Guild Wars 2

Sheobix.8796:

I tried the mesmer and the first thing I noticed different was how cool the staff would bounce back to me and give me boons. The necro on the other hand would fly pass my target and kill squirrels out of trees.

That’s called Piercing, and it’s a good thing. I use it routinely now. (Necro’s Focus #4 sends out a scythe that bounces, harming enemies and aiding friendlies.)

Swadow.6213:

I believe that it’s all the result of abolishing the holy trinity and forcing every class to fight with each other for viability.

Ridiculous revisionism. WoW had this kind of competition among various categories as well: you’d hear some healers whining “why bring a healer when a hybrid (Druid) can do everything we can and can do it better?”. Or between DPS classes? Etc.

This has everything to do with class balance. And whining in forums like this, which eventually makes it into guides and popular lore, and then in LFG messages.

Just like the myth that Necro’s are the buggiest class in GW2. I saw it so many times here that I started repeating it myself… Until I looked again at my Elementalist and Thief, and, … basically those classes have terrible bugs as well. (And for every two Elementalist bugs that were (mostly) fixed in the latest patch, another one was broken.)

Or how about the “Depending on conditions sucks, since other classes can do that too, and because of the 25 cap, your damage goes through the floor.”? No mention of how that might also hurt the OTHER class, just that somehow the Necro suffers.

I’m not saying “L2P”, or that everything is roses, but this constant, ill-informed whining is probably the major contributor to people avoiding Necros — if they actually are.

I don’t yet have the time on a Necro to make definitive statements, but I’ve seen this kind of “we’re mediocre and every other class can do what we do, but better” talk repeatedly in MMOs … when it wasn’t true. I also think that Dulon nailed it on the head when he mentions that people doing research on party makeup come to places like this and see the comments and walk away with “Necros are weak and the buggiest profession, so why bring them?”

In talking with my buddies, I mentioned that Necros were the buggiest class. I’d bought into that. Then I started actually comparing bugs with my Elementalist and Mesmer to Necro bugs, and it’s about the same. Long-term, class-defining bugs in all three classes. Some Elementalist bugs were finally fixed in the latest patch — though at least two major abilities were broken by the “fix”. Mesmers had their one OP skill “nerfed” in a stupid way that fixed nothing, while another skill that was being abused in WvW resulted in a “fix” that’s made illusions very unreliable.

People want Guardians because they have so many protection/healing skills and heavy armor so anyone can make them work and you’d have to really try very hard to not benefit the entire party. Personally, the only class I’d be biased against in a dungeon are Rangers, and there mainly because of pet issues.

^^ Oh, and Caltrops is great too. It’s surprisingly powerful at lower levels.

I’ve used Sword/Pistol and Shortbow. With pistol offhand, you can blind quite often and take almost no damage. Sword #3 is a multi-strike that evades damage, too, I think. I’ve finally decided to learn to move/dodge better, but it certainly wasn’t needed.

Yeah, there are two or three towns where I’ve tried to do the “help the people retake their town” kind of quest, which is not labeled “[GROUP]”, and it’s just overwhelming. Insane respawn rate, mobs assist each other from long distances, etc. To be honest, those areas have spoiled my opinion of ANet as a whole.

Just last night I tried to escort the guy setting up anti-ghost machines, and was simply swarmed and overwhelmed by the respawns. And I couldn’t even keep the mobs on me: one or two would always go to the NPC, killing him and stopping progress, and by the time I’d rez’ed him, four or five had respawned.

A few days ago, I was in some town that had been burned and taken over by the bad guys. We had to keep repairmen alive to repair three buildings. Two of us arrived at the town at the same time, and we simply couldn’t do it. Two mobs would drop from the skies at a time, doing AoE damage if you happened to be in the area, and mobs ran all the way across town to get us. Absolute frustration and it really makes you hate the designers. Nothing else you do or see can really make up for that.

(The only designers I still have respect for are the ones who create the idle chat between NPCs. They are brilliant.)

The WoW Druid was also my favorite playstyle. I’d say that an Engineer is similar to a WoW Shaman with Engineering as a profession (and steampunk theme instead of nature).

My Thief is only level 26 or so, but I’m also really enjoying him a lot. He does stealth and mobility, and adds utility (rather than healing). Things like Caltrops (AoE bleed and cripple), Smokescreen (line of blind and destroys projectiles), Blinding Powder (AoE blind and stealth), and the incredible Shadow Refuge (AoE stealth and heal). Shadow Refuge gives 10-15 seconds of stealth to a group and lets you rez while stealthing yourself and your target.

