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I, and likely many others, finished the achievement Fashion Forward long ago; have 1,000 unique skins in your wardrobe. I enjoyed adding to this one (the little unlock popup is always satisfying) as well as lording over my friend who is much more fashion-obsessed but has fewer than me. At the very least, it was interesting to have a numeric counter of how many skins I had, but it stops counting at a thousand. I would be happy to have more tiers to pursue, and for achievement hunters I would imagine it would at least slightly spur skin acquisition, which is a good thing for Anet.
A tiny suggestion but there was nowhere else to put it, so now it’s out there.
The last feature patch added/changed some things in starter maps. The new hearts are near the western entrance of the map; one just a bit north, at the farm below the ramp (where the cattle-prodding event takes place), the heart tends not to pop up until you’re right inside. The other is further north at the cannon range, where skritt steal cannon balls.
Note that if you already completed the map the game still treats it as “complete”, in that you won’t get any new map completion rewards or anything.
Pretty simple question…Reaper’s Precision, a trait that gives you a chance to gain life force on critical hits. Does this work in Death Shroud?
I don’t know whether the OP wanted free slots or an increase to account maximum, though either would be nice. For people who don’t make a lot of alts I’m sure 64 sounds like way more than you could ever need, and I thought it would be more than enough when it first started, but with how many characters I have/plan and the addition of Revenants, I think I’ll honestly be right on the edge. Since this is only the first expansion and the unknown future could still bring more new professions or races, 64 could easily end up not being enough.
It alleviates that problem, but causes new ones. New traits might be harder to implement, but are also the kind of thing people already want and may expect from an expansion. My worry is that this would eliminate the variety and freedom of having many different weapons in favor of your weapon being basically chosen for you by your specialization.
I know the devs aren’t actually able to just go through and answer the many questions buzzing through the forum right now, but I figured I’d at least raise this concern in the hopes of it being answered whenever more specialization info is released.
Like many I’m pretty jazzed about professions being able to use new weapons, but the description from the unveiling worries me. Currently weapon choice is all about variety; each build type/profession has their arguably “best” weapon, but you can still typically mix and do fine, put your own spin on a build, or just use whatever your playstyle prefers or you find most fun.
Unless I’m misunderstanding, though, it sounds like the new weapon usage is tied specifically to the specializations, i.e. druid to staff, which worries me. If they are indeed specialization-bound that would mean that every ranger that wants to use a staff will be forced to become a druid. Likewise, every ranger that becomes a druid will feel obligated to use the staff, weapon that seems tailored to whatever unique abilities that specialization grants.
This has the potential to wipe out a lot of build variety and freedom, since I think it can be safely assumed that most characters will take a specialization, and subsequently be cornered into limited weapon choice. Adding staff use to allow druid-type rangers is great, forcing them together not so much. Hopefully when info is released we can get some details on how this works.
There’s no “only times” on when slots are on sale. They might come on sale for a holiday, for an in-game event, when a “one item per day for a month is on sale” thing is going on just because they feel like it. You’ll just have to keep an eye on them.
Probably because this year we have Dry Top to provide a steady supply of quartz into the economy, when last year it was just whatever people sold from their home nodes.
If they implemented a Hero system that let me use my alts in a party, and each needed gems to unlock, I would be both incredibly happy and willing to buy dozens of those unlocks, as many as I needed.
As an admitted altoholic, whenever I make a new character, I pull out a total makeover kit from my bank and see if any of the unique effects fit them better. There are some problems with this, though; the window for seeing your face is smaller, and I’ve already settled on a face I like in case I don’t change it. The new faces are pre-adjusted by your existing facial customization settings, potentially distorting them in a way that obscures the options compared to being able to look at the default faces side by side.
The suggestion is to be able to “send the kit to creation”, so to speak, something like a transmutation charge. Next time you create a character, the new faces/hair/colors are available, with default appearances and the larger chargen size. If you pick options that need it, a popup warning lets you know that making the character will consume a kit. It would be much easier for me to use the kit for a new face, than to replace an existing one, in that way. A less coding-intensive option may be to let the creation screen detect if your account has any kits in the bank and give the option that way, allowing them to remain in the bank to be used in creation OR to modify an existing character.
You’re definitely overthinking it, I’m afraid. The book sounds to me like they’re simply recommending that the people of Tyria flee, and it’s not new information. People have been jumping on every hint of Tengu since launch, but this really doesn’t seem like anything more than a mention of them; simply acknowledging a race doesn’t mean they’re becoming playable.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t any. There could be multiple clans of them just hanging out in a mountain somewhere avoiding all the chaos. It would really be as simple as Anet saying “look what decided to come out of the mountain!”.
It does mean that, actually. The rite of the Great Dwarf transformed ALL of them, the entire race, whether they wanted it or not. There are no holdout clans.
I think people who play other genders are creeps (unless it’s a game where you have no choice. Then it’s fine. Or if you get some bonus out of it like in Fire Emblem)
Authors must be the creepiest creeps in the world. Being able to imagine a character who’s not you is the sign of a weirdo!
