Guild Wars 2

Check out Dulfy, she has pictures and notes on all the changes for all professions.

Windsagio.1340:

Jerus.4350:

Exactly, and being mainly an Engi/guard, not gonna lie, reading the stuff left me feeling a little tingly. I feel like someone at ANet loves me or something.

On that, do you feel better about the valor tree now, especially since stats have been desynced?

Looks well balanced, but I’d like a shield trait buff, pretty lackluster currently. I still probably won’t go for it often being a mainly passive defense for the group and personal sustain tree, but I think it’s balanced quite well, few different options on each trait slot if I were to use it.

Yeah my thought is they need to make the traits competative to actually have us use different builds. Having that scepter trait make Smite a symbol with added damage or something would be a good start. Having sets of 3 traits where 1 is the clear winner is the exact thing they should be wanting to avoid, and that seems to have happened a bit here.

Sold Out.7625:

I’ll write the unthinkable…

I prefer the hobosack to having incredibly suggestive dingle-dangle-balls in my right hand.

I prefer the hobosack to my character holding a -giant- toilet paper roll with a fuse and attempting to eat the fuse.

I’m so sorry because I hate the hobosack.

I mained engineer since the day I got into gw2 now. But this -new- visual issue might be a class changer to me where I’ll just stick with eles from now.

HAHAHA, Honestly I hadn’t thought of that but yeah it looks like you have a string of … yeah…I mean I heard about soldiers collecting ears but these? man Engi’s are sick

Still very happy with the change.

Thanks for the math Quin, though I would point out that while we will almost always have Might/Fury, it is quite likely we’ll have retal/regen/swift as well potentially taking 6% more off that 8% loss for a total 2% loss. If we got air training back there is a good potential that alone could lead to an actual increase in damage… which DF needed anyways as you said staff is going to still blow it out of the water.

Yeah and wasn’t Radiant Retal shown to do less damage even with condi build than the power alternative? I seem to remember reading some issue about it. Would be nice to see that replaced with a sword trait, really there are a few mediocre traits I’d like to see adjusted. Wrathful Spirit would be an optional slot for it, competing with Scepter trait and fiery wrath (would need a large effect to counter loss of fiery wrath). Permeating Wrath seems quite lackluster as well and I think should be combined into Supreme Justice. Again freeing a slot for a possible sword trait to compete with Indomitable Courage and Battle Presence both support options.

My thoughts:

Engineer: Looks nice, I don’t think out of line nice, I mean just nice.

• with the rifle and pistol changes to explosions, Flame Blast from Flamethrower has always bugged me that it’s not an explosion, I mean, it’s a fireball you detonate and then it bursts and causes a blast. What about that doesn’t scream explosion?!
• Kit Refinement with speedy kits has lots of potential, but with that also the potential to screw you over and get you in combat. I would love if they made the kit refinement part of it “in combat” only, let me swiftness myself up outside of combat, but not be dropping magnet bombs or anything while I do that.

That’s really all I got for Engi right now.

Guard: OMG the damage, BUT!!! we’re losing support on some builds, losing viability on weapons, and just overall it’s concerning. I believe the changes wanted to create more diversity, not less, and right now I’m seeing some almost set paths for guardian to take and I hope they can adjust some traits to counter that.

• Zealous Scepter, seems like a solid trait as is, however, it competes with fiery wrath, 10% strait damage vs at most like 8 stacks of might? Yeah, not sure it’s worth it. This is a major issue because it will likely determine the viability of an entire weapon being used in ideal situations. I’d propose at the very least it gets an additional 10% damage, but truly more likely it should receive like 15-20% damage to not only counter Fiery Wrath but also counter the symbolic power that mace/hammer will do so well with. Or they could make Smite a symbol?
• Sword viability, we have this pretty mediocre trait “wrathful Spirit” that also competes in that same line. Looking things over that’s the biggest “weak spot” of the entire new design IMO. I’d propose scrapping that and putting in a Sword trait, with again 15-20% damage, alternatively you could combine the sword and scepter traits so that both are giving might and countering the limitations of the weapons that are now more glaring.
• Shield… c’mon… Who uses it and who the hell is going to trait for it jsut for 20% less cooldown on pathetic abilities? Trait needs to give it some oomf. I liked someone’s idea of Aegis on anyone hit by the effect of a shield skill, meaning 1 more aegis potentially for us with the 5 skill, 2 more potentially for the group with 4 and 5 skill. Powerful? Sure, limit the duration of the aegis to require well timed activation. I’m honestly thinking like 2s duration.
• Honorable Staff & Virtuous Mallet, I think these should be swapped. Honor is our Hammer Tree with the Symbol buffs, Virtues is our support tree, which if there is any reason to use staff, it’s in a support role. With the 3 tree max rule we honestly probably won’t be able to touch the hammer trait currently.

