Guild Wars 2

bullyrook.2165:

Again, the results vary widely. And it wasn’t a tid-bit used to prove anything, merely some info I stumbled upon.

Actually, this is another case of “where you look” and “see what you want to see”. For instance, the often cited theory of men being right-brained and women being left brained is often muddled in improper analysis methodology. In the very study that alice posted, ventricles were included in the studied area, and when detailing the total volume of the brain, ventricle size variations lead to false analysis. The lack of differences in the cerebellum, the area of the brain that contains only gray/white matter and fewer ventricles, demonstrates a methodological flaw within the research method.

For the contrary, another study on brain asymmetry:

http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/7/1550.abstract

found the opposite of “conventional wisdom” in that women had greater right-brain thickness. All in all, I’m going to have to agree with this article, in which the writers wrote their own criticism:

“Given the apparent specificity of differences in male and female cognitive advantages, and regional specificity of brain–behavior relationships, global differences in brain size between the sexes that have been readily observed with relatively gross methods might not be the most relevant structural dimorphism when investigating neural substrates of sex differences in cognition.”

As for your old experienced, that is something you’ve probably seen. These studies don’t control for what kind of homosexuality is present, or even factor bisexuality at all. So, if a sample happens to have a high volume of emotionally dependent homosexual men, but didn’t pull in a group of physically focused homosexual women, then you’d get different results.

I don’t know where Savic and Lindström got the idea of dismissing learned effects, though. As far as I can tell, Amygdala Connecivity is readily changed through outside and internal factors, and that brains wire themselves differently all the time (as is seen in comparisons between brains of sufferers from obesity and anger problems vs. controls. Don’t have a link for that one, though). This makes me wonder exactly how the Savic and Lindström think our brain interprets, stores, and processes information if they assert that all connectivity is static.

Lasica.5068:

I couldn’t access the report you linked so unfortunately can’t compare to the report I will link to below.

If you cannot access the report, then I will quote the relevant section:

“Occasional same-sex attraction, but not major attraction, was more common among the most educated. Between age 21 and 26, slightly more men moved away from an exclusive heterosexual attraction (1.9% of all men) than moved towards it (1.0%), while for women, many more moved away (9.5%) than towards (1.3%) exclusive heterosexual attraction. These findings show that much same-sex attraction is not exclusive and is unstable in early adulthood, especially among women. The proportion of women reporting some same-sex attraction in New Zealand is high compared both to men, and to women in the UK and US. These observations, along with the variation with education, are consistent with a large role for the social environment in the acknowledgement of same-sex attraction”

Emphasis mine. The interesting thing is, in a post-college area women reverted back to heterosexual relationships.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

No, sexuality is who you are drawn to. This could be both sexually and emotionally. Sexuality and love go hand in hand, just as sexuality and sex go hand in hand. Sexuality covers both these things.

No, sexuality is preference in the act. Many homosexuals have had intercourse with both genders, and of their own admission say that, regarding the act itself, the preferred same gender is out of performance. Hell, that’s what the first homosexual I ever met told me. Otherwise, you could classify all homosexuality as mono-sexuality, in which case the attraction is entirely individualistic and not dependent on gender at all.

BTW, there are people who are sexually attracted to inanimate objects.

Alice.8694:

If you see fault in their work, I whole heartedly encourage you to submit a peer-review of their work so that they may further refine and improve on it. That is the beauty of science after all. It adjusts and corrects itself not based on opinions but on what is demonstrated and observed. Be it with direct observations or with repeatable and demonstrable predictions with a mathematic model.

Your personal opinion on math within science however, is fundamentally meaningless to the findings presented.

Ah, the old appeal to authority. The industry of science as a whole is actually a lot less concerned about self-correction, and more concerned about prestige, subscription rates, and sociological agendas. Often times, industry decisions (such as the prevalence of crisis counseling and ethnicity based psychiatry) are based on monetary prospects rather than actual fact, and because of this the outcomes of scientific studies will be tweaked, with negative relationships being under-reported or dropped. This, unfortunately, can have unfortunate circumstances in the realm of medicine:

But for now, I will leave with a quote from Rogers H. Wright and Nicholas A. kittens on the matter (particularly psychology):

“Let no one presume that ideology does not influence science. Within psychology today, there are topics that are deemed politically incorrect, and they are neither published nor funded. Journal editors control what is accepted for publication through those chosen to conduct peer reviews. Although it can be argued that journals have the right to determine their areas of primary interest, this can be used to stifle controversy or political incorrectness even when these are important topics for scientific inquiry. Censorship exists, and if the Psychiatric News and the Monitor on Psychology published all the news of interest to psychiatrists and psychologists, there would be no market for Psychiatric Times and The National Psychologist, both published outside the two APAs.”

Rogers H. Wright, Ph. D., past president of division 12 and founding president of division 31 of the American Psychological Association.
Nicholas A. kittens, Ph.D., Sc.D., professor of University of Nevada, Reno, and president of the kittens Foundation for Behavioral Health.

“Destructive Trends in Mental Health; The well Intentioned Path to Harm”. Page xiv (preface), published in 2005.

Interesting stuff, OP. Personally, I’ve never been part of an MMO with a heavy PVP focus, so the length of time between updates hasn’t bothered me that much.

Then again, I have to ask myself why I quit playing PVP a long time ago. Two reasons come up: #1 is that my favorite spec was hit with a bunch of bugs that were never fixed/declared features now. #2 is that I just got bored of how samey all of it was.

Anet’s idea of balance so far has been “tap it with a 40 foot pole, then stay real quiet and hope the beast didn’t wake up”, with the exception of when they release a gigantic patch and decide to smash the beast with a hammer then run for the hills. Originally I feared the chaotic and unsure nature of everything when balance updates are every 2 weeks, but at least the chaos would be interesting. Small but rapid changes would be quicker to settle, so meaningful feedback can be acquired relatively quickly. Gigantic balance patches, however, take forever to truly acclimate. Overall, I think a smaller but more involved hand is better than a big, negligent one.

So +1s all around.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I wouldn’t call it meaningless. It has what ever meaning we choose to lend to it. Human sexuality is very broad. Most people aren’t realistically divided into hetero and homosexual categories. There are many in between variations. But we chose to use a word for each end of the spectrum, depending on how much someone leans to hetero or homosexual. All that really matters is that we are talking about the same thing.

If we can all agree that heterosexuality is not a choice, than neither is homosexuality. They are part of one thing: human-sexuality. If however we agree that there are many factors that influence human sexuality, that that again applies for both ends of the spectrum.

I’m wondering however why some people would think a form of love would be wrong. If we can let go of any presumptions regarding the purpose of life (of which no one can safely say if it has a purpose to begin with), and simply see it for what it is, two people falling in love… how can anyone be against that?

It is meaningless because it is internally contradictory: a description of behavior must describe behavior, and thus is dependent on that described behavior. When a description is independent of what it is describing, then it is no longer a description. Simple as that.

And therein lies the rub: I don’t agree that heterosexuality isn’t a choice either. That kind of goes with the dual nature of the subject.

Also, I must reiterate this very frequently: sexuality isn’t love. Love is a generalized affinity and care for things. Sex is the act. Sexuality is preference in the act. Sex can, and does, very frequently exist outside of “love” of any sort. Sex can be for entertainment, an act of maliciousness, an effect of obsession, a product of lust, for profit, out of boredom, for procreation, for speech and expression, and as an effect of psychology via emotional dependence or depression, or many of the other psychological causes. Love, likewise, is independent of sex, despite what Freud thought.

Alice.8694:

Not gonna be mean, not gonna throw insults at you…

One link is all this takes… One.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/nifm-sfe120612.php

You rise or fall with your reaction to this, reject it or embrace it… After that post of claims of reason, logic and science if you cannot accept this and adjust your views based on what is observed… People will form their opinions of you and your opinions and move on.

Personally I hope you embrace science and reality and your fellow humans different as we all are…

Something I’ve learned in the realm of science is to be immediately skeptical of anything that says “simulation” or “model”. A model or simulation is, ultimately, an arbitrary construct that produces a result that it was specifically tailored to produce. A mathematical formula for any circumstance. This is usually done using a set of factors, some scientifically determined, some merely invented, and some to be tested by that very calculation.

