Guild Wars 2

Dee Jay.2460:

DrakeWurrum

Only comment so far: it’s traits not taints.
Other than that, I feel that you’re quite wrong. You should especially remember that initiative is SHARED between our two weapon sets.
Other professions get 8 cooldowns to juggle, and can use them all one right after another, sometimes endlessly chaining combos. That’s not nearly so easy for Thieves to do.
16 cooldowns, in the case of Elementalist.
Death Blossom, for example, costs 5 initiative. You can use it three times in a row, if you have 15 points in Trickery. And then you can’t use ANY other weapon skill, but for auto attack.
That’s the balancing factor of initiative.

I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or disagreeing here.

While other classes get to juggle a number of different abilities the Thief is most effective when spaming that single effective ability that you’ve decided to base your build on.

It’s just a very uncompelling and simplistic play-style.

To expand on that, say I’m specced into Condition Damage as a Thief. How many viable attacks does that leave me with each weapon combo (assuming I want to get the most out of my specialization). One, maybe two attacks per weapon combo?

I mean D/D has Lotus Strike and LDB that deal Condition Damage…that’s it. Other weapon combos have even less.

Should be pretty obvious that my stance on initiative is that it’s perfectly fine and balanced. It’s not at all flawed. The fact is that you have to choose when and HOW to spend your initiative, and then either wait for it to regen or have mechanics to get it back. The ability to use the same ability multiple times in a row is INCREDIBLY powerful in this game, and is only balanced by the fact that all of our weapon skills (save an auto attack) require the same resource, and are all fairly expensive.

(for the record, it’s not LDB anymore, it’s just DB – this has been true since BWE3)

Backstab just hits hard when you hit somebody from behind. If you KNOW a Thief just stealthed on you (and you should recognize the obvious animation), you might want to dodge to a good distance, or perhaps even start spamming Death Blossom since it has an evade (and REALLY makes it hard for them to hit your back)

Remember that when stealthed, it’s often REALLY obvious where you actually are, and you can still be hit. You’re not safe just because you can’t be targeted.

You people are talking about “DPS rotations” and crap as if using 2-5 on other profession weapons is how you maximize DPS. With a few exceptions, your greatest DPS comes from the #1 skill working unimpeded.

On top of that, not all skills are about “loldamage” sometimes they actually have real uses to them. Take P/P for example.

• The #1 attack is for stacking bleeds, and to just have something when out of init.
• The #2 attack is to stack up Vulnerability really high – not necessarily for YOU, stop being so selfish. It can be, but remember that the max stack is an extra 25% incoming damage to that enemy – do you really think sacrificing ALL initiative to get that is better than getting THREE Unloads out instead of ONE? (hint – that would be 200% increased damage)
• The #3 attack is to just spam a bunch of raw damage. BORING!
• The #4 attack is to Daze. Yay, we can interrupt everything several times in a row!
• The #5 attack is a defensive aoe blind for when enemies get close.

Notice that each ability has a unique and distinct usage. And remember that this game is not purely about damage.

It works in combat just fine, it’s just that your base combat speed is reduced when in combat, period, for all players.

Apparently, somebody from Team Legacy found out that, on a 1000 HP hit, 100 Toughness will only reduce it by 30-40 damage. Not sure how they found out, so no idea how accurate it is. Sounds like it’s just as terrible as Healing Power.

They just need to improve the evasive part of it, imo.

Frankly, I don’t see any balance reason for this thing. They should allow teleporting moves to go over gaps, just as leap moves can. I can’t count the number of times I used the Greatsword #4 on my Guardian to help me leap across a gap more easily. I should be able to do the same with a 60-second cooldown Shadowstep. Or with Infiltrator’s Arrow, which costs initiative.

It is a bit weird. I agree, the return should be available for 15 or even 30 seconds.

After all, the Mesmer’s Portal skill lasts 60 seconds. They can effectively teleport people across the entire map. What’s wrong with teleporting us back to where we were 15, 30, or even 45 seconds into a fight? Or maybe we’d like to runrunrun away from somebody trying to kill us, and pull off a funny little “Gotcha!” maneuver?

Yeah, really shouldn’t ever try to limit yourself to just melee or just ranged weapons. You need to use the tool that fits the job best. You remember fights in WoW where the melee are useless, because it’s too dangerous to be in melee range? Or the ranged are useless, because they’re too busy dancing around to avoid damage, or maybe even they take damage when they use an ability?