Overall I love the changes, but I’m concerned on the diversity it will bring as I feel like we’re all going to go 66006 grabbing all the damage modifiers running GS/Mace+Focus, and swapping in Unscathed Contender for MoC when MoC isn’t needed, that or a full DPS hammer build of like 66060 losing your support. No longer will we be mixing up mace/sword/scepter depending on the fight, which is not something good IMO.

Elementalist:…ugh

• LH nerf, is it really needed? It was good damage, but nothing amazing, nothing gamebreaking, just solid damage that allows us to have Scepter builds compete. I’m honestly curious what about it they felt was overpowered? If there’s any way to leave the auto attack alone it’d be nice. Ice Bow I understand and even kinda agree on but, yeah…
• Stone Splinters & earth modifiers, loss of those pushes us to 66060 build in PVE almost certainly, which is again a shame if all this work was supposed to lead to diversity.
• Air Training, is the ferocity going to make up for the loss of a flat 10% damage? I don’t think it will and I’d really like that 10% back to keep options viable, /mourn DF the best Ele build.

Main thing here is trying to salvage the viability of D/F and S+LH builds, being stuck in the most boring build ever (staff Ele) would just not really be something I’d desire. I was hoping for the reverse of what seems to be happening, in that Staff needed toning down and the other two up.

cranos.5913:

Jerus.4350:

I’m curious how the math will turn out on guard though. With the Symbol buff maintaining that will be key, but also you’re going to get the 10% on symbol damage. Will it be able to overtake GS/MaceFocus? I say Mace because again the symbol thing.

I imagine 66006 will be meta with GS/Mace+Focus. I imagine the hammer build will be nice as well, but you’ll lose your support.

I don’t know, excited, think they’ll tone guardian down a bit.

Why is this so exciting to you tho? We get a 20% with symbol buff, but our flat 10% while the enemy has condi got nerfed. I’m sure we’ll do more damage now, but where I would constantly swap mace, sword and scepter in fractals, now I will pretty much stay with mace or depending how the math turns out… spamming hammer 1 all day. In the end, while we’ll see a bit bigger numbers, the gameplay changes sound terribly boring overall.

I hear ya, just excited to have things mixed up a bit.

Sword will definitely take a beating. Losing the trait for it, and not really having much else special about it for many situations, mace will almost always take over. Scepter also loses the 10%er, and even if they tossed that on the scepter trait you’d be losing Fiery Wrath’s 10%.

I guess if I could adjust some stuff I’d change that line of traits, 15-20% increase on scepter, you have to counter fiery wrath so high % makes sense IMO. Then get rid of that awful retal trait and slip in a sword one that makes it compete.

Devildoc.6721:

Jerus.4350:

Devildoc.6721:

I wouldn’t just say nerfed I’d say run into the ground. I didn’t notice how hard hit D/F was until I started looking at the air traits again.

I think there’s not even a “spirit” of that build left when so much damage has been stripped from it.

Yeah I was like “hey it’s not that bad, we got the water tree instead of earth and BttH” but losing Air Training too!? Ugh. And is vital striking gone as well? If so we’re losing like 26-27% in modifiers and gaining 2% per boon, which could add up to a bit, but not 26%!

Well Vital striking is there it’s in the Aquamancer trait that reduces water skill cooldowns..

But the loss of Bolt to the Heart and Aeromancer Training is pretty huge, Bountiful Power will not make up 30% damage.

Nice on Vital Striking, and while BttH is 20% when active, it’s only active 1/3 of the time, so we’re looking at an average of like 6-7%, so it’s only 16% we’re losing or there abouts, you’d need 8 boons to match that. If they gave us Air Training back, we’d only be having to make up 6-7% which wouldn’t be all that bad needing just 4 boons.

