Guild Wars 2

You do not lose anything by using it except for the natural progression through the game.

You will also hit multiple brick walls in terms of difficulty (vanilla Orr areas and especially all the expansion HoT zones).

A significant part of the challenge from the vanilla areas (which already is not that high) will make for potentially boring gameplay.

You will have no idea of how your class works, though having access to all traits and skills might be more fun for mix and matching.

Personally I’d recommend wait and play at least 1-2 clases to 60 or even 80 just so you can get an overview of how the game works and especially what classes are good where.

If you absolutely can’t wait, definately try out multiple classes in the trial area before unlocking one for the 80 boost.

ThomasC.1056:

I indeed feel so. It’s a sad biais in this game that the most of your survivability comes from being able to end the fight fast (either by winning or running away).

For small scale or 1v1 roaming yes, because most players do not survive a dedicated burst. This becomes less effective against experienced players.

The time aspect also plays a role because the longer the fight takes the higher the chance of additional parties getting involved. That’s not something a developer can design around on a class balance level.

ThomasC.1056:

I’ll try to put signets as you suggested, eventhough I’ve never been fond of them (in any class). I had those summons in order to keep shatter pressure.

With CS, chrono phantasma and IR shatter pressure should not be an issue. At least not for a condi build imo.

ThomasC.1056:

Mirror images was also a fair stun breaker.

In that case I’de replace it with decoy.

ThomasC.1056:

Disenchanter’s first purpose wasn’t to cleanse me. It’s mainly a low CD summon, and the boon breaker thing is useful too. I often switched to defender too.

Understandable, though eventually you have to prioritize, you won’t be able to counter out all enemy builds. I don’t feel that we need additional illusion summons on condition builds that are aimed at outlasting an enemy (which your build has turned into stat wise). The boon removal while useful can be achieved via other means.

ThomasC.1056:

When I happened to be able to craft an ascended set, I decided to go full dire/trailblazer, because I’m reading to nausea on the forums that those stats are “oh so powerful”, or “ez mode”.

The sets are superior to their vanilla counterparts due to simple stat advantage. It depends on the build and playstyle though of the player and how he utilises those stats. Traiblazer will vastly outperform viper in any bigger scale engagements where survival becomes more important while providing viable small scale performance.

Dire and Rabid often are used in combination and the amount of precision requirement of the class to perform will give one or the other an advantage.

As was mentioned, outnumbered fights which happen quite often in wvw will also benefit the more defensive stats (as long as enough offense is present). The best approach is to mix and match. The stat increase switching from exotic to ascended armor will not cover the difference in prefix type though. This has been pointed out multiple times from people with ascended since the stat increase from exotic to ascended is minimal (on armor).

Worst case, reforge the ascended armor to stats of your liking.

It might very well be both.

The switch of gear will have taken a big chunk of offensive stats away for more tankiness.

You’ve lost significant amounts of precision (from rabid) and power (from viper) in favor of only expertise (which in a wvw roaming build can be useful but loses to condi cleanse). You’ve gained mostly defensive stats which is quite useful, if you were having a hard time surviving.

Going by what you said your build worked for you, meaning you did not suffer any significant survival issues. Exchanging more survival for less burst might very well hurt your roaming capability.

Looking at your utilities, Mirror Images could maybe be exchanged for SoD for some extra condition damage (since you have 0 direct damage now) and an on demand stun.

I might also exchange Phantasmal Disenchater. You have Restorative Illusions which should cover you condition cleanse wise, maybe exchange that for Signet of Illusions for more burst or Signet of Midnight for the condition duration and on demand blind (for synergy with Inemptitude).

Otherwise change some gear back and try to find the sweetspot which works for you.

The IR nerf will have had some effect, but since that is not likely to get reverted you have to work with what you can.

DarkDucke.3481:

The worst is that in addition you have nothing there to see, you take 2hs dishonor in PVP … it seems that everything that the game does is to make you angry and frustrated. that to not mention the reward system, if I can call it.

Because it’s arenanets fault that the game is getting DDOS attacks…

Be happy you couldn’t pvp for 2 hours. I doubt the experience would have been enjoyable with the games limited availability.

Because testing builds on open world enemies matters….

I find hilarious how people are defending this attitude of monopolizing open world mobs. A ton of other MMO communities would literally kill to have people help each other in open world content.

If you want to test a build, go to a target dummy or open a dungeon/fractal or go to a story mission or duel someone in your guild arena, etc. The amount of available methods to get solo content to practice on are more than sufficient.

I’ll take people helping on open world enemies over people ignoring and running past one any day of the week.

tl;dr: player complaining he doesn’t manage to test his new meta build on open world enemys. Giving this troll 7/10.

First off, are we talking casual endgame (open world, some dungeons, some story missions and achievements) or actual endgame difficulty wise (fractals and more so raids)?

Two big differences there.

The former is where you are now and where you can improve with little effort by optimising your build, your gear and maybe some better runes/sigils. It’s quite open and relaxed and allows you a lot of freedom to experiment with different weapons and itemisation.

The later (especially raids) is quite restricting as far as gear choice and build goes due to the role mesmers fill in that content. We are main party support alacrity and quickness providers with occasional immunity and reflects.

Read up on the current meta builds on http://qtfy.eu/build/mesmer . Acceptable gear for mesmer is berserker, commanders and minstrel (maybe assassins). Condition damage builds are very situational and usually not run in raids.

