Guild Wars 2

Coherent build, similar core concept to what I was looking at for Hammer burst spamming. Didn’t consider using Longbow, but it fits well.

I forsee this becoming a common build template, although some tuning of gear, runes, sigils, and fringe trait points will take place.

I like it.

Circus is best because you can beat up Logan.

Maharius.4651:

Israel.7056:

They run around in massive numbers though. Often times I see them have something like 20-30 people all running around together.

20-30 is a large number these days? Numbers must be well down in WvW for that to be a zerg!

I remember the good ol’ days in Warhammer and DAOC where a “zerg” described 80-300 players.

20 players was not even a single warband in Warhammer. Sigh.

It’s not unreasonable. For you or me, it is. For paid professionals, it’s not unreasonable to expect a little bit of experience with directing or providing a voice that fits more than 1.0 archetypes.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t TC get more rating for every 100 points of score they take from BG rather than SOR?

E.g. aren’t BG’s points worth more?

I thought this was intuitive.

Throdin.8061:

Drakenvold.9761:

Ulfrith Drakenvold

I can’t pinpoint how but I feel the last name could be improved. Otherwise the name’s very norn and awesome as a result.

Throdin Anvilfists

Drakkenvolt.

Kasla Urloung
it’s a charather from my favourite serie and the ultimate barbarian

Are you referring to KARSA ORLONG who demands that you WITNESS?

I’m not sure I understand the people in this thread that are complaining that the female Norn voice doesn’t suit their character. You cannot possibly expect the devs to record oodles of additional dialogue just so you can make a character that doesn’t suit the stereotype.

Ideally, the voice could have emotion but be slightly more neutral in tone so it’s more believable as a voice for other types of characters.

Tbh it probably has something to do with how artificially husky the voice sounds. If it weren’t so artificial it would probably sound better for light builds / Ele/Thief types.

I now officially hate Kirito and SAO.

Way too much character fanlove.

Brb rolling a character that looks like Drizzt.

Builds that don’t use DE (or don’t have to use DE):

- 30/30/0/0/10
- 20/0/0/20/30 (power)
- 20/0/0/20/30 (glamour)
- random support build with x/x/20+/20+/x
- 10/20/20/0/20 (condition)

10/30/0/25/5

Message Body length must at least be 15.

Immediately spec 5 points into Illusion. Every coherent spec includes that allocation.

10 points in Dom is highly recommended while leveling. Whether for illusion (phantasm) damage or Mind Wrack damage, your choice.

Rest doesn’t matter much and gets specific to what your spec / favorite weapons are.

2. Is there any time a s/d thief should use #3? Or is it better to leave this skill alone save in. for a different skill?

The one significant aspect is that 5-1 is better at nullifying a single target. 3 is better at nullifying the attacks of several opponents simultaneously. 3 also takes effect slightly faster than 5-1 if immediacy is a concern.

I remember someone commented somewhere that the return part of 2 didn’t break stealth, so you can do some extra tricky stuff with that.

My opinion on the downed and defeated states:

1. Player base HP and Vit scaling should be doubled.
2. Downed HP multiple should be reduced by half.
3. Most downed state abilities should be removed entirely. Or, they should be strictly normalized between classes.
4. Defeated = respawn, not spy on the terrain for the next hour.

If the downed state is going to remain in the game (duh, it will), then I think it would be a better approach to increase the fraction of gameplay surrounding combat-while-living and decrease the total amount of gameplay that centers on rezzing people that already sucked enough to die.

Also, add a mechanism for lower health for consecutive downs. For example, being downed should give a -50% hp on your next down. Debuff lasts 30s and stacks to 3.

Also, another mechanism for lower health for consecutive rezzes. Being rezzed should give a -50% hp on your next rez. Debuff lasts 30s and stacks to 3.

I’m still trying to figure out why it’s so difficult to have a client-side “draw distance” slider like most MMOs in the past 10 years.

