Guild Wars 2

Sigil stacking is good if they rebalance values.

Them not stacking was crazy unintuitive.

Liewec.2896:

while there is no reason they can’t retroactively grant rank points for previous tournament wins there is also no reason why they should either,
just because they’ve added a new insentive to play tournaments it doesn’t mean we should get the new insentive for everything we’ve already done,
there was no reason to play tournaments if you were after rank points in the past,
now there is
so if people complain that they spent thousands of hours struggling through rank tournaments, i just have to ask, why?

To add more value to the rank system again? I thought this was obvious to everyone here but some people seem to still not realize what we are asking for.

It is not about personal progression but somewhat saving the rank systems integrity. Right now it is literally worthless. You could even say it scales inversely with skill since hotjoin farming certainly made you a worse player than playing 400 turney games. Even if it did give you a level 60 rank and the turney games like 35.

What this would do is raise the overall rank of everybody. While they certainly did not want this it is the logical result of their bad system and they should accept this mistake now by keeping a fair distribution retrospectively and instead increase their amount of ranks.

For example they could create a new tier of ranks after dragon that starts with rabbit again but now the effect could be red or green and they could call it Veteran Rabit. Or they come up with just more animals although it will be hard to top a phoenix/dragon. Maybe god ranks?

Dragon -> Lyssa -> Dwayna -> Grenth -> …

No, not in a lifetime.

Josh Davis.6015:

As John mentioned previously, we don’t plan on retroactively awarding rank points for previous wins. We will, however, be rebalancing rank tiers to make them more attainable.

People realized your last response. The question is much more “why not?”.

All you do is keep saying “we won’t do it” although there is clearly the desire and reasoning to make it happen.

Yep, compensating the turney players is the only way to clean up this mess, Anet.

Maybe they will give us an update on next fridays “ready up”.

Or mabye they will just ignore this again.

More burning on that would even really help engineer, we don’t lack burning.

If anything I want to see a 20% dmg buff on that OR make it say “deals 30% more damage to burning enemies”.

Anyone else thinks that these are nearly exclusively bad and block trait slots that could actually increase build variety?

There is just one really good one that comes to my mind (and actually makes sense by itself) which is the guardian bubble on revive. I also guess some people take the fall damage traits for WvW because you can actually survive some of the cliffs there.

But again 90% seem uselss.

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

Kamui.3150:

With these additions it’d likely boost the CD of the skill, probably to somewhere in the 30-35 sec range.

It’d have to be more in the range of 60-70 seconds to be anything close to balanced.

Ok now you are talking out of your kitten . Healing mists of Elixir gun toolbelt is a kit stunbreaker as well and sits at a 40 second cooldown which goes down to 28 when fully traited into tools.

chungiee.8764:

I actually like FT #5 as it is… i’d much prefer it to be left alone and have skills 1/2 changed.

The Blind on demand is great fun to use and have much utility in PvP.

I also like the no animation on demand blind but having just that on a skill button is too little, especially since flamethrower can use some help.

It needs other gadgets to be good so that you actually can run them with traited cooldowns etc. Gadgets just lack condi removal though (I suggested a change for PBR here).

If GS guardian would cleanse more condis it would not be an issue imo.

I honestly think some kind of universal condi removal would not be a bad thing. Further balancing might become necessary because it changes a core aspect obviously but it could help the game in general.

Yeah. The cd would have to be changed. Didn’t want to commit to a number but 35sec seems fine given that you can still trait it. Remember that the stunbreaking will take slightly longer though due to having to kit swap first and you also don’t know for sure if it is off cooldown.

Maybe those should cleanse conditions when using blast or leap finishers instead of 3/5s retaliation. Would this influence the meta in a good way? Takes pressure away from utility slots to run condi removal and thus increases build variety.

Tyragon.2496:

I agree on this. When I drop my fire field as warrior and blast, I want the Might, I don’t want the random condition cleansing from a guardian’s Light field when there even aren’t any conditions.

Combo fields put down by yourself should always be prioritized, yes!

Blasting a light field doesn’t cleanse condis.

Smoke Vent

• breaks stun
• creates a smoke field for 1 second (similiar to the water field of regenerating mist toolbelt)

Why?

• brings flamethrower slightly up in viability compared to other kits
• stunbreaker on a kit helps engi which usually lacks enough utility slots for stunbreakers because of having to run kits
• goes well with engi theme of combo field supply for their own blast finishers

It should still not require an animation btw to keep the blind stomp utility.

