Absolutely agree with this. Stealth changes are bad.
We don’t need to know the absolute inner workings of the game, we don’t need to know “code changes” or whatever as the above poster joked about. But actual changes that effect the gameplay for players need to be noted.
As an example, the patch on Monday fixed the Ranger traits Opening Strike and the other 3 traits based on it so that they work correctly. And yet those changes were not mentioned in the patch notes at all. That kind of info being excluded is bad.
That already happens in some places as it is. Certain outposts will get taken over and the waypoints will remain contested / merchants disabled until someone goes there and clears the place out. Or friendly NPCs will take over an enemy outpost and as long as players defend it now and then it’ll remain a friendly outpost (happens a lot with Seraph and Centaurs).
I don’t think that should happen with major hub cities though. It would suck to be trying to do your story mission only to find out “oh bugger the city has been taken over so you can’t do anything until a bunch of people get together and kill a hundred enemies”. Or to be sitting there trying to craft items and suddenly the city is being assaulted and you get swarmed and killed. Cities should be safe zones, IMO.
And Lion’s Arch would NEVER get taken over. There are way too many people there for that to ever happen.
I assume the reason they made emotes hide weapons is because they didn’t want to bother with making the emotes “play nice” with weapons (EG no weapon clipping through the back or something). Particularly with more energetic ones like certain races’ Laugh or most Dance emotes.
Which I agree with. I’d rather have the weapons disappear than have my staff jutting out of the middle of my back. Neither is perfect, but of the two I’d prefer just removing them.
They could adapt the weapon positions to the animations so they’d work properly, but I’d rather have them put that effort into something which would have more effect. Like making hair not disappear when wearing a helmet.
I think a larger reason guild chat is usually empty is because most guilds require / prefer to use voice chat programs (and for good reason considering the action-based system of GW2 doesn’t really allow much time to stop and type).
But yes, a notification system would be nice.
The only one that seems too minimal to me is Air. The lightning effect is a bit faint, and it could do with some wind effects as well as lightning (like a brighter streak of lightning inside a ring of wind). Or maybe even a thundercloud looking effect with lightning flashing through occassionally.
Other than that, I still notice them and they look really nice. Though I can’t say I’ve ever noticed the effect on other players, don’t know if its only visible to the Elementalist themself or whether I just never see it on others.
Making them a bit bigger and more noticable wouldn’t be bad, but I wouldn’t want it to look like the video clip you linked. The fire in that clip doesn’t look controlled, it looks like your arms are just on fire. The ring effect they use in GW2 makes it seem like you’re really in control of the element, so much that you can just make it circle around your arm in a controlled ring. In the clip its more like your power is backfiring and burning your arms up or something. IMO, anyway.
I always use natures vengeance over spiritual knowledge, punishing noobs who kill my spirits is always good!! And it boosts the radius if their buff radius…
It boosts buff radius? I thought it only boosted the radius of their activated AoE attacks.
All of them except Frost Spirit have internal cooldowns, far as I’m aware.
Though even the Frost Spirit now lists a 10-second “effect cooldown” in its tooltip. I don’t know when that was added to the tooltip or whether its a mislisting (that Frost Spirit doesn’t actually have a cooldown but lists one anyway), or whether it was changed so that Frost has the cooldown as well.
As for which of those two traits is better… personally, I find the active AoE effects of spirits to be terribly weak and contarary to what the spirits are supposed to do (I want them for buffs, not to attempt to throw them into enemies for a debuff). So for me, I’d say Spiritual Knowledge is definately the better one. But its a lot of personal preference I think, whether you want better proc rates on the boons or whether you want to try to use the spirits to debuff and punish (melee) enemies that kill them.
Does the T2 light armor glow for males? I know it does for females, but I don’t know about males.
I’ll probably use T2 light as my main cultural armor for my male Mesmer, once I get to the level (and get the gold) to acquire it. The wings are nifty and sufficiently “flashy” for a Mesmer trying to distract enemies as much as possible. Right now I’m only level 38 and using the T1 cultural though.
Sylvari do have a pretty big role in the story, though its not like what race the characters are really makes that much of a difference.
On the other hand, all the events seem to be related more to the Humans and Asura. The events take place mostly in human areas, but the “main” NPCs have been mostly Asura (the researcher running the Halloween Scavenger Hunt, the researcher “warning” about the Karka attack and running that scavenger hunt, and Tixx for the upcoming event).
