Guild Wars 2

Honestly, I felt with the recent elite specs that every class was viable in PvE content. you can only have 5 on a party and super world record speed run teams may be more strict—as they should—but you could bring anything to fractals and dungeons, and yes preferably zerk/sinister.

Engi is viable sinister or zerk
Ranger is viable melee zerk or sinister
Necro reaper is viable

GW2 PvE meta was finally in a place where any class had a strong viable build. Sure PSEA warrior and eles are highly valued, but as long as you have a little reflect, anything was viable and even strong.

Now we need to face tank and heal through “un-dodgeable” damage?

Gogo heal meta

Canakun.8031:

What nobody seems to be accounting for is that by creating content that needs a healer to heal, the developers are casuing the following (assuming raid content is exactly as they want it to be).

- A new meta that is much stricter than the previous meta. It will no longer be a “LF1M zerk” situtation but a “LF1M druid CLERICS OR KICK” situation.
- For this reason, the people who complained about the zerk meta will eventually complain about the druid meta. This is just my subjective anecdotal experience, but the majority of PHIW complainers are ranger mains who like their bear and their bow a little too much. Guys, you’re going to be pigeon holed so much more now that you’re the only class that can fulfill the role as dedicated healer. You have EVEN LESS BUILD DIVERSITY now.

To summarise.
- New meta will be stricter.

this this this this this

Tank stats and heal specs just reduce the required player skill in encounters while the only thing they increase is the duration of the fight.

We didn’t want any of this. GW2 is a dynamic game unlike any other because it requires that fast twitch reactionary play. If we wanted to face tank and heal, we’d play something else.

Pushing the trinity is lazy and unoriginal—two things I don’t tend to think of when I’m talking about GW2 content. There’s no innovation here.

10 drood heal meta

I may not agree with the daily/weekly system, but I understand why you guys do it.

However, with Raids on a weekly lockout, what is my incentive for raiding again in the same week to help other players?

I feel that this will create an environment where raids will be set teams and you are in or you are out unless someone wants to tag along and help which may in reality be spending many hours for no personal reward.

How will this be addressed? This is promoting exclusionary play which is always detrimental.

JoshuaRAWR.4653:

Not everything needs a reward tied to it in order for it to be fun.

I think either way could be viable.

Demented Yak.6105:

BlackDevil.9268:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Druid is more about burst healing in key moments as it takes a while to build up astral force to enter celestial avatar, Ventari is more about sustain healing.

I rather see it the other way around:
Ventari is limited to a small pool of energy with a nice on demand burst healing, while not really healing much over a large duration of time since you would run out of energy quickly.
While Druid can basically heal already quite good with just the weapon skills already and provides for a nice burst but also quite long burst healing after building up astral force.

I also see it this way.

+3

Demus.4571:

Look at what classes are run in high level tournaments. Warriors are fairly common as both dps and bunker builds. I don’t think the class is the problem, I think its you.

this

Sign up. Have some fun.

http://battlefy.com/aspectgg/pugquest-na-19/560177e58560a74700b10e6c/info

Don’t look at the world the way it is; look at it the way it could be!

Daniel Handler.4816:

Silverkey.2078:

I guess it’s a bit more tricky since the skill works as a sequence.

Yep. Don’t use it after first block. Always use it after second.

Did you get it working, in either case? I got off the first 2 phantasms and had the skill on CD, yet Ether didn’t refresh it last time I tried.

Iason Evan.3806:

If their names are red sure. I kill Charr, humans, undead all the time if their names are red. If their names are green and you still hold something against them, well, that’s your own personal issue.

In the story, you choose which path, ie Trusting or Not.

Not everything in life is red or green!

It’s not likely that we will have all of the aforementioned items on launch day. I’m okay with getting it over time as long as I have enough content ahead of me until then.

Of course players will run the campaigns multiple times, but on your first pick, will you aid the sylvari or have bias against them in your decisions?

I don’t know. Do all things have a right to grow or are you going to cuddle with your sylvari girlfriend and wake up next to some Mordrem beast in the middle of the night?

