Guild Wars 2

I think the reason rapid fire is rapid fire and not a single uber shot is because rapid fire plays better with combo fields, and because it distributes its damage over a longer time frame it gives opposing players a chance to try take countermeasures. Both of those lead to a more involved experience for the Ranger and its allies/enemies. It’s also going to fare better against freak/buggy ‘obstructions’, which will only screw up a fraction of the damage instead of the whole thing.

If they could make a single aimed shot not just 100% projectile finisher but also carry amplified combo effects, and maybe in PvP warn the opposing player by marking them with that ground target like some PvE mob snipers do, that might make up for it… but I don’t think it’s an easy change to make, and it changes lots of different dynamics (combos, PvP, synthesis with other skills) that have to be assessed.

There are a lot of browser extensions that will help with eyesight issues. If you struggle with black text on white, I’m amazed that you haven’t found one yet.

It’s their game and their fictional universe. They can call it what they want.

There’s way too many assumptions in there for the results to be meaningful. Inaccuracies compound one another, and that calculation has loads. It’s like saying apples are 20% better than oranges, give-or-take 60%.

I prefer duration, as my build relies a lot on non-damaging conditions like weakness.

Poison Cloud goes well with an off-hand dagger, as you can apply a lot of weakness over a group and even more on a particular target. If your build is neglecting support abilities, though, then you probably won’t care about reducing incoming damage.

You can get monocular head gear for medium armour users.

Spectacles with heavy armour? “Punch here for massive damage.”

ChairGraveyard.2967:

projectcedric.6951:

ChairGraveyard.2967:

No, but you can easily define things that aren’t fun.

In an RPG, a genre which has and always will be heavily influence by loot, having insanely low drop chance loot and nerfing drop rates into the ground is the antithesis of fun.

GW2 has some of the worst loot of any RPG game, period.

You know, during the golden days of the Ragnarok Online private servers, most servers have increased drop chances -like x25, x100, x1000- in response to the horrible loot drop rate of the original client.

Once in a while, you’d come across a “x1 drop chance” server. I wonder why.

Maybe because some people actually found it more fun that way. Why? I dont know. Why do some people like pink and others dont?

Irrelevant anecdote.

Unsubstantiated dismissal.

The Wurm is a stun-breaking teleport that doubles as a turret. It’s a very good skill. The others I’m not so sure about.

The blood fiend is too unreliable; timing the use of your single heal skill is a key part of the game which makes blood fiend a high-risk option that doesn’t offer any decent payoff.

The bone minions mix well with wells if you use them as blast finishers.

Shadow fiend and bone fiend have rubbish special abilities compared to other utility skills, and again the extra damage they dish out is nowhere near worth the risk of those skills being unavailable when you need them.

Flesh Golem is a good meat shield, but again it’s unreliable and plague form is better for both improving player durability and for CC.

Basically, if the minions have any worth, it’s as vessels for their special abilities. I’d rather have the bone minions not attack and just stay close but safe for when I want a blast finisher, and the wurm would be better if it stayed underground until you need to activate its stun-breaker teleport.

1. Kill things.
2. Not die.
3. Help allies not die.

Same as any other profession. I find my Necromancer to be very good at 1 & 2.

Alpha Strike looks fun, and not overly powerful for an elite.

Skirmishing is precision/critical. No conditions boosts except in some optional major traits, which apply only to specific conditions sources.

You have loads of different sources of conditions; marksmanship also happens to offer bonuses to the longbow that the short bow doesn’t get. The system forces you to make decisions based on your own play style.

AlexRD.7914:

The pet revive skill is absolutely useless because of its ridiculous long cooldown, so why not make traits that improve these pet skills?

/disagree. S&R is excellent for tough fights where allies go down often, including NPC allies. Those fights are usually the ones where the pet struggles to survive, and S&R doesn’t need the pet alive to work. This combined with quickness from traited pet swap and/or QZ makes the Ranger capable of reviving people in the most ridiculously dangerous situations.

So rapid fire: holds a fistful of arrows that diminishes as they’re nocked and shot, Point Blank Shot: wider, more stable stance and draws the bow a little further… I can’t think of much else to change.

I never noticed any shortcoming in the animations until they were pointed out, which to my mind means it’s fine and will continue to be so as soon as the idea slips from my thoughts.

What I disliked about the clock tower was the lack of clarity. The platforms had literal stumbling blocks on them, you couldn’t tell from looking if a bump could be run over or if you had to hop. Everything was tight so there was little leeway to get ahead or fall behind the screen-blocking Charr and Norn.

