Guild Wars 2

Behellagh.1468:

Khristophoros.7194:

I don’t care how many people agree or disagree with the court’s decision but I do find it annoying when a company takes a position on political issues.

There are a bunch of reasons why and I’d rather not get too deep into it. To keep it simple; just do your job ANet, which is making Guild Wars.

They’re already taken a position with Jory and Kas for years and recently added a transgender NPC.

These things shouldn’t be in the game for the purpose of taking a position. They should be there for the purpose of making characters deeper and more interesting.

I don’t care how many people agree or disagree with the court’s decision but I do find it annoying when a company takes a position on political issues.

There are a bunch of reasons why and I’d rather not get too deep into it. To keep it simple; just do your job ANet, which is making Guild Wars.

Lucius.2140:

Khristophoros.7194:

Crit Chance – When your crit chance is lower, it’s not just your damage that drops. You also proc things less often. If you design a build with a crit procs you get them far less often while you’re downscaled. This is an unecessary penalty for being higher leveled than the area. The whole point of the system is to make it so you don’t 1 shot everything and you can take enough damage from mobs to actually care about them hitting you. It doesn’t need to ruin the functionality of sigils and traits.

Crit chance its lower for low levels, so when you are downscaled its intended you get less crit chance, if a low level have a trait that benefits from crit chance he have the same situation than you.

The extra traits you get for difference in level (been crit chance based or not) are a plus, even if they dont function at their fullest, you are getting a power up against the content that its designed for lower levels.

It’s unnecessary though. The other players aren’t affected by how often you can proc things. The only thing that matters is that the high level character doesn’t 1 shot everything so that everyone has a chance to participate in kills.

It also kinda matters that the high level character is able to take damage and there is a possibility of them going down, but it doesn’t matter as much.

The system should not do anything other than those two things.

Necro has weak mobility and no stealth. That’s why it’s allowed to have tons of health, sustain, and still deal damage.

Gorani.7205:

I did Ascalon Catacombs yesterday and it actually was fun again, because you did not kill everything super fast and had to make effort to kill some bosses.
It is perfectly fine that you can’t proc every on crit sigil 100% of the time, in time.
Also, zerker gear people finally see that stack and might slashing does not work all the time and they have to evade or dodge once in a while.

Complaints about “having to constantly upgrade your gear” are irrelevant. If you can prevail with easily with low level gear (lets say 10 levels lower than the map requirements), than that is the problem.

I have the impression that maxed out lvl 80s in dungeons now are not too superior compared to masterwork or rare item wearing lower level characters that actually have the right level for the map.

I hate to break it to you, but your group was just weak.

I’ve been doing AC multiple times a day since the patch and my groups still tear through everything. Perhaps slightly slower, but I certainly wouldn’t call anything in that dungeon challenging.

dobri.7820:

1) crit chanse is not affected by down scaling
2) u need to have apropriate equipment for your level! (-5lvl max)
not for the zone you are in
lest all 80’s do AC in 35lv armors LoL

saing “I don’t have level apropriate weapons and armor and I’m punished”
is as it is supposed to be

get some 3silver greens on TP and be done

It’s stupid that you have to constantly do that.

But more importantly, people don’t do that. People do not understand the system and we can’t just make everyone understand it. As a result you have level 60s with 45 gear trying to get into AC groups and then they get 1 shot by the mini spiders in the first fight. This is why dungeon groups always want level 80s.

People should be crying about this, not condi damage…

rapthorne.7345:

Lopez.7369:

Why are some people using warhorn over focus? Locust Swarm does about the same damage as Reaper’s Touch except it has double the cooldown and doesn’t apply vulnerability.

Then again, I’m also not really sure why some people are taking staff and the Death Shroud traits. Dagger is still better single-target DPS. Changing to staff for mediocre Life Blast damage isn’t worth it.

WH5 has a kittenload of damage ticks, so it’s great for easily negating blind and also procs vampiric presence on every single damage tick/hit (Which is a flat damage buff on top of any damage tick, as well as huge sustain).

Focus would probably be better in a single target situation, but the low cd daze and utility from WH5 VP makes WH outshine focus right now (at least for me)

I think even for single target if you’re using siphons, swarm is better. Vampiric and Vampiric Presence both proc every hit. 10 hits per enemy means a little more than 800 damage per enemy from siphons alone, plus you heal around the same amount.

