Guild Wars 2

Gandalf.1537:

Love the Vabbian Armor as well. Would be cool if Anet brought back older skins like that, could you imagine what they would look like now?

Well, going by the outfit we just got: “Ridiculous”?
Because that outfit linked there, the Vabbian Armor, it has the same design in GW1 as what we got now, it’s a texture change so the armor looks like a skin-tight printed-on shirt, not armor.

Which the outfit we got… also does.

To make things more productive, a small list of ideas for simple~medium additions or changes with the UI:

• Free resizing of all components.
• Free movement of all components.
• Ability to spawn a second or more chat windows to have multiple tabs open at the same time.
• Also, full chat window lock, absolutely no interaction possible, unlocked through the options menu (to have a see-through / click-through combat log).
• Customization for background and fade-out for the chat window(s).
• Smaller background “overhang” on the squad UI, or just making it click-through.
• Resorting of boon/condition UI into multiple rows, which are only displayed as required. Boons, Conditions, Banners, CDs, Others.
• A small customizable bar with 1-5 inventory slots shown on the main UI for quick access.

Now onto the bigger things:

• Modding API. I know, pipe dream, but it had to be mentioned first, it could solve all other issues instantly because we could just do it ourselves.
• Ability to re-layout certain screens, like having a dual-window hero panel if we want that, always two tabs open at once.
• Click-casting for GTAE skills on the squad/party frames. Example: I’m in Celestial Avatar form, Alt+Leftclick on a squadmate’s little window casts Cosmic Ray at their position, Alt+Rightclick is Seed of Life. Ofc customizable via the options, set up which skills are casted via which combinations.
• Optional HP bar directly next to me character.
• Optional skill cooldown bar directly next to me character. This is a little bar with a logarithmic scale which will have skill icons / trait icons float over it as they cool down, leaving the bar to one side as they come off cooldown. This plus the previous change makes sure I can look at the action instead of constantly glancing at my bottom bar.

warbignime.4610:

Wow, that’s an over statement. GW2 UI has a unique style, its fairly clean compare to other mmos.
I get some people dislike it, but the worst in the genera? really?

It’s certainly not the worst, but for how many problems it has, its baffling that they didn’t at least put the time in to add a clean modding API, let us fix it ourselves.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Vayne.8563:

Doing hearts …simply isn’t fun for me.

Fixed that for… me

Everyone, really. Repeated hearts are a form of creative bankruptcy, because they are much faster and easier to design than event chains. So they can quickly add more “content” to the mini zones.

I have a sinking feeling the new zones in PoF might be full of them, and the managers probably patting themselves on the back what a “great idea” repeatable hearts were.

Now ofc, they work. But there’s nothing they do better than event chains other than being much easier to design and implement. But they lack any form of sense or place in the world. Why would they reset daily? Why do the tasks never change? Why does the place never improve permanently? (Many event chains even include small details to explain their repetition later on)

The outfit is really lame. It’s just a texture, it has no bulk or depth, despite supposedly looking a bit like ancient roman armor.

I want a Spider Mount, too. Able to scale walls ideally, just walk up.

The thing is, 20s duration on a 28s CD is what Portal always needed for PvE purposes, basically. To become a main-hotbar skill outside of specific JP use.

Sad to see that while ANet seems to have understood that, they went for an elite spec with it. Even though I’m still happy (by and large) that it was done at all.

Zintrothen.1056:

applies massive amounts confusion and torment on top of plenty of bleeding and other conditions

Weeeell. “Massive” amounts of confusion and torment (and bleeding) without Illusions or Dueling. Uh huh.

I have a feeling you had 4-5 spec lines taken when you thought of it.

Ardid.7203:

I truly hope you are right. But somehow I doubt swiftness will keep being used in the open world if mounts have that speed boon.

The overreliance on swiftness / runspeed wasn’t healthy either, though. It was factually a given for everyone already, so it makes sense to just make it, well, available to everyone.