My GF is sylvari so I can say these things.

Tommyknocker.6089:

Roll a sylvari, or better yet just wait a week and people will post the vids on youtube. I see nothing wrong with a race being unique, and seeing as it fits the dragon/plot in this case I say good job ANet.

+This

On a related note, I do have to say that I’m not a fan of what Nolan has done with the voice. Maybe this audio is raw, but it’s nothing near what I’ve come to expect from something as massive and bad kitten as an elder kittening dragon.

At least turn up the base. It sounds like me trying to impersonate Lord Voldemort.

I’d love raids to support a set up with all 9 classes in the mix. I think the synergies and gameplay would be phenomenal.

However, that is to say, no comp should be mandatory. We all know how hard it is to get 10 good players together regardless of class types.

I think that if you’re like me and you don’t care for the new elite-specific armor/weapon, then you will probably be fine without farming HPs on your existing 80s.

I don’t see value in wielding the same shield as 90% of all other chronomancers at launch. I’ve been waiting to use all these Fractal Shields for so long!

If you roll a new 80 or a Revenant, the story may be a little different.

PvE Challenge Mode!

I was between long-assed, lunch time TPvP queues and a duo of friends asked me to come speed up a FoTM Grawl Shaman fight. I enjoy the fight so I tagged along. Good times.

This had me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to select individual PvE encounters? With the future FoTM change making each level of FoTM specific to a certain fractal, it was mentioned to allow players to practice strategy. This Challenge Mode would be along those same lines.

No more running half of Arah to do a Lupi fight. No more countless RNG fractal rolls so make a new strat or speed kill video.

It also creates another huge chunk of content for guilds to unlock over time. Maybe guilds would have to unlock each individual fight.

As for implementation, spawning a boss in your GH Arena probably is not feasible (although awesome), the mechanic could just teleport the player/group to the instance of whatever fight.

Internal guild-created events are possible. Guilds could do speed kill races within their own guilds or with other teams. Have however many groups form up in the guild hall and start the encounters at the same time, racing to a kill and some community-funded reward. Players could stream it all on twitch with a split screen set-up… or whatever.

Should the encounters themselves give rewards? Maybe, but not enough to remove incentive for the source content, of course.

The PvP community has seen a lot of great love and development lately. The PvE/dungeon running community is starving for some attention. HoT, FoTM 100, Raids, and Guild Hall PvE Challenge Mode is a great addition.

Did anyone do an update? Considering how the patch changed gear stats.

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

And phantasmal haste reduces the cd on your phantasms so you can re-summon them faster.

Phantasmal Haste: Phantasms attack more often (20%).

Illusionists Celerity: Reduce recharge on illusion-summoning skills (20%)

Last I checked, this combo wasn’t working. Was this fixed during or after BWE2?

Zenith.7301:

Can the Continuum Split rift receive aoe/cleave immunity in PvE, please?

With the amount of aoe/cleave I often found myself in situations where I couldn’t even benefit from it on a single skill as it immediately died as I activated my shatter to all the aoe/cleave mobs in dynamic events and bosses were doing.

IMO, just remove the Continuum Split rift altogether. Great idea, clunky mechanic. The balance of using Chrono is that it lasts so short and duration being based off of the shatter #.

Robert Gee.9246:

There has been a lot of discussion on this point so I’d like to explain a bit about the decision to change the Illusionary Avenger’s attack type and how we ended up with the attack that we’re showing in BWE3.

The main feedback we got from BWE2 was that the effects applied by this phantasm were unreliable and hard to control. We wanted to make a more reliable way to apply alacrity and slow that players could respond to which is why we ended up with the AoE attack.

We had tried other ideas but the important aspect of the one we chose is that it keeps the delivery method consistent. We considered many of the versions suggested in the feedback threads such as the one where he throws the shield but applies alacrity around himself, but realized that this basically amounted to two different delivery methods in one skill. While this kind of behavior is okay for player skills we felt that it was too complex for a phantasm attack. This attack already has different effects based on if it hits an ally or an enemy so it was important to us to keep the attack on the Avenger easy to understand for both allies and enemies. This is why the PBAoE version was selected.

