Guild Wars 2

The by-far coolest part of their design is how they’re fully invisible until you destroy their one (very meaty) clone. Then they’re super vulnerable.

I’d love that, a defense mechanic actually based on illusions.

For me HoT itself was a massive boon to the game, more dangerous open world, large sprawling maps with tons of hidden areas, 3D movement, everything.

The downside was the story, the latter parts felt terribly rushed.

Since then it’s sadly been mostly a downhill slide. Utter lack of balancing effort (to be fair, par for the course as it was just as little or less before HoT) coupled with rather meh story patches combines into something which feels as if the cool parts of HoT were one-shot effort.

Artaz.3819:

This was way overpowered prior with stacking a large amount of confusion very early on against any target (even if stunned) with the standard spam the clones, F5, immobilize, F3, F2, F1, end F5 early, do it again normal burst rotation (F5 optional) with a condi chrono build, perplexity runes and other confusion application factors.

You know, you actually sum up a huge balance problem GW2 has, really well: Things are not overpowered on purpose.

If I go full-on-out confusion, that Confusion better be kitten overpowered. That’s the whole point. I should be a confusion machine, blanketing entire WvW zergs in it. After all if I cannot do that, what’s the point of giving me the option to hyper-specialize like that.

To be fair, the opposite is also a good (and solid) way of designing, but needs to be actively decided for. So:

1. Either embrace the amount of hyper-specialization the stack of gear, weapon, skills, traitlines, traits, runes and sigils allows, and intentionally over-balance these aspects and provide a class-vs-class balance by making everyone “equally overpowered” (so ti say).
2. Or, remove many of the customization options because frankly – right now – they add ~nothing to the game. They just complicate things for factually no depth to the class system. It’s just a lot of noise.

Ashen.2907:

Weird, most of the legendaries have been, “jokes,” in my opinion. Oversized, excessive, bling.

Same. Most of them look utterly ridiculous.

I always feel like replying in these threads that these changes aim to fix symptoms instead of actually working on the causes.

However, at the same time, the causes of balance problems in this game are so very very deep-seated in the class setups and combat system that fixing them just won’t happen without a GW3.

I would say they could be worked on, at least many of them, but it’d require the devs to actually do class-changes. And I don’t mean the teensy tiny things they do in their much-self-commended “balance patches”, which frankly are the size of hotfix rebalances in other MMOs. I mean actual balance patches.

Where entire skills might get thrown out, traits moved around and stat combinations replaced, with some regularity. Because that’s how other MMO dev teams find their balance, they swing wildly to get a sense of what the current aspects of each class do, which actually provide meaningful additions to the class, and then toss out the rest to fill the gaps with more meaningful things.

The GW2 devs?

They seem to sit there twiddling their thumbs, or rather I suspect there’s just no one paid to do class balance. So it’s something the other devs do as a filler.

Legendary Tempest Stance

Get access to 5 Tempest skills, such as Meteor Shower and Overload Air, actually making you somewhat useful in some rare cases.

@Cristalyan

Now to be fair, since that manifest was written a lot of players whined endlessly about GW2 having no “goals”, no “longevity”, “nothing to do”. Basically they missed the endless farming and grinding from other MMOs, “giving them something to do” (this is the part where I make a gesture suggesting they might not be quite alright in their heads).

I mean if anything we just don’t have enough specialization, which is funny if you consider just how many knobs to turn exist. Gear with stats, sigils, runes, traitlines, traits, skills, weapons. And yet everything feels bland.

Which, to be fair, isn’t entirely unexpected: The amount of combinations of character setup GW2 allows is flat out unmanageable for any realistic dev team. So the only way to provide “balance” is to wash out any identifying feature of the character so that ultimately, it all becomes a slurry of similar effects.

Because frankly, what Chronomancer should be is this:

• Speeding up allies’ animations/movement.
• Speeding up recharge speed. Note that this works for yourself, the above doesn’t, it’d be our main group support.
• Slowing down enemy animations/movement.
• In very focused situations, undoing or freezing elements of the combat.

These four elements should be all of it. That is to say, no 30k DPS via spamming phantasms or an autoattack. No condition spam. No slurry of boons. No hard CC and constant interrupts.

