Guild Wars 2

There’s nothing worthless about having to buy/craft/acquire them before you can slot them. And they can stay soulbound on equip if you really insist on punching altoholics in the throat . (otherwise they could be account bound on equip and still retain considerable value)

Oddly I’m really looking forward to playing a modified Super-Unicorn Daredevil this weekend and expect the result will be possibly the most maddening bunker build Thieves have EVER had.

Then again I also realize that even if Thieves had gotten an Espec that unlocked rifles the current P/P skills represent exactly how much ranged effectiveness the Devs are willing to let a character with the Thief mechanics (absurd mobility, stealth, initiative rather cooldowns) have in a ranged configuration. When rifle comes — and it will — its not going to be any better than the ranged options Thieves have now. So just put that out of you mind right now and save yourself the self-inflicted disappointment down the road.

It would be about 3,500 times easier to implement and of greater service to the player base to just add 6 rune slots to the character sheet and take runes out of the armor entirely. Then you could just move runes in and out of those slots freely.

((Points to tomorrow)) Well, we can see at least one example of them turning on the content at noon Pacific time.

I really would expect them to press the big red button at a time when their tech staff is in the office and ready to put out fires.

Ohoni.6057:

and even if that does work out, it still requires the player to participate in the raid, which is something they probably have no interest in doing.

That ship has sailed, and it sailed long ago. I’m not big on participating in guilds made up of hundreds of people I’ve never taken a meal with, but that was the requirement to get guild merits and the weapon skins those buy. I’m not a huge PvP’er in this game but I had to do it to get the glorious medium armor coat (turns out I’m actually pretty good at it). I like Fractals well enough, but I haven’t done so many the RNG has dropped any of the weapon skins on me. I don’t have any of the luminescent armor despite having thousands of hours played. I still haven’t killed Liadri, but I understand that its a requirement to have the miniature and wear the title.

You either jump through specific hoops or you don’t. But hoops are well established as part of Gw2’s rewards system.

I find Neitzsche to be mostly a morose twit, but he did get one thing right – to truly want something is to want to take all the steps required to get it. Otherwise you’re just fantasizing about it. While I’m with you that alternative, proportionate methods of acquisition would be a huge plus, I just don’t see ANet adjusting course on something they’ve already done repeatedly in the past. On the other hand we’ve seen them respond to the irritating nature of the first round of weapon precursors by added a new means of acquisition, so maybe the same will eventually be done for the armor legendaries. Years from now, but eventually.

((shrug)) People will be selling raid slots with groups that can clear it with 9 people (or less) soon enough. I suspect there will also be some learning groups and semi-open raid nights where a person who can kinda-sorta-mostly pull their own weight can hook up with other players to learn how to do it and eventually earn some raid-currency/rolls on the raid-loot table.

Karl McLain.5604:

Hey all. Following up on what we talked about last week. Here’s a few more things that we’re looking at doing:

…

Please keep in mind that (as before) these things won’t be in the next BWE, but in a future update. As always, thanks for your constructive feedback!

Cheers,
-Karl

Karl, another avenue to consider:

I’m already planning to run at least one of my Guards as a longbow-wielding Dragonhunter with Sword of Justice and/or Hammer of Wisdom in my utility tray. Both of these skills let a Guardian project force down range and they will happily chase/harass crippled or warded targets. Having them also adds Superior Runes of the Ranger to the list of Runes you might consider playing with. The synergy with the Dragonhunter longbow skills is there, but the Spirit Weapon skills need some attention. Can we please have them classified as “minions” using the same general rules as Necromancer with unlimited duration and going into cooldown when they die? Necro minions have also seen some improvements in AI aggressiveness that I sincerely hope can be ported to the offensive spirit weapons. This is an under-utilized skill group that could be updated to bring new competitive options to the Guardian and the Dragonhunter using existing code.

I also wanted to check – does Pure of Sight increase the damage of the Spirit Weapons when the target is 600+ units away? If not, does the tech exist to make it work that way?

Random.4691:

I said it before, I’m almost positive I read somewhere that pets were going to be optional, but for the life of me I can’t remember when and where I read this.

Faulty recall of the Ranger CDI. Players suggested numerous ways of going about it.

The holiday toy staff is also quite reasonable.

Sounds account level to me.

Will people’s heads explode when they realize you can get armor precursors out of the mystic forge with the same odds as weapon precursors?

Did you pre-order or pre-purchase?

Very, very different things…

With 10 slots and 9 profession you pretty much know there will be a step in the design process that asks “at what point in this is raid is [each]class highly desirable?”

