I think the plan proposed in the OP is great. It keeps it balanced by having long periods of cooldown to prevent Elementalists from having a “real” weapon swap (AKA a swap used frequently for access to more skills, because attunement does that already) but still allows you to switch weapons when the situation arises where you really need to switch weapons.
Heck, I’d even take it a step further personally. I’d gladly take a 40 second weapon switch cooldown and a forced 20 second cooldown for every non-active attunement on weapon switch. Make it entirely a “just in case” tool.
I just want something so that if I’m playing Dagger / Dagger (which I usually am) and end up against a boss that totally screws melee, I at least have some way to swap to a Staff other than running 50 feet away and hoping combat decides to end in a reasonable amount of time.
Appearence-wise, I like the Spiders better. Skill-wise, I’d probably lean towards the Devourers. While the Spiders’ immobilize is great for a ranged pet and they do good damage with their basic, I’m not a fan of their style of F2 (not that they’re ineffective, but its boring that they don’t even really have an actual attack for an F2, just a little buff) and the poison field doesn’t last long enough to actually use and has major accuracy problems. I like the Devourers’ ability to poison with basic attacks, and the tunnel escape is also pretty nice. Their F2’s are cool as well.
I guess overall, picking one specific ranged pet… I’d go with the Whiptail Devourer. Looks the coolest of the devourers with all the skills associated with the group, and the F2 is nice, 6 stacks of bleed. Looking forward to the point when I can spec the “Pets do extra condition damage” perk with that one.
EDIT: Oh, one nice thing about the spiders though is they seem to have longer range. Against something like the Champion Giant that spawns in the 17-25 Charr / Norn area, they’re better at staying out of range and not getting killed.
(edited by Electro.4173)
I’ll have to look more into the red bars on skills. I’ve definately noticed them before, but they’ve seemed… off. But maybe I just wasn’t watching them close enough.
I’d really like to see a range display added next to a targetted enemies’ name so you can tell what range they’re at from your character. Particularly for stuff like the Ranger Longbow or the Mesmer Greatsword, where you really want to attack at absolute max range, I find myself constantly starting to attack an enemy (usually from out of range) then inching forward little by little until I actually start attacking and hitting, and it seems like a goofy approach, but its the only way to do it unless you’re godly at distance approximation. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought I was in range, tried to use a skill besides “1” to start combat, and gotten an “Out of Range” message, wasting the skill and needing to wait for cooldown.
An actual distance reading would be perfect, but if thats deemed “too much” as a break of realism or whatever, then maybe at least a simple indicator which will tell you whether you’re in range or not based on the range of your basic attack would help at least.
Salvaging from karma items is turning karma into gold. Which is why its not allowed.
The amount of gold you could possibly make from salvaging a Karma item is rediculously low to the point where its negligable, especially since Karma rewards tend to be relatively expensive. How much money are you really going to make from a few chunks of ore? Certainly not enough to be worth the karma cost as a money farming tool.
If the problem is the built-in runes on higher level karma items, then just disallow salaving of those runes (but not player-applied runes, as this topic is mentioning).
Would Elementalists be able to use greatswords in the future?
in Elementalist
Posted by: Electro.4173
I’d prefer Hammer or Mace. Purely on the observation that those are the weapons that have the lowest number of professions which can use them (only 2 professions each, where the GS already has 4 professions which can use it).
But as mentioned, I don’t think NPCs are any indication of weapon usability. Seems in some situations the NPCs just use whatever skills / weapons / professions they want with no regards to game mechanics.
It looks quite silly when you’re wielding some fancy looking axe, throw it, and the second it leaves your hand it turns into the generic basic hand axe model. The axe should look the same flying through the air as it does when its in your hand. Ditto for every other thrown weapon skill in the game. And Engineer’s shield toss skill is the worst because its very noticable since its bigger and flies slower. My transmuted Iron Legion shield turns to wood every time I use the skill >.>
Its a fairly minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but it would make thrown weapons look a lot better if the thrown graphic matched what you’re actually holding.
I’d like to see an “Examine” function for both NPCs / enemies and especially other players, which would open a window similar to the Preview window (minus all the actual preview slots of course) and allow you to look at the model, rotate it, and so on. Maybe even a Zoom function (which is strangely abscent from the Preview window as well). Could be added to the menu that pops up when you Right-Click on a player’s icon when you’ve targetted them, and give enemies NPCs a similar menu with an Examine function.
I enjoy looking at enemy models, and definately enjoy looking at other players’ characters. But right now its rather difficult to get a good look, enemies will obviously try to kill you if you get close and even players require you to position your own character in a specific way so that you can rotate the camera around yourself to look at them. And hope they aren’t moving around.
