Guild Wars 2

Well, until the recent trait changes:

Human Ranger for reliable Condition Removal that doesn’t kitten your self-healing (Prayer to Kormir)
Charr Ranger for Fury (Warcry).

But these are less useful now since the recent trait updates, since now Greatsword can be traited to give Fury on crits, and the one-hand Sword can get it from Warhorn anyhow, and now also Wilderness Survival skills can be traited to give both Fury and reliable Condition Removal on the same trait.

There’s no way I’d find the exact quote now, but I’m sure back at one point close to GW2 release when ANet were asked about their plans for the GW1 servers they said they’d be running for at least another 3 years after GW2 release, so the GW1 servers will be up for at least another year yet, most likely. Probably longer.

Of course that’s not to say Anet might not change their mind I guess; GW Beyond was supposed to continue after GW2 release, and well, it didn’t, because they said they needed the team to work on the China release, and well, now that’s out and I still see no signs of them returning to finish up what they started in GW1, so.

Would totally go back and play it some more though if they finally pushed through that Paragon overhaul.

Rieselle.5079:

On the action side, the mechanics are too shallow, and there isn’t a proper risk/reward system in place. Even something as simple as “Powerful attacks and defensive skills use endurance too”, would mean that you have to make the difficult choice between using your endurance on offense, or saving it for dodging/defense. Rather than just hitting every skill on cooldown 90% of the time.
Also, too many of the traits are passive, minor and invisible. It would be much better if (like Diablo 3), choosing traits produced visible and game-changing alterations to how some of your skills worked. (eg. The elementalist trait Evasive Arcana is a good one.)

You know, what you’ve actually described here is the ESO combat system. Yup.
You get a stamina bar and you can use it for Power Attacks, for Blocking or for Dodge Rolling. It’s also linked to some skill usage.
And the game-changing skill alterations ala Diablo 3? In there too; For example the basic Sword ‘n’ Board skill generates Aggro and lowers target’s physical defense; But later on it can be customized to also either A: Increase your Armor upon usage, or B: Decrease the Target’s Magic Defense in addition to the Physical Defense debuff on use. Naturally, these ‘morphs’ alter the role you play (dedicated tank or DPS hybrid?).

Funny thing is, I actually like the ESO combat system – or at least the concept. The problem is, the execution is off – this is because in ESO combat feels a bit sluggish and it can be rather unresponsive at times, which makes well-timed Blocks or Dodges that change the way the game is played somewhat hard to achieve.

However, GW2 combat doesn’t have this problem. It’s actually very responsive, certainly the most responsive I’ve seen in an MMO, and with this responsiveness, the way the combat in ESO is designed could actually work really well in GW2 so I second the idea. However, it’s probably too drastic and intelligent of a change for ANet to seriously consider. Here’s to hoping they surprise us.

Turn them into something useful;
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Toxic_Sharpening_Stone
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Toxic_Maintenance_Oil
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Toxic_Focusing_Crystal
These can be sold on the TP (and they do sell). The profit margin isn’t very high, seems the Crystalline Dust required in addition to craft (silly they need both Crystalline Dust and Toxic Dust, seems Bloodstone Dust is essentially the Ascended Tier dust, but regardless), and Crystalline Dust is expensive and far more valuable, but it’s better than nothing.

It’s worth noting that crafting these stones/oils/crystals can get your crafting level all the way up to 500 too BTW, if you haven’t yet reached that point.

There’s definetly some bugs in the megaserver system to work out. Last night my guild attempted a Guild Rush in Dredgehaunt Cliffs, and despite being
A: The same Guild
B: The same Server
C: The same Parties
We got split between two different servers. We got everyone in the same one in the end by reshuffling the parties and using the join feature, but it seems like that’s something we really shouldn’t have to do with the way Mega Server technology is supposed to work.

Because the Tengu are awesome. Maybe you have to play through Guild Wars 1 and the GW: Beyond content to full appreciate them though.

That being said, this isn’t happening. Such a big and bold move as this would be well beyond anything ANet currently do with the living story; And if it was happening they’d have already hyped the crap out of it for extra publicity. As there’s been no mention, it isn’t happening.

Making it so Warrior Banners and Elementalist Conjure Weapons were user only would entirely defeat the purpose of the skills, and you could argue, to do that, would basically be the same as just removing them from the game.

Saint.5647:

.and there are times where a certain class is prioritized a certain conjure. Mesmers and feedback are a good example of a benefit of sharing the LH.

Another good example is Rangers in general. Ranger weapons do ~30% less DPS than other classes weapons to make up for the fact that they have a pet; However if a Ranger acquires a Conjure Weapon, it will have the full 100% equivalent DPS of any other class, seems the Conjure Weapon is no weaker or less effective on a Ranger than it is on any other class, while the Ranger will still retain an ‘extra’ ~30% DPS from the pet. Infact a team with an Elementalist doling out Great Swords and Hammers to Rangers, probably has some of the highest overall DPS a party could possibly have in the game.

Considering anything in-game that doesn’t have primary-stat power, with the exception of some triple-offense stat-sets (and even some of those leave something to be desired), hits with the ferocity of a wet flannel, more primary power-stat combinations are really needed to increase the viability of support and control builds.

