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Love it. Even in PvE, I could make good use of this.
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I assume you’re running the train. There’s a merchant in the lodge between spider and boar. By chance, that’s also when you have ample time to make use of it.
The simplest solution to this problem is already in place.
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Just make mentor events, (ones lower level than you), completable only once per day per character. You would only get event completion and karma from the first run around the circuit. Most players won’t want to rotate characters for a train.
Trains are fine if people are enjoying them, but they should be in high level areas. If the devs could deliberately tweak existing events to craft a few rapid-repeatable event chains in high level maps to replace this, it could bring some life to places where it’s actually needed.
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Different types of new abilities should be unlocked in different ways.
- Elite skills
- Merge skill challenges and GW1 skill capping. Talk to a hard-to-reach NPC for a difficult fight where you and they both have this skill; the rest of your skill bar stays as you had it built; win to permanently learn the skill.
- Utility skills
- Training point. An NPC is trying to defend a point, and their new utility skill is the best way to do it. Talk to them to have your skill bar replaced with an environmental weapon and this skill. Defend the area against x waves of enemies to learn the skill.
- Healing skills
- Gauntlet challenges. Talk to an NPC who empties your skill bar and boons, giving you nothing but the new healing skill. Step into a gauntlet area full of unkillable enemies or other sources of damage. Between movement and the healing skill, survive a set amount of time to learn the skill.
- Weapon types
- Talk to a profession trainer to get a training version of the weapon, usable anywhere. It has relatively poor stats, and cannot be upgraded. While equipped, you have no healing, utility, or elite skills. Weapon skills themselves are learned the same way they are now: by using the weapon. Weapon swapping during combat is temporarily disabled. Experience earned through combat while wielding the training weapon fills a mastery gauge. Gain full access to the weapon type when the gauge is full. The experience required assumes a high level character; learning at a low level is technically possible, but would take forever.
- Traits
- Let me get back to you on this one…
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It already does this, but you need to hover your mouse over the mini map to see it.
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This is bound up into the Interface Size option, under Graphics Options. It also makes windows, icons, and everything else bigger.
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I see here a very common misconception. The venom skills are mostly about control. A venom build is a rounded balance of control, damage, and support. You have to look beyond the skills to their traits and traited attributes, and how it works as a whole.
The control aspects of venom skills are only medium tier, and are matched with medium tier damage from high-power/no-crit attacks and a couple of damage conditions. Add medium-tier support from letting allies hinder their own targets, share your might stacks, and recover a little through life-stealing and the new healing venom. It’s very well-rounded.
Venom thieves are definitely not about stopping power—we’ll leave that to hammer warriors and mesmers—instead, they are about managing the long fight.
The power attribute helps some melee builds peck away at their hindered foes, but ranged thieves depend more on bleeding, boosted with condition duration to stack up and do the work.
Even without bleeds, the poison and especially torment just aren’t going to do their jobs well without condition damage. Nobody’s going to bother holding still to avoid torment damage when it’s ticking away in pitiful digits. The poison only reduces healing, without giving them any reason to use that healing in the first place.
If everyone is trying to play venoms up for their control aspects alone, I think I see another reason why so many people complain about them being weak.
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Venoms are mostly about conditions, and half of them do damage. But venom traits lock you out of condition damage.
Traiting yourself for venoms nets you power, condition duration, toughness, and healing power. Venomous Power grants some quick might, but this doesn’t make up for the deficit in condition damage. I can’t help feeling that this lack of damage synergy is a critical part of why so many people view venoms as a “bad build.”
This a tricky problem. Venoms work great with their traited minor attributes, (condition duration and healing power), but have no use for the major attributes, (power and toughness).
I have hope, though. There is room for one more venom trait in the Shadow Arts line.
So, create a new trait:
- Venomous Adaptation
- For each venom on your skillbar: lose (x) Power and (x) Toughness, and gain (x*2.5) Condition Damage.
Some shuffling might be required, but that’s another topic.
