Guild Wars 2

In SW, after a while, they start getting dropped directly into inventory. 20 seems about the right number

If the customer/consumer base feeds ANet enough money, either through the gemstore or buying up expansions, i’d say it’s likely that NCSoft would allow them the funding/people to rebuild the graphics engine to take advantage of more modern graphics technology (just so the cash cow keeps producing)

It doesn’t seem as though GW2 generates so much revenue right now that it’s likely to happen anytime soon, however.

Aetrion.8295:

If healing and HP is merged there is no more need to strike a balance between offense/defense/support because defense and support will simply be the same thing.

There’s no need to now. Taking healing away from an attribute investment will at least make it more tempting, as it’s no longer a monetary investment/doesn’t take up extra inventory space/can be easily swapped at any time.

With the harder hitting content of HoT, allowing vitality to improve your healing will (i hope) increase the temptation to put points into defensive stats, but no matter how much healing power gets buffed, i don’t see people running around with it on in the open world. If you regularly farm content as a dedicated guild group, then perhaps there is a space for you to play a dedicated support role, but the average person has to be able to hold their own in solo play, and if you have a significant investment to healing power on your gear, your ability to do that is severely hampered. Even if you do build a separate set for healing, when you come across a group large enough to benefit from support, you’re going to have to stop, find a quiet place to swap in your healing gear (trinkets and rings ofcourse require bringing up the healing panel; can’t just double click) and even the you’re probably going to need to reassign traits to be effective.
It just makes more sense, for the style of content that GW2 offers (and which HoT will presumably continue to offer; only the difficulty was significantly altered in the part of Verdant Brink we played on the BWE), to have healing tied to the much-more-robust trait system.

it was awful the first BWE, and not good the last one. Activating Impossible odds basically made it so you could only auto. The reason this only made it not good is that autochain with essentially perma quickness is still pretty strong. So maybe that’s what they intended?
It still seems like poor balance, though.

for more reasons than just this. But my major MAJOR beef, is:

while your mouse is hovered over a selected targets healthbar (at the top of the screen), your ground-targeting cursor is placed at your characters feet.

I really can’t believe this has not been changed/fixed after this long. it makes long range (and even mid range) combat clunky or just stupid for any class that makes extensive use of ground targeting (thinking mostly of engys)

please PLEASE make the ui transparent to ground targeting.

Definitely interesting ideas. The health stat is very similar to an idea i’ve been proposing for this last little while. My main concern is with the critical stat – i think it would simply be too strong, given that spread across three different stats, the pow/pre/fer build is current the strongest (in pve situations, at least). I would keep those two stats separate, but make precision able to apply an additional (half?)stack of an applied condition, and make ferocity increase condition duration (for synergy)

Aetrion.8295:

I don’t like this idea purely because I don’t care for having to use an all cantrip bar or running arcane to be a good healer on an Elementalist. Especially with Tempest shouts being set up as a huge boost to your support ability that seems like it’s breaking just about every interesting build purely for the sake of getting that boon.

mmm. perhaps put the boon on the inscription trait instead, then? I’m not as familiar with elementalist as the other classes, but it does strike me that regardless of your desired role, you can still only cast your major healing skills every so often – that was what i had in mind with suggesting that Elemental Attunement give Benevolence – you switch to water, cast healing rain & geyser(or equivalent skills appropriate to your weapon choices), then switch out again. The more sustained benevolence from Soothing Disruption or Elemental Attunement would be for builds that want to remain in water for longer, taking advantage of the passive aoe heal or the heal around projectile impact. Like i said – i’m not intimately familiar with elementalist, but it doesn’t seem to me that it would be overly build restrictive; it would require you to take water &/or arcane trait lines, but for a support focused build i think you’d be taking at least one of those anyway.

still an issue…

Tyloric.7520:

I don’t get it.

added the idea from the last post into the first post.

bumping for visibility since it’s an old issue returned or possibly never fixed at all.

Mosharn.8357:

Those 4 pve maps equal 2 regular pve maps. Its like the tiny season 2 story maps. Its a sham.

There’s a lot more going in those maps.
Also, the map we played on beta weekend isn’t nearly as small – i’d estimate at least the size of brisban or metrica (but probably not caledon). Just the fenced-off bit we got to test was easily the size of drytop, and there’s supposed to be multiple layers to these new maps too.

