Guild Wars 2

Just for shiggles T raw, I will.

-Main damage stat requiring no additional damage stats with gear setups that include two hard defensive stats.

-Damage that can’t be mitigated by toughness/armor but only through heals/utilities.

-Easy application process that usually lies in either spamming 1 or facerolling the keyboard.

-Stat point acquisition via builds which favors defensive, passive play to maximize damage throughputs.

-Lack of necessary synergy with utility skills to properly deal adequate damage to kill targets opening up even more defensive options.

-Torment’s implementation was poor to the point where many skills designed to clear DoT conditions were not updated to include torment as part of its cleansing options, making this damage to some classes completely non-mitigate-able aside from high health pool builds (i.e. either tank builds designed to survive damage or other condition builds).

-Damage remains being dealt regardless of player positioning/dodging frames as long as they took the initial condition application.

Yea, I think condition builds are easier to play and have a lot less counterplay to them.

Fluffball.8307:

DeceiverX.8361:

First off, you can’t spend any points in beastmastery or plan on being a beastmaster.

The ranger in the team that placed second in the EU ToL had 30 (edit, er sorry, 6) points in beastmastery.

OP mentioned WvW. If you run a pet build in WvW (assuming you’re not doing 1v1’s, in which case you’re not really doing WvW) you’re not going to fare nearly as someone building deliberately to avoid as much pet use as possible regardless of how good you are with a pet.

The BM line is fine for sPvP and 1v1/small-scale fighting if you’re building bunker or tank-oriented, however simply put, the line is inadequate for WvW play due to roaming opposition being way too slippery and bursty for the pet to matter at all, and the zergs way too AOE-intensive for the pet to stay alive or even have any impact at all in a given group fight. Even then, ranger has some high potential builds in sPvP which are now being experimented with which also do not use the BM line.

In PvP, condi shortbow spirit bunker is considered to be one of the best builds for holding points.

PvE? Open-world, they’re the most overpowered class, just because your pet can take so much aggro and so much damage and you don’t have to worry about really getting hit for much damage at all.

Fractals? Play another character. Seriously, this class is absolutely horrible in this mode and even as a ranger player I switch to other classes because they’re too much of a liability without the capability to stow the pet and overall less damage dealt.

WvW, eh. Frankly, your best WvW build is either going full tank GS healing for frontline support, or a pure berserker build for the backline damage if you can avoid it, seeing as the pet in both cases is pretty much useless. Even then, the thief is usually in a better place for back lines, and is DEFINITELY the better roamer.

Melee ranger can offer a lot of durability and support in the form of AOE soaking via pets, fairly-low cooldown water fields, and a lot of evasion. In terms of larger-scale fights, they’re much better front-liners than thieves and mesmers, however in small groups and roaming parties, the ranger is out-classed by the two above due to ranger’s overall low burst potential, still fairly squishy setups (again outside of regen tank builds), and limited access to fight-changing elements like the capacity to reset a fight via stealth, significant lockdown, etc.

A ranger can be less squishy than a thief. It depends on how you build either one, and what weapons you’re using. Ranger has inherently more base HP, however their limited access to stealth, heals, mitigation outside of GS, and gap openers/teleports makes them easier targets to kill when focused. In terms of raw numbers, yes, they are more durable, and are more difficult to one-shot kill; however, they lack a lot of reset potential and targeting avoidance that thieves have, allowing thieves to usually perform better when in good hands regardless of how squishy they build (Not to be confused with D/P permablind/permastealth because those builds are totally skill-less cheese and I wish for smoke fields and stealth-stacking to be nerfed hard, and this is coming from a power thief main with 2k+ hours invested in dagger mainhand).

Yes and no. Traits like RtW have made the longbow a functioning weapon, which many people are happier for (although the trait shouldn’t have been made and longbow skills should have just had their projectile speeds increased). That said, the ranger still has some serious problems when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of performance in PvE/WvW issues due to their pet dependencies forcing so much damage loss.

While I praise good melee ranger roamers because mastering the sword is quite the feat, often times I find that simply good players on thieves have a much better upper-bound for both damage throughput and overall success.

As mentioned, yes to a degree, mostly due to the fact longbow can now at least work as a weapon to an extent. These new traits really haven’t changed much else, though.

I’ve noticed this is an issue with birds more than anything due to their idle animations. Casting F2 when the bird is in its idle animation does not cause the pet to cancel its idle animation, thus causing the player to wait for the entire idle animation to finish before it will engage.

In combat, however, when the bird is not performing any idle animations, responsiveness overall has been improved.

First off, you can’t spend any points in beastmastery or plan on being a beastmaster.

Keep your pet on passive and use F1/F3 to engage/disengage as necessary.

Don’t think you can just #yolo a group of players because you’re playing greatsword.

Keep your distance from the blob and do not just stand there with the back line. Circle around the fight as necessary to both interfere with their back line and to prevent just getting AOE’d to death.

Healing Spring is a water field. Understand water field interactions and use this wherever it’s necessary. Greatsword #3 -> HS -> Lightning Reflexes can augment your frontline’s survivability by a lot. That said, be sure your frontline isn’t pugs and call your water fields to be sure other fields are not placed down on top of it.

For longbow:
Only use Rapid Fire on enemies which will be going into stealth (mesmers/thieves) just before they will start going into stealth. RF does less damage than your #1 but it does have stealth/target tracking.

Use #3 to reposition (see circling above), not as a means of extra “burst” damage from Remorseless if you use it.

Point blank shot is incredibly useful as an engage skill on their frontline to interrupt targets without stability and push them out of the front line; conversely, using stealth towards the end of a complete flank, you can push their backline targets into your heavies.

RoA is pointless unless you’re roaming.

While unfortunate, RtW is almost necessary for longbow to work as a weapon, forcing you into 30 power.

CC Danicia.1394:

Nynuwe.5893:

PS: I am deeply concerned no moderator has yet to appear here to intervene. That no developer has peaked in to aknowledge some of the concerns brought up here.

The thread was doing remarkedly well for a long time, which is why it had little interaction from the Moderation Team. There has been plenty of debating, only a tiny bit of off-topic, which quickly got back on track.

We saw the first reports about this thread this afternoon. Thousands up thousands of posts are made every single day and although we wish we could review them all, it’s just not physically possible, so any assistance we can get from players using the report function is greatly appreciated.

All this said, we have cleaned up the thread. Please keep it on-topic and clean. Thank you!

If the feedback was actually ever taken into consideration, we wouldn’t be here right now.

I’m not trying to de-value your position (I worked for another game company doing Community/Forum interaction work, ironically the “CC” title is the same there, so I am well-aware that this isn’t a fault of yours), however the bottom line is that there’s such an immense detachment from reality between the players and developers that simply stating that a lot of posts are made justifies a lack of attention is simply covering for what is a broken company dynamic. I’ve been there, said the same things you have, and totally understand why you’re saying these things, but the community shouldn’t simply be appreciable for a response stating that the concern has been noted.

