Guild Wars 2

They still drop from PvP, but half as much, a lot of them were replaced with one of the new crafting mats.

You can get them quicker if you have an extra character slot, just create a new character and clear rata sum, takes as little as ten minutes.

warbignime.4610:

Bad example of grind: leveling up mastery while doing variety of interesting and engaging events across four beautiful looking maps with amazing music.

How many non-sequitir fallacies can you fit in to one sentence? Or how many personal opinions for that matter. Does that make it a grind if they don’t find the events interesting and engaging? Does it make it a grind if they don’t think the maps are beautiful? Does it make it a grind if they don’t like the music or even play with it off?

Plus, even the one single argument related to the topic is false. You don’t get to do the events in four maps, or else no one would be complaining about arbitrary gating of map content.

You get to explore a relatively tiny part of one map, being gated behind some mastery from the remainder of the map. You then have to farm events in that tiny portion of the map, and in no section of the map is there enough events that you will not have to repeat one or all of them many many times, until you finally get the mastery necessary to overcome the gate. At which point it opens to another area, where you hit another mastery wall to overcome, now, by farming events from both areas. And it’s only after you’ve repeated this process who knows how many bleeding times that you actually even have four maps.

I like the idea behind what ANet meant to do with this expansion, creating a progression system in an MMO more like Metroid, or Zelda, Castlevania, or many other adventure games. In fact it sounds amazing and I wait for the day when someone actually pulls it off, because ANet, didn’t. Those games feel great because when you hit those walls, they require you to explore, work, and discover and overcome unique challenges until you find or earn that one thing you are looking for that gets you past the wall. They do not require you to go back, and repeat the content you have already done, over and over and over again, to fill an arbitrarily chosen bar to get past the wall. Masteries are great, hear they are challenging and I love that. But the XP grind behind them, is a hang on from archaic MMO systems that ANet really had no logical reason to keep, but did, and I can’t imagine for any reason but fear that minmaxers would blow through the content and complain.

Jax is based on traditional temple/priest clothing from Japan, the Hex outfit it based on the exact same real world inspiration.

And under the logic you are using, nothing is anyone’s ‘own concept’. Anything can be drawn back to previous influence, which can likewise be drawn back to real world inspiration, so no one has any right to any intellectual property because the real world exists? No, because that would be stupid.

quaniesan.8497:

10 second of block?

It’s called an exaggeration, grab a dictionary and look it up. I don’t know the exact figure and clearly you don’t either since you also failed to provide any proof that it isn’t 10 seconds in spite of ignorantly taking the figure as a hard fact. Nonetheless, it gets the point across, the guardians ability to inerrably get in melee range is one of the best qualities of the base class, and it meshes far better with traps than any previous class that had them.

quaniesan.8497:

die instantly? which trap that does that? tell me.

Just Dragon’s Maw and Procession of Blades, barring any other sources of damage, is over 22000 damage without any power scaling, is cast in a half a second, and prevents you from escaping its damage radius. That damage, by itself alone, is capable of killing multiple classes on anything but a tanky build, let alone with more traps and other damage sources.

You see, you suffer from the principle of inverse ignorance, commonly found on the internet, it is the broken illogical thought process that because you don’t know anything about a subject, whatever assumptions you have about it are inherently correct. Here’s your wakeup call, they’re not. Looking at facts, instead of childish open-ended probings one cannot answer, and so expects others cannot likewise answer, (another property of inverse ignorance) the dragonhunter does factually have problematic gameplay that needs to be addressed.

Nike.2631:

Heimdallr.7021:

Hi all,
i was just wondering, i’ve seen any sort of complaint about the DH in the guardians community (many of which also true).
These last days after the expansion hit I say instead a lot of complain in pvp targetting DH and their supposedely OP traps.
How that happened?

Because DH traps got a GIGANTIC buff after BWE3 that was never tested in a large scale environment.

And because people didn’t know what the kitten they were talking about when they were claiming that it’s hard to hit people with traps. It’s trivial to consistently land trap skills.

Well honestly, pervious to the dragon hunter they were right. It is really annoying hitting people with the existing ranger and thief traps. The guardian on the other hand can just walk up to with 10 seconds of blocking effects, stopping you from doing anything about it, and then lay the traps wherever he wants, forcing you to either get off point or die instantly.

It just shows that minority of players were right about specializations, those who told ANet they needed to add this content at the cost of base class content so they could have a mechanism for balancing between the two. Without any such mechanism, now they have no choice but to nerf the new mechanics of the specialization or the old mechanics of the base class, not because either of them are overpowered, but because they are overpowered in combination.

Dristig.9678:

Luke.4562:

A lot of people lack taste and artistic coherence.

This is the best you can ever get out from an human Necromancer, in both pieces combination and colors.