I don’t see the point why there is a trait that makes spirits move. Inb4 rage but this is the exact problem: it makes them AI pets that follow you and more or less randomly will run into enemies or dodge them. Even the spirit actives are much more random like that than if they were stationary how spirits always were supposed to be.

This is just a trait that makes something class specific (stationary boon donor with a local effect) into another generic AI pet and you have to trait so much for it that you will always want a full spirit build instead of mixing just 1 with other skills for example. It is plain bad design by Arenanet and despite people hating it the defend it so hard for all this time and even release MORE spirits…

You could say rangers didn’t like their one moving pet and arenanets answer was forcing them into builds where you have 4 of such pets.

Longbow damage is actually very high. It is higher than shortbow as well on max range and if they would make it any higher it would kitten with the balance.

The problem is the pve melee meta. If you stand beside your warrior group you will also get the 25 might stacks and aoe boons while you give them spotter etc. This won’t happen on range. And honestly it is good like that. You never should be able to make a build where ranged damage > melee damage and I don’t understand why so many people don’t get this. Must be the bearbow mentality.

Yes that was my intention as well. I think just creating a “remove condition when you use a gadget” trait would be pretty bad design because we already have this exact thing on elixirs. So I would prefer if they just create 1 or 2 really good gadgets (or change existing ones to that) that remove/transfer conditions. Basically this could be PBR and Utility Goggles could offer immunity for a bit more stuff.

This could already be a strong base for gadget builds (which currently don’t exist) because it deals with stuns and condis. We still need a good trait for gadgets but it wouldn’t have to be about conditions then. I personally suggested a trait that drops a mine whenever you use a gadget + all mines should remove boons.

Problems:

• gets outperformed by kits and many other skills
• does nothing special for the sake of a whole utility slot

Ideas:

• add utility like stun break or condition removal
• rework toolbelt to work better in a static discharge build

Final suggestions:
Personal Battering Ram (A)

• if you launch a target successfully remove all of your conditions and add a stack of confusion (5s) for each unique condition removed
• risk to miss/get dodged but high reward if hitting the launch
• a gadget with condition removal

Personal Battering Ram (B)

• break stun and launch the nearest 3 targets (hits stealthed enemies)
• increases overall skill efficiency compared to standard knockbacks like rifle, shield, flamethrower

Launch Personal Battering Ram

• remove cast animation (so that it functions like surprise shot) or increase damage

Josh Davis.6015:

It would be in your benefit to salvage the items from the chests for luck.

What hapens with all those tokens/crafting mats?

I think engineers just have the largest kitten.

Dirame.8521:

Dojo.1867:

Josh Davis.6015:

I’ll write myself a note to bring it up on Monday. Thanks!

Can you add Static Discharge to that note?

I always was curious if it is intended that toolbelts that do not require a target will make the lightning bolt just go straight forward with you camera angle (which pracitcally means the ground most of the time) and not towards the selected target.

Then again if this is going to be fixed you might want to remove “detonate turret” from the list that triggers discharge and it might need a nerf in general.

Also Flamethrowers Flame Blast should detonate when hitting surfaces and you promised us to do something with FT5 a long time ago.

Btw you are communicating so much more with us than any other dev. Love it!

Thing about SD is, you run the risk of making Toss Elixir S useless since it just flies of into a target when you toss it trying to stealth yourself.

Deselect target or don’t include both in the build if you don’t want that to happen.

Josh Davis.6015:

I’ll write myself a note to bring it up on Monday. Thanks!

Can you add Static Discharge to that note?

I always was curious if it is intended that toolbelts that do not require a target will make the lightning bolt just go straight forward with you camera angle (which pracitcally means the ground most of the time) and not towards the selected target.

Then again if this is going to be fixed you might want to remove “detonate turret” from the list that triggers discharge and it might need a nerf in general.

Also Flamethrowers Flame Blast should detonate when hitting surfaces and you promised us to do something with FT5 a long time ago.

Btw you are communicating so much more with us than any other dev. Love it!

sorrow.2364:

Because Asuras are small.
That means that animations are small and they vanish in the clutter of the fight, making it harder to even target them.

Take an Asura minion master, for instance. Most the time you can’t to see it because it is among all of those big minions, so you can’t really tell when a fear mark or a dagger immobilize is coming.
The more clutter there is in a fight, the bigger is the Asura advantage.

