Guild Wars 2

Gray.9041:

I’d like to think so, but we have no indication of this, the single biggest concession we have is that they’re reading the forums – a far cry from any admission of fault.

Trust me man, when a dozen major gaming news sites are running coverage of your player base exploding their jeans in sheer dung-flinging nerdrage, you can rest assured the company knows they screwed the pooch.

Now, whether or not you guys are going to get the ArenaNet team groveling on their knees for forgiveness and offering veteran players half-priced expansions with another five free charslots…well, that’s not how business works. You may well get your sixth free slot, but c’mon. Marketing doesn’t let people admit they made a pricing/content mistake. Remember – to a marketing guy, “mistakes” are things which are made only once, by companies which are then about to fold.

Keep your expectations realistic, your objections reasonable in both wording and scope, and your feces in the toilet, and we may yet all get through this poo-rricane without smelling like crap.

Solori.6025:

Are you seriously suggesting that people
A. Stop telling anet they are upset
B. Excuse anet for shady business practices and
C. Be happy with everything that is wrong with this preorder fiasco and ignore the issue?

You may as well ask people to be happy with being stabbed in the liver.

Nah. I’m saying that this:

!http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/robber-penguin-agency/images/7/72/Gaming-Rage-Face.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140618172440!

Isn’t going to get anybody anywhere, even en masse. People are perfectly entitled to their opinions, and the forums exist for the purposes of discussion and feedback.

We have long, long, long since passed the point of ‘discussion and feedback’.

They know they screwed up. Telling them nine hundred thousand more times is not going to improve their response time. TELLING THEM IN ALL CAPS HOW MAD U R is also not going to improve their response time. I’m fairly certain the actual game devs are fighting Marketing as hard as they can on this one, but trust me – Marketing gets more say than they do in matters like this. NCSoft is not going to be backing codemonkeys over money people, even when things have exploded in their faces like this.

And in the meantime, there are folks in my guild who are almost horrified at the amount of incendiary horse hooey being flung around in here.

Heh, suppose I was just trying to tell people that their blood pressure could use some reduction. All this crazed insanity cannot be healthy for you folks. Maybe give the Poopocalypse a rest and switch to relatively calm and peaceful “This is why I have yet to purchase the Heart of Thorns expansion, ArenaNet. I would like to, but in good conscience I cannot until these issues are addressed” posts for a while instead?

I guarantee you those’ll go over better.

Seriously. I don’t think we’ve reached Dead Sea levels of eye-searing, fish-killing, meat-preserving crusty brine yet.

I just counted – there are currently four threads on the front page of this board talking about something other than how immensely pants-bruised people are over the expansion pricing, and this despite a huge E3 showing by ArenaNet and something like eleven hundred blog articles on guild halls, a feature people have been demanding info on since forever ago. This is up from two non-pricing threads the last time I counted.

I get it. You guys are cheesed. Even the gaming news sites have all picked up on how incredibly rustled your collective jimmies are. I fail to see why this brouhaha is such a thing – if you figure fifty bucks, or a hundred bucks, or whatever, is too much to ask? Then don’t pay it. Funnily enough, this conclusion is what all the news site articles I read which bothered to venture an opinion came to as well. The stink is ridiculous, it reflects poorly on “the friendliest, most welcoming MMO playerbase in gaming”, and frankly there’s other crap to talk about.

Either ArenaNet fixes it and they sell preorders, they don’t fix it and don’t sell preorders and thus learn their lesson, or they don’t fix it, they do sell preorders, and clearly it’s not as big a deal as you guys are all making it out to be. Especially when you all know this was Marketing’s brilliant idea and has absolutely nothing to do with the actual dev-side folks you’re all threatening repeatedly.

I’m not telling you to buy or not buy Heart of Thorns. I’m not telling you that you’re entitled greedy jerks, or conversely that you’re being an idiot ArenaNet fanboy too stupid to know better. I don’t care – what you do with your money is on you, what I do with mine is on me, and there’s no reason for either of us to have any opinion on what the other decides.

What I’m saying is that you folks have made the MechWarrior Online forums – a collection of bittervets, salt miners, crusty codgers, and dev-hating megatrolls which cannot be equaled this side of League of Legends – look like a reasonable and respectful community.

I honestly did not think that was possible.

You’re embarrassing the Torment out of yourselves, folks. The ludicrous angstsplosion in this house is a complete and utter turn-off, and if I were an ArenaNet developer I wouldn’t want to talk to a bunch of ragecanoes either.

Settle down. The world is not ending. The sky is not falling. ArenaNet is not the Devil. Keep calm and talk about guild halls already, would ya?

DiogoSilva.7089:

papry.8096:

DiogoSilva.7089:

HoT Standard Edition with partial access to Revenant: $50
HoT Standard Edition with garanteed access to Revenant: $60

XD. For veteran Only.

Yes, of course. New players will gain direct access to the new class if they wish to.

We are so greedy.

And in return they lose access to one of the core classes that you got ‘guaranteed’ access to when you bought the game three years ago.

Everybody who’s never bought slots will, in HoT, have five slots to split between nine classes. Nobody’s gaining or losing anything they didn’t already have/not have.

Seriously. Slots are not that expensive. Yes, it was churlish of ArenaNet to not include one in the budget-priced expansion, but I would posit that the sixth slot should be a bonus for everyone, not just vets. They already practically give the base game away on Special Event Weekends as it is, why is this such a poopocalypse?

Seriously. This is not the issue we should be concerned with. The issue we should be concerned with is the appalling and unacceptable lack of a physical Collector’s Edition. I need a gloriously oversized RevLock statue to sit on my shelf next to my OG Rytlock.

WHERE MY SWAG @, ANET

GW2 released with five character slots and eight professions.

Your own opening post says you paid for three additional slots, presumably without a care or a million-thread forum kerfuffle.

A slot costs ten bucks. Skip a Big Mac combo one day and play your Revenant for years to come. I really don’t see what the giant deal is over the slots thing is. There’s other things to be bothered about. And a million threads in which to be bothered.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Achrisos.1360:

Fashion Mage.3712:

DevilLordLaser.8619:

no longer losing damage to Vuln-not-working-with-conditions as compared to Power

I guess you’d be fine with condition damage being reduced by protection then?

Too late as they added resistance buff….

That’s true, although resistance seems to be exceedingly rare at the moment.

Rare, but also kind of significantly more powerful than Protection. And also a PvP perspective, which is fine but just isn’t how I think. Conditions lose damage to time-gating and cleanses while Power loses damage to neither, and both types of attacks are equally vulnerable to blocks/blinds/dodges/whatevers as a condition attack still needs to hit to inflict its condition.

Given the fact that condition damage takes longer to deliver, is countered by a wider array of defenses, is outright nullified by Resistance as opposed to simply reduced by a percentage a’la Protection…well, a few nods here and there seem appropriate, hm?

pandorasbox.6340:

I’ll tell you a secret. I already know that. I’ll tell you another secret. They have it within their power to give us an ETA. I can’t live “it comes when it comes”. Take the Kickstarter project Greedmonger. It is now never coming out and the backers are preparing a lawsuit. Those people got tired of waiting.

I am not saying grab your torches and pitchforks, but as an Anet example I started hearing about Guild Wars 2 coming in 2008. It got released in 2012. That is a long time. A long time for me to sit on info. I just don’t want to see that happen here.

I like the guys that are saying it’s coming in summer but no later then September. That is something I can live with. As far as I can tell it is official speculation. Did Anet give that window tho?

So it honestly doesn’t matter to you when the release date is, so long as you have a date?

You’d be perfectly okay with ArenaNet telling people that Heart of Thorns will, definitively, launch before September, 2020?

Come ON, dude! Listen to yourself! “I don’t care when the date actually is, but if I don’t know the date I’m going to scream!” How does that make any sense whatsoever? if you’re prepared to wait for whatever date they set, then why do you need to know?

Could also, theoretically, be Revenants with a signet-focused Legend for elite spec.

Frankly, I’m thinking the Engineer will be getting Minions. The reveal trailer showed a hammer Engineer with unique armor being trailed by li’l helicopter drones. I’m banking on the Engineer elite spec being derived from Scarlet’s technology and using variations of her clockwork minions as supporting skills. After all, Scarlet was specifically working on anti-Dragon technology while she was busy being driven completely bonko by Mordremoth. Why let perfectly good anti-Dragon tech go to waste?

Or, and here’s an idea – Terror and Deathly Chill simply add damage effects to the existing conditions, without modifying their current behavior. No “Chill becomes a short-duration intensity-stacking thing like burn”, just “Chill is a duration-stacking snare and recharge debuff, which now also does [X]/s on the side.”

