Guild Wars 2

kolompi.1287:

Ugh. I assume you never played GW1 otherwise you would not say that interrupts take no skill.

I know that getting interrupted is frustrating but just because they interrupted your skillful spamming of ele skills, you should not feel bad but take a step back and think.

Interrupts in GW1 had a cast-time. No matter how minute 0.25 s is, in GW1, it was still something to consider. Also, interrupting 1 s and above skills was always cake. GW2 has an average skill cast of 0.5 s (which was far below the threshold of reliable interruption). However, combined with an increase in the total number of buttons along with a drastic decrease in build customization, interruptions have become somewhat underpowered given that rotations in GW2 are comprised of a lot of fluff: passive procs, rapid/instant cast-times, the fact that interrupting a skill doesn’t put it into full cooldown, the lack of any real resource mechanic, and the total length of rotations all passively mitigate the effectiveness of interruptions.

So, what was anet’s solution to this arbitrary benching of overall interruption effectiveness? MAKE THEM INSTANT OR MAKE THEM LAST 2-4 SECONDS!

The game is borked. Skill 404

Ross Biddle.2367:

Wait, so I have to take the Chaos line + PU + a torch and or Decoy and or mass invis so I can run MoD? I thought there was no cost/investment?

Yeah, but why wouldn’t you? The point is that in GW2, opportunity cost doesn’t really exist given the shallowness of combat. The choices to be made for any build are incredibly obvious, and if one dies in a rapid fashion, it was due to a strict hard counter or because of cooldowns. Tool-tips should not be a substitute for skill, but that’s the mantra in GW2.

Fay.2357:

Mantra of distraction has a 2.75 second channel time. Trying interrupting that next time instead of just complaining.

That’s always readied before combat begins. If they need to cast it again, they have stealth or a blink. Please don’t try to be serious when using the preparation cast as an excuse to allow Power Lock to be instant. The joke is old and was never funny.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Lava Font, Fire Grab, Path of Scars, Shield of Wrath, and Overcharged Shot all come to mind, and only Lava Font is arguably an obvious animation. Arcane Wave and Arcane Blast can also hit 5k with appropriate damage mods and Might, and those have no telegraph whatsoever.

Let’s be honest here:
Guild Wars 2 is pretty poorly implemented and horrifically balanced. The only damage that matters is instant. It’s not fair, and it doesn’t foster a high skill ceiling. Gameplay (since actions are either instant or outside the realm of CC due to stability, invulnerability or speed of cast) is balanced by cooldowns instead of timing, positioning (because once a player is in range of another player, things are going to hit unless one of the two combatants wants to just sit out of line of sight and then nothing gets done—which means its back to waiting for cooldowns again) or gamesense.

The problem with conditions, though, is that they epitomize this nature of poor design. Direct damage at least needs to be maintained (regardless of how easy it is to maintain it) while DoTs are fire and forget. To have a fire and forget mechanic often exceed direct damage effectiveness in PvP means that the game doesn’t really take itself seriously.

The whole system needs to sort of be gutted, but the playerbase is too rabid at this point. People get super salty if you question their skill levels or builds because CLEARLY, Guild Wars 2 is an esport that has a high skill ceiling. I have to get mad at the assumption of the contrary because anet says so(?); because some streamer says so(?).

If there’s such a controversy regarding “fairness” or “skill” in a game’s PvP mode, maybe there is something critically awry in the PvP mode itself? People like to argue that conditions or damage are all balanced with esoteric and niche reasoning, but given that the questions to the contrary still linger even 3 years after the game has released, are they really? Is anything honestly balanced or well implemented when the questioning is so rampant?

Embolism.8106:

It’s obvious the OP’s problem is with Confounding Suggestions, not Power Lock (though he doesn’t realise it), so I don’t think this warrants further discussion unless we want to talk about CS instead.

Instant, aimbot effects (much less a hard CC) without a governing resource involve no skill. Instant passives having such a massive sway on combat in general is a different conversation to have.

Give it a cast time. Instant removes skill from play when it isn’t balanced by a resource (either initial cost or a type of resource that requires a high build up time).

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

9k hits aren’t “strong?” But 10k burning over 12 seconds is terribly overpowered.

Logic at its finest, people.

Players can see and dodge Gravedigger. There is no effective way to consistently mitigate the passive triggers, instant ranged skills and autoattack spam which dominates condition play aside from stock up one’s bar and traits on hard counters and then hoping that they buy the player enough time to +forward while pressing buttons until the condition guy dies.

There is nothing skillful about either side of that exchange and it is perpetuated by condition damage being overtuned and improperly implemented on a fundamental level.

Condition damage will never be balanced at the rate this game is going because of the warped concept that the devs (and now the deluded playerbase) have been attempting to apply to it. Condition damage (damage-over-time; DoTs) is a pressure mechanic. In a very long history of off and online games, DoTs have fundamentally never functioned as a consistent way of finishing a kill on their own.

DoTs have always been a tool to force unfavorable decisions onto the resources and movement of enemy players. They put sustained, light pressure over a long period of time which is dealt with by the target either using their own skills/resources to remove it or by retreating to a location or a player who can address the DoT. However, not only does GW2 not have a party member that can provide sustained, direct healing (yet, and even then, the “healing output:incoming damage” ratios seen on some of the new specs are still ENTIRELY out of whack to the point where I continue to doubt anet even tests anything regarding the numbers that they put into the game), but a basic condition rotation is often a death sentence even against a target with 50% HP. The only thing stopping this is cooldowns, because of its nature as an mmorpg and also its shallow combat design which foregoes the importance of legitimate positioning and juking along with its lack of any real managed resources.

A solution? As crazy as it sounds: add health packs to the field with a 15 s respawn. The packs could heal various amounts of HP, but most importantly, they would remove conditions from the player who touched and consumed it. The packs can’t be very near to points, but their existence would at least allow DoTs (even after they get rightfully nerfed) to force a predictable movement into an enemy instead of what happens now which effectively boils down to someone popping a hard counter and laughing while still pressing their buttons or a guy without the right buttons running around for 3 seconds as his HP pool boils away under the effects of what is supposed to be a DAMAGE-OVER-TIME mechanic.

tl;dr “Damage over time” does not mean spike; it does not mean burst. DoTs such as GW2 condition damage have a very specific pressure purpose which it has overstepped for no established reason other than the arbitrary whims of some flavor-pushing dev team and a vocal group of the playerbase who just didn’t feel like wearing a certain gear stat triad.

Normalize all capture node sizes to match those on Foefire.

infantrydiv.1620:

For the people complaining about condis…

Just run this list of hard counters.

Guild Wars 2 skill ceiling cap in a nutshell.