The Grove is the Sylvari city. The way to get there is at the far south of the Caledon Forest (the 1-15 area), at the Village of Astorea area / waypoint.
Though there are crafting tables in Caledon Forest itself, in an area called Mabon Market.
Ele Scepter is one of the only weapons in the game I actually dislike. I hate that its a ranged weapon yet has almost no utilities to keep enemies away from you or get yourself away from enemies (if you take Focus you get a bad chill and a knockdown, take Dagger and you get one blowback). I hate that half the attacks will miss any moving enemy at range (and miss even in melee unless you’re facetanking stationary or move around specifically to keep enemies in the area). I hate that the Fire and Air auto-attacks get screwed up by dodging. I dislike the lack of combo fields compared to Staff.
Its a ranged weapon that basically needs to be played as a melee weapon (due to attacks missing except at close range and lack of ability to keep enemies away in the first place, in addition to the fact that you can only benefit from the few combos you do have at melee range). Not really a fan of that type of thing at all, I want to use my ranged weapons as ranged weapons, not stand there and facetank hits so that my attacks might actually connect. Especially on a weapon with slow attack speed.
I keep trying to force myself to use it simply for the fact that I like to use every weapon for variety (especially on a profession with only 3 choices to begin with) but it really doesn’t do it for me at all.
None of this is to say the Scepter is a “bad” weapon. It just really doesn’t fit for me.
I use other conjures, but not Earth Shield. Earth Shield is quite lackluster IMO.
The windup time on the pull, for example… its so long that you’d probably have a hard time interrupting anything other than a revive with it, especially if you have to summon the shield and then cast the pull.
How do you even get those Shoulderpads? I didn’t join until the Lost Shores thing, so…
They were available randomly from Black Lion Chests / Mad King Chests during the Halloween event. Of course, that event being long over, they’re unavailable through that method now.
You can buy them from the Trading Post though. Just search “Deathly” on the TP and you’ll get a list of all of the available shoulder items. Look for the ones called “Shoulderpads” as those are the ones which apply to medium armor (Mantle is light and Pauldron is heavy). There are 3 different styles, the normal Deathly Shoulders are a typical skull, the Avian is a bird skull, and the Bull is cow skull with horns.
Luckily there’s a fairly good amount of them floating around and they don’t seem very popular (I think I’ve seen like 1 other person other than myself using any of them) so the price isn’t too ridiculous. As I’m writing this post, the Bull and Avian Shoulderpads are both under 40s. The normal Deathly Shoulderpads are a fair bit more (at 1g 50s) but still not that insane considering they’re technically unattainable now. Though they are just skins, they have no stats and aren’t wearable on their own, and you just double click them to “apply” the appearence to another item (like a free transmutation).
I went ahead and grabbed the item codes for these things if you want to preview them in-game. Just paste the code into the chat box, hit enter, and then right click the blue [] in the chat and hit preview.
Deathly Shoulderpad – [&AgH6jQAA]
Deathly Avian Shoulderpad – [&AgH/jQAA]
Deathly Bull Shoulderpad – [&AgECjgAA]
Maybe a bonus for performance could be added to lessen the grind to an extent, but what you’re suggesting (an amazing player being able to get tokens for a full suit in one run of all paths) would be ridiculous. Thats cutting it down far too much. It still needs to take time.
And I’m leery about how this would effect people running dungeons anyway. There’s already a lot of “LFG, level 80’s only”, but with something like this you’re going to have people doing “LFG, amazing players who never die only” or so on. Or people so dead-set on getting the “Never die” achievement for bonus tokens that they’ll actually avoid getting into battles and hurt the rest of the group in the process.
Its a clipping thing. Easier to remove the hair model completely when wearing a helmet than to have to go in and individually edit each hairstyle in combination with each helmet in order to display the hair along with the helm.
While it would certainly be nice to have helmets and hair combined, the amount of work it would take (considering the dozens of hairstyles and helmets in the game, almost all of which can combine with one another) means it probably won’t happen.
Yeah, some profession specific weapons would probably look nice, though I would prefer more bug fixes / less new content… Because looking at the professions bug compilation makes me sad.
