Don’t forget that there are some nice rewards tied to the LS2 achievements. Not the same as the initial rewards, but in some cases really worth it.
This has already been specifically addressed with respect to lack of new gear tiers. They want defeating these things to remain accomplishments one is proud of.
I love it. Absolutely love it. Until we got Herald, it felt like something was missing. For me the key is versatility, with a ton of useful benefits I can bring to a group depending on team composition and situation.
How long did it take for GW2 to go on sale?
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Misguided.5139
I would wait at minimum until the end of November. If HoT isn’t a huge success at launch, it will almost certainly go on sale during black friday week.
Perhaps. But probably by no more than 5-10 dollars (more than that on a game released in October would be unusual unless it was part of a major promotion like a console bundle), and you’ve lost a month of access to the new content as well as pre-purchase bonuses (like an extra character slot).
With all due respect to our brethren across the waves, I suspect the start time has everything to do with (possibly) having a chance to meet first thing in the morning to go through any kind of last-minute details, and making sure they have all hands on-deck in case of problems.
They would need to add a new legend in that case.
Nope, just a new utility per legend.
All indications are that they have no intention of doing that. I presume the rationale is that the ability to carry around two complete sets of utilities is balanced by the lack of customization.
shakes magic 8-ball
“All signs say no”
Good definition, and it gets at the heart of the issue. True Attunements are annoying but essentially fair, because you know about them in advance and can’t even start the raid without them. ANet’s Mastery gates will let you start running to kick the football, then pull it away right before you connect.
It’s a good question, but we don’t know for sure that this is really going to be a problem. For instance, maybe they put the raid at a location that you have to have gliding in order to reach. Yeah, there are ways around that, like TP to friend, but there would essentially be a “soft” attunement in that case.
If they did let you start a raid without the tools you need to have a chance at completing it, I would agree that the design is flawed (or at the least unfortunate). I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt on it for the moment.
Enrage timers are a necessary evil
Otherwise everyone will just load out with the most tanky/support spec and just survive and slowly win, guaranteed.
Enrage timers suck, but they at least require a bit more diversity and skill than a typical “we’ll just make sure we can survive the boss and just slowly dps him while watching a movie”
There are many other ways to deal with that. Like secondary enemies you have to kill quickly to prevent bad things from happening.
Again, we will see how it is implemented, but the “we have the basics of the fight down and got the boss down to 2% but didn’t meet some arbitrary time limit so we wiped” type of enrage timer isn’t fun and I hope it is avoided.
Generally speaking, I don’t like enrage timers, but we will see how they implement it.
Designing Challenges vs. Designing Gimmicks
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Misguided.5139
While you are right that the Mai Trin fight is based around a gimmick, I’m not so sure that makes it bad. I kind of like that fight to be honest (which I know makes me a weirdo). I actually think that gimmicks can make the fight interesting and unique (Thaumanova Anomaly or Dredge Powersuit, e.g.). Gimmicks can certainly be overdone, but they aren’t all bad.
As for the Molten Bosses, I’m honestly not sure what you see in it. It isn’t a particularly interesting fight to me.
I’ve been confused this whole time since Anet mentioned the word attunement cause I have no idea what that is apart from the elementalist thing. Is it something related to WoW or some other MMO?
Attunement is like a pre-qualifying quest chain that you must complete before you can enter a raid or dungeon. The exact nature depends on the game, but these can be a gold sink or time-consuming. They often function as a gear-check.
Enrage timers will be a thing, which I thought was obvious but some people seemed to disagree. This means no cheesing encounters in nomads gear, also good. This does however bring up the awkward DPS meter discussion. It is hard to have an enrage timer if you don’t know who your weak link is…
I wish they weren’t. I’d rather the design emphasized the unique mechanics of the fight moreso than a dps check. Heck, I’d rather have rewards or achievements that scale with beating the encounter more quickly (i.e. rewarding for skilled play rather than punishing players that can’t quite make the cut). When they talked about wanting to put their own unique spin on raids and getting rid of the annoying stuff like attunements, I’d hoped enrage timers would also be discarded.
Gaile,
One thing you could do is introduce the notion of a gem “reserve” which would be uncleared gems that you purchase. These would be available immediately for reserving items in the store. The items themselves would not be delivered until the fraud service clears the gem purchase
Splendid idea, but seems like something that would require significant engineering work on the back end.
Torture myself by playing Revenant (esp for Glint) and Reaper again (only to have them ripped from my grasp).
I haven’t played thief yet, but want to try out Daredevil.
