Guild Wars 2

Took the image from the GW2 wiki showing all the professions, gave it a black background and smudged the edges so it transitions better. Nothing special but sharing it if someone wanted to use it for a background as well but didn’t want bright white for a desktop.

What if the teamwork in combat revolved around “essentially the same attack” that everyone has for damage and survivability.

What I mean is, everyone has a group heal, but it is on long cooldown. In order to heal and live through the fight you have to time and rotate your group heals otherwise you die.

Everyone can break the bosses armor so that he takes damage, but it is on a long cooldown, and if you all blow it at the same time, then there will be long periods of no damage being done, resulting in the group dying because they couldn’t meet the damage needed.

Everyone can control the boss, but you have to space out controls between the group otherwise there will be periods where the boss is flailing about and hitting everyone for obscene damage, and the only way to prevent that is to immobilize/knock down/block at the right times, but for the group.

Take that self survivability and apply it to the group and the group becomes stronger for longer periods of damage and combat.

Zeldain.5710:

Spoken like someone who has never had team success in an MMO.

You sir, are amazing. Oh wait team success meaning your team accomplished the objectives and you continued on for the ride as well?

What is your deeps, I am sure it is really big

If you want you can post your wow character history and what guild you were in for more credibility. Maybe a gearscore too.

Going through your post history shows you area very upset and negative individual who is not happy where he is. You then take this out on others to make yourself feel better which while I think you feel it is productive, in the long run you are just lashing out at anyone near you in an attempt to hide your own deficiencies.

Maybe you should take a break from games and do something you like.

Galen.9042:

So coordinating 40 people to do the right things at the right time isn’t an example of skill, but coordinating 5 people to throw orbs at the right time (Arah) or get through a swamp in 30 seconds (Fractals) is an example of high skill? Sorry, not buying it. The two tasks are identical; it’s just that one requires more people.

In essence, that is what I am trying to get at, but you are on the other side of the fence. The same tasks are being done here, minus the role based combat of the trinity. The complexity of logistics has been reduced so it happens on a smaller scale thus ridding some of the confusion invoking factors and reducing it down to simple player performance.

I am not saying GW2 is doing combat better, I am saying GW2 and WoW combat are not so distinctly different that they NEED to bring trinity here. Simply flush out the fight mechanics and let us do MORE things in combat, not force us into less things with roles.

Have I done progression, hardcore mode raiding? No. Were the core mechanics different? No. Hard core mechanics simply took the primary encounter and added a stipulation on it, like tanks lose agro over time or you can’t taunt so you are punished if you do not swap correctly. Or they had it where the boss had more hp than normal but there was a hard enrage on the encounter so it became a gear check.

I know full and well the mechanics and the intricacies of raiding, so don’t assume and attempt to belittle people. You may simply be afraid that my words diminish your achievements in previous games, and while I don’t try to take that away from you, I don’t feel those were truly skillful occurrences, but simply everyone performing their own role correctly and on time, like a choreographed dance.

The personal skill you so desired to tout was about knowing class rotations and maximizing them in the correct scenarios. Sometimes on highly mobile fights, people would have dps drop off, but a “skilled” player could manage pushing the buttons and moving at the same time.

It is still wack-a-mole as far as priority of cooldowns and attacks to use. Belive me I have been all over elitestjerks, tanksspot, and other raiding/theory crafting sites.

Understanding what skills to bring into a raid on your hotbar versus what ones are not needed often times has me laugh at the “unskilled” player, because then they say things like “what is repentance? I don’t have that on my bar” and we needed him to CC one of the mobs before pulling. That took some time explaining what the skill does and how to get it on his hotbar.

Maybe I view these things as simple because I have played games for so long that I see the same stuff rehashed constantly, versus the younger player who their first game was wow and know nothing else.

As far as what does GW2 have to offer? Right now the only thing that they differ from is removing the trinity which removed some of the gimicky boss fight mechanics that relied on healing or tanking.

The rest of the boss fight mechanics that rely on positioning and avoiding damage are still there. Don’t stand in fire, don’t stand infront of the mob if you don’t have to, and do as much damage as you can because our HP is limited so you try to not face tank too much.

So to answer: nothing. What GW2 does bring to the table is a change in paradigms that may allow for a new way of playing to arise and include all players instead of the traditional trinity.

So for now, I am waiting and hopeful, while providing any ideas I can to spark creativity not stifle it.

The difficulty in wow is paying attention and moving when you are told to move. Attack or stop attacking when you are told to, and have enough stats to do the required tanking/healing/dpsing for that fight.

What makes those things hard is organizing 10-25 (or even 40) people to do the right things at the right times. Not that the actions you need to take are difficult, but organizing a large group of people to wake up and pay attention was. As well as the time invested into gearing properly.