The only exception would be if you are running a hardcore condition-based build, in which case you want condition damage as your primary stat, and there’s no triple-offense stat sets which offer than either. More on that after.

As far as main-stream build possibilities were concerned, the Zealot’s set (Primary Power, Precision, Healing) was a good step in the right direction here, but we need more. As a result of this, I would suggest the following:

Power (Primary), Precision, Toughness
Power (Primary), Precision, Vitality
Power (Primary), Healing Power, Toughness
Power (Primary), Healing Power, Boon Duration
Power (Primary), Precision, Boon Duration
Power (Primary), Vitality, Boon Duration
Boon Duration (Primary), Healing Power, Power (for hard-core supporters)

Of course, more combinations would be nice, but these would seem like the most useful to me.

As for the condition side of things, as mentioned, Conditon-based builds suffer to compete with Power-based builds in part due to their being no primary triple-offense-stat Condition Damage sets, as a result, to improve the viability of Condition Damage builds when compared to Power-based offense builds, we need the following:

Condition Damage (Primary), Power, Precision
Power (Primary), Condition Damage, Precision
Condition Damage (Primary), Precision, Condition Duration
Condition Damage (Primary), Power, Condition Duration
Condition Damage (Primary), Power, Healing Power
Condition Damage (Primary), Condition Duration, Toughness
Condition Damage (Primary), Condition Duration, Vitality
Condition Damage (Primary), Healing Power, Boon Duration
Condition Damage (Primary), Toughness, Vitality

These would seem like options which would help triple-offense stat builds able to compete more against the typical Berzerker sets when focusing on Condition Damage instead of Power Damage, and also provide a Condition-based primary offense alternative to Power for more balanced and support-orientated builds.

momo.1867:

I didn´t crafted this components so i don´t know if I should craft them now (without getting xp) or buy them.

Whichever is cheaper; If you already have the mats, it’s probably cheaper to craft due to TP taxes. But if you don’t, might make more sense to buy them straight from the TP, rather than go out and farm them.

The End of Repair Costs: Long overdue; Sort of. The problem with armour repair costs, was that dying in the open world resulted in a double-dip cash sink. You had to pay to use a waypoint to get back up, and then also had to pay to repair your armour. This sorta pushed dungeons into being more profitible in more ways than the ones we commonly see, seems in dungeons waypoints are free.

However, I feel a better change would have been to leave the armor repair costs in, and make waypoints free instead. This would have been far better of accomplishing the task of spreading players out over the world. Far, far, better. But instead, the changes actively work against that, as we will see in the next point…

Event and Champion Loot: I guess I can understand the nerfing of champion gold, people still farm them like crazy in the open world and do little else. And there does need to be some balancing for free armour repairs. But nerfing event gold? Really, I can’t understand the logic behind this. Most players totally skipped events anyway, because they were already poor earners, unless there was a zerg of people there causing multiple mobs spawns like we see in Arah.

The decrease in event gold just discourages people from exploring and doing these events even further. Events needed better rewards, not less! Now people are even less likely to do events seems with reduced gold output, you’re not even going to be making your money back from waypointing to the event. Unless all you want is karma, which is still rather limited in usefulness, events will now have a negative effect on your wealth rather than a neutral one.

Mystic Forge: I’m not exactly sure what’s changing here; Rewards will be more random, I think? That’s actually a good thing.

I always had the theory that the Mystic Forge worked on a global set seed, rather than true RNG, deliberately limited to ensure that too many exotics and high level materials weren’t pumped into the economy in a small space of time by random chance – which is why you could throw 200 rares in the Mystic Forge sometimes and not get one bloody upgrade to exotic at some times of the day; But at other times of the day, you could throw 200 rares in and consistently get one exotic back every five attempts as the 20% chance to upgrade should imply (and sometimes more if you were lucky).

The Mystic Forge change, which isn’t really explained much, seems to coincide with my theory that there was infact a seed for it rather than true RNG, and that the actual change they are making is to remove the seed, that punished players for attempting to use the Mystic Forge at the wrong times, and make it true RNG, as it should be. It should be fairer this way, and actually help out those players trying to get precursors (I know, precursors aren’t altered according to the post, but assuming they are treated like any other named Exotic by the forge, it should indirectly improve some people’s chances at getting one – and result in less cases of one player getting three precursors in a row, while another played spending twice as much and not getting even one).

Trait Resets: Can’t really complain or argue with this one. Long overdue and well-needed, will be nice to be able to freely experiment with my character’s builds from now on. This one has been needed for a longtime, and should result in a wider variety of builds being in play as players become less afraid of “trying new things”, due to it being less hassle to go back to the one build you always used that you knew worked.

Galtrix.7369:

sweetmesquite.5024:

[end game] Warriors, guards, and rangers have very high sustain, but thieves and elementalists have high sustain and the highest spike.

[leveling] Rangers and warriors. Probably.

Rangers? What are you smoking?

Galtrix, don’t be a naive general consensus newbie. Remember, in games general consensus is often wrong, as the majority of players are bad players in any game, and simply don’t understand the potential or capabilities of any class in full. That’s just the way it is.

