Guild Wars 2

I find it quite boring except the platforms and even those are ill designed. The tower defense part just gets extremely long and boring, especially if you have to wait until it gets back to your lane to break a chain. The platform part needs to allow the other people in your lane to assist after they defeat their champion. Perhaps a little walkway to the platforms on either side of you? Last but not least the 2 hour wait is very excessive.

Terrahero.9358:

I dont really see what the difference would be if they changed it to a guarenteed burn on Lifeblast.
The big condition burst involves Deathshroud anyway, so now they need to weave in 1 Lifeblast and they get the same result?

Honestly i feel giving Necro’s Burning was a mistake.

Making things more complicated increases the chance of failure. Now instead of popping into DS using fear then torment you also need to lifeblast. This not only keeps you in DS longer but give your enemy more time to react to the combo. Once you blow your DS cooldowns you want to get out ASAP to save lifeforce for either another burst or for survival. Having to continuously pop into DS just to put on burning where before you could have it up continually just drops our survivability since DS is pretty much all of it. If it’s on cooldown and you need it, you die.

I fully agree that giving burning to necros was a mistake but they need a complete revert to undo the damage. Necros got nerfs based on having burning and now that it’s being moved and will be harder to use effectively they other nerfs are still present.

I would pay them money if they postponed the last 3 story arcs for the feature patch. It’s very telling about the state of the game when balance changes are worth way more to a lot of people than the “story” content. How long does it really take to get some tweaking done to some classes? Most of it is just changing some numbers in a database/formula. I’d say they spent time testing to make sure the changes were balanced but just look at the current balance that they’ve “tested”. The worst part is that it will have been 4 months since the last underwhelming balance patch and it will still be a huge letdown. I have yet to hear of anything in the feature patch that warrants it being it’s own patch. Everything from ferocity, sigils/runes, class balance, etc are all things that SHOULD be put in alongside story content. Every other MMO developer can do it, why can’t ArenaNet?

Lilith Ajit.6173:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Vol.7601:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Vol.7601:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I’m sad that they decided to make another Teq scale encounter. I thought they would have learned to make it scale more by this point. If they aren’t going to merge servers and increase zone caps then the bosses need to scale starting at 20 players, not 100.

Skill and coordination in the open world = bad.
Skill and coordination in instances and guild sized events = good.

It really isn’t that hard of a concept.

To be honest, teq is not that hard. Players refusing to work together and utilize strategies is the issue when dealing with teq. Every server should have the capability of defeating him on reset.

If you do not want to do teq/wurm, then fine. There are plenty of less-challenging bosses out there that you can do. But for those that want challenging content and are willing to put the time and effort, we have our opportunities.

There is nothing challenging about Teq himself. The “challenge” is having to stand in one zone for 2 hours in order to get a spot, or to fail because there are too many trolls or afk people.

I have no problem with challenging content, but the only reason the content is challenging is because of the lag and how stupid most players are.

What I want is a fight that takes actual coordination with interesting mechanics where we can show up on our own schedule, figure out the fight and not fail due to level 40’s in blues who want to see the fight but won’t listen to directions or come back from being afk.

I have to schedule more time to wait to fight teq than it took me to complete entire raids in WoW.

I hope you have run teq multiple times because there is no way an uncoordinated server will be able to just port in 2 minutes before the start and expect it to succeed.

First you need 6 competent turret gunners that know what they are doing. Then you need 2 separate defense groups that need to kite/lure spawn away from the cannons (as well as deal with tentacles that spawn on cannons). Then you need to allocate four different groups to spread out amongst the 3 batteries and megalaser.

You can’t possibly expect an unorganized zerg to allocate themselves accordingly.

We do it every night 10 minutes before spawn on JQ. Everyone stands AFK on the cliff for 2-3 hours in advance, but organization doesn’t start until 10 minutes prior.

It sounds like this fight might be a little more interesting. I still wish it scaled better though, having 100 players instead of 20 doesn’t really change the challenge imo.

We shall see today at some point.

The 2-3 hours might be caused by the server only organizing it once per day.

For instance, when I guest onto BG to do Teq, I usually go an hour to 45 minutes in advance, and I’m always in, because BG does it so much everyone isn’t desperately trying to get that one spot for the one time Teq will be downed on the server per day.

Gonna call you out on this one! I am on BG and I show up an hour early(7:00 pm est) and NEVER get into the main server. We still kill teqautl on the overflows though. If you show up in the last 15-30 minutes though you really risk getting on to an overflow that won’t kill him.

Vol.7601:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Vol.7601:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I’m sad that they decided to make another Teq scale encounter. I thought they would have learned to make it scale more by this point. If they aren’t going to merge servers and increase zone caps then the bosses need to scale starting at 20 players, not 100.

Skill and coordination in the open world = bad.
Skill and coordination in instances and guild sized events = good.

It really isn’t that hard of a concept.

To be honest, teq is not that hard. Players refusing to work together and utilize strategies is the issue when dealing with teq. Every server should have the capability of defeating him on reset.

If you do not want to do teq/wurm, then fine. There are plenty of less-challenging bosses out there that you can do. But for those that want challenging content and are willing to put the time and effort, we have our opportunities.

There is nothing challenging about Teq himself. The “challenge” is having to stand in one zone for 2 hours in order to get a spot, or to fail because there are too many trolls or afk people.

I have no problem with challenging content, but the only reason the content is challenging is because of the lag and how stupid most players are.

What I want is a fight that takes actual coordination with interesting mechanics where we can show up on our own schedule, figure out the fight and not fail due to level 40’s in blues who want to see the fight but won’t listen to directions or come back from being afk.

I have to schedule more time to wait to fight teq than it took me to complete entire raids in WoW.

I hope you have run teq multiple times because there is no way an uncoordinated server will be able to just port in 2 minutes before the start and expect it to succeed.

First you need 6 competent turret gunners that know what they are doing. Then you need 2 separate defense groups that need to kite/lure spawn away from the cannons (as well as deal with tentacles that spawn on cannons). Then you need to allocate four different groups to spread out amongst the 3 batteries and megalaser.

You can’t possibly expect an unorganized zerg to allocate themselves accordingly.

So 10 minutes of organization then? All it takes is 1 person organizing really, it happens everyday in 3-4 sparkfly overflows. Don’t get me wrong, I think having a hard timer on tequatl was a bad idea. It probably would have been better if the lose condition was set at a battery or mega-laser dying. That way people would have to pay attention to zerg allocation instead of a timer ticking down and a DPS race. The turrets should have also been non-usable so they couldn’t be trolled, instead just grab some ammo and run it back to the turrets so they could keep firing.

I’m curious to see what they do with this new encounter. Hopefully they have learned from Tequatl and not included a hard timer or trollable mechanics. What I really don’t want to see is instanced raids. Then the game becomes about joining a big guild and dedicating time to raiding and that’s the exact opposite of what a lot of people want.

Andele.1306:

Ihales.3820:

because: a)weapon swap (you can even count underwater skills, but yeah underwater combat…) b)reduced initiative regeneration = increased “cooldown” on all skills not only on those used.

a) Still chilled
b) Because its not like all of your skills dont have any cooldown expect said initiative and you can spam a single skill 3 times in a row without cooldown…. right no need for a condition which has one main thing going for it, increasing the reduced risk window between skills, to work on that… totally balanced for everyone else…

a) You missed the point. If any other class is chilled they can still swap weapons and have a bunch of fresh skills to use until other skills are off chilled cooldown. A thief cannot do that since all of their skills are tied to initiative. If you are all about making it fair then make sure you also campaign for a separate initiative bars for each weapon swap

b) There is a tradeoff for using 3 of the same skills in a row and that is that we can then no longer use any #2-#5 weapon skill on both weapon sets. Other players can do #2-#5 swap and do #2-#5. So normal players can drop 8 attacks(some way more) where a thief can drop 3-5.

