TLDR on mine: Please label the trait lines rather than relying on artwork to help us name them. For instance Ele Fire is obviously “Fire” but what if the game called it “Art of Flame?” Then there’d be all this imprecision in help threads as people called it whatever they thought it was based on the art.
I believe they won’t mind a dedicated thread. Hijacking and spamming, now, that could be an issue.
I’m lucky enough to have done this when it was the active chapter but I 100% agree there should be a way provided to get the locket, that can be removed again once they fix the bug if needed.
So please ANet.. just prove me wrong and be more creative than somethign like that …
Do you consider “Warrior” creative? How about “Engineer?” Or “Guardian?” Or, as you seem dismayed by naming the spec after something meaning a wild storm (which can be used metaphorically, btw, not just as a weather system … eg "A tempest of protests arose after a convicted thief was appointed to the city council), what about Mesmer? That’s named after an 18th century guy who theorized animal magnetism as a cure for illness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer
Yeah, sorry, I wasn’t clear I was agreeing with you and clarifying that it is for sure a wallet currency and thus definitely not tradeable as far as I can tell.
I use it on all my alts, even if I go no further in the line than is needed to get it. It’s the first trait I grab for all alts, so they can level via exploration more easily. I think I only have one alt (out of 14 80’s) that doesn’t have it permaset, and that’s because when I take her in a dungeon I swap out to make her Chains inflict vulnerability. This is why I was (I believe) the first person to ask in the AMA thread what the plans were for fall damage traits.
The stream answered that by showing the traits linked to other traits, and Thief getting it second tier instead of first, in one specific spec line. I’m sad. It’s super useful on Thief as others have noted above. I use it in the Labyrinth to get a little more wolf immunity, and also when jumping off the Labyrinth ledge down to help the Amber bull, it lets me zip past the devourers that might slow me down. I’ve used it in exploring the world (my Thief is one of my two gold star winners).
I really do think that now that it takes up so much more real estate in our traits, and requires commitment to a whole trait line if we want it, it should be baseline rather than a selected trait. I know the original reason it was put in traits at all was to foster the need to choose between it and other fun/useful/necessary traits, but that was when it didn’t mean giving up as much as it will now.
I don’t think they actually said. If you already have an L80 character with 65 skill challenges completed, you’ll be able to unlock the core the first day of the new system, regardless of whether we have to “unlock again.”
Characters below L80 at the time of the release might have to unlock them again.
I’m not sure they will. The reason they say an 80 with 65 skill challenges done will have enough is that the 80 has gotten full hero points from leveling to 80. Someone who’s leveled to 70 would have 10 less hero points, but then they could have done 75 skill challenges to make up for that.
I think you can’t unlock the Elite Specialization until you are 80, but that is only an impression I have with no specific memory of hearing that said by devs. Whenever you unlock it you’ll want more challenges done on top of the 65, I’m guessing 35 more at least to cover the cost of the line. Except the hero points also pay for skills and those might need unlocks as well as the traits.
I’ve just taken notes on how many world skill points each of my alts has. The total available now is 189, btw, I’m assuming there are more to gather in WvW for those so inclined. Looks like I have quite a few alts that need to trot about the world doing skills.
I think you’ve turned that around a bit, aryvandar. Not that I’m crystal clear on it either but my impression is the scrolls will become the currency, which will go in the wallet and replace skill points for making Forge purchases of the mats that already exist.
And that means, Behellagh, that it would be no more tradeable than any other wallet currency.
I use the same mouse as Khisanth. Well, the same model. I don’t share my mouse.
Sorry .. it’s late …
But yeah, after the first Beta Weekend I ordered the HEX because I couldn’t hack keyboard movement along with firing off skills since I’m mostly a one-key-at-a-time person. CTRL-T to put up a target is about the only combo I use. The HEX has been wonderful in letting me do almost all my movement with the mouse (does make ground targeting harder) while hitting skills with my left hand.
I’m sorry, but this sort of thing’s been suggested before. Prepare yourself for a lot of explanations of what a small fraction of the playerbase is on the forums, and for being advised that just because a suggestion is requested a lot doesn’t give it any weight with the devs if it doesn’t fit their design or would hurt it.
So far I think they’ll be the same mats you can currently buy with skill points. The “new” thing they went on about was the currency because they don’t have a name for it yet.