I was revered for my work (and I started as a player) because of what I managed to achieve and do for the people who asked for my assistance. Until those in charge of major decisions like these make educated ones and actually start acting and making good decisions which are demonstrated through good game update implementation, no amount of sugar-coating PR is going to stop cynics like me from actively eschewing people away from GW2.

Rather than telling your developers and decision-makers about some of the discussed topics, pitch them the prospect of trying to comprehend the player perspective and come up with creative solutions to resolve these issues while still bringing money to your studio.

Good solutions and implementations make money. Until that actually starts happening, you’re on a sinking ship. Better to replace some planks before they break while docked rather than trying to plug leaks while out in open water.

You could also just autoattack and deal more damage ._.

@jcbroe:

The class isn’t so much useless as it is out-performed in what it’s designed to do by other classes either building for its niches, and that its niche is rather insignificant. It’s not inherently “useless” because it can perform well-enough where it can be needed, but simply, other classes can achieve better results in most situations.

The problem with sustained raw damage, particularly in GW2, is that is simply doesn’t work. Healing is too easy to come by and there are many ways to actively prevent it to the point where pressure classes aren’t so much a threat as they are merely an annoyance. Classes which can 100-0 people in between their heals, or before they can even get them off are simply better. As someone mentioned in the ranger CDI, the “sustained damage dealer” model simply doesn’t work because the game in its entirety, even including condition builds, is about burst damage. This is particularly why so many power/precision rangers run GS – maul gives one the best chance of killing targets. I mean, poison can deal 10k damage, but are you ever actually afraid of dying from poison damage if you’re at full health? With two stacks of bleeding? Those just aren’t worth blowing a precious cleanse on, which is why condition builds work; they’re only countered by high-cooldown utilities which people may or may not run, and application is often very easy.

I actually think Rapid Fire is one of the longbow’s better skills – much more so than barrage – for it has stealth tracking and is near impossible to juke. I’m not at all against a damage increase, though, for the ranger frankly NEEDS a burst skill on its kit.

Barrage simply needs a total rework, ranging from its damage to the lack of mobility to retaliation’s potency to it being easy to dodge, and so on. Perhaps boon removal could be applied here to help fix this, as AOE boon removal on a pulse, even with low damage, could provide incredible utility where we’re at our worst currently – in zergs.

Or, we need a means of locking down targets better. It gives me a bitter taste in my mouth that frequently I find myself incapable of pursuing warriors despite having 1500 range just because we lack the chasing potential via gap closing or hard CC outside of the short-duration KB on #4.

I’d like to see the option of removable pets, though, anyways. In some instances, their mere existence as targetable objects or being incapable of taking cover behind obstacles to prevent vision just makes combat more difficult. That, and if compensated for in damage, the class’s archer role could be much more viable, and would even possibly allow for the sustained damage model to work in GvG/WvW as then the pet wouldn’t just be dead weight causing a forced lack in DPS which can be out-healed.

If you flank and stack the bleeds, you’ll be fine.

That said, I personally as an archer run double longbow. Seems crazy I know, but on-swap fury keeps the damage as high as it’ll get and keeps crits consistent.

You HAVE to play smart with stealth and use LR though and time #4 if you plan on keeping your ranged advantage/plan on staying alive.

jcbroe.4329:

It isn’t the gap closing. That wasn’t the point I was trying to make. It’s that you don’t have to dedicate your position for melee range. Sure, you might be able to gap close into the back lines of a group/zerg and do more damage to the squishies there, but the only class that can truthfully reliably escape if the group collapses on them is a thief. Maybe a mesmer if they take far reaching manipulations and still have their cooldowns to use, but if they gap closed in, then chances are they don’t have much escape left outside of stealth if they are using that setup, which won’t save them from a smart group of players.

Rangers don’t have to make the decision to dedicate their “safer” ranged position. They can poke safely from their own back lines, and function much more like a single target damage version of a staff ele when they are played this way.

My guild group, for instance, plays with 2 thieves. I brought up the fact that ranger could replace one of our thieves since the main goal of our thieves is being a back line harasser and rangers can perform the same role (our thieves run with our backline groups, so its us mesmers, thieves, and some of our eles in the same group) but bring an AoE immobilize that right now our group doesn’t really have and could be really useful based on the way my guild likes to play.

After assessing the build, my leader came to the conclusion that the ranger would be a good choice for the role, but then went on to say “but you’d have to find a ranger that doesn’t suck to play it, or a mesmer to replace you.”

It’s an anecdote, but it goes to show that when you start teaching people about the ranger class, they actually realize that we can do more useful things than they realize, and that a lot of the time, the way a percentage of the population plays rangers has given people a bad perception of what the class is actually capable of.

That’s under the assumption your back line is safe. Good zergs don’t let this happen. Our commanders are now actually telling back-liners to get in the blob now and push forward to get past the heavies (gaining stability from our own) which try and do the same thing so that they don’t get caught up in it. A lot of fights end up backwards of what they start from; back lines end up aggressing onto other back lines while the heavies end up duking it out trying to scramble to get there in time for the sweep. Simply, the faster you can traverse this gap and take out their back line before they have the chance to traverse, the better the entire fight goes. Rangers simply lack the mobility and overall capacity to dispatch players fast enough to succeed in this environment. The only thing they can really offer is longbow #4 to maybe perhaps prevent some of the squishies without stability from traversing and knocking them back into either the heavy brawl or their own DPS players.

The issue is that a thief is a much more capable back line player, just because it can dispatch players so much faster. Rangers can deal some damage, but a lot of blobs are going to prevent you from actually taking down players without additional fire.

Mind you, this is coming from someone who has mained ranged classes for over a decade in MMO’s/RPG’s in general (always my first character/go-to class), and also has two ascended 80 rangers (yep, I made a second one for on-demand character/build switches before this new patch), and I assure you that I’m not some meta-following onlooker who inherently thinks rangers are bad because other people said so.

A good thief can actually out-pace a longbow attack towards a given target and land his full burst before the arrow even hits without RtW. With RtW, it’s about the same. That same thief can also move to anther target or retreat just as easily while also providing better aggressive support to his back line via TotC upon initiation and move around as necessary without being cornered or punished by an enemy’s aggressive front line hammertrain/static field from afar.

Simply, the pet in these kinds of situations is more inhibitory than anything. It dies, and your sustained damage and utility effects are often too low to kill good players.

This topic is mostly for bolstering the aspect/permastow option requested by so many players, but in doing so due to a mechanical problem rangers face – an inherent disadvantage in WvW even when their pets are alive.

This problem is that pets cannot deal damage to targets on surfaces which the player cannot reach from his current location. This is to some degree frustrating when killing players across gaps, but is manageable. That said, a fundamental part of WvW is sieging and defending keeps and towers.

And pets cannot assist in the siege or defense of towers, forcing the ranger to be dealing substantially less damage (and thus therefore have less of an impact in a given siege/defense) than pretty much all other classes.