But in return, these four points should be very very strong. They define the Chronomancer, after all. Having one appear in an enemy team means the enemy team is supercharged and yours is slow, only there’s this rather defenseless person in their team whose death ends all the magic.

Sadly, setups like these (“actual” class identity) are currently impossible in GW2.

(edit)
At the very least, please do this devs:

• Quickness not a boon.
• Quickness back to 100%.
• Slow not a debuff.
• Slow to 100% (half speed).
• Alacrity now gives 200% regen bonus (Skills recharge in 1/3rd their normal time!).
• Time Warp applies Quickness, Alacrity and Super Speed to allies, Slow to enemies. Alacrity is added via a Grandmaster-level trait for Chronomancers.
• Access to Alacrity severly restricted. No more AWTEW, no Alacrity-on-shatter, the +50% self-duration stays. Main sources are 5s from the Well and 10s from a talented Time Warp.

FOKOZUYNEN.8206:

ok so i have to explain all the combat seems… .i clean 20 stacks of confusion then another 5 and then another 3 ,after all this i got those 22 and i instant die.

You have 6k HP, and stood around dong nothing while someone went through all the effort get nearly 50 stacks of Confusion onto you? Were you in the kitchen making coffee? O.o

Nova.2890:

Well in WoW, i raided not only for the fun of raiding with friends, but because the armor/weapons dropped allowed you to take on more difficult tasks that otherwise you couldn’t do. So the game rewarded you in that you down a difficult set of bosses, get geared up and take on the next challenge, but with GW, the same armor is used for all encounters. You can do Raid X, Y, and Z all with the same gear, i get that it is nice for casual players, and they do make up the majority of a game, but where is the type of progression that rewards you not only with better loot, but then allows you to take on even tougher challenges?

I discussed this a lot in WoW, so apologies if this gets wordy, but that kind of difficult is a fake difficulty at best.

The problem is that you are using better gear to attack something which is built against the better gear. If this is balanced well, then nominally speaking the gear didn’t make you stronger, neither is the new boss more difficult. Rather, like with Agony Resistance in Fractals, you just created an artificial barrier to even attempt the second boss.

Ofc, WoW mixed in actual difficult increases, too. That is to say, later bosses in dungeons were often more knife’s-edge, single mistakes easily wiping the entire raid (Lich King comes to mind) or just so overloaded in abilities in pushed the player’s ability to handle everything (Yogg-Saron is a good early example here).

But the increasing gear didn’t actually make it easier to attack them. Rather I would be nominally underpowered and ill-prepared if I didn’t have the previous gear.

In short, use gear tier 1 to attack tier 1 boss. Defeat boss, obtain tier 2 gear. Attack tier 2 boss. Obtain gear tier 3. Attack tier 3 boss.

Now to put this into perspective, if tier 2 gear gives me 20% damage but the boss has 20% more health, then I +don’t actually cause more damage at all. I take just as long to kill the boss. And this extends in all directions, it’s how Blizzard can even do these gear grinds without breaking their combat system, by effectively invalidating the gear just as you get it, by then throwing you into a place where the boss is built to feel balanced for the new gear. So you’re not really stronger.

Ofc, there are still plenty upsides. For one it gives you “something to aim for”. Secondly, you’ll breeze through the now-outdated bosses, which makes you feel powerful.

But overall, if balanced well, actual difficulty of bosses doesn’t go up in such a system. That’s its key flaw, because it becomes a negative barrier instead of a positive empowerment.

But that means the farm does what they wanted it to do: It’ll tank the price. Perfect.

Yes yes yes yes.

TYsooooooVM, ANet devs! :o <3

Healix.5819:

The combat log must be an absolute mess for him to say that, considering simple text logging should be trivial to implement. Considering the combat log doesn’t even list everything, it probably is, though he could have also been thinking about a party-wide combat log.

I bet it’s some kind of async event-listener thing which providers data to the HTML-based UI components. But even then, the client itself should be able to dump the data out as it is passed through the internal event chain for processing, though maybe it is nontrivial to know what would be “combat log” and what isn’t.