I wouldn’t call the Engi changes insane as much as just really nice. Guardian, yeah I really imagine them dropping the “in symbol” buff to like 10%, it’d still be very very nice. Still be a major buff.

I’m curious how the math will turn out on guard though. With the Symbol buff maintaining that will be key, but also you’re going to get the 10% on symbol damage. Will it be able to overtake GS/MaceFocus? I say Mace because again the symbol thing.

I imagine 66006 will be meta with GS/Mace+Focus. I imagine the hammer build will be nice as well, but you’ll lose your support.

I don’t know, excited, think they’ll tone guardian down a bit. I don’t think Engi is out of line at least from a PVE perspective (not educated enough to really judge pvp perspective).

Devildoc.6721:

I wouldn’t just say nerfed I’d say run into the ground. I didn’t notice how hard hit D/F was until I started looking at the air traits again.

I think there’s not even a “spirit” of that build left when so much damage has been stripped from it.

Yeah I was like “hey it’s not that bad, we got the water tree instead of earth and BttH” but losing Air Training too!? Ugh. And is vital striking gone as well? If so we’re losing like 26-27% in modifiers and gaining 2% per boon, which could add up to a bit, but not 26%!

coglin.1867:

I predict that grenades greatly falls out of favor.

For PVE not at all, you generally used them in close range already. It’s the 3X explosions for vuln that makes them strong not the range. It was certainly a plus though. Now we’ll probably carry around Mortar if we need a far range optoin, combined with a traited rifle which I’m hoping will still boost the range.

That’d be nuts lol. But you do have big ol bomb, but I’d probably take FT for it’s regular blasts in the situations I would have used bomb heals before.

Make it very short duration and I don’t see a problem really. Think about the alternatives. Focus, you have blind which helps the group as well as heals and damage. Then a 3! block shield that does damage if it explodes.

I mean, wow, that’s a weapon. Currently you got nothing for shield.

As an addendum though, I’d have it be part of the shield trait. You want that power, Spec for it.

With that though, kinda overshadows Communal defenses a bit, BUT you can always gain your damage with focus/torch, use other blocks and still provide an Aegis, I think that could be balanced by making the aegis from shield attacks a 1-2s aegis. Essentially letting you block for your team(and you with the 5 skill) IF you time it well making it actually take a high level of skill to gain from.

It’s not like shield skills currently are anything worth mentioning.

You’d also create a nice variety in that tree, More support = Communal Defenses, block trigger a longer duration aegis for your team, Passive = Retributive Armor, Active and weapon dependent team wide shield blocks.

Simply making it “in combat” only would go a long way. All else fails always have toolkit ready for runs and pop that giving you superspeed and not agroing anything

While I hear ya and it ruins my plan of picking up both of those, I do think it’s a good choice in that I think the more they make you choose the more variations on builds will come from it. You might lose some potential synergies out of it, but it’s “for the good of the game” I think. People wanted diversity, you need conflict to create that diversity in a system like this. If you had clear cut choices everyone would choose them.

Sarahfull.4930:

At first it was a shock to read my nades wont be 1500 range, although the idea that the impack aoe is gona be increased did take my notice. During my fractal runs, how I combat enemies with reflect is to aim for the ground near them and the explosion would still hurt them so it wouldnt matter. With this change, I would be able to do this with even more ease.

Well, you now have Mortar kit for long range as an option. Also looks like “rifle trait” will be a solid choice in the master slot, hopefully comes with extra range?

As an aside, I noticed Bombheals are gone, we have heal-splosion but that’s for blast finishers it says. I’ll miss that option if it’s gone, didn’t use it much but was a fun twist.

Sounds fun, I might have to set up my WvW Engi again for some frontline bombs with Mortar to screw with them at long range

Iris Ng.9845:

LOL, nice one. But Ice Bow is truely strong though. I can understand the nerf.

I agree, I hope it isn’t nerfed into oblivion and remains worthwhile, but it was a serious burst powerhouse… and you got 2 of them.

Exactly, and being mainly an Engi/guard, not gonna lie, reading the stuff left me feeling a little tingly. I feel like someone at ANet loves me or something.