There really should be a point during each and every raid at which your class of choice shines above all others (in the matching build). Two-to-three other classes should be able to fake it, but in that moment… BOOM, you da man. Like the moment where a well placed Portal makes the struggle 25 times easier. Boom: Mesmer slot confirmed. Imagine a super-pain-in-the-buttocks archer-type on the wall designed to be scorpion wired. A layered array of recharging insta-death fields that are best cleared by flinging a swarm of minions (or spirit weapons, remember them?) into the zappers to die in place of the heroes. Boom: Necro slot confirmed.

There’s also plenty of room in a 10-man composition to reward racial skills. A boss that takes +400% damage from charzooka for example or a boss that’s specially debuffed by summon owl or seed turrets.

The essential difference between 5-man and 10-man content is the design can demand everything. You have room for it with a slot to spare.

I just want a streakbreaker currency. Some sort of raid token so even if I don’t roll a jackpot 15 weeks in a row each week I win I still inch forward.

myself.2143:

“You’re going to have a bad time. But don’t worry, as we’re leaving you a repair anvil at the entrance. You know—to collect your tears on.”

You know who else talked like that about their PvE content? Carbine.

The only MMO I’ve seen butcher itself with a single word during a promo reel:

“Hardcore.”

Game population IMPLODED when players realized if you weren’t a raider you weren’t even a 3rd class citizen. You were barely an afterthought as they realized they’d run 90%+ of their initially playerbase out of the game.

Hell, I AM a raider and I still found the other 6 days of the week tedious and unproductive outside of raid night. Because it was.

I guess they’re hoping its actually fun enough you might do it a second time per week to practice or help out you’re buddies who we’re on the main raid-team…

I raided actively in LotRO… Some of the raids were entertaining enough I’d log in with well geared but not completely awesome alts to help other groups and disseminate strategy first hand… after having gotten it done on my main for that week.

Kelgo.5481:

Just call it Acrobat like the old D&D cartoon, or better yet scrap the whole thing and go back to sniper .. Tybalt’s rifle calls to me

Just want check… are you seriously proposing to name an Espec “Acrobat” that doesn’t have to take the “Acrobatics” specialty?

Kashrlyyk.5364:

100% agreed. It looks like ANet has given up on making good looking skirts for female humans that don’t clip and don’t flare.

Welcome to being a small Norn. Norn players have had to put up with ridiculous deformed balloon armor since day 1 except for a few pieces they forgot to screw up with racial distortion coefficients.

For some reason the poison has migrated back to the Human models recently.

Samnang.1879:

I have no problem with the name.

My problem is Would any good guardian be using a longbow to fight though???

Karl McLain.5604:

…
Grandmaster – Hunter’s Fortification: The area effect protection was bland and, while defensive, didn’t really portray the more selfish dragonhunter nature that likes to hold an advantage over their enemies.
…
-Karl

They aren’t Guardians. Its something of a radical militant sect.

Ermagerd. One whole wave of Especs and the prognostication of doom can begin!

I love how this is a game of “I’ve heard the name before, typically in another game, so that makes it good — unless I’ve heard it too recently. I haven’t heard it before: ooooo, bad.”

Or it could just be word-for-word the same text string they lay across the artwork for all gemstore backpacks on the rotating splash. I mean, the resemblance is uncanny!

Black Box.9312:

Obtena.7952:

Yes, that’s why you have the choice to not use it. Working as intended. Almost all the negative feedback I see for DH seems to start with the premise it’s suppose to be better or players must find a way to incorporate it into their game. Not true.

People have every right to be disappointed that the shiny new playstyle that they were promised is garbage. Sure, people can choose to not use it, but that doesn’t give them any less right to be disappointed at how subpar it is.

I am so looking forward to taking up this conversation 3 months after HoT launches – there’s really only two outcomes: either the revised and refined Dragonhunter has at least one meta-worthy build constructed around the tools it offers… or we’ll have the accumulated metrics data to show that it needs to be buffed until that is true.

The reason you don’t see many thieves is… They don’t let you see them .

(More seriously, Engineer is by far your best shot at special snowflake-hood.)

Just checking but we are talking about people who are so intensely committed to this game that they care about 5 AP over the lifespan of their play… but who won’t just pre-order the expansion for a game that gives them something to focus on so intently?

Because not having the expansion come launch day is going to put you a lot farther behind than 5 points…

I got about 6-7 of each color during the fighting and bought my way up to 10 of each shortly after the event.

Other people having them in no way detracts from the one I made. Good luck to the folks hoping to make one for themselves. I hope you get a crack at your favorite of three. (Start saving ascended materials now – they are not cheap to produce)

CandyHearts.6025:

Just something I’ve been thinking a lot about in regards to Dragon Hunter.

When you’re extremely immobile and slow and you toss some root via skill kit on top of that it just doesn’t make me enjoy myself when I play the class. For me personally I would like to either see some running speed given or the root removed.

Or you could play any of the other ranged builds in the game that already allow you to do that.

It’s not just a question of being different from the baseline Guardian — there is some effort being made to create a new play experience altogether. One where you have to think 3-4 seconds in advance and choose the spot you’re going to shoot from… and be rewarded handsomely for it.