WoW had COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED, which was amazing for a modder, albeit dangerous in that you had to make sure your hooking code is super lean.

I now run an armor entirely made of gold, iron and greenish hue, after my partner gifted me the auric glider. It looks surprisingly cool on a Mesmer because it provides a nice but lavish contrast to the purple/pink in the spell effects.

Should really have taken pictures before heading to work… :<

Nova.2890:

So again, what is the point of raids?

Eh… do fun group content with a bunch of cool people? What did you raid for in other MMOs? O.o

mauried.5608:

Anet have chosen not to go down this road and for good reason, as the above model essentially creates an ever ongoing gear grind.

See, this would be valid if they had provided a sensible alternative. Which they didn’t, in fact they caved to the complaints and gave us the horrible mess that is Ascended Gear. :’(

Honestly I’d even be fine with a “pick your playstyle”. I feel somewhere between traits, skills and gear, there’s just too many options for a dev team as low-output as ANet to handle. It’s like designing Skyrim as an indie studio of 2, tall order.

That being said ,then we’d need cool options, because if user selectability is no longer a thing ,the devs can – and should – go wild to make up for it. That is Chronomancer as a pure buffer/debuffer with virtually 0 damage, but making enemies slow as molasses while making allies go crazy. Enter say the Mirage, virtually unhittable due to highly realistic illusions, swapping with them, all illusions visually executing skills, etc. Oh and in turn very easy to kill if you manage to find the actual Mesmer. Or add another pure damage option which is just an Animist (DaoC class) style pet bomber through and through, pets with limited lifetime without a need to specifically blow them up.

Ah, yeah that’s a base underlying balance problem with GW2 wanting everyone to be able to “play as you want”. Instead of say, having Warriors be a direct damage class only.

Because of this we get this hybrid damage wherever we go. DoTs in general are short in duration comparing other MMOs, and the skills applying then also generally cause some direct damage. As a result, you got a real burst potential, something DoTs would usually specifically not have, that’s more or less the key part of their design vs DDs.

That is to say, DoTs are suppose to trade burst or (in extreme cases) on-demand damage for superior throughput.

But I feel somewhere in the early design someone decreed from high above that there must not be any shoehorning into specific “roles”, and for whatever reason gameplay design elements were this restrictive/bad thing to them instead of something the designers actually do for a living.

And so we ended up with the combat system mess GW2 nowadays has, which really underpins so many of its woes. Be it in regards to balance, design or even role.

I mean they tried to backpedal on it, see Druids and to a lesser degree Elementalists and Revenants. But either the manpower just isn’t there so the initial design goal of adding healers cannot be followed up by 4-6 months of frequent balance patches until it’s where they want it to be, or someone again exploded in a manager meeting and the relevant designers have all been let go.

But that’d lead to this weird setup where they might as well reduce the classes to a simple “I want to play XYZ style”, instead of all the minute choices of traits, gear and skills.

Because in the end, there’s always that one optimal setup. And if we get elite specs as differentiated as you say, that’s basically selecting your playstyle full stop. So IMO then they should just make the playstyle the spec pick, instead of requiring so many clicks, most with such ignorable effects.

Considering how, unless this balance update is nothing like any of the previous ones, this patch will change ~nothing and not even remotely touch any of the actual issues the class balance and design face right now, what does it matter?

It’ll all stay (roughly) the same. Because as always, these balance patches come either much too rarely (the past size would need to be applied monthly or so to end up moving classes to a better balance slowly), or much too small and don’t do enough (should have changes far bigger and do more daring changes such as ripping out entire skills or trait lines, and that 4x a year).

Overall, there’s no challenge to pose. Just ignore the balance patch, swap the odd thing around, done. The effect will as always be ignorable.

I don’t get why there need to be CDs anyhow. “It works for thieves”.

OriOri.8724:

That’s cause everyone knows mesmer isn’t allowed any fun damage options. We either have to go condi cancer, go full on power shatter and hope to burst someone down before they look in our direction, or we can deal so little damage so as to be 100% inconsequential.

Meh.

