Guild Wars 2

Dances are bound to race, not profession. Sorry!

Krispera.5087:

We have no trap traits. I don’t even know where that speculation came from. It’s either Ranger or Thief spec.

This would be for the elite chronomancer spec. Any traits for it would be in that line, not the core ones they just showed off. The devs have stated that elite specs would spread around skill types like traps and shouts, which are currently only on a couple professions.

Ranger and thief have enough traps already, so giving them six more would be overkill. Since mesmer has always been a rogue-ish profession, it is a logical choice for a skill type currently belonging to the other two rogues. Lastly, the ability we saw the chronomancer use in the trailer looks very much like a trap, and it would neatly tackle the oft-cited issue of mesmers not being able to fight more than one foe at a time.

Altogether, I’d guess the likelyhood of us getting traps in HoT is pretty high.

We know that one of the elite specs will get six traps, and glamours are being considered more defensive now. I’m probably not the first to speculate this, but that skill used by the shield-wielding mesmer in the HoT trailer could have been a chronomancer time trap. Whether it actually was a shield skill or a utility being used, we don’t really know.

What would your opinion be if chronomancer gets traps? Is it something you would be excited to play? How would you see traps fitting into the mesmer meta?

How about this for SoV’s passive: “Whenever a nearby enemy attacks you or one of your allies, you and (up to 5) nearby allies siphon health from that enemy.”

No trait changes needed.

My main concern is that I’m still not convinced this is the best line for venoms to be in, in the first place. No venom grants stealth, so you have to get it from a melee weapon, or sacrifice a utility slot for a non-venom. My ranged venom specialist will still be forced into minor traits focused on a mechanic she has virtually no access to. Humbug.

(Yes, I know focusing on ranged and venoms and not utilizing stealth is as far from meta as you can get. Too bad – I like how it plays. If it makes you feel better, my other thief is a stealthy melee spiker just like all the other Heathers.)

I’m pretty happy. My venoms thief is going to explode with all the new options and functionality open to her

Condition transferal is nice, but more of a necro thing. The trick is finding a way to do this that feels more thief-y.

Gaining the new boon Resistance, (I think that’s what it’s called…), whenever you use a venom could work, as someone posted above. Although honestly, venoms already feel supportive enough. I would rather just get a recharge bonus to all my venoms whenever I get hit by a new condition. Let the increased access to healing and life steal compensate for the condition damage…while also killing the enemy slightly faster.

The Wizland.8435:

Personally I’d like a trait that teleports minions to an enemy and makes them attack. Maybe on cripple or chill with a 10-20 sec ICD and 900 range?

You might enjoy a mesmer, then. That’s pretty close to how their illusions work.

(shrug) Probably when they finally decide to make a tabletop game, which is pretty much what the eponymous Guild Wars are best suited for.

You never know, this could come with specializations…

There have been numerous threads on race and profession change already. The devs haven’t said much on the subject, except to make it clear they aren’t interested in doing it.

Overall, GW2 is more alt-centric. If you want the same character, but with a different race or profession, make it and level it. Use tomes if you have them. That is the tool they have given us, and want us to use.

Ehh, the D&D stats were too big a jump for me. I was sad when they went away from the GW1 system of no universal stats. The trait lines are sort of supposed to replace the old attribute lines – at least in spirit – but it still feels rather messy by comparison.

My take is a little more unusual:

• Trait lines should provide primary attributes only, (as well as actual traits, of course).
• Equipment should provide secondary attributes only.

There a few advantages to this:

• Players still have to balance attributes versus traits when picking lines, but the problem of taking potentially unwanted secondary attributes is removed. Simultaneously, the bonus to primary attributes attached to lines is significantly increased in scale and importance, with the values otherwise gained from equipment moving over to the trait lines.
• Equipment prefixes have a more defined role, no longer mimicking trait combinations. Equipment tiers will not impact primary attributes, although their impact on secondary attributes will of course be larger. This should help players feel somewhat less underpowered while leveling, with gear grind mostly affecting your ability to create refined builds.
• This would give a moderate nudge to build diversity, without breaking the balance of the game. Trait lines would restrict builds a little less than currently, while still being important and interesting. Overall available values of each attribute per level could remain the same, just located differently in the hero panel.
• Altogether, this could make the attribute selection process more varied and meaningful.

I think the simpler solution would be an 80-level tome, which could be acquired only by deleting a level 80 character. You would still lose skill points, soulbound equipment, and story progress, but I feel that is an appropriate price to pay for something drastic like this.

Scepter or focus wouldn’t too weird on a warrior spec, if they used it right. They could manipulate something martial like shrapnel, or remote bone-breaking. Or they could borrow concepts from the monk’s retribution line, turning themselves into a spiky mo-fo nobody wants to attack.