FJSAMA.2867:

You mean fun by being an annoying jumping all over butterfly.
This means salt will be real and a top priority for nerfs.

Yeah but.. how much salt? Are all remaining 27 sPvPers going to be upset? All 6 WvW roamers?

narcx.3570:

Except that one can be reduced by toughness and the other is cleanseable…

And one scales off Power, Precision, and Ferocity; the other off of Condition Damage, Expertise, and (technically, but just barely) Precision.

And one delivers all the damage as a burst, while the other does it’s damage over time.

And one allows you to multitask and do other things while still dealing damage, the other does not.

So yeah, I guess they’re the same in the fact that they do damage to an enemy… But really, they’re quite different.

Oh, they are in a lot of smaller effects, but c ompare other MMOs:

• DoTs often last 15-30 seconds, dealing damage over a very long time.
• In turn, damage per cast-time spent is very high.
• Scaling is often the same.
• Defenses are usually different (DoTs cannot be blocked/parried for example).

The thing is, ultimately this changes the specifics of your damage profile, but not the point of your spec: DPSer.

You deal DPS. Some might be better at burst and worse at sustained (these are usually far on the DD-side of things), some are better at the opposite (usually those with a healthy mix), some are very good at dealing near full damage to handful of opponents (usually those good with DoTs).

But, the point is: They all focus on dealing as much damage as possible.

Contrast this with the other 5 basic RPG roles: Healer, Buffer, Debuffer, CC, Tank. They do fundamentally different things.

They’re so laughably bad that you can’t go a week without having someone come in here and cry about CoR and AA damage on Hammer. :<

Yeah but fx-overload is a general problem of the game, not one specific to CoR.

Taltevus.3289:

Do you seriously believe that Elite Spec’s Mechanics are going to fly? Seriously ask yourselves.

Well… considering that there is another class which had this mechanic still launch and had it repeatedly buffed despite having a plethora of engage and escape options even outside of their ambush (and we don’t even get constant stealth), I’d say… yeah?

It’s a very normal thing to have?

I mean look at the skills found in the beta. They’re not that strong. At all.

Elementalist Owner.7802:

Or we’ll move to another game that actually puts resources into its competitive modes…

A MOBA? Then sure, I do the same. If you’re interested in the sPvP side of MMORPGs, team-vs-team, then going for a MOBA makes more than just sense, those games are built entirely around the team-vs-team aspect, and do it worlds better than even the best MMOs can.

If you mean large scale warfare, then… well… yeah. I mean I agree, go to a game which actually invests resources, and that’d be? Far as I can tell there is none, the last was DAoC (which did it really well, tbh, GW2 could benefit tons from a Darkness Falls and actually large maps), and the next potential one would be Camelot Unchained, no?

That’d be really cool tbh. But we’d need way larger maps to make it be really great.

xikira.3264:

I have played other ones and did not like it. I loved gw2 for not falling into the mount crowd. Gw2 never had mounts and it just ruins the immersion.

How does it break immersion more than if someone travels 200 km either on foot or via magical bling bling teleport?

Wouldn’t… you know… riding there be more natural?

You don’t stealth though, @Doam. You artificially get access to the skills.

Justine.6351:

An animation for the ground cascade would be good too.

This confuses me. There is an animation. A very obvious one, too.

And so many new guild missions!!!

Oh wait…

I’m excited! Means I don’t have to change my gear too much. Also, condi is a DPS spec. That’s the whole point.

While I agree, at the same time burning on an axe is something the Firebrand already does. I’d rather use Bleeding then I suppose, also fits the idea of clones breaking into glass shards.

Yeah nothing about the trait really screams condition spec, it’s just the weapon. Can probably just use it with Sword/Sword or something.

Hot Boy.7138:

I gotta say i’m disappointed that this build is heavily focused on conditions. It should be viable for power also. As a matter of fact, condition mesmer has already been the only viable dps build for mesmers, even if it’s on just a few fights, for the last 2 years.