That doesn’t happen in GW2, because you can always have the option to suddenly switch from melee to ranged or vice versa. You will never be useless, unless you intentionally kitten yourself.

Do you mean “less damage” as in things kept hitting you for less as you faced higher-level enemies, or do you mean it was less of your total HP? Because remember that as you level, your base HP goes higher.

Only comment so far: it’s traits not taints.

Other than that, I feel that you’re quite wrong. You should especially remember that initiative is SHARED between our two weapon sets.

Other professions get 8 cooldowns to juggle, and can use them all one right after another, sometimes endlessly chaining combos. That’s not nearly so easy for Thieves to do.

16 cooldowns, in the case of Elementalist.

Death Blossom, for example, costs 5 initiative. You can use it three times in a row, if you have 15 points in Trickery. And then you can’t use ANY other weapon skill, but for auto attack.

That’s the balancing factor of initiative.

Of course it’s a worthy build. You can get a trait that causea you to gain 5 stacks of might on signet use. There’s another that causes you to gain… I think 2 initiative on signet use. So you definitely want to use signets if you slot them, assuming you get the right traits. They also have ridiculously short cooldowns.

In the case of Infiltrator’s Signet, I find the active to be more important than the passive.

Try to view the passives as sort of… well, as bonuses. Think about cooldowns in other MMOs. 2-minute cooldown, you blow it every 2 minutes on the dot to maximize it’s usage, regardless of what it’s for. Or you hold it for an extra, say, 30 seconds to get the most use out of it for that next use, while getting less uptime. Sucks, right?

In the case of signets, these are cooldowns that you won’t feel “required” to use right away. You can hold off on it for a bit, and still get some benefits from the ability. That said, imo, you really should actually use them, in the right situation.

If “every single wolf is the most decisive battle of your life” then you’re doing it wrong. =\

Durzlla.6295:

I wouldn’t suggest stacking that many condition removals since it kinda kittens your utility

Depends on the goal of your build.

I also am wishing that name reservations had been undone immediately after launch day. I spent TWO weeks holding off my main character because of a name I wanted, and eventually just gave in and made a much less satisfactory name that, until a name changing service is eventually added (if ever), I’ll have to constantly look at my character’s name with annoyance at the memory of simply not being able to name him properly.

SneakyMegladon.4061:

Why do they have a on/off profanity filter if u cant curse makes no sense

Oh, you can curse. You just can’t be mean to other players with a filthy mouth. There’s always a way to say it more nicely.

GaileGray.9587:

The Account Restoration feature is not in the game yet.

I’m not trying to be disrespectful with my question, but can you tell us why? It just seems… weird, to launch the game without it.

Durzlla.6295:

DrakeWurrum.6049:

Durzlla.6295:

Actually from what i’ve checked toughness seemed to be SIGNIFICANTLY better against damage but did nothing against conditions (rightfully so), however should i go up against anything that didn’t really use conditions i just kinda shrugged off anything and everything they do…

Bah. Don’t know who to listen to. I just have to see for myself, I suppose. I just know that several people claim that Toughness is worthless, and that Vitality is simply all that matters.

Well in PVE conditions are very common (and atm condition builds are the “meta”) so it can create the illusion that toughness is bad when people stack nothing but toughness and an offensive stat or two.

What about a Guardian that stacks up tons of Toughness, and then also has Smite Condition, Purging Flames, and Contemplation of Purity for his utilities? :o

Durzlla.6295:

Actually from what i’ve checked toughness seemed to be SIGNIFICANTLY better against damage but did nothing against conditions (rightfully so), however should i go up against anything that didn’t really use conditions i just kinda shrugged off anything and everything they do…

Bah. Don’t know who to listen to. I just have to see for myself, I suppose. I just know that several people claim that Toughness is worthless, and that Vitality is simply all that matters.

So, I’ve heard numerous times that, right now, Arena Net can give absolutely no help in repairing the damage done to a compromised account, regardless of the severity. Whether that’s hundreds of gold lost, or hundreds of thousands of karma, or entire level 80 characters deleted.

I’ve also heard that this is only temporary until this account rollback system is brought online, or implemented, or whatever phrase is accurate, so that they can rollback your entire account to a date before your account was compromised.