Not much point in playing DH unless some of the announced changes have found their way in.
You can buy multiples at that price from the inventory of individual characters.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could use runes in legendary armor pieces sort of like a wardrobe, in the sense that you would “feed” a rune to a piece of armor, and it would be added to a drop down menu (or when one was overwritten, it could be added to the list)
So basically you’re saying that items of real value got overshadowed and kicked to the curb by… minis… I don’t even care about them being on sale… I would pay full price for the quiver had I known it was in there…
Not kicked out by minis, no. The Rox quiver went on sale… 2 days before the minis I believe? The day right after the Black Lion key sale. It was just some bug or oversight that made them not jump to the top of the promotion page even when they were first put up. Lot of people thought there was no sale that day because of it.
Correct. Two days earlier, and would have still been on sale when the OP bought the silver-fed salvage doohickey.
What did you love that has gone missing? Bear in mind that what I “gutted” was effectively:
Certain autoattack spam being consistently too effective
Passive damage spam (conditions) being entirely effortless to apply (and often without projectile-related counterplay)
Passive/instant offensive procs and skills; direct damage has a fair cue in order to promote counterplay that isn’t just protracted invulnerability periods.
You wrote off my favorite weapon as “uninspired” and completely overhauled it while acknowledging that other people enjoy using it, removing the ability to transfer any condition but bleed in the process.
You’ve removed the damage from Blood is Power not only from the ability itself (outside of the verge mechanic, but why on earth would I want to be forced into shroud just to apply damage with this ability?) but also by removing Master of Corruption. While I appreciate that CPC destroys projectiles, the 15 sec increase on the recharge (again, w/o MoC) is not. Dhuumfire on shroud 2 instead of 1 is absolutely horrible (I’m assuming you intended the same 15s cooldown, since none is listed), no thank you. No soul marks. No parasitic contagion.
Conditions may need a nerf, but destroying Epidemic isn’t the way to do it. Leave my Epidemic alone.
Plague…I don’t even know where to begin. Why in the world would anyone use this version? It’s terrible. Drains health and life force, and you’ve removed the single best thing about it (stability).
Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that condition Necromancer is too effective? How often have you actually encountered one in PvP? You’ve nerfed the hell out of something that didn’t need nerfing, simply because you don’t find it interesting. I happen to find it great fun.
Not everything needs to be intricate and complex. There are other builds and other classes for that.
Re: verge, interesting idea, but telegraphing that you will be entering shroud in 4 seconds doesn’t seem very wise.
Again, let me say that you clearly put a lot of thought and effort into all of this. The above probably sounds harsh, but I honestly do appreciate the creativity you displayed. However, I would ask that you give a bit more consideration to how other people play and enjoy the game as well as how you do that.
One last thing: I appreciate that you feel that the game as a whole needs some changes in how it works. But making those changes to one class in isolation is a problem. Work within the framework of what the game is now. For instance, trying to make changes to conditions within a single profession is a disaster because they still exist within the same game as the other professions.
(edited by Misguided.5139)
It’s like a Phoenix Wright case: Tequatl Turnabout
Also if you bought it from ANet directly, you get the expansion on Oct 23 and all the goodies therein, because ANet isn’t selling anything but HoT now.
This. Did you buy the original GW2 or did you buy Heart of Thorns. If the original game, how much did you pay for it? If you paid 40 bucks for the original game from a third party vendor then you got shafted (since you could have spent 50 and got the base game plus the expansion).
My plan is similar, save off-hand shield, Cleansing Channel as Adept major (invocation), Radiant Revival as Adept major (herald) and maybe Soothing Bastion.
“We are removing Bleeding on traps and Burning on symbol”
Seems like my condi guard will never be. It’s sad, considering a condi guardian was really fun to play on last beta.
I actually spoke to Roy about this on Friday (Karl wasn’t there, but they all work on balance changes together apparently). I asked him to keep condition guardians in mind when making further changes. He said they might be able to work in something condition-related elsewhere.
I hope that they will. Right now, DH doesn’t seem like a very good fit for a condition build.
I’m hoping that Revenant will become my go to character for dungeons and Fractals. I plan to continue with my Necro in WvW.
Interesting, I’m actually on the oposite situation. I so want to main Reaper for dungeons and fractals but I loved Revenant for WvW
Cool. In my case, I tend to gear a bit on the defensive side, and go a bit more offensive with skill setups. With Revenant, I see a real opportunity to gear very aggressively while having good survivability via active defensives (evades, shield, & glint heal, e.g.) and to be able to support a party via a wide range of boons, while not being a liability damage-wise.
