Guild Wars 2

Yobculture.5786:

The moment raids were implemented into the game, of course it was going to be inevitable. I use my DPS meter all the time to judge how well I’m doing against other people on a particular encounter.

It also shows buff uptimes so I can maybe suggest things to people to help them get better. Please do not think that DPS meters mean the end of GW2 is coming, it’s just that we need reliable metrics to be able to do raids properly and monitor what is going right/wrong in a particular raid group.

Exactly this.

People were just as nasty before anyhow. Only then you got kicked over any of:

• LIs.
• Achievement points.
• Class.
• Weapon.

It has good controller support tbh.

I recommend a G502 and a DasKeyboard for controlling the character. Really good controllers.

It is overall… really bad.

However, it has lots of positive elements.

The Good

• The mount animations are fantastic.
• The zone overall seems really pretty and well designed.
• I love how some of the events are a bit more complex than just spamming autoattacks at things, for example the race through the city to collect coins.
• Did I mention the animations? Sooooo pretty :o
• Event balance feels really good.
• The new mobs are cool, lots of cool little elements which can kill you if you don’t remember them.
• Love jumping chasms!

The Bad

• The raptor gets stuck on everything. It’s even worse than my Revenant’s mace-attacks.
• Bounties are confusing and often over before you notice what you’re doing. There have been a few threads how to improve the UI for them, because frankly that’s all they need.

The Ugly

Unidentified gear. But this deserves special explanation.

The original problem
It takes way too many clicks to sort inventory in GW2. So many that I have repeatedly considered quitting (and have reduced my playtime) simply because I’m way worried about RSI. No other MMORPG I’ve played since I started with EQ1 back in 1999 had inventory management even a fraction as problematic as Guild Wars 2, largely based on the sheer amount of “stuff” thrown at you and how many clicks it requires to process.

The “supposed” solution
We saw that WP image of the unidentified gear. “Hey yeah, that’d be a way!”. We could have 1 stack of unID’d gear each, replacing all bag and item drops, which can be salvaged directly for the same results salvaging that amount of actual items would have had, or identify it if we want the actual gear. Ideally also make the mass-salvage not drop the sigils/runes and hey, inventory woes (mostly) solved.

The actual implementation
Basically instead we get all we had before and the new unID’d gear on top. And, it’s only one type, green quality, but it can ID into all kinds of items.
This is a “worst of all worlds” implementation:

• We still get our inventory filled up with random items.
• We still have to open lots of bags, tons of extra clicks.
• We also now have to be careful to not accidentally mass-salvage the unID’d gear.
• Then we have to complete a heart, ID all the gear, then mass-salvage / process / sell the gear, since now we have lots of extra greens/rares/exotics.

Frankly, and without meaning this in a bad way, this is just cruel. It’s like someone in the office saw the complaints about how loot in GW2 is done, and figured he’ll show us how much worse it could be.

Why do this? The implementation is even very close to an actual improvement where instead of tons of greens/blues/bags we get 4 stacks total of unID’d gear, one each for green, blue, yellow, orange, and that’s all we get. Neat, compact, efficient.

zealex.9410:

mirage looks like it could be broken in pvp to be fair lul

sPvP is broken baseline, so that’s hardly an achievement.

Mantras had a way? When?

I mean, sure, back at release there was an interesting conceptual idea there, pay the casting-time “beforehand”, and then get an instant cast skill out of it. But of course if combat is long, you end up having to recast it, and then it becomes a weak point.

The idea was really cool. Of course, the implementation was problematic as with so many things done by ANet (good idea, bad execution), and they never realized that idea ingame.

Then, instead of going back and iterating on the concept, they promptly scrapped it by embracing the “weak per use, multiple charges”-design first shoved onto them by Harmonious Mantras. So instead of working to counteract the problematic element of the skill type, they embraces it and tried to re-tool them around this, leading to all kinds of weird indirect problems. Just look how often they had to decrease charge-up cast time over the years, because the new concept just isn’t a viable one for GW2 skills.

Now, I’m not saying the original design was good. Not as implemented. But it had potential, the underlying idea of making you able to cast ahead of use, but pay with a longer cast time, that’s cool. Neat concept.

But it was never meant to be.

