Guild Wars 2

The files for the Revenant are in every players’ game regardless of whether they buy the expansion or not, so no, its definitely not a case of being forced to buy or anything like that. Just a bug.

I think its probably more “other races have stuff about them with regards to Revenant that isn’t done” (thinking mostly of the voicework) than specifically limiting you to humans because you aren’t supposed to be testing appearance.

They’ve specifically stated that its a Revenant test, so I’d assume it means exactly that. Revenant only, no elite specs.

I’m sure there will be an elite spec test in the future, but that probably wouldn’t happen until all the elite specs have been revealed, as otherwise it would spoil the surprise of the unrevealed specs. Unless they just included the ones shown already, but that would be a bit odd I think.

OMG yes. I hate the fact that Elementalist (and most other staff using professions besides Guardian) basically just hold the staff unused in one hand while doing all their spellcasting in the other. Like, why am I even carrying around this stupid stick if I’m not even using it for anything? Heck, if I’m not going to use the staff it’d be better to ditch it altogether so I could cast with two hands.

Scepter is guilty of this as well sadly. Though at least its basically just Ele that has the problem with scepter, other classes do use it like an actual weapon at least.

TheFantasticGman.9451:

Electro.4173:

Inb4 a million suggestions of “I want a spec that lets us get rid of our pet”.

Inaccurate, as the pitiful Ranger would still have the pet

Future Elite Spec without the pet might make me main a PVE Ranger Spec again… But, that’s at least two years away from happening (judging by how long they’ve been working on HoT).

Its a million years away from happening unless Anet changes their stance on what elite specs can do.

They’ve specifically said that they want elite specs to work WITH existing traitlines. Getting rid of the pet would make a dozen traits completely useless including most of the Beastmastery line, not to mention the effects of various weapon skills which utilize the pet as well.

Doesn’t mean people aren’t going to ask for it constantly anyway, though.

RevanCorana.8942:

Guards have 1200 range on throw torch by the way

Guardians throw a magical fireball, not the actual torch itself.

I don’t really mind the character animations. What bothers me more is the skill effects.

Sword and GS have some Ranger-esque skill animations like Swoop, Maul, Viper’s Strike, Hornet Sting, ect. Those are interesting and give the class flavor. You look at those and its clear its a Ranger skill. Even the underwater weapons have that flavor to them, which proves that its something that can be done with ranged weapons as well as melee.

Then you look at both Long and Shortbow (and Axe / Torch / Dagger for that matter), and its just… bland shooting stuff. No unique effects, basically nothing at all that says “This is a Ranger skill” over “This is a generic bow skill that anyone could have”.

I’d love to seem them give the skills a visual revamp to make them more Rangery and
less bland. Barrage could look like a shower of falling leaves or a swarm of insects. Spread Volley could conjure up a Devourer “spirit” to launch the poison shots. Hunter’s Shot could make a spirit Shelk appear as you go into stealth. Crippling Talon should look like some sort of bird. Heck, maybe even put a little campfire graphic in the middle of Bonfire ala Healing Spring. So many possibilities to make the Ranger really look completely unique, instead of having a few unique weapons and then some that are generic as can be.

But an animation revamp AND an effects revamp would be even better, I suppose. As long as they took their time and did it right, rather than the aforementioned seeming “rushjob” changes to Bomb Kit / Necro Axe.

Inb4 a million suggestions of “I want a spec that lets us get rid of our pet”.

I’d like to see more magic-based weaponry for Ranger personally. Rangers already hit on that aspect to a degree with spirits, and I’d like to see it expanded further as they already have plenty of martial weapons. I mean, Druid / staff is probably going to fill that niche to a certain degree, but honestly, I want even more than that. Give me a Scepter that has decent single-target ranged DPS (since our only ranged 1H weapon right now isn’t great for DPS unless you get multiple enemies) and a bit of support mixed in. For utilities, I actually envision a new kind of utility skill which would place a debuff on a chosen enemy, and any allies who hit that enemy receive a bonus, whether that be in the form of buffs on the allies or other more interesting effects.