One-hand Sword + Pet Ranger with the right set-up is some of the highest DPS in the game and I can’t remember precisely, but I’m sure somebody did a breakdown once that showed it did more DPS than any possible Warrior build, yet you don’t question the comment here that Warriors are high damage.

That being said, a new player is far more likely to get much more leverage DPS wise from a Warrior than any other class because they are just so much easier to play and understand, and have a far lower skill barrier to capable play than any other class.

sweetmesquite.5024:

A bear is the single most useless pet to bring into a dungeon, and if I ever see a ranger camping a bow in my party, a swift boot is in order.

Not entirely true, but true for the most part. The Brown Bear has party-wide double condition removal with a relatively low recharge as it’s manual skill, which makes it useful to bring as an on-swap pet in Dungeons where you are going to be facing a large amount of destructive conditions. Caudecus’s Manor comes to mind (25 stacks of vulnerability can quickly get you killed even against the regular mobs in a single shot). This is more a case of the Ranger lacking any alternative on-demand Condition Removal though. You’ll still definetly want a strong DPS pet as your other however.

I have to admit; This does seem awfully suspicious what with the release of a ticket in the gem store which enables life-time access to a convenience we already had with LA before.

Now if I want to combine regular crafting with mystic forge crafting I’m going to have to run between two zones, and with that comes loading times each time I switch between the activities, of a minute or more.

The slippery slope argument is starting to seem more and more compelling all the time…

I do try to use Borderlands anyway, but sometimes it’s full or an opponent holds our keep, and as others have mentioned, I’m beginning to be worried that this might be taken away in favour of a paid pass aswell.

Dante.8456:

I mean look at the number of weapons that a warrior has access to vs the number a Guardian can use – obviously a warrior should have more but the Guardian does appear to be lacking in choice somewhat.

While I understand your point, Guardian is a very poor example to use. Guardian has the second biggest selection of usuable weapons types in the game I believe (after Warrior, of course), even if they can’t dual-wield (which IMO wouldn’t make much sense on a Guardian anyway). Also, Guardian perhaps has the least amount of “unused” weapons of any class. The only Guardian weapon that never really sees any play is the Torch, and hey, it’s still good to keep one on hand for lighting up dark areas!

That being said, I do feel the game has come to a point were we do need more weapon skills availiable for classes, and if extra weapon-types were unlockable via Skill Points, well, it’d give people some extra horizontal progression (so Anet could increase the amount of things needed to “complete” your character without doing something utterly stupid like increasing level cap or disastrous like introducing another new equipment tier).

However, I believe they said they are more likely to give currently existing weapons to more classes first, which probably makes the most sense anyway. Why introduce new weapons when currently existing weapons that the class just doesn’t have access to yet could quite easily fill the roles you are looking to add?

Horrible idea. It’s bad enough that we have to pay to use them, isn’t that enough punishment?

I’m not sure what this obsession with removing map travel from games is. Like all those Oblivion or Skyrim mods that remove it too; If you don’t want to map travel, then don’t, walk it instead. Nobody is forcing you to use the waypoints. Will you miss events? Sure, but then people miss them when they do use the waypoints anyway, so.

People just think they want to be old-school and have no map travel, but they don’t really. Look at Dragon’s Dogma; Great game, but the biggest criticism levelled at it was “no map travel” (not practically, anyway) in many reviews, which put alot of people I know off playing it.

Gamers are all growed up now, we don’t have several hours to trek across the world between actual gameplay all the time. We’ve got families and/or jobs that demand alot of our time instead, so when we get home we don’t want to have to waste 2 of our 3 free hours a day actually trying to get to the gameplay…

Doggie.3184:

Legendary with no stats. I guess you’d have to skin it onto an exotic or ascended weapon but I wonder if it’d have the stat swap function. :o

I don’t think it’ll be quite like that. The legendary probably retains it’s stats in PvE, and they simply become hidden and disabled when you enter a PvP area, then return once you re-enter a PvE area. That’s likely how that’s going to work.

And bringing “PvP and PvE closer together” is likely an excuse to ensure Legendaries are not acquirable through unique PvP methods, though with the upcoming changes (gold rewards for PvP), you could potentially, with enough time and effort, afford to buy one off the TP even without ever stepping a foot outside the PvP areas and LA. There will likely not be a Legendary Weapon skin acquirable in the way PvP items are acquirable now.

Well, that’s because access to the precursor currently is based solely on RNG, whereas access to the mats you need for the upgrade process to a legendary aren’t (other than perhaps the Clovers, but personally I got those so fast it seems like it was really unlucky because I got less t6 mats in the process hehe).

Once precursors are craftable, then people might start to get them first. As for if they should be Ascended or not, well, that would depend on the mats required to create them, I suppose.

There’s quite a few other exotics that should be ascended stat weapons IMO too though. 350 Charged Lodestones for Mjolnir anyone? Yeah…

When creating a new character I only upgrade my gear a few times.

I live off the land between 0-35. At 35, the first time it’s availiable, I craft a Rare set of gear for the new character, which makes the character no-less capable than an 80 in AC or CM.
This is then what I use until 65, which, as you mentioned, is when triple stats have just started to exist, and is also the minimum level to apply Superior Runes. Granted, around the Level 60 mark, the character does often start to struggle with some mobs due to gear not being kept up-to-date, so around that level the 35 gear starts to be replaced in parts by stuff from the land.
Then once the Level 65 rare gear is crafted, and Runes applied, it obviously doesn’t get replaced until Level 80, with a set of exotics that the Runes then get transferred too.

