Guild Wars 2

It has good utility but that doesn’t justify making the autoattack completly worthless. I don’t want to have a weapon that I can only use to close the gap, then fail my stun because the target moves and wait for the timer to switch back to shortbow as soon as possible …

A slight buff won’t do here. They need to add atleast 50-70% of damage to the chain to make it worth using.

Chopps.5047:

I use the greatsword all of the time, particularly in dub v dubs. Slightly off subject, but I also use the offhand axe all of the time. I leave DPS balancing up to ANET and top sPvP players results. Obviously, weapon choice is build dependent, but I’ve found both to do solid damage when you consider the fact that you get [Swoop] (extreme escapability / CD short enough & distance long enough such that it’s faster than running—plus it’s a leap finisher), as well as a stun and a daze. The swings do big AoE hits in a wide sweeping arc.

What more do you guys want again?

Damage. I don’t care if I can tickle my enemies in a wide arc.

Well the roaming/escaping is indeed great (blocks are always nice and the swoop range is good).

The point is … the damage is freaking awful.

Oh I thought about that aswell. Wonder why I didn’t include it.

So we have a whole lot of bad traits, traits that should be merged into one or just replaced, etc, etc. Here are some ideas of what would be cool for the class and generally help with its weaknesses:

Evasion Traits
There are many traits for other classes that do something on blocks like make enemies burn for guardian. The counterpart for blocking of ranger is evasion so why not give us “on evade” effects. Maybe one of these:

• gain a stack of might
• remove a condition
• blinds enemy that missed

Because normal dodging allows to evade this should be either exlcuded or the effects should get appropriate internal cooldowns.

Mobility Traits
Warrior has Mobile Strikes (Movement skills break immobilize.). Wouldn’t that be very fitting (imo even more fitting) for the ranger class aswell? There are many traits that are shared for multiple classes and we could definitely use this one!

Trap Traits
These are missplaced completly. If you go traps you need condition damager which is in the Wilderness Survival traitline. Trap traits belong there, too while there is actually stuff in Wilderness survival that would be way more fitting for Skirmishing (like GS cooldown reduction). I really think this is actually just rushed and ended up like this by mistake. I personally also think the range increase is to massive for a trait. They should be 25% bigger by default and get another 25% + the ground targeting with the trait.

Attack of Opportunity
This is currently an “on next attack” buff you can obtain by running Moment of Clarity (12 Skirmishing) and successfully interrupting a target or the active effect of the speed signet traited for applying to the pet and the player. It makes your next attack deal 50% more damage (wrong tooltip say 150% increase). I love the idea of this but for the effort it feels a bit weak. This should either just be “your next attack crits” which would benefit from crit damage but still be atleast 50% OR it should just trigger whenever you stun/daze (not having to interrupt).
Your ideas?

CRrabbit.1284:

Which class can not ?

Joey.3928:

I solo camps on my ranger so I feel the opposite of useless.

Ye lol. He solos camps. Wow!

Seriously it feels so pathetic playing ranger in WvW. In zerg/siege situations you have to run longbow and unleash your arrow barrage. This stops being fun after doing it twice…

I am personally rather a roamer anyway but beside sword + x tanky condition specs I feel crazy weak exspecially since the pet has a successful hit rate of like 10%. Great sword as a weapon feels like a joke compared to damage other classes dish out. Fighting thiefs with greatsword is such a joke.

5 is actually bad. Not usable vs target that run away. Even if you stand on top of them when you start casting they will be out of range due to the long anim/short range and it will miss.

I am so disappointed by Arenanets kitten balancing philosophy. They just dont adress any ressources to that since 6 months. I already stopped playing that game and I will again. I don’t want more content if the existing one (classes) is so restricting. You can play like 1 viable build. And thiefs in WvW compared ot ranger? What is this kitten.

Zenith.7301:

The GS counterattack should knockdown, not back. The last thing you want on a melee weapon is to move your opponent from you. Especially a melee weapon with no good cripple.

Well from a WvW perspective I like those rare occasions where I push someone down a cliff (and it is the only push we have beside longbow).

What Greatsword needs is straight out more damage on the autochain, more damage on 4 when you throw it (it even roots us for the animation) and longer ranger or faster animation (or better both) for 5. I actually think in beta it was at the right spot but to many people cried and they overnerfed it before people learned other classes and how to counter/play properly.