Let’s see, confessions…
*If I had absolute power I would immediately and without explanation kick anyone from the map who asks “when’s karka” or “is karka dead” and so on.
*My characters are chosen by attempted symmetry; I initially planned a total of 20 characters separated between two each of every race and gender. Any additional future characters will continue this even distribution and I probably will condemn some to nonexistence if it leaves me with an uneven number.
*I’ve never looked at or cared about the meta and base all my builds on concepts that seem interesting. Sometimes the results are bad, and that character is doomed.
*I refuse to change builds outside their concept and have subsequently never had more than one armor set per character. I.e., if I have a minion-master necro, I will only change her stats or traits to better match that build concept. If I need a non-minion build, I will use/make a different necromancer.
*I’ve played this multiplayer game regularly since beta and have never done most of the dungeon paths because I don’t like interacting with people or strangers.
*I went more than a year without joining a single guild. When I finally did, it was a close friend’s own friends-only guild. I’m currently the only active member and have never done any guild missions.
*My number one cause of death in the game is probably accidentally dodge-rolling off of jumping puzzles.
*An unstoppable bot has dominated Crab Toss for a long time now, but I haven’t reported it partly because its skills are so impressive.
As for materials, my guess is that it’s because the new rewards for leveling and personal story include a fair amount of materials, so there has naturally been an influx of supply/reduction of demand.
Weapon skins, I’m not sure. I have to assume it would be a wealthier minority of players who can buy OR sell those, not a group that would reflect shrinking as much. If I had to guess it probably has something to do with the new Black Lion Collections.
There’s a very small gap between when the skeletons are summoned, and when the lich applies retaliation to them. If the group is stacked on the boss and ready to blast AoE as soon as they appear, most of them can be wiped out safely, in doing so eliminating most of the threat.
I know, I know, it’s a trait thread. But I had some thoughts that I felt might be able to target a few issues players have had since launch, at the same time as some newer ones brought on by the trait system changes. And just posting into the nearly 3,000-reply traits thread would be like trying to show off to an empty room this neat cactus I grew in the middle of the desert.
Now, as I see it there are three main components to a character build: skills, traits, and equipment. A player generally has most, if not all, of the skills they need for their build at around level 31. Equipment tends to be replaced so frequently as you level up that there’s not much point trying to maintain a specific attribute spread until 80, as many players (especially newer ones) are going to be willing or able to deal with the mid-range material costs of frequently crafting new armor sets.
As I’m sure I don’t need to go into detail on, the current trait unlock system demands a lot of tasks that are well beyond the level that you would unlock that trait. For a new player who doesn’t know what these events and tasks are, it would be particularly overwhelming. The result is that you’re often unable to really even -start- getting your traits until level 80, when you have the freedom to run all over the world, as buying them is again not a very appealing option for new players.
This means that from roughly level 30-80 there is almost no progression or substantial change for a character. It can create a rather boring sense of limbo, one that new players may not even be sure if/how it will end. However, I can understand that even if the system were universally disliked (I’m not going to pretend I have any way of knowing what percentage of players like or dislike the system compared to the old) there are always going to be corporate bigwigs who will refuse to admit error on new designs. I do think there’s a way this unlock system can be changed for the better, though.
One of the recurring complaints I’ve seen in other areas is having little reason to ever return to your home instance. It particularly struck me while playing a new Charr alt, finishing up my order-choosing quests and hearing the NPC’s talk about my warbound doing citadel business “until I get back”. Which I never, ever do. Every race ends up with all these friends and allies they’ve built up and never really see again.
My suggestion is small, instanced quests to unlock traits. As a simple example, a Charr taking their warband to a castrum to take out some Flame Legion. The quests available could vary with race, profession, and trait tree; an engineer doing less combative tasks for an Inventions trait like the tank repair that gets you the Tailpipe Bandana, or a human guardian working with priests of one of the 6 gods. They might have limitations such as once per day or a skill point fee to engage in, and they reward you with an unlock point that lets you get a trait from the relevant tree and tier.
This would allow for a more intuitive method of unlocking traits, which characters of any level can participate in and always have access to, and give them a reason to return “home” and a way to spend more time with the characters they met in the personal story.
I understand that a double function of the current system is to encourage the player base to spread out into events and areas they might otherwise ignore, but instead of traits, I feel the perfect ability to tie to wandering is epic skills. Very few builds could be considered as revolving around an epic skill, and so their absence is not going to be as severely felt. It’s also a great way to implement new such skills, which I’m sure many players want as well. There would be a much more “relevant” feel, such as a necromancer skill tied to the Bria event, or an engineer skill to the Inquest Golem Mark 2.
Anyhow, I always tend to ramble, so hopefully this wasn’t too ridiculously long…
As far as being unreliable, it should be noted that the last feature patch broke minions. While they’ve never been fully reliable, since then their AI has been a disaster that leaves them standing around more often than not. Until that’s fixed, it’s obviously not the best time for testing them, let alone using them full time.
