Guild Wars 2

The funny thing is not only did we have this conversation back when the new set up was announced… we had it 20 months ago in the Horizontal progression CDI.

They know. Seriously, the class balance team knows. Obliterating choice so that players stop surprising them is the POINT. They got sick of unexpected permutations vastly over-performing. And having accomplished what they set out to do — create a system so simplistic that they could actually stay ahead of the metagame arms race — they ain’t going back.

I don’t believe for a moment the company’s highest placed public face came out and said “It will be this year” just to cover for something that’ll be ready only 8 weeks from now. Over half the elite specs weren’t far enough along to even beta test. They’re offering a pathetic 3 out of 17 new legendaries will be ready to go at launch. They STILL won’t talk about how many maps make up the new region. They have yet to run a large scale test of the new WvW borderland. They are so completely failing to have fluid, interesting reveals that we now have to try work up excitement over getting dates for when reveals will happen as they try to stretch what they’ve got to cover how long it’ll take to deliver it (“difficult group content”).

There is a TON of work left to do and they are visibly scrambling to get it done.

Put October out of your mind. ArenaNet is going to slump to the ground exhausted if they manage to get this beast launched for Black Friday in November.

Indomitable Courage. They’d need to be written to stack correctly, but otherwise…

Whips. Animations for them are already in game (some nightmare court use them).

While a lot of attention has been focused on re-working or completely re-building the 2 Guardian Shield skills, there is another avenue for making shields more desirable on the class that has a shield as it’s profession icon …

Stalwart Defender — the Master tier Valor trait for shields.

Instead of the comically bad +180 toughness, this trait could reduce the interval of the Courage virtue providing Aegis from 40 seconds to 30 seconds — giving a dedicated shield user more block events. Throw in “each time you block an attack you gain 2 seconds of resistance” and you’re looking at a trait that is strong enough to consider on its own merit and incentivizes carrying a shield with the 20% cooldown reduction.

1. Terrestrial Spears / Wells (supportive wells) — Paragon
2. Off-hand sword / Mantras (utility and cleansing) — Soulblade
3. Warhorn / Minions (spirit archers/warriors matching your race) — Harbinger

For it to arrive with the 5th anniversary of the game’s launch, and to have announced that with clarity six months beforehand.

The FX already exists – we should be shooting the projectile seen in our Focus #4 skill not arrows.

Don’t troll the noob. Shields are useful in a couple of very specific places but for the most part they are our worst weapon option… probably why they are our class symbol ((sigh)).

Sword/Focus is incredibly violent for PvP, Greatsword is amazing in multi-target fights. Staff is called ‘the lootstick’ for good reason – in zergs is the perfect blend of tap everything for loot and good utility effects. Hammer is ferocious with practice.

When Devs say Guards are “in a good place” its actually for a reason. It will take you a long while to explore all that Guardians do and do well.

Except portal, which the Devs acknowledge was an issue once years ago.

But now Guards have an option to get stealth… which ought to be amusing.

Thing is we don’t need the Revenant shield skills per se, we just need better skills than we have. I’d like to see the new Resistance boon on our shield or a Taunt. I just want them to back up, look at the new tools and start fresh. If 5 stays a bubble, that bubble has to be SOLID, none of this strolling through it with a dodge roll. If it does something different look at the size of bubble Braham throws down when he uses his Shield 5.

One of the reasons I really like the fragments of Faith trap is it’s a great group effect but used solo you get a lot of blocks in rapid succession.

I’ll bet dollars to donuts it’s 3 stacks (like the big crabs, basically).

Just a feeling.

Kaiden Valor.7163:

I’m not a huge fan of Herald, but it works.

Sure. I’m not adverse to it, it just seemed like there was a profession-ish title so deeply associated with Glint that it might tie things together a little more neatly and save Herald for when some class gets warhorn as their Elite Spec weapon . ((Honk!))

Roy Cronacher.1576:

I’ll be showing it all off plus some extra things on the POI this Friday which will give a much better idea of how everything works.

Just one comment on what we know so far:

Herald is a perfectly good, but quite generic name for the spec. So generally useful in fact you might want to keep it in your pocket for later given there is such a obvious lore-based name for this Elite Spec…

Flameseeker.

The ability to write clearly/concisely and GW2 hour’s played are two totally unrelated things.

Having run testing programs, I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count which quality provides more actionable data in my experience.

I like to think of the Herald as a sign they can make good, thematic shield skills…

Now we just need them to do it for us.

Guard Shield 5 — Double the duration. Add “You and up to 4 allies in the shield gain Resistance while you remain within the bubble.” Done

Arnath.2319:

Keep Virtues as they are.

Add new F4, passive is weaker swiftness, active is the wings of the turkey leap that triggers fields and gives swiftness when land.