For the people with toasters.

My god what an overreaction. All they did was fixing a bug and changing an obviously overpowered trait.
I can not fathom how someone can whine over this, I just dont get it.

They fixed the bug in the wrong way.

End of story.

Edit:

I don’t know why ANet buffed the might trait that way. I wonder if they confused the mechanic of boons “on shatter” with “every shattered illusion”, so they thought it would only grant a few stacks, rather than stacks per illusion. Shrug.

Either way it shows a lack of connection with the class mechanics to make such a basic error.

KirinDave.6451:

Must you?

State the truth? Well, yes, if it leads to a faster resolution of the discussion.

Like I referred to before — you are mixing Mesmers being upset at an incorrect fix or an unprecedented balance mechanic with Mesmers who accept reasonable nerfs and fixes. This is because you are reading poorly.

Until culling is fixed, stealth should have a “fade” time equal to the culling timeframe.

Easy.

Except some of the best damage, best AI, and lowest cooldowns of any external damage source in the game?

Damage and AI components are balanced by the part where they die pretty kitten quick (if you are talking about an actual DPS build).

Numbers can be tuned one way or another. The issue is the allowing them to be defendable twice compared to once is significantly different from any other ability in the game — regular attacks or necromancer summons.

ya’ll are writing a thread being upset because of something that even your community viewed as questionably balanced.

Your summary and opinion here is a result of a deficiency of reading comprehension. The bug that was poorly balanced was the 57 Might stacks on a trait that was already balanced and didn’t need a buff. That is fine and I don’t think anyone’s really upset about that.

LOS on phantasms was also fine(-ish). There was some minor QQ but I’m pretty sure most people didn’t cry too hard on that (there was a lot more crying about the actual summon timing which happened to get borked in the same patch).

Being doubly susceptible to defense mechanisms, however, is a different topic.

Also, a GCD on shatters is asinine. Ohwell.

^

I like this poster because he further strengthens the argument for adding a blast finisher to GS3 and otherwise leaving it alone.

^

It’s not even the unload part. If parity actually existed, summoning the phantasm alone would trigger a flame sigil proc (ohwait!).

The cooldown on Shatters is a “GCD”. Each Shatter is an ability,

An attunement is not an ability. An attunement swaps access to 5 abilities.

Hence, it’s a terrible comparison. The “GCD” stops shatters from being used. The attunement cooldown mirrors weapon swaps.

haviz.1340:

??

Blind works like that for every class. If you blind someone during his animation he’ll miss.

Elementalists got gcd since ever. And its 1s, not 0.25s

Mesmer phantasms can be blinded on summon, or the phantasm can be blinded on attack. Hence the enemy has 2 chances to defend against a phantasm, not 1 as with every other ability in the entire game.

This is more apparent when discussing Aegis, block, dodge, evade, or invuln effects with regards to avoiding phantasms. They can put up a passive defense mechanism and have a very large window (2 chances) to avoid the phantasm compared to the relatively smaller window (1 chance) for any other attack in the game.

It’s kind of silly.

Edit: Mesmers on the forum rag on the Blind effect more because it’s annoying and makes the edges of the screen dark. However, the point is that phantasms get affected twice by defensive mechanisms instead of once. Zzz.

Maelwaedd.5842:

too bad screen shots and fraps say different

you had your chance

Right. This isn’t inflammatory or anything.

Or you’re running away and you don’t want to risk death from a Kill Shot or <insert random ranged attack>.

Conceptually the point is that spiking too much of the same stat is inefficient.

It’s better to balance crit%, crit damage, and raw %damage than to spike any of those.

Power is a bit different since it starts off way better than any of those.

Oh, also one important thing:

Bigger number is better.

I’m ok with “500 health” phantasms, as long as they are putting out appropriate damage.

I don’t expect them to survive long, so I just shatter them. With a 30/30 glass megacannon spec, I nailed some underlevel folks in WvW last night for 8.3k iBerserkers and 6.7k MW (x1s).