Initiative is a terrible mechanic for balancing. It has a great upfront burst but it’s sustain is terrible, if you make the sustain good then the burst needs nerfed. A thief at base regen and post burst(3-4 attacks) can special attack once every 3-6 seconds(call it 4.5 avg), if you apply chill that’s 1 attack every 5-10 seconds(7.5 avg). Now for other classes the average cooldown is ~15 seconds. If each attack takes 1 second to perform and you have 8 attacks that is 1 attack every 1.875 seconds, chilled that’s 1 attack every 3.113. So lets get this straight, thief initiative regen is ALREADY at chilled levels. There is some more variables that can be applied to this(initiative traits/signets and cooldown traits), but I am not doing spreadsheets just to further prove it.

You want to apply chilled to thief initiative to be fair, that’s fine. But then thief initiative needs buffed to be equal to other classes attacks per second, basically double what initiative regen is currently.

killahmayne.9518:

If people want to cite sword/GS as an example of broken mobility, How about I cite the elementalist with fiery greatsword, teleport and rtl? Can anybody catch that? Seriously. Or thieves with shortbow and shadow step and stealth, or rangers with sword + greatsword.

Warriors wielding only a greatsword, with no trait cooldown only has average out of combat mobility. Which many people tend to have in WvW.

I’ve caught a fiery greatsword ele on my warrior. Not sure if he was bad or what but I caught and then killed him. Shortbow thieves are quite easy to catch as the arrow has travel time and the extra distance gained is very small and can only do it twice before it becomes basically a 6-7s cooldown. Stealth is good for getting away but honestly doesn’t compete for landspeed. Shadowstep is the same as blink and you saw how quickly the warrior gets out of range after it’s used. Heartseeker on thief is actually really good landspeed but I don’t think it’s faster than a warrior. I’ve never had a problem with a ranger outrunning me or killing me for that matter.

The warrior is FAR from average landspeed. You can get 25% runspeed for using melee for 10pts which is great. Then the rush+whirlwind combo will alone create a big gap between you and other classes. You can have nearly 100% swiftness uptime with balanced stance+Signet of Rage too. Then of course you have savage leap and you can pair that with warhorn(swiftness+remove movement conditions) or shield for blocking which is good if someone ever does catch up(unlikely), getting out of a fight(likely), or if you run into someone heading towards you(likely).

Some classes can be pretty mobile but they have to really spec for it and give up other things. Warrior can be very mobile and lose very little while doing it. Just using a greatsword makes you more mobile than majority of enemies on the battlefield and that’s why I don’t also run sword with it. If someone starts outrunning me or catches up to me then meh, it’s not worth the chase and I’ll take a death.

The absolute worst thing that I’ve found in WvW that are faster than any class in the game are the quick travelers. At the first sign of a class they don’t want to fight or numerous enemies they can’t kill they quick travel back to safety. Supremely annoying.

Rednik.3809:

Ross Biddle.2367:

The distinction has already been made, there’s more than just “best mobility”, there’s also best landspeed. Warriors are the undisputed kings of [strike]GW2[/strike] landspeed. The question needs to be asked, has Landspeed been considered for balance?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh8wtucvZJs

This gameplay is outside the pale and warrior exclusive. It needs to be brought back in line with the rest of the game.

Oh, I was waiting when someone finally will copypaste this funny topic from WvW forums.
Hint: mobility PVT build is absolutely harmless, he can only run and tickle someone with GS before run away again. Even trololol CnD permastealth thief build is more dangerous.

Hint: You don’t need to be PvT to be not only mobile but also tanky and high damage. You can easily hit 3.4k attack, 40% crit(60% with fury), 80% crit damage, 3.2k armor, 22k hp, which also comes with healing signet, cleansing ire, Adrenal health, dogged march, and 25% run speed. Maybe 2k per auto-attack is a tickle to you, but for most other classes it adds up quickly. Oh and if you have a bow in your bag you easily do 5k crits so you can compete in ranged zerg battles

junho.7825:

You don’t seem to have a warrior do you?
How can warrior fight against his opponent with sword/XX + GS?
If you have a trouble to deal with GS warrior, that’s your problem
If you have a trouble to deal with sword warrior, that’s your problem
HB and sword burst skill are channeling skills which are very hard to land without CC
GS is not an ideal weapon in wvw unless you take a mace on your main hand
sword/XX (maybe warhorn) + GS is completely for mobility set

p.s.: I was watching the video again to make sure about this. Why did you just let the warrior escape? I would admit the truth if the warrior could escape with cripple or CC

GS works absolutely fine in WvW. It gives you mobility so you can close gaps quickly and allows you to escape if things take a turn for the worse. Whirlwind is a great AOE damage attack for multiple enemies, minions, or shatter mesmer(bad for condition mesmer). 100b is hard to land and many make the mistake of trying to use it when they shouldn’t but if an enemy goes down it is an amazing skill as it not only just completely decimates the downed person, if anyone tries to rez them while you’re doing it they are pretty much downed as well. It is also great for taking camps You act like all the other GS attacks aren’t doing 2k+ per attack either.

I run GS/hammer or GS/Bow(zerg) on my warrior and do absolutely fine. It is just too good at damage and mobility to pass up for roaming. Top it off with 25% run speed for using a melee weapon and you cruise around the maps.

Ross Biddle.2367:

JETWING.2759:

Ross Biddle.2367:

The distinction has already been made, there’s more than just “best mobility”, there’s also best landspeed. Warriors are the undisputed kings of [strike]GW2[/strike] landspeed. The question needs to be asked, has Landspeed been considered for balance?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh8wtucvZJs

This gameplay is outside the pale and warrior exclusive. It needs to be brought back in line with the rest of the game.

Horrible Mesmer in the video

Yeah, the guy has no idea how to chase down a warrior
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tffTmVN-zG0

…

Or Mesmer in general
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8td7XyA1JU

…

That warrior is not a mobile warrior, he basically ignored all the mobility that the warrior offers. The fact that it even took the mesmer that long to actually kill him is just a testament to how unbalanced things really are.

Bri.8354:

The Lost Witch.7601:

It is not as simple as this.

Bring in food, +x% damage modifiers from traits, from sigils, from runes, banners, might stacks, ascended gear etc… and the balance starts to shift.

As they say: it escalates at the top end. Each point of extra power, extra critical damage, extra precision or extra damage % becomes more effective the more you already have. For toughness, the returns per point are lower at the top end. Vitality and healing power are merely linear.

It makes sense for them to try and keep this in check before playing around with renewed AI or encounter design. Otherwise they are likely to either come up with monsters that have too much health and defense for average groups, or that die to berserkers like flies, just like the current set.

If they are concerned about the benefit being too high at the highest possible amount of critical damage then they should introduce something like a stat cap on critical chance (around 80-90%) and/or damage (around 100-110), not reduce the damage across all levels of critical damage. This will also allow players to mix and match their equipment if they would reach this limit and use defensive consumables rather than offensive ones.

And if they are trying to address damage being too high for monsters with this change, then they are using the wrong approach and will accomplish nothing. The 10% change they are making to berserker damage will only mean enemies die in 16.5 seconds instead of 15.

Similarly, bunker builds are just as much of an issue when it comes to creating difficult content. If you get a group filled with a guardians using greatsword or hammer with mace/focus, they will have so much healing, reflects, protection, and blocks that they become invincible. They may not beat the content in record speed which is why this hasn’t got attention, but it ruins any sort of challenging content.

The game is littered with things like this, and to try to address them through stat changes is ridiculous. The equipment stats themselves are very much balanced; the problem has to do with the skills and buffs (such as food) players have access to that allows them to achieve such high offensive or defensive capability, as well as the limited intelligence and capability of the monsters.