Kageseigi.2150:

In short, the Thief became glassier, but did not become more powerful… relatively.

That’s actually not true. Thieves naturally become more powerful because they rely on blind spam, teleports, perfect invisibility and instant damage. The only reason why this doesn’t work anymore (or it’s “less” effective) is because GW2 has always been balanced around two player forms: “deal damage” and “be invulnerable.” Over the course of the game’s lifetime, this has only become more and more obvious while the two forms blend together. Notice how everyone carries damage negation abilities—especially if they allow one to continue to take actions while they are in effect. Runes of Vampirism are everywhere now.

What this means is that Thief is still inherently overpowered and a flavor-based mess of a class design, but it indirectly isn’t as powerful (although it still won’t die) when everyone runs meta builds, and it is absolutely worthless at the outset of any fight because that’s the point at which everyone on the field can press a button to instantly be invulnerable.

Oh, wow, alright, so I didn’t even read your whole post and you actually mentioned Runes of Vampirism at the bottom. I told you man, that’s the meta. The only thing that Thief doesn’t have that would make it meta would be shatters that can be activated while being invulnerable without being able to take actions. In any case, the whole class boils down to effectively being a Lich Form autoattack with instant travel time, that can be reflected, and it comes with a steering wheel for a player.

tl;dr Thief is “underpowered” because everyone is invulnerable but still able to take actions. Thief is still innately overpowered in principle, but the entire game on the whole is balanced around twitchy hard counters which work to all hard counter the thief. The whole system is out of whack.

Bezagron.7352:

Petoox.6570:

Nah, thief doesn’t need more nerfs.

Okay this could be a slight nerf (maybe) but the largest point was these indication of position are delayed. I don’t see this as a nerf but improving stealth gameplay as now you can bait you foes into positions you want.

Also stealth skills & effect could be strengthen improving them because of this improved counterplay. This is not to nerf Thief but improve stealth gameplay for all parties.

The point is that we’re attempting to add a level of universal counterplay to an overpowered and poorly implemented mechanic that never needed to exist in the first place. The problem is that the player base’s collective brain is dented at this point into believing that stealth is properly executed and balanced. It happens with a lot of games: there is a very small window of opportunity in which a new mechanic or ability can be rescinded after its introduction into the community; if a developer doesn’t take the opportunity to fix or entirely remove something, the playerbase sort of just takes it for granted (even if it’s poorly done and/or blatantly overtuned).

The best thing that could be done at this stage would be to provide a universal, on-hit soft counter to stealth (the shimmer or the blood stain idea or the footprints), raise the Thief HP pool, and then nerf its damage to smooth everything out.

Not many online games properly implement and balance player invisibility. Guild Wars 2 is not among that small group.

• Stealth now only stacks duration up to 3 times.
• Foes struck while in stealth suffer Shimmer (½ s); Shimmer is a unique debuff which causes the player to appear to all enemies in the same manner as if allies were viewing a stealthed ally.
• Add more super speed to stealth abilities and combos.
• Thief stealth attacks (1 slot while in stealth) now reveal the player when activated (skill still naturally executes as normal).

This is a band-aid fix, but stealth in GW2 is a shoehorned, superfluous “flavor” mechanic after all. Not much can be done. The class that abuses it the most is absolutely nothing without it, which says a lot about the shallow design of the class. Mesmer never needed stealth to begin with. Engineer didn’t need it either. Nobody needed it. The only thing to keep in mind is that there is nothing more fragile or easily baited than the ego of a MMORPG rogue player.

Senario.2038:

WvW is not inherently imbalanced because of a numbers game. That is a problem with only big differences in numbers and not a problem with WvW.

Yes, and WvW is a game that often revolves around and is dominated by big number differences. They are rather inclusive.

Senario.2038:

Blasting is the only reason they are effective in any capacity, otherwise you put down a water field and it would heal a little bit only for you to get hit for that amount of damage immediately after.

Therefore, it’s an effective way to mitigating damage. That’s a general purpose of healing: damage is going to exceed HP totals very rapidly, so focused healing can be a way of effectively and responsibly (within the context of design) mitigating that so long as the healing doesn’t effortlessly outpace incoming damage.

Senario.2038:

You argue that it turns a player into a one button wonder but you forget elementalist has three other attunements, each of which have a use though changing water fields would just straight up nerf ele. Meteor is good for downs, earth has a wall to deny movement through an area, air has static CC.

“Four-button wonder” is not helping your argument given that the class has a total of 30 buttons to press. It’s true, though, Elementalist—as most classes are in WvW—are typically condensed into a very small number of their total skills (if not a single button) in many large-scale situations. The power of excessive and improperly limited numbers.

Senario.2038:

Doing a regular rotation does not really stack might as fast as you would think. One rotation takes at least a few seconds and if you counted Earth 4, earth dodge, and water 3 on dagger dagger ele that might is not at all a high amount. To nerf fire fields to give less might is again nerfing a class without providing anything in return to keep their balance the same.

You’re right, it’s about a 3 second process (if we’re talking about setting up might before PvE combat), but most players who rely on those fields and combos for might in PvP just get it passively while they execute their rotation. If we’re going to talk about how players get might passively while just using their skills as they would normally, we might as well also discuss the excessive the amount of might that those players receive when performing these simple, mundane actions.

Senario.2038:

Them getting Fury is also questionable because you have to trait for that and by no means is it a 100% thing.

There is absolutely NO OTHER trait to take in PvE within that trait slot aside from the fury one. Moreover, it’s meta to take fire in PvE for all of the additional DPS. Most encounters don’t last long enough to warrant perma-fury, nor is it of the utmost necessity even in fights protracted out by virtue of boss invulnerability/HP sponging. Even if other players contribute to party fury, the fact is that Persisting Flames is the trait to take because it lengthens the duration of Lava Font—not necessarily just because of the fury.

Senario.2038:

You don’t trait for fury in PvP because you need the blind

It honestly depends. I prefer the longer fire field to smite downed players and also permanently block point access with a pulsing 2k DPS (because Anet in their infinite wisdom made capture nodes the same size as AoEs). Again, as I’ve said before, there are two big facets to Persisting Flames, and the choice often comes down to how your party is composed rather than how the Elementalist feels like playing.

Senario.2038:

Most of the fury trait is mediocre unless you are a staff ele.

And that’s the point: given any situation, the choice between the two options is always obvious so there’s no need to complain or discuss about either trait’s viability.

Senario.2038:

PvE balance doesn’t matter all that much and I would not think that Ele would be fine if you suddenly made all of their fields weaker and made others stronger without changing anything else to compensate.

It’s easy to replace an underused or irrelevant trait with more field bonuses.