1. At some point someone has to explain to me what’s so bad about condi. Everyone always says it’s “condi spam”, but I see power specs use just as many abilities, just of a different damage type.
2. If the ANet devs could ever be bothered to actually do balance patches (the little things they do barely qualify as hotfixes, and should happen every 2-4 weeks if anything), and could be bothered to embrace actual MMO gameplay balance, we’d have conditions as a class identity. As in, Necros are a condi class. (for example). And it’d be balanced. Because the devs in other MMOs care.
3. Mesmer could be a cool low-damage-high-XYZ option. Or tanks via dodging/evasion. Or even full support. Again though, this assumes the devs are even interesting in balancing or designing the classes, which given the lack of patches to that effort over the past four years is doubtful.

OriOri.8724:

The best update wells could get is to have their effects spread out more evenly with each pulse. Maybe 25% on the first 2 pulses, and 50% on the third. Its still backloaded, because kitten mesmer getting any non telegraphed damage option that isn’t shatter spam, but at least you might get a tiny bit of effect in before someone just walks off the well.

Meh. That’s actually exactly the wrong thing to do, IMO. That’s trying to staple a bandaid to an effect too weak to even care about.

If anything, wells should be strong. So that combining them with disabling effects in a group settings is really really rewarding.

Windwalker.7421:

Nerfed into uselessness like so many other skills, traits, and utils. /cry

Yep.

I have a feeling that the ANets devs are terrified of the concept of impactful abilities. And the worst part is, this isn’t a Mesmer problem. And even skills we players call impactful (say, Meteor Storm) aren’t actually all that strong. Not truly.

I’m used to MMORPGs where you had clipping range AE CC which lasted up to a minute (or spammable AE instant cast stun :P ), the ability to mind control elite mobs as pets, combat rezzes which worked on dead players, etc. It’s not even just “don’t compare WoW”, GW2 is the outlier here, having abilities which are by and large bland and as a result have to be spam-spam-spammable to do anything. There’s very little meaning behind using these skills.

I mean, imagine a world in which nothing was truly spammable. Something as simple as removing two conditions on a kitten CD would become fight-swinging if the DoTs you remove are on a 60s CD, much as they’d hurt you. But in turn you lose one of three utility slots, and all your abilities are this impactful.

OriOri.8724:

No one is forced into a healing role. No one is forced into a damage role. Yes, some classes are better at those roles than others are, but no class is forced into them like they would be in other games.

Eh, it’s been a while since anyone was forced into a healing or tanking role. I mean look at WoW, there is no class which has no damage spec option.

Plenty classes in plenty MMOs “force” you into a damage dealer role, but frankly for one, few players ever mind that, for two, if anything, GW2 did that with all classes until very recently. And still does with virtually all of them and in virtually all contexts.

True, a full CC setup could be interesting. And imagine if you had Fear and Taunt. Juggling!

OriOri.8724:

I wouldn’t mind the damage being taken off of MW if it was given back to mesmer weapon skills in exchange, however Diversion should remain as an interrupt, and not a debuff.

Oh I only changed that because I felt an auto-interrupt debuff fit the name “Cry of Frustration” so very well.

messiah.1908:

phantasm build should be added as its our core design. the dmg should be as a sustain dmg and not burst

burst- shatter build (like thief) condi or dmg (later need boost to dmg)
sustain – phantasm build like ranger with pet should now be harder to kill and attack bit more often. could split to defense sustain or offense sustain.
support – another build which got gutted with chrono line and wells. no with no boons, no healing.

Honestly the devs are seriously struggling to have the amount of work hours on deck to make one setup work per class.

And you want multiple. That’s entirely utopian.

If anything we should be campaigning to collapse the options. Maybe Mesmers should just be a burst damage class, in all game modes, always, and be built around that (which also implies PvE needs elements which are much easier with burst compared to sustained damage).

I mean I’d have never thought that I’d like the way WoW does their classes in hindsight (in reality each spec is a unique class entirely, but each spec only has one real way they play as the triplets of talents and the legendary skills are all more or less fixed for each setup), but I do. At least they have a consistent design target for each spec and each expansion. So everything is built around that.

GW2 is lacking that. They have this “everyone should have some of everything” goal, which ultimately just means no one feels like they do anything particularly well.