So without changing the behavior of structures (as doing so would allow for exploitation of traversing structures for player objects, too), there needs to be some kind of system in place which allows for rangers to be compensated for their lack of pet damage when placed in situations which their pet – even if alive – cannot partake in.

While I understand people like their pets, and I strongly encourage ANet to make beastmaster-style builds more effective in that style of play, something needs to be done to address the inherent discrepancies rangers face in WvW, even barring the fact that pets are completely worthless in zergs as they either die or must be forced into doing nothing.

jcbroe.4329:

Loyo.8526:

My only problem with the build in places like WvW is that Longbow, even with consistent hits, does not hit for much on most targets. Maybe its my build itself thats the problem, but im only seeing 1.8-2.2k and very rarely 2.6ks

Those are autoattacks. 1500+ range autoattacks, that are hard to avoid with Read the Wind.

It honestly sounds to me, like if I have to evaluate your opinion, that it isn’t that your problem with the weapon is that damage output you mentioned, but that there isn’t a better way to damage than those numbers, and that the weapon skills don’t really hit for higher (or much higher in total) than the autoattack.

Maybe I’m projecting, so tell me if I’m wrong. I see in your sig that you have a mesmer, so I would ask you if you end up wishing that the longbow, damage wise alone, functioned more like the mesmer greatsword (one of the best weapons you can compare ranger longbow to).

Because if that is the case, I would be more than agreeable that would could use cooldown skills on the longbow that result in bigger hits than we do now. Point Blank Shot could stand to do 50% more damage imo, but that’s without bringing up any of the millions of suggestions I’ve discussed to death elsewhere since launch, and heavily since December.

Depends on the class you compare it to.

Like my thief does 3k damage autos at a way faster speed, and range is so irrelevant seeing as it can close 2400 range in literally .78 seconds. Every class in the game except for some guardians and some mesmers have incredible means of closing such gaps extremely quickly. 1500 range is nothing in the scheme of things, and the damage that the ranger can deal through his entire skill rotation – including the auto, is pitiful.

Unfortunately, 30%+ increases in damage will never happen until ANet allows for players to choose to play without the pet. Currently, the ranger actually has fair DPS values with the pet included, so they can’t justify damage buffs from the ranger alone, especially with skills like RoA causing some havoc.

Nerelith.7360:

You say :“1.) One does not select or unlock the given trait.”

then say “Obviously, the first option is considered to be out of the question implicitly.”

I do not accept that it is implicite at all. There are many people that will Look over some traits, decide either that they do not fit their build concept. Are too onerous for them to aquire, too expensive to buy at this time, and will forgo many traits.

Not every player is a completionist that needs EVERY trait as soon as they are able to use those traits.

I Played EverQuest. And In that game you needed to hunt down the spell vendors for your spells so at say level 19, you had to go into a zone that may or may Not have mobs 5 to 7 levels higher than you were. Also you might or might Not have all the gold necessary to buy all your spells. SOME spells required you to kill certain mobs over and over. And some required you to hunt down crafing compnents to research the spell, that was on RNG… the Higer your research trait the better chance of crafting the spell…but sometimes you had continuous failures… trust me.. gw2 has made it easy in comparison.

So the idea that traits MIGHT require that things be done that a typical character of that level may not be able to do, is not new. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad decision, just an unpopular one.

And yet again what you’ve stated has no relevance.

Not selecting a given trait is considered out of the question because it is implied that the given trait has synergy with one’s build and is considered necessary for character functionality.

Whether or not you can skip certain traits is again irrelevant to the topic.

And the EverQuest example… more irrelevance. Just because it’s “harder” in one game to unlock skills does not mean that GW2 should follow the same model with traits.

Actually, I’d argue it’s extremely easy to unlock the traits. None of the content in this game aside from some of the major bosses is particularly challenging unless you make it so.

The problem is that again, we’re dealing with literal impossibilities of acquisition upon reaching the level requirements and extensive hassles to get such traits without spending what is honestly an absurd amount of money. Frankly, this is bad design.

And EQ found success in that model likely because the competition was so low when the game was successful. I’d challenge a game to implement a grind system to unlock what should be necessary content and succeed in the Western market.

Grinds are not successful in the Western game market these days. That’s why GW2 is the way it is, and why the US/EU almost never sees most Korean games. Extending the period until acquisition is not a successful model to follow in this market demographic, especially when the game is and has been marketed as being fair throughout and allows for a more casual audience.

This change does not abide to that philosophy, and therefore must be changed on some level to do so.

I’m surprised people would even bother trying with this trait.

I mean basic math dictates it’s useless.

For every 100 damage you deal, assuming it’s a critical strike (okay, so signet + Thrill with berserker gear is what like 80% crit chance?), you heal 5.

50 on 1k
500 on 10k.

So every 4-5 seconds if you’re critting as a stab thief, you’re healing for 500.
Overall, maybe you’ll heal another 400 with the autoattack chain, too, assuming you’re critting on everything and dealing a bit of damage and are not stopping to dodge/re-position and your target doesn’t die.

Meanwhile that full tank hammer warrior is hitting you for 2-4k per swing, and you’re not healing since you’re on the ground.

The trait was useless from design, even before considering its conflict with HK/Exec.

Nerelith.7360:

Ashen.2907:

Nerelith.7360:

I respectfully disagree, you state opinions… I used math.
and…

Math trumps opinion any day. And twice on Sunday.

A list of the options for gaining any given trait:

• do the assigned task.

• buy it.

The mathematical sum of those options:

1 + 1 = 2.

You admit that your calculation is based on assumptions (opinion based at that). Mine is not. By your logic my math trumps yours.

This is Like saying " the chances of tossing a coin heads 5 times is 2… because at each point there are only heads…and tails…."

Ok, if you say so.

Except your math, despite being correct by concept, is irrelevant.
It’s like if you were asked what 5 + 5 is, and then proved that 50 – 5 = 45. Your math actually has nothing to do with what’s being discussed.

What you did was count combinations. What you didn’t do was properly address how many means of acquisition there are.

In reality, this value is 3. That said, it is implied that it should be 2, as the options for the decision are as follows and apply to each and every trait.
1.) One does not select or unlock the given trait.
2.) One explores for the trait.
3.) One purchases the traits.

Obviously, the first option is considered to be out of the question implicitly.

So per trait, one has two options (hence 1 + 1 = 2), and as mentioned above, some are quite literally impossible to do even remotely near acquisition in regards to the exploration option.

Therefore, one is indeed forced into merely one option in order to unlock the trait. Quite frankly, this is poor design. Even then, forced PvE/WvW exploration is also poor design. The game is marketed as allowing players to play in any way they wish. This does not abide to that mentality. This is even more prevalent if ANet has any further intentions of trying to legitimize sPvP and WvW.

Not to mention the slowed down progression also hurts new players and makes slower what is already considered to be a slow early game progression in comparison to many other games. I personally know of more than thirty people who have picked up this game before this patch and have quit within the first day or two because the early levels and progression were already too slow for them and too restrictive in what they had to do to level up.