As far as advice for melee, start fighting enemies without killing them just trying to stay alive as long as possible. Start with trolls, move on to imps and elementals, then move on to mini raptors and smokescales in HoT. Start using Sword+x in both weapon slots and leave the greatsword in you inventory.

I like the reskin.

Purple does look a tad nicer than gold.

Personally I wouldn’t mind either way of implementation. Either a grind making them prestigious or some challenge mode way, both fine by me.

It’s unfortunate that fractal skins have become such a seldom sight, though that might also be due to the vast amount of newer skins available in the game.

http://qtfy.eu/build/mesmer

Condimesmer uses dueling in its raid meta build. Realise though that your chances of rading in that build are near 0 unless you already have a raid and they are willing to let you use the build.

As other mentioned, in Spvp different stuff works. As far as engame pve (fractals and raids). Domi and Illusions outperform Dueling but I guess you could run a Domi+Dueling or Illusion+Dueling suboptimal build.

Blackmoon.6837:

Tryhard Pants.9745:

…But how would the group even know? …

I run GW/Staff as Mesmer. It’s all I ever run (I find it somewhat fun to play).

I’m sorry, I get that elitism can take a toll on people and often others overreact and non meta builds can pull their weight in most content if played properly.

As mesmer main I take offence to your weapon choice though and then complaining that people kick you.

You are literally playing probably one of THE most useless combos of class and weapon choice for pve content possible (it might even be the most useless pve combination).

First off, GS. Absolutely useless as far as group content goes. Okay you need a range weapon because pure melee can be tough, been there done that.

Then you also use staff? Wow…

So to summerise:

- you neither bring damage because mesmer is probably the worst damage class in game at the moment and certainly not with those 2 weapons

AND

- you do not provide a useful amount of quickness uptime and cc bar break because that would require you to take a shield as chrono

AND

- you provide no swiftness, reflects or npc repositioning (all focus)

Yeah sorry, I can fully understand every person who decides to exchange you in their group composition. I could understand complaints when 1 or maybe 2 of those points are a concern, but all 3…

Adenin.5973:

Well, I at least will answer your question finally.
In case you ever asked seriously: No I am not a developer that has ever worked on GW2.

So all your suggestions are based in blank theory without any practical experience versus official developer responses that pintpoint the actual problems.

That alone takes a big chunk of credibility out of them.

Adenin.5973:

That said: It makes no difference at all how armors for gw2 are created. An example:

I do not need to know how exactly and in every little detail how my computer monitor is working. What I do know however is that it requires electricity and a certain voltage and I do know also that my monitor does not produce that electricity itself.
It does not matter in which of my 12 sockets my monitor is plugged in. As long as it delivers the right current and voltage my monitor will produce a frame.

True, the difference being you are not on some tech forum telling the engineers how to improve their monitor while they are telling you it can’t be done that way. That’s the part you are ommiting in this example.

There is a difference between understanding the basics and actually improving on them.

This is exactly what you are doing here, you understand a fraction of the basic work in theory, then extrapolating your own arguments and explaining how stuff should work when even the official developer responses have pointed to the problems you are ignoring.

Panda.1967:

Astralporing.1957:

Ashen.2907:

There is every reason to believe that one race would become optimal. If one race’s racial elite offered even one percent more of something than is available for another race it would be optimal.

That already happened with take root and condi rangers. And that’s why that elite got nerfed.
So, we don’t even need to believe in it. We already know it.

That really speaks more to how poor the actual ranger elite skills are than anything… Spirit of Nature is more in line with how Water Spirit should function… Entangle is more in line with a regular utility skill than an Elite… and “SotP!” is really the only actual Elite Skill available to Rangers… it’s no surprise that Condi rangers would have looked to Racial Elites… with Take Root nerfed, the next best option is Entangle for it’s 5 stack bleed.

Except that it wasn’t only rangers that took Take Root as elite but almost all condi classes as long as content allowed it. Thus this was not a ranger specific issue.

I was running Take Root on my (specifically for that purpose created 3rd warrior) on encounters where Headbutt was not required.

While I understand the sentiment that every playtime should reward one as flexible as possible in achieving their goal (which most commonly is gold). Making all currencies interchangable would add 1 new problem:

- currencies then need to be balanced against each other (will never happen because this would require massiv rework of game currency rewards accross all game areas)

or

- the exchange rates need to be balanced so that conversion does not benefit certain game modes

This is already happening with gold. Some gold farms are more efficient compared to others and yield a better result. Players gravitate to the most profitable farms or near most profitable for variation. The same would occure if currencies ingame are interchangable or exchangable with each other.

At the same time, a lot of value would get removed if some long time players were to exchange their near unlimited amounts of old currencies against new currencies and thus devalue any new addition of skins, items, achievements into the game.

Just look at karma. The conversion rate of karma to gold (one of the oldest 2 currency methods of exchange, usually from karma to gold) is so unprofitable that people rather sit on their karma. Basically this would have to be the state all currency exchange values would have to sit at to not negatively impact the game.

Cyndercat.5120:

Djinn.9245:

Astralporing.1957:

Ashantara.8731:

None of you has made any argument that makes it more equitable to not have race matter (at least in the story!). On the contrary, it’s like you are defending having less variety, “because”.

