Guild Wars 2

I dont see the issue, serious players will gravitate toward the “best” commander and you can turn off other pins in the map. General pugs will also learn who the good commanders are as they will give them the most pips.

Dhuum
Palawa Joko
Turai Ossa
Saul
Mallyx
Kanaxai
Argo

Unfortunately guys, balthazar never corrects us if we are mistaken and he summons his two dogs. Menzies is not balthazar but the idea they are putting lore stuff into gemstore before even introducing it into the game rubs me the wrong way.

Until they rework spirit weapons to actually be interactive (make command skills more engaging), I could care less about having AI floating around doing occasional dps.

Unfortunately the rest of the patch neutered guardian pvp quite a bit so overall its a negative.

If anet is going to split skills can they separate pve and pvp changes into separate areas instead of adding in pve/pvp only at the end?

Ex:

Elementalist
PvE changes:
asdasd

PvP changes
asdasd

Its not about anything being blacker, its how the weapon looks thematically. Right now, it is a cake on a stick. Sunrise is not a super dark legendary and still looks more serious than FoW.

/reply Squee

Idk, I still disagree. Balth could easily make a false promise that he will trample all the human enemies once his objectives were completed. He has already shown willingness to use some of his power to help others if it gets him closer to his ultimate goals (saving Aurene). His presence itself would sprout a healthy faction of zealots within the city that would reinforce his rule.

Inc.4753:

I’m not so sure the humans would make as useful an ally as the mercenaries will:

• Humans are just one of the major races. Mercenaries can come from all races, so a much larger pool of potential soldiers.
• How many humans would eventually follow Balthazar? He is just one of the six gods, I don’t imagine all followers of the other gods would just follow him immediately.
• Jennah probably can’t put all her soldiers behind Balthazar. The Centaurs are still a threat, and the human kingdom aligning itself with such a powerful being could endanger the treaty with the Charr.
• If Balthazar’s goals or his means to achieve those goals are not in the interest of humans, his group of followers could turn on him/abandon him. Mercenaries would stay as long as he pays them and they think they are on the winning side.
• Balthazar probably wouldn’t need to explain as much about his goals to mercenaries (‘do your job, get paid, don’t ask questions’) as he would to loyal followers. Only religious fanatics would blindly follow orders without questioning them. This means that using mercenaries enables Balthazar to keep his intentions and actions secret for a longer time.

It seems we have a disconnect about how venerated the Six are. I believe Balthazar supersedes Jennah’s authority with most humans. Only a few worship specific sects, most humans follow all Six gods. Even then Balthazar could deceive the followers of the rest by claiming he would call the other Gods once his goals were accomplished. No one would question Balthazar’s motives lest they be branded a heretic.

They should actually fix Rodgort before improving new legendaries further. The footsteps are really small, it messes up the animation of Guardian torch 4, and barely has any interaction with most torch skills.

Rodgort also screws up the zealot’s fire animation

I had some questions that may or may not ever be answerable given the story’s tendency to leave loose ends forever but anyway…

1. Was Balthazar impersonating Lazarus the entire time or was he the “fake aspect” that Caudecus gave Xera to ensure the real Lazarus did not return.

1a.If he was simply impersonating Lazarus then where are the “real” Lazarus aspects?
1b. Was Balthazar also the one taking in blood power at the end of the Xera raid?
1c. If Balth was the “fake” aspect then what happened to the other 4 parts of Lazarus? Did Balthazar simply subsume him and Lazarus cannot return anymore? (unless the 1/5th of him that is left is enough)

2. If Jormag is dead/dormant, what happens to the Norn? After all they had some prophecy about whoever broke the tooth could defeat Jormag. (Also did anyone else not find it annoying the Norn aren’t going crazy and mobilizing the moment they saw the dent in the tooth?)

Observations:

In-game vs lore power level discrepancy

The ingame power level not remotely matching the lore power level leaves the player feeling quite unsatisfied. You cannot hype up some creature to be a great threat if you can kill it with auto attacks later on. Part of this is Anet’s severe failure to give a sense of progression and difficulty as the player moves further into vanilla maps. It is not really until HoT or Living World maps that players are forced to improve. This failure to push skill increase leads to the creation of “weak” bosses that do no fit their lore reputations.

