Guild Wars 2

Panda.1967:

Funny how many of Without meters many exclusions were based on generalized and vague information. Some classes sufferd blanket exclusion, necromancer, while others excluded you if they didnt saw a certain weapon or buff. With meters those exclusions expand to everything but a few select builds. If they see anything that hints that you arnt using the meta build, you’re excluded… for most classes, exclusions jumped from anyone using this one weapon or skill to everyone who isnt using this one build. That is a MASSIVE increase in exclusions, and it was caused by meters.

And?

You play, say, an Elementalist. Not a Scepter/Dagger Nomad Elementalist, an Elementalist. As such, you were always expected to be “clever” enough to realize when trait X or weapon Y would be superior, that’s part of the beauty of having a game such as GW2 allow you to ~freely redo your setup.

The big difference was that before it was all rather vague. Elitist exclusionism was based on utterly droll numbers such as the amount of LIs you had or your achievement points. Now it’s based on something which at least has some connection to how good you actually play. Is elitist exclusionism still bad? Ofc it is, but it was ever so slightly improved by this.
On the other end of the spectrum, spec proposals and min/max-ing was massively improved by this, but how is that a bad thing? I already knew beforehand that a Staff is a bad weapon for Mesmers in PvE, all I do now is have more fine-grained details.

If anything, this is a bad sign of the balance of the game. We can now prove how imbalanced traits/weapons are.

What if shouts were relatively weak PBAE effects with no target limit but a dynamic range based on # of enemy targets? Because, intuitively, you cannot hear much in the chaos and noise of combat.

So say it’s 900 radius, but -450 if there are 10+ enemies around, and another -300 if it’s 25 or more?

CrimeMaker.8612:

Why do conditions do damage through blocks?
Why do conditions do damage through invulnerables?

For the first one, their don’t. I actually got to try that this morning, you can perfectly clock condition application and the damage is prevented. No condition is ever applied.

Second thing, same. Untested, but if you are invulnerably, the attack is blocked and no condition is ever applied.

I think I know what you mean, and let me ask you this:
If you are hit by a direct damage attack and take 3000 damage, and half a second later you press block, do you expect the damage to be retroactively blocked and re-healed?

You don’t, do you?

Why should it work for conditions then?
You block the attack, preventing all damage. Same as for a direct damage attack, in fact. You don’t block the ongoing damage after the fact much as you don’t block direct damage after it has already been dealt.

Panda.1967:

“Play the way you like” has been completely beaten into the ground when it comes to group content. It’s now “play how we say or get out”… I wish I could say this mentality is purely from the use of DPS meters… but sadly, this is something that was prevalent in GW1 even. However, in GW1, unlike here, people were more receptive of being proven wrong.

There is no “proving wrong”. This a MMORPG. There are going to be better and worse setups for content XYZ. Either you intentionally pick something worse or you don’t.

That being said, difficult is so low everywhere that even if you pick an absolute garbage build, you can do fine. Only everyone will know you do worse, and seriously, why not pick a build which works better for the content you’re trying to do? Your class says, e.g., Elementalist, not “Scepter Dagger Condi Tempest Nomad Gear”.
Or in other words, I expect of the developers that they balance the classes, but to stop there (because frankly that’s enough work and we’re far enough away from that as it is). Meaning you have 1-2 or so specs for each content which are “balanced”. the overall game balance still assumes you’re willing to use those optimal specs, use all parts of your class, as you approach each content.

Flipside, and this is where the “play how you want” comes in: you can do all content. This wasn’t always true in older MMOs!

Excellent Name.9574:

01. Pricing the expansion as the full game for players already owning the original game
02. DLC worth of new content, not worthy of expansion name
03. Rushed and short story mode, with a really underwhelming final battle design.
04. Questionable map design, not the beauty of HoT maps, just usability. Minimap system is not enough for HoT layout.
05. Lack of new character slot for the new profession (remedied after an outcry from players).
06. Killing the casualness of the original Guild Wars 2 in more than one way and thus making maps either extremely hard or right down impossible for solo completion.
07. Nerfing the older content, all in hope player base will be forced to buy into deeply flawed new one.
08. Essentially killing off PvP with tying it to the expansion.
09. Nearly destroying WvW which survival is still up in the air.
10. etc.