Meanwhile, one still needs to purchase traits from the same NPC despite the intention of on-the-go swapping to be able to be done anywhere. Most people who reset their builds frequently either do it near the spawn in WvW or before they go dungeoning, and usually stick to that particular build. Additionally, new players which “screw up” their builds will still not have any use for the trait reset feature since they will be lacking getting any new traits to begin with.

This implementation failed on all fronts to achieve what it intended to, and simply stating that your opinion is correct “because math” is clearly demonstrative not only of your lack of comprehension of the subject, but also in that your math and logical reasoning are incoherent.

Kibazuka.1390:

Asmodeus.5782:

Monsters should hit weaker and more often, that’s one simple and useful adjustment. You won’t be able to dodge it all – tough/vit/healing suddenly become needed in the team.

And in what would that result? Forcing players to use these builds because otherwise they cant complete the content, thus lowering build diversity more than anything else and secondly creating more skilless play since beating an encounter because you were able to tank the hits thanks to defense stats has nothing to do with skill whatsoever.

OP, you, as well as many, many others, fail to see the real problem here. Its has nothing to do with berserker being the best gear(and stop referring to berserker as build, its simply the stats you are using. You can play any build you want and will still be able to do it best with berserker gear.). Berserker was the best gear long before there was this meta and lfg tool and this hate and pro vs anti discussions. Long, long before that.. since the start of the game to be precisely. So what has changed since then to cause this? Nothing has changed! ..THAT is the problem.
We have the same few dungeons since launch with only one single path and 12 mini dungeons added since. People played them, people learned them, people mastered them, people start them for maximum profit which happens to beat the dungeon in the shortest amount of time. For that, people maximize their damage output, which in this game happens to be berserker gear -could be any other, would make no difference- because this allows for the fastet runs. The people who mastered the paths share their tactics and more and more master it resulting in more and more wanting to only do it as fast as possible. This is same for every other game and mmo btw, people master it and it will stop being difficult and then people want to maximize their time and thus use was does the most damage – if they do not its only because the game FORCES them to do otherwise and they maximize the damage they can do while being put under the restrictions the game gave them – and that is what i would call bad game design.
There are way to few dungeons and the amount of new content getting added in that regard is beyond laughable- There are simply too many people who know how it all goes to put it simply. And when time the only thing is that matters damage is the only thing that matters -because “damage” is the only thing that will drain your enemies health bars- meaning berserker gear is the only thing that matters.
It is as simple as this.

This is an excellent post, providing exactly the correct reasoning as to why the holy trinity should never be implemented.

@OP: GW2 is not a stats game. At least not like other MMO’s. It’s heavily a skill-oriented one. Therefore, direct support and dedicated roles aren’t as effective, or simply put, they’re simply less necessary.

That’s not to say I don’t agree with you to some extent – I think dungeons should be designed better to accommodate for different group archetypes. Clearing speed should not be dependent entirely on how fast a group can simply drain health bars but perhaps allow for more diverse plays such as being able to skip certain areas by traversing difficult environments which would be impossible to complete without some dedicated heals or an inherently tankier party. This then offsets the time spent killing minibosses and trash by cutting down on run speed towards the boss.

I want to highlight a particular segment as well:

Kibazuka.1390:

The people who mastered the paths share their tactics and more and more master it resulting in more and more wanting to only do it as fast as possible.

And this is precisely where the support/tank/DPS trinity comes from. It ends up being the best solution in many games because rather than have everyone be mediocre at everything and struggle by the content, having dedicated roles makes the experience easier, faster, and much more streamlined. This is especially apparent with how most games calculate damage, as usually this process is nonlinear past certain defense thresholds.

From a min-max perspective, 6% is huge in itself. Anything more would be insane.

Not to mention the infusion stats one can also gain.

WaveyDL.6945:

How is it “better” though?
Makes new players progress slower and the game less appealing. I looked forward to leveling and getting a bit better. now I need to level 5 times to do it?

I don’t understand why it’s a “better” system?

Absolutely. And for some classes, waiting until 80 for GM traits is just too painful. This is especially apparent for stab thieves, as one can no longer take HK at 60 and actually kill things properly for the latter 20 levels.

I also find this new system way more confusing and worse for new players. When do I get my next trait point? What do I spend it on? How do I figure out this new UI? One per level WAS easy. Five levels for an upgrade WAS easy. Skill books every 20 levels WAS easy.

That’s also not to mention how the new trait system is horrible for new players just because of the sheer cost to get traits and the SLOWNESS of progression, now. Levels feel totally insignificant and not even worth the grind. The grind feels more apparent and you don’t even notice improvements until you hit this absurd thresholds. Traits being part of one’s build should be achieved through leveling up, not as a gold sink targeted towards high levels.

And this is horrible in conjunction with the dungeon gold restrictions. One needs to now pay 43g for traits when their daily gold gets reduced to around 1/8 of what it used to be. It’s like all of the different devs were trying to solve all of the problems at once but refused to communicate and created an absolute clusterkitty.

The entire thing is abysmal.

Ferocity is a failure. People are hating on me for having said it two months ago when they released the early details, and are still yelling at me because “it’s only a day after patch.” Systematically, however, it’s a failure, and will remain a failure. It did nothing to address build diversity, and if anything, reduced it. It also ruthlessly killed the effectiveness of several other stat combinations and various builds.

The wardrobe system is alright. I feel for the people who had town clothes before, though. That was discussed extensively and it looks like it wasn’t properly executed. I like the treatment of the wardrobe and account bound items, now, but the UI is awful. Opening the character menu should bring up your gear as it used to and the little dye icon for dying. Dying shouldn’t be part of the wardrobe, just because it adds so much extra clicking. The wardrobe should be a whole separate panel in he character menu, and should always require clicking out of the character panel to get into, not the other way around.

And the megaservers? Great if you all speak the same language. Horrible for EU if you don’t, though. Quite a shame to speak French and be plopped in a German map.

The intentions were amazing with this patch, but the implementation could have almost not been worse.

Nabrok.9023:

I haven’t read through 5 pages of this stuff, but anything declaring something we haven’t even seen in action yet as “failed” gets an automatic dismissal.

And now that it’s launched…

… Is it fair to dismiss my arguments now?

I thought so. Preemptive feedback is critical. Running the numbers is critical. The state of WvW is now trash.

SkylightMoon.1980:

Bigsexy.8302:

At level 80, it will take 15 points of ferocity to gain 1% bonus critical damage, which means that there will about a 10% decrease in overall damage for a full “berserker” build.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/learn-about-critical-damage-changes/

Well… Nope.
Now basically Warrior’s Discipline is 20% from 30%. Zerk weapon is 8.5% from 10%.
Ring from 8% to 4.5% etc.
It looks to me the nerf is higher than the announced.
Anet dev to come here and explain it.