Problem with that is that some offhand weapons aren’t really actual weapons. Torches, focuses, shields, ect. You wouldn’t use any of those for normal attacks. There’d also be a discrepency when it came to melee / ranged combos (for example a Mesmer wielding a Sword mainhand and a Pistol offhand). You’d either end up with a strange hybrid basic attack where one hit is melee and the other is ranged, or more likely the offhand just wouldn’t be used at all in that situation either, as with focuses and the like. Unless you could work out a system where the game would automatically detect whether you’re in melee or range and change the basic accordingly (so for example if you’re in melee you’d attack with sword, if at range you’d attack with pistol).
It would have to be on a per-weapon basis. Some offhand weapons would alter the basic attack, some wouldn’t.
Still, I think that would be pretty interesting. Use certain offhand weapon combinations and you get an enhanced basic attack, while others give you no basic attack buff but have stronger special abilities to compenesate. It would add a bit more differentiation to the weapons.
I’d say just make karma items salvagable. I really see no reason they aren’t. Is there really a worry that people are going to dump a ton of karma to buy an item just to salvage a few resources / upgrades out of it?
Agree with this 100%.
I hate when I fight my way into a cave or side area to a Veteran enemy, engage the veteran, and halfway through the fight the mobs I killed on the way in respawn and gank me from behind. And god help you if you have to fight a Skill Challenge in an area with other hostile mobs. Its really irritating, and forces you to constantly rush around. Kill fast and move the heck on or else those enemies you killed will be back and trying to kill you again.
I understand the respawn rate needs to be somewhat high so that areas don’t become dead, don’t want one player clearing out an area and then the next person through has nothing to do. But if thats the case, perhaps the respawn rate could be tied to how many players are in the area, so that if you’re alone the enemies stay dead for a decent length of time but if there are half a dozen people there the enemies respawn more quickly.
Or have it so that when another person enters an area, the respawn timers have their current counts dropped dramatically, so that each time a person enters there’s sure to be a fresh batch of enemies appearing shortly. For example, lets say you have a 5 minute respawn timer and a player just came through and killed a group of enemies. So the respawn timer is counting down, and its at 4:30 until the next spawn when a new player comes in. The timer is immedietly reduced to 0:20 (or even lower) until the enemies spawn, so that the newly arriving player will have enemies to deal with shortly.
I don’t see why it was even nessicary to rearrange.
There ARE skill sets out there where cooldowns do not go lowest > highest. Off the top of my head, Dagger offhand for Elementalists in the Earth attunement. 5 skill has shorter cooldown than 4.
And I really don’t think order needs to have anything to do with which skills are considered “primary” or anything either, other than obviously 1 should be the basic.
I don’t see the reasoning behind changing it.
Meh. Even if it doesn’t do the very high listed damage, it still does quite a bit, and the fact that you can use it any time without interrupting anything else you’re doing is awesome. Not to mention Blast finisher.
Bugged or not, its still a great attack.
Supposedly the devs are planning to add kits that let you change appearence. I’ve even heard someone mention that the items were coded into the game with the last patch, so they might be coming soon.
But at the moment, no. Once you leave character creation, its permanent.
I’ve noticed no change in pet tankiness. I’ve been using my Raven a lot since I tamed it a few days back and it still draws more aggro, and its definately not a toughness pet.
I do have Beastmaster, but I also have Survival (both at 10, since I’m only level 34).
Could just be a something that effects higher-level experiences though. Maybe at lower levels toughness just doesn’t stack enough on you to make a difference and make you get over the pet.
I gotta say though, I actually would like something like this. Having some way to determine whether your pet or you draw more aggro would be nice, as opposed to just having pets draw aggro all the time. I don’t know if stats are the right way to go about it, since it does pigeonhole you into certain builds, though.
Axe is not melee. Axe is a thrown weapon, it hits at range. I suppose you could use it for melee since its at least not penalized for close-range (like the Longbow is) but its not actually a melee weapon.
I like Sword + Torch for melee quite a lot, its my favorite melee config for Ranger. Though if you’re looking to be tanky, you probably want to run Greatsword, since Sword has very little defense, while Greatsword has a counter special and built-in evasion for 1 of the attacks in your basic string.
Can’t really speak for the overall effectiveness of a tank / pet DPS build. My build thus far is sort of shaping up that way (I have Survival for Toughness and Beastmaster) but I’m only at level 34 so I can’t really know if it’ll be effective at higher levels. It works well enough for me so far, though only in PvE and haven’t done any dungeons yet, but I’m not really tanking, I’m still letting my pets tank for the most part. Though I don’t just run tank pets like bears, I run any pet
I’m not too happy with my armor on either of my Charr characters either (and both wear Medium armor unfortunately, so I don’t even get variety between the two). Trenchcoats everywhere.