To answer the question, yes, sigils still work in Death Shroud, assuming they still apply (weapon swapping doesn’t work inside since naturally you can’t swap weapons, etc). The on-criticals are fine.
As a “non-serious” build, it seems fine. It’s a little unusual, but since most necromancer utilities aren’t very wrapped up in your attributes, the focus on the necromancers own damage output means the non-traited minions shouldn’t matter much.
The main problem with the passive eating lifeforce is that the death shroud mechanic is the necromancer’s main form of damage-absorption, in the absence of blocks, movement skills, invincibility, etc. A healing skill that’s always draining your supply is kind of going against the mechanic; you need the healing just to undo the extra damage you’ll take without death shroud. However, I can see that working as part of the active, perhaps consuming your lifeforce in one go and healing you on the amount lost.
The passive and active both need work. As it is now, by returning a portion of health the passive basically functions as a damage-reduction signet. Because of the ICD and the flat return (which means the harder the hit, the less efficient the return), however, it performs below pretty much every other such signet. It is a healing signet that doesn’t heal you, and a damage-reduction signet that skews toward being less effective the more aggressively you are attacked, which is exactly when you need either signet.
When active, it provides a moderate-at-best heal and a dysfunctional unique condition. To be fully utilized, a party needs to be coordinated to strike exactly when the heal is used. At best, several people get a modest damage and heal bonus. The necromancer has to be prepared to maximize their hits immediately after using it…when they need healing, and as such are probably at their least aggressive. It is a struggle to achieve mediocrity. At worst, in WvW/world boss situations, the condition stacks will be stripped instantly by the zerg; your healing is being literally stolen by allied players, while in PvP the enemy can easily avoid the effect.
There are many other ways it could work. Make the passive siphon health whenever you gain life force, or inflict a single stack of the vampirism effect on enemies that hit you. Make the active allow siphoning in death shroud, or as mentioned above, consume boons on the target. I could go on and on. Left as it is, it’s just a very clearly inferior skill.
Is it? Well I’m alarmingly dumb. I guess after leaving at about the same time as the week transition and seeing all the other categories filled I just spaced out on what was actually done.
EDIT: I guess this topic can go ahead and be closed/trashed/whatever the mods do with it, if the resolution was so easy.
After a few days away from home and the computer, I logged in to grab my participation for the last week of the tournament before it ended. Only…I can’t? Nothing I do in WvW seems to actually add an event to the competitive achievements . I wish I had more specific factors to offer, but that’s really about all there is to it. I was able to log in on Friday to get last week’s rewards, and haven’t logged in until this evening, in case the recent patch is related. I visited the borderlands, eternal battlegrounds, and edge of the mists…still 0/5 events despite more than 5 having been done.
I’d really hate to miss out on tickets because of a bug, considering that these tournaments are the only place to get them, not to mention the title for all 4 weeks.
The video even says “even while handicapped”. The point isn’t that off-hand dual skills are bad, but that there’s no incentive to take them other than “for the heck of it”. Even choosing them solely as a personal style choice is badly hindered by the mechanics that force your alternate to be shortbow or nothing. You’re losing not just the 4 and 5 skills, but the stats and upgrade slot of an additional equipped weapon. Someone with a character build specifically to the meta may still lose a duel to an experimental character; maybe the fight just went badly for them as some do, maybe they’re not used to fighting that sort of enemy, maybe the other player was just more skilled. None of that disproves any of the imbalances that cause the meta in the first place.
I think it became that way as more of a side effect than intentional feature. There’s no “default” #3 weapon skill for thieves, since their class mechanic is that it’s determined by the combination of their weapons. So rather than stuff another mechanism beneath that, they just made an empty hand count as another combination for that skill. It put those attacks in a rather strange place, since I doubt they much expected people to use them, so they’ve just been sort of swept under the rug without being either removed or justified.
It’s too bad, because making “single wielding” like that more viable would create some more interesting variation in build variety, and I’m sure many people would enjoy it as a stylistic choice alone. There are plenty of things you could do with it, like traits for buffs with an empty hand, or even making the 4 and 5 slots bare-handed attacks like dazing your enemy with a sand throw or lengthening their weapon cooldowns with a disarming grab. As it is with the auto-equip mechanics, not many people would sacrifice an off-hand weapon for it, especially when doing so forces you to either take a shortbow alt or have no other weapon set at all.
That’s unfortunate. It could be so easily changed to allow both functions by just putting a bare hand icon in the options when you click the off-hand slot. I suppose I’ll have to just add that to the list of easy improvements that will never happen.
So I was playing around with my new thief and decided to try the empty off-hand “dual” skills. I realize that they’re not going to be worth having an empty hand, but I wanted to play with them just for the sake of trying it out.
Except, it’s apparently impossible to do that as an alternate weapon? If I have dagger/dagger as my main set and equip only a pistol as my alternate, switching automatically gives me pistol/dagger. The only way it seems possible for me to use those obscure skills is to be equipped with only that dual weapon and have no alt at all, except maybe shortbow.