Ye the nerf is higher than they said, I have no idea how the devs could have gotten their calculations wrong? Technically we could have figured out this nerf before the patch though because we already know the stats on secondary stats. For some reason no one really did the calculations which is quite odd.

Nobody got their calculations wrong.

ANet is just absolutely idiotic when it comes down to this kind of stuff and the community failed to actually listen and think about the change.

They said “OVERALL” 10% DPS loss on characters with “BERSERKER GEAR.” They didn’t say 10% less crit damage. They said 10% less damage overall.

So to compensate and in comparison with their favorite warrior builds not running precision specs with like 45% crit chance, this means actual critical damage falls around 30%, for if one only took a 10% crit damage nerf, the overall difference would be less than 10%, as the hits (55% of them) not critting would be unaffected.

I tried over and over again to try and rally people to realize this, and everyone said “wait and see, I doubt ANet is that dumb.”

Well it certainly proves my point.

I’m definitely done with GW2 until this is changed, though. I refuse to play a game that forces me to play a certain way to be competitive in PvP (condi bunker).

I’d say it’s in a good spot. If anything, D/P is a little too much, actually.

The amount of skill it takes to beat a thief as a ranger is higher than that it requires of the thief.

I’d also argue active defense is better than passive defense. What’s better, a 100% reduction in damage with lower/no cooldowns or a 33% reduction or a one-time block with a 90 second cooldown? Stealth versus more base hp? I’ll gladly take the stealth. I’ll take that active defense and get way more value out of it than someone just relying on numbers, thank you.

Thanks for the epilepsy warning at least.

Seriously, thank you.

oscuro.9720:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Build-Oscuro-s-LRB/first#post3864235
P/D burst build. More focused around sustained and constant dps, not conditions. Slightly less burst than Backstab builds.

@DecieverX: Rabid gear wouldn’t help. We have no on crit traits that proc conditions, like necro or engi. Dire would be far more valuable because you can have much more sustain in exchange for almost nothing.

Not using rabid o.o

Using Carrion (Condi/Power/Vitality) for that exact reason, as P/D already has fair attack speeds and decent coefficients on Shadow Strike. I suggest this over Dire for roaming because Dire is too slow, especially in regards to taking camps.

Hard to get a thief to be good in roaming, 1v1, 1vx, yakslapping, and flipping camps solo.

Best I could probably state is some kind of S/P or S/D building heavily into crit strikes, going either acro or SA for the defense when flipping camps. 10-15 in Trickery if you’re going berserker.

P/D might do it for you, but I’m not honestly sure. Camp flipping with that getup might be a little slow. If anything, I’d go for carrion to speed it up a little and build like this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vYAQJAqYlsMpppdNx7J8PNRw9wpItpeK+qY1UQzbC-zECBIhBkWAkkGIFqIaslWFRjVpETjiIq2jgIqOAwBwu1NAE0NA-w

Slivyr. No last name. Obviously derived from sliver.

A pain in your side that’s not easy to find or get rid of, but if left unnoticed and unattended to in your body, can be fatal.

I really want no-stealth longbow more than anything so I can actually play an archer since ANet refuses to allow pet removal on rangers.

But pistol offhand is the non-stealth offhand at the moment. The only stealth you get with pistol offhand is with dagger mainhand for the leap finisher on smoke for stealth. Otherwise, it does nothing else but damage and blind.

The biggest issue is that you can’t make things like sword offhand because then you’d have two kits for the same weapon sets, and then #3 skill would remain the same as that’s how thieves work. You’d end up with lefty-pistol whip with ranged damage on P/S with bleed stacking and vuln stacks.

It’d have to either be a weapon dedicated to offhand which the thief currently has no access to (which all thematically don’t really work), or a two-handed one like longbow/rifle/greatsword.

So then if rifle were to become an option on the ranger, it wouldn’t need to be single-target long range DPS because the bow already has that role designation covered and ranger is already the only class which can use that weapon for that role. No other class can play a single-target DPS archer and obviously even now it’s weak on the ranger.

Thus removing it from this role and swapping the rifle in its place would only inhibit build diversity. Give rifle another role if it were to become a ranger’s weapon.

infantrydiv.1620:

Ickorus.4518:

Honestly the entire longbow doesn’t make sense to me, it’s a totally unfocused weapon; what they should do is rework it into a long range AoE weapon and give us a rifle to use as a high damage single target weapon.

This^

They could take literally every skill except for #5 on Longbow, put it on rifle, and then give us a brand new longbow ideal for skirmishing and wvw with more AoE.

Except a lot of people want a single-target DPS archer.

Single-target DPS rifle is already a thing on Warrior.

Regarding RF and the longbow kit in general, I prefer it as it is. It’s an AA-oriented weapon, yes, however it therefore just makes it less of a faceroll class. If you enter a fight and just mash all of your skills, you’re going to lose. I very much like this aspect of the class and believe its utility on 3/4 is quite nice.

RF is a good skill for stealth-tracking and using it in close range if the enemy comes near you. The only change it needs is a bit more damage to equate to an AA.

Arguably barrage is the ranger’s weakest skill. I’d like to see that changed the most of anything.

I do agree some of them are a little too short.

That said, there are some like
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Aether.jpg

which are quite long for shortbows :P

You keep both as they are.

It’s just now all of your other characters on your account have access to the weapon skin.

bhagwad.4281:

DeceiverX.8361:

If the starter zones are too hard:

- Take off your armor.
- Reset your traits to nothing.
- Equip a level 0 white weapon.

And there you have it, hard mode.

That’s voluntarily crippling yourself. Players would like to wear all their armor and still face tough content that’s also rewarding. Proper downscaling should go a long way.

Voluntarily crippling yourself.

Is that not the perfect solution when asking for new-player/low level content to be more difficult just because your gear doesn’t downscale well when such content is specifically designed to be easier and more forgiving because new players are less experienced and have worse gear relative to their level?

Even fixing downscaling doesn’t actually solve the problem you’re stating. New content is even easy for players that aren’t down-scaled because it’s designed to be. Mob AI and decisions are predictable and extremely easy to sidestep their damage. Recoil time is high, damage is low, and animations run slow. These monsters and bosses also have no fancy conditional moves or anything, either.

Your retort makes quite literally no sense in this context.

cyyrix.6105:

Cygnus.6903:

This is a thief nerf.

therefor, it should never be implemented without significantly buffing thief survivability options out of stealth. D/P and D/D would become unusable instantly otherwise.

IMO, stealth is not a problem right now.

I almost never side with thieves, but he’s right. That reveal change would destroy dp and dd.

My solution is to make backstab cost 3-4 initiative. If you spam backstab and miss, you should be punished somehow (but not revealed). Maybe move BS to f2 and then give a stealth auto attack so that the intelligent thieves can still clear blind/aegis at no cost.

This would actually be even worse.