What legs are those? I’m worried they are ones that look very different on female…

Citadel of Flames light leggings. And no they look pretty much the same, will be larger or smaller depending on how hip-heavy your character is though.

SamTheGuardian.2938:

Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns is like a five star meals in France.

It’s overpriced, overrated, and very likely insanitary?

ProtoGunner.4953:

3-4 people isn’t a guild. And if you really wanna do it, just ask friends online to join your guild to claim it or whatever you wanna do.

That’s an interesting opinion considering that the game’s entire story is based around two guilds of five people or less.

Hope so, the idea behind specializations was to create a pipeline so that ANet could more regularly expand profession content.

If getting the only spec currently available took practically all the hero points in the entire game, what were we going to earn any new specs with? Only answer is that we probably weren’t going to get another specialization until after the game space was again expanded sufficiently for another 400 hero points. Most likely not until another expansion, which I think is just ludicrously slow.

New content doesn’t have to mean new areas as often as ANet can pump them out. New specs can be a great way to expand content without the huge development time of having to create a ton of new assets, the existing content is new again when you play it through with a whole new set of abilities.

You guessed correctly. When the break bar is broken, it goes on a refill period, during which time disabling conditions and control skills which would effect the break bar have no effect.

Not sure if they’re supposed to pulse grey to colored and back again though, that seems like unintended functionality to me, they should just stay grey until the break bar is filled again.

Well first of all, either this is a troll post or you are the dumbest thief, no- person, ever to post on these forums.

And second, Anets official stance is that they will without a doubt permaban people who get caught doing this.

Just taking a little too much is a grey area that they let guilds handle internally. Cleaning or nearly cleaning out a guild bank on the other hand, especially if done multiple times, will be considered theft and harassment and will without a doubt lead to a ban.

Penguin.5197:

Oh you know, less cluster for their e sports and what not.

Meanwhile they continue to add gemstore finishers that take up three freaking quarters of the screen with models and particle effects.

You buy it from the Candy Corn vendor for 6 corn cobs, and it’s one of those skins that unlocks all three weights at the same time

Right, it’s not like it’s a support spec with its only supportive elements limited to its offhand weapon, which was already true of its vanilla weapons.

Oh wait, that’s exactly what it is.

Melanie.1240:

Squishy: Ele

What? The only way eles are worth anything is as a sustain bunker.

PvP is 99.99% defense. Learn to bunker, be on teams with at least three heavy bunker builds. The win condition does not encourage DPS, aggression or any such strategies, it encourages sustain, tanking, control, dodges, blocks, and all around refusing to die. You win by resistance and attrition, not actual pursuit of any win condition.

As for PvE, anything goes really, but going high DPS and relying on active defense like dodges and blocks will get it done faster than anything else.

And in WvW your individual build doesn’t matter, you are a tiny blip in a zerg. Either be tanky and stack stability for the front, or grab a 1200 range weapon and high DPS for the back.

Or the more likely option, they weren’t going to make a whole new game asset for a tiny GW1 easter egg and so used one of the existing golem models.

Pretty sure the mask it granted last year is available from the laurel vendor under the LS1 rewards tab.

EDIT: But I can’t check because for some reason the wiki is down this morning.

Monk Tank.5897:

What does the revenant get? I insta 80’d him and put him in legendaries but i dont recall getting anything for the Herald. I did get the Bo Staff (Traveler’s Bo Staff) on me Thief.
Love it..but no really..What was the Herald supposed to get?

Herald gets a crystal shield themed after Glint, the legend they gain from their elite spec.

Sariel V.7024:

Relax, it’s been, what, 9 hours?

Yeah and everything else’s acquisition was found within an hour of release. Either they forgot it, for some reason are saving it for next week, or we’ve got another case of Final Rest syndrome. In one of the cases, I need to wait, in two of them, the devs and community need to know something might’ve been borked about the items acquisition.

This skin seems to be nowhere, no one has got it yet from the ToT bags, doesn’t come from any of the achievements, and can’t be bought from any of the halloween vendors. Please don’t tell me it was removed for some reason, it was the skin I was looking forward to the most.

Sephas.8793:

Conncept.7638:

Sidenti.6035:

I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who just don’t pay attention. “Unique” means “one of a kind”. If people have questions about what that means, logic dictates finding out before buying.

To the original poster, I suggest just sucking it up. You made a mistake, and that mistake was preventable. Learn from it and grow.

Or don’t. Whatever. I’m not your parole officer. -Sid

Because ‘unique’ in the real world…

Please guys and gals, don’t feed the trolls.

Trolling is posting opinions one doesn’t agree with (or even care about) just to get people riled up, in which case I would have just reported him because that is a reportable offense.

Unfortunately I think this guy or gal truthfully holds the opinion that anyone who doesn’t innately know what he knows, completely disregarding their experience or the subject matter, should suffer for it. Which frankly, while he has the right to it, is a completely inane opinion that ought to be corrected.

