Guild Wars 2

I did them for the achieves way back in the day. I found them fun at the time just at an exploration level, because it was like everybody’s first time inside them, but I don’t really like the gameplay for its own sake.

Sunflowers.1729:

I think the change is a good one, if only for the sake of consistency. Why should teleports be unaffected by movement skills, and dashes/leaps not? Of course, if it were up to me I’d have made teleports affected by chill/cripple instead of the other way around, but at least it is kind of consistent now. As it is you can teleport while immobilized, as well as up some terrain.

For those people arguing that mobility is affected in the open world, the difference is actually quite small. A few weeks ago I used a GS+Sword Warrior and had a race against someone simply running. Our base movement speed was the same (+25%), and I used GS #3&5, Sword #2, and Bull’s Charge on cooldown.

Over a distance that took me about 3 mins to travel, she completed it in 25% more time (80% of my speed). Already we can see that movement skills don’t do that much. They only account for 20% of the distance I traveled (the rest is from running). If this 20% is no longer affected by the +33% bonus, then 20/1.33 = ~15.

So you will travel at 95% of the speed you previously were at, assuming of course that all your movement skills are leaps (and not teleports). The math is a bit wrong but I’m sleepy and can’t be bothered to fix it. In any case it’s not that big of a difference.

Teleports aren’t dashes. Why does Bull’s Rush get to knock people down when it’s the same as my Lightning Flash in every other way?

Also, most mobility in this game doesn’t happen on the huge scales you’re talking about. Far more important is the sheer amount of distance you can chain together in a short quantity, as you’re rarely ever running more than ~5000 units at a time between spots of action. For realistic distances dash skills make up a much larger proportion of the distance traveled, and this change will feel very significant indeed.

Plus, even if you accept that it isn’t a huge difference mathematically, its a change that feels bad to play with. You want your dashes to feel fast. If this goes through I can be walking around with swiftness, cast rush or swoop, and be moving barely any faster than I was before. That’s a super lame feeling that exists on certain skills right now (slow as heck FGS4 springs to mind), and not one i’d like to see across the entire game.

I never understood why they told kids to ask their parents before getting on the internet.

Now I know.

Laraley.7695:

Chill needs not to affect attunement swap cooldown.

It’s a bug and it should be fixed.

Wait hold on this is actually a good kitten point tho.

GreyWraith.8394:

Xillllix.3485:

The AoE cap greatly favors bigger zergs…

Please explain how this is true. Removing AoE caps would give bigger groups even more damage and allow them to blanket a larger area with insta-death AoE damage – killing smaller groups even faster.

You literally just agreed with him. Like what the kittening hell I feel like i’m in another dimension.

Jade Arkadian.9280:

I’m eager to know more in depth whats the full story behind nerfing movement skills. (yeah, we can theorize in the meaning time on what were they thinking)
What’s been said in the blog sounds more like a cheap excuse to me, and i hope there is some sensible reasoning for that change that’s not been told.

If not…well…as I said some posts ago, it would be a very poor choice which aims to nothing but unnecesarily mess the game mechanics.

I’d put a solid grand on anet hearing a bunch of their beta testers and silverwastes players complain that mordrem were crippling them too often. No doubt in my mind at all that this is the cause after that one thread talking about mordrem wolves.

Darksteel.8412:

Linnael.1069:

Darksteel.8412:

Linnael.1069:

Shala.8352:

finaly finaly finaly they did it! was so frustrating failing my rush cuz of cripple and chill, i mean it’s already noob easy fail animation skill, but if it has to be even affected by those condi, then it will be a perma fail!!
And i dont see why my rush or sword leap or eviscerate skill should be nerfed by cripple and chill, really is skill 4 GS mesmer been affected by that, or any of the “easy cheap autotargeting impossible to fail” skills of the thief, or any other ranged skills? Really i never seen a reason for my warrior skill to be so much easy countered by these conditions, they already have worst easy to read animation of the game, if you dont dodge them or block or do something, why they should fail only because i am crippled??

Cripple and chill were not designed to interrupt movements skills or cause them to fail, they already have their main effects, they dont need a side effect that will just only hurts classes based on movements.
I mean is Necro somehow touched by these side effects like warrior? NO
Actualy cripple is spammed by so much attacks, and this is high damaging the only class that has no teleports and has to run on melee range to be effective and has to rely on movements.

Be happy friend. Arenanet is doing this change just for players like you.

I kind of want to cry.

cause it’s time to git gud….for players like you…meet you in the battlefield with HoT…ill perma destroy each and everyone of you promised

O jesus kittening christ another one of you. I play GS warrior and acro daggers thief, you wanna kittening tell me how i’m gonna have problems in the upcoming patch?

youre crying tho tears tasted good…was kinda giving it away that you do

You’re literally so out of it you don’t realize the whole thread is screaming about those specs specifically getting massive buffs. Like really how did you even manage to open up your computer.

Purple Miku.7032:

Not only does it make sense for movement-impairing conditions to reduce the efficacy of movement skills, but it makes sense for movement-enhancing boons to increase the efficacy of movement skills.

The logic behind this change makes no sense and it’s going to make mobility SO much slower in WvW, in open world, and in dungeons.