If the race mattered, we would have less variety. All warriors would be Charr or Norn, all Rangers would be sylvari, all engis would be Asuras. That’s an example of course, we might have ended with a different race/class pairings, but we would end up with those. That is exactly why race doesn’t matter buildwise.

Still, more emphasis on player character race should be made in LS and personal story,

This is an assumption not based in fact.

Its an exaggeration but the basis is true that people will chose to play the race that is objectively stronger and synergies best with their class. Unless all racial skills are perfectly balanced (unlikely) then racial skills cant be worth using in combat at all because race stop being cosmetic.

Exactly, perfect balance is impossible or near enough to impossible to consider it impossible.

The entire argument that racial skills should be more powerful and it would be fine if they are balanced is stupid. Why risk adding imbalance if the current way dealt with this issue (keeping skills irrelevant) works perfectly fine.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Players don’t want compromise, only results.

Players can want what they want. However the results are what we have as it’s most unlikely that ANet will redo the armor or stop making outfits.

Edit: in addition all these no outfit posts are always either/or. They assume if ANet stops making outfits there will be more armor. But the outfit team is not necessarily the armor team. In fact, since armor is one of the most expensive and time consuming items they make it’s very likely to be different people. Removing outfits then won’t increase armor and in fact the loss of sales would mean less money for things such as armor.

Thank you. Finally someone who puts some thought into how outfits fit into arenanets process.

Less revenue/profit for arenanet net means less developement in every area. One of the downsides of having a no subscription game.

Personally I love outfits. I buy the ones I like, don’t care about the ones I don’t like and get to cycle different outfits for my less played toons making them seem fresh and shiny.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_trinket

The Living World Season 3 maps and their ascended trinket selection offers every stat currently ingame on said trinkets as 1 time choice (and changable option on blood gear for 100 unbound magic).

As far as wvw, you have to complete the titles tracks corresponding with the new maps to get the ressources to buy the trinkets from the vendors in said maps.

Acantha.8634:

Greetings!

I have this problem, I really REALLY like the concept of Mesmer (especially using the staff, that’s bloody genius!), but hearing all this stuff about how hard Mesmer will be after the ellite spec scares e to the bone!

I wouldn’t worry about elite spec at your point in time. Try out the class, see how you enjoy it.

Most of the difficulty comes from endgame content like raids and to some degree fractals. If you are starting our right now, those things are quite a way off and certainly far enough away to get used to the class.

Acantha.8634:

This would be my first class leveling to 80 so is it really not recommended?

Play whatever you like. Though I will say this: should you get close to burned out with mesmer, definately try some of the other classes. All of them are quite unique.

Acantha.8634:

If this would really, really not be recommended, could you guys give advice on which class also plays safe but isn’t as boring as plain old ranger/warrior or something like that?

Necromancer. Probably one of the top tier classes for solo pve content and quite easy (compared to some other classes).

Thief can also be quite fun due to epic mobility.

That said, mesmer is fine. It is a tad more tedious than other classes, especially early game, but most old school mesmers played the class from 1 to 80 without tomes or other fancy “get there quick” methods (except cooking, come on, you know we all used it).

I’d say give the class a try. If you enjoy it, keep with it. If you want to try another class, do that. The first time to 80 is one of the coolest experiences MMO wise in this game.

Ashantara.8731:

Ashen.2907:

Ashantara.8731:

How would it “increase the cost”, if the devs were working on the several story path options instead of “more story content”? Logic?

More story paths would cost more than fewer story paths. Seems pretty logical to me that X * 5 > X (where x is tbe cost of one story path).

Okay, now think for a second. If you cut the overall content in order to produce more variety in the existent content, that evens it out. How hard is it to understand that? I’m really beginning to wonder here…

Except that creating branching content is inherently more complex and time consuming than creating one story path. How hard is it to understand that? I’m really beginning to wonder here…

Nyx.6532:

mauried.5608:

Anet doesnt sell gold, they only sell gems.
The gem to gold exchange feature in the game and the exchange rate is set by the players and any gold you get from exchanging gems is coming from other players.

tomato, tômata.
result is exactly the same, there is absolutely no difference in its effect.

Except that it is not.

The gold you buy with your gems was farmed by players. You buying it via gems (or other people) keep the price and supply in check.

Yes, it might seem that gold magically appears in your wallet and you just bought it from arenanet, but if you spend 5 minutes and read on how the gem exchange works you’d know that is not the case.

Back on topic:
If you keep calculating what your best return for your money is, then just stop playing. By that logic you would have to only play the maximum gold yielding aspects of this game and never move away from them and I doubt you’ve been playing that way so far.

Here is a different way to look at those 25 Euro spent:
- you get aproximately 20 hours of story without achievements and replay
- you get access to some areas which provide very easy access to ascended trinkets with all stats on them available as choice

Eventually you end up with less than 1 Euro per hour spent. Try matching that with any other activity. Also factoring the cost from the ascended trinkets into the calculation would make the Season 3 maps shoot past 600 gold easy (ever tried crafting exotic trailblazer trinkets?).

That gameplay and hopefully enjoyment is no where with those potential 600 gold in your wallet.

I would personally hold on to it. Who knows what additions might come bevor the next expansion and especially with the expansion.

Otherwise check https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crystalline_Ore.