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I think it would be fine if the items we stole had passive effects instead of active ones. Receiving a semi-random boon sounds so much more palatable than a semi-random skill that I have to actively fuss over, struggling to find a useful time to trigger.
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Venoms are working as intended. If they applied all stacks at once, you couldn’t apply them to multiple foes. If they worked like mantras, you couldn’t easily apply multiple stacks in a burst. If they had to charge up, you couldn’t control the timing of infliction.
There are some solutions to your issue in place, but they’re situational:
- If your opponent is removing multiple conditions at once, exhaust each venom before activating the next. Stagger them out, so they can’t all be stripped away at once. This works great with Leeching Venoms, which procs only once per hit, not once per hit per venom.
- If the problem is your opponent cleansing all stacks of one condition right after application, use slow attacks and take a moment to dodge something—let both you and the enemy breathe after applying the first stack or two. Hopefully, this will taunt them into cleansing while you still have some ammo left. This approach can be a nasty surprise when bursting several venoms for a Venomous Strength spike.
- Where appropriate, spread your conditions between multiple foes. Shortbow makes this easy, but you can always change targets.
- It can also help to have non-venom cover conditions at your disposal, such as bleeding, cripple or weakness.
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Archetypes (SubClasses)
Archetypes beyond the default can be unlocked after level 80 by completing difficult profession-specific challenges. Once unlocked, archetypes can be changed at the expense of some skillpoints. Each archetype for a profession has a distinct visual theme and variation of their F1-4 primary mechanic. Traits, weapons, and other skills would be unaffected.
The examples below try to introduce more control and support.
Example 1: Mesmer
- The Tragedian’s Monarch (default)
- Theme: Lavender phantasms & butterflies
- Mechanic: Shatter illusions for damage and conditions
- The Comedian’s Pariah
- Theme: Red-violet phantasms & bats
- Mechanic: Shatter illusions for area healing, boons, and fear
Example 2: Necromancer
- The Mortician (default)
- Theme: Fleshy minions
- Mechanic: Attacks during Death Shroud
- The Ritualist
- Theme: Spirit minions (they function the same, but look different)
- Mechanic: Reflects attacks, buffs minions, and heals allies during Death Shroud
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As far as housing goes, I’d be totally ok with a hall of monuments/home district mix. I’m already feeling like the Home Instance is actually home due to the npcs there, as well as the ore nodes and the krait obelisk. Expand on that a bit, maybe add some dialogue to said npcs based on personal storyline and you’re 90% done with making player housing a reality.
Don’t forget the teleport orb, or other way to instantly go there and back. Then put our shiny new wardrobe, (I’m sure we’re getting this), in there and we’ll have both the means and motivation to visit home!
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Playing a bard is easy. Load up GW1 and make a Me/Pa.
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It’s just one condition, and the cooldowns between applications via the rune are kinda long. I can only see this being an issue against berserker builds with no defense. Anything reminding players that dodging is no more a sufficient plan of defense than boiling water is a sufficient recipe for soup, is good in my book.
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I’m sure ArenaNet is very sorry for having offended you by attempting to fund the vast enterprise that keeps this game running and growing without a subscription fee. They have certainly realized the error of having to gall to offer you things you might want in exchange for money. After all, they’re just a few hundred talented artists and technicians working full time to maintain a AAA title; they don’t really deserve to pay off the student loans that got them there.
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I searched in the sub-forum but I didnt find any other posts about this, so i posted it.
Sadly, the Search function doesn’t work. It can only see the most recent posts. This is an old bug that they still haven’t nailed down. If you need to find something, use an external search engine like Google.
There are a few posts on this in the current CDI thread, although this is more of a QoL suggestion than Progression.
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The weapons are designed to look nice with the colors they have. Dyes would require a huge amount of work in reskinning every weapon in the whole game to have dye maps and channels, reprogramming everything to make them work, and checking that every color functions right on every of them. This is a very expensive request, and I’m assuming you don’t want to pay a dime for it.
There are very few weapons that could benefit from dyeing in the first place. Most have only a tiny hard-to-see section that could be colored, and half those sections are the grip that can’t even be seen when you’re holding the weapon.