I run the same utilities as angan. I actually like Lightning Reflexes more than Signet of Renewal but the fact that it only breaks stun but not immobilize kitten me off so hard and killed me every single time when trying to get away.

Power/Vitality/Toughness is best imo. A condition spec can work too but limits you more weapon wise.

I just think sharpening stones does way to little for covering a whole utility slot. If you want to bleed just get a sigil into your weapon or something. Maybe this would be better if it also added fury or might or if it would remove some conditions on activation.

I recently leveled a ranger to 80 and WvWed quite a bit. Needless to say defensive gear is the way to go because you want your pet to hit while they attack you. This works great in 2-6 people scenarios because it is very unlikely that they can down your pet here.

However at the same time exactly this aspect (which the class is based on) does not work at all in zergy fights/siege scenarios. You just lose your pet there in seconds or you cannot use it at all which just removes 40% of your efficiency atleast. No other class is that polarizing and drops so much use in a scenario that isn’t rare at all. You are basically forced to never ever fight in any > 5 enemy skirmish.

This is very hard to fix but giving pets some kind of 50% AoE resistance would be a start together with tuning some utilities/traits towards better pet survivability. A good example for completly underpowered skills is signet active effects. I do not know who thought this would be balanced. One time 50% more dmg that misses most of the time for giving up 25% speed boost for quite a long time? 120 seconds of cooldown on most other signets??? I mean wtf. These need a serious overhaul starting with active effects that are actually worth using on a fair cooldown.

Last but not least: Great Sword damage. While a sword/traps condition build is at a decent place right now GS just got destroyed damage wise at some point in beta. Nobody really knew how to play at that point but still they did a huge nerf that made GS unusable for dealing damage/nearly never played again in sPvP until now. It just was an overnerf and while it had to be nerfed they now have to give it back a part of its former strength.

Autoattack chain: This just needs more damage, maybe focuss the buff on the 3rd hit to reward chaining a bit.
2nd skill: Fine even though I find confusion stacks more apporpriate of a condition for a bear hitting you. Making this the only skill in the GS set with cond dmg makes it hard to gear for.
3rd skill: Absolutely no complains.
4th skill: The block into knockback is fine but throwing the sword seems like complete garbage. This needs to deal way more damage and it has to be possible to cast it while moving. Terrible right now.
5th skill: Needs slightly faster animation and slightly higher range.

Well imo you should do your balance meetings more often then or specifically adress someone for it (not just the person that has some time left like it sounds in your post).

Fact is you balancing progress is rhater bad. Alot of changes since bwe1 that were simply stuff like a wrong cooldown persisted way too long. It just needs more attention and also MORE people directed to the speficic taks Jon was talking about. The balancing itself needs a real team and not the people of the other areas holding meetings ocasionally.

Please focuss more ressources on balancing and ability/class improvements. Wouldn’t hurt if they come up with new slot skills for comig updates either. For example it would have been great if each class would have gotten 2 new slot skills for the lost shores update. Then again there is so much unviable stuff right now you should fix first…

Well pirate looks pretty good: http://i.imgur.com/107Ch.jpg

Why not use it?

I find it catastrophal that they don’t even really have a real matchmaking system planned at the moment despite the massive negative feedback (being very new user unfriendly) concerning the tournament system. Wow!

Needs hammer:
1 – Smash, Confusing Smash, Concussion Smash [auto chain]: Damage, Damage + confusion, Damage + 2 stacks of confusion.
2 – Mine Bash [8s]: AoE ground attack that plants a mine that acitavtes after 2 seconds.
3 – Hammer Shield [16s] – Block all incoming melee attacks for the next 2 seconds. When hit by a projectile the effect ends and you get: ‘Batter back’ that allows you to shoot the projectile at a target within the next 3 seconds.
4 – Heavy Leap [12s]: Leap towards your target dazing it on impact.
5 – Contructing Strike [18s]: Creates an overcharged Rifle Turret in front of you for 8 seconds.

As someone that began PvPing in about the last 1-2 weeks and most of the time not having a group with my I can totally speak for the scenario described by OP.

The game is fun when playd as a 5vs5 and the maps are imo actually rather well desingend. However 8vs8 instantly removes all tactics and strategy and makes it random zerging. You could aswell throw a dice to determine the winning team. Remove 8vs8 servers!