No one wants another melee ranged illusionary suicide bomber (or maybe we do….). Just make the iAvenger pulse AoE alacrity passively with a large radius like an aura and revert the actual phantasm attack into a ranged shield throw.

The phantasms are defenseless. No sense in making them run around getting kited as well.

Enko.6123:

Yeah it is annoying. For this, I usually position the buy window so the Buy button is at the same spot as the confirm button and just click away.

this

I’m just hoping we don’t have too much time-gated prerequisites attached to it.

Did they turn this “experiment” off yet? PvP is unplayable.

Gotta love this kind stuff on your day off. QQ

Pls stahhhp the experiments!

PvP has been skrit all day

Ayrilana.1396:

You can expect two titles for Revenant though.

Two?

Make friends. Run with them. If I’m 5-manning something there is a 2 PUG limit!

Great vid. Consider lava jump skip? https://youtu.be/ZnqKM6IEIp0?t=56s

+1 remove NPCs. They just give devs more bugs to fix.

Let’s all speculate on the grind of this sweet sweet shiny.

FOTM100, maxed FOTM mastery..

And what else? Maybe there’s a new FOTM weapon skin collection achievo with a reward you need for crafting the backpiece or the precursor itself.

Other than that? No idea. Probably a few 1000g worth mats for a gold sink..

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

I’m 90% solo queue and I always pick Courtyard. CY and faster queues are the only reason to queue Unranked.

Deathmatch is THE BEST game type.

I’m aware of the ‘ping experiments’

I think no.

Each elite spec changes the class mechanic into an alternate style of play. Many rangers have requested this.

“But they can’t do that because of the Beastmaster spec line!” Then don’t spec in beast. You can only bring 3 lines anyways—I think you know the line to drop.

I’m anticipating a shapeshifter class mechanic to replace pets and the F1-F5 commands. The Druid spec will offer 3 ways to play it via trait choices. Adept, master, grandmaster will all offer traits to go shapeshift damage, shapeshift tank, or shapeshift support at each level respectively.

Dahkeus.8243:

They already confirmed that druids will still have pets. As much as I’d like to see them go back on that, I doubt we’ll see it since that would invalidate the entire BM trait specialization for any druid.

Source on the druid pet claim?

And they can invalidate an entire spec line with no problem. If you spec Druid, don’t spec beast. It’s as simple as that. You can only run 2 lines anyways.

Morfedel.4165:

I have a theory that they are replacing for the druid pets with an mechanic where the druid changes aspects which will also influence his glyphs

I believe in the no-pet druid. I’d much rather see shape shifting.

Why to people quote an entire post? We know you’re responding to OP.

You can bet against my prediction (as I clearly implied it was but using the phrase “I propose..”) but you do so at your own risk.

Do the math. [# of ascended chests] * 80-120g depending -vs- [# ascended costs] * cost of recipe. Which way does the scale go for you?

Tyria – dungeons (if they work), maybe EoTM

HoT – no one knows

Everything is a better guardian than guardian.

If anything is unbalanced, it’s warrior banners. I love me some banners, but you know they have no equal.

If anything, give the equivalent buff to other characters so they can fill the role if needed. No warrior? Well reaper can run [disco banner equivalent]! And if you have a warrior, he’d love to swap that banner to another signet or FGJ, etc.

Kravick.4906:

I’m gonna laugh my kitten off when they introduce new mats which you can only harvest in HoT zones that you will need to level cook/JC past 400.

This is exactly what I was thinking.

Mawdrey, Princess, and that star thing I missed out on because I was away for the holidays..

Silverwastes changed the game as far as gathering ascended materials. After a day on that map, players were throwing mats into the trash just to keep inventory space open. Now they added these material-eaters to give us a minor sink.

I propose that those material eaters are a bit of a (friendly) trick played by development. New legendaries (and other things) in HoT will (read:could) take a million of each of those ascended materials.

