It’s so boring when you have to press a character to see which profession it is. There’s no distinction.
Guards burn blue most of the time.
Wars have very clear skill animations.
Mesmer are fabilous.
Eles are elementy.
Necros have darkgreen mist or stay way back to place staff aoes.
Turrets are very annoying.
Ranger have pets.
Thieves you will not see in ti…
Badges of Honor are terrible. Probably the most broken, useless currency in the game. Why do we even have those if we can’t use them to upgrade anything with it but use gold instead?
Aion had fun gliding but it had no maps where gliding was featured because they focused on flying. Gliding in that game was a fun bonus. It shared the same time limit as flying unless that was changed since it went f2p.
I can’t see why others view endurance as a bad thing. In Aion I liked to push my gliding to the extrem and glide as far as I could limited by the timer and the often very flat map design (more so by the flat maps) . If the maps in Maguma support something like this and add rewards I’m exicted for it. Gliding Puzzles FTW.
Maybe you just stop regreting yourself for a moment and think about word “rarity” and its meaning? At my oppinion, drop chance must be much lower, than now, because normally i want at most to possess things, that other people don’t have, but want to. And the complexity by obtaining such items is direct that, what make it “rare”. Maybe i’m just a child of other MMO-type, there are items, not only beautiful, but powerful, that exists as single copy and only one lucky guy can make boast of it. So, it’s just my opinnion as well.
But it isn’t a “rare” reward. Rare rewards are fractal skins as well as the weapons in TA. Those are really rare as well as precursors. You get the rare (yellow) stuff everywhere and can buy bags and other yellow skins easily, after every boss you get yellows. Nothing is rare about yellow skins. Just unneccessary RNG.
Noone is kittened about not getting a fractal skin, TA or a Tequatls Hoard after finishing those things a few times. (It becomes different after a few hundred attempts…)
The system in place just kills the fun for this boss for everyone who’s unlucky. It becomes a chore, which makes people afk on maps.
Well aside from the personal oppinion that null field isn’t very good compared to well of corruption, I say a shatter mesmer will have the most number of removals. F1-4 can all be used to remove boons when clones are around. As far as I know most if not all removal on necro is more of a corruption effect which adds a different factor though.
I don’t know what’s better but I do think none of them is on the level to compete against the boonspam.
With the addition of the new breather I have lost some hope for underwater. Specific underwater equipment is a huge barrier of entry for no benefit. You pretty much lose your normal weapons, many skills, one piece of equipment and most weapon based traits.
Most players have no clue what their underwater weapons even do…
Most mantras aren’t too bad. Concentration is a little on the weak side because the stability is very short, so it ends up being a double stun break instead of some source of stability. I’m also not very impressed by Pain but that’s just my opinion.
The traits are really not interesting. CD is fine, a trait you find for everything.
Harmonious is okay for extra charges but not really an impressiv grandmaster. A shorter casttime instead of extra charges and an even more reduced casttime when you already charged another mantra in the last 2s would be an interesting change.
Empowering is just boring and passiv and doesn’t improve the gameplay. Make it add mantra dependend boons to mesmer while casting mantras or something.
My suggestion would be to make uw weapons available on land and aw weapons available underwater. Perhaps with a (small) attackspeedmalus in the wrong place because that’s the only way people will understand what their skills do on certain weapons. And make breathers skin only…
In guild teams I don’t really care, what I like to have is a guard.
In lfg-groups I like:
Elementalist (if bad can be ask to play a more supportive role, boonsupport)
Guardian (people can be bad and still offer something…)
Warrior (place some support under them and they can close to afk every fight)
What I don’t like:
Thief (too many can’t dodge at all…)
Ranger (same + no pet control)
Something in the middle:
Engineer (if confident to use engi most aren’t too bad)
Mesmer (illusions and stuff will absorb hits)
Necromancer (hard to die with, can rez)
Something like that would add another layer to combat but I only see it possibly implemented in new skills or rare exceptions. “New skill XXX is a 1200 range leap with a short cooldown but will instead knock you down when you’re crippled.”
If anyone would use a skill with such an drawback, I can’t say.
People are annoyed by everything, so my hint to these people would be to keep calm and go to sleep, you will find nothing that annoys you about others while you sleep.
Stop focusing on other people and stop blaming others when you fail. Really, I have heard people couldn’t concentrate because something was written in chat at the moment or because a mini pet was walking behind someone. WTF?!
First: Those things that you need to trigger vortexes please make them appear faster. Running in circles while waiting isn’t that great. And make them more visual, we have to check where the boss hits where the thingy is and where we are walking to. The thingy is hard to see and I don’t think there is any reason for it because the challenge should be to keep it and stay alive with it instead of finding it.