It’s not like these particular things are super-widespread and six of nine professions get to deal damage with fear or chill. It’s one trait each, both on the Necromancer. I’m fairly sure those traits can be exceptions to the new overall condition rules.

Shiro will likely be Power DPS and movement. He’ll be the ‘mobility’ Rev Legend as Shiro was all the frack over the place when you were fighting that kittennozzle in GW1. His skills also focused a lot on sweeping AoE cleaves or multi-target flickers, but that was as much a function of him being built to engage teams of eight players by himself as anything else.

I’m thinking Riposting Shadows will be the Elite, and it’ll be that stealth-flicker-groupslaughter skill we saw Rytlock use in the reveal trailer. Battle Scars or Meditation could both be healing skills, though neither will work as advertised, especially as Meditation was a total party wipe waiting to happen in GW1. A “take reduced damage while swiftly regenerating health” might work, though.

Impossible Odds is a good choice for the upkeep skill, though a number of its functions overlap with Mallyx. I could see it being IAS rather than actual double strikes, just for the purposes of keeping the skill just a little bit under control. Alternatively, make it an Elite Upkeep, like the Demon Form thing, and don’t bother keeping it under control. Double strikes for EVERYONE.

As for Glint? likely they’ll rebuild Glint’s skills altogether. Glint’s design from GW1, from a skills/mechanics perspective, is ancient and while that fits the Rev lore-wise, I don’t really see how most of Glint’s old skills would work. There’ll be a lot of ‘Crystal [X]’ skill names for Glint, but I expect them more to fit Glint’s lore and the role she played against Kralkatorrik than her original skill patterns. I mean heck, Jalice’s skills don’t exactly reflect what he did as a GW1 NPC, which as I recall was a whole lot of bossing you around and dying during the seige section of Thunderhead Keep :p

It is most assuredly several steps in the right direction.

Improved scaling from Malice, no longer losing damage to Vuln-not-working-with-conditions as compared to Power, Confusion not being a complete waste of time in PvE, and that all-important relaxation of the condition stack limits are all key things that needed to happen for conditions to start coming into their own anywhere but sPvP. The final numbers will be telling, as will adjustments for skills that used to rely on long-duration applications of poison/burning for damage, but the overall picture is terribly exciting.

Sinister was already pulling its weight for a lot of players who weren’t 100% on the Zerk or Bust train. With these adjustments it will be possible for Sinister to bust ahead into full-on Acceptable Gear status for some builds, while things like Rabid or Carrion will start having much wider niches. Remember, all armor/item stats will be getting a boost when the core specs update hits next week – and Ryan just told us that Malice as a stat is going to be a lot more valuable. Every point over ~700 you can get will be worth more damage than it was pre-this-stuff, which means sets with Malice just became overall more valuable.

My Rabid-armored pistols Engineer might actually be useful as well as fun. Who would’ve ever thought, eh?

I’m going to tell you a secret.

The game will come out when it comes out. Whether or not ArenaNet tells you when that date is two months or ten months in advance, the date on which the game releases will not change.

It’ll release when it’s done. When they know when that’s gonna be, they’ll tell us. Until then, anything they said would just be a falsehood that would get hurled back into their teeth by the slobbering barbarians who populate these forums. Why should they open themselves up to that when the majority of the playerbase is in on the ‘When It’s Ready’ joke.

Which isn’t a joke because it’s the flippin’ truth. Settle your jimmies. It’ll come out when it comes out. In the meantime do other stuff.

How many times do we have to say no to mounts before it sticks?

Or we could try this new thing where we don’t require fifty guys in the same TS channel to do one piece of content.

Seriously, what’s wrong with a five-man team? Most everyone can scrape up a five-man team if they really need to. Not most everyone can work up a ten-man herd, and nobody wants to work up a fifty-man marching clusterfrisk just to try and do one thing. Things like the Aetherpath show that you can have a long, multistage piece of instanced content that doesn’t require the entire population of a developing-world country in hive-mind unison to accomplish, so why do people continually beg for these stupidly oversized bits of nonsense?

Five-man dungeons? I like those. Those are fun. Nice, compact, easily manageable teams where everyone can actually contribute and the party bloat is kept to a reasonable minimum.

Ten-man dungeons, whatever you call them? Ehhhhhhh….

Fifty-man ‘dungeons’? Sod off. That’s not a dungeon, that’s a corporate management sim disguised as a Fantasy Adventure where the contributions of any one single player that isn’t in on the management sim are essentially meaningless.

Or, to put this a bit more succinctly for all the TL;DR types who hate reading things on forums…

Raids are raids no matter what you call them, and that being said, raids are bad. We don’t need them, and if people want them there’s five hundred and seventeen other MMOs out there built exclusively around raiding. Play one of those.

Portals were available, pre-purchase access was not. Forum reaction: “**** THESE PORTALS! Why won’t they just let us pre-purchase for beta access already?! I have money but not time, just take my money and LET ME IN!”

Portals no longer available, pre-purchase access potentially on the horizon. Forum reaction: “**** THIS PREORDER! Why would they just let people pre-purchase for beta access already?! I had time to grind a portal, how dare they just take your money and LET YOU IN!”

…oh forums. How very silly you are.

Crossflip.4390:

Since the general answer to this seems to be “buy the xpac” I’d recommend you move on right now if you’re not planning on getting it. There’s a couple of other good mmos you can get into, with actual content to experience instead of the mechanical grinding that seems to be the only thing left to do in gw2 now. There’s sod all coming for players outside the xpac.

Don’t be disingenuous. The answer isn’t so much “buy the expansion” as it is “what do you expect them to do?”

Do you think it’s fair for ArenaNet to release Heart of Thorns, have a bunch of people buy it, but then have everything Heart of Thorns offers be available for free to players who didn’t buy the expansion? How does that make any remote sense?

“We’re sorry you don’t want to buy Heart of Thorns. Here – in the pursuit of fairness, have a ticket to the Maguuma Jungle, access to the Revenant profession, and tokens for all the elite specializations for the existing classes. We don’t want to split our playerbase, so we’re going to make everything the rest of these people over here paid for available to you for zero dollars. Because we know you’re upset that you can’t have all the new stuff too, for zero dollars.”

Ruminate on that for a moment, then ask yourself what, exactly, ArenaNet can do about this player divide that they aren’t already doing? And why you should be able to get 100% of Heart of Thorns content for free when the rest of us have to pony up our forty bucks for it?

Necromancer w/MH Dagger is already fairly respectable for single-target Power damage. One of the big things the class lacked was AoE capabilities, which were basically ‘covered’ by one well and Life Transfer in the regular Necromancer, weird Epidemic builds notwithstanding.

People keep asking for:

Navi.1032:

• Still no support options that are useful in current game.
• Still minimal boss support.
• Reaper is forced into Chill.
• ‘Rise’ Shout seems counter intuitive, summon a bunch of minions that will then go and single target mobs, probably requiring minion related traits to work effectively.
• Not expecting Combo Finishers or Fields from the Shout traits, so hopefully something from the Greatsword

…and all I can really see there is “Necromancers can’t generate or blast fire fields, and so they’re useless in PvE.”

The game only revolves around stacking in fire fields if you play it that way. And frankly, I’m pretty sure HoT is going to make that a whole lot trickier to pull off anyways.

If the Reaper is inducing mass long-lasting Chill, as it sounds like it can do, that’s pretty helpful crowd control. It’s a melee spec and so it can benefit from fire stacking, even if it doesn’t do any of that stacking itself – but it does look like it might be quite good at controlling enemy moment and position. From the, y’know, skill and a half, partial description for one utility, and three minor traits we’ve seen.

Perhaps we can see tomorrow whether it has the whole “stacks Might and Stab to 25 forever” thing everyone immediately thinks of as the only group support worth having, but even when that inevitably turns out to not be the case (though I would not count Stability out, given the whole unstoppable-monster angle), it may well have new tools that will work well in the jungle, or reinvigorate old fights.

So not terribly off from the Banshee speculation, and also very much the mass AoE cleavemonster people were hoping for with. Damaging/enemy-focused shouts – and if you don’t like the sound of “Rise!” in a big messy fight and some of the things it can do, I got news for ya, buddz – melee cleaving greatsword, and also based on unkillable horror monsters.

Wait a sec.

