Guild Wars 2

I don’t really see the problem personally.

It would be a problem if Gem Store items were 100% “real cash” exclusive. But they aren’t, and never have been. You’ve always been able to snag gem store items through in-game gold obtained through normal gameplay if you so choose. Buying the items with real money is just the easier option to get them, but not at all the only way.

If the fact that you can buy gems through gold as a general premise doesn’t tick you off, than neither should this. At least not on the simple idea that they just plain aren’t exclusive any more. Because they never were.

MAYBE the price will be an issue, that they’re much easier to get now than getting the equivellent gold to buy them via gem conversion back when they were in the Gem Store. But that’ll depend on what rewards we’re “supposed” to be getting, so its too early to say at this point.

And even if they do end up being cheaper / easier to get than the old gem conversion, its essentially just a “sale” at that point. No different than putting them back in the Gem Store at 50% off or whatever, except that instead of grinding for gold and then converting gold to gems people can instead play a special event to get them.

Yashuoa.9527:

Sagramor.7395:

And to answer the OP’s question, in HoT there will be one Elite spec per profession (with potentially more to come in the future). You can chose any 3 specializations with ONE being Elite.

Just for clarification.

You can choose 3 specializations and one of them can be Elite.
One of them does not have to be Elite right? They can all 3 be not Elite.

Yes, you can choose 3 “core” specializations and ignore the Elite Spec.

That is the main point of not making the elite specs better, actually. To ensure that taking an elite spec isn’t required to be competitive, and that taking 3 core specs is still a valid option.

I believe their use of “Elite” was meant to point towards the special aspects of the Elite Specs, not the raw power of them.

They’re elite because they’re the only ones that give you special weapons, new utilities, and change your profession mechanics. Not because they’re meant to be superior power-wise.

Anet’s official stance is that they’re SUPPOSED to just be options. Never meant to be a pure upgrade to normal specs, but rather just side-grades. A choice you can make, but shouldn’t feel underpowered if you don’t.

Whether they actually will be balanced properly to the point where that is actually the case, is hard to say. There are a few (Herald, Berserker, to an extent Chronomancer) which many players are considering to be pure upgrades, based on beta stuff. Not the type of upgrade that’s strictly required, but one that’s going to be very hard to give up at the very least.

Ticky.5831:

Ardid.7203:

The name of the pet for a class that is forced to use them, while not mechanicaly broken, IS something huge. And if it is working as intended, as some dare to say, then it is worse, because, while a bug can be understandable, intentionally poor design is simply insulting.

I don’t think it’s poor design, I think it’s a pragmatic compromise to save space.

Think about it; at over 5 million copies sold, assuming half of the player population has a ranger(pet classes are popular), that would be 10 million names that have to be stored somewhere on Anet’s servers. Now imagine that it let you name every individual pet, and all those players named all their pets(there’s 61, including amphibious ones twice); that would be 152.5 million names would have to be saved somewhere.

And yet they do still save where you tamed every single pet. Granted, the amount of data they need to store for that is infinitely less than what you’d need for storing names, since its likely just stored as a single / double digit (depending on how many tame locations there are). But still, if the reasoning behind it is “we don’t want to store anything extra for pets” then why in the heck are they wasting any space storing something so useless as where they pet was tamed?

But… but… I’ve been using my beta chars for joke names that I’d never even consider using on “real” characters.

Like, my Reaper’s name is “Icanhazsoulburger”. And my Revenant is “Iseedeadlegends” (was going to be dead people, but someone already had that :p).

So since you’re asking for this for a selfish reason of wanting to use the name, I’m going to deny it for the selfish reason that I don’t want to use my names.

Sale on name change contracts would be cool, though.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I just threw it all in the bank, since I knew it wouldn’t carry over to Live. Lol.

I wish I had thought of that. I was trying to find any way I could to get rid of stuff without painstakingly deleting it one by one.

My beta bank is probably full too, though… I got an extra 2 tabs from the account bump, but I only bought that during the sales, so it probably wouldn’t have applied to my beta bank.

Condition duration increase for existing conditions on the target would definitely be my choice for buffing Warlock. It’d be unique and effective without taking the skill in a completely different direction (like the 3rd change would do).

1 second seems pretty lacking, though. Granted, you can stack multiple Warlocks for a more substancial increase, but even then, a 3 second increase every 6 seconds seems pretty lacking, especially since if you do that you’re losing your ability to stack the normal Staff illusions to apply more conditions in the first place (and hindering your ability to shatter).

While a Tempest certainly has ample access to auras, they all require you to use certain utilities / traits, plus it requires you to also take the Earth line in order to get Elemental Shielding in the first place. Not to mention that one source of auras (the trait that gives auras on overload completion) doesn’t even serve the same purpose, as that gives you an Aura / Protection AFTER the channel, and not during. So I don’t think Protection during Overload is weak or redundant at all. Its a way to defend yourself during overloads if you choose not to go the aura route.

I do think that it needs to last the entire duration of the channel, however, not just the first few seconds. Obviously making it a long duration Protection proc would leave it open to abuse by people starting their Overload, then cancelling immediately, so it should instead pulse Protection every couple of seconds for the duration.

As for stability on overload… that feels a bit too powerful to give “for free” (since minor traits are just there for everyone who takes Tempest period). I’d tie it to Lucid Singularity instead, that way it at least requires a commitment and sacrifice.