I can appreciate that you spent a lot of time on this, but you pretty much gutted everything I love about my necromancer.
Asura Female. I’ve had a terrible time really getting into an Asura character and playing them past the early levels, but this will be the one, methinks. Also love the Asura hammer animations hefting it onto & back off their shoulder.
I’m hoping that Revenant will become my go to character for dungeons and Fractals. I plan to continue with my Necro in WvW.
And with Malicious Sorcery, Scepter 3 deals all of its damage in 1.7 seconds. Confusing Images, however, is crazy difficult to use effectively, which is part of why hardly anyone uses scepter, despite the potential.
am i missing something ?
Yes, actually. For one, Dhuumfire can be applied much more quickly (and to multiple opponents) in Reaper shroud than Death Shroud. The other biggie to me is the whirl finisher on four, which you could easily use in an ice (RS5) or poison (Staff 3) field. There are smaller things, like the ability to apply chill on RS2, etc.
But in the last BWE I loved Reaper Shroud for this exact reason, that I could now go on the offensive in shroud as a Condi necro. Try it out next week, I think you will like it.
Berserker…a first for me.
Personally, I’d like to see a raid encounter be something along the lines of the Teq fight, but with a prescribed number of people. It would require coordination and everyone knowing what their job was, but without hours of slogging through to get to the good part.
Because Anet didn’t design it to be? I mean, feel free to use it in a PVE spec … just like if you want to wear nomads or something. Up to you. In fact, I would love for someone to show me a PVE build with a DH spec that would be even remotely comparable to anything we see being used now. Not to argue, but to be genuinely proven wrong so I have something to look forward to when DH comes out for PVE.
Maybe you’re comepletely right, but as I said before, that’s feedback that they should hear. If you look at DH and think “man, this sucks for PvE” then the community should be talking about what tweaks could be made to change that, rather than accepting it as a foregone conclusion that it is intended to be that way.
There’s still plenty of time to make changes.
Rifle might make a cool condition weapon.
I seriously hope not. They need to do something unusal, like a dagger as a condi range weapon.
How is that more unusual than a weapon only used by 2 professions?
Rifle might make a cool condition weapon.
1. It doesn’t matter if you pay attention to the meta or not; you can make a condition build with DH because our damage conditions aren’t sourced from weapons.
2. DH is a PVP spec so if you even try to talk about using it in PVE, you could care less about your performance or potential. There is no potential ripped out of DH because traps lost a single bleed stack from a crap adept trait.
Just because you have decided it is a pvp spec doesn’t meant it couldn’t have PvE potential as well (and why shouldn’t it?) We’re talking about ten stacks with a trap like Procession of Blades, not one. Maybe still not amazing, but having a condition other than burning isn’t a bad idea. Instead of removing it completely, they could have added bleed to more things. And if you think it sucked, you didn’t have to take. Some of us thought it had potential.
I’d love to discuss it further, but honestly, it seems like you’ve made up your mind, so there’s probably no point.
(edited by Misguided.5139)
I think there’s going to be one or two more beta weekends, personally. On the plus side, with every other elite spec having gotten 1-2 rounds in already, they can really focus on feedback from the last two.
better idea is, 3 spear of justice options, 1 for each new virtue options, something like that. and maybe they are similar to this in the recent update post, i don’t remember.
That’s perfect! I knew the other wasn’t quite right even as I typed it, but still threw it out there for feedback to see what shook out. This ^ is a stellar idea. Love the idea of different effects for Virtue of Justice.
Foxfire clusters and bricks of clay are only used for making Mawdrey. Pretty sure the entire point of Mawdrey is to make you suffer as much as possible while crafting it, so no storage slot.
Bleed on trap was not useful so not going to misss it and real condi guards (made viable by the condition stacking patch) wont miss them either since their build relies on on utilities to survive and deal damage they cant afford to lose heals and condi cleanses for in exchange for pathetic bleeds and nearly no survivability.
Well, gosh, apparently I’m not a “real condi guard”. Thanks for keeping an open mind.
For the Devastation master, how about removing the dual-wield restriction on ferocious strikes? Speaking of which, why on earth is the aoe version with less restrictions (clearly more powerful) an adept trait, while this one is master?
Well put. We’ve been discussing similar issues with respect to DH not being good for Condi builds. Ideally, the elite spec (even knowing it is not the last) would be useful for a wide variety of players & builds. The trait in question might make more sense on a major (for this and other reasons too).
forum bug begone
Based on the pathetic amount of conditions DH had in it, it never did. In all honesty, if anyone doesn’t think they can still make a condition build with DH spec’ed, I don’t think they are paying attention to the current meta.