Keep in mind that specializations include a slight change to the profession’s lore, and almost anything seems possible.

Elementalist is a tricky one. It’s hard to change their mechanic without having to rebuild a hundred or so skills. It’ll be interesting to see what they’ve come up with.

I still wonder if it would be better to simply buy traits with Skill Points. No gold, no arbitrary event requirements, just a fair skill point cost. Adepts should only cost 1SP, up to 10SP for Grandmasters, equivalent to the cost of skills from basic to elite.

It was harder for devs to spot the threads before, unless they deliberately went into the Suggestions subforum. Now the policy is that suggestions should be posted in the subforum appropriate to the topic, so that players (and devs) interested in the subject matter will be most likely to see it.

Suggestion threads are still commonly posted and grown, but they’re spread out to the places they belong instead of hidden away in a dark little corner.

The teragriffs are mostly fine. I could stand to see the huge hit area on the charge attack be cut down a little, though. The current version honestly feels more like a bug, since it extends ridiculously far from the griff’s body. It’s unintuitive and immersion-breaking, which to me is a bigger problem than the difficulty.

Darkening it was a better idea than changing it to green. A light green / dark red setup would seem best, I think.

Try tweaking the new FoV settings. An increase in your field of view can make the system render more objects and slow things down.

Also, note that GW2 puts more strain on the CPU than the GPU, so the graphics card isn’t necessarily the deciding factor.

Hope that helps a little!

Today’s patch notes say the vines should have a touch less evasion and pop up right under the player when burrowing. If the range is actually increased, that may be a bug. Anyone else tested this out?

Some box retailers actually will start offering pre-orders on certain products before they have release dates. This practice is risky and kinda frowned upon, since they haven’t yet been able to order the copies they’re trying to sell.

I would expect any potential change to a segment of crafting professions to be released in a normal content update, instead of being tied to an expansion.

His voice in the CDI’s will be missed. Best of luck, Chris, and may you find something new and exciting to challenge you.

Aside from the Lion’s Arch portals, don’t the hotkeys still work for new players to enter PvP and WvW?

From what I’ve seen, most new players are pretty happy with the NPE, when there’s isn’t a veteran telling them what they can’t do. The devs may have gone a little overboard with hiding features, I will admit, but players will discover it all on their own if you just let them play. Most of the clueless level 80’s I’ve met were rushed through leveling by a friend or guildie, and never had the chance to figure the game out on their own.

That said, it certainly is frustrating for many of us vets to deal with the NPE when leveling alts. The hitch is that the scaling system requires all level X characters to be equivalent in power. They can’t have alts unlock things faster than first characters, because we’d be killing champs in one hit.

Personally, I think the easiest solution is to have more of the locked or hidden features occur before level 20. If we could bypass the spoon-feeding with nothing more than a level-20 scroll, it wouldn’t be much of an issue. And of course: traits. I definitely want to have at least a minor, if not a major slot available by 20.

Gibson.4036:

“It’ll be ready when it is ready” is purely for public relations.

You can bet the people working on it have given time frames to their supervisors. No successful business uses “It’ll be ready when it is ready” internally.

Sure, it’s not “bake on 350 for 30 minutes” and it’ll be ready, but neither is cooking. There’s still “cake is done when toothpick inserted into center comes out clean”. Any professional, however, has a rough estimate for how long something will take unless they are fresh out of school with no experience.

But PR speak has to be “It’ll be ready when it’s ready” because they are ballparks, and might need adjusting.

There is a big difference between internal due dates and promise dates. The former has a tendency to be wrong, and the latter needs to always be right.

I’m sure each will get their time in the spotlight. Just like with the original professional reveals, it’s best to unveil one at a time and let people digest. The demo will have plenty for people to go through without them.

Indeed, he’s always been brown. Norn come in just as many colors as humans, which hints that they weren’t always contained to the Shiverpeaks. It seems they condensed there at one point, like how the tengu have squeezed into the Dominion of Winds.

I think some of you must have some weird sound settings, because none of these things are really noticeable for me. I hardly even realized the mini hybrid makes sound at all, and my venom thief has it out all the time.

For weapon sounds, none of them are annoying to me in the strict sense. However, the necro’s scepter auto-attack kinda sounds like I’m playing cricket, and doesn’t feel especially necromantic to me.

