Guild Wars 2

The idea is that Varied content will bring with it varied builds and varied parties to deal with the various different battles presented in an area or dungeon. The idea that zerk PvE meta needs to be nerfed is a bit of a flawed argument right now: The content needs to put less focus on zerk. So on top of providing benefits to all the different areas, we need to address the drawbacks and counters to each of these strategies, the overall effect of these counters, and we might see where the system begins to fail:
(S) (M) (L) (H) = small/medium/large/huge countering effect
Counters to tasks:

• Damage – weakened (M)
• Crits – non-crit objects (S)
• Multi-hits – [Cleaving – none] [AoE – 5 targets (L)]
• Dodging – energy (M)
• Armour – one shots (H) Mathematical diminishing returns (M)
• Crowd Control – Defiant (H) invulnerability (L)
• Conditions – Cap (H) invulnerability to conditions (S)
• Self Heal – Poison (M) One Heal Skill Slot (M) Weak Healing Power (M)
• Ally Heal – Poision (S) Weak Healing Power (L)
• Zones and Finishers – none
• Offensive Boons – Boon removal/conversion (S)
• Defensive Boons – Boon removal/conversion (L)

So what patterns do we see?
CC, Conditions and Healing have a lot of drawbacks and counters.
Straight damage output, cleaving has very few counters / drawbacks

Once the content puts a better well-rounded focus on the different tasks in combat, then we can really dig into balancing individual tasks (aka zerk) and further individual skills and traits

TL;DR? Read the bold

As I read this forum, I feel as if many cannot see the forest from the trees, and are so focused on individual things that they don’t realize what the true repercussions of their arguments are, or what the underlying issue is.

As a thought experiment, people should at least read this post by Veydar.

Jon Peters mentions that you should always expand and look at the pros and cons. Make sure you step back from your argument and look at the repercussions.

There are a lot of posts out there that say X on class A is not like Y on class B. When anyone argues for this, they are arguing for class equality, and in the end, they are arguing for class A to equal class B. This is not balance, this is equality, and does not bring diversity to the game.

So we’ve identified the issue in some of these posts, how do we go about making sure our suggestions can work. Lets start with some definitions:

• Equality = All classes are the same, all classes have identical skills, traits and abilities
• Balance = All classes have the ability to do a task in a different fashion while achieving a similar end result
• Viability = All classes have the ability to change their build to take on a different task without being considered grossly inferior to another class.

• Diversity = All classes do a particular tasks in a different fashion.
  Alternatively, Diversity can be represented as a formula:
  Diversity = Maximizing Balance and Viability while Minimizing Equality

When someone brings forward an argument, they need to make sure they are arguing for Balance, not Equality, and that as you extrapolate the argument to the rest of the game, it promotes Viability.

On profession A, Skill N plus Trait M plus Equipment O should create result Z
On profession B, Skill P plus Trait Q plus Equipment R should create result Z
But
Skill N should not equal Skill P
Trait M should not equal Trait Q
Equipment O may equal Equipment R

So what are the tasks that a character can do. Keep in mind we want to keep the holy trinity away.

• Damage
• Crits
• Multihits
• Dodging
• Armour
• Crowd Control
• Conditions
• Self Heal
• Ally Heal
• Zones and Finishers
• Offensive Boons
• Defensive Boons

Maybe this isn’t an extensive list, but it gives you the idea…

Now, the content should equally make these tasks all relevant at different points in time.
Examples below could be an idea (BH – Brain Hurricane) or already exist (E – Exists) in the game. A dungeon should require of each these concepts at some point during a run.
note – these (BH)’s are quick brainstorms and are meant for illustration more than actual suggestion. Please treat them as such