For the handful of weapons that could benefit from being dyed, it would be more practical to ask for colored variants. It is so much easier for them to manually adjust a color slider in photoshop a few times than to remap and code the weapons to be usable with the dye system.
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I can’t see them eliminating server splits completely for PvE. That would require a major rework of their core server architecture.
What would be perfectly feasible, however, would be to detect low map population and offer a temporary guest pass to that a version of that map on a random server where it is currently busy. When your home server gets into its more active cycle, you’ll be gently bumped back with a minute or so of warning. If you waypoint out to another map, you will be right back on your own server, (unless the other map is also underpopulated).
It’s important that the free guesting be optional, though. There a lot of reasons a person might want to stay on their own version, be it for timers, friends, or just enjoying the relative quiet.
This should be a lot easier to implement, and wouldn’t throw off any players who like the current split-up. It won’t even count against your daily guesting limit, since it’s only for one map for a limited time, and you can’t even control which server you go to.
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You can also move the chat window between the top and bottom.
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Diversification
- Make all the current abilities viable.
- Add a few new abilities: weapons, traits, etc.
- Extend variety to theme: let a mesmer replace butterflies with bats, and a necro replace fleshy minions with ghostly ones.
- Let our character’s interactions in new content be influenced by personality.
- Add armors that break the mold: pants and modest tops for women, shoulder pieces that fit through doorways, maybe even a kilt.
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It would be wonderful if there was a way to let our characters choose between the three armor types, but it’s much too late to try balancing such an option in for the existing professions. Everything from their health to their skills are leveraged against their armor type, and it works great.
But a new profession can be more flexible, if designed that way from the start. Hence I propose a new class built around this idea: switching roles and armor types as their primary mechanic.
The player would have to maintain three sets of armor—and runes—simultaneously, making this an advanced profession aimed for players who have built up some resources.
F1-F3 skills swap you to your light, medium, and heavy armor sets, respectively. This drastically changes your role in combat, altering the effects of traits and skills similarly to an elementalist’s attunement. The recharge on role switching would be necessarily long, to avoid abuse of stacking lingering bonuses from different rune sets.
The light role is based around damage; medium is control; and heavy is support.
We need only four trait lines, instead of five. The fourth line has three versions that would change with armor role:
- Light: Critical Damage; Weapon Skill Recharge
- Medium: Condition Duration; Utility Skill Recharge
- Heavy: Boon Duration; Elite & Healing Skill Recharge
The kink in this trait scheme is that one of the other lines would have to combine two major attributes. It could be Toughness and Vitality, so that the increased defense in this one line can be easily offset by slightly lowering the profession’s base health. Alternately, combining Power and Precision could be offset by bringing skill damage down a tick.
Making the profession a gemstore unlock should be enough to keep newbies from breaking their banks trying to equip one of these guys, and I don’t think many people would argue the merit of paying for a new profession when there are no known expansions for it to be bundled with.
(Note: I’m not concerned with the profession’s theme right now. It could be pretty much anything.)
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I recommend doing some easier content to get your feet wet again. Try out some different skills and builds to see what feels right for you. The game has changed a lot in a year, and your play style might have as well.
Once you’ve figured out what you need, you can work your equipment up to level 80 exotic. If you want tips that are elementalist-specific, I recommend the elementalist subforum.
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It wasn’t the mere presence of Asian content that would have been offensive. It was the juxtaposition against other cultures, such as in the prototype Divinity’s Reach. Consumers in their Asian markets would have been disgusted at seeing their culture “dirtied” by being muddled with Western and African elements.
Keep in mind that racism is still pretty well tolerated in most of Asia.
The irony, of course, is that GW2 isn’t even out in any Asian markets.
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- Add new weapons for each profession. This especially includes seeing old weapons used in new ways. (e.g. Melee staff, magical pistol/rifle, dancing dagger, etc.)
- Rework attributes and traits. Encourage soft trinity and reduce interdependence. Work in attributes and/or bonuses for Control Duration, and some sort of control and/or condition resistance. Make Critical Damage useful without Precision. And so on.