Hrm, many of those I don’t agree with, but you raise some very good points.

For me, there are two really big problems with HoT:

Rushed story
The story was genuinely good. Up until about where you go to TD, and specifically when you hit Rata Novus. From there on out it was very noticeable that everything was cut short and shorter and shorter. This was so sad because it was such a grand and in theory amazing storyline culminating in Mordremoth, but because of the rushed nature it all felt… stupid. Trivial. Meaningless.

Power creep
My, my, my… When you said the mobs in HoT would be stronger, I didn’t think this implied that we’d make a 2x++ jump in power to compensate, and all you meant to do was utterly trivialize any non-HoT element of the game, plus make PvP silly in the process.
This is in theory reversible (heavily nerf the elite specs and especially their mechanical advantages, add downsides to them), but I can’t see it happen.

Going forward, I’d prefer if the core concepts of the expansion are more thought out. The maps were amazing (even though I agree that the minimap needs to be 3D or something…), but the story and extra specs were annoying as hell, and the specs specifically caused a lot of long-term damage to the gameplay as a whole.

Substance E.4852:

Progression, or a sense of it, it paramount in an RPG’s PvE. Without it, you are effectively asking your playerbase to play the same game over and over again, having essentially the same experience every time. Even the most die hard fans of FF7 or Skyrim can only play the games so many times in a row before getting tired of it.

Honestly, I wouldn’t really be disagreeing with this. At all.

Only GW2 was built around that idea, and there are plenty really really great MMOs out there who never tried to go “progressionless”. I tried FF14 recently, and if I wanted that again it’d be a clearly superior game to GW2. Granted it has a sub, but meh, minor amount of cash each month and the game shows that it clearly has more money to feed into development.

And then there’s ofc still WoW, old as it is now it has this “progression PvE” formula so perfected that you can’t really beat it, plus it’s probably still the by-far largest MMO in sheer player count.

What I’m trying to say is, correct as you might be, that isn’t the niche GW2 was aiming for, and doing a complete 180° turnaround feels even more damaging to it, now.

It’d be cool if when you made the char, you had 4 racial skills, 3 utility and 1 elite.

These will slowly be superceded by learnt class skills, but they’d be there to fill the slots initially.

A group buff would be nice, especially if it means the game gets a second source of raid quickness.

“Challenging” is true though. You ever tried staying awake during that farm? :P

I think one important difference is that both FF14 and WoW are subscription driven games.

I played 8 years of WoW initially, and recently tried a free month of FF14, and they both feel significantly more polished and actively developed. But, being subscription based, that is quite expected, as there is a lot of more dependable income to move around for development purposes.

So in a certain way it is disappointing to see GW2 be developed so slowly (lack of treadmill rewards wouldn’t be a big issue with faster development), but at the same time because it is also much better value than WoW or FF14 because I pay significantly less here.

coro.3176:

My guess would be main hand power, but that it will still be worse than hammer.

And since no one uses Hammer, that’ll mean more nade spam?

Yeah I agree, what balance team?

If there was a fulltime one, we’d see faster and more consistent balance patches. We get them 2-3 times a year and even then they contain quite few changes for how rarely they happen, so um… nope. It’s probably a thing a few developers do every so often when they have spare time.

Ivantreil.3092:

0, and surely it’s intended, as it is with us with kits… heres the thing, they don’t have to slot their weapons in their skill slots in order to be efficient.

And they in turn don’t have secondary utility/healing/elite slots.

Apples and Oranges, tbh.

Vayne.8563:

It’s borderline exploit and exploits should be dealt with.

Now, I’m fine with arguing it was bad for the game. But “exploit”? Using class skills as intended?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Wasn’t it (the hills) intended as a group farm area?