There is a multitude of recepies and minis besides the insignias/inscriptions and runes (the most interesting probably being Commanders).

Or if you to start playing more regular fractals and especially raids in the future, you could always buy the runes then.

Rednik.3809:

Cyninja.2954:

True except that the entire gamedesign of GW2 is based around no significant powercreep.

Basic one. Expansion brought pretty huge powercreep and kicked almost all vanilla specs out of meta.

Again true and one of the main reasons I have my doubts that a pure sidegrade model towards elite specs will be upheld. Since the release of HoT though there has been a lot of balance changes and at least from a pve perspective, a lot of classes were balanced to be closer to each other performance wise.

That being said, HoT was the first elite specialisation and arenanets first attempt at expanding the class system. If elite specialisation are ment to be sidegrades to each other, the powercreep this time around should be less (ideally close to nill).

Stacwad.8250:

I should have been more specific. Yes I meant strictly PvE. I play zero PvP or WvW

Here’s the deal, leadership runes beat most other runes for mesmer due to the high itemisation value from direct boon duration. 30% boon duration is equal to 450 stat points worth of concentration (15 conc = 1% boon duration). For mesmer that’s pure gold since our main role is support in group enviroments in pve.

If you play fractals or fractals and raids, it’s a good investment (and should go in berserker armor, worst case commanders armor).

If you only play open world pve, occasionally fractals and dungeons, the runes might be a tad overkill and to expensive. Other runes will outperform leadership runes in any solo or non group content.

Rednik.3809:

Cyninja.2954:

On topic, raids are fine. Let’s hope the new elite specialisations actually are sidegrades because even a slight amount of powercreep could destabilize the current ecosystem of easy and medium fights with nicht challenge mode versions.

I will be quite surprised if they will not do it. Power creep with new addons is common practice for MMO, you cannot expect that old content designed for old mechanics will stay relevant with new ones.

True except that the entire gamedesign of GW2 is based around no significant powercreep.

We’ve seen this in:

- the rebalance of downscaling
- the very low powercreep over 5 years (compared to traditional MMOs)
- the lack of increase in gear stats (with the one time eception of ascended addition)

The basic idea always was that elite specialisations are supposed to be sidegrades to each other. I guess we will have to wait and see how well arenanet keeps to this idea.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

What if racial skills were the same between races, except for aesthetics? Like the HoM pet skins.

Give every race the same number of racial skills, that do the same thing, but with different names and animations. Thus, for example, the sylvari Summon Sylvan Hound, human Hounds of Balthazar, asuran Summon 7-Series Golem, charr Warband Support, and a new norn racial skill (since they have no elite summon racial skill) all summon an NPC that has the same exact stats and skills, but different names and appearance.

Thus there’d be no balance difference between races and at the same time the skills can be improved to matter/be effective in PvE/WvW.

I like it. This idea has come up in the past and I’d even go further and say it would provide a nice way to get rid of some of the excess hero points if slightly modified.

Make all races able to use hero points to gain other races racial skills and create unique animations for each race. That way racial skills could even get slightly improved from absolute useless tier.

At the same time people can use some of their up to 364 extra hero points to buy not needed skills to complete their main characters.

Downsides:
- races would lose all racial uniqueness
- people who want to “finish” characters would have to grind more hero points
- extre developement ressources required in the shortterm
- doesn’t fix the problem revenants have of not having any access to racial skills

Fay.2357:

For raids and high fractals? Yep. For WvW? Nope. For open world/dungeons? Doesn’t matter.

Quoted for truth.

Panda.1967:

Cyninja.2954:

You have yet failed to explain how a change of racial skills would improve story telling.

You are hung up on that strawman of yours… NO ONE has made any such claim that changing racial skills would improve story telling. The suggestions to improve racial skills and to improve story telling by making your race, background, class, etc… matter are TWO ENTIRELY SEPARATE CONCEPTS.

1) Improving racial skills and making a racial skill slot makes your choice of race feel more impactful and meaningful in general content as you can actually make use of your racial skills without sacrificing build performance.

Very first post by TC equates story telling and racial skills:

Ashantara.8731:

How boring is it that races in GW2 are merely cosmetic?

…

I say race should matter. It should make a difference in both story and builds. It should not be merely cosmetic, because that only adds to the increase of boredom any game with a lack of variety poses.

Which then lead to:

Westenev.5289:

Cyninja.2954:

So your argument is that race should matter, except in any situation where it would actually be of any use?

Interesting.

Or, and hear me out here, we could just keep the system as is and not waste a huge amount of developer ressources on this issue.

Shrugs Is it so useless though, if it leads to a better story?

To which I had responded that one is not necessary for the other. Racial skills have nothing in common with good story telling. I’m all for improved storytelling.

Panda.1967:

That said, I still honestly would prefer to have the personal story back in all it’s glory.

Which is your right, others can have a different opinion. This has nothing to do with racial skills. Race as far as story can matter, though I doubt arenanet has the ressources at this time to create both, unique content per race and enough content to satisfy a majority of the playerbase.

Ashantara.8731:

You are confusing “content” with “story-telling”. I’d gladly have “less content” if it meant that the content I got had more diversity and was replayable without causing boredom.

No matter how much replayability you have, once you play character number 10 through it you will get bored (I have 24 characters for example). The main drive for most players is not story past the first 1-2 characters they play it with.