I can deal with that. My account is secured right now by e-mail authorization and 2-step verification on my Gmail. What I want to know is… why was the game launched without this rollback system ready to go from day one? I’m not trying to assign blame or call people out, I am simply wanting to know the reasoning behind this. I think paying customers deserve such an answer.

We live in a time when our information on the internet is constantly under threat of being stolen. When Diablo 3 launched, people were hacked on day one. Hindsight does not justify not helping people who do get hacked. Hindsight shouldn’t justify a “Sorry, you screwed up,” kind of response. Obviously, they should have had authenticators, but that doesn’t change the fact that hackers will try to hack from the moment the game launches. They pay attention to the game news, they know when it’s coming out, and they spend weeks, if not months, making their preparations to steal people’s accounts.

So, knowing all that, what possible logic could have resulted in delaying the ability to rollback compromised accounts? Was it simply time constraints? Was there a problem with the system that wasn’t known about until it was too late? Was it simply lack of foresight, despite the fact that Guild Wars 1 has been running for 7 years or so?
I’m wanting to know more details about this because, I assure you, this problem will cause less people to be willing to trust Arena Net as a company, let alone buy their products.

I think some people would love to at least know the why to all this. For that matter, why weren’t we informed ahead of time that we wouldn’t have the ability to rollback accounts for several weeks after launch?
Some people might have taken more precautionary measures if they had known.

To be fair, autotargeting is for lazy people and unskilled players new to the game.

I do agree, however, that if you’re not in combat, auto-triggering effects should not activate and put you into combat.

I guess it is just me, after all. :<

He makes quite a valid point. Some people, even today, still wrongly believe that champions like Master Yi and (original) Evelynn are OP. When, in reality, they’re just strong against weak/unskilled players, and terrible against anybody who knows what they’re doing.
This exact same thing can be applied to what little meta there currently is for GW2 PvP, specifically in regards to popular builds and how combat mechanics work (this game’s mechanics are more akin to an MOBA than a proper MMO). That being said, of course, hopefully it’s the case that every profession has ways to be powerful in the hands of skilled players, when played against other skilled players.

It seems that whenever I make a post that pushes over to the next page of a thread, and therefore adds a new page to the thread, I suddenly cannot see any of the thread posts, and do not see an option to tab to other pages of the thread.

The only way for me to address this is manually change the address in the URL to move back to previous pages. Oddly, I can see my new post on THAT page, instead of on the new page.

StarlightGamer.9560:

Quoted from an earlier post:

We also added the new Healing attribute to take some of the pressure away from toughness being the most important defensive attribute and to create an additional option for players who wanted to emphasize a support role.

I can’t believe they actually said that.

There was a thread in Players Helping Players (before the subforums were created) where players, including myself, were comparing vitality and toughness. I myself have experience switching characters from one extreme to the other: tons of toughness to none and vice-versa. There was also some guy that spec’d into toughness and went to test it in that thread.

In the end, we found that toughness actually did very little to reduce your damage taken (especially since condition damage ignores it) and that vitality was pretty much better in every way. Vitality is really the only way to go if you want to survive longer.

So since healing is also worthless, I guess that’ll make finding the best builds easy: focus on one that uses power, precision, and vitality. Coincidentally, I think almost every character I have is already running that kind of build. Meh.

Hrm, that’s extremely disappointing. They’re going to have to tweak Toughness as well as Healing, it seems. I’m hoping they do tweak the scaling of stats so that there’s more viable options besides just making us better damage sponges.
Otherwise, what’s the point in having these other stats? It seems like they are over-compensating in their attempts to prevent tanking and healing, and thus removing possibly viable methods of building a character.

Hellacious, if Healing Power is such a worthless stat, then why have it at all? Think this through a bit more clearly. Yes, there are no dedicated healers, but that does NOT mean that healing itself should be fully worthless. Otherwise, what is the point of our 6th skill slot? Or what about abilities like Geyser and Healing Rain? Or traits like Restorative Mantras or Restorative Shouts? Healing is part of this game, it’s just not designed to work like it does in other MMOs. That does not mean it should be weak.

Still not sure people are actually paying attention to the content of the thread.

For that matter, still not sure people understand how this game is designed.

Vargs.6234:

Hey man, crap on healing power all you want, but boon duration is awesome. I wish there were more ways to get it.

