Guild Wars 2

Whisper to yourself. I don’t believe there’s any spam filter on whispers (at least I’ve never hit one), and that way you don’t bother anyone else either.

I believe that its a restriction of the game engine that you can’t dye particle effects. At least that’d be my guess based on the fact that there isn’t a single one in the game that you can in fact dye.

But I could definitely get behind at least letting you dye the non-particle effect metal parts. Seems kind of odd that you can’t, unless they just wanted the Radiant and Hellfire sets to match completely and couldn’t figure out how to let you dye the Hellfire set or something.

I love Blast and Wave because they’re 0-cast time attacks that hit decently hard (and for Wave, being a blast finisher is also great). That’s a rarity in this game, so that alone makes them fairly unique in my eyes. Love using them and just being able to throw them out literally whenever I want without interrupting whatever else I’m doing.

Arcane Power has always been pretty “meh” to me. Its unique enough, there aren’t really any skills that do the same thing, but its not all that impressive overall. Guaranteed crits are nice, but not enough to waste a skill slot for. Also, the fact that its the next five hits and not the next 5 attacks kind of sucks, as it means one single multi-hit attack or a single AoE uses the whole skill all at once. I suppose the condition applications are nice if you trait Elemental Surge, though.

Arcane Shield is great, again mostly for being a 0-cast time defensive utility, which comes in handy for sure. Cooldown is a bit of a detriment, though.

Brilliance is alright. An attacking / finishing heal is fairly unique (though getting less so with elite specs). Healing amount is a bit of an annoyance with how inconsistent it is, though. Particularly since sometimes you want to get away from enemies to heal to keep yourself safe, but then you get bad healing.

I’d say Arcane skills are far from the most boring in the game. Heck, even on the Elementalist specifically I’d say Signets are far more boring (as well as signets on most other classes). Their active effects tend to be underwhelming, and I don’t like being encouraged to NOT use my utilities. Even on Ele who can use them as regular skills with Written in Stone, the effects are just bland.

Did it happen while fighting Platinum (the thrasher)?

I’ve had it happen a handful of times against that boss, and only that boss, where I’ll be there the entire fight and not get credit for the event, nor a Mordrem part from my extractor.

Something like a bunch of armor-mounted weapons sounds much cooler for a future elite spec than something to just throw on current Engineer willy-nilly. They could be much better developed that way.

And I happen to love turrets. I don’t care that they’re bad (well, I mean, I’d prefer they were good without a doubt, but I’d rather have bad turrets than no turrets). Why completely change something that does have fans rather than just adding it as a new feature.

LS in general is account-wide for the most part. The only thing that’s character-bound is progress on the individual episodes.

So yes, the pack will let you play the LS on all characters. Its an account-wide unlock.

Why would you want them to replace one of the current outfits that no doubt many people like rather than just adding it as a new one?

I have the perfect way to fix this “bug”.

Change the trait so that it isn’t pet-based. I don’t want to screw my pet with CC anyway.

The biggest factor is availability, IMO.

Greatsword is always available for you to use, 100% of the time (barring weapon swap cooldowns). You can’t be knocked out of it by taking damage or simply through passing time, you don’t need to save it for situations when you need defensive mitigation, you don’t need to pre-build any resources to use it.

Would I trade a completely new weapon and set of utilities in exchange for a weapon and set of utilities we already have? Uh… no?

They’re proportional to their body size.

I’d rather not have Asura running around swinging hammers twice the size of their own heads.

Does the heal at least build astral force? And can it trigger Lingering Light?

Alright, so after a few more hours at the wheel of my Druid, its time for my full writeup on the class. Not including the new pets, since I already gave my impressions on them here.

Overall, I enjoy Druid. Some fun stuff there for sure. I do think you need to tweak the healing coeffecients to make healing gear a bit more enticing, however, but that’s more a change the entire game could use rather than just something for Druid specifically (even if Druid does necessitate it more through having more heals).

~ Celestial Avatar ~

I like it overall. Lots of healing (obviously), some cleanse, some utility… nice skillset. I’ve actually found myself jumping into Avatar form just to use the daze and Natural Convergence in those situations where I don’t necessarily need healing. I do think that Natural Convergence could use a bit more damage or maybe some conditions (bleeds / burns) to make it just a tad more dangerous and further justify it being a stationary skill, though. Oh, and the blast finisher on Lunar Impact doesn’t seem to work, so that should be fixed of course.

Now, getting it filled up so that you can enter it in the first place… that’s a different story. Staff fills the bar entirely too fast (we seriously shouldn’t be jumping into avatar form 3 seconds after it ends) while everything else fills it entirely too slow. Which creates a big problem where staff is too central to the elite spec, and you basically HAVE to use it (or certain very specific and equally restrictive builds) if you want to actually utilize Avatar form more than “on a rare occasion”. Which is a huge difference from all the other elite specs, which simply provide the weapon as an option. I’d definitely bump up the rate of celestial power build from damage. The rate certainly should still favor healing so I don’t think the damage ratio should be too high, maybe up to 1/2 or 3/4% per hit (its too bad we don’t have another beta so we could test different growth rates). But its clearly far too low now.

As for staff building it too fast, that seems like a problem that could be fixed by simply changing the auto-attack. If possible, then simply coding it so that you only get one healing “tick” pekittenr target would be ideal, but if that can’t be done then maybe change the beam so that it simply does one burst of healing instead of multiple small heals.