Ashantara.8731:

Even the nay-sayers here can’t deny that race (like every other choice that initially made your character unique) has zero influence on anything anymore these days.

As nay sayer I have to say: great, that’s exactly how it should be.

Also you are incorrect, the sylvari racial Take Root was nerfed not even 2 months ago because it provided a damage advantage to condition builds in raids.

Other racial skills encountered similar fates in the past.

Ashantara.8731:

You know what I did these past couple of months out of sheer boredom? I started collecting legendary weapons I don’t need to feel like I was playing some “unique” content, and making new characters I don’t need of professions I already have only so I could play through different personal story options in order to experience that thrill of feeling like my choices during character creation somehow matter.

You have yet failed to explain how a change of racial skills would improve story telling.

Welcome to fashion wars. Legendary weapons are endgame design for most players who have completed the story multiple times. No matter how many “improvements” you believe might benefit the story, once you are doing it for the 10th time it will get stale.

Faaris.8013:

apharma.3741:

Eh, you don’t all have white mantle portal devices in shared inventory slots to easy mode this?

Scrubs!

What the…!

I didn’t know this exists. 1000 Magnetite Shards :S

Only 964 more to go for me then!

This is a nice gizmo, despite 30 minutes cooldown time. Would use it for the starting wisps at T4 rather than at Bloomhunger though.

Remember, Adrenal Mushrooms reduce cooldown of skills and use items like the WMPD by 20 minutes. A great way to reduce that 30 minutes cooldown when running around in HoT areas.

As others have mentioned, arenanet has all this data and much much more (for example breakdowns of skills used per game mode which is of prime importance to balance concerns).

Obviously if some skills are predominant they varant review. That alone does not mean anything though without context. Condition cleanse skills were useless before condition damage got reworked to the state it is in today (well not useless but cleanse was way less of an issue) meaning they were run less. Does not mean that they were underpowered, simply that the game balance did not warrant their use.

UnitedChaos.8364:

For example:
Out of all the rangers if “We Heal as One” is used 71% of the time, Troll Unguent is used 24% of the time, and Healing Spring is used only 5% of the time. Wouldn’t that be a clear indicator that Healing Spring needs some love and WHaO could be toned back?

All this example would show is that “We Heal as One” performs better than Troll Unguent within the gametype it was used in due to many different reasons. Better synergy, better healing, better condition cleanse etc.

It also only addresses class balance within the ranger class and in no way is an indicator as to how those 2 skills compare to other class healing skills. In essence “WHaO” might me more powerful than Troll Unguent but both skills might be underpowered compared to other class healing skills. In this nerfing “WHaO” would damage game balance overall.

Taco Del Mar.4582:

How do you get the recipes for these ascended trailblazer pieces? I may try an exotic version of it first, though.

Would not recommend it. As mentioned:

Cyninja.2954:

Definately don’t make exotic trailblazer.

I’d recommend going with Dire and Rabid for you first condi roamer.

and mentioned by Fay:

Fay.2357:

Whatever you do, don’t make the exotic version of trailblazer’s. It’ll be just about as expensive as the ascended version…but soulbound and with worse stats. If you must actually craft the gear (protip: don’t craft asc armor, get it from fractals/raids/WvW), make the ascended version.

If you absolutely want to try exotic trailblazer gear and are willing to play the HoT story to get it, the mission Bitter Harvest (mission 15 of 16 of the HoT story) offers a one time completion award of viper or traiblazer gear (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Box_of_Trailblazer%27s_Gear). With enough characters you could get some weapons and/or armor.

Otherwise, honestly just stick to Dire/Rabid on stuff you have to craft.

Westenev.5289:

Cyninja.2954:

So your argument is that race should matter, except in any situation where it would actually be of any use?

Interesting.

Or, and hear me out here, we could just keep the system as is and not waste a huge amount of developer ressources on this issue.

Shrugs Is it so useless though, if it leads to a better story?

“Guild Wars 2 defines the future of online roleplaying games with action-oriented combat, customized personal storylines, epic dynamic events, world-class PvP, and no subscription fees!”
~ Guildwars 2 opening page.

Having a cookie cutter commander is hardly “customised”.

Getting a better story has nothing to do with how skills are dealt with. It’s a straw man to pretend like the quality of story telling would improve with a revision of racial skills.

One can happen without the other and having more useful racial skills can just as well disrupt the balance in story telling. Say if people started exploiting some sylvari skill which makes them superior in a scenario where any asura should be superior.

If more immersion is needed, custom story related skills are already available and are getting used more an more.

Any idea which artificially creates more zombie player accounts in todays day and age of MMO video gaming is terrible.

This idea specifically has come up in the past and here are some of the major reasons why it does not work well:

1.) performance. This works well in 2d games like ragnarok online or some of the older MMOs with their 2-3k players per server. Does not work so well with megaservers

2.) players actually lose information on products they want to buy/sell. This is one of the biggest “no no”s of this idea. There is enough flipping on the TP as is, no reason to make life even harder on players who don’t want to research every item they trade over google

3.) visual clutter. To some running through a vast forest of afk npc player characters make a city seem more lively. To many others this display is simply freakish and unpleasent. It’s already bad enough to run past those lifeless bots on some maps, absolutely no reason to invite even more of this behavior into the game

4.) these merchant professions eventually turn into “must have” characters which creates even more “work” for casual players.