Can’t summon them in the middle of pulsing AOE, but in most cases they will survive long enough to get their first shot off, which is all that you really need.

A lot of the mechanics in GW2 are very discrete, so it seems like simply getting the damage and animation time of each ability in question can be used to make a simple and effective model for measuring DPS.

It’s not like half your skill bar affects the other half of the skill bar, with traits and trait line affecting different skills in synergistic ways. It’s mostly … pretty straightforward / simple / direct.

Edit: For more holistic testing, with no precise combat log / parsing capability, yeah, well. Good luck.

One of my friends basically did a multiple trial of killing all 3 golems. The benefit is that you get a decent spread of armor, along with a decent spread of “real combat events” like target switching and movement. The downside of course is that it’s all artificial on 3 chained target dummies, with random variables like AOE/cleave effects.

But, in controlled methods, it’s useful enough. He was able to determine that Warrior Hammer 111111 spam was actually pretty kitten strong. Also that Warr Sword 1h 11111 spam was pretty strong with a pure power setup (no condition damage).

There are no sliders for any body parts below the neck because Anet wanted to minimize armor clipping.

That’s silly though — I don’t mean full gradient sliders. I mean sliders with 3 options that already exist on the char creation screen. E.g. the armor models in the game are already QA’d to work with the existing body combinations, so it seems logical to allow the players to choose which combination of body options they want, rather than the random subset ANet currently provides.

I use Reaper of Grenth for certain builds. It’s a reasonably nice source of two very good conditions.

The active is not useless when you are being attacked. It’s still healing you once in 15/12 seconds for a modest ‘burst’ amount.

The active only has a direct cost / issue when you are actually attacking — because you are trading your heals per strike.

Of course, it could probably be shortened by 0.25s or something just because it’s annoying. Annoying is not a really objective statement about balance though.

This would be a “QOL” change, not a “fix” or a “needed buff”.

Rounding seems convenient. This discussion proves that minor swings between crit%, crit damage, and raw % damage bonuses are pretty irrelevant.

Edit:

For the record, when comparing between two stat options, you need to factor in the concept that you already have a baseline amount of said stats … and that for most stats, more of the same becomes less efficient.

Too many formulas with too many variables.

Assuming you have +50% crit damage (e.g. 100% crit damage total):

If you have 0% crit rate and 0 +dmg%, then 1% crit is worth 1% damage.

No one has 0% crit rate.

Typical crit rate for the builds we’re talking about is >30%.

At 30% crit rate it takes more than 1% crit rate to equal 1% damage.

It’s easy to observe if you plug in simple numbers rather than post pages upon pages of abstract formulas.

100 damage. 30% crit. 100% crit damage. 130 effective damage (100 * (1 + .3*1.0)).

+1% crit results in 131 damage. 1/130 = 0.77% marginal improvement in damage.
+1% damage results in 131.3 damage. 1.3/130 = 1% marginal improvement in damage.

1% > 0.77%

The more of a stat you have (like crit%), the more each additional crit% decays in value.

Mind Stab is rubbish and should never be cast unless you specifically need the boon removal. We’re a zoning control class, so stationary casting is the absolute last thing you should do.

It’s also good raw damage against multiple targets when they stack to rez, which is basically every 10 seconds in WvW.

It also only stops you from moving for a half second.

1. You may have already tried, but try out higher graphics settings. Many semi-modern / older graphics cards have lower performance with extremely low graphics settings.

2. Use a defensive spec for sure. Staff is the best all-around defensive weapon. You also want a surplus of clones for PvE. Random brainstorm:

- 10 points Dom with the Crippling something trait (cripple on clone death)
- 20 points Dueling for Deceptive Evasion + Sharper Images
- Staff as a weapon
- 5 points in Illusion because it’s the best

Everything else is optional. I would recommend Illusionary Elasticity (20 Illusion) based on what I would do with the playstyle. 10, 20, 20 leaves you 20 points to play with. You could get the Staff trait in Chaos or Illusory Persona and something else.