Not even sure why you brought up Rock Solid. Given the duration of the stability that grants, it’s physically impossible to even use it for Overloads, since they can’t even be used until after you sit in an attune for 5 seconds, by which point the stability from jumping into Earth is long gone.

The last beta feedback responses didn’t come until a few days to almost a week after the beta ended, IIRC. It takes a while to sort through all the comments. Compound that with the holiday weekend, and its a bit early to be demanding a response already.

I loved the clone death traits. Was my preferred build prior to getting removed (well, more precisely I used a combination phantasm / clone death build). Made it actually worthwhile to use the many clone abilities Mesmer has at their disposal without having to constantly shatter (thus also removing all my phantasms) or just “waste” them. It was really fun and quite active to utilize so many clone generation traits and skills to create a cascade of conditions. More active than shattering, even, IMO, because you’ve only really got 2 shatters you can “spam” so there’s only so many clones you can clear using shatters, and inevitably you’re going to waste some or have to avoid using certain abilities.

If spamming clones from stealth was the problem, I never really understood why they couldn’t just make the traits break stealth.

There are plenty of people who won’t be using elite specs.

As for me personally…

Chronomancer will probably be permanently-on for my Mesmer. Not only is the alacrity mechanic interesting, but I like to play a phantasm build, and Chronomancer is far and away the best spec for that sort of build. I won’t always be using Wells / Shield, as I’m a player who loves variety far too much to ever commit to one weapon / set of utilities (I use basically everything on basically every profession I play, with a few exceptions) but the traitline is basically going to be on all the time even if I’m not using that stuff. The only exception to that might be in the future when we have multiple elite specs to use, in which case I’ll probably swap the other elite spec on for variety (or maybe even switch to it permanently if its even more phantasm-based).

Reaper will probably be on my Necro 70% of the time. I absolutely love Reaper Shroud, so much fun. That said, I do also like Death Shroud as well, so I don’t want to go all Reaper all the time.

Tempest will probably be on a decent majority of the time. I know I’m an outlier, but I actually really like the Overload mechanic. Mind you, I do still want the overloads themselves improved, but in general I like sticking to one attunement for a bit longer and getting a nice power attack out of it. Might switch it off on occasion when I feel like running 3 core traitlines instead, though. Especially since outside of an aura-share build (which I enjoyed thoroughly during beta, but don’t usually run on my normal Elementalist) the traits aren’t all that impressive.

Dragonhunter… eh. In its current form, it doesn’t really “click” for me. You aren’t rewarded enough for using the new virtues, and the traits are meh (especially since Guardian has a lot of good traitlines), so aside from the weapon / utilities there’s not much to really hold me. And as I said above, I like variety, so its not like I’d ever use traps / longbow exclusively. I made a lengthy post in the Guardian forum suggesting some improvements, and on the off-chance they actually agree with them and implement some of them I’d probably like it a lot more (well obviously, they’re my suggestions). But as it is now, I’ll probably only put it on when I want to use traps / longbow.

Herald I’ll probably be using quite a lot. I find the Legendary Dragon utilities by far the most enjoyable out of the lot of them, and its also the most adaptable Legend of the bunch. So I’ll probably be running Dragon / rotating 2nd legend most of the time. And even if I’m not using Legendary Dragon stance, its going to be tough not to keep Herald active just for the F2 alone (Herald really gives you a whole lot with that F2 without costing anything at all in return, which I don’t really like, but can’t deny its effectiveness).

Don’t have a Warrior or a Thief, so I can’t really comment on them. Though Daredevil seems like a ton of fun.

I guess this is as good a place as any to put my personal feedback about Reaper, since it doesn’t seem like there’s a central thread for it like there is with other professions.

Reaper is still my favorite elite spec so far (though Herald is close). The improvements made from BWE1 were really nice overall and hit a lot of the problem spots. Don’t really have a whole lot of comments for improvement now, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few here and there.

Nightfall – Going to echo others and suggest it become a Reaper-centered AoE that moves with you. Fits the theme of the Reaper chasing you down all the while surrounded by crippling darkness.

Reaper Shroud AA – Could use a touch more life force generation. Nothing too drastic, but maybe an extra 1% spread over the first two hits for example. A bit more damage overall would also come in handy.

Death’s Charge – New functionality where you can drill down a single enemy is nice, however it seems to me that the range or the smoothness of the skill has taken a hit because of it. Seems to occasionally bug out and slow down prematurely, or just not go as far as it should. Like, I’ll be in range of an enemy (according to the range indicators) and yet I’ll just barely make it to them by the time the charge ends, or fall just short. Hoping such issues can be resolved.

Placement of Shout stunbreak – Having our designated shout stunbreak on “You are all weaklings” feels off to me. That feels like a shout I’d like to start combat with, given the weakness (to cut down on opponents’ initial burst) and the might (to improve your own initial burst). But if I use it like that, I leave myself without a stun break until it comes off cooldown. I feel like it would be much better suited for “Suffer”, since that one is already a bit more defensive / reactive in nature, rather than something you want to blow early. Or I suppose they could just add a stunbreak to “Suffer” and keep “You are all weaklings” as a stun break as well. 2 stunbreaks would hardly be super OP or anything. But if it has to be one or the other, then I’d much rather have it on “Suffer”.

Your soul is mine – Still feels like it could use a bit more healing, whether it be from scaling or base heal amount. Its a pretty nice heal against multiple targets, but if you’re already facing multiple targets you probably need more than “pretty nice” and against less than 5 it’s pretty meh.