Senario.2038:

I highly doubt you can determine what is skilled and what is not based on opinion. To me, the sign of a good player is one that knows how to combo fields based on the situation and that includes water fields. It requires practice and I would consider it skillful to use combos in a way that benefits a class and the team.

Yes, and that’s not wrong, but as I’ve said before, the situations which call for certain fields and combos are incredibly obvious. While there is a skill ceiling to approach, it’s low enough that one can bump one’s forehead on it while walking forward standing upright (provided they straight up do something as simple as peruse the wiki and read tooltips).

Senario.2038:

In general it really just sounds to me like “Nerf fields, buff other fields that aren’t on engie/ele, ignore current good balance for unneeded changes”. Blasting fields takes two cooldowns. One for the skill, one for the player that needs to blast and I believe the reward is not only fair currently but very important to balance and changing it would cause even more balance problems.

The current good balance renders irrelevant most fields and often foregoes their use entirely if they aren’t water and fire. Lightning has a purpose, but that’s only because swiftness is a shoehorned speed buff with no real, immediately viable purpose but to carry a player from point A to point B while outside of combat.

Senario.2038:

Also everybody seems to ignore that the amount of practice needed to play Engie/Ele

Those classes are carried by passive triggers (like most); and a longer, still obvious rotation interrupted only occasionally by instant (mind you INSTANT) reactive skills isn’t something that requires a great deal more “skill” to operate. Yes, muscle memory is something that a player can work on to commit into the subconscious, but it’s not terribly difficult to accomplish and moreover, we’re talking about like a combination of 2 – 4 skills total when dealing with combo fields.

The “average” amount of practice require to master a class in this game is relatively low. What is above “relatively low” is not necessarily a pressing consideration when talking about the trade-offs to actions which have barely any opportunity or resource cost to begin with.

TheSwede.9512:

I have a few ideas myself.

Auras

hide spoiler

Dark Armor

• Surrounds the player in a Dark Aura, causing them to Blind (2s) enemies that attack them while granting Stability (1 stack, 4s) to the player. This can only happen at most Once every second per attacker.

Toxic Aura

• Surround the Player in a Toxic Aura, causing them to Poison (2 stack, 4s) and remove 1 Boon from enemies that attack them. This can only happen Once every 2 seconds per attacker.

Frost Aura

• Additionally grants Regeneration (4s) to the player whenever it Chills an enemy.

Chaos Armor

• Enemies who attack now gain 1 Random Damaging Condition (Confusion/Torment/Burning; 1 stack, 3s) and 1 Random Debilitating (Blindness/Weakness/Vulnerability; 1 stack, 3s) when triggering Chaos Armor.

Blast Finishers

hide spoiler

Dark Fields

• Now applies AoE Dark Aura for 4s to nearby Allies.

Poison Fields

• Now applies AoE Toxic Aura for 4s to nearby Allies.

Leap Finishers

hide spoiler

Dark Fields

• Now applies Dark Aura to yourself for 4s.

Poison Fields

• Now applies Toxic Aura to yourself for 4s.

I’m not a fan of more auras—not merely as an opinion thing, but by virtue of how too many auras will just lead to entire teams being coated in colored bubbles throughout the entire duration of fights. On its own, that’s already rather aesthetically offensive, but I also mentioned the current, problematic and ultimately lackluster design of passive, “get-hit” auras. Making every aura require the player to be hit by an enemy in order to trigger a bonus is just something that further contributes to an already messy, illegible combat experience. Players are already triggering multiple passive procs for damage and conditions with individual, arbitrary attacks; therefore, adding more passive procs with colored bubbles for everyone just means that ANY ACTION WHATSOEVER taken by ANYONE would result in an even more inconsequential and random exchange of passive conditions and damage.

Passive poison, passive boon removal, even more passive (and RNG) conditions for chaos armor, passive STABILITY, it’s like you don’t want people to have any sort of counterplay to anything—everyone just either waits or facetanks passive triggers because they have no choice if they actually want to take any actions whatsoever. Having established, consistent, actively triggered effects leads to combat legibility. Good combat legibility leads to more soft counterplay and lends itself to a higher skill ceiling that isn’t determined almost entirely by the tooltips that someone brought into combat.

Even light aura—something that I included in my suggestions—was something that I would rather just remove entirely. It’s superfluous—like most things in GW2. It’s only there because of some flavor whim. It’s not really a thoughtful contribution to combat.

Senario.2038:

Too broad for changes, tell me. What does this accomplish except nerfing classes which rely on these combos and buffing other classes? It is totally biased without any compensation for classes who are largely fine because of combos.

Ele water fields are pretty meh without somebody else blasting them.

The problem is, the only place where Elementalist water fields are blasted frequently is mainly in WvW. WvW is innately imbalanced because of the number of players on the field. Given the sheer body blobs, water fields are enough to full heal huge numbers of players. When fighting in smaller groups, players have their own skills and traits which heal them passively, often instantly and/or negate incoming damage for extended periods of time—all of which trivialize the idea of taking a water field to manually blast for healing. It’s either overpowered and mindless because it turns an entire player into just a single button in zergs or it’s worthless because general combat is balanced around passive triggers, hard counters and knee-jerk twitch reaction buttons/procs. Adding diminishing returns and opening up water field healing to whirl finishers would force some responsibility and opportunity cost onto people attempting to heal large groups.

Senario.2038:

Fire field might being lowered would only make people not use them at all when there are better ways of stacking might (Empower anybody?)

Empower is far more of a battery for self healing rather than an efficient way to stack might given the relation between its cast-time and the might duration that it grant, that it roots the player, and that the player can’t take actions while performing that skill (not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just not as efficient as passively generating might for doing a regular rotation—which is the norm in GW2).

Senario.2038:

All in all it just seems like Ele would be nerfed into the ground with these changes. What use are they anymore? Water fields will be terrible so might as well take a druid, fire fields won’t even grant might and other classes have an easier time generating might or putting more damage into their builds due to higher base hp or a heavier armor type. Their auras also will no longer match up anything they do and are weaker in some cases.

Ele would still be fine because of its base DPS and the fact that it also grants fury when blasting a fire field. HP and armor rating don’t matter in PvE because of how nobody is supposed to get hit anyway, and it’s not that hard to accomplish that (if not that then certainly not dying at the very least).

Auras are already boring effects that have no active application. “Let enemies hit you for a bonus,” is design indicative of passive and reactive play. By turning auras into active bonuses, it allows a player to press an advantage without facetanking everything for some piddly bonus (even if facetanking damage is easy to do and often without legitimate consequence in GW2). I’ve already proposed a big update to Elementalist in which it received quite a few whirl finishers. Being able to coat a 5-man in “+10% damage bonus” aura is pretty good on top of already passing out free fury, might and DPS.