• Damage – (E) Any object that can’t be crit but needs to be destroyed
• Crits – (BH) A regenerating shield that requires crits to be dropped
• Multihits – (BH) Big bosses “cover” littler foes from AoE/Cleave, remove AoE target limit.
• Dodging – (E) negate an attack
• Armour – (BH) smaller more frequent attacks / damage packets
• Crowd Control – (BH) Speedy foes can’t be damaged while moving and attack one character to the next
• Conditions – (BH) Boss cannot get vulnerability, except gains stacks of vulnerability when bleeding is applied.
• Self Heal – (E) skill 6
• Ally Heal – (BH) Effect applied from foe that reduces Self Heal until an ally does something to you such as apply a boon to you.
• Zones and Finishers – (BH) Boss shield is buffed by blast finishers, but weakened by projectile finishers or vice versa
• Offensive Boons – (BH) Boss gets offensive boon for all characters less than or greater than X range
• Defensive Boons – (BH) Defensive boon is applied to a Boss every second unless he is hit with a melee or ranged attack.

I would actually prefer to see the inverse. These skills that “fail” with no target should likely work without a target.

Anet would never remove the ability to use these skills without targeting. Remember the gong show that followed when ride the lightning cooldown was increased if you didn’t hit anyone? What you’re suggesting is basically take away RtL completely.

Depending on how Anet felt about the repercussions of the RtL nerf, they could look at doing that kind of thing to all skills.

Regardless of what they do, that’s a pretty big undertaking.

Brother Grimm.5176:

NiloyBardhan.9170:

Just curious, which karma exotic armor has traveler rune?

Pretty sure the OP must have added them.

Correct, I added a number of runes to karma sets long before I found out they couldn’t be salvaged. I believe I have both a divinity set, and a travelers set tied up in karma armour.

And the new gemstore items? It’s cheaper to buy new runes, even at 10g a pop that to use those brutally expensive things. 200 gems ~=15g. And that’s the best “deal”. Yet it costs 10g a pop just to buy the runes straight up…

Transmutation stones are at least only 10% of that cost… about 1.5g + the cost of a 65+level transmutable item. But still… that’s a HUGE cost. 9g across 6 items just to get a runeset back from karma items.

There must be a better solution.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Is it fair to say that regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method?

Chris

What if instead of collecting a ton of armour, worrying about drop rates, long time to make all these different sets with different stats, you could infuse existing armour sets with new stat combinations for a subcost, with the end result similar a legendary weapon, just not giving that to you up front so legendaries still feel legendary.

Example
Step 1: Craft Zerk Ascended Armour
Step 2: Acquire Knights insignias
Step 3: Infuse Ascended Armour with Knight with “transmutation crystal”
Step 4: Ability to switch (in town/out of combat etc) between Zerk and Knights Stats.
Rinse and Repeat for each new stat set, giving you new options to switch between without needing you to get an entire new armour / weapon set.

The same could be done for skins.
Apply Skin to ascended armour / weapon using “transmutation crystal”, adds skin option to drop down on armour / weapon piece.
- This retains “buy 1 skin for 1 character”
- This removes “losing a skin to salvaging or getting a rune off or not having the right stats”
- This improves ability to switch between skins and customize your looks mixing different elite skins around

Taking this another step forward (not sure how far you’d want to take this) apply this concept to sigils / runes? Infuse an item with another rune, get a drop down out of combat to switch up the rune on your equipment to anything already infused on this weapon.

ColinJohanson.2394:

A question to help direct the discussion a bit:

What are some of your favorite progression systems of all time in others? Be they horizontal, or vertical, just which ones really got you excited and were fun for you to continue to progress in?

TL;DR? Read just the first 2 paragraphs…
One of my favourite progression systems of all time was GW1 Skills. Getting new skills was the best part of the game. Making new builds and combinations based off those new skills.
Collecting Elites through Signet of Captures was an amazing concept of getting out in the world and performing specific tasks to get those skills.