If you trait properly, you can give poison abilities to your entire group when you apply poisons. Note that the stealth mechanic is very different from WoW’s Rogue class, the poison mechanic is very different, and the Initiative mechanic is somewhat different.

I think that the bottom-line issue is that every almost every skill in the game affects no more than 5 other players. AoE certainly. Some friendly skills can affect more than 5 players — run across the line to get a speed boost, etc — but are limited by low time limits and short ranges.

Portals are longer range than any other skill in the game, have as long of a time as any other skill in the game, and affect unlimited numbers of players. It wouldn’t kill it to have charges so that only 5-10 players can use the portal before it collapses. You could still port strike teams where you need them. You could hide multiple Mesmers in a place to port more folks if you are that determined. You just couldn’t have one guy portal an entire server’s worth of folks. (And the limitation of AoE to only 5 targets means that the entire server’s worth of folks standing on the same spot are initially invulnerable to counter attack, to boot.)

Dee Jay.2460:

On a related note: Is it normal that other professions have such a huge range of “junk” abilities?

I mean we can literally dismiss about half of our utility skills because they suck and dismiss more because they don’t suit our build.

My opinion would be that Thieves are above average in terms of useful/interesting skills. Currently, my Thief is only level 25, but I love Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder, Caltrops, Smokescreen, and Shadowstep. I really look forward to both Dagger Storm and Thieves Guild which are both, well, elite.

On my (level 54) Elementalist, only one of two 10-point Elites is worth it, and the 30-point Elite actually makes you worse off when you use it. The only Elementalists that used it were taking advantage of a loophole where you could fire it off, then immediately cancel it, and retain stability. (AN closed that loophole in the last patch.)

Granted, some utilities depend on what attunement the Elementalist is in, so there’s a lot of flexibility to each, but I have a ton of skill points on my Elementalist and nothing left to spend them on, while my Thief will continue to get better as I add new skills.

I think it got overlooked on the previous page: The Ele’s hammer takes up a utility slot, so you need to compare the Warrior’s hammer + a Warrior utility against it. Would you give up your favorite utility in order to get your hammer buffed?

On top of that, a Warrior can use a hammer, switch to another weapon set, then switch back to hammer, while an Ele loses the hammer if they want to “switch”. Perhaps if the Warrior weapon switch cooldown was lengthened to the cooldown time on the Ele hammer? Or if the Warrior hammer had charges?

This is the kind of greedy comparison that tears up MMO’s: “Someone else has something I’d like and I think my class is so special that I can claim it by right!”

KratosAngel.7289:

Sometimes your character just stops moving at the end and you have to press a direction arrow so that it starts running again.

That’s the way it used to work for me: about a third of the time, if I was holding down a motion button during the RtL, I’d freeze at the end of the ride and have to let the movement button up and then press it again. So I just got in the habit of not pressing anything during a non-targeted RtL. It introduces a slight delay at the end, based on my reflexes, but was more reliable.

Hsinimod.5784:

I saw Elementalist got their spawned weapons to have default stats… I then wondered why our Kits (if they can’t use our stats and sigils) didn’t get the same treatment—to have default stats and sigils added to benefit the kit.

The Elementalist summoned weapons are way more niche than kits. You can’t switch in and out of a summoned weapon: drop it and it’s gone. (Enter water and it’s gone, too.) It has a charge limit and also a time limit. It locks out attunement switching, which is a core of the class.

So kits already have huge advantages over summoned weapons and aren’t really comparable. Not saying that kits don’t have to be addressed in some manner, just saying that it’s an apples and oranges comparison: different mechanics, different power, different usefulness, different coding.

francisling.2987:

Please understand that being a tanker or a healer isn’t an unwanted chore, a lot of people actually love it, and to see that group support traits(skills are oo-kay still) are almost always at the end of the line, and aggros are so messy that tankers are not even viable, is pretty sad.

The holy trinity is a stupid idea. Unrealistic and stupid. I’d buy GW2 to as a vote against this sacred cow, even if I didn’t care about the rest of the game.

The tank-healer-DPS pigeonholing makes balance more difficult, leads to poor play by most players — a price GW2 is paying now — and ends up with ridiculous developments like a tank class also being the best DPS class, or a healing class also doing higher DPS than a DPS class. The worst. idea. ever. period.