Caps suck. They are band-aid fixes for poor stat formulas and balancing. GW2 has probably some of the worst stats/formulas that I’ve seen in any MMO. Why some stat systems are linear and others are exponential is mind boggling and it’s worse when they are systems that are supposed to balance the other(toughness+vitalty vs power*Crit*critdmg*% dmg). This is why we end up seeing some incredibly silly numbers damage wise.

I have no doubt a 5 man guardian team can beat pretty much anything, but it has more to do with their damage than anything else. The armor, heals, etc help them stay in to DPS longer but they still won’t be tanking the big hits. There in lies the problem if no matter what gear you’re wearing or team comp you can’t tank the hits, you might as well be wearing full DPS gear. It’s mitigating damage by killing faster. It does need changed so that full DPS builds are a big risk. The dungeon encounters certainly do need changed but so does the overall system. If you update the encounters so it’s much harder to be berserk them people will go to something else entirely, which is equally bad. Since this game isn’t like other MMO’s where a full DPS class is safe due to a tank having aggro it makes things a whole lot harder to balance.

The stats might look balanced but once they start getting used they aren’t. Skills, traits, food, etc just end up making a bad thing worse. The PvE encounters certainly need an overhauled but we probably will never see it or stat/formula changes for a very very long time.

Writetyper.1985:

He was in a 3v1 and he’s upset that he didn’t have enough dodges?

Are you for real? Even a permavigour engi doesn’t have enough dodges to dodge EVERY skill that comes out in a 3v1.

You’ve missed the point entirely. There should be no skills in the game that instant-kill you if you don’t dodge. Doesn’t matter if it’s a 1v1 or a 50v50. Dodges are something that should be used to HELP mitigate damage, not the only thing that stands between life and death.

Tryble.6819:

If you see a rifle warrior and don’t save a dodge, blind, block, or interrupt (or line of sight, if there’s suitable terrain nearby) of some kind for Kill Shot….

To be honest I wonder what the heck is so dangerous you’re using all your dodges for when you know a 10k+ attack may be coming in the future.

You do know that almost every class has this thing called weapon swapping right? A warrior could start off with say a hammer or greatsword then swap to rifle mid battle once you’re dodges are gone and they have max adrenaline. As for attacks that are worth dodging, you’re going to want to avoid the warriors hammer stuns for starters since he won’t have stability. Letting a hammer warrior beat on you for 1.5k-2k per hit isn’t that great for your health pool. But if you want to tank a warriors damage(let alone 2) on the assumption he might have a rifle on swap then by all means, I’m sure the bag will make your enemies very happy.

Atherakhia.4086:

Burn: Damage reduced to 2x bleed damage and removes 1 boon a second.
Poison: Damage stays to 2x bleed damage and reduces healing like now.
Torment: Damage increased to 1x bleed damage, double if moving.
Vitality: For every 100 vitality, reduce condi duration by 1%.
Retaliation: Changed to reflect 10% damage up to a cap of the current amount reflected.
Confusion: Deals damage once based on the amount of confusion on you at the time of your swing. Consumes the stack on damage.

Cap condi duration and condi reduction at 40%. No more food+trait+utility+sigil+rune stacking etc.

Did I nerf it enough?

You have some decent ideas. If you cap condition duration though then you also need to cap crit at a level where the damage increase is the same. The damage increase for conditions is linear where power*Crit*crit dmg isn’t. Then we need to remove ALL % damage increases via traits/runes/sigils/food/etc. Honestly the worst thing about this game is how badly they messed up stats. Why in the world would you have one form of damage scale differently than another and the same goes for defensive stats too. When damage scales exponentially you also need defense to do the same or it becomes a game of one shots.

selan.8354:

Furajir.3815:

Lmao @ mesmers saying they don’t have enough toys. hahaha

sais the guy that walks around with a zoo as spirit ranger or whatever u play. u clearly dont get what mes is about. ever been forced to use utilities? yeah welcome to the wvw mesmer! u are not allowed to trait or bring utilities that help u survive at least. u are required to bring veil,tw,portal and temportal curtain for pulls other than that u stand on the side and hope u tag something and also if u dont have veil u are useless and wont get to play in organized guilds ever.

I can glean two things from your post. 1. You somehow think rangers have ANY role in WvW. The pets and spirits they have are basically worthless in WvW. One thing that no one in the history of WvW has said is “Oh no it’s a ranger”, well maybe if it’s on their side :P 2. You’ve run with incredibly strict WvW groups or haven’t run in many current WvW groups. Mesmers can take whatever they want, survival is very much encouraged over utility as a dead mesmer has no utility. Portal bombs are pretty much a thing of the past and I might have seen 1 in the last 2 months and it ended with the bombers dead. Veil is something you can switch to right before you do a big zerg vs zerg battle and you can still run 2 useful utilities and 3 any other time. Mesmers in zerg combat are actually quite effective with chaos storm, feedback, and berserker illusions. Their condition cleanse AOE is pretty spiffy too in the condition heavy world.

MrSilver.5269:

Really glad I just crafted my celestial ascended set.

Seriously anet… really bad move from a customer relations standpoint. Way to destroy an entire set of armor that people spend hundreds of gold to craft.

I am actually a little glad about this. This nerf helps show everyone what others have been saying about ascended. Having ascended as a giant time/resource sink does not work in this game. As classes get changed/balanced people want to change specs and that is not supported by ascended. It also inhibits them balancing stats/classes as they have to worry about customer ramifications. If this is what gets people mad enough to demand change then it is a blessing in disguise.

Writetyper.1985:

Dodge it you monkey. Killshot has the single most obvious animation in the game. Do you sit in churning earth against a full zerker ele for the full duration then go “WHAT THE HELL, WHY WAS I HIT FOR 16000??? ELE OP”. No? You don’t? Then why do you do it to warriors?

What’s more is that as a necro you could literally just toss a few condis his way and he’s 100% dead as a burst war.

Nice one.

EDIT: And just to back up this claim (Because you were killed by a burst war – IE a war using a build from back when they were really really sub-par) I will gladly duel you with you playing a warrior, if you win I will fully admit that killshot is the most overpowered skill in the game. If you lose it might teach you something about how to counter the single most counterable skill in the game. Win on a killshot burst warrior and I will legit give you 20g. If you’re not on SoS or SBI or you don’t have a warrior we’ll have to do it in PvP.

In fact, chances are if you roll your face across the keyboard you’re going to do something that counters killshot. I’m not even joking, a good amount of skills in someones bar will in some way, counter killshot.

I’m sick of these threads by new players about things that aren’t actually broken.

He was in a 3v1 and is a necro. Necro’s don’t get vigor. In a almost any fight bigger than 1v1 you’re going to be out of endurance quickly. There is no dodging it. The best he could do would be popping into DS quickly to help mitigate it, assuming he hadn’t already used it and it was on cooldown. Of course this leaves him still taking damage and now has lost his DS for sustain/torment/fear.

Of course we can just play by your rules. Make every attack in the game have a long animation and one hit. That will be incredibly fun fights right? Just learn to dodge! What do you mean you’re out of dodge? JUST DODGE IT or are you bad at the game? OR we can be sensible about it and say that no matter what gear or animation duration an attack shouldn’t hit for 16k(more than the base health of all classes except necro/warrior). There are plenty of very noticeable animations in the game that don’t hit people for 10k let alone 16k.

Or how about we actually balance things back down to a reasonable level? Something needed to be done about the ridiculous damage that could be done in both PvE and WvW since the game released, no one should be hitting for all or even 1/4 of the lowest base health of a class. This damage is what helped perpetuate everyone needing to bunker up to WvW or be insta-gibbed. Even then classes can still put out insane damage thanks to crit damage. Personally I would have preferred crit chance got nerfed too. It would have allowed for some big hits still but they would be unreliable, but you gotta take what you can get.