But please keep banging the “we want/rely on/are completely dependent on our mobility” drum . All it does is help make them aware of how steep the price is for not having it and how big the payoff should be for being able to work under that deliberate handicap. Frankly as the game’s premier blinds/aegis class, I think I can keep from going down just because I parked for two seconds to get a beefy shot off and maintain my perma-stability (honestly, I can hardly believe they’re gonna let us have a 1 button perma-stab. I mean holy heck… how does that not make people giddy?)

videoboy.4162:

Just because you suggested it, Nike, doesn’t mean there aren’t flaws to it.

So what? I mean literally SO WHAT? Perfection is not the threshold required to get a plan accepted and implemented. Obviously. Because clearly you didn’t catch the part where I just said I was one of the people arguing for new weapons to be attached directly to the base classes rather than being gated behind sub-classes. Maybe that would have been more obvious if you read the discussion where I said over and over “Sub-classes are a terrible, toxic idea… and if you insist on doing them here’s my best attempt at minimizing the damage” Minimizing… not eliminating. Not perfect. The lesser of 77 evils.

You have yet to provide a good reason for the Weapons to be locked behind a Spec.

Because by doing it this way they can re-uses weapons with different skills. No, they haven’t yet. They may never. But that’s WHY its the way it is. Because it’s a plan that lets them not paint themselves into a corner when they run out of new weapons for every class and they really, REALLY don’t want to have to take on the art-burden required for adding new weapon types.

So lets review. If they attach new weapons to base classes in waves they can do 6 waves before Warriors run out of options and they MUST create a new weapon and all the work that entails. Or they can do it this way and they can do an infinite number of especs without generating a conflict or having to do new weapon types.

Six.

Infinite.

videoboy.4162:

OK, no, that’s not how this works. You do not get to say “I have evidence to prove I’m right” then refuse to show people where it is. You especially don’t get to speak down to someone that calls you out on it.

You’re proceeding from a false assumption – that I’m trying to prove anything. I’m not. People wanted to know why something works the way it does. I happen to know why it works that way because I designed it. Which was a process. It took days/weeks of contemplation and multiple rounds of defending it or incorporating good points against it put forward. And rather than rehash arguments it’s already faced and overcome, those arguments are right there in line in the discussion. If you are interested in knowing how it happened, now you have the means to find out. And if reading one or two dozen pages is too much trouble then you don’t want to know badly enough for me to care. I’m happy to talk game design… with people who are sincerely interested.

There’s nothing I can say in this thread that will be more convincing than seeing the Devs responding to the process as it was going on. Then compare it to what actually has manifested. Yes, the punch-line came 14 months later, when most people had forgotten the joke, but the two are still intimately connected. Go to the thread with red names in it. That’s the only “proof” people are really going to accept anyway so why waste all our time trying to prove the unprovable here? And even then people are going to say “Well yes, they did exactly what you suggested, but maybe they just threw all the plans in a hat and picked one at random… I mean, you can’t prove what they were thinking!”

That said, I was in that CDI and at no point in time did any red tag say that they were thinking about giving a single class a weapon, that could do two entirely different things. The closest Whiteside came, was acknowledging that people wanted to weapon skills to apply to existing weapons.

The system they chose to use was designed to have that capacity. Whether they ever use that capacity remains to be seen. But it’s there. There are other ways they could have done it, but they chose to go with that. Other ways that would have been easier to implement or would have added weapons to the base classes directly (something I argued for passionately, I might add). But they had a goal and I tried to offer what I thought was the least destructive way of reaching it. I don’t need to prove WHY they chose to go that way when I understand what the benefits of going that way are.

Jelzouki.4128:

Nike.2631:

There is one link in this thread. Click it .

So please show me where this system is proposed and show me where the devs reply to it because telling us to go to a 70 page thread and asking us to find the answer seems like a good way to get out of providing a straight forward answer that supports your claims.

Here’s the deal. I’m NOT going to treat you like a baby bird. I’m not going to chew your food for you and throw up in your waiting beak. If you’d like to know, I’ve pointed you to the right area. I’m not going to point to specific posts because it was a discussion. There were counter-arguments and some of them were good and you should read those too to understand what the idea had to overcome to gain acceptance. If you don’t want to know badly enough to read for a bit, that’s not my problem. I’ll content myself with the knowledge the Devs listened and liked it enough to implement my plan almost verbatim.

JediYoda.1275:

Linfang.1087:

This is the most Bi-Polar community I ever seen.

Rave over a free 1k Dye
Rant over a 1k Dress

Anet just can’t win, can they?

lol no they can’t no matter what they do as seen on the forums, reddit, blogs etc.

I would call raking in a couple million a month winning.

Outfits don’t cover back items.