I could be wrong. I’m still in need of a very clear statement on exactly what the skill scrolls will become and what they will buy, so I can figure out if I want to use them before the change or wait.
I especially would like to know if they’ll have any non-MF use as I barely use the thing.
When you actually would look at what kind of things are listed up all there, one with the ability to put 1 + 1 together should quickly get it, that with Tempest isn’t meant an Elite Specialization, but most likely some kind of gameplay mechanic, that the Elementalist has…
The live stream confirmed early on that Tempest is indeed the Elite Spec name. They then very carefully didn’t show us any of its trait line.
I only caught the end of the live-stream. I didn’t hear any of the Q&A. Did they answer this?
They didn’t do the Q&A. They did say the skill points/scrolls turn into the not-djinngots, so maybe that will include currency for the siege (the skill points aren’t turning straight into mats, they are going in the wallet to buy mats).
Changed a few colors and my hair to fit the out fit more! Anyone have some suggestions on cute-ish shoulders?
Probably you want to not have shoulders showing with that top … how would they attach? But one option would be the Temple Armor one (Aurora?), as it’s a metal applique to one shoulder.
Otherwise, peruse the wardrobe (carapace with butterfly might work).
They’ll be turning into currency for mats for the forge. Hero points will only come from leveling (one per level gained, to 80), and doing skill challenges. Scrolls are transforming just like excess skill points, as far as I can tell.
In the AMA stream they said at the end that Tomes will function exactly as they do now so long as you aren’t 80 yet. So they’ll bump your Rev to 80 if you so desire but won’t help post 80.
For skill scrolls, I think it’s time for me to research how to turn those into gold since there’s no reason now to spend them on unlocking skills for my alts.
I’m with Kal Spiro on the fall damage thing. I was really hoping it would be baseline. It also struck me that Thief’s fall damage trait is in the second tier when all the rest (that I saw, I didn’t spot them in all professions) are in first. That’s likely due to folding in an unrelated trait, Blind on Steal. Thief overall felt a bit lackluster compared to the other professions, other than the first trait line they showed, the poisons one.
I hope that the whole fall damage thing is still subject to a great deal of change. I use the trait almost universally on all my alts and as you said, Kal, the real estate it takes now is tremendous.
Yes, thanks! I was happy to watch the whole thing. Mostly. I flagged towards the end, no idea how you guys kept up the energy, and I did want to see the General Questions part shown on the agenda. But what you gave us was a tremendous info dump, shared by devs clearly having fun with what they do, showing a fun human side to the design team.
Also I just might feel the need to play my engineer. He exists only for his name, for my having one of each prof at 80, and for rare RP sessions, because I find keyboard control of Engie very clunky and he’s a Norn so he feels clunky. But those new kits look so fun!
I know the UI is very much a work in progress but I think it might be nice to have a thread discussing it and how to improve it.
It’ll be hard to really say what could improve until we’ve gotten our hands on it to see how intuitive it is. However, I do have a starter comment:
The name of the trait line should show up somewhere in the bar. The artwork certainly helps, but only seeing the name while selecting one to swap to could cause hiccups. Or at the very least, not knowing what it’s called when asking for help on the forums. Perhaps the name could be artistically melded in, or just in a nice font somewhere along the bottom edge?
A lot of the lines discussion in the special Ready Up! was harder to follow because I only got a brief glimpse of the line title during the rapid swaps to a new one. I know some of that is due to the lack of artwork. Still, labels can be very useful!
My only sadness is they didn’t answer the AMA questions everyone submitted except for when it’s coming (pre-HoT) and what the skill scrolls will do (turn into wallet currency for the Forge). I guess they got tired after they ran long and gave up on that part.
I would very much like them to address the AMA thread questions in text now.
Two new questions based on the stream that I think won’t be in the General Questions section since they are based on info in the stream:
- For those without enough points for every line and skill, can skills be re-picked as easily as traits? Ie if you spend a lot of points on, for instance, the Cantrips skills, then realize you wanted a different skill set, can you sell off Cantrip skills to get points back for the other set?
- Since Rangers won’t be throwing traps like grenades, will that affect the ghost rangers in AC?
edit: Uh .. the General Questions got dropped, so I sure hope you’ll at least give text answers to the queries in this thread that people posted since you said you’d answer them in the AMA. I hung on through Ranger and Warrior, neither of which I play, waiting for that section.