Honestly I find that if I take a step back, the only big difference between the two is how the numbers above your enemies’ head are formatted. You’re a DPS spec, doesn’t matter how the numbers are printed, what matters are “burst” and “sustained” output capabilities.

In fact, most MMORPGs use DoTs vs DD as a facet of class theme, instead of something players can actively decide between. And much as options are nice, after 5 years of GW2 I think what other games do is the smarter choice. :<

Well, what is your context. As in, where do you die? Is this in PvP? Or in PvE? And if yes (either :P ), then what specifically, do you use the Mesmer for fractals, open world, raiding, etc?

Aww, Ross is back! See you in PoF then :P

BrotherBelial.3094:

When guild wars 2 launched it was going to step away from traditional MMOs. But in truth it’s creeped slowly to being just like every other MMO out there.

Weird how that works out, considering virtually all feedback the first 2-3 years was how they didn’t do things like WoW / FF / Whatever did them.

Curious. Some might fault them for listening to their community I guess. I mean the mount threads alone could probably fill their own forum, over the past 5 years.

OriOri.8724:

These specs look awful honestly. I mean they look fun, but the powercreep is absolutely insane. I was hoping they would have learned from HoT, but this is kitten honestly. The specs WP talked about are ridiculously overpowered. Beyond broken.

Well… is this a surprise?

I mean this entirely seriously. GW2 has no increasing item level and no increasing player level. With HoT they did exactly as expected, used a rampant power boost across the board as their own version of boosting player power. And ofc now with PoF it happens again.

Same as any other MMO increasing player level, there is really nothing surprising about this :o

Yeah we’ve talked about this for a long time, if we want skills to be individually powerful they cannot be truly unique, there needs to be at least an “off class”. Now if the CD is brought down to something more sensible for PvE purposes, 20-25 seconds, that’d be kitten fine IMO.

TL’DR: Weakest episode, very weak dialogue and scene design, overall LS3 is much too short for this story. A much simpler story which fits into the limited time would have been better.

Full opinion:

I have to say, episode 6 was the weakest by a substantial margin. At least in my opinion.

This is primarily because unlike past episodes, where sometimes the voice acting was off, sometimes the character dialogue was cheesy, sometimes there were just too many supposedly funny quips thrown around and sometimes the overall story just fell flat, this episode had all of those. Together.

I feel that none of the individual pieces except one are off by much, but together they make for an episode which at times feels comically off. It’d be funny if it didn’t try so hard to be so serious, basically.

Key issues I’ve had:

• Second episode in, the new bad guy feels no more motivating to my character than before. There’s too little personal impact. We lack time. Given time, given exposition, understanding just how shattered Kasmeer’s (one of our closest friends after all) world is now, how this impacts Marjory, all of this could help add motivation. But I think because it was only two episodes, it all had to be cut down and as a result this all just feels… artificial.
• The dialogue was very problematic, mostly by Anise and Kerida. Kerida’s super-snarky attitude doesn’t fit the reactions of the Commander, and Anise playing along with her makes it seem as if this is a trap. In fact, everything points towards it, but then it’s not and our character just accepts that. I feel that with different dialogue and/or different voice acting, this could have been remedied.
• The initiation I’d just scrap. The hazing ritual was pretty tasteless (especially the stoning), and the fight afterwards explained badly, plus the reason we do this is very very flimsy. I’d rather just skip this and ask Taimi for a magic “I can find it with a scanner”-moment again, because while those got tiresome before, they were believable in a Magitech kind of way. The Shining Blade stuff was not, my character is part of the Order of Whispers, I have the greatest spy network of the world on speed dial pretty much. If they don’t know, no way my character would believe the Shining Blade knows.
• The final story instances is problematic again due to the extreme speed it has to handle its content with, but to a much greater degree than the rest of the episode. Two important GW1 characters get thrown in, and carted out before you even finished reading the dialogue in the chat box. Like with the first point, this lacks time to impact us. Exposition. Getting to know both the bad guy and the good girl. We need to know these people to care about them. The way it was it came off rather weird, as if I was supposed to be excited for these names, but missed playing an entire episode of story or something.