Balthazar current state is ridiculously weak by any God standards. We have two Gods to stack him up against.

Dhuum is a fallen God who constantly threatened Grenth’s grasp on the Underworld. To subdue him we had to do all this dirty work just to save the Reapers from getting overrun and then have them help us restrain Dhuum. Now it can be argued that Dhuum may be stronger than current Balth as Dhuum gains strength everytime things die in the UW.

Abaddon is the other severely weakened and chained God we have faced. He has been tormented and broken for ages that he doesn’t even have a real body anymore. He is probably the lowest point of a former God we have seen and yet current Balth appears to be weaker than him. I legit cannot tell if that is the real impression we should be getting or if Anet just had to weaken the encounter by that much because of in-game unskillful-ness. I mean atleast give his dog a bigger model or something…

Balth’s mercenaries

Why does the God of War need mercenaries and Inquest to help him when he can just walk into Divinity’s Reach and have the whole city bowing to him? Regardless of his current power level, he is still one of the Six and would be able to break off a large portion to do his bidding. Unless Anise/Jenna being another God is proven to be real, the path of action he has undertaken makes little sense.

General story direction

It appears to me Anet wants to wrap up this dragon stuff as quickly as possible. It was a great idea for the next “big bads” (after all what is going to easily top defeating a God in Nightfall?) but they have failed to make compelling villains of the dragons. Mostly by choice, the dragons being this force of nature type of enemy leaves no interesting motivations or grey decisions to be made. On the other hand. their attempts at alternate villains like Scarlet have gone out of control into the realm of lunacy with super-genius intellect and ability to make alliances between vastly different groups. In my view, the writers are now pulling from old lore and will build from there. GW1 lore is not a masterpiece by any means but at least the world was consistent. Nothing was super over the top that would break immersion or story telling. Indeed that is why I think they resorted to Lazarus and the mursaat to end this dragon stuff faster. The Mursaat storyline is relatively fleshed out and their motivations well known. They used this as a crutch to provide instant intrigue into the story. I see a similar situation occurring in the near future with the mentions of Palawa Joko.

You guys really want to see Scarlet outsmarting Abaddon and learning more “secret” information about dragons?

Its entertaining how Konig attempts to rationalize Anet’s hilariously poor writing every lore patch.

I’m so glad I quit this game, the last decent thing about it was the lore and they come out with this garbage lol.

Walhalla.5473:

Sorry but the Bloodstone IS locking away Magic, not just hiding it. To access it you need a Bunch of Seer Artifacts. And as far as I know the Game Sources don’t tell us that the Elder Dragons have Access to it.

There is no source which states they lock away magic, only that the seers hid uncorruped versions of it. Also you do not need seer artifacts to access the stones. The white mantle just tampered with one and managed to create supercharged humans (Matthias) and the Mursaat accessed the one in the Fire Islands to seal the Door of Komalie.

zerorogue.9410:

Bloodstones where specifically made so the dragons couldn’t eat them.

Walhalla.5473:

Dragons can’t access the Magic in the Bloodstones. They ( or it, since it was one Bloodstone at first ) were made to seal Magic off from the Elder Dragons.

Parroting each other doesn’t make either of you correct. The bloodstone did not “lock away” magic (and that may not even be possible as wards would be magical in nature and they consume magic), they hid away uncorrupted magic. As far as game sources give us, they can access the magic and is why Primordus moved from the Central Transfer Chamber all the way to the Fire Islands.

Hesacon.8735:

There’s a bloodstone in Arah (you run into it at the end of path 4 of the dungeon) and he mostly left it alone.

There is no bloodstone in Arah. What you find are shards left as that is where they broke it into pieces.

Walhalla.5473:

Why should Zhaitan send his Risen to a Place thats completely hostile and has nothing to offer to him?

A bloodstone exists in Hell’s Precipice.

Rognik.2579:

I’m sorry that Lazarus is a nuanced character that might genuinely want to help rather than be a moustache-twirling villain from a 1940’s film. We’ll make certain to have the next morally questionable question to approach the party have a banner over his head saying, “I’m evil! Kill me!”