The ground seems to be paved with a mixture of wood planks and cobblestone in a way that makes no physical or logical sense. Here’s a screenshot. The whole city is like this. I can’t unsee it now.
http://puu.sh/iD4uT/91cd727782.jpg

I don’t think siphons seem to have much synergy with a condi build anyway. The way to get tons of individual hits to proc tons of siphons involves the stuff I mentioned above. Wells, Dagger, Warhorn, and Staff. You could also go for Axe for a similar effect.

One general tip no matter which profession you pick. If at any point while leveling your character starts to feel weak, it probably means you should update your gear and make sure it’s caught up with your level. For various reasons this is often a problem that happens during the leveling process.

“It seems the only way to really be able to enjoy the game is by studying the trading post. Just playing the game gets you nowhere.”

A ridiculous hyperbole that is not true at all.

Warrior is the best starting class because it’s super easy so it’ll be easier for you to get used to the fundamentals of the game.

Warrior is easy because it’s tanky and deals a lot of damage but there are a variety of builds to explore and interesting mechanics available to it so I still enjoy my Warrior (who was my first character) even though I now have a few other characters also at level 80.

I didn’t play other MMOs before this one but I’ve seen experienced WoW players having trouble in some of the easier GW2 content because they weren’t good at the GW2 mechanics. So for that reason I think it’s good to start with an easy character even if you’re experienced at MMOs.

The downscaling system is flawed because it lowers all stats by a percentage and it fails to consider some important factors.

Crit Chance – When your crit chance is lower, it’s not just your damage that drops. You also proc things less often. If you design a build with a crit procs you get them far less often while you’re downscaled. This is an unecessary penalty for being higher leveled than the area. The whole point of the system is to make it so you don’t 1 shot everything and you can take enough damage from mobs to actually care about them hitting you. It doesn’t need to ruin the functionality of sigils and traits.

Item levels – This is a huge problem with leveling up characters. When your gear is sufficient for the area, but your character level surpasses the area, your gear suffers the same downscaling as your base stats. This makes the gear worse than the area, so you need to constantly update your gear as you level up or else you end up weaker than the level you get downscaled to. This is also totally unnecessary and goes outside the scope of the original purpose of the system.

The second issue is the root cause behind people wanting only level 80 characters in dungeons. Sub-80 characters are usually extremely weak because of how the downscaling system works. In order to make a sub-80 character strong you have to deck them out with the best available gear for their level. If everyone did that, we’d see most of the sub-80 characters performing well in dungeons and groups wouldn’t be asking for level 80 characters. So changing the system in the way that you did actually made this problem worse. Because to be clear, most of the pre-80 characters trying to get into dungeon groups are still above the dungeon level. When you downscale a level 50-60 character who’s still wearing his level 45 gear down to level 35? He gets 1 shotted by everything in AC.

So yeah this system is totally broken and it just got a lot worse with the patch.

Lopez.7369:

Unless you’re in an AOE situation, it would be better to stay outside Death Shroud and auto-attack with dagger.

Soul Reaping is decent for Spectral Mastery for Lich Form and Strength of Undeath. Death Perception is okay for AOE. Everything else is kind of useless.

I think Death Perception is worth taking if you have Soul Reaping and you have wells because AoE situations are common. I guess Foot in the Grave is also worth taking.

Overall I think Soul Reaping is worth it but mostly for survival reasons.

I like being able to place the mark with a dodge roll before combat starts. I was already using this trait before the patch and slowing down while running through mobs has never been a problem, only a minor annoyance.

Soul Reaping is good for a well build. Drop the wells and go into shroud immediately to gain +50% crit chance while the wells are ticking. That’s the only reason Soul Reaping has any offensive use in PvE.

Odeezee.7362:

/sigh Power Necro DPS is so wet noodle? my mistake was playing my Guardian before my Necro (main).

why does our damage need to be so terrible Anet? /sigh

Man up and use your dagger. It’s the only way.

DrArmature.4619:

Khristophoros.7194:

DrArmature.4619:

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

Actually that does not matter at all.

The real secret to builds like this is to realize that healing power is terrible for any type of build that focuses on healing yourself.

The true stat to buff your personal sustain is toughness. Healing power is incredibly weak. The ratios on things are too low.

So you’d suggest rabid? and perhaps undead runes?

I actually use a power build with high toughness so I can only guess what would be best for a condition build. But probably yes.

DrArmature.4619:

Khristophoros.7194:

DrArmature.4619:

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

Actually that does not matter at all.