Omg I am so frustrated with the amount of people who don’t even care about anything other than “oh cool I can still leap further when I’m chilled and crippled.” This is so hopeless. I feel like I’m timetraveling back to Runescape when Jagex proposed EoC.

Make your own thread (no sarcasm). This one is going nowhere good, defs not getting any good dev attention, and a miku thread will probably have better credibility anyways.

Darksteel.8412:

Linnael.1069:

Shala.8352:

finaly finaly finaly they did it! was so frustrating failing my rush cuz of cripple and chill, i mean it’s already noob easy fail animation skill, but if it has to be even affected by those condi, then it will be a perma fail!!
And i dont see why my rush or sword leap or eviscerate skill should be nerfed by cripple and chill, really is skill 4 GS mesmer been affected by that, or any of the “easy cheap autotargeting impossible to fail” skills of the thief, or any other ranged skills? Really i never seen a reason for my warrior skill to be so much easy countered by these conditions, they already have worst easy to read animation of the game, if you dont dodge them or block or do something, why they should fail only because i am crippled??

Cripple and chill were not designed to interrupt movements skills or cause them to fail, they already have their main effects, they dont need a side effect that will just only hurts classes based on movements.
I mean is Necro somehow touched by these side effects like warrior? NO
Actualy cripple is spammed by so much attacks, and this is high damaging the only class that has no teleports and has to run on melee range to be effective and has to rely on movements.

Be happy friend. Arenanet is doing this change just for players like you.

I kind of want to cry.

cause it’s time to git gud….for players like you…meet you in the battlefield with HoT…ill perma destroy each and everyone of you promised

O jesus kittening christ another one of you. I play GS warrior and acro daggers thief, you wanna kittening tell me how i’m gonna have problems in the upcoming patch?

Shala.8352:

finaly finaly finaly they did it! was so frustrating failing my rush cuz of cripple and chill, i mean it’s already noob easy fail animation skill, but if it has to be even affected by those condi, then it will be a perma fail!!
And i dont see why my rush or sword leap or eviscerate skill should be nerfed by cripple and chill, really is skill 4 GS mesmer been affected by that, or any of the “easy cheap autotargeting impossible to fail” skills of the thief, or any other ranged skills? Really i never seen a reason for my warrior skill to be so much easy countered by these conditions, they already have worst easy to read animation of the game, if you dont dodge them or block or do something, why they should fail only because i am crippled??

Cripple and chill were not designed to interrupt movements skills or cause them to fail, they already have their main effects, they dont need a side effect that will just only hurts classes based on movements.
I mean is Necro somehow touched by these side effects like warrior? NO
Actualy cripple is spammed by so much attacks, and this is high damaging the only class that has no teleports and has to run on melee range to be effective and has to rely on movements.

Be happy friend. Arenanet is doing this change just for players like you.

I kind of want to cry.

You wanna know the real reason? In their HoT testing a bunch of bad players are complaining about the mobs being too hard and constantly crippling you. Just look at that one complaint thread on the silverwastes wolves. An embarrassment.

Anet problem solving right here.

They’d have to change epidemic or necro zergs will become the new meta. Imagine sharpening stones ranger/venomshare thief and then 10 epidemics go off. The condition count would rise exponentially with each epidemic and the whole zerg would fall down in 1 tick.

Ayrilana.1396:

Linnael.1069:

Are you kidding. NO dashes will go further if you are OOC compared to if you are in combat. I would recommend you go inform yourself a little better. Try that ranger GS leap out again. The ooc speed boost works differently from swiftness. You seem to be under this huge misunderstanding that dashes will go further if you are OOC. That isn’t how they work at all.

I never stated that dashes will be affected by movement speed whether in/out of combat or with speed boosts. I even stated that in the post that you quoted and yet you seemed to have missed it. You also missed that I was talking about movements skills and that there are movement skills besides rush. I also mentioned that in my post you quoted.

I mentioned Swoop as being a movement skill affected by swiftness. The article even stated that skills were normalized so that movement-speed increases or decreases do not impact the distance traveled by your character. Since they mentioned that in the article, obviously there must be some movement skills impacted by movement speed increases and decreases.

Linnael.1069:

A d/d ele packing fgs is going to outrun a sword/horn/GS warrior every time, and GS/Sword ranger matches the war outside of swiftness uptime. If you pack runes for that or run in a group they’re faster than warriors by far. You’ll put warrior up there for 2nd best leap mobility, but don’t think eles or rangers can compare? Like come on man the points you’re arguing aren’t even the ones that make sense.

Swiftness is not a movement skill so I don’t know why you brought up a GS/Sword ranger. Swoop is on a 12 sec cool down and the only movement skill that sword has is relies on you having a target and being engaged. Warriors have rush, ww, and leap which all can almost be used very frequently with minimal downtime.

Elementalist has FGS for as many charges and duration remaining. That elite is also on a 3 minute cool down timer. It’s not what I would consider spammable as it cannot be maintained.

Linnael.1069:

Because I like to actually know what i’m talking about before I say it I tested out that ranger GS dash myself. You can see in the image where I applied swiftness, dropped off the wall to get into combat, dropped the first trap, then dropped the second trap at the endpoint. Then, simply lining myself up in the middle of the first trap, I apply swiftness again and what do you know, end up right in the middle of the second trap. No change between in or out of combat. Hope this clears things up for you. God i wish there was a smiley face that could communicate rekt appropriately.