Yeah, fair enough, boon duration is really good.

That being said… that only emphasizes how terrible Healing Power is. If you want to build your character for a supportive role, Healing power is the weaker choice. If you want to build your character for a defensive role, Healing power is the weaker choice.

If you want to be both defensive and supportive, you still don’t want to get Healing Power, because you can easily get Vitality, Boon Duration, and say… Expertise.

So, I’ve not been playing Necro much, as my girlfriend leveling by my side has been, and I want to let her enjoy it on her own for a while… but after some recent underwater events, we’ve both realized a major problem with the Necro’s underwater weapons.

They are both designed for close-ranged PBAoE. This is… well, like I said, it’s a problem. Only two underwater weapons, and they both are designed for the exact same purpose! Now, the Trident’s auto attack has 1200 range, to be sure. And the #4 ability is 1200 range CC.
But the other three abilities are all short-range PBAoE: one applies weakness to all nearby enemies and drains life force. Another is a forward charge that poisons enemies in it’s wake. And the last is a PBAoE Chill + Vulnerable.

I don’t have a problem with that, except that the Spear skillset is practically the same thing: all about getting a large group of enemies close to the necro, and beating them down with AoE.

This was a particular problem for the two of us on the champion krait queen (or whatever it is) in Kessex Hills (though it’s also been problematic on other, harder events), because she couldn’t manage to survive within range of the boss for anything but her Trident auto attack. The result being she got a bronze medal.
Meanwhile, my Thief gets a gold medal with his Speargun, lazily firing dozens of harpoons from a distance.

There are certain other effects that take advantage of this, though there are some that seem like they should, and don’t. Elemental Surge and Glyph of Elemental Power benefit.

Lingering Elements doesn’t seem to affect all the traits that it (by the tooltip description) should. I noticed, at the very least, that it doesn’t work for Stone Flesh. It does work for Soothing Mists, at least. Haven’t been able to test Zephyr’s Speed or Flame Barrier.

It’s hard to tell what this trait should and shouldn’t work for right now. As some abilities are affected by what attunement you’re in, but do not benefit from Lingering Elements (Evasive Arcane is a good example).

At the very least, this trait needs a more specific tooltip.

More appealing, yes, but what we need is more defensive stats, not less. Toughness, Vitality, and Compassion should all be viable methods for building defensively.

Unfortunately, while this isn’t exactly the topic of the thread, very few people actually value Toughness.

There’s a reason that certain traits reward you for remaining in air attunement longer, you know.

I know there’s lots of threads on it, but I can already see exactly what’s happening. For some reason, all the forum tools, such as quoting, replying, editing, and reporting, are not appearing on posts… until you actually post in that thread again.

Please. This build plays well for the auramancer builds, as already mentioned in this thread.

OneBloke.7264:

Yeah elementalist’s traits are horrible, the main reason for that being that almost all of the traits affect one single attunement. In a class where you need to be constantly swapping attunements to stay alive this is not very useful. Take fire, nearly all of the fire traits give you bonuses only while you are attuned to fire and as soon as you swap to a different attunement they are all gone.

Seriously Drunken Monkey.2653:

2) A trait that encourages using a Focus as an Offhand-Item. At the moment everyone uses Dagger on Offhand, but a good (creative) trait might change that.

I actually use a focus 90% of the time for all those defensive skills on earth and air, I understand, however why so few people use it and I wish someone from Arena Net read this:
The focus should have a healing skill on water attunement but most importantly the fire focus skills are utterly useless:

Flame Wall: Damage almost non existent and it causes burning for one second, yes for one second to a target which is probably burning already from Flame Strike or Dragon’s Tooth.

Fire Shield: Perhaps the most useless skill in the entire game as I said on another thread. Puts up a shield which lasts for 3 seconds during this time if someone attacks you they will get burning for 1 second. Yes you read properly, as if burning from Flame Strike, Dragon’s Tooth and Flame Wall was not enough Fire Shield gives you the chance to burn your enemy for whole full second holy cow!

So yeah the focus has some nice defensive abilities but its fire skills are worthless, I really wish they implement a decent offensive skill for the focus on fire attunement. Isn’t attack what the fire attunement is supposed to be about? I’m sure more people would begin to use it if they made this change.
For now I’ll just watch my poor foes suffer for that full second…..