The real secret to builds like this is to realize that healing power is terrible for any type of build that focuses on healing yourself.

The true stat to buff your personal sustain is toughness. Healing power is incredibly weak. The ratios on things are too low.

Sort of true. Although group heals are designed to benefit most from Healing Power scaling, self healing over time skills/traits do become quite effective with more Healing Power as well. This creates potent sustain in combination with lots of toughness and siphons.

So Regeneration, Unholy Sanctuary, Edit: Signet of Locust /Edit, Blood Bond/SoV’s Active and SoV’s passive, pretty much in combination, are the real reasons to go Healing Power for self sustain. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for Parasitic Contagion/Curses, but the healing is less “conditional” (hehe).

Basically you’re right though. It’s terrible to build Healing Power for the sole purpose of buffing Siphons alone.

The Siphons are just complimentary in such builds and shouldn’t really be built around stat wise at all, unless other parts of your build demand it.

I did some math when I was looking into which stats I wanted for my build and I found that you need a really high amount of toughness before healing power becomes worth taking at all. This was true for every healing source I looked at.

I have a lot of healing sources in my build but it doesn’t make healing power any better because if you add up all the heals, the total base amount is still a lot higher than the total healing power ratio. Like you said, healing power is good for support builds that heal allies.

edit: Also Last Rites provides a crazy amount of healing power which means you need even more toughness before it becomes optimal to invest in healing power.

I don’t want to call it a bug but this trait can activate and fail, using the ICD without applying the debuff to your target. It happens because it requires you to be facing your target.

It feels really bad when using staff because the quickest way to get 4 bleeding is to use Mark of Blood and the dodge roll trait to get another Mark of Blood. The dodge roll often causes you to not be facing the target.

I don’t see why the trait should require you to face the target. It just feels bad this way.

DrArmature.4619:

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

Actually that does not matter at all.

The real secret to builds like this is to realize that healing power is terrible for any type of build that focuses on healing yourself.

The true stat to buff your personal sustain is toughness. Healing power is incredibly weak. The ratios on things are too low.

I’ve been doing a vampiric build since before the changes. I like wells for my utilities and staff + dagger/horn for my weapons.

Wells trigger a lot of siphons. Each well can siphon up to 25 times and of course the grandmaster trait gives them an extra siphon.

I like staff because the AoE and piercing ends up triggering a lot of siphons.

Dagger/Horn because when you do Locust Swarm and autoattack you will get a ton of siphons in a short period of time, especially if you stack some wells first.

Other than that I don’t have much to say. Those are the most important things to know about using siphons imo.

Phyrex.5174:

I actually am decked in the best possible gear i can possibly get short of ascended/legendaries :/

i spent hours figuring out a new build too :/

i feel they really overdid downscaling

I did some ascalonian catacombs and other downleveled content with a few characters and I didn’t notice any difference.

What’s your build? Maybe we can offer some advice.

Electro.4173:

In order to account for the new condition system and be zerg-friendly it had to be swapped to intensity stacking, or else it’d remain just as useless in huge zergs as it was before.

Only one player would ever be able to have their burn in effect, and players with low / no condition damage would be able to mess up the burning DPS for condition players. Which is exactly the problem that they were trying to solve with the new condition changes.

I mean, I guess they could have changed it so that each individual player could have 1 stack of burning active at any given time, but I don’t know if the game is setup to allow anything like that, and it would probably be harder to program than just letting burns stack like other conditions.

I really doubt that it suffered much in the old system. How many non-condi builds are doing much burning? Yeah some characters will apply it for 1 second every now and then but that is fine. I guess there are cases where you have some warrior doing axe 5 in stacked fire fields and that actually stacks a bunch of burning.

I think the problematic cases with burning were rare though, while bleeding was always capped in 100% of world boss fights. I’ve never once seen a world boss not cap out on bleeding. But with burning usually you see moments when it totally falls off so you know that everyone’s burning makes it through relatively quickly.

Now it’s like super bleeding instead of working in a unique way. I don’t get it. In order to balance stacking intensity you’ll have to nerf it pretty hard and it’ll start to feel too similar to bleeding.

Stacking duration was fine. It was unique and honestly in most cases you didn’t have to wait too long for other peoples’ burn to end before yours started ticking. There wasn’t a problem with burning. Bleeding was the only condition that really needed help in large scale content.