~ Staff ~

Like the concept. Like the visuals and sounds. But other than the ridiculous rate at which it builds celestial power, it seems extremely lackluster all around. The damage is outright awful. Which, yah, one can argue you should expect from a support / heal based weapon, but it seems a little TOO terrible to me. Also, it needs some sort of pet buff / effect somewhere, because right now its the only weapon in our kitten nal that doesn’t have one.

Solar Beam mainly just needs a damage increase. Not a huge one, but it needs to hit like a little more than a limp noodle.

Astral Wisp just seems lackluster. Again, its a cool concept, but it just doesn’t DO much. Heals once or twice on melee targets and… that’s it. You could boost the damage to give it a little more “oomph” but personally I’d favor a secondary effect of some sort. Pulsing vulnerability on the targeted enemy, a blind on the initial impact, buffs on allies who come into contact with the wisp, something. Give me a reason to use the skill other than “it looks nice”.

Ancestral Grace is mostly OK. The one change I think it really needs is to not get you “stuck” in the animation when you use it at short range, since that not only leaves you vulnerable to attacks but also makes it hard to nail the blast finisher on shorter fields. And although it doesn’t strictly NEED it, I do have a really cool idea for the skill, where if you teleport through an enemy said enemy takes a bit of damage and maybe gets a condition of some sort (blind?). The idea being that passing through the enemy in energy form is harmful to them in some way.

Vine Surge is pretty bad. A 1-second immobilize, really? So little reward for a skill that’s not all that easy to hit with. Sure, there’s the rare occasion where you nail an enemy twice and get a 2-second immobilize, but even that’s only barely passable. How about making it actually root enemies? Ya know, inflict them with the vine root from Entangle. Probably a weaker version of it, maybe a 3-second duration of Immobilize and Bleeds to match. Would give the skill a lot more use and flavor. Also, as mentioned above, staff needs a pet boon skill of some sort, and since a lot of them are on CC-related skills, I figure this would be a good place to put staff’s. I’m thinking something with a unique Druid flavor, so perhaps “Your pet’s next attack tethers it to the enemy” (same effect you get from Glyph of Unity). Though as described below, you’d need to buff up the tether effect to make that useful.

Sublime Conversion is fine. Could perhaps stand to last a couple seconds longer, and the water field needs to be noted in the tooltip, but other than that its solid.

~ Glyphs ~

Quite the mixed bag here. A few standouts, a few duds. Overall concept of switching forms when using Celestial Avatar is really cool. I know some people have complained about the limited range, but considering their AoE damage component I’m fine with that aspect. Also, the Glyph trait is really cool, its probably one of the major reasons I’ll use glyphs in the future. Feel like we need a stunbreak on one of the normal glyphs, though. I am wondering, on the aesthetics side of things, why only Glyph of Alignment displays a glyph in the air during the animation. Its something that all Elementalist glyphs do, and I think it adds a unique flavor to the skill type, so why only 1 of the 5 for Druid? Why not all of them? Is there a specific reason, or was it just overlooked, and can it be changed?

Glyph of Rejuvenation – Needs more power. Its pretty weak as it is. Also, it rather desperately needs to heal your pet outright for the same amount as it heals the player, since the base heal from the normal-form glyph is not nearly enough to keep your pet going, it requires you to be in melee range of your pet, plus the AoE limit means that sometimes your pet won’t get healed at all.

Oh, and a random bug… for some reason, Glyph of Rejuvenation blocks part of the effect from Runes of Altruism. With a full set of 6 Runes, I get the 3 Might from the heal but not the Fury. Tested with other heal skills and both bonuses work properly, so definitely seems like just an issue with the Glyph.

Celestial form is probably mostly fine as it is, though it does also need a pet heal built-in, and the pet heal should probably be the default amount and not the reduced heal the player gets.

Glyph of Alignment – The effect is good in theory, but 3 seconds is too low to be really useful. I’d bump it up to at least 5 seconds.

The Celestial form is completely pointless and redundant. Who looked at the Avatar form and said “Gee, ya know what we need? Another basic heal”. Needs a complete overhaul. I’d suggest keeping it debuff-based (since Druid has precious few debuffs), but just swapping what debuffs the enemy gets. Since the normal version gives you Weakness and Cripple, a more defensive / CC set of debuffs, perhaps the Celestial version should give Vulnerability and Poison (or Torment), a more offensive set. Or perhaps you could make it strip a few boons off enemies, if you want to instead go for the action-based opposite (normal applies, celestial removes).

Glyph of Equality – Brilliant. Needs nothing changed.

Celestial form is… alright. Nowhere near as universally awesome as the normal version, but situationally handy. Shouldn’t be our only glyph stunbreak, though.

Glyph of Empowerment – The theory is sound. Burst DPS boost. Its hugely underpowered, though. 10% is negligible as a damage boost, particularly one limited to 5 seconds. When Frost Spirit, meant to be a sustained damage boost, nearly outperforms your burst damage boost, that’s a problem. Should be 20% at the very least, and I’d honestly consider 25% even.