Agreed but take into consideration that Wintersday is about on us and you know they are going to add weapon skins like in Halloween
There’s definately going to be skins, no doubt. The question is whether those skins will be ice / winter related, or holiday related.
Are we going to see ice weapons like this, or are we going to see swords shaped like christmas trees and candy cane staffs?
Being able to swap weapons in combat would give you a ton of weapon skills to use. You’d never have to worry about weapon cooldowns, just swap to a new weapon and blow all your specials then on to the next weapon.
Giving 2 seconds of immunity to all damage (other than DoT’s) to every ally in front of you every 6 seconds would be broken as heck, I think. I appreciate the thought behind the skill, the idea of using a unique aspect of Mesmers to buff other players, but Distortion is just too powerful for that sort of thing. While its more boring, it’d probably be better to stick with a “random boon applied to allies” sort of mechanic ala Chaos Storm. And probably kick the cooldown up to 8 seconds.
You could make the skill a little more unique by having the daggers thrown into the air and then fall down in a spread pattern and burst on impact, with each creating a small AoE (would be ground targetted). It wouldn’t be random, would have a set pattern of 5 blasts in a ) shape and the ground targetting would reflect that shape like how something like Fire Wall shows you the area the wall is going to cover. Though that would make the buff aspect less useful as allies would need to be at the point of impact rather than just the general flight path and it wouldn’t allow close-range stacking on enemies. But if you’re looking for a less “Ranger Splitblade made purple” while still working a multi-dagger angle it would work. Could bump it up to 2-3 stacks of confusion to make up for the lack close range stacking
Having a clone that applies cripple using a basic ranged attack also seems like it could be a tad too powerful. Get a couple of those out and you’ve got a self-sustaining perma-cripple. Maybe just have the dagger stab itself apply a cripple rather than the clones.
Other than that, looks like a pretty fun and interesting moveset.
I have to disagree with this. There are relatively few pieces of gear that are “locked” from you, and while its not a bad thing that you can get most any gear you want, I do think there should be some limited items. Order gear is one of the few and I think it should remain that way.
The game makes it relatively clear that what order you join is permanent, so flip-flopping just to buy another orders’ armor would be silly. And the orders selling their “uniforms” to people not in the order wouldn’t make much sense either.
In any topic mentioning traits I feel the need to request a change to Windborne Daggers. Even aside from the fact that it plain doesn’t work ATM, its a redundant trait with all the passive movement speed buffs we already get and the Swiftness that Elementalists have access to. Staff users get bigger AoE which is great, Scepter users get more endurance which is… well, not nearly as impressive as Blasting Staff, but useful at least. More dodging is good, especially for a ranged weapon. Daggers, the weapon which already has plenty of gap closing ability, get a bit of movement speed. Oh boy.
My personal preference would be to change it so that it provides an attack speed increase (nothing ridiculous, maybe a 15% attack speed boost) which would still fit with the whole “daggers are fast” theme the trait already has while being useful and providing a benefit Elementalist has no access to otherwise. But honestly just about anything would be better than movement speed IMO.
From a pure “wish list” perspective, the top of my list would be either a Griffon or a Worm (pref. a ranged one EG Plains Worm). Though really, I don’t think I’d complain about any new pet family getting added.
However, more realistically I wouldn’t really expect any pet that doesn’t match a family we already have for a montly event like this, and since we aren’t getting a new area or anything probably not even a new model. So based on that, an Alpine Stalker would be nice. Fits the winter theme and would have a relatively distinct appearence from our other cats (we don’t have any tigers).
Of course, I don’t really expect a new pet at all for Wintersday, honestly.
I’ve been looking for a good look for my Ranger, and I think I’ve found it, but I need help on 1 part.
Cultural 3 Helm
Cultural 3 Armor
Cultural 1 Leggings
Cultural 2 Gloves
Cultural 2 BootsIt’s looking good, but I can’t figure out what to use as the shoulderpads. I’ve looked at the 3 cultural versions, and I find that #1 meshes with the entire look, #2 seems to mess with the color scheme, and #3 is just too bulky. Anybody have any ideas on what to use for the shoulderpads?
I’m going to use the Deathly Avian Shoulderpads for my T3 set because yah, the normal T3 shoulders a tad too bulky for my taste. Might consider looking at any of the 3 Halloween shoulder sets, they all have the skull / bone theme that fits well enough with Ranger in general and the T3 armor. There’s a slight bit of clipping between the Avian Shoulders and the T3 gloves, but since you aren’t using those that shouldn’t be an issue.