I say have specializations be automatically available to all Lv 80 characters when you purchase HoT, but a story instance becomes available when you switch. The instance should be optional, (mostly a lore drop and tutorial), and the player should be teleported to it. The reward for completing it should be something valuable, like a unique skin for their new weapon.

blakdoxa.7520:

What’s missing from the discussion is the “new to gw2” player and the “don’t read a wiki/research” player. Theses players go from 1 to 80 without knowing much about the trait system at all (something anet tried to fix..). I wonder how this new_erer_ trait system will affect them. Us seasoned players that read up, research and test the traits won’t be impacted as much as them that probably only looked up one build and use it for pve, wvw and pvp. I feel bad for them…

I don’t feel sorry for them at all. They’re playing the way they want to. Not everybody is interested in build-crafting.

If they want to dig deeper into it, all they have to do is open the hero panel and actually read through the traits. It’s literally that easy to figure out.

Almost forgot: no weapon section of the skill bar, and no weapon selection or skills at all for mages.

A secondary profession could give you access to more weapons and their related skills, and this is where a lot of the more interesting thematic builds came in. For example, my Factions main is a “ghostboxer:” a ritualist/assassin equipped with brass knuckles.

One more note: elites are completely different. In GW2, they are emergency moves that you bust out in a pinch. GW1 elites were often the keystone of your build. They synergized with other skills to make everything click in place, almost more like how the F1-4 skills work in GW2.

• No shield. This is the more aggressive heavy profession. They should be able to defend themselves without hiding behind a physical shield.
• Warhorn. I want to hear the legends shouting in battle!
• Focus. Could be pretty good for energy maintenance.
• Rifle. We haven’t seen it on magic-users yet.
• Staff. I just want to thwack enemies in the head with a stick, you know?
• Longbow. I have this mental image of a train of slow, glowing arrows that track their target like missiles. As soon as one hits, the rest in the air speed up and zoom in for the kill. Accelerated arrows do bonus damage according to how far they travel, so enemies that kite just increase the length of the chain and ultimately suffer more damage.

VocalThought.9835:

What’s the difference with the Mesmer between games?

Huge. Illusions weren’t creatures that you summoned out on the field, but just a spell cast on the target. Mesmer spells were mostly conditional – “If x, then y,” with a lot of punishment baked in. Their main attribute reduced casting times to enable snappy interrupts. In GW1, fighting a mesmer could hurt. They could drop you in a few seconds if you weren’t watching yourself.

I still find myself giving wind riders a wide berth, even though the ones in GW2 aren’t mesmers. (All mobs in GW1 had a profession, just like players. I actually miss the way groups of mobs were designed as teams, and PvE felt a little like PvP.)

What confuses me is that they’re changing both defiance and stability, but not taking the opportunity to fuse them into a single mechanic. Especially since the new stability is basically the old defiance.

For example, instead of stability being boon stacks, why can’t it just give us a breakbar (with continued application increasing the bar)? Then just call it the Stability Bar, and turn defiance into a boss effect that makes it auto-regenerate. Without defiance, the bar only goes up when skills grant stability to fill it. If they want to keep a boon in play, then stability could go up gradually instead of all-at-once, via a weaker defiance-esque boon that stacks in duration to make the gauge fill up a tick each second.

I don’t see the point of upgrading B to C because you don’t like how B works, but then simultaneously upgrading A to B because you secretly do like how B works after all.

The number of active threads on the revenant isn’t so high yet that it needs to be separated out. Especially since so much of their design goes hand-in-hand with redesigns of core game systems in HoT, I’d say it’s best to keep things as they are for now.

However, it does feel like the time is right to give them their promo page in the Game > Professions section at the top of the page.

I think it’s being mixed into all of them. Jalis has physical support, and Mallyx draws conditions from the group. I’m guessing Glint will be boon-heavy. The fourth…I dunno.

Xae Isareth.1364:

I guess the problem is that as they stand, our current classes are essentially from a 2 – 5 year old game. They haven’t added new skills, they had barely any new traits for 2 whole years since release.

Its not a surprise the revenant looks so much cooler, its like comparing the graphics of a ps3 game to a ps1 game.

The specializations should catch the others up pretty well. I’m personally expecting conversion rates to be really high for mains, (probably lower for alts), mostly for this reason.

• 33 years old
• in a committed domestic relationship
• from Minnesota, living in Seattle
• amateur writer and game developer
• had a couple short stories published
• used to work at a renaissance faire
• have dislocated my shoulder underwater three times
• due to being on pain meds after I was born, my mom accidentally gave me the wrong middle name and last name – oops
• worked with teams on some unfortunately scrapped games, particularly an MMO and a tabletop RPG
• finally getting over ego and beginning to study properly, and working hard to eventually publish my “D&D bugs me too much, so I had to make this” game
• made numerous decent attempts at homebrewing a GW tabletop game, including RPG’s and a board/card game based on the eponymous Guild Wars
• been playing since Prophecies; original main was a ranger with a pig named Rurik, switched to ritualist/assassin “ghostboxer”
• wish I could say I have a main in GW2, but I’m on my 9th level 80 character, and am eagerly awaiting the next trait revamp so I can start another
• used to do parkour; then I turned 30 and started complaining about the weather and young kids on my lawn
• Odo and Quark are my OTP
• addicted to tattoos; just got “Do the thing” inked as a reminder to always do the thing

