Guild Wars 2

As we already have a shout heal now, I’d like to see Shelter become a Spirit Weapon (add the spirit shield to the FX). If spirit weapons are traited to cause burning Shelter burns all enemies within 200.

And tomes as Spirit Weapons rocks on all kinds of levels.

(I would prefer healing Breeze be a consecration, but ((shrug)) its never going to appeal to me as long as I have to be behind my allies to use it…)

Its not ‘basically uncraftable’. Its very expensive to craft. Misrepresenting that fact is the fastest way possible to get a Dev to ignore your concerns.

That certain items are very expensive is a situation that doesn’t concern ArenaNet in the least. The creation of such items are deliberate choices not accidents of design. So don’t think “but I want it” is going to be a compelling argument. You’re supposed to want it.

However, they are discussing adding specific map-based rewards cycles and my impression is Giant Eyes are under consideration as an automatic reward for playing in Orr maps at the appropriate time.

Lets be perfectly clear:

The “no grind” policy extends to a full set of Exotic gear. Full Stop. Done. Finito.

EVERYTHING beyond that does and is intended to require MASSIVE investment of playtime or real money.

And as far as that goes they’ve succeeded brilliantly. Putting exotic gear on a freshly minted 80 is trivial. Mission accomplished. Job well done.

Ascended tier was added specifically to provide a gear progression activity that takes ages or heaps of money for people who like chasing that type of carrot. Rare skins like Infinite Light or Mjolnir have always required monumental effort, mostly gated through lodestones. Rare minis are truly rare. High end Achievement point skins take months if not years of dedication to unlock. Cultural armor is a serious investment in gold for the casual player.

This is not an accident, and it’s not going to change.

I am hopeful I’ll be able to string together a Battle Presence (Virtues) + Force of Will (Honor) + New Elite Line spec for WvW zerg-leader duties.

Wwefan.4982:

Where does it say there is a closed beta coming up Anet has not released anything about this.

Its possible I’m psychic.

I prefer to think of it as the power of True Prophecy .

Michael Conrad.6704:

Kal, is this your opinion or is this an official Anet stance ?

Yes. ArenaNet has officially stated revenants will be able to use existing ways of gaining XP — specifically tomes.

However, if you’ve been following the Traits discussion, all new characters will also need to do 65 skill point challenges to unlock the full range of trat lines/utility skills so while insta-80 Revenants will have 400 out of 465 of the points needed for full trait/utility unlocking (more than enough for any specific build desired) to have access to the tools for all possible builds they will have to do a bit of adventuring.

It will make me glad I’ve kept a full range of Ascended rings that I can now use for tweaking “off-main” stats.

Let me guess… no one else plays Super Unicorns anymore?

Unless I missed something the Sylvari are all asexual drones. They do not reproduce. Therefore any Sylvari ‘couples’ are simply bonds of affection and about as sexualized as rubbing a pair of 2×4s together (eww, splinters ).

You won’t have to equip the shield.

And like it or not, mesmers with shields have been in GW2 since launch day.

One of those numbers is right, the other is off by over two orders of magnitude.

•Right now a single trait line take to 6 points has 418 possible arrangements of traits. Ignoring anything other than 6/6/2 set-ups (and there are many other combinations that have well regarded examples) that gives 31,450,320 traits combinations per class.

•The new system allows a total of 27 arrangements per line. If you like two adept level traits, tough, you can’t have them. Ever. Being locked to exactly 6/6/6 means there is a total of 10 possible unique line combinations bringing the total number of trait set-ups per class to 196,830 (27^3×10). Add another 196,830 for each elite line they