Am I reading that right “baseline: spirits no longer move”? wasn’t that the standard baseline and needed a trait to move?

And here I am with a smile on my face about the whole thing. Strange how terrible it is while making me so happy…

Ragnarox.9601:

Jerus.4350:

So bring some vit gear which will now be even more powerful to make up for the loss from traits, as well as a base ~75 increase to all stats.

Please, QQ more it’s entertaining.

750 hp < 6000 hp…pls do the math. And stop trolling.

Man, if that was a troll it was a terrible troll, I feel ashamed that you thought that was my trolling.

I was just speaking facts. If you want health you can’t rely on the honor tree to fill you in anymore. You can still get force of will as I understand it for 3k hp. But you won’t get the other 3k hp along with it. For that you might have to /gasp, wear something other than zerker! ohh my god! I hear Valkyrie has vit on it, might try that. Or with the burning changes maybe Celestial will be nice?

GL to you. I hope you can eventually understand the new system, it’s not too complicated but you seem to be having a little trouble.

Iris Ng.9845:

Engineer

+ Hobosack changes to handheld bundles. Grenade sac, med wrap
+ Med kit first two skills change, 1st = Healing Breeze, 2nd = a turret which buffs area, 3rd= syringe
+ Mortar kit is an equippable, longer range rifle which shoots 5 aoe fields
+ No fields on grenade skills
+ Engi has 5th Toolbelt skill for elite skill
+ Supply crate = Turret category

Explosives
+ Evasive Powder Keg (dodge bomb), Steel Packed Pwder, Explosive Powder (dmg + 10%)
+ Grenadier (radius and velocity, extra grenade is default), Explosive Rocket Belt (proj on hit 33% chance), TBD
+ Damage vs Target with Vuln, Explosive Descent (Fall dmg), Short Fuse (only Bomb)
+ Mortar Field (last longer + f5 is a barrage, skill 1 on kit is a blast finisher), Shrapnel (+ cripple), Evasive Powder keg (blast finisher on dodge)

Baseline: Accelerant Packed Turrets, Forceful Explosive (+radius), pistol 1 + rifle 5 become explosions.

Firearms
+ Sharpshooter, Target the Weak, Target the Maimed
+ New pistol trait (condi), + Crit change at <600 r, Precise Sights + Infused Precision merge
+ Rifle/Speargun (+ dmg, -cd), Crit to Condi conversion, Robo legs (reduced cripple, immob, chill, + swiftness duration)
+ Modified Ammunition, Juggernaut (pulsing stab, 1 stack/3s), Incendiary Powder + Napalm Specialist merge

Baseline: Rifled Barrels, Coated Bullets

I LOVE THIS DEV. HE MAKES MY LIFE SO MUCH EASIER!!! <3

You’re so right, taht dev is awesome! And engi looks to be getting quite a bit of love in the QoL department and power, can’t wait to get my hands on it. (and no mention of hammer yet! can only imagine)

I think someone likes me at ANet giving all the goodies to my Engi and Guard, whoever you are, I love you too!

Iris Ng.9845:

engi is getting disgustingly buffed x)

\o/

Hoping someone does a nice breakdown of everything, or chops up the video for easier watching. Can’t watch right now and catching up on this long of a video feed… ugh, please someone save me!

I don’t see how or why LH should get nerfed. I just really don’t understand the thinking behind that one.

Ice Bow I can understand, it has crazy burst potential, I could see wanting to nerf that by a little bi (5-10%?) It’s only when you can manipulate the firing area that it really becomes OP.

I’m curious to see more details about these things, because again I really don’t understand the LH idea.

Zention.1849:

Okay..I think it’s an interesting change.
Frostbow isn’t that great. It was ONLY worth taking because of the traits which gave additional power/precision/damage modifiers.
If these can’t be accessed anymore, icebow will lose its purpose in some way. It was ONLY worth taking because the meta requested taking it. (gear, trinket, weapon choices)
But with these changes. Traits not giving any additional ‘support’. I am curious how gear will change, especially for Ele. Since we will be lacking a lot of precision as well as power.
——
Although there will be a 1000-ish base power?! Gear will get an more important role. Or did I misunderstand something?