Suffer – If it doesn’t become a stunbreak as per the above suggestion, I think it needs a little something extra. A single condition transfer and a small amount of chill doesn’t really scream “suffer” to me. Perhaps a few stacks of Torment or something. But if it becomes a stunbreak then its probably fine as-is.

Chilled to the Bone – Cooldown reduction, please. Gods, its way too high for just a stun, as many have already said. Alternatively, give it a secondary effect outside of the stun (perhaps a flat, unremovable damage nerf for 5 seconds) to make it more worth the cooldown.

Augury of Death – Plain cooldown reduction traits are pretty boring and out of place in the new specialization system. I’d like to see a secondary effect added to shouts through this trait. In keeping with the “unstoppable monster” theme, perhaps it could give 1s of Stability to all shouts, ensuring that our shouts are also unstoppable.

Chilling Nova – Its already a chance to occur based on crit AND dependent on the enemy being chilled in the first place. I’d cut the ICD down by half for that reason.

Soul Eater – Does the recharge reduction actually work? Because in my testing it doesn’t, but it seems no one else mentions it, so maybe I just wasn’t seeing it. It seems like it’d be nice if it worked, but I’m just not sure it does. On the other side of the trait, the life drain is pretty low considering how slowly GS actually attacks most of the time. If the spike heal from Nightfall / Death Spiral is too problematic, I’d rather see the trait get an ICD to prevent those spikes while giving a greater heal amount for the slow hits of the rest of the GS attacks.

Shivers of Dread – As many have mentioned, we don’t have enough Fear sources to actually make this count. I don’t think I’d ditch it entirely as some have suggested because I do like the concept, but it needs a secondary effect to make it more worthwhile.

Bhawb.7408:

If anything the scythe is too small. Why can’t we have a 1200 range scythe weapon that melees people with a scythe so large it reaches 1200 range. I want the visuals to be so obnoxiously large that people across the map can see my stupidly massive scythe being swung around.

LOL, I love the visual image conjured up by that suggestion.

All the clipping. All of it.

Alrighty, so I played quite a bit more Tempest during BWE2. My thoughts are as follows…

Fire Overload – Needs more whirl finishers (and the tornado should also do a continuous whirl finisher AFTER the channel as well). Needs longer duration burns. Needs a bit more range.

Water Overload – Pretty decent. Animation is horrid though, the sitting animation itself looks off in general, not to mention your character just kind of “pops” into it when you start and then “pops” out of it afterwards, with no real animation frames in between.

Air Overload – Range increase helped, but it still needs more range IMO. And more damage. And the lightning field really needs to stick around a lot longer after you finish the cast, right now its gone faster than the channel for the cast itself, which is a shame as having an on-demand lightning field on something besides Staff would be great and a unique aspect for the Air overload to have. I’d say 7 seconds at absolute minimum. Gives the Elementalist some time to use the field themselves, even combo it with Fire Overload if you’re quick.

Earth Overload – Blast finisher should be at the start (or perhaps at the start and the end, a double finisher on a skill would be pretty interesting). Protection pulse durations need to be longer so that you can actually build up some protection that will last after the skill is done. Like with Water Overload, the animation needs work. I notice its a bit better in BWE2, since your character actually falls to the ground now after the earth breaks at the end instead of just warping down, but the start of the animation is still as choppy as ever. Need some transition frames at the start.

Cyclone – I like the concept of the skill. Gather enemies into a line, and since all your other Warhorn skills happen in a line, it gathers them nicely for other attacks (and even Overload). But the range is so bad that it doesn’t tend to actually gather anything, since everything that can get hit by the skill is already close enough to be hit by most of your other WH attacks just fine. The radius / cone on the attack needs to be significantly increased so that it actually does what its supposed to. Right now its only use is as an interrupt.

Lightning Orb – Lackluster all around. Its clearly supposed to be a pure damage skill, but the damage it puts out is too low and it gets out of range of enemies far too quickly unless they stupidly run with the orb. I’d suggest slowing the orb down a bit while also increasing the range at which the orb will fire at enemies, which should help it be more reliable and make the skill more powerful overall. I’d also like to see the cooldown reduced significantly so that it becomes a semi-spammable sustain damage source, which could coincide nicely with Tempests’ overall theme of staying in attunements longer. For instance, if it had a 12s cooldown, you could fire it off as soon as you entered Air attune, then by the time you wait for your Overload to come off cooldown and use that, you could use it a second time before attune swapping.

Dust Storm – Good skill once it gets going, but the problem is that it takes forever to do so. Definitely needs to be sped up some on the startup of the dust storms.

Feel the burn – In the vein of Warrior’s torch, I’d like to see it “burn off” a condition.

Eye of the storm – Needs Shocking Aura added. It just feels off without it since all the other utility / elemental shouts give an aura, and given the long cooldown I feel its a justified addition without becoming broken (the skill is a touch “meh” as it is). Plus, it actually gives the skill a nice dual nature, where you’re breaking stun while applying an aura that can in return stun other enemies. Besides, what kind of lame “storm” is this that has no lightning or anything? The Shocking Aura would be the storm in the name “Eye of the Storm”. A slight cooldown reduction could also be handy since its the only stunbreak a Shout Ele has.