If you mean the one west of Lowland Burns, I think that’s just a terrain feature, a bit of wall or something like the fort to the east of the wp. If you mean the one with the screenshotting person on it, that’s their icon with an arrow pointing the way they’re facing.
They did demo it. Basically you click the line, then hit the three skills you want in it. I think it’s actually faster than swapping all your utilities because you don’t have to precisely click three little arrows in turn.
That assumes you know what you want to change to, of course. If you have to mouse over tooltips and think things out, that’ll add time. But the actual trait line change is 4 clicks in a roughly horizontal line.
“For now, characters will only be able to equip a single elite specialization. Doing so will be as easy as it currently is to swap trait points; simply exit combat and select your new elite specialization, or do it in Heart of the Mists for PvP. We made this system to build upon it, so let the speculation about future specializations begin before we’ve even revealed the first full set!
Elite Specialization Reward Tracks
Finally, these reward tracks unlock everything for an elite specialization: weapon, unique mechanics, skills, and traits. They’ll also reward items, including new runes and sigils, a fancy weapon skin for your new weapon type, and an armor skin for a single matching piece of armor (usually headgear or shoulders). As long as you’ve purchased Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, you’ll automatically unlock access to all elite specializations in PvP."
I am ready! (I also am possibly going to start playing my Engi, because it looks cool).
The thing is while they’re changing things around, they’re not making them more complex, just different. LotRO lost me when my only played alt, a Minstrel, got completely changed in the Isengard patch. With 40 hotkeys to deal with, and having just barely figured out some good rotations, I logged in to find everything hugely revamped. I had learned what I had by leveling up, one new skill at a time. Suddenly handed 40 new ones? I was lost, and I left.
Here, ok, I’m paying attention in advance. But still … it will just be easier to comprehend the set of options as they are all nicely in one panel. (It may help that I’m not a theory crafter and thus don’t care about precision balancing to maximize effect, I just want to use fun skills).
Actually they’ll change to a wallet currency (per today’s live stream) that will be used to purchase mats. The name of the currency is in flux but will not be “djinngots.”
I still am trying to figure out what happens to people that have full unlocks but not a lot of skill challenges under their belt.
Well, you’ll have to do -some- skill challenges if you want a full unlock. Like, 65 of them, but not 200. Then to get the new elite lines you’ll need … 35? …. more. Any you’ve already done count towards the total.
This is per the live stream still in progress. Someone commented that Dulfy has said it as well, so she may be doing running notes.
Yeah, but it also says that if a character has world completion done then they’ll have enough to unlock everything. I don’t want to do world completion again. It was PAINFULLY BORING. So much so I did it once two years ago and haven’t done anything close to it since. That’s how painful it was. Hopefully the 465 pts will be enough to unlock the traits I need for DPS builds so I won’t have to do any map completion.
You don’t have to complete the world. Just the skill challenges. No hearts, pois, vistas, or wp’s required. Being level 80 plus doing about 65 skill challenges gets you everything but the Elite spec, and further skill challenges get you that. I think it was 35 points or so for a full trait unlock? So 110 skills done on top of level 80 and you have all you need.
I do wonder how future Elite Specs will work if the challenges run out.
They would look cool, though I fear they’d get the oversize treatment so many of the weapons have.
Darkwolfer, they intend to keep adding elite specs. They haven’t said if those will always include a new weapon, or be profession-changers in other ways. I don’t see how they can run out of spec lines to offer; the problem is more likely they can’t develop them very fast so there will never be a plethora of constant new ones.
I think this is another way of saying you want build templates. Which even ANet agrees would be lovely, but for whatever reason are not including in HoT. (If I want to lawyer that I could say “soooo … coming before HoT, is it?” but I know better). Perhaps there are technical problems, perhaps it simply is too big a coding/art task to be doable simultaneously with the other coming features.
In another thread a poster commented that it looks like those are the special weapons and armors mentioned as coming with specs. Without being able to mouse over the icons for tooltips, the most we can manage are educated guesses
I may have come close, in character creator, not using the special faces and hair from the kit. If it’s a base face, I believe it’s the center one once you scroll to the far right of the selections. It’s hard to tell with the bangs covering the eyebrows, so I put on a hair style that has similar coverage. Is this about right? If so I’ve screenied the sliders and can post them.