I wouldn’t call that skill so much as awareness and time.

As my concept of combat mechanics in rpg games has developed with MMOs I went back and played some old school D&D based games (Dragon Lance series on dosbox emulator).

My new found understanding of stats and combat roles was hard to fit into the D&D style of combat. Yes I could have a plate wearing class with more HP and AC than my mage, but that character did not hold agro. There was no agro.

To fight I had to worry about positioning. Fight in doorways, keep squishies in the back. A cleric could only heal a few times and at most it was meager and kept the plate wearers barely alive but still fighting.

Combat in those old D&D games had no real tank/healer/dps, because everyone had to contribute to the damage. Clerics could front line fight as well since they were heavy/medium armor wearers, mages had to get up front but use spells to reduce or avoid damage, and even then you only had so many spells memorized that you couldn’t just stand in the back and cast all day. So often times I had my squishies with slings and bows.

Non-trinity can work, but there has to be a lot of other things involved. A big things is positioning, the next thing is figuring out how to help the players work together and not simply just every man for himself.

What would happen if they forced PC/NPC collisions on and you couldn’t run past a line of enemies nor could they run past you?

Zeldain.5710:

MistyMountains.3751:

Dont support this- sorry but the holy trinity actually required no real tactics what so ever…played many mmos in my life and action oriented combat will always require more skill and teamwork …

Sorry, didn’t realize it was opposites day.

Not having the trinity results in total, chaotic combat with absolutely zero strategy required and no tactics applied. That’s what we have here in GW2 here now.

Team combat is all but non-existent. It’s a joke of an MMO.

Not totally related, but an fps with no combat roles what so ever has tons of strategy and tactics required in order to hold rooms, clear hallways, and reach objectives.

There isn’t a tank, healer, and dps in counter strike but there are tons of strategies in that game if you want to use them (even if most just zerg a spot)

So positioning and team coordination are still around in non-role oriented combat.

So the question is now, what is challenging with the current paradigm of no trinity.

• Knowing what attacks to dodge and what attacks to simply walk out of are one mechanic of GW2 combat.
• Using bundles like rocks or specialized weapons in combat are another thing they have done.
• Adds are in combat here that you have to manage or kite.
• Enemy composition on priority of easiest target to kill to hardest are in encounters.
• Knowing choosing whether to range an enemy or melee is another combat choice.
• Staying out of red rings on ground (don’t stand in the fire!)
• The downed system is odd and frustrating, but can be used as a combat mechanic for players to recognize how to get up from being downed by a non-dodgeable attack.

Those are all things that have been done without the use of trinity or profession specific mechanics. Can we kick that up a notch and add more interesting ideas?

Maybe a fight that removes dodge and requires players to use stuns/immobilizes/knock downs to not be hit.

A mobile fight where the tunnel is collapsing and you have to run forward and fight.

A fight where you have to drag the enemy to traps to do damage or cause a debuff to make it vulnerable to attacks?

Those are primarily boss type encounters, but what can you think of in general to make the game combat more dynamic without a trinity.

edit

What if the combo system were enhanced and you could do things like a leap attack combo with a slam attack to give a flying ground stomp. Give button combos that do different things instead of just combo field and combo finisher.

My mmo gaming roots are from Meridian59, EQ1, UO, DAOC, EQOA, SWG, Vanguard, EQ2, GW, WOW, SWTOR, GW2. Some various mmo betas and trials here and there that never made any impact to the community. The games I spent the most time in were EQ, EQ2, and WoW.

EQ I was a minor raider, and only did things I needed to do for quests, such as Vox and Nagafen, then some Temple of Veeshan stuff before I quit. Same goes for EQ2 to a much lesser extent cause I got tired of raiding from EQ.

WoW I didn’t put a lot of effort into it until the end of BC and the start of LK. I pushed and raided much of the LK content till Cata came out and the new story didn’t intrigue me as much, but finished Firelands and Deathwing.

In all those games I have typically played a tank, and only at the end of WoW did I start going dps with some dabbling in healing.

Honestly I found the WoW encounters and general content a regurgitation of its previous encounters/content/skins many times. What’s that? dragon fight, well it probably has some sort of frontal cone and tail swipes, don’t stand in front. everyone stand in back or sides, watch for big tells to move in or away from certain mechanics.

Maybe we need 2 tanks to soak up damage or trade agro…

Oh adds came in? Either we kill them, or we kite them.

Bosses health is linked? Learn to switch targets or split dps…or even better if the mechanics let you, aoe them together.

First time through was interesting enough, but seeing the same fights used from expansion to expansion was silly. Yes they were revitalized, but Blizzard is the king at rehashing old content with a pretty new ribbon to satisfy the masses. I found it insulting though.