Also it is a HUGE problem that the current matchmaking does NOT estimate the strenght of players/teams in any way beside being a turney system and thus directly promote the winner of each round. That is just not enough for nomal play. It is making things complicated and hard to experience for no reason. I can only repeat OP.

Make a single game queue system and actually try to implement matchmaking that balances out teamstrength:

• player level (much better: elo, but first will buy you some time if it is too hard to implement yet)
• premade combos (dont match 1+1+1+1+1 vs 5)

For single games it wouldn’t be too hard to find fitting teams to play the round (or even 3 rounds). For a turney your current system is fine but …. this should be for turneys and not the main competition mode.

PLEASE do a soloqueue I beg you and also create a ladder that people can relate to.

And do it rather sooner than later. I saw alot of people that wanted gw2 esport to be big stream and even cast but they get less everyday and from the people that continue you can hear the frustration.

Beside elixier S which is random and has a very bad cooldown : duration ratio.

Makes it impossible to fight on nodes vs spirit hammer guardian or a tornardo. You are literally cced non stop.

Please don’t! I love my current sPvP build and actually Glue shot is a kind of cc which is hard to achieve with our other options (exspecially with traited pistol range).

You are right that we also have alot of other ways to apply burining but again Blow torch does it in a way that allows for different other utilities/traits. Incendiary ammo is a very good adept trait but it wont apply this amount of burn to this amount of people. Try this build in sPvP and tell me if you still think it is bad: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqal0pae3zSfF1LJxoCcGki8WfRFy/nHyltpF;ToAAzCpo+y8l4LbRuvkFNqYSA

And for PvE I cannot really say alot because EVERYTHING is outperformed by grenades/rifle but basically you lose the block and reflect and gain very reliable aoe burn that is somewhat ranged compared to flame bomb and a huge ranged aoe bind/cripple.

As we all know engineer cannot equip multiple weapon sets. He only has kits but even then it is pretty much the (static) stats/traits that decide what damage we deal so if we are skilled for conditions we only have very kitteny direct damage.

Jon Peters mentioned he wanted to look into that and if you ask me this is actually a really important issue. I just would like to know if they are working on it/haven’t forgotten about this. If I remember correctly the 2 favored possibilities to solve this were:

1. Always directly deal the condition part of any skill damage the moment the skill hits and deals its direct damage with a balancing modifier (dealing 100% of the condition damge would porpably be to much).

Example Explosive Shot: 30 base damage + 200 bleeding damage * 0.5 (<- subject to balancing) = 130 damage

2. Create a universale DOT condition for structures called ‘Blazing’ where alle condition DOTs are added into. It stacks in intensity and the amount of stacks added would be higher the more damage a condition normally does (Burn > Poison > Bleed).

Creating this here because I feel engineer is one of the most affected classes concerning this issue. An engineer with bombs, grenades, flamethrower that cannot damage structures. Arenanet why?

I also find it way more comfortable to always have the same function on my keys.

Press utility skill → equip kit
Swap weapon button → unequip

If they changed it there would always be the additional thought process required of asking “am I currently using the kit or not?” to do the right thing. I also usually spam buttons so it happened alot to me that I actually switched away from my kits when I didn’t want to.

So in my opinion make it behave like it does for all the kits.

I agree. Those times are ridiculously biased towards us players.

@wintermute:

This is why grenades are a broken concept. They will always be either too bad for sPvP/actually moving mobs and too good vs relatively static targets (which applies for 90% of PvE and then there is still the AoE aspect). I don’t hate the targeting mechanic at all but THIS is the reason they have to change it. Thus my suggestion to make 1 and 2 autotargeting. There would still be travling time and a missrate but it would be way more reliable and allow for better balanced damage.
The “balance change” back in beta were they just added a flat 50% damage boost just to make up for the hard targeting mechanic was kitten and made it the must have vs nonmoving pve targets it is right now.

Gilgamesh.2561:

Sure, pick up Elixir U and some gadgets and go to town.

Engineers are not destined to spam grenades. Except maybe in WvW.

Right now they are designed for exactly that exepct sPvP.