I am sure they will grandfather in all the completed skill challenges for each alt. They sort of have to, short of resetting all the challenges for everyone (cue epic firestorm).
What’s not clear to me is whether having skills and traits unlocked by other means (vendor purchase, skill scroll use) will be grandfathered in. I’m cool with a trait reset — one is inevitable as we simply won’t have the same system or trait distribution — so long as I have as full access to my traits as before, ie I get as many points to spend as will get me equivalent trait/skill unlock completion.
They should be asked about it, sure — but these posts haven’t been asking questions, they’ve been stating opinions.
Kingroad, interesting question. They’d have to balance it far better than they did the current trait unlocks, so it is organic and easy to get to where one does the challenge to unlock the line.
But if there is a world-action-unlock component, will that be required of established characters? This brings us back to the question of just what will be grandfathered in. A clear statement on that will help immensely, because many of us have a lot of alts to work on to put in our preferred status for the changeover.
Corollary: When do you anticipate making this change? How much time will we have to go skill challenge gathering or skill scroll converting, assuming your other answers make it clear what the pros and cons are of holding onto the skill scrolls?
I mouse move, so ground targeting takes some work to do while remaining mobile. I certainly can’t rapidly find my cursor and move it to my feet.
Fortunately for me this is a mostly academic concern as I don’t use my necros for anything but RP. Still, I always avoided the ground-target trait like the plague (pun intended) because needing to select my well location was a sometimes crucial slowdown.
Silverwastes would be a nightmare for me if I didn’t have the Copper and Silver salvagers on me. Cost effective? No, but I don’t try to copper-pinch. It matters much more to me that I can click away on all the loot I’m salvaging without having to pay attention to my salvage kit charges. I get 200 salvages in every day or two when I’m actively playing, so there’s a ton of peace of mind from the infinite items.
Guys, can we perhaps move the discussion of implications of the changes to another thread and keep this one focused on lists of questions for the AMA? It’s going to be hard for the AMA people to catch some of the questions in the last couple of pages since they’re surrounded by debate about build diversity.
In a third party news interview you said you want to unlock specializations around level 20. Was that the old pre-blog meaning of specialization, ie the Elite Specs as we now know them to be named, or the new one of Core Spec, so essentially just traits at level 20 and Elite Specs still not til later, likely 80?
I asked this in another thread, consolidating it here:
If we swap our chosen trait lines away from the Elite Spec while we have the new weapon equipped, where does the weapon go? My druthers would be that the Hero Panel would have a slot for it so it doesn’t go randomly into our bags.
And that might mean having two new slots for weapons so whatever we have equipped can rotate with the trait swapping, though I’m too brain fried due to a RL emergency to suss out a good and elegant way to cover all the weapon set contingencies.
Why not wait till we see it, or at least know more about before all the hand wringing? At this point, this is pretty much all just speculation.
I know you’re trying to be helpful, but “why not wait and see” is never helpful. We need to express our opinions, whatever they might be, at the earliest possible opportunity. The longer we wait, the longer it will take them to act upon those opinions. If we’re completely wrong here, if they already have a solution in mind, then no harm done, but if they were laboring under the delusion that they could remove currently unlocked skills from characters and not catch trouble for it, then we’re giving them fair notice in advance and they can get to work on the inevitable solution sooner rather than later.
It’s never of benefit to procrastinate.
However, “wait and see” right now means “wait until tomorrow afternoon once the AMA is done to see what concerns have been allayed, which remain, and what new ones may have arisen.” That’s not procrastination, that’s further information gathering before forming conclusions based on partial data.
I’m not going on a skill challenge binge on my non-world-complete alts until I see what’s what in the AMA.
What I want to figure out, and hope to learn in the AMA tomorrow, is whether unlocking utilities with skill points will result in a fuller slate of skills for my alts once HoT comes, or be wasted on them because only the unlocked skill challenges in the world will contribute.
Though I could be getting mixed up with the latter being only to unlock traits and skills still come the old way but with a new UI?
Oh look there are official Q&A threads now! I’ve linked this thread in the General one but y’all may want to start adding to that one instead of this one with new queries.
I posted in it and will highlight a question I had since it’s not been asked by anyone else I’ve seen: Will fall damage reduction be severed from trait line choice now that there is a much larger impact from choosing a trait line? I always grab that trait as my first unlock but often go no further in that trait line if it’s not suited to my build.