Celestial form seems pretty bad, to me. I know it was mentioned during the livestream that the purpose is to allow other players to heal themselves in case the Druid is out of “heal juice”, but… you’re in Celestial form if you have access to this. Your entire purpose at that point is to heal, and you have a 0-cooldown heal and a 1-second cooldown heal at your disposal. How can you be “out” at that point? Which means its only purpose really is to boost your own healing, but that doesn’t really seem necessary (and you already have Glyph of Unity to do that much more interestingly anyway). I’d do away with the boosted healing aspect and perhaps make it a damage reduction (not Protection, mind you, but just a 15-20% resistance to all direct damage for 5 seconds), which would work perfectly as an opposite effect. However, if the heal boost is kept, it needs to be raised to at least 20% just like the normal form.

Glyph of the Tides – Good radial CC. No real complaints about either version, although the pull distance on the Celestial version could stand to be increased some, since it feels like kind of a weak pull. I know that some people have advocated for reversing the effects (normal = pull, celestial = knockback) and I’d have no problem with that change if it happened, but I don’t really feel as though its required.

Glyph of Unity – Weak. So very, very weak. Its basically a weaker version of Retaliation, but with a target limit, a very strict range limit, and not a buff so it can’t benefit from boon duration (it also can’t be stripped, which I guess is a plus, but considering how easy it is to break anyway… not much of one). The easiest change would be to simply jack up the damage, but even then I’m not sure it’d be up to snuff. Rather, I’d personally go ahead and make the link go both ways (so damage is dealt not only when you take damage from the enemy, but also when you do damage). And apply a condition to enemies upon breaking the chain by moving out of range / activating stealth, perhaps a big burst of vulnerability (10 stacks for 10 seconds) to make breaking the link more of a choice and less of a given.

Celestial version is a lot better. Allies are a lot more likely to stick around for the full effect, and more healing (particularly with how many pulse heals the Druid can pump out) can come in handy. I’d still consider buffing the effect a bit, though.

~ Traits ~

Most of them are good overall. Don’t feel like there’s a whole lot that needs changing, but one or two could use a bit.

Celestial Shadow – I feel like this should happen when you enter Avatar form, rather than when you exit it. Happening on entering would let you use Avatar as an “oh crap” button via stealth, and the super speed would allow you to reposition yourself for maximum healing efficiency more quickly. For example, getting into range to use Rejuvenating Tides. A range increase to 300 or 360 would be nice as well, its a bit small right now I think.

Lingering Light – It should have a second trigger besides healing, so that it gives you a way of putting out a little healing without using a heal / avatar skill (or staff skill), since its a Grandmaster trait and all. Having a bit of healing in situations when you normally would have none is more interesting than just healing more when you’re already healing. Perhaps it could trigger on the use of any finisher. I’d also like to see it trigger a wisp around your pet when you activate your pet’s F2, just for a little more pet play in Druid traits, since there’s not much there right now besides Cultivated Healing. The two would share a cooldown, so no doubling up or anything.

Ancient Seeds – Seems a bit slow to activate, and sometimes doesn’t seem to activate at all. Could use some functionality tweaking.

I actually really like the auto-attack animation. Its not super flashy effects overload death laser, but even in its simplicity I think it looks pretty neat. Personally, anyway.

I wouldn’t mind if it was changed to be slightly wider and yellow instead of blue (as even though there ARE blue suns / stars, yellow is more commonly associated with it), but I don’t think I’d like it as well if it was some huge flashy thing with lots of sparkles and stuff.

I agree that the rate of build for astral force needs to be adjusted and opened up for more use than just “use staff” to build it up at a decent speed. Though I feel that staff builds it too fast, and I think maybe staff 1 should have a limit of one astral force “tick” per target per AA rather than now where it does multiple ticks.

However, I am still fully opposed to Regen being that equalizing factor. While Ranger does have plenty of regen in a variety of places, its just far too passive. Just click a single button and watch the astral force roll in like water. You could throw out a few Shouts and then just spend the next 10 seconds running away, then end up with enough astral force to go into avatar form, rinse and repeat. Of course, a good player won’t do that, but it shouldn’t be possible for anyone to do it.

They just need to make damage boost the astral force regen rate more than it currently does.

octagon.6504:

Would be nice if they released the pets early. I think more people will buy the expansion when they see the new pets running around before release.

Considering the fact that you can’t tame the pets outside of the new areas… I don’t see how that’d even be possible.

Also, that’s what the beta is for.

Alrighty, I’m going to go ahead and start with pets since I think I’ve played around with them enough for some first impressions.

Overall, I want to note right off the bat that the pets don’t seem to play right with some traits. Like, they seem to get no effect at all from the Beastmastery trait which reduces attack cooldown. And they don’t seem to benefit from Wilting Strikes either. I’m betting there are plenty of other traits that don’t work on them either, for whatever reason.

Smokescale – No complaints. Very solid pet, both offensively and defensively. Don’t really understand why its AA has a bleed on it when its one of the pets with very low innate condition damage, but its not like even small extra damage hurts or anything. Maybe its just flavor since the thing has huge fangs and those tusks.

Tiger – Not much to say, since its just another cat variant. Only thing different is its F2, which is fantastic. Perma-AoE Fury and a decent damage burst as well? Yes please! It should be a Leap finisher, though. Right now its not for some reason (actually, lacking finishers of any sort is kind of a problem with all the new pets).

Oh, and the tooltip doesn’t display a cooldown for the F2, so that needs to be added.

Bristleback – Nice to have another ranged option. Base damage on AA is a bit lower than spiders and hovers just around Devourers, but it makes up for it by having awesome special attacks.

That spike barrage is great, though it could stand to be a bit more accurate at max range (seems to shoot off-center and half the projectiles or more miss).