As you’d spend 6 initiative on CnD and against say, a guardian, which has permanent auto-aegis when entering a combat situation, thus requiring another CnD, putting you at around 5-6 by regen, and you’d spend the other 6 getting into stealth on the first defense break, leaving the thief at 0, and the guard could just pop blocks or his aegis again. Now the thief’s only option is to literally wait for his initiative to recharge before he can even make any attack at all, which would be exactly when stealth ends, thus leaving stealth and trying to just auto-attack the guard to death while waiting for init regen with an already-low initiative pool (good luck with that). Okay, so the thief autos the first aegis and manages a CnD on the second. He’s now got 4/5 init to stab, the guard re-applies aegis, and now the thief is back to less than enough to stab while stealthed. All this does is simply encourage thieves even more to build into SA/init regen builds which are already overly-prevalent and why people are complaining.

Thief’s attacks should not reveal from stealth. What should be done is penalize permastealth and stealth chaining by increasing the revealed timer based upon how long the thief was stealth for. Now you have thieves which either sit in stealth and do not re-enter combat to heal/reset (thus allowing the other person to effectively have a fight reset), or ones which utilize almost no stealth uptime and thus will be subsequently be revealed for constant short intervals.

Consequently, you also have very good interplay with the new Deadly Arts skill, which yields the user +200 power while revealed. Thieves could now stage and ambush with a stealth setup and then smack for some damage with P/P or S/P for an extended period.

I’d also like to see heartseeker spam nerfed. Having it take penalties to damage based upon the target’s current HP with a higher base value to compensate would let the skill remain to be a good finisher but prevent it from being spammable, such as having it take a 1% damage reduction for each percentage point of health the target has, with the value at 25% being the same as the current value is.

Therefore an opening HS will deal only 1% of its current maximum damage, but its finishing damage on targets <= 25% health will either be the same or increase.

Mad Pig.2890:

Ranger can’t kill a thief. Ever.
That skill that disrupts stealth? Doesn’t work. No point having it.

It’s easy with a Mesmer or Necro however. That low health pool melts like butter under a condi Necro.

I beg to differ. I find that it’s much easier to beat thieves on my ranger than anything else.

Just gotta get good with longbow and know how thieves work. How do you counter a thief’s damage? Timing dodges and repositioning.

Having the ability to keep hitting them while they run in stealth (and I’m not referring to Sic ’Em) is pretty amazing.

Everything can kill a thief. I consider myself a pretty established one, and have been beaten by everything. I kill them all the time on the other classes I play. It’s really a matter of player skill a lot of the time.

Regarding P/P thief:

It depends. If you want to be someone who stands in the back shooting from safety, then P/P is not what you want.

It also depends on what you like to do. P/P is plenty viable in PvP and WvW. S/P is considered much better in PvE, though, just because it has cleave damage and is clearly superior for stacking.

That said, anyone who says P/P isn’t viable in PvP/WvW isn’t playing P/P well.

A berserker P/P build is a surprisingly good skirmish build, particularly against non-ranged builds or in 1v1’s. The blind application is astonishing. You’re quite literally capable of facetanking a warrior or guard if you do it well.

With a berserker signet build, the burst is impressive, and you can apply quite a few stacks of bleeding for condi pressure despite not being a condi build. You also have an on-demand immobilize/vuln stack applier and an instant interrupt daze. Unload’s damage potential is also still very high and can be used repeatedly without interruption and is much harder to evade and leaves you still mobile, unlike S/P.

I’ve actually noticed near-opposite trends.

I find that those within the 3-6k range are actually the best players, often because those with over 6k usually either have no dedication to a particular aspect of the game, or simply played a lot of GW1.

With most of my parties with pugs, those with over 10k AP often have some kind of superiority complex and believe they never do anything wrong. Reality often demonstrates, however, that they play overly-selfish classes and builds and often find themselves dead or dying when being incapable of working with the rest of the team or expecting the rest of the team to work around keeping them alive.

I recently had a party in AC p1 where three of the other members had above 7k AP. The party took over two hours to get to the final boss and never finished the dungeon. I was heavily carrying the group alongside another player who only had 2.1k.

AP is but a mere measure of how much content one has plowed through. Nowhere does it present any effective yield of how well a player has mastered any of it.

This industry is cutthroat and frankly, simply giving extremely expensive tools out for free, or even for a fee would let a ton of people capitalize on this. What’s more is that they would be directly supplying their competition to beat them at their own game.

It’d be like a gas station worker blatantly telling you that a different station down the road has better gas for less money.

If the starter zones are too hard:

- Take off your armor.
- Reset your traits to nothing.
- Equip a level 0 white weapon.

And there you have it, hard mode.

I can’t think of any new sets I’d like to see.

I’d much rather prefer increasing the viability of sets such as assassin’s and Valkyrie, especially due to how hard ferocity hits them. This, however, is not possible with how the current stats are calculated, for power will always be better than precision and will always be dependent (for a competitive DPS build) entirely on its usefulness on precision/fury and ferocity/crit damage. Otherwise everyone is forced into building tankier via PTV or condi bunker.

All I could suggest is to rework some of these sets such that Ferocity and precision are both main stats to such a degree that their damage values would compare or be greater than those of Berserker gear against low-armor targets via raw crit damage scaling, however then you will just have players building hybrid into both for the absurd ferocity to modify high power.

There need not be new sets but refinement on the entire system since precision/crit chance builds become absolutely nothing with the implementation of ferocity, for berserker will be the only remotely viable option.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

DeceiverX.8361:

-snip- (just cause it was really long)

While it is true that a company cannot simply lay out a plan and adhere to it strictly in order to succeed. Neither can they succeed by bowing down to their players’ screams for various things either. They’ll have an outline, if you prefer that to plan, on where they want to go, things they want to do. Yes, they’ll look at feedback, they’ll adjust to keep the majority happy (cause ya just can’t please everyone), but they will also make decisions based on what is best for their overall goals (and profits, they are a business after all). We aren’t necessarily going to like it, or agree with it. Some will leave, others will be drawn in by what they find when they try it.

It just seems after each patch implementation, they’re abiding to their internal vision and are doing very little to accommodate for player requests. Most changes appear to be coming from their opinions as players rather than what is being asked for by the community. This is especially apparent in regards to a lot of aspects of core mechanics such as profession balance and attempting to increase build diversity. Quite a few attempted resolutions to this, including some of what’s coming in the feature patch, is proving more detrimental to both aspects – a completely opposite effect to these goals they’re trying to achieve.

Of course one can’t take every request. Like I said, players asking for a totally free game, or one which is just too easy shouldn’t be listened to, for this is a business and money is essential to keep that service going. If this was public service, then nobody would ever need to pay anyone anything or attach an incentive to paying for certain things in-game. As I stated, the issue relies in that a company in this business cannot succeed without being more inclusive towards the players. From what I’ve seen since release, there exists only the guise of player-inclusion or any real heed to such discussion. Without real progress, the game will get more toxic, just as the one I’m working on has. The players which stay play only for bragging rights on their accomplishments and stomping other players, for the community players will leave when they realize nothing is being done by the publisher to accommodate other styles of play rather than how those truly managing the game see it.

alchemyst.2165:

The problem with that, deceiver, is that we melt outside of stealth . We would need more survivablilty to compensate. We would have no condi removal for that duration and we would have to waste a hide in shadows, unless you’re running withdraw.