The new fights with Pandaria have huge obvious signs to tell people you are the target, or move out of these rings. Taking deadly boss mods and integrating it into the main game now in essence.

I wonder what it would look like if someone were to compile the boss fight mechanics from wow release to now.

As for GW2, I don’t feel that combat is horrible and broken, but I do agree it needs to be spiced up and give us more impact on what we do, but I do not think trinity is the answer. More mechanics, more interaction, more reward for skill and good play.

edit
Was just remembering EQ group requirments: War, Cleric, Enchanter, and what ever else…or else you were going to fail. Often times you “needed” a Monk to FD pull groups of mobs to pull singles out and not die.

Clerics job? complete heal. Casting any other spell resulted in a delay in CH and causing a death. Cleric rotations on raids were ridiculous.

THAT was a rigid system.

Reposting here as I think it is more oriented to continue this thread and deleting my own post on the topic.

I believe I see a trend with a lot of the gripes with this game and I think it has to do with players not feeling special or different.

How is that? Well the biggest gripes are about lack of skill involved in play, lack of combat roles, lack of meaningful choices in character development. One of the ones that boggles me is how upset people get that Trehern is the hero in the story and you are the assistant (I really enjoyed the story and thought the break away from “you” are the hero interesting and meticulously crafted so that the story could be consistently run from each character without having to change drastically, since you are a side character not the main).

We are all expected to dps/support/control in combat. Gear doesn’t matter as far as fighting too much. What profession doesn’t matter in a group as much as people like it to. “Play your way” tries to encourage creativity while not trying to penalize players for bad choices.

So what we got is everyone is equal.

Question is, is that good or bad? Do we now have choices because we are all the same, or is anything you do futile because you will still just be the same?

Bottom line for me is I am still entertained and intrigued, but I think that is because I am trying to break the “same” mold so I like to theory craft and find boundaries to push and niches to fill.

This maybe why some people like role based groups so they can be special and distinct versus the masses. Someone to tank, someone to heal, and then dps fights to see who is “the best”.

So final question: How can we find ways to feel special and different, or does that not need to matter and we need to look past that?

Would like to point out that the sound persists even if alt tabbed out of gw2 and game sounds should then be muted, if I remember correctly. So it seems it is corrupting or filling the sound processes as a whole operating system/sound card and not just game sounds. The sound does not stop until gw2 is shut down and unloaded from memory.

Additionally, it has been mentioned in the past to turn the sound quality down in the game and this will reduce the occurrence of this bug appearing, which again seems to link it to some sort of memory leak or the like. I have not had any problem with this since turning down the sound quality option.

The Guardian trait Shimmering Defense has the description of “Burn nearby foes when your health reaches 25%. (60-second cooldown)”

The actual activation of the skill occurs at 15% of life instead of the listed 25%.

While it satisfies me to know that I caused someone to ninja log or quit out of a match simply because they didn’t want to be downed or killed, it is slightly frustrating when trying to keep decent matches going in sPvP. I guess in the long run it doesn’t matter as much since it isn’t tourney, but still.

I have noticed an up trend in people avoiding being killed by leaving the match. Often this is preempted by smack talking for a bit till they get downed.

I think we all need to man up and accept our wins as well as our losses and just enjoy the game. This will make it a better environment for everyone.

~slightly annoyed but overall triumphant player~

Oversight or intentional?

Greatsword attack for Guardians, Binding Blade attack puts an effect on the target that does damage over 10 seconds. This damage is only modified by increasing condition damage and it ignores power.

Logic infers that since this is effected by an increase to condition damage, then condition duration should have an effect on it as well. Especially since condition duration is a trait line that has a lot of greatsword enhancing traits in it.

Increasing condition duration has no effect on binding blades duration. I think it should based on other mechanics.

I am well aware of the AH/Crit Hammer build or other variations of that, but I was trying to list out what we have and spark new ideas.

Still I do contest that our trait lines are not as straight forward as they could be as other professions and require us to spread ourselves a little thin. Also as you said a lot of armor doesn’t split stats the way our trait lines do so it requires a little more thinking on our behalf. Maybe that is why I am always so intrigued with the Guardian class as I keep trying to find new ways to make it work.

Different professions have different combinations of stats within each trait line. Some lead to stat synergy that helps you direct what gear to combine with the build you have created.

For example that obvious combination of precision and crit damage combined in the Elementalist trait line of Air Magic helps both stats work together well. For Warriors in the Arms trait line they have precision combined with condition damage. This still makes sense since that trait line provides bleed conditions on crit, which helps utilize the mechanics of that build.

For Guardians, what are our trait synergies and what stat combinations go best with us?