Is this a bug, or how it’s intentionally (albeit annoying and frustratingly) supposed to work?
Suggestions:
-Remove the internal cooldown, from both sides. Other damage mitigation signets don’t only protect you from half of incoming attacks, and no rapid-but-weak style of attack is weak enough to make this healing signet actually heal you as-is. For the active, the extra hits in 6 seconds could actually provide health comparable to other healing skills.
-Make the passive give you a passive lifesteal on attack, and the active increase the effect/expand it to the party. The boring option, but the one that confused everyone as to why the signet wasn’t this in the first place.
-In the theme of drawing power in general and from death in particular, make the passive similar to Bloodthirst, but increasing with the number of conditions on the necromancer or with percentage of life missing. Active effect activates Death Shroud, with life siphoning still temporarily functional.
-The passive restores some health whenever the necromancer gains life force. The active creates a temporary effect that, if a target is killed during it, ends the effect and restores a large amount of health, like a death-based A.E.D.
Hopefully this wasn’t too long and rambling…a signet of “vampirism” is something I’d hoped for for a long time, and now I’m just hoping Anet notices and attends to its many flaws.
Having been using this skill recently, I felt it was noticeably underperforming, and wanted to play with some ideas on why and how might be helped. The numbers are taken from the wiki.
The passive effect of the signet heals you for 325 when you’re hit at level 80, with a one second cooldown. The active effect marks an enemy for 6 seconds with 25 stacks of an effect that makes anyone who hits it siphon life from them (while stripping one stack), with a siphon damage of 201 and heal of 392. This active drain has a one second cooldown as well. In addition to the active effect, using the signet gives an initial heal of 3,960.
For comparing one healing skill to another, the most important factor is naturally how much health it gives you, versus the cooldown time. Because of the 1 second cooldown, the most the player can hope to siphon from their target is 6 times, combining with the initial heal for a total of 6,312, with a cooldown of 35 seconds. This compares to Well of Blood (initial plus all pulses) with 6,640 and 40 seconds, Consume Conditions with 5,240 and 25 seconds, and if one were to use Summon Blood Fiend and immediately consume it, 3,960 and 20 seconds.
While this looks comparable on the surface, the context is where the signet falls behind. The drain assumes an ideal situation where you get the maximum number of hits, and only goes down from there. Consume Conditions can heal dramatically more if you have multiple conditions on you (which is often going to be the case when you need a heal), with the substantial bonus of removing those conditions, with a faster cooldown. Well of Blood has substantial trait support including reduced cooldown, added protection and health siphoning, and the possibility of being cast outside normal use via reviving. Both of these skills scale considerably better than the signet with healing power, as well.
Blood Fiend is harder to compare, but with a passive heal of 926 every 3 seconds, the signet requires the necromancer to get hit every second for comparable numbers, which is going to lead to death pretty quickly. While the minion can be destroyed, it also has the fastest cooldown. The only necromancer heal that can’t have its cooldown reduced with a trait is Consume Conditions, which is still going to recharge faster than the signet anyway.
Its passive effect means the Signet of Vampirism basically functions as a strange, overcomplicated damage mitigation, with some damage returned as health instead of reducing the damage. However, its low rate (barely helped by healing power) and internal cooldown means it’s damage mitigation that becomes less effective the more aggressively the necromancer is attacked, which is when it’s needed most. Slow, weak hits are not likely to put the character in much danger in the first place. The active effect provides moderate healing at best if you scrabble for it, with a long casting time and cooldown. The exchange for this is that the target-marking effect lets a party all heal from the victim. While party-aid is an area the necromancer is notoriously bad at, sacrificing your own survivability in exchange for a very modest group heal (scarcely over 2000 hitpoints for an ally, assuming the timing works out for them to take advantage in the first place) isn’t a very appealing option for a class whose survivability is supposed to be a key factor.
I understand not wanting to turn the active effect into basically a duplicate of Litany of Wrath, but there are other ways the skill could be improved. My suggestion would be to turn it more toward that survivability, where it suffers badly; a healing signet that doesn’t heal you at all while passive is a problem. Some ideas on what might be changed will be below, since I apparently went to long on this one.
This has probably been asked before, but the wiki doesn’t clarify and the forum search gives zero results for the word “terror”, so…
Simple question about Terror, the trait which causes Fear to inflict damage; is this damage just when the fear is caused, or does it pulse per second? If it’s the former, is it tied to the moment of casting or is it wasted by stacking another fear before the first has worn off?
It’s an interesting idea, but very…“alone”, so to speak. It doesn’t seem to synergize well with guardian builds in general, since all the things that could help it stretch you out among other trees. Condition duration is up in Zeal. You’d presumably want high precision for an on-critical trait, but Radiance is half Condition Damage, which won’t do Chill any good…and now you’re focusing on criticals for the Guardian’s slowest weapon, and condition damage when their primary source of burning relies on attack speed! Meanwhile the trait for reduced two-handed weapon recharge, desirable for a hammer for obvious reasons, is down in Honor.