I think they forgot how long-term playable their LS zones are when they decided on that one, but you’re right ofc.

It was explicitly implemented as a group farm spot.

Honestly even a guild of 20 active players feels inconsequential. The Guild Hall system, nice as it sounded, just provides virtually no depth.

It’s a lot of busywork, but for no tactical value. The buffs you gain are just… passive enhancements. You got your own little dueling arena, and a portal. Those are the meaningful things they provide.

Beyond that they’re super oversized empty spaces which feel dead and broken (partially because well, that’s the theme of the two we got so far) and were promptly abandoned once delivered, except for one minor upgrade.

If guild halls were continuously expanding and improving, providing new buildings to access mastery skills instead of getting them personally, new guild hall types etc, we’d probably be much more interested in our hall. The way it is, I don’t even know what my guild has in there, design-wise. Not like I pay attention, it’s not an important part of the guild play.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

So grinding for gear does not count as playing and is not fun. The fun starts once max gear is acquired and it stops with the next level increase.

cRPGs are fundamentally built around a continuous power increase. Yes, I generally agree with you, but not in this specific genre.

Even though ofc, yes, GW2 is the one game which foregoes much stat progression but hey, even they added Ascended gear after release. Still, one can notice that GW2 is in large parts a bit hollow. Look how many progression systems we now have in a game which isn’t supposed to have them.

In WvW, you become stronger and stronger as level goes up. In PvE, you have masteries which make much of PvE easier. In sPvP, you… well… no clue what those 25 players left there do. But anyhow, there’s already plenty vertical progression past 80 in place, even with gear. Just compare HoT condi stats to pre-HoT ones. Clear upgrade path there.

Buran.3796:

Anet wasn’t the source of the leak, which was unintended and unwanted. They plan to slowly reveal small fragments of infos in a looong lapse as they did with HoT (which personaly bored me to tears, so I tried to absorb any valuable infro from the leak to save time).

Yeah I agree, the way they release information is a really good way to stifle any chance of player excitement.

Honestly Underwater is so abandoned at this point, this is just one more checkbox in an endless list of “is underwater off the development table” list.

Cyninja.2954:

Shiro is pure power and with all the cooldown nerfs not really worth using for mobility.

Shiro makes you attack faster and gives you mobility skills. Nothing about it says “Power”.

It just so happens that the extra attack speed isn’t worth the energy invested for condi specs.

I’d go even further Ori, I think most traits could be removed.

Because, depending on your specific loadout selected (say, “condi damage” or “quickness raid buffer”), you have mandatory traits (reason for removal, fold baseline) or useless traits (reason for removal, no point to it) in the usually-mandatory lines you pick.

I’d hence do the following:

• No more selection of major traits at all.
• You pick 3 out of 6 (soon 7) trait lines. Each is associated with a “role” of your class, you pick which 3 you want to be good at. Say Illusion is all about shatter, Domination about direct damage, Chronomancer about Quickness/Alacrity/Slow (“time manipulation”), etc.
• Each traitline has a certain number of “effects”. These do not just have to be pre-selected traits, and there’s no uniform structure at all.
• Some might give you additional weapon types and skills. Others might not.
• Some might have 9 different effects listed. Others only 2. Depends on the traitline and how strong those effects are.
• Some might even take abilities away! (mostly an elite spec thing IMO)
• Yet others might still have some selectable things in the traitline, but those should be at most a handful in the entire game, because it should be something specifically about that traitline which causes it.

The design goal would be to make traits more of an actual spec choice, not a mere passive result of it. Right now I decide what I want to be, and I have to then make that choice 6 times. Weapons, Armor, Runes, Sigils, Traits, Skills. But I make the same choice, in 6 pieces. It should be one choice ideally, or at least less.

Fallesafe.5932:

It’s not unreasonable to want something satisfying for the effort you put in. If jumping puzzles were your thing, how do you think it would effect puzzle-jumping to see a fireworks animation at the end (and that’s it)? How many people do you think would keep doing the jumping puzzles?