Second: Mesmer deals (close to) no damage against the first miniboss. If I had known my phantasms are useless I would not have taken them. Left me with a pretty bad taste of the whole instance even when I enjoyed the lore and stuff.
Last boss, is it supposed to trigger vortexes like 3 times before getting a single hit at him in certain stages?
I think this thread is pretty good evidence that the value of skins is incredibly subjective. Sometimes a cool skin is going to be basic, gritty, realistic or plain. Other times a god’s hand come from the sky to hand you a universe tearing, light sparkling, night glowing mace that may not compel awe as much as it will force other around you to dance until the stubs of their bones beat a catchy cadence for your amusement.
I agree with the subjective value of skins. However, I don’t think anybody wants their character to be Disco Stu. Sometimes the developer’s sense of humor really gets in the way of immersion.
Thing is, if the villagers fight back “together” right at the beginning instead of just running away they can kill the lunatics easily.
Not easily. It takes 2-5 villagers to equal 1 Lunatic. If they tried to fight back against all the Lunatics, they’d lose because of the damage and fears.
That’s why I said at the beginning, when there aren’t that many lunatics. If you can stop them from multiplying for a while you can finish some of the collection events which will spawn allied mobs that aren’t easy to deal with for the lunatics. MKS will reset the cd of your stealth too. So if another villager can stop the courtier for the duration you can run away and stealth somewhere.
One thing that can be a problem are the detection the courtiers have on the portpoint.
Really, the villagers can only win if they work together at the beginning and that’s rare. The game suffers from the same problem every other activity suffers from. You can’t play it with friends only with random people.
This map is still not at all enjoyable. Why can’t you just try to make more new maps like temple or foefire? Why so many gimmicks?
Edit why those maps are better:
Foefire: Lordrush. We all know how good this can feel, even watching is fun. Go all in or try to sneakly get it by a portion of the team.
Temple: The map with the best coming back potential. Get all the buffs and turn the match or take too long an watch how all points are recapped just afterwards because you focused too much on the buffs.
Compare this to skyhammer where you can see a direction right at the beginning and watch it end exactly this way in 99%. No comeback potential and all those unneccessary gimmicks..
I would just like to know if these content breaks become a regular thing. IMO these are horrible and this year isn’t as enjoyable because this is already the third one since december last year.
Last year we visited the norn and charr before going to the beach and partying in LA and divinity, trading with some travelers, fighting of evil plant and snakeguys.
This year LA got destroyed and is in ruines since, we got to party again in divinity and traded with the travelers before they crashed in the sand, where they still are.
Aside from the story itself:
If you create a story where you destroy something, make it so it at least adds new content. If you destroy another fort, make it so it comes with events like scavanging it afterwards or rebuilding or hunting down enemies in the remains.
Why do we need this discussion? Staff is simply the most versatile weapon of mesmers and because of that useful in almost every situation while other weapons have moments where they become less effectiv. 4 out of 5 skills have more than one effect, 3 of them give boons which no other weapon can do that well.
It’s not a burst weapon but it doesn’t need to be one, we already have enough options for that job.
I’d say, GW2 is doomed. The whole genre is doomed. Look at WoW it’s the biggest MMO out there and it’s losing player! It will die and so will GW2 and every other MMO. It’s already too late. None of those games can earn the money to keep a company going. It’s too late, I’m sure most devs are starving. Also did you look outside? These purple clouds don’t look healthy.
I for once will be ready to accept fate when it comes to this point.
I don’t think mesmer often run gs / sword + focus right now. Staff / gs is the current mesmer meta, I think. At least until the patch hits and illusionary leap and warden are back in action.
I’ve been checking in on this thread pretty regularly and I appreciate the thoughtful discussions. I wish I had time to reply to everything but it’s a busy day and the thread is growing larger so as a quick alternative I’ll throw out some potential takeaway points to summarize the discussion:
The reward structure in Dry Top is desirable for many people. But Dry Top lacks some favorable elements from earlier open world maps such as chaining or random events. My thought here is that one does not exclude the other and in the future we could incorporate both the best of both designs.
Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.
Karma may be an underwhelming common event currency. Many people would like to see it applied towards a greater variety of personal reward goals such as crafting materials, more skins, etc. People seem favorable to region specific rewards, but at some point we have to reconcile the notion that it would probably further devaluate karma. I would also like to submit that karma has another issue which is that whenever you purchase something you are setting back your progress towards other purchases. Of course, that’s a fundamental aspect of currency and yet, it’s less intrinsically rewarding than gold because you can use gold to make more gold (gear upgrades, crafting, trading, etc). At the level 80 end especially, big karma sinks are largely cosmetic and will not help you earn more karma. Personally, I feel that effective reward systems regularly disperse rewards along the path to a longer term goal. (If you haven’t checked out PvP Reward Tracks, you should!)