I think your only option is Warrior, and I’ve now come to believe the old MMO adage that Warriors are the most-played class in every MMO and that Warriors get whatever Warrior players want.

Elementalist? I have a level 50 Elementalist and have avidly sought out skill challenges to fill out my skills. Problem is, the two top-tier, 30-point Elite skills are worthless. In fact, Tornado was so despised before the patch that people would only use it to immediately cancel it and keep the 20-second stability boon. That loophole was closed in the patch, rendering it useless.

Other than that, some fixes that might be good. One of the signature moves of a D/D Elementalist, for example, has been Ride the Lighting. Unfortunately, it’s been plagued with pathing problems that result in either no movement or else being frozen at the end of the move, depending on terrain factors. In the patch, they said they fixed the OTHER issue where RtL would easily miss moving targets. Perhaps they also fixed the terrain issues, but…

Mesmers didn’t get much out of the patch either. One cool skill, using a less popular offhand, The Prestige, got a buff but it was buffed in a way that doesn’t actually benefit most Mesmers.

I’m really enjoying my (level 20) Thief and will probably continue playing him. After reading all of the forums and triangulating comments with my own experience, I’d say that no class got the fixes they desperately need, and most fixes were either nerfs or were fixes that were easy to implement in the code. Plus a couple of necessary nerfs that were implemented the easy way and thus overshot their mark by so much that they destroyed the skill rather than fixed it.

I’d give the patch a C- for profession fixing/balancing. They spent too much effort on new content.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Ahh Balance/fix drama. Hilarious.

Most of the skills have been fixed to work as intended. This isn’t a nerf.
Elementalist got buffed extremely in the conjure weapon section.

“Extremely”? You do realize that conjured weapons have a time limit, a charge limit, disappear under a variety of other conditions, and lock us out of attunement switching, right? Even if a temporary stat increase is greater than all of the downsides, we don’t even know how much that increase is, so how can you use the word “extreme”?

FrizzFreston.5290:

Nerfed evasive arcana? LOL that skill still works the same except it’s not a finisher.

Which is the only reason people used it. The skills that it procs have the same names as other Elementalist skills, but do not do the same things at all. Heck, the one is the Elementalist’s best known blast finisher and it no longer does that.

It made sense to not have EA be a blast finisher even when the it was on cooldown and didn’t proc the skill. But to remove blast finishing entirely, leaving only watered-down, vaguely-like-the-real-skill skills in place?

Or how about Tornado, our top Elite skill. It was such a terrible skill that people used it and immediately canceled it to keep the stability buff. AN fixed that bug.

To be honest, I’m a level 50 Elementalist who is bored. I have every single skill except the two 30-pointers at the top of the Elite skills and neither one of them is good enough to waste the points on. I used to go after every skill challenge I could find, but now I don’t care one way or the other. So the only thing I’ll accomplish between level 50 and level 60 is getting to the point I can finally use Grandmaster traits… and the one at the top of the Arcana trait line has been nerfed so hard it’s not worth getting either.

FrizzFreston.5290:

MEsmers being fully nerfed? i only see portal being nerfed significantly and giving phantasms and moa form a less unfair impact on opponents. Plus every other class needs line of sight, I dont see why the mesmer, who has 23576 ways of deluding the enemy needs a mechanic where they can hide behind walls.

You almost have a point, but still don’t understand. What Mesmers were abusing was not needing LOS to throw phantasms into the tops of walls in WvW. Unfortunately, LOS is so poorly implemented in this game that Mesmers now have issues casting a phantasm up a flight of stairs and Elementalists have issues doing Ride the Lighting across level fields.

FrizzFreston.5290:

But on the other hand they buffed prestige and phantasmal mage. and finally made phantasm recharge work properly. Yet people scream “mesmer nerfs”

The buffed the direct damage of Prestige, which benefits Mesmers very little.

The bottom line is that this patch was mainly a handful of fixes to the easiest things to fix, along with a bunch of tweaking tool tips to reflect whatever (sad) state spells actually were. Fixes, like for Mesmer portal abuse, didn’t actually fix the underlying problem. Heck, various morphs, like Elementalist Tornado, were fixed to close loopholes that were the only thing that caused anyone to use them in the first place. Would’ve been better to also do something to buff them so that people want to actually fully use them.