It was pretty clear in Chapter 1 that Lazarus has a grand plan, and it seems like that plan is killing the dragons. Our characters has killed 2 so far (I guess word travels fast, and even into the Mists), and that would be reason enough to pause before trying to challenge us head-on. And if he genuinely does want to be friends, it’s best not to threaten that person right from the start. Honestly, even if he does have some nefarious plan connected to killing dragons, I’d rather have him as a temporary ally against a foe that we both fear than try to fight a battle on multiple fronts.

Is this a joke? There are more subtle ways to portray grey evil. Even palawa joko came across better in gw1. We needed him to cross the wastes and knew he was evil but he recognized his leverage and used it to restore his bone palace. The idea that we had to help a lesser evil to defeat a greater one is far more nuanced than " lol I am gud guy now." Furthermore, Lazarus should be far more powerful than us so him coming to US for help makes no sense anyway.

It would have made much more sense for his story to continue in white mantle areas where he lets primordus distract us as he rallies the mantle from caudecus and proceeds to a unexpected master plan. I would have found it interesting if he threw us back and stole Aurene. He would use her to create a new prophecy to counter the old Flameseeker ones and revive his dead brethren.

You obviously don’t realize how the mursaat behaved in gw1 if you seriously think the path they took is good storytelling. It’s simply a 180 turn to cram old lore into gw2.

The entire scene was poorly done from the moment Lazarus appeared.
Our character thinks he can threaten a magical being who already absorbed a bloodstone is ridiculous. Then we get Marjory acting as if she can manipulate or even “keep an eye” on such a powerful entity is garbage writing.

If the idea is supposed to be that Lazarus really isn’t that powerful then they shouldn’t have played up how big a deal the bloodstone exploding then being absorbed was. If he is as powerful as was depicted in LS3 ep 1 then the dialogue poorly reflects that idea.

Also his voice should have been more authoritative even if he did want to “help” there is no reason for him to cowtow to the player character. If he does go with the betrayal route it better be ruthless enough to make up for the pathetic dialogue he has in this episode.

I want some of what you are on if you think dh has more sustain than pre-nerf ele.

Why do people feed this guy replies? Every single time he makes some garbage thread and refuses to listen to any responses. Anet doesn’t care what he has to say but he garners like 5 pages in bait replies.

A truely professional troll.

I’m sure this has been asked about already but are some of the older legendaries ever going to see some improvements?

Rodgort specifically has really faint footprints and actually makes some skills look worse.
This video shows how guardian torch 4 becomes this small little fireball. Any hope for it they will look into it?

https://youtu.be/pJufqXewuxU?t=1m22s

Zelulose.8695:

An example of Guardian damage potential. Although they are test dummies I doubt any other class can do this even with Berzerker amulet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsMqRxL5o4I

and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nKDTAs4RiA

It is being ganked by surprise with this that upsets the community. I am always ready for it but even then it is annoying to have to account for because any time I let my guard down I could instantly be killed this is not the case for most other classes. If these guardians were dying as fast as they killed It would be fine but they last too long with their respective amount of damage. Not to mention my previous post about undogeable guardian fields that fan the flame.

Dying to traps…I have nothing more to say

No, these skills are not overtuned. Symbols themselves are a very failed concept. In a mobile game like gw2, having such weak stationary effects are worthless. Hammer guard’s pve dps is highly reliant on a stationary/semi-stationary target. In pvp, symbols are the least reliable dps a guard has access to.

If anything, Anet needs to bring up other symbols to the same level. The staff, mace, and greatsword symbols all could use some additional utility. Longbow is left out because it is still a ranged symbol and applies one of the better boons in the game.

@ LughLongArm.5460

Why don’t you check out your own reading skills, druid should not be running into teamfights headfirst to begin with and in general ranked play, a necro/dh/mesmer is always going to be a higher priority that a druid simply because they are easier to burn down. Also I clearly ended my statement with a suggestion that druids get more offensive capabilities. Contrary to popular belief DH WAS played in high tiers, they were just rare because of the aforementioned focus fire.

@Swagger.1459
Unless you can actually contribute why comment?

@EnderzShadow.2506
I was mistaken when I typed long-term. On demand would be a more apt way to describe it. Nonetheless it the the accumulation of the defensive tools what I find overwhelming. Druid are perfectly fine in popularity: case in point today’s qualifiers. “Not very popular” was thieves and DH’s.