Aye, levels are a gameplay mechanic. Nothing more, they don’t actually exist in the world.

No NPC runs up to you and says “you aren’t a high enough level for this area, head back!”.
They run up and say “You might not be strong enough for this area, perhaps headback?” instead for a reason.

I could live with a level cap increase. 80 to 90 or whatever would be fine, under the strictest condition that, level 80 equipment still remains the BiS gear. No, I don’t mean Ascended and Legendaries get beefed up to Level 90 gear status; I mean Level 90 Gear doesn’t exist. Nor does 81-89.

In otherwords, if it was just about getting a few more attribute points, perhaps a wider array of availiable skills and weapons (so long as they are options and not strictly stronger than current skills and weapons) I could live with that. It wouldn’t bother me (hey, you’d be downscaled to 80 or lower for most areas anyway, right? So if they changed the cap to 90 they’d have to be a point to it that would mostly only be relevant to the new zone that needed 90 characters or whatever). It would help me solve a few build set-up dilemmas too!

Presumably, sPvP would remain at an auto-capped 80, to prevent any sort of rebalancing debacle.

But really, while I wouldn’t mind it, assuming the above limitations are implimented, right now, what exactly would be the point of a level cap increase? If they want to do it, fine, but make sure it’s not “just for the sake of it”.

That’s not fair on the people who bought the skin for what it is, though, so you’d be solving one problem and creating another.

While I appreciate your ideas, there is a far simpler compensation that Anet could apply to make up for this fluke.

- Anybody who has a piece of human T3 cultural armor, recieves a matching piece of Flamekissed armour skin. So if you had the human cultural T3 head and leggings, you recieve a Flamekissed skin head and leggings in your in-game mail, free of charge.
- You can choose to apply these to your character, or an alt, or you can sell them at a vendor for a full 50% of the price of the matching T3 cultural armor piece. They are account bound.

What this does is the following:
- Players who bought the T3 cultural armor due to its uniqueness, are compensated for it now being availiable to all races, if they wish to keep their current T3 cultural, and basically have the gold difference from the “upgraded” gem store skin over the T3 vendor skin returned to them, so they don’t feel as shortchanged.
-Players who spent money on the T3 cultural, but prefer this new, reskinned version, basically get a free upgrade; Or an extra skin set to give to another armor set on their character, or an alt.

While it’s not an 100% solution, it does assure most players are compensated in a fair way for this “oversight”.

Draknar.5748:

Some weeks I get nothing, this week I got a level 62 exotic chest piece that dropped from a WvW kill while I was leveling an alt. It sold for 12g….yea….I was shocked at the price for that one. Also got a level 62 exotic scepter or something that sold for 5g. I mean, who the heck needs exotic gear at level 62, and for more than level 80 exotic gear lol. Whatever, it was nice picking up the 17g-ish from the TP afterwards..

A little off-topic, but not really that strange. Next time look at the Rune or Sigil in the exotic equipment drop; Chances are people are paying for that and not the item itself, and by just selling the item itself instead of salvaging the components first you may have lost out on some money.

For example, if an item comes with a Rune such as Superior Eagle, Divinity,. Traveller or Scholar, the price for the item is going to sky-rocket no matter it’s level. The same goes, for a lesser degree, for weapon sigils. Ones to look out for are popular Sigils such as Superior Sigil of Battle, Superior Sigil of Fire, or Superior Sigil of Bloodlust. At times these Sigils have fetched 5g or more each (though Fire has gone down alot in recent months, presumably due to a named unique item that drops in Champion Bags natively hosting the Fire Sigil).

For example, the other day I got a level 68 Exotic piece of Armour with a Superior Rune of Divinity in it. I could have sold it straight up for 10g, But instead I salvaged it; Then sold the Superior Divinity Rune for 11g, and gained some Dark Matter, Ectos and Mithril in the process.

Because the whole point of the combat system in GW2 was to get away from the need to have a healer class in every group (and certainly not 2 with only a 5 member party limit this time around). And if you just mean general healing abilities, well every class currently in the game has a method by which they can heal allies (cumbersome as it may be at times).

Plus, we haven’t had any expansion yet (whether we’ll ever get one is anybody’s guess though). I’m sure we will get another heavy class at some point to even out the class -to-class category ratios, but I don’t think we’ll get more than that (and to be honest, there isn’t really a need either, better to just extend the classes we have with new weapons and skills, etc).

Honestly, I’m ashamed at myself for not seeing this coming. When I got to that bit I was like “oh right, of course it was going to be Scarlet sigh”. Honestly, I think at this point Anet are very intentionally trolling us with her now, shoving her down our throats as much as they can just for giggles lol.

Oh well, maybe next year we’ll have another “big bad”, and they are finally trying to wrap up why we should care about Scarlet. Hopefully, it’ll be something we can take a bit more seriously.

Astral Projections.7320:

So it requires 2 fine T stones.

It only requires 1, but it might require 2 depending on your target armor.
At the minimum it’ll cost you 1 Transmutation Crystal (that’s what fine T-stones are called now), and 1 Transmutation Stone (the lvl.79 and below one).