And the new ammo version? It’s no better and no worse than the precious multi-charge one IMO. Both are really, really, really bad and uninspired. Meh. At least I can finally see my charges on the toolbar, so that’s a plus.

I would predict that they’ll throw whatever storyline we are following then out of the window to pull a new bad guy out of a hat with no connection or introduction, and then we are going into xpack 3 fresh and free from any previous story, sense or care about any of the major NPCs.

Oh wait, that’s this xpack. Hrm. Guess they might repeat it?

Warlord.9074:

Why would a company drive away their player base and make them angry, by gutting professions to make them unplayable. Like berserk spec on warrior.

Um, having a Berserker Warrior, they’re perfectly playable? Do you have a bug with your character maybe? What is the specific problem?

HoT’s open zones are very nice relaxed casual content. :o

Why do people think they were not? They have enemies which can kill you faster, yes, but we are also much stronger, so this just barely evens out.

If they instead want Nomad’s Endurance to … actually, just remove the condition damage from it. It doesn’t even fit the name. At all.

Find other ways to improve damage, tbh. Like increasingthe abysmal scaling on virtually all of our attacks.

Yeah well, other MMOs have no problem letting 3 Warlocks each apply a Curse of Agony. While WoW certainly didn’t start that way, I fail to see why there cannot be 3 instances of burning on someone, but each is its own stack unique to a specific source character.

That design would then in turn allow a balance in relative availability, because you have your entirely separate stack of bleeding, burning, whatnot. And hence say, burning can stack in duration. Confusion could stack in per-attack damage while the per-second damage is fixed. In PvP, in PvE it’d be vice-versa with a large but fixed per-attack hit and a stacking per-second tick. And so on. They could even minimally vary the same debuff between classes if balance demands that.

I mean, I bet the reason we got this current “fixed” version is simply because of engine limitations, it is >10 years old after all.

Holebark!

The city of woof!

Angel de Lyssa.4716:

No, thanks. For powers build you have Chronomancer. Let Mirage be full conditions damage, especially this trait “Nomad’s Endurance” is good, +150 damage conditions is very well. I dont like +150 damage power, i prefer damage conditions.

But other than that specific trait, nothing about Mirage is slanted towards conditions. If you check the new elites, that’s an overall design choice: The weapons are heavily biased to a particular playstyle, while the elite isn’t.

Hence I’m thinking that the trait nearly seems out of place, although even with it, a Sword/Sword setup Mirage might very well beat an Axe/Torch or Axe/Pistol Mirage in damage.

Zenith.7301:

No other class gives the same uptime of quickness and alacrity as chrono. A ventari rev at best sees 60% uptime on alacrity for a short burst of 30 seconds, then it only goes downhill.

Which is how it should be given that if a class is going to have absolutely miserable DPS, the very least the spec can offer is unmatched support.

Frankly someone else should give the uptime, though. It’s unhealthy to give classes fully unique effects unless (I like class-unique effects, on paper) all classes have these unique effects and are fully built around them.

That is to say, I wouldn’t mind a Chronomancer as the source of Quickness/Alacrity if Rangers are also the source of a percentage damage buff, Elementalists the source of healing, etc etc. But that’s a very problematic design for sPvP, where only 5 players exist per team, hence less than the number of classes.

Alternatively, give each effect a “primary” and a “secondary” class. Guardians already have some significant Quickness on their elite, so it makes sense they’re getting even more, we just need a viable secondary source of Alacrity. If healing were more useful in raids maybe Ventari Revs would bring that anyhow, remains to be seen whether PoF raids are designed better than the HoT ones though.

I don’t know why every class should get burning?

We already eroded ~all differences between Bleeding, Burning, and, with this patch and for PvE, Confusion and Torment. We have 4 types of bleeding. Wow. Such design. Much unique. Wow.

Back when Burning was much stronger but couldn’t stack in intensity, back when Confusion had no ticking damage, there was a point to having all these different conditions.

Frankly looking at I’d only want to replace the Master Minor, simply because it’s the only forced pick which relates to condi damage.

The spec doesn’t necessarily need power traits (it’s perfectly valid for a spec to be favoring DoTs or DD or Healing or whatever!), but if that trait were slightly reworked or swapped, then it woukd offer a valid power setup without having to take a condi trait.