Finally someone that actually analyzed the skill and posted arguments. Grenadekit delivers so many reasons to not ever swap out of it again. Spam insane damage from insane range with decent support for the rest of your team (poisonfield, chilled, blind, 25 invul stacks). I mean what the kitten????

The 1 spam is strong enough already so atleast allow us to cast 2-5 and swap back to our other weapons but right now it is just by far more efficient to just keep roatiting within the kit and forget everything else.

And I also find it kitten that they implemented autotargeting only underwater with pretty much the same stats. What?? Either do it for both or for nothing but not like that. How can they even consider this balanced?

If I was allowed to remake the kit I would do somehting like that:

• 1 and 2 become autotargeting
• 2 and 3 cooldown increase
• 3 also does damage now
• grenadier trait will only offer a 50% chance for a 3rd grenade instead of 100%
• base range + traited range slightly decreased

I consoder this a general gameplay flaw. Yes it is also affecting my own playstyle but most people I talked to that wanted to run an efficient dungeon build are annoyed by the superior nature of pure grenade spam. And one problme leading to that is that 1 and 2 are meant to be spammed. 3 sec cooldown is just to fast to even get a poison volley off.

And again. It would be a change for more versatility but people that like to press 543211121112311145 can continue to do that.

This basically doesnt hurt people that like to spam grenades but I personally tried to get a pistol/shield/grenade kit with constant switching working and because I use pistol condition damage is the main damage soruce. However it is very annoying to basically have to switch every 3 seconds.

This skill forces you to stay in the kit the whole time which – to me – is antifun.

Grenades are just flawed due to the face that it IS very hard to hit moving targets. It pretty much has to be this insane damage due to the totally natural miss ratio that even the best grenade user will experience. Problem: it is the by far best skill vs relatively immobile targets (aka pve, dungeons). It is a classic example of a game design flaw.

They DO have to remove this mechanic. I don’t even hate the targeting system but there is no way to solves this problem (beside removing any travel time whatsoever and make the explosions appear instantly what kind of destroys the weapon theme).

TLDR: They have to make the targeting system similiar to under water (atleast for 1 and 2) and thus nerf the damage.

True. Didn’t think about that but as you said it should not be that hard to popup a message “you already have this skill” whenever you want to equip something twice just like you cnanot run 2 ults or a flamethrower underwater.

I would totally buy this backpack skin:
https://d2vn94glaxzkz3.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/engineer-weaponkits.jpg

I 100% agree. At level 1 or so the kits fit in nicely but with all the shiny upgrades we get on our visuals until 80 they just look like some old trash. We need skins. My sugestion would be to just sell them as new skills.

For example:
1) Buy in Gem shop: Shiny Black Metal Flamethrower bundel (300 gems)
2) Unlock the item via doubleclick.
3) You now have a new slot skill to equip but you can aswell switch back to the old flamer if you want to.

Pretty much like the digital deluxe elite. Best solution imo. They wouldn’t even have to be gem only but I wouldn’t mind it.

Yes I mentioned that. This is about speargun though.

What is your general opinion? I have the feeling this weapon gets no attention right now just because grenades deal easy double the damage and have better cc/damage negation with freeze/blind. But what will happen when grenades might get a nerf (atleast under water)?

1: Very simple autoattack. Slow missile speed (also I think it needs a smaller model, hate it when there comes a giant torpedo out of my speargun). Overall attackspeed/damage is rather low imo. Not worth using.
2: Main damage source that is actually the only thing putting it somewhat near grenade level atleast in melee range. Vulnerability is a nice sideeffect.
3: A backwards move that also pulls a single target. I find this rather situational/hard to use.
4: Actually like this skill. Good damage and what is very good: mix between condition and normal damge.
5: Situational block spell. Sometimes useful though.

What I consider the biggest flaw is that engineer, as we all know has basically 2 weapon choices on land: pistol and rifle. So he will either go condition damage or power. Now under water he only has ONE weapon. So what this weapon should offer is a 50/50 mix of both ways to deal damage. However the condition part is highly underrepresented.

Autoattack should bleed and be faster (with smaller missile). The pull should pull all the way in fornt of you so that you can follow up with the second skill and also propably poison the target.

RoughJaco.3148:

So, grenades are barely on par with other classes one button “specs”, and pistols are rather boring and ineffective, therefore grenades should be nerfed useless?
/mindboggled.