The problem is, math exists in a vacuum. The hardest part about applying math to real life problems (and I mean things more complex than simple arithmetic) is determining applicability. You have to determine

1)If the problem is a math problem. There’s no sign to say it is.
2)What math would be appropriate. No textbook or course description to guide you.
3)What is everything that contributes to the problem.
4)How is everything related. This one is really hard, since it takes years of study just to solve this step.
5)What assumptions have to be made of unknown variables, and how they might influence the result.

You mess up anything, and the result is something inconsequential and unpredictable. So the math is only as good as the theory, and the theory is only as good as the evidence, and the evidence is up for interpretation anyway. Worst case scenario, the math is tailored to explain the phenomena exclusively, in which it has no predictive or excluding power whatsoever. Heck, I once saw a mathematical formula someone made to explain spontaneous human combustion through undetectable particles.

Case in point with interpretation, something caught my eye in the description: “Previous studies have shown that homosexuality runs in families, leading most researchers to presume a genetic underpinning of sexual preference”. You know, I remember a study on that subject from awhile ago:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1845227

It is a bit old, but it had interesting results regarding the distribution of sexuality amongst identical twins, fraternal twins, regular siblings, and adopted siblings. I’ll post up the results:

52% of male monozygotic (identical) twins were homosexual
22% of male dizygotic (fraternal) twins were homosexual
11% of adopted brothers (no relation) were homosexual
9.2% of regular siblings were homosexual

This information often comes up as a “see what I want and reaffirm what I thought anyway” study, but there is an interesting phenomena here: adopted brothers had a higher homosexuality ratio than non-adopted brothers. Under genetic circumstances, the rate of concurrence between sexuality of adopted brothers should have been anywhere from 2% to 3.5%, to match the statistical trend of male homosexuality overall. But it isn’t…

Another interesting trend was the higher concurrence of homosexuality between fraternal twins and otherwise normal siblings. The thing about “fraternal twins” is that they’re basically regular siblings who share the same first apartment. Also interesting, identical twins with the same genetic makeup and the same first apartment only had about a 50/50 chance of sharing sexuality. This is interesting, because from a genetic standpoint this should be near 100%.

The assumption of a genetic cause is a case of people rocketing forward with what they want the truth to be. The thing about familial relationships is that they are far more than just genetic. Families grow up in the same neighborhood, under the same roof, at the same time, in the same culture, in the same nation, with the same external and internal stresses, being exposed to the same stimuli, conditioned with the same upbringing, eating the same diet, having the same religion, and getting the same education while living on the same amount of wealth. The similarities are nigh endless. I would argue that the combination of these factors attributes to sexuality, instead of defaulting toward determinism.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I think a good question would be if any of this really matters? Humans are a very sexually diverse species. Our emotions are complex. So it really just boils down to if these emotions are harmful to anyone, and if they make us happy. Clearly they aren’t harmful. Consenting adults simply fall in love of each other, and that makes them very happy. From that angle, I can’t see any reason to be against it.

By the forum rules, someone is not allowed to express disagreement with this statement.

Now this is flat out wrong. We have observed homosexuality not just among humans, but amongst many other social species as well (such as elephants). So clearly it is a natural phenomenon.

This, however, is an argument I’ve heard a lot, and it just doesn’t fly.

An interesting thing about studying animals is the tendency to selective impose human qualities on non-humans, AKA anthropomorphizing traits. I say selectively because many of the negative traits we just ignore. For example, in many social animals it is common to see infanticide, fratricide, neglect and abandonment, relative bestiality, castes, and cannibalism. However, it is rare for anyone to look at these qualities, and say that because social animals exhibit these qualities it is natural in humanity. This argument is wholly inconsistent on the basis that we largely pick and choose what we want, and what we want it to mean.

For the explanation of the benefits or detriments of any traits, this is an exercise in human creativity more than science. The biggest flaw of evolutionary psychology is that it provides just-cause explanations for phenomena, and does not predict or exclude anything (two facets important to the very core of science). It merely observes phenomena, then attempts to explain their behaviors by providing any number theoretical and unknown factors as an explanation for known behaviors. It cannot be wrong: everything must have evolved a certain way because otherwise it wouldn’t have evolved that way. Given enough free space and leniency, and even I can come up with an explanation for everything.

Again, I have to bring up the ever variable definition of homosexuality. The idea of a disposition, or a true manner of existence, or even a lifestyle can be readily called into question when dealing with animals. Animals exhibit counter-intuitive behaviors for many reasons: localized cultural behaviors, sociological circumstances, instinct confusion, extraneous outside circumstances, emergency, conditioning, upbringing, and probably many other things that I’ve forgotten to mention. These aren’t mutually exclusive behaviors, either. For example, I read somewhere (don’t have the source, so you’ll have to take my word for it) that higher caste chimpanzees will engage in homosexual acts with more submissive males, and doing so relieves tension within their pack. This is most readily explained as instinct confusion caused by the social status of dominance, and the release of tension can be seen as merely a side effect of this instinct confusion. To go so far to claim that this act represents a true human analogue for homosexuality, which I had originally heard, is at best il-informed.

Indeed, having grown up in my parents own personal zoo, I’ve seen many interesting things. In particular, among the plethora of birds we owned, we had a female parakeet that was originally straight (laid eggs with another male), but upon that male dying took a dominant role over the others and would occasionally mount other birds, both male and female. One particular male parakeet, who was highly submissive, would mount inanimate objects, since the female took up the dominant role the majority of the time. This occurred despite the occasional insistence of the female to be mounted by the male.

At what point would any of this be considered a true human analogue for homosexuality? And to that end, what considerations and definitions of homosexuality would this ascribe to?

Lasica.5068:

The science is very clear on this, no matter the underlying reason for a persons’ sexuality, it is most definitely not a personal choice. To advocate that everyone choose a heterosexual relationship is harmful to those who are not heterosexual and this is the underlying issue with this entire topic really.

This is a point I’ve often found is muddled between the definitions of homosexuality, and also the definition of choice. You can say that many people do not choose their negative habits, and instead fall into different things due to circumstance. Common examples include obesity, anger management, attention, and alcoholism. I myself do not know anyone who has directly chosen to be fat, or chosen to be constantly upset, or chosen to be stupid, or even chosen to be an alcoholic. But yet, people have resolved to change these things and have been very successful in their endeavors.

When you talk of “choice”, you have to consider choice as both pre and post situation. One can choose to enter into a set of circumstances, and one can choose to exit a set of circumstances. Indeed, many of the greatest choices in life are the choices you make regarding things that seem out of your control.

To that end, there a few cases of people choosing homosexuality, though they are not commonly discussed. An example being something known kitten .L.U.G.s or Selectively Lesbian Until Graduation; a phenomena where women would become lesbians, but only in the 21-26 age demographic. Afterwards, after graduating college, women would drift back toward exclusive heterosexual attraction. You can read a study about shifting sexuality in the college demographic here:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953602001612

These circumstances are arguably an “opt in” situation, wherein the specific education in New Zealand, which gives high appraisal of homosexuality, encourages students to experiment with attempting to find the same sex attractive. There’s an interesting statistic here: women are 5 times more likely to convert from exclusive heterosexuality than men in this time period. This is interesting, because this is an environment that praises homosexuality, so gay relationships should see a similar increase. My theory is that, since women are universally viewed as objects of beauty and sexuality in society, that it is easier for a woman to condition themselves to be aroused by other women than it is for men to be aroused by men.

There are other circumstances that are.. .not as favorable. I have no scientific source for this one, because it is something I’ve observed from people I’ve met. An interesting side effect of amphetamine addictions are that addicts will engage in more sexual acts, as well as be less discriminatory in their preferences. This lead to the unfortunate divorce of one of my bosses, who’s husband developed a meth addiction and began cheating on her with other men; something he didn’t display before. These circumstances are also arguably an “opt in” scenario.

I say “arguably” because there is no absolute definition for sexuality. In many arguments I’ve been in, the definition for sexuality has sometimes become so abstract and intangible that it loses all meaning. It works like this: many people have come to define sexuality as an existential state of truth. This “state” cannot be faked, cannot be changed, and always exists despite what a person says, thinks, feels, or believes. In this sense, the varying trends of sexuality between nationality, age, and gender are meaningless, because there are people who are “truly homosexual”, those who aren’t, and regardless of what they do this will never change.

