Guild Wars 2

Nah, ANet produced enough fails long before WS went live. Can’t see a big change here, they just went on doing the same bad balance and other stuff.

Second edition is pretty hard. All of the GW2 kittenups are pretty harmless compared to what happened in WS.

Nope, the copyright on that book already belongs to Carbine Studios for what they did to Wildstar.

Anyway, I also wouldn’t mind if 100% uptime on anything was impossible for a single character of any class. Such constraints would probably be a trivial aspect to anything in PvE and I simply don’t care enough about PvP and PvD. However, it’s rather obvious that such restrictions most likely won’t happen, so I’ll continue to ask for 100% stuff being given to other classes in order to break the current monopolies.

Exaggeration does not substitute valid arguments. Every class giving out everything would not be good design for obvious reasons. However, having two or maybe even three classes that can satisfactorily fulfill a given role (e.g. “provide 100% quickness” or “provide banner effects”) would allow for much greater flexibility than we currently have. Right now, the buff distribution means that certain classes are essentially mandatory for teams (like warr/druid/mes in raids, guardian apparently in WvW zergs, etc.). In my opinion, no single class should be mandatory, although a healthy mix of classes should be beneficial for any team.

€: Was too slow. This post is directed at Aeolus.

Azoqu.8917:

Sadly there are not enough Bearbows around anymore to bring the CC we need.

I’m pretty sure that all those bearbows would use their CC randomly, so hardly in the moment you need it.

Aeolus.3615:

draxynnic.3719, well Anet sucks awfully at class design and game balance… i would not find strange if they gave 100% uptime of same boon to diferent classes…

Giving 100% uptime of the same boon to different classes would be the exact opposite of “suck[ing] awfully”. It would be a (rare) step in the right direction.

Looking at the way raid bosses are designed, that’s probably a brainless oversight typical for ANet’s general design approach. The aura ticks should simply ignore blocks.

Crappy dps is a feature inherent to the bow. So you have exactly two choices: switch to reasonable weapons (greatsword, scepter, hammer or sword) or do everyone a favour and don’t join groups that expect halfway reasonable dps.

zoomborg.9462:

I still see guardians in raids and the dps potential is still there. The problem is that in order to keep up with other dps classes u need to perform super good. What does that mean?

It means that guardians are only a setback if the player isnt that experienced while they perform very well otherwise. Truthfully most guardians i’ve seen are really struggling with dps even though the rotations are ez af.

The latter is the case with pretty much any class. Outside of dedicated raid groups, most people just have no clue of how to deal dps. Even in T4 fractals, the supposedly hardest content below raids, most pugs don’t even get close to the dps of an almighty hammer guard.

So for the OP, guardian still is a great class in most content. Not that great for raids anymore, but still more than viable. Don’t be deterred by all the QQ.

And I thought the biggest problem in raids was PEOPLE WRITING IN CAPS. Guess I was wrong.

I agree with suicidal’s assessment. Such ridiculous suggestions aren’t helpful, btw.

RabbitUp.8294:

Protector’s Strike last 2 1/2 seconds
Blocks all attacks on you for the duration, and pulses aegis to allies in range when you block an attack (1sec internal cd)
And it works like DD’s Bandit’s Defense, if you block an attack, you unlock the flip skill that damages all enemies around and grants protection.

That would be a reasonable rework, indeed.

UnbentMars.9126:

IMPORTANT NOTE: I believe much of this will come with the next round of elite specializations. The current issue is that the existence of only one elite spec for each class pigeon-holes everyone, but once more options are available that will open it up for ANET to truly specialize them.

I also hope they’ll do this, but somehow I wouldn’t be that surprised if they kittened up this great opportunity.

Swampland and nightmare for me.

MerlinGamer.7410:

Perhaps raiders are too ridgedly attached to the meta and could ease up on builds that are at least realistic in what they try to do and arena net need to really consider why we have things in this game that are objectively terrible and either buff or remove them.

It’s not “raiders”. It’s a large part of this entire community. These issues have been there for much longer than raids.

Nonsense. DPS will be meta no matter whether timers exist or not. With all that active defense stuff, it’s built into the game’s very foundation.

It’s more than lfg, it’s an attitude thing among large parts of the GW2 community when classes that are less than 20% below the golem’s No. 1 class are regarded as “trash tier”. I can’t remember the good old WoW times being that extreme (no clue what it looks like today) and I definitely know that the Wildstar community wasn’t that ridiculous. Wildstar raids were at least an order of magnitude harder than the ones in this game, btw.

I don’t see how the damage formula is supposed to support your calculations.

A handful of people per week hardly show anything.