I’m not screaming, and I won’t leave the game, but this big patch spent WAY too much time on content and way too little time making things actually work properly and reasonably.

Hermes.7014:

Yes, changes were made to other classes too but they were mostly all buffs…
Look at the Mesmers, The Prestige now hits for double, and our Dancing Dagger hits for half.

You don’t play any other profession, I see. Or even read other forums.

Mesmers are laughing at the Prestige’s 100% increase because it’s the direct damage part of it, not the burn damage, which doesn’t fit into the builds that would use the Prestige. Other than that, what other buff did Mesmers get?

Same with Elementalists: there’s perhaps one outright buff to them, a bunch of tooltips being changed to match what the skills already do, and a couple of significant nerfs. Some may argue that one of the nerds (Evasive Arcana) was needed, but it went so far as to eliminate blast finishing even from the one Evasive Arcana spell that actually is a blast finisher.

Poor pathing affects, as far as I can tell, one Thief skill, which many people don’t like on its own. Poor pathing renders several Elementalist core skills unreliable, and it’s not clear that the fixes AN is touting actually fix these issues. Now that Mesmers require LOS to cast phantasms — probably a reasonable nerf — poor pathing (which affects what the game considers LOS) means that phantasm summoning is unreliable in certain terrain.

So no, Thieves didn’t get the short end of the stick.

I’m also not saying that AN did a great job. I think it’s pretty obvious that several of the nerfs were things that were easy to do, but not actual fixes, and it’s obvious that several game-breaking skill bugs in each class weren’t actually fixed. And it’s not clear AN actually knows how to fix them (or perhaps they’re baked into the core of the game and are unfixable).

I do like that AN can buff/nerf skills on a PvE/PvP basis, which will hopefully keep us mainly PvE’ers from getting nerfed into the ground because of PvP imbalances, and keep PvP’ers from getting nerfed because of PvE exploits.

RetroSamus.9860:

Where is the shadow Refuge fix?
Leaving it to early still removes stealth.

As far as I can tell, it’s supposed to work this way.

I could see that it might be a bug that it removes stealth that’s obtained by other means, but it seems reasonable to me that if you leave the shelter you lose its benefits. Complain too much and perhaps they’ll remove the stacking of the stealth it generates, which leaves you stealthed way beyond its duration.

Someone was ragging on the new blast of Dragon’s Tooth, but it now works more intuitively, and lets you drop a Dragon’s Tooth over your group’s target and insert a water field under it to AoE heal.

I guess that you can’t use it on yourself anymore to stack some Might, but it always was a little strange that the blast occurred at you instead of where an enormous tooth fell and exploded.

Actually, this is not obvious at all, and needs to be better-handled in the mail interface somehow. You continue to get quest reward emails — I hadn’t deleted any of them and had dozens — so it looks like your mail should be working, but it’s not. I finally stumbled onto deleting everything, and lo-and-behold I had about 8 messages from friends with the stuff that they’d said they sent that I never got.

The ultimately capacity of mail is much larger than 10, obviously, so you need to do something like bounce the mail back to the sender with a message that “The recipient’s mailbox is too full”, or notify the recipient, or find a better way to handle quest rewards than email. (Or auto-delete quest reward emails once the money’s been collected. Or… well, anything!)

In terms of out-of-combat weapon swapping, I think it’s more complicated than either side makes of it:

Those who favor it haven’t thought through what restrictions might be needed so it wouldn’t be abused. (I’m thinking of PvP, getting briefly out of combat — and Elementalists have a lot of movement options — and essentially going from twice as many weapon skills as other classes to four times as many.) Would there essentially need to be a “Weary of combat” condition that sticks around for 10 seconds after going OOC, the sole purpose of which is to stop Elementalist weapon swapping?

Those against it don’t think that it’s much more complex than just opening your bags. It’s easy to confuse weapons, and if you’re half-way through a swap from a staff to two daggers and a mob runs up and puts you in combat, you end up fighting with one hand empty.

You do realize that Elementalists can stomp while in Mist Form, using their ring-o-rocks (forget the name) shield for stability, or when invulnerable, right? Every class has one or more nigh-invulnerable skills that they can use while reviving. Yes, the Thief can do it while invisible, which is unique but not necessarily more powerful than others.

And yes, you can do something about it. Stealthed does not mean impervious to damage or CC.

I’d like to hear more. I think it’s one of the few skills I didn’t bother to get, since it seemed so unimpressive. Does it add a lot of armor or something else not listed in the Wiki?