Shock and Aftershock – Well, for one thing the name needs to be changed now that the voiceover has been altered. Could also really use a cooldown reduction, its quite long for the modest effect the skill has, but increasing its effectiveness might be a bit much. 40 seconds, perhaps. EDIT: Actually, now that I’ve read some other players’ thoughts, I agree with many that suggest adding a Blast finisher to this skill. Would fit thematically and give Shouts a bit more of a varied utility to them.

Flash Freeze – I’d increase the duration of the Chill to 5 seconds. Its already very similar to Aftershock, but the duration is a lot shorter compared to that one, so at the very least I’d give them similar soft-CC durations. Maybe also add some vulnerability to enemies (3 stacks maybe?), since right now it just seems kind of simplistic and lacking.

Harmonious Conduit – Really lackluster as a standalone trait, but helpful as something you get for free. Ditch the Major trait entirely, fold its effects into Hardy Conduit, make a more interesting trait for that Master slot. Alternatively, add a second effect to this trait besides just a cooldown reduction to make it more worthwhile. Maybe this trait would allow you to swap out of your attunement while Overloading without cancelling it, for instance.

Hardy Conduit – Needs to pulse Protection every 3 seconds of the Overload to the point where you have Protection for the full duration of the overload (I say it needs to pulse instead of just being a longer duration at the start to prevent people from starting the channel and then cancelling for long duration Protection).

Lucid Singularity – In addition to the current effects, should also pulse 1 stack of Stability every 3 seconds for the duration of Overloads. Enough to keep you from getting knocked out of them by stray CC’s, but not enough to prevent a focused assault from interrupting it.

Tempestuous Aria – Cooldown reduction on Shouts, please. Its not as though they already have super-short cooldowns to the point where it would be OP or redundant.

Latent Stamina – Why is this even here? I mean, Elemental Bastion, while it is also somewhat water-reminiscent, at least has to do with Tempest as well since a lot of Tempest skills give Auras. But this? Just, why? What does vigor in Water have to do with Tempest? Nothing, that’s what. Here’s a suggestion. Remove the “on water attune” effect, and instead make it grant vigor when you remain in any element long enough to gain access to an Overload. Makes it more usable overall and now fits Tempest thematically. And getting Vigor before you trigger overload can be handy, since now you have a bit of extra stamina so you can dodge and get into position for your overload.

Earthen Proxy – Seems a touch weak, honestly. Revenant gets double Fury effectiveness, while Tempest only gets a 20% boost to Protection? I mean, granted that double Protection effectiveness would probably be broken, but how about at least 50%? Or, if even that is deemed too much, how about a 20% boost under normal circumstances, but a 50% boost while channeling (which would mean 50% boost while Overloading).

They DO need shorter cooldowns, for sure. Actually being able to use the virtues frequently would really help to make Dragonhunter unique beyond just traps and longbow. I want to actually be able to use my unique new virtue mechanics. But I’m not sure flat reductions is the way to go. I posted an idea for how to shorten the cooldowns in the main BWE2 response thread, if you want to see what my take on it is.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/BWE-2-Dragonhunter-feedback-thread/page/3#post5467517

So after playing a bit more Dragonhunter during BWE2, I’ve finally figured out exactly what doesn’t “click” about the specialization for me.

Its the virtues. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re not BAD, and I love the concept of changing virtues to be more “physical”. That’s actually a really cool idea, and could be a meaningful change to the way you play the profession. But the thing is, none of them (except maybe Courage) are good enough to give up the passive effects, and even if you are willing to give up the virtue passives, the cooldown is so darn long on all of them that its impossible to use them with any sort of frequency. Even running the Virtues traitline leaves all of them with pretty high cooldown (some more than others coughcouragecough). There’s just no way to use them frequently enough for them to make a difference.

So my thought, then, is that there needs to be some way to drastically reduce the cooldowns on the virtue actives to the point where you can actually include them in your rotations to meaningful effect.

And once I started thinking about that, I came up with the following.

Remove the minor trait Defender’s Dogma. I mean, on top of it being lackluster in general, its unfitting for Dragonhunter (not one of DH’s unique attacks other than active Courage even blocks anything, not Longbow nor Traps), and it does the exact opposite of what Dragonhunter should be promoting. DH should be promoting active virtue use, and this promotes leaving it on passive.

So, after you get rid of DD, replace it with a new trait. I’m not even going to attempt to name it because I suck at that sort of thing. But anyway, what that trait would do is reduce the cooldown on all virtues by a certain percentage every second you have an enemy tethered by Spear of Justice. Numbers would have to be worked out and balanced of course, but for the sake of example lets just say 1% per tether, per second. So now, you have a trait that promotes not only the use of the active abilities, but also promotes skillful use of Spear of Justice. You want to tether as many enemies as possible to get that cooldown reduction. Tether 3 of them, and now you get a pretty nice 3% cooldown reduction per second. Enough to actually make a dent in the cooldowns of your virtues.

And ya know, why stop there. Our Grandmaster Minor Trait isn’t exactly stellar either, considering its restricted to a handful of weapons and attacks. So lets ditch that one too, and add another trait that reduces Virtue cooldown for every ally healed with Wings of Resolve. Heck, maybe even make it a dual-trait and have it reduce virtue cooldown for all attacks blocked by Shield of Courage as well. It is a Grandmaster after all.

And voila. Now you’re actually encouraged to use your active virtues, since you aren’t locking yourself out of your passives for insane periods of time for doing so. And by encouraging use, you make Dragonhunter feel more interesting compared to base Guardian. Making it more than just “Dragonhunter gets traps and longbow… and maybe some virtues you probably won’t use anyway…”.