Know what I call a behavioral description gets applied regardless of any behavior it describes? Meaningless.

Also, I would not be so quick to call the advocacy of determinism to be harmless. But I’m not allowed to speak further on that matter.

Uruz Six.6594:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And in these four roles, support and control were king.

Brutes and scrappers would have had something to say about that.

/e pours another 40 for my SJ/SD scrap, she was so much fun.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If, while playing the game, the only way you can describe yourself is that you “do damage”, then you aren’t doing it right. You can do a lot of things. Why is it that you should have to sacrifice damage for utility, or vice versa? So many people insist that this must be the case, but I can’t think of a good reason why.

This. As for why, the DPS boat race meta is – from what I have seen – all about facerolling dungeon speedruns.

My highest DPS was a stalker. Kinetic Melee after the assassin strike rework and the release AT specific IO enhancements turned me from a cannon into a mass driver. That said, my strongest toon bar none was my ice control/storm summoning controller, as he was the only toon I was able to successfully solo Ghost Widow on as an Arch Villain (+1).

The PVE DPS race is a bit more than just dungeon speedruns. I made a few elaborate posts on the matter, which are currently my highest rated posts, but in short the way it goes is like this:

Damage and durability share a direct relationship with each other. The more damage you do, the less damage the enemy can fire off before they die. The more durable you are, the longer it takes for you to die, and thus the more damage you can do in the long run. These currently are fairly well balanced, except that the plethora of active defenses in the game that mitigate damage no matter what. This makes it so glass cannons can defend themselves and do a load of damage, whereas the tankier builds don’t as much of a benefit. Since PVE was designed fairly generically, there aren’t many situations that fight against active defense, so the tankier builds are left with little to no perks.

Once you reach a certain level of competence, glass cannon is objectively the best way to go in PVE. Almost regardless of situation.

Nick.6972:

When was the last time you saw someone posting “LFG SUPPORT GUARD” in Party Search?

Yesterday. However I digress:

I’ve never played a game with a “holy trinity”. The closest I’ve come to this was City of Heroes, and in CoH there were 4 roles:

Damage
Support
Control
Tank

And in these four roles, support and control were king. There was no need for dedicated damage when you could debuff enemies into wet paper. There was no need for a tank when you could disable large groups of enemies for extended periods of time. Fact is, paragon had to put in enemies specifically to be hard to control and debuff, and even then those two still reigned supreme.

So whenever I hear someone say that Tank/Heal/DPS is the way to go, I keep thinking “But what about the red mage? I love the red mage! Why are you excluding the red mage?”.

The way that builds work in GW2 is just fine. I love that there are many skills that work independent of stats. This gives players a way to customize a class to their playstyle, and not to their role. This also adds flexibility, allowing players to change up their weapons, utilities, and gear depending on circumstance, instead of being rigidly locked into a premade build.

The roles are also more nuanced and variable, since classes can fulfill more than one role. For example, my primary dungeon runner and arguably strongest character is my thief. It is a thief not because of “lol 25k backstab combo”, but because of how potent my defensive utilities are. With all of my evades, blinds, weakness, stuns, boon and stealth, the thief is arguably the best defesive debuffer/tank combo in PVE. The high damage is just a bonus to this.

This is how pretty much every class I play goes down. Sometimes you need boon removal. Sometimes you need cleansing. Sometimes you need cripple or swiftness. Sometimes you need big knockbacks and pulls. Sometimes you need projectile stopping. Sometimes you need blinks and teleports. Sometimes you need endurance regen. Sometimes you really can use heals and rezzes. Sometimes you need stability. Sometimes you need to engage at range, and sometimes you can just melee. All of the classes in the game offer these abilities at different capacities, and this is what makes all of the classes useful.

If, while playing the game, the only way you can describe yourself is that you “do damage”, then you aren’t doing it right. You can do a lot of things. Why is it that you should have to sacrifice damage for utility, or vice versa? So many people insist that this must be the case, but I can’t think of a good reason why.

I think the screen clutter adds to balance issues as well.

I recently made a norn elementalist, near maximum height. I also recently discovered why it is that I never see anyone else play a norn elementalist of near maximum height. I can barely stay alive, despite being quite the champion-soloing dungeon-running veteran, doing obscene things like meleeing Hotw P1 on my zerker thief for the entire fight in pugs.

It took me a few fights, but I eventually discovered the reason why I’m face-planting so much is that I can’t see a darn thing. All of the elementalists attacks are so flashy, with so many particles and residual effects, that all of the actions of the enemy are masked behind walls of flame and glowing crystals. With the thief, all of my movements are subtle, and this leaves me free to observe enemies.

And this is with the effects LOD turned on. I can’t imagine how things would look with full effects. So I, too, cast my vote for the whole “there are way too many particles and effects in the game”. As for the bright red circles, those I don’t mind too much.

I would totally play tengu and largos, and even kodan.

DarcShriek.5829:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Fext.3614:

no real human beings can be such a bunch of annoying drama queens like the Destiny Edge.

Clearly, you have not been around tabletop gamers for very long in your lifetime. Trust me . . . there’s worse which inhabits your Friendly Local Gaming Store.

Teachers. Teachers are the biggest drama queens I know. It seems that being around kids all day rubs off on them. Not all teachers of course, but more teachers than other professions I am familiar with.

After spending years being an adult, I can say with absolute certainty that maturity is a lie told to me by my parents in an attempt to conform my actions into something more convenient for them. The same petty antics you see on an elementary playground are what I see every day at colleges, jobs, offices, clubs, and politics. The only difference now is that, when a post-graduate engineer throws a hissy fit because he wants to eat the muffin that someone else bought to work, he can espouse philosophical and sociological justification for stealing Ted’s muffin.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

You mean Logan/Rytlock when you’re talking about the conflict of duty and friendship. That was_their_ whole issue. Logan/Jennah is more “Woman In The Queenly Mask”, as she cannot currently appear to show anything back to him, no matter how much it hurts him for her to be distant. Countess Anise knows, and seems to prefer it if Logan stop letting it distract him from his duty.

But more importantly? Rox/Braham isn’t romance. It’s friendship of two people who have fought side by side enough to form a bond.

Logan/Jennah was, ultimately, the source of conflict between Logan/Rytlock, as well as the death of Snaff and the failure to kill Krakortorik. Case in point, the romance between the two produced “something” that we’ll probably still see the effects of in the future.

I also never said Rox/Braham was a romance. I said relationship.

Hm, no. I mean, I get your point here but . . .

I find the sheer simplicity of it is preferable to trying to milk it for drama this early. And right now, despite all we can make of this? It’s still only them dating so far as we know.

Simplicity doesn’t need to be boring. There’s an entire genre that is based upon simplicity and lack of drama but is still interesting to watch: comedy.

Maybe. It’s intriguing (for myself) how it didn’t come off as exploitative to me. Though . . . I think I can sense something of “a thing to say”, but it’s not there yet. We’ll see later.

It didn’t come off as exploitative to me, either. But, nonetheless, it is something I’ve heard to describe the relationship, and I can’t disprove it.

Faowri.4159:

Why do we have heterosexual relationships in storytelling? Simply because they are a facet of real life and representative of real life experience that readers/moviegoers/gamers also experience and enjoy seeing reflected in the media they consume, right?

Actually no. The important thing to know about fiction is that it is that it is ultimately fantasy. An idealation of some kind.. The fantasy is created for a myriad of motives, such as expression, profit, inspiration, condemnation, and can be used for both the exploration of a concept as well as the exploitation of a concept. It is always important to know that no pen stroke is ever non-deliberate. Fiction serves a purpose, specifically one where mere fact is inadequate.

Relatability is usually a side factor that determines marketing success. Relatability’s selling point in fiction is the ability for someone to transpose themselves onto the role of the protagonist, as the similarities make someone feel more prominent and important in society. Relatability, however, is not necessary for idealation at all. In fact, it can be a detriment to idealation: blanket relatability is often extremely bland, and more accurate portrayals of people will emphasize their negative traits, which then comes off as condemnation of one’s character.

In particular, focal romances are largely wish fulfillment that work by transposition. I’ve read enough about werewolf/vampire love triangles and seen enough romantic comedies to know that. To anyone in the right state of mind, the build of the romance itself is an expression of their desires. To everyone else, romances are bland and uninteresting.