I think the person you quoted was less on about why you play games (or why rewards may or may not be desirable), but why you play this MMORPG.

It’s hardly the only one. And multiple others have continuous piecemeal reward systems or stealing upgrading grindable gear improvements.

Just not GW2. Yet this is the one you play.

I don’t mean this in a “get out!”-way, btw. Really not. Because the question has merit, why pick the MMO which specifically doesn’t do what you seem to want in a MMO?

Speaking even more historically, DoTs as a damage source are fine.

However, and this is important, they need to:

• Be different in their general design to DDs (direct damage). This is usually accomplished by lasting a very long time (12-30 seconds or so), and having rather low DPS. However, needing only a short cast to deal that low DPS for 30 seconds means the DPC (damage-per-cast) is very high. It’s efficient to first cast DoTs.
• As a result, their design is one of efficient damage, but DDs provide threatening pressure. Something DoTs cannot, but in return you’re free to do other things while they tick.
• Classes can then be designed to be more or less reliant on DoTs vs DDs at a design level. Some classes might nearly entirely be based on DoTs for example, which means that this class probably has something else they do with most of their time, but so that they’re not useless damage wise they can cast stackable DoTs on something. Very low pressure but good damage for the time used, and free to do their main thing. Others like a Warrior might be entirely based on DDs to go with the theme.
• Cleanses can then be mostly removed. They need to exist for someone specifically designed to be “tanky”, which could again be a class design thing (not be a tank, be tanky, important differentiation).

Do the people here who say “conditions are sooooo bad” really believe that all other MMORPGs which were entirely fine with their DoT vs DD setups (and who miraculously shared the same underlying design for it…) just got… lucky?

I started with EQ1, then DAoC, then WoW and now GW2. The former 3 all did their DoTs well, as described above. Supplementary damage but with superior DPC. Quite superior in most cases.

They also all had main-DoT classes. This simply meant you had 4-6 DoTs available + some filler spell which scaled off of the number of DoTs on the target or enhanced your ticking DoT effects while casting. Works fine, and is rather beautiful in design because it means that you can optionally trade in the DoT’s main advantage (no need to stick around while it ticks) to remedy its main downside (low DPS).

Dadnir.5038:

Do you think it’s better to have healers to supply to the survivability? The game is all about a fast paced gameplay where each is responsible of it’s own survivability and help others in a roundabout way.

Umm… you say that, and so does ANet marketing, yet we have PS Warriors, Quickness/Alacrity from us Mesmers, 10 minutes enrage timers on bosses, huge HP sponges as world bosses with fully survivably and rehealable attacks, and all-do-DPS-first-gameplay for all the other specs.

Much as marketing can paint it a shiney color, this is one of GW2’s biggest problems: really underwhelming class and combat design.

It sounds nice, but in effect it just means everyone plays somewhat same-y and all your skills are individually bland and in turn spammed out like there’s no tomorrow.

Feanor.2358:

You can’t rely on the content being a motivation by itself. This motivation exists, but it is exhausted MUCH faster. To make content creation cost effective, you must provide some additional motivation. In other words, grind. It’s always there, in any MMO. The only question is what should be the end result of that grind. Virtually any other MMO answers with “power”, whereas GW2 answers with “fashion”. Apparently, both approaches work. Obviously, there will be the player who prefer one and those who prefer the other.

Makes sense, yeah.

You can gain short-term or momentary motivation from “omg this is new!” or “omg this is difficult!!!”, but MMOs are played long-term hence we need something which pushes us to do doing it 50, 500 or 5000 times.

Fair enough, really. TY.

Zackie.8923:

power does damage. condis should affect status only. condis shouldn’t do any damage

Why not? I mean you state this as if it were some universal truth, but what would be the benefit of this solution.

