Guild Wars 2

kurfu.5623:

Your negative point #1 is a win in my opinion. I absolutely hated the convoluted clutter-fest HoT map designs.

I wholeheartedly agree and I’m really glad they simply can’t make any of the PoF maps truly vertical – because it doesn’t require HoT.

Valesius.6054:

Everyone likes bigger numbers. If you kept the new numbers but the old pet style would you like that better or worse?

I’d still prefer the new style. It still needs some considerable polishing, but at least we are much more independent of stupid AI.

To me, the combination of cast time and animation time till the weapons really hit feels way too long. I’d like to see cast times reduced substantially or maybe even gone, but at least the update was a step in the right direction.

Heavy armor is hardly the reason why investments in toughness are sub-optimal. Personally, I don’t really care which of the two stats the traits scale with, since I’ll have 1000 of either. Maybe ANet wanted to keep scaling in check, but it hardly matters. It scales with toughness now and the probability is close to 0 that they’ll change it in the next years.

OP, your suggestions would not do any good, but just make everything more tedious.

Somehow, to me this appears even more stupid than all the easymode threads.

Vindicus.2130:

It’s not really Anet’s fault, unless you want to say their game design is conducive to creating this kind of elitism. It’s the community. This game has a more elitist community than any game I’ve ever played, and I’ve played them all. This fixation on ascendant gear, meta classes and meta builds is at a fever pitch in GW2. Not sure how or why it got that way, but it’s very off-putting for myself and many people I know.

That’s it and it has been like that forever. That kind of toxicity and blind meta-adherence could already be experienced back in dungeons.

I absolutely agree with regard to FB. That’s where I expect that trait to shine, especially if FB can replace the group’s mesmer for quickness. Something like FB-cPS-healer (maybe Ventari rev for alacrity?)-2x cDPS would probably benefit massively from Wrath sharing.

Yannir.4132:

Perfect Inscriptions was already a hair away from being the top pick in Radiance, now it’s the no-brainer choice. And further on the positive side, you can now use your Bane Signet freely on breakbars as it actually buffs group damage even if yours drops a bit.

Yeah, using BS on breakbars won’t hurt as much anymore, but I’m not convinced that using it is worth it from a DPS perspective. You lose about 20 seconds of the passive, while one (hopefully power) dps and three classes that won’t profit a lot gain 10 seconds of it. Haven’t done any real calculations, but I’d guess it’s at best plusminus 0 dps for the group.

Mikau.6920:

Lets just hope they at least rework the skill. For now the range is just a little more than melee, but does a lot less damage than melee weapons. This doesn’t make any sense to me.

This probably comes closest to what I think. The basic principle of lootstick was ridiculous, but what’s the point of a 300 range autoattack that does … exactly nothing? Staff AA does not deal damage, it has no beneficial secondary effects, with 300 range you probably wouldn’t even notice if the #1 skill on staff was empty. Give it some kind of “identity”.

I think the signet trait will probably be more interesting for firebrand than for DH, at least with regard to the active component. DH can activate Bane only once for a 10 second effect for the party. That means that one power dps will profit from it, but cPS, mesmer and druid will likely not make that much use of it. Guess it hurts less when you have to pop it for CC, but that’s all. Firebrand, on the other hand, can activate SoWrath twice via utility and radiance trait. Additionally, a condi dps and the cPS (and maybe cdruid) profit, so that’s much more beneficial.

Just had half an hour to beat the dps golem so far, but I like what I’ve seen. With more or less no build adjustments compared to before the patch, it looks like a ~15% damage increase for the standard GS/Sc+T dps build. I’m curious how the big picture looks like when QT update their benchmarks.

I think Tanner is correct, you shouldn’t expect any big new role for unbound magic. I’m just curious whether the way to obtain ascended trinkets will remain relevant.

Replacing the unreliable aegis effects from traits etc. with barrier would certainly be interesting. For the other aegis casts, I’d love to see them streamlined with distortion. We have too many similar damage negation effects in this game and the whole principle behind aegis is outdated.

There has already been speculation that all fall damage traits are getting merged into something else when something was found for warriors, I think. Maybe they’ll kill even more useless traits, we probably find out on Tuesday.

Substatic.6958:

For some reason GW2’s raiders are more elitist than WoW ones. Which is very odd, considering WoW ones are far harder.

Haha, I had similar thoughts in the past. I usually compare it to Wildstar, but you’re right, I also don’t remember the kind of kitten I’ve seen here from WoW, Classic till WotLK. But it isn’t exclusive to raids, the GW2 community has always been more elitist (in a ridiculous sense) than other MMO communities.

void mentioned the most important things. Always make sure that you have enough agony resistance for the fractals you’re doing. The rest may have been bad luck, I cannot really judge it with the lack of details.

