Those three nerfs I thought were pretty fair – being able to cast phantasms through doors was a bit daft. Now at least I have to go to the battlements like everyone else – and unless the place is blanketed with AoEs it’s not a big problem.
Moa/tuna form is still going to throw people off. That’s the main purpose, not to render them completely worthless for a few seconds but to break their game plan.
Portal I thought needed some adjustments, but adding 30 seconds to the cooldown isn’t going to change anything. Limiting uses to 5 would have been more sensible. That would do nothing to fort infiltration – you just send five mesmers through for recursive portal madness and get 30 people in there within seconds – but it would slow down portal bombing.
More seriously, it has a long cast time – the smaller the fight, the more likely you are to see it coming and counter it. In a large fight, you can back off and wait for it to expire without much difficulty.
It could be something planned for later when traps (hopefully) aren’t one of the main things a ranger can do well. Flame Trap recharge is so short it’s an obvious skill to take – it could do with being dialled back a little, if only there was anything else that was a useful substitute.
It would bring everything else into line, recharge-wise, with Frost Trap… but that only has any merit where the 66% reduced recharge is going to be helpful (i.e. not PvE). Otherwise Spike Trap does much the same with damage on top.
I might think about it with Nature’s Vengeance, but I’m not putting 20 points into a poor attribute tree just to make spirits almost good. The problem is, the benefit they give you simply isn’t that good when it happens at most every 10 seconds.
Think the last bullet point was
•Reduced active ranger playerbase by 40 percent. 97 percent of active rangers are now bots.
While this would be a great way to filter out all the bots, this has made a positive difference in dungeons… I think. Will have to take another look at spirits and see if the numbers are looking alright.
Except for traps. I’m going to wait until the later update to see what happens to those before re-traiting – if the cooldown has been increased significantly it’ll affect synergy.
The idea of making rangers so unpalatable to general players that only bots would use them, and then just banning all active rangers is funny, but the bots would just use other classes and you’d hit a few legitimate players who only do open-world PvE in the process.
And of course you’d take out all the rangers who’ll be camping the lake and bay keep in WvW borderlands. With the number of sharks assaulting people we’ll see, it could be mistaken for Cronulla.
The adjustment to spirits was a step in the right direction. I’d double it again to 50-60%/100% traited, but actually having them trigger often enough to be worth taking is a plus.
The rest of it… well, maybe I should have another look at greatsword. Sounds like traps have gone from being the only good thing about the class to garbage, but it does free up some attribute points for Offhand Training and give me a reason to use a torch instead of fire traps, perhaps think about using spirits for once…
And then there’s the underwater buffs. The only place where a ranger was brutal, it’s now even more powerful.
We’re like Jaws. Whatever you do, stay out of the water.
Got 10 charr, of which 7 are female.
Curiously, of my four non-charr, there’s one female and three males. Most games I play the vast majority of my characters are female, but I wasn’t too keen on the female designs for sylvari and norn.
They were designed as a replacement for standard orc monsters. In retrospect they do look like they were inspired by Beauty and the Beast, and at least one of the artists is a Disney fan, but the original concepts would indicate they evolved into something like that rather than being inspired by it.
Probably going to see more of those in future expansions. Blood and Ash are based in different territories – Blood to the north, if I recall correctly, and Ash across the Blazeridge Mountains to the east?
Talk to NPCs in the higher-level charr zones. There’s a fair amount of interesting dialogue to be seen.
@ Sdric: You certainly didn’t crit 8k on an auto-attack with your thief. No doubt that’s the result of “Unload.” 1k for an auto-attack on the condition-heavy short bow is very respectable. In short, your pictures don’t mean what you think they mean.
I’d never argue that rangers don’t need a damage boost, but your screenshots don’t demonstrate much.
Auto-attack is the best burst you’re going to get out of a ranger, unless you’re keen on running up there with a sword and praying you don’t get hit.
The lag is workable from Asia to NA, mostly. 300-400ms is about the borderline of playability and there are already regions of Asia-Pacific that have that kind of ping in GW2.
Force me to deal with the 500-600 ms pings to European servers and I’m getting a refund. I’ve been shunted onto EU servers in GW1 before, it’s just a waste of time.
I quite liked Mesmer Norn and Granite Citadel sets. Honourable mention to the Obsidian set dyed hot pink. :]
For other professions, the Necro Elite Kurzick was one of my favourites, and the Ranger had a good trenchcoat in the Norn set. Monk Canthan armour had a good pattern to it.
Getting close to 80 now on my Mesmer, and I have to say it’s a lot better. Lower levels for PvE was horrendous, but now it’s great.
Low levels are going to suck. Just grind through it, and you are rewarded with a great profession.
I’ve noticed this as well in levelling a second mesmer. It’s not even as good as a scaled level 80 who’s not wearing armour. There’s definitely a bit of a lull in the mid-levels, but it still has quite nice utility – albeit a bit light on party support beyond condition removal.
If you’d bought a bunch of gems with gold close to release and waited until now to trade back to gold, you’d still come out way ahead. Price is about 6x higher per gem.
It’s hard to know if there’s another 33% left in the market, though – holiday events are going to spike the prices more than anything else, and after this one we’ve got Wintersday coming up. By January the prices could be dropping for the first time.
I can understand why they’re bound – karma items aren’t supposed to be tradeable – but if they were account bound instead of soulbound, I could at least use the armour piece on another character. As it is right now, I’ve ended up with an expensive, non-refundable, waste of inventory space.