~ Swoop
Having swiftness or a movement speed boost such as Signet of the Hunt will cause the distance of the sprint portion of this skill to be extended, effectively increasing this skill’s maximum range ( about 150 ) and decreasing the activation time.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Swoop

~ Heartseeker

Distance traveled by the leap is affected by changes in movement speed, such as from swiftness, cripple, chill, and Signet of Shadows.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Heartseeker

LMAO bro i assumed you were miscategorizing swiftness because all it does is make your case worse. If you didn’t have a movespeed modifier before you still won’t. If you did before, then now you won’t. I didn’t miss jack kitten. There’s no case where you’re gonna be faster than you were before outside of the one I stated.

Stop trying to salvage this. You claimed the OOC speed buff would effect movement skills, it doesn’t.

Man I don’t even know what i’m doing responding to these. You think ranger sword “depends on being engaged with a target” . . . Please, try and be a little more informed before the next post. A lot of misinformation gets spread and you’re only contributing right now.

Ayrilana.1396:

Linnael.1069:

Ayrilana.1396:

Linnael.1069:

Ayrilana.1396:

Linnael.1069:

Ayrilana.1396:

The impact on the majority of classes in PvE will be minimal as most are not able to consistently spam movement skills.

So then you agree it has a negative impact, but its ok for this change to happen because some people won’t notice it that much?

It’ll be more of a positive than a negative.

I’m very curious to know what benefit this has, honestly. Unless I choose to walk around with what a build somehow packing enough leaps to bull my way through a bunch of cripples/chills, but no swiftness or condiremoval at all, I’m just going to be flat out slower. Not to mention the fact that if you’re getting hit with that stuff at all you get the in combat slow which outweighs any mobility skills by far.

Only two classes were close enough to having movement skills that could be spammed (used loosely). The rest either had little to no access to these. The the amount of distance gained from those skills was small enough that it’ll easily be overshadowed by being able to use the skills at normal speed while in combat. Those that could nearly spam the skills will only see an impact if they travel enough distance outside of combat for the loss of ground they would have covered to eventually add up.

Warrior, Ele, Ranger, Thief are all spamming dashes like nobody’s business. Engie isn’t but it’s getting hit on super speed just as hard. Mesmers, Necros, and Guardians are really the only classes that aren’t going to be relying on dashes for mobility.

Also, you aren’t going to be able to use the skills “at normal speed while in combat”. Thats not even how dashes work currently. Rush will take you the same distance at the same speed whether you’re in combat or out. Literally the only way you get any faster at all is if you somehow have enough leaps to bull through a cripple but do not have any condiremoval or swiftness. And you’re even arguing that practically none of the classes have enough leaps for that.

Exactly what skills did Rangers anf Elementalists have that were spammable or near it? The classes I were referring to was warrior and thief only. It was also implied that they wouldn’t be relying on those type of movement skills as they don’t have much access to it and especially so if their build doesn’t use the weapon that applies it.

There are more movement skills than simply rush. Those that are not affected by whether you in combat or not are kind of irrelevant in the discussion regarding movement speed affecting distance covered by movement skills. Ranger’s GS leap attack is affected by movement speed for example.

Are you kidding. NO dashes will go further if you are OOC compared to if you are in combat. I would recommend you go inform yourself a little better. Try that ranger GS leap out again. The ooc speed boost works differently from swiftness. You seem to be under this huge misunderstanding that dashes will go further if you are OOC. That isn’t how they work at all.

A d/d ele packing fgs is going to outrun a sword/horn/GS warrior every time, and GS/Sword ranger matches the war outside of swiftness uptime. If you pack runes for that or run in a group they’re faster than warriors by far. You’ll put warrior up there for 2nd best leap mobility, but don’t think eles or rangers can compare? Like come on man the points you’re arguing aren’t even the ones that make sense.

Because I like to actually know what i’m talking about before I say it I tested out that ranger GS dash myself. You can see in the image where I applied swiftness, dropped off the wall to get into combat, dropped the first trap, then dropped the second trap at the endpoint. Then, simply lining myself up in the middle of the first trap, I apply swiftness again and what do you know, end up right in the middle of the second trap. No change between in or out of combat. Hope this clears things up for you. God i wish there was a smiley face that could communicate rekt appropriately.

Ayrilana.1396:

Linnael.1069:

Ayrilana.1396:

Linnael.1069:

Ayrilana.1396:

The impact on the majority of classes in PvE will be minimal as most are not able to consistently spam movement skills.

So then you agree it has a negative impact, but its ok for this change to happen because some people won’t notice it that much?

It’ll be more of a positive than a negative.

I’m very curious to know what benefit this has, honestly. Unless I choose to walk around with what a build somehow packing enough leaps to bull my way through a bunch of cripples/chills, but no swiftness or condiremoval at all, I’m just going to be flat out slower. Not to mention the fact that if you’re getting hit with that stuff at all you get the in combat slow which outweighs any mobility skills by far.

Only two classes were close enough to having movement skills that could be spammed (used loosely). The rest either had little to no access to these. The the amount of distance gained from those skills was small enough that it’ll easily be overshadowed by being able to use the skills at normal speed while in combat. Those that could nearly spam the skills will only see an impact if they travel enough distance outside of combat for the loss of ground they would have covered to eventually add up.