Now I am all for people suffering the consequences of their actions, we live in a ridiculously escapist society that confuses ‘freedom’ with ‘passing the buck’. Everyone expects legislation on where and when and how people have to take responsibility for their actions, and far too many people want as many instances where ‘big brother’ will alleviate them for the results of their ignorance and stupidity as they can get.

But when you take responsibility to the point that people are expected to suffer for the consequences of actions they couldn’t have possibly known the consequences for? You are in fact encouraging consequence without responsibility, and as such are warring against responsibility just as much as those who would have a society without any consequence at all.

Sidenti.6035:

I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who just don’t pay attention. “Unique” means “one of a kind”. If people have questions about what that means, logic dictates finding out before buying.

To the original poster, I suggest just sucking it up. You made a mistake, and that mistake was preventable. Learn from it and grow.

Or don’t. Whatever. I’m not your parole officer. -Sid

Because ‘unique’ in the real world doesn’t mean there is more than one but only one will function if you own two, it means there is only ONE at all, ‘one of a kind’ as you put it. When you can purchase two, that real world definition obviously doesn’t apply and what you claim he should ‘just know’ is a giant logic-leaping assumption that doesn’t make any sense.

History shows that they will refund for these mistakes, particularly for newer players, as the developers have admitted on multiple occasions that is something made unclear on their end and as such it’s their job to fix it or make up for it.

Ashen.2907:

Conncept.7638:

Ashen.2907:

Conncept.7638:

Nexons majority acquisition of NCSoft stock.

When did Nexon increase their holdings of NCSoft from their purchase of 15% to the 51% you claim?

Picked up that huge wealth of finance knowledge from 1990s business dramas did you?

Nope, from the dictionary.

To be the majority shareholder one must own greater than half of the stock in a publicly traded company.

Good for the dictionary, however in the real world where you have no idea what you’re talking about, majority means a majority of votes concerning the goings-on of the company which is a result of owning the largest part of controlling interest in company stock. Otherwise, most public companies would not even have a majority holder since most companies are not owned in 51% or greater portions by anyone.

Ashen.2907:

Conncept.7638:

Nexons majority acquisition of NCSoft stock.

When did Nexon increase their holdings of NCSoft from their purchase of 15% to the 51% you claim?

Picked up that huge wealth of finance knowledge from 1990s business dramas did you?

You don’t have to have 51% of a company to be majority shareholder, you have to have a larger portion than any other shareholder. And these days, 15% is actually a huge portion, most large businesses have hundreds if not thousands of investors.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I have to say I don’t understand the forums.

Previously: Everything is too easy! We have nothing to do! Give us something, anything to do!

Now: OMG! You want us to do stuff??? This is uncalled for! Way too much to do!

Poor Devs.

There’s this interesting phenomenon where people of differing opinions tend to speak up in the same places and be heard by the same audience.

raises hand

I’m not buying jack until I see:

• How the economic changes pan out (especially given ANet’s track record in this particular area)
• What makes raids ‘elite’ content. Specifically whether they are something you can work toward, learn about, and overcome; or something that is ‘elite’ because it just flat out excludes casual players based on real world time/economic/responsibility restrictions out of their control.
• Anet demonstrates they intend to fix the class mechanic flaws and stat system errors we all suffer through instead of using specializations as an excuse to ignore them. (Though admittedly, they’ve been doing pretty good in this area lately.)
• Whether there is even enough content in HoT to warrant the full price tag of a launch title.

Two questions

1. Is there any problem with using a mouse program to rebind right and left mouse click to different buttons to fix the issue you guys have with mouse input? And could that effect ICM negatively?

2. Will there be an option to reverse the two buttons? I find holding down the right MB and tapping the left is much easier.

The reason I ask is right now I have my autoattack keybind set to 9 and my dodge keybind set to 0, and I use software to change the input from the left and right mouse buttons to be read as 9 and 0. And I use this with the ICM mod which holds the right mouse button down for me. The result is that I autoattack with my left mouse button, and dodge with my right while using a targeting reticule.

Ricky Rouse.1583:

Engineer couldn’t be any farther then what you envisioned it to be.

Turrets do not scale with any power/weapon strength, meaning the numbers you see on them for raw damage is what you get. Even assuming they take 95% less damage, they still do diddly for damage.

In PvE, the meta is using as many kits as possible bar the med kit, so your setup will be something like FT Grenades and either bomb kit or EGun depending on your stat setup, finished off with Mortar Kit for orbital strike.

Then, you just hit all the buttons. For example, streamlined kits —--> Mortar gun for the throw gunk to synergize with modified ammo —->Egun —-> Acid bomb —-> FT —-> flameblast into napalm wall —-> Grenades #2, #4 and #5 back to rifle and Blunderbuss —-> jumpshot and repeat it over and over until the boss is dead. Didn’t even count the toolbelts in this rotation, which you have to use as well (Grenade Barrage, Orbital Strike and Incendiary Ammo)

You don’t even use auto attacks much, and if you do its the grenades.