Actually, this is a more interesting question than you may have thought when asking it. In my opinion, ANet did a very clever thing for the Mage-type class by splitting it in two. Most of the other professions (“classes” in other MMO’s) are clearly based on a single archetype, but they took the classical Mage and split it in two: Mesmer (Illusions and Manipulations) and Elementalist (Calling down Fire and Ice on people’s heads).

Anyhow, I started with a Mesmer and got him up to 20 or so, but got intrigued by the Elementalist. He’s now my main and up to level 50 or so.

Playing PvE straightforwardly, my Mesmer feels like he’s tougher and better able to survive. If I play straightforwardly, the Elementalist feels squishy, but if I throw myself into it and watch combinations very carefully I actually feel stronger than the Mesmer.

The Elementalist feels like he has more utility for a group (heals, AoE, buffs, debuffs, pets, etc).

I don’t do PvP, but enjoy WvW, where both feel useful, and both are successful. Right now, the Mesmer has a few tricks which some WvW teams have borderline abused, so maybe they’re more useful — if you’re on the right server — but I wouldn’t expect that to last forever.

Even though they’re not technically a caster, I’d recommend you also look at Engineers. They do their magic via steam-punk-style equipment, so if you really need to see balls of flame rather than flame-throwers, it won’t work, but… (Engineers are similar to a WoW Shaman whose profession is an engineer.)

I just have a level 10 Thief, but half of the OP’s complaints are whining plain and simple.

Legitimate:

1. Improper rendering leaving a character in stealth who should not be.

2. Being able to stay stealthed for longer than say, 20-30 seconds, on general principle and in regards to controlling points in particular.

Whining:

1. Stealth rez/stomp. Elementalists have mist form, a couple of bubbles, sustained blinds, and invulnerability, all of which can be used for a rez/stomp. Other classes have stability/stealth/invulnerability equivalents. Heck, if I’m willing to spend a utility slot on it (my main is an Elementalist), I can rez a player from a distance and teleport him to me, or rez him at full health, or rez three at once.

2. Backstab complaints. Unless it falls into culling/rendering issues, working as intended. The Thief class is about ambush, burst, and stealth. The entire class is built around the burst mechanic, and has a boatload of stealths and teleports specifically for this.

I’m not sure I’ll ever have to speed and control setup to play a Thief well, but I’m very intrigued by the class and having fun (at level 10).

I wonder if a simpler (from Anet’s viewpoint) solution would be to have the skill button turn into a user ability, depending on type of Elemental? That is, you can’t control the Elemental, but the Elemental provides a synergy to you that gives you another skill you can use while the Elemental exists?

You couldn’t really sacrifice the Elemental, which would either end up being too Mesmer-like or too Necro-like. Simply providing a buff to the owner wouldn’t really add much. Having direct control over the Elemental may be doable, but may be very difficult, depending on how the Elemental is actually implemented in ANet’s code, so I’m trying to think of something else that would be Elementalist-like and an additional skill that depends on the type of Elemental could be fairly easy to implement and also have the right flavor.

Elementals are fine in PvE. FGS is situational but fun in PvE.

If you mean in PvP, put that in your title. Otherwise, you’re just wrong.

I just hit 40 and respeced traits to include Blasting Staff, so this is a little disappointing.

[EDIT: Ah, just checked the Wiki and it says Meteor Shower is unaffected by the trait. I think that’s the only cast that would lose out, so question answered. I’ll leave it anyhow, in case someone else had it.]

BUT, I just thought of the question: I assume that the the larger radius is a total win for, say, Healing Rain and that you get the same effect in a larger area. But what about Meteor Shower? It drops meteors in an area and you literally have to be hit by one, right? Does it drop more meteors, or the same number spread out over a larger area. If the latter, it actually dilutes the power of the cast.

I would add that it’s not always possible to help out the guy who isn’t prepared for the area and is leading a train of adds towards you. I’m only lvl 30, but have been trashed at once when I tried it and was overwhelmed, and another time when I tried to mind my own business and the mobs all aggro’d on me. So yeah, I tend to help folks and appreciate folks who help me, but the guy who is running like crazy and training mobs to me might get a wide berth.