In terms of possible changes to profession mechanics, perhaps one that replaces our pets current F2 attack with some kind of support aura or something would be interesting. Or perhaps something that removes your second pet, but in turn makes your pet swap button into a second special ability for your single pet (and said special ability would work with swap traits, so they wouldn’t render them useless).

Bugged or “intended to not work because it would be OP”, its a problem either way honestly.

If its bugged, well obviously its a problem that needs to be fixed.

If its working as intended because having it apply to Duellist would be too good, then… why the heck did you design the trait that way in the first place? Surely you could have come up with something more reasonable that would have at least affected both Pistol attacks without being OP?

Given just how many traits are based entirely around symbols, I do indeed wonder why the devs don’t have an “Every Guardian weapon set must have a symbol” rule like they do with Mesmer and Phantasms. Maybe its just different main developers working on the professions or something, and I suppose on some level you could argue that phantasms are a little more important to Mesmers than symbols are to Guardians given that phantasms are tied to their profession mechanic, but still… So many traits that are just outright completely unfunctional when using 2 of our 3 mainhand weapons seems off to me.

And as someone who plays a hybrid symbol build, it makes me feel like I’m pigeonholed into specific weapons. Even some of the weapons that have symbols don’t utilize them nearly as well as others. Hammer is obviously godly for symbols, and Mace is really good, then Staff and GS not so much… but at least they HAVE symbols. And as someone who also loves variety, that makes me sad.

Sure, most builds are always going to have weapons that are better than others to use. But most aren’t quite as bad as a symbol build, where slotting a Sword or Scepter instantly turns off a chunk of your traits.

I agree with Heimskarl. I’m 100% fine with them trying to aim for a tad of realism / thematic sense and not letting us throw daggers and axes further than we can shoot a bow. And yes, that does seem to be the way that Anet is moving lately as well, with them reducing the range of stuff like grenades.

And that would still apply even if Shortbow was 1200 range, honestly. Shooting a bow should be a longer range than throwing a weapon, so if SB was 1200 then I still think the others should be 900 to match being shorter range.

The radius of Bonfire, Whirling Defense, and Call of the Wild, as well as the lunge distance of Stalker’s Strike? Those should definitely have been made baseline. Without a doubt. The range increase was a huge reason to take Offhand Training when considering any and all of those skills, and since apparently traits changing range = bad now, they need to be rolled into the core functionality.

And Hunter’s Call should be 1200 range baseline since its actually NOT a thrown weapon and does actually make sense to have longer range (heck, I’d actually like to see it become a debuff to where you only have a range limit when you first cast it, and after that no matter what range you move to it always hits, since that would make sense). And that would help the skill and Warhorn in general differentiate itself from other OH weapons a bit.

My assumption is that HoT will be a self-contained story that will end with Modremoth’s defeat and wrap up that part of the story, and then when the normal Living Story episodes pick up they’ll be going in a different direction entirely. Different zones, different storyline other than Mordremoth. Going after a different dragon, dealing with another crisis, whatever the case may be.

In that way, Anet would avoid excluding people who don’t buy the expansion from future free content.

I mean, obviously the people who don’t buy the expac won’t be able to encounter Mordremoth and will essentially put themselves into a permanent cliffhanger state from the end of LS season 2. They’ll never get to experience the conclusion of what Season 2 set up for. But at least they’d still get the normal bi-weekly LS updates once those resume.

That IS just a guess, mind you. But I don’t really see Anet locking all future content behind HoT.

They just got done with a massive infodump at E3 as well as a big patch, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they take a couple weeks off now honestly.

People can join your instances and experience the story that way without purchasing it themselves, yes.

However, I believe that all achievements are gated behind actually owning them. So it’ll be purely for the experience, they won’t be getting the rewards.

Anet has said that they want all currently unobtaintable skins like this that became unavailable due to the wardrobe / PvP changes to become obtainable again in the future.

But who knows when that’ll actually happen.

I think there’s a pretty good chance of it becoming a skin at some point. Anet loves using assets from other parts of the game for skins.