You basically just mash every button that has a high number and do nothing else. That is the state of Engineer, and while it may change for Raids I doubt it will change for dungeons or fractals.

I don’t like it either. Turrets need to scale with Power or they will continue to be a joke.

What you described sounds exactly like what the OP has a problem with and then some.

Grenades are the only kit you actually get to use as a kit, everything else you pop into for 1-2 skill uses as part of some longer skill combination, or 1-2 skills in response to enemy conditions, buffs, or control.

If you want to make a mono-kit build or even a non-kit build, too bad, even though the mechanics are there the balance team has taken away the ability for any kit to stand on its own except grenades. We’re basically elementalists now.

I actually summed it up best in a discussion on elementalist conjures which have a similar but more egregious problem to our kits.

Conncept.7638:

Even if they managed to make five skills with equal output to where you don’t just pop and drop every conjure for one or two skill uses. You simply cannot simultaneously balance a class to have the same output with 10 and 25 skills unless there is some greater degree of control over how they can combine those skills. There is a reason that any deckbuilding game’s competitive format limits the cardpool you can build from and how many cards you can build with.

The engineer is proving this even better than us. Kits are constantly dumped on by the developers, forcing engineers in to multikit builds because if the kits were powerful enough to stand on their own, they would be overpowered when used in concert. So the developers choices were to make multi-kit mandatory from a balance standpoint, make mono-kit required by mechanics, or create additional mechanics to accommodate both – probably the best option that third, but something we all know they aren’t willing to put in the work for this far in to development.

And the same thing applies to our conjures, except in reverse, Engineers have a standard of ten skills and can’ build up’, we have a standard of twenty and can ‘build down’; and that just can’t work without major changes to the system controlling how we build up and down.

Terra.8571:

Timiok.1048:

Ascended is such an insignificant boost to your stats (About 5%) that I actually wonder if it would really cripple your team to use exotic armor. If we were talking about FoTM then I’d understand, since they have infusions, but I don’t see how it will be much better unless they plan on making ascended better in some way.

Actually, ascended is a significant boost when you look at the numbers. Take the Vale Guardian (first boss of the raid). He had 24 million hp. In comparison, Lupicus has 1.2 million ish.

The Vale fight has an 8 min timer. Let’s assume the Vale Guardian takes 7 min’s to kill by the average full ascended raid group (first kill was about 6min 20 I think). In 7 mins, the ascended group did 24 million damage.

As exotics do 10% less dps (I think it’s 12.5% but we’ll use 10), that means, at the 7min mark, the exotic team will have done 21.6 million damage and have to burn the last 2.4 million in 1 min. The exotic team would be averaging 3.1 million ish damage/ min til that point so at their current rate would require 47 second to kill the boss assuming no mistakes.

[I know this isn;t entirely accurate because the second half of a fight usually has higher dps because of traits like executioner and bolt to the heart, in addition damage during burn phases is higher than the average dps calculations but I’m only tring to show a rough guide.]

As you can see, full exotics cut it much closer to the timer and allow for far fewer mistakes. It may be a case, some timers are so finely tuned that it takes almost the whole timer to kill the boss for an ascended party.

The tldr version is 10% off the bosses we know about now e.g. lupicus, moss man etc are in the hundred’s of thousands. 10% off the raid bosses will likely be many millions in damage and to confound this their will be a timer, this is how I think AN are fine tuning/ balancing their raids.

Your argument isn’t even a little bit accurate because ascended gear is not a 12.5% increase in damage, it’s a 12.5% increase in STATS, which translates to significantly less than a 12.5% increase in damage.

Are you talking about mist form or vapor form?

Because mistform doesn’t kill you, I have never seen this happen and a quick google search doesn’t show anyone else to have ever seen it either.

And while vapor form appears to kill you, it’s actually a combat log mistake.

Vapor form works by healing you enough to get you out of downed state, then taking that health away to put you back in down state. So if you have conditions dealing damage to you while in vapor form, they can deal enough damage to you that the health which is taken away at the end of the effect gets credit for killing you. But in reality, you died to enemy conditions.

Alekt.5803:

I do not like the idea. Conjures are interesting the way they are, it’s just that some of them suffer from outdated abilities and need some quality of life changes.

Your idea is a complete mess to balance overall.

5 seconds to cast is pretty crap, and it completely ignores the possibility to run multiples conjured weapon at the same time.

Problems.
1. You did not resolve the cooldown issues on Conjured weapon. You even made it worse by denying a second pickup which could cope with it.
2. You break a current playstyle.
3. You are overly buffing conjures with important cooldowns.
4 You do not promote the active use of the conjure. Instead, you promote a play pattern relying on using important cooldown and swapping. I.e. FGS spin and swap back to D/D.