Conditions do need looked at as well and hopefully it’s in the works. Just removing the proc condition sigils and runes would be a big step towards limiting some of the condition spam. Making skills more dependent on power/condition damage would also remove the benefits for say a power build to also utilize damaging conditions.

A giant thread telling them the dumbfire to lifeblast change was a bad idea and they do it anyway. Remember everyone, ArenaNet listens! They just don’t care.

While I think access to certain conditions needs restricted to lower spam/burst, berserk still needed nerfed in WvW. Conditions in a zerg are absolutely worthless. It is so incredibly easy to have them removed either from a friendly removing them, combo fields, or just using your own. Condition specs are mainly a big problem in roaming and small group battles. Now crit damage is a problem in zergs because with the amount of damage flying around the instant deaths aren’t that fun. You’re very wrong if you think the “meta” isn’t survivable high power damage builds, most of which utilized crit damage to get the damage. When you can depend on having fury like you do in a zerg, you can really concentrate on power and crit damage on top of survivability.

I still think precision is what really needed nerfed as 60%+ crit chance is stupid high, but I’ll take what I can get. In another two years they might actually get around to fixing the condition system!

Norjena.5172:

Umut.5471:

they can add one-time stat selection for ascended zerker gears only, that can be the solution. it’s good that zerker only meta is being removed from the game. speedruns and skips(mostly glitches) mustn’t exist for a challenging, harder gameplay.

If u don´t play zerk/rampager/assasin…which content get´s more challenging then?

Even if Berserker is often easy to play, it´s still the hardest to play. Sad but true.

And there is no way to make healing/support/cc viable at the moment. They have to change alot of mechanics. Before they don´t this, max possibel (to play) dpsbuild will always be superior and most wanted.

Conditionbuilds…the only 1 which should to the same dps as berserkers is rampager. All others have got at least 1 defensive stat and dire for example deals much more dps then PVT.

Zerker is by no means hard to play in a berserk group. Even when a fight lasts long enough for you to have the potential to take fatal damage the attacks aren’t fast(easy to dodge) and the damage you receive if you do get hit is often fatal even if you’re PVT. Warriors by far make it extremely easy to berserk considering they have a big health and armor advantage on top of being great at pretty much everything else.

Stats in general need revamped for balance and the whole condition system needs redone. Conditions need to be actual attrition instead of burst. However if conditions will be based on attrition then the tools needed must be available, which isn’t the case for many builds/classes.

The problem has a few sides to it.

1. They have given way too much access to multiple conditions. Things like Torment sigil and perplexity runes alongside class changes have given certain builds/classes access to all the damaging conditions and it makes for a condition “burst”, which it shouldn’t be.

2. Condition removal is way too powerful. If someone spends 5 attacks stacking bleeds you shouldn’t be able to wipe it all out with 1 skill. This leads to needing more conditions to cover the condition you actually want to tick.

3. It is too easy to stack conditions. No one should be hitting condition caps by themselves. I can easily hit 25 stack of bleeds on my thief.

4. All damaging conditions should stack. Sounds confusing after the last one but poison/burning should be able to stack at the cost of some of their damage.

Condition specs in this game do not act like condition specs. DoTs are supposed to be a slower attrition based spec, yet here they burst you down in seconds. By reducing access to certain conditions(#1) this will help eliminated the burst. say every class gets two damaging conditions. That would leave few conditions kitten due to heavy removal(#2). So we make removals limit the number of stacks they can actually remove, possibly make healing power increase the number of stacks that can be removed. Since removal will now be much lower we need to reduce the number of stacks any one class can maintain(#3) because classes putting out 25 stacks makes them burst not dots. Last to make sure that each class has access to equal potention condition damage output we need poison and burning to stack, of course the damage/scaling would need a nerf and the heal reduction wouldn’t stack.

Conditions need to be brought back into attrition specs and then their armor/health won’t be such an issue as they will need that to survive long enough to do their damage. I also think all attacks/conditions need to have their base values reduced and scale better with stats, that way power builds using damage conditions don’t get much out of them.

juno.1840:

I feel bad for ANet in a way because they’re a victim of their own success. They have a history of excellence with GW1 and we fans are rabid about the franchise. So much so that we build up massive hype with anything they say. In addition, there’s so many things to do in GW2 that everyone has their own idea of what’s “great”. So when deliveries do occur it’s a let-down from super-high expectations as you can’t make everyone happy.

I’m hoping for a good GW2 year so I don’t shelve it when the next good thing comes to town.

Why would you feel bad for ArenaNet? They brought everything on themselves. They hype up stuff to insane levels, see “Tyria will never be the same” or “The end is near”, then when customers get upset because it’s just a tiny patch with 1 or 2 hours of actual content it’s a HUGE letdown. Their class balance team is glacial in it’s pace and their SPvP team is clueless at best. This isn’t a case of one portion of the game getting a patch and the people who prefer other stuff are letdown, this is a case that universally almost every patch is a let down to the targeted players. Finally, they mislead their playerbase constantly. The obvious one is easy to obtain max stats, which was kicked out the window by ascended. However, there are certainly other occasions where they’ve done it as well. I know early on necromancers were told certain things that were blatantly false(the jagged horrors lasting 11s(iirc) comes to mind). The rangers being told constantly they were getting lots of fixes next patch only to receive no major changes. Or how about them having ascended only available through fractals was a mistake, yet it took them months to even change that for current ascended and what did they do with new ascended weapons/armor? Crafting only! Well there is an infinitesimal chance you might get a drop, but we are talking reliable means.

I could go on. The point is that ArenaNet is not innocent in this by any means. Sure sometimes players will take liberties and assume, but usually ArenaNet is right there saying it will be “amazing”(never has been the case), “game changing”(never has been), etc.

I really hope ArenaNet lays off the fluff content and actually buckles down and makes some game changing content and class system reworks.

Quick Mouse.7635:

I find it funny how many people are complaining about nighttime players and how “they don’t put in any effort to cap things that require 100000xs the effort during primetime.” I’m pretty sure 90% of these people have never even played outside their timezone. Sure there may be less people on, but that doesn’t mean the nighttime players have it easy.
Have you ever tried to stop 3 simultaneous golem rushes on 3 different maps with only 20-30 people? I can tell you it’s not easy. I am a primetime player but on a few occasions I have stayed up late playing with SEA/EU players. They fight just as hard as anybody during primetime. You just don’t see it.

Your post makes the point exactly, well not your point but the one for scaling the points based on population effort. Do you think the enemies that are against you doing the 3 golem rushes are having a hard time? I highly doubt it. It’s only the under populated server that has the hard time. So in SEA/EU times the server with the most players has an easier time and can rack up a load of points, THAT is the problem. If points scaled your 20-30 man team could concentrate on one map and not be worried about other maps where the points might be scaled down to 10% or normal value. Instead your points will be equal value on your one map or greater if you’re fighting a higher populated enemy on it.

Primetime is usually considered harder because it is far harder to earn points in that time frame with sides being equal. Yes it will be hard for the underpopulated SEA/EU servers to gain points but there will be one side earning easy points. Alot of matches are won or lost based on the SEA/EU hours because if you have the population it is easy points. Point scaling would at least make hard targets worth more points and easy pickings worth less. It isn’t about making other timezones effort valued less.

Coldtart.4785:

The idea that gets thrown around of ‘scaling by difficulty’ is about as hilarious as the night capping whining itself. If something is being difficult to take it’s because your strategy is bad, if it’s easy then your strategy is good. Trying to take a siege capped, t3, supply capped keep with 50 defenders in it is not only going to be a boring fight but is strategically foolish. Taking the same keep when its 50 defenders don’t realise what you’re doing is great strategy and lets you potentially get an open field fight against the enemy zerg.