Senario.2038:

I can’t comment in detail on Engie because I don’t play Engie but it seems that their combo fields would also suffer because of these changes. They are some of the few people I ever see that actually combo their water fields/other fields.

Healing turret is unfairly the most powerful healing skill in the game and blasting it/leaping in its water field isn’t skillful or interesting given its duration. Same goes for any other field produced by that class. They have a plethora of instant blast finishers along with a load of combo fields. Pressing buttons isn’t necessarily indicative of a skillful player or good design: it’s just to show that one person actually can read tooltips.

= AURA CHANGES (given that many come from combo finishers) =
BASE CHANGES

• Auras now grant attack bonuses when striking foes rather than when being struck by a foe; every aura-specific on-hit effect has an internal cooldown of 1 s per target; auras do not stack in intensity nor in duration (new auras of the same type will overwrite old ones).
• These on-hit effects have a maximum range of 600 (if a player has an aura and successfully strikes a target that is outside of 600 range, no aura effect will be applied to that target). The only exceptions to this rule are magnetic aura and the new fire aura.

= WHIRL FINISHERS =
BASE CHANGES

• Whirl finishers now generate point-blank AoE effects
• Whirl finishers now cannot trigger more than once per unique field, per player (a field can be the subject of multiple whirl finishers, but not unless multiple individual players use a whirl finisher within it over the course of its duration).
• Ethereal fields do not have a limit on the number of whirl finisher that a single player or NPC unit can execute within them.

= BLAST FINISHERS =

The theme was already made for them. The entire class is fueled by nostalgia instead of original design. A vast majority of the skills themselves are hardly any different than anything we have seen before either, and the class added very little to the game at large regarding actual new application of current GW2 engine mechanics. Aside from a select few abilities, everything “new” about the Revenant was either sourced and modified from already-existing code or outright ripped from old content.

All of the particle effects are new, though.

Done entirely on a fleeting whim, some in-game testing and observation lead to a lot of updates for these lists. Elementalist, Engineer, Ranger, and Thief saw the most changes.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

Being forced to take specific weapons shoehorns the player into a build that he/she doesn’t want to play or isn’t traited and equipped for.

It occurs to me that this is a funny thing to bring up. Consider the following:

Every class already has every underwater weapon combination option already equipped, and there are only two ways to deal damage in GW2: direct damage and condition damage. Each class typically has access to 2 weapons while underwater; one that doesn’t already has supplementary weapon sets while the other is already dedicated to direct damage respectively. Underwater combat (although the numbers are all goofy and arbitrary even more so than the examples on the ground), already covers every base possible in combat.

I argue that GW2’s combat system has very little to add to it (in any format—even one as neglected as underwater zones). Due to this shallow combat design stretched thin by bloat skills and excessive total abilities per build, I took the liberty of condensing skill abilities and combat options in order to give general, individual skill use a more tailored and powerful effect on a profession to profession basis. This sort of adjustment not only gives individual professions multiple options (re-positioning, damage, control, support) with its 5 weapon skills, but it also makes combat more legible by limiting the total amount of skill spam on the field.

Now, all this doesn’t mean that GW2’s combat system is entirely bad, per se, it just means that the actions that anyone player can take are often diluted and floaty in application despite often dealing ludicrous amounts of damage. It’s out of whack.

This makes me think that I’m right in assuming that anet’s loot tables reset drop percentages whenever they release new content. Anyone remember the karka event when precursors were just raining from the sky? Precursor drops at launch were also pretty generous. They go scare when the game receives no updates whatsoever, and now everyone is getting ascended/precursor drops again in the betas. It seems pretty silly.

Sizer.3987:

Wrong. Hard = expensive.

Ultimately effortless, but time-gated tedium is not difficult. Time moves forward without us even doing anything about it. That’s how easy it is to achieve ascended armor. The only thing stopping people from getting it immediately due to its ease of acquisition are the arbitrary barriers imposed by anet.

Sizer.3987:

Anet cannot put gear behind “challenging” content because it will either be too hard (only 5% of ppl will beat it) or too easy (everyone will beat it in an hour and run out of stuff to do) and people will complain either way

Everything is already very easy, though. Arguably, one of the fastest ways to achieve ascended armor is by grinding the Silverwastes. That zone is entirely balanced in favor of the players due to their sheer mass of numbers combined with the ease of the mechanics. The only thing stopping players from getting ascended immediately is the RNG factor of maybe getting a chest drop and/or the total cost of materials that must be bought or salvaged. It’s not hard, it’s tedious by virtue of fluff content implemented to give the player the illusion of legitimate progression which doesn’t actually exist.

Moreover, “difficult” content in mmorpgs is typically synonymous with “unfair.” Given that mmorpgs are mainly balanced around hard counters, “difficult” content emerges when players cannot beat it due to certain factors: those factors typically concern themselves with the party not gearing or building itself properly. This isn’t really an active, in-combat skill factor, but rather something that players do before an encounter even begins. The skill factor of mmorpgs comes down to consulting an excel document and being relatively literate.

The trouble is that statistically, the type of community which plays mmorpgs are comprised 95-99% of people who seriously can’t read or turn with a mouse or something. There is a reason why statics are so highly prized and why people clique together within these sorts of games: the playerbase at large is typically very bad at video games.

Sizer.3987:

you cant just nerf the cost by 50% after thousands of ppl already have the armor. That would ruin the economy and kitten off a ton of people.

Sure you can. The vast majority of people don’t have every one of their characters fully decked out in ascended armor. Those that do won’t have to worry given that they already have it. Since GW2 is already pretty alt-unfriendly due to its amount of unnecessary grind (not that there is a massive amount of grind, but the vast majority of it is entirely unnecessary; be clear about that), cutting the cost of ascended would relieve a lot of nonsense tedium from the player.

And then they changed it to “stacks up to 5 times.” Then everyone exploded about how obscene and ridiculous the change made all combat. Then anet said, “Don’t worry, we’ll tone it down to only ‘stacks only up to 3 times,’” but in hindsight, that did nothing at all given that even 3 stacks of the most piddly ticks of immobilize is still easily 3-10 seconds of “haha, you can’t move if you can’t remove that condition?” Does immobilize actually need to stack or was that mechanic change just some arbitrary whim with no purpose or real forethought but implemented anyway because the devs weren’t doing anything else with their time two years ago? I mean, I know that the technical description had always described it as stacking in duration, but most people appreciated that it didn’t and still operated within that restriction very effectively.

What’s wrong with it just stacking once and supplanting itself if new packets of immobilize are inflicted onto the same, already immobilized target?