This subforum appears to suffer from the same biases that all class forums seem to have. I am glad Anet does not read them for any suggestions. I’ll figure it out on my own, thanks.

Swagger.1459:

I personally think you should keep learning from every fight with every profession and improve your skills and builds first.

You should play other professions too, like ranger, so you can understand how they function.

Probably good advice but does not address the question asked.

Lazze.9870:

Because it got access to tons of heals without using the heal skill.. I mean, it isn’t that much too it. The devs almost made it out to sound like that was the only point of the spec. To me it is more ridiculous how forgiving and how much sustain a revenant can have without really speccing into defensive traits, while also bringing an utility weapon like their staff that still hits hard. And if they do spec into something defensive, like retribution, what they get is just an absurd amount of passive stuff that imo is more damaging to the game than most other things.

I may have over-emphasized the heal part but the point is that with the evades, stone signet, long term stability, stealth it becomes a bit much. I agree scrapper and rev are currently carried by passives.

LughLongArm.5460:

On last seasons in high leve pvp, druid was known to be the healer that can be focused down and get killed fast, unlike the cleric Ele that was able to survive on point much longer compared to the druid(and i’m talking mender meta druid ithSoS, staff-S/D)

This is blatantly false. The first to be focused were necros and DHs. Rangers in all seasons have been fantastic bruisers on side points and that is where they shine. Even mesmer and thief is easier to kill so don’t just make stuff up. Also how is a comparison to ele supposed to be sound logic when they just nerfed ele for the exact reason that they were too bunkery?

Swagger.1459:

Druids are still far from meta competitive, they don’t need any nerfs just because the average and lower skilled player have a tougher time with a more experienced player on Druid.

Is this a joke? Druids have seen play in high tier pvp in all seasons as well as in Pro leagues the past 2 seasons. If you even bothered to read I did mention how some compensation to damage would be ok.

Or is this another situation where what the class currently has is justified because there are no alternative “viable” builds?

Full disclosure: I do not main/play druid.

Druid and scrapper both feel over tuned to me. Anet has slowly brought down bunkery specs and these are the last two remaining ones where they simply beat you by having their defenses on shorter cooldowns. Druid seems to just rotate between signet of stone, celestial avatar into stealth and superspeed, kiting with short cooldown evade/dash. Perhaps there are some tips that I simply am unaware of but it seems ridiculous how easily they can full heal without using ACTUAL heal.

I understand that the spec is based off of healing but some portion of it needs to go. My choice would be to remove the stealth OR superspeed from the celestial avatar ending trait and compensate with w.e you guys feel some damage should be added.

Darknicrofia.2604:

if anything they still need more QoL changes on weapons like hammer/staff and reworks on entire useless trait lines (zeal in pvp, radiance) and the dichotomy of half the virtue traits encouraging spam activation while the other half encourages NEVER activating

a trait like zealous scepter and big game hunter existing in the same class is just hilarious.

I disagree entirely. Not all traits are made solely with pvp in mind.

Also
1. DH is an elite spec. The scepter trait is in zeal, a core spec. Another elite spec may come out that has more synergy with it
2. Having to pick between what traits you want benefits from is not a bad idea. In fact the game probably needs more of this. Do you want a % damage increase or might?

Traits require reworks on nearly every class. This is not a unique issue for guardians. Its easy to talk but far harder to create a consistent “acceptable” set of traits that don’t become OP.

Where have you read you can get it another way? The only way I know of is to play in pvp seasons.

Gw2 pvp is fine. The problem lies in the fact that currently there are little to no resources that tell you how to actually pvp well. On top of being decent at your class you need to understand rotations and (to be really good) know the cooldowns of skills/traits of other classes.

As of now the tutorial doesnt teach anything outside of stomping and capping. Id also argue the general playerbase is rather noob and this is lazy playstyle is encouraged when pve mobs will literally stand in place so newcomers dont learn any reaction skills.

Lol druid and rev can teamfight just fine

Actually I was a bit mistaken. If you are running only core then you can afford to go zeal 3,3,3 as you will never be popping f1. But yea scepter torch is one of the best sets currently. Sword focus is just a good opener. Focus 5 can be used for burst initially and then later for blocking while keeping a strong main hand weapon in seord for damage.