This makes up my largest criticism of Jory/Kas: it produces nothing. Their romance in the story has succeeded in only putting their romance in the story, and were it nonexistent the story of the game wouldn’t suffer in any way. The relationships of the other characters are deeper and produce more: Rox/Braham shows the conflict of char loyalties and pride versus their fire-forged friendship, with Braham’s immaturity and abandonment issues putting additional stress and doubt on Rox’s goals. This is interesting, because it tells me about the world of tyria while also establishing dynamic and unpredictable relationships in which further stories of equal quality can and will be told. I don’t know how Rox/Braham is going to end or where it is going, so from the air of mystery, conflict, and activity I have a vested interest. The similar air of mystery and conflict exists with the Logan/Jennah relationship, which in-game wise exists mostly to provide an interpersonal conflict to resolve in Destiny’s Edge.

But Jory/Kas are… cute? Honestly I think that if this wasn’t a same-sex relationship, their romance would’ve been universally panned. I’m not the biggest fan of homosexual relationships, but in regular media same-sex relationships generally do more than just… be. Heck, my favorite movie has multiple homosexual relationships, and I don’t even care because it is played for tension, conflict, and laughs. Several things that vastly overshadow the social issue in their quality alone.

Kas/Jory has nothing to cast that shadow. Kas/Jory, for all intents and purposes, seems to exist solely to press the social issue. Or exploit it… maybe both.

Proven.2854:

@Blood Red Arachnid, there’s a third caveat. You’d lose the mechanic of applying a condition and then boosting its damage via Might stacks. Worth can also be debated and etc. etc.

I wouldn’t call this a caveat, but a feature. As far as I can tell, making conditions depend on might only during their application will improve the game.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Lore-wise skimpier armor makes a lot of sense for Norn (both genders). They have higher body temperatures and get grossly overheated in massive amounts of clothing, even in freezing external temperatures. Males have greater surface area for cooling, so they can get away with slightly more armor, but females having lower surface area actually vastly prefer less clothing to keep themselves an appropriate temperature.

Minor nitpick, but this wouldn’t be true. The rate at which any body cools off has to deal with the proportion of surface area to volume. In general, the larger any object becomes, the longer it takes to cool off, since volume tends to increase at a cubic rate, but surface area increases at a quadratic rate. Larger volumes give more space for heat to wander about before leaving a body, and larger surface areas gives larger space for heat to enter or leave a body.

That stereotypical joke about women always being cold? There’s truth to that: women have a higher surface area to volume ratio than men do, both because they are smaller overall and also because they are more slender for their height. So, in a more realistic setting, it is the men who have to reveal more skin.

However I digress: I do find the armor choices in GW2 to be quite a bit more conservative than other games I’ve played. It isn’t quite on the level as something like Dark Souls, where the male/female armors are literally identical, but if one chooses to seek out an armor set that looks practical, they have many options to choose from.

Reikou.7068:

Dirame.8521:

Reikou.7068:

Personally I’d say remove customization from PvP altogether. You queue with a class, when you enter the match, you pick a preset build for that class (With everything from Traits/Runes/Sigils/Weapons/Skills all preset and picked for you,) and roll with it.

Devs can then just balance these presets and it would be much easier to do.

Yay for build diversity!!!!!

“Build diversity” should never take precedence over balance in a competitive game.

The most important factor for the game is to be fun. Balance and diversity are two of those factors. If you don’t have balance, then things become stale really quickly while everyone plays the OP class/build. If you don’t have diversity… things also get stale really quickly.

No one wants to compete in a game that isn’t fun to play. You can’t just oust one for the other.

Chaosbroker.3860:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Something I’ve suggested before, and will continue to suggest, is to make stability much more widely available than it is now. Currently, stability lasts for a few seconds on very long cooldowns, making stability in PVP nearly useless. It’s never around when you need it, and opponents can just wait a few seconds for stability to wear off.

Stability granting utilities need to be more common, and give stability for much longer durations. At the current rates, I’d say to double the availability of stability.

The problem with that method would be creating the problem again from the other end of the spectrum. In short why even play a stun play-style when your opponents all have stability access equal to or on shorter cooldowns than your stun access.

It’s not that I disagree with you necessarily, personally I feel some of the basic mechanics of the game need some tweaking. But the fact that some classes have weak or non-existent counters to certain play-styles is more of a problem than play-styles that aren’t considered “fair” exist.

I’d argue that even doubling the availability of stability will not render stun moot. Just tactical. Instead of spamming stuns non-stop, you have to actually watch your opponent and wait for the opportunity to stun them. Likewise, players with stability will have to use it at crucial moments, since blowing stability just whenever will waste that resource.

ThiBash.5634:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Signet of Restoration is just so… plain. It heals slowly and for very little when attacking, and upon activation it heals for very little again.

Yet when traited you can get both active and passive, and due to the weapon healing skills, it’s not the only source of ‘healing while attacking’. Other professions don’t have those. My guess it’s balanced around that concept, because it’d get too powerful otherwise.

The thing with traiting for written in stone is that you’re combining very little with very little. Even with Written in Stone, the signet feels weak.

insanemaniac.2456:

ArrDee.2573:

confusion is a worthless condition in pve.

why? it does double damage but npcs do 1/2 the actions… and they dont cleanse or try to avoid actions when its on them

Most NPCs do less than half the actions.

Personally I recommend Noble Runes. They work great on my hybrid build. Those 3 stacks of might equal 105 malice and 105 power, and even in a condi build you’ll still use power.

If you want to really take advantage of the runes, you can pop med kit every 14 seconds or so to keep the might permanently on. If not, they’ll still make a great addition when using healing turret.

If you want to compare healing signets, the best IMO is signet of malice from the thief. No internal cooldown, and triggers for every hit. In the right circumstances, things get ridiculous.

For example, in a CoE run recently I picked up FGS on my thief and did Fiery Rush into subject alpha. I was nearly dead, and it brought me back to full almost instantly, healing me from 3K health to max (12k) in a moment.

But I digress: yeah the healing signets for Elementalists and Necromancers need work. Warriors get the highest passive heal, Guardians get passive condi cleanse and a very large active heal, thieves have no cooldown so their passive heal can burst for massive amounts, and mesmers get decent passive heal along with an instant phantasm recharge.

Signet of Restoration is just so… plain. It heals slowly and for very little when attacking, and upon activation it heals for very little again. Seriously, Signet of Restoration and Signet of Malice heal for the exact same amount on active, but Signet of Malice recharges 10 seconds quicker. It just doesn’t seem fair… I guess Anet is trying to balance around Written in Stone, but they aren’t doing it very well.

I’d say Signet of Restoration needs to do something else. The whole “heal on cast” thing is just a watered down version of malice. I suppose you could “fix” this issue by making restoration heal for 66% more health at base, but just making Signet of Restoration stronger feels like a waste of creativity.

Why yes, the elementalist does feel weak… at first. When I made a zerker full DPS staff build, seeing my auto attack hit only for 2.5k was quite disheartening. Compared to my usual dungeon runner, which is a thief that can hit a single target for 14k damage every few seconds, it seemed weak.

But the ele’s damage doesn’t come from big hits. It comes from accumulating smaller hits. While the fireball doesn’t do a lot of damage, the lava font doesn’t do a lot of damage, and meteor shower doesn’t do a lot of damage, the fact that they run consecutively means things add up very quickly to a respectable amount of damage. Outside of staff builds, there are many lingering effects that and quick hits that layer up over time.

Ele damage also comes from the size of their hits. Most melee cleave hits 3 targets, but most ele attacks hit at least 5 targets. Ele attacks tend to be in large AoEs, hitting enemies that are more spread out. Many Ele attacks benefit from larger enemies. Against the bigger enemies in the game, things like Lightning Storm from Glyph of Storms, Meteor Shower, and Ice Storm from Frost Bow do mind bogglingly insane amounts of damage. It has been said before, but the Fiery Greatsword, when used properly, has the highest DPS in the game.

The ele also has a whole lot of support skills. On the staff DPS build I give my party 36 seconds of fury and 9 stacks of might, while also making a permanent fire field for others to blast off of. The ele also has water fields in which you can burst heal in, and a lightning field in which to give AoE swiftness. On my fresh air + elemental attunement build, I give my party over 50% uptime of protection, along with regen, might, and sometimes a minutes worth of swiftness. With many different control effects, movement skills, cleansing, buffing, and reviving skills, the elementalist is excellent at support, being capable of doing nearly anything.