And the final beautiful piece with this whole system was Skill Tomes.
Those were the most amazing alt-friendly things in the game! Already achieved that skill on your main? Great, here’s a slightly easier way to get that skill on an alt as well!
//End TL;DR

Even after I’d collected every single skill for every single profession on my monk main, I could lose hours just digging through skills looking for new combinations to try out. Some of the builds that emerged were met with amazing or hilarious results in the competitive missions like JQ, FA and AB.
Despite considering myself a mostly PvE player in both GW1 and GW2, some of my best memories were from all the different builds I used in those competitive missions. Sometimes the builds were similar to meta (necro sacrifice bomber, air of enchantment monk) and sometimes they weren’t:
- my ele heavy fire nuker which used 3 enchantments to maintain energy while literally spamming the most expensive and hard hitting skills in the game
- our 3 player AB team build that had us each bring dragon’s stomp/earthquake for 6 coordinated AoE KD’s using the elite signet to avoid exhaustion.

About the only thing I didn’t really like about GW1 skills were the PvE only skills that were horribly imbalanced. Ice storm was junk while “You Move Like a Dwarf!” was so amazingly strong it outclassed almost every single skill in the game, including elites.

GW2 really feels like a step backwards when it comes to skills:
- Weapon skills locked to weapons reduce skill and build flexibility by a huge amount, especially with the limited selection of weapons available. The weapons concept force you to take skills you never use just to get the skills you actually want.
- Elite slot can’t take anything but elites. I have a number of builds where I’d just prefer to just take another utility. This could be improved upon by the introduction of more elite skills, but until that happens I typically forget about my elites on about half my builds simply because they are not worthwhile and have insane cooldowns.
- Further, only a single healing skill when in half my builds, I have utilities in there that are just weaker heals/defensive skills.

Here’s an example of how the GW2 weapons fail, including something that keeps getting pushed as “one of the main benefits of the ele”:
D/D – instead of the attunements with a bunch of skills I don’t really need. I’d rather have a single skill bar with a subset of those skills (with slightly reduced cooldowns ofcourse) because most of the skills in the rotation are barely worth the time and only get cast cause I have nothing else to do. So here’s my D/D skill bar, without even changing any of the slots of these skills.
1 – Vapor Blade (longest range D/D attack)
2 – Cone of Cold (self heal – looking at you “only 1 healing skill”)
3 – Burning Speed (fire combo field)
4 – Earthquake (blast finisher, KD)
5 – Churning Earth (blast finisher, cripple, bleed, heavy hit)
What about all those other skills? meh.
Dragon’s Claw? meh. Fire Grab? meh. Frost Aura? meh. Lightning Touch? blech. Impale? blech. Magnetic Grasp? ugh. Ride the Lightning? not bad but should be a utility. Updraft? meh. Ring of Earth? meh.
Sure they all do some little thing, but a ton of “mediocre” does not add up to “amazing”.
The end result of weapons? You need to take a bunch of junk, to get what you actually want/need.

As per https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/How-do-I-get-traveler-runes-off-karma-armour/
The concept of Karma items not being salvageable is difficult when you want to retrieve upgrades off of them.

Why not give Karma items (kegs, jugs, drops, drips etc) instead of materials along with the upgrades so that we can get our expensive runes and sigils back. As long as the amount of Karma returned is less than the karma cost of the item, this prevents karma items from being a trap with respect to upgrades. This is especially true for lvl 80 exotics which are likely to be considered “end-game equipment” for an extended period of time (until they are finally replaced with time-gated ascended), and as such going to get expensive or high end upgrades.

With the time limit on Winter Wonderland, it is a race against the clock to get a high score! Post your high score.

I just don’t understand why karma armour can’t be salvaged. Anet clearly knows which armour is karma. Why not give karma back when you salvage a karma item? Jugs, Kegs, swigs, thimbles… this is a perfect use for them instead of just saying “No Salvage!”

so I can use my lvl 79 transmutation stones then? Nope. Transmuting lvl 10 whites with lvl 80 karma exos still requires a 80-transmute crystal
That’s over 10g to buy the gems to get the crystals… over 20% of the cost of the runes themselves

Is there not an option to salvage that doesn’t require spending 12g?