Even with that, though, I might make a few improvements to the virtues themselves as well. Since even if you CAN use them frequently, if they’re lackluster many people won’t. So…

Spear of Justice – Wears off too fast and inflicts to little burn to make it worth giving up a free burn every 5 attacks (much less if you’re traited for the passive effects). Inflicting more burn every second would probably be too much considering it can stack, so I think a duration increase would be the way to go. Honestly, I’d say the duration should actually be doubled, or at the very least increased to 10 seconds. That way it lasts a while and you don’t lose as much burn over time. It would also improve Big Game Hunter, which is also a bit “meh” right now I’d say. It would also give enemies more of a reason to get out of range and break the chain, since right now by the time they get out of range its probably almost worn off anyway, unless its used at max range where they can just walk a few steps back to break it. Oh, and I still think it needs to be a physical projectile finisher. That wouldn’t really be much of a buff, but it would be a nice flavor change, since the whole gimmick of Dragonhunter is PHYSICAL virtues.

Wings of Resolve – Increase the heal radius. Make it a leap finisher. Maybe have it give a couple seconds of Resistance, enough to let you always make the leap successfully regardless of conditions.

Shield of Courage – I think there was some talk by the devs of having it block melee attacks made against the Guardian. Make that change and it should be more than good enough.

OK, so that’s my thoughts on the virtues. That’s honestly the bulk of my problem with the elite, but that isn’t to say there aren’t a few other things. So here’s some other various comments on other aspects…

Symbol of Energy – I really don’t want the burn to be removed. I mean, to some extant, yah, its “out of place” with other symbols. But other symbols are also instant-cast and not launched through an arrow, so its already an oddity. So I say let it keep the burn on impact.

Hunter’s Ward – Cooldown on this skill is way too high. Its got a 50% longer cooldown than the other wards in the Guardian’s kitten nal, AND its arguably harder to actually hit with on top of that, given the long delay. Yah, it does damage, which other wards don’t do, but it still feels like an excessive cooldown hit just for that alone. 45 seconds would feel a lot more appropriate to me.

Procession of Blades – Really needs to be a whirl finisher. Also, with the removal of the “bleed on trap hit” trait (which I personally don’t agree with getting cut, but oh well) it needs a pretty hefty damage bonus to be worthwhile.

Test of Faith – I’d love for the trigger radius on this to be larger, to the point where it matches the radius of the trap itself. That way you get an initial hit on the enemy when they first trigger the trap, rather than just relying on them to cross the line or else the trap does nothing at all. Either that or leave the radius as-is but let the triggering of the trap cause an initial burst of damage.

Dragon’s Maw – It really, really, really needs to hit multiple enemies and not just one. Even the description of the skill says enemieS. Plural.

Purification – Having some condition cleansing would be nice, since its something traps lack entirely. I’d say maybe 1 condition on setting the trap and 2 more on trigger or something, perhaps.

Does Soul Eater’s cooldown reduction even work? I was playing around with it last night and I wasn’t seeing any “jumps” in my other GS skills’ cooldowns even while spamming Gravedigger over and over.

I’m big on the semi-realism aspects in this game. I like using weapons that make sense (like, I won’t use shields with holes in them unless the class using it is using it as a magic tool rather than a normal shield, that sort of thing). While it is fantasy, I do like a bit of “fantasy realism”.

But I have no problem with the scythe. From both the way it looks and the way its just conjured out of thin air on a whim, its most likely made of magic and not solid matter. As such, it being insanely oversized doesn’t hurt my immersion at all, personally. There are so many things that magic has been shown to do in this game that conjuring a 15 foot demonic scythe doesn’t seem out of place at all.

fluidmonolith.3584:

Invictus.1503:

fluidmonolith.3584:

It appears the game limits you to -10 energy/sec upkeep at the most (-5 pips). The interface isn’t designed to show energy drain at a rate faster than this, so perhaps ANet decided to prevent you from having more than -5 pips at once. I don’t know if this was intentional or not.

This, though I’d like to see Impossible Odds have one less pip of energy drain so it can be used with Facet of Nature.

Facet of Nature has -2 pips, so Impossible Odds would need to be brought to -8. Or brought to -9 and Nature brought down to -1. Unless, of course, this limitation is just a bug and not intentional by ANet.

Its most definitely intended. Roy flat-out said that -10 is the limit during the Herald POI.

I’m 99% sure its bugged.

Mainly because it seems the break bar can take multiple hits from hard CC but only one hit from cripple. Like, I’ve been using Shield in the Silverwastes and I can tank an entire charge from a Teragriff like nothing, but the second a Hyena pops that cripple, insta-break. It just doesn’t make any sense. The devs have said different things will subtract a different amount from break bars, but I’d assume soft CC is supposed to be the least, not the most.

If I had to guess, I’d say the reason they don’t have one is probably because of the extremely situational nature of them and way Revenant is set up.

Because utilities are tied to legends and you thus have a set of utilities locked depending on which legend you’re channeling, giving them a rez utility would mean forcing a “wasted slot” on one of the legends except in those exact situations where they’d be useful.

I guess they could work around it by having one of the legends’ abilities do partial “rez healing” (like Toss Elixir R) in addition to its normal functionality (probably Ventari) so that you could still use the skill in other situations, but maybe they didn’t think it was necessary or just overlooked the possibility.