I’m really baffled by the lack of finishers on any of its skills. I mean, both spiders and devourers have Projectile Finishers on their auto-attacks, and they’re shooting liquid. And yet the Bristleback, which is shooting 100% solid spikes, has no projectile finisher at all? Should have a 20% Projectile Finisher on both its autoattack and the spike barrage. Would add flavor and help it utilize that high condition damage a bit better.

I’d also suggest lowering the cooldown on Sharpen Spines to maybe 20 seconds, since that’s its only way to apply conditions at range (outside of the aforementioned finishers it should have). And while you’re doing that, consider the same sort of buff for Spider venoms as well.

On a less balance-related and more aesthetic note… its animations are off on its auto-attack. Watching the animation loop, you can clearly see when the projectile is supposed to be launched (the pet recoils and the spike above its head disappears) but the actual projectile gets shot before the animation reaches that point. Which makes it look really sloppy and awkward. Needs some tweaks.

Wyverns – Hoo boy. Lets start with the good. Its nice to finally have a second option for a pet with cleave, and just the idea of having a pet dragon is awesome.

But my god are they bad in combat. Why are they so SLOW. That auto-attack chain literally takes like 3 seconds. I mean, it says 2 on the tooltip, and even that would be bad enough, but then there’s a solid extra second of after-cast as well. Their DPS is utter garbage because of it. From the little bit of testing I did, I’m pretty sure a freaking Moa can outdamage them, at least on auto-attacking alone. And Tail Lash certainly doesn’t help, its barely faster and gets outdamaged by the auto-attack (at least accounting for the double-hit). Wing Buffet is the only thing that boosts DPS at all, and its too high of a cooldown to matter.

I can’t even imagine how bad they are in PvP. People complain enough about pets that can’t hit anything when talking about normal pets with a >1 second attack speed, you can probably dodge these things by walking.

They need a serious, serious speed increase on their auto-attack string and Tail Lash. Like… double the speed. Hopefully that doesn’t screw up their animations too much, as I do really love their animations, but cool animations are worthless if the pet can’t do anything useful.

I’d also consider putting a Blast finisher on Wind Buffet. More pets with Blast finishers are always nice, and I definitely think it fits thematically.

As for the F2 skills… Fire Wyvern’s breath attack takes an eternity to finish, but since the pet is immune to damage for the duration… I’m OK with it. Certainly not the fastest way to get burning going, but the extra utility makes up for it. I think it could still use a slight speed shave, but nothing drastic. I would suggest cleaning up the fire field’s disappearance a bit, right now it just “poofs” after a while. I’d like to see it gradually diminish and then go out.

Electric Wyvern’s charge needs some serious work. Its terribly weak. Manages to be weaker than the auto-attack (counting the double-hit) unless you grind an enemy against a wall, and the brief CC isn’t worth having no damage attached to it. Also, the lightning field doing absolutely nothing besides being a lightning field feels boring and off. That stormcloud shooting lightning down really does nothing at all? I’d suggest upping the damage of the charge a bit, and also attaching a pulsing damage (and maybe vulnerability) aspect to the lightning field. Or maybe even a pulsing quickness buff. Something.

Oh, and make it a Leap finisher, since its very leap-like in functionality anyway.

On the aesthetic note again, the charge also feels lackluster in that regard. Particularly in terms of sound. The charge itself has no sound effect at all, the lightning field’s sound effect doesn’t start until well after the field is created… there’s just no “oomph” there. I also think it’d be really cool if the charge made the wyvern quickly swoop forward using its wings to fly rather than just hobbling along the ground.

The Electric Wyvern’s charge may be instant, but its also incredibly weak. Pet F2’s are usually heavy-hitting attacks or otherwise “game changing” abilities, but the Electric Wyvern’s is just… lame. Manages to do even less damage than the auto-attack with a brief CC and a useless lightning field at the end (seriously, other than being a lightning field, it serves no purpose whatsoever… no damage, no buffs / debuffs, nothing).

I’d rather have a chance to hit with a very powerful attack (a chance which I can increase with my own CC and such) than be guaranteed a hit that does practically nothing.

Of course, they could (and definitely should) improve the Electric Wyvern’s charge.

Charr are easily my favorite. Its so nice to see a beast race that actually looks like a proper beast race (especially the females) and not just “humans with animal heads / tails”. And the overall look they have is just awesome, brutal and interesting. Yah, there’s tons of armor problems to deal with, but I can deal with those for all the awesome Charr bring to the table.

Second is Sylvari. I’ve always been a fan of plant-beings in general (favorite LotR race? Ents!), and they have ’dat glow on top of it. I love me some glowing.

Asura are 3rd. Nothing that stands out about them too spectacularly, but they’re another non-human race, which I tend to prefer in fantasy games overall. And they do have nice animations. I do really wish they had more skin color options, though.

Humans are 4th. Meh. Utterly meh. I see humans every day.

You may think Norn should be above humans just because they’re at least not human, but I absolutely hate how female Norn are designed. Male Norn are these big hulking gorilla men, and female Norn are… just upscaled humans. Ugh. Thank god whoever designed the Norn didn’t also design the Charr, or we’d have typical anime catgirls as the female version.

