Guild Wars 2

After further testing, I’ve concluded that:

-the skill itself does not have a counter, but
-it has a certain minimum range that the AI will use it.

So basically kite around very close to it and hope you don’t get exploded by the acolyte’s plague carrier summons before they load in.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

…….

PO – TAY – TOES!

.

I think a lot of the time when they make a new creature, they more or less copy+paste then alter a few things (name, appearance, some skills, et cetera). Sometimes they miss things, and you get for example a coyote that summons a wolf when you attack it.

Stunbreaks are useless because it keeps pulling you back in, stability is useless because it gets ripped off. I’d dodge it if A) there was any distinctive thing to dodge – it’s hard enough keeping the thing in view and still avoid the explosive trash effectively, nevermind see what pitiful little motion it might be making with its hands – and B) it didn’t appear right beneath me and take immediate effect. So far I’ve only been able to escape if I was lucky enough to get KD’d near the edge, burn a stunbreak and dodge out before the next pulse. If I’m in the centre, which is usual, I may as well save the effort of pressing keys.

I suppose I could try warrior with endure pain, but then there’s a 60s cooldown.

Is there some obvious thing I’m missing here, or is this ability pretty much someone’s way to say ‘zerg it or screw off’?

Bhawb.7408:

It doesn’t fit well with the current them of majority of fields/finishers are accessible through the same means. Ours are utilities.

Eh, there’s three (four if both bone minions count) and one’s on the staff. At that point it could be theme or coincidence.

Trying to turn it into an offensive version of call to arms? I guess it could. Not sure whether it needs much more than it already has though.

I’d be happy with swapping them around and removing the self root, provided the #2 didn’t get gutted in the process. I like that skill a lot better than the axe #4 when it comes to keeping fury up without utilities/elite.

Umut.5471:

With the recent buffs, many warriors are currently using this and they are nearly immune to conditions. They have reduced necro’s burning duration and fear damage in pvp, so we expect arenanet to nerf warrior’s this ability to be fair. It’s way too op against condition builds. They have to reduce its duration or condition immunity. They have to nerf all classes properly or buff nerfed ones again to be fair…

You realize that this is less effective vs conditions than endure pain is vs direct damage, yes? 4s of total invul and stunbreak, vs 8s of -100% base duration to incoming conditions (nothing done to existing ones) and some adrenaline. Traited you can even get endure pain twice in a row – once from the skill and once when your health hits 25%, on a 60s cooldown each.

Somehow direct damage builds have managed to live with this.

Kick does seem a bit… lacking. It has its uses, and it’s not even bad at them, but at the same time I have trouble sacrificing something else for it – it is a bit like an extra weapon skill.

That said, having it as an F2 seems a bit weird. In an alternate world where all physicals were F-skills it would make sense, but with the current system I’d rather just get an F-skill for the off hand weapon (and for 2h weapons, just a secondary F-skill). Or even have the one skill change based on your weapon set, like the middle skill on a thief’s bar does, so that more weapon combos could be meaningful.

Outside of CoF I’m pretty sure you could show up with your pants on your head and most groups wouldn’t care. Or if you like, just tell everyone you’re in cleric’s gear and don’t group with the ones that run screaming in the other direction.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Fun fact: Tequatl in hylek means “One in the Darkness” iirc; “the Sunless” is the hylek name for Risen. In other words his name basically means “Risen One in the Darkness”

Hm… what’s more risen than risen? Maybe he’s fermenting or something in this update.

I think the performance increase they’d get from you removing a shiny thing would be literally imperceptible. Far better to just turn their display options down for the duration (and kill pre-rendering).

Ashabhi.1365:

DPS comes in many forms. I have seen Necros with Rabid gear kill a host of mobs in the same time that it takes a Zerker warrior kill 1.

I am hoping that the TQ is going to be more like a raid situation in which it will be NECESSARY to have other builds in order to take him down. Somebody has to protect all these zerker single target killers while the dragon DoTs them to death.

I think coordination and tactics will win out in the end, not specific builds.

Eh, world bosses seem to have a consistent 25 stacks of bleed and quite likely are poisoned from start to finish. I can still get credit using necro w/ rabid but its actual damage output probably isn’t spectacular on those.