Oh man. I’ve resisted the urge to buy any unlimited-use picks up until this point since I have a fair number of characters that I try to equally split my time between and can’t be bothered to swap my tools around all the time, thus 1000 gems would be a lot to pay for a convenience item I wouldn’t even be able to use all the time.

But half price? That’s real tempting. Especially for that watchwork pick…. sprocketsssssssss. I can find a lot of uses for sprockets, between Zealot’s gear and all the runes / sigils.

Anet may have finally broken me.

So your suggestion is that in order to make it so that EU doesn’t have the beta start and end “when people want to sleep” that instead it should start when the US wants to sleep. Which means you’re basically asking for the Anet staff to work through the night just to get the beta going and monitor it.

Its got to start and end sometime. And no matter what time that may be, someone is going to have an inconvenient start time. Timezones and all of that. Heck, its not even that convenient for the US honestly, as many folks are going to be working or going to school in the middle of the day when it does start. Better, then, to work around the companies’ schedule and not the players’, since the company is one in place with no timezone nonsense to work with.

Nynuwe.5893:

Electro.4173:

I’d be all for cleave on the melee minions, but if that happens then they need to go and do that to ALL pets then. Ranger pets, Elementalist summons, Spirit Weapons, ect. Having just the necro minions do it would be out of place.

The only other class I think should benefit from this suggestion is Ranger. But elementalists already have many other damage sources and so do guardians. Those last two don’t need it. Both necromancer and rangers are not in a good spot, so they do need to have their pets become more efficient.

The classes maybe be in a good spot, but the summons themselves aren’t.

Spirit weapons are almost universally viewed as the worst utilities Guardian’s have by a wide margin. Elementals aren’t viewed quite as harshly, but that’s probably because they aren’t a full utility set (just part of another set) and the fact that pretty much everything that’s not a cantrip or Ice Bow is overlooked by Ele’s. Plus the fact that one of them is an Elite and Ele’s have terrible elites all around, so Glyph of Elementals isn’t “that” bad by comparison.

Heck, if we’re talking about which minions / summons need cleave more, I’d say that Spirit Weapons and Elementals need it MORE than Necro minions. Granted, they need a lot more improvements than just some cleave, but every little bit helps.

I certainly don’t agree with the idea that poor utilities belonging to classes that are already “good” should just be left bad just because the class can already perform fine without them. All utilities should be useful to their respective classes regardless of how good the class is.

Yunielesca.2850:

Electro.4173:

I actually like this one. Sure, its just a mail carrier, which isn’t the most impressive thing ever, but its so cheap. Like, less than 50 cents. Yes please!

My only complaint is that its one of the least impressive mail carriers. You already have a bird mail carrier by default, AND you can buy another 2 different bird mail carriers via the Trading Post for pretty cheap. I would have loved if this was one of the more exciting carriers.

But still. I like cheap stuff!

50 cents for something useless that you don’t even see are still 50 cents wasted.

You see it every time you put something on the TP. Which for me anyway is quite often.

Granted, you have to close down the TP window immediately in order to see it, but still. Its far from “never seen” if you actually care to see it.

I actually like this one. Sure, its just a mail carrier, which isn’t the most impressive thing ever, but its so cheap. Like, less than 50 cents. Yes please!

My only complaint is that its one of the least impressive mail carriers. You already have a bird mail carrier by default, AND you can buy another 2 different bird mail carriers via the Trading Post for pretty cheap. I would have loved if this was one of the more exciting carriers.

But still. I like cheap stuff!

Its all just RNG, not any specific spawn location.

I had the most trouble finding 4/4 as well, oddly enough. The others I got without much trouble at all (and in fact, I’ve gotten probably 10+ of the 2/4 scraps), but it took me a while to find the Shiverpeaks map scrap.

Not that I was specifically grinding for it or anything, I just got them through normal gameplay. But I’ve had the first 3 scraps sitting in my bank for months and just now managed to finally get 4/4 and complete it.

First thing I’ll probably do is create a Revenant and test out Shiro (I actually skipped playing a Rev during the last beta, instead playing Reaper / Tempest / Dragonhunter) and Herald, as well as the general changes that have occurred since the very first pre-order Revenant test, which was the last time I played a Rev.

Then I’ll probably go back and test out the changes on the 3 Elite Specs I played last BWE, as mentioned above. Particularly excited about the Reaper changes, but hopefully all of them are changed for the better (hoping for some “surprise” changes beyond just what they posted in the individual forums already).

After that… I dunno. I still need to try Chronomancer, which I never got around to during the last BWE, but unless they actually give us more beta slots I’m not sure if I actually will or not. Kind of want to keep my 3 current elite specs + Revenant around for future tests.

Definitely won’t be trying Daredevil or Berserker, since Warrior and Theif are the two classes I don’t have in the core game. So I’d have no idea what to do with them and wouldn’t be able to give any sort of quality feedback anyway.

I’ve decided I’m not going to spoil any of the HoT zones for myself, so I’ll be mainly doing my testing on the above stuff in the open world.

I always try to put my character in a spot outside of other people, barring situations in combat where I need to stand in a specific spot to avoid dying or whatever.

Nothing really to do with “etiquette”, I just prefer to see my character unblocked and make them seem more “solid”. If they’re just clipping through other people then it diminishes the illusion of reality. Not that this game is particularly realistic to begin with, but still.