I’ve considered giving each class individual conditions to stack up. But, doubling classes isn’t the only issue with this suggestion.

The response Anet has for condition damage has always been the same: “bandwidth”. Anet hasn’t raised or removed the condi cap due to bandwidth issues. Adding additional, class based conditions, bandwidth wise, is just a more complicated means of raising the cap. Likewise, personal conditions per player runs into the same bandwidth issue.

Having a superior condition replace an inferior one is also an interesting idea, but it runs into the bandwidth issue again. You see, to have a “superior” condition take precedence, it has to calculate this superiority against every stack of conditions present. So, every time a bleed is applied it must be compared to 25 different stacks of bleeding. Put multiple players causing bleeding in the same spot, and things can get crazy really quickly.

So far, the best idea I’ve come up with is to change how conditions are handled as a whole. Currently, every condition does a series of complex calculations every second, treating each “tick” as an individualized new attack. This means that, at each tick, the game has to re-acquire your player identity, re-acquire stats, re-calculate the damage that would be done with that condition, re-check the duration of each condition, re-check the stacking number of each condition, and perform an operation on the stacking number and duration, and then actually inflict the damage against the target. That is a whole lot of calculations each second.

What I would ideally like to see is each condition acquire its damage and player identity only once. If conditions were a self contained, simple operation that just subtracted HP each second instead of some kind of personal attack each second, then the amount of bandwidth required to process this info is a whole lot smaller. The changes to the nature of conditions would be slight, but IMO preferable to how conditions run now.

There are, however, two caveats with my own “best idea”. First is assigning credit and participation to events. That is easily done: just take some percentage of the tooltip’s listed condition damage, and apply that as credit via direction damage in events. The second caveat is that, to make this suggestion work, a whole lot of the game code would have to be rewritten. Once again, my ideas fall into the practicality hole: they’ll work, but they ain’t easy.

Something I’ve suggested before, and will continue to suggest, is to make stability much more widely available than it is now. Currently, stability lasts for a few seconds on very long cooldowns, making stability in PVP nearly useless. It’s never around when you need it, and opponents can just wait a few seconds for stability to wear off.

Stability granting utilities need to be more common, and give stability for much longer durations. At the current rates, I’d say to double the availability of stability.

Well, I’ve gone and done it. Finally finished my Ele’s outfit, and now she’s ready for the public.

First setup: shy blue dye + pitch dye. Wearing Inquest Chest, Legs, and Boots, Svanir Gloves, Conjurer Mantle, and Sheepskin Circlet.

Second outfit: same dyes. Full Phoenix outfit, shoulder piece not visible.

You know… I once compared pure soldiers vs. pure berserkers gear for an otherwise identical setup for a Guardian, and then ran some calculations for their effective effective power and effective health. It was at the beginning of this post, but to take out the contest and just post the results:

Effective Power from stats:

DPS build: 4376
Same build w/ Soldiers: 2871

Effective HP (assuming base 1836 armor)

DPS: 12,871 HP
Soldiers: 29,152 HP

The berserker build only hits about 52.4% higher than a soldier’s build. If I were to make a similar cleric build…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vUAQNAR8dlsApUo9CxOI8DNhkzQkQQbGA0BVpIeuHA-zwBB4hERzkfQUBDZOJtIasFXFRjVNjIqWnEjUARMMC-e

Effective Power:
2397

Effective HP
17255

Which makes zerker do about 82.6% more damage than clerics. This is with identical builds, where the modifiers cancel each other out. With additional modifiers on different builds, I’m certain that things can go higher, but to say they do 500% damage is an exaggeration.

I wouldn’t put the damage differences higher than 150%, or 2.5 times more. Whether this is too much, you can debate. But I figured I’d lay some math down on the actual scales of things here.

I see these kind of threads a lot, but no one ever says what clothes they are wearing or what dyes they use.

Anyway, after the new makeover kit, I’ve manged to make my thief look rather dashing in the moonlight. Clothes: anonymity hood (not shown), duelist paldrons, gloves, and chest, whispers legs and boots. Dyes: Abyss, Grapefruit.

If you’re going to be running around in WvW with that, I’d recommend Valkyrie with ruby orbs and zerker weapons. With curry butternut squash soup and master maintenance oil, you’ll hit about 30% crit rate, which is enough so that all that crit damage isn’t just wasted space. The appeal will come from using Deathly Perception, which ranks up your precision from 30% to 80%, causing life blast to hit like a truck. The whole time you’ll still be sitting behind 24k health + 18.6k LF, so you’ll have enough bulk to take many hits and survive burst.

While scholar runes are great for PVE, they actually aren’t that good for WvW. Their only advantage over ruby orbs is that whole “10% above 90% health”, which drops in an instant in a PVP environment.

Mesmer, currently, is the only class that I’ve rerolled out of. That is, I had a level 80 character with full exotics, multiple transmuted armor sets, and gutted this character and deleted it. I haven’t played warrior/ranger though.

I just didn’t find the mesmer that entertaining. For me, the mesmer had several issues that just made things uninteresting for me.

#1: Lack of activity. The mesmer feels like I spend most of my play just standing around, auto attacking until the phantasm is recharged or I’ve managed to build up enough clones for a shatter. Then I shatter/use the phantasm, then go back to auto attacking again. The mesmer has a ton of niche moves that are useful in specific circumstances, but outside of those circumstances the mesmer is a whole lot of idling.

#2: Lack of presence. It never feels like the mesmer makes a solid impact on the fight. Other classes have excellent boons, large AoEs, potent defensive utilities, debilitating conditions, ridiculous durability, or outstanding damage. The memser… not so much. If you needed a boon removed or a portal to somewhere, the mes was alright, but otherwise the only thing that felt important was Time Warp. Everything else just seemed “meh” at best.

#3: Lack of options. Mesmer weapons and utilities have a lot of dead weight to them, which often made choices not about what was good, but just weeding out what was bad. Lets take a loot at them real quick:

Staff 1: slow, short duration conditions, random condi’s + boons, feels weak overall.
Staff 2: good defensive skill. One of the selling points of the staff. Also, the clones can be deadly when in large numbers.
Staff 3: a conflicted phantasm. The staff weapon says “conditions” but the warlock only really works with direct damage.
Staff 4: was nerfed, never makes a noticable impact.
Staff 5: you basically hope for aegis and daze, but rarely get it. randomly does something slightly useful, otherwise useless.

Greatsword 1: loses power at close range, which is where you’ll do most fighting anyway.
Greatsword 2: 2/5ths of a fire field blast finisher, and the clone is night useless.
Greatsword 3: less damage than the auto attack at range, but at least it removes 1 boon in its short radius.
Greatsword 4: IMO the best phantasm in the game. It does its damage fast, in an AoE, and moves out of danger very quickly.
Greatsword 5: It’s a knockback. Nothing else to say.

Scepter 1: a weak, slow attack that slowly summons clones that do nothing.
Scepter 2: decent block and torment application.
Scepter 3: good confusion, but hard to use in an AoE or in a timely manner.

Sword 1: highest damaging auto attack, but still weak. removes boons, though.
Sword 2: good damage + invulnerability makes this an excellent skill.
Sword 3: convoluted immobilize + teleport that doesn’t work half the time.
Sword 4: good block and damage. The clone causes vulnerability and can body block, so not too bad. Also a good stun.
Sword 5: decent phantasm. Single target, but does its damage really quickly.

Focus 4: your only reliable source of swiftness! Decent pull, and with traits can reflect projectiles. Not a bad skill.
Focus 5: second best phantom IMO. Does a lot of damage + whirl finisher in an AoE and also protects against projectiles.

Pistol 4: decent phantasm. It stays out of danger, but only attacks a single target. Was nerfed.
Pistol 5: It’s a stun that… bounces around becoming less effective for everything it hits. Not sure what the point of that is, but at least it is a stun on your main target.

Torch 4: a skill that takes forever to burn. The blind basically just permits you to use this skill without getting hit, whereas other blinds let you use other skills…
Torch 5: worthless phantasm. weak, short duration confusion with short duration retaliation, takes forever to actually attack.