Of course, until they add a preview option to the TP actually getting a look at them beyond screenshots could be tricky, unless you figure out the whole “paste item codes into the chat box” method.
Its a very cool idea. I remember back when I played Star Wars Galaxies you could have your droid harvest bone / hide / meat for you from dead animals. Was pretty cool.
Its a shame botters have to ruin everything.
I don’t run any Marskmanship traits, but this is a very nice fix certainly.
But why the heck is this not mentioned in the patch notes? Fixing an entire 3 minor traits (and apparently one major trait as well) is hardly something that should go unmentioned.
Its not that Juggernaut has a “cap” to it or anything, its just that the might duration doesn’t last long enough for you to go beyond 6-7 stacks (or a little more if you have Might / Boon duration in heavy quantities). Since Might stacks effectiveness and not duration, your 1st stack of Might is disappearing around the time your 7th stack kicks in, and from that point every time you get a new stack another stack is dropping, so you can never get past that point.
Happens with Charr too. Floats off the back when sheathed and off the arm when readied. Seems like they didn’t quite get the shield positioning right on the non-human races.
Thanks for that. I don’t get why when anything is sheathed, they look super tiny. But as soon as you unsheathe, they look a bit bigger
This actually happens on every race, not just Asura. I noticed the other day that my staff is smaller on my back than in my hand while playing my Sylvari Mesmer. If I watch closely during the sheath animation, it shrinks a bit the moment it diseappears from the hand and slots onto the back.
Haven’t noticed it on 1H weapons (except shields), only stuff that goes on the back.
Don’t know if its an intentional feature to reduce the chance of weapons clipping with the ground, or whether its a bug / oversight (maybe the back models are simply a bit smaller than the held models or something).
As a charr, this is indeed a real problem in a game where aesthetics is so import.
Sadly, I don’t see any dev or moderator actually bothering to read this.My biggest issue is with my tail. Most of them just feels weird. Therefore, I’m forced to used AC heavy armor for my leggings. It actually seems to hace a hole for my tail and it swings accordinly.
Helmet is just a nightmare. There are no good helmets.
Most cultrual armour was designed for being worn on Charr, and therefore accounts for the tail. The only Charr cultural armour that looks like it was designed for a human and then stretched to fit a Charr is the T3 light armour… which is an incredibly big shame that the T3 of all tiers doesn’t account for Charr physiology for light armour.
Note: I am unfamiliar with Charr medium cultural armour, so perhaps there are some bad armours not made for the Charr model in there as well.
As for helmets… yeah they are all terrible. I’ve already posted an example of an awesome Charr helmet earlier in this thread. Sadly it appears that awesome Charr helms only exist in the world of concept art.
I previewed the medium armor the other day, it all seems Charr-fitting, and IMO all looks quite nice as well (minus maybe the hoodie on the T2, don’t much care for that). I grabbed the T1 armor for my Engineer and I am without a doubt getting the T3 on my Ranger once I get a crapton of money. The T3 medium armor is one of my favorite armors in the game TBH, and I especially like it because it actually looks like armor and not just clothing like much of the medium armor.
Just don’t mix and match the T3 medium with anything else. The T1 and T2 armors have their “tail pieces” on the chest piece (which is actually nice because it means you can pretty much ignore the leggings altogether and save money, the chest piece covers 80% of the pants anyway). The T3 tail piece is attached to the leggings though, so if you were to mix the two ( a T1 chest and T3 leggings) you’d probably get a double-tail covering and it would probably look crappy in general.
Though, the T3 also has the “skirt part” on the leggings where most medium armor has it on the chest piece, so for all the people who hate the longcoat / skirt look of medium armor, you could mix the T3 chestpiece with a normal set of pants and end up skirt-free. You wouldn’t get the tail slot / covering though.
Cleansing Flame cooldown seems fine. Its not THAT high, and as mentioned with traits its actually very good. Its not all that impressive without traits, but… making it better untraited would make it too good with the proper traits, so the lesser of two evils is to have it a bit underpowered untraited.
Now Armor of Earth, that I think could use a signifigant cooldown reduction. Even traited I don’t feel its good enough to warrant the cooldown it has right now.