I also do other things for the same reason, like whenever I harvest nodes I try to put my character the right distance away so their tool actually hits the ore / tree. Which isn’t to say I sit there for a minute getting it perfect, but if I actually happen to get it just right I’m like “Aw yah”

I can almost accept Explosive Shot not piercing, since its an AoE on hit, so even without piercing it still has some decent mob capabilities. And it does get a tad boring when every projectile just pierces. Make it an explosion so that it works with those traits, maybe increase the AoE radius a tad, and I’d actually be perfectly happy with it.

But Dart Volley really, really suffers from the lack of piercing. Its hard enough hitting a target at range with it as it is given the spreadshot nature of the attack, but even moreso when random enemies in front of your target can also eat your shots. And its hardly powerful enough to justify that amount of difficulty for using it. Just make it pierce, please.

Going full Celestial for my Revenant. I’m very much a player that likes to use everything a profession has at their disposal (every weapon, and almost every utility, though there are a few I don’t use much if at all), and given the fact that Revenant has so many different things going on, so many vastly different skill functions, Celestial is the only stat build that will allow me to do that without needing multiple gear sets.

I’d be utterly shocked if we didn’t get new stat combinations.

Given the fact that we can’t really directly position the pet, I agree that the radius should be improved dramatically. Boon limit still applies, so its not like you’d be buffing a massive number of players or anything, just that you’d stand a better chance of actually hitting 5 at least.

Projectile defense is boring and makes it too much like other skills. What if Spectral Wall powered up all projectiles fired through it instead? Would give a nice synergy with the functionality the skill already has. Keep enemies away and at the same time make them more susceptible to your ranged attacks. And makes them consider if they want to burn a stability stack to pass through the wall or stay on the other side and take more damage from you and your allies.

I’d be all for cleave on the melee minions, but if that happens then they need to go and do that to ALL pets then. Ranger pets, Elementalist summons, Spirit Weapons, ect. Having just the necro minions do it would be out of place.

It was a pretty garbage trait considering the 10-second ICD and the fact that it proc’d on burn, giving you basically no control over it since Guardians are pretty much always applying burn.

I would have loved to see it get reworked to something more useable instead of just outright cut, though. Reduce the ICD a bit and put it on something you can actually control (maybe Justice’ active effect, or perhaps even something like “After swapping weapons, your next attack strips a boon”) for instance. But oh well. Its gone now and probably won’t be added back in unless they pick up the idea for a later elite spec trait.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Purity_of_Body

There are a ton of neat creatures in GW2 that I’d love to see as pets. Heck, ideally it’d be a situation where nearly every wild creature could be a Ranger pet, but that’s definitely a pipe dream at this point.

That said, my top 5 for new pet families is…

~ Wind Riders. I love the more “fantastical” creatures, and Wind Riders certainly fall in that category, plus they’re just plain awesome. Who doesn’t want to tame floating magical squid monsters. They’d make for a nice new ranged pet with some interesting special abilities (like Reef Riders having a boon steal, though probably not on their auto-attack like the “wild” ones).

~ Skales / Shelk. I don’t even know what these are supposed to be, but they look cool as heck, and there’s already precedent for them being tamed in various parts of the world (I know there’s at least 2 different places in Ascalon where Charr have tamed them). Having a Shelk with a shadowstep ability would be neat, as would a Skale with an AoE vomit attack.

~ Grubs. What can I say, I’m a fan of bugs. Firebreathing caterpillars are pretty neat. Another option for a ranged pet, hopefully a more offensively-based one compared to spiders and devourers.

~ Beetles. Like I said, I love bugs. They could have some really unique abilities, like the spray of liquid that causes vulnerability and the charges. Oh, and also, Anet teased me with that one spot in The Silverwastes near the Mystery Cave where there’s a small side area that has a bunch of small, non-hostile beetles. When I first saw that I was like “OMG tameable!” and then… no. Just playing with my emotions. I demand recompense Anet! Give me my tameable beetles!

~ Griffons. Like everyone else. The quintessential fantasy pet, and ogres get them so why can’t we!

And for underwater pets….

~ Sea Scorpions (especially the Deep Sea variant). These things are so kitten looking. Seriously. I need one just because of how awesome they look.

~ Electric Fish. Also look pretty cool. And clearly something like an electric fish should have some pretty great combat abilities.

First suggestion seems wildly OP to me. I mean, the concept you have of being able to buff frontliners while hanging in the backline is nice, but… if you’re NOT in the backline but rather in the “stack” with everyone else, then Rangers would essentially become beacons of boon multiplication for every AoE buff performed by their allies. Which would be pretty insane.

I love the second suggestion of letting your pets’ boons transfer to you, though. Of course, they’d need to figure out a way to code the trait so that boons originally transferred via Fortifying Bond wouldn’t trigger the opposite effect so that you wouldn’t end up with an endless loop of boons going from Ranger > pet > Ranger > pet stacking infinitely, which I imagine would be the main hurdle to the concept. But if they could get it to work somehow, it’d be amazing. Perhaps even a little too amazing, but it’d be something to try at least.

People still treating datamining as fact… sigh.

Also, we don’t know how many hero points HoT is going to give us. Could easily be a sizeable chunk of that. Just because there aren’t many hero points on the map in the beta doesn’t mean much. Wouldn’t be surprised to get a bunch of free points for unlocking your Elite Spec either, to give you a “head start” on learning part of it. For that matter, I seem to recall Anet at some point saying that hero points would be earned through achievements and such as well, and not just map challenges. Though maybe I’m thinking of masteries.