- Tengu.
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Is it ok to farm these bandits?
Within a reasonable limit, it should be fine. I wouldn’t expect much in terms of rewards; they’re just trash mobs, and kind of a pain.
Maybe with a party, it could be a fun place to use a Killstreak Experience Booster.
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It lets more players get their own stacks in, instead of being capped out all the time and making your skills useless. If they only wanted to keep the champions strong, all they’d have to do is increase the base attributes or give them might and protection to compensate for the conditions always being applied.
Cutting durations isn’t the best solution, but it’s one of the easiest to implement universally, until something more rugged can be worked in later. I’d be happy if they did this with a few other conditions, too.
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Had the same problem today when using a Letter of Commendation. Also couldn’t access guild storage.
Left LA for Hoelbrak, and guild storage was accessible there, but still no influence from wasted letter. My partner had the same problem accessing storage, also solved by mapping to a different town.
Already submitted a bug report.
If the problems are indeed linked, , my advice is to check that you have access to guild storage before trying to pop influence, (especially in LA).
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The comparisons between Scarlet and the Joker deflate as soon as you look past the laughter.
The only trait they share is the characteristic detached mania: the heightened emotional state leading to frequent cackling murder. Whereas this is all we see of Scarlet, the Joker is bi-polar, regularly flipping into depressions as low as his manias are high.
Mr. J has a limited personal skillset, refined through practice into expertise in leadership and strategic planning. While he does fiddle with simple toys, he leaves the real engineering to others. He uses his capacity for strategy like a military general, applying immense pressure on a single, small goal.
All of his resources – from personnel to money and materials – are acquired with some believable difficulty and tenacity. Everybody throws everything they have into fighting him. Yet his thugs have genuine reasons to believe that the rewards of joining and staying on his side are worth the risks.
He is a character of obsession. Most of his jokes arise from a compulsion for the ritual of the gag. Everything he does is expressly for the attention of the person whose visage consumes his mind.
Scarlet is an attention-deficient, antisocial sadist whose entire franchise of influence is handed to her on golden platters of deus ex machina.
Her skillset is simultaneously diverse and deep. She somehow attains mastery of every subject she touches, even though she gets bored right after starting them. Tinkerer, chemist, mystic, fighter, leader: Scarlet does it all herself, and supposedly better than anyone else. Then she goes on and does something else.
For Ms. Briar, resources jump out the air like sparkles ‘round a unicorn. Most of her minions have little if any reason to follow her, but by now it feels like a quarter of Tyria’s population has happily fallen in line to suffer under her pigtails. Troves of materials that would make a nation blush get tossed around the continent like confetti, and we have no idea how she got them. Or where she keeps them. Her incessant raids around the world expend much, but acquire nothing. Although her enterprises bleed assets at a horrific rate, they miraculously keep getting bigger.
The opposition is hardly stacked against her, though. She took over half of Kessex, and the only forces that responded were a handful of outsiders. Not a single fart against her from the Queen, centaurs, or bandits affected by the incursion. This is the red carpet Scarlet can expect everywhere she goes.
She has a goal, but it is expansive and seems more reactive than active. Her designs result from a destructive defense mechanism against the unpleasantness of existing in the world as it is, with the people that are in it. Her grand plan is to push everyone and everything away, to break every system and bone and rock that offends her. It’s a sort of reverse suicide of the present life by destroying all that is outside instead of inside.
The Joker is almost all focus and cathexis, embracing his life and the world around him as tools for his obsession with playing the game against his chosen opponent. Scarlet has none of this, and that void is just another thing she has in spades.
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My only concern is that the new crew is being written by the same people who write Scarlet.
Actually, I have an itch telling me that our Villain Sue will be “cured” of her insanity and brought into the fold. They are lacking a sylvari, after all.
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The core of the character is fine. It is really her role in the story that makes us shudder.
A bloody rose came out of the blue
That all her victims call Mary Sue,
Her past at odds with what we hold true,
Her deeds at odds with what she can do,
Her big laugh too small to stave the rue
Of all those who turn nose at the rose.