So it’s not 4, you’re right, it’s more like 8, or maybe 12

AdaephonDelat.3890:

Aetrion.8295:

AdaephonDelat.3890:

You can play that character so what’s the issue? It won’t be optimal but it’s still perfectly viable.

Never being able to actually be considered a great character is the issue.

But if they’re taking defensive support utilities and using them to support their group then how are they not performing in that role?

I think his problem is that it’s not the current ‘meta’

The meta can’t be so easily controlled. it’s the unforseeable outcome of a very complex interplay of a very large number of variables, some of which are player perceptions and general game culture, hence why the meta can spontaneously shift.

diablo accomplishes this quite elegantly.
there’s a toggle to show items immediately on dropping, and holding alt will highlight them. They stay lit for several seconds after its released, then taper away.

maddoctor.2738:

Example:
Imagine a random 5 player team, if the encounters are designed to not be dodged easily, then all 5 players might need to pop Control and Support skills and not just damage. Alternatively, one of them that is specced in Support (more Healing Power) could provide the needed support for the team on his own, so the others don’t have to deal with it.

Both ways should be valid to complete the encounter.

That’s kinda the bones of my idea. Healing power would be tied to a boon tied to a trait, accessible by professions who are proficient at providing outgoing healing to other allies. Thus, rather than needing a full set of healing gear which significantly diminishes their offensive utility, they instead respec to access the heal-amplification. The balance is through the loss of a trait or perhaps a different trait line, and their needing to bring a specific heal or utility skill to accomplish their healing.

maddoctor.2738:

The thing is Healing Power is already useful, you can check the countless solo/naked runs using Cleric gear with no dodge allowed. The problem with healing is that it makes content easier but considerably slower. But think about it, if they buff Healing like the OP suggests and the difference in time between healing and damage is so little then what’s the point of damage sets?

I’m not disputing it’s useful, it’s just not viable. That people do these challenge runs just cements that for me. You don’t see people posting videos of themselves doing all-zerk runs going “HAY GAIZ LOOK WUT I CAN DEW” There’s a reason for that.

maddoctor.2738:

Not everyone should be able to finish all types of content in full DPS gear. When everyone, even new players, can complete content in the highest DPS gear then there is a problem with the content. Fix the content not the gear.

Even in PVP there are builds and professions that use full Berserker yet there are others that are not. Isn’t it better to make the game use all those just like in PVP? When the game was released everyone was running Soldier gear in dungeons.

I definitely think it’s better to make all attributes useful; that’s been my point all along. Sometimes it’s better to prune out the ones that don’t (sufficiently) contribute to the game. In the case of healing power, it’s not just that i think it doesn’t, i think it can’t. Not without such an overhaul that it’s no longer ‘healing power’ but a completely different stat which may incorporate some of the same function.
Simply adding boon duration, as many suggest, won’t fix it. It’ll make it better, sure – better to the point that the healing component will have to be cut back to prevent it being too strong. Competent pve players still won’t take it; new players of any stripe will be only more confused.

please understand i’m not advocating the removal of healing as a mechanic from the game, or the ability to build with a healing focus in pvp; i just don’t want it as a stat where it is not going to provide utility outside a narrow range, and be regarded as a useless waste of itemization in the majority of the game.

All scrolsl SHOULD have been converted directly to spirit shards, and dumped in your wallet. if you know exactly how many scrolls you had and how many skillpoints you had and the total is now less without having spent enough to make that difference, then absolutely put in a ticket.

EDit: also, your skill points should have become spirit shards. At lvl 80 you have a set number of hero points which is enough to unlock everything with a handful to spare; your total hero points at lvl 80 with everything unlocked should be just a fraction over the number of hero challenges you have completed worldwide.

maddoctor.2738:

So instead of fixing the problem (PVE encounter design) you want to change how stats work which will have an effect even on the place where they are already used (PVP/WVW). I’m glad Anet prefer to add more interesting and complex mobs in PVE rather than ruining stats for all game modes.

What’s the fix? will you be assigning healing power outside your wvw build? Do you expect the ‘meta’ to include healing power builds, going forward?