Honestly maybe Shatters should just be debuffs-only, anyhow.

Something like:

• Mind Wrack: Send your current illusions to violently dissolve around their target, bedazzling them. Causes Weakness, Slow and Cripple.
• Cry of Frustration: For each illusion shattered, the next ability used by their target within 2 seconds is interrupted automatically.
• Diversion: Each illusion shattered applies a stacking 4s (2s in PvP) debuff. While an enemy has this debuff, attacks by them have an equal chance to hit any target between the mesmer and her illusions. Strong enemies can partially avoid this effect, and will still apply much of their damage to the mesmer.

But not really an elite idea, sorry.

Oh a few:

• House of Glass, basically a shatter for the entire area around you after 6 seconds, undoing as many things as possible. You channel those 6 seconds, interrupting you ends it, leaving the area makes it permanent. The only hint is a slight pink-ish blur/drag to things as they move, but very very mild. If multiple mesmers use it, the duration is extended, even between opposing mesmers!
• Accelerating Influence. Quickness for 5 players as a signet/aura (has no active effect). Why? Because I think busywork to keep quickness up is stupid, either balance it as an actual raid buff or as an active buff-player role, not as this in-between by-accident “solution”. Hence, passive aura. Also puts more pressure on proper class redesigns if the “buy you’re supplying quickness in a raid”-excuse is no longer a valid gameplay element.
• Well of Time. Ticks 12 times, full circle around the clock. Each tick, 1 new stack of Cripple and Slow is applied. These stack in effect! Not in duration. Meaning the longer you spend in it, you’ll slow to an absolute crawl. However in turn, the maximum rate at which your HP can deplete is also limited more and more, and projectiles slow down the later it is on the clock, too. At the end the ignored damage due to the ticking effect is split between everyone inside.
• Masterful Illusion. Acts like a Mesmer. “Perfect clone”. Uses skills, dodges, sidesteps, gains boons, conditions, everything. Nothing it does has any effect whatsoever, not even the autoattack.

But, and bear with me here for a second, not everyone plays 1v1 WvW or sPvP. I would argue the majority doesn’t.

Condition builds are weak enough as it is. It kiiiinda works, but only because you can put up 3 Pistol Phantasms on larger targets and then sit around and dig out some boogers while your Phantasms do the DPS. Read: It’s annoying to play.

Nerf conditions? Didn’t you mean to say make conditions actually usable in PvE, first?

I mean it’s not a big step really, but for some reason ANet is woefully unwanting to do things such as:

• Conditions on-attack proc now deals 10x the normal damage to PvE targets. This bonus is further increased by 50% against elite or boss targets.
• Torments on-movement bonus is increased by 300% (from x2 to x5 damage).

I mean that’d at least make these somewhat useable on PvE targets. And I do agree it could need a look at in smallest scale PvP, but really I would love for them to first recognize that it has systemic issues in PvE because mobs don’t attack or move like players do.

Shriketalon.1937:

The one change I would make to the suggestion above would be to not add clone creation to the new weapon skills. Instead, the first minor trait of every core trait line should be a clone generator. “Create clone on dodge”, “create clone on block/evade”, “create clone on interrupt”, “generate two clones from weapon skills instead of one”, and “create a clone every third auto attack” should be spread across the core lines. Balance accordingly, and the mesmer will generate enough clones to fuel their shatters appropriately.

Interesting. Assuming this also applies to elite specs, that’s a really neat idea for character customization. Which three things should generate your clones.

I mean I would just remove shatters from the f-skills and make generation the skill bar, but your idea is far more realistic.

Toasa.1236:

Just imagine the beautiful abilities it could have .. :c

I think you accidentally misspelled “boring, generic”. Also the same for “dread” instead of “imagine”.