The boon limit of 5 players on most buff skills I can see. Mulitple players throwing around group boons to a 20-player group could get really crazy really fast.
I really don’t understand the 5-enemy limit on damaging AoE skills, though. This is just about the only game I’ve ever played that arbitrarily limits the number of enemies you can hit, and I really don’t see why that limit needs to be there. If you can physically hit 6+ enemies at once, why disallow that? Its not as though the AoE’s in this game are so large that you can regularly hit 10 enemies at once so that AoE’s will just always be insanely powerful and need to be limited, the situations where that can happen are uncommon and almost entirely limited to DE’s where large groups of enemies pour in from a single point.
Unless its simply to try and make it easier for people without large AoEs to hit enemies before they just get nuked by a bunch of AoE damage from other players. Which I can kind of see, but at the same time it seems a big limit on AoEs and there has to be a better way to handle that issue.
I actually like the large amount of recoil the Charr rifle animations have. Makes them feel more powerful, even a strong Charr can’t hold them completely still, thats some great power. Could be toned down a little perhaps, though.
My main problem with Charr rifle animations is that the rifle itself doesn’t fit into the hands properly. The hand holding the trigger is fine, it sits in the proper place on the gun model. But the hand holding the barrel of the gun is off. Its obvious from the posture and way the hand is positioned that its supposed to be supporting the gun barrel (which makes sense), but the gun is not placed at the proper angle, so the gun is floating off to the side of the hand. So what you end up with is the hand holding thin air and the rifle unsupported to the side. At least thats how it is with my Charr Engineer, its possible that maybe it only happens with female Charr or that its related to body type and not an issue with all Charr.
As for the Pistol… I agree that the way the pistol is held for Dart Volley is odd. Kind of fits the fact that Dart Volley just shoots off in random directions though, impossible to aim when holding it down there like that. A change would be welcome, though.
I’d say respawn rates need to be looked at across the board, but I definately agree that for events specifically, enemies should not respawn. At all. If you have to kill 9 enemies, those 9 enemies should be it. You kill one, its dead forever until the event is completed and restarted.
Some non-ascended quivers would be nice though.
Ranger Staff would be fine in general due to the whole druid angle, but it wouldn’t make sense with regards to traps. Ranger traps are actual physical traps, not magical in nature. A magic weapon launching physical traps would not really gel.
A trap-based Ranger weapon would have to be something that launches physical objects. A crossbow or something, perhaps.
Is there actual testing to support this, or is it just assumption?
I was under the impression that spirits were exempt from the buff limit.
I don’t see why people are saying torch is an “offensive” weapon. It’s 5 skill is useful only for healing allies, it does less damage than even the mace AA chain. Number 4 is meh I guess, but there are better ways of applying burn.
Torch needs a buff. If number 5 gets buffed so that it actually does good damage, then I would probably use it because I’m an offense kitten. But until then, torch is really only viable for rangers.
Cleansing Flame’s pure damage output isn’t great against a single target. But its got a nice cone AoE that makes it easy to hit multiple enemies (more enemies hit means more total damage dealt, thats when the damage output starts to perform better), and its very effective to use while retreating / straffing.
I’m curious about what the “better ways to apply burn” that people keep mentioning in this topic are. Passive Virtue of Justice gives you a 1-second burn every few hits, probably 2 seconds of burning from the faster multi-hit attacks Guardian’s have. Active Justice gives you a 5-second burn on a single enemy (unless you trait heavily into the Justice line for the AoE burn on Justice). Zealot’s Flame gives you a 9-second burn (6 seconds on activation and another 3 seconds when the flame ends) on up to 3 enemies. Seems to me Zealot’s Flame is the best burn we’ve got, at least unless you’re running with a group so that Justice active can stack burns from multiple players. But maybe I’m missing something.
The reason the F2 abilities are slow to come out sometimes is because commanding your pets F2 doesn’t force it to immedietly use that action, it just adds it to the end of the que of what the pet is already doing.
Someone posted a useful trick to get them to work more reliably in another thread that I’ll go ahead and mention here as well. Use F3 first to call your pet back (which clears the pets’ action que) and then immedietly use F2.
At least half of the events (probably more than that honestly) are soloable.