So you’d do the following, on your Order-Alighned character:
Transmutation Crystal —-> Order Armor (Lvl.80) + White Armor (Lvl.20~)
= White Armor with Order Skin (Lvl.20, Account Bound).

Then, on target character:
Transmutation Stone —-> White Armor with Order Skin (Lvl.20) + Berzerker Armor of the Berzerker (Lvl.79) = Berzerker Armor of the Berzerker with Order Skin (lvl.79)

With Ascended Armor just around the corner (and most of it ugly, too), this might be wiser in the longrun then going all out and using a second transmutation Crystal for a level 80 final product.

This is a pet hate of mine too. If the enemy is dogmatic enough to follow you across half the friggin’ map, it shouldn’t reset once things start to go bad for it. Fine, if you want to make it begin to run away (afterall, somebody that’s losing would run, right?), but you shouldn’t let it begin to reset and restore its HP till it actually reaches it spawn area.

Keep having this problem too; Not sure what triggered it the last few times, but today, it happened after finishing the Lyssa World Boss, and again after finishing a Personal Story step.

You briefly hear the battle music start, then stop, then another battle music track start. This is the one that continues to play, only changing on zone change, and then straight into another Battle theme. The only fix seems to be to exit the game and re-log. Pretty annoying to say the least.

I would presume the critical hit is only for a guaranteed single target, like similiar abilities from GW1 (i.e. if “Go for the Eyes!” or any offensive Anthem was used with Barrage, it would expire after the first critical hit from the volley, even though Barrage hit 6 targets).

But you’d have to test to be certain I suppose.

Ilmatar.6709:

I think, Anet change this Holy Trinity only because Guild Wars 1 players asked it for. Everybody got frustrated because there was always missing one healer from the party. Tanks were always available but not healers.

When party was yelling LFG for hours just to get one specific monk, it really make whole group nerves tight.

To be fair, this was the narrow-mindedness of the playbase themselves fault, more than anything.

Ritualists were just as effective (and some would say even more powerful) healers as Monks, and plenty were always availiable due to the popularity of SoS builds for solo farming. Their protection was also less direct but in PvE no less effective than a Monks.

Then there was of course Ether Renewel Elementalists who could outheal and outprotect through sheer skill spam any other class in the game, the only real crux being enchantment removal but then this hindered Monks too.

There was also the Necromancer/Ritualist hybrids that were popular for heroes towards the end of the game’s major lifespan. This too boasted healing through brute force of strong health spells and limitless energy supplies.

Heck, as every class had an effective self-heal, if people cared enough to use it once in a while, and communicate with party mates a bit, even a Dervish or a Paragon could provide enough healing to keep a team alive (and at one point the Paragon could outheal pretty much anything, before it got hit with the nerf bat ten gazillion times).

But people weren’t willing to bring anything that wasn’t on PvX Wiki, and as a result most people sucked at build creation, which IMO is what killed all build variety and originality in the game. PvX was a core of rampant narrow-minded elitism. That’s what caused those parties to be stuck there for hours spamming LF Monk, not a lack of variety or options in gameplay styles and party makeups.

They’ll probably release them alongside revamped fractals rewards and ascended armor, seems ascended gear is sort of what fractals is all about. And they said we’d be having those before the end of the year; Still, wouldn’t be surprised if it’s delayed.

Snow Leapord form is actually really useful; But mostly for the stealth it offers and the huge mobiliy it has (a 1600 range dash I believe? Something like that). It’s also the only Norn Elite that can auto-attack while moving – something that I think could help out the other Norn Elites greatly.

As for Prayer to Dwayna; Aye, it’s perhaps the most useless racial skill in the game. It really offers nothing at all to anyone. Lots of people argued this a while back but I think we all gave up in the end, Even if it’s effectiveness isn’t increased, it needs something to make it “unique” or flavourful rather than just a standard heal; Such as boosting it’s power if you are under 15% HP, or making it a HoT effect.

All that aside, despite many racial skills needing a rework to be worth something at least, even if they aren’t too be as powerful as other skills, making various “encompass all” traits (such as the Guardian’s Elite Skill CD reduction trait, or Shout-related Traits working on Warcry) would be a good first step to helping them out a bit.

A day-night cycle, that works somewhat similiar to that found in Dragon’s Dogma would go down a treat IMO. While it isn’t as scary as something like Silent Hill or Dark Souls, it is atmospheric, and manages to still keep you on the edge of your seat a little despite the fact you have constant company – which I presume is the reason some people say MMO’s can’t be scary or atmospheric. I believe they can.

And definetly agree on the point that Orr could do with a Silent Hill makeover; Was really hoping it’d be like that pre-release. Dark and misty, with a deadly silence, and then maybe you walk past an old decayed stone house and catch through the window a few undead getting on with their business…slowly, not noticing you. Things like that. That would have really made the place feel “undead” and creepy. But right now, as mentioned, it does just feel like a warzone for the most part.

marnick.4305:

It means the people with 10-12 hours a day to play will not get certain things faster than me, a person who has to work 10-12 hours a day. Since people with a job are more likely to spend money in the gem store, it makes sense to cater to people with a job.