Zeal
Power/Condition Duration
Radiance
Precision/Condition Damage
Valor
Toughness/Crit Damage
Honor
Vitality/Healing Power
Virtues
Boon Duration/Virtue Recharge Rate

With our trait lines, it seems we are forced to combine two different trait lines to see full effect with many stats. If you take Radiance and gain Precision, you can increase that effectiveness by taking Valor and gaining Crit Damage. Unfortunately there are not a lot of traits in that combination that have good synergy with crit damage and precision. At most more crit chance with Right Hand Strength at the end of the Radiance line.

The Honor line makes sense as you gain more health you need more healing power to recover that health. The trait synergies in this line encourage you to dodge more with increased energy returns, heals on rolls, and more damage with lower energy. It also promotes utilizing symbols more with large symbols, symbols heal, and symbols last longer. Lastly this trait line promotes the utilization of shouts, with removal of conditions and faster shouts.

With the Honor line encouraging symbol use, the logical combination now points you to the Zeal line with more utilization of symbols causing vulnerability and more damage. These are less critical to the synergy of vitality and healing power though, so can easily be ignored.

With the above examples it really seems like our synergies are broken. Or at least they are less obvious than other professions.

What synergies can you find to enhance our profession play and better gear in accordance to your trait lines?

Ok, since no one else is chatting it up and discussing how to use the above abilities I’ll throw my spin on it.

There are two general break downs in healing. Good with Healing Power and Bad with Healing Power.

Good with Healing Power (Defensive)
*Regeneration
*Virtue of Resolve
*Writ of the Merciful
*Selfless Daring

Bad with Healing Power (Offensive)
*Zealous Blade
*Monk’s Focus
*Altruistic Healing
*Pure of Heart

With the two lists we can split the style of game play up to be more offensive or defensive. Without having to stack healing power to be viable you can utilize the list that has bad scaling with healing power to maintain self survivability and now stack other damage dealing stats like precision, power, crit damage, or even condition damage/duration if you want.

The other list that scales well with healing power will inherently benefit if you go down the Honor trait line and wear gear such as Cleric’s armor and weapons. While stacking healing you are now limiting your offensive stats and have positioned yourself to be playing defensively.

The question is now, do you stack more defensive abilities on top of your gear and traits, or do you try to balance them with offensive abilities like the Healaway build that has been posted on this forum.

Remember, the whole point is to stay alive while you are killing things, and the longer the fight goes, the harder it is to stay alive typically.

So how would you combine the above abilities to gain an effective build?

True that sigil of blood and omnomberry ghost provide good life steal, but was trying to keep this specific to how to build your Guardian’s and new or old ideas combined.

The things that any profession can tack on top of their build such as gear and food is icing on top of a good foundation.

With recent changes, Altruistic Healing has fallen out of the limelight for some people. Regardless of the semantics with if AH is/was broken and if those changes hurt the build, I wanted to talk about fundamentals of creating a build.

In GW2 we are supposed to learn out to help ourselves and maintain our own survival. Indeed in every profession there are ways to prolong your own life and sometimes the life of others around you to a much lesser degree.

So a core function of any build should take into consideration on how to maintain your own life to continue fighting. Well how do Guardian’s accomplish this? Let’s list out the sources of our own survivability.

• Altruistic Healing
  • Heals yourself for each boon applied to allies and self for 69 + 1% of your healing power. This is most effective in group situations where it becomes our best heal over time with reliable boons being applied.
• Monk’s Focus
  • Heals yourself every time you use a meditation skill for 1960 + 10% of your healing power. This is our best burst healing, and best used in solo fighting situations over AH.
• Regeneration
  • This boon is available to other professions, but we have the capability of having a fairly good up time with the boon and the only profession that can have it available on a utility slot. Necromancer’s and Guardians provide regeneration consistently. It heals for 130 + 12.5% of your healing power at level 80.
• Virtue of Resolve
  • Built into our profession mechanics, this virtue seems weak when activated and for the majority of the time best if maintained as a passive (unless traited in the virtue trait line). This heals for 84 + 6% of our healing power.
• Selfless Daring
  • Every time you roll you heal yourself and allies for 129 + 100% of your healing power (50% in pvp).
• Zealous Blade
  • While using the Great Sword, attacks heal for 25 per enemy hit at level 80. This does not scale with healing power, but provides decent burst healing in large clusters of mobs. Also leaves the AH or MF self healing traits available to select to stack on top of ZB.
• Writ of the Merciful
  • Symbols will now heal yourself and allies for 107 + 7.5% of your healing power. On quickly activating symbol weapons (the hammer) this can provide a lot of healing up time while fighting.
• Pure of Heart
  • Whenever an aegis you applied is removed, you are healed for 645 + 10% of your healing power. The question remains is, will this heal allies that gain your aegis? Will this heal yourself if allies that gained an aegis from you is hit? At first glance this seems less effective since our aegis are on long cool downs, but some creative players might find a use for it. Works well with Valorous Defense, which gives you an aegis when your life drops under 50%.