While we are losing some damage modifiers stats shouldn’t be an issue. In fact we should get more of our chosen stats.

We’ll be seeing a baseline increase by about 75 iirc to all stats, then gear will make up for the rest of the “losses” by being increased to compensate. So zerker gear will give more of those stats and if you used to run with points in water/earth/arcane you’ll see an increase in power probably (not sure on numbers but that’s the idea).

Interesting stuff on Engi, I was expecting “and they smashed them like a bug with the nerfhammer” after all the PVP complaints I’ve seen.

Little disappointed with Ele though, I was hoping for more diversity, seems like it’s fire/air/water all the way for PVE, unless you need the vigor. (energy sigil probably better option when you look at lost damage %).

Iris Ng.9845:

Jerus.4350:

Where might one find all this info Zenith? For someone stuck at work and can read but can’t watch stuff.

My crappy note:

Elementalist:

+ Blasting Staff is default, culled from traits

+ Adept: Flame Barrier(fire shield on swap), Sunspot, Burning Rage
+ Major I: Burning Precision, Conjurer, Power Overwhelming (condi-> power)
+ MAjor II: Pyro’s Training, One with Fire, Burning Fire + cantrip grants Might)
+ Major III: Persisting Flame(+ Lava Tomb), Pyro’s Puissance, Blinding Ash

+ Adept: Zephyr’s Speed, Lightning Strike, Weak Spot
+ Zephyr’s Boon, One with Air, Ferocious Winds (Ferocity from Healing)
+ Aeromancer’s Training, Inscription(+ Glyph cd reduce), Tempest Defense
+ Fresh Air, Bolt to the Heart, Lightning Rod

+ Adept: Stone Flesh, Geo’s Defense (less damage at <600r)
+ Earth embrace, Serrated stone, Elemental shielding
+ Diamond skin, Written in stone, Stone Heart
(lost 2 dmg modifiers Stone Splinter, plus GM minor)

+ Water: Bountiful Water 2%

+ Arcane Fury, Lingering Attunement, Arcane Prec(crit applies condi)
+ Arcane Energy (restore endurance), R-Stamina, Abatement
+ Final Shielding, Ele congitency,
+ Elemental Atunement, Evasive Arcana, Elemental Surge

Could miss a lot as they skimped through the line too fast.

Thanks Iris, sad to see the modifiers leave earth. Seems like Water may be the way to go? Between Vital Striking and Bountiful Water should be able to make up for the loss of Bolt to the Heart to roughly break even with D/F? (4 boons should mean exceeding BttH on avg).

Ragnarox.9601:

If you didnt noticed they are removing atributes from traits so you are losing 6k vitality if you are vitality heavy…so what..guardians will be running around with 12k hp? You are joking if you are thinking this are good changes. Some of trait changes are good yes it needed to be that way in the first place. Simbols are buffed but everything else sucks.

So bring some vit gear which will now be even more powerful to make up for the loss from traits, as well as a base ~75 increase to all stats.

Please, QQ more it’s entertaining.

Neko.9021:

I’m glad, honestly. Using Ice Bow to fire off two skills then putting it away always felt really weird and cheesy to me. Hopefully if they nerf the skills, Conjures could be re-balanced into something more general purpose and useful (kits?).

More likely they’ll be ignored (spirit weapons?)

Ice bow I at least understand. Lightning Hammer though? Really?

Ignavia.7420:

Right now it seems like staff is the (only) way to go in PvE. You don’t have to invest in arcana anymore to get blasting staff so you can basically go full damage. That build is also not reliant on fresh air, so you can pick bolt to the heart – something a D/F build can no longer do. Scepter builds are also getting nerfed, since lightning hammer and frostbow get changed. So right now I’m not super confident this is going to work out well. All those three builds were pretty close together, but the margin between them seems to have increased by quite a bit.

It’ll be interesting, but in any case you’re going to go fire tree for sure. Then it’s your choice between air/water/earth, in any case you won’t be able to get all 3 % modifiers and will have to go down just 2 of the 3. Staff should still take a little hit I’d imagine.

Where might one find all this info Zenith? For someone stuck at work and can read but can’t watch stuff.