People were calling half of these changes months ago (especially the scepter and scepter trait ones). Truly, these are the most predictable and unimaginative devs given the shallowness of these changes.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

I don’t doubt that a single weapon set can be very “active” with the changes you proposed

Alright, “active” is a pretty big buzzword, but the main point was to not just increase APM, but also give the player something other to commit to “autoattack” and “shallow rotation that takes nothing to cast.” The fact that the player has about three things to juggle per skill bar now makes playstyles a little more apparent by how a player decides to use those options. Right now, playstyles don’t exist because all anyone does is dump a shallow rotation into autoattack. Playstyles aren’t determined by tool tips, they are determined by how a player uses a build in a way that seeks to overcome detriments or optimize abilities on a situation-to-situation basis.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

however depending on the player’s personal style, he wants a weapon that deals direct damage or condition damage,

There is no game that has so seriously considered damage over time as something to rival direct damage as Guild Wars 2—and for good reason. People feel cheated when killed by a DoT. Direct damage yields that clear-cut victory whereas a guy who dumped DoTs onto a guy and faffed about in a circle while the target bled out over the course of 3 seconds because it didn’t have a condition cleanse ready is a convoluted design concept. Damage over time means just that: damage over time. It’s a pressure mechanic. Attempting to make what is conceptually a pressure mechanic into spike damage is nothing but a ploy at trying to make it seem like Guild Wars 2 perpetuates any playstyle aside from “be invulnerable and deal damage.”

BunjiKugashira.9754:

controls enemies or boosts allies,

Every weapon set featured in this thread has this option in their own respective ways as well.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

has it’s focus on single target or aoe, is melee or ranged.

I already mentioned how I adapted skill sets and mixed options in order to allow an underwater weapon user to adapt at both ranges and within the presence of different enemy groups. It’s not so much about “which weapon should I bring so I can press 1-5 more effectively (because I’m going to press every button rapidly no matter what)?” but rather “Should I be using 1 or 2 for this guy, and when/how should I use my 4/5?” The latter is an example of actual, dynamic playstyle generation. Weapons as they are now are mainly just simple rotations without any real thought aside from maybe saving 1 button out of the 5. The rebalance above is a work that seeks to make every skill worthwhile and repeatable depending on whatever situation in which a player finds himself/herself.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

There are so many possible combinations that you can make a single weapon either a jack of all trades, master of none,

Except, as I’ve said before, most people don’t have any real playstyle aside from “be invulnerable to effects and deal easy damage.” Why is Guardian Shelter meta? Why is Endure Pain meta? Tool Kit block? Mesmer invulnerability/stealth spam? Ranger signets? Stability? Shadow Refuge with as many teleports as possible? Why does everyone and their grandmother run Rune of Vampirism? Why do people stack and dodge?

The underwater reworks above work to deny that single, gimmick playstyle by replacing it with a lot of positioning-dependent attacks that aren’t necessarily bound by the targeting system.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

or you make the weapon only viable for a very limited amount of playstiles. And that’s why we need more underwater weapons, so that every playstile has a weapon.

If you wanted to make weapons bound to specific playstyles, this game would have had weapons with 3 skill slots. The boon/condition/damage dealing system in GW2 is incredibly shallow and given how most boons/conditions are not only spammed/passively granted for free (and any that aren’t are acquired instantly with the press of a button), but are also tied to skills that already deal direct damage on their own. The only way to actually make class or build-specific playstyles in this game would be to drastically bottleneck the amount of skill slots available to any given player.

Anet won’t do that because they aren’t going to change anything and the playerbase’s mind has already been formed to the game’s norm, so in all honesty, discussion of the reality that you actually want (no matter how sure you are of it in your mind) is entirely moot.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

From what I saw from your rebalanced skills, most of the weapons are only viable for a single playstile.

Yeah, OK, so that’s the part that I’m curious about: what playstyle am I pushing? What’s good or bad about it? You’re just saying “Oh, it’s pushing a single playstyle,” but what does that even mean? How is it just a single playstyle? Don’t be so vague. Give an actual answer or description.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

Simply rebalancing the existing skills won’t help underwater combat and reducing the number of weapon choices will make underwater combat even worse.

Again, worse HOW? What are you even talking about when you say these things? Tell me specifically what the problem is instead of just giving your vague, airy opinion.

While being conceptually lightyears beyond GW2, it has aged very poorly. The game is pretty good as a standalone if you’re willing to learn how to play it, though.

Odokuro.5049:

Yeah this isn’t WoW where you stand still and your character magically dodges/blocks attacks, and having loads of skills on your bar(s) as you do in WoW doesn’t mean you actually use them all, having a bloated skill bar doesn’t make you any better of a player.

GW2 is loaded with bloat that could very easily be condensed, though, and while GW2 players don’t stand still and magically block attacks, they do strafe relatively slowly wherever they please while under the effects of damage negation that is instantly and sometimes even passively activated.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Underwater combat is a prelude to Air to Air combat. Just saying.

/aion

And that’s fine, just as long as they don’t do what they did with underwater combat and make the vast majority of ranged abilities entirely bound to having a selected target while letting all the numbers on skills unravel in weird, arbitrary patterns in relation to their effects. Although, anet is a LONG way from aerial combat if they can’t get any skill to work mid-air except for a few specific “transform” style abilities.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

*Base movement speed while underwater increased by 25%

Why would you move underwater faster than on land? Underwater-movement is already sufficiently fast. It just doesn’t feel like it because you have no ground immediately under your feet to measure your traveling distance.

Fair point. To explain, I have to first make the point of how movement speed is abysmally slow in relation to the speed at which damage travels on land and in the sea. The reason why I propose a 25% base movement speed increase is because of how relevant the z-axis is while underwater. In comparison, while on land, combat is about as isometric as Diablo 2, and thus movement speed is rather strong because all we are doing is moving a hitbox across a flat plane of dangerous damage zones. While underwater, moving and strafing (along with the movement penalties for not necessarily moving directly forward) in three dimensions combined with the spherical shape (although many still remain somewhat cylindrical) of AoEs compounds the effectiveness of movement in general. Making everyone faster would not only help players mitigate incoming damage with actual positioning (since the skills and mechanics that I’ve proposed below have a lot of directionality and aiming to them), but it would also just be a general quality of life upgrade.

It isn’t exactly perfectly necessary, however, it will only increase the amount of player engagement in combat by allowing them to move more freely across an encounter.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

*Players can now finish downed opponents while underwater.

This would require to remove the option to move while downed because currently anyone can just swim away from the enemy that’s about to finish him.