Prior to the beta, I actually liked the way the staff was held and thought it made perfect sense. The Druid’s main / basic form of attack is a two-handed staff blast, as opposed to other caster classes who typically shoot their basic attacks out of their free hand, so it makes sense they’d hold the staff with 2 hands when idle as well. Less effort and quicker to be holding the staff 2-handed and simply lower it into position for the blast than to pull it over, grab it with the second hand, and shoot.

However, now that I’ve actually played with it… it doesn’t make sense at all, because the Druid ends up flipping the staff 180 degrees from the neutral stance in order to fire the laser blast. Which is actually less natural than the normal caster idle would be. They’d need to make your character hold the staff in the opposite hand to make it natural as I was imagining it to be.

At least that’s the case on Asura. I know all the races have different animations, so maybe others aren’t quite as backwards.

However, if it is backwards for everyone, then yah. I’d advocate just using the normal casting idle instead.

Editing my post here for a few more bugs. A couple of them are more exclusions / errors than bugs, but I figure they fall into the same realm of “stuff that needs to be tweaked”.

~ New pets don’t benefit from some different pet-related traits, including Wilting Strikes and the cooldown reduction from Pack Alpha. I’d guess those aren’t the only two they’re incompatible with, either, though I didn’t run a comprehensive test.

~ Natural Stride takes a few seconds to “kick in” after equipping it, for some reason. After first slotting the skill, the speed boost only shows up after a few seconds.

~ Tiger’s F2 skill doesn’t display a cooldown on the tooltip, only a cast time

~ Sublime Conversion’s tooltip doesn’t list a water field in its description

~ Glyph of Rejuvenation disables the 2nd bonus from Runes of Altruism. 3 stacks of Might proc correctly, but Fury does not (using the same equipment but other heals gave me Fury correctly)

~ Lunar Impact’s blast finisher is completely non-functional

~ Vine Surge will get blocked by terrain in some instances, including elevation changes. May not be fixable since similar skills have always had the same bug, but I figure I’ll mention it anyway.

~ The Bristleback’s Spike Barrage ability seems to fire at enemies off-center. Which leads to the majority of the attack missing completely at longer ranges. I’ve seen some people say that its just because its a spread ability, but all the spikes seem to fly off to one side, which leads me to believe that’s not the case.

~ The Bristleback’s animation cycle for Spike Shoot doesn’t match the projectile being launched. The projectile is launching at a point well before it “should” based on the animation cycle (you can see the pet recoil and the spike above its head disappear, but by that point the projectile has already been launched).

They’re confusing now because you aren’t familiar with them.

After a while they’ll feel natural just like the original icons. Just give it time.

Alright, so after a few hours of various Scrapper play, here’s my initial thoughts…

~ Hammer ~

Pretty good overall. Lots of utility, lots of mobility, fun overall. Few specific issues I have with it, though…

Auto-attack chain is a little slow. Yah, its a big hefty hammer, but it seems just a touch too slow, mostly on the aftercasts on the chain. Cut the aftercasts a bit and I think it’ll feel much smoother and better overall.

Also on the note of the auto-attack, the first two hits in the chain are dull as dishwater visually. There’s literally no effects on them at all. I don’t expect a ton of effects from the AA chain, but a little lightning trail or something would be nice.

Rocket Jump is wonky as heck when used at close range (and even mid-range sometimes). You jump all over the place, half the time not even at your current target, particularly on the first jump (the second and third seem to target a bit better). Maybe that’s an intentional weakness of the skill, but a lot of the time when I’m in melee range I’ll try to use it for the leap finishers or something and end up leaping right past my enemy (and out of the combo field I’m in), which is irritating.

The block on Shock Shield is… off. Like, it seems to take about a half a second for the block to actually kick in once the animation starts, and then the block persists about as long after the animation is over. Again, maybe intentional, I do actually kind of like the persisting block after the animation, but the lack of block during the initial startup makes it really hard to block on reaction, basically requires you to anticipate the attack in advance and start the skill up beforehand. Which is awkward, and if intended I’d gladly trade the aftercast block in exchange for a prompt start to the block as soon as you start the animation. And if its not intentional, maybe the block timing is just misplaced on the skill data.

~ Function Gyro ~

Meh. Being exclusively a PvE player, I haven’t had much chance to use this. It seems decent at rezzing when the opportunity to use it actually comes up (and rezzing without putting yourself in danger or taking your own DPS out of the equation is certainly handy), but sadly said opportunities are few and far between (at least in normal open world, even the Silverwastes).

~ Utilities ~

I’m probably in the minority here (in fact, I’m almost positive I am), but I like them on the whole. The insta-cast on most of them is a nice change for minion / AI, and they have some decent effects on them. Which isn’t to say almost all of them have some issues I wouldn’t like to see cleared up. The one thing I’d definitely suggest changing on the whole is to throw a stunbreak in there somewhere. Possibly more than one.

Medic Gyro – Healing from this is completely terrible. The self-heal on cast is passable (particularly since its a 0-cast time heal) but after that… yuck. It either needs to heal a heck of a lot more frequently, or heal a lot more. Possibly apply some Regen as well. Right now, its not even good at sustained healing.

Shredder Gyro – My favorite of the bunch. I’ve always thought a ground-targeted, long lasting whirl finisher would be neat, and indeed it is. I do think, given the nature of the skill (that it’s less of an AI and more of a long-lasting AoE finisher) that the recharge should start as soon as you cast it rather than waiting until its dead. Either that or reduce the recharge to 20 seconds, which would basically be the same effect. Alternatively, see below for my suggestion about Final Salvo. Also, it seems to have a bit of trouble actually using finishers in large groups, I assume since its treated as an AI and thus players get “first dibs” on fields or something. But it kind of ruins its entire purpose, so I think it needs some looking into, see if it can be made to ignore the normal field limit or something.