By slowly dwindling down the mass amount of these materials, they are able to move veteran players closer to new players in terms of the New Legendary/Precursor Gathering Grind.

Instead of old players with millions of each material, they’re having you spend them all so at launch you’re on the same level as everyone and you miss your headstart.

What to do? Might want to keep a tab or so of each material on an alt or get to laying some bricks at the least.

Let me be the first harbinger to warn you. I propose that this recipe will be removed upon the launch of HoT.

- Recipe: Ascended armor/weapon + exotic inscrption (desired stats) + Anthology of Heroes (MF NPC) + 5 globs of ectoplasm = new ascended item of the desired stat type

Why? “Because Anet.” Kidding aside, here’s the rationale.

The recipe itself was a knee-jerk reaction from the recent specialization overhaul patch. Stats were removed from trait lines and put into gear. This boosted stats on all tiers of gear. However, players flipped out and mobbed the forums due to ascended receiving its increase. Players claimed that this made ascended gear mandatory, and this mystic forge recipe was pulled out of the mists to silence the masses. Problem solved..?

The recipe has been out for months now and players have had their time to exploit it as much as possible. Considering the developers were reluctant to introduce the recipe in the first place, the launch of HoT would be an opportune time to revert back to the old ways. If ascended chest drops were intended to be stat-optional, it would already be that way.

With all the positive noise that comes along with a new launch, any cries for the stat swap recipe will be drowned out. With ascended salvage on the horizon (confirmed) the most anyone will tell you is to enjoy the salvage.

Most of you have used your chests, but if you’re stock pilling them, it might be time to reconsider. Each chest is a 80-120g value while the stat swap recipe cost is closer to 10-20g. I’d get crafting.

I benefited greatly from the recipe. I was too frugal to spend to gear each character so the recipe freed me from swapping armor around and was a great quality of life improvement. It will be pretty rough to see those of you with bank tabs full of chests get a nasty surprise at launch.

Good luck in prepping for HoT.

Can anyone clarify if there is a soloist option for this?

We all know how hard it can be to coordinate a full team for consistent, long term play..

Thief got an F2, so it’s entirely plausible ANet is interesting in improving QOL for the classic mechanics—not just elite specs and such.

I’d like to being back to everyone’s attention a few things.

- Portal range indicator. Make it red or greyed out when you’re out of range or unable to click. Leaps now ignore CC so players aren’t ‘confused’ by the false range indication of a crippled leap, but we haven’t updated portals to not ‘confuse’ players?

- Phantasm indicator. Mesmer theme is pink and purple. Let pink circles (above the skill bar) be for clones and purple circles be for phantasms. For those fast-paced or screen-cluttering fights where you can’t always see or keep track of your illusions.

It’s 2015. Time for some QOL.

Feel free to add.

Discuss………………….

Evan Lesh.3295:

Personal score does not factor into Leagues at all, only team score.

Is Leagues only for teams or is there a solo component?

Roy Cronacher.1576:

• Since corruption and mallyx is all about being the master of torment and being pushed more that route, I’m playing around with an idea I wanted to run by all of you. Torment is less valued in stationary fights due to the way torment functions. Since torment is the main damaging condition for Revenant, I’ve been thinking about adding functionality to a trait or maybe changing the minor 2 in corruption to increase the base damage torment does while not moving while not increasing the while moving damage to help it become more of a viable option in all areas of the game. What do you all think?

I’m opposed to this change in the same way that I was and still am opposed to the Confusion condition change. The entire point of confusion was that you were punished for skill use and rapid firing skills could get you killed if you weren’t paying attention. The change to making confusion tick in addition to damage-per-skill removes the entire flavor of the skill. With Torment, it appears we’d be doing the same thing. Yes, that makes Confuse/Torment strong in some situations and weak in others. That’s the point, is it not?

At launch it’s likely they’ll be a big strong, but soon (and likely very soon since we’ll have had 3 betas) they’ll find balance of new and the old.

Elite specs aren’t supposed to be better than classic, they’re just supposed to offer an alternate play style / utility.