I’d add that there are several issues named in this thread. One is getting disconnected and when you get back, your camera view rotates in a crazy way as you move the camera. Exiting to Desktop and restarting GW2 seems to fix that, as Xandman says. (I was disconnected in one of the Crazy King things and when I logged back in, I was on the ground in Lion’s Gate and the camera was CRAZY.

Mouse-sensitivity seems to be another matter.

A friend of mine had an issue where they upgraded their OS to the latest version and GW2 wouldn’t run. It would launch very briefly (a second or so), but crash before displaying anything. We looked in the system logs (using the Apple utility Console) and saw a Cider error -1 (I believe it was -1). Cider is the package that ANet wraps GW2 in to provide Mac compatibility.

In another thread, someone suggested a command line that uses a Cider tool to fix things. We ran this, and it complained that other users should not have access to a particular directory. From the command line, I deleted this directory (it was empty), and as I hoped, when GW2 launched the next time it recreated the directory with the permissions it was expecting.

I don’t have time right now to find the Cider command line fix thing, but will try to post that in a followup. I just wanted to get this solution out there in case it would trigger some solutions for folks.

I’m only level 33, but I’ve been experimenting with S/D and S/F, instead of D/D which makes me feel squishy. The S/F gives up several nice things (RtL, Earthquake, Churning Earth), but gains a projectile reflect and a projectile destroyer, plus a total immunity (during which you can continue to do anything you need to do). I also like the scepter’s E1-E3 a lot more than the dagger’s E1-E3, and Earth seems to be my go-to attunement.

Zenyatoo.4059:

No heal is “useless” but they can often be “Use impaired” Heals will rarely save a teammate from death in my experience. You need 2+ heals to combat a single monster hit, and chances are if you’re able to maneuver and get those heals off on your teammate (who is most likely running away) chances are they would have lived anyway.

Hmmm… this gets me wondering if healing (water) is really useful at all.

In PvE, would it be better to throw conditions on bosses instead? (Or does weakness not work the same on bosses?) I haven’t had enough group time to tell if this game is more about DPSing until you pull aggro, then survive until someone pulls it off of you (or the boss is dead).

A buddy and I hit 30 and went to our first dungeon yesterday. It was a terrible experience, since the group was basically leaderless. Some of the other three knew the dungeon a bit, but no one ever said anything the entire time. I thought at times I’d try to throw out a Healing Rain and use Water Bolt, but then got to wondering if that really made any difference and if I should’ve been burning down stuff instead. (Of course, it really hurt us that with no leadership we didn’t focus on anything.)

@Zenyatoo: Thanks, great answers!

One more clarification: on #4, I believe we have a base healing power and can then add +Heal gear, and you’re talking about the base without +Heal gear/upgrades, right?

I ask for three reasons: 1) I hear +Heal gear isn’t really that useful to acquire, 2) I’m thinking I can’t use too much +Heal gear or the party’s DPS will be too kittened, and 3) I’m assuming no one else in the party will have +Heal gear. So would my Water Bolt (I think that’s it, the one that damages and heals) be useless at level 80? And would my Water Field + my party’s Finishers (Projectile and Blast) be useless at level 80?

(Of course, that assumes that they’re useful pre-level80, which I haven’t yet determined.)

I just edited the config file and with the same settings as I was achieving 25 fps or so, I suddenly jumped to over 50 fps. I reset most things back to Medium, and am still getting 40+ fps. (I left the screen resolution at the lower setting, since it seems to work out well and I like the additional performance and the room for slowdown in chaotic fights or Halloween events.)

I realized another reason it would be overpowered: take a look at our weapon choices and note which ones can make Fields and which ones can do Finishers. Note, for example, that the staff can make a boatload of Fields, but has only a single Finisher. While other weapons can make few (or no) Fields but have several Finishers — some on fairly low cool downs.

I have some questions about water, fields, and healing, and wanted to know if anyone had already tested things and gotten answers. Thanks!

1. When you use a Blast Finisher in a Water Field, say, what is the radius of the heal? Is it the radius of the field or the radius of the blast? I’m thinking in particular of Healing Rain, which has a huge field.

2. When you use a Blast Finisher in a Water Field, how much does it heal for? Something related to the Field’s originating spell and the player doing the detonation?

3. What about a Projectile Finisher and a Water Field? I gather that it heals players close to the target and not the player that fired the projectile, right? (Something like the Water Bolt.)

4. Does healing scale in such a way that it keeps up with mobs damage as you level, or does it fall behind? In particular, assuming that you don’t have +Heal. Two sub-cases: 1) the Water Bolt’s heal, and 2) Projectile/Blast Finishers in a Water Field.