@AnthonyOrdon.3926: How hard is it to create dynamic events? I thought to remember an article back at release that your systems allowed to create new events in a short time.
Good question! The answer: it depends. Largely on the complexity of the event and the experience level of the event designer. I can create a very simple event very quickly. Things such as interesting characters, voiced scenes, event criers, new mechanics, new items, finely tuned scaling, new bosses, new boss abilities, world impact, and chained events are examples of things that will give an event higher implementation cost. Some events feature none of those and some are all of the above. Complexity is also deceptively difficult to perceive. Clockwork Invasions, for example, appear to be many, many events but conceptually they were just one very large event, which is much less expensive. When I implemented those, I deliberately sacrificed depth to achieve breadth. In retrospect, a little more depth was definitely in order. But we were able to create what was more or less a brand new experience and we have those lessons to apply if we revisit the concept in the future (which I intend to do, at the right place and time).
But in specific regard to this thread, your question asks the possibility: could we keep maps fresh by adding tons and tons of events? In my experience, a large complexity factor in event implementation is other events. Any time an event is placed near another, we have to at least consider how they will interact. There’s one interaction between two events, two between three, five between four, nine between five, and so on. Returns definitely diminish. Over time we’ve come up with some effective techniques and patterns to mitigate this, but the cost is greater than zero.
Clearly I’m willing to ramble over this, so maybe someday we should have a thread on event complexity vs fun vs replayability. ;]
Thank you for this answer!
I love the different designs you used for the open world in the second half of season 1 and would like to see them all return in one way or another.
I think hearts add very little to the world. A few are entertaining and have some interesting story bits that could be worth replaying but the majority isn’t. I much prefer the idea of more events in the open world, specific invasions would be cool, that are better implemented into the maps than the scarlet ones a year ago. Unleash the destoyers, the icebrood, the flame legion (or molten alliance if they are still a thing) or any other already developed enemy faction on some maps. Make invasion states of some of the current maps.
@AnthonyOrdon.3926: How hard is it to create dynamic events? I thought to remember an article back at release that your systems allowed to create new events in a short time.
IMO stability is the problem. It’s too strong and split unfairly over all classes. Classes like Mesmer and Engi are reduced by that fact.
I wish it would be split into two boons:
One to be able to move around (perhaps even ignoring cripple and immobilize) but when stunned or knockbacked, that stun is converted into a daze. So you can run around but not cast anything.
And another that just makes immun against daze. Combined it would work like stability now but none of those boons would be as potent as stability.
That would be a huge change because not only every skill that applies stability now had to be checked what to give afterwards but all stuns should be checked if they would be too strong in a new system like that.
I don’t expect to see anything like that so cc will remain weak in certain spots.
What Askadia said is so true. If your enemy isn’t using projectiles on you it’s a complete waste to slot mimic right now. And we already have other options that can do a simular things, mirror for example.
In the reworked form it will not only work good against certain classes that always have many boons up but it will help in every groupfight and it will help us survive and/or deal more damage because many other classes have easier access to boons than we have. This seems like a really good change but it all depends on cd and casttime if it will be too strong, too weak or good.
It will not be good in pve if it can only be used on enemies because the number of boonstacking mobs isn’t very high and AT will be enough.
By the way, is anyone using illusion of life? Can we make that next on the list of crappy utilities?
Hey guys, I wanted to pop in and make a few points about the siege disabler.
This is a thrown projectile, and as such, can be countered by abilities that block or reflect projectiles (Shield of Absorption, Swirling Winds, etc)
It has a ~5silver, 10 supply and 15 badge cost. This cost coupled with the above point, will likely limit the amount that these items are used to important tactical plays.
Siege is not permanently disabled, the disabler is just meant to open up a window of opportunity. Players may choose to spread their siege out more to be less vulnerable to this tactic.
As you are probably aware, we are adding Golem Mastery in the same update. This provides a new, viable option for countering a golem rush.
The traps we’ve added in the past, have seen low use. So we intentionally created this trick to be a bit on the stronger side. However, it’s still hard to say exactly how it will play out in the live game, but if it ends up hurting gameplay more than helping it we are open to adjusting it in the future.
I have only one question about those. Do they work on oil and canons? Both of those are already really vulnerable to the point that most canons are completly useless.
Ascended dungeon armor that can be created by combining the original dungeon armor piece with something fractal and stuff that adds special effects to the armor. That wouldn’t be that hard to create because it would be simular to the capacitor and would add a number of “new” PvE exclusive sets. It would also add another way aquiring ascended armor without involving crafting.