A couple of things. First of all, some of us don’t care so much about the meta. There’s a difference between what works pretty well and what is completely optimal. There’s also a big difference between what works in PvE vs PvP. I think you have PvP in mind, and you might be right that few players would have gone for a condi DH build (which in and of itself is useful feedback), but that doesn’t mean it might not have worked just fine for PvE content before the recently announced changes. The point here is that what modest potential DH might have had (which could have been increased for all play modes with different changes) instead got ripped out of it pretty hard.
(edited by Misguided.5139)
Oh, thanks for going back and looking at this stuff!
I get why they wanted to make the two changes they did, I just think they should have considered different changes
Problem 1: energy symbol has additional on-hit effect that doesn’t fit
Solution: Remove burn on hit, but change physical damage with pulsing burn effect
Problem 2: bleed on hit was only really interesting for a couple of traps
Solution: add bleed on longbow hits (or maybe weapon crits, regardless add more to make it more useful instead of ditching it entirely)
One other note. The grandmaster traits for Daredevil are really cool where they have three different options for altering how dodge works. They could do the same here (not with GM tier without major changes) with three different trap options, for instance 1s daze, bleed on hit, and maybe an extra heal or a condition cleanse.
Regardless, I agree that it feels scattered thematically. I would support pulling it from the BWE, stepping back, reassessing what they want the role of the specialization to be, and making sure all the components stay true to the vision they have for it.
(edited by Misguided.5139)
tl;dr Make Confusing Images a beam that travels a fixed distance in the direction of the target, hitting enemies in the path.
Unlike many, I really love using scepter. I think it has so much potential, but it is limited by the extraordinary difficulty of using Confusing Images effectively. The positional aspect of Confusing Images (lining up targets) is great fun, but because of the way enemies move (even in PvE) it is nearly impossible to keep the target in the back of a group selected, meaning most of the potential of this skill is wasted when it is used. It would be much less frustrating to use if the beam always traveled the maximum distance in the target’s direction, prioritizing close targets. Effective use would still require skill/positioning, but not doubly so as it currently does.
Thoughts?
What they really SHOULD do is change the Zeal GM minor’s functionality so that symbols have that initial burn pulse on all symbols, instead of the crap 33% chance per hit bullkitten. Or better yet, do the same thing but merge it into Symbolic Avenger and put something non-symbol dependent as the minor.
That doesn’t remotely solve the issue at hand (not that I object to the idea). DH spec shouldn’t be semi-useful to a condition build only by requiring Zeal, a spec I don’t even use on a burn build.
@savacli actually, I think the most common usage of Ventari will be for stopping projectiles.
I thought about that too, but then it was one of those “surely someone else on my team can deal with projectiles better than I can”. In a party set I’ll gladly let the reflect bots handle that responsibility more efficiently (looking at you Mesmers and Guards) since absorbing a projectile doesn’t offer as much as reflecting it. If extreme projectile control is needed, such as a handful of fractals, I have no problem slotting in Ventari, but it really feels like wasted potential.
I agree completely. I hope I don’t HAVE to do that often, but there are certain fights in fractals where it will be the best option. A reflect trait might have been pretty awesome, though…
I was really looking forward to using DH with my burn guardian. The latest changes announced gut that idea pretty hard, so I am hoping they will reconsider.
I understand why they made the changes they did, but it feels like they weren’t looking at the big picture in terms of the overall impact on the use of the elite spec for a condition build. I would like to see them go the opposite direction with both changes by having the symbol of energy pulse burning and adding bleed to bow hits on the trait (as suggested by Ragnar).
Symbol of Energy: Removed the burning on impact (no other symbol has an additional effect, so this felt weird). Increased damage dealt by 10%.
Karl, I get why you feel this needed a change, but can we go the other direction and pulse burn from the symbol of energy, instead?
The longbow doesn’t offer that much to a condition guardian as is, particularly against 1-2 targets because of the small number of hits on skills 4&5. This change will push it even more that direction. I don’t think pulsing fire would be overpowered for PvP because targets aren’t going to stand in it for long. Moreover, even power builds can get some decent damage because burning is so strong.
I’ve been looking forward to using this spec with my burn guardian, but between this and removing the bleeding option from traps (my favorite trait in the entire set, I would have rather added bleed to bow hits as suggested by Ragnar), I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t going to work very well. Thanks for taking the time to consider.
(edited by Misguided.5139)