Warrior, Ele, Ranger, Thief are all spamming dashes like nobody’s business. Engie isn’t but it’s getting hit on super speed just as hard. Mesmers, Necros, and Guardians are really the only classes that aren’t going to be relying on dashes for mobility.

Also, you aren’t going to be able to use the skills “at normal speed while in combat”. Thats not even how dashes work currently. Rush will take you the same distance at the same speed whether you’re in combat or out. Literally the only way you get any faster at all is if you somehow have enough leaps to bull through a cripple but do not have any condiremoval or swiftness. And you’re even arguing that practically none of the classes have enough leaps for that.

Ayrilana.1396:

Linnael.1069:

Ayrilana.1396:

The impact on the majority of classes in PvE will be minimal as most are not able to consistently spam movement skills.

So then you agree it has a negative impact, but its ok for this change to happen because some people won’t notice it that much?

It’ll be more of a positive than a negative.

I’m very curious to know what benefit this has, honestly. Unless I choose to walk around with what a build somehow packing enough leaps to bull my way through a bunch of cripples/chills, but no swiftness or condiremoval at all, I’m just going to be flat out slower. Not to mention the fact that if you’re getting hit with that stuff at all you get the in combat slow which outweighs any mobility skills by far.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Linnael.1069:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Jerus.4350:

Doombringer BG.3740:

Am I the only one who’d prefer 5 dashes and faster endurance regeneration? xD

Nope, a faster game could be fun. That’s not what this is though. We’re getting slowed down except in the case of when you’re movement debuffed, then you’re faster than you were before.

Where did it say we are getting slowed down? All I found was this, which is talking about leaps and that when crippled/chilled, you’ll still leap as far except at a slower speed.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/combat-changes-dotsanddashes/
“Let’s take a second and look at movement skills, which are skills that move your character between positions or toward your target, such as Savage Leap or Leap of Faith. Right now, these are affected by movement-speed decreases or increases. These skills are less effective when you’re crippled or chilled, making it so the skill does not perform as expected, preventing you from reaching the intended distance. On the other hand, using a movement skill with Super Speed will propel you much farther than we want.
In order to make these skills more reliable in combat and prevent unintended behavior, we’ve normalized them so that movement-speed increases or decreases do not impact the distance traveled by your character.”

Swiftness won’t bump the range of dashes by 33% anymore.
“movement-speed increases or decreases do not impact the distance traveled by your character.”
As opposed to the current functionality where you get the 33% bonus to the increased speed of the dash for the entire base duration of the dash, after this change you will lose that bonus when you get to the base max range, which will come sooner. You can think of every dash skill as giving you an additional piece of movespeed bonus when used under swiftness because they increase your base speed. After the change you’ll get less of that every time you dash.

Eh. Just what I thought it said and no, I still don’t care. I certainly don’t hate it and you shouldn’t be trying to speak for everyone.

Speak for yourself only. Don’t try to puff up your position by claiming to know what everyone else thinks.

You didn’t get how the change would make you slower. Two people were kind enough to inform you with rather detailed explanations. I’m not seeing how this is what you thought all along.

Also, congratulations on not caring. Your apathy does not make this a good change. If you’re in need of any more clarification on that last point the original post should now be clear enough for anybody to understand.

Pandeh.5248:

If you are not familiar with this condition you can read about it here.

This has to be my favorite skill effect/negative condition in all the MMOs I have played to date.

It might not fit straight into GW2 in vanilla form, but a slighty altered form of it would be awesome.

Given the pace of combat in PvP it would be OP to suddenly have your max health cut by 20%.

What suggestions do you guys have that would make this condition fit into GW2?

Max health reductions are only cool when spike healing is a significant part of your survivability against burst damage and overhealing is a danger. This is a very specific case that doesn’t really exist inside the GW2 system at all. I think you’d find it would be really boring until it got to a point where it was strong just because of how much damage it did when you threw it on.

Ayrilana.1396:

The impact on the majority of classes in PvE will be minimal as most are not able to consistently spam movement skills.

So then you agree it has a negative impact, but its ok for this change to happen because some people won’t notice it that much?

PvE players hate it because they can’t run around as fast out of combat.

PvPers and WvW roamers hate it because it’s just strengthening disengage, which is boring and annoying.

Zergers don’t care because you can’t use dashes without breaking the blob anyway.

Come on Anet. Smart positioning is already made half pointless by shadowsteps, and now you’re just dumbing down PvP even further to implement a change that makes PvE players unhappy?

Remember when Ride the Lightning got huge nerfs because it ignored cripple/chill/swiftness? This functionality used to be a massive balancing point for certain skills. Are we going to see similar nerfs to every other mobility skill in the game?

Edit: The post originally containing my response to the series of comments wondering about the techniques behind my statistical modeling has been unfortunately deleted. I’ll just say that if you would like, feel free to read the title as “No division of the playerbase is positively effected by these changes at a general level.” I would recommend an in depth study of mass communication techniques and strategies to anyone who has further questions.