And, though GW2 (currently) doesn’t do this, what about the universal DPS-vs-DPC complexity betwen DoTs and DDs which give rise to DoT-centric classes in RPGs to begin with?

Ariurotl.3718:

My two cents: BFF situation is worse than Doric farm (which is actually supposed to be a farm) and I’m surprised they took care of the latter before the former.

I’m sure something is going to be done to stop BFF as well. For now I just make the point of reporting every single AFK farmer on my daily berry run.

Also, none of these zones have any value to the game beyond their story and maybe the odd item someone wants, if not for these farms.

If they’re not supposed to have that, why even have the zone be permanent? :s

Feanor.2358:

Nevertheless, it’s a silly and boring gameplay which should be nuked from orbit.

It’s boring and silly gameplay for a boring and silly “solution” to a silly problem.

Honestly as far as “solutions” to leather prices go, this was the perfect fit, AFK turret farm on a weird underdeveloped mass-centaur-spawn.

DiogoSilva.7089:

We’re talking about a game with little to no difficulty in the open world. We’re talking about a game where most skills are useless, clumsy or balanced for pvp, which makes them feel underwhelming and unsatisfying to use in PvE. We’re talking about a game that still has repetitive grinds just as much as any other MMO, just with cosmetics instead of more powerful items. We’re talking about a game that forces you to go into jumping puzzles to complete map achievements, and then had a kitten bad game engine that puts invisible barriers and invisible ground everywhere you jump into.

I can go on, but GW2 isn’t exactly the champion of “fun” games.

Thank you. Independent of the thread, this summed up the issues of GW2 quite succinctly.

Healix.5819:

The thing is, they could easily stop AFKers by simply requiring actual input every 10 seconds or so, otherwise loot is disabled, but that wouldn’t acually stop real bots. A generic solution would be crowd sourcing it, where you report the player and they have to solve a captcha within 3 minutes, otherwise loot is disabled until it is. This would also stop actual bots and could also be automated in cases of simple AFKing, but something like this would require development, so a proper solution is unlikely to happen.

I honestly still don’t get the problem with turret farm.

It’s… using your class skills? As intended? You drop a turret. Turrets are skills which happen to then attack on their own, but the damage is sourced from you. That’s… how they are supposed to work.

Basically I’m trying to say: Don’t add class skills which are specifically fire&entirely-forget-for-a-while if you then in turn don’t want players to, well, fire and forget about them. Or at least infract the developer who added them because if anything they’re responsible. Give them a temp ban or something.

An interesting question arises:

Should higher-level/-difficulty content by default give better rewards? As in, should the game artificially add meaning to tackling challenging content? Or should the content inherently be rewarding enough to overcome?

Where should the motivation come from, basically?

They’re actually fairly rushed in design, you can notice.

Going there once for the story and staying a bit because you want to farm a specific item is ok. Beyond that, they only serve to show how much better properly designed maps are. In most games these would be temporal/seasonal maps, given the development quality. They feel temporary for sure, despite being permanent additions.

Best ones so far IMO are Bloodstone Fen (tiny as it is it has the atmosphere nailed) and Draconis Mons, but even those are rather meh comparing say, the full HoT maps or even Silverwastes/Dry Top. Worst one by far is IMO Ember Bay.

Vagrant.7206:

Many of what would be flat cutscenes (in the past) are now dialogue that plays while you run around. This is great for people who don’t care about the story (they don’t have to hit skip as fast as possible) and great for people who do care about the story (you can see how the action ties into the dialogue).

And terrible if you don’t read your text at a snail’s pace. There is no way to speed up modern conversations, and interactions which took me 10-20 seconds in the old system now frequently take 90-120 seconds due to the extensive 3D cutscenes around them which also frankly add nothing to them.

All the characters do is stand around in the 3D engine while chatting, instead of in front of a 2D background. No real change with it. Since the old version was skippable, this doesn’t even help if you want to ignore the story, could already do that anyhow.