They have an unfair and obvious advantage and anyone denying it has no clue whatsoever.

True. If it was for me I would give them an hp debuff.

I wonder if it would be possible to create a balanced elite kit without a swap restriction (like currently no kit has a swap cd) or if it would have to be atleast 20 seconds or something like that.

Then again it is true that they could just put higher cooldowns on the skills themselves. I wonder if someone could come up with a good theorycraft.

I have trouble finding a viable elixir gun build for spvp. Any link?

Silentshoes.1805:

The numbers of people in the Mists has more than doubled after the Dec 10th changes.

Structured PvP is more integrated into the game world. You can now level your character in the Mists with sPvP. You can earn gold in sPvP.

I hear people saying it is dying because their friends from beta have moved on to other games, but I don’t see any evidence that GW2 sPvP is dying.

Newsflash. Those changes happened about a month ago.

Sorry but rocket boots is only better than a kit if you already have 2 and even then I would pick elixir R or a stunbreak over it.

Wolf.5816:

I feel it should be the complete opposite.

Elixir Gun Is already the whole “KIT-and caboodle”. Healing Mists untraited is an instant stun breaker that will give Regeneration to you and allies healing them over 1300 with a 40 second cooldown. Yes Healing Turrets Soothing Mist is only a 25 second cool down and has a mildly larger range but it’s Regeneration is minuscule in comparison and with a cast time. Yes Blast finishers are great and make this skill actually decent but I strongly feel it should at the very least remove 1 condition. As far as I’m concerned Elixir Gun is in a decent position, it’s the other Skills and Abilities that lack the versatility/condition removal of the Elixir Gun.

Giving Our Soothing Mist the ability to remove 1 condition would be a reasonable way to open up builds that don’t want to be forced into Elixir Gun. Not that I don’t love the Kit I’m just trying to push for more diversity through minor changes ect.

Naturally I would say, just make Soothing Mist instant as well and we can call it even but having spent a noteworthy amount of time as an Engineer this change would be…. Very powerful. But that being said, pretty much all Turret tool belt skills could use some help, they should either be re-designed to keep the engineer alive while the turrets are on CD or their mechanic should be changed to allow the skills to be usable while the turrets are active and relocate detonate.

Today I leanred. People are forced into Elixir Gun and Healing Turret needs a buff.

Isn’t healing turret the best healing skill already by far? I would hardly touch it in terms of buffs.

Only map where you should start might is spirit watch.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

How is a grenade any harder to land than a Cluster Bomb Ostrich?

They are equally hard to hit but an important fact is that engi commits to the fight and will die when missing while thief can disengage (even though this will be suboptimal for the team on the long term).

Since it only removes 1 condi it wouldn’t be that much of a conflict imo. Stunbreak >> 1 condi unless it is a very dangerous immobilize or you know the enemy you duel has no CC left. I figured most of the time you will just keep breaking stuns with it but also remove a condition when you are stunned.

I just doubt 30+ seconds of regeneration duration stacked is worth anything, you have so much regeneration just with healing turret already.

ProxyDamage.9826:

If you won duels as a 30/30/10 full berserker ranger you were playing against crap players.

30/20/20 with a good mix of berserker and knights/soldiers can do…something… Provided you outplay your opponent…

30/30/10 full berserker is only for zerg play kitten ing around from 1.5k range.

Wrong. 30/30/… is considered the better spec by many because you are just too vulnerable anyways to outsustain anything. Swapping 10 more points does nothing, actually moment of clarity gives way more damage AND damage negation by increased cc time than those 10 points in any other tree.

You just have to play extremely cautious and engage/disengage a lot. And the disengage is quite good with stealth shot into swoop or just gs block into swoop even if it is not thief level.

The really absurd thing is that Arenanet WANTS ranger to be a very easy low skillcap proffession. Basically they promote the bearbow with their design decision because they think this helps new players but actually it just stigmatizes them together with the whole class.

At this point of the game it is (and one could argue it alway was) the most flawed class with the most construction sides/unfinished work. The whole pet mechanic is just one thing.

Now I know that these skills have very different secondary effects. One is a water field and one is a stunbreaker.

However I still find it extremely awkward to have 2 toolbelts that both add regeneration in a very similiar way (range differs but this isn’t even telegraphed well since the effect is nearly the same?).

Can we just change healing mist (Elixir Gun) to an AoE 1 condi removal + stunbreak?