That being said, even with the trait, it should be fine as a power setup.

Me Games Ma.8426:

Sadly that is how mesmer is designed. I suspect that Mirage will be in the same spot. Whether it uses clones or phantasms in the end.
If we were to use more of our kit the dps would decrease.

Maybe we’d need some mechanic akin to what Samuro from Heroes of the Storm has.

One of his ultimate talents is that he can manually control his illusions, using buttons to swap active control.

Ofc, if you use this you’d need some sort of top-down view, controlling your mesmer and the clones/phantasms like in a strategy game.

(but kitten , actually that sounds pretty fun)

I wish we could do ~anything with the UI.

Even if they don’t want UI mods adding functionality, there is really very little reason to not allow us to re-implement their current UI parts to, well, improve them.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Everyone thought scrapper was going to be trash too, and it ended up being one of the most broken elite specs.

True, it’s so broken no one even uses it (in PvE).

Palador.2170:

That whole line could have been done without. A smaller example is the Flame of Koda, and how it’s used in only one zone.

Good point, although I think the biggest issue with the Flame was that the zone just doesn’t have the debuff effect the torch was meant to counteract. Hence it all fell entirely flat.

Dawdler.8521:

Hahaha… no, killing a brainless NPC 1 second slower, that is irrelevant. In PvP combat, minor stuff like this can have a major impact, especially with exponential growth (ie 25 condi necros in a zerg).

Not judging much, are we? Well I guess it can have major impact for all of those 25 PvPers left in GW2.

Please add Tengu, and here is why

… because armor isn’t buggy enough on Charr and Asura yet. We need more races with weird body shapes.

Photoloss.4817:

+%dmg upon shattering a phantasm, like Berserker’s Power?

Hrm, maybe. Frankly I’d prefer a set of patchnotes which start with “Phantasms have been removed as a skill type”.

Near.7439:

kitten , guess this confirms Mirage is meant to be condi only.

You get this impression from what, exactly?

GreyWolf.8670:

I hope it’s the former. There is no point to raids in this game and HoT should have proven that.

As much as I enjoy activities such as raiding in MMORPGs in general, agreed.

Plus, if I wanted to raid, I’d not be playing GW2. Even at its worst, something as old as WoW raids are running circles around how they work in GW2.

Of course, for what I’m paying, the raids I’m getting are amazing. That’s always something to keep in mind.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Also, was there anything about this balance pass that anyone is happy/ok about? All I see are tears everywhere.

Been playing MMORPGs since 1999, this patch has done everything correctly judging from the amount of tears.

It has always been a weird thing about MMO patches, the more people cry the better the patch was overall. If no one says anything, you know they screwed up badly.

Rexx.1805:

They should have looked at the GMs in the Domination line since there’s nothing there for a DPS Mesmer.

My suggestion: Mental Anguish also affecting Phantasm attacks (even if PvE only). Or remove/rework Imagined Burden (that thing is Master Tier at best).

I want less Phantasm-reliant stuff. Not more :<

Vyrulisse.1246:

Yeah I was referring to Power mostly… which should be a Warrior’s specialty in my view. This push by them to make EVERYTHING condi is a bad move I believe.

What does it matter how the numbers above the enemies’ head look when you’re doing DPS?

Levetty.1279:

When did we change the meaning of viable to be ‘useful in a few raid bosses, useless everywhere else?’

There are 9 classes and round about 250 million possible specs. I hardly doubt that even the most generalist of non-Elementalist classes is going to be useful everywhere. Niches are an absolutely integral part of class/spec systems.

Yeah, bit of a shame. I think overall I’d genuinely prefer Confusion to just deal damage on skill activation again, but it’d require a massive overhaul of the entire condition / skill mechanic in the game to be viable across modes.

Meh, 28k is more than viable considering that the requirements are what? 15k or so average? 18k?

I mean yeah it’d be nice to fine-tune above that, but frankly it hardly matters. Unless raids in PoF are massively more difficult than HoT raids, it’s viable “enough”.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Can you suggest how you would indicate a reduction of condi duration on yourself as an expertise variable?

Not at all, I’d just remove the food tbh.

roamzero.9486:

From the WvW standpoint there was that -20% condi duration reduction food to cancel it out. I hope that gets nerfed too along with the -10% damage reduction food.