Heh…no, seriously. Did anyone see the line “We pulled elements from slow but seemingly unstoppable horror monsters like Pyramid Head and Jason Voorhees to try to craft the feeling of a relentless pursuer who becomes extremely deadly once they close the distance to their prey” and not think “dude, dududududuuuude…babycats is about to get real up in here”? Yes yes, I get it, nobody likes the notion of slow. Frankly I’m not a big fan either, but there is still the option of taking MH Dagger under the claymore for faster attacks, and given how heavily chill-focused this spec is, I’d be very surprised if at least one of those big honkin’ murdershouts wasn’t something designed for hefty Chill uptime. That and we don’t actually know how much Cold Shoulder will extend existing Chills. I don’t think a 33% increase would be uncalled for, given the spec’s focus and general theme.

Besides. Assume for the moment that Cold Shoulder’s damage reduction vs. Chilled is 10%, like Putrid Defense in Death Magic. Taking both means that any enemy who is both Chilled and Poisoned, which should be fairly easy for a Necromancer to contrive, is now dealing 20% less damage to you. That’s more than half of Protection’s damage reduction, and Necromancers can gain Protection pretty easily, too.

Gotta say, I’m liking the sound of Death Magic/Soul Reaping/Reaper. Given that we know relatively little about the Reaper thus far, true, it’s hard to tell what would mesh properly with it…but Death’s extra defenses help a melee Necromancer, and frankly the concept of a five-fold Death Nova off “Rise!” sounds pretty entertaining. SR gives you faster movement while in Shroud as well as a fat gigantic Crit boost to really punish enemies with that scythe. Not as much normal-mode damage as Spite, of course, but something’s got to give, and Death has some hefty options for extra punch. Toughness-to-Power’s a nice conversion to get in Deadly Strength, especially at 14% in Shroud. As I recall Ryn’s currently sitting around 1300 Toughness. Add 180 from the upcoming new Death minor, and you get over 200 extra Power while in Reaper’s Shroud from Deadly Strength and slightly over 100 out of Shroud. 3 and 7-ish stacks of Might worth of Power, respectively, just for existing. I’ll take that.

Yeah…I am quite looking forward to seeing what this sucker can do tomorrow.

Genesis.8572:

It’s as if people are genuinely displeased and bitter about the name.

Fabulous. Be displeased and bitter over the name in the five hundred and eighty-nine other threads kvetching about the name. This isn’t one of them.

Mar.4839:

Auras would actually be pretty sweet. I know a “Banshee” is favored but honestly the idea of getting shouts just feels lame. THEN AGAIN Guardians got traps and usually I’m not a fan of those utilities either but the way they work and their flavor actually makes me happy with how they’re implemented.

Hoping ArenaNet can do the same for shouts with Necro because just pushing a button to buff feels….idk just seems too simplistic for the Necro.

On the topic of its Death Shroud and Life Force: Arena Net has teased us with using our life force in a different way right? We also know that we’re still going to have to be able to enter Death Shroud because of its existing traitlines and traits that affect Shroud.

So what if Elite Specced Necros get to use Life Force in a similar way Revenants have an Energy Bar? What if our utilities, whatever they are, can utilize Life Force to have an empowered effect vs a normal one? This would introduce having to balance between using Life Force for Shroud or using it to empower whatever utilities are introduced with the elite spec.

I don’t think Life Force being at specific thresholds will be the main function because Arena Net has stated they’d like us to use Life Force in a different way and also they’re trying to move all the professions away from “don’t use your abilities to get benefits” like how Phantasm Mesmers couldn’t shatter, or Warrior’s wouldn’t use their Adrenaline for certain builds even though they also acknowledged Necro should still have some passive gains. It seems they are trimming those kinds of abilities down a lot.

The issue with using life force to fuel utilities a’la the Rev’s energy bar – beyond further blending of the Rev and Necromancer, anyways – is that it then directly competes with Death Shroud and basically forces people to use one or the other. It’s an interesting idea and one favored by a lot of players – Death-powered weapon attacks, or Death-powered utils – but I’m not sure it wouldn’t cause more problems than it solves. PvP Necromancers have enough trouble building life force as it is, do we need to make their lives any harder?

Not that I PvP, mind, but from what I hear the PvP necromancer basically doesn’t get a profession mechanic. I don’t think we need to exacerbate that by giving them more things to spend the life force they don’t have on.

Also, pushing a button to screech madness and devastation at your enemies instead of ladling out a few boons a’la Warrs/Guards sounds much more appealing to me, and is what most of the Banshee folks are hoping for instead.

Ye know what? Let’s buck this sad, ridiculous, and completely unwanted trend and get some actual blasted speculation in here.

SO.

Between the Chronomancer and the Dragonhunter, ArenaNet’s made their position on modified profession mechanics fairly clear – anything an elite spec does still has to conform to existing traits. The Chronomancer’s F5 doesn’t interfere whatsoever with F1-4 traits, and the Dragonhunter’s updated Virtues were specifically designed to still function with their respective OG traits.

Given this, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the existing Death Shroud on Necromancers will be left mostly untouched. Each and every skill in DS has its own specific trait save for Tainted Shackles – heck, Life Blast has two. So they can’t really just dump the existing Death Shroud and replace it, or do weird stuff twisting the skills around. DS has to remain more or less intact given that at least a third of Necromancer traits are Shroud-specific, unless the Necromancer elite spec reveal is also when ArenaNet tells us they heard the incredibly lukewarm reception to the Necromancer’s overview in the Four Hour Super Show and have spent time completely rebuilding it. And…well, we all know the odds of that happening.

So the new spec won’t touch Death Shroud’s base functionality, and frankly tacking on an F2 alternate mode just feels very off. If we get F2-5 skills, I anticipate they’re going to be single-shot discrete skills rather than toggle modes a’la Death Shroud, and honestly I don’t much like the feel of that, either.

What we might get is alternative ways to use Life Force, almost like the Warrior’s Adrenaline. New passive mechanics which work with your life force totals, or alternatively passive things that happen while you’re in Shroud. What those are I do not know, but the Necromancer has always been the aggressive facetank-range member of the Scholar trio, and the greatsword will almost certainly require melee range.

I almost feel like the new spec could potentially make use of…I want to say Auras but the term is already being used for Elementalists. But if the Necromancer is given a passive field effect that tags anything within, say, 360 units of it while in Shroud – or out Shroud, or who knows – that might be something that’d both help their dismal AoE capabilities and also segue more naturally into Death Shroud as a mechanic. What those auras would do is beyond me, though. I’m still hung up on how awesome a screaming Banshee spec would be to really think about what the profession mechanics might be rather than the utilities.

Any other ideas? Or conjecture of any sort that does not involve making Dragonhunter jokes?

Some hints from Rox/Marjorie point (loosely) to it being a stance-based character, i.e. Marjorie remarking that Rox is “teaching her the stances” to use with her new greatsword. Now, Stance as a GW2 skill type and ‘stance’ as a foundational aspect of any martial combat style are indeed two different things, but I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if the Necromancer spec ends up full of stances. I’m not sure how that would work, and frankly the notion doesn’t excite me half as much as a Banshee would, but you might want to brace yourself for it.

It would kinda fit ArenaNet’s treatment of the Necromancer class as a whole to give it a half-crippled spec unable to use more than one of its new utility skills at a go.

Is anyone else completely and utterly fed up with all the hysteria and bitterness over the Dragonhunter’s name? I swear this feels like the Ascended announcement all over again, except this time there isn’t even any proper basis for it.

Get OVER yourselves already, please. This is a new week for a new spec. Can we try focusing on that for three consecutive seconds?

Jeez you people are sore over the Dragonhunter thing. Let’s wait and see, shall we? Unlike Guardian, there are actually plenty of other things one can call a Necromancer specialization which aren’t dumb as Gehenna.

As for the spec itself, gotta say I’m hoping for the Banshee speculation myself. Offensive/debilitating Shouts matched with crazed murder claymore sounds amazing and I want to play every inch of it. I doubt the spec’s greatsword will be another Mesmer-style ranged weapon, though. The Necromancer as a class tends to be more brutal and direct than that, and frankly it’s also in utterly desperate need of area attacks. If this thing isn’t a melee cleave there’s going to be a great deal of disappointment for Necromancers out there, what with this spec basically being the last faint hope for the class.

Suppose we’ll know by Friday, eh?

Hunter’s Fortification (Prot on Virtues) is potentially one of the most powerful traits in the game, enough so that I expect it to be pretty seriously nerfed before going live.

Gotta remember – Justice is a Virtue, and that particular Dragonhunter had a 16-ish second cooldown on Justice. 4s Prot every 16 seconds, i.e. very nearly 25% uptime, is pretty big – until we remember that Renewing Justice is a thing. I.e. Hunter’s Fortification becomes “4s Protection any time random trash dies”, which can very easily be huge. The 1s ICD is necessary for a reason, and even with that ICD, permanent Protection is a real possibility.

