistic graphics they could manage on the most powerful engine they could get upgrading the engine is unlikely to achieve much without them also going through and re-designing every single object in the game to make use of the new engine.

On the plus side past experience suggests that it also means the game is likely to age better than many which go for realistic graphics.

For a quick and easy extreme example look at Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. OoT was amazing when it first came out, it may be hard to believe today but people could not stop talking about how good it looked. These days even when reviewing the updated re-releases journalists will urge players to look past the graphics to appreciate everything else the game has to offer.

Wind Waker on the other hand was somewhat controversial at first for the extremely cartoony, cel shaded look. But these days no one makes any apologies for it, it looks nearly as good by modern standards as it did when it was released.

And for an MMO which (hopefully) many people will still be playing in 10 or 15 years time that’s important.

The art direction is ultimately what makes a game look good, but you need to give the artists the mean to make it look good, and that’s the role of the engine programmers.

That’s the thing I find paradoxal with Arenanet. I think they have the best artists in the industry (after maybe the ones behind Assassin’s Creed games but that’s close) and I regret not having purchased the art book at launch because I think it’s a collector’s item now, but the engine that Arenanet gives their artists to work with is (or at least looks) abysmal.

Also, I disagree with your Zelda analogy. The reason why games from the 1995-2000 era such as Ocarina of Time or Super Mario 64 look ugly is because those games were created when 3D graphics just began becoming mainstream so they had a very low poly count. But if you look at the games with pre-rendered 2D graphics from that era like Diablo II, Starcraft or the prerendered backgrounds from FF7-8-9 they still look great. (Pixelated because of the media, but they still look great.) Heck even Donkey Kong Country still looks good. And today the realtime graphics look better than the prerendered 2D graphics of that era, so I don’t think people will look at current gen games and think they’re ugly.

It’s not just the graphics renderer that seems wrong, a lot of other things are just weird.

Like how they can’t support Mac natively and have to use a Windows emulation layer like Cider to make it work? Do they program gameplay directly against the Win32 API to make it such an unsurmountable task to support non-Windows platforms without Cider? It’s against all software engineering good practices to mix platform-specific API calls with the business logic. Normally you’d “just” have to port the renderer to OpenGL and you would be 90% done.

Another one is how they embedded a full HTML renderer in the engine for the trade post. Really? Why not just a simple RESTful web service for fetching and sending data and render the UI natively? The trade post UI feels very sluggish right now…

Yeah, I’d like them to rewrite their engine, but the graphics engine’s woes is just half the story.

Choppy.4183:

Ultimately, I don’t think it’ll matter. I’m not sure if I’m in the minority or not, but I’ve been impressed with ANet’s moves with all of this so far.

I don’t think you’re only one, I see pistol and dagger suggested as the warrior weapon all the time.

Personally those are the weapons I am the least excited to get because I think they are too “rogue-ish” to fit a warrior and I personally despise the theme of “rogue” archetypes in videogames.

I think torch fits a lot more because I can easily picture an angry barbaric warrior running with a torch in his hand, threatening to put everything on fire. I can’t really picture that same guy pulling a small knife from his pocket and going at war with it, and even less a pistol and doing a “clean” job of his foe.

I also think that with the rumors of us getting an F2, an off-hand weapon makes more sense than a mh/oh. I don’t see Arenanet giving us 5 all-new weapon skills when we already use so many weapons.

I guess we’ll see what we’ll get in a few months, although I’m a bit bummed about the break on specialization reveals, although if it happens to be because they want to revise the unannounced specialization after the lukewarm reception to Dragonhunter then I guess it’s a good thing.

^
There’s Torch too, and personally I think that’s what we’ll be getting because pistol and dagger are too subtle as weapons and foci and scepter are magic. A big torch would fit nicely though.

My choice would be staff (for quarterstaff style fighting) but I think we’ll get torch. My reasoning is this:
1- Looking at some screenshots, there is a very strong indication that we’re getting an F2 skill, which is most likely an off-hand burst since bursts are weapon-based. (Not sure what it’d do for 2-handed weapons.)
2- Torch is off-hand so it would benefit from an F2 skill. It would be silly to get a new weapon that can’t use the F2.
3- Pistol, scepter and dagger are one-handed weapons that could fit in either hand (so technically F2 compatible) but I don’t see Arenanet giving us 5 new weapon skills on top of all those F2 skills. (Although ele are probably getting 12 new weapon skills minimum so I guess that point could be debated.)
4- Focus and scepter do not really fit the theme of the class. The magic-themed armored class is the guardian.
5- Likewise, pistol, dagger and shortbow don’t really fit the theme of the class because those are more “stealth” types of weapon and warrior are everything but subtlety.
6- Torch fits the class, we already have fire effects on bow, and an horde of angry pillaging warriors enjoys putting villages on fire.
7- From a game design perspective, warrior already has plenty of weapons, and those cover most roles, so it would make more sense to give them a small (2-skills off-hand) weapon and to just add an extra skill to all the weapons (the F2) they already have.

Of course I could be 100% wrong, and I wouldn’t bet any of my goods on that.

For the new class of skills I have no idea what we’re getting. If I’m right that we’re getting torch, then the torch users are guardian, mesmer and ranger, and thematically, guardian and ranger both make sense. I could see us getting survival skills if ranger and meditations if guardian.

Again, pure speculation.

EDIT: I forgot guardians got ranger skills. So warriors are probably getting guardian skills if we indeed get torch. I don’t see what mesmer could get us. (Mantras? Nah, I think that’s what thieves are getting since they’re all about instant attacks.)

The lack of tanks and healers or any replacement of those roles (what happened to support/control???) mean that this game never really had compelling dungeons in the first place (at least compared to other MMOs) but on the other hand what it has is pretty good for world events because anyone can jump in and help when an event happens, while in other games a group would restrict from doing a hard world boss because there is no tank or healer.

I’m 100% behind Arenanet focusing on more complex and challenging dynamic events instead of more dungeons because I want them to exploit what this game is good at. People who bought the game expecting compelling raids and dungeons probably quit years ago anyway.

Anyway, for those absolutely wanting new dungeons and raids, the devs have said many times that they are/were/thinkof brewing and experimenting with raids so I’m sure it will happen some day. My bet is that they want to see if the new game mechanics (such as the defiance bar and the taunt condition) enable more fluid cooperation between players and break the monotonous meta of all-DPS in PvE: if that’s the case I could see them importing that in dungeons and hopefully raids and try to create compelling instanced PvE experience.

Mattmatt.4962:

Chrono trigger ?

Nobody has ever won a thread as much as you just have there. Highfive, bro!

Yeah I was thinking the same. No real need for the distinction now. It would also be good if they were all as powerful since the distinction doesn’t matter anymore.