I don’t see how events have anything to do with your levelling. Events are not required for levelling. You can level just fine from heart quests, exploration, killing random mobs, and your personal story. Events might net you a little extra experience (I’ve honestly never paid attention to how much experience they’re generally worth compared to other things) but its hardly the only source of experience in the game.
The only way I can really see events hurting your levelling is if you stop playing and
spam map chat for 20 minutes every time you see a Group Event hoping to find a group to do the event. Just ignore it and move on, rather than wasting your levelling time hoping to find enough to do an event.
Yes! Agree with this 100%. Its silly that pickup from the TP is all-or-nothing. The TP already displays every item and money seperate, so why can’t we just click on an individual item and say “Pick Up” rather than just taking everything?
Sometimes I want to buy a few items from the TP on one character but leave the profit from my sold items in there to pick up with another character or something. Or I’ll buy an item with one character while travelling so I never get to pick it up, then the next day I’m playing a different character and oops, the other characters’ gear is still in the TP and I need to pick up an item I just bought, so now I have my other characters’ gear on this character.
Sure, you can always go to the bank, deposit the gold / items with one character, switch characters, go back to the bank and withdraw them with the other character. But why the need for so much workaround when it would be so much easier (and make more sense, what do the TP merchants do, shove everything you buy in a box and refuse to give you your items unless you take everything?) to just allow you to pick up individual items / money from the TP?
^^ I believe that anything referring to allies includes yourself as well. That’s why AH works even if you are alone.
Personally, I have found the self-burning from #4 to be an interesting aspect of the torch I haven’t explored yet. It actually makes something useful happen with Radiance 10 through Inner Burning.
Most skills that refer to allies do effect you as well. But Cleansing Flame in particular does not. Its purely for healing other players.
I don’t really see the complaint about Sylvari being too humanlike. There are certainly faces that look more human, but there are also faces that look distinctly “alien”. The skin texture definately doesn’t look human, and skin color has so much variety that it definately doesn’t resemble humans at all. The hairstyles are almost completely plant-based, some may resemble human hairstyles but its obviously foliage and not hair.
The body shape is human certainly, but I don’t know what people were expecting for that. Were people expecting something like Ents, literal walking trees with hunched postures and different body proportions?
IMO, if you want your Sylvari to look distinctly plant-like there’s plenty of room for that. I don’t see how a dark green Sylvari with a bark face and branch hair could possibly be mistaken for a human. You can also make your Sylvari look more humanlike as well, but I’d assume the people complaining about that would obviously not do that. I see no reason to force one or the other, accomidate both and let people decide for themselves.
As for the TC and wanting Sylvari to be shorter… sounds more like you’re thinking of wood nymphs or something than dryads. Most of the dryads I can recall are human size or even larger, not smaller. Still, nothing wrong with wanting them to be shorter, just your own opinion on the matter. Personally I’m fine with the size they are, though I wouldn’t have been upset had they been a bit smaller for variety’s sake, since the gap between Asura and Human / Sylvari is pretty big, so something in between wouldn’t be bad.
I would absolutely make all of the Tier 2 major traits apply to all pets, not only certain families. I appreciate the idea of trying to make families different, but specific traits that apply only to certain pets is not a good way to go about that. It just limits you and makes you use only certain pets if you ever want to use any of those traits. On traits that are already mostly situational, restricting pet choice on top of that is awful. I want more pet variety, not less.
I agree with most of your other points, except for a couple.
One that I disagree with is Remorseless. Its situational, but with Opening Strikes working its a very good skill in those situations where it does work. And there are other traits like it in the game (Guardian has one that renews Virtue of Justice). However, I do think its subpar for a grandmaster major trait, so how about making it the grandmaster minor trait (considering the one you proposed is pretty meh) and adding a new major trait?
The other I disagree with is the general idea of putting trap traits in Wilderness Survival. I really don’t think that traits and stats need to match up in that way. Just because traps do condition damage doesn’t mean they need to be in a tree with condition-related stats. Maybe if the trap traits were weak then it would be nessicary to have the extra condition boost, but the trap traits are quite good and nicely arranged in a single trait tree (unlike something like pet traits or even something like Guardian spirit weapon traits which are spread all over the place) so I think its good as-is without needing to move them around for condition damage as well.