With regard to your class, hammer guard is fine for pug fractals. If you really want to be the good guy, learn when to use other utility than the standard ToF/PoB/BS. In my experience, at least 90% of pug guardians are too dumb to switch to stuff like the Wall when it’s needed. Try to be better.

There are more than enough hammers in this game that make me seriously doubt whether any normal person could just lift them.

Xenon.4537:

I think it’s fair to say the raids are fine. It’s some of the best content in gw2. It’s the people that are terrible.

The last part is probably true, but it goes both ways. Both the wannabe-pros, which are rather frequent, and all the clowns, who want raid shinies without putting in any effort, are a disgrace.

Berserker is still the go-to stat for power damage and power damage is what guardians do.

Belorn.2659:

What they really need is to normalize the starting values. Critical Chance starts at 5% while condition duration starts at 0%. That is 105 “free” attribute points to power builds.

If you really want to normalise all that stuff, there’s a lot more to do. I doubt the results would justify all the work that would have to be put into such a thing.

With your ranger, you can’t do too much wrong. Druids have 2/10 spots in raids (though I hope that’s reduced to 1 with the new addon) and are a nice addition to most fractal groups. If a druid isn’t needed, switching to condi ranger yields a solid dps class. For builds, just check http://qtfy.eu/builds/

Just one thing, though: Playing at range is not how you contribute to a team in GW2. Most buffs are shared at rather close range, so people usually stack pretty close to each other.

Well, you can hardly expect any reasonable build with that. You choose a weapon that has little to no support itself and is bad at dps. Shouts are bad, being able to dps and heal is rather contradictory in itself and the bow of truth is a joke.

Reality is simple: For most of PvE, the hammer dps build offers the best compromise of support and damage. For more damage, go for the GS/Sc-T build. For more support, do whatever you want, but don’t expect to be objectively good at anything. It won’t work.

Dark.1823:

Can you rename the Ranger class to Healer? Since its only viable spec now is Druid. May as well bring the holy trinity back at this point.

I’m sure they’ll consider that once you’ve learned to do at least some basic calculations. If, of course, you still demand the quoted stuff then.

Victim blaming? Now this thread is becoming pure comedy gold. Go on, please!

This judgement reveals a true wise guy. I’m impressed.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

as long as it […] only shows DPS for others using DPS meters.

Unless I missed something, I think this part is wrong. Party/squad members are fine no matter whether they use a meter or not, afaik.

The meaning of viability has already been commented on and Ghotistyx nailed it. In the end, Syktek is right – the GW2 community takes meta builds and all that stuff far too seriously for the actual raid difficulty. More realism, especially with regard to player capability, wouldn’t be a bad thing. It’s something I miss from Wildstar – people hardly cared about dumb golem benchmarks but we had wildstarlogs, which provided nice data on what actually happened out there in the raids.

Phyxius Animus.7356:

So I bought PoF already and I am really regretting it after having read this. This is just a little too much for me. They sell GW2 as “no gear grind,” but I consistently find myself having to fix builds due to their insanely heavy-handed approach. They were so close to actual BALANCE in PvE, that I was actually getting pretty excited.

Rofl what? Balance? For anyone who had just a basic grasp of balance, it was obvious that food providing an equivalent of 300 stat points of concentration/expertise is broken, when the same slot on normal food has just 100 stats. This nerf has been necessary for a long, long time and is anything but heavy-handed. Most condi builds will probably lose roughly 1000-2000 dps from this change – that means they’re still ahead of power builds.

TexZero.7910:

Memser (Mirage) Not enough other tanks to push out chrono
Guardian (Firebrand) Probably still a mid tier dps, doesnt seem to show enough to break into other roles

Firebrand may kill the second mesmer who’s not tanking, though all that depends on many things we currently have no idea about. Thinking about future metas seems pretty pointless with the currently available information.

Palador.2170:

If you push your character to their limits and fine tune everything for maximum performance, then ANY change can “wreck” your build.

As if GW2 raids pushed stuff to the limit …

These changes are great and long, long overdue. Condi and boon duration consumables currently are so far beyond their proper budget that it’s not even funny. It’s rare that ANet does something that has so many benefits at once with no relevant trade-offs.

Oni has already said the most important thing – the meta will most likely be shaken up and we have no idea what it looks like once the new elites are there. Currently, guardian is certainly viable, but not optimal – that means you’ll get into raids with a PS warr more easily. If you want to raid with the guard, try to find a bunch of reasonable people, but somehow that’s no trivial task.

Adrenalin.5719:

A meta in an MMO just means that the balance is terrible, that is all, and that it needs fixing.

While I certainly agree that balance in GW2 is bad, this game’s meta culture is beyond ridiculous and that’s, first and foremost, a community thing. I’ve played games with harder raids (which isn’t really difficult, since GW2 raid difficulty is a joke) where people cared much, much less about meta, FOTM or whatever else it was called.