5.) scaming and the work that would go into preventing scaming and all the resulting developer/csr-player interaction

Some of these points on their own would already warrent to not even consider this idea.

Finally, there won’t be any new classes. The elite specialisation system has made this approach unnecessary.

Ashantara.8731:

Dawdler.8521:

GW2 have competetive PvP and WvW, I have no doubt that this would make meta skills for racials. Race isnt supposed to matter. We dont need that.

In PvE theres nothing stopping you from selecting a racial skill anyway.

1. This could be deactivated in PvP? (PvP is imbalanced anyway as it is, what with the random way teams are being scrambled together.)
2. In PvE end game, no, you can’t pick racial skills, because underpowered.
3. “We”? Speak for yourself, as I clearly disagree.

None of you has made any argument that makes it more equitable to not have race matter (at least in the story!). On the contrary, it’s like you are defending having less variety, “because”.

So your argument is that race should matter, except in any situation where it would actually be of any use?

Interesting.

Or, and hear me out here, we could just keep the system as is and not waste a huge amount of developer ressources on this issue.

The MMO you were looking for is called Scarlet Blade. Sorry to say, it went bottoms up last year.

Roxanne.6140:

Oh is that why it is still so hard to find a group to raid, why I am still seeing comments like “if you haven’t done Vale guardian I’m out”, “there isn’t enough dps” when gors didn’t even have the chance to worldeater, why lfgs can last a few hours in the lfg without anyone ever finding a group?

LFGs last for hours because most raidleaders put up their own lfm and have people join on their raid and then decide who they keep.

Why would I as raid lead (as example not that I always run lead) bother looking through the lfgs when I can put in my own lfm with what I need and have people come to me? If you are looking as a solo person for a raid and expect people to handpick your lfg and invite you, you must either play a very desired role which right at this moment is in short supply(chronotank or druid heal/kiter) or a very inflated ego. One of those 2 will not get you invited.

Just to be clear, if you are dps number 5,673,921 with your l33t 300 LI hoping to get picked up out of the lfg? Keep waiting, I just had 3 other dps with 301 LI message me about a spot.

On topic, raids are fine. Let’s hope the new elite specialisations actually are sidegrades because even a slight amount of powercreep could destabilize the current ecosystem of easy and medium fights with nicht challenge mode versions.

WalkingMyles.8947:

Cyninja.2954:

snip

Thanks, yeah Ive seen those, but my reasoning behind focus would be that it spawns clones asap thus giving me shattering fodder. that procs alacrity and swiftness.

Well yes but torch is mostly a condition damage weapon (or stealth utility) and most pve meta still revolves around direct damage for mesmer (due to the high investment skill, trait and utility wise on condition builds poorly interacting with our support skills).

As far as alacrity, if you keep up a semi healthy rotation you will have permanent alacrity yourself and provide 50-100% uptime to your allies depending on how well stacking and rotation is done. Also keeping 2-3 shield phantasms up instead of shattering goes a long way (which makes the trait chronophantasma so powerful).

Quickness becomes a matter of rotation and boon copy (boon duration gear, you want ideally leadership runes) with special note to Tides of Times and Signet of Inspiration for upkeep.

This is all for a support mesmer though (which is the most common mesmer run for fractals and raids).

Open world – doesn’t matter. Run whatever you like.

For fractals and especially raids, read up on the quantify build and check the rotation (http://qtfy.eu/build/mesmer). If you read through the first page of the mesmer official forum you’ll currently come along a multitude of threads which deal with exactly the same topic you opened.

Torch gets outclassed by sword and focus offhand in pve. Focus for the target movement of temporal curtain and reflects when traited, Sword for the extra block and superior phantasm (both cd and damage wise compared to torch). Shield is our best offhand though by far.

The ascended trailblazer gear is called Pahua:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pahua%27s_Trailblazer%27s_Inscription
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pahua%27s_Trailblazer%27s_Insignia

it’s also quite expensive due to the current prices of Maguuma Lilies (both the exotic and ascended versions. Definately don’t make exotic trailblazer).

I’d recommend going with Dire and Rabid for you first condi roamer. Exotic should also be fine until you are certain you enjoy the build and it works well.

Get ascended trinkets via the new maps and pick trailblazer on those.

As far builds go, as mesmer you aren’t as set in stone as some other classes. Your weapons of choice will be scepter, sword, pistol, torch and shield (depending on if you pick chrono). Since you want PU Chaos is a given trait line, Dueling works quite well with condi and pistol.

Blind forging a build and being very rusty (my last serious wvw experience on mesmer is about 2 years past pre HoT) I would assume you might end up with a build along these lines:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAra8fncfCVohtpBOqBcrhlcjqMAStWr+Vn1b1sCetHA-TRBNABPo+z/KBZX5no7PAg+DSBsouK-e

The utilities you use will vary widely on what exactly you are fighting and you should expect to rotate those as needed. I left out Sigils (and went with perplexity for runes) because I’m out of the loop what people run today in roaming wvw.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ironically, the time most likely for a DS map to fail is when DS is the daily.

This.

Doesn’t take a genious to figure out that this daily is bogus. The amount of people who would rather just complete the daily versus finish the map will hurt every meta on such a day.