Shinji.2063:

coso.9173:

1 lesbian couple and 1 trans character is WAAAAAAAAAAAAy lower than the 2to 7% of the population number you just gave.
by that number most games should have at least one lgbt character, and MMOs should have many more, considering how many characters are there in the game.

3 major couples so far,

Caithe/ fiolin can’t spell her name

Kas / maj

Quenn/ log arnt actually a couple but close enough I guess

So we are sitting at 66% right now, I would say that is dam good represention

I actually really love the fact that they put in homosexual relationships between some of the Sylvari characters. I don’t perceive this as token inclusion like I often do because it adds depth to the Sylvari lore. Generally in Sylvari romance, gender is not important. This is a unique feature of the race that they’ve successfully created examples of in the story. That’s why I don’t see it as a token inclusion.

I’m guessing you’re not in full exotic or ascended gear?

They really need a more complicated formula than just X% less stats. There are so many issues with downleveling that can’t be fixed by tweaking numbers.

To keep it simple, if you are not at least using full exotics/ascended with a good build, downleveling will destroy you. If you are using full exotics/ascended with a good build it’s the opposite and you’ll destroy low level content.

coso.9173:

1 lesbian couple and 1 trans character is WAAAAAAAAAAAAy lower than the 2to 7% of the population number you just gave.
by that number most games should have at least one lgbt character, and MMOs should have many more, considering how many characters are there in the game.

They should have way more ugly people too. The NPCs in GW2 are all beautiful. x.x

anx.7549:

Dashingsteel.3410:

Self-determination is fine but there are always consequences. When your choices offend other people they have the right to complain.

Being offended and complaining is one thing. Telling someone to die because they disagree with you is another. (Not that you made the die comment)

And telling somebody that their opinion is invalid is bigoted and disrespectful. (not @ you lol)

coso.9173:

so people don’t talk about poverty and war and murder all the time?
not true, they do too.
when someone plays a game and has no trouble with violence, murder, war, genocide, and then looks at a trans npc or a gay couple who love eachother, and think that doesn’t belong in a game, then we have a problem.

I think it really depends on the context. When it comes off as a token thing then you’re going to get people complaining about it.

chemiclord.3978:

Bloodstealer.5978:

See .. this is why ANET should of steered clear of this kind of attempt at inclusiveness.. small and of little consequence to the game per say.. but that small thing has already begun to ignite that very hot potato Chronos is referring to.
Many of us genuinely don’t have any issues with LGBT inclusion and their preferences, but we also know and understand that not everyone shares that same level of acceptance, tolerance, acknowledgement and understanding around the globe.. its cruddy yes but it’s a fact. MMO’s or games in general are not the place to fight these kind of stigmas and hot topics and for good reason…
If this is allowed to escalate within game then maybe ANET need to start placing warning on boxes, or across splash screens and raise the age bar.. because this isn’t something that young kids need to get embroiled in when playing .. a game.

So do yourself and others in the LGBT community a favour and take your aggressive intent out of the thread because your actually the one who is doing their utmost to turn it into the cat fight many of us are are saying we would prefer to avoid.

And I disagree. I think this is the PERFECT place to fight these stigmas.

The art and entertainment we experience is the PERFECT place to challenge societal mores and rules. The best, most enduring tales we pass on to future generations are the ones that force us to think about the world around us and how we view it.

Video games need more like this, more things that make players reflect on themselves and ask if there is something more they can learn… because the answer is almost always “yes.”

There’s a time and a place. You can’t just inject it into every game, movie, TV, show, book, etc…

Make a game about it. Write a book about it. Make a TV show about it.

Create a work that expresses an authentic experience that you want to share with the world. It doesn’t have to be verbatim but it should be based on something real.

That’s what some people are actually doing and it actually pushes the change you want.

coso.9173:

anx.7549:

Great, so people who play games to leave reality behind for a while get force-fed the stuff that’s shoved down our throats everywhere. Same-sex relationships, transgender NPCs.. What’s coming next? Demonization of masculinity? “Healthy-at-every-size” promotion?

Heterosexuality…. ? Oh wait… that’s ok to have that shoved down our throats.

Oh and Rukhas, if you are leaving the game, can I please have your stuff?

this is precisely the type of double standard attitude that just reflects blatant homophobia disguised as something else.
“leave reality behind” but has no trouble with a game that has war, poverty, murder, betrayal, cruelty, etc…
but when there’s a gay couple or a trans character or anything lgbt related, then it’s some sort of “agenda” and “shoved down their throats” no matter if heterosexuality has been “shoven down” OUR throats time after time.