I don’t disagree that a trap Grandmaster with 20% cooldown and bleeding would potentially work. I haven’t seen the stream so I don’t know if Dragonhunter traps are ground-targeted or feet-dropped, but if the latter then yes, throwable traps would be good. This is very clearly a sniper class, being able to use your utilities at your preferred combat range would be good. That said, I also don’t really mind the fact that most of the Dragonhunter majors are neutral enough that DH can be taken for its excellent Virtues rework, and you won’t waste your time/traits if you’d prefer a sword-focused (or Sword/Focus. Tee hee hee) Dragonhunter. You do lose your GM minor, and frankly I kind of want Pure of Sight to switch into a major slot somewhere/be reworked. I don’t mind ranged fighting myself, but I know for a fact that people will see that one minor and decide “THIS CAN’T STACK IT’S USELESS RARGH RAWRGH RABBLE RABBLE”, and that notion irritates me.

Beyond that? I really like what I see, and I will be investigating this closely upon the Dragonhunter’s release.

scerevisiae.1972:

^ you very obviously don’t play/understand Ele. Yes there’s twice the skills, but a lot of them are filler and are not worth casting in WVW/PVP. Watch any good Ele player play, they only cast 1-2 skills per attunement. So having more skills is not that big of a deal, it’s the diversity of those handful of good skills that are the real bonus. But I digress.
…

Then perhaps try and get those skills fixed?

No, I don’t bother with Wuv or PvP for reasons I’m not going to bore you with, but saying that a handful of boons is the entire point behind the attunement system is no less ridiculous a statement for that. The point behind the attunement system is the attunement system. If you need those boons to feel like the switches are actually worth it, then first of all the class’ skills need some rework, and second of all why are you on Elementalist in the first place?

And even if there’s only two worthwhile skills per attunement…well, you’re about six total weapon skills up from the Necromancer. Two “worth casting” skills per attunement leaves you eight skills worth casting, which as I recall is generally three or four more than most PvP builds I’ve seen get.

Semi-reliable access to Protection (which, let’s face it, is what you’re talking about) is not the core defining characteristic of the Elementalist. It sure as shootin’ helps, but given how immensely powerful Eatt can be, it’s way too much to be a baseline thing unless it gets murdered, at which point you will have lost your current Eatt entirely rather than simply being ‘forced’ to take the Arcane traitline for it.

Which of those sounds preferable to you?

Genesis.8572:

Hence why you are doing a terrible job playing apologetics for the terrible name ‘Dragonhunter.’ But imagine that if this specialization had been called ‘crud-eater,’ you would still be defending ArenaNet to the death.

…

Inquisitor. Again, check out the Pathfinder ‘Inquisitor’ class, which is precisely a bow-wielding divine/defensive magic-using hunter of big scary monsters.

Right then.

Listen, Gene. I’m not saying I’m married to the name Dragonhunter. Matter of fact, I’m pretty sure what I said was “the only things worse than Dragonhunter is everything I’m seeing in this thread.”

Chronomancers are Mesmers, but Mesmers are not Chronomancers. Druids are Rangers, but Rangers are not Druids.

Calling the new Guard elite spec…:

-Defender
-Protector
-Sentinel
-Warden
-Paladin
-Keeper
-Bulwark
-Stalwart
-Intervener

-…or any of the other ninety-seven things people have come up with which is functiuonally identical to "Guardian’ actively bothers me. Those things would be Guardians, yes. Guardians would also be all of those things.

Avenger is just as silly as Dragonhunter. What am I avenging, exactly? The Fleet’s destruction? The (assumed) death of my B-team? Marjorie’s sister? Trahearne? Trahearne’s cat?

Same problem – we’re all avenging those things, just the same way we’re all hunting dragons. Every character of every race, class, and gender is going to be out to get their own back from Mordremoth and his plant goons for making us look like right and propah fools. Trust me, my Thief is just as aggravated at Mordy’s nonsense as either of my Guards, and she will be doing everything she can to avenge her own self on them as well.

Now, if you want to talk about Inquisitor? All right, we can do that.

‘Inquisitor’ is a term with a lot of very dark, negative connotations, even for players who don’t have, like, six friends who all play Warhammer 40k. The term ‘Inquisitor’ generally brings to mind a very cruel individual seeking to inflict pain and harm on his victims, and I use the word ‘victims’ rather than ‘targets’ or ‘enemies’ very specifically. Inquisitors are people put in charge of religious torture chambers. Or Spaniards. Monty Python aside, honestly I’d associate the term Inquisitor with a Necromancer specialization far more than a Guardian spec. In fact, Inquisitor would actually be an excellent name for a Necromancer elite spec.

I can’t really see the case for it for Guardian however, especially as I have no earthly idea what Pathfinder is or why I should care about it.

What you might be able to get away with is Vanguard, but at that point we have the issue of ‘Vanguard’ more or less containing the original name of ‘Guardian’, which is just as awkward in its own special way as Dragonhunter.

It’s difficult to come up with good names for proactive holy archers because proactive holy archers don’t really exist in the general lexicon of Accepted Fantasy Stuff. Not as a single, unified concept. Whenever they show up they tend to be forcibly folded into other things which impose their own restrictions (the otherwise excellent ‘Valkyrie’ suggestion being untenable due to gender exclusions issues, for example), or come saddled with a specific term unique to that game ‘verse which players are explicitly instructed means ’holy archer’ (i.e. ‘Cipher’ meaning a psionic Mesmery sort of weird caster in Pillars of Eternity).

There’s no generic term for a righteous hunter/holy archer. Trying to force some random synonym for ‘Guardian’ to mean righteous hunter sucks and I won’t stand for it. Everything else tends to come with baggage the new spec doesn’t need. It is difficult; if it wasn’t, ArenaNet would’ve come up with a better name themselves, or we would have all come up with a better name folks generally agreed on as ‘the obvious choice’.

The lack of an obvious choice is exactly why we currently have a Dragonhunter and not a ‘The Obvious Choice’.

…Photonbuster.

Yep. You sure showed me, man. That is such an amazing choice I can’t believe it hasn’t come up before. Absolutely. That is the 100% perfect name for a righteous hunter. Going to go preach it to the rest of the forums right now.

.
..
…
….#sarcasm.

Genesis.8572:

The mesmer is about chaos magic and both illusion and time magic are aspects of chaos magic.

And the Guardian can be said to be about righteousness or virtuous battle.

Righteousness doesn’t always have to mean a passive defender. Virtuous battle is still battle. Many tales exist of chivalrous knights seeking to defeat a great and terrible monster – do they wait until the monster is in their base eating their dudes?

No – they went out looking for the monster, they found it where it lives, and they jacked its face up.

Is there a particular reason every Guardian spec ever needs to be a passive, defensive thing instead of an aggressive smiter of the wicked? because let me tell you, I have two Guards right now, and both of them are leaned as far towards “aggressive smiter of the wicked” as I can realistically make them because “stalwart defender of the innocent” is boring.

Should we just call it the Marvel, while we’re at it? Or perhaps the Cap?

I get that some names are going to have already been used for other things. That happens a lot. But you cannot believe anyone would take “the Avenger!” seriously. Not when that name is so widely, thoroughly, and infamously associated with a Marvel superhero group. Just doesn’t work.

Same with Arbiter. ‘Arbiter’ either means a very particular Elite from an old Bungie property, or someone who decides against you in a legal decision out of court. Furthermore, neither of those words remotely suggest a hunter, which is what this new specialization is.

Frankly, Archangel is closer to the correct idea, but it’s also patently unsuitable as these things are not, in fact, divine beings. Which also shoots down Valkyrie twice over, for that matter. And again, coming up with every single possible way of saying "Guardian’ except with different letters offers absolutely no indication of what this class actually does.

“Druid” is intuitively understood as a natural magic user who communes closely with nature.

“Chronomancer” is intuitively understood as a mage who specializes in time manipulation

Hell, for that matter “Guardian” is intuitively understood as an individual who stands with his allies and protects them from harm.

This new specialization is a big-game hunter who fuels his archery and his traps with righteous light manifested as burning energy/constructs. Ya know what? There is no good one-word name for one of those. “Dragonhunter” is honestly about as close as we can realistically get to a single word which tries (and does partially fail, but less so than anything else I’ve seen) to make what the thing does intuitively understandable from its name alone.

Until you can find me a one-word title that says “Light-manipulating hunter of large angry animals”, we’re probably going to have to stick with Dragonhunter as the best they can do.