Spirits: Remove the 20% chances – make it 100%. The buffs they provide aren’t particularly powerful anyway. If they were always on, rangers might at least contribute something besides the warhorn. Spirit of Nature could do with being 5 times more powerful as well, the healing on that is so weak it’s a wasted elite.
SBI does actually have a pretty big Oceanic crew… haven’t seen much of them lately though. We had some decent competition over the weekend but by last night I was just seeing handfuls of SBI and JQ fighting at spawn.
JQ’s numbers weren’t that big either, but for some reason we’ve stopped trying to cap anything regardless of enemy numbers. I can understand the reluctance to spend any gold on a lost cause – I’ve stopped wearing armour for all the good it does – but I don’t want to end up being a lone random running around a green map.
Fights were actually better during the beta and 1-day matchups because people didn’t just stop turning up – apart from the initial mismatches that is.
I still keep jumping into WvW for some reason, but particularly during the Oceanic primetime there’s less and less to do every time. Fortunately, without a subscription fee, I’m not in any hurry – I have a couple other games I was going to play more of eventually. And there’s still stuff I want to see in GW2 PvE at some point.
My experience is that maxing out Beast Mastery is highly effective in PvE, but it’s a waste of points in PvP where the pet is less reliable and staying alive requires effort.
Which is trifling compared to the data required for other attributes – and in terms of disk space I can only imagine what the servers have to cope with to populate the world with players and NPCs.
You’d need to set up heavy siege inside the fort you’re trying to take.
To be honest, I’d like to see forts etc. a bit harder to take. Not that I want to see the game completely static, but a bit more so than it is (some JQ players may remember holding Bluelake for 8 hours against two servers in the BWEs, which is rare to see these days). Providing basic siege equipment as soon as camps, towers and forts are capped might help too, so that defenders always have a boost to firepower provided they have two or three people there.
What do you mean? AN can absolutely stop this and it happens in many other games. You log out or completely disconnect, your avatar still stays in game for 10-20 seconds, you get the kill/loot and they get the penalty. I immagine AN will make it so at some point.
GW1 has a 10 minute disconnect timer (in PvE at least) where your toon stays in game on an abrupt d/c. I know because I healed a buddy’s toon for nearly the whole of that time at the end of The Deep so that he could reconnect and get his chest loot. For WvW I think a combat logout should work the same way.
IoJ and BG are likely to focus a lot of effort on us simply because of territory held. Overnight when I get back home they tend to focus on separate maps – generally holding a lot of territory on each. Seems SBI has more night-time coverage across 4 maps this week though.
If you’re just playing PvE, go for Beast Mastery. The damage pets can deal (and absorb) when fully specced is insane, as you’re seeing there. Unfortunately they don’t work in PvP.
Stealth isn’t really a big issue with thieves; the ability to jump in and out of large enemy groups as a solo player is more concerning – if only because other classes can’t do the same thing without getting stomped.
I’d rather see other classes get more useful utility skills than just see the skills that have utility get nerfed. At the moment there seems to be an aversion to GW1-style skills that are as powerful as the first half of the skill bar when used properly… so what we get now is button mashing.
That would be because dope is in the prohibited list.
I’ve tried drakes briefly but found their breath weapon to be too dodgy. There’s a bit of a delay before they cast it, during which time anything they were attacking invariably moves out of the way. So, I decided to stick to cats and birds.
You cannot fully guard a mesmer teleport line. It only works if you’ve got a clear line to your target, and from there it’s a race against time to break the keep / castle before the golems run out of HP. I won’t be surprised to see golems excluded from mesmer portals, but having been on the receiving end of this tactic I respect the amount of co-ordination it takes to pull it off… and yet it still doesn’t always win the day. Saw at least 6 golems get wiped in a keep last night before they could cap it.
Sounds like the same thing you face anywhere. Getting tag-teamed is just what happens when you’re ahead on the scoreboard. Now ET has a good hold on second place they’d want to make sure SBI’s lead doesn’t get too big – and that’s exactly what they did last night, the anvil to HoD’s hammer.
EB first night one keep in the lowlands being attacked for 12 straight hours, ET and SBI taking turns running through the same hole.
No swords on the map anywhere else, not one supply camp or tower taken that ET and SBI own.
That is what you guys call Focus while patting yourself on the back saying how good you are.
Your not fooling anyone but yourself.
We were trading supply camps around Ogrewatch periodically. ET definitely wasn’t bringing their full force against us down there though – we had more issues with their trebs along the HoD border firing at Stonemist.
Even on Sunday, they had a group trying to take Stonemist from the north. Were it not for them we’d have kept it, but even with most of our siege gone they never reached the inner gate until the HoD siege golems turned up.
We saw siege golems again shortly afterwards in SBI borderlands to take our last keep – more of them, in fact, about 6-8 – but PRX lost all of them in the keep lord room when the group attacking one of ET’s towers recalled.
I’ve had no complaints about the format so far – if anything it works better than the Battle of Claw Island cutscenes where the graphical quality starts to look like I’m watching a GW1 cutscene again.
The main immersion issue I see is railroaded dialogue. After level 30, the quest chains merge together and racial distinction is lost – as an example, it doesn’t really work to have a charr go with Trahearne on that little vision quest in the Pale Tree without one mention of how hocus-pocus this all seems. If the dialogues with Trahearne weren’t so strictly business I think he would have looked like a deeper character.
Trahearne’s VA might have seemed pretty monotone, but for a sylvari I think he kind of makes sense. Wasn’t too happy with the female charr PC voice particularly towards the end where my charr seemed like a human in a fur suit, but the male has been solid all the way so far. Other than that I don’t have any complaints – I’ve been quite happy with the Asura NPCs in the dialogues so far.