An interesting side note, we have the longest cool downs on our Healing skills (shelter, healing breeze, and signet of resolve) out of all the other profession. This may be due to our various ways to heal ourselves in the traits and skills listed above.

Tried this build last night in sPvP and found it worked and was effective enough on surviving where a guy msged me with a question on the build I was running.

Damage is higher than other bunker type builds I have run, but this is more flexible. It is not insane high burst damage though, so don’t run in thinking you are unstoppable.

It plays sort of non-intuitive to the styles that I have played and relies on you avoiding damage and letting regen and heals come off cooldown either by utilizing blinds/dodges/blocks.

I think this is a decent build and should get more interest.

It does work, and it does apply to yourself (at least in the mists and spvp where I have tested).

You will see an icon in your boon/condition list that looks like the trait symbol in your trait list.

Take the buff and get into combat by falling damage or one of the test dummies and you can verify it works.

This one turned out entertaining enough for me to post.

Me and my gingerbread posse don’t put up with nothing from no one, that means YOU! (they are so happy!!! Except for the little one in the back, he feels bad.)

While a little more doom and gloom than I would like to put it, OneManArmy, your opinion on things mirrors mine in many regards.

We are supposed to be amazing and defensive but others can do that role as well if not better.

We are supposed to be group support and utility, but others again can do that better as well.

We sacrifice our HP and our burst for sustainable combat, but others can do the same as us with more HP and better burst.

What we are missing is our defining feature, which apparently is supposed to be boons and defensiveness. Right now that doesn’t define enough.

Yet the rest of the players hate guardians because they can’t kill us and it is so OP that we can hold a point.

So is it as bad as it sounds or do we have it where we need it as is cried about by other professions.

Some really interesting ideas getting posted here. Glacial Symbol would make things much closer to the control of position and movement. I still think a ramp up in symbol damage would be good and not be small percentages.

In essence what we are all saying so far is to make boons give us more damage the more boons we have one. Something that makes a guardian having boons different than any other profession with the same boons on.

They already have us with low base states with the stipulation that boons make us amazing, but as you said it has the same effect on everyone and we are not the only ones that can apply these boons.

We do get some benefit with boons that other professions don’t via Altruistic Healing and Power of the Virtuous. The latter being less used by the majority of players as it only applies 1% extra damage with a max of 9% extra damage if you have all boons up.

Maybe change Power of the Virtuous to increase damage by 5% per a boon? Also have a trait that increases the effectiveness of Virtue of Resolve per each boon you have, so that your regen is stronger to make up for lower hp?

If staff had boons get applied on the number 1 attack that would make it fairly interesting. Maybe a 20% chance to apply a random boon to allies and self?

JonathanSharp (Game Designer)

We want them to feel very powerful when their boons are active, but if those boons are removed, they will start to feel pressure.

That is where I derived the “maximize boon up time” from. While we may not need to invest in boon duration, having quickly refreshing sources of applying these boons seems to be important.

As you said, having boons on or not does not seem detrimental in our game play, and if anything with the majority of the players doing AH style combat because of how effective it is in our self survivability, the quantity and frequency of boons (as you pointed out) is more important.

Also many people have stated that Guardians are good at surviving burst damage but condition damage is our weakness. While we have plenty of ways to remove/convert conditions it is still a point of contention on if this is our strength or weakness.

So in the end, I think they may have missed their mark with the effectiveness of boons.

As far as area control/positioning. We do have a few good push backs and one good pull, but I am unsure if we really do excel in battlefield positioning or not. Symbols on the ground and consecrations are mainly ignored, so maybe increasing the leathality and benefit of standing in these symbols would help give us that strength in positioning they stated.

Long cooldown symbols that tick once or twice for in effect nothing are shrugged off by many players and mobs. If we want a battlefield presence we need to have these things be something people want to avoid if they are fighting us and move to if they are fighting “with” us.

I think wall of reflection does fairly well in it’s battle field positioning roll.

Boo, didn’t see your post when I made one as well.

Well my opinion on the stated goals for Guardians are that most people consider guardians more prone to conditions than other professions because of the lower innate health on the guardian. We are awesome at removing them though, so this balances it self out I guess with that being our strength and weakness.

As far as focusing on Boons, I do not know if we have a better time maintaining efficient combat boons more than others. What do you need to fight in the matter of boons?