That’s what happens when you get beyond established tropes in a fantasy setting – longstanding one-word names just don’t really work anymore.

You know what a worse name for the new Guardian spec than Dragonhunter is?

Literally all of these ideas.

People. Is “Chronomancer” a bad synonym for Mesmer? No? is “Druid” a bad synonym for Ranger? No? Then explain to me why everyone keeps coming up with bad synonyms for ‘Guardian’ as a replacement for the name Dragonhunter.

1.) “Call it a Paragon! Because GW1, and because it has wings and a spear!”

You can stick a rune in its headpiece and it’ll have a spear and magic helmet, too. Does that mean we should call it the Elmerfudd? Paragons don’t exist anymore. They were a flawed idea in GW1, and the parts of them that worked have already been folded into the base Guardian. Yes, you could call it the Paragon just because people are overly attached to a bunch of guys who couldn’t decide if they were nomadic native hunters or angelic heralds who wore their underwear on the outside, but that’d be lamer than Dragonhunter.

2.) “Call it Warden!”

Is it in charge of a prison? Is it responsible for the healthy maintenance of a thriving natural ecosystem (and if you make ‘hurr durr jungle’ cracks here I’ma pitch a fit)? No, and no? Then how does this make any remote sense? It’s also a passive term that doesn’t give any indication that this profession is a proactive hunter of bad things. It’s weak. Dragonhunter, at least, isn’t weak.

3.) “Call it a Valkyrie!”

I’d be delighted to call my Guardians, both of which are female, Valkyries, though it would cause clashes with the equipment prefix of the same name. Easy enough to change the prefix name, I suppose. That said, the menfolk likely wouldn’t particularly appreciate their new bow spec being Valhalla’s beer wenches.

4.) “Call it the Keeper/Defender/Sentinel/Protector/Bulwark/…!”

IT’S NOT A FREAKING GUARDIAN. It’s a new class that builds on the basis of the Guardian while taking it in a new direction the base class wouldn’t/can’t go, like the Chronomancer is not a Mesmer. Calling it ‘Guardian’ with different letters is insulting. Stop it.

5.) “Call it the Crusader then, if you want an aggressive, proactive holy warrior!”

Cantha has been removed from the game completely because NCSoft feels like the mingling of Asian/Oriental influences is offensive to their international customers. Do you really think that naming an elite spec “Perpetrators of the Islamic Holocaust” is going to fly?

Crusaders are bad, not good. No.

6.) “Okay…fine! Call it the Arbiter, then!”

Wort wort wort!

…anyways. In all seriousness…actually, no. No, ‘wort wort wort!’ just about covers it.

6.) “Well fine then! What do you think we should call it?!”

I’unno. Dragonhunter works. After all, we’re all people who fight wars and also members of a standing army, which makes us all Warriors and also Soldiers. We’ve all also gone on long, epic quests for various reasons, which makes us Adventurers, and a great many of us would qualify as Scholars, as well.

Who cares whether “we’re all Dragon hunters!” or not?

I get that it’s not good English, and I would’ve preferred Dragon Hunter myself. However, ArenaNet has had a very long-standing tradition of one-word class names they’re clearly unwilling to break. Give me a better idea for a proactive, righteous hunter of bad things – an actually better idea, not just Guardian with different letters – and we’ll talk.

I have yet to see one.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

…
I have Guardians too. I would like the elite spec name to reflect what they are, and the current choice just doesn’t suit. I’m already a dragon hunter, have been for almost 3 years now.

Heh…don’t look at it as “I hunt the Elder Dragons”. The Dragonhunter is described as a big-game hunter, and the still-kinda-lame trailer showed it hunting a giant dinosaur, which could be easily seen as a dragon if not a Dragon.

‘Dragonhunter’ means this is a Guardian who finds big angry things that are tormenting innocent folks, hunts them, and brings back their heads. That’s cool. I like that. This is a Guardian that doesn’t wait until somebody is in peril before saving them – it’s a Guardian that saves people by putting spears and arrows of light into the dragons – and demons, and plant monsters, and bug monsters, and religiously pushy frogs – that want to eat them before those people realize they’re in danger of being eaten.

The Dragonhunter is a righteous slayer of bad things. I’m interested in that, and if I were a righteous slayer of bad things, I wouldn’t want someone calling me a ‘Keeper’ just because the thing I studied before finding my calling was a passive protector who waited until trouble was on top of me before doing something about it.

The Dragonhunter honestly seems like the Smiting Prayers edition of the Guardian to me. Much more of a focus on searing one’s enemies with righteous light, and frankly that is something that would make me play my Guardians more. I will admit, I kinda wish ArenaNet sold reclass tokens somewhere so I could turn Fhionne into a Dragonhunter – when you have a Ranger named Fhionne Dragonlily who was supposed to be a Warrior before GW2 released and some uppity Charr took her spot, you start to really regret not being psychic enough to know she should’ve been a Guardian the whole time.

If not for the fact that she’s one of my oldest characters and also my level 500 Leatherworker, I’d be seriously thinking of rerolling Fhionne as a Dragonhunter. The spec fits her so well it’s scary. Heh…ah well.

As for the Dragonhunter itself, I am indeed very interested to see more of it. I’ve never been a ‘main’ Guardian player, but I like my Guards just fine, and this seems like it could be expanding the Guardian square into my personal preferences and playstyles. It really stinks that I work through these livestreams they always do.

Also: raise your hand if you’re a GW1 player who is perfectly and absolutely content to never see Paragons again and will take Dragonhunters all day long.

#raisedhand

scerevisiae.1972:

No it’s really not the power level, it’s about how the class feels & plays. The attunement mechanic is largely pointless without EAtt.

And this is where you lost me.

I’m honestly boggling over here, just staring at this statement with a stupid look on my face going “what? wha, wha…what?”

The attunement mechanic is supposed to have the point of offering you twice the weapon skills of every other class in the game, barring kit-heavy Engineers. You switch attunements and you get five new skills to use, with five new cooldowns. You get the passive minors for those attunements if you took the corresponding trait(line)s, you get any associated majors you’ve taken, you get…

How, how, HOW is the attunement mechanic ‘largely pointless’ without Elemental Attunement? Attunements are the fundamental engine driving the entire class, you cannot be serious telling me that there’s no point to the attunement system if you don’t get a handful of boons every time you flip attunements.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

…
Paragon, Keeper, Steward, Protector, Sentinel, Crusader…..those all would have been better options considering what a guardian is – a holy warrior. His specialization needs to be an extension of this, which the bow and traps looks like it could suit just fine. However, the name is way off base.

The issue is that none of those properly fit. The Dragonhunter is a more physical, proactive Guardian. The Guardian’s righteousnes and high concepts have, thus far, been somewhat static. The Virtues are boring as snot, and the Guardian itself doesn’t tend to have a lot of physicality to it. he swings his sword/scepter/mace/hammer, and magic happens around it. Not that this is bad, it’s still a much better vision of the Holy Warrior archetype than typical paladins, but I didn’t really realize how non-physical Guards were until ArenaNet started talking about the Dragonhunter.

This iteration of the class, though? Much more focused on protecting its allies by defeating its enemies, or on being in the right place to do the right thing. It casts with its hands, not its mind, and it is a hunter.

‘Paragon’ has ties back to GW1 lore, and as a GW1 player? Paragons were boring. They had excellent angel-wing animations, and Elona was itself bursting with life and flavor…but the Paragon couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a native Elonian hunter with African-styled weapons and tactics, or a so-European-it-hurts angelic herald in white tights. They felt confused, and were easily the weakest class in the game when it came to identity and cohesion. Assassins, Ritualists, Dervishes, all boss. Paragons…Imbagons aside, not so much.

Keeper, Steward, Protector, Sentinel…none of those work for beans for a proactive class. Those are just synonyms of various sorts for Guardian, and the Dragonhunter is a Dragonhunter, not a Guardian. It’s a permutation of the class with distinctly different goals and methods. It doesn’t stand around and wait to protect its allies, it protects its allies upside its enemies’ face with blazing spears of light and righteous traps full of screw-you-buddy.

Crusader…well, Crusader gets the proactive part right, but it’s also an extremely bad word in the international scene. It’d be somewhat analogous to calling an elite spec ‘Nahtzee’, as many Muslim and Arabian communities throughout the world consider the Crusades to be their own tragically forgotten Holocaust. It also doesn’t really conjure up images of a righteous hunter seeking evil and destroying it. Crusaders don’t use bows or traps. Still closer than the others, but we’re not going to get a Crusader if ArenaNet knows what’s good for them. And given the fact that Cantha has been excised from the game forever due to international tensions…well.