Any attempt to scale the strategic reward for an objective based on the amount of fighting that goes on over it merely exacerbates the coverage wars and would be easy to exploit.

You do realize that the scaling could be based partly on overall map population right? Like if a map is capped then it would be worth full points. However if only your side is capped and the other two are at 50% capacity it’s worth 33%. Then you could build on top of that with number of deaths in the area prior to it being taken or number of successful defense events. We could even get more technical and on an equally capped map there could be bonus points for things being held longer like camps.

The main problem I see is if people decide not to queue for maps or don’t defend to reduce points. Honestly though, it would still be a step up from what we have now.

oxo.7869:

Nope. Pointless, meaningless, useless waste of time for no reward.
For this game, for many, the only real draw is WvW and yet it’s the one element that’s been ignored for so so long, while we continue to get worthless pve fluff thrown at us.
Seasons just proved how badly WvW needs to be improved, without ruining it further with more pve elements and achievements.

Letting US and EU servers go at it would be a start.

PvE elements are absolutely fine as long as they create better PvP. A good example here is the original Alterac Valley. It had PvE elements(farm rams/wolves for pelts, rescue captives in towers, summon lords) and they absolutely made the PvP better. They gave both sides goals(farm your own or stop enemy from farming theirs) and ultimately tools for pushing the enemies back.

ArenaNet though did not learn from that though. Instead we have skritt, dredge, and centaurs that are 100% useless. They bring nothing to the table and are a waste of map space. If NPC’s, mobs, and events actually mattered it could bring a whole new dynamic to WvW. That will never happen though given the rate of development and how clueless ArenaNet usually is.

The problem is this game is setup for extremes.

The TTK in this game is extremely low unless you invest in health/toughness. Even when you invest in them the TTK is still low for most classes/builds. Having a class start at 10k hp with light armor is absolutely INSANE considering that a berserking thief can basically one/two shot that person. It’s not like thieves are outliers either, there are tons of abilities/classes that can put out insane damage(considering some classes starting health) even against toughness stacked opponents. Sure those 10k crits might only be 5k but if you only have 10k hp it’s still too much damage. That’s why everyone HAS to stack health/toughness and condition builds provide that best for most classes, some can build for power and still have the survivability they need.

Conditions get extreme too. On one side you have skills/traits/etc that can fully clear all conditions, it doesn’t matter that your opponent spent 10 attacks stacking 20 bleeds on you, they are just all gone. To compensate for the fact that 1 type of condition will get cleared quickly and unable to do their damage you need to spam multiple conditions. This is how the necromancer suddenly became viable, they got access to spammable burning and that allows them to get through cleanses and do damage, probably way too much damage. Combine that with torment sigil and perplexity runes and suddenly they are dropping every damaging condition on you constantly. It’s a sad state of affairs when the condition specs need to “burst” people down.

The condition fix is going to require a lot of work. First off they need to make all damaging conditions stackable(poison/burning), but make it harder to stack them. That means making a lot of attacks that apply 3 bleeds only apply 1. Conditions then need to be restricted so certain classes only get certain conditions(no torment, bleed, etc on crit, no perplexity runes), which will kill condition burst.Then removals need to be toned down as well to say 1 stack of each condition, which will remove CC conditions completely but leave stacked damaging ones still ticking. This way cleanses aren’t a complete shut down of condition specs, the condition burst is gone, and condition specs will be played the way they are supposed to be.

Then we just need a complete rebalance of power damage. Either base health needs jacked way up or damage needs to come down. Perhaps somewhere in between with vitality giving more health per point? I also think skills need to scale more based on your condition damage/power, this way a condition spec doesn’t still do decent direct damage and power builds don’t do decent bleed damage. Perhaps healing power could be worked into conditions somehow? Either by reducing their damage directly like toughness or increasing the number of stacks a cleanse can remove?

Thobek.1730:

Bunker builds are a by-product of roaming zerker rogues. Basically if you want to survive 18k backstabs then you bunker down.

It isn’t just roamers, even in zerg vs zerg if you don’t want to die instantly you need health/toughness. Unless you play a ranged zerker that runs as soon as the enemy zerg is closer than 1200 you’re going to get hit by the red circle train tracks that predict the enemy zergs path.

Anyone remember back when they first introduced ascended when ArenaNet admitted in a Reddit AMA that it was a mistake making ascended only attainable through 1 method? If you EVER believed that ArenaNet would learn from mistakes, NOPE. I guess in their eyes as long as some of the ascended has an abysmal chance to drop and trinkets are available through other means that’s a win?

Antares.2586:

When the condi meta will be fixed ?

It’s way too easy atm to spam conditions @1500 condition damage, and to build other stats for bunker, on Toughness, Vita and Healing power.

You have only one stat to boost for damage, instead of three for a power build.

Anything is coming to fix this, please ? :/

The short answer is that it would require ArenaNet to make major changes and that simply won’t happen.

The long answer is that most classes do no have the survivability to run around in WvW in anything less than a bunker build and power builds get diminished by armor so without crit/crit dmg they lack the damage/burst necessary to bring others down. There are a few exceptions that can have bunker stats and still demolish people like the warrior. I was just fiddling around with my warrior based off a post on these forums and with exotic berserker armor/weapons and cavalier trinkets I can get 22k health, 3.2k armor, 3.4k attack, 48% crit, and 70% crit damage. On top of that of course I have healing signet for 420 health per second.

A lot of this has to do with a poorly setup stat/trait system and of course the base health/armor of classes. Some classes starting with 10k hp and others with 18k is pure bad balance. The same goes for armor considering that there is seemingly no balancing based on that armor. Then you are forced into certain traitlines to get the stats you want or vice versa you are forced into certain stats to get the traits you want. Bring all classes to 20k hp and make armor class a choice that has pros and cons and finally make stat choice a seperate advancement system from traits. Then we can start actually balancing classes. Until then all the lower health classes are trying to stack on vitality/toughness and conditions just lend themselves to that build.

Reverence.6915:

Die in 3 seconds? Really?

I drop meteor storms on zergs, and while they hurt, they probably do 10k damage to me max, which I can burst heal just by switching to water attunement. Most of that damage is nullified by being next to guardians when they’re dodge rolling. I’m also using zerker trinkets and have more health than you, so you’re probably not all geared up or using the right trait build for zerging (You NEED 30 in the water trait when zerging as an ele)

Retaliation is a great mechanic to fight against greater numbers. Don’t nerf it.

Retaliation is the exact opposite of an anti-zerg mechanic. A zerg going against a small group is not going to care that you have retaliation, you’re going to go splat on their windshield as they plow through. Retaliation on a zerg vs a small group makes the zergs job that much easier. You’re going to half kill yourself just trying to hurt them and then go splat. The only place that retaliation is balanced is currently in small fights 1v1 up to 5v5. They have several options really, 1. Add an internal cooldown so it can only tick 1 per second, 2. Make it only work against direct attacks and not AOE’s 3. Make the caster only take ticks from one source just to name a few.

The worst time I’ve had with retaliation was on my mesmer when I dropped chaos storm and feedback on a zerg. Apparently reflected projectiles count as my attacks and thus proc retaliation. 20k hp to downed in 2 attacks!

Vayne.8563:

They advertised this game based on several things. The manifesto was one five minute video. That’s what it was. It’s been misinterpreted and lines from it are taken out of context to try to prove specific points. People have ignored the clarification posted three days after it, explaining some confusion. People have ignored the two years of stuff released afterwards explaining everything in much greater detail.

If you look at the number of times in the “advertising” words like vertical progression were mentioned, you’d find that the game was advertised on dynamic events, personal story, and active combat.

The other stuff was side bar stuff that if it was important to an individual they focused on it to the exclusion of all else. But it wasn’t what the game was advertised on.