I really don’t like this new system. It’s my least favorite part of the current story, too. The endless blablablablabla. Not that I dislike the story itself (well I do now with episode 5, but that’s besides the point), but it takes sooooooo long. Why not let me read? At my own pace? Like it was already possible before?!

blakkrskyrr.7413:

Honestly the whole gathering and crafting system is a wreck. Some materials are gathered (plants, ore, lumber) and others are only from drops (rare materials, cloths, leather). The rare materials I can understand being from drops from specific creature types, but the leather and cloth should have been a part of the gathering system from the start.

The bigger problem for me is on the crafting side. We would ideally need a system like in DAoC, where all gear is crafted, but due to gear permanently getting used up slowly, most of the time you use “99%” gear, or probably exotics in our case, only very rarely equipping 100% gear (Ascended) when the time is right.

I think one big but easily solved problem in this regard is that the order of relative income is wrong.

Money-wise, it should be:

• Specifically designed money-farm (basically I’d envision something like Darkness Falls from DAoC here, which makes WvW relevant to PvE in an indirect manner, temporarily opening up a superior PvE farming spot).
• Full meta chain runs.
• Random events.
• Good farms for money. (this importantly needs to be lower than random events, the upside being that it’s dependable)
• Everything else.

Feanor.2358:

No, but it does matter what I do to produce it. I actually have no issue with condi builds per se. My issue is with the rise of simple to play overpowered builds. They happen to be condi, because condi is what gets buffed recently.

Yeah true, that makes sense. I mean playing a Mesmer nothing ever changes for me, granted. >.>

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

Went to kill some horsemen and was greeted with this. Seriously, this is plain smh status.
http://imgur.com/pINjlaw.jpg

People using the map as it was designed is a bad thing now? They specifically advertised this part of it.

demitel.1340:

Lake Doric for instance, dozens of engineers just sitting in one place and people who want to do events which can’t be finished when there is not enough people to do them.

Honestly, I don’t see the big deal with this.

There are a few upsides to this:

• For one, hey, more leather. Never a bad thing.
• Two, it’s hardly some form of automated farming. They’re using class-skills as intended. Turrets just happen to act autonomously after creation, but that’s skill using your skills to farm.
• Further, MMORPGs need braindead content. It’s helpful. Either you want to relax after a busy day while browsing reddit or the forums, or chat with people ingame, you want something you can “do” without actually doing anything.
• And lastly, this is in one of the throwaway maps from the LS releases. Good. They don’t generally have any really use beyond farming 1-2 items from it or so. They don’t feel designed to be all that permanent, despite in fact being here to stay. So if one of them ends up as a farming spot, better this than virtually any of the other maps.

I am not sure I actually see the problem with this.

Mindless grinds aren’t inherently bad for your MMORPG. People need these activities. They allow you to relax, browse something, watch a video or (most importantly) focus on chatting. They shouldn’t be the mainstay of your game but they definitely got their place.

Feanor.2358:

Too bad raid bosses do not use these much.

Does it really matter all that much what way your outgoing damage is displayed above the boss? Because frankly that’s all the ways in which condi and power differ in raids.

It would just have to be a 2s reduction but can only trigger on shatter skills used at least X seconds apart.

So that iff Chronophantasma ends up allowing you extra shatters with phantasms, you don’t get the bonus.

Jski.6180:

The problem behind condi is a few things mostly that it makes a passive game. It lets players spam that one skill and get the most out of it. It dumb downs rotation for most classes to the point of bot viable level. It a great deal more taxing to ppl pc and gw2 servers causing more and more lag. It comply destroys any thoughts of build divisively.

Say, how exactly is using skill X to deal Y damage different for condi than for power again? You even dodge it to avoid the damage.

DreamyAbaddon.3265:

DPS meters need to go…
It has no place in GW2

Well argued indeed. Certainly going to sway the masses that way.

(why exactly don’t they have a place?)

Ryou.2398:

A rev still brings unique things then dps even condi.

To quote a fair few people: wat?