I think the key points of my rework would be this:

• Utter reliance on clones to protect yourself. In fact, you cannot be killed while they’re up.
• In turn, utter reliance on clones to do anything at all. Clones only get used up by the strongest abilities, but everything but your AA requires X amounts of clones present or won’t be usable.
• Shatters are a goner. The above is the class mechanic, including the UI for it.
• F1 is a low-CD ability to spawn a clone against your current target.
• Clones are 0 damage 0 effect, die in one hit, but it has to be a targeted attack used while targeting the clone. Also they use abilities, but only their target can see them – as in, to bystanders, the clone is blindingly obvious, while to the target it moves, dodges, uses skills, has boons, has conditions, etc.
• F2, F3 and F4 swap with clone 1, 2 or 3 respectively, shared CD.
• Skills no longer spawns clones/phantasms. Phantasm skills target a clone and temporarily empower it.

We wouldn’t even be having this conversation – or any of these waste-of-dev-time balance tweaks – if the dev team could own up and get around to fixing the baseline issue with the terrible stat-customization system our characters have.

Namely, that it exists.

At the level of balance the game is at, and considering this is 4 years in, we really should not have stats on gear. Seriously. We should have fixed damage/healing/duration values on skills, and certain abilities can modify these either by flat or percentage values. But no gear stats. Which in turn would remove a humongous amount of needless balance worries because there’s no separate scaling modifier.

And really, in theory I’d be welcoming an actual stat customization. But that is assuming that the game is balanced without the user-selectable stats, which this one isn’t. Stats actually just serve to narrow user choice, instead of adding another level on top of it. It boxes you in.

IMO, just remove it, and give yourself breathing room to balance skills more readily.

For me it is:

• E,S,D,F – Movement
• 1,2,3,4,5 – Weapon skills
• F1,F2,F3,F4 – normal shatters
• Middle mouse button – Split
• ` – elite skill
• Q – healing
• W, R, T – utilities
• A – weapon swap
• G – interact
• Shift – dodge

Honestly the big problem is how like so so many systems, it was dumped into the game them promptly forgotten and never supported again.

As a result, we’re still running the same boring guild missions years down the line.

If at least each new zone would – as you would expect it to – bring new targets for Bounties, new spots for Treks, and every so often a challenge or puzzle, there’d be a real sense of evolution to this.

Though I agree on the general CS-induced balance problem I feel one conceptual issue to solve first is whether Elites should be “game changers” like originally advertised to be.

They’re currently not. They’re strong, but rarely game-changers. Continuum Split should be an elite, if anything.

Now, there’s two ways to make Elites strong enough to be the anchors of class design, if wanted:

• Reduce the cooldown a lot. So much that they form the cornerstone of any class gameplay, though ofc this will also include a functionality change. For example, Time Warp could be an aura you carry around. Yes, passive (actives would be stronger), but hell, Quickness aura! (say with a 60% uptime or so on the Quickness and 40% on the slow, maybe alternating).
• Make the skills long-CD, but strong enough so that they always dominate the fight when used. This probably implies shared CDs to prevent chaining in mass combat situation (compare raid CDs in WoW), but it could allow for insanely strong elites which are truly impressive.

We really could use another Rifle class balance wise, or Shortbow. So either of those two as a ranged condi weapon would be good.

Windwalker.7421:

The balance team on this game just lacks focus and proper leadership at the moment. It’s just one Knee Jerk after another, and it’s making this game and this profession dull anymore.

This, agree entirely. The balance team seems to be fully reactive, and even then limited to 1 hour a week they are allowed to work on it.

I doubt there are any designs for the classes right now, as in “If management would give us X time, we’d make B changes to class N”, and a lot of those. Long term plans, rework considerations, overall class designs and paradigms, and so on.

Because if there were, we’d see skill replacements on these nerf rounds, not continuous nerfs until the skill is no longer used. Because someone would have an idea what they want the class to do, with or without that specific skill.

Josh Davis.6015:

Would you want to see any changes to Courtyard before it came back? A new mechanic, perhaps?

After a huge part of the Skyhammer and Capricorn reworks were about lessening the impacts of their unique mechanics… actually no, thanks. All good. :P

Well, “extremely powerful” and 6s seconds including a speed boost. Not exactly the words I would have used, Fay. :P

I understand it’s strong, but not overly so really. Strong was 1:30 minutes of Mez in DAoC with self-purge being on a 5 minute CD even if fully specced.

I really wish kits – or maybe even weapons as a whole – would get a bit more specializing.