My current breakdown in terms of armor class / race / gender is…

Charr Medium Male
Charr Medium Female
Charr Light Male
Sylvari Heavy Female
Sylvari Light Male
Asura Light Male

So basically, when thinking about Revenant specifically, I already have a character that uses the heavy armor female visuals. I already have 3 Charr and 2 Sylvari. So the clear gap that I need to fill is Asura. Gives me a 2nd Asura which I’m lacking compared to the other races, and a character that uses the male heavy armor models which I currently have none of.

So Asura for race, and since I already have a male Asura I’ll be going female with my Revenant.

Jasper Defthand.3018:

So basically you’re saying that items of real value got overshadowed and kicked to the curb by… minis… I don’t even care about them being on sale… I would pay full price for the quiver had I known it was in there…

Not kicked out by minis, no. The Rox quiver went on sale… 2 days before the minis I believe? The day right after the Black Lion key sale. It was just some bug or oversight that made them not jump to the top of the promotion page even when they were first put up. Lot of people thought there was no sale that day because of it.

I’m certainly worried and disappointed at only having 1 BWE for Druid / Forge.

I mean, people can say “Well, maybe they’re the most polished so they don’t need as much testing” but I think its been well proven at this point that no amount of polish Anet can put on content will ever equal up to a proper live server test. There will always be bugs, there will always be ideas the devs thought were just amazing that the players are less than impressed by, and so on. Numbers alone ensure that (players outnumber devs exponentially), not to mention differing opinions.

Just the sheer amount of changes some of the current elite specs are getting is impressive. In a good way. But its a process that takes more than one test to iron out. I think every single elite spec that appeared in the first beta weekend has at least a few changes that are situations where its “we’re going to see how this works for the next beta, and if its still not enough we’ll tweak it some more”. Which is fantastic… until you get to professions that only HAVE one beta weekend for testing. Then all the changes are going to be rushed out the door in time for launch, and knowing Anet they never rarely want to “overbuff” so there’s a very real chance that Druid and Forge will be released in a transitory state where there’s still changes waiting to be done and tested.

I certainly understand that they want to draw out the reveals to keep the hype train going, but knowing how close they are to launch I really wish they had rushed the elite spec reveals a bit more (maybe not taken a 3-4 week break after the first batch). With only 2 tests to go, I think every single elite spec should have been shown and ready to test in this upcoming weekend.

Speculation is a FAR different thing than an official announcement.

Anet has said that Druid with Staff is going to be the Ranger elite spec. Flat out. Not a tentative “it might be” or “we’re considering it” but flat out “Ranger gets Druid elite spec”.

Anet themselves are typically very careful about announcing stuff until its set in stone (its one of the main reasons they’re tight-lipped about info about upcoming content), so if they say Druid is the Ranger elite spec, then it is. Ranger was probably one of the few elite specs they had worked out to the point where they were completely certain of what weapon it was getting, which is why they used Druid as the announcement spec in the first place.

In theory, COULD it have changed? Possibly. But that would probably require a major announcement by Anet to let people know about the change. Which hasn’t happened.

Plus, Ranger = Druid was literally just mentioned a few days ago during the PAX livestream, if I’m not mistaken. Or during last week’s POI. One of the two. I definitely remember Colin saying that Ranger’s will be able to become Druids in HoT in one of those recent videos.

For some reason the Quiver (and the other items that went on sale that day, which was Rox’ Shortbow, Braham’s stuff, and the Unicorn Finisher) didn’t get put at the top of the “promotions” page like new stuff usually does.

They were definitely there in the Gem Store, but you had to look towards the bottom of the promotion page or just check the normal style / finisher categories to find them.

I would never take off just to play a game.

But I’m always off on Fridays (and Thursdays) anyway, so…

This suggestion has been brought up a few times in the past, and I’m always opposed to it.

Legendaries aren’t supposed to be better than the other “best in slot” items in the game. They’re just supposed to a fancy skin and a guarantee that those will always be best-in-slot no matter what else in the game changes.

The change to allow them to swap stats already gave them a distinct advantage over ascended gear, BUT I feel that change was at least justified since legendaries are such a massive time and gold sink and if you were stuck with only 1 stat combination it would be a huge disadvantage to commiting to a legendary. So give it a distinct advantage in order to prevent legendaries from having a large disadvantage, that’s fine.

Rune / Sigil swapping, on the other hand… that would just be a pure bonus. You can already swap sigils and runes on legendaries, the same way you can on any other piece of gear. Buy a new sigil / rune, slot it in and replace the old one. There’s no problem that needs to be “fixed” by allowing swappable upgrades, it would just be something to make legendaries outright better than other gear. Which isn’t the intention of legendaries in GW2.

I was fully expecting no teaser / elite spec reveal this week, since whatever they revealed wouldn’t be usable in the beta anyway, leading to a lot of disappointment. Plus, the POI this week will probably be focusing, at least in part, on the beta itself, like last time. And elite specs take a long time to go through fully, so it wouldn’t leave any time for that.

Two things.

One, you don’t know how much they are yet. Datamined costs aren’t official, and even if that is the amount currently, there’s no saying it couldn’t be changed before launch.

Two, HoT itself will probably have a have a hefty amount of hero points available since elite specs are part of the expansion specifically. I doubt the devs want to provide everyone with these brand new elite specs as part of the expansion and then say “OK, now ignore all the HoT maps and go back and grind old maps for Hero Points so you can actually use those elite specs”.