Didn’t someone calc the power scaling difference between bombs and grenades and bombs were only like 5% better than 3 grenades?

Now consider the fact that one is pretty much max range and one requires you to sit inbetween them with berserker stats and we have a winner for PvP atleast.

Knighthonor.4061:

Okay going with the Mech Suit Device Kit idea.

Skill 1 (chain)

1- Chain Cleave – Deal damage to target and nearby enemies. Apply Weakness 4 seconds.
1-2-Chainsaw Sweep – Deal damage to enemy and nearby enemies, apply weakness and Bleeding Vulnerability and Cripple for 3 seconds.
1-3-Saw Claw – Deal damage, causing Bleeding, Weakness, Vulnerability and Cripple for 3 seconds.

2-Steam Hammer Arm- Smack the enemy, doing damage, and knocking down nearby enemies for 1 second. apply confusion for 3 seconds and regeneration to self and nearby allies for 6 seconds.

3-Chained Explosion- Send out a barbed chain that pulls 3 enemies to your location, and explodes ,dealing damage to nearby enemies, then knocking them back. apply daze for 1 seconds.

4-Knetic Energy Shield- Forms a shield around you, that heals you a percentage of the damage you take, while reflecting 1 attack per second at a nearby enemy. duration 4 seconds.

5- Dark Matter Shield- creates a large radius shield around you, that knocks back foes, and reflects projectiles. 6 second duration. Movement is slowed by 75% while in effect.

toolbelt skill- Laser Beam- fire a laser beam in a cone pattern while on the move, dealing damage, and removing boons from enemies hit, and applying it to nearby allies. causes torment for 3 seconds.

Trait-

*Allow Mech suit Device Kit to mount Turrets when picking them up.

*passively gain Stability and protection every 6 seconds while equipping mech suit device kit. Toughness increased.

*Mech Suit device kit, produce nanobots which can repair. Regenerate health every second while in mech device kit.

To be honest I would much rather see elixir X changed to something like this (instead of warrior/ele copies) than see juggernaut/flamethrower changed. I like Juggernaut and it is well placed as a master trait. Even though flamethrower needs some buffs in general you idea would fit an “elite kit” much more.

Tesla Gun

• Energy Bolt (Autoattack): Deals damage and fills 5% of your endurance on each successful hit.
• Charged Shot (8 sec cd): Charge your Tesla gun for 3 seconds to release a shot that dazes foes for 2 seconds.
• Discharge (12 sec cd): Discharge you Tesla Gun to deal damage to nearby enemies with a bonus dependent on you endurance. Lose all endurance.
• Short Circuit (16 sec cd): Stun target foe in melee range for 1 second and burn him for 5 seconds.
• Faraday Cage (18 sec cd): Create a lightning field around you for 3 seconds that destroys projectiles and dazes/deals damage every second.

I think my class is the hardest because it has so many skillshots.

Thief is part of nearly any competitive team. Still is the best in its niche by far.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

It would be nice to see a community built list that shows specs rated top>down for each class and role in all areas of play. This kind of feedback is really helpful for our team.

Was just about to say what would we do even if all classes were in the same tier? This says nothing about how specific builds like Power Ranger or DPS Guadian perform.

Why are there no polls in this forum btw? I hardly belive it is too difficult to code.

Since devs seem to gather feedback for there next big patch I would like to offer my input on the classes I mainly play.

Engi:

• needs more interaction with gadgets badly
• new heal skills suffers because hard to use in a build and also have enough condi removal in it
• lack of stunbreakers because utility slots are filled with kits (which are necessary to stay competitive in combat)
• weak pistol autoattack
• grenade kit (forced into 30 explosives always) = toolkit > bombkit > flamethrower = elixir gun

Ranger:

• power builds still too weak mainly due to lack of condi removal in a 30/30/… build
• many useless pet traits
• pets still stop animations of there f2 and go full cooldown
• many missplaced traits for traps
• new heal skill is just bad 95% of the time

Guardian:

• new heal skill is too weak in 5on5 -> higher stats or instant like all meditations
• not a guardian thing but we still lack a visual effect for stability, the visually most important boon in the game

Warrior:

• nerfs for healing signet if any should happen in 1-2% steps per patch because it is very close to being balanced

Josh Davis.6015:

We haven’t announced when the removal of the vendor will be, but we’ll make sure to give adequate warning beforehand.

Josh I have a huge problem with my glory boosters. When you announced you would remove glory at some point and whe should spent our boosters I have them on whenever I play but still like 195 left and a lot of unopened boxed from which I get more.