I suspect an IP build would not be what you want with 5 fps.

I would consider the following build:

- 10 Dom, 25 Dueling, 10 Chaos, 20 Illusion
- Staff // Scepter/Torch
- Rabid / Rampager / Carrion mix of stats

GS builds require decent positioning, which is hard as hell with 5 fps. Sword defenses require good timing, which is again difficult.

Staff is pretty easy. Scepter and Torch give you good defensive and escape-ish tools to avoid a lot of damage without tight timing constraints. The cripple on clone death in the Dom trait will help you kite a lot. Throw on bonus Confusion and other debuffs when your clones die, and you should be ok.

The damage will somewhat slower than with other builds though.

I dont think its bravado to point out we are ready for tier 1

Didn’t BG get rolled last time they were in T1?

Edit:

Technically, I recall BG made a big splash in their first weekend, talked a ton of kitten, then were pushed down to second place by the end of that matchup. In subsequent weeks, BG was crushed.

It’s because white hair is the most unnatural natural color. Therefore it is more attractive yet realistic at the same time.

What boggles my mind is the way ANet skipped certain combinations of muscle tone, body size, and bust size.

It seems like it would have been much easier to give players 3 sliders — one for each of those, rather than give players a random sub-selection of those 2*3*3 = 18 permutations.

Just a very weird character creation design choice by ANet.

kitteno.8103:

As for Norns, they’re certainly have a lot of nice hairstyles, but their faces are simply horrible. Not a single face was satisfying to me when I started creating one. Human females, on the other hand, have like 3 decent face types.

A couple of the Norn faces are actually pretty good, IMO, but you need to tweak the sliders heavily and do odd things with hair / tattoo matchups to make them work. The Human faces are a lot easier near their default settings.

I like some of the human hair — Norn hair has a poor braid-less selection. Norn hair definitely does “unusual” a lot better though (e.g. the long topknot and exotic braids in general).

My take on the voice:

1. I think the voice itself works overall in terms of being a ‘deep / husky voice’ matching the Norn style.

2. I think it’s slightly too deep since a Norn can be anything from an Elementalist to a Warrior. I have a Norn Warr and the voice works well. I have a slim Norn thief, and I can’t play her because of the voice. The voice needs to be slightly more neutral, or less skewed to a Warrior concept.

3. Flat emotion. Yeah it’s bad. Could have helped to have the character animate more. Could have helped to have the VA put in more dynamism. I feel like the VA was trying too hard to be “DEEP HUSKY NORN” and lost some of the emotional inflection in the process.

Laying off the deep tone a tad would have enabled a wider opportunity for emotional inflection and made the voice more adaptable to different classes and Norn builds.

So, yeah. I like the voice itself, but I agree that the voice direction may be the core issue.

Nobody.4395:

The starg armor is great I really like it, but why my pants are so low??

Well, this aspect of the T3 armor is about half the reason I rolled Norn on my Warrior.

Arcing Slice should strip 1 boon per Adren level. And have a marginally faster/smoother animation while we’re at it.

Yea I have that in my hybrid Shatter build.

As a general observation, there’s no rule that says the value of a finisher is measured by the fields that the same weapon or class is able to use.

The core concept of a field and combo finisher is for teamplay between players.

The entire Warrior class, for example, is chock-full of combo finishers but they only have 1 field.

Chaos armor alone is pretty nifty. Combo’ing it for other effects would be even better.

1. While you are engaged on a target SoM’s passive provides heal throughput.

2. When you are disengaged from a target, you cannot use SoM’s passive. Therefore SoM’s active provides a supplemental option. When you are disengaged from a target, you are unlikely to be greatly affected by the activation time.

SoM’s active is a non-“I am actively engaged in direct combat” mechanic. Think of it that way, instead of as a “burst heal”, and re-consider its balance.