Advertising focus is such that the more times something is mentioned, the more a company talks about it, the more important it is to the product. There are so many discussions around dynamic events and how they work and how they’re made and why they’re better.

The manifesto is a 3 year old 5 minute video. If people watched that and ignored everything said after that it’s not Anet’s fault.

That’s right we ignored things like this said by Mike O’Brian

Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.

So once you realize that you don’t have to run on this gear treadmill to compete, then ask yourself whether you think it’s fair or unfair for players to be able to trade microtransaction currency with other players, which essentially allows some players to trade money for time and other players to trade time for money. I think it’s more fair to allow that.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/21/guild-wars-2-interview-monetization/

Well clearly that’s ambiguous and with just 3 months until launch they could have marketed the game as something completely different! OR it could in fact be that you’re entirely wrong and the game was marketed as not having a stat grind at max level, but rather a cosmetic grind.

Colin Johanson: Everyone, including casual gamers, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game. We want everyone on an equal power base. The rare stuff becomes the really awesome looking armours. It’s all about collecting the unique looking stuff and collecting all the other rare collectable items in the game: armour pieces, potentially different potions – a lot of that is still up in the air and we’ll finalise a lot of those reward systems as we get closer to release. And those come off of things like the bosses at the end of dungeons – the raids.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-27-guild-wars-2-preview

There is a reason that GW2 was known as the MMO you didn’t have to grind for endgame gear. They said it multiple times and in multiple places. Pretty much any time they brought up legendary weapons they made it clear it was NOT a stat advantage so people who put in more time didn’t have an advantage, they just looked cooler. It might not have been their biggest bullet point, but it was brought up several times; enough times that it was well known.

You need to face facts, ArenaNet has deviated from what they sold at least a part of the game as. There is now a gear treadmill. You certainly do not have the best stat gear by the time you reach 80 and I’d expect most casuals to never have it unless it gets made a lot easier. There is zero room for debate here, Both of those statements are now 100% false.

I’m beginning to think that you’re the one who didn’t listen or read anything ArenaNet said prior to launch.

Juba.8406:

vincecontix.1264:

glaphen.5230:

Rezzet.3614:

glaphen.5230:

Rezzet.3614:

people say runner warriors are ok but what if you arent playing a super runner class like thief or mesmer or ele or another warrior how do You run from the said warrior when he returns over and over and somehow manages to harm you ?

pretty much the only condition that slows them is stun and fear and those dont last over 3 seconds usually specially if said warr has lemongrass and melandru

How is this any different than a Thief except that they do more damage with better ability to run away and get back into the fight?

i never agreed with thief being fine either but since theres so many defending thief i just dint mentioned it

the diference is if a thief messess up i can at least kill em cuz 98% thieves run glass cannon thief can actually be balanced easily though

as simple as making them revealed when they hit a blocking player

If a Warrior is not glass and using greatsword how are you dying exactly? Only bad Thieves die in any situation ever in WvW while wearing full zerker.

A war in full zerker armor can have 3.2k attack, 3.2k armor 60% crit chance(with fury) 89+ crit dmg 22.5k vit, great regen via hs and great mobility via gs.

3.2k armor ? on zerker gear !!! , dude im using “Knight” armor with zerker trinkets and got only 2.7k armor, stop pulling numbers out of that hole

I just did some fiddling with some spec builders and it’s certainly possible to get near the numbers the guy listed(3.2k attack, 3.2k armor, 22k hp, 40% base crit, 80% crit damage). However that’s only using Berzerker weapons/armor and not trinkets. Using berserker weapons/armor, cavalier trinkets, and some food you can hit those stats. It’s actually pretty ridiculous to be honest. Now the build I used might not be the greatest but with some more time and fiddling I’m sure it could be refined into something very deadly. These are stats most classes can only dream about, it really shows how poorly ANET is at balancing things.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/warrior/?8.1|1.1g.h1.0.0.0|0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0|1g.71j.1g.71j.1g.71j.1g.71j.1g.71j.1g.71j.0.0.0.0.0.0|2v.0.2v.0.3v.0.2v.0.3v.0.2v.0|a3.k19.u29b.a1.0|3t.7|5x.6i.6h.6g.6m|e

8 level 80’s, 1 for each class. All Asura except for a single Charr engineer.

I’d love to see the thief get more short range teleports that disorient opponents over stealth. The problem is that stealth is pretty much all the thief class currently has. The survivability out of stealth is incredibly poor. Sure you can spec heavily into health/toughness but even then other classes can have more damage and survivability.

If we are talking about gutting stealth though, we also need to talk about gutting the mobility/resets of certain other classes. Nothing like attacking certain classes on the move only to have them outrun you while tanking/regening the damage or engaging them in a fight and just having them run and reset it at the first sign that they might lose.

Poxheart.2845:

Skooma.3459:

Why? Because everyone feels the need to roam in 5-15 man groups if not in the blob.

I’m not sure what time zone you play, but me and a guildie duo roam regularly (occasionally joined by a third) and we rarely see any JQ or BG roaming smaller than 5-15.

I didn’t read your entire post or any of the other posts because I feel that every solo/duo roamer on all three servers experience the same thing. Any even fight you might start will get adds every time because of the size of the maps and the limited pathways people travel looking for action.

My buddy and I roam a lot and it’s increasingly frustrating trying to find a good 2v2 or 2v3 fight against SOR or JQ. It isn’t the servers either, it’s just the horrible horrible map size and pro-zerg mechanics. 90% of anything we engage ultimately ends with either 5+ joining the fight(friend or foe), the enemy zerg joining the fight, or the friendly zerg joining the fight. On all the maps there simply isn’t any place you’re going to find a good fight that isn’t at a high risk of having a zerg come running through in the next minute.

We’ve contemplated changing servers, but the fear is that the zergs we normally get hit with will turn into 5-15 man groups and the roamers we normally fight would become non-existent. I’d much rather deal with getting hit by a few zergs and having at least some roamers to kill rather than no roamers. Of course all servers are very heavy so it’s going to cost quite a bit to even test the waters.

Gudradain.3892:

The idea to remove the waypoint upgrade from the keeps has been toss around many times and the developer even acknowledged it. So, it’s something that will probably happen at some point.

The main reason for removing the waypoint is to split the zerg. If you remove the waypoints the zerg can’t cover every places with only 1 group so it has to either split or to lose everything. Waypoint are what make it possible for 1 big zerg to cover all the maps. But let’s not discuss the waypoints.

What I wonder is :

When we remove the waypoint upgrade, what should be put as a new upgrade to replace it?

If they remove the waypoints it will not kill zergs or even really deter them I don’t think. The sad fact is that a zerg can move faster than small groups. Having a bunch of small groups will ultimately slow a servers reaction time and splits a servers forces, meaning a bigger zerg will crush small groups and the slow run back will ultimately give the bigger zergs the advantage since they already killed a portion of the enemies forces. The only thing I see this impacting will be the overall meta of hold your borderland and your side of eternal. Instead it might shift to hold your side of borderlands and eternal, as going the whole way south on your borderland is a big unnecessary risk. This will of course also further emphasize that the server who can field more players will win since you will be spread a crossed all 4 maps.

Taking out waypoints is a bad decision that will ultimately reinforce the things that need eliminated(zergs and numbers > Skill). I think instead what they need to do is rework the boon system. Make it so boons are shared by all nearby allies but it divides the duration by each person granted the boon. So a 20s swiftness quickly becomes a 1s swiftness in a zerg. This will make it so small groups will travel faster than zergs and also has the added benefit of killing off zerg boon stacking. I know it’s a bit anti-friendly player but leaving things as the are isn’t any better.

New weapons.