• Aegis (we do this reliably but with long cooldowns and it only stops one attack)
• Fury (only one trait gives us fury and thats on burn)
• Might (We are decent at keeping might on, if not high stacks at least it is active)
• Protection (We excel at this with hammer builds)
• Regeneration (Maybe best or second best at keeping regen up)
• Retaliation (Very high uptime for guardians)
• Stability (Sufficent sources of stability to use on cooldown)
• Swiftness (Multiple sources but long cooldowns or require staff)
• Vigor (With a crit build this has good up time, with recent change it is easier for lower crit players to maintain this buff)

So we can keep protection, regen, vigor, and retaliation up in combat fairly well. Does this make us powerful or is it negligible as other classes can have these boons as well?

JonathanSharp (Game Designer)

Class balance philosophies
We normally try to employ metered and controlled balance changes with each pass, rather than huge reductions or improvements to classes. We want to get all classes on the same playing field, and we want to avoid “whack-a-mole” style balance. HUGH increases and HUGE decreases lead to meta instability, and thusly, we try to make multiple small tweaks rather than putting in massive changes that we have to later correct.

When designing and balancing the classes, we try to make sure that class roles and identities stay intact. So, in doing so, we make sure that there are rules and boundaries outlining the capabilities and weaknesses of each class.

• Guardian
  • The Guardian is a heavy armor class who relies on boons to make up for their low levels of innate health. They focus on area control and punishing enemies for the position on the battlefield. We want them to feel very powerful when their boons are active, but if those boons are removed, they will start to feel pressure. They can remove conditions more easily than the Warrior, but share the Warrior’s need to be in melee range to dole out maximum damage.

Source Post

Based on the above post, we are supposed to:

• Maximize boon up time
• Control positioning
• Manage condition damage better than others
• Fight in melee range effectively

Do you think they have hit the mark or at least making steps towards hitting that mark?

Some items that can be destroyed would not take damage unless I placed a ground target attack down (symbol) the majority of the items I did guardian staff AE to run around breaking things.

The last thing I was missing was in the Norn section. One of the tent/houses wouldn’t break till I dropped a symbol.

It is working, but double check you hit everything in different ways to ensure it breaks right.

Before anyone goes ballistic over semantics or what not, I would like to point out what I think is happening.

Silentstorm you are a professed clicker, so there is a built in travel time on the mouse courser as you move from one button to the next. There is nothing wrong with that, and I know plenty of people that perform perfectly fine in pvp or pve like that in many other games. I do think, however, this can limit the complex things you can do as far as timing.

One of the examples in your video you were doing a whirling wrath and then judges intervention to the risen mob. What “I” saw was that you initiated the spinning attack and it was halfway done by the time you moved the mouse to JI and the remaining attacks landed on the target.

JI did not cancel WW, but simply you didn’t get to the target in time to maximize the WW hits.

The leap attacks you demonstrated you stated that you gained extra distance and it canceled the leap attack. Simply you could have used JI as it has a longer range than any leap attacks and traveled that same distance.

Additionally I don’t believe the leap attack gets canceled either, but as my previous post about Z-axis mentions, you may have animation issues with being too high for the leap to attack due to the arc in travel changing when combining JI with any leaps.

Same thing with empower, you may have already completed the majority of the animation by the time you initiated a JI teleport so it “looks” like it is shortened to you, but simply you didn’t start the teleport at the beginning of the animation.

If you get the same stacks of might from empower standing still as you do teleporting from JI, that shows it is not canceled.

I have not had an instance of JI interrupting any of the attacks I use with it.

If it did cancel then things like a JI teleport to Whirling Wrath, Ring of Warding, or Banish on people wouldn’t work.

I know these work and they are a popular thing to do, so maybe JI is interrupting your moves for another reason.

The two you listed are leap attacks which change the Z-axis of the player. The leap attacks have known issues with Z-Axis changes such as down hill ramps causing a miss.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Commands

hold shift or alt and try drawing on the map or minimap.

You can set waypoint, draw, and ping the map for those in your party.

On the guardian forums this came up a while back and people were trying to figure out if it could be considered an exploit or not.

They called it “ninja skipping” or “animation clipping” and were using it with hammer to speed up the attack animation of hammer and produce faster roll heals without going too far away from the combat area.

They reported it as a bug/exploit and received no finalized word on if that was a confirmed exploit or not, but this died out in conversational use.

This is best seen/reproduced with a slow attacking weapon and to dodge right when it connects with the target.

Not sure I see how it can be considered power leveling since it won’t help you advance faster, but simply allow you to run, albeit at a higher difficulty (with harder hitting and/or new mechanics than you are ready to handle of you are the low guy).

Simply allows more flex with groups. Players still only progress if the difficulty is higher than current level.

I am sure everything can be exploited to some degree, if you can think of a good flaw in this one other than it sounds like power leveling then I am all for it and maybe it can spur a counter idea to help this work better.

As you said the idea is to help a friend but not miss out due to level, but I am sure it isn’t fully fleshed out so there are flaws. Help me find them.

If anything people may still be unwilling to run because of higher agony resist requirements.