Also for Shredder Gyro… is it supposed to have some sort of animation for its attack? Right now it just kind of floats there, somehow creating this whirl effect around itself. Shouldn’t the robot itself be spinning, or slashing its arms around, something? It just looks kind of inert and awkward right now.

Blast Gyro – Surprisingly decent. I was expecting to find it all but useless, but I actually enjoy it. Great burst damage and a nice AoE. I’d put a Blast finisher on it, though. It would just make sense.

Bulwark Gyro – Awful. The insta-cast means you can pop it out just when you need it, but it dies far, far too quickly in any situation where you actually need a damage reduction. Either cut the damage it takes from the transfer significantly, or increase its health a heck of a lot more. This would probably also be a good spot to throw a stunbreak

Purge Gyro – After thinking it was going to be basically Bow of Truth, I’m pleasantly surprised at how decent it is. The condition cleanse on a 0 cast time in and of itself is fantastic, and the gyro itself seems to do its job relatively well. Cures at a decent enough frequency to keep conditions at bay for a while. I do feel like it should last 5 seconds more before running out of fuel, though. Its duration just feels really short.

Sneak Gyro – Seems fine. Good for those “oh crap” moments when I need to drop agro. Could probably stand to move fast enough to keep up with players, though.

~ Gyro Toolbelts ~

Really good for the most part. Love the fields, love the insta-casts. There’s only one that I feel is kind of “eh”.

Bypass Coating – I mostly just feel like this should have 0 cast time. That’d make it really handy for repositioning and chasing targets. May also be a good spot for a stunbreak.

~ Traits ~

Super solid. Probably one of the best traitlines in the game. My main complaint is that I can’t take all of them, heh. That said, there are a couple I feel could use some tweaking…

Perfectly Balanced – Stability needs a longer duration. I’d gladly take a single stack of stability over 2 stacks if it lasted twice as long (or maybe even 8 seconds), which would give it a lot more chance to actually work. Right now it gets wasted more often than not unless you’re dodging into a multi-hit attack that CC’s. And since the weapon has this great block attached to it, I’d like to see it apply stability on both block and evade.

Stabilization Core – Could stand to apply some other defensive buffs to Function Gyros (Protection and Regen for maybe 5 seconds each) to help it stay alive a bit better, since that seems to be the key purpose of the trait.

Final Salvo – I see a lot of people asking for all gyros to start cooldown after they’re summoned instead of after they die. Since Final Salvo doesn’t have a base cooldown reduction attached to it, I was thinking maybe this trait should enable the cooldowns to start before the Gyros die, while they wouldn’t do so baseline. Would be an interesting way to implement a cooldown reduction besides just a generic one.

So… are we just going to start throwing BWE feedback in this thread, then? I kind of feel like this thread has so many posts and so much theorycraft from prior to the actual beta that it’d be better served to start a new thread for BWE3 feedback.

I would guess the reason Birds don’t have 1000 condition damage is because by default, they don’t all actually have damaging conditions.

Cats have a family skill that applies bleeds, which means every single cat benefits from that high condition damage. For birds, only a select couple actually get damage conditions via their F2.

That seems to be the pattern with condition damage on pets, anyway. All of the ones with 1000 have a shared skill that inflicts a damaging condition.

A good Ranger will have plenty “investment” in keeping their pet alive, as its a chunk of utility / DPS lost if you let it go down. That would be the case even if it was only 20 seconds (or more reasonably, 10-15 seconds, as its not like your second pet is going to instantly die most of the time), it doesn’t need to be a completely ridiculous 60 second penalty.

If we do need a pet revival beyond cutting the cooldown to a flat 20 seconds, I wouldn’t want this theorhetical pet revival to be tied to a heal or utility. If anything, I’d rather the devs simply re-enable the ability to revive your pets as you revive players (but only for the Ranger themselves, to keep a bunch of dead pets from cluttering the screen and keeping others from reviving players). That way you always have access to it, and you don’t need to worry about cooldowns because you can always revive your pet, but there’s opportunity cost for doing so as well.

The post on the main GW2 page about Halloween items in the BLTC flat-out says that more returning stuff AND new stuff will be coming later.

I was all in favor of switching over to standardized boon durations for WHAO’s boon transfer ala Fortifying Bond. Awesome as it was as just a flat transfer, it was also sort of ridiculous how much benefit you could get from it.

But limiting might to 3 stacks is just way overdoing it. 3 stacks of might is nothing. Its a single burst finisher in a fire field, probably with a lot less duration to boot (admittedly I haven’t play with the new version yet personally and can’t seem to find concrete duration numbers, but I imagine its the same as Fortifying Bond or worse). Its a single cast of our new Call of the Wild, again with less duration. Tons of builds and classes in the game can maintain 10, 15, even more might with little effort. But this has to be limited to a paltry 3? Why?

Getting might from our pet via WHAO is the one reasonable way this skill shined, since its one of the big boons that Rangers can’t apply all that much to themselves but can apply in greater numbers to the pet. And now its so limited that it may as well not even exist at all.