Spear of Justice replaces Deflecting Shot.

Traps removed, we receive a set of skills that are actually useful.

Shield of Courage is worked into one of those new skills.

At least that’s what i would do to make the Dragon Hunter viable… one can dream.

What you should do instead of dreaming is wait for the next round of Especs. Because exactly none of that is gonna happen.

Maybe they’ll pick a theme you like next time.

Fortunately the class balance team and the sound team and the FX artists are all separate, so getting a little video/audio polish does not take time away from getting the mechanics getting tightened up.

We can ask for BOTH and the universe won’t implode .

I can answer a few.

1. it goes into an overflow box.

3.×. I ran around with Battle Presence most of the beta. Seemed to work fine as a Dragonhunter. Keep in mind BP already took a nerf in that it now shuts off while your VoResolve is on cool down for Guardians and Dragonhunters.

5. Dragonhunter isn’t quite make it or break it for me, but with 5 Guardians in my stable, it is far and away the most important Espec for me. I think it’s close to being that fun/good. It needs a few bugs ironed out (the new virtues need more range, more area of effect and instant cast would certainly help…). It needs it’s traits seriously steamlined and the 20% cooldown for traps and 20% cooldown for bow skills added somewhere. It also needs some numbers tuned: the risk to payoff on the Longbow 2 skill just ain’t there yet. I WANT it to self root, and in return for that I want it to hit like a truck dropped off the side of a mountain falling 3,000 straight down before it lands on my target — CRUNCH. Right now its just the risk. But I like the concept of the bow skills a lot.

If it gets a good polish pass it could be GLORIOUS.

You might consider posting in the bug forum.

An OCD craving for pointless symmetry is NOT something they’re planning to satisfy.

They’ve said so explicitly.

((snort)) You know there’s a physical Heart of Thorns box, right? That means informing retailers well before release date when the release date will be.

…And they haven’t yet.

What they have done is backpedal ferociously, promising “This Year”. Drop dead date 18 weeks from now. That’s not language you use when you’re shooting for 6-10 weeks.

My bet remains Black Friday +/- 2 days. That being the absolute latest they can string this out before Heads. Will. Roll.

So what number of maps would it take before people recognized you’re going to burn through them ALL in a couple of weeks anyway?

Most maps are single use content. People get offended at having to do them again on alts they are so play-once-and-done. The size of the real estate is not a meaningful measurement of the quantity/quality of enduring entertainment being offered, so counting maps as if its a guide to how well the expansion is going to entertain its pretty silly, really.

Of course, there is some possibility that we won’t be getting any new pets, but that is speculation.

I wouldn’t call “nothing is changing until they say it’s changing” speculation .

I’d love to see more variety of young animals being kidnaped into a life of servitude and blood by the same folks as killed their parents by the thousands (because that’s not ghoulish at all…), but Rangers have not had a great track record for getting new pets. Changes to the trait lines which have moved away from bonuses by family to more standardized effects for all pets have upped our odds though.

Here’s hoping it happens .

Azathoth.2098:

I wanted to have one elite-skill for each magic-set.

Which is not how ANY GW2 profession works. One of the key processes in creating something for a game is recognizing the existing patterns and working within them. Doing “I wanted” instead of how it obviously works is not creating a good presentation.

Aces are not exactly the same like signets.
During recharge, the Illusionist will not lose the benefits of the passive effects.

Which should immediately set off alarm bells in your head that you’re making something grossly overpowered. “Oh, it’s like what seven profession have, but better.” You can possibly salvage those mechanics by setting up some trait lines, which is where permanent passive effects appear in GW2.

About stealth: I think the duration for stealth is ok as Mesmer can increase their stealth duration by 100%.

Where as fade does it automatically and without trait investment. Just looking at that should tell you you’re breaking the rules.

There is good stuff in here, but it’s pretty much ruined in the initial draft by the over exuberance. Having more attunements than an elementalist, more conditions than a necromancer, more elites than anybody… does not make it better or cool. Look at what things will be compared to and scale back – keep the fun concepts and make them work without such overwhelming complexity and out-of-scale power.

Haunt is literally 3 times as complicated as any other condition. Trim it down. Also needs to indicate what it becomes when converted to a boon.

This would probably be considerably more readable if you put each weapon and it’s 5 attunements (!!) in a post instead of grouping effects by attunement – so that people could more easily see what kind of choice equipping a weapon is (which is a lot more practical consideration that seeing all the things an attunement can do, which is a choice made on the fly in play).

Aces should be listed as signets since that’s both how they work and will allow them to tie into existing game mechanics like Runes of Resistance.