This guy knows what’s up. Conjures are never going to be useful as weapons so long as they overwrite our attunements. You could stick them all on one non-elite utility slot, and without any changes to their ‘environmental weapon’ mechanic would still invariably fall in to one of two categories:

A) Useful for one or two overpowered skills, then immediately dropped.
B) Not powerful enough to ever be worth overwriting fifteen skills.

Simple fact is losing fifteen skills for five is never worth it unless the conjure is in some way God-mode overpowered beyond any ability to ever be balanced, case in point, old Fiery Rush and Ice Storm.

Even if they managed to make five skills with equal output to where you don’t just pop and drop every conjure for one or two skill uses. You simply cannot simultaneously balance a class to have the same output with 10 and 25 skills unless there is some greater degree of control over how they can combine those skills. There is a reason that any deckbuilding game’s competitive format limits the cardpool you can build from and how many cards you can build with.

The engineer is proving this even better than us. Kits are constantly dumped on by the developers, forcing engineers in to multikit builds because if the kits were powerful enough to stand on their own, they would be overpowered when used in concert. So the developers choices were to make multi-kit mandatory from a balance standpoint, make mono-kit required by mechanics, or create additional mechanics to accommodate both – probably the best option that third, but something we all know they aren’t willing to put in the work for this far in to development.

And the same thing applies to our conjures, except in reverse, Engineers have a standard of ten skills and can’ build up’, we have a standard of twenty and can ‘build down’; and that just can’t work without major changes to the system controlling how we build up and down.

Thaddeus.4891:

About Revenants. Like Tregarde said, Revenants are the only profession that have two bar of utilities and Anet need to balance them so that they won’t be overpowered. That said, Conncept is also right that this limite the choice you have on a Revenant.

In the end, Revenant is a flawed system. Anet had a nice idea, but it doesn’t work that well. That said, it won’t stop the Revenant to be a good profession. Players will just have to live with a limited amount of choice when they build their Revenant and a very bad adaptability during content. Compare to another profession that change change one specific utility skill for a specific fight.

I still enjoy the kitten out of my Shiro/Herald in PvE

Sad thing is, this mistake has already been made, we know what’s going to happen.

The game which shall not be named added something called a hero class during an expansion. Which basically was a class that started off nearly at max level, including having only that portion of skills which any other class would gain at the higher levels, losing a significant portion of the customization experience. The class had a fair stint of popularity, but eventually pittered off and now is seen nowhere but PvP and other competitive content. They intended that this class be how they introduced new classes as well, instead they’ve never added another such class.

Lack of customization is not something to be offhandedly dismissed as a ‘design choice’ ANet, a certain amount of customization is necessary to give longevity to a class. Even when more skills were added to the above mentioned class, the standard opinion among the playerbase had already been established that this was an uncreative ‘shortcut’ of a class for players looking for quick power and viability but a cheap semblance of play as compared to the other classes.

The revenant is not going to last with the amount of customization it has available. It’s not going to be invalidated, its just never going to reach the potential for popularity or fun of the remaining classes.

Tregarde.6031:

1 – Revenants are a new profession. Their versatility is that their weapon AND their utility skills change. No other profession can do this. ANet had to balance this somehow.

He said customization, not versatility. And mathematically speaking he’s right, revenants literally have less than 1/10th the amount of choices for a build compared to any other class.

They need to add in 12 or so utility skills that you can swap in to your legends. Glyphs, spirits, and signets would probably be perfect. Glyphs will adapt to either each legend or each weapon, and spirits and signets will provide skills themed to the mists but no particular legend.

Ayrilana.1396:

Varonth.5830:

There is alot of things wrong with ascended crafting, but as many system which were introduced once and didn’t quite work out well, this ascended crafting system is left to collect dust. Instead we will probably get some other way to get ascended armor.

Crafting is not the only source for ascended armor and weapons.

Hardcore gambling is not a ‘source’ by any logic whatsoever, if anything it’s an expenditure, one for the particularly stupid and/or desperate. Anything you can get ascended gear from, you could be doing other content in the same time frame to gain more mats, gold, karma, pretty much everything in fact.

And I don’t even see why we’re on this subject. John Smith (lead economist) already stated that this disparity is intentional and isn’t going to change. Though in reality I doubt he actually meant intentional, what he meant was that it doesn’t matter, it isn’t his job to keep the economy in an equitable and enjoyable state for players. His job is to ensure the in game economy doesn’t interfere with ANet making a profit in the real world economy.

You want this crap dealt with? You want a reasonable and equitable game economy? Stop feeding ANet’s bank account until they do something about it.

paintpixie.7398:

I think it’s because it’s the most “human looking” face option.
My personal favorite is the second one in the following image:
I like the big eyes.

I swear I’m the only one in the whole game that uses the second to last face on the bottom row.