Ah, right. I always tend to ignore large hitboxes.

It’s great that you apparently found something that satisfied you. Maybe the raiding crowd should be more active in presenting this option to people who want a story mode. However, with that attitude you’re probably part of one of the smallest subsections I mentioned. When looking at our frequent easymode guys, I’m 100% certain they’re not in your subsection, but in a very different one.

Aeolus.3615:

isnt DPS, damage per second???… 30k per second… yeah right. :}

29.3k, to be precise. I think it’s fair to call that 30k :P

zealex.9410:

Ppl just want their character to be in ther talk and kill the mobs and move on they dont care about challenge if they give them that well yes it will take some resources but it will free up their hard creatively alot for future raids and you will get rid of ppl crying so whats there to lose. Ppl want to exerience the story not the fight and they dont care how epic a story can be with difficulty.

Just like Feanor, I’ll have to disagree. What you write will be true for a small subset of the easymode crowd, but the vast majority of them will continue crying, because they actually want easy shinies with no effort. At least that’s the impression I get from all these whine threads.

IndigoSundown.5419:

On another matter… I think those claiming “anyone” can raid should spend more time in the open world. There are people being downed in fights like in Bloodstone Fen (Hablion, the Jade Bow + Armor and the Legendary Guardian). How likely are such people to do what it takes to succeed in content that is certainly “harder?”

With all the stupidly scaled kitten flying around during some open world events, it’s sometimes easier not to go down in raids. And there, at least you directly know what killed you …

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’m sure there are people who want the rewards without going through all the hoops. Even so, there are plenty of people who just want to experience every single line of dialogue, read every journal scrap, examine every interactable — that’s not something they can get from the videos.

If I had to judge human nature based on the threads in this forum, I’d suspect that the true story mode people are a vanishingly small minority. The rest is just whiners who want all the shinies for no effort. If the devs found a way to create a story mode without spending substantial resources on it, that would probably be something I welcome. Anything else would seem like a waste of resources.

1. Braindead builds imho shouldn’t be the no. 1 build, but I see no reason for easy builds not to be competitive. Being ~10% weaker than keyboard piano builds under golem conditions would probably be reasonable. However …

2. I strongly dislike the focus on golem performance. It’s probably the only comparable thing we have right now, but it’s way too artificial. People can already upload logs from raids online, so I’d love to see a website like wildstarlogs or warcraftlogs come up in order to pool and analyse the log data. I’m pretty sure there would be quite some surprises if you compared a reasonable percentile (something like 80th) to the golem benchmarks.

3. I’d probably prefer if there were (at least) two classes that can bring each unique buff. As an example, thieves could get utility skills that replicate warrior banner effects and are mutually exclusive with banners. Empower Allies wouldn’t need to go to the same class but could go to guardian, for example.
As a band-aid solution to the current imbalance, extending the buff cap in raids to 10 targets for anything would probably also work, bit I prefer the more flexible solution that doesn’t nail you to one certain class for a specific buff. The only thing I’d actually like to be scaled back is the amount of active defense chronos have. That’s just ridiculously broken.

4. Offering some more niches, maybe by raid design, is probably not a bad idea. However, I’d be reluctant to force those niches if they’d require expensive stuff like new gear just for one or two encounters.

Hildemar Moguntiaco.3057:

Sorry, but most of the replies saying that raids are simple are absolutely incorrect. […] And yes: I played NM in SWTORS.

Why am I not surprised at how easymodes have distorted the scales? I still hate Blizzard for opening the floodgates with WotLK :’-(

I’m a bit confused. How exactly is a comp supposed to be a reasonable beginner comp when it excludes the vast majority of potential beginners, i.e. everyone who doesn’t (want to) play ranger?

MerlinGamer.7410:

If a larger percentage of the community could experience and got into the concept of raiding then the developers would have more of an excuse to devote more time to raids, so it would likely create more raid content, not less.

If that’s supposed to happen, the easymode crowd first would have to find a consensus on what they actually want. So far, I’ve seen a crapton of different and sometimes contradictory concepts (some more stupid, some a little bit less), of which each would appeal only to a small subsection of the easymode crowd. At the current state, I see no reason to believe we’d see more raid content if they added another mode.

There’s probably a much more simple explanation: He just did the easymode and thought it was srs bsns.

Warcry.1596:

None of the fights require top DPS, I never said they do. My issue is that they require DPS at all. Sure, some fights can have certain parts or phases, but in general, I would much rather be challenged in other ways, mostly because I don’t feel like wearing DPS gear to be enough of a challenge for content designed to be difficult.