How are Sphere’s mantra-like? They look like traps to me. And the casually tossed in there “all of them reveal stealthed enemies”… Yeah. No. That’s effect bloat and wildly out of keeping with existing skills. Reveal is a fairly rare effect.

You might also want to look at existing stealth effects and see if maybe your duration for Stealth is a little out of scale.

What existing Profession were you looking at that lead you to think yours should have SEVEN elite skills?

Well, for one thing the current set up allows them to use the same new weapon more than once. Or to swap an existing weapon for a different set of skills while holding that weapon. Both of those are tools more important in the long run than making every class use every weapon by default.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Awesome feedback everyone, keep it up! I’m working on changes based on feedback from this last weekend and will likely make a post updating with changes at the end of this week, if not then next week.

I realize crowd-management is not the balance team’s strong suit, but you might encourage the Devs in charge of the Chronomancer, Dragonhunter, Reaper, and Tempest to come out and post similar hand-holding “Hey, we heard you and we’re working on them” statements in the boards for those classes.

Just a thought.

Wow those look really coo— oh… Outfits. No Sale. Sorry.

November.

Arken.3725:

One last thing to add. Bow will not see any real play in PvP due to the loss of sustain you gain from running X/Focus. There are no defensive capabilities attached to this weapon so you’re essentially a sitting duck.

So when the Devs say “The Dragonhunter is designed to serve in the Backline” what did you think that meant?

If we had 8v8 PvP, there’d be a backline, but the rolling shuffle that is 5v5 you pretty much ALWAYS end up with somebody directly in your face… No backline build fairs well in that environment.

Oh really, a build you’ve been able to practice on for years and completely optimized for PvP is stomping something obviously untuned/Beta that people have been fiddling with for ONE DAY…

Imagine our surprise.

Start a ticket with Support. No one here can help you.

Sykper.6583:

I was playing a lot of DH yesterday both in PvE and WvW.

It’s not even remotely comparable to the normal Damage Meta Guardian used in Dungeons so from that perspective it definitely can’t fit in the open world (unless the zerker meta really gets tossed around in HoT).

GOOD. If 6 hours of flailing around with a new trait line were comparable to the alpha predator produced by 2+ years of careful tuning something would be terribly, terribly wrong.

However, from a WvW perspective I found it to be an amazing backline, the traps I used and mixing in ‘Feel My Wrath’ to help channeling LB 5 and the traps either offensively and defensively really helped make them shine!

…But it could use some work.

Agreed completely. As long as we all recognize that Elite specs shouldn’t make us do one of the things we already do best even better (power creep). Ideally they should let us do something new very, very well (more diversity).

Two solutions immediately come to mind: learn to control your splash or learn to kill the things you hit. Neither are terribly hard.

I feel like the Dragonhunter has a lot of potential. I like the flow of play, but it does need some tweaking/strengthening.

Bow 1. Needs faster projectile. Could stand to hit significantly harder considering how many of the other skills on the weapon are situational or on long cool downs. The ricochet/cripple is fun and keeps you thinking about position at all times.
Bow 2. I’m satisfied… IF its traited. Could stand to hit a little harder for the risk.
Bow 3. If the damage is gonna stay that non-existent, the cooldonw needs to be shorter. Make knocking down randed attacks one of the class’ memorably features that really rewards practice and not just a once in a while effect.
Bow 4. Largely satisfied.
Bow 5. Caging targets needs to be near instant (at the beginning of the animation, with a long after cast rather than the current timing)to give us some synergy with our traps. If the cooldown is going to stay that long it also need a little more damage.

The longbow and traps both SERIOUSLY need cooldown reducing traits (and NOT at the same tier).

Fragments of Faith rocks almost exactly as hard as I thought it would .

They went to a lot of trouble to have nobody be “needed”. That’s not going to change for the Revenant players.

Story. As long as you want one of the Three Chosen Weapons.

The pace of design on this has been glacial. Heck, it’s been geological. Waiting for the other 14 weapons to get their turn is going to suck.

HaxTester.9816:

Will it be grind hell for those who have multiple characters?

My impression was masteries are account-level. And if they aren’t there will be complaining until they are. Sort of like dyes.

No one paying attention thinks they’re going to hit the anniversary. Saying “definitely this year” is saying “definitely not this month”. That’s seizing massive wiggle room. They want to gather live feedback on four elite specs this weekend. The other 5 aren’t done yet and they’ll need that kind of live testing too.

My guess would be their internal Do-or-Die has become Black Friday for holiday sales. Since even the folks normally stocking the gem store every week seem to have vanished into the resources black hole of HoT-is-running-late, I’d guess they are sprinting pretty hard even to hit that date.

Oh, and having 3 new Legendaries ready to go out of SEVENTEEN is a sick joke.