End result? You’re stuck with sword/focus + either an offhand pistol/sword, or the greatsword if you want to use its phantasm. You’ll see a lot of the sword’s auto attack, which is the only thing you’ll be doing most of the time.

Berserker is still going to have the highest DPS out of all the gear sets. I’m personally sticking with berserker myself.

This is to the devs mostly, and is a bit inspired by an extra credits video.

One of the big problems plaguing sPVP right now is stagnation. It is the reason why I myself haven’t played sPVP in what seems like forever. We’re still using the same equipment, running the same maps, fighting the same teams. There’s only so many times you can capture the clocktower before one throws up their arms and says “Screw it! Let the clocktower fend for itself. I’m gonna go outside!”.

Anet has been trying to have a high standard with the sPVP maps they release. This has predictable results: problems anyway, and it takes forever to make a new map. But what if Anet decided to… not? Skyhammer is was one of my favorite maps, despite the majority hating it. A lot of people want skyhammer to be relegated to some obscure corner where they’ll never have to deal with it again.

Lets just say that corner exists. Think of what else we could put in there? Dynamic and crazy PVP maps that aren’t necessarily meant for e-sports or competitive gaming. Unofficial game modes that doesn’t have sPVP balanced around it. Guild vs. Guild. There are a lot of things we can shove into this corner on the premise that this corner isn’t meant to be competitive.

With that premise, Anet can put out a lot of content, so long as they lower their standards and fail faster.

With all that said, here are some ideas that probably would fall in the trash competitively, but nonetheless would be fun to just play around with.

#1: Dueling. Three maps: Flat circular arena, flat circular arena floating in the sky so you can be knocked off, and an overworld PVE mode which is basically wherever you decide to duke it out.

#2: Battle Royal / Guild vs. Guild. Maps include all current spvp maps, plus a wide open area, plus the smaller dueling maps. Two modes: fight to the death, and time match w/ kill count.

#3: Labyrinth map. Whole map is a 3 tiered maze with corridors, traps, rotating rooms, and switches/levers to prime some of the traps (that will fire off on your own teammates if you aren’t careful).

#4: A map that has, alongside other features, a long but relatively narrow corridor between two conquest points, creating a choke that will allow you to kill people off point if you so desire.

#5: A mostly underwater map that has several floating ships and a larger underwater area. Conquest points would be predominantly underwater.

#6: A very large G vs. G map that is loaded with large but slow moving champion monsters that are extremely dangerous, leading to a map where you try to stealthy navigate NPCs to try and capture points.

#7: An sPVP mode where both teams try to kill off a dedicated world champion in a quartered off area from each other, except there will be several traps and siege weaponry that allow one team to harass the other. Essentially, a PVE race, but with sPVP gear.

When the primary concern becomes fun instead of balance, there’s no limit to the stuff you can come up with. If other people have other ideas, feel free to post them.

I couldn’t bring it higher than a 5 out of 10. There were many good/fun parts, but truth be told from sheer repetition and boredom I checked out of the LS for many months.

In many of these updates, I’m glad that I play hybrids. If I want to stop doing condi damage, then I don’t need a new build. Sure, it isn’t as much DPS as just using berserker, but should a situation like this arise while on a hybrid, I’m not screwed.

Overall, I didn’t like this update.

Story: Didn’t grab me in the beginning, and lost interest early on. Some generic relationship stuff happened. Best part was the cinematic featuring the rise of mordremoth, which was masterfully done. All in all, I’ll put this as “mordremoth’s prelude” and leave it at that.

Music: I loved the soundtrack for the fights with scarlet. They brought a nice feeling to the whole fight.

Gameplay: strongest part. I found the boss fight quite fun, especially since no one would tell me what to do and I had to kind of just figure it out on my own. The biggest hitch was the glitch where I was stuck floating in the air, which made me quite mad to learn that half the fight was to be spent endlessly falling and hoping for death.

Rewards: they’re fine I guess. I haven’t really paid attention to the rewards for most events lately, since I already have my ways of making money.

So, what is my biggest disappointment? The Kas/Jory scene. I found it uncomfortable and off-putting, and the whole thing just ruined the event for me. Normally I do the event once on every one of my characters, but that scene just ruins it for me.

Maximus Delion.8719:

The biggest part of the problem is that the three stats on Berserker gear have a MASSIVE synergistic effect with each other.

This is a notion I see a lot, but this simply isn’t true. All stats have a synergistic effect with each other, and defensive stats scale in the same manner as offensive stats in respect to each other. Vitality scales geometrically (that is, they multiply each other) with toughness and linearly with healing power (via healing capacitance), and toughness scales geometrically with both vitality and healing power.

The solution to the zerker problem is about how enemy encounters are designed. With the active defenses every class gets, there’s no reason to not run berserker in PVE. Enemy attacks are slow and easily kited, dodged, blocked, etc. Enemies behave in a straightforward manner, running directly into your blade and doing nothing else. Enemies have a ton of gimmicks that don’t amount to anything meaningful.

The good news is, these changes are already taking place with enemy design. The zerker mentality itself might only be a temporary issue.

I hate negative reinforcement. Allow me to explain how this works with an example:

In another old school MMO the developers introduced a now infamous online item: the party hat. The Party Hat is much like any kind of limited skin or item in this game: cosmetic only, released only for a brief period of time near launch, never expected to really amount to anything other than a way to say “hey, I played the game at this time!”. However, they made one mistake: they made party hats tradeable.

Now, why is the party hat infamous, you ask? For the unaffiliated: the party hat is one of the most valuable digital items you can possibly possess. Specific colors are so expensive that they are literally more valuable than the maximum amount of currency the game can physically process. I believe in real world currency, the party hat is worth something like $1500 in real life cash, making it a cash cow for real world traders.

The jetpack being tradeable, limited edition item in itself is actually more than just cosmetic. Far more, actually. For you see, the price will rise. Maybe in 3 years, 5 years, 8 years, however long the game is running, the price will rise. So, when a player receives the molten jetpack as a random drop, they aren’t receiving a cosmetic item. They are receiving 8,000 gold. Because that is what these kinds of items will be worth in the future.

I have to ask if Anet is happy giving out 8,000 gold randomly in extremely rare circumstances to players. Yes, it will make players feel special. They’ll feel special because they’ll eventually become obscenely rich from a random drop of a cosmetic item. So, whenever there is an item that is limited distribution, tradeable, and a randomized drop, then GW2 is baiting players with a lottery: play our game, grind whatever hamster wheel we put in front of you, or else you will lose out on the chance to be obscenely rich in the future.

I hate things like this, and not just for their economic impact. Whenever I make an alt, I come up with a concept on what they’ll be like. Currently I don’t have a desire for any of the temporary items, but what if that changes in the future? What if I decide that, with how a particular toon is designed, that the molten backpack would look great on him? Do I have to grind every event that gets released for fear that, one day, I’ll suddenly care about those rare limited-edition items?

That’s one of the reasons why I quit playing another online game: for a contest, I came up with an idea and design for a weapon. It didn’t win, awhile later (during a period in which I wasn’t playing the game), a similar item was released for a limited time. I came back later to find that this opportunity had come and gone, and was never going to return… it still makes me sad just thinking about it.

City of Heroes nuked one of its starter cities once. Originally, when starting out as a hero, you had a choice of entering either atlas park or galaxy city. After seeing that everyone preferred atlas park, the devs decided to nuke galaxy city to make way for the new tutorial.

I find this update to be “meh”. Everything that can be stated is essentially said in the cutscene, and other than the banter between Evon and ho-bo-tron or whatever his name is now, I’ve lost interest mostly. I’m going to do the whole asperger’s thing and go through a full event chain at least once with every toon, but after that I’m done.

TimeBomb.3427:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I like to aim for maximum effective HP myself. Your effective HP is the total HP you have multiplied by your total armor rating. It is maximized when HP and armor are roughly equal.

So, for maximizing effective HP on an elementalist, you’ll need to have about 18.3k HP before it is more profitable to invest in toughness than in vitality. So in general, vitality will give you a bigger bang for your immediate buck.

You’re not taking into account healing or condition damage taken. These two variables, notably healing, heavily complicate the effective health algorithm. Simply armor*health is largely a useless number in and of itself.

Healing and condition damage are dynamic variables of the fight itself. You won’t always get heals off, and conditions can be cleansed/miss, so you can’t rely on those two factors.