Best thing arenanet can do is either remove the daily or tie it to completing the map.

That being said, why would anyone do DS daily when there is easier and faster dailies left and right? 0_0

mooseface.3025:

Hi all;

I enjoyed GW2 and purchased HoT. I’m not having fun with HoT. The fun I had exploring in GW2 does not exist in HoT. The multiple layers of elevation render the map useless. Venturing alone to explore is impossible as everything kicks your @ss in seconds.
The only option I have is to upgrade my weapons and armour and here lies the problem.
Now my game consist mainly of farming resources and crafting. With the scarcity of farming key crafting materials needed, combined with the ludicrous quantity of the same key farming material required and the quota imposed on us for how many key ascended items we can create in a day makes for hours and hours and hours of gameplay lost. After three weeks of gathering and using my cheapest option (balancing forging vs crafting) it still took me 2 hours to craft one ascended item.
THIS IS BS

So fellow players, is this what I am to expect with this game? I would appreciate your help and honesty because Im not gonna get honesty from the programmers of this game.

ty all

There is so much wrong here, where to start…

1.) if it takes you 2 hours to craft an item you already have materials for, you are doing it wrong. Also ascended crafting was and still is one of the most expensive ways to get ascended gear. Which leads us to:

2.) if you think that upgrading to ascended will make HoT easier on you, it very likely will not. HoT can perfectly fine be played on exotic items and even rare or masterwork on some classes if your build is good. Don’t worry though, many before you have had the same thought: I died thus I must be lacking the gear. They too were mostly wrong.

3.) As mentioned in 2, go for exotic gear. Once you’ve completed the HoT storyline for the first time, finish the Caladbolg quest (which starts after you finish the HoT questline) for some very cheap ascended weapons. Then use the Living World Season 3 maps for some very easy farmable ascended trinkets (amulett, rings, asccessoires and backpiece. different maps offer different items). Keep armor exotikittenil you are 110% sure you know what stat combo you are getting and playing.

4.) check the lfg frequently for events happening in the HoT map you are in. Might as well join a full map and run with other people if you can’t traverse the map alone in the beginning.

Final comment: HoT is not the braindead “I can run whatever I want and have 0 idea of how my class works” open world content you are used to from vanilla GW2. Having semi fast reflexes, not taking every attack enemys through at you and using sustain utility skills if needed is the name of the game for the HoT maps.

Most of this is pure learn to play and getting that full ascended gear will do you less good then spending maybe 30 minutes reading up on some guides or how your class works.

If LWS3 trinkets are already considered grindy I really don’t want to hear peoples opinion on armor and weapons.

No, taking 2-3 days per item is not to grindy. Less if you go for winterberries and have enough characters. Especially if those items are best in slot and some of them on par with legendarys (the stat switching on bloodstone trinkets).

Deihnyx.6318:

I simply stated that there is no such thing as afking without the use of a bot (which is illegal to use), because the game requires you to refresh your participation. For people who don’t care about participation, they automatically get kicked pretty fast anyway if they’re truly afk.

The timer is lenient enough to allow for multiple minutes inbetween inputs. Now this might be a minor anoyance for other players in pve (and even here it has become a more and more visible problem) but in a competative enviroment as wvw it can negatively impact a big part of the active playerbase. So no, the game does not amply protect from people abusing the system. It’s become so bad that even in pve we get constant “is afk farming allowed” threads on a regular basis.

Deihnyx.6318:

Now, whether you choose to follow a zerg, do roaming on the other side of the map or mindlessly flip camps nearby, all these scenarios are contributing to the server. Whether some people think it is not ok to wait near a camp to flip it has more to do with elitism than anything in my opinion.

No one is talking about people waiting at camps or doing their own thing. The issue is with players waiting out their contribution ticks and staying semi-afk for multiple minutes in the starting area. With other new pip farming methods finding more and more ways into the game.

If you have to take a break of more than 5 minutes, leave the area and let others cycle through. If you are on a tier 1 server, be prepared to be active as much as you can and finish inventory and merchant management at the end.

Astralporing.1957:

tigirius.9014:

Curious if the team has given serious thought to porting to the next gen consoles?

Yes. Several times. The answer was always that they’re not interested in doing that.
(it’s not the first time someone asked that question)

From what we’ve been told, that would not only require rewriting the game engine from scratch (something they do not have manpower for), but also negatively impact the ability to introduce content patches, or, worse, to bugfix on the fly.

This.

It won’t happen, period.

tigirius.9014:

There’s been a crazy insane amount of inflation in this game for a long time now directly due to the outside influx of currency. It’s been written about on several gaming websites.

Economically currency is being magically created from outside of the economy by the use of the gems into gold system. That’s not even the worst price I’ve seen honestly.

A.) the Chack egg sack has been this expensive for a very long time. To argue this is due to inflation will be difficult to prove.

B.) the gold-gem and gem-gold conversion does not create or increase gold ingame. On the contrary. While it does redistribute gold which can lead to more active gold use, the total amount of gold certainly does not increase. The quite stable price of key items like ectos and legendarys also disprove the theory of inlfation happening.

Please link to some of those articles you mentioned, it would indeed be interesting to read what arguments the authors make and what data they use to justify their claims.

Deihnyx.6318:

Jayne.9251:

You all were booted to character select. It was glorious. And it opened up the queue.