Random thought and I’m surprised I haven’t seen something like it before, or maybe I just missed the previous suggestions for it.

What if the highest level fractal you could do was averaged out by the spread of the group?

Something like this:
Max Fractal Difficulty = (group average rounded up) + 1 for every player at highest group level not to exceed the highest accessible difficulty for the group

If a group consists of: 15, 20, 25, 25, 25
The averaged out group difficulty possible would be: 22
Add +1 for each player at 25: +3
highest difficulty is now: 25

This scenario gives a player 10 levels lower than the group difficulty a chance to join without penalizing the group drastically. If either of the two lower difficulty players had an extra level now that group can progress onto level 26.

A group with a level spread of: 16, 20, 25, 25, 25
Average group difficulty: 22.2
+1 for each player at max group difficulty: +3
Round up decimal places gives max group difficulty: 26

On completion of the fractal everyone lower than difficulty completed gains the next difficulty for their true level while equal to the difficulty done stays the same.

I’m sure the numbers can be tweaked better but its a suggestion to open up the playing field a bit.

In his video comments he says:

IcomeINpeace.2085

Edit: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAS7flYgSD33ROEg4ERNj4xP8Da86BEjYDB;TkAqaM1I…
All jewel berserker
Armor 42K karma power/vit/tough with legs power/precision/tough
weapon berserker
food orian steak fries
3 orb

So the armor he is wearing is karma gear with a mix of power/vit/tough and power/precision/toughness

But also take note in the video you can see the little green arrows on the name plates of his targets that show that they are low levels being up-scaled to 80, which explains why he hits so hard on some of those guys.

let me try this again

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weight_of_Justice

No weight of justice does not reflect projectiles, but if they were to have cast refraction and the bubble persists while you are doing your attacks then you will hurt yourself.

If you are trying to imply that it is bugged and your team mate is causing your own projectiles to reflect back and hit you then this I have never experienced.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Refraction

Admittedly I skimmed through a good bulk of what you wrote so I might have missed a few points but I did latch onto your idea of how to give vertical progression via scaled down gear.

As it is now, gear is scaled down when you go to older content along with level. What you are proposing is to allow higher level/geared players to “earn” their way into higher stats with lower level content by granting an increase in stats with the exact same gear they are wearing. Thus giving way to a “grind” if players want.

The question is now, why would players even go back to that lower level content? Is there a reward for grinding up gear to match stats they already have but are simply scaled down?

Progression players want to get stronger. This delves into the argument about carrot/stick and treadmill (which I agree is an illusion of progression since you are just “catching up” to the new high water mark and not getting stronger in the long run). That can be re-hashed any which way and was done on many other forum posts.

Something else that I have noticed while playing this game is that more and more references to Everquest are made here than I have ever seen in a long time. I myself am reminded of the newness and exploration I felt on EQ. Somehow this game has captured the spirit of EQ and I really enjoy that.

One thing I remembered about EQ was that at the start gear was very subtle. The smallest increase in armor was much needed and amazing. There were no +100 to what ever stat back at the beginning.

To fight a willowisp you needed a magic or a silver weapon, otherwise that wisp was invulnerable. So coming back to GW2, small increases in gear are good, but keep it minuscule and more about looks or content based.

It is a form of gating, but maybe give different areas a needed armor stat that is only useful in that dungeon/area. Like cold resistance for a cold weather area, or fire resistance for a lava area. Much like the fractals with agony resistance.

The biggest problem with fractals is that the levels end up being spread out so players become separated over time, which in turn makes it harder to find groups. Also agony resistance felt too mandatory, so an idea of area specific stats might give way to the same problems. (I know I"m contradicting myself, but throwing out ideas and pro/cons).

Even in WoW there was talk about a “stat squish” to bring back inline the over inflated stats and mobs because over time the more “+’s” they added to equipment the higher and more ridiculous the stats became.

I have often wondered how it would be if numbers went away and everything was percentage based. I.E. – an attack could do 10% of the targets life. Gear would allow for a 5% reduction in damage, so that attack would now do 5% of the targets life.

Levels could give way to innate armor reducing the percentages even more, so gear would allow you to survive more hits without having to worry about 100’s or 1000’s of damage. And weapons would allow you to do more damage.

This gets rid of stat problems and allows a weapon or armor to be as effective as it was when you first got it anywhere you use it. Add in levels now, a level 5 weapon will do 10% of a level 5 targets life, but a level 10 target it would only do 3% of that targets life (arbitrary numbers).

So now you have a reason to get new gear to match the higher level content, without making the older weapons weaker, just less effective in that new area.

Anyway, posting at lunch time so rambling ideas instead of taking time to think them through and clarify. Figure out my gibberish if you like.