I recall seeing plenty of feedback about We Heal as One being lackluster and boring. So I don’t think its fair to say that it was completely unwanted / not listening to Ranger feedback to change it and give it a secondary functionality.

Obviously there’s a lot more stuff to change (which I’m pretty sure Irenio outright stated as being the case) but its not all going to happen overnight.

Also, I haven’t seen too much happiness over the weapon changes from Necros either. Most of what I’ve seen has pointed towards the Scepter changes being a wash (due to the trait nerf that went along with it, as well as a baffling nerf to life force generation when what it needed and necros have been asking for is more LF on Scepter) with the exception of frontloading the damage a bit more, and Axe still lacking on damage and especially utility.

I’ve never cared for the idea of getting boons on glyph use in general. It just seems like something they threw on there as an afterthought without any reasoning behind it. You’ve got a weak self-boon application on a ground-targeted AoE, a couple of summon skills, a crit debuff skill, and a skill which already gives boons. Unfitting on 3/5, redundant on one, and sort of OK on Glyph of Elemental Power.

I was really hoping they’d do away with that idea when they did the trait revamp and put something else on there. Granted, with glyphs being so eclectic, finding something that fits all of them isn’t exactly easy, but I have to think there’s something that works better than random boons.

There has been no official word on the number of skill points needed for elite specs, anything out there right now is just based on datamined info from the game files, which can be spotty or downright incorrect. I’m pretty sure Anet wouldn’t be stupid enough to lock elite specs behind a hero point requirement which is impossible to reach.

And you’re somewhat confused about how hero points were “converted” from the old system. There actually wasn’t a real conversion at all from skill points > hero points, but rather skill points > spirit shards, with hero points being a completely new thing.

Any and all old skill points you had on your old characters were converted to Spirit Shards. Doesn’t matter if said points were from tomes, leveling, whatever. Every single skill point on every single character was converted.

Then they simply gave every character the appropriate number of hero points based on level and how many hero challenges that character had completed.

Every character in the game has access to the exact same amount of hero points. Nothing you did in the past with skill points has any impact, negative or positive, on the number you can get total.

The difference between your characters is most likely due to how many hero points you’ve spent. One character probably has more traits / utilities unlocked than the other.

You don’t have to do LS to access the Silverwastes (or Dry Top, for that matter) at all.

The game won’t introduce you to the area without doing the story, but you’re free to go there with any character at any time.

My original thought was that HoT would wrap up Mordremoth, and then once LS picked up again they’d head in another direction. It seems like a perfect method to me. Use Living Story to introduce us to to a dragon or another large threat, and then an expansion to give us a “big finish” to the storyline once you’ve built it up via normal updates.

But with recent comments by Anet about how HoT would be required for future LS chapters, I’m now doubting that theory. If future LS stuff is going to be taking place in the Jungle, then I dunno if Mordy will be finished in HoT or not. What else could take place in the Jungle besides him?

An actual cloud effect would be nice, though I have a feeling the reason why such an effect doesn’t exist and they instead went with the more subdued “ground fog” version is because it was deemed too obscuring.

Still, something worth looking into sprucing up a bit I think. If not a full-on cloud, perhaps at least a “rolling poison mist” effect sort of like what Engineer’s Healing Turret gets, but slightly more apparent.

The fact that its based on Healing Power is probably the reason it was put on a trait with a secondary function rather than just a trait that boosts one stat based on another (which most of the other “gain X amount of stat based on Y amount of another stat” traits are).

So people can take it for the Quickness, and if they happen to have healing power get some bonus stats as well. If not… well, then you just have to decide if the quickness alone is enough of a reason to take it.

It’ll probably be my main go-to heal from this point on. I’ve been struggling to find my ideal heal ever since they changed Healing Spring to a trap.

I already run a Beastmaster build with a focus on buffing my pet. Using WHAO to give some of those buffs back to myself will be great, even if it uses standardized durations like Fortifying Bond does (which I expect it will).

I do wonder how it’ll behave with my Runes of Altruism. I expect the transfer will happen before the runes kick in, but it’d be nice if the Runes would kick in first and give both myself and my pet boosted durations via the double-transfer.

I don’t believe they can change the chest contents / in-game merchants without a patch. They can change the store without a patch because that’s all done through an outside application which the game just accesses when you call up the store (its the reason why it sometimes takes a while to load or doesn’t load at all), but chest / vendor contents are in the game files.

So judging by the lack of patch, I’m going to say that there’s definitely no Halloween weapons in the chests yet, but perhaps that’s going to be added (or re-added) tomorrow and someone just jumped the gun on the splash image.

Hmm. If we’re talking aura traits specifically, maybe something that could give an offensive application to them, since they already have a lot of defensive applications.

Perhaps something like “Allies with an active aura have a 5% increased damage output” as a sort of AoE trait which gets applied to nearby allies (ala Spotter / Vampiric Aura and the like). Would not only give Tempests themselves more support through auras, but also allow simply having a Tempest around to buff other classes who utilize auras in addition to that.

Not sure if 5% is the right number, just kind of spitballing with that. Would also maybe suggest doubling the effect on the Elementalist themselves, just to give it a little more “oomph” in solo situations.

You don’t want to get hit by the big death attacks, but if Anet has learned anything the bosses won’t just be throwing big, easily avoidable death attacks around 100% of the time. Otherwise people will just avoid the damage through active defense and zerk through the content like its nothing just like dungeons and such.