Pre patch the only core guard build I knew was burn guard. For HOT-specs it was hammer/mace focus or greatsword/scepter focus but these hurt you at higher end fractals because of boon stealing.

Post patch you can run scepter torch/sword focus with or without HOT. You run full zerker with zeal 2,3,3 radiance 2,2,1 virtues 1,1,1 ( change based on need of reflect, condi clear, or stab) . This still may hurt as virtues has a minor that gives retal on virtue pop.

If you have HoT then replace virtues with dragon hunter 1,2,3. This build is best as it also does not give enemies any annoying defensive boons (prot/retal) while still giving you options to block multiple attacks

I always thought it was odd that it is continuously claimed the Mursaat had been completely wiped out. It made sense they sent a large faction to defend the Fire Islands but I thought their main city was in Janthir considering we use the Eye of Janthir to find the chosen. But now that Lazarus is also saying he is the last of the Mursaat unless he is mistaken from being half-dead for so long.

I wonder if he would try to use the power he absorbed to revive his brethren. It would lead nicely into the Fire Islands maps.

You can try to justify it but its kind of obvious that Anet writers didn’t plan through the story for 4-5 expansions. Thats why you get such a joke encounter with Estel.

On a side note: what does anyone think of the fact the three Inquisitors have the same names as some of the WiK members from gw1. Could they have tapped into the power of the bloodstone and be the originals or is it simply a case of reusing names to throw a bone to gw1 lore fans.

I don’t understand these threads. Ok what if they made this the Living Story reward instead. Then once you got it you would be complaining that there is nothing to do in the new content and once you’ve done the events there is nothing going on. Its lose/lose. Anet doesn’t want stuff to feel grindy but that does not mean grind won’t exist. Literally every mmo in existence has grind because it is not possible to pump out content fast enough for people.

And they do give you options to farm the rubies : mine nodes, do events, do dailies, do wvw reward track, do pvp reward track. Just because you want something quickly does not mean the method of obtaining it has become a grind.

He brings a pvp perspective and while I haven’t pvped since the patch I disagree with how he underestimates some of the “QoL” changes.

Hmm not sure if troll thread…

102/82
games played/games won

I’ve found that the generic meditrapper works fine until high diamond, but once you start encountering teams that have 3-4 eles/revs/engis/rangers/wars you are much less likely to just body your way through a 1v1 so just use dragon’s maw had try to get quick kills. Renewed Focus doesn’t matter much when you cannot deal enough damage to them.

Keksmuffin.1450:

Took me 73 games with 61 wins to reach legendary. I used the standard meditrapper build with marauder lbow sw/f with air blood and air hydromancy.

It takes 62 wins minimum to reach legend from amber so wtf?

Mace auto will now cleave. Guardian is saved!

It may work in PvE land but it is a failure in PvP.

In PvE, shelter can block more damage than your hp bar while healing you at the same time. The heal trap has a vastly superior reliable heal that can also be traited to bring CC. Outside the meditation synergy this is an unreliable heal. It would see more play if it boosted your damage by x% for its duration and its duration was slightly extended but the heal itself reduced to 10% or so.

In PvP it is absolute garbage. In no circumstance is a proactive conditional heal good in pvp. Proactive heals are easily punishable by good players. If they see you pop this skill then they will kite away from you or CC you for its duration (just as you would vs an endure pain warrior). You may try to rationalize this being an ok trade-off since you got positional advantage while they run away but unlike endure pain which is a utility skill, this is your main heal being burned for garbage returns.

I never got a mail about the lodestone after the patch? Do I have to do something for it to trigger?

Haha this has got to be the only game I have played where being better than someone is either “not possible” or (if you are) it is something you should be insulted for.

People are so lazy they can’t even be asked to play the game to progress in a different part of it.

Dirame.8521:

If my class was as fun as playing Necros right now, I would be more inclined to agree. But when a class has 2 potentially viable builds and even they are not entirely great then you have a problem.

1. fun is subjective
2. There are classes worse than engi and that have even less viable builds (2 is plenty in gw2). You only argue for engi changes.
3. The entire feedback is usually flawed because the benchmark for being “good” is measured against the most broken specs at the time and does not take into account other play modes.
4. If this thread gets anywhere its only going to be because a “pro” player is complaining about engi. It already should have been moved to engi forums

Like I said noone cares about balance, only their own class.