As to evilapprentice, I like the idea of being active, I just don’t see how this is a buff defensively. I’m starting to open up to the idea more, you’re arguing this very well. But what happens when I get to about 2k health, my last refuge procs, I want to heal up but I have to reveal ourselves to get extra protection? Conditions ticking away, opponent still attacking. I suppose I could always shadow step away, but I’d rather try and win the fight than escape if possible. Plus, there’s gonna be conditions crawling all over the place. I would be dead in a few seconds unless I asked for more. There’s also people who actually know how to fight thief and predict where we are.

I tend to look at thief ideas first by defense, because we lack defense. I think the damage is fine, but survivablilty is not good. I understand you would still get the bonuses on revealed, but I just feel like that wouldn’t work. We wouldn’t get to prevent death unless we asked for the time period we usually die during.

We don’t, though. Especially SA builds which are fairly resilient compared to most other ones. As a thief, good play just like every other class and not facetanking hits can yield positive results.

HiS’s condi removal doesn’t apply only when you enter stealth – it removes them anyways. Any thief not building SA has the same condi cleanse potential as a thief in revealed. Again, the whole point of this is to prevent exactly what you’ve mentioned: squishy builds capable of totally ignoring/mitigating damage or not being targeted through passive play.

Again, as I mentioned, stealth now doesn’t become something which players would just use whenever it’s available. The critical question of when to use stealth and for how long increases the skill cap on the class/stealth builds while not really restricting it too heavily.

Again, all about that demographic.

Granted, a lot of the full-covering armor sets are rather unattractive. See pirate medium armor sets :T

I came up with another approach a while ago to punish players for excessive use and abuse of stealth uptime while encouraging players to play outside of it.

Mind you, this is also coming from someone with over 1k hours in a thief, with it being my favorite class to play by miles.

In that another “revealing” timer is applied whenever the skill first used to cast stealth would normally expire.

And that the revealed state duration increases with the amount of time the user spends under stealth effects while slightly increasing the duration of each stealth skill.

The “revealing” effect simply prevents chain-stealthing, something which works way too well with the SA line and also just works way to well in itself. Being able to just stack that much stealth duration/untargetable capability is crazy. This forces players into positioning themselves well to not die while under the revealed effect.

The latter effect punishes SA permastealth builds by reducing their effective ability frequency and also making the builds more technical, rather than just shooting for stealth whenever it’s available. Stealth now becomes much more tactical, for spending 15 seconds in refuge to engage would net you at a 50% stealth duration converted to extra revealed time would be 10.5 seconds of revealed – a hefty amount of time spent without stealth.

And of course, this also has good synergy with the new DA trait which gives you extra power during revealed. Stealth builds now may play with more investment of the “sneak attack” and skirmish while visible for extra sustained DPS.

I’m all for skin diversity and for the future implementation of some better-looking ones which cover more (this applies to every armor tier, frankly), however do consider a few things:

1.) Racy things sell. You know the old expression (which is blocked by the forum filter). Especially in this market. The demographic, while shifting to a broader audience, usually is fairly accepting of this type of attire for females.

2.) This game isn’t realistic. It’s high fantasy with a little bit of sci-fi and steampunk. Again, take a look at the demographic of consumers for this type of content, and its rivals. This kind of aesthetic stuff predates WoW all the way to Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970’s. Go read through some of those books and you’ll notice it’s not unique to modern fantasy games. It only makes sense to make it this way.

And of course, keep in mind that many people are quite satisfied with this. To demand a change to current content would be pretty unfair to those who invest heavily into their appearance. Lategame content is pretty much all about either dress-up or PvP/WvW, too (or both), so a large portion of people would be pretty upset with such changes. This is definitely perhaps something which could be and in some cases rightfully should be looked into (such as diversifying some of the more bland/repeated skin sets in whites/blues/greens through midgame), but asking for sweeping changes to everything wouldn’t be the best way to approach the situation.

On a little side note, also do keep in mind that this isn’t in WoW’s universe, either. Norn females actually have real lore behind them as to why they wear less clothing than other races

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Did they do things wrong? Perhaps. In our eyes, oh most certainly, but what about in theirs?

At the end of the day it boils down to Anet has their own plans that they intend to follow.

I just want to point out these two tidbits. After working with another company in the MMO business for what will soon be four years, I can assure you that your interpretation of how the MMO industry works is unfortunately flawed.

Because the reality of the matter is that in a community-driven game where profits are made on the basis that players are retained, success is found solely when the catered audience feels as though you (as the producer) have not failed them.

Producers for this industry need only portray their own vision, not abide strictly to it. The audience playing and paying for the support of the game simply has precedence in terms of their vision over the producers. Yes, producer vision is essential – for a product without a desired destiny or major features cannot sell – however selling points of a game in this industry rely solely on the fact that the producers’ vision of the game parallels that of its targeted audience to a degree it can bring a profit.

I want to note that I do not blame any particular section of the company because we don’t have that information to place a target. Mis-communication between branches can kill a company. Micro-management by executives can. Poor development cycles and lazy developers can. Even moderators not communicating with staff and staff not with project managers can.

I’ve seen the game I’ve worked on lose 96% of its yearly stable income sources in a single patch cycle within a month of that release. I’ve seen player toxicity rise to levels where over sixty percent of active players have received at least one account suspension. I’ve seen hacking prevention updates/auto-banning implementations deny over 30% of the playerbase access to the game in one go.

And what’s the worst aspect? The game was slated for success on launch. It reached a million players within its first year as a F2P title with almost literally zero ad campaigning. It’s surviving only because of its first-year/vanilla profit success.

These are the side effects of a game not being maintained well. As an employee, I can assure you that all of these faults are because of a mis-aligned company vision. When the company fails to assume the perspective of the players, the company fails entirely.

I’m not saying GW2 is dead or dying – no – it built way too much hype for that to happen for a long time, and has made a fair share of money on release due to the $60 sign-up fee. I assure you the launch profits were huge based on the number of people I know personally who pre-ordered the game and never played it again after the first week. What I am saying is that ANet is establishing a bad track record; one that isn’t sustainable. Experimenting is great, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of necessary implementations, and if it hasn’t, then there are serious issues pertaining to the teams involved with what should be considered as “standard” game implementations and updates. ANet’s vision cannot just be their own – that is – if they want to succeed as a business, especially in this industry; they need to adopt the players’ vision (I’m not referring to ludicrous posts about demands asking for easymode content and everything being free in the gem store, etc.), and utilize the professional experience they have to make their product the best, because striving for anything less isn’t good enough.

Gotta love it when your break makes you noxious.

I appreciate the attempt, but it should have been put on a toggle switch.