What makes you think they don’t track Guardian performance every second of every day?

As the class that they have consistently said is “in a good place”, you can be pretty sure they’re happy with the skills — all the skills — in the broader context of the profession. And don’t think they don’t know what percentage of guardians has each utility equipped. Clearly Smite hasn’t thrown any red flags for a long, long time.

That’s about as legit as it gets.

Here’s what I proposed in the Ranger CDI over a year ago now~

WATCH ME PULL A MOA OUT OF MY HAT…
While pet AI may not be entirely satisfactory, MMO combat is hardly a Turing Test. We can, with a little stagecraft, easily create the illusion of intelligent play.

Nothing Up My Sleeve…
Ranger companions gain an endurance bar, identical to player endurance bars in all ways. They gain Vigor any time their master gains vigor and they benefit from Natural Vigor if their master has that trait.

Any time the pet takes more than 20% of their maximum health in damage (a trigger we know the game recognizes due to traits like Nature’s Protection) and they have more than 50% of their endurance left, the pet instead takes no damage, evades for 2 seconds, and performs a dodge animation/movement towards its master (whom we can only hope is standing somewhere not stupid…).

Presto!
Pets now pretend to dodge, using their master as a reference point to give the appearance that they roll in a sensible direction when something massive is dropped on their heads. They also interact more consistently with the boon removal and corruption skills of other players, adding value to those skills.

Are even Players that Smart?
While I feel that triggering automatically when a major hit comes in is probably consistent with the level skilled players display, it would be possible to add an addition check with a <100% chance before the “dodge” triggers to simulate lapses. Also, because the trigger is damage-spike based, there are smaller attacks the pet will not expend a dodge to avoid. Finally, some of the pets with larger HP pools might be unnecessarily reluctant to dodge. Thresholds would have to be tuned following playtesting.

And just like the hissy fit that came with giving a free copy of the game to new players, having new characters have access to additional options for free while the characters of veteran players have to pay for those options will set off a firestorm that ANet doesn’t need or want.

There is a way new character appearance options come into the game and as a nice bonus it even helps pay salaries at ANet. Don’t expect them to shoot themselves in the foot for the privilege of giving their work away for free when they have a working model for monetizing this exact sort of labor.

I hope to test the elite specs on the old maps. Basically a calibration run. I’d rather not see the new maps until I’m playing on the Live server/permanent progress.

I kinda wish they’d let us take the beta characters into WvW. That would be chaos (of the mostly good kind).

I would love to have a series of 2-3 small Asura-styled golems as Ranger pets. Being able to play “golemmancer” with my Asura Ranger would rock of three kinds of toast.

I’m terrified they’re going to turn all 4 shaman armors into (crappy) outfits.

At this point there’s about zero chance they’ll do it right, so I’m hoping they don’t do it at all.

They’re already struggling to complete the work in front of them with the first round of Elite Specs. I don’t see them going out and making more work for themselves.

yakuza snowdragon.4639:

It seems like the elite specialization is more like adding new levels to a class without actually adding new levels.

Only its not. Elite specs came out of a CDI long discussion about how to add more options without adding more raw power. Elite specs give you new options, not more abilities at the same time. You have to give up stuff to get stuff.

What reason would anyone have to not use the elite spec?

Because many powerful build rely on the interaction of traits from 3 of the currently available trait lines. And because some people have zero interest in the new weapon the Espec trait line unlocks.

Will the elite spec close other base class traits or skills and replace them or just add more?

It fills your third trait line slot.

Can you use the bow (guardian) without using the elite spec?

No you can not. In every case the ability to use the new weapon is part of the first minor trait of the Espec trait line.

Will any class be less useful or powerful without unlocking the said elite class?

There’s always going to be some impact on effectiveness, but the design goal is to minimize the differences in overall effectiveness. People’s opinions will make out those changes to be a lot bigger than they are as viewed through the metrics the Devs collect to make balancing decisions.

If you don’t have multiple elite specs to choose from its not an elite spec its just an advanced class level?

Nope. Its still an elite spec. You always have a choice. Right now the choice is to not mistake novelty for advantage. If you had to take one and there was only one, then you’d be without choices.

Umm is it just me that is thinking this?

No, more than one person has expressed this. I figure most of them haven’t read the Horizontal Progression discussion either . It is kinda long.

Rapid Fire verges on noise in my (limited) PvP experience. Once you hear the sound and the ticks start rolling in dodge rolling is muscle memory and 80% of the attack wiffs into the void. Plus if you know you’re rolling up on a Ranger there’s an absurd likelihood they have a longbow (I prefer the short bow myself, but I’m a mutant) so you’re already watching for their fairly obvious rotation.

Seriously looking forward to trying out Dragonhunter next week.