With regard to the new spec, looks interesting. I’ll reserve judgement till I’ve seen (and ideally played) more of it.

skillze.7689:

i have played this game since beta and excelled in everything that its had to offer

What exactly did you excel at? Pressing 1? Raids are still too easy in this game.

Did the new 100 (normal mode) this afternoon. Me, a friend (both in TS), three pugs. Feels like the overall difficulty isn’t that bad, but I don’t really like the general design principles in this fractal. The boss-boss-boss thing has already been commented on and I’m not really happy with the clusterkitten of mechanics especially when the boss tells are as bad as in this fractal. Also, please keep those “random guy is stupid, group wipes” mechanics out of normal modes. That’s fine for raids and challenge modes, but there are too many stupid people around for normal fractals.

That has been demanded since approximately day 1 of GW2. Maybe even earlier, don’t remember the beta weekends that much anymore. You can see how far we’ve got …

Rain.7543:

A broken mechanic is something everyone would have easy access to, the fact that not everyone does shows that it isnt like you paint it out to be.

Here’s the problem. I don’t think that definition of “broken mechanic” is anywhere close to universally acceptable. Just requiring a modicum of skill doesn’t make something balanced.

IndigoSundown.5419:

So, you want me to believe that if the difficulty was there, but the rewards weren’t (and they really weren’t) that people whose preferred content is raids would have kept doing temple events? Sorry, not buying it, at least not in the amount of that type of player the developer wanted to attract and keep.

Loot may be a factor, but it’s certainly not the decisive one. Yes, that’s what I want to tell you. Challenging open world (raid) bosses are a difficult feat to pull off. WoW had two bosses of that kind I remember (the demon lord and doomreaver in TBC, can’t really remember the open world bosses from classic). Those weren’t so bad, but not at all comparable to GW2 bosses. First, the loot system discouraged any kind of zerging, and second, a single death could be extremely devastating due to chain reaction effects. If GW2 introduced the latter, I’d love to see the ocean of tears it creates. Doc already mentioned Marionette, which could become quite toxic – a boss with real difficulty would make that fight look like a walk in the park.

With regard to being a “raid equivalent”, open world was never going to fail due to lack of exclusive rewards. It failed because it was a joke that didn’t even come close to raids in any way.

MerlinGamer.7410:

Raids are something I’m not convinced is good for the health of an MMO. If you google something like “Raids made me quit” you’ll see that they’ve caused problems in pretty much every mmo ever made and I’m wondering if there’s something fundamentally broken about the concept. But I’m not going to be able to be more specific about that if I’ve not really tried multiple times to enter the raid and have no idea which specific parts need pin pointing.

There will be posts about roughly every aspect that made players quit a MMO. People just don’t write about some obscure little things. As for raids, there are myriad reasons why they indeed make people quit. I quit WoW over Blizzard’s handling of raids years ago – not because they were too hard or anything like that, but because they introduced exactly the stuff the easymode crowd is crying for. That kittened up a system that had been working perfectly for about four years.

For the average open world player, +50% HP in exchange for 5-10% damage is probably a good choice.

The low number of chronos is probably the result of a combination of issues. I hope they use the potential of the next expansion to fix quite a bunch of problems with the class – that would benefit the entire game, since the current state of mesmers hurts far beyond that single class.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

You do realize the Devs deliberately scaled back the participation of NPCs in instances/story episodes/etc. a year to two ago, so that they did not contribute much in combat, anymore.

I must have missed the NPCs ever reasonably contributing to getting stuff done. They always felt like level 1 mobs thrown into a level 80 instance.

Wasn’t there already a naked raid run?

NPC henchmen are a bad idea for GW2, because they don’t fit to any part of the game. AI currently is bloody stupid, so that would require a massive overhaul, and then it’s a very thin line between the NPCs being sufficiently helpful and becoming overpowered. There are better things to spend development resources on – this is a MMO, after all.

Point of failure would certainly be a great name.

Fractal dailies are fine, since recommendeds are absolutely optional. Among the fractals themselves, aquatic and solid could certainly use a revamp, though that should focus on solid first (since I can’t imagine the devs can create anything exciting with the kittenty underwater combat). There are some issues in other fractals, but after the changes to swamp and snowblind, I have some faith that they will evetually be fixed.

Changing all unblockable skills to normal ones is probably not warranted in any game mode. However, at least in PvE I’d really love to see some normalisation with regard to different damage avoidance types. Either a skill should be avoided by block, evade and distort no matter what you choose, or it should be avoided by none.

If 15-20% chrono damage is expensive to you, we clearly have different ideas of what’s expensive. Besides, it’s not as if the II trait didn’t yield other massive advantages apart from granting distortion.

Rising Dusk.2408:

far superior to 1 second of AOE invulnerability on a 50 second cooldown with potential additional applications every so often if you invest an additional two traits and pick a whole specialization to support it.

Effectively, it’s something like a 12 second CD, that’s relevant. The investment for that isn’t really high.