If they can have me debating between even just 2 out of the 3 options per trait choice, that’s leaps and bounds better than it is currently where it’s pretty clear that A>B&C in most situations.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Rauderi.8706:

Old school WoW trees were a mess of bloat and micromanaging with numerous traps and the same “choose this or go home” selections that the GW2 trait trees already have. Not to mention, the old WoW system doomed itself in vertical progression, because more talent points meant more chances to dip into other trees in an unintended way and more micromanaging. It’s not difficult, it’s just tedious.
And, there were some talent points that always, always went to the same place like crit bonuses. So those were moved out of talent progressions and just given to the class/spec during leveling.

If the illusion of choice has six options, but only two are superior, there’s not much of an actual choice; only two choices and four “why would anyone ever pick those” traps. The choices a player does make in a messy, bloated system like that are less meaningful. Not to mention, the options that weren’t used often end up ignored by developers because no one used them anyway. They were too busy balancing against meta builds to deal with obviously inferior choices.

And yes, it is easier to balance 3 traits in a tier instead of 6. So doing that for development reasons isn’t wrong.

You might be right, but you’re missing the point. If I wanted to make my character a mess of bad choices, I should have the option. I shouldn’t have to follow the legion of sheep that say, “Such and such build is the best,” and be all but forced to play it.

Easier to balance doesn’t make it right. It just makes it lazy. And it also caters to those players who can’t think for themselves and need someone else, developers included, to tell them how to build a class and play the game.

Hasn’t the new leveling system taught ANet that hand-holding is a bad decision already?

But, again, we’ll see.

It’s not as if you won’t still have choices. 27 different combinations per tree, multiple trees. If the changes leave us with more actual choices I’ll be stoked. I rather have more good builds than more bad ones.

maha.7902:

dlonie.6547:

rfdarko.4639:

This is going to be like the vote kick change. A few months of “I’ll get back to you” before a change goes in randomly with no word back whatsoever. It’s not a huge deal but I wish we could at least have a “The developers told me what happened was ‘x’, they are planning to do ‘y’, I can’t give you a time but it’s on their short list of bug fixes.”

Or Alphard’s bug. Back when she was broken I actually got an infraction for daring to ask a direct question addressed to the dev team in a polite, friendly way. Hopefully that nonsense doesn’t start up again.

Let’s remember how that went: several months of people asking “is this intentional or not?”, no reply, and then one day it was magically fixed.

Gaile, you remember all of the communication threads, right? This is the sort of thing we’re talking about. Talk to us like people, engage in discussions, let us know what’s going on. As long as there are major bugs that go unacknowledged for months, you can’t seriously believe that there is an acceptable level of communication here by any standard.

guess what happened when they tried communicating? when regina wanted a bunch of threads about the different dungeons? a whole bunch of “omg why have you guys ignored us, let’s get our circlejerk together and flame the ANet staff”.

i’m not defending their practice and saying it is acceptable, but there’s good reason they don’t communicate.

You mean the ones that started with a bit of “this is pointless” ended with a ton of information and then disappeared proving the “this is pointless” people quite correct? yeah…

OP I’ll keep this simple. You have much to learn, take a look at the stickies they may help you, if you have specific questions ask and people will surely help. You’re wrong about just about everything in your post though.

You can blame that on the completely impractical mechanics for mesmers. Ugh, I hope their specialization does something interesting to free them from the burden of the current profession mechanics.

Iris Ng.9845:

Jerus.4350:

It’s 5 stacks as a cap, there is no known timer cap.

If you have 5 Engi’s all do “toss elixir S” you’ll get 5sX5 for theoretically 25s, in my tests it seemed we would get 24s and quickly tick over to 23s in less than a second. So we had time “lost” somewhere. But yeah, you can stack quite high.

Curious, how does SR work? Does it just strait tick on the 5 stacks of stealth? or does it just keep you stealthed while in it, then at the end place a large stack of stealth on top?

And as Iris pointed out, you lose time while blasting, esp if you let a thief blast all of them in smoke screen. So the idea of 5X meld with shadows being 20s is a bit unreasonable unless you have 5 thieves all tossing a blast in at the same time. And with that, as I mentioned on Elixir S it seems you often lose a second for no real reason.