Really? I find the opposite. This game punishes people with a job. Especially those that do shift work.

I have to start 5am in the morning on the days I work, and I usally get home by about 9pm. That leaves me 8 hours to do household chores, prepare for my next day at work, and sleep. I don’t really have time to log-in to GW2 to get daily crap done.

Now the advantage of shift work, is that while I have to work long days, I do get more days off a week than your 9 to 5 worker. So in other games it wouldn’t be a problem; Can’t play the days I work? No problem, I get more days off so I have the hours to catch up with the people who can play every day on those days off.

However, this isn’t the case in GW2. If I don’t find time to log-in every day, I fall behind everyone else, there’s no chance to catch up on those days off. So I have to choose between keeping up with everyone else, or going into work like an orrian zombie. So the game actually punishes you for working or having a job; It doesn’t cater to it.

The time-gating need to be far more lenient or there needs to be a proper catch-up option before anybody can really say the game is good for the casual player or those whom have a job.

I salvaged around 70 ecto-viable rares once, using a Mystic Salvage Kit, and didn’t get even one ecto back. This was monthes ago before any complaints about nerfed ecto rates from salvaging, and before the salvage rate bug Anet actually confirmed once was introduced aswell.

I’m just a terribly unlucky person. RNG will be RNG.

That being said, it would be nice if Anet would put some RNG fail-safes in the game for those of us who are terribly unlucky. I’m pretty sure GW2’s RNG is algorithm based, rather than true RNG. At least my experiences in the game appear to have suggested this.

While I hope you are right, it’s worth mentioning that Anet don’t document everything in the patch notes, including sometimes really important changes.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times Caudecus’s Manor was changed and it wasn’t listed, or even mentioned in the patch notes at all, over many monthes, even once. Then there’s that recent change making back pieces salvagable which also wasn’t listed and took me completely by surprise. Many more examples, I’m sure.

Awww, was hoping this was a thread dedicated to fans of Ettins. An ettin fan club. I love ettins. They are awesome.

That being said, I picked up one of these as an environmental weapon laying on the floor in Kessex Hills the other day, and actually thought the same; That they seemed pretty powerful and wondered if they were availiable in inventory form, so I would have suggested looking at the heart vendors around there, but it seems you already have.

Next step is to probably try to do a few dynamic event chains related to ettins, there’s quite a few in Timberline Falls and Lornar’s Pass, and one of them (can’t remember which), results in a vendor for Ettin tonics. It’s possible that he sells the Ettin Clubs too I suppose, but I really can’t remember.

Of course, there’s the chance it may have been removed in purchasable form from the game at some point, due to potential abuse of the skill spam in WvW. Anet did do some purge related to that a while back, didn’t they?

haviz.1340:

Would be good troll attempt if anyone had read it. Practice that art and some day you might succeed. Tough I’ll give you a tip for that, you can’t block Rabsovich’s shockwave.

Wasn’t a troll attempt, just a retaliation to your ignorance. If anybody was trolling it was you with your original comment. What I said to you was merely something along the same lines of path of thought you seem to have. Means if you met your mirror image, you’d be at it all day, and wouldn’t ever get anywhere.

Just because somebody notices something that a supports a point people are trying to make, doesn’t mean that they are unable to do it or even struggle with it. Just because somebody observes something like that, doesn’t mean they think it’s too hard. Lose the judgemental ignorance, it works against any points you make, and doesn’t support them because it shows you already have a closed mindset to things, with a pre-determined opinion of everything, which makes your opinion far less valid overall.

I assure you, I have no problems doing fractals (infact I’ve done a 20+ fractal without any AR before, which is why I know that little tidbit about being able to stack enough Healing Power to survive an agony that should kill you), tend to run in ‘zerker gear, and only ever use my tanking/support gear if I need to carry a weak team through it. In short; Don’t dish out baseless insults over a player’s ability that you know nothing about.

And BTW, you can Invul it, even if blocks don’t work.

Finally – you read it.
Now, if you don’t mind keeping your comments constructive and relevant this time, moving on…

haviz.1340:

Maybe try lower levels if you are dying with your tanky gear. You don’t need to do such high levels.

Funny. I don’t remember saying anything about dying. There must be some mistake, either A: You can’t read, or B: You are inexperienced at the game and don’t understand how death, dying, and health work in GW2.

Seems as it’d be pretty dumb to post in an online forum if you don’t know how to read, then I’ll assume it’s the latter, so let me give you a quick explanation.

See, in GW2, when your health reaches zero, you don’t actually die, you go into a state called “the downed state”. It’s sort of an emergency back up healthbar. When this happens you become rooted to the spot, with the exception of a few skills you can use in the downed state on some classes that enable you to move while within it. These one hit K.O. attacks that the rest of us have mentioned generally put you straight into the downed state, rather than the death state.

While “downed” your skill pool is limited, but you can use the skills you are given in the downed state (which are specific to your character class) to “Rally” by managing to defeat a tagged opponent (or have someone in your party defeat them for you), and other players are able to pick you up from this downed state much quicker than the “death state” too. If you succeed at one of these tasks before your “emergency health bar” runs out, which gradually depletes while in the downed state unless you are using skill 4 (Bandage) continuously, then your character doesn’t die, gets back on their feet, and can continue to fight and play as normal.