Though aside from the tail clipping, which is horrendous the problem isn’t really Charr-specific. My problem with medium armor is more the fact that its not medium armor. A trenchcoat is something I’d expect for light armor. Medium armor should be leather at the lightest, and probably more along the lines of chainmail. Not cloth.
I knew very little about the races’ culture and such prior to my first Charr character, having never played GW1. I knew basically just what the character creation screen / official website blurbs told me, so that didn’t factor in much.
Appearence played a big part. I always like to play non-human races any time its an option (I see plenty humans in real life), and while I do really like living tree beings in general which would have made me lean towards Sylvari, Charr won out just because I like the unique body structure and the unique combination of features (generally feline but with horns, strange ear placement, beastly body shape).
But another reason that played into it was because I knew I wanted my first character to be a Ranger, and a Sylvari Ranger would just be far too typical. Tree people fighting with a nature theme and taming animals… meh. I prefer more unique combinations than that, if I can manage it.
My guild has a ‘warband’ of charr, some play them as mains some as alts and we’ve all adopted ‘Feral’ as a common name. So for example my Charr is Titian Feralspur. It makes for a unique little tie to each other when we see other out and about in the world. We also do some roleplay where we get together as a warband and stomp some DEs or something.
That’s awesome. I was wondering if anyone did anything like that with any of the racial groupings (warbands, krewes, ect). Seems like it’d be a fun RP experience.
My first Charr character was also my first character in GW2 period and I hadn’t done any research into names or anything, not really even knowing that different races and their names would follow different “templates”. So I just named him Geirikk based on nothing besides the name sounding good. Actually turns out to be a pretty good first name for a male Charr, fits most of the criteria on the GW2 wiki. But not having a surname now that I know what the surname actually entails is a bummer, I really like the idea of the surname being tied to warband. I did pick the Flame Legion father bio option, so I’ve at least been able to somewhat rationalize it with that. Something like his surname being given by the Flame Legion and giving it up when he left. Since it seems Charr never take a new surname even when they change warband (at least none of the ones you recruit do, but that could just be a gameplay thing).
Thankfully my second Charr I knew better and was able to make a fitting name with the warband / role naming scheme. Cazza Gearburst is her name, Gear being the name of the warband (yah, it sucks, so what, I’m not very good at names :p) and burst because she’s quick and aggressive.
It doesn’t make sense, but its probably intended. They probably don’t want you ducking behind a wall and still able to do damage while an enemy can’t damage you. They’re treating it like a normal ranged attack in that way, you can either hit your opponent and they can hit you or neither of you can hit.
But then again, condition damage isn’t screwed by LoS and does pretty much the exact same thing as Hunter’s Call does, so… I don’t really think its nessicary to limit it in that way.
Eh, controlling pets should be kept exclusive to Ranger, IMO. Those controls take up all of the Ranger’s class-unique slots, another class shouldn’t be able to have those controls “for free”. Plus, where would you even put them? At most you could make the summon skill into an “Attack” command for the duration of the summon, but there’d be no way to do other commands.
Lesser Elemental could use a power buff. They seem pretty weak at both attacking and defense.
But the biggest issue for me is the duration and the cooldown. They don’t last long enough, and the cooldown is just insane. You can’t rely on them at all because unless you’re going to wait a minute between every battle, they won’t even be available half the time. The cooldown could be cut in half easily.
@ Cleric.6185 – The Charr armor being the same regardless of gender is actually a lore / cultural thing. Charr don’t differentiate their clothing based on gender, according to the GW2 wiki anyway. Everyone wears the same.
As for the issue of Sylvari and the lack of “leafy” clothing for your character to wear… I agree its really jarring. But I think thats mostly because almost every single Sylvari in the game is wearing leafy clothes / armor. The profession trainers are the only ones that commonly wear anything else (though there are a few others that wear normal clothes). If there were a more even split between Sylvari wearing cultural gear and Sylvari wearing other normal clothing, it wouldn’t make you feel so out of place.
The same can be said about most other races I suppose, almost all the NPCs wear clothing specific to their race, but the Sylvari are the most obvious because rather than just being different styled clothing, its a completely different material being used.
Mind you, even if there were more Sylvari NPC’s wearing normal clothes to make your character seem less out of place, it’d still be nice to get some lower-level plantlike armor, just for variety.
There is an actual name save function thats bugged, it doesn’t just not exist.
I’ve seen pets retain their names after being switched out of the active rotation. Its extremely hit-or-miss, mainly miss, unless you have the same pet in both aquatic and land slots, then switching it out of one will still let it keep its name every time, but it does happen.