In related news: ~50% of humans polled believe satire is something for their car, 100% of cats swear they’ve never heard of it and wouldn’t take part in that sort of thing, honest.

Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it. If it’s that bad, just do it once and let it go the way of Southsun.

ilr.9675:

Balth’s Gladiator is one of the only Champs I refuse to fight.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even drop a Coffer :p

He doesn’t AFAIK, I’m just used to doing the event when it’s up for the hell of it. No great loss ignoring it now, but the cheap junk they seem to think of as ‘challenge’ when messing with events in Orr gets bloody tedious.

Christos de Soufre.3802:

He might have had Retaliation.

That would be a pretty impressive amount of power. Since I stopped attacking in downed state though (all of those are SB #1) and still got finished off with nothing appearing in the combat log, I have doubts.

Also don’t_its damage numbers with their reddish aura thing appear over your character if the damage is incoming? I could be getting that backwards, but either way I usually find retal pretty obvious.

Queensdale is a bit ‘special’, it’s best not to pay it too close attention.

The stat buff: of course not.

The rest: looks like it has potential, though I’m not sure why they’re using it to push that finishing move rubbish on us.

The longbow skill causes a lingering fire field… they weren’t really going to let you go ‘oops, missed’ and reuse that one.

Yaki.9563:

Boroming.8093:

would be enough for me if they add to Lung Capacity (-20% shout cd) the removal/conversion of 1 cond. So i can finally change the soldier rune.
It would be just like the warhorn trait which is in the same master major slot.

Wouldn’t you just keep the soldier runes so you can remove 2 conditions per shout?

Eh, I often use pure of voice on my guardian and I’ve always felt that was a waste of runes. I do take other condition removal, but on the signet, focus, virtue, or purity. Since I’d have other options on a warrior as well (in the same trait line even, in warhorn’s case) and Shake It Off already removing one would make a full bar of traited warrior shouts a bit more effective than guardian ones, I think I’d prefer to pick up another rune set. Melandru, scholar, 2xwater 4x altruism, or whatever else fit what I was doing.

Rednik.3809:

Earthshaker needs anti-blind mechanism. This is one of major problems with hammer atm.

This should be a thing with Cleansing Ire… instead of going ‘nope – missed’ and not removing any conditions, remove the stupid conditions and use the bloody adrenaline already. Only thing to get around this stupidity so far seems to be the longbow, because its skill always counts, hits or not.

Without that traited I don’t mind so much… attack misses, I keep my adrenaline, blind goes away because I swung and missed.

I was in CS after a dungeon run and went to kill the champion gladiator before I leave. After dodging out of some little AOE circles, I notice that I’m taking pretty heavy damage… from something I can’t see. Dodged away from him into the open… still can’t see anything happening to me, but I get downed all the same, and killed even as someone runs to me.

So I checked the combat log. It was so useful, I decided to include it here.

Yep… yet more poorly (or non?) telegraphed high damage attacks. I bet if I looked really closely, maybe squinted a bit, and peeled away layers of effects from the target, I’d see some tiny red bubbles from life leeching or something. Maybe it would even look at me funny before I took damage, like a sideways glance or angry glare. That approach should be perfectly functional, right?

I occasionally get this as well. For a few months it stopped, but recently I started getting it again. Twice in Invasions, once in WvW. The last 2 times, I wasn’t even near unusually large groups. Already got pre-rendering limited to 1, doesn’t seem to prevent it (though worth doing for its own sake).

Lately I’ve noticed that a lot of times if I attack players or something like a moving supply dolyak in melee I will get spammed with ‘miss, miss, miss, miss’. If I use targeted movement skills, or ranged weapons, they fire at_its true location. In the case of the supply dolyaks at least, if it should die, the corpse teleports to its true location.

Another example, which even occurs in PvE, is downed or defeated players. Occasionally I will try to revive someone, and my character will turn to look a certain way, but not do anything. If I can walk a little in that direction, but still close enough to where I see their body to use the revive option, I can start reviving them. They then teleport to their real position and get up.

So my question is: why, if the client does actually know their true location, do they not appear there?

edit: so I hear the filter around here breaks common English speech. Who would have thought it.