The second that seems “lost” is due to how the game counts stealth to 0th second before you get revealed. In that case, a duration of 5 seconds would start counting from 4th to 0th.

Awesome, yeah that makes sense, thanks.

Pax, who’s to say that blasting staff won’t get the same treatment as necro’s wells, and just be integrated in naturally?

Really no use getting overly passionate when we don’t even know the details yet.

Narum.7402:

Hey just looking at acid bomb, it says it does 210 damage. I don’t see how this is the highest damage for an engi when landing jump shot, for example, does 405.

I do, however, see that acid bomb lasts for 5 seconds. Does that 210 damage pulse every second?

Yes, it pulses every second. And that 210 is not the actual damage it’ll do. I’ll typically get well over 1k damage per tick with my build. (I don’t remember exactly what it is but I know it’s 4 digits )

I think the quality of the system shouldn’t be measured on possible choices or the restrictions it has, but on how it actually turns out.

If they set up a system where I actually want to use all 3 options per line in a trait tree, well that’s a success to me.

Currently I feel like I have half a dozen at most trait choices before I start going to just silly stuff for the heck of it.

If this all turns out to have me looking at more options as being a reasonable selection, well I have nothing to complain about.

Iris Ng.9845:

Meld in Shadows doesn’t affect blasting stealth.

Really? thought it did /shrug

As per usual, nice post Lishtenbird.

Overall I agree and understand the issue with the more restricted choice.

However, they can still pull off a good system I think if they actually make me want to choose different trait options.

Currently there’s just such a big discrepancy on the power of traits taht I’m often left feeling like I “need” to get certain ones. Leaving other interseting traits untouched because they just don’t have the oomf that these other ones do. If the combining and reworking of traits leaves me with more powerful options, well I’ll be happy. Less options overall but a greater amount of powerful builds, that’d be fine by me. I could go on, but I’ll leave it at that, my head is swimming witht he possibilities, and I really think they can pull it off, whether they will botch it or not though, we’ll see.

Cbomb.4310:

Seems a bit of a pointless conversation considering we dont know what abilities are being made baseline, what traits are being combined, and know absolutely nothing about the elite specializations.

Talking about most of the expansion related stuff is pointless since we don’t have all the information.

But then again.

Talking about dungeons is pointless because no one at ANet cares.

So, if there is anywhere best fit to have pointless conversations, this is the place.

It’s 5 stacks as a cap, there is no known timer cap.

If you have 5 Engi’s all do “toss elixir S” you’ll get 5sX5 for theoretically 25s, in my tests it seemed we would get 24s and quickly tick over to 23s in less than a second. So we had time “lost” somewhere. But yeah, you can stack quite high.

Curious, how does SR work? Does it just strait tick on the 5 stacks of stealth? or does it just keep you stealthed while in it, then at the end place a large stack of stealth on top?

And as Iris pointed out, you lose time while blasting, esp if you let a thief blast all of them in smoke screen. So the idea of 5X meld with shadows being 20s is a bit unreasonable unless you have 5 thieves all tossing a blast in at the same time. And with that, as I mentioned on Elixir S it seems you often lose a second for no real reason.

I’d disagree, with the idea in general, as I think more utility/support/defense should result in a loss of damage. In your example though I don’t really disagree though as both options are pretty solid all around.

tramwajarz, I don’t think that’s what he means at all. I think his point is that if you have say 30% worth of modifiers in one tree, and 20% in another, you’re pretty much going to always run the 30% unless you absolutely need to switch it up. With thief you have more initiative or more dodges as 2 alternatives for the last tree. Both have quite a bit of utility in them. Obviously the more dodges is nice defensively but the tree doesn’t really give all that much else. The more initiative you have quite a few nice little gems of traits and overall it’s just as potent in the control/support area as the more dodges. So why should one have more damage potential than the other? it simply bumps one out of being an option for optimal play.

It’s one thing to have full DPS spec, it’s another to have one spec with support higher than another spec with support.

J Eberle.9312:

I’m a little bit fuzzy off medications atm so excuse my typing , but I believe I have found the mother of all pug experiences. enjoy

http://imgur.com/a/nKcbb

“There’s no way you got to 28 without choking on your own spit”
“what are you saying…means no sense”

LOL