As it is, there aren’t many build options for which it would seem very vital, and so at best, it’s just a trait for if your build just happens to go there, and just happens to not really need any of the other available traits. And it’s okay in that case, but…that’s about all it is.
Just to bump this with more info, it also seems to be happening if the mesmer is downed.
As I recall the main changes were some quests and instances regarding the Mad King’s son, the Bloody Prince, hence the title. The previous content (labyrinth, jumping puzzle, PvP game) were still there and pretty much the same. So, I have no reason to think previous rewards will not become available again.
My guess on what’s happening is that being larger gives your character a longer stride, and therefore a higher base speed compared to a regular-sized character. Or, it could be one of several cases that are an exception to the rule, such as the elementalist’s One with Air trait that grants superspeed. Just guesses unfortunately, I’m not in a position to mess around with the signet at the moment.
I don’t think gear is doing that…have you checked your traits? Since you last played a year ago there have been changes to both the trait system and trait balance itself; in situations where it changes your build (such as a Master trait you were using moving to Adept) the game would refund your trait points automatically. It may be that your characters are dying because they have nothing invested in traits.
Magic find improves your drops, that’s the whole point, but making a difference is hard to measure. Luck increases very slowly, and a few percentage points makes a negligible difference, so you’re not really going to notice a change. Even if your results are substantially better your mind will have been gradually adapted to that as the new normal instead of a sudden realization that drops are better. Rare items are still rare, and RNG being what it is two people can try testing but have particularly lucky/unlucky streams that seem to contradict their MF.
That said, I would consider it worth it, at least in the sense of salvaging blues and greens instead of selling them. While it seems contradictory to raise your chances of getting items just to spend more money on salvaging them, you’re also raising your chances of things you want for their value, and will eventually hit the cap and be able to fully enjoy the fruits of your MF. As for whether assorted boost items are worth it, that’s more up to you and your resources. For example, doubling your MF would make an item with a 1% chance of dropping, grow to 2%. It makes a difference, but you’re not going to be rolling in exotics, and how much boost you want to go out of your way for is your choice.
The maximum account MF is +300%, I believe. However, I don’t know how the occasional boosts from achievement points stack with the bonus from luck, and whether the AP bonuses are wasted after reaching 300% or if they stack separately.
The last megaboss who required active use of individual skill was the giant marionette. IMO that megaboss was awesome, requiring little organization and lots of individual skill.
It featured a HUGE drawback however : the boss could miserably fail because 5 weak players can get grouped on the same platform and make an entire lane fail their platform phase. And trust me failing an entire megaboss/your lane because of 5-10 weak players and bad luck is an infuriating experience.
This is why I am in favor of bosses that require organization rather than skill : if you fail the boss, it’s also your fault for you could have done more to set up the teams.
Seeing hordes of players afking at tequatl on the bumper is stressing and infuriating because your are basically forcing others to do the lower work of getting teams ready.
Trust me, I got more than my fill of other people failing the Marionette for me. However, from the point I was trying to make I would file that more under organization, in the sense of being penalized by other people outside your control . You can do more to try and set up teams, but you have no power over whether anyone listens or their performance at the task.
The individual skill I suggested is in regards to a boss like the Shatterer and how you approach them. I enjoyed fighting the Marionette more than most bosses because it felt like I was doing something; I could pile torment on fleeing clockworks or chase them with movement skills in the effort to keep them from the portal. Every enemy I killed reduced the strain on my lane. When I once used Signet of Undeath to revive 3 downed players on my platform, I felt like I made a difference.
In my opinion the problem with that boss was not the use of individual skill, but the mechanics that made victory and sudden failure so tenuous. For example, the ability to help adjacent platforms after your clearing your own would have been great. More skilled players could compensate for less skilled ones instead being crippled by a “weakest link” effect. Or instead of stage-based damage the boss could have had a health bar that was reduced by how many platforms were successful, instead of the whole thing being blasted by an underpopulated lane leaving a platform to be managed by 2 people. There are many other ways it could have gone.
Similar concepts could be applied to the Shatterer, and the way it plays out. The individual skill>organization I seek is in the way you fight the boss that makes it fun, the things that made the Marionette awesome, in your words. The mechanics I seek are ones that still make the player base’s performance as a whole what brings victory or loss.
I think the middle ground is in requiring players to use their individual skill, but not mass organization. I remember back when the game was new, the first times I fought the Shatterer it actually felt like a threat…and as I recall it’s actually been buffed since then. I didn’t know its mechanics, and more importantly, had not yet learned about foot-stacking.
Without that knowledge I was running around in what seemed like the appropriate place to be; in -front- of the dragon, shooting at it, dealing with enemies and purple fire breath. Other people could help of course, but my survival relied most on my own actions, dodging projectiles and not getting overwhelmed by branded minions. There were no more “mechanics” to the fight than there are now, but not surprisingly, this was also the most fun I had fighting the boss.