Earthshaker needs gravity not stability. When I target something below me on terrain with a skill that makes me leap at it, then I should leap at it – not the air above it.

Assuming you’re doing PvE and don’t care about breaking any records… use whatever you most like watching the animation of. This is a very easy game.

Keep in mind my experience is with PvE and WvW, but I found the heal from symbols wasn’t that great unless I was PvE-ing with a hammer, because I literally spent all my time standing in symbols (and the protection helped too, especially in convincing other people to stand in them). Here, you’ve only got the GS’s symbol without even reduced cooldown, and one when you hit 25% life, on a 30s c/d. You sure it’s that helpful?

Depending on how badly you feel the loss of health+healpower I wonder if it might be worth skipping merciful altogether, going 0/0/30/20/20, and taking Absolute Resolution instead. With the extra condition removal (since you’re carrying Renewed Focus, and already take an actual focus as well) perhaps you could be rid of Purity and take something like Defender’s Flame or SiN. DF seems like it would go well with your focus + heal skill (and of course aegis), and the benefit of SiN is fairly straightforward. Plus you’ve only got one meditation with a cast time, so the other meditation trait would be a bit ‘meh’ I expect.

Supposing I made one for the hell of it, but don’t like how excessive legendary skins are, could I transmute another skin onto it and keep that function? Or would this break it like transmuting its skin onto other stats?

I have like… 60 mystic clovers and >250 obsidian shards, but I don’t like legendaries, and I seriously doubt the new ones will be any less sparkle-factories than the old ones.

Coldin.2840:

The time gates are just on the first refining process, correct?

Once you get to the step to make the ingots, those are unbound and tradeable. So while it may take you 2 weeks to make the gear just by yourself, it would take much less time if you were willing to purchase those materials from other players.

The timegates are likely there to prevent the market from suddenly being flooded with materials, and quickly devaluing Ascended Gear as soon as it comes out.

It’s possible but if they’ve said as much somewhere I haven’t seen it.

I think it should reduce the base duration of incoming (i.e. applied to you after you turn it on) conditions by 100%. So if someone had no points in the 1st trait line and no other traits, runes, or sigils extending the duration, you should be immune to the condition. Otherwise you should be getting whatever is left, so if they’ve got 30 points in the top line you’d be getting 30% of its base duration (instead of 130%).

I don’t really care for PvP personally, but I do have a necro, and I can think of at least one reason I wouldn’t use a 60s c/d skill to get 8s of reduced condition duration when fighting one. If anything I’d prefer some shorter cooldown skills, like the traited warhorn, runed shouts, cleansing ire, or some combination thereof, because ‘in rapid succession’ is going to be how they’re applied to you most of the time, unless something like corrupt boon or signet of spite is off cooldown.

Certainly I’d at least want shake it off, because it’s a short stunbreak too and can deal with fear. The signet does make a handy emergency purge though, especially if you’ve got a lot of boons that might be corrupted now and then, but the warhorn can also deal with this to some extent because you can convert two of them back into boons, incidentally freeing up movement in the process (that last part even untraited, though slightly less often).

Untraited I almost never rally from vengeance, to the point I mostly won’t even bother using it. I’ve a better chance just throwing rocks.

One thing I’ll do when I get the chance though, is go into vengeance then run off to res a downed ally (or if you had battle standard, I guess a few downed allies).

Were you getting crits via stuns then?

I suppose cavalier/berserk would make it easier to still get a high crit chance with a greater variety of builds, if the toughness proved to be enough defence. I was mainly considering this for content like invasions and some temple events, when stuff is being hurled at you from all directions, LOS-ing doesn’t really work because nobody else is or there’s nothing within the leash distance anyway, and you can only see to dodge from one way at a time. Mostly I’ll just go ranged or tank and use CC, but ranged is boring and CC only works on trash anyway.

Oh, that. Well yeah, it does seem like the crafting itself will be an exercise in masochism, that’s why I’d rather farm the drops and just maybe, eventually, if all the pieces happen into my inventory by accident, bother to make something.

Did you feel it could get decent damage compared to tankier stuff, and/or did it seem any useful amount more survivable than berserk?