That’s a good point. It’d be easy enough to just do the anet thing and say “underwater downed state immobilizes players,” but that’s too problematic for gameplay since immobilize (for some inane reason) freezes all player axes instead of just the x and the y (which means going to the surface would be impossible, not to mention how someone might accidentally absorb a allied downed player’s perma (or long duration) immobilize with a condition transfer skill.

It’s a problem to consider, but it should be dealt with.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

*Professions now only have access to a single underwater weapon.

And this makes underwatercombat more engaging for what reason? If anything we need more, not less underwater weapons. Being forced to take specific weapons shoehorns the player into a build that he/she doesn’t want to play or isn’t traited and equipped for.

The customization would have to come from the latter 5 skills. The reworks are aimed at providing a base of 5 skills which can be used often and at the discretion of the player in order to legitimately turn the tide of combat in a way that isn’t as demeaningly simple as paper covering rock. Take a look at the rebalanced effects and especially the cast-times/recharge times of the skills above. The reworks result in higher APM, but more importantly, many of the skills have multiple uses built into them aside from just straight damage. With the new GTAoE underwater mechanic combined with the rebalanced attack intervals, movement and positioning skills (which most of those classes now all have in some form) become very powerful and useful in ways that they might not have been before. On top of that, some of the weapons even have viable, consistent melee and ranged options as opposed to them being brutally segregated behind a 10-second wait timer.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

*The weapon swap button remains on classes that have it solely as a button to trigger sigils (as if that’s not already its main purpose most days anyway).

Nope, it isn’t.

I will direct you to the questions raised in the first post of this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Sigil-bloat-solutions/first#post5512595

BunjiKugashira.9754:

I’m sorry to tell you, but I completely disagree with the changes you proposed.

I’m crushed.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

What would make underwater combat and exploring better from my point of view:

• More underwater weapons (including 1h weapons) so that we actually have a choice what to play underwater.

The reason why I consolidated most of the current underwater weapons is exactly because there was so much filler fluff that it makes underwater combat even more spammy than ground combat. Have a look at some of the skills in this thread, and you’ll see how a single weapon set can still be very active so long as skill effects are balanced properly with cooldowns, activation times and conditional effects. We don’t need more skills; we need more sustainable, consistent, well-cued actions which save the player from having little to do but spam 1 while he/she waits for the BASELINE 8-12 SECOND RECHARGE ON A 2 SKILL to come back up.

That also harkens back to what I said about weapon swapping existing to swap sigils: why design a weapon set in which the only skill that can be used repeatedly before the weapon swap timer is even fully recharged is the blasted autoattack? Anet really expected people to be satisfied with pressing their 2-5 buttons (with their typical short activations) and having nothing left to do but autoattack until maybe their 2 skill came back up just in time to swap to another weapon set with fresh cooldowns. Their design is practically begging people to just use the weapon swap button as an energy sigil proc (that is if the player isn’t just slotting one or even both of the same sigils across the two weapons—which does happen very, very often). It’s completely crazy, so I addressed that.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

• Traits and equipment independent from the land build. Instead of using traits that don’t support the underwater weapon or even don’t work at all underwater, we need a seperate underwater build.

There aren’t enough things underwater or unique mechanics in all of GW2 to warrant a separate gear/trait system.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

• More underwater skills. For starters ANet could make underwater versions of the skills that currently aren’t usable underwater. Most (if not all) classes only have a single underwater usable elite skill. This needs to change.

Most of those are GTAoEs. I addressed that with the mechanic I mentioned in the first post. If we can get a mechanic like that implemented (and by implemented, I mean, it’s already basically in the game in its own disassembled form), then it suddenly means that loads and loads of skills can easily be adjusted and included into underwater combat. The rest are just anet not addressing basic concepts like flesh golem dying if it enters the water or some transform abilities not having underwater equivalents (the latter of which is fine by me for the most part).

BunjiKugashira.9754:

• Don’t make underwater areas too crowded with enemies. ANet already reduced the amount of underwater enemies in some areas, but there are still areas that have way more mobs than an average player can handle.

Given that I gave a lot of classes many movement and control options on their weapons now, the only thing that would quickly kill players would be loads and loads of ranged enemies. So long as we cull those to a low number, underwater with the skills up above would be more like a musou game with the player dashing about and crushing mobs of melee NPCs if they’re good enough.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

• Add cosmetic options for underwater. While this may seem unimportant or even useless, GW2 is all about skins. If a player has some nice underwater skins he/she is more likely to go underwater and try the new stuff.

I can’t disagree with more cosmetics. Still seems a little contrived, though, given that there aren’t really any “ground-only” skins aside from helmets given the forced rebreather (but players can even just skin over that).

= ELEMENTALIST TRIDENT =

= GUARDIAN TRIDENT =

= THIEF HARPOON GUN =

• The thief gains reveal upon activating this skill; Thief is revealed while casting.

= ENGINEER HARPOON GUN =

= WARRIOR SPEAR =

= NECROMANCER SPEAR =

= NECROMANCER DEATH SHROUD (UNDERWATER) =

= RANGER SPEAR=

= MESMER SPEAR =

Not many seem to like it. Devs have been removing it bit by bit in order to sweep their mistakes under the rug. And yet despite this, underwater combat—due to its genuine embrace of a true 3D environment which incorporates all three directional axes—has so much untapped combat potential that ignoring it would be a colossal design blunder (especially considering a possible Bubbles the underwater dragon expansion).

By consolidating and re-balancing the underwater weapon options along with the addition of a very specific theoretical targeting mechanic, underwater combat could rival and surpass ground combat in terms of player engagement and fostering a legitimate skill ceiling.

GUTB.8436:

So, on my first character, I am trying to find the fun in the combat system. I’m really struggling. I rolled a Charr Thief.

1. The rune/skill/weapon system in the game seems incredibly counter-intuitive. I’m sure this problem will go away when I learn the game — are there any meaningful tutorials that assumes the system makes no sense and explains everything?

Pick the ones that buff might for PvE. Pick the ones that give you 3 seconds of invulnerability for free in PvP. There are about 3 other rune sets for niche situations, and the rest are worthless bloat. Never use anything but 6 of the same runes. Originally anet commented about how mixing and matching runes for different bonuses was going to be a priority functionality of the system, but they went back on that some years after release given how nobody cared what they did since the system has been poorly designed from the get-go and there have never been more than about 5 or so optimal rune sets out of the dozens that exist.

GUTB.8436:

2. Going by the few ability slots, rotation doesn’t seem complex. In fact, it seems extremely casual. However, the system mixes in action elements like dodging which appear to be necessary in order not to die. To me, Wildstar is a joke because it is too action-oriented — is GW2 going to be plagued with the same problem?

