Problem is that I’ve seen this bug happen even when the enemy hasn’t moved much at all from their general area. Even if my Warrior goes in and hasn’t moved a bit the enemy will just up and start walking away at a slow pace and start regenning health. If this is not a bug, but a feature, it’s a rather silly one. All it does is make you want to use a ranged attack to finish them off, or just use ranged to start with.
Hey folks,
(snip…)
We’re also looking into options that would allow players to experience the story sequences that will go away as the story moves forward for those who missed them, but this is still a ways off as we look at various options.
(…snip)
One bit in particular that stuck out to me was this. This, in my opinion, should not be “a ways off”, it should be a priority. I love the content that’s been put out, and I love that it’s been both fun and challenging, and I love this game in general. The way they’ve done things differently, encouraged grouping to happen automatically, and made fun mini-games, is very nice. What I don’t like, is the idea that if I need to miss out on a couple weeks, all I will have to go by for what happened content-wise during those weeks, is the small changes in the world. I will be locked out of that content forever at worst, and need to wait another year at best.
The latter is not such a big problem, but the former certainly is. The worst part is that it’s not just a problem for players that miss out due to whatever circumstances may arise, it’s also a severe problem for new players. If a player joined just yesterday and was told that Kiel had won a council seat, and that Braham had helped save his village with our help (really the other way around, but we’ll just go with what the story says he did, instead of dying like a wuss because he was an NPC fighting dungeon mobs, give these guys Determined status, and have it vanish if the party wipes or something!), then how exactly would this new player go about finding out who these people were? If the answer is “Check on the wiki” then the game has failed at telling a good story. Any game where you have to check an external source to find the lore for something that happened within the game? Is by default not doing a good job at telling a story.
In addition, some of the most fun content has been done during these stories. Molten Facility and the Aetherblade Retreat are coming back as Fractals, and that is fantastic, but players need a way to experience the story, even if it has already happened. Have some mystic archiving box that a player can access which lets them go to instanced versions of the past areas, offer it as a single-player version of Fractals, something that lets a new player experience the story parts of the events, even if they can’t get the time-locked rewards. This will overall make a more fun game, one that has LOADS more permanent content to play through, and which is easier for newer players to understand and get into. The Living Story is supposed to be about building the relationships between our characters and the world around them, a new player or one that missed out on the content should be able to have the same experience that everyone else does. Just my 2 silver.
Glyph of (Lesser) Elementals: No limited duration on the summon. Basically make them function like a Necromancer minion and keep them around until they die. In addition, have their special attack be what replaces the Glyph skill itself (Necro minions, Ranger spirits, and Guardian spirit weapons all get this) so that we can fire them on command instead of them being used randomly.
Having them ALL be “Recharge on crit” is kinda a bad idea as well. It works with Fresh Air since you’re already at least +300 points into Precision. And it’s also kinda silly to have them all have instant recharge abilities as well, at least IMO. Main issue with the Alacrity skills is that they’re really limited since they only work on one attunement, and aren’t going based on equipped weapon. Eles get stuff in the Arcane line for their weapon specific stuff (except for Focus, which is something that could help it somewhat). I have some general guidelines that probably should be followed for the 20% CD reduction traits. If it’s JUST the -20% CD? It can be Adept, if it’s -20% CD and some special ability (e.g.: Warrior’s “Axe Crits give bonus Adrenaline”), or it works for multiple weapons, then it can be a Master trait, IMO you shouldn’t have a -20% CD trait EVER as a GM trait unless it’s something really kitten. A good example of this? Written in Stone. The way it is in Blackrose’s merged bit above is a good example. Something like the “Glyphs give you a boon based on attunement” one could probably do fine in Master tier.
I still stand by my idea that the Alacrity skills, if they’re going to remain a Master tier trait, should also work for any utility skills also aligned with that element. Potentially you could also have them boost the attunement recharge rate of that element by 20% as well, but it may be too powerful with both of those.
(edited by Kamui.3150)
Not sure but I think this is the first thing they’ve done that only affects SPvP as far as traits and/or skills. So hopefully this could be a harbinger of having the old RTL come back for PVE at the very least, potentially also WvW. So what do you guys think, good things to come, or should we not get our hopes up?
Fundamentally, condition Ele is broken because of the long attunement switching timer – if you need to switch out of Earth/Fire, you can’t do any appreciable damage for at least 9 seconds – and that’s if you have 30 arcane, which offers little to a condition build.
Attunement times need to come down for Ele. You shouldn’t need 20+ point in arcane just to play the class fluidly.
If you’re going to talk fundamentals any Condition based spec is pretty bad by virtue of game design. Conditions basically have everything working against them.