I heard warriors are getting lightsabers that one hit kill anything and block all projectiles, but it’s okay because it has a long animations that make the attacks easy to dodge :P

Predator.7321:

I don’t understand how some people don’t have 100+ gold if they have been playing since beta. I have 2000g right now and have equipped 5 characters with exotics. Game has been out for over a year if you saved 2g a week you will have 100g in savings now

They don’t play everyday? They buy exotics and skins? They are unlucky? They only like WvW and die a lot? A whole host of reasons really. I mean it’s incredibly easy to drop 60g just for one set of exotic gear for a single spec and that’s not even getting some good skins. Sure if you saved 2g a week you would have 100g now, but you’d also be bored out of your mind using the same spec/gear the entire time not to mention angry if the devs nerfed that spec along the way. At 2000g I’d wager one of three things 1. You play everyday for several hours 2. You play the AH(takes money to make money) 3. You got lucky on a good drop.

I can say that I’ve played since beta, 8 lvl 80s(4 in exotics), 100% map completion, and the most I’ve ever had was 220g. I’ve only ever had 5 exotics drop for me and all of them were absolutely terrible(1g).

Grevender.9235:

Horizontal Progression? good.
My vote goes to Prestige Classes:

magician > mage > archmage

a system that allows players to truly craft the character as they want it to be. I see this as ultimate end game content…

I’m not against crafting the character you want, but I think that can be accomplished without creating a whole new sub-class system. The trait system should be expanded or a new system built that allows choices that completely change things like weapon abilities. That way we won’t have the weapon sets that are a jumble of power, condition, CC, etc skills that basically provide abilities that are absolutely useless on some builds(Necro weapons are a big offender of this). This way a condition build could construct a weapon set that caters towards conditions/survival without having a pesky power ability just sitting there. They need to allow traits or a new system as well as sigils/runes to drastically alter the playstyle of classes. Balance would be hard but I think we can all agree that balance certainly isn’t that great currently so what would it matter?

Junkpile.7439:

Warrior survivability is too high if you think how much dmg they can do. I don’t really want that they nerf hammer dmg or stun because i use hammer too, but they need to do something about survivability. It’s kind of boring when you don’t even need to dodge at all.

This is the crux of the problem. Not only do they do good, dare I say great, damage while putting out CC, they also have tons of survivability and mobility while doing it. Two major things need to happen 1. Base health of classes needs to be the same a crossed all classes 2. Armor classes need to be available to all classes with pros/cons attached to them. These two alone are contributing quite a bit to class imbalances. warriors wouldn’t be able to do nearly the same damage if they actually had to worry about toughness or vitality up to certain levels. Only when everyone starts on an even playing field can we begin to actually balance the skills/scaling/cooldowns/etc of the classes.

I said it all the way back in beta, steal is a lackluster class skill. They should have given us any of our other major utility types(Venoms, traps, deception, tricks). It has one use and that is closing the gap, what you steal is unreliable and may not fit your build at all. Steal from a necro and the conditions you inflict from it can come right back at you. Steal from a warrior as a condition thief and you’re just going to spin for very little damage while exposing yourself to more damage. It’s just not as cohesive to the class like all other class skills are.

Retaliation needs an internal cooldown just like all the other on hit/on crit attacks in the game. In order for things to be fair either the ICD on other things need removed or Retaliation needs one placed on it or Retaliation needs to be made harder to get/keep up. There is of course a reason that skills have an ICD and that is because fast hitting would have a large advantage in applying debuffs or buffs. Currently there is no real advantage to fast hitting attacks but retaliation is certainly a large con and if you use a fast auto-attack confusion can put a hurting on you before you stop it. The ICD would at least bring it into balance with what other skills are currently balanced on.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

adubb.2453:

Here’s an crazy idea that’s a little out of left field:

What if any profession could use any armor type?
With this one change you would instantly have access to a wider range of aesthetic choice for their character. Not only would your characters get a wider aesthetic choice, but you could have some really crazy builds with it but it would completely squash the idea of the “trinity”.

In order to assist with balance, you could perhaps give certain advantages/disadvantages with each type of armor. Heavy armor would give you increased armor rating, but decreased movement speed. Medium armor would give a healthy dose of both. Light armor would give you the most movement speed, but lowest armor rating. The ability to mix and match would significantly widen the range of builds and survivability.

Bizarre use cases!
Guardians could switch to medium armor to focus more on DPS, then survivability. Ele’s could wear heavy armor to boost their survivability and perhaps encourage more melee Ele’s in PvE. When was the last time you saw a D/D ele in a dungeon? (It’s rare!) And imagine what would no doubt be everyone’s nightmare? A necro in heavy armor! Good lord, it would be glorious!

One thing to keep in mind how our system works is you can’t mix heavy, medium and light armor together the way we lay out the texture means these items can never be mixed. After that while it would open up some options you always have to be careful with making profession all feel the same. This is all ready a big struggle as we want all professions to fill multiple roles but it’s important some professions have weakness that they can overcome if you let your weakest character be a toughest as your toughest then they both lose some some of what makes them different

The current system lacks any sort of discernible balance formula where say 8k hp is equal to heavy armor and heavy armor is equal to stealth. If you were to make armor class a choice and even out the base health then it would open up a huge amount of builds. Through those builds would be horizontal progression since now you want multiple sets of armor class as well as stats, of course that involves demolishing the current vertical/time gating progression. Obviously armor classes would then need pros and cons, something like Heavy armor is more damage mitigated but reduces your damage output or reduces endurance regen or slows run speed, maybe a combination of them all. While you’re at it make stat choice it’s own system so they aren’t tied to traits. This starts to create a character progression system with depth and multiple layers of customization.

I think you’re thinking about your profession system all wrong. Instead of trying to limit a profession to just a few roles you should give them access to all roles and let them choose a few(more polarizing choices). The playstyle of the class is what will ultimately create the differences between the classes, not the roles since roles can be accomplished in different ways(playstyles).

Delryn.7235:

I just thought this deserves more attention and praise than it’s currently getting.

New skills (and skill balancing) are things that I personally and many other players have been wanting in the game since day one.

Although there’s some controversy to the usefulness/balance/overpowered nature of some skills I really loved them all for what they are; beautiful little specks of hope and love.

It’s fantastic how the new skills aren’t just “another +1 to my skill list” generic skill, but instead manage to individually change whole builds around. They do this in such simple ways too.

I’ve been catching myself in game a lot more, and I’m just generally more excited to play through all parts of the game for the sole purpose of enjoying this one new skill.

I think if Anet did some sort of constant skill release every X weeks, much like they do their LS, I’d be a lot more interested in just playing the game.

I have to disagree. Most of the new heals are niche and that puts them in the trash bin. Most of the heals also don’t change the builds at all they are built to fit into them. A spirit heal for rangers just goes right into the spirit ranger build, of course assuming it actually healed decently. The necro signet only fits into the leeching build and even with it that build subpar on anything that does some decent damage. The only heal I’ve seen that is actually a step forward is the Mesmer one since it fits into pretty much all builds and actually heals for a good amount.

The heals have the same problem that the rest of class balance has, the devs do not have a formula for balancing AT ALL. There are just extreme inconsistencies between cooldowns, healing numbers, utility, and usefulness. If you need to be shown what I’m talking about just look at the new thief heal skelk venom, even landing all your attacks it heals <200 hp/s which compared to warriors healing signet 400 hp/s is a joke, even the new mesmer heal will do ~333 hp/s. The cooldown does not make sense for what it does and it is zero utility unless traited and even then it’s not that great of a heal. The devs need to start creating a formula for balancing or they will continue to flounder and look foolish with these inconsistent changes/additions.

Mimizu.7340:

TooBz.3065:

Mimizu.7340:

you cannot have an alt without first having a main.

False premise. Alt is just a term that is used to generically refer to people with more than one character. I have 8 alts, and no main. Or one character I play more than the others, but who that is changes.