Jayce.5632:

Linnael.1069:

Vampiric Rituals is for midpoint bunker specs. Vampiric and the life force gain from dagger/horn and axe/focus will cover you against sustained damage from 1 or 2 foes but VRituals allows you to spike your sustain when you’re facing three or four and your team needs time to rotate. Against 5 targets, which is basically all the time given the amount of turret engies, rock dogs, rangers and mesmers running around, VRituals on 3 wells is healing you for 900 a tick. Add well of blood and that one trait is like having three healing signets at once.

And it could be 20 percent better if bloodthirst weren’t broken.

Do you truly believe what you just wrote? Serious question.

If you’re doubting the numbers you’re wrong.

If you’re doubting what I’ve proposed to be the best role for the trait, I’ll tell you to be constructive and propose what you think the trait is meant to do besides boost sustain in outnumbered fights.

If you’re having trouble controlling your dissatisfaction that it isn’t that good at what it’s there to do compared to the other options … I can’t help you on this one.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I’m willing to bet this is from back from when they changed siphon values and reduced Bloodthirst to 20% increase. My guess is that they did not change the base value for “when Bloodthirst is equipped” and apply the 20% to that value.

Good idea, but I think even the old base values + 20% would be bigger than what you see now. Vampiric only hits for 19

I think what he’s trying to poke fun at is how big windup animation attacks like the reaper is supposed to focus on are totally unbalanced by the asuran player model. see asuran axe wars

The thing is gravedigger just flat out needs to do more damage. It might have the ratio of a backstab, but backstab is near impossible to reliably avoid whereas gravedigger is looking easier to dodge than eviscerate. Gravedigger honestly needs to just have a 3.0 ratio. It should feel totally unfair if they get hit by that ridiculous windup multiple times.

Invoker-ele would really separate the great players from the ones that have time to eat and drink.

DeceiverX.8361:

Bhawb.7408:

NeXeD.3042:

So with all the new dmg reduction and the possibility of pseudo condition immunity… can you potentially have both?

Yep. The damage reduction is entirely within Death Magic, Reaper, and skill use, it doesn’t even take up a third tree, and the condition immunity is from Reaper, runes, and food in PvE/WvW. They are completely compatible, and you have room left over. Say DM/SR/R with the relevant traits, make sure you have good sources of poison/chill, bring spectrals for the protection uptime, and you are set up to be a strong bruiser build.

This was a friend of mine’s immediate response to the Reaper; he plans on doing nothing with spite or curses despite the craziness that can happen and is just instead focusing on an unstoppable truck with way more base power than it should have from the 14% conversion.

Knights is already OP with the 10% minor. I’m callin it now, 14% on Cavalier’s with the new crit traits is going to be crazy.

Vampiric Rituals is for midpoint bunker specs. Vampiric and the life force gain from dagger/horn and axe/focus will cover you against sustained damage from 1 or 2 foes but VRituals allows you to spike your sustain when you’re facing three or four and your team needs time to rotate. Against 5 targets, which is basically all the time given the amount of turret engies, rock dogs, rangers and mesmers running around, VRituals on 3 wells is healing you for 900 a tick. Add well of blood and that one trait is like having three healing signets at once.

And it could be 20 percent better if bloodthirst weren’t broken.

Kilger.5490:

Sigmoid.7082:

Unless the other party has condition duration then yes you could be immune to the condition and they would see an " immune" message when trying to apply it.

Are you sure they would see the immune message? I thought that was reserved for abilities that made you fully immune, as opposed to “effectively immune”… just curious since if that happens there is going to be a lot of crying about necros and all these immune messages :P

You will indeed see the immune message. It’ll pop up even if your target isn’t 100% immune. It showed up against warriors running -96% duration.

Dunno if anybody’s mentioned this before but huge props to whoever voiced the male centaur that shouts:

“YOU WIIILL BE BROOOOKEN”

One of the only enemy threats that feels serious, and seriously threatening.

The thing is Dark armor might be good if it did what it said. But it actually gives you defense, not toughness, so stat conversions from food/traits don’t apply. It’s pretty suck, but I’d rather see it actually work than see it removed, because it seems to me like pretty good game design with alot of play/counterplay potential.

You use Vampiric Rituals. It’s bugged (again? still? who even knows).

I posted this on the bug forum but thought it would be good to give everybody here a heads up as well. When both Vampiric Rituals and Bloodthirst are equipped, lifesteal effects procced by wells are actually reduced instead of increased.

This applies to both the on hit lifesteal granted by the Vampiric minor as well as the lifesteal granted by VRituals.

Throw on VRituals, watch your wells tick, and then add bloodthirst and watch the ticks get SMALLER. It’s super odd because bloodthirst will still be properly increasing all lifesteal procced by other abilities. You can see vampiric hit for 44 on auto attacks, then 19 on wells a second later.

Description: When both Vampiric Rituals and Bloodthirst are selected from the necromancer’s blood trait line, lifesteal effects procced by wells are actually reduced instead of increased. This applies to both the on hit lifesteal granted by the Vampiric minor as well as the lifesteal granted by Vampiric Rituals.

Replication: Enter Heart of the mists and equip the ritual mastery trait. Use any well and note the lifesteal numbers from Vampiric Rituals/Vampiric. Then equip the bloodthirst trait and note how the numbers actually get smaller.