I was considering something like this, in PvE obviously. Probably wouldn’t be the ideal way to do it but I was being lazy and built for brief fights and lack of effort where a banner would get annoying – and assumed deep strikes, like, works or something. Signet for more dodges and emergency condition removal, second axe to swap for might and build adrenaline (since the gear relies a bit on the adrenaline for crits/dmg, and I may sometimes feel like pressing F1).

Food is expensive IIRC but there are cheaper versions, and the one that just adds power and precision without crit damage. No idea how much the oil is worth since I make it.

JaxomNC.5381:

When carrying it, only your left forearm is on fire and this can be easily missed for example when Aegis is up as the aegis shield is much bigger and noticeable than the fire effect.

To be fair this is an issue with guardians more than the concept of having your left arm on fire. It’s even worse with shields. At least with a torch or focus the Aegis effect itself can look decent… not so much the shield-ception effect from Aegis and to some extent Retaliation. If you’re lucky it’s at least a shield on your shield rather than in your shield. Pity you can’t sling that floaty Aegis icon over your back…

There’s a lot of good shield skins I wanted for my guardian, too. Nope.

Maybe if I ever get bored and open a 9th slot I’ll get a second warrior.

Nilkemia.8507:

I’m not so sure. :/

of…

Following up this thread in a new post so people who haven’t read it yet can skip to the important part.

Firstly, some stuff about the crafting:

There are two types of Tier 7 material: those refined from lower tier materials plus ectoplasm and a new reagent, and those refined from brand new materials rewarded from specific content plus Obsidian Shards and the new reagent. You’ll also note the inclusion of a cooldown timer on the Ectoplasm Refinements. Each one can be refined only once per day, per account.

Any of you who just went swimming in T6 mats better be able to hold your breath.

As to Type II crafting, I’m not immediately clear what the limit is, if any, based on this post. However actually combining the pieces will not be it, if there is one.

Now, using your newly found refinements plus continuing to craft Exotics, you’ll shoot up to rating 500 and be able to truly start on your Ascended Weapon crafting journey. Your first stop should be to the nearest Master Craftsman in your discipline to pick up the recipe for an Ascended Inscription purchased with karma, and a recipe for an Ascended weapon purchased with Laurels.

Again it remains to be seen precisely how gated this is. Reasonably I’d expect recipes bought with laurels wouldn’t be that expensive when we’re looking at creating weapons which quite likely (if not certainly) cannot be traded. However, sinks are sinks, and I’m guessing ~1 month ea. so be sure to log in every single day!

Also you’ll need to spend some karma. Yes, I too am overcome with grief.

Presumably since these inscriptions determine the stats, the recipe defines ‘greatsword’ to you again, or perhaps different recipes for the same weapon-type will enable you to pick a preferred skin for any greatswords you produce.

Because we wanted all stat combos in the game to be represented in Ascended Weapons, we have added new Exotic Inscriptions to the salvage tables on all non-crafted Exotic weapons and to drops where applicable. We have also added Exotic weapon recipes to use these new Inscriptions so that they aren’t only used for Ascended weapons. That’s a whole lot more discoveries to find!

‘’Arc’ may finally leave my bank’ is all I really took from this. Wait… sentinel… no, Arc can stay there.

The final piece of your Ascended Weapon is the Vision Crystal. Historians of Tyria will recognize this piece as an important part of Ascension. It is crafted with Obsidian Refined materials and skill points. Each Obsidian Refined material is found in its raw form by playing many different types of content out in the world, such as: dungeons, champion kills, mega bosses, temple bosses, jumping puzzles, Guild missions, and WvW camps, towers, keeps, and castles!

If we’re very very lucky, the picture with a shiny light that looks suspiciously like a ‘skill challenge’ is merely coincidental and in no way represents a similarity to celestial crafting (unless you’re actually crafting celestial stats, in which case it would seem you’re just as screwed as before, because ‘The Ascended Inscriptions all take the exotic inscription of the stat combo you want plus Dark Matter and Crystalline Dust’).

But now for the thing from which the title derives:

First off, crafting is not the only way to get Ascended Weapons! Anywhere you can get an Ascended Material drop or an Ascended item drop there is also a rare chance that you will get an Ascended Weapon chest that allows you to choose which weapon type you want from within a stat combo.