You are aware that certain traits play off auras, right?

What’s “best to do” is situational. It might be better to just sit and wait for a bit, as not all of your cooldowns are really that significantly long.

What other stat could they possibly put in it’s place though?

The weird thing is, in one of their dev blogs, they obviously see Compassion as a “support” stat and a “defensive” stat both. Even though it clearly does both terribly.

We also added the new Healing attribute to take some of the pressure away from toughness being the most important defensive attribute and to create an additional option for players who wanted to emphasize a support role.

I think the stated goal in that dev blog… hasn’t been met.

DiogoSilva.7089:

because if you want to deal damage, you’re much better coming back to fire or earth

Here’s the problem you’re having. It’s not all about dealing damage. It’s really not.

Im Too Godlike.5629:

Cool. Your opinion is that elementalists are fine. You are in the minority.

Nope. The forums are a vocal minority. Popular forum opinion: loleleisweak!

That’s the minority opinion.

Skoodles.1260:

don’t know doing 100 damage to mobs at level 20 while my engi and guardian have been doing 100 since level 2 makes me think our damage is a little low…for pve at least.

Sucks for you, but it ain’t that way for me.

I made a thread in GD about the scaling of +Healing and uh… honestly, it’s not looking good.

DiogoSilva.7089:

The reason why Elementalists require so much effort, even for easy fights, is because their auto-attacks are not meaningful, exceptions aside.

Could you be more specific than that? We have a total of 12 different auto attacks across our three main-hand land weapons. Some just do damage, some have additional effects, some are projectiles, some explode, some are short range, some are long range, some cause conditions… they’re all different.

What could you see changed, specifically, to make our auto attacks more “meaningful” compared to what other professions have?

I have noticed that not a single one causes self-buffs, like some other profession auto attacks do.

DiogoSilva.7089:

But, against normal PvE foes, like that generic wolf outside of your city, why must a Mesmer, which is equally hard to play with, can finish it off with little effort, while an Elementalist player must still fight it as if it was the final boss of the game?

Um. I hope that is highly exaggerated, because that is not how I feel in the least.

In fact, I’m starting to wonder why heals don’t heal for a percentage of the target’s maximum HP, with that percentage scaling based on your +Healing, rather than flat numerical values.

So apparently I don’t have an edit button, again. But right now it doesn’t feel like Zephyr’s Speed lingers with this trait. Unfortunately, I have no objective measure to find out.

I feel like the scaling of the “group” healing is fine, as it’s fully intended that they’re small. Especially when you think about all 5 people in the group using group heals – it adds up.

The scaling of the self-healing is off, though, and I’d fully expected +Healing to be an alternative defensive stat to either Toughness or Vitality, for those who enjoy such a playstyle. And so far, it’s not.

Which sucks, because as I stack more Vitality, my self-heal becomes less and less effective, and I feel like I HAVE to get +Healing in order to make my 6-slot worth pushing…
Except the scaling is downright terrible, and that doesn’t improve the situation by very much at all.

So yeah, I did some testing in the Mists, and you’re right, it doesn’t affect Stone Flesh. It DOES however… affect Soothing Mist. You think it would affect both. I don’t have a reliable way to really test Flame Barrier or Zephyr’s Speed.

I have, however, been testing various skills for this trait, as best as I can without going out into the real world or getting help from other people, and have been updating the wiki accordingly.

The healing stat doesn’t mean there’s dedicated healers. Remember that your 6th slot heals yourself, and it’s your most reliable way to heal yourself (both in terms of frequency and power).

Unfortunately, the scaling balance of the healing stat doesn’t match that design goal, for some reason.

It’s also worth noting that just because there’s not dedicated healers, doesn’t mean there’s nobody that heals. This is tangential to the point of this thread, however.

zexion.5842:

aivedoir.3471:

Anyone did the maths for toughness? Is it as good as stacking vitality? It already doesn’t affect resistance to condition damage right?

Toughness reduces burst damage and damage in general (except conditions) and vitality increases hp to survive damage (including conditions).

They both fill a niche. I don’t have math but they support different situations.

Different situations, sure, but the same goal as Vitality and (in theory) Compassion: staying alive longer.

I’d seriously love to find out the numbers for Toughness myself, but I haven’t found a way to check.