EDIT: I mistook ritual mastery for vampiric rituals. This has since been corrected. It is Vampiric Rituals that causes the bug when used in conjunction with Bloodthirst.

War Mourner.5168:

Linnael.1069:

I see you didn’t get to experience the heyday of melandrugrass roaming warriors. Yes its possible, and yes it is incredibly strong. Essentially means that you can take any matchup against any other power spec and reduce it to taking turns smacking each other in the face.

It’s additive with +duration effects tho, so condi specs can still lock you down

Those warriors were awful.

Just running away constantly, jesus christ.

And then they all started running mace shield on the swap. X(

It was like they all thought “what can i do to be more of a prick?”

Elementalist is difficult to pick up but rewarding once you get good and geared up. It’s not the class to pick if you want leveling to be super easy, but consider this:

Eles have the top long term DPS in the game.
Eles have the largest theoretical burst in the game.
Eles are generally considered as good at or better at bunkering than warriors.
Eles are one of the most desired support classes too, if you want to play that way.

At level 17, you honestly haven’t even scratched the game. Give it until you know what you’re doing personally before you judge the systems.

I see you didn’t get to experience the heyday of melandrugrass roaming warriors. Yes its possible, and yes it is incredibly strong. Essentially means that you can take any matchup against any other power spec and reduce it to taking turns smacking each other in the face.

It’s additive with +duration effects tho, so condi specs can still lock you down

WellSteal Blood/Death Reaper is going to be fantastic.

PvP/WvW: D/Wh + GS, Blood/Hydromancy on both sets, Earth Runes. Wells of blood, suffering, and power, and flexible in the last slot. Plague Form Elite.

http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgQEpAO8Bpw~

Wellsteal is already a fantastic mid bunker/frontliner, so with all the buffs this is gonna be freakin huge.
Just remember, you heard it here first folks

If you aren’t opposed to changing you playstyle a bit, runes of the warrior are pretty good and vastly underrated. Just think for a minute about the things you can pull off with those swaps.

You kind of need to use quick pockets to make acrobatics worth it, but if you are comfortable swapping sets it’s incredible. Warrior runes are secret OP. Gets you 3 initiative per 8, nearly doubling your initiative regen rate with one trait. I use D/D, S/P 2/6/0/6/0 and it’s incredibly flexible. You get great condition control and a disengage mechanism by having the sword on swap, and the utility of S/P is huge when you can rely on having D/D to actually do the damage.

Battle is ridiculous on all characters. It’s a guaranteed 6-9 stacks of might, which is currently better than maxed out bloodlust and corruption combined. Even after the nerf it’s providing equal to or more than 360 raw stat points.

Zaxares.5419:

But couldn’t you just sell the Dusk and buy Spark with the proceeds instead? If all Precursors were account bound, you’d have the reverse problem; players who get a lucky drop, but to whom the drop is worthless. And now they can’t sell it, so it’s like a blind man getting a call and hearing, “Congratulations! You have won a state of the art Ferrari! Oh, you can’t drive? Too bad. You can’t sell the car.”

The problem doesn’t lie with the Precursors being tradable. It lies with the inability of players to work towards a fixed goal without relying overmuch on RNG (either through the Mystic Forge, or from drops). While you can just buy the Precursors outright, the increase in money supply has meant that prices for Precursors has risen, resulting in players feeling like the goalpost is constantly moving away from them.

We’re not talking about precursor problems here. We’re talking about why mob drops feel worthless. When you in particular are looking for a drop, there is almost always, because of how generalized the loot tables are in this game, going to be more people who do not want the drop but get it, than those that do want it. This pushes down the market value of basically every tradeable drop, and it becomes many times more efficient to do activities with intrinsic value and buy from people who don’t want the drop and value it less.

This is why the best way to a legendary is simply to farm gold. You don’t look for the dusk or the spark or anything else in the game, you just speedrun dungeons till you can buy one.

If ANet can figure out the right amount they need to raise the odds on good loot dropping from mobs, they can remove the need to make everything tradeable. Players would feel better about loot drops, but it wouldn’t impact the economy too much as the additional loot would be account bound.

In fact, this already happens on a small scale in fractals. It feels really good pulling an exotic out of my fractals chests, even though I know it’s account bound and all i’m going to do is salvage it.

Zaxares.5419:

That’s a terrible idea. It would end up making supply even rarer (unless you also pair it with cranking supply way up, or introducing token systems for everything), and it would also annoy people on the other side of the fence; players who get a very rare drop, but have no interest at all in the item and now can only destroy it or, under your proposal, merched for gold that they can’t spend on anything because all the desirable stuff is account bound.

Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. When I said more account bound loot, I meant yes, you crank drop rates way, way up on the account bound stuff. I’d wager you wouldn’t feel kittenty about only getting to salvage exotics you couldn’t use if you were getting one dropped every two dungeon runs. And I never suggested having “only” account bound loot.

You haven’t refuted the problem statement either. And bringing the issue to light is what i’m going for. There’s always a myriad of possible solutions, but you need to look at the right issues.

I thought up something in a reply to a different thread that I really wanted to talk about in more specificity. Basically, this is a proposed explanation for why loot drops feel so bad in this game:

The thing is that almost the entire population generates supply for nearly everything. I could theoretically drop a dusk or a spark by killing a moa in a field. It doesn’t matter if I want the spark, and it doesn’t matter that the moa was 0 difficulty.