My problem is when new maps are released, there are never any hearts added and they don’t count for map completion. Why? Also in regards to hearts, weren’t they added to at least give players some kind of quests to do while exploring/leveling? I like the hearts. Not too many of them are truly tedious to the point of annoyance.
Two big problems I have with the map though.
1) By the time you get to your 4th character and above, completing the map just gets tedious. It starts feeling like a job and eventually gets boring. I’m at 82% on my 4th character and am struggling to find the desire to finish, to say nothing about the 5th I just created. It would be nice if, after getting 100% on one character, if subsequent characters could have the option to start with a completed map, at the price of receiving no rewards (SPs, money from hearts, Gifts of Exploration, etc).
2) The Waypoints are both a blessing and a curse. It’s VERY nice not to have to waste so much time on travel. Sometimes in WoW getting somewhere could take 15-20 minutes of play time, especially before flying mounts. At the same time, it takes away from exploration and seeing the map during travel. The mount debate will rage forever, but in the end it would be nice to have a mount to ride around maps.
Hearts are the worst thing when you replay maps and they cripple exploration. They take some time and don’t add much storywise. It feels better to just travel in an area ignoring all hearts and doing events as you go. Especially these small eventchains where you follow a npcs story are much better. They add lore and character to areas while hearts feel like anchors.
Decoy is supposed to drop the target which wouldn’t work with normal stealth and revealed. An easy fix would be to reduce the duration of the “specialstealth” to 0.1s and add another normal stealth with the real duration.
See, we’re already way dependent on this trait. I don’t like that. I don’t want to be forced 2 into Inspiration just so I got a fighting chance against anything throwing out conditions (this isn’t even PvP related).
We got (in theory) 3 potent anti-condition moves. Illusionary Disenchanter (been a while since I saw one!), Null Field (long CD since it’s a field, otherwise very strong) and Arcane Thievery (yeah, right).
I’d rather see them work on those. Gives more options. Also reconsider the Phantasmal Mage to make the torch trait more useful.
You missed the mantra, which in my opinion is the strongest one.
IMO this skill is lackluster since the glamour nerf. On it’s own it’s just weak compared with the more directed necrofields. The only things that makes it a little interesting for me is the combo effect (chaos armor).
It’s a bad boon removal compared to our other options because it’s too slow and noone with eyes will stand in it for the full duration.
It’s a bad condition removal because an enemy with aefields will know where to aim them.
Since both effects are combined it becomes a mediocre skill with good comboeffects.
If the field was the size of the “warrior longbow max sized burst firefield” it would be harder to just leave the effected zone.
In large scale battles the most important thing about it really is just the comboeffect. You will not get the full duration of both effects, if even of one, ever.. Condition removal is someone elses job and can be done with the mantra better anyway and boon removal should be on point to really make an impact before the boon is applied again.
So what I suggest is a bigger area with a more burst like effect (short duration + strong effect) on a shorter cooldown.
The only thing they should change with burstskills is to lose at least one adrenaline bar when used. Right now dodging those isn’t useful because the war can just use it again sooner.
I would prefer a cut on the long lasting stability, the passiv “I take no damage” and/or the never ending gapclosers.
I really hope Anet’s silence is a good sign, that it’s on purpose, to land a big surprise. Maybe the next feature patch, given that we’ll get one, will solve many important issues.
All mesmers will be converted to Commandos
More like: If you shatter your clones with the IP-Trait you die and have to be resummoned on a 90s cd by your guildies only to use timewarp and veil before getting killed by the enemy or yourself again.
the biggest difference between warrior and thief mobility is cost i think… to keep up with a GS/Sx warrior a thief will have to burn through utilities & initiative while the warrior will be able to retain most of their burst / defensive potential regardless how far and fast they travel. (yes, the burst skills left to the warrior may be ‘harder’ to land but that is besides the point, the thief will have no burst skills to even consider using left. I would take ‘hard to land’ skills over ‘no skills’ any day, wouldn’t you?).
in thief OP disengage QQ posts.. many people would recommend that you should not chase a thief. it’s not worth it, it’s dangerous, they will have the upper hand, etc etc. Most thieves would recommend that you should not chase warriors, it’s not worth it, it’s dangerous, they will have the upper hand, etc etc :P
That’s something I realized when I looked at the support options. Ele will always be a better supporter because he has most of his support already on his weapons. He’s free to choose between better survival or even more support while other classes have to slot support if they want to do that to beginn with. And it’s not like they have better survival build in their weapons or higher damage compared to ele.