Yeah that is indeed a bit weird. I never understood that food (or the plethora of runes) anyhow, because that’s such a high number. Then again, runes do still offer something like +40% duration to a specific condition.

Yep, same. Quite impressed.

I said in the past few years that balance in GW2 is a problem because balance patches are both too rare and too small in scope to fix anything really. If patches like this one roll in 4-5 times a year the game could quickly evolve into a much more balanced affair though.

kitten good patch. There are plenty instances of localized increases in imbalance or new problems, but overall things are looking better now.

raykor.6723:

If your data determined that the Oils were under-performing then buff them. If you wanted to add a new Utility that was geared to the support build then by all means, create a new Utility.

Why have two power-utilities around? One is always going to be superior to the other flat out.

Cloud Windfoot Omega.7485:

if we require a full picture, why bother giving us half a picture which was basically just ruining peoples fun for a month and a half?

Hrm, I was tempted to post something like this, but rethinking it, maybe the other half of the changes need code which won’t be part of our client before PoF? No clue, but could be!

The biggest thing I didn’t get is why Chill-Bleed didn’t get changed. Reaper will not ever be a power spec as long as that trait is around, because no matter what the rest of the spec does that just turns it on its head.

VaLee.5102:

Raids are not the be all and end all, stop making changes to the classes just to balance the very top end PvE scene that 90% of the player base can’t even get close to.

Just because a few players in some no lyf guilds can achieve a billion DPS that doesn’t mean you have to nerf the class for everyone, including for SPVP and WvW players.

So um… why balance for the non-top-end? Seriously. Below that you mostly would improve as the player, not as the character.

Gwydeon.3580:

ArenaNet,

I hate having to choose between Phantasmal Force and Malicious Sorcery. Please move something so we can have both!

<3
~Wand users

How dare you devs provide actual choice in traits! Next we’ll have an actual reason for this system to insist as it isn’t just a big illusion of choice. What is the world getting to!

:P

Does anyone know already whether this provides a boost or a loss (overall) to condi phantasms in raids? I mean with Viper we crit plenty, too.

flabebe.5209:

But won’t you be chrono for every group encounter that matters? I feel like mirage is, by default, doomed to be an open world or solo spec.

Considering Firebrands give Quickness, and they’ll probably push Alacrity somewhere else, why would you waste a slot on a Chronomancer?

zomgbuffalo.5276:

This is where I am going to get very very salty. With the current condi meta they dare to do THIS to us?

Frankly this still isn’t a problem to be solved with excessive access to cleansing. Never was.

All skills are spammed like crazy. Everything barrages you 50 times a second. In a balanced world it wouldn’t matter much whether a 1000 damage direct attack hits you or a 1000 damage bleed. Both are 1k damage if you fail to dodge the attack. One gets reduced by toughness, the other can be cleansed and ofc has lower burst since it needs time to tick.

Excessive access to cleansing just means conditions have to be hellishly strong to compensate (see: current PvP/WvW gameplay).

Azel.4786:

Actually I feel that we had only a nerf to Mantras…. mantra of recovery now is significantly weaker with its threshold debuff (lower heal if above 50%)… so yeah, my preferred healing skill just got nerfed and nothing better for mantras.

Meh, using Mantras was always “Hard Mode”. It’s something you do voluntarily because you want a tougher game experience.

Feanor.2358:

There’s one big problem with this. It makes zerk the only choice for any damage dealer, ever. Zero variance, ever. So no, it would not be a good fix. The condi/power split is good, because it creates choices. Yes, there are “choices” in the game where you can trade offensive attributes for defensive ones, but we all know they are irrelevant in PvE and virtually nobody picks these.

But then, how does condi vs power create an actual choice. You are essentially changing the formatting of the numbers above the enemies’ head because either way you’re speccing for DPS.

If anything, if removal of the distinction breaks the ability to have meaningful choices in PvE, then that just hints at a bigger underlying problem in regards to PvE choices, or rather how things seemingly being player-choices are in fact inconsequential. If we all spec for maximum output, why have Viper and Zerker gear? It’s the same as just having Zerker gear in the end, doesn’t really change that.

And in fact I posted about this before, we have too many knobs. If your gear is ideally the optimal gear for your spec / skills, why have it as a separate component, basically?