In order to account for the new condition system and be zerg-friendly it had to be swapped to intensity stacking, or else it’d remain just as useless in huge zergs as it was before.

Only one player would ever be able to have their burn in effect, and players with low / no condition damage would be able to mess up the burning DPS for condition players. Which is exactly the problem that they were trying to solve with the new condition changes.

I mean, I guess they could have changed it so that each individual player could have 1 stack of burning active at any given time, but I don’t know if the game is setup to allow anything like that, and it would probably be harder to program than just letting burns stack like other conditions.

So, the new Ascended stat swap recipe. Does that work for stat combinations which require you to unlock the individual recipe for each item via recipe sheet, most notably Keeper’s, which can run hundreds of gold per recipe in some cases?

Because that would be a great way to circumvent at least part of the absolutely insane cost associated with that stat combo. And that would make me happy, as I’m one of the few who actually wants to run that stat combo it would seem.

The devs have said that the $50 price tag IS the price of HoT. Just HoT alone.

They’re just throwing in the base game in as a free bonus to make it easier for new players to come in, rather than requiring them to buy the base game and the expansion separate.

Now, whether you agree with that or not is up to you, and I’m sure a lot of people don’t. But considering that is Anet’s official stance on the matter, the chance of them changing it is pretty slim.

Basaltface.2786:

They are pretty “normal” and “rustical” and that is a good thing for a change. Polished, clean, very detailed, made clearly with a lot of love and reasonable in size on every skin, also sharp looking blades and they got that “yea i can fit to anything if i want to” vibe. Thats from my perspective a clear 10\10, i specially dig the hammer and the dagger and sword and the smart idea for a focus… an incense burner? Yes please, here are my tickets.

Might be a bit off topic but if a designer is reading that… maybe you could note somewhere down to make a flail skin for a mace sometime in the future in the way the incense burner is, actually just make the ball solid and slap some spikes on it and done, would be something id personally love to have arround.

There actually is a flail mace skin, its just a pretty rare one. Look up the Super Mace.

I’ve never been able to figure out how people can manage to hit over 2k condition raw condition damage (I’m assuming “base” means no food / utilities?). My Engie is pretty much 100% condition damage based on every piece of gear I have and I’ve only got 1400. Clearly I’m missing something huge. I’m sure the fact that I can’t be bothered to get ascended armor and weapons is part of it (though I do have the trinkets, thanks LS season 2), but there has to be more to it than that.

Fluffball.8307:

We only saw a single staff skill, we don’t really know anything about it. Presumably if it is a shapeshifter, you wouldn’t be shooting lightning bolts out of your wolf eyes or something. Think D2 druid shapeshifters that often used staves for melee weapons.

That said, I have 0 confidence this is a melee staff shapeshifter.

Staff and shapeshifting could easily be unrelated to one another. Shifting itself could be tied to either the profession mechanic or the new utilities, which would leave staff and shifting separate and allow staff to fill a more traditional ranged role.

And yes, we’ve only seen one skill, BUT that one skill is clearly magical in nature, rather than martial. If the weapon was going to be another martial based melee weapon, giving our first glimpse of it as a magical ranged attack would be rather odd.

Not to say it most definitely couldn’t be melee, just saying that I don’t really see much evidence to support that conclusion.

I can maybe see the shapeshifting angle based on the image if it is indeed Druid related, since there’s conspicuously human character present in the image, so it could stand to reason the character is one of the animals.

But how does that image in any way imply that Staff would be another melee weapon? Especially when we’ve seen it using a ranged attack in the trailer?

Thematically, Warhorn fits Tempest wonderfully if Tempest ends up being what it sounds like it might based on the name (and even the datamined image). Which is a spec based around storms and wild destruction. I can definitely picture a stormcaller type skillset using Warhorn. It could very well end up being a situation like the devs described with Mesmer, where they originally were considering one type of weapon but felt that another one fit the theme better and switched it (hence the datamined sword skills, which were extremely simplistic anyway and thus probably not that far along).