The problem, as i see it, is this; if damage is too high, & too unpredictable, then players cannot complete the encounter without defensive stats (except by getting lucky). The whole dodge mechanic is built around avoiding this; what’smore, this has enabled the lauded trinity-free game we have now (which i like)

As soon as a critical threshold is crossed, where players cannot complete an encounter without defensive stats, that is when the meta will shift. Long before that, the content will be considered punishingly difficult by the average player, who will most likely avoid it, or just play a different game altogether. Presumably ANet doesn’t want either of those things to happen (not the meta shift; if they care at all, it’s probably an attitude of mild interest bordering on indifference)

So how do you make content smarter without being harder, and yet make healing useful without being required? We weren’t seeing it in the last beta weekend. The mobs had much higher price-of-failure difficulty, where if you missed the cues or diddn’t understand what was going on, you were likely to die; over the weekend, most people figured out how to cope with them (my revenant had trouble only when confronted by multiple smokescales, which tends to lead to them chaining their evasive mist fields and being invulnerable; she was built a lot less tanky than my current characters are)

The thing about healing power is that it isn’t a fixed number; you need the very highest achievable number to be not-game breaking, so that is the point you have to balance around. With a linear scaling system (as exists now), that means that at low numbers, the stat is worse than worthless, because not only does it not do enough to help out but it costs you other essential stat points which would probably have helped more.

An exponential scaling system might work better, but that gives them more data points to balance around; not game breaking at the top end, useful at low levels without overpowering the current balance; powerful at moderate levels without feeling like it tapers off too sharply)

It’s good that people are optimistic that a balance can be found; it shows trust in ANet as a developer, which means a mindset which is much less hostile and is probably part of the reason the GW2 playerbase is generally more friendly and helpful than in other MMOs.
I simply don’t share that optimism.

maddoctor.2738:

Narrrz.7532:

Certainly not toughness. Vitality could use a boost, but healing power is, imo, unsalvageable.

If Healing Power is so bad then why is it used so much in PVP/WvW? Same with Vitality and Toughness.

because those modes have a mechanic to instakill a downed player, and the damage is typically too intense and unpredictable to dodge or endure without additional protections.

The problem is that healing ONLY has a place in pvp and wvw. I’m don’t want to see dedicated healers in this game but i think it could play a better roll outside pvp, but for that to happen it can’t be an attribute. as soon as you have to allocate a large amount of your limited quantity of stats to it, it becomes undesirable.

better to remove it as a stat and have healing increases as a mechanic.

The two also stack ( the swiftness from each applies with every gather, at least)
i’d assume that means the chance for an extra gather applies too, though i think it caps out at 4?

maddoctor.2738:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The whole discussion is moot. Anet already plan to do this. They’ve already done some of it with mordrem and aetherblades, and they’re going to continue doing it.

Yeah they are trying to make all stats worth taking but not by how the OP is suggesting (buffing the stats, which is the topic of the thread) instead they are doing what they should, change the encounter design. The topic was moot from the start, there is nothing broken with defensive stats, no need to fix what isn’t broken

Certainly not toughness. Vitality could use a boost, but healing power is, imo, unsalvageable.

Hammerguard.9834:

Diovid.9506:

Tengu, tengu story, tengu leveling zones, tengu city.

It can’t be said enough… I still want tengu. I don’t care how little content it adds to the game. This is by far the most exciting thing they could add for me.

This type of content can be considered enticements, there to make people excited for the expansion and prompt pre-purchasing

The other type of content, new areas, actually in-depth gameplay, long term goals, are the rewards side.
There needs to be a certain amount of both; it doesn’t matter how amazing your product is if noone buys it; similarly, if it looks flashy but fails to live up to the hype, GG your company

Add in a mode which will undoubtedly be hailed as the ‘real’ way to play, further dividing the community and marginalizing casual players, or anyone who doesn’t want hundreds or thousands of hours to be lost to a momentary lapse in attention?
yeah, THIS is what this game needs…

I’ve been thinking more about how healing could be managed without a healing power stat, to make it viable without being essential and useful without a major stat investment in it. I think a temporary boon is the way to go.