Removing the security blankets of safe spots and stacking would do wonders for a lot of bosses like the Shatterer, without the need for adding mechanics that require mass organization. A powerful area attack, like a foot stomp, which prioritizes high player density for targeting would help. Perhaps a form of scaling resistance, which makes a spot take less damage the more people that are targeting it, encouraging them to spread out and attack all the weak spots at once. As it is, the ability to mass-apply healing and boons to each other makes stacking in one spot a nearly unbeatable tactic for bosses, yet in any kind of real combat situation, “never spread out” is only going to last until your enemy finds a single grenade. If stacking is made more of a liability, people will have to actually fight to survive, using their own dodging and healing (which incidentally will probably make support characters more noticed and appreciated) instead of just taking advantage of a fountain of help by standing near each other.
The ice spikes at the Claw of Jormag’s second phase are a good mechanic, requiring people to spread out in an obvious fashion without any need for organization or directions. The role of siege could maybe be made similar to this, rather than the more boring option of sitting in one spot at the edge of combat firing a gun at the same spot over and over. Perhaps the mortars are less effective at direct damage, but the dragon periodically shields itself with crystals that the mortar can destroy more easily than players. In addition to the healing phase, individual healing crystals might occasionally pop up and cause problems (or instead of healing, spawning crystals that release a flood of minions). Attacking them on foot is difficult and dangerous, but cannons can do damage and clear out large groups of enemies. Mechanics like this would make siege something valuable that players will run to when needed, without pinning them to the spot or needing pre-made teams.
Upon downloading the feature patch today, a huge 554kb .txt file named “THIRDPARTYSOFTWAREREADME” appeared in my game folder. It seems to be briefly mentioned in the User Agreement, but never existed in the folder before, while a friend of mine downloaded the patch and did not receive the file. I’m not sure what, if anything, this means (dense legalese is hard enough to flounder through even without the migraine entertaining me today), but large text files about third-party software appearing from nowhere make me uneasy.
Should I be concerned about this? I have never used or attempted to use any third-party programs with the game, but I don’t want to somehow get in accidental trouble because I accidentally received a legality-related file or something.
When the patch first dropped I was lucky enough to be part of the server’s very first attack on Scarlet, and things overall went fine. After we killed the three assault knights and entered the portals, Scarlet muttered some things and paced in front of the controls, presumably to give players a moment to file in before the fight started. She then introduced the hologram and attacked.
Every single time I’ve fought her since, whether main server or overflow, once the knights are dead and the portals open the fight is already started before we get in there. We’re not just missing the introduction, according to the timer in the last one I did it had been waiting for five minutes before people were getting in there. Additionally, it seems that the hologram is almost always firing a beam right into the door, causing people to spawn into the damage zone. It’s annoying in itself to potentially start out dead, but it also makes the achievement to dodge those beams immediately impossible.
sooo leatherworkers get treated great..
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: ExtraCosmic.9082
I would say these recipes are a step in the right direction, actually. The reason damask is dramatically more expensive isn’t just that it takes more of a harder to get resource to make, but because recipes demand so much more of it. It takes more bolts of damask than deldrimor steel to make heavy armor. Those first Dwayna/Grenth themed ascended backpieces both required a ton of damask.
It’s unfortunate that the one recipe asks so much more of the player, but having versions that actually use the other materials will help toward equalizing the prices.
I was expecting a new topic as well, but, it looks like this is the one so here goes…
I dabble in PvP and WvW now and then, but the vast majority of my playtime is in PvE. I like making new builds and characters so I’m spread across several professions, and wouldn’t really say I have a main one.
Problems
The troubles with the ranger can basically be summed up as such; no other profession is forced to rely so heavily on their class mechanic, and no other profession can have their class mechanic so completely disabled. That’s not a good combination. Many ranger abilities are weaker as “compensation” for the pet, but unless you build focused on it you’re just left as a sub-par character with a dead pet. A huge number of ranger traits and skills are pet-centric compared to other class mechanics, suffocating build variety, and either leaving a character built away from the pet full of holes, or making them even more overdependent on a minimally-controlled and easily lost companion.
Solutions
The pet needs to be something that is seamlessly used with varied builds, instead of feeling so central yet out of your hands. Any thief can benefit from using Steal now and then, but only a thief that’s heavily built around the mechanic will truly suffer for not using it. That sort of “casual advantage” may not be possible for pets without completely rebuilding the mechanic, but they can still be made more of a passive boost for any ranger.
More control is vital, so that the pet can behave in a way befitting whatever build the ranger is. “Protect Me” should be an AI mode, not a utility. In this state the pet draws greater aggro, and the ranger gains some damage reduction. In the aggressive mode it has greater move and attack speed, by which I mean speed of animation more than rate, so that so many melee attacks can’t be easily avoided by just strafing. It would also gain bonus backstab/flanking damage against enemies ignoring it, working with the ranger instead of beside them. Passive pets would not engage in combat, and instead provide a buff that varies with the species.