I’m going to do some experiments, but it’s a little hard to convince my buddies to participate in controlled experiments and it’s pretty much impossible to test things without at least one other (injured) player. Thanks!

About the same for me: I was getting around 30 fps with a mid-range resolution and most things set to High, which dropped to about 6 fps after the update. By turning everything to Low and turning off anti-aliasing, I got things back up to 15 fps or so, but it’s really bad. In town it was so slow that I could barely go up a tower’s stairs.

I had to turn all of my settings to low in order to get a half-decent framerate. Could be a coincidence with something going on with my system, but I was getting decent fps earlier in the day.

Running latest Mountain Lion on Retina MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM.

Anyone else see anything change this evening?

Have you tried WvW? It’s not unbelievably great, but it is different and lets you contribute in a variety of ways. I believe it will improve over time, but even now it’s better than WoW’s large-scale battlegrounds ever were.

I agree with the OP. GW2 is refreshing and fun.

Yes, there are issues with some skills being less useful than others, with profession balance, etc, but every MMO will have those issues. The difference is that GW2 has a great foundation in place, so most problems can be fixed with tweaks.

I can really feel the thought and design that went into GW2 in a way that I certainly didn’t feel in WoW, and haven’t felt in most other games.

Now that some suggestions here have gotten me thinking about mob threat assessment, what factors might go into that?

1. Your role. Once you enter combat, you’re locked into the role you’ve adopted by the weapons and skills you’ve equipped (plus your traits), since they can’t be swapped in combat. So perhaps part of a mob’s initial threat assessment includes whether you’re DPS-ish, or heal-ish, or tank-ish. So an Elementalist with healing traits, a staff in water attunement, and with healing-ish utility skills might be classified as a healer.
2. Passive skills/traits that may be firing off even if you just stand there.
3. AoE skills.
4. Oppositional skills: lots of curing of conditions on a boss that depends on conditions, the ability to wipe boons off of bosses that depend on them, or the ability to reflect projectiles from bosses that use them a lot. That is, to what degree do your skills, gear, and traits allow you to thwart the boss.
5. The capability of setting up particular combos. Or the ability to self-combo particular combos. (For example, healing turret, explode healing turret for an AoE heal.)
6. Concentration/spread of trait points. Perhaps someone with 10/20/10/20/10 is viewed differently from someone with 30/30/10/0/0.
7. Level or upgrading of gear.
8. Fighting range versus boss’s preferred fighting range. So if you go in with a rifle and the boss prefers melee, it may be tempted to run after you to close the gap, but if you’re melee and the boss prefers to fight at range the opposite happens.
9. Your character’s character. (Or whatever you call that 3-way reputational thing you can roll over in the top right of your hero panel.) Perhaps if you’re fierce, you’ll have a higher priority.
10. Your burst capability. Depending on skills, equipped weapons, and traits, you may have a high burst capability and perhaps the boss wants to take you out early and not give you the chance to burst them down once they’re wounded.
11. Your damage type: fire-prone mobs may prioritize players who can dish out a lot of fire damage. (I know some mobs are, say, immune to poison, but don’t know if mobs can be prone to particular types.)

I really like the idea that mobs do an initial threat assessment, perhaps based on your capabilities to heal your party, remove conditions that the mob inflicts, remove boons that the mob “likes”, how tough you are, how persistent your AoE/heals/boons/condition-removers are, etc. I never played GW1, but from some of the posts, it seems that it was well-known that GW1 did similar things.

I do believe that if you don’t kill a boss, it does remember your aggro level, so if you get rezzed or run back to the fight it may go straight for you. That happened to me last night with a DE boss. (I’d also rezzed several NPCs who were also fighting the boss, and perhaps that counts against you as well.) Eventually, several players joined in the fight, but the boss was on me the entire time. (I was playing my Elementalist.)

I like a more sophisticated aggro system than WoW had, but there also has to be some understanding of aggro that would let us manage it. Unfortunately, if too much is known about aggro, players will find ways to abuse it and perhaps try to replicate the Trinity. Perhaps the devs are waiting a while to release some aggro information so that non-Trinity play styles get entrenched in the culture?

You need to disable the setting that says something like “Change direction with scrollwheel” in the control settings. That fixes it. Sorry I can’t remember the exact answer.