Overall, I would say this was the weakest episode by a significant margin to episode 5, which in turn again had a significant gap to all the others. Like with episode 5 however, this is entirely based on trying to do too much with too little time.

Maybe it just wasn’t the right choice of storyline for 6x 45 minutes of storytelling. Especially because most important parts happen in just the last third of it. Maybe a much simpler storyline would have ended up being deeper in impact simply because it could have been fully explored instead of just being hinted at?

Justine.6351:

I’m so sick of getting hit with 15k CoR and 6k Hammer Bolts that revenants spam out. All they do is press 1 and 2 and you cannot get to them because you die before gap closing.

Have you tried projectile defense or dodging?

dusanyu.4057:

The problem is it killed the play style enjoyed by many has been castrated in the process.

Well, your numbers are smaller but there’s more of them.

There, that’s all which changed. Mace even feels really meaty on the attack, what with the #3 especially. You still use 5 weapon skills, you still have an auto-attack.

I bet you this: If you could not see the conditions on enemies, and not see any damage numbers above enemy heads, and skills did not have tooltips, most of us wouldn’t even know whether they dealt condition or power damage. That’s how similar they are in actual gameplay.

So it doesn’t truly matter, sorry. I’d rather use condition vs power for class balance, make some classes more based on conditions and others less for flavor reasons. They are too similar to make them two full specs on each class.

How is having a restriction to the class automatically “is unfinished”, btw?

I mean, if we have classes, having upsides and downsides seems a natural thing to me, and why would “Has no condition ranged option” not be a valid downside?

My problem with this JP has always been the terrible design more than the difficulty. In fact, I’d argue for being called “Chalice of Tears” it is much too easy. However, the buggy and broken design makes it difficult in random parts, unless you know how to work around it – in which case it becomes rather easy.

So my proposition is this:

• Remove the inconsistencies. For example, if one part has you walk on an angled floor of 55°, another part shouldn’t have you slide off the very same floor at a 40° angle.
• In turn, require much tighter precision jumps. currently, ignoring the first point, the JP is pretty kitten lenient.
• If the second part makes it too difficult, maybe improve the QoL of the checkpoints, clearly indicating them and giving a buff which informs you that you got checkpoint XYZ.

Net result should be a higher difficulty, but no more buggy floors.

It basically is. Here you can only talk about things which you can discuss in a fully objective manner. For example, item stats, builds, such things.

For everything else, just use reddit.

I had a bug where the illusions displayed no change in cursor or highlighting, so if you don’t stand near them there is no way to know they can be interacted with.

Might be that you ran into the same problem? Restarting helped.

Mantra spec with some heal proc rune (triggering the heal skill constantly anyhow, so can fire a 10s CD one all the time) + regen from phantasms + EHP gain from Defenders (even better than raw healing).

zealex.9410:

If they were to move away from future quickness stackers then chrono’s buffing capabilities would need to be massively nerfed to balance out with other future mesmer specs which also need to be balance with other non support build of other classes.

Easy enough to do, remove boon-sharing from the Signet, done.

maddoctor.2738:

Regarding fishing:

Some Chefs out there may have noticed that there is not a single recipe with fish in it. Nor do fish in the rivers, lakes, and oceans of Tyria drop fish meat. This was all done intentionally.
We aren’t going to have fishing on release and we may not even have it any time soon (initial expansions/Live updates), but there is a place for it when the time comes.