Now assuming that:

-the weapon is not soulbound on acquire, or
-the box is not souldbound on acquire

This has the potential to be absolutely kittens!

Remember that: ‘Each Obsidian Refined material is found in its raw form by playing many different types of content out in the world, such as: dungeons, champion kills, mega bosses, temple bosses, jumping puzzles, Guild missions, and WvW camps, towers, keeps, and castles!’

and ‘Anywhere you can get an Ascended Material drop or an Ascended item drop there is also a rare chance that you will get an Ascended Weapon chest’.

and keep in mind that ‘The vast majority of luck will come from Fine and Masterwork salvaging…’

TL;DR – we can farm champions, salvage pretty much everything, only stop at vendors for salvage kits, increase MF up to 300% while killing faster than MF gear allowed, vendor (or tp?) blues/greens again and if you want to jump through a few more hoops you can craft stuff with the materials you get in the mean time.

Outcome: optimistic.

I want to toggle the warning for rares too.

edit: and deleting Twisted Watchwork Shoulder skins.

Tom Gore.4035:

I think most of the ones complaining about time gated progression are those with hours and hours of free time they choose to spend on games. They hate the fact that for all the “work” they put into the game, they still cannot progress any faster than the people who only play an hour a day.

How fast other people progress has nothing to do with it. We aren’t competing with them, their progress doesn’t impede ours and neither can they: they’re just there. In all likelihood you’d never even notice their time-to-reward ratio unless you were stalking them or something.

Time gating itself has an impact on progression: it limits us from advancing at our own pace. Not only if we’d otherwise be faster, but slower too, given the tendency toward daily resets. With content gated like that, 1hr 7 days a week becomes vastly better than 7hrs 1 day a week or even 14 hrs 2 days a week, and likewise any additional characters you have (unless you buy another account, hint hint) extend the time it takes you without allowing you to increase your progress by trying harder to meet the requirements.

There’s no need to look beyond that for reasons to hate it, it’s an arbitrary door getting slammed in our faces whenever we demonstrate a willingness to put in more effort than somebody somewhere has decided is proper.

Fallout.1798:

While I do agree that the farmers do in the end help progress the aetherblades meta quests, I have seen plenty of times when it was not. For instance, I have seen several times where there are like 6 commander icons all clustered on 1 aetherblade event. I check out whats happening there and there was at least 40+ people there. For the morale event part, this leads to massive upscalling and the morale bar goes down soooooo little per pirate killed. Then for the Captain phase, I will see some people intentionaly lure the captain away from the other pirates, thus giving the zerg a green light to farm kill all of the other pirates and their seemingly endless spawning rate and champs.
^ THIS is what gets on everybody else’s nerves. The farmers are at this point no longer helping progess the meta event at all, they are ONLY farming the additional aetherblades and champs that spawn and do not kill the captain. This is what should have been fixed from day one. More pirates should only spawn at every 25% hp of the captain.

AFAIK the spawns are not, and weren’t infinite. The next set seems to appear after the previous set is killed, and after a few (three? That seems to be what I’ve noticed but I haven’t intentionally been counting, and it may vary) the captain is all that’s left.

Curo.2483:

They just need to make “completion” and “profit” not mutually exclusive. It doesn’t seem too far fetched an idea that you should be rewarded the best for reaching your goal.

I actually saw, for the first time, a champion Steam Creature in an invasion yesterday (or maybe the day before). That was interesting to me because there didn’t seem to be a particularly impressive number of people there compared to what I’d seen before, so unless it’s just a really rare spawn I wonder if they are starting to scale the non-’blades a bit better.

DeWolfe.2174:

for time gating, how about if I want to put in 8+ hours over the weekend, instead of taking an hour out of each day. Dailies are annoying enough! Now more time gating on top of it. Increasing the amount I’d have to play, every day. Not just when I have the time for it.

This game is becoming more and more suffocating. There really isn’t a leisurely way to play it at all. Because if you do, you’ll end up feeling behind the curve. Time gating isn’t slowing down the hardcore, it’s hurting the casuals most.

Heh. It amuses me that I didn’t think of that, considering there were times I’d get home during the week and pretty much fall onto a safe-looking surface to sleep.