I think what he meant was “leave behind current IRL issues that people talk about incessantly”

chemiclord.3978:

Khristophoros.7194:

My opinion is not from bigotry. I have a close family member who has been in transition for a few years and I don’t accept it. That is a much more real experience on the issue than most people have.

See… that’s the problem. Your “acceptance” means jack kitten. You don’t get to choose whether it’s acceptable or not. You get to shut your mouth and let other people choose how they want to live their lives.

Your opinion gets to be dismissed without merit, because that is all it deserves.

When the person is close to me it matters. It’s up to them if they want to go ahead and transition regardless of what I think, but there will be consequences because they cannot ask me to do or think what they want.

There are social and emotional complications for me that they cause by transitioning, so it’s not fair for them to ask me to continue to play the same role in their life that I did before.

All tolerance is, is not trying to stop them from what I truly believe in my heart is the wrong choice.

Nikkle.4013:

ASP.8093:

You’re assuming no one on the dev team is trans. That’s not a safe assumption to make. For all I know, one of the coders or artists or testers or managers wanted this character to represent their own feelings about their life.

That’s exactly what happened. A dev currently transitioning put her in.
https://twitter.com/PaschBlue/status/613515181985914880

Think the timing with the whole Jenner thing is just a coincidence

It’s not surprising that a trans dev was the one who put it there but at the same time it really does end up being a token character because it doesn’t help me learn about or even become aware of this dev’s experience.

However, I’m not saying it would be appropriate to make the character really deep and everything. There are tons of devs at Anet and they’d all have a story to share if you asked them, but that’s not what this game is about.

Xdmatt.3958:

Reading this thread one should note that that assorted vile statements, insults, accusations of every shade of bigotry and general belligerence are a-OK so long as “your heart is in the right place”. Which is trademark of progressives at large and SJWs in particular, but what is new under the sun?

Bigotry – intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.

Intolerance and disagreement are not the same thing.

Furthermore, tolerance doesn’t mean acceptance. What it means is you’re civil and as understanding as you can be towards people who you disagree with or dislike.

ASP.8093:

Khristophoros.7194:

That’s why earlier I said that the way to create change is to share your own experience by creating your own works or going out and representing your experience somehow, not by asking for or praising token representation.

… You’re assuming no one on the dev team is trans. That’s not a safe assumption to make. For all I know, one of the coders or artists or testers or managers wanted this character to represent their own feelings about their life.

Also, going back to what I wrote earlier, tokenism can be pretty weak, but at least it’s an okay indicator that you’re not going to see a flagrantly hateful depiction in the same work later on.

Deep depictions of characters are nice, but any game with an expansive world is also going to have a lot of background NPCs. Acknowledging that not every one of the random extras is going to be straight adds a bit of depth to the world even if the individual characters themselves are just a name, a procedural face, and a few lines of dialogue.

I’m not assuming that at all. It just doesn’t appear that the NPC has anything taken from a real person’s experience.

ASP.8093:

In particular, might be nice to give the player a few options here, including the ability to say “Me too!” One of the ways to avoid tokenism in an open-ended game is to allow for the possibility that maybe the protagonist is going to belong to one of the minority groups they encounter.

There’s a lot more to it than that.

The problem I have with it is, which person’s experience is being represented here? There are so many important facets to each person’s experience. I don’t see any depth in this NPC at all so it doesn’t seem to be based on any particular person’s experience. This makes it seem like a token character.

This reminds me of a blog post I read where the author was showcasing some art of black versions of Hermione from Harry Potter. She loved these artworks so much because she herself was African American and had always wished there was a black character in Harry Potter, and she also liked Hermione a lot. So of course there was all this stuff in the post about how she wanted to see her experience represented and whatnot.

What I think the blog author failed to consider is that if a character with African ancestry was in Harry Potter, and it was actually true to the setting and true to JK Rowling’s experience, this hypothetical character would not represent the blog author’s experience at all. Afterall, the book is set in Britain, not the US. African British don’t have the same culture as African Americans. They are actually a completely different people who happen to have similar ancestry and physical appearance.

A realistic character who is true to the setting would not be what this blog author was truly looking for. A character like she wanted would be a token character, since it wouldn’t fit the setting and the book’s author wouldn’t actually have the necessary life experience to give the character true depth.