@OP:

There’s little activity elsewhere because no development effort has been made to really give new and lively permanence to the atmosphere. Recent atmosphere changes have been relatively negative (Kryta-post-Scarlet is a great example) in regards to their influence on the surrounded world. LS takes too much development effort and its limited-time duration keeps players out of their homes and not making new ones.

Populated, well-designed cities are great, especially when they’re abundant. Unfortunately such design changes are unlikely to occur due to the fact that the developers are too caught up with LS and ANet isn’t capable/willing to make such changes or hire people to do them.

To reiterate:

It’s like complaining that a computer from five years ago now sells for $50 and you spent $2k on the same model when you bought it five years ago, and are now asking for a refund from the distributor.

At the time, that is what the product was worth. You enjoyed having a top-of-the-line product for a period of time – a luxury most people could not afford – as time progresses and technologies become more accessible and new ones develop, those prices drop and the market is flooded with similar or better products.

You still have that computer, though. Expecting something to remain top-of-the-line forever is unreasonable. If that were the case, nobody would ever purchase anything or upgrade anything because they’d always be waiting for the “upcoming better version” and subsequently little progress would be made since R&D would prove inefficient in regards to a cost-benefit model for business.

Can we be upset for dumping cash on something and not getting what we wanted from that product? Sure. It just means the product wasn’t enjoyable or suitable for you. That’s not to say it isn’t for someone else, though. Blaming the manufacturer for innovating a new and improved version is really just kind of silly. At least they’re not designing the old versions to break or expire in order for you to purchase new ones all over again.

calavel.6249:

DeWolfe.2174:

…. how many professions have a 25% trait/utility or access to swiftness???

Those things are not even remotely the same. One is a permanent, unremovable passive effect, the other is a time limited buff that can be stripped in tons of ways. Permaswiftness is a sacrifice for everyone but engineer and warrior. Two classes that also happen to have passive +25% movement speed traits, but that is beside the point.
I doubt you will ever see a warrior or engi run trav or speed runes, because they have no use for them.
Go check out the newest viable 15 or so mesmer builds for WvW that are not specifically for zerging.
I guarantee you that 99% of them use traveler runes, because there is no other valid option unless you are willing accept the DPS loss from speed runes or run with a group 100% of the time that provides you with permaswiftness.
Thieves and necros can use a signet for OOC move speed, but it’s not as good as the passive +25% which is also on in combat. I don’t know ele, ranger or guardian very well so I’m not sure where they stand on this issue.

Every class has access to either permanent swiftness while moving or a 25% movespeed bonus except for guardian and mesmer through traits or utilities. Mesmer is the slowest class in the game currently.

A better fix to this is to simply just give all classes a utility which yields movement speed. Is your utility slot worth a massive bonus to damage? If so, run the utility. If not, run travelers. The fact two classes don’t have access to this just makes them totally necessary to get the runes. I know few other people who run traveler runes on classes or builds which have easy-access mobility. It still doesn’t diminish the value of swiftness, either, as it’s strictly better than 25% mobility.

Exclusivity isn’t in the appearance of legendaries.

Seventeen people in my guild have eternity. Seven run Twilgiht. Eighteen with Sunrise, eight incinerators. Six bolts. Fourteen bifrosts. A good 25% of players I see playing WvW on established characters have them. Frankly, the only people I see who don’t have them are either newer players or people who just don’t care to have them (myself included).

And the thing is, I get more requests on what equipment/weapons I’ve got than all of them, using exotic-skinned ascendeds.

People know the legendaries, they see them, and move on. If you’re concerned with being unique, I can tell you now legendary weapons aren’t the way to go. Tons of people have them and anyone who does uses them. Somebody walking by with an excess of particle effects just screams “another high level player.”

If you’re going to sheer gold drool factor, legendaries still aren’t the way to go. There are plenty of other weapon skins around worth substantially more than legendaries.

Also do remember that a lot of people pass legendaries already across their characters. If they have one sword, they’re going to keep moving it on all their characters which can use swords. One can only have one character logged in at a time, so this doesn’t really change much.

If anything, asking for compensation in the form of another, different legendary would be worse. Now you have account-bound legendary skins and people owning multiple different ones. The accessibility just increases and the pool of legendary skins goes up, making them even more abundant.

The dyes thing, yea, I got hit hard by that, too, and I can’t say I’m a little bit upset that I “wasted” money, but as others have mentioned, I made those decisions on the basis of impatience and aesthetic desire from the beginning, and in my opinion, being able to have a color scheme worth 75g on a level 1/2 (and look great) was worth it at the time. The update doesn’t change anything, and I still keep all those dyes (and will be better off than I am now due to the UID compensation). Now it just reduces the cost and normalizes it for all future characters. Not something worth being frustrated about.

PopeUrban.2578:

I don’t think you get it. Crit-damage based damage is supposed to be nerfed. You’re not supposed to be able the put up the same DPS on crit builds as you were before, as crit builds were overpowered to the point they made all other builds effectively useless

Nerfing crit makes base power equally valuable, and increases the value of every other stat in the game because you can’t as easily cheese through everything by stacking in a corner and burning it down.

Saying that it penalizes valk/other builds because they “need to go zerk to keep their DPS” is missing the point. You’re not supposed to have the same DPS in those builds as you did before. The overtuned way crit damage was previously implemented led to the currently broken PvE metagame of “all damage, all the time” which at best trivialized content, and at worst required overtuned DPS races that made the problem worse.

The problem is that berserker remains the best DPS gear combination, dungeons aren’t changing, and people still want to clear dungeon contest fast. Ferocity nerfs precision harder than power + precision. That said, any nerfs to critical damage or precision also affect power, too, seeing as attacks from power-based characters are inherently weak without critical strikes. Simply, changing/reducing the effectiveness of critical damage does affect power, though, because in all honesty, power is almost useless without precision/crit chance and crit damage, and vice versa. This is why PVT gear is considered the tank set and does very little damage on its own.

This change designed to make the game more diverse is actually doing the opposite. Berserker will be the only DPS set. People will get more strict on player kicking in dungeons because we’ve just hit a net-decrease in dungeon clear times regardless of how one looks at it. Berserker builds are the PvE meta because the current PvE content does not reward support/tank players, and is not enjoyable enough for people to want to allow for runs to take longer. They’re also the meta in WvW zergs because zerging is about the following: Kill Speed, AOE’s, and combo fields. The potency of combo fields makes more damage more useful for finishers, and more damage is also better to kill your opponents faster. Condi stacks effectively reduce damage. This is also why condi is the meta for roaming: with less healing/combo fields to finish off of, having better survivability and arguably the same damage output per unit of time while not needing to worry about hitting max condi stacks makes the individual player more efficient in both dealing and receiving hits.

Ultimately, nerfing critical damage does nothing to resolve any of these problems, because the problems lie in condi stacks, PvE content not rewarding players for playing support/tank roles, and ultimately, players wanting to be doing other things rather than grinding dungeons for money/tokens, be it that they wish to spend time in-game or out-of-game.