It sure is fun to randomly create sentences people never said because it is easier to argue against them …

So you think it is balanced if attacking with pistol will barely do 50-70% of grenade damage or do you think pistols need a buff?

Like every seocndary weapon it is supposed to be on par with the alternatives not unbeatable above it…

Yes I used it in orr and whenevery I pulled more than one mob (which I considered rather hard to do) I just killed all 2 or 3 in no time. With pistol/shield I actually have decent fights with dodging/blocks/blinding that require timing but here I just kite around abit and press the skills and all the mobs die…

And seriously underwater is just as stupid. Lets be honest and aknowledge them being too strong.

Yes I am talking about PvE. Should have mentioned that. Sorry. This is about PvE. The dominance is way to storng there, it is just dumb if you have targets that don’t really move unpredictable. I edited my opening post oh and to give some constructive ideas:

• damage needs to get nerfed, sorry
• cooldowns of most skills should be way higher (and can even keep their strength that way) so that it becomes more a “swap for specific skill and swap back gameplay” like bombs and flamethrower
• maybe make vulnerability the main theme but seriously if it does already create those 25 stacks on its own lower the damage of the skills itself so it wont overcome pistol

TLDR: We have 3 possible weapon combos. Now atleast don’t make 2 of them rediculously inferior to some kit spam…

Seriously it is just stupidly strong and unlike bomb kit (which you can chain in for burning/blind and swap back or requires melee range) it is basically just “activate and spam grenades”.

Why don’t we take some strength of grenade kit (exspecially the spammable autoattack) and put it on the pistol? It just is braindead easymode for me that overcomes everything else easy. Why did I get me a cool Corrupted Shield and Pistol if I am never going to see them if I dont want to reduce my damage by 50% intentionally?

Edit: Sorry forgot to mention. I talk about PvE only, I know it is bad for PvP due to the targeting mechanic making it much less accurate vs unpredictable moving targets.

20 burn duration and incendiary power are great traits. Having flamejet always on is nothing but unreal scenario crafting exspecially when attaing multiple targets those traits are straight out huge dmg buffs for any condition spec.

Only playing with 2 thumb buttons and on a laptop and I do juts fine:

Toolbelts: 1-4
Weapon Skills: Q,E,R,M4,M5
Utilities: X,C,V
Heal: T
Elite: Z

No I do not have to break my fingers. Only annoying thing is walking + grenade spam.

All the on 25% heath traits don’t actually proc at 25% health but at 25% vitality I believe (i.e. elixir s will proc at 2.5k health or so when I have 18k health and about 10k vitality).

This often does not leave enough time to make good use of it exspecially for the toolbelt (bandage self) recharges.

Here is my view on the whole topic:

First of all the damage versus objects definitely has to take conditions into account as Jon Peters said. I also think the easiest and best way to do this would be implementing a unique condition for structures that sums up all conditions that are applied in one damage over time.

Blazing:

• no max stacks
• burning adds 8 stacks
• poison adds 2 stacks
• bleeding adds 1 stack
• overall damage per tick balanced around bleeding (somewhere between 40 and 100 damage dependend on cond. dmg. stat on gear)

Now for the general cap on non structure targets: I really think it should just flat out get removed. A cap is the worst solution they could have come up with and extremly player unfriendly. At one point simply every additonally added condition is 100% wasted. Bad bad design Arenanet. Remove a hard cap as soon as possible!

My personal solution would be to attack the problematic at its origin. They made the cap because unlike direct damage and armor (which can scale up on bosses when multiple players are around) overly stacked condition damage would fast become extremly strong. So basically we just need an armor equivalent for condition damage. The most logical way here that actually is already in the game is giving bosses scaling condition duration reduction. A boss that would scale in a way that his armor reduces direct damage by 50% would also have a 50% condition duration reduction buff. This actually helps all conditions at the same time while removing the cap for bleeding would still leave burning/poison at its single stack (being always filled with 50 people attacking).

TLDR:

1. New combined condition for any condition damage applied to structures (i.e. “Blazing”)
2. Removal of caps for bleeding. Scaling condition duration reduction system for “big” PvE targets.

onzo.6987:

Pistols are inferior to the rifle, certainly. A 0/30/0/10/30 build with Berserker Amulet gets 4.5k crits with Blunderbuss; which is similar to the linked video with no charge time like Kill Shot has.