That’s why earlier I said that the way to create change is to share your own experience by creating your own works or going out and representing your experience somehow, not by asking for or praising token representation.

DBZVelena.5186:

Khristophoros.7194:

Arshay Duskbrow.1306:

Khristophoros.7194:

My opinion is not from bigotry. I have a close family member who has been in transition for a few years and I don’t accept it. That is a much more real experience on the issue than most people have.

On the contrary, that means your bigotry is more deeply rooted and prejudicial than average. Most bigots are simply against a faceless hypothetical image, not a real person. But you’ve made the decision to turn against a real person who is part of your life, denying them the love and support they no doubt were hoping for and may desperately need. Your bigotry is on a whole other level than that of a mere idealogue.

This is an extremely disrespectful thing for you to say. You have no idea what my experience is like.

I was actually very accepting of transgendered people until this happened. I’d like to see you just accept it if it happened to you.

I would have absolutly no problem with it. ask them, their preferd pronoun and try my best to use it.
Sure i’d slip up ocasionally, but would correct my self right after.
Depending on if it was FTM ot MTF, i’d offer any help and support they would need.

I Don’t know why you have an issue with it. Perhaps learning of it was traumatic for you? People are all different after all. Perhaps you could go find somebody to talk to about your issue with it? Then you can overcome whatever made you so upset. And in the end be supportive for your family.

You can’t know that until you have the experience. It’s that simple.

I’m not going to go into all the reasons you’re probably not even considering, or which member of my family it is. It’s all too personal and I’m not comfortable with it. But I assure you that you simply can’t know what you’d do or think in my situation because you have no experience with it.

Arshay Duskbrow.1306:

Khristophoros.7194:

My opinion is not from bigotry. I have a close family member who has been in transition for a few years and I don’t accept it. That is a much more real experience on the issue than most people have.

On the contrary, that means your bigotry is more deeply rooted and prejudicial than average. Most bigots are simply against a faceless hypothetical image, not a real person. But you’ve made the decision to turn against a real person who is part of your life, denying them the love and support they no doubt were hoping for and may desperately need. Your bigotry is on a whole other level than that of a mere idealogue.

This is an extremely disrespectful thing for you to say. You have no idea what my experience is like.

I was actually very accepting of transgendered people until this happened. I’d like to see you just accept it if it happened to you.

This is a low hanging fruit idea for your ANet. Add an extra path to each dungeon which would be a “challenge mode” version of the story mode with unique rewards.

I just think it’s a shame that there’s a path in each dungeon that we have no reason to run after the first time. This would be like adding another path without having to change the dungeon master achievement and without having to go through the dev process of creating the new path. This would give us more content to farm!

Einlanzer.1627:

Xdmatt.3958:

Khristophoros.7194:

Fay.2735:

Well done Anet for encouraging tolerance. Keep up the great work!

I don’t see how this encourages tolerance. People aren’t going to change their opinion because of a transgender NPC in a video game. I say this because … well, you wouldn’t like my opinion on the matter. Anyway, now that I’m aware of this NPC I can assure you that it hasn’t influenced my opinion at all. It’s not a real person. It’s an NPC.

So I am not sure what the point of this is. I can see from this thread that it makes certain people happy but why? What is so great about this? Nobody is going to feel any differently on the issue due to the existence of this NPC.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

With utmost focus on constructiveness, here’s my opinion on this: yes, the NPC is inconsequential, avoidable and irrelevant. But he is also unnecessary and inflammatory; one could say unnecessarily inflammatory.

Now, we all know that gaming community is rife with SJWs, Gamergate being the most stark proof thereof. And while respectful of ANET’s decision, I’d like to note my disappointment in their desire to jump onto the social justice bandwagon du jour.

You’re entitled to your opinion(s), I’m entitled to mine.

Bigotry-fueled opinions aren’t worth consideration.

My opinion is not from bigotry. I have a close family member who has been in transition for a few years and I don’t accept it. That is a much more real experience on the issue than most people have.

Guhracie.3419:

Khristophoros.7194:

Fay.2735:

Well done Anet for encouraging tolerance. Keep up the great work!

I don’t see how this encourages tolerance. People aren’t going to change their opinion because of a transgender NPC in a video game. I say this because … well, you wouldn’t like my opinion on the matter. Anyway, now that I’m aware of this NPC I can assure you that it hasn’t influenced my opinion at all. It’s not a real person. It’s an NPC.