Warcry.1596:

Right, but that goes back to how it’s designed. It doesn’t HAVE to be designed in such a way that full damage people need to push to that specific limit. It could just mean that as full damage, they lack any sort of defensive capabilities aside from evades and skills, and THAT to me is a much better skillful challenge, figuring out how to survive while dealing the damage you are capable of.

That’s all I mean… Reward that sort of skillful play, high DPS =/= high skill.

Not really. That’s not proper playing as a raid.

In a raid, you want someone else, specialized into it (i.e.: a healer) to handle your non-binary damage (obviously there are still some simple don’t-stand-in-the-fire-checks).
Because, this way you can focus on what the group has you for, damage.

And the higher the damage, the faster the boss dies.

And the faster the boss dies, the less damage taken, the easier survival becomes.

This is a core fallacy in evaluating why a raid “dies”. Or struggles with downed people. Quite often, the solution is not to focus more on defense. Rather, focus more on offense. The faster a boss dies, the less need to survive, and the less chances to screw up.

saerni.2584:

If your goal is to increase cleanse it won’t solve your issue. What you want is for no cleanse and a rebalancing of conditions around this. Then conditions won’t have to burst to deal damage.

Pretty much this.

Also, conditions need to be a part of class design and intent. Meaning that some classes just happen to deal more in DoTs while others deal more in DDs.

And DoTs would simply be effects which are cast every 12, 18, 21 or so seconds, dealing superior damage-per-cast-time for inferior damage-per-second. Now some classes just have one such DoT for some background damage while doing other things, while others have 6-7 DoTs to constantly rotate recasting, being virtually fully a DoT-class when specced for damage.

But hey, am I going to far and implying that specs would be a better as a dropdown of 3-5 “roles/intents” instead of these 84533423426 possible combinations of which only 4-5 are truly viable anyhow? Oh, shame on me…

Sold Out.7625:

And this is even more impressive. Things actually looked cool once. And all they’d have to do would be the OPTIONAL setting that Colin promised us over a year ago. Before he left Anet.

I mean, I readily agree this is only good if you’re solo, but instead of actually fixing the underlying issue, they went with “just remove all the skill effects ~entirely”.

Correct solution:

• A set of new graphics fidelity optioins.
• Spell detail for: Me, Party, Squad, Others, Enemies.
• Possible values: Full, Simplified, Off
• Additional option to auto-scale, with a slider how many players need to be in combat around you to go from Full to Simplified even for those options where you selected Full. Example: I can set Me to Full, but the slider for auto-scale to 30. In a big zerg fight, even my spell detail is simplified.

Warcry.1596:

Understandable, but there are other ways to prove knowledge of mechanics and the game itself than maximizing DPS.

Not for people in the role of damage dealer.
Assuming they don’t cause other people’s deaths (usually easy to notice, though to be fair with the way GW2’s combat explodes in a disco whenever people start using skills it is rather difficult here), then the higher the DPS, the better.

Ofc for a tank or a healer the metrics are different, and not quite as simple (because for example higher raw healing output can still be worse healing).

Buran.3796:

The next Revenant specialization is PvP focused, the same as was with the Dragon Hunter for Guardian with HoT. Dragon Hunter’s longbow was implemented due how poorly scepter performed as ranged weapon in PvP/roaming. DH’s longbow had no use in raids and fractals, DH specialization was devoted to PvP, the same as the Renegade. The Revenant will get a bow in the next expansion due how weak is condition Revenant in PvP and roaming, and the main reason behind his weakness is the inability to put condition pressure at range, so is easily kitted to death.

I suspect you know this in such great detail because of a dev quote you can link to?

OriOri.8724:

I’m glad fire/air sigils were removed. They did nothing but add spam to the game.

Fully agreed. My one gripe is that they didn’t go far enough, and left virtually all autoattacks in a state where on top of causing 2-4 effects by themselves they can have another 2-3 stapled on via traits.

Instead of, you know, being an autoattack. Dealing damage. Nothing more.