Particularly if they’re trying to incentivize healing, they’re going to need some sustained damage to wear down people without being easily avoided.

I’m starting to feel like “add a blast finisher to it” is just the default buff idea for Eles. Dunno what to do with it that actually fits? Blast finisher. Blast finishers solve everything!

Playing off the idea of making you more tanky, I’m thinking something along the lines of “Enemies that strike you while under the effects of Protection are inflicted with Weakness”. 3 second duration, 6 second per-target ICD.

I don’t see why they need to become wisps to become immune to damage, and I’d much rather have tree spirits than wisps personally.

Also, as cool as the ideas of spirits playing off celestial form in some way are, they’d be highly out of line with any of the other elite specs in the game (elite specs don’t change core utilities), and set a rather bad precedent of requiring an elite spec for a core utility set to function.

In its current form, Empathic Bond would be terrible in the Beastmastery line, as it promotes sacrificing your pet to conditions in order to save yourself, particularly since pets get basically no condition removal outside of Healing Spring. Which is extremely contrary, since BM is all about keeping your pet alive and using it as a more powerful source of damage and support.

Now, if they changed Empathic Bond to where the pet takes a condition from the Ranger and converts it into a boon or something rather than just becoming laden with conditions themselves, then it might work. But people have been asking for something like that for ages and its never happened.

Honed Axes doesn’t really fit in WS either, I don’t feel. Axe has a single condition on it, sure, but the trait itself is more direct-damage and support based (Ferocity + AoE Winter’s Bite). It actually works pretty well in Beastmastery, since it gives you an AoE chill (sets up foes for pet attacks) and axe in general is a great weapon for pet support if you have Fortified Bond.

I believe the idea is that you pull them in with Tides, then start casing Celestial Skill 5, which will force enemies to scatter or take heavy damage / become immobilized. Or pull them in and then use Celestial 3 to daze them all.

Granted, that is just a two specific combinations, and I do agree that pull would be more useful overall as the normal version rather than the celestial version. Particularly since your other glyphs are offensive in normal form, so you could pull them in and then combo other glyphs on them for burst damage.

It may also be a theme issue, though. We didn’t get to see the celestial versions of the glyphs (sadly), but I have a feeling the graphics may be changing from the normal non-celestial versions, in which case Glyph of the Tides may become a moon based skill, with the moon pulling enemies into its “gravity”. And if that is indeed the case, then the pull version wouldn’t really make sense for the normal version, which is water-based (I guess they could make it a whirlpool or something, but that wouldn’t really be a “tide”).

As for the whole “incorrect use of a push”… pulls can be just as guilty of that problem. I’ve had many a Guardian who pulled a group of enemies out of my AoE using Binding Blades, for instance. So I don’t think there’s much difference there.

MirrorOfNature.4279:

There’s one tip: Next weekend, when BE3 runs, open your spec window and see how many points you will need to fully unlock the new elites. No need of any data mining.

Doesn’t work, elite specs are auto-unlocked during the betas.

I could definitely get behind a secondary effect on Staff to benefit the pet in order to bring it in line with most other weapons.

I mean, healing DOES benefit the pet, rather significantly so in fact. So its not like the weapon exists in a void with no pet benefit whatsoever. But even still, some sort of direct secondary pet effect on one of the staff skills would be appreciated.

I was originally thinking something on Astral Wisp, but on further thinking I’m now leaning towards Vine Surge. It seems a lot of the pet effects are tied to skills that CC foes in some way (either soft or hard CC), which makes sense since it sets the enemy up for an attack from the pet.

As for what effect specifically… Druid seems to avoid boons, so probably not a boon. Since Druid has so many unique mechanics, I kind of feel like it should play off one of those. A simple damage bonus would fit considering Glyph of Empowerment, but Greatsword already does that same thing, so that’d be a bit boring. So I was thinking maybe something like…

“The first enemy hit by your pet Vine Surge becomes tethered to the pet for 5 seconds (ala Glyph of Unity) and takes damage every time your pet is hit”.

Why not just make every skill a 900 radius ground targetable attack. Its apparently what everyone wants, since basically every single new utility that gets added has the exact same complaint.

Have to be in melee range, don’t wanna be, CHANGE IT!!!!!

Anet has been trickling HoT files into the patches for months now, its how the stuff has been datamined.

Most likely they’ll continue to do so (and probably ramp up the amount) in the coming weeks so that there will only be a relatively small amount of new stuff to download on launch day.

I definitely won’t ignore Halloween completely, but I think it’ll be getting a lot less attention from me this year with HoT.

I’d rather have Fragmentation Shot count as an explosion and benefit from those traits than gain baseline piercing again. Piercing always functioned a bit oddly on Frag Shot anyway, and it just makes it too similar to Rifle as well. Having it count as an explosion makes it more interesting and creates more synergy with traits.

But Dart Volley absolutely needs piercing to become decent again. Its bad enough that the spray misses out on targets not at point-blank range, but when said shots can also be blocked by other random enemies in the path of the shot it just becomes laughably ineffective at anything more than “apply some poison to some random thing in a vague area in front of you”.

I’m guessing they chose the hammer-staff animation because the Ranger’s staff AA is a two-handed blast rather than the usual “wave hand around while holding staff in the other” sort of AA that most casting classes have.

Given that the rangers use their staff with two hands for their most common attack, it makes sense that they’d hold the staff in two hands normally.