So I am not sure what the point of this is. I can see from this thread that it makes certain people happy but why? What is so great about this? Nobody is going to feel any differently on the issue due to the existence of this NPC.

For the same reason it’s important to have ethnically diverse casting in film or television. For the same reason it’s important to show representation to women. Small motions create the foundation of change.

I really disagree. Change is achieved by going out and representing yourself and the people you care about. That can be done by creating or contributing to a work of fiction, but not by placing a shallow token character where it is actually irrelevant.

Fay.2735:

Well done Anet for encouraging tolerance. Keep up the great work!

I don’t see how this encourages tolerance. People aren’t going to change their opinion because of a transgender NPC in a video game. I say this because … well, you wouldn’t like my opinion on the matter. Anyway, now that I’m aware of this NPC I can assure you that it hasn’t influenced my opinion at all. It’s not a real person. It’s an NPC.

So I am not sure what the point of this is. I can see from this thread that it makes certain people happy but why? What is so great about this? Nobody is going to feel any differently on the issue due to the existence of this NPC.

Move more of the conditions to crit based condition procs. This makes Dire weaker and Sinister stronger so that condi builds need to give up some durability to get extreme damage.

Malystryx.4172:

Can’t tone down the dmg. It’s simple math.

If base condition dmg before was 100 dmg…

100 × 25 = 2500 dmg.

Even if you did a 75% nerf… Condition dmg at 25, with a cap of 1500, let’s say we hit 500.

25 × 500 = 12,500 dmg.

That’s not even getting CLOSE to the actual limit. And that’s also assuming a 75% nerf is done to conditions… In order to get back to normal, you’d need a 98% nerf in conditions.

2 × 1500 = 3000 dmg.

Not gonna happen, you may as well wipe conditions out the game.

And if a power build crits for 2k and you have 25 people all critting for 2k, that is 50k damage.

Remove damage from the game?

XxSmokedatganjaxX.2948:

It is simple math, everything at the moment is dying at least 5 times faster than before. Raw damage and condition damage are not equal, the late being way too powerful right now… and they did not buff raw damage, just conditions. So they either have to put back the 25 stacks cap or tone down the damage.

Build diversity? Cleric, Soldier, Nomad gear are still forgotten in the void lol, all the damage mitigation builds are still lacklustre

I doubt that a condi group can burst down dungeon encounters like a zerker group. As strong as conditions are, they are DoTs. Zerker groups burst stuff so they’re inherently stronger for much of the content.

Condi builds are now competitive with full zerker builds. I wouldn’t call that too strong unless you also think zerker builds are too strong.

Consider that previously if you actually had an instance full of zerkers, world bosses would go down just as fast. They were balanced around the assumption that most players in the instance wouldn’t be doing a lot of damage. Now that the condi cap was removed, disorganized groups of players end up doing decent damage so you just have to adjust the bosses.

I’ll be really disappointed if you nerf conditions right when there was some hope for build diversity. Zerker meta has been overpowered for years. Please look at this with some perspective.

The UI doesn’t know which enemy you will attack next, so there’s no way for it to show it. If the game could calculate which enemy you would decide to attack, that would be really impressive and creepy.

I made a topic about how it reduces dash ranges but there’s actually some more interesting stuff about this trait.

I haven’t confirmed for sure but I am pretty sure it reduces all of your ability activation times including utilities. That’s very useful with physical utilities like Stomp or Throw Bolas, signets, banners, etc… There’s a trade off with dash skills because they move slightly faster but go slightly less distance.

Still not sure because it’s hard to test and I’m not going to video capture and look at the frames. Simply too lazy. But this is how I think it works.

Wallace MacBix.2089:

Khristophoros.7194:

Just tested with Savage Leap. It reduces the range because the skill activation time is shortened.

Quickness always reduced the range of leaps so I had to test this trait right away.

Considering that movement abilities no longer affect leap range, quickness and this trait shouldn’t either. Also because sword is probably the best candidate for this trait, the anti-synergy feels really bad.

Then they should also most likely address slow, which will most likely make us travel farther with movement skills. I assumed leaving quickness out of the patch notes was just an oversight.

I assume the intended result should be you travel the same distance, but faster with quickness, not traveling less.

Well they always intended for it to shorten the distance, but they should change that decision in light of the decision they made about movement speed.

Also yeah slow making it go farther would be really stupid but is probably how it’ll work at first. ._.