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All the interviews I’ve seen of Colin this year have pointed to them being undecided on expansions.
If you have the source for him saying something more concrete, please link.
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The tengu, the skritt, the kodan, the hylek, etc are all good ideas for a possible new race that would be unique to GW2.
Tengu aren’t original, but the rest are, (at least in name). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengu#Modern_fiction
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Tyria is its own world. Early development did introduce a lot of standard mythological creatures, most of which are still around in GW2. But eventually they hit a turning point within their talent pool where virtually every new species they added was original.
That doesn’t mean they ignore myth archetypes altogether. The charr were concepted to fill the “orc” role, just as the sylvari and asura loosely fill the “elf” and “gnome” roles. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Artistic_Origin_of_the_Charr
(The norn, I suspect, were designed to fill trousers and blouses.)
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Scroll through this subforum a few pages. You’ll find oodles of specific suggestions.
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Just don’t click things you don’t want to click. You could also try using the auto-sorting bags – this is literally what they were made for.
I’d say that if they do anything, it should be to replace the drop-down with a horizontal row of graphical icons. There aren’t enough options to warrant having a drop-down in the first place.
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Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good fight!
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Thanks for the feedback, guys!
Yes, they would be about as magical as the Guardian. Thematically, I really wanted to use the name Avenger, which is more heavy-appropriate. Sadly, it’s already associated with an in-game title, and…you, know…the Avengers.
I agree that a lot of work needs to be done on existing classes, but that will always be true. I’d rather see them start iterating a new profession sooner, before they’ve introduced more complexities that will make it harder to introduce.
A quick note about reading/writing any suggestions like this: Don’t get worked up over the details. All that matters at the conceptual stage is the concept.
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I definitely agree with moving the condition cap from target to attacker. That would promote a lot more diversity in the direction of condition builds.
Control builds need some of that too. Extending the above change to non-damage conditions is a good start. Defiant needs to be changed so that the target still receives some penalty from being hit with control effects. Converting them to conditions like chill or vulnerability might be a reasonable exchange.
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For those who want new skills/weapons — that works in the short term to keep the game fresh, but it’s not sustainable. If you keep adding skills, balance becomes a nightmare (Anet’s already having a terrible time of it right now).
How do you propose they Anet deals with this?
They did it with Gw1, and are probably better at now
[awkward cough] Skill bloat was one of the main reasons production on GW1 had to be stopped.
I want more skills and weapons as much as the next guy, but just a few, and they don’t have to come right away.
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Letting players swap out skills on a weapon isn’t appropriate for GW2.
First of all, would you rather new weapon skills be placed on existing weapons, or would you rather get those skills on whole new weapons? ’Cause my thief really wants to use a staff as a melee pain-stick.
Secondly, keeping weapon skills locked is important for balancing the game – let’s not make it more complicated than it already is.
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The HoM could easily be added to non-linked accounts, for GW2-only purposes where needed. 95% of what I suggest putting in there comes from GW2 anyway.
Home instances are different for each character, so loading all those up as you cycle through characters on the screen would take a prohibitively long time.
HoM was supposed to be an account-wide display of your accomplishments, so I say update it and put it right up front. A lot of the objects you get there could be duplicated in each character’s home instance, providing nice overlap to grow both areas.
They could even make a whole Living Story release around renovating the HoM: gathering supplies and workers from around the world, porting them in, and fending off dragon minions while they work.
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Or a button to toggle ’don’t show this in the Top 3’
BWAM!! Done.And yes, I want this frigging button !!!
Yes, please. We need a Hide option to keep the list from being clogged up.
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I like the idea of introducing sub-classes, but please blur the lines a little and give players control. Here’s my idea: merge sub-classes into a heavily reworked trait system.
Replace the five trait lines with three: Control, Damage, and Support. Let each trait line go up to 50, but adjust per-point bonuses to each attribute so the final values stay the same.