Heck, that type of moveset is perhaps the only one I could ever see becoming a mainhand warhorn. Who knows. We’ve already potentially got two melee staffs (if the Thief one turns out true) and a ranged hammer on the way, so the devs certainly seem to be on somewhat of a role-breaking kick. Maybe tossing an offhand into a mainhand role could be one of those role breaks as well.

Even if it is just an offhand, as far as the idea of an offhand not adding anything to the profession… that would depend entirely on the skills. Of course sword gives you more skills total, and I’m sure for the most part every single profession is always going to want a mainhand / 2H over an offhand for that reason alone. But it could still be interesting and worthwhile, plus there’s the whole “professions that get an offhand will get other cool stuff to compensate” idea to consider.

Fay.2357:

I’m willing to bet that all attacks proccing Fencer’s finesse just if you’re wielding a sword is probably a bug.

That was my first thought as well, but upon further consideration I’d actually guess its intended. Since without that functionality it would be basically useless with offhand sword. None of the OH sword’s attacks are fast enough nor hit enough times to proc more than a couple of stacks of Finesse at a time (barring multiple enemies getting hit by the daze bolt I suppose).

And it seems like the trait is basically meant to build and maintain 10 stacks most of the time, given the short stack duration and relatively modest boost you receive per stack.

Sounds like you have your trap set as your auto-attack.

Ctrl+Right Click on another skill and set that skill as your auto-attack instead. Usually you want it to be your first weapon skill (skill #1).

That would be glorious, but I’d also like it to come with some sort of selection option so that you could turn on / off certain minis from the rotation.

I have a number of minis that I have only because they were given to me for free from LS events that I don’t really care to ever use.

I’m undecided as of yet.

On one hand, getting $50 worth of gems for half price is nice, assuming you agree with Anet’s pricing of the Deluxe pack. And I do occasionally buy gems for real cash, so said discount is nice.

BUT, I buy a lot less gems than I used to. At one point I was buying a $25 gem card every couple of months, but since Anet’s shift to outfits over armor sets, of which I have little interest in, not to mention the fact that I’ve mostly got my bank and character bag slots upgraded to a level where I don’t really forsee needing much more on that front, $25 lasts me a lot longer. I think the last time I bought a gem card was about 3 months ago, and I still have half the gems left.

Still, I don’t forsee quitting GW2 any time soon, so even if I use them much slower I would probably use them eventually. So yah, still considering getting that gem discount.

The other issue is that the Deluxe / Ultimate edition content is rather… lackluster for me specifically. I don’t do PvP / WvW, so the finisher is basically useless. Likewise, I don’t have a guild, so the guild hall decoration is also useless. I like minis in general, but that specific mini is pretty meh IMO. I tend to gravitate more towards creatures, vehicles, and other such things than characters, so I probably wouldn’t get much use out of Revenant Rytlock. The glider skin is alright I guess, but nothing I’m overly impressed with. The only thing I actually really want out of the Deluxe edition would be the character slot, and even that I’m not in dire need of having right this exact moment. I already have 2 open character slots, and although I was planning on using those for a Warrior and a Thief at some point to round out my characters (having one of each profession), I’m in no great hurry there so I could easily use one for Revenant and grab another the next time they go on sale.

Yah, I brought that up a few days ago when the condi changes were first detailed.

I’m hoping (probably in vain) that pets are going to get some innate condition damage and they just forgot to mention it. 300 condition damage just isn’t going to cut it if 700 is supposed to be the baseline for current effectiveness. They should be able to hit that 700 mark at the very least, if not go a bit beyond that with expertise training.

The favor comes from the entire map, its not just you personally. The more events that are completed over the entire instance of the zone, the more the Favor of the Zephyrites goes up.

You need to find a good map with a decent number of people doing events to have the Favor reach tier 4. Tier 4 isn’t THAT difficult (T6 is the max and requires heavy coordination) but you can’t be in a completely empty map or anything.

Also, favor only goes up during the first 40 minutes of the hour (the time before the sandstorm).

You could also attempt to use LFG tool and request to be taxi’d into a tier4+ map.