Maugetarr.6823:

Ensign.2189:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You know, there is something that is bothering me. I could’ve sworn that, awhile ago, I did a comparison between a PVT build and a condi build, and found that direct damage did more damage.

This is the right way to compare skills across classes and specs. Your methods are good.

I question your choice of sample. Guardian sword has a pretty typical melee chain, but Necromancer scepter has a really weak ranged condi chain. When you’re comparing a weak skill to an average skill, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the weak skill is, well, weaker.

This is in fact typical. Skills are not anywhere near each other in power; some weapons have very strong skills, some have a bunch of garbage and 1-2 scary skills. If you just pick two skills and compare them, the results aren’t going to generalize, because the power of individual skills dominates.

You have to look at the whole set of skills if you want to avoid those errors.

I would have to agree with this. I also want to emphasize that in this analysis, the necro attack is 900 range while the guardian is 130. Ranged skills are typically balanced to do less damage in this game than close combat ones. An analysis of a physical ranged attack versus a condi ranged attack might be better.

I already talked about the difference between the two attack types. But if you guys insist, orb of wrath will do about 813 damage per second, and in 3 seconds it will come to 2439 damage against a 2600 armor target, which will roughly put it on par with the scepter’s auto attack against heavily armored enemies. Against lightly armored enemies… different story.

The thing about comparing whole classes is that the circumstances must be applied equally. If you want to include the necromancer’s full condi burst, you have to include the guardian’s full direct burst. If you want to include trait procs, you have to include trait damage mods. This argument eventually breaks down into certain skills being OP/UP, and not the damage type itself. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though: the dominance of conditions may be because of build viability, and not some broken down fundamental mechanic.

My comparison of auto attacks is meant to show a baseline power. The auto attack is always available to the player. Weapon skills, utilities, and trait abilities are not. They’ll be blocked, miss, cleansed, dodged, body blocked, healed, interrupted, etc. Auto attacks stay, no matter what.

I talk about the Auto Attack War, but I’m not sure every knows what I mean by this. The AAW is which player has a higher combination of total DPS (from basic damage rotation via auto attack) x total durability. Before any skill comes into play, the player with the highest product of DPS X durability has an immediate advantage: they win by default. The player with a lower product has to use skill and use their skills to gain superiority in the fight.

If you guys want to do comparisons, it isn’t that hard. With the current specs I laid out, just multiply the tooltip damage by 2.902 for 2600 armor, and for lower/higher armor values multiply that by 2600/(Armor value).

Conditionmancers depend on the “tier” that you are playing in.

Low organization pugs and randoms: not a problem.
Med organization pugs: only an issue when there aren’t too many condition users, which usually isn’t a problem.
High DPS groups: condi’s don’t work well here, since enemies usually die in a few seconds anyway.

I like to aim for maximum effective HP myself. Your effective HP is the total HP you have multiplied by your total armor rating. It is maximized when HP and armor are roughly equal.

So, for maximizing effective HP on an elementalist, you’ll need to have about 18.3k HP before it is more profitable to invest in toughness than in vitality. So in general, vitality will give you a bigger bang for your immediate buck.

You know, there is something that is bothering me. I could’ve sworn that, awhile ago, I did a comparison between a PVT build and a condi build, and found that direct damage did more damage.

Ah… I found it:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Personally I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, and I go hybrid.

Anyway, not a lot of people have done math on the issue. What most people get is the tooltip, and that is misleading to a large degree. The tooltip assumes 2600 armor, and since the minimum is 1836, this means it can be up to 41.6% higher.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to make an arbitrary comparison between a guardian’s auto attack with his sword, and a Necromancer’s auto attack with their scepter. This is assuming a few things: Full PVT / MVT gear, exotic level gear, 300 in the relevant damage stat, and an appropriate rune/sigil. Off-hand weapon will not be considered. So, in full PVT/MVT we get the following bonuses:

Guardian:

Vitality: 698
Toughness: 698
Power: 1003 from gear + 165 from rune + 300 from stats = 1,468 Power
Runes of the Ogre bonus: 4% damage increase
Sigil of Force bonus: 5% damage increase

Total effective power: (916 + 1468) x 1.04 × 1.05 = 2603 power

Necromancer:
Vitality: 698
Toughness: 748
Malice: 1003 (from gear) + 300 (from stats) + 183 (from runes) + 83 (run undead bonus) = 1569
Total Malice with Sigil of Bursting: 1663

At 1663 condition damage, bleed does about 126 per tick, and poison does about 250 per tick. This means that the necromancer’s scepter auto chain will do 4 (126) x 2 + 4 (250) = 2008 damage over the course of 7 seconds (3 seconds to initialize the damage, 4 for the poison to tick). If you want to get technical, the motions to inflict all the damage is done in 3 seconds, so we’ll just go with that. Note that the auto attack also has a direct damage component (118 + 118 + 168), so the real total damage comes to 2,421 in 3(+4) seconds, factoring in crit chance and crit damage.

At 2603 power, the sword auto attack will do 764 × 2 +1,432 damage, or 2,960 damage in 2.5 seconds. Now, this isn’t assuming any crits, but if we factor in a 4% crit chance along with a 1.53 crit damage, we will get a further 2% increase, or about 3023 damage in 2.5 seconds.

This tooltip damage is also assuming 2600 armor. That is actually more than the necro has ATM (2584), but assuming we were fighting something like a GC mesmer, who would only have 1836 armor, then we would do 41.6% more damage, up to 4281 damage in 2.5 seconds. But, we’ll just go with the tooltip for now.

Ultimately, the guardian is doing more damage, doing it faster, doing it in power, and doing it while in heavily defensive gear. A lot of people constantly point at zerker gear, saying it is the only way to run a damage build. It really isn’t. I’ve been running a PVT guardian build in sPVP for a long time, and it does hit things quite kitten its own. One of my favorite things to do is just go around auto attacking people with the greatsword, since the combination of power + bulk means I’ll win the auto attack war. I’ve even played around with Valkyrie, which I recommend to many people, as it hits really kitten crits, and still has plenty of vitality for defense.

Those “builds” above are merely skeletons. The more modifiers you throw at it, the more things change up. But if you do throw modifiers on, you have to remember to do it to both classes: if you include trait abilities, you do it for both. If you include additional stats, you do it for both. If you include consumables, you do it for both.

We do see a lot of condi spam, and it is not because it is stronger, but because it is easier. Most condi attacks are ranged, which means they are easy to execute. They are also done in an AoE, which means they have an accumulating group damage, which is higher. They also have more passive abilities, which means it requires less skill shots or timed attacks. They have less obvious animations, making them harder to avoid. They have less direct build counters, instead yielding almost exclusively to cleanses. This makes it so that, for pole positioning and kiting, conditions are the best bet.

Power, while being stronger, is harder to use. You’ve got to be in melee range to do the best damage, and with big hits you are often relying on control effects, which have their own counter in stability and stun breakers. When it works, it pays off. Up in t1 we have melee trains, which are groups of warriors, guardians, thieves, and sometimes Rangers and Mesmers who rush in with movement skills in a large wave, and just mow everything down with power based melee attacks. These melee trains are capable of mowing down groups much larger than themselves, often splitting zergs in half once they march in.

This was in the WvW forum, so the context is slightly different, but nonetheless I think it applies.

Off-hand, I can’t think of any fanservice that didn’t have some plot behind it. I’ve watched about a million coming of age anime to know that there are about a million plot-related reasons to go to the beach or walk around in frilly lingerie.

And yes, I consider it fanservice, just look at the wiki’s example photo.

I’m not sure Marjory is a parody of Sherlock Holmes, but Film Noir. The introductory cinematic looks almost exactly like the standard black and white detective film opening sequence. Old noir films were made in a more highly conservative time, and elucidating the sexuality of the female leads (these were, after all, a male fantasy), they had to speak it. Marjory fits the part perfectly, except instead of being the client Jory is the gumshoe herself.

Also I can’t stop thinking about this line by Grouch Marx.

Flissy.4093:

Skillwise, Norn are objectively the best. They have a racial skill that is actually worth using – Leopard Form in WvW. Humans/Asura are all bad racial skills and not a single one should ever be used.