There’s some other special rules to how the downed state works, I recommend looking at the Guild Wars 2 Wiki for further information.

ThiBash.5634:

If anything, taking precision without power at this point is basically wasting your stats, and even then you’re probably better off with Soldier’s than Knight’s simply because power scales so much better than precision.

I wouldn’t say taking precision without power is always a complete waste, seems on-crit proc effects may be valuable to somebody’s none-offensive role for healing, boons or conditions if that’s what they want to do, but considering that Power is such a strong stat, it’s certainly an incredibly far from optimal thing to do, and if a couple stats were altered in mechanics to be more balanced and in-line with the overall value of current certain extra-strong stats, like power, it could go along way to improving the overall balance and feel of combat in the game, especially the PvE game.

haviz.1340:

KotCR.6024:

Okay, to be fair, when he’s fully decked out in his tanky gear, on-times my Guardian can survive attacks that are supposed to be one-hit K.O.’s while he is under Protection. But the protection is crucial to this, which tells you that one boon is way more important than your entire gear set combined, which to be fair shows something is wrong with the game design.

Really? Because my zerker ele can get hit at least once by most of the bosses. Instagibs starts at 60-70 fractals.

Yes, really. In particular I’m think off Raj-a-whatsit from the Dredge Fractal, at 20+ fractals I can only survive that instant KO attack if I have Protection up on my Guardian (not taking into account blocks or dodging, etc, of course).

And for SE p3, the first Dredge Boss there, his instant KO attack appears to instant KO regardless of Protection or not.

I’m only talking about the instant-KO attacks mind, not all their attacks of course.

CHIPS.6018:

They should start replacing one hit kills with DOT damage.

This isn’t a bad idea actually. Replace one hit K.O. attacks with one hit attacks that put a DoT on you that eventually will kill you in a couple seconds if you don’t do something about it. This would immediately have the effect of making both Healing Power and Vitality useful for mitigating or creating the ability to “eat” these one hit K.O. attacks, aswell as giving support healers a more relevant role.

Actually, this is sorta how Agony already works. The thing is, as it’s % damage based, extra Vitality doesn’t help you against Agony. Healing Power does, however, and if you stack enough of it sometimes you can survive an Agony hit by activating your self-heal part way through the DoT damage, even without the AR amount that should normally be required to survive such an agony hit.

So assuming the above was implimented, however, what would you do to make Toughness relevant?

haviz.1340:

Why some of you are you keep claiming bosses 1 hit you with tanky gear? List all those nasty bosses for me please.

Okay, to be fair, when he’s fully decked out in his tanky gear, on-times my Guardian can survive attacks that are supposed to be one-hit K.O.’s while he is under Protection. But the protection is crucial to this, which tells you that one boon is way more important than your entire gear set combined, which to be fair shows something is wrong with the game design.

Open World PvE or Dungeon PvE?
It can be pretty different for both.

For example, Rangers would place highly on Open World PvE tiers, but low on Dungeon PvE Tiers (which is really all to do with how fast the Pets die in dungeons, but that’s a discussion for a different thread).

Mesmer would be the opposite, placing low on Open World PvE tiers (except for JPs I suppose), but high on Dungeon PvE Tiers.

Guardian and Warrior would be consistantly high.

Engineer, Elementalist, Necro, Thief all would come under circumstantial and debatable usefulness, in both environments, to varying degrees.

Sadly I don’t have any screenshots, but I encountered this bug on Gandara Server (EU) a couple days ago, while the server was fighting Taidha after a world reset due to patch (pretty much the only time she spawns seems the blocker that appears after fighting her once is ridiculous :P, and you have to do it three times to get her events to start again, but that’s besides the point).

Recently, a 15-minute timer got introduced to defeat Taidha when she spawns, that’s all well and good, but we encountered this problem when we defeated her AS the timer ended.

Basically, we defeated her with about 2 or 3 seconds to spare, but because of the death speech she gives, which lasts longer than a few seconds, the event failed (perhaps her timer should be increased to 16minutes to compensate for this? Off the point again, but anyway). Eventually, we did still get our Champ Bag Loot from her (no world chest or bonus rare chest of course seems the event itself failed even if she was defeated).

The nature of this pairing of Taidha dying but the event failing seemed to cause a problem though. While Taidha gives her speech, she is invulnerable – but as she died and was defeated before the timer ended, and was in her death speech at the time the event failed, once she finished the death speech she didn’t die.

Instead, she remained in the world, and re-engaged combat with the zerg, despite having zero health – she also retained the invulnerability buff she gets when giving her speech, which meant it was impossible to finish her off. Que annihilated zerg in a few seconds lol.

She persisted around the keep for a few minutes afterwards, among the undead that appear after her defeat, but eventually she despawned, leaving her champ bag.

So basically, in a nutshell;
TLDR; If you kill Taida with only a few seconds to spare, you don’t get the event reward due to her death speech. Moreover, she doesn’t die and remains in the world after her speech as a hostile but invulnerable enemy NPC, and takes a while to despawn. Pretty sure this isn’t intentional, so I thought I’d bring the bug to your attention on here.