I’ve been playing since beta, read all the news and watch every videos, still an active player, and they have yet to convince me to buy the expansion.

Alekt.5803:

Conncept.7638:

Alekt.5803:

Please define “attunement overwriting” because I clearly do not understand it.

Sorry, by the time I got back to the forums this thread was long off the front page, never even thought anyone responded.

I mean that when you cast a conjured weapon utility, its will replace the attunement you are currently in for the conjure’s duration.

Example, you are a scepter/focus fresh air elementalist. You decide you have no need for earth attunement, so you slot Lightning hammer on your utility bar, attune to earth, and cast lightning hammer. You now have lightning hammer as a second air attunement in earth attunements place.

Additionally, while in ‘lightning hammer attunement’ you will get all the passive bonuses that come with being in air, and get the on attunement bonuses from attuning to lightning hammer that you will also get from air. Any spells you cast while attuned to lightning hammer will be considered air spells for the purposes of procs and effects, such as with glpyhs.

It would basically be as if you have no earth attunement for the duration of lightning hammer, but have a second air attunement instead.

So if I use Earth Shield, I am stuck in Earth Attunement? No swapping while in earth shield to get air super speed?

No you’re not stuck in earth attunement, you can attune out of the earth shield, to fire, water, and your earth attunement, then attune back to the earth shield, and everything will proc its own traits according to its elemental tree. You don’t lose any ability to swap between four attunement, you just lose one element attunement to gain one conjure attunement, in this case losing air and gaining earth shield. But it is your choice what element you lose, doesn’t have to be air, could be fire or water, or you could even write earth shield over earth if you don’t want two earth attunements.

But yes, in the case presented above you do lose air attunement, if you write earth shield over air, you can’t proc the super speed trait because attuning to the shield will proc earth attunement traits. You will however proc earth traits twice as often by attuning to both earth or the earth shield. But if you have the superspeed trait, that means you have the air tree slotted and depend on its procs, in which case, why on earth would you write earth shield over air? Writing it over fire or water would almost certainly fit your build better.

Logically, with the way conjures would work under this system you would want to overwrite the elements you are not dependent on, not the ones you’ve spent a trait tree slot on. I mean, strictly speaking there wouldn’t be anything to stop you from picking the earth, air, and arcana trees then slotting frostbow over earth and lava axe over air, leaving you with only the ability to swap between fire and water and never proc your air and earth traits, but that would just be a really bad idea.

Alekt.5803:

Please define “attunement overwriting” because I clearly do not understand it.

Sorry, by the time I got back to the forums this thread was long off the front page, never even thought anyone responded.

I mean that when you cast a conjured weapon utility, its will replace the attunement you are currently in for the conjure’s duration.

Example, you are a scepter/focus fresh air elementalist. You decide you have no need for earth attunement, so you slot Lightning hammer on your utility bar, attune to earth, and cast lightning hammer. You now have lightning hammer as a second air attunement in earth attunements place.

Additionally, while in ‘lightning hammer attunement’ you will get all the passive bonuses that come with being in air, and get the on attunement bonuses from attuning to lightning hammer that you will also get from air. Any spells you cast while attuned to lightning hammer will be considered air spells for the purposes of procs and effects, such as with glpyhs.

It would basically be as if you have no earth attunement for the duration of lightning hammer, but have a second air attunement instead.

If all they do is add on-cast affect to conjures that is worth using, they’ll be as worthless as conjures as they are now, people will use them for the on-cast effect, maybe one skill use, and then drop them. If that’s the route they go, they might as well replace them with a skill type that just drops an effect without creating a weapon.

If they are ever to be of any use, as weapons, they need drastic changes to their base functionality. No amount of nerfs or buffs or added effects is going to fix them.

The skill just needs to be made instant cast, if you could cast it without interrupting any of your other skills, it would be one of the most amazing harass skills in the game.

Cause them to write themselves to the current attunement as a second attunement of their appropriate element.

Example: Built full condi bunker, don’t need air attunement. Slot earth shield on a utilty and cast it while in air attunement to get a second earth attunement.

This would not only make conjures worth using, but fix one of the biggest issues with this class’ design, how we can’t create more thematically specific builds without abandoning the class mechanic that pretty much makes our entire class.

Isn’t there kind of an obvious solution?

Engineers only have one weapon at a time, meaning that having the pistol and rifle traits in different tiers of the same trait tree, is utterly worthless, they can’t possibly use both traits. Furthermore, if anyone takes firearms, its practically guaranteed they have either a pistol or rifle since those are our firearms.

Move No Scope down to an adept and take off a second of fury, move Pinpoint Distribution down to an adept and change it to 7% stat conversion while wielding a kit and 10% while wielding a weapon.

Move High Caliber up to a master and change the critical increase to 15%, and finally move chemical rounds up to a master and give it the functionality of coated bullets.