Just because they are not some “evil invasion of ____(insert your demographic here)” does not make it wrong and detrimental to the economy of the game as well as give unfair advantages against players that do not bot.

On a side note, I have been out catching bots again today and I noticed it last night but didn’t pay attention to it until now.

What seems to happen is that names will flicker for a split second point blank on my screen. I think this is an artifact on how these players are teleporting around. Happens so fast I can’t screenshot it but if I were to fraps it I am sure I could get it.

Check it out yourselves, stand by a node and wait for a few minutes and you will see huge text flash in front of your screen.

Unfortunately not lag or something innocent.

I have 10 user names on block right now and I reported them for botting after sitting at a rich iron ore node for the last 30 minutes.

Some of them die while trying to harvest so I have a small laugh to myself, but I really think Anet should make a node unreachable and then seeing if these bots can farm it. If they can they just self identified and then ban/disable any account that accesses that node.

Been a few posts here and there about the teleporting harvesting bots and even one by devs admitting how hard it is to report them since they disappear so quickly.

I’m sure others are doing the same as me but wanted to share how I have been catching them.

Take a screen shot.

After that you can see the botters name in the screen shot and give them a whisper in game.

Once you gave them a whisper their name is in the chat box and you can now right click and report them.

Gotta catch them all, enjoy!

For the bulk majority of the time, attacks like confusion or retaliation are not as effective in PvE as they are in PvP. I will say though, I have found a few fights here and there where I could take off huge chunks of the MOBs life by timing a retal at the correct time.

One example I can think of is one of the veteran fish in frostgorge sound. It does a breath attack that hits fairly low, but when I do retal it takes off chunks of it’s life. (I think it was the fish, something in the water near the watchful fjord).

So I guess the answer is “situational”, don’t build to maintain it. Having it available for cooldowns is nice though.

falling back on some reminiscent memories, I still have the EQ song stuck in my head to this day because of all those loading times.

Also the random blurbs they put on the loading messages like, “Teaching snakes how to kick….”

There are three fundamental ways to make combat “interesting”.

Either have the enemies do different and various things.

Or have the players do different and various things.

The combination of these would be the third.

Enemy combat has to be fairly predictable in order to allow the player to respond to those attacks. Such as a big hit having a glowing charge up indicating the players needs to run out. Or having combat swings from NPCs happening every 3-4 seconds (or what ever the time is).

NPCs also are managed so that special “kill” moves do not happen too frequently. We only have two dodges available and then a refresh time as the energy bar fills, so enemies can not spam big killer moves that need a lot of dodging (read, majority of enemy hits need to be within an acceptable range for players to stand there and take it…for the most part).

For the enemy side the things they can do to make combat more interesting would be to change the pattern of combat dodges up. Maybe some attacks require you to do a double roll while others require just a single roll. Or maybe put in an attack on a fight where you need a condition or boon from adds or enemies otherwise you will die.

The game needs to have punishment for wrong moves, but not so much that it doesn’t matter what you do, you will die anyway.

The other side of this is player interaction with the combat. Right now it is fairly static with a rotation of skills and the occasional combo field.

I think some interesting game play can be promoted by having various combat combos based on previous movement.

For example: Maybe if I roll forward and do an attack now I have a thrust move that has a push back.

Or if I roll to the sides I have a flanking attack that counts as hitting from the side/behind for a damage in bonus.

Rolling backwards could give a defensive bonus, halving the damage you take for the next couple of seconds.

How about more button type combos, such as if I do a leap attack and I hit a ground slam type attack I can combo them both into the target area at the same time.

By giving rolls more than defensive capability you have increased combat interaction and player decisions. Now I have to think about if I need to save the roll for defense or use it for offense.

By giving us more “real” combos with our abilities the players can do new and interesting things and apply skill. Like a fighting game allows players to combo and chain abilities into a smooth fighting style.

Taking a look at the OP’s post history, I think he is talking about loading things in respects to other players and graphics which cause culling issues.

Yes culling is annoying, but the game does this to minimize load on your computer. Again WoW does this with large clusters of people, and I notice you do a lot of WvW. Again in a large cluster of people.

They do need to optimize how they cull things and/or give us the option to cull more or less depending on how good our computers are.

With culling you can limit the amount of different characters there are on your screen (i.e. polygons and textures) which will take a load on your graphical frame rate and memory being used. This is a very high graphics game so in order for it to run smoothly, culling is needed. Most likely it needs more culling than other games of lesser graphical quality.

Can they make it better? Yes for sure. Do they put time and effort into making it better? I have to believe that they don’t want a game where you can’t see people because of culling, they have addressed the issue publicly, so I believe they will do what they can to fix that.

interesting video I watched a while back but good insight to this same issue we are taking about with loading times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=A3oIiH7BLmg#t=467s