In a way that would be true, I suppose. But it would also mean that your LF generation on that particular weapon would be 100% based around having conditions in the first place, which means it would only work sometimes. I’d rather have it be more reliable.

They better be taking a long, hard look at pet stats with regards to condition damage now that they’re going with this new condition system.

Pets cap out at 300 condition damage right now, and that’s WITH traits.

If the new system is going to treat 700 as the “baseline” that the current conditions hit, then pet conditions are going to be completely useless unless they give them a serious boost in their condition damage, both baseline and traits.

Is this datamined or something?

Anyway, I expect Resistance to be transferable once its actually added to the game, but I’m assuming that’s not going to happen until HoT itself because I don’t believe Resistance is going to exist until then anyway (where I believe quickness is becoming a buff in the next patch?).

As for Stability… yah, I really don’t know why they’ve never made that passable. But the fact that they haven’t yet means they probably have a reason for it, and that it may never become passable at all.

I still find it funny that Vigor can be passed, when it has absolutely no effect on non-players.

I would love for OH dagger to have some kind of LF generation. The other OH weapons have it, and quite frankly some of the MH weapons have such bad LF generation on their own (coughscepter) that they really need a weapon with a secondary source for an OH, which ends up making OH dagger a less appealing choice.

Like how all Mesmer OH have phantasms, I think LF generation should be something that all Necro OH weapons have.

I’d probably put it on skill #5 personally, though. #4 is already pretty good I feel, and putting it on the #5 skill would make OH Dagger more unique, where putting it on #4 basically makes it the same as Focus. Since its a DoT based skill, perhaps they could do something like a custom debuff that gives you life force every second from every enemy you hit (similar to how Guardian GS has the unique DoT debuff on their #5 skill).

Yamsandjams.3267:

It’s a bit funny also that rocket boots cures movement impairing conditions but is no longer affected by movement impairing conditions.

I suppose it handles the uncommon situation where you get chilled or whatnot just after using the rocket boots, but that’s about the only benefit it gained from this.

Getting rid of them still seems perfectly good to me. It means that after you use Rocket Boots you can move at normal speed, rather than going 900m and then being slowed to a crawl from an existing movement impair.

I agree that its easily the worst map for daily completion. There aren’t any larger event chains / meta events, a few of them that are chains get bugged, and for some reason the scaling in this particular zone seems horrid compared to basically any other zone, with enemies dying far too fast to downlevels and the events don’t spawn nearly enough enemies (if you go to most other zones and have a 20-person zerg, you get huge groups of enemies spawning, but Snowden Drifts seems to spawn much less).

That said, I don’t really want to see it removed either. It serves its purpose of getting people to visit the zone, and I think that needs to stay, it just needs to be less frequent. All they really need to do is make it a bit less common (mainly by adding more maps to the daily event completion rotation, thereby reducing the chance of any single map being chosen), fix the events that are broken, and boost the scaling numbers.

Do the daily, and it goes away (until the next day of course).

If you put another achievement on your watch list, it’ll display that instead. Not really a perfect fix since you still have something there, but you can shrink it down that way at least.

I used it to good effect during the Marionette event during the lane defense. Large, long lasting chill / cripple fields to slow down all the enemies came in handy.

Useful during Vinewrath for pretty much the same reasons, although arrow carts do it better. The extra healing can be handy for the carriers at least, though.

I’m pretty sure they’ll never give the group an official name (as in, like, a guild title), because they’re trying to make it seem like YOUR group. So they’d want each player to have their own name for it, rather than trying to give it a single cannon name.

Same reason they never give the players’ warband a name for Charr players.

Personally, I wouldn’t really expect Canach’s Backpack to show up until he has some sort of important story role. Which probably means after HoT launches, unless they release some sort of lead-in patch before HoT itself that features him.

I may be mistaken, but I don’t think Canach has ever actually WORN the backpack, at least not yet. It’d be kind of weird for them to include an item related to a specific character before that character even used the item themselves.

The point of the “tiers” is that every time you complete a higher tier of the event, you get better rewards (from the event itself, NOT from chests… completing the T3 event gives you a bonus rare and some sand I believe) as well as a higher level of the damage buff VS modrem enemies.