If encounters were more focused on difficult mechanics, I’m 100% certain that the tears resulting from it would drown the entire game and that toxicity would reach a whole new level. All those current “easy mode pl0x, mimimi” threads already point in that direction and current mechanics are not difficult.

Hildemar Moguntiaco.3057:

The main problem with the raids in GW2 is the fact, that they require a group of ten highly equipped players with very good skills.

I’m sorry, but this is just plain wrong. Getting the gear to start raids (some ascended weapons and ideally ascended trinkets) is anything but hard unless you just started playing GW2 a month ago or so. And very good skills? GW2 raid bosses present, at best, some kind of moderate difficulty compared to other MMOs. Most of them already are stupidly easy.

Looks reasonable and when we’re already at EM, that trait needs a big rework, i.e. no ICD and an increased range. Unfortunately, I doubt the devs have the brains to fix it.

If I had to guess, maybe WoW’s LFR does that. Can’t say for sure though, since I quit that game a long time ago.

runeblade.7514:

This suggestion is to make Fractals more alt-friendly while giving progression for every other alt-characters.

WTF? Your suggestion isn’t alt-friendly at all, it would be a giant pain in the ass for anyone who wants to bring alts to fractals.

vesica tempestas.1563:

I play LOTR, ESO and EVE and i do not see any toxicity re meter performance.

I bet you also don’t see the GW2 level of toxicity with regard to achievement points or whatever else there. Hence, your argument is invalid.

I assume you looked at the fractals build at metabattle. That one uses assassin’s stuff because it takes Virtues instead of Radiance and therefore lacks the 15% crit from right-hand strength. In general, I’d recommend to stick to QT, i.e. just keep your berserker stuff. No one cares or will even notice whether you do one or two percent more or less damage in fractals and open world is a joke anyway.

With regard to underwater combat, just get some cheap exotic berserker or assassin weapons and you are done with it. Underwater combat has been (rightfully) abandoned by ANet years ago and there’s no underwater content where your weapon choice matters.

Kiza.5630:

Goldfox.5729:

I kill all Raid bosses on a weekly basis and I do T4 Fractals maybe every day of the week.

But most likely with ppl you know. And T4 fractals don’t necessarily attract ppl with vastly different player skills.

Read his post again with regard to people he knows. And T4 fractals definitely attract people with player skills like night and day. There are pug groups where I out-dps two or three dps-classes combined and those are not very rare. And then there are those groups where everyone obviously knows what they’re doing.

On the contrary, ANet’s decision to allow (party-wide) meters was a great one. Now we finally have some precise data to locate problems. Toxic people would have been toxic anyway, as the history of this game clearly shows.

I agree with the norn faction. Humans aren’t very exciting either, but that’s at least predictable. Norn could have been much more than they are.

You just won’t get all the aggro and prevent your group from getting cleaved by stuff.

womwom.5209:

Getting into raids in GW2 is actually really easy. The caveat is that you need to be proactive and be willing to invest a decent amount of time (at least in the initial learning phase).

Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:

Sorry, but that’s hardly “easy” when I compare it to other games that had much, much more challenging raid content.

boomersooner.4612:

there is a burn guard

Possibly, but will it do more damage than the quickness bot, erm, chrono?

Draco.9480:

elitism in a nutshell.
and in gw2 a lot of pugs play worse than pugs in wow.

Haven’t played WoW in ages, but somehow I can’t imagine pugs in some game can be worse than there. Though GW2 pugs definitely are bad on average.

Anyway, for the OP, what others already have said: Search for and find a proper guild, then you should be able to get into raids without too many issues. No matter the class, guardian is fine as well.

Looked at in isolation, I almost like the seaweed salad nerf. Brings it back in line with the other power food and if my quick napkin math wasn’t totally wrong, it should still be the best power food with perfect movement.

However, with the lack of a similar nerf to condi food, the devs have clearly shown that they have no clue about their game. Old news, I know …

Somehow, I don’t associate things I’d like to see in this game with “endgame progression”.

Which great condi dps spec? The one that’s halfway effective once or twice in a lifetime, i.e. currently at impressive two bosses?

As to Rabbit, I’ll try to keep quote wars limited, because I think that our interests actually do overlap in quite some aspects. I’m not interested in escalating a discussion that started with an “he’s entirely right”, which I still contest – however, that doesn’t mean I believe you’re entirely wrong or anything close.

RabbitUp.8294:

I’m not sure what your objection is here. Are you saying that Feel My Wrath is even worse than I claimed? That only makes the +50%cd nerf even more jarring.

As for how close guardian was, you can bring multiple guardians and stack the quickenss. Or just use guardian + mesmer instead of 2 mesmers. It could have made Guardian a more attractive dps, since they bring a valuable buff along with their damage.