Perhaps the active should heal for more raw health, but over 3-5s. Shrug. I don’t know, but I also know that the activation time is integral to the concept of the ability and that shortening it won’t really help a huge amount (since you are deactivating the passive).

That’s not the point. It stacks multiplicatively with the other illusion cooldown trait and increases the number of Mirror Blades you can pop out (nevermind iBerserkers) by a huge amount.

Mirror Blade every 4.8 seconds is awesome Might, Vuln, and raw damage. The power is not bad, too.

Well, as a playstyle adjustment to succeed with or without any changes on ANet’s part:

Learn what opponent abilities are channeled. The most obvious case of “QQ I was wtfpwned in stealth” is Ranger Longbow or Warr Rifle channel abilities. These will not be cancelled on stealth. Deal with it by interrupting the offending player or use your stealth before or after their channel, rather than during it. If the enemy is, in fact, using a channel when you just hit stealth, realize this fact and use other abilities rather than assuming the stealth will help. Finally, make sure stealth isn’t your “last” escape. Have Blink in reserve, etc.

have u actually sever seen a mesmer HIDING in a tower for long?NO…so in your case this portal must have been thrown down by some mesmer that exploited.

I’ve hid inside a TOWER for over 15 minutes. There are some good spots. Zzz.

As I said other utility skills are far more useful underwater. They should be separate like all other skills are. I don’t see why you have to use the same skills underwater when using a mantra build.

Generally speaking, the Mantras are mostly just as useful underwater as they are on land. For the most part, it seems like you should be able to overlap at least 2 or 3 out of 4 Mantras if you are actually using 4 Mantras.

I don’t find 1-2 resetting a big deal.

That said, the issue is a game mechanics one since the Mantra charges are tracked as buffs tied with the skill presence. Dropping the skill means losing the buff. While it’s possible to implement a convoluted workaround (refer to above comment on “it’s not a big deal so why would they go through the effort of a convoluted workaround?”), the workaround would have to be tuned so that it would not be exploited.

For example, if the Mantra charge could be carried over without the skill being actively equipped, what would stop a player from charging a Mantra, swapping to another utility (say, Blink), then swapping back to the Mantra and immediately using 2-3 charges without charging it up first? Or more importantly, charging up 3 Mantras and rotating them on the same utility slot (e.g. 9).

Etc.

From a mechanics perspective, the downed state is legitimate. It does two things:

1. Adds an additional tactical layer to PvP (all forms) that basically focuses on it.

2. Creates a domino + zone control aspect to large scale PvP.

The issues with the downed state center on:

1. The snowball in WvW. Tbh, the zone control aspect is cool, but it’s a pain in the kitten because it promotes zerging.

2. Un-fun. Really, when people die they should die. The added tactical complexity of stomping and “killing someone who’s already dead” is nice and all, but it’s more frustrating than anything.

At the least, the downed state for all classes should be significantly more normalized than they currently are. In addition, the abilities should be very limited and traits augmenting the downed state should be removed.

There is so much good gameplay involved in the actual combat. The “combat after combat is resolved” takes away from the experience.

WvW is not about an elite squad holding the gates against hundreds of noobs, nor should it be.

Yes, it is. Or at least, that’s what players want it to be.

The reality of PvP formats like WvW will always be “ZERG WINS”. However, this assumes an even playing field.

One of the largest points of FUN in formats like WvW is the potential, the possibility for a 6-man to beat 24. For an 8 man to kill 120.

This potential is severely diminished in GW2 for a variety of reasons, and the downed state mechanic is one of those. It also pisses off players for other reasons (revive on random mob kill), so it is easy to point to and beat to death.

I have no idea why ANet didn’t make WvW a “PvP zone” with the same restrictions and mechanics as sPvP.

Oh wait, because they wanted to drag in the PvE crowd to clear jump puzzles.

Sigh.