All of this was solved in this Wintersday puzzle. I felt that every time I failed it was down to me and not due to unclear graphics like having to guess what stuff was passable and whether slopes were too steep or not. It was all literally crystal clear.

I think the multiple difficulty suggestions are good ones. Maybe have the course split into different paths with different difficulties and rewards. By difficulty, I’m thinking faster/slower pacing, smaller platforms… skill based stuff.

But whatever happens, as long as future content continues to ensure failures are down to player error and not fuzzy/unclear understanding of the environment, I’m happy.

Turn autoplay on, turn the volume up really loud and unless you disabled the in-game music, you can take a nap and be woken up when it’s ready. Or you could go make a sandwich and a coffee.

Piercing arrows turns the gameplay into something like fruit ninja… how many targets can you skewer in a single shot?

Also, when the planets align and you do longbow #3, QZ, Longbow #2… it’s beautiful.

Fiorrello.8126:

you know, its kind of funny. i know that there are some die hard fans of the sword on the ranger, but i kind of feel like we got the wrong auto attack on it.

the auto attack chain that lets you stay on your target while applying cripples to prevent them from getting away feels like it should belong to the thief, and the auto attack chain that is more conservative letting you attack in an arch and giving you good options to dodge or use a dodging skill when needed should belong to the ranger.

A weapon built around harrying and hounding a target while being harder to retaliate against is more than appropriate for the broader definition of a Ranger and the adaptability that they’re supposed to have.

Aesthetics aside, a Ranger melee style would need to bring something offensive that the ranged options can’t offer. There’d be no point having a ‘conservative’ auto-attack with dodges when standing 1200 units away with a bow has all the dodging you need for the same amount of attack. The greatsword gives local AoE, the sword gives constant cripples.

NaturalPortman.9562:

An untraited raven always dies in combat

Is there some bug in the game that kills all ravens just before they exit their in-combat status, or is it just that you have such difficulty keeping avian pets alive that you can’t even kill critters without your pet dying?

’Captain’s Council Commendation’ is a pretty generic name for a currency that could be awarded for almost anything you do for Lion’s Arch. I think it’s safe to assume they were designed to be applicable to more than just the reconstruction event.

It seems the main response to ‘if you want a pure archer, just play a warrior’ is ‘but that’s what a ranger should be.’

So how about just swap the names around? Even if it annoys every other warrior and ranger, they won’t get so hung up about it as the pet-hating Ranger demographic.

Bring some friends to get you there safely, of course… the actual act of charming doesn’t appear to be level-restricted.

GMT/UTC is the international standard. It’s just baffling that it isn’t used.

CET/CEST is just as inconvenient to someone living in Asia as PST/PDT is. Any timezone that shifts at arbitrary points in the year is.

What’s the point in using a time code (or two) where the vast majority of the world has to Google to check whether daylight savings is active for that zone and then mentally make two conversions: one into the prime meridian and another from the prime meridian into theirs. Why not just make announcements using the prime meridian?

GMT/UTC is good enough for the U.S. Navy and every last business that has to coordinate internationally, why isn’t it good enough for ANet?

Seriously, why? I’ve been looking for a reason for ages.

I’ve found the AoE weaken and bouncing blind/condition transferral are extremely useful for PvE. Combined with the right skills, you can take attention as well as any heavy. Stacking weakness with poison cloud, for example, gives you enough durability between all the oter mitigation you get from DS, snares, plague form…

I’ve never seen anyone run the skelk spike traps in AC on a guardian/warrior than I can on my necro.

I don’t see the point in not rerolling. There’s 5 character slots per account by default; and the lack of a rat race means that there’s really no harm in experiencing more than one flavour of profession, race and backstory options. I mean, it’s not like you have to delete any progress.

I might get around to finishing exploring Tyria when SotH is finished. And it’ll be a staple for some of my builds even after.

I think shortbow’s fine. It really shines when you have piercing arrows in tight enemy groups, as the fact that it doesn’t need to be at range like the longbow does means you can get into skewering positions a lot easier.

Faster signet of the hunt, faster arrow speed for longbows… those are both great but has anything else specific been mentioned?

This, and they have to be stupidly close to you to get the buff… which means they’re in the line of fire and therefore dead, or they’re useless and safe. If their buff range was longer, there’d be more savvy required from the Rangers when placing them and the opponents deciding if and how to take them out.