Could you help noticing there’s 17 more days of sale?

And again, that entry reflects the post-wardrobe environment after the boots vanished. Guild Defender boots were available and they were quite distinctive as the came up over the knee on Norns whereas the banded boots do that on humans but not Norn. I’ll see if I can find some screenies, but I only had mine for a week or two as I pushed hard to get them just before the wardrobe change over.

I think we’ve established that smooth penguins are statistical outliers in financial matters .

I’ll be picking up eletro blue because I actually wanted it (not just because it’s the most expensive — its a great tool for creating corrupted ice effects on armor), and probably one other high value dye (above 200g). I’d get shadow abyss just for giggles if the shadow dyes become valid (I have three other shadow dyes that actually blend much better than abyss). I think there are probably two 50g-ish dyes I’ll get… and then the other 4-5 of these gifts I’m getting this month will probably go into storage to wait and see if later kits get rotated in. With around 20 character slots the third B-day is gonna be the gift that keeps on giving.

But it does mean I don’t have to offer up prayers to the Six that the Taimi kit would be part of the anniversary sale this year. That’s kinda a relief, really. My luck on those is mediocre.

It hurts even less to explain it in terms they might find advantageous .

Realistically, I was never going to pay 1,000 gold for electro blue.
Now I can sport the color without having to.

The market didn’t change at all except that I’ll now be a mobile billboard for how cool the dye is for ice-themed characters (hail Jormag!). Unless you think there were lots of people ‘on the cusp’ considering buying it for that much who also happened to be close enough to a third b-day to wait patiently…

Can I have your stuff?

…I’ll give it back in a week .

There was flatly NO reason for them to confine themselves to a pattern across 9 classes that doesn’t actually improve their individual gameplay. In fact, making it clear now that they won’t be shooting for such meaningless pseudo-symmetry in future is a huge plus. Because really, most people complaining don’t care about the larger structure, they’re just irritated their pet choice didn’t make the cut in round one.

When round two comes along if it’s announce that Rangers are getting rifles you can bet the Thief-riffle-sniper fan club would be giddy to see they’re getting their favorite choice too because weapon’s can be duplicated in a wave and you KNOW the Swords-for-Elementalists party won’t give a flying skritt’s butt that Engineers are getting sword main-hand that wave too. They just want their sword.

Have any of you people begging for a “ranged weapon” for your profession of choice ever PLAYED a ranged class in this game? Ranged damage SUCKS in GW2. That’s a RULE. And they aren’t going to change that rule for Thieves. You see P/P…? THAT is what the Devs feel is a good level of performance from a ranged skill set backed by Thief mechanics. Rifle is not gonna be better than that. It’s just not.

When they do a rifle Espec for thieves — and they will — you are going to be horribly disappointed to find out its’ gonna have the same problems every ranged class has. Terrible damage coefficients, no cleave (piercing is a privilege not a right), optimal position is out of range to give or receive buffs, inadequate ways to maintain/restore distance vs. a persistent melee attacker. And honestly someone is gonna be so clever with it and so over-perform Dev expectations that it finally brings the eye of Sauron down on the whole stealth mechanic and end up getting the whole class nerfed.

Gray.9041:

fair enough, though I’d personally prefer a more collected thief – the kind who thinks everything through, rather than the reckless kind.

And someday that will likely be the inspiration for a very cool new Thief Espec…

…And people will kvetch about the name for that one too .

SirWarriant.2319:

Clipping is never going to go away, restricting items because of the possible clipping is pointless, they might as well never add anything else to the game with your logic because it will add to the clipping.

I’m thinking the people for whom this is a livelihood rather than a hobby have some standards on what they will and won’t release. Almost like there’s a whole spectrum of clipping severity rather than it being a binary state. So far they haven’t solved cloaks in a way that rises to those standards. It’s not like they don’t know the interest is there.

Vizardlorde.8243:

Trueshot is inferior to scepter/torch since it restricts movement preventing DH from delivering decent damage while chasing that base guardian can do better.

I so hope we see a 25% move speed trait in DH. I really do.

But until then I’m looking forward to cripple being made innate on the Longbow auto-attack and not just when there are two targets trying to run.

Meaning that because it exists isn’t a motive for adding more of it.

There is one link in this thread. Click it .

Enrif.7359:

yes, that_shaman already datamined it a week ago

http://imgur.com/a/W51BS/

Neat! Thanks for the info .

Looking at the teaser art for the thief, it looks like we might be getting a new bit of hair ribbons to go with the ribbons on the class’ staff skin .

Their own staff skin looks pretty good…

Sir Vincent III.1286:

“Batman” is more appropriate than “Daredevil”

You want to name the new E-spec a “butler”?

Weird.

saalle.4623:

Wings are here to further break immersion of this game.

How immersed can people really be if they don’t notice they’re walking around under winged folk all the time?