I guess they’re leaning toward not just casual players but a specific subset of casual players…

(and for the record, I’m still hoping someone will pop in and say that this won’t be time gated, or at the very least there’ll be other ways to get things, but the chance has been out there…)

Whom?

…anyway, I like the style of the event, though I think it would’ve been improved if (initially, anyway) it happened in two zones at once, and if the different types of mobs were closer to equal in difficulty and reward. It’s a bit dull that if I want a challenge or loot I need to fight Aetherblades (granted the Nightmares are decent, but make up a small part of minions overall and only the even rarer champions are rewarding to kill).

In defence of the minions though, as far as GW2 enemies go I’ve found their attacks for the most part easy to see and counter effectively in practice, meaning when there’s actually a fight going on and it’s not some type of 1v1 with the creature in a high visibility situation. I guess time will tell if they’ve actually started designing for that, or it’s been a coincidence in this case.

TehPwnerer.7215:

Dante.1508:

If they nerfed the Aetherblades i’d just stop doing the event completely +1 to op..

Good. Maybe more will think like you and stop the event so that people who want to succeed rather than farm champs actually have a chance at beating the event.

Except that wouldn’t help.

I’m more surprised by the fact there are apparently times this doesn’t happen, if I understand what you’re saying.

jazzllanna.1278:

Interesting. Thanks for the input. I will have to give the axe mace a try. The 5 skill seemed to be really strong, but I am still in starter areas lol so you never know for sure :P

Bear in mind that as a channelled skill, the damage readout it gives you is the sum of all the hits it’s dealt. It looks impressive at first (and the skill is kind of fun to watch, if nothing else) but those things dying quickly in low level zones are doing that because they just generally die quickly.

RvLeshrac.2673:

mtpelion.4562:

The reason this thread even exists is because ArenaNet chose to design the content in a way that allows reward seekers and content seekers to work independently.

What should have happened is either make all aspects count towards the event completion, or limit rewards to success (i.e. take out the champs and send more elites, then increase the bag drops from winning).

What they SHOULD do is completely eliminate the possibility of any reward unless the event is completed successfully. No drops. No XP. No Karma. Just a huge reward at the end.

This is also why they need to fix the stupidity of losing all reward should you be disconnected after participating in the better part of an event.

Every time I go to an Invasion, people are whining about how farmers (by magic, I suppose, since game mechanics don’t support it) prevent them from winning it. Almost every time I try explaining to them that they don’t need the farmers, nor the particular events they’re scaling, in order to win. That all they need to do is disentangle themselves from their own zergs, fight easy events around the map in small groups until their respective bar is empty and that type of event stops being created, and pretty much stroll leisurely to victory. It’s hard to think of a way they could have made it any easier.

Of course, instead I see the same bunch keep whining in /map, while one or two non-Aether (I refuse to call these completionists, because they never will if they keep this up) zergs limp around the map snagging on every bunch of silvers and every champion Nightmare they spawn, until it fails.

You’d want to hope the farmers think it’s worth wagering 30-45 minutes of effort on the success of the event, in that case. If they don’t, something tells me that’ll be the end of it.

The last two axe skills aren’t exactly useless, but they’re quite redundant.

Skill #4 grants a brief bit of Fury, which warriors already have in abundance and for much longer from most (all?) other skills which grant it.*

Skill #5 has low damage but will land a lot of rapid hits on several targets, which does give it some functionality in that it can build adrenaline very fast, proc (extremely) low-cooldown sigils, and tag things in PvE. Unfortunately it’s only marginally better at those than the auto-attack, which deals more damage.

*That said, it does have the potential to be comparable to other skills if you hit three enemies with both of the skill’s attacks.

The blind works well in PvE, not sure in WvW, I have done it but it’s hard to measure the impact. It seems to have a fairly short radius and it’s harder to stack as much vuln as you can in PvE where everything just runs up to you in order to die.

The fire and might stacking on the other hand is awesome in either case, if you’re tagging loads of things/people which subsequently go down. The buff I’m fairly certain goes much further than the blind, so in a zerg-fight even not stacked you should be hitting the player limit each time I’d think.

…so no official word yet?

I can find speculation it will be time gated just about anywhere, but for some reason it seems to be something they’re not mentioning.