And you are assuming I’m an afker because… ?

He’s assuming because you said so yourself:

Deihnyx.6318:

However players half-afking are just using the system to get the most of it, but aren’t doing anything worth “banning”. They still refresh their participation every so often.
Working as intended, right?

That being said, yes once people start afking at camp, due to the very nature of how balancing and numbers in wvw work, they should be kicked off the map. You and your other 9 buddies might have a great time optimising rewards, the other people of your faction who are getting steamrolled due to potential number disadvantages are most certainly not.

Deihnyx.6318:

So you report everyone you see not moving at camp?
Interesting. Knowing that pretty much everyone pip/reward down after they’re done with their run, including commanders, and knowing you can just be afk bio or discussing about a strategy, reporting someone not moving would be the equivalent of… oh yeah, assuming again. Exactly what you’re doing here.

Oh I’m sure the occasional strategy disscussion or bio break person might get affected. Let’s be honest here though, when 90% of the affected players are afkers, the means justify the end.

henchmen.1856:

Zalavaaris.5329:

It requires no skill therefore it’s not worthy of the legendary status or perks. It’s just a skin with a time sink.

and copying a rotation someone else made and repeating it over and over in a predictable environment requires tons of skill /s

Going by the amount of complaints and the average skill of the playerbase, yes it does seem to take a huge amount of skill.

Compare that to literally people afking the s*** out of wvw and still progressing title track wise etc. (and let’s not get into some of the other abuses that have started to show up)

The triumphant armor is a start in the right direction (and hopefully wvw will get more love in the future) and should be viewed as nice bonus for people who enjoy wvw. If you enjoy wvw you’ll get it eventually. If you are a casual pleb who decides he needs his rewards instantly and is anoyed he can’t scum his way to nice stuff like in previous sPvp seasons, tough cookie.

The actual value is even above 10k gold, it’s only that the maximum is 10k gold on the TP.

As others have mentioned, it’s a vanity item and has a near 0 drop rate.

Nafets.1238:

Legendary armor and backpack can take damage and get broken.

Why? This “mechanic” was meant for new players to learn when they are doing something wrong. Why does it apply to legendary items?

Actually this mechanic was designed as:

- a gold sink (which was changed a long while back)
- a way to prevent people suicide running content (something which was fixed and designed around soon after the game launched and is less of an issue today)

It never had to do with new players supposed to learn anything, though I will agree the system needs a redesign or be removed gamewide. This change should not be legendary armor exclusive though.

First off, congratulations on joining the “toxic raid community” and good luck on getting those last few bosses down. Dare I also congratulate you to a new amount of acquaitances/friends you have thus gained from joining a guild and playing with others.

Yes, the forums do paint a horrible picture of how supposedly the raiding community is. Then again, back in vanilla GW2 one could have said the same thing about dungeons and the terrible berserker meta. Though everyone who actually did dungeons (and did not only forumwarrior about them) knew that it was not even half as kittenome made it out to be (unless you decided to join those – “zerker, exp, 80, speedclear, don’t suck” – groups in your full knights gear letting people know you were wearing knights).

The big difference being, you will soon be one of those who can sport a nice envoy armor (and eventually legendary) while others will remain complaining and demanding on the forums not getting 1 step closer to achieving their goal. I still remember completing the Envoy Armor I collection, it was awesome (was missing Xera as last step and boy did it take multiple tries to get her down back then). Also had 1 person in my casual raid group finish his step 1 yesterday and we all congratulated him on doing so, he was very happy too.

tl;dr: Congratulations, it’s nice to see people not listen to the forum doom and gloom and attempt to join raids with some common sense and realistic expectations.

The problem with healing in general in raids is, it’s not useful on every boss (since some of those mechanics one can not fail and live to tell) and other classes do it better mostly (healing druid, minstrel mesmer and healing tempest). Thus you are fullfillng a role that is not always needed and revenant is inherently bad at multitasking (unlike say a healing druid who can opt to wear condi gear when less healing is fine).

You are essentially competing for that 1 pure healer spot (2 on matthias if people want to play it safe) with other classes that provide similar required amount of healing while they provide other benefits as well. The best chance to keep playing the build in raids would be to join a casual fixed raid and have the other 9 people adapt to your build.

WvW zerg might be interesting if you adapt your build to incorporate resistance uptime.

Dungeons would likely work too.

Fractals can work if the group is aware of what role you are fullfilling. Again though, a dedicated healer is not actually needed here.

For your first set of ascended gear:

- use the new Living World Season 3 maps to get trinkets and backitems. Should take you about 3-4 days tops (maybe a week if you only use 1 character) to get all 6 items.

- for a your first ascended weapon use the HoT collections from class specialisations and the Caladbolg questline since those are quite cheap

- for armor, well honestly you don’t want ascended armor until you are a tad more exprienced in the game and it makes the least amount of difference. Fractals are probably the cheapest but most rng way of getting this. The bioluminescent collection offers a cheap way (but takes 2-3 weeks unless you hardcore grind it in 3-4 days) for 1 piece of gear (take the chest piece since those are the most expensive armor parts)

As far as grind, ascended gear does take a while to aquire (armor mostly) but has remained best in slot for over 4 years now. Compare that to most other MMOs on the market which require you to regrind/collect gear every 3 months and GW2 easily comes out as least grindy MMO.