Every build possible now is possible with this change, we get coated bullets back, and the developers don’t have to have more than one pistol trait.

morrolan.9608:

Conncept.7638:

morrolan.9608:

50% nerf to ice bow HAD to happen? Its rendered it entirely useless. This is anets big problem stupid large changes rather than iteraitve smaller changes.

And they nerf ele burning but not guard! Why not?

Do you see the staff water skills doing that much damage? No? Why not? Because they’re support skill just like the ice bow, just like all water skills. It was never supposed to deal that much damage, it was a mistake they babied the ele community about for far too long.

What? Icebow is all damage and cc, barely any support. they would have to completely revamp it to make it a support weapon.

As for Roy appreciation as per the thread title change, why after the gloating on twitter? Very poor choice of wording from him.

Do you not know what support means? Control IS support.

An auto attack that AoE heals
A teamwide damage buff
AoE Control
AoE Damage
Single target Control

Yeah, not supportive, just four out of five skills is all.

Just because everyone used it for its single damaging skill, because that skill was completely borked, does not mean it was designed for damage. It was designed for the same support ALL water skills are, team damage amp, disables, condition clears, and heals.

Though honestly, water could afford a little more in the team damage amp area pretty much everywhere. It should not be so binary as ‘condition clear and heal or go home’. No other class has trait trees so ridiculously pidgeonholed in to either offense or defense as we do.

Varezenem.2813:

There is one problem devs stated that there should be only one utility/weapon focused trait per utility/weapon. Signet is already taken.

They never stated that for utilities, just weapons. This trait is one of two traits dedicated to cantrips, Mesmers have two dedicated to mantras, and Necros even have three dedicated to nothing but minions.

No Glyph of Lesser Elementals has use in PvE for the Ice and Fire and Earth elementals, which provide a third of our few ice fields (while the Greater Elemental provides another third), AoE might, and a meat shield that dwarfs Flesh Golem. They aren’t great DPS its true, but they cover you against ranged enemies and at least hinder melee, while having other uses.

The worst glyph by FAR is Glyph of Renewal, there is no circumstance under which that glyph is of any use. It is actually slower than just reviving the person by hand in most cases, and ALWAYS slower than a stomp. And even IF you can find content where you need a ranged revive and can cast the entire thing without being interrupted, if that content deals enough damage to down anyone you will have to dodge some time during the cast time, which is a channel and is therefore interrupted by dodging.

If any of the glyphs should go, its Glyph of Renewal, and I would love if they would bring back Glyph of Elemental Storage as a replacement. Heck even Glyph of Concentration would be better than the restoration glyph.

Pandaman.4758:

Palador.2170:

Astra Lux.2846:

I was actually a bit surprised to hear him speak, and very clearly at that. Granted, we know the dragons are intelligent and capable of speech. Zhaitan was probably too rotten or wasn’t interested in taunting us (and at the point where we meet him he is weakened and probably in WTFWTFWTFWTF panic mode).

Actually, I think that goes against what we’re supposed to know about them so far. Until now, they’ve been shown as more animalistic, just raw forces of nature and destruction. With Zhaitan, it was his underlings that were smart and thought for him, which is part of the reason why he was able to be taken down like that at the end. We didn’t just starve him, we lobotomized him by cutting him off from his smart minions.

Mordremoth is the dragon of mind, though, and he may be able to think for himself more than the others can. If he gains the knowledge of any sylvari he corrupts, then he’ll know all about us and the world at large already. I’m sure he’ll want to exchange a few words with the people that killed Zhaitan, and be smart enough to use an avatar when he does so.

Or we couldn’t hear Zhaitan speak because we don’t have undead characters? Only reason we can hear Mordremoth is because we have dragon minion characters, if we were allowed to make Frostbrood or Branded characters we’d probably hear Jormag and Kralkatorrik as well.

That aside, Mordremoth might not even be “speaking”. It’s presented to us as words, but that’s probably because there’s no other way for ANet to really describe a dragon trying to impose its will on our characters.

Actually the developers have stated that all the dragons can speak and are in fact more intelligent than mortals can even comprehend, they’re basically gods, just not the nice kind.

They don’t normally speak to us though, because the dragons consider themselves so far above the mortal races as to have no reason to ever communicate with us. It’d be like an exterminator talking with ants. However I’m betting that changed when we killed Zhaitan, now we’re a threat, and we’re going to hear Mordremoth and the other dragons speak a lot more often.

Actually his vision doesn’t even apply to real world druids, as least not the original thing. What he is looking at is the modern cultural revival of pagan druidism which has cropped up only in the last thirty or so years, and is heavily bowdlerized and influenced by christianity and the philosophies of the 1970s nature and free love culture commonly monicered as ‘hippies’. There was no dancing around the maypole and flower crowns in real druidism, it was much darker than that.