Noone cares about balance, they just want thier class to be the best.

Ravenmoon.5318:

So we are going to close our eyes about everyone and their dog rolling a mediham guard right after that tourney? For the sole reason of this build being so dope it could one-shot people better than the thief at the time. I’ve personally done it. Multiple times.

And the builds you’ve listed are mostly builds that 90% of the baddies didn’t know how to outplay. They weren’t that OP.

But yeah, Gw2 is a game that has crippled very good builds that required a lot of player skill to actually be rewarding … and that has been done consistently because ANet tends to listen to their joke of a pvp community. I mean seriously … would you compare ROM’s shoutbow with your average joe shoutbow?

I’ve never played a shoutbow but it sure was interesting fighting them. Same for hambows. But yeah there were bunch of crybabies and what do you know … warrior is a scrub tier these days. Guardian was too strong with meditations and burns and what do you know … it’s getting closer and closer to scrub tier. Chrono had a real nice power shatter build and slowly but steadily it’s going to get nerfed until scrub tier. Revenant ate the nerfbat on an already underperforming DPSer it is slowly but steadily going to go away.

But hey, we get cool things like no-skill chronophantasma build or the spamwich reaper. Those sure made some baddies feel good about themselves.

^ Reasons why no one takes the forums seriously.

Obtena.7952:

If you are right, we would see people being able to choose their favoured profession and getting relatively equivalent performance between classes happening all the time. It doesn’t. In fact, almost never, unless you get lucky.

BTW, being too far from the mean? That’s just a matter of opinion. On the other hand, 50% of professions below average is always correct. You can wish things you think should be all you want. That doesn’t make them so. Anet, or any other dev team I’ve played their games, do not balance according to some ranking to the other classes to achieve equal performance levels. If they do, they all fail hard at it.

Either you are a most excellent troll or simply cannot comprehend basic balance. The way other posters have framed the argument is somewhat incorrect. It isn’t about being the 5th “best” class but Anet cannot balance classes close enough to each other than what each class brings is individually important.

For example, condi mesmer is the current king of pvp and the reason is because of its damage. The utility it brings is simply a nice bonus on top of it. Having the mobility of portal AND the best dps makes taking one a no brainer.

Because anet gives every class a bit of everything and does not flesh out utility mechanics for each class means that the only thing that matters is raw dps and survivability. Noone cares about reflect because either a class has it or they can survive without it. Noone cares about group condi clear or heals unless they are so powerful that they outvalue the loss of dps (ele,druid). Balance needs to be decent enough where it should be harder to say a single class is significantly worse than the others. Currently it is not hard enough to say that.

So with this in mind, guardian or dragonhunter specifically has never had great survivability or utility outside bunker (and even bunker guard would be considered the weakest bunker to have existed in the game) so they have usually been given a variation of a thief’s role of burst dps. Even then thief is better due to raw mobility.
So please tell me how having kitten utility, low mobility justifies taking away the barely competitive dps we have? If they wanted to appease noobs then actually put some effort into fixing the rest of the class.

Tie heavy light trait proc to deflecting shot.
Spread out LB5 damage instead of backloading it
Move glacial heart into a trait spot
Give guardian two handed weapons some defensive capabilites even if they are minor.
(Guardian two handed weaps are the only ones in game that offer no defense or mobility, if you consider gs3 to be mobility then idk wtf to tell you)
Fix sword auto

They haven’t done anything for many years and anyone who has been here for a while knows they probably will not so any outrage is justified by the fact it is going to be a straight nerf with no compensation.

Looking for a exp raid group to tackle raids regularly. I have DH/rev and have killed all the bosses except Matthias.

brannigan.9831:

Necros are very strong but at least Necros are easier to kill then the other problem classes from the last meta like Chrono, Tempest, and Herald. You can’t honestly tell me you were beating those builds 1v1 last meta because there is no way in hell you were.

You must be joking. Chrono (unless they ran time warp) and herald were not the difficult to kill because almost noone but esl players ran them well. My issues with new necro are that it makes our boons a liability.

Its becoming apparent that people here are from various skill levels and experiences. Theres too much nuance towards the match ups than I would care to write to respond to posts like this. Suffice to say I do not see guard having a place without some more changes.