Even though I play more than an hour daily I cannot finish them in the next couple of months. Will I have an alternative method to use them?

Since mostly turney players have glory boosters left it might be a good decision to alternatively convert them into rank points or something like that.

Still waiting for an answer on why exactly this should NOT happen.

Vuh.1328:

I actully think the pistol #1 could use some sort of auto attack chain(ranger SB #1 could need one too)

That would be a huge break in design patterns since ranged weapons never have auto chains.

Anymras.5729:

Man, even on the fake patchnotes, there’s no Turret bugfixes.

To be honest I would completely remake turrets. Like make their abilities have a cooldown when you spawn them so that you actually should have them on the field as long as possible.

Would have been a bit too much for these notes though and the whole thread would have become “you cannot do this to healing turret”.

Weapons

• Explosive Shot – Increased dmg by 20%. This skill is now considered an explosion (adds synergy with Steel-Packed Powder, Shrapnel and Explosive Powder)
• Glue Shot – Increased projectile speed by 50%. Now grants stability to allies for 1 second every tick in addtion to cripplin enemies.
• Homing Torpedo – Increased attack rate by 30%, reduced damage by 30%. Now causes 1 second of burning on every hit.

We wanted to boost the pistol autoattack because compared to most other weapon sets it was really lacking. While we want to promote kit usage, engis were often forced to run multiple kits on utility slots which took away the option to run stunbreakers or condi removal just to have as little “pistol downtime” as possible. This also indirectly buffs Coated Bullets. Pistol offhand also felt a bit too weak for giving up the defense shield offers and the stability fits the glue flavor. Finally we wanted to make the Harpoongun autoattack more hybrid given that it is the only UW weapon for engi while there are both: condition and direct dmg specs on land.

Utility Skills

• Personal Battering Ram – When sucessfully launching a target this now removes all condtions from the engineer and adds a 5 second stack of confusion for each condition removed that way on the target. Increased cooldown from 25s to 35s.
• Launch Personal Battering Ram – This skill is now instant without animation time (like Surprise Shot).
• Utility Goggles – Now also become immune to cripple, weakness, chill and immobilize.
• Flame Jet (Flamethrower) – Increased direct dmg portion of this skill by 20%.
• Flame Blast (Flamethrower) – Now is also a blast finisher. The detonate part will now also trigger when the projectile collides with a surface (it just disappeared before).
• Smoke Vent (Flamethrower) – This skill now breaks stun.
• Supply Crate – Now counts as a gadget.

Between all the utility skills we thought Gadgets have the most problems. We hope to see those more used now especially since they include more condition removal with these changes. Also we added some utility to Flamethrower to make up for the lack of utility slots when running kits and made the autoattack stronger which hopefully affects its viability in PvE dungeons.

Traits

• Autodefense Bomb Dispenser – Decreased internal cooldown from 30 to 15 seconds.
• Removed ‘Packaged Stimulants’ (Med Kit skills can be thrown and are more effective.)
• Added new master trait in tools: ‘Armed and Dangerous’ – Drop 2 mines whenever you use a Gadget and 1 mine for Gadget toolbelt skills. (These mines are identical to the ones created via Reserve Mines minor explosives trait.)
• Static Discharge – Now correctly launches a bolt of lightning towards the selected target even on no target toolbelt skills. No longer interacts with ’Detonate Turret" toolbelt skills.

Here we mainly tried to support the tool traitline with more gadget interactions. Also fixed static discharge which was bugged on most toolbelt skills since release.

They just said they decided to keep ranks based on player feedback. Nothing about creating a fair environment concerning time spent/ actual rank retrospectively.

Penguin.5197:

Speaking of backdraft did they ever give a reason as to why it was changed?
Also I think its time #5 gets changed to something useful.

Well they didn’t want so much control on a single kit (push and pull) and they wanted to make toolkit better at the same time.

There would be many options to improve Smoke Vent:

• blast finisher
• smoke ticks multiple times (like 3 times in secon intervals)
• stunbreak (you can swap into kit while stunned)
• short duration smoke field

They just have to chose one.

So for a long time this has been the most viable spec in pvp despite people not really liking this playstyle. Will Anet ever realise that people want to play their ranger without all that passive kitten and bad AI zoo?

More than flameblast I could see it on FT5 which is propably the weapon skill with the smallest kittening influence on the game ever.