Necro. A dagger/dagger CC tank. It’s brilliant.

I’ve had something of a Ranger Renaissance over the past week though. Rediscovered the longbow and marksman/skirmish builds after opening strikes was fixed.

In keeping with the ‘mists’ theme, you could just have culled players appearing with a generic template like shadows.

I was always under the impression that culling was done due to bandwidth limitations rather than graphics, though.

JonPeters.5630:

Agreed. Signet of the hunt needs to and will go to 25%.

Cool, now that’s off the list of complaints, we can add ‘Signet of the hunt should give 50% speed’ to the bottom of the list and carry on complaining

Re: signet of the locust – I never use it. Spectral Walk is far more useful for getting around and in-combat. They should invert the locust signet so that it becomes more interesting while keeping the ‘locust’ theme: a slow pulsing AoE lifedrain (tiny amount, obviously) with a swiftness boon on activation. That way it’s a better complement and alternative to Spectral Walk if you want to spend 1 or 2 skills on mobility.

5 points for such regular quickness is very competitive on the Ranger talent tree – even operating under the assumption that the stat points in pet and healing are completely ineffective, it’s still a very competitive option.

In practice, too many players use it as a “flavor of the month” feature. They join up for a couple of days and hang around, but after they encounter an ad or invitation that promises even better times, they represent the new guilds. Few new guilds get a chance to build a community in the midst of all this fickle shuffling, and consequently most seem to die as quickly as they’re founded. That’s got to be depressing for players like me who jumped into Guild Wars 2 alone, and I suspect we make up a huge chunk of the playerbase.

I’d like to know how GameSpy journalist Leif Johnson got definitive enough data to say ‘too many’. This hasn’t been my experience at all, but I haven’t been going around asking people in the game how they approach the guild system. Has GameSpy journalist Leif Johnson? If so, he didn’t quote anyone on it.

I’ve joined 3 guilds: 1 that I signed up with in Beta and is relatively healthy, another that has a high proportion of people I’ve befriended while playing, and a third made up of people who are still awake when most of the other two guilds are asleep and it’s early afternoon in my time zone. Each of the guilds has a purpose for me, and each of the 3 different guilds has my membership based on an understanding of what I would bring to their membership and when.

There has been no issue with multi-guilds for me, in fact it has improved the social aspect of the game for me.

If it’s supposed to be a British accent, the Sylvari scout NPC in the Kessex Hills pronounced ‘Quay’ wrong. It’s /key/, not /kway/.

If Webster had an issue with that when he invented American English, he should have changed the spelling instead of the pronunciation so that it was consistent with the Spanish-origin places like Key West.

So anyway, it’s not a British accent, it’s a Sylvari accent. Besides, a British accent is unsuitable for a species that’s so cheerful and spry. It’s more suitable for a species that likes to complain about the weather and gets spiteful when other species compliment them on their accents.

I’ve been using a Naga for GW2 and it’s working fine. Never had any issues with their support; the only issue I’ve had with their firmware is that one update had the firmware configuration window popping up uninvited on Windows’ boot.

It took a couple of hours to become effective with the mouse’s side keypad and about 8 hours’ gaming for it to be second nature. It’s definitely been worth the retraining time.

Did anyone ever get back to you about bug #2? I’m getting it now. It’s frustrating as the process leading up to that point is so tedious.

This is good news. If nothing else, it adds a little temptation to give marksmanship another chance for those of us who’ve been avoiding it.

I had no idea about that bug (have given up trying to keep track of Ranger bugs).

Thanks for taking the extra effort with the video.

I bound Q to ‘Nearest Enemy’. That one’s usually hostile. That and called targets go a long way towards staving off dependence on Tab while in crowded combat.

Yeah, gw2lfg.com is good. You take a risk advertising to the whole NA/EU playerbase, but you can add a note that will cause the kind of people you don’t want to run with to skip over you. Like “No speed runs/micromanagers” or “speed runs”, depending on you. I’ve not had any bad experience with it. Yet.

The one in Lion’s Arch. I won’t say which due to spoilers, but you probably know which if you’ve been there with your Norn, because it’s the one where the roof becomes really cramp and you have to jump from column to column with the camera jammed into your Norn’s back so that the avatar becomes invisible and you can’t see your feet and you only have about a 20 degree cone of camera angle where you can actually see anything.