The term ‘druid’ was originally a title for greek scholars, however that isn’t where we get ‘druidism’ from, that’s where the celts got the name from, at least in theory, no accounting for the possibility that it may just be an etymological coincidence.

And the druids of the celtic peoples of the british isles were neither associated with nature in its biological form nor its cosmic form. Astrological sites like stone henge are thousands of years older than druidism or any people we know of in the british isles, we have no idea who built them but we know they have nothing whatsoever to do with the Celts who created druidism.

Druids were in fact, above all, worshipers of death. Most of what we get from necromancy and witchcraft is in fact taken from the original practices of pagan druidism. They frequently wore masks made of skulls, the term ‘necromancy’ was a seance of the dead druids would perform, cauldrons were one of their most powerful symbols and involved in a great deal of their mysticism. Ravens were sacred animals, swamps were sacred ground, the list goes on and on with nothing connecting them to plant and animal life or the cosmos.

In reality what we draw most of our fantasy tropes concerning the druid from are not in fact related with real world druids at all but from Norse Legends and Nordic totemism, which saw nature as a force man could gain power from, be it from the sea, or the land, or animals.

morrolan.9608:

50% nerf to ice bow HAD to happen? Its rendered it entirely useless. This is anets big problem stupid large changes rather than iteraitve smaller changes.

And they nerf ele burning but not guard! Why not?

Do you see the staff water skills doing that much damage? No? Why not? Because they’re support skill just like the ice bow, just like all water skills. It was never supposed to deal that much damage, it was a mistake they babied the ele community about for far too long.

However, the ice bow is useless, but it has nothing to do with being underpowered, it is useless because its a conjure, and conjures operate on a broken non-functional mechanic that render all of them useless save when there is no other option.

If they are overpowered, like Icebow was, they see play. If they are underpowered, or balanced, or even just short of being overpowered, they never see the light of day. Why? Because being insanely overpowered past the point of any hope at fair play is the only way they could ever be worth giving up fifteen skills for five. They need a redesign that incorporates them in to the attunement system in some way, but I doubt ANet is willing to put in the work when they could be designing future content instead of fixing their existing crap.

Erasmus.1624:

Conncept.7638:

So far as math is concerned . . .

Look, I can admire one’s dedication to analysis, but are we seriously obsessing over the effectiveness of a player mashing 1? Is that the pinnacle of the game? It really feels like it (especially with condition builds). Is this what people had in mind with a rework? Is this what people had in mind when “dynamic gameplay” was the buzzword several years ago? It’s really a shame that “more passive damage” and “longer range for your attacks that are already aimed for you and potentially don’t even have projectiles to mitigate” is the “rework” that devs shove out nowadays.

Well I can’t admire someone who quips a single sentence out of every post they respond to instead of reading the post in full, so you can feel free to shut the kitten up until you actually take anything from the conversation before attempting to add anything to it.

Now then. I went over all three of the scepter skills and I’m going to paraphrase for you since I’m a nice guy and all that nonsense.

These changes are an incredibly slight but overall nerf to the scepter, not the auto attack. The auto-attack was in fact buffed, not nerfed, but not as much as the second skill was nerfed, leading to an overall decrease of about 40 DPS if both skills are used at their maximum uptime. And this is excluding whatever changes they are about to make to the third skill. So overall, this change has done nothing but changed what was a scepter trait in to a Feast of Corruption Trait since that is really all it buffs beyond what we have now, while the gap between no FoC and FoC dependent builds has been significantly closed, decreasing the overall effectiveness of the trait.

Your over-simpilification of the changes attempting to vilify the use of an auto attack as simple thick headed gameplay has not only totally ignored the majority of my post but completely missed the mark concerning the end goal of these changes.

The purpose of these changes are to give the weapon a consistent increase to DPS to compete with the similarly consistent DPS of other condition weapons. A simple DPS increase can be done through any single skill, but my point if you had read to the end, was that with no other buffs pending, what insane amount of power is going to have to be invested in to that single skill? And would the amount of risk involved in investing power in to one source really provide any consistency at all? The answer is most likely no, it would not. I’m all for adding risky rewarding play, but not until there is a reasonable baseline established to where one decision or one action doesn’t completely define every play experience.

Vesrys.6819:

So you are calling it a nerf because they are essentially removing exploit in a sense that you can’t LOS and remove siege anymore? You’re funny

At least he isn’t bitter and totally misinformed. It was not an exploit, the developers even said so when asked about the same functionality on Impale. Not every skill requires line of sight, and if it doesn’t, that’s because it was made that way on purpose, that’s not functionality that can just randomly happen on its own. But just because something isn’t a bug or an exploit doesn’t mean the developers like it or intend to keep its functionality, as we learned with fire field stacking.

That said, I’ve wanted this change forever, as an enemy targeted skill Dragon’s Tooth was totally worthless for everything but this one strategy.