The last one especially would allow rangers who aren’t focused on the pet to still benefit from the mechanic non-intrusively. I would also recommend being able to heal the pet when it’s downed, to keep it from being so easily taken away. This doesn’t seem imbalanced, as it adds the risk of prematurely setting the skill on cooldown when the ranger may need it next. To further boost the pet’s versatility while filling some of the holes in other builds, some pet-oriented traits could be tied to these modes, such as by boosting flanking damage or passive buffs.
It seems that since the latest updates my client can no longer survive large groups of players. While mobs have always been prime territory for the game to have issues, I’ve never had any particular trouble like this before recently, and nothing has changed with my computer or performance in other games. There are no in-game signs of problems, beyond the level of slowdown that are typical of huge crowds in combat, and then the client instantly and quietly dies, only leaving a popup asking me if I want to send the report to Anet.
This has happened in the Edge of the Mists, against the Claw of Jormag, Tequatl, the Shatterer, and the Karka Queen, making me incapable of participating in them. I’ve been playing in these events and similar for months since culling was removed, so I’m disinclined to think the problem is on my end. I dislike having to waste time at an event I’ll be unable to finish or get rewards for, but if needed I’ll go to the next one and crash again in order to get another report to copy/paste from.
While Anet has mentioned plans to create new weapons, this is understandably a daunting task; on top of creating and balancing entirely new skills and animations, you’ve got dozens of new models and skins that must be provided with them all at once.
At least some of that could be bypassed by allowing some weapons to be used both above and below water. I’ve also seen complaints about interesting, hard-to-get skins that are then never seen because they’re confined to such a small part of gameplay. Spears and tridents (which, let’s face it, are just spears) are some of humanity’s oldest weapons, and some sort of polearm-type is exactly one of the weapon forms missing in terrestrial combat.
The main problem I’d see is how transitioning would work, since you’d either need to change the current mechanic or require someone to equip two spears to wield one both in and out of water. But, that seems like a smaller technical problem than the effort that would be saved utilizing all these mostly-ignored spears.
The release preview page refers us to this page to see the upcoming changes. However, that page was last updated a month ago and still mentions that the changes listed are not final. Are they in fact exactly what we can expect to see? I don’t want to go through the effort of making trait comparisons for all my characters to figure out what I may be changing, only to find out it was wrong and do it all over again.
Rangers take a lot of flack for being underpowered or crippled. I think a substantial amount of this comes from the way their class mechanic, compared to other professions, aggressively and sometimes obnoxiously shoves its way into everything they do.
For example, I could make a minion-based necromancer, or one that focuses on marks and wells. Neither of these build options would be directed at traits to improve the Life Force mechanic, and they aren’t forced to lean on it. Yet it’s potentially useful for any necromancer, at the very least as temporary damage absorption. It doesn’t get in the way or demand my attention.
Rangers, by comparison, don’t have the same luxury in making builds. A huge amount of their skills and trait options are tied to pets, and it’s nearly impossible to make a build that’s not heavily influenced by it. You can make a pet-oriented build, just as every other class can build specifically around their unique mechanic, but the ranger forcibly has one foot in it no matter their build.
The result is a mechanic that in some ways actually siphons from the profession’s abilities. While the pet is always there to absorb or deliver damage, if you’re not built around it, your skills being half dedicated to it is like throwing some of your stats into a void. Just like any mechanic, if you don’t trait toward it at all its impact will be minimal, but the weakened pet can easily die and leave me without its passive boost. I’m left with piles of half-functional skills and no benefit to counter them.
My idea is to expand the mechanic to include a more passive, less “demanding” function: the option to stow your pets, and in their place, gain a passive boost. Similar to how the engineer and elementalist’s class mechanics functionally let them equip more skills at once, this would be like allowing the ranger to have a couple more traits equipped. You could have your pet out and fighting, or put away and buffing you. Switching would be outside of combat.
This could allow for much more build freedom by giving every animal type a different buff when stowed. Black Bear giving a chance to weaken on critical hits, as a random thought. Skills that effect both player and pet could offer a temporary boost to whatever the pet grants; Heal As One, if you have an on-critical pet boost like above, might grant temporary on-critical life siphoning.
There would be a lot of work and balancing to all this, of course, but I think it could be an effective way to allow the mechanic to benefit all rangers, instead of benefit one type and just kind of be “there” for all the others.
@Delvoire
Actually, there is one thing that makes me think they did NOT have the removal of MF in mind when they added Celestial, and that is the Triforge Amulet. It has the same stats as a Celestial amulet, but has been around a long time, and was likely the basis for how those items were balanced.
While I don’t agree that the MF was the only point of the set, I do think some sort of “compensation” is warranted, purely in comparison to other MF equipment like Traveler’s and Wayfarer’s. As everyone knows, standard exotics all give you the same three stat numbers, with different selections of stats. The MF on those sets replaces a third stat.