How in the cute fluffy kitten do you get through that thing? Having to do a jumping puzzle involving fiddly jumps without being able to see your own character’s position can’t have been the intended design. Does the gigantism mrow purr kitty the camera often? My Norn’s only on level 6 but if this kind of thing happens often for Norn he’ll be staying at 6.

Or maybe this is a new thing resulting from the change in Field of View?

Only 600? Are you sure about that?

600 is how far you can throw the trap if you trait for it. You can definitely be more that 600 units away from a trap without it despawning.

They’d be even more useful if they fetched loot for you in all game modes, instead of running up to enemies and wheezing on them.

30th level is when you get your elite skill slot. Hope you’ve been saving skill points for it.

About 9:00 a.m. UTC. You’ll get a handful of players from Aus, N.Z. and other parts of Asia gadding about, but it’ll mostly be tumbleweed and insomniac North Americans for company.

Wikipedia will give you the long asnwer. In particular, check out the section on the origin of the term.

The main difference between using the word ‘thinning’ and ‘culling’, is that ‘culling’ is supposed to be more selective and, usually as a result, careful and complicated.

but…

Warcraft 3 had a mission called ‘The Culling’ wherein you had to massacre lots of peasants (the name was presumably chosen to emphasize the cold, pitiless attitude the protagonist had at the time, as if he were sorting through sheep), and as a result it’s entered the gaming vocabulary with new meaning, which is to massacre trash mobs. For example, you’ll cull the smaller adds before you start on the boss to reduce incoming damage faster.

However, if you ever work at an English-speaking farm, and the chief tells you he plans to cull a herd, you’ll get fired if you decide to take the initiative and kill the entire herd with a chainsaw. Unless he’s also a gamer.

Yes, +1; either make the camera keep still if the player has shown that they want to control it manually, or don’t let the player move the camera at all. Either of those would better serve whatever the design objectives are, the current solution is just a cause for frustration at a time where players are likely to be frustrated enough already.

P.S. Should this have been made a question thread? It’s a query of opinions and there’s no way to select a definitive answer… I thought the Q/A thing was for questions of factual info.

Savan.8495:

Scepter 2, Dagger 5, BiP, Dagger 4, Scepter 3, Swap weapons, Staff 2, Staff 3, Staff 4, epidemic

Alternatively pop epidemic after Scepter 3 if so, I would then continue the rotation then enter DS, DS 4, DS 1 × 3 (assuming you stack might on life blast – spite 10)

Do this, and someone will come along and kill your ‘patient zero’ just before you launch epidemic. Murphy’s Law!

Reading threads about the Reanimator trait and the Summon Flesh Wurm skill, I thought of a possible change that might make both desirable.

Necrotic Traversal (formerly Summon Flesh Wurm):
1st skill allows the Necromancer to spawn a chrysalis or egg sac at the target location.
2nd skill works like Necrotic Traversal currently works, except the player travels to the egg sac.

If an enemy destroys the egg before the 2nd skill can be triggered, the Necromancer gets (insert condition) for n seconds (for balance, and lore-wise because of the shock of the severed connection), but the egg still causes a poison blast and n jagged horrors are spawned instead… which subsequently do their trademark ‘Bone Minions with Asthma’ thing where they totter towards the nearest hostile and flail limply at it before dying.

Reanimator:
Spawns Flesh Wurms instead of jagged horrors. Changing the spawned minion to a ranged one means no more dying before it can get a hit in – a valid target is either in range or it isn’t. The Flesh Wurm would likely have to be much weaker than the current version, so that it gives the Necromancer’s team a brief boost in damage output in an area for n seconds, comparable to the benefits offered by other 1st tier minor traits.

So… improvement? More fun? Fair?

I only ever use the wurm as a teleport/stun breaker. From the point of view of using it as a stun breaker, the fact that there’s a minion involved is just a liability; it can be killed and you lose your escape. I think it’s an unnecessary liability, because even though the stun breaker + teleport is powerful, it’s already got a significant downside in that it’s a reaction skill that has to be set up first.

I like Venom’s idea of Necrotic Traversal being a separate skill, but if corpses can’t be exploited due to the difference in game mechanics, then let the Necro place a chrysalis or some other inert thing instead of a wurm, so that the wurm can be its own skill.

As it stands, the main reason the wurm is next to useless as a combat minion is due to its immobility and long cooldown… and the main reason it has a long cooldown is definitely due to the Necrotic Traversal half of the skill. Has anyone actually killed an enemy flesh wurm and felt even marginally less doomed? They’re impotent and disproportionately overshadowed by their second function.