If we were only suppose to have one character, and this game was not going to be multiple character friendly (it was originally, but it really isn’t anymore) then they should have made that clear upfront.

Not so.
Without a main, the term alt would be superfluous.
You argue semantics, as do i, yet i use alt in its correct sense.
I myself have 9 characters, 1 is by default my main, 8 are then alts.
You say you play one more than the others and that changes,
yet one is definately played more than the rest,
most probably your first ever 80.
That is your main. The rest are alts.
The same is true of me and anyone else who likes to play multiple characters.

I’m not really sure what that last bit is about, something about someone not being upfront about something?

The bottom line is:
If you like playing more than one character you need to understand that it will take you much longer to do everything you want with all of them.
I dont understand why you are only just now realising that concept.

You can try and argue semantics if you want, but you’re just showing that you’re close minded. Some people will have a main and an alt, others however won’t have a main. I have 8 level 80’s and I have 4 that I play equally. Guardian for PvE and necro/thief/mesmer for WvW. I don’t have any character that I play more than the others. I’d love to have them all equally geared and multiple sets for multiple specs, but ArenaNet has decided that I’d need to grind my face off to make that happen.

Oh how I wish they had stuck to easy to obtain max stats hard to obtain skins. Now we have super grind to obtain max stats.

BlackBeard.2873:

Requiem.8769:

If you had any power, you would have been fine. You didn’t. If you’d been in a teamfight, he would have lost that 10% immediately. You’re running headfirst into a brick wall – that is one foot wide. Step 6 inches either direction and you’ll be fine. You can try to argue “oh I shouldn’t have to” and keep running into that wall, but please don’t complain about the immobility of the wall when you’re choosing to run into it.

Quoted again for truth! Necro building for 100% pure condi with a tanky amulet gets upset b/c something would require him to not be tanky with hella damage? Carrion fixes your issues. Teamfighting (which a necro should be doing anyway) fixes your problem.

People have complained that condi-builds could have glass-damage with non-glass survivability. Take a non-tank amulet and enjoy the life that power-builds have had to deal with forever (giving up some survivability for their high damage).

Most decent condition builds do give up some survivability for more damage. A lot of condition builds also want crit so they can keep even more condition pressure up. Power builds could do the exact same things that condition builds could do(PVT) and still get gains via % damage increases that don’t effect condition damage.

No one should be near invulnerable to one of the two types of damage. If we are going to be fair and balanced though then there needs to be a trait that reduces all direct damage to 1 if you’re above 90%. Condition damage. That won’t happen of course because then people running direct damage builds would be screwed. Although I would LOVE to see that trait in WvW vs a backstab thief.

UltraHiDef.4809:

Stop spamming conditions with your damageless bunker condition build and you can win. It’s not like bringing elementalist down from 100% to 90% is impossible.
Stop whining, and learn to adapt.

You’ve missed the point entirely. A condition build simply doesn’t have the damage to keep an elementalist below 90% health. That means either a hybrid or power build is then neccessary. The problem is that the best condition weapons are terrible at direct damage, if you swap out a decent power weapon then you’ve lost some of your conditions. If you’re going to go full power build then you might as well pick a class that does it better.

That’s the problem, in order to adapt to this you toss the necromancer away so it’s not even adapting. I think necros need to get a trait now that reduces all direct damage to 1 when above 90% health and we can see how the other classes “adapt”.

If people want to continue to allow killshot to do it’s damage because it’s dodge-able then we need to balance the rest of the game in that same manner. All 1s skills will do half that damage, so if it’s 15k killshots then 7.5k for normal 1s attacks. Obviously channeled attacks like necro’s ghastly claws will do the full 15k over the 2s (better dodge!). It’s all dodgeable though so it’s not a problem right? Just gotta pan your camera better…

The argument for this type of damage is absurd. If warriors rifle is so bad outside killshot then it needs reworked, it should not justify the damage on killshot. A 2s animation also shouldn’t justify that damage because I can think of dozen more ways that you’re either not going to be able to dodge it or you’re not going to see it coming. In a 1v1 or even a 2v2 it’s balanced but very quickly it becomes unbalanced.

The bottomline of all of this is that there should be no insta-kill or near insta-kill abilities in this game. Those types of attacks completely kill tactics and strategy of combat. It isn’t just killshot that crosses that line and this isn’t just a nerf warriors thing. ANY class that has abilities or combos that can crit well above say 7k on a medium armor build need to be brought back down to size.

Stx.4857:

Relentless.7023:

Of course Necros complain about anything that doesn’t puke over itself with “obviously overpowered” stamped on it.

The signet pairs well with Blood Magic builds and is built for both dueling power builds, and helping in team fights. Conditions are going to be less common in pvp after the patch hits, and especially so over the coming months when “Immune” keeps popping up on the screen against Warrior and Ele, disappearing against Mesmer and Guardian.

This gives Necro a potentially viable duelist build if you have the understanding of your class outside of scepter/dagger staff most of you have been drooling with for so long.

Look at the numbers on it, dude.

There is literally no argument you can make for this crappy new heal. Passively, it heals less than Blood Fiend. The active heals less than all of our other heals, and it is on a long cool down.

The team synergy isn’t there either. This heal does about 5k damage total assuming all the charges on it get used. Not only can I deal more damage than that in the time it would take to CAST the heal, but it also heals for about 1/4th as much as our other team oriented heal: Well of Blood.

I have played a Blood specced/Vampire Necro for almost a year… and there is nothing about this heal that makes it good for a siphon build or a 1v1 build, because you are still giving up a lot of healing and condition cleanse for this crappy signet.

The facts are in the math, the signet sucks, badly. You cannot logically state otherwise. The passive healing is worse than Blood Fiend, Healing Signet, and the active heals less than other heals with a longer cool down. It is trash.

Correction, it heals around the same as blood fiend. Blood fiend heals for ~900-1000 every 3 seconds, that’s 300-333/s where assuming SoV is proccing every second it’s healing for 340 per hit. Also the big heal from blood fiend is ~4k and initial self heal from SoV is also 4k. Now the big difference is that Blood Fiend can be killed and you get no heal. The signet does have nearly 2x the cooldown though, but it also has the group heal that heals for 2.77x more than the base blood well tick and also does some damage.

I’m not saying the heal is great, it’s certainly not even close to the mesmer’s new heal and certainly doesn’t approach the warriors signet. However it’s not exactly unusable. Sure you give up some condition removal but you gain a sustained heal with group utility. Now if I were to tweak it I’d say allow it to work in Death Shroud(all vampiric/siphons should) and remove the ICD. My reasoning is that with the duration of 5s and a 1s icd it’s tough to get all 5 possible heals. By removing the cooldown you allow for a bigger heal payday to combo play(Signet+Ghastly Claws/Life Siphon) but it isn’t guaranteed due to allies. I think that would better make up for it’s lack of condition removal and cooldown.

Samhayn.2385:

you need to word the mitigation part better, toughness does not mitigate conditions, yes conditions need to land to do damage but most of them are applied thru crit or in conjunction with a direct damage attack.

and I am all for builds between full zerker and full condition if and when they can be used more viably. As it stands right now its hard to make a viable hybrid build on most class due to the limitations on spec and stat allocation on gear. With more diverse stat allocation (even if its a change in Main stat from precision to power) you would see more reverse builds. Its been stated in the past that more stat combinations would come so its just a matter of time.

You are correct about toughness and even protection, I was just too lazy to type it all out. I just get befuddled when people forget that conditions need to land to be applied. I also fully agree on stat allocations, I always felt that stats should have been another character customization layer on top of traits instead of shoehorned into traits. We also need to look at base class health and armor, but now I’m just wishful thinking considering the speed that arenanet changes things.