I get that people are offended by the term ‘Dragonhunter’. It is a bit clumsy, and doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the game’s class names, but frankly? That’s okay. Elite specs are a new thing with new standards, and I’d much rather play a Dragonhunter than any of the hundred other names players keep coming up with which are basically just more names for a passive bodyguard-type guy.

We have Guardians. Why does the new spec name have to be something-else-that-just-means-Guardian-with-different-letters?

‘Dragonhunter’ isn’t so much ‘hunts the Elder Dragons’ as it is ‘hunts big angry dragon-like things’. I will admit, I did not expect them to take their resident Paladin and turn him into Sir Hammerlock, but I’m going to err on the side of ‘this actually sounds pretty dang cool!’

For one, traps. It means the Guardian/Dragonhunter could now use Trapper runes if it likes, which would give Dragonhunter, and through it the base Guardian in some manner, semi-predictable access to Stealth. Yeah, not a lot of players like existing traps, but y’know what? Those are existing traps. Who knows how the Dragonhunter’s traps will work, eh?

For two, the new Virtue forms sound kind of awesome. Both of my existing Guardians basically just sit on all their Virtues except for Justice, because for the most part the Virtues are uninteresting and often counter-intuitive. Group Aegis is only helpful if my group knows I’m going to dump it on them, elsewise they’ll handle their own defenses as the game has taught them to. Resolve’s healing is…not high. And Justice only gets activated for trait benefits.

Spear of Justice works wonderfully with some of the reworked Justice traits (looking at you, Wrath of Justice), Wings of Resolve has a large number of potential applications what with being a giant freakin’ jump as well as an AoE heal, and Shield of Courage? Shield of Courage, my team can clearly and easily see I’m using, and can also clearly and easily see where the safety is. They know that getting behind the giant wall of light means they take less damage – it’s much more intuitive and party-friendly than the existing Courage.

For three, dat longbow. We don’t know much yet, and the trailer was not particularly helpful, no, but a long-range targeted Symbol, with some of the vicious new Symbol traits? Yeah. I’ll be waiting to see how that can be awesome as all get-out, and even if the longbow ends up sucking? Frankly I’d be thinking of taking the new specialization for the incredibly baller Virtues rework alone.

Yeah, it’s not specifically called the Paragon. It doesn’t really feel like a Paragon. The base Guardian is more of a Paragon than this thing, distance combat aside. From what we know, the Dragonhunter definitely feels more…primal, maybe? I’unno. I just think that unlike the Chronomancer, which I like but which also is a generic-y sort of thing, what I’ve seen/heard of the Dragonhunter makes it feel like it belongs in the jungle hunting dragons.

Is it the name I would’ve picked? Prolly not…but I’m warming up to it.

That’s the thing – that article comes to the conclusion that most of what the Necromancer has is good, they just need to get more of it. As opposed to the typical official-forum “everything [game’s developer] does is absolutely horrible and any self-respecting player of [game] who can tell black from white or up from down has no choice except to despise [game’s developer] with every fiber of their being for deliberately setting out to screw over [class/race/’Mech/whatever]”, he undertook a calm and reasonable analysis of the profession and tried to come up with at least the kernels of ideas required to fix it.

Death Shroud replacing your 1-5 weapon skills, rather than your entire bar, would be an excellent start. Death Shroud not blocking healing effects, or potentially absorbing healing effects as increased Life Force while in Shroud, would be an equally good step 2. Blood Magic not healing for peanuts is something that should’ve been in from the start. How is it that Invigorating Precision, one Thief trait, is miles better at offensive heal-while-you-inflict-beatings than the entire Blood Magic line?

A significant Toughness boost while in Shroud wouldn’t go amiss, or for that matter rebalance how much damage every given point of life force gets to absorb. If degradation was stronger/more difficult to trait down (i.e. Shroud didn’t/couldn’t last as long), but every point of LF absorbed, say, three points of damage…? Then, suddenly, relying on DS for protection against spikes or padding out one’s normal health would be less problematic.

What would not be good starts is scrapping Shroud altogether, or completely tearing down and rebuilding the class’ weapons from scratch, so that it gets all the same blocks, dodges, evasions, and invulns as everything else. Necromancers are the facetank class; they’re not supposed to avoid everything you do, they’re supposed to eat it and then keep right on coming after your brains for dessert. That’s their schtick, one of the ways they’re supposed to feel different from Chronomancers or Guardians or Revenants or what-have-you.

Life steals need to be significantly better. Death Shroud should be much more durable, and frankly lowering the stupidly high cast time for Life Blast would go a long way towards making Shroud feel better. Necromancers should gain pretty much unparalleled access to Resistance, so they can draw conditions, use them, feed off them, whatever they want to do with them, much more effectively. They need much more frequent and sustainable access to cripples and chills – don’t give the necromancer more mobility, give it more options to remove its enemies’ mobility.

My Necromancer is one of my favorite characters. I play her all the time even with how utterly awful everyone claims Necromancers are, but I’m also with a very casual, fun-loving guild and tend to do more solo work than anything else, so I don’t run into as many issues as the PvP ultracomps or the Fractals speed-clear guys or whatever do. Clearly I don’t know my head from a pumpkin helm when it comes to things like class balance, but I do know that if I wanted to play a dodgey blocky tricksy thing that evades/avoids everything that comes its way with a plethora of stacked active defenses, I’d play a Mesmer.

I hate my Mesmer.

I want my necromancer to be a tough, unyielding, undying black mage that uses its own pain as a condiment for its enemies’ souls. My necromancer is supposed to survive damage through unnatural vitality (high base health, lifesteals), through condition control and manipulation, and through redirecting damage it takes into Torment (Death Shroud), and which deals with its enemies by sticking them in place and rending their lives until they don’t have them anymore. I don’t want my necromancer to do all the same crap everybody else does. If I wanted to do that crap I’d play everybody else.

‘Fixing’ the Necromancer is no such thing if the thing you have at the end of the process is no longer a Necromancer.

HGH by itself is something of a game-breaker and one of few existing Grandmasters that feels like a Grandmaster. 409 makes Elixir Engineers immune to conditions. You don’t think being able to take one trait in one line that gives you faster Elixirs which also give you all the Might in creation and makes you immune to conditions might be overdoing it a touch?

CONTINUUM SHIFT IS NOT A FREAKING DEATH SHROUD X_@

I am so sick of seeing that. Yes, it can potentially be a bass-ackwards heal which spikes you back up to high health – but only if you were at high health before you cast CS something like six seconds ago tops. It doesn’t provide an entire set of new skills with their own independent cooldowns, and it’s also a resource-eater that requires the Chronomancer to shatter their existing illusions. If it lasts longer than six seconds (3s base +1s per illusion), I will eat this company monitor in front of me.

You know what happens if a Chronomancer Splits at low health? They go right back to being at low health six seconds later, even if a hundred-man legion of blast-heal-blasting Engineers run up to him and drop five hundred thousand points of health in his pants. Any cooldowns they used before Splitting – and they need to use cooldowns to generate illusions to Slit with, outside Scepter AA – are lengthened by whatever time the Chronomancer spends Split, since their cooldowns are reset as well.

Treating Continuum Split like a second health bar or a Massmorey Death Shroud shows a fundamental lack of understanding, of either DS or CS. Continuum Split has tremendously more potential power than Shroud, at the cost of requiring more resources to use, having a vastly longer cooldown, and also being much more difficult to use well.

Continuum Split is more like an Elite shatter than a Death Shroud analog. it’s meant to be used sparingly, deployed carefully when someone needs to get through a particularly tough fight. Shroud, on the other hand, is a short-cooldown, low-maintenance mode meant to be woven into a Necromancer’s normal fighting style.

People are flipping way too many lids over the whole EHRMAHGEHRD HEHRLTH REHRSEHRT thing. And people are taking the dual-classing comment too literally. The Chronomancer uses Wells because ArenaNet wanted giant clocks on the ground that pulse effects, and using an existing skill classification allows for more potential rune/sigil synergy in the future. The Chronomancer is only superficially an Me/N, and trying to treat it like a particularly fruity Necromancer is going to get Chronomancers killed.

Especially when they realize their’second health bar’ has a two-minute cooldown before Alacrity. That 10s cooldown on Shroud is going to start lookin’ mighty inviting, ne?

Khenzy.9348:

In practice, that’s not true, at all. Weapon skills are the ones you press 90% of the time, they are the prime build defining feature of any build and playstyle.
No matter how they twist it, some professions getting 5 weapon skills and others getting only 2 is an enormous difference.