I find Hounds of Balthazar to be an excellent elite skill for Humans, especially on classes with lackluster elites. I’m only so versed in elementalists, but in a WvW or PVP scenario I can find the Elemental summon to be lackluster, the sword too limiting/ mostly for mobility, and the transformation really gimmicky. The Hounds, however, have a fairly strong burst, so combined with a few control skills I can see the burst really sealing the deal against enemies.

Other skills might be useful, but not for an elementalist.

The only scary thing about engineers is that they have the most builds out of any other class atm. The hardest part about fighting us is that you have no idea what we’ll do until we do it. We’re kind of like the boogeyman in that way: you have to assume a 30/30/30/30/30 6 kit build until we do something to show you otherwise. It’s pretty awesome, really.

But I do agree that Automated Response is a bit much. Hard/Diamond counters like this are never good for a PVP game.

If I remember correctly, this trait was originally overpowered at launch: it didn’t have a cooldown. Engineers could stack a lot of precision, main the rifle, and opponents would be nearly helpless because they were nearly perma-blinded. It was then over-nerfed.

I think it could use a buff, but I haven’t played PVP in awhile, so I’m not the best authority on the subject.

I think the debate about frequency and demographics is beside the point. The issue with same sex couples isn’t about distribution, but approval. For someone who doesn’t approve, the unsatisfactory number is 1. It doesn’t matter how many couples there are IRL.

But, if you want to get into the specific numbers, those vary widely on which study you look at. The Kinsey institute is where that 10% figure comes form, which is widely misinterpreted. That 10% consists of everyone who is not a 0 on the kinsey scale, and arguably nobody below 4 is homosexual going by that standard. A couple of random samples I’ve read about (polled about 5000 people) would find anywhere from 120 to 150 self-identifying homosexuals (or 4 and above on the kinsey scale), which puts the number somewhere between 2.5% to 3.5% of the population.

While you can talk about people not admitting to homosexuality, you can also about people misrepresenting homosexuality. The Kinsey scale isn’t well known, so someone who is a 1 or a 2 might think themselves fully homosexual, largely because they think the subject is black and white. Many will argue that anything other than 0 on the Kinsey scale is fully homosexual, and classify that one guy who had an experience once or twice years ago as a homosexual. There is also the shifting distribution between ages, with college age having the highest percentage of homosexuals per population, which drops off in later years. Then there’s the issue of self-identified bisexuals, and how to consider them.

Then there’s also the type of homosexuality to talk about. There are many: some who are only physically attracted but still exhibit emotional heterosexual attractions, then vice versa of that situation. Many people will have “flings” with same sex partners while still married to their heteo partner, and not consider themselves homosexual despite how an outside observer might classify them. Then there are individuals that are characterized only by a lack of affinity for the opposite gender, then there are people with strong aversions to the opposite gender, such as those who suffered abuse at a young age and find an emotional safety and comfort in same-sex relationships. Many of these people can be classified not as having a homosexual attraction, but an aversion based default in their lives. Here, the kinsey scale wouldn’t even properly apply, since sex/sexuality is multidimensional.

The hard part about talking distribution is that there is no definite definition for what constitutes homosexuality, and there is no way to properly sample or test it. I can say that 100% of the worlds population is homosexual, and there is no way to prove that statement wrong. Just cite some results of some Penile Plethysmograph tests, give generic hiding or misrepresentation statements, and make the definition of homosexuality wide enough, and it can envelope everyone. I’d argue that distributions IRL are an aside of the issue as well.

The thing with fanservice is… well… this is how many players (including me) discovered Lady Kasmeer:

https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/71543/gw032.jpg

This is her second appearance in game that I can cite, with the first only being a cutsene with Marjory. Lord Faren appeared in a speedo, but he had a role in the human personal story (wealth starting path) since launch, and is widely recognized as a more comical character.

Marjory voice, IMO at least, is overly sensual. She could read the phone book and keep men interested. So, you take someone with an overly sensual voice, and someone who’s big appearance involved wearing Tyria’s only bikini, and put them together.

This complicates things, since many people don’t like that lesbian relationships are being used for fanservice, regardless of their approval of same-sex relationships in general. Some find it patronizing to men, some find it insulting to the integrity of homosexuals.

I think the effect of stacking itself is a bit overrated. The thing with enemies in this game is that they aren’t that big most of the time. So, when you get 5 players who melee an enemy, it is extremely hard to not stack on top of each other. I mean, the thief is usually trying to take advantage of flanking strike by standing behind the enemy, but melee combat is extremely close quarters no matter what you do.

Now, there are some issues with stacking, but they aren’t all that widespread. Enemies will change their behavior sometimes, and stacking will lead to enemies not using their most dangerous attacks. Also, many enemies don’t have cleave, so when players stack in one spot, this leads to a bit of a “supertank” where to get even one player down, the enemy has to get all 5 players down essentially

Skipping is a bit of a different issue. I’ve argued with players who skip, and the only conclusion I can come to is that they hate anyone who tells them they shouldn’t skip, and will wildly mischaracterize and insult anyone who disagrees with them. So, this latter half is mostly for people who don’t skip.

There is an often repeated myth that Anet endorses skipping. This isn’t true. Anet currently tolerates skipping. The quote by hrouda is usually misinterpreted as widespread endorsement, but really it is hrouda saying that he hasn’t come up with an adequate solution for it yet. Hrouda left, and now Anet has imposed their solution: arbitrary gates. From doors that don’t open until enemies are dead, to mandatory objectives, to escorts, Anet is designing their dungeons more and more around preventing players from running past mobs.

The act of skipping itself is done for many reasons, and they are not mutually exclusive:

A)Regular players trying to emulate the “1337”. This often ends in failure, with everyone standing around waiting for somebody to run past the mobs, and with people yelling at whomever was picked out of the crowd from the slew of attacks flying at the fleeing players.

B)Players who are rushing for rewards. Dungeons are end-loaded with tokens, so players who want those tokens will run forward as quickly as possible. These players view whomever slows them down as a personal insult, seeing teammates as tools for their wallet and little else.

C)Players who are bored with the content. Of course, this begs the question as to why players are doing something they find boring, but nonetheless there are people who just run dungeons over and over again, no matter how much they detest the act of doing so. I think this is a holdover from other MMOs, where a grind is expected, so they see GW2 dungeons as the skinner box that most MMOs are.

D)Players who find the content too hard. In many dungeons, the enemy groups can be more challenging than the bosses, especially when in glass cannon gear. The boss strategies are hammered out, but the mooks are more dynamic, leading to players dying and wiping frequently at them. This is often counter-productive, since players who can’t fight the regular mobs will often get caught and killed. This leads to players not getting better at the game.

E)Players attempting speedrunning records. This is the most admirable reason, but it is also the most non-applicable reasons (since you can still speedrun against arbitrary gates).

The thing with skipping is that most players who defend skipping will cite the whole “play how I want” mantra, but fail to realize that their actions affect everyone in the game. In particular, Anet must balance rewards for dungeons around the average rate at which dungeons are completed. If dungeons are mostly skipped and speedran, then Anet has to balance rewards around this, and ultimately this negatively impacts players who don’t speed through things.

There is the communal aspect as well. Reason above is the most hostile, and these people will actively seek out and harass those who don’t speed through with them or disagree with gear checks or full GC philosophy. This hostility drives away people who wouldn’t skip, and spreads more hostility against that notion. Soon, players who don’t want to skip can’t find a like minded social circle because they’ve all been run off.

Or something else happens: in stark defiance, players will adopt a hyper-casual mindset, which will cause them to shut off all self improvement or criticism, citing an entitlement mentality when anyone says anything.

No matter how you slice it, playing the game in such a manner to avoid content the devs designed doesn’t turn out well. I’m not a fan of arbitrary gates. I’d rather incentivize early content by speading out tokens and gold instead of just awarding it at the end. But I prefer arbitrary gates to nothing.

1. Elementalist
2. Mesmer
3. Necro

Basically the light armor classes.

I Just re-rolled a toon into an ele, and so far I haven’t had problems with surviving (only level 41 atm).

The main clutch tool I use is Arcane Shield. The 3 blocks in PVP kind of sucks, but in PVE that shield has saved me time and again. Depending on weapon sets, however, I’ll usually pace the usage of my blinds, controls, and heals to maximize efficiency.

If built for DPS, you don’t need to live very long before you plow through an enemy group.

EDIT: Also I always try to have high vigor uptime. Those dodges really help.