For example with the Flamethrower I imagine a weapon which, in addition to dealing medium damage, sets the ground on fire for 6 seconds.
Both standing in the fire stream from the FT and standing in the ground then have the very same effect, applying burning as long as a target is in it.

The burning shouldn’t be too deadly, rather sweeping the Flamethrower would allow to quickly set large swaths on fire, denying area.

Isn’t the scaling actually pretty great due to the trait?

Honestly, I am really bad as far as Chronomancer goes, and even I can time my distortions to save people from green effects. Takes 5-10 impacts to know the timing, it’s anything but complicated, even in the heat of the fight.

Or move Gravity Well off the elite, return evade to WoP, and move that onto the elite?

It’s basically time for the monthly topic refresher. It’s still not possible to freely skip dialog, which is just not nice on trying to do achievements.

This actually worked better before the way conversations work was changed, because back in the old 2D visual novel style interface, you could skip lines.

So either: Add a skip button.
Or: Return to the old interface on replays only.

finkle.9513:

All we get are skill nerfs, constantly. Cant we all get buffs?

This is problematic for two reasons:

• Each individual buff to damage requires a wide-spread set of buffs to defenses or time-to-live goes down across the board.
• PvE needs to be rebalanced every time.

It’s much smarter to set a power baseline, and buff/nerf as elements deviate from this baseline.

Tigaseye.2047:

GW2 would be doing better if it had a better, or fresher, gemstore offering.

That’s really the thing, what about another Outfit is going to entice me?

When there were 5 or 6 outfits, getting another one as an option was interesting. Now, there are so many outfits and so many minis and so many gliders, and they come out so quickly, nothing individually registers any more.

I usually don’t even check dulfy’s posts about the new stuff any more >.<

Amaimon.7823:

The Super Hyperbeam Alpha: In case you need to kill a Chack, and all his siblings, and everything else alive near him in a thousand feet radius, 10 kilometers away, with the shiverpeaks between you and your target

I need two. Dual Wield Super Hyperbeam Alphas!

(edit) Scratch that! Seven Alphas, strapped to my forehead!

I would definitely like to go back in regards to the following two changes:

• Trait rework (it needed a rework, but this one turned out to be nearly worse than the original).
• New Player Experience (the starting zones used to be full of flair and theme, now they feel rather sterile and broken, even to a new player)

Hrm, no, not like that. I was more thinking that we keep the skills the we have right now, but lose the trait choices. Some get baked into skills, some don’t.

And then a traitline could be something like:

Inspiration

• Your Phantasms apply Regeneration in a radius around them.
• Healing yourself causes you to also heal allies around you.
• Blocking or Evading attacks summons a Phantasmal Defender.
• Getting affected by more than X conditions summons a Phantasmal Disenchanter.
• Summoning Phantasms spreads boons from you to nearby allies.

The numbers and CDs would ofc be different from how these are now, plus some other stuff is folded baseline, etc. Anyhow the point would be, this is a supportive Phantasm-centric traitline. Probably needs stronger effects than what I wrote there, but just to convey the idea.

But say in WvW due to issues with boon spreading, this traitline doesn’t actually exist that way. Instead there is as traitline called Glamour:

• Your glamour abilities grant resistance and regeneration to allies on cast.
• (a few more passive effects or procs)
• You gain access to the ability Illusion of Health, temporarily curing and healing allies in an area though they take damage and conditions afterwards.
• You gain access to the ability Mesmer’s Wall, creating a wall which makes it impossible to see or target enemies on the other side, though it does not prevent movement.

And so on. Seriously, that’s stuff I wrote down in 2 minutes so don’t take the specific ideas too serious. But the idea would be less to split our skills into trait lines and we have to take that line to get them (especially for weapon skills! :o ), but more to give the remaining choices more “freedom” of character development.

Is all a very rough idea, but the way current traitlines always need to have the very same layout is rather limiting, IMO. And as I also feel we just have too much (never thought I’d write that about an MMO <.< ) character customization in GW2, it’d be a nice thing to adapt. More ability to make characters unique, less raw amount of combinations and hence easier to balance for the devs.