You’re stating that 1-5, by themselves, outweigh literally every other facet of one’s build all taken together, such that the ‘loss’ of three weapon skills means an offhand spec class is categorically inferior to a 2h spec or Mainhand spec class.

1-5 outweigh your traits, equipment, utilities, healing, elite choices, as well as your profession mechanic and profession-specific functions. All at once.

You realize how ridiculous that sounds, right?

Again – a Chronomancer is balanced such that the player can use either MH sword or MH Scepter and still gain 100% of the Chronomancer’s new abilities. Furthermore, utility cooldowns are falling and their impact is rising since the days of launch, when they were largely pointless. And if you don’t feel like the Chronomancer is worth your time? Don’t play it – run a base Mesmer instead with a 2H weapon. Or wait for the time when Mesmers get a hammer elite spec or a bow of their own, as they otherwise use every other 2H in the game already, eh?

The Chronomancer gains Alacrity, as well. There’s no guarantee, as of yet, that every other specialization also gains access to a new unremovable buff or the ability to double-cast elite skills. It could be that specs with two-handed weapons gain fewer, or less impactful, non-weapon resources.

What ArenaNet said was that each elite specialization was supposed to be equally fun and rewarding to play. That doesn’t mean each of them gets the exact same list of benefits, as such a stance would tremendously limit ArenaNet’s flexibility in creating new specializations. People are flippin’ their hairpieces over the minutiae and making all kinds of accusations about ArenaNet ‘favoring’ certain classes simply because they get more weapon skills.

Well, how ‘bout this – the Chronomancer gets to pick between melee-range Power sword attacks or distance Malice scepter attacks while still making use of 100% of its new specialization mechanics, enabling it to pick where it wants to be. The Bowdian gets to use a Longbow, and if it doesn’t like those Longbow skills it gets zero granularity to decide “Hey, maybe if I used a Focus or Shield instead…”

Two-handed weapon means it gets five new weapon skills – or zero new weapon skills if it wants to use its non-weapon mechanics with something other than a Longbow.

Eggs.3142:

The picture also shows them using it two handed. Which while is not 100% proof, it is an indication that its a ‘two-handed- bow’

‘Two-handed bow’? Really, dude? o_@

Hmm…winged longbow Guardian spec…

Obviously the Paragon is strong with this one, but I don’t know as there’s enough separate identity left in the skein of ideas they pulled apart that used to be the Paragon to make a new elite spec from. The Paragon was billed as a heavy-armor party leader with holy powers (hinted at via their admittedly awesome phantom-wings animations) and a focus on vocal abilities. The base Guardian…is a heavy-armor party leader with actual straight-up holy powers and access to vocal abilities. Short the spear – which we’re not getting – all the Guardian lacked is a strong ranged option. And…well, Longbow.

I don’t think the Guard spec will be ‘Paragon’ because the Guardian’s already eaten most of the ‘Paragon’ concept/role. Oh, they may use the term ‘Paragon’, but I doubt it’d be much more than a cheeky callout to the original class, not a serious attempt to recreate a Paragon facsimile in GW2. Heh, they’ve already done that.

As for skill type…hmm. Banners are a possibility, but Guard and Warr are already distressingly similar in a lot of ways. They would be a good fit for a backrow support character, though…hmm. I could almost see Spirits, but realistically there’s not much conceptual difference between Spirits and Banners. A stationary AoE buff fountain is a stationary AoE buff fountain, and in neither case is gameplay around the things usually very interesting. Conjures occur to me as something a Guardian elite spec might be able to work with, but Elementalist conjures are in a dicey place as it is, and also Spirit Weapons.

A lot of other classes’ special skill lines are basically grab bags of random skills appropriate for the class archetype which the devs gathered together for traits with no real unifying identity – Deceptions and Tricks, Glamours/Manipulations, a few others. Some stuff just flat isn’t fit for a Guardian – Venoms and Corruptions just don’t work on a holy warrior, though mechanically both could be thematically repurposed to work. Just couldn’t call them Venoms or Corruptions, which kinna defeats the point. So between skill lines with no real identity, skill lines that require mechanics the Guard doesn’t have (Glyphs), and skill lines that run counter to the purpose of a righteous paladin, we lose at least three quarters of the game’s skill options.

Someone pointed out in a Banshee speculation thread that Elixirs aren’t necessarily exclusive to Engineers, but without toolbelt thrown skills Elixirs aren’t good party support, and party support is pretty much the core of what the Guard does. Turrets…well for one, you’d have to create random magic turrets because Guardians don’t do wrenches, for two once again Spirit Weapons, and for three no. Same for most of the rest of the Engineer’s stuff, really.

Man, this stuff is hard. So many of the skill categories in the game are either profession-exclusive by fundamental mechanics or just don’t work as skill categories. We’ll have to see what comes of the Bowdian, I suppose.

(Arch(er)angel?)

Jokubas.4265:

I also want to point out that, Mesmer is not getting a “second health bar”. Chronomancer is. That’s important because if you nerfed these things across the board, the Mesmers who haven’t specialized in Chronomancer would be completely destroyed. Of course, we have no reason to believe that Elite Specializations lose anything, but it’s something to think about (and not necessarily because of this, but balance in general going forward).

The idea is less “Hey, let’s #rekt the Massmore’s blocks/dodges/evasions/invulns because the Chronomancer gets a second health bar like Necromancers do with CS!”

And more “Necromancers don’t get any blocks/dodges/evasions/invulns at all and are supposed to just take everything to the face because they have high base health and Death Shroud…that’s both not really fair and also not really very effective…q_q”

Which is a valid point to be made, even if this isn’t the best way to go about it.

(stupid character limits…)

In Summation - Marjory’s comments towards learning the stances for her new greatsword lead me to believe that we could be seeing a stance-based death knight sort of thing, which could be interesting but wouldn’t do a dang thing to solve the Necromancer’s whole selfishness issue in PvE unless they were some really whacky stances. Of the remaining skill types, relatively few fit a melee Necromancer-y sort of feel. Venoms are a possibility but would be a disappointing such possibility, Spirits would help solve the whole selfishness issue and also be a callout to Ritualists, but Spirits are in a bad place right now as it is, and relatively little else is of use.

I honestly think there could be a strong case for Shouts on the Necromancer elite spec. Necromancers need some manner of party support, even if it’s just actually-effective ‘debuff the enemies!’ offensive support, and the notion of a wailing Banshee carving people up with a claymore is just too awesome not to do. That and I think stances might well fit better on the Tempest. The name implies a very volatile, active combat style, and stances which synergized with attunements could be a pretty sweet thing to see. Even if it’d start getting into SC Maxi levels of “okay, Stance A leads into Stutter B, which can go into either Stance C or Follow-up D, depending on whether I do E or F…”

…anyways. Gripton of words aside…there you go. I’m going to go sleep now. G’night.

Well, let’s look at it from another direction. What sort of skills might Necromancers pick up?

Looking at this list right here and going down it…

Transforms - while a spec dealing heavily with transform skills would be interesting, it doesn’t seem very Necro-ish. That and it steps on the Kitgineer’s toes to some extent and would be a hassle to deal with.

Traps - Uhh…Marks. Moving on.

Guard Stuff - Consecrations seem…odd…for a black-magic caster, though black mages have often done inverted consecrations so maybe. Though, wouldn’t inverted Consecrations be Corruptions? Maybe that’s just me. Just seems…weird. Meditations are in the same boat, and Spirit weapons and Symbols step on minions and marks respectively. Tomes…yeahlolno, and Wards are a definite Guard exclusive. Nothing here really worth mentioning.

Warrior Stuff - Banners don’t really seem like a necromancer sort of thing, and frankly they’re not the sort of skill one centers a build around. Sure, one or two, but a barful of banners sounds like butt. Physical skills are just not going to transfer to Necromancer and I don’t care that they have greatswords, though that one comment by Marjory about Rox ‘teaching her the stances’ means stances might well be on the table. That could potentially be interesting if done right, though not nearly as awesome as a Banshee.

Engineer Stuff - …yeah, not happening.

Ranger Stuff - Spirits seem like they could be an idea, hearken back to the old GW1 Ritualists, but Ritualists did not, as a general rule, run around with two-handed greatswords. Besides, Spirits are bad and uninteresting on Rangers – why port bad an uninteresting to an elite spec? Survival skills don’t fit the Necromancer’s theme at all, and I think the forums would just erupt into open revolt if the necromancer’s elite spec had a Ranger-style pet, so…yeah.