And lastly, Eagle Eye. Now the auto-attack, that certainly needs to be fixed, I agree 100% on that. But I don’t feel the damage boost needs to be raised. 1500 range is already a nice boost and 5% damage is alright considering that, I think. Longbow does need a buff I think, but I’d much rather have Longbow damage get increased in general (so that everyone benefits) than have the trait bonus raised.
I do have a few more trait-related comments of my own.
Honed Axes. Why do axes get a situational 10% damage boost, when most damage-boosting weapon traits usually get a flat 10% damage boost (or a 5% boost and other bonuses)? Seems a bit lackluster. I’d say make it a 15% crit damage boost to make up for the situational nature, or the usual flat 10% damage boost, either way.
Primal Reflexes. Even putting aside that its a rather lackluster skill outclassed by the other sources of Vigor or general endurance regen speed (Vigorous Renewal / Natural Vigor) Ranger’s have access to already, it really seems pretty bad. Requires you to be taking hard hits and doesn’t really do anything to help you survive those or give you any immediate benefit. I would say either have it regenerate a certain portion of Endurance instantly (maybe up to 50% so that it gives you an immediate dodge if you’re down below 50% already) or have it proc something more useful, like perhaps Stability since Rangers otherwise have little access to it.
Oakheart Salve. I assume the point of this trait is as a counter-DoT without actually removing the condition, but because Regeneration tends to be weaker than these DoT effects I think most of them are probably doing more damage than is being Regenerated, and 5 seconds of Regen on a 20 second timer is low for a 2nd-level trait. I’d say to kick up the Regen time to 10 seconds.
Strength of Spirit. I’d say make it a10% instead of 5%, since thats what Nature’s Wrath is. 5% isn’t much as a standalone trait.
I’m loving Mace / Torch a lot, personally. Mace has enough defense as it is that you don’t really need more defense (though I do switch to Focus for situations where I know I’m going to need even more) and Torch, specifically Zealot’s Flame, gives you an extremely nice damage boost, especially when you wade into the center of a group. Mace isn’t all that good at triggering Justice, so Flame is very useful for burning in that regard.
Zealot’s Flame is really, really good for this weapon combation IMO. High AoE damage (and honestly even high single-target damage) on a short cooldown? Very nice. But perhaps the best thing about it is the zero cast time, which works particularly nice with Mace because you can use it in the middle of any of your other skills (all of which are somewhat slow) without interrupting them. Being able to lay down a damaging AoE without interrupting my basic attack chain and losing the final power hit / heal? Being able to block and at the same time burn everything around? Aw yah.
Cleasing Flame is… good. Its not amazing like Zealot’s Flame, but it can be handy for times when you get in over your head a little (even with Mace’s defense it happens), so you can still damage a group while backing up / circling while waiting for your regen to tic. And you can use it while approaching ranged enemies or just while approaching an enemy in general to start damaging them sooner than you’d normally be able to with Mace (I never use Zealot’s Fire for damaging a far-off enemy unless its the end of an encounter vs a retreating foe, I always want to enter battle with Flame ready to go).
I like Sword / Torch too, though its a tad on the squishy side and doesn’t quite synergize as well (IMO). Teleporting into a group while triggering Zealot’s Fire is very nice, and Cleansing Flame probably gets a bit more mileage as an “attack while retreating” measure because sword gets overwhelmed easier. Sword procs Justice burns more readily than Mace, but its still a 6-second burn from Zealot’s Flame vs a 1-second burn from Justice, so I think its still useful.
Overall I really like Torch. I think its probably my favorite offhand weapon for Guardian (though Focus is right up there as well). The only real complaint I have about it is that Cleansing Flame doesn’t cleanse you, only allies. Kind of a bummer, but then again Guardian has a decent repetoire of cleanse skills / traits as it is, so its not the end of the world or anything.
The level scaling in the game is off. While theorhetically the game does downscale you to the dungeon’s appropriate level (which should, in theory, make every player equal as long as you aren’t below the level requirement), the damage you do isn’t reduced as much as you’d expect, so level 80 players downscaled to level 30 will do more damage than actual level 30 players. The difference is relatively noticable as well, moreso the lower you go. You’ve probably noticed even while playing normally that some players are doing much more damage than you are in the lower level areas, thats probably because they’re high level players being downscaled to a lower level zone.