In PvE Conditions can be stacked at maximum for 25 for bleeds or duration for other effects. This largely means your damage is going to have to wait in line to be done if at all. On my Mesmer I passively apply 10+ bleeds without wanting to (minor trait) with 0 condition damage. That means any class that seriously wants to apply them are unable to because even more powerful bleeds won’t overwrite weaker ones. In addition for stacking duration conditions a weaker burn/poison is also not prioritized lower. Even if they were prioritized based on effect power, if two people intentionally apply a high damage burn as part of their damage only one will take effect meaning by game design one person will always be doing lower damage.
In PvP (and/or WvW) things are even more grim because of the number of counters. The huge advantage raw damage has over condition damage in PvP is you can’t quickly or easily “erase” raw damage where as all classes have a wide variety of options to remove condition based damage. There is also an entire stat (-Condition Duration) dedicated to countering condition durations which forces you into +Condition Duration options to give you base durations in the best case scenarios. Except the base duration on many conditions is so pitifully small because they were balanced around the idea you could increase said condition duration. Also with the stacking nature of Bleed it’s extremely difficult to “cover” them as the last condition applied because Bleed was designed to be stacked and is available on most spam abilities.
This is not to say Condi specs are impossible to pull off, have fun with or even that they can’t excel. It’s just the very way the game is designed is set against them (regardless of class) which makes them and abilities like this seem so lackluster.
Yeesh, if these details are true about conditions, then they really do get screwed over. That means in group settings that if 3 people each stack a 5 sec burn but the strongest one is applied last that it would be the last one to do damage, correct? That really sucks, since it means in WvW or the like, you’re praying that your conditions will be the ones at the front of the queue and won’t get cleansed right away, while direct damage dealers get all their damage delivered right up front.
^Frankly, I agree. Mainly figure that ANet is stubborn about Eles getting too much at once, so having it as a trait might be more palatable. Ideally though, yeah, I’d far prefer the 1 skill to be cost-free, even if the base charges on a Conjure were to be reduced to 10 base or something similar.
Alt ideas for Conjurer and for a new Grandmaster Major trait could be for Conjurer to no longer deduct a charge for the 1 slot skills, and the new GM M trait could be something like Burning Wrath, or something. Idea is that your burns deal the same amount of damage per tick, but said ticks occur every half second, and burn duration itself is halved. Another idea I’ve liked is for the “Reduce cooldown of <element> skills by 20%” abilities to also reduce the cooldown of the utilities tied to that element. So Pyromancer’s Alacrity would also reduce cooldown on Cleansing Fire, Conjure Flame Axe, and Signet of Fire (unsure if Fiery Greatsword should be included here).
Will say that on the whole I love these new traits, pretty good, without being OP. Especially like the new Adept Minor on Air, since +10% Move speed is NEVER gonna get used, and doesn’t make a bit of difference. Same as the current One With Air, it’s just silly, IMO. And if ANet wants us to constantly be swapping Attunements, having a trait that requires you to spend an extended time in a single one is bad design.
For the cooldown reduction traits, one sugesstion I had in a thread a little while back was to also have it affect the elemental utilities we head. So the Fire one would affect Cleansing Flame, Signet of Fire, Conjure Flame, and the others would affect their elemental equivalents. It’s probably not a GREAT boost, but it was a neat thought, at least IMO.
I also agree that lowering the base cooldown on attunement swapping should be done, although I don’t think that Arcana should be tweaked to just be doubled Boon Duration. I dunno what exactly it could do, but lowering cooldown on base swapping would still be a good idea.
I actually made a suggestion thread a while back specifically regarding traits, some of them were probably a bit OP, but I think I had SOME good ideas. Check it out if you get a chance, by some miracle I might have had a decent idea.
(edited by Kamui.3150)
Fair enough. I realise that a lot of them are probably a bit OP. Main thing I had focused on was a theme for each trait line. Damage/Might for Fire, Protection for Earth, Healing for Water, etc. The Arcana fury one is prob a bit much if you rotate through your attunements only getting off 2-3 attacks per element, I’ll admit I assumed that the player would at least get all of their attacks off before swapping attunements, at which point like I said, you’re still only getting an attack or two of effect from the effect of the Fury.
I made some mistakes in these, no doubt. I’m mainly hoping that there’s at least one good idea in there that might be balanced and still useful. Thanks for your time, and the comments!
Hey there, I run an Elementalist main, and haven’t been playing from the start, but I have been playing since January, and I like the game, but I do feel that there are several aspects of it that could certainly use tweaking. I have hopes that the community feedback is important to ANet, so I figured I’d toss up my suggestions for a big point of character customisation, the traits.
Traits are very useful since they give loads of new abilities to the player, and they can pick and choose exactly what they want to get out of the system. However, there’s several traits that are pitifully useless, at least from what I’ve seen, so here are my suggestions to fix and/or replace them. I will be addressing any issues I have with the minor traits first, then the major ones. Please note that any precise numbers in suggestions are just suggestions, and those probably need tweaking. The general idea of the suggestions is the main thing that should be considered.
This is an EXCEEDINGLY long post, so what I’m going to do is just link to a pastebin page, so that it doesn’t need to be spread among loads of posts.