Benevolence: Stacks duration, increases healing to other characters by 33% (ie, not affecting self healing at all; vitality would be your way of increasing that)

No skills would ordinarily apply this boon (to fit with the philosophy of not requiring a character to sacrifice a major part of their utility to amplify their healing). Instead, different traits for each character would give them access to it:
-Engineer: Alchemy line, Tier 1: Health insurance now grants you 10sec benevolence upon equipping a med kit or elixir gun, and adds Benevolence to the boons applied by Elixir B
-Elementalist: Water line, Tier 2: Soothing Disruption now grants Benevolence as well as vigor & regeneration when you use a cantrip
Arcane line, Tier 1.5: Elemental Attunement gives you benevolence upon switching to water (all targets still gain regeneration)
-Guardian: Virtues line, Tier 2: Absolute Resolution also grants you Benevolence
Honor line, Tier 3: Force of will amplifies outgoing healing by the same amount that vitality usually increases incoming healing (basically, no change in function)
-Necromancer: Blood line, Tier 1: Ritual of Life causes well of blood to grant Benevolence upon activation
-Ranger: Nature Magic line, Tier 1: Allies Aid causes your water spirit and healing spring to give benevolence

(i don’t think the other professions have any noteworthy ability to heal allies)

Grim West.3194:

Guild Wars 1’s storylines are very good. Not like GW2’s, which is a boring skip to the end as fast as possible waste of time.

I found GW2s story a lot more involving, tbh, and they did a better job of not making it the sole focus.

By the end of prophecies, i was pretty burnt out and once i’d completed it i was just like, “…now what?”
sure, they added in that war in kryta content a bit later, but still. GW1 was almost totally campaign driven, whereas in gw2 it’s threaded throughout hte world but isn’t the sole focus of your activities. GW2s world just feels more alive & involving.

Zev.3407:

I’ve had no problems getting spirit shards from just playing normally

Me neither, but some people obviously are.
“i don’t have bad luck” is not a good counterargument to “i’m having bad luck”

AllNightPlayer.1286:

The Reaper’s greatsword:

The auto-attack is very slow. First two movements are the normal greatswords moves and the last one resembles Ranger’s Maul

I noticed last night that marjory has a very fluid looking greatsword skill chain which doesn’t appear to mimic any other animation. Why was this not used, at least for the other races on that wireframe?

I remember reporting this some time ago, but i haven’t noticed it in a while, so it may have been fixed and then broken again.

Basically, the audio is completely wrong for ice elemental NPCs ice lance skill – it plays what sounds like the frostbrood norn death audio.

ugh… trying to bring my myriad alts up to speed in the old personal story and this glitch is killing it for me. Any word on if this is the same bug as originally reported?

the xunlai chest in gw1 is account wide.

Aetrion.8295:

Too bad it doesn’t have a skill based active combat system where you can use good aim and knowledge of the game to inflict a lot of damage too.

i don’t quite understand. are you advocating a change to that sort of combat system? you’re not only playing the wrong game, then, but the wrong entire genre.

if not, i’m not sure exactly what point you’re trying to make

The OP seems to think karma boosters have bee nerfed to no longer last an hour.
Just for the sake of clearing this all up, i grabbed that karma booster from my bank.

also, to carry your biscuit analogy further, It’s more like you were sold a token you can redeem at any time for a set number of biscuits. Sometime after you bought it, the seller altered the number of biscuits he gave out per token, and didn’t distinguish between tokens bought before then and tokens bought after, so the number of biscuits you were able to get was reduced.
…if indeed the number has been changed, and the tooltip not updated

i still have a karma booster (i had an uneven number and couldn’t convert)
it still says 1hr duration.

Just to reiterate my argument yet again, if you had 113 enchanted boosters purely from converting karma boosters, you have thrown away at least 113 karma boosters without using them for anything. you would literally rather have an empty inventory slot than a karma booster. What i take away from that is, “i will never select karma boost from the range of boosters offered”

if you had karma boosters, you still have them unless you have consumed or destroyed them. anet hasn’t taken anything away. they have only made it so you can no longer use the old style boosters as karma boosters. This was a service they offered for a time; it is a service they no longer offer.

thefinnster.7105:

i have a perma merchant express

thefinnster.7105:

many player like me

If you converted karma into boosters, it was because you valued karma boosters at half or less the value of any other booster.
For a time, those boosters gave the option to select a karma buff. now they don’t. It’s presumably intentional, we just haven’t been given a reason.