- CONTROL
- Condition & Control Effect Duration
- Condition Damage
- Toughness
- Profession Attribute
- DAMAGE
- Power
- Precision
- Critical Damage
- Profession Attribute
- SUPPORT
- Boon Duration
- Vitality
- Healing Power
- Profession Attribute
Control effects would be scaled down by default, but scale up well with the trait. When healing other players, the game should usually use an average Healing Power between the skill user and target, so that Boon Duration isn’t the only attribute in Support that affects other players.
In general, traits need to make all three roles viable and attractive, but difficult to perform simultaneously.
Note that each trait line has its own unique profession attribute. Two more would need to be created for each profession, which I feel is manageable. Some of these could replace current fixed minor or major trait bonuses with flexible values. For example, Phantasmal Healing could be replaced with a scaling attribute that varies how much healing you and allies get while near your phantasms.
To further turn this into a subclass system, make most of the weapons and skills weaker by default, but dramatically increase the bonuses gained from related traits. If somebody is effectively using a greatsword, you know they have a Damage build. Staff? Support. Mantras? Control. And so on. New weapons and skills introduced to the game could play on this more than the base set, possibly even being locked behind trait walls.
I feel this creates a lot of opportunity for diversifying characters in a way that brings a lot of satisfaction. The final-slot bonuses from each trait line could be marvelous character-changing beasts if done right, and I would love to see what the developers could come up with.
If this were combined with an out-of-combat paradigm hotswitch, the results could be amazing.
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While the regional home instances are supposed to be individual homes for our characters, the Hall of Monuments is a shared property spread across the account. Why not make more use of it?
Replace the current, (admittedly beautiful), character select screen with the HoM as a Home Screen. Have all our characters moving around inside it, going about their business and sometimes interacting. When you select someone’s portrait, the camera zooms over to show them.
Represent multiple categories of achievements inside the HoM:
- Order banners and such from the current character select screen would become physical objects in the HoM.
- Achievement gauges are illuminated on a physical display.
- Crafting stations get a visual upgrade according to your highest level in the craft.
- A random selection of minipets stored in your Collections run around.
- Trophies and other awards are prominently displayed.
- Linked GW1/2 accounts will show the big banners and maybe more from the first game.
- Even small objects scattered around can represent accomplishments.
- Flavor with a couple props or characters from the current living story.
Inside the actual game, replace the Hall of Monuments Portal Stone with a waypoint. Make the inside match the loading screen version, with all the trimmings. You can even interact with your other characters in a limited fashion, including swapping to them right from the dialog if you don’t want to go out to the Home Screen!
For an added bonus, bring back the Scrying Pool instead of filling our inventory with cinema-playing objects.
I know everyone talks about making the Home Instance better, but it’s not our only home in Tyria. This is something you would actually see on a regular basis.
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Although I’m relatively content with the transmutation system, there is the downside of it destroying items and making the leftovers soulbound. This is good for the game’s economy, but irritating for players.
What if we simply had multiple slots for each equipment piece – one for the look, and another for the stats? (If you only slot one, it takes both functions.) Gear wouldn’t need to be altered or destroyed.
You would start with one set of skin slots and one set of gear slots, but could acquire more through the gemstore, then swap between them while out of combat.
UI would take some work. I visualize the layers being stacked to display just the top, and sliding out to temporarily reveal all on hover, (stays open if clicked).
This whole scheme would unfortunately skew supply and demand on the market, and creative measures would be needed to balance that out.
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In what way, comanche? I’ve tried to keep them relatively short-ranged and good at grabbing aggro, sort of an “Avenger of the Ancients.” Physical versus magical theming is only aesthetic, (see: guardian), and it’s the final details in all the traits and skills that would fit them in as a heavy.
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Hrmm. My guardian is already my most mobile character. I don’t think we’re exceptionally lacking in this department.
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I really want a soldier that uses archaic magics borrowed from the (now-)fallen races that defeated the dragons. A destructive arcane avenger pulled from the game’s lore, instead of shoehorning something new in.
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Also: that feeling when you’re fighting a world boss, and have to re-target every fifteen seconds. Grr.
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