Sorry, going off on a tangent, I know

lmaogg.7325:

Wouldn’t that just make hybrid skills stronger than pure condition ones.

If skills weren’t changed, yeah. But it’d be much easier to balance going forward because both parts scale of the very same stats.

So you could have 3 skills like this:

• 1000 damage, direct.
• 500 damage direct, 700 damage over 6 seconds. Higher damage per use, lower DPS since it needs 6 seconds to deal over half its damage.
• 1400 damage over 6 seconds. Highest damage per use, lowest DPS.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Fair enough, as long as they add another stat that condition builds need to invest in to gain max benefit. Like halve all the durations and then let condition damage crit so you need to invest in ferocity as well.

In all seriousness, this would be a good fix:

• Condition Damage removed.
• Condition Duration removed.
• Conditions now scale from Power.
• Conditions can now critically hit.
• Critical Hits are calculated per tick, and will use your Precision and Ferocity values.

This has two big upsides: For one, it puts the balancing game in the hands of scaling numbers alone, making it easy to balance DoT vs DD on each specific class.

Second, as they now both scale the same way, and the only big difference is DPS vs DPCT focus (and ofc cleansing vs toughness), classes can be designed to inherently work “more with DoTs” or “more with DDs”. As a function of class theme.

Conncept.7638:

You know, it isn’t really clear.

Considering the amount of story holes around everything involving Balthazar, I think it’s safe to say that we need to stop him because “omg look over there Elona! Quick players, be distracted!”

Frankly that what it comes down to. Somewhere early in LS3 development managers must have decided that it is time to go full on “Do everything the players ask for!”-mode (sounds good, but frequently can cause as much damage as it helps, because we players are good at saying what we dislike, not what we like), and hence by LS5 the old story was entirely thrown out of the window and replaced with human meta pandering.

Blaeys.3102:

Because the design and implementation of raiding that Anet chose in antithetical to pretty much every part of the GW2 PVE experience. For the average player moving from the open and flexible systems in something like fractals or the open world to the walled off and shortsighted experience that is GW2 raiding is jarring and encourages elitism.

It adds that the implementation is also – understandable – hopelessly infantile in production value. I mean sure, it’s a new thing added to a game which was never meant to have it. Ofc it’s going to feel rough around the edges. And surfaces. And everywhere.

But, it still means that established MMOs (yes, specifically including WoW!) are running circles around GW2’s best raidfights. With their worst fights. And their whole systems and setup, all meant to facilitate and enable good raid gameplay.

In contrast in GW2, everything feels incompatible with raiding. The way we spec characters is unnecessary given raids, spell effects are detrimental to handling boss abilities, no support for UI mods (which could alleviate the previous point), no ally-targeted skills and hence no click-cast healing, no specific loot systems to enable raids to assign dropped items, no nothing really.

And it makes sense. GW2 was never meant to have raiding. Obviously so, or the whole combat system wouldn’t work this way.

It just feels like a misguided “me too!”-effort. Now GW2 has raiding, and all it does is motivate me more and more to quit and play a MMO where the game supports raiding instead.

I have to say, I very much disagree with this “all mats tiers” idea. I want there to be a very valid reason to go back into the older zones. At all times.

If I want lvl30 mats, go to a lvl30 zone. It’s sensible, self-explanatory, and makes sure old zones don’t fall out of favor.

In theory they could add all materials including all LS3-mats to each new zone, making sure we never have to leave the new zones. Sure. But that’d be pretty meh, equivalent to how expansions in other MMOs invalidate virtually all of the previous world due to level cap increases. I really don’t want that. GW2 is cool because the older zones never quite lose their value.

But, importantly, part of this is going there to specifically gather materials. So I’d rather have them keep the new zones specialized on new materials (compare Flax from HoT zones) with a bit of T5/T6 mats thrown in since well, they’re lvl80. I think I’d even de-emphasize those “older” mats, too. We can already get them in tons of zones. Focus PoF zones onto new mats.

To be fair, the DPS requirements are so low that you can do the raids with naked people. For the most part.

Bry.8140:

According to taimi, if another ED dies then so does the whole of tyria iirc

There’s always some collateral damage. I mean c’mon, wusses.