I’m not sure how to get these runes back. They’re sitting on some unused exotic karma armour, and I’d like to move them, maybe to another character… But I can’t seem to actually do anything with the armour pieces.
I’ve tried transmuting with HoM pieces, but they seem to retain their inability to be salvaged.

PvE Issues:
1) QoL, UI polish (10,000 molehills make a mountain) AKA issues that have been here since the beginning
random examples in no particular order:
- intermediate chef materials with no bank slots
- Non-customizeable UI (unlike GW1)
- “Last logged in / Represented” Guild Info
- No save build feature for traits
2) Alt friendlyness
- account-level-time-gated soulbound ascended gear
- GW1 hat collector
3) Condition Caps and multi-player condition viability

and a runner up for a recent issue that has cropped up
4) Instance vs Open world content
- AKA how Teq is only killed in instances (specially created overflows) anymore, effectively shutting down the open world area

TA = Thaumanova Accident

>.>

… not the first time we’ve seen sylvari influencing asuran science

<.<

I didn’t look that closely at the callstacks, or save them locally. But I definitely sent them off to ANet in the automatic crash reporter so that they have the necessary info to fix it.

Please fix the crashing that’s occurring when fighting Scarlet.
I’ve now done 4x 45 minute events.
I have completed twice, and crashed twice.

It’s pretty hard to get worldwide invasion responder/invasion canceler when you crash after 40 minutes and don’t get credit.

And for the record, I was in a group, I rejoined the instance and did not get credit towards the titles.

So I noticed today that there were patch notes surrounding the missing emails:
Fixed an issue with Support Token mails disappearing.

So I logged in today, and the mails are still missing. What’s up?

So I just logged in for the first time today, saw 2 in game mails. I quickly scanned them and saw there was something attached to them, but then I logged out and switched characters to go do tequatl as he just came up. Now I can’t find those mails anywhere?!?

What did the mails say?
What was attached to the mails?

How do I get the mails back?

The biggest benefit of the ele is supposed to be the your choices of skills, yet one of the first lessons I learned as a GW2 ele was to use them all or you’re just crippling yourself.
What does Anet think about this contradiction in terms of stated intentions versus reality with respect to weapon skill choices?
When Anet indicated that we’d have the selection of 4 attunements worth of skills, I initially thought I could pick one or two and focus on those. But those builds are fairly unviable from both a cooldown perspective and a trait perspective. Did Anet mean something else when they talked about “selection of skills”? Or does Anet think the Ele needs a lot of work?
This issue is further exascerbated underwater for eles
Let’s put out the following statements on the table for underwater eles:
1) We have 1 underwater weapon
2) Use all attunements (or you’re a “noob”)
Based on these 2 statements, Eles have actually no choices. We have no ability to pick and choose anything. You can either use the skills provided by the trident, or you can’t.
So this brings up a secondary question which I think has been asked a fair number of times, but is worth repeating.
Does Anet ever intend to make single or dual attunement based builds viable?

My other issue is we don’t have any elite skills. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at GW1 elites, and what they did. They were the central core of the build. They helped define the build, and would work closely with the other skills in the build. Typically in a GW1 build, the first skill you equipped was the elite, and all other skills were selected to work around or with the elite.
1) Searing flames required supporting skills that sustained energy regen because it was a low cooldown, expensive and hard hitting skill
2) Elemental Attunement was about finding combinations between attunements and making it viable to spread your stat points around between all the attunements (Side note, my favourite build and considered one of the strongest single character offensive builds made among my group of friends used this elite. It was heavily used in JQ and FA, and consistently had a good track record)
3) Glyph of energy was all about removing exhaustion as a cost
Now lets look at GW2 elites:
They are fairly weak skills overall, have little synergy with the rest of the build, combined with the fact that they have massive cooldowns and the end result is that I typically forget about them completely when I play as an ele. I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve stated I wish I could just bring another utility rather than be forced to bring something I forget to use. So my last question is:
What plans or ideas does Anet have to make elites viable instead of us just wishing we had a 4th utility slot?