Thief Stuff - Exempting dual-wields and stealth skills leaves us Deceptions, Tricks, and Venoms. Deceptions and Tricks are things ArenaNet did in order to group Thief utilities into traitable bundles and have no real identity or unifying nature, so they’re out. Venoms, on the other hand, could be semi-intriguing. Sure, the Thief’s venoms stink, but that doesn’t mean someone else’s have to as well. The greatsword Necromancer might well be a decent choice for experimenting with potent necrotic venoms, though frankly I’m not sure how that’s a build niche Scepter doesn’t cover. We’d have to see how that goes, but I don’t really think it’s likely. Venoms are another skill which are kinda bad and uninteresting on their original class and need work there before they get ported out to an elite spec.

Elementalist Stuff - Ignoring for the moment that giving Necromancers any category of Ele skills would result in Eles shrieking louder than Banshees…Arcane is out, as the Elementalist is the accepted mastery of outright wizardry and direct manipulation of the aethereal. I would’ve expected Massmores to get Arcane skills before Necromancers did, and they may yet do just that in a future Elite spec, but the sources Necromancers draw power from don’t lend themselves to ‘raw, non-elemental energy’. Cantrips…hmm. I don’t see a specific reason why not, except that nobody likes them and they only get used as traited defensive spells and stunbreaks. Conjures would be weird, especially since Elite specs are generally supposed to focus on their new weapon as much as their new skills and conjures would get in the way of that. Glyphs are tied too closely to attunement swaps to really be glyphs on anything else.

Mesmer Stuff - Turnabout is fair play! Chronomancers get wells, let’s see if there’s anything the Massmore can contribute Necromancy’s way. CLones/phantasms are right out, and both glamours and manipulations have the same issues Deceptions/Tricks do where they’re basically arbitrary categories for traits to deal with and don’t really have a unifying theme to run with. That leaves Mantras, and while Mantras are an interesting category choice on Massmores, a greatsword Necromancer is almost assuredly going to be melee-range since only Massmores are silly enough to snipe with swords. Mantras are…weird…in melee range. I don’t particularly like the notion of locking myself into a three-second cast in punching distance of the baddites. Not only does it feel kinda wildly unsafe, it seems clunky and flow-breaking to boot. How many MH Sword Mantra Massmores are out there, anyways?

Dude. Have you seen banshees? Do you Celtic myth, broh? o_O

A screeching light-armor death maiden with a greatsword in hand rending her enemy’s souls with her unearthly voice before rending their flesh with her totally-earthly claymore? Yeah, that fits right in, and is also about as brutal as it gets. In fact the more I think about it the more intensely depressed I’m going to be when it doesn’t happen, because it sounds amazing.

I really, truly despise the fact that ‘challenging PvE content’ instantly, unilaterally, and exclusively means RAIDZ to anyone and everyone in this forum that isn’t me.

Gonna be honest with you guys here – I can’t stand RAIDZ. Force twenty guys to get together to do a given thing and your own abilities no longer matter for snot. It doesn’t matter whatsoever what you do, fail to do, or manage to heroically pull off against long odds. The RAID will succeed or fail regardless of what you do. Furthermore, RAIDZ lock a great tremendous majority of players out of doing them because of high player count requirements. A 20-man RAID is a thing anyone without a guild of, realistically, 50 or more people in it is never going to see. A five-man dungeon team? Yeah, solos can’t do dungeons either, but four buddies to run dungeons with is something most folks can eventually aspire to pull off. Being able to find a 50-man minimum guild is less of a sure bet.

And besides. We all know what RAID guilds are like.

I would vastly rather see RAIDZ-style content be something more akin to the Toxic Tower; that sort of semi-instanced content was intriguing, and solo players could still actually see it by tagging along with larger groups, while guilds were still highly encouraged to form their own parties to handle the thing. As for challenging PvE content…dungeons. More of them, more like Aetherpath (if not as agonizingly long) and less like CoF1. Redux the dungeons we have, put new ones in Heart of Thorns, and let Guild Wars 2 be the game where small teams of close friends get to shine, instead of needing herds of nerds as vast as the stars themselves to get anything done.

Not everybody can manage to work a second job with a high-prestige RAIDZ guild in order to continue being able to play the game. Guild Wars 2 is about challenging industry conventions, eh? Let’s challenge the one which says that if you can’t do RAIDZ, you may as well uninstall and go back to playing Angry Birds on your iThing.

Some of us are totally on board with never seeing RAIDZ in an MMO again. As odd as it is for other people to believe.

Mar.4839:

Wow I came to post about this too. As much as I dislike the idea of Necromancer’s getting shouts, only because it just sounds uninteresting. I have to agree that, barring the Revenant obtaining them, Necromancers seem the most likely candidate. Especially if “one specialization getting a defiance bar” is what the Necromancer’s Elite specialization allows them to do with lifeforce.

If we look at it right now, almost all really tanky professions have shouts (Warriors, Guardians, and Rangers), Necromancer is also tanky and is lacking shouts. Again it could go to the Revenant too but Roy said they are a dark knight-ish archetypal profession and usually those guys are lone wolves.

Hard for the Rev to get a new set of utility skills; their elite spec will likely introduce a new Legend rather than give them a straight utility choice. Now, that legend could be a Legend that offers its channelers six utility shouts, but outside Adelbern I don’t recall anyone in GW1 who spent their entire lives screaming at people. And Adelbern’s out because he’s a jackwad ghost in AC story.

Assuming that elite specs don’t double up on utility skill types, that leaves Warrs, Guards, and Rangers out. I can’t really conceive of a Thief permutation which would appreciate bellowing its face off. Stealth and yodeling just don’t mesh. Chronomancers do wells. So that does indeed leave Tempests, Siegemasters, or whatever the Necromancer ends up being, and frankly a case can be made for all three.

As for not wanting shouts on a NecroBanshee? We’re talking about screaming at your enemy’s soul. Frankly I could easily see an elite Banshee shout being something like…:

Howl from Beyond
“Unleash a scream from beyond the grave to rip at your enemies’ souls, Stunning them and making them Vulnerable. Regain life force for each target struck.” (2s Stun, 25 Vuln@10s, 20% life force per target. Moderate-heavy AoE damage)

Yeah. Scream at your enemies so hard their souls shatter, leaving them paralyzed for a couple of seconds whole you hoover up the wreckage, and also they’re maxed-out Vulnerable to you cutting them into ribroasts with your death-powered greatsword.

‘Shouts’ doesn’t have to mean mostly passive boon application for your group. Shouts just mean that somebody’s being loud. Banshees are as loud as it gets, eh?

You know what?

A Banshee with a ghostly greatsword who screams to debilitate her foes/terrify her allies into performing better sounds kinda awesome. I would, in fact, play the heck out of that. Unfortunately I don’t think we’ll get it – more likely, I think, for the Engineer or Elementalist to get shouts. Especially since Marjory is definitely going to be one of these new Necromancer specs, and frankly she’s really not a Banshee.

As we recall, ‘Shouts’ aren’t always shouts – back in GW1, the Paragon had various song-like vocal skills which may well translate as ‘Shouts’ in something like the Tempest. Heck, don’t even need to do that – how many mages in fantasy have you seen who shout arcane phrases in long-dead languages to cast spells? And we all know how loud one has to be to get themselves heard in a busy machine shop – the Siegemaster (calling it now, Siegemaster for Engineer spec :P) would’ve learned to bellow like a furnace just to get people to listen to him. He’d probably have a similar set of shouts to Warr and Guard, which would be depressing, but honestly? I could see the Tempest invoking magical effects via shouted incantations.

Still kinda want this Banshee, though. The notion of screaming at your enemies to inhibit/damage them prior to carving them to pieces with a greatsword is in fact tremendously awesome and I want to do it. I will totally reskin Ryn to something primal and savage and stuff. It would be amazing.

Fraggit, now you guys have me hoping I’m wrong. Necro elite spec next, ArenaNet!

Lily.1935:

Using Death shroud is a Double edged sword as well. And I also started the post off with “Okay not really.” Its really tongue and cheek to people who say Death Shroud is a second health bar when it really isn’t.

DS doesn’t really have any way of screwing over your recharges/healing the way Continuum Split does. Also it’s a bar which takes damage when enemies hit it in lieu of your main health bar when you’re Shrouded up.

Heh…I get what you’re saying Lily, I do, but this isn’t the way to try and point out issues with the Necromancer. Necromancers already get practically double a Massmore’s health, and you’re comparing a base Necromancer without traits to half a Chronomancer build. Expecting a necromancer to just facetank everything on its fat health bar without any extra dodges, blocks, evasions or mobility sucks, yeah, especially when Massmores get all of those and Chronomancers get all of those plus a TARDIS – but complaining about a Necromancer’s health is kinda the last thing people pay attention to.