Hrm, didn’t know that. Filed under “Never going to happen”, then :<

circuitnerd.5863:

You mean like fishing? Or sailing a boat?

kitten , fishing would be amazing. By far the most enjoyable non-combat activity in WoW, and I would love to see it added in GW2. Including fishing schools:

• Generally speaking you need to press interact when the bobber bobs to catch the fish. Depending on difficulty of the fish, timing matters.
• Schools of fish exist, can be targeted for fishing by right-clicking when close enough, will guarantee that catches are of that type only. ~3 fish catchable from a single school until it disappears.
• Scrappers can use their function gyro to fish a school from extended range.
• Loads of fishing poles available, including Tenebrous / Shimmering ones and hey, new avenue for gem store fluff!
• Also sold in the gem store: lazy chairs your character will automatically sit in while fishing instead of standing. A basic one can be obtained from a lengthy collection, advanced ones are from sPvP, WvW, Raids (looks only ofc), and from the gem store.
• Legendary Fishing Pole comes with a bird balancing on the pole, diving in to catch and deliver the fish on successful catch.

The problem with Guild Missions is that, just like a plethora of other cool elements of the game, they have been entirely forgotten by the development process.

Extra Credits called what ANet is doing “development by accretion”, a process in which, instead of developing an existing system further, fixing it up, expanding on it, you take the lessons learned from it and build a better, new, system, then add that on top. It’ll soft-replace the old one because it’s functionally superior, but you don’t need to keep working on the old one.

It has tons of downsides, but also a few upsides to make up for it. Though, in the case of Guild missions / halls / anything, there are actually no upsides because there are no successor-systems either (maybe raids would be one, actually).

But yeah, if Xpack2 brings no new GMs either, please just remove the system entirely ANet and add the items from the vendor to say, Karma vendors. Because frankly it just feels sad to see this dusty outdated guild missions system in the state it is in now.

To be honest, Druid isn’t much healing anyhow, no need to apologize. In raw output, Revenants and Elementalists are the healers of the game, and I reckon Mesmer might be third.

Aldath.1275:

“Lf chronotank, heal druid, DPS”.

Yeah no Trinity at all right?

Anet dropped the ball with the expansion in every way. Period.

Meh, the game desperately needed roles (in PvE), plus we already had them in PvP situations.

Evon Skyfyre.9673:

Fighting Dragons is fun, but we have the possibility of being caught in a battle of the gods. “My light was dim, they’ll notice me now!” Or words to that effect. I don’t know about you, but being thrown into a war of that magnitude… BRING IT ON!!

You mean, a fight between comparatively weak “gods” (if I’d even call them that, considering how they are only part of the lore of a single of our 5 races, and mostly seem to be something like minor world-caretakers), instead of between forces of nature in the form of dragons?

Yeah, sounds amazingly epic…

I mean, as I said above, the switch away from the dragons was ok. But to what they switched, and how utterly random it showed up with no prelude, no introduction and no rhyme or reason? Meh.

Well, the Legendary Armor looks super lame and underdeveloped, too. Didn’t stop anyone, either.

Totally with you on the comment on “might get two weapons”, Fay. I’ll be surprised if classes get one new weapon, nevermind two. :P

I don’t mind the shift away from them, interesting as “Dragons as forces of nature” could have been. They were just used as generic bosses anyhow.

What annoys me is just how utterly random the newly introduced boss is. And how he shows up and all. It’s all so… yeah. Might as well be anyone else.

OriOri.8724:

They obviously did, its been this way for a long time now and they haven’t addressed it at all.

I don’t know since when you play, Ori, but “it’s been like this for X time” is not a reason to assume intent on ANet’s side at all.

Rather, it seems they’re just “too busy”. They sometimes fix things 3 years too late, probably because now someone got around to doing work on it.

“for”?

Hrm… maybe that new armor doesn’t take long enough to develop yet and comes out with too few clipping issues. I guess. :P

Seriously though, I’d rather not have them add more races. Asura and Charr constantly run into clipping/modelling issues, and this’d just get exponentially worse with another non-human-body race.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Both are ways to sink materials from the economy. Without such sinks, the game can suffer overstock of mats as well as gold. So making exotic soulbound on use means that someone else has to make (or buy) their own gear after you’ve used yours.

Honestly, that part is mighty fine. A bigger problem is how all HoT stuff is accountbound because they couldn’t find a different way to keep non-HoT owners away from it.