Yes, it’s a casual, bland DPS rotation with some on-demand invulnerability to break it up intermittently. GW2 is even worse off than W* regarding positioning anyway since the dodge gives you full invulnerability, damage is incredibly easy to hit, and nobody actually moves quickly at all in GW2 unless they bring a teleport button (no movement speed boost or movement skill that doesn’t directly teleport you out of line of sight will never mitigate incoming ranged damage by virtue of moving quickly).

GUTB.8436:

3. Thiefs. I understood going into this game really doesn’t have a stealth class, but so far I just don’t see how this character is going to go out ganking anything if the opponent sees you coming a mile away. Escapes seems powerful though…is Thief really just for trolling?

Thieves have always been conceptually overpowered. However, in practice, they are somewhat underpowered because GW2 is balanced around having access to huge amounts of perfect damage/status effect/CC effect negation. Thieves are effectively only just for trolling, yes. Their only legitimate “purpose” is in team fights as a freebie way to get enemy players to pop their panic buttons and get away for free, or as a what could effectively described as a player-shaped Lich Form autoattack on demand (typically only good after everyone has pressed their panic buttons). In short, given how combat is artificially lengthened so drastically by personal, on-demand invulnerability, it makes Thief only effective after about 30 seconds or so of a fight having already dragged on. If you don’t like playing passively around little countdown timers, this isn’t the game for you.

GUTB.8436:

4. Voice acting. It’s….atrocious. Maybe my expectations have been too heavily skewed by WoW and SWTOR, but is there some way to listen to my character in battle without cringing? Do you just become desensitized to it? Are there other races with better voice acting? kitten .

It’s an mmorpg, don’t play it for the voice acting—but yeah, it is pretty cringy.

Zenith.7301:

You do realize splitting bosses would only make the engineer stronger by comparison, right? His damage is consistently cleaved and has no ramp up compared to the necromancer.

Even in the Molten Duo fight, one of the bosses is focused while the other is ignored. The trick, however, is that the two are both attacking and spaced out enough that grenades have no effect on but a single one at a time. There’s also the two examples of guild missions which require simultaneous kills: although the crystal one requires a special gimmick bundle in order to damage the special gimmick object, both missions have the target objects/creatures spaced far out enough that grenades would never deal damage but to a single one at a time (the ogre and the devourers are also on different elevations in addition to being very far apart laterally). Just because there could be multiple enemies doesn’t mean that they all have to always attack the same target or even attack at the same range. That’d be silly.

Zenith.7301:

By all means suggest me a single game whose PvE combat design you approve of and I’ll see if we’re even on the same galaxy of mutual understanding.

Conncept.7638:

These changes are an incredibly slight but overall nerf to the scepter,

And still my point stands about how absolutely nothing has changed regarding scepter usage. Even if you ran the calculations over all 3 skills, it’s the same weapon, and those skills are exactly the same. They changed some numbers and called it a rework. This is the design that anet pushes, and players are willing to watch the numbers go up and down in delight instead of actually imagining playstyles that don’t rely on DPS generated from letting an autoattack run while the relatively massive cooldowns on any other skill tick back down to zero.

The combat relies on passive bonuses and triggers instead of active player maintenance and decision making. It’s not that the use of the autoattack is thickheaded, it’s that the use of the autoattack is overemphasized in GW2 and nobody who plays the game seems to care that the easiest thing to do is often the most important thing to do in combat (or at the very least it comprises the majority of player action given how fast any other skill activates compared to how fast it recharges; it does nothing but create massive wait times between act). That design does nothing but frontload massive wait times onto players and promote passive, skittering play which is only broken when someone has a readied button which negates incoming enemy effects; in the meantime, players are forced to rely on an autoattack and how much it can do passively (base damage, passive trait procs/bonuses, sigil procs, rune procs) while it effortlessly recasts itself on a target. It’s a bit of a farce.

Conncept.7638:

I’m all for adding risky rewarding play, but not until there is a reasonable baseline established to where one decision or one action doesn’t completely define every play experience.

The only thing that separates this game from straight rock, paper, scissors is the mess of particle effects. That’s why I propose the high variety of skill purpose, multiple niche abilities and multiple, small instances of synergy (nothing hamfistedly obvious like “capitalize on the synergy between equipping scepter and then taking the passive bonus that doubles the duration of your scepter-inflicted conditions”).

Zenith.7301:

Well, yeah. You may prefer gimmicks that are hardly ever balanced, but we prefer the hard and practical results.

Playstyles emerge from the restraints imposed on players by properly balanced mechanics. A playstyle is what happens when a player circumvents the natural restraints or drawbacks of an ability. Your hard practicality is just easy damage without a proper hard counter; nothing gets changed and no playstyle exists outside of what a tooltip says a player can do.

I’m pushing soft counterplay through multiple synergy conduits and high variety. You’re pushing what might as well be borderline runescape-tier combat in which damage is so easy to hit that it might as well be a given unless someone just decides to stand out of line of sight or chain invulnerability periods.

Zenith.7301:

In PvE, if a class is to ever be considered for a position, it needs to be competitive with the alternatives. Currently, numberswise, they’re not.

PvE and PvP only see drastic segregation when a game lacks a fundamental, coherent and inclusive design concept. PvE (especially in GW2) is going to be dominated by DPS, but the DPS doesn’t need to be so overtuned that it locks out certain classes by virtue of their lower numbers (and not by virtue of specific playstyles or execution). Anet continues to rely on HP sponges and boss invulnerability to artificially drag out boring combat when they could easily just divide up huge health pools among multiple, dangerous enemies in order to create more engaging and threatening PvE encounters.

meow one twenty.4376:

Erasmus.1624:

Conncept.7638:

So far as math is concerned . . .

Look, I can admire one’s dedication to analysis, but are we seriously obsessing over the effectiveness of a player mashing 1? Is that the pinnacle of the game? It really feels like it (especially with condition builds). Is this what people had in mind with a rework? Is this what people had in mind when “dynamic gameplay” was the buzzword several years ago? It’s really a shame that “more passive damage” and “longer range for your attacks that are already aimed for you and potentially don’t even have projectiles to mitigate” is the “rework” that devs shove out nowadays.

If it only impact Scepter he has a point.

Here’s to hoping it’s universal and applies to Dhuumfire, Fear, etc!

Even if whatever effect you’re discussing is universal, it’s still just a blanket passive that doesn’t actually change how any skill plays or functions. Everything in this game is just what it says on the tin. There is very, very little creative play outside of the cycle of hard counters and what a tooltip allows one to do. This sort of thread is testament to that design.