And the fact that the name does save between the land / underwater slots is proof that you’re not just “naming the slot”. If you were, you’d need to name the same pet in both the land and underwater slot individually.
As for the issue at large… I still rename my pet every time it reverts. I want my pet to feel like a real pet even if the game isn’t going to make that easy for me.
I’d have no problem with the Swiftness on the horn being replaced by something else. I’d settle for a few more stacks of Might or something, even.
But for the exact opposite reason this thread is getting at. Being strictly a PvE player, I find Swift to be next to useless except for moving from place to place. In combat it may as well not even exist. I’d be all for a more useful combat buff.
The only problem I really have with spirits is that they draw too much aggro. They don’t even attack (well, except for the activated ability of the storm spirit I guess), why are enemies so intent on killing them all the time? They shouldn’t be ignored completely or anything, but enemies are far too willing to kill them ASAP as it stands right now. When an enemy breaks contact with both myself and my pet who are both attacking it just to kill a spirit off to the side, there’s a problem. It wouldn’t be so bad if Rangers actually needed a decoy (I really wish enemies would go after my clones more often than me with my Mesmer) but Rangers have pets for that.
As far as low health, being succeptable to AoE and such… doesn’t seem like that much of a problem to me. Positioning them so that they’re out of harms way or keeping enemies away from them (not standing directly on top of them while using ranged attacks for example) I can see just being part of using the skill properly.
And the basic Spirit design I have no real problem with either. Sure, its random and that makes it somewhat unreliable, but the ability to buff a group for 60 seconds passively I think is pretty nice.
Spirits aren’t the only things that draw mysterious aggro though, I have the same problem with enemies pretty much instantly nuking my Sylvari racial ability to summon a healing flower the second I summon it too.
I’m suprised there are so many people who missed the “Lighting Change” button on the character creation screen. I for one experment with every single button I can find during character creation. I suppose a notice of some sort would be nice, but… I thought it was fairly self-explanitory if you actually know about the lighting button.
My main complaint about the glow is that the pulsating makes it annoying to actually see the changes you’re making. Every time you change color you have to wait a couple seconds for the glow to reach “max brightness” to see what it really looks like, and then you only have a second of bright before it dims down and you have to wait again. Makes it take a lot longer than it should (and taking longer is a bad thing, I’ve been timed-out on character creation and lost everything twice as I was making my characters).
I’ve never even noticed major oddities in the running animations in either my male or female Sylvari. Then again, my other characters are Charr and Asura (humans are boring :p) so I guess I don’t really have much to compare to, since both of those races have extremlely distinct animations. The sylvari end up being the “normal” ones of the group.
I’ll have to look more closely next time, see if I can spot some of the intracacies mentioned in the thread.
I have noticed the female’s idle animation, and I love it. Looking around with an expression of amazement and wonder fits the race perfectly, and aside from fitting well I think it looks really nice.
According to the OP I must be using my GS wrong then. I spam 2 and 5 constantly for DPS (bleed on the 2 and the 50% pet damage boost from 5) and on stronger enemies / groups I’ll throw down a Fire / Poison / Frost trap and use 3 for the combo. Or use Lightning Reflexes + 3 for a quick evade / dash in.
Greatsword isn’t that powerful, so I doubt it’d get nerfed.
The Drake pets 1st special “Chomp” is messed up. The description says that its supposed to regain health, but the attack stats underneath the description show no healing, and indeed I have never ever seen my Drake heal at all. I’ve let it finish entire battles on its own, just watching for any bit of healing, and nothing. Needs to either have healing added as per the description, or change the description and the cooldown to just make it a high-damage attack like the cat families’ bite special. I’d prefer the former, some healing would be very good for the Drake if it actually worked. And fix the tooltip as well.
Honestly, I’m not sure Chomp even triggers at all. It may be in the same boat as Tail Swipe and just not work at all period (in which case maybe the attack does heal but since it just never triggers obviously you won’t see it). Thats actually what I’m leaning towards. But I’m not completely sure on that, given the fact that the animation would probably be similar and the fact that right now it only does slightly more damage than a basic attack, it might be triggering and I just can’t tell.
Don’t know if it would be nessicarily be considered a bug, but Drakes’ basic attacks cause AoE damage. The description for the attack does not mention this at all. Should alter the description so that it reflects the AoE damage of the attack.
Also, the very brief poison field created by the Spider families 2nd special ability (the 3-shot poison blast) seems to obstruct ranged projectiles for its duration if the target enemy is in the center of the attack (where the projectiles actually impact), and triggering field combos with ranged attacks using said poison field seems to be very hit-or-miss, though that might just be because of the obstruction thing. Might be related to the normal obsctruction bug?