Carlin Sanders.3587:

Pretty much what Gulesave said, but i imagine they’ll add the ability to slot in racials for your currently equipped legends so that racials aren’t left out. (it’ll be very strange to see charr-mallyx pulling out a pistol but why the fudge not? also, heretical for mallyx-human to call on dwayna for help, lul.)

although a jalis-human with a pair of balthazar hounds would be cool. sort of a lord of war persona there.

Right, I didn’t mean to exclude racial skills, (and Antitoxin Spray). I’ve always assumed they can be swapped in, even if nothing else can be.

It seems highly unlikely they will want to create that many new weapon skills for ele. That’s as much work as they have to do for all the other professions combined.

“Life Attunement” could be a heal skill, though. There a lot of different ways that could play out.

They’ve stated that you will pay skill points to unlock the legends themselves, so it sounds like that includes the utilities, all bought together as a bundle.

If we do have some limited swapping of utilities, those could still be purchased individually. So, you would buy the legend and get their “default” skills, but then can still buy individual skills, (legend-locked or universal, whatever they come up with), to swap in.

I think they will probably include an unlocked skill type for revenant, just because that gives them more room to easily add new skills later, without always having to create a full set of one for each legend.

I’m really hoping that the revenant has the most weapon choices of all the professions. With no weapon swap and potentially predetermined utility bars, making them fill a “weapon-master” role could be a saving grace for build diversity. Being able to choose from almost any weapon, (and dual weapon combination), in the game would certainly be a selling point for the rev.

It sounds more mesmer-level mobility than thief or guardian, to me. Especially with how they described it as needing to be in combat and having a target.

Gomes.5643:

Gulesave.5073:

I do not want my trait lines pre-selected for me, though. Choosing legends should not strong-arm you into choosing matching trait lines.

You dont have to pick them. It´s similiar to the other classes – when youre running a signetbuild it is probably wise to choose the signet-recast-reduction-trait and invest in that line. When you are using an Hammer the trait which reduces the recast of all hammerskills will be useful, but you dont have to pick it. When you think another trait is more important then pick that.

Imagine what trait spreads would look like on the elementalist if they had to choose just two attunements for their skill bar. Sure, you can technically still choose the other trait lines, but the game would be staring you in the face like you’re a disorderly weirdo.

Given the limitation of two legends, they need to very careful to make sure players have a reason to experiment outside of the neat little boxes they’re setting up for this profession.

I do not want my trait lines pre-selected for me, though. Choosing legends should not strong-arm you into choosing matching trait lines.

Traits were the one area I was hoping the rev could truly break away from its possible diversity problems, and now I just hope they see that before it’s too late.

As fun as revenant looks as a shiny thing, it has a lot of potential to get very old, very fast if we can’t play around and find new ways to play it.

The problem with player housing in games is that I never have a reason to go my house and do anything there. All the action is out in the world. If it wasn’t for gathering nodes, I would never go to my home instance.

BrunoBRS.5178:

Kaleban.9834:

Honestly, the easiest way to do the Rev’s skills and Legends is to look at the legends as modifiers.

Revenants get the same number of utility, heal and elite skills as any other profession, and players are allowed to mix and match as they see fit, same as any other profession.

The Legend stances then modify how each skill works. For Example:

Utility skill A under Ironhammer Legend performs a short leap and then melee AoE knockdown, under Mallyx Legend the same skill is a long distance shadowy teleport and AoE launch at the point of impact. All governed by the Energy mechanic.

This is just a simple example. It would let ANet modify and balance the base skills’ relative strength, and then the Legends end up giving more utility to make up for the lack of a weapon switch.

you’re just describing elementalist glyphs.

they already confirmed that the utilities will be completely different based on legends (with separate cooldowns and everything), and i much prefer this way.

what i take issue with is not being able to pick which utilities to bring with each legend from a pool of skills, be them “5 or so skills exclusive to this legend”, be them “3 legend skills + some baseline skills that all legends can use”, be them a mix of both (i’d prefer this option, obviously).

Of course, the baseline skills available to each legend could certainly work like glyphs, but I guess that would ruin the point. Rev already has utility skills changing with legend swap, so it would be nice to have a few that can actually stay the same.

I wouldn’t mind bringing in an existing skill type to fill the breach. Maybe signets, since people often like having them as an option anyway.