The dungeons ARE perfectly doable (though very difficult) with a full group of level-appropriate players, certainly. Like you said, thats what they’re designed for. But because level 80 players have an advantage, some players will still prefer to run pure level 80 groups regardless. Especially since many of the higher level players are at the point where they’re running dungeons purely to get tokens / loot, so they just want to beat it as fast and easy as possible.
Not to say that everyone is like that, but there are some.
Paying for extra stuff like boosters and crafting ingredients (haft / blade, ect) would be fine. I’d be all for that. Although buying extra bank space pretty much covers those sorts of things anyway, until you reach the bank space limit.
But paying for holiday / event crafting material storage is bull. Events already carry an array of new stuff to buy from the Gem Store, costumes and chests and the like. Basic things like storage for the numerous new materials they’re going to be piling on (if the last 2 events are indication) should not be something you need to pay for.
I guess they limited the hide option to helmet and shoulders only because they do not want players to run around in their underwear but have 100% of the stats.
That. I do not want to see 50% of the playerbase running around naked with no penalty.
Gloves and boots could maybe be added as toggles, but chest and pants need to stay as-is.
No one uses the current staffs for melee combat because the current staffs aren’t built for melee combat.
Look at most of the staffs in the game. You try smacking someone with one of those twiggy staffs with a crystal on the top and either the crystal is going to shatter or the staff is going to break in half (or both). They aren’t suitable for melee combat at all.
They should add actual, proper combat staffs to the game as a new weapon type if they want to go the route of physical combat staffs.
Another idea I had this night was about a greater change in the weapon system like this: The skills you get with a weapon are not profession-based but “style-based”. So not every ranger has to learn longbow automatically in ranger-style, he could go to an warrior-style-teacher and learn the skill like a warrior. And a mesmer could learn to use the scepter like an elementarist.
That also would open up more degrees of freedom, without even re-programming the skills themself or adding new skills.
That would completely negate a large portion of the differences between professions. The only differences in professions at that point would be profession mechanics / utilities. Having a set of weapon skills for weapons that are different per class is one of the things that makes the classes more unique.
Plus it’d make no sense in many cases. How would a Guardian who whips out a staff and starts making clones and throwing chaos magic around fit a Guardian at all? Or a Warrior who grabs the Ranger Greatsword moveset and suddenly has animal spirit visuals on attacks?
As for making all weapons usable by all classes… gonna have to say no on that one too. Again its a matter of removing a part of what makes the classes unique. Even if each class had a unique moveset for each weapon, it would remove the fact that classes identify with and use certain weapons. It would open up more options, but it homogenizes everything a bit when every class can grab anything from a Rifle to a Scepter and just go to town.
I’d rather have them focus on making new, fitting weapon types to add as additional choices for existing classes than have them spend all the time making movesets for existing weapons. I’d rather have them add Flails or Spears or Tomes, giving those new weapons to applicable classes, than have Thieves picking up staffs and Necromancers picking up huge hammers.
I actually feel the exact opposite from what you do. I dislike the T1 and T2 heavy Sylvari armor. Yes, they’re bulky, but they’re also made up of leaves, vines, and petals mostly. I don’t care how thick and bulky a leaf is, its not going to protect you. Bulk isn’t the only thing that matters.
The T3 heavy armor, on the other hand, looks like wood. Its not super bulky, but its solid wood, which is at the very least somewhat protective (still not nearly as good as metal, but its the best you can manage from a plant). Yes, there are some leaves on the T3, but you can see if you look closely that the leaves are simply on top of a full wooden suit. There’s wood under the “skirt” and wood under the chest flower. The leaves are decoration, nothing more.
I wouldn’t mind if they had made the T3 a bit bulkier and in fact I’d prefer it to be bulkier (like the gloves which as you mention look awesome) but IMO, at least its something solid and not leaves and petals. And it still looks pretty nice.
The only thing I dislike about the T3 is the shoulderpad. Not because its too small, I think the size is fine (I actually dislike ridiculously oversized shoulderpads) and I think it looks fairly good, though a wooden motif like the gloves instead of the thorn motif would be better. The problem I have with it is that I HATE single shoulderpads. Absolutely despise them. Why the heck would you ever protect one side of your body only. If they need to be assymetrical in order to accomidate the chest flower bandolier, fine. But one shoulderpad on a heavy suit of armor is stupid.