Silverkey.2078:

Wow so much negative reactions…
Scepter and axe are not bad. They were just lacking a kick. Scepter seems to be getting just that. We don’t know yet all the changes, but this is getting in the right direction.

“Kick” and “right direction” clearly just mean “higher numbers for my skills” to the majority of the playerbase. The usage of the changed abilities has changed in no way whatsoever except in the case of CPC (and even then, that skill is plagued with its own harshly conflicting conceptual design issues). The update raised numbers to appease a bunch of players who didn’t think that their auto-aimed hitscan damage wasn’t easy enough to hit or effective enough on its own despite the lack of counterplay.

Silverkey.2078:

In case you haven’t noticed, the devs recently worked on an elite spec. In terms of creative changes, I think we got something to look forward to!

Not only have the specializations not honestly introduced any legitimately new mechanic to the game (aside from maybe, maybe the “save state” on Chronomancer f5—which still might just be jerryrigged/cannibalized from an already present mechanic in the game), but I myself have already redone the entire necromancer profession on my own in like a week’s total spare time in a way that gives players more to think about than “How much damage does my 1 skill do?” or “How far do I have to walk in order for all of my attacks to hit a guy with auto-aimed hitscan?”

Silverkey.2078:

Also, this confirms they do listen to the forum: most of the changes (the projectile destruction on CPC, the torment on scepter 3, etc…) are changes we specifically ask for.

CPC’s self-inflicted weakness (and the corruption skills’ forced self-condition gimmick is nothing but a worthless nuisance trying to propagate a contrived sense of flavor) holds the skill back. Corruptions need a rework (something that I already did in a holistic manner taking into consideration all aspects of the class, it’s abilities and how damage should be balanced across all classes in the game) and it’s a petty effort to buff CPC in the way that they did (even though it was a suggested change—and one that I had myself already made in my own suggestions); again just another example of “take skill and slap new mechanic onto it.” It’s about as creative as putting a blast finisher onto a skill and calling it improved and more “team oriented” (which has happened plenty of times already).

Silverkey.2078:

If you still have complains, then present some constructive feedback!

This is constructive. I’m laying the facts about the changes bare: they are shallow and simple; lazy efforts that do nothing but make dealing already easy damage even easier than before the update. Criticisms break down the problems, and then solutions can be proposed afterward. Have a whole bunch of solutions to problematic necromancer design features here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Necro-combat-base-heal-support/first

Conncept.7638:

So far as math is concerned . . .

Look, I can admire one’s dedication to analysis, but are we seriously obsessing over the effectiveness of a player mashing 1? Is that the pinnacle of the game? It really feels like it (especially with condition builds). Is this what people had in mind with a rework? Is this what people had in mind when “dynamic gameplay” was the buzzword several years ago? It’s really a shame that “more passive damage” and “longer range for your attacks that are already aimed for you and potentially don’t even have projectiles to mitigate” is the “rework” that devs shove out nowadays.

Silverkey.2078:

• Projectile destruction on corrosive poison cloud! Duration decreased to 8s with pulse every 2s (so more bursty).

DPS is mostly negated unless you want to spend one of your mass condition cleanses/transfers on something other than what you should spend it on: that moment when someone instantly applies 6 lethal conditions onto you with no effort and from range. The contrived flavor on corruption skills bottlenecks their usage in a way that is just a nuisance because it’s better to wait for a player to load you up with conditions to transfer away rather than build them on yourself by using a bunch of corruption skills.

Silverkey.2078:

• axe : range 900
• scepter condi buff, torment on scepter 3 (2 stacks + 1 stack/condition on enemy up to 5)

Direct upgrades are the least creative and interesting ways to “improve the quality of life” of an ability. The playstyle is utterly unchanged and these sort of changes are on par with “reduced rapid fire activation time from kitten to 2.5 s.” I already called this sort of stuff long before. Anet doesn’t do anything but raise and lower numbers. It doesn’t actually generate playstyles or soft counter opportunities.

Silverkey.2078:

• transforms don’t destroy minions

Technically sort of a quality of life change, but mostly again just a direct upgrade. Nothing really to consider aside from how MMs can now take plague, lich or rune of “I’m going to artificially extent combat by 3 seconds because of passive procs” without losing the minion cloud.

1.5/10. It’s pretty much nothing, but it’s exactly what was to be expected.

While Reaper’s Touch received a big update, and I snuck two whirl finishers into two respective off-hand options in order to better provide non-GS synergy with the Reaper whirl trait reworks (the ones that replaced a few sub-par/non-taken Reaper traits), I primarily wanted to draw attention to the healing support capabilities described in this thread’s promoted design.

If you really want to a glimpse of the potential healing support capabilities of Necromancer, take a look at the Blood Magic line (specifically the tier-3 traits) as well as Spectral Armor (including its related tier-3 trait in Soul Reaping). Every suggestion is well within the realm of implementation because they use no mechanic that isn’t already within the game. I’ve also been debating on shuffling around a few traits in the Blood Magic line in order to provide a Necromancer with more healing options. The whole point is to make Necromancer more layered and engaging as the player decides what kind of role he/she wants to take within combat.

Retaliation: the condition. Please stop, I just ate.

Rym.1469:

1. You seem to like Elementalist

I mainly like proper cues and cast times that are balanced with their effects. I did drop a lot of shoutouts to lava font and fireball mainly because they are very nicely cued (which allows for some soft counterplay by the opponent while also providing versatile usage for the player utilizing them) while still being very effective and rewarding should they land a hit.

Rym.1469:

2. Some of your suggestions are extremaly complicated or niche.

The only reason this is potentially a bad thing is because GW2 is super homogenized and bland across all classes. Nobody has any real roles and DPS dominates everything because the devs kept caving to people asking for nonsense buffs in a game that never had a well-established cooperative, role-based combat system from the start. A high number of niche options per class would allow for more opportunities for counterplay that isn’t “press the stability button,” “press the invulnerability period button,” or “press the button that removes the conditions.”

Rym.1469:

3. You try fo use skill names from GW1. Always a plus.

I try. Functional flavor is tragically absent in GW2. Many skills in this game are just bland abilities that try to pander to nostalgia instead of being something legitimately useful or unique which can be used to define a specific playstyle.

Goldenrevolver.4371:

i wont get my hopes up so much. “redesign” and “rework” seems way too much work and rightly so. axe and scepter need buffs not reworks. they shouldnt completely change everything.

Time for Necromancer rapid fire spam. It only makes sense that the playerbase would want this. They know nothing else by this point.

While weapon swaps wouldn’t need a cooldown if this game were actually designed and balanced properly, death shroud’s potential sudden health gain due to its “second health bar” effect along with related trait triggers warrant a short cooldown period.