This means that for a time, you were able to use boosters of another type as karma boosters, or use karma boosters as another type of booster at greatly reduced efficiency. You can still do the latter, there simply are fewer karma boosters around to convert. You can no longer do the former, but you were never given any guarantee that the converted boosters would always have all buffs available. With the 2 to 1 conversion from karma to enchanted, i always suspected something was up. ANet has every reason to think that the people who chose to convert at this rate had no use for their karma boosts and thus would have no complaint.

in short:
If you converted karma to enchanted and fully intended to use the enchanted as karma, you are a fool.
If you converted other boosters and intended to use them as karma, the opportunity to do that has passed.
If you used karma boosters as they were supposed to be used, then great! you got use out of them!

i was never good at micromanaging (or just simply picking up a good skillset for) heroes, so i think i probably didn’t enjoy gw1 as much as i could have.
I still have very fond memories of the game, though, and its the reason i bought gw2 the moment i could (another decision i have never regretted)

Rain.9213:

(That’s actually a pretty accurate number and not an exaggeration considering you have a 10% chance of getting a Fractal skin and a 0.5% chance of it being the one you want)

wow, it’s that high? i presume that’s at scale 50?

uhohhotdog.3598:

Narrrz.7532:

i’d be fine with placeholder/copyover underwater skills. I just worry it’s not balanced/finished enough to allow general access to pvp outside the occasional beta weekend.

They could just keep it out of ranked pvp. It’s not like anything else is serious enough for it to matter. Not that ranked is all that serious right now.

Yeah, that’d work fine for me, at least. i never really pvp anyway

Knighthonor.4061:

If you were lead developer for Revenant, how would you have redesigned the Energy resource system?

I’d redesign the legends entirely to be a kind of major cooldown ability.
Outside of legend, you may use racial utilities/pick from a set of general revenant utilities. these are cooldown controlled an without energy cost, as per usual. Energy wouldn’t regenerate at all, might perhaps degenerate, but could perhaps be increased by weapon skills.

Once you activate a legend you get a sizeable stat boost to a stat/s associated with that legend:

Shiro:Power/Pre
Jalis:Toughness/Ferocity
Mallyx:Condi/Vit
Ventari:Healing power & boon duration
Glint:Celestial??

your utilities and heal/elite change as now, and your energy regen caps out for a short period, then diminishes to nothing over a longer period, then starts degenerating – say 10 seconds of full regen, taper off over another 20, at the 45 second mark your energy is depleting at max rate.

after that 30s mark, if you hit zero energy, you lose hold on the legend. Weapon skills/traits would aid you in staying in a legend beyond that 30 sec mark, but ultimately you would be sacrificing the use of those utilities to prolong access to your heightened stat levels.

While invoking a legend, your character is changed in appearance, similar to how mallix/jalis elites currently change you.

Trying to make an indeterminate-but-arbitrarily-large amount of gold for when HoT finally drops.
trying to recoup my losses from attempting to use the skritt ecto scambling to make an indeterminate-but-arbitrarily-large amount of gold for when HoT finally drops.

frayon.3984:

If we did get it early it would be after balancing the underwater part of the revenant. I don’t think we could do much without that part of them and parts of the maps we would be unable to to do at all.

i’d be fine with placeholder/copyover underwater skills. I just worry it’s not balanced/finished enough to allow general access to pvp outside the occasional beta weekend.

if you buy eternity, do sunrise & twilight skins also unlock?

i built sunrise for my guard, then decided i wanted a more dark-paladin theme.

it’s still not a bad weapon.

FOR MORDREMOTH

CandyHearts.6025:

. . . but why is the karma gone? ;_;

Either they’re phasing out karma as a currency or else making it play a new role in HoT, and don’t want people to be able to amass it so easily beforehand.

Those are my guesses.

if you had karma boosts, you still have them.
If you changed them into enchanted reward, you had to throw away half of them in the process.
why would you throw away half of your karma boosts if karma was what you wanted from your enchanted boost?

i’m not against the enchanted booster being changed back, i’m just struggling to understand why such outcry.

Kicker.8203:

This maybe more true for pvp than pvp but you have to dodge, chase enemies, kite, heal, wait until target comes out of stealth etc. so it is a lot more ufesul than it seems. For bursting its bad but for sustain damage it is good.

combat only.

the moment the gold mist disappears, you’re back at base crit rate.

This would be pretty cool.

i bet people will accuse anet of trying to goad folks into pre-purchasing though.

can’t win for the losing…