Those sets were, presumably, made to be balanced against other options. While you can’t really measure the worth of Magic Find against combat stats, the fact remains that, through whatever process, Anet determined those few points of MF to be of roughly equal value to the third attribute they replaced. If you removed the MF from Wayfarer’s or Traveler’s you would be left with blatantly inferior items. The presence of Magic Find IS considered to be worth some amount of combat attributes, as far as game balance goes.
Unless you want to argue that Celestial was added either with the knowledge thakittens MF attribute would soon be removed or was knowingly unbalanced, I would have to assume thakittens attributes were also determined with this MF. Like the other MF sets, I have to assume that it is considered to be of equivalent worth to some amount of combat stats, and was placed there INSTEAD of them.
It’s not my place to claim how many attributes it’s worth, as personal experience is a poor position for arguing game-wide balance to begin with and I’m not about to craft a bunch of expensive sets just to test it anyway. But it does seem to me that by the item balance the game set forth, simply stripping the MF find without some sort of compensation, despite it not being a combat attribute, seems unfair.
Or maybe they could just meet halfway and replace it with coin find or something.
*Next is the spawning itself. This is one of the ways in which I feel the temple events represent this idea better, as aside from respawn timers there are also pre-events that must be done beforehand, and can also be failed. The more clockwork-style of dragon events results in huge crowds that easily wipe it out and are difficult to scale against in a balanced way. Instead, its re-appearance could be tied to its lingering influence. Additionally, it could be tied to another of Anet’s more recent efforts in the game; getting players to return to older maps and keep them populated. For example, after Tequatl corrupts the land, a powerful risen enemy spawns on those other maps with risen in them that have been boosted, and is the source of the buff. It would wander around instead of patrolling in one spot (sort of like those new guild marks). Once killed, the boost to risen on that map disappears. After all these powerful undead around the world have been killed, the chance to bring Tequatl back appears. At this point you would get something like the “temple raid” events where you help a group of NPC’s attempt to cleanse the corruption, and ultimately get another chance at killing the dragon. The raid can fail, but like the temples has a much smaller wait before being attempted again, to make sure you have a substantial enough group to fight the dragon and gamble on either victory or a re-application of corruption. This would allow lower-level players to help influence the world at large by fighting the stronger risen, encourage higher-level players to return to maps and hunt for them, and make it harder to exploit predictable dragons. Alternately, you could even further encourage that involvement by instead of tying the map buffs to a single enemy, tie it to several and have them summoned as extra bosses at the end of relevant events, so that players are running around the map doing events to clear away the local corruption.
I could ramble further but I’m sure this is getting too long. The dragons would generally need to be more difficult to make losing more plausible, and the reward would possibly have to be made more or less depending on how difficult/frequent the event became, but I think it would make their presence much more interesting and dynamic. Between the three dragons a similar impact would be able to reach almost every map across Tyria in some way.
Edit: Oh dear, it’s too long. I’ll cut this into first and second post and hopefully it won’t be trouble.
First off, I apologize in advance since I’m sure dragons are one of the most heavily present topics in this forum, and my browser seems to be gagging on my attempts to search for the word. However, I’m not just going to talk about difficulty and rewards (though I’ll probably go over them), but hopefully a subject that hasn’t been gone over so much.
One of the most loudly advertised selling points of Guild Wars 2 was its dynamic events that would change the game world as they were done, or not done. While people can argue elsewhere on how successful that approach was, it seems odd to me that dragons (and by extension most “world boss” encounters), one of the biggest events available, have no impact at all. Its presence is felt, certainly, but it changes nothing beyond itself. It appears from nowhere, is beaten senseless by an angry mob, and then everything is back to normal.
I feel these encounters have a lot of room for improvement through this approach. The lieutenants, after all, should be the strongest enforcer of an elder dragon’s will outside the dragons themselves. Their presence should matter beyond a treasure chest. So, here are my suggestions on how this can be changed.
*First, it should be possible to -fail- the events. The ability to influence the world is limited when there’s only one inevitable outcome. This would be tied into the lingering effects. For example, say Tequatl the Sunless is there to kill Pact defenders and further spread the undead corruption. Up in the top right window where you see his health and the megalaser info, you would have a total corruption percentage, increased by bloated creepers exploding and patches of corruption created by his breath. Instead of shooting mindlessly at the dragon, players would need to act more strategically, focusing on creepers (to kill them before they explode) and destroying bone walls so that they no longer obstruct the Hylek turrets (which would be able to disperse the corruption patches). If the land is corrupted, the event is failed and the dragon retreats, its job done.
*Second, the impact itself. Because of both the scale of the event and the much longer periods before it repeats, this would need to be much bigger than the local impact of most events, more akin to temple events and the devastating statues they empower across Orr. Using the above example, the southern region of Sparkfly Fen where Tequatl appears would become highly hazardous, and this strengthened corruption echoes much further. On that map and others where risen appear (but not Orr, as that’s more about Zhaitan’s personal influence), they would receive a modest stat boost and be more dangerous, especially in large numbers such as the events where they siege outposts. It would send a clear message to players across the server; there was a battle with the dragon’s servants, and we lost.
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