However, only a fraction generate demand for any one product. If I play a thief, I’ll really want that spark, but not personally want the dusk at all.

See the problem here? Instead of making the supply mostly account bound, ANet made mostly everything tradeable and just knocked down the supply to super low values across the board. Thus, every single player looking to getting a drop of any tradeable item will always see much lower drop rates than appropriate for the value he personally assigns the item, because somebody else assigns the item much less value than he does, and if it’s tradeable then the TP averages everything out.

TL;DR: Market tradeable gear will always, to the people who want to have it, feel like it drops too rarely. Make more loot account bound instead.

What do you guys think? I’m not an economist, so I’m really looking for somebody to word the last line before the tl;dr in a more technical way.

John Smith.4610:

I want to remind everyone that this isn’t a discussion about precursors or specific rewards, that’s a different conversation. This is a discussion of the pro/cons and philosophy behind different forms of RNG implementation.

The problem people have with the loot in this game isn’t a symptom of RNG mechanisms. Most players don’t care a whit about whether the game’s RNG has a streakbreaking mechanic or whether its only Fake RNG or whatnot. They care that the value of loot is, on average, very low.

Please, based on the actual loot tables and current TP prices for items, calculate the average value dropped by the most difficult content in the game, say Fractal 50 or Triple Wurm.

The reason you get such low values isn’t an RNG implementation problem. It’s a binding problem, and a loot specificity problem.

The thing is that almost the entire population generates supply for nearly everything. I can drop a dusk or a spark by killing a moa in a field. It doesn’t matter if I want the spark, and it doesn’t matter that the moa was 0 difficulty.

However, only a fraction generate demand for any one product. If I play a thief, I’ll really want that spark, but not personally want the dusk at all.

See the problem here? Instead of making the supply mostly account bound, you made mostly everything tradeable and just knocked down the supply to super low values across the board. Thus, every single player looking to getting a drop of any tradeable item will always see much lower drop rates than appropriate for the value he personally assigns the item, because somebody else assigns the item much less value than he does, and if it’s tradeable then the TP averages everything out.

TL;DR: Market tradeable gear will always, to the people who want to have it, feel like it drops too rarely. Make more loot account bound instead.

Black Frog.9274:

I’m not any kind of good WvW player. But, I run P/P 100% of the time. I’ve got 4k+ kills. It’s a great DPS add on. When I run with 10 to 15 man groups (or larger, but counter zergs of similar size limit my usefulness), I can burn down anyone, absolutely anyone, who gets into trouble with the rest of my group. If you can’t get out of range, if you get downed while the rest of the group moves forward, if you are stalled, delayed, crippled, or slowed, I will burn you down. With ricochet, high crit, and crit triggered abilites, I can do some real damage, most of which no one realizes until their builds don’t function quite like they think they will.

I’ve watched groups notice I’m a thief, see I’m P/P, discount me, and then die in a fire while I burned them down with their focus on someone else.

Problem with this is you might as well just take a ranger and do the whole dps-while-they’re-busy thing much better, or a signet mugger d/d and do the whole burst-while-they-ignore-me also much better.

P/P is in the nasty spot where ranger longbow used to be (and should still be), where you can’t give it real dps without making it braindead easy because it basically hinges on doing one thing.

I run it all the time in WvW. Highly recommend you take it for a spin while roaming if you’ve only ever used it in pvp, because it basically guarantees that your targets won’t see your opener coming. Also allows you to disengage from basically anybody with one button press given you run towards a pack of ambients. As a secondary benefit it becomes super duper highly reliable, because the long base range gives it more room to path around rocks and stuff.

You can also play three signet 6/6/0/0/2 with sword on swap and blow the kitten out of people from 4200 range.

That’s about as far as portal range. It’s hilarious

What are some things you haven’t seen people ask for, but would personally love to see? I’ll start

-Fractal update. Fractal Skins reworked and levels past 50 opened up.
-Alternative precursor acquisition methods
-Dueling. There’s 0 reason for this not to exist with an auto-deny option
-WvW scouting rewards mechanism

There’s a lot of talk about celestial amulet builds being overpowered, and as a result, people are suggesting nerfs to the classes that use celestial amulet best, namely engineer and elementalist. It’s true that i’m a little biased on the ele side, but I absolutely hate engie, and I’m still going to tell you why it shouldn’t be nerfed. To understand this, we need to understand something I like to call stat balance. Please stay with me here. I know it’s a long post, but I would like to think it’s a lot of it is background that’s necessary to fully comprehend the situation.

In general, the end goal of balance is that every supported build has a similar degree of effectiveness when played by the target demographic. How effective a build can be is largely determined by the interaction between two things: Stats and Skills.

Note that the interaction is what’s important. More stats gives you the potential to apply more damage/do more healing/take more damage, and more powerful skills use those stats better than weaker skills, but a set of powerful damage mitigation skills will not make good use a set of powerful DPS stats. This can be thought of as an “effectiveness ratio”, where each skill converts each particular stat into actual effectiveness with varying degrees of efficiency.