Valkaneer.7834:

Look no further then WoW when they introduced flying mounts. Not only was the size of the world reduced dramatically, world PvP died. When they implemented a shorter hearthstone, teleports to zones, dungeon finder and more gryphon points, they destroyed the immersion even more. The world became empty

I never experienced the world as empty. I imagine world PvP died out because it’s stupid: you want to login and do a few things with friends (or maybe spend a half hour solo’ing) and your experience can be ruined by bored level 80’s? Arenas and battlegrounds made much more sense, and between the stupidity of world PvP and structured PvP, world PvP died a well-deserved death.

If you want to be forced to literally travel everywhere and to be subjected to NPC and player attacks at any point along the way, play EVE. That’s all about griefing. GW2, by design, is a cooperative game and many of us like it that way.

I agree with the poster (can’t find their post right now) who mentioned that waypoints make it more likely I’ll wander off to explore, since I can get back quickly. Nothing worse than wandering down a beautiful valley, thinking you must surely be able to go around that mountain and finding that you can’t. Then having to walk all the way back, get lost halfway, and…

I also agree with the OP that the world feels more full when people have to move through it. Even if that means mounts or or (flying) taxi’s of some kind. On the other having to wait on the guy who has to take 5 flights to get to you is a pain. A real pain. Which then leads to classes that can summon, and in GW2 I guess every class would have to be able to summon, right? Which really tears the world apart when you can be summoned to a specific spot in the world.

I think there are a whole bunch of transport issues that need to be distinguished: 1) coming back from a death, 2) personal transport, 3) public transport, 4) transport to join your associates, 5) transport from the field to town to sell/repair, etc.

I’ve ended up using ControllerMate to make my G13 work under Mountain Lion. It’s not a simple solution if you’re not used to the logic of programming, but it’s very customizable. (Of course, doesn’t support the LCD display, but…)

The Logitech site has drivers that haven’t been updated since Snow Leopard, so I didn’t try them. Looks like kyonethree has few problems using them, though.

Are we considering burst damage? Perhaps a burst of damage will shoot you to the top of the aggro list even if your overall damage is lower than others?

Or distance? Perhaps bosses have a “ranged” list and a “melee” list, and engineers tend to play at a mid range and get counted in both lists?

Or fields/finishers? Could people laying down fields (or using finishers) rank higher on the aggro list?

Or movement (or the lack thereof)? Or perhaps having a lot of conditions (and maybe engineers are less likely to care about them or less likely to cleanse them off due to class mechanisms) raises your desireability as a target?

Or maybe AoE heals (like the healing turret) raise you on the aggro list?

Or … ?

Sigh. Elementalists already get twice the number of options of any weapon-swapping class except Engineers, and Engineers have to burn utility spell slots to get more options and their Kits don’t benefit from weapon upgrades, etc.

If it really bothers you, why not pretend that your attunements are weapons and your weapons are attunements?

The attunement mechanism is a core of the class. Live with it.

Having weapon-swapping but having it only work out of combat — for convenience — is an exploit waiting to happen. And then you’ll have the other Professions complaining that Elementalists already have twice the swapping capability with attunements and now can do 4x the swapping “on the run”, even if it’s out of combat.

I think The Prestige works that way to force a choice: A) Offense, you stay in the same area, Defense you run away and the burn is incidental. Sort of like a short-range version of the Engineer’s rifle jump (which does some damage at the take-off point and more damage at the landing point, which could of course be the same point).

Another point is that AoE will still hit you even if you’re stealthed, so the blind before you stealth minimizes the damage you’ll take while stealthed. (Assuming Blind affects AoE’s in the same way as targeted attacks, which I haven’t tested.)

The Mermer illusion mechanic is what it is. If you want longer-term minions play a Necromancer, and if you want pets play a Ranger. The mechanism is unique and interesting. If you want a simpler class, you have that choice as well. Personally, I’d hate to see the the Mesmer simplified to the point that it’s dumbed-down. As you say, in the hands of someone who gets and likes the playstyle, it’s powerful. Which means that it’s working just fine (excepting bugs, of course).

If you need a lore-based reason for the illusion mechanism, my guess would be that the illusion is put into the target’s mind. The target dies, the illusion disappears.

I haven’t felt like I’ve been particularly slow to this point, but I also haven’t gotten my engineer to the point that he can be near-perma-speeded with various mechanisms. So there’s a downside.