Oh wow, what a sly update. A pretty big one too. Guess alot of people must have made some good money on that. Shame I didn’t notice lol. Stuff like that really should be in the patch notes.

Mystic.5934:

nope. I salvaged 1,120 rare charred back warmers on friday and got 4 stacks of ecto + 3 more.
at 0.9 ecto / rare, I should of got 1,008. so I was a little unlucky at 0.8955 ecto / rare

What? How? Charred Back Warmers can’t be salvaged. What are you upto? :/

Blaine Tog.8304:

I actually really like the Laurel system, overall. Best-in-slot trinkets that won’t bankrupt you and can be acquired in parallel with working towards a Legendary? Sign me up!

Granted, it’s more an issue with the limited methods of acquiring ascended gear than it is with the laurels themselves. I don’t think laurels and dailies feeling forced would be such an issue if there was other options to acquire ascended amulets, and other practical options for acquiring ascended earrings.

But until there is other options for acquiring Ascended Amulets, and a more time-practical way for gaining Ascended Earrings for those who have alts (the horrible Guild Commendation system really doesn’t cut it)., then the current laurel system is a more negative thing than a positive one.

Hopefully, if Ascended Amulets and Earrings become craftable along with the Ascended Weapons and Armour we know are coming, this will no longer be a problem and laurels will once again return to being what they should be – a “bonus” not a “necessity”.

It’s not dailies that are the problem. It’s the rewards they offer.

Dailies are a great idea to encourage people to play every day, and offer people a little extra bonus incentive for doing something in particular.

The problem with dailies in GW2, is that they award laurels (they didn’t always and nobody disliked the concept of dailies too much before they did), and laurels are time-gated, with no catch-up option. Laurels are important because they are the only way to acquire certain objects – objects that improve your character’s power. This makes people feel forced to do their daily every day or be left behind.

If their was other options for acquiring Ascended Amulets, and an alternative non-time-gated way to acquire Ascended Earrings (Guild Merits are even worse than laurels when it comes to time-gated design), I think having to worry about finishing your daily every day would be alot less of a concern.

I lol’d :P. I assume it’s a bug? Would hate if I logged in now and found that it applied to me too.

RogueTigeR.3160:

I was under the impression that when they referred to “consumables”, they meant items that disappear when you use them which will give small but permanent bonuses to magic find for the account, not food items or such which you can eat at any time for a brief magic find increase……

This is the impression I got too, so he’s not alone Blissified. I’m pretty sure this is exactly how they are doing it. Why would you go to all the trouble to salvage multiple blues and greens for a temporary magic find boost? Pretty sure they’ll be new items that do exactly this.

That being said, I’m pretty sure the Magic Find food won’t be changed. Easy to see when someone is using it anyway, and you don’t really lose much at all by using it.

I’ve had this problem before.

I was kicked from a dungeon team right before the final boss once because I was the best player there. Sounds stupid and arrogant, but it’s true. They were complaining because I wasn’t dying enough, and when they wiped on every mob encounter i proceeded to solo the group – though I was in full Berzerker, as a Mesmer, at times attacking in melee. Other team members included a Warrior who was afraid to melee, and a Minion Master Necromancer who never used death shroud, so you get the idea. I basically carried the team. Because I wouldn’t die on the final mob before the final boss when the rest of the team wiped instantly, as usual, and I told them to be patient and I would finish them solo and then rez them for final boss, they kicked me.

Since then, I never join other Guild groups unless I’m the one to open the instance – at least then you have the reassurance and security that if you carry them and they kick you, they lose the last hours progress aswell, making them less likely to do it.

Ideally there would be some alterations to the way the kick system works, though exactly how you would impliment it while retaining the functionality and safety nets the current system provides, I do not know.

I have to agree, the Hammer designs in this game are rather lacklustre. I too pretty much agree with Axos. While there is a handful of decent hammer skins (all of which we’ve already covered), these are few and far between and tend to be very difficult to acquire (350 Charged Lodestone for Mjolnir…might as well be a legendary). My biggest gripe too is that they are almost all small (at least on a human male), and most of them have more historical rather than traditional fantasy types of design (not many big fancy blunt blocks on the end of a stick, too many elaborate hefts with finite and pointed ends). It’s personal taste I guess, but it’d be nice to have both.

The issue here is, I believe Anet did indeed put less design work and attention into Hammers in the game. Hammers have never been as popular as swords, and in this game they are utilized far less, having more niché purposes and only being availiable on two professions. The same issue applies to Maces. Under-utilized and their gameplay purpose doesn’t really fit in with the game’s DPS orientation (except perhaps Warrior off-hand Mace).

The reason we have so many nice Sword and Greatsword skins (and a good amount of decent St@ff5 [censored for some reason] too for that matter) is because half the professions can use Greatswords, and if I’m not mistaken more than half can use Swords. As they are far more widely utilized, it makes sense I guess to put more focus on designing a wider variety of popular skins.

Somewhere down the line it’d be nice if they give Hammer to Rangers (not sure why they didn’t give them this to begin with instead of Greatswords, considering GW1’s legacy), and Maces to Engineers (they have plenty of 2H weapon options due to kits, but a very limited amount of 1H weapons). This would give them a good excuse and opportunity to expand upon the variety and selection of Maces and Hammers in the game.