Rifle also gets 2 great CC’s without having to weapon switch like that warrior is doing. Yes, Warrior ranged damage is better than our AOE condition pistols. That’s to be expected. I will say that Warrior damage does seem a little high at times – considering they have the highest base hitpoints (tied with Necros) and the highest base armor (tied with Guardians).

However, rather than trying to measure crits of one class against another, you should probably be thinking big picture. The Engineer does lack as a whole in the damage department. However, we make up for that with sneaky-good utility and a host of crowd control abilities. I’d venture to say Engineers are the best CC class in the game.

I don’t want to hurt Engineers by asking for too much. If you want to receive, you have to give – and I don’t want to give up CC.

But just take dungeons. CC is worthless against all those bosses/bigger mobs. If we atleast had alot of blocks to dodge/block tank abit like guardian. Our utility is indeed 100% directed on enemy targets which doesn’t work vs bosses. Only usefull skills I found were elixir S and R.

My big hope is a turret remake that might give some dmg.

I have the feeling they are balancing it around coated bullets/sigil of earth which just sucks. Better nerf the trait or the sigil but don’t force people to get this stuff or otherwise the weapon sucks.

2 sec is just overkill even for the rather fast attack speed. The power scaling is sokittenlow.

At what cost is a good question. I am not experienced but a lot of people told me that for PvE you want to aim for offensive stats. In all those dungeons you have to neglect damage with constant dodging anyways and if you attack from range just dealing more damage helps a lot more if you aren’t supposed to nore are in direcet danger of taking damage yourself anyways. That being said I only played rifle very little in PvE.

Hey this is not ment as a guide because I rather want to know which gear will turn out to be the most efficient myself and I am far away from having found a final answer. So lets start!

[Weapons]

Actually the easier task since there are only 3 different combos:

• Rifle
• Pistol/Shield
• Pistol/Pistol

The last 2 options will basically use the same gear. Also it is important to note that weapon stats will NOT influence kit skills. You basically lose the weapon once you equip them.

Rifle
Well, in the end this will be similiar to most other power/crit glasscannon builds. It has some bleed dmg on it but this should be pretty much neglectable and I don’t see a real reason to go for defensive stats even if you have to close up a bit for 3 and 5. So propably something like Berserker’s gear, just observe all the other power builds also for other classes.

Pistol/Pistol and Pistol/Shield
Here it is important to note that all skils nearly won’t scale with power AT ALL. This means for every engineer shield or pistol out there power is basically a wasted stat which limits our options by a lot already. On the same time we want condition damage so the main candidate becomes Rabid. Oddly enough this stat prefix is very hard to obtain. I found a very limited amount of exotics on the trading post with those stats (Dragonshot and Jora’s Defender) and it seems to be not craftable. I also don’t know if you can get it from some karma vendors or as dungeon rewards. Update me if you know anything.

[Armor and Trinkets]

The main difference here is that we want to take a look at kits too to see what synergizes. Again for a rifle build the decision should be rather easy with the well known glass cannon specs. For anything with pistol you propably again want atleast some condition damage. Most of the kits deal heavy condition damage but have a decent power scaling aswell. Thus I am not 100% sure if Rabid is the optimum here or if we should sacrifice the thoughness for some power (-> Rampager’s). For some kits like bombs you also have to stand right inside the enemies requiring atleast some defense while others are basically pure ranged spam like grenades.

So what are your experiences and what gear are you aiming for in PvE? I am only sure I want a pistol and shield with condition damage, precision and toughness.

There could be an endless survivalmode for all the different areas similiar to dungeons where the corresponding mobs span in waves that become harder and harder.
At the end of every 5 or 10 waves there could be chests spawning. Veterans could select an option at the beginning where they chose to start at wave 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. There could even be objectives like getting a supply ressource from time to time (maybe even with a dolyack) to build/reinforce defensive weapons and those objectives could differ for every region. Easiest would propably be to integrate the whole thing into the dungeon system allowing to chose between:

• Story mode
• Explorable mode
• Survival challenge

The main idea is that it would be endless and could even offer leaderboards while being relatively easy to implement for Arenanet because it doesn’t require a complex story.

I also would like to hear an explanation why you can only obtain this via karma vendor/very rare exotic drops (vatlaaw’s).