For example, shield block would have a very low effectiveness ratio for power, but eviscerate would have a high one. Flame burst would have a high effectiveness ratio for condition damage but a very lower one for power.

Effectiveness ratios, however, are incredibly difficult to accurately quantify for the sake of balancing, and are often tied intrinsically to the core theme of a class/character/what-have-you. If you want a part of the core identity of a profession, say the elementalist, to be flexibility and versatility, they must have usable effectiveness ratios for many different stats. Changing the Skills of the profession to tone down the total effectiveness would completely destroy it thematically.

What most games in the past have done is alter the Stats available to that particular build. (funfact: This is why armor classes exist. They are holdovers from the days that your tank could not be allowed to wear mage gear) This process of Stat-Balancing allows Skills to be created as theme and concept direction demand, and effectiveness to be balanced later by something the player won’t actually see as they play.

Guild Wars 2 runs into a problem because Stat-Balancing never happened. All stat combos are available to all Skill loadouts, and the only thing limiting the power of Celestial, which flat out gives more Stats and in thus objectively better than all other amulets in terms of Stats, is the assumption that most Skill loadouts will not have usable effectiveness ratios for all of those stats.

Arenanet assumed that enough Skills on any particular build would have low enough effectiveness ratios on enough of the celestial stats that they would be justified in putting a higher total amount of Stats on celestial to achieve a balanced effectiveness.

Unfortunately, problems arise when some Skill loadouts (engineer/ele setups) have high effectiveness ratios for nearly all stats, as a result of their thematic design. When these Skill loadouts are paired with the boosted Stats on Celestial, a ridiculously high total effectiveness results, and the game becomes unbalanced.

The answer is not to cut the effectiveness ratios on problem builds. This messes with other skill loadouts that do not have the same problem and potentially ruins the profession theme. The answer is clearly to rebalance the Stats on Celestial Amulet for these edge cases. Nobody expects Carrion stats to be effective on Axe/Shield Warrior. We should expect Celestial to be of regular effectiveness on Skill loadouts with the appropriate effectiveness ratios, even if we have to nerf it until it sucks kitten on all other loadouts. That is how every other stat set works.

Fire ele summon dies in moments to anybody with cleave, takes a long kitten time to summon, has a multisecond telegraph, does not cancel previous animations to cast the active, and does about as much damage as a burning speed and a half.

It’s kitten.

Water ele is a better summon in 100% of all pvp cases, and I’m playing full zerk d/d so I’m by no means undervaluing burst damage. And even the aoe knockback/burst healing/aoe chill gets completely dominated when you compare it to supply drop/Timewarp/lich/plague/SoRage/anything.

It’s not that we’re not seeing the possibilities with glyph. You aren’t seeing the possibilities with other elites.

Logan: Yo what’s good we bout to farm some champs join us brah #DragonslayinDreamteam #intheHOUSE #gotnoplanforactuallykillinthismordremothdude #goinoutanyway

Me: dude that sounds great, but instead lemme just go on a critical mission to steal an incredibly valuable object with nobody to back me up but a team of marginally heroic teens and this shifty kitten thief of uncertain motives.

Caithe: 3sneeky5U

Me: omy wtf i did not see that coming

thewaterguy.4796:

Everywhere you say? Been playing since launch never got one myself, if they are dropping “everywhere” maybe some people would consider spreading the love and donating a few of em to some other players? Yeah just because your friend got insanely lucky and happened to find a precursor doesn’t mean “they are dropping everywhere” also legendaries have lost all prestige so stop pretending like they should have more prestige, at this point they are just overly fancy ascended skins and Anet has done NOTHING to suggest that they want legendaries to be “prestigious” considering most of the stuff involved in getting them is simply grinding for hours

Honestly I think that precoursers should be dropping more frequently or their should be an alternate way of getting them, because at this point, people that already have a legendary can spread it to any other character, and those who are working towards one have an almost impossible task because of the insanely bloated prices of the precoursers

so in conclusion precoursers “aren’t dropping left and right” otherwise the prices on the TP would have tanked to achievable levels by now

This thread has literally nothing at all to do with the total drop rate. Go read either the first post or the one immediately prior to yours. Now close your mouth and sit down.

If you thought this thread was about precursor’s dropping too often, precursors not dropping often enough, or legendaries being too hard to get, then I advise you to seek assistance before the next time you have to read something.

For those of you that actually got the point but disagree, here’s a point of consideration: Do you think that players should be able to get a legendary by doing casual, unorganized content? I see a lot of statements along the lines of “no thanks casuals won’t ever get a pre”, but isn’t that the point of legendaries?

Where we’re at now a casual player who just does the world boss train each day has probably a better shot at getting a precursor than the hardcore Fotm runners. This is why legendaries don’t have prestige.

I’d go so far as to say that, if all you’re doing is facerolling open world trash, then no, you absolutely do not deserve to ever see a precursor drop. I’m having a hard time seeing why there should be an expectation to the contrary.

EDIT: There’s kind of a side convo about farms. If you want to say that people will begin farming the content that does drop precursors after this change, then yes, I agree, turning FotM 50, Wurm, Arah etc. into precursor farms is a good idea. Just keep in mind that most “farmers” shouldn’t be able to do this content, and that it would be difficult to really grind away repeatedly in the way that most “farms” work.