All races move the same speed, some just look like they’re moving slower due to larger size and accordingly slower animations.

And that encounter is completely doable without a speed boost as well. I’m guessing your problem is that the fire ring keeps going out during the 2nd ring phase, in which case your solution is to get the divine fire buff and kill the shadow that spawns. Once the shadow reaches the fire it puts it out, kill it before that and the fire will stay lit (only one spawns per section of the fire ring). You kill the shadows in 1 shot once you have the fire buff on you.

I highly doubt Tempest (or any elite spec in the future) will give a 5th attunement. The sheer number of skills that an extra attunement grants would be huge development time sinks as well as being far out of line with anything other classes get. Reaper, for example, gets 15 additional skills while losing out on the 5 original Death Shroud skills, sum total of 10. An extra attune for Ele would be 23 new skills bare minimum (assuming an off-hand weapon and counting new utilities) not to mention new effects for stuff like Glyphs.

I suppose it’d still be possible to get an F5 skill in general, but it would probably function as a separate skill and not an attunement (perhaps something like Warrior F skills but based on current attunement). That would be a bit odd, perhaps, with F1-4 being attunes and F5 being something completely different, but that’s the only way I see an F5 happening.

I’m pretty sure they will be slowly trickling in the data into the updates leading up to HoT, just like you suggested. Heck, they’ve already started doing that to a limited degree. But they have to be somewhat sparse with doing so, because there are people who can look into the game data and release that information to the public. Its one thing for a few rough skills to come to light (which is what has happened up ‘till now) but something entirely different if the entire expansion were to be spoiled. So while they will be adding some stuff, they likely won’t be doing the entire expansion that way, there will be a chunk download at release.

Having a boxed version and adding data into updates aren’t mutually exclusive things.

Personally, I’d expect that this week will be another off week for specializations, as I expect the focus is going to be on the beta.

Perhaps I’m biased because I can’t be bothered to go through the trouble to get a legendary, but I’d much rather they release legendaries in limited number while releasing higher numbers of normal skins than overload the game with a ton of skins that are all insanely difficulty / grindy to acquire. Being that the endgame is all largely about customizing your appearance, they need to expand that for everyone, not just those who can put in the grind for a legendary.

Legendaries are never going to be the way to go if you want a “unique” skin anyway. Even if there were 10 legendaries per weapon type, there would still be a much higher number of people aiming for those 10 skins than the dozens of normal skins in the game.

This game has one of the worst targeting systems in any recent game I’ve played, I think.

Its just so hard to target what I want to target. I can’t target a boss in the middle of a group of players because I instead end up targeting every player, pet, mini pet, and whatever else is in the group instead of the boss itself. Half the time when I’m trying to click-target an enemy, even if my cursor is right on top of them, I’ll click and end up targeting nothing. Tab targeting is more reliable in that at least you’ll target SOMETHING, but half the time its something behind you or off camera or whatever instead of what you actually want.

There are some creatures and enemies that will ignore pets more than others. Risen are the biggest offenders I find, Risen will ignore pets 90% of the time no matter what kind of pet they are (even buffed up Ranger pets) and go after players instead. Others that tend to go after players and not pets, off the top of my head, include bears, destroyers, and a lot of the Mordrem enemies.

I believe the event is just based on a timer like most events in the game.

Regardless, I agree. I found it rather annoying to be locked out of story completion while waiting for some random event to pop up so I could actually get to the area and access the next story part, particularly since you have to go back there multiple times. It doesn’t take THAT long, but at the same time its just plain unnecessary to have to wait at all.

I don’t even think a waypoint would fix the problem, since you’d still end up waiting the first time. I think the better idea would be to simply leave it open at all times. Leave the shortcut tunnels tied to the event, but that particular tunnel leading to the Far Silverwastes should be open all the time.

Its fine for the time being. There isn’t a single class in the game without a handful of weapons they could add and fit the theme of said class.

In the future, yah, they may need to use specs to add brand new weapons to some professions.