I don’t contest FMW being rather bad, I contest the QQ about it and how it hurts the guardian so much. Every class has a crapton of currently terribad skills that deserve a buff and/or never deserved certain nerfs. With regard to attractiveness, I seriously doubt that the old CD would have any measurable impact. A mesmer and a proper dps slot will almost certainly be much more effective than two self-castrated FMW guards could ever be.

Druid healer doesn’t deal damage either, they can’t tank. PS war is forced into a suboptimal rotation damage-wise to maintain the might, they don’t tank either. Mesmer has the tools to tank and more importantly, doesn’t lose anything at all to do so, they don’t even have to change their rotation that much. Mesmer is not just a tank, they defend the whole group. Why bother with guardian and their pathetic aegis when mesmer can share invulnerability when needed just as easily?

And how does that hurt mesmers exactly? The lack of a dps build? They only play support, like guardian only plays dps, and there’s a lot less competition between supports. At least they get what they signed up for, mesmers has always been like that, but when I picked up guardian, they weren’t a necro/thief-tier selfish class.

So, you are saying mesmers are holding the whole meta hostage until they are relevant in dps before they can allow being nerfed in support, that’s not exactly reassuring.

The entire mesmer issue is incredibly messy. Given the current constraints in their design (i.e. lack of a proper dps spec), I see a very thin line between OPness and uselessness. I won’t dispute that, at the moment, they’re probably on the OP side of this spectrum, at least with regard to raids. And yes, it does hurt mesmers, because there’s more to this game than raids and for much of this “more”, a proper dps build is extremely helpful.

The current situation reminds me a bit of WoW in its early days. Class balance was horrible in classic, semi-awful in TBC and finally got good in WotLK (if they just hadn’t ruined the rest of the game). I see GW2 somewhere in the TBC era right now. A bunch of balance-related things are fine, some require rather little changes to become fine and some require massive reworks.

With the new addon, they have the chance to fix many of the glaring issues in one step. If they do it right (keep in mind that everyone has their own ideas of “right”), I expect that many people like you will get what they want. I honestly hope that they’ll break monopolies like the mesmers’, but you can’t just break things.

Giving mesmers a good dps spec in exchange for taking away their monopoly would be a step in the right direction. I’m still not concerned by those ominous 80k dps, because it doesn’t matter whether you have to balance a bunch of damage numbers on a bunch of new skills or on some class mechanics. Ideally, they’ll rework the class mechanics anyway for mirage, since the illusion/shatter mechanics are a disaster with regard to dps. Obviously, producing a new elite that gets to 80k (and therefore needs a giant nerf) isn’t reassuring in the first place, but hardly surprising when looking at ANets history.

And entirely pointless, because there’s no second place in the dps race. Either you do the most raw damage, or you bring enough buffs so that in the end, spread across the whole group, you do the most damage. Which is why guardian is in such dire need of a supportive backbone, as more and more dps builds make it into the game.

That second place stuff is nonsense. As long as the differences between classes are within a reasonable range, the first place issue is reserved to record runs or stupid people. The latter are probably more prevalent in this game than would be healthy, but that’s no reason to balance around them.

Shall I? So I’ll take just the stuff that appears to be the most glaring nonsense, since I’m not in the mood for a giant wall of text.

Mesmer QQ – how exactly was the guard coming close to mesmers with regard to quickness stacking? With the old CD, we could provide a bit more than 50% quickness uptime in the most optimal case, i.e. with 100% boon duration, the shout trait and with a mesmer for alacrity. That’s not even close, that’s a joke. With regard to tanking, mesmers got that role for one simple reason: if you don’t deal damage anyway, you don’t lose damage by tanking. Even worse than druids outshining all other healers mainly due to one single buff, this flaw in mesmer design hurts all other potential tanks and mesmers themselves.

It leads to the third point, which mirage will hopefully address. Mesmers always have desperately needed a build that allows them to be a proper dps class. The current class and illusion mechanics are massively flawed with regard to most situations. Mirage filling the dps niche would finally open up the potential for huge balance improvements for all classes.

Speaking of balance, if you think that the current “80k dps in test” are relevant in any way, I dare question why you are still around in this game. Maybe you think that the devs are totally incompetent (which is a valid point of view), but then the consequences should be obvious.

The raid build is fine for any kind of PvE. Can’t remember a lot where I wanted to make big deviations. Apart from the utility skills, ofc.

Fashion Mage.3712:

CptAurellian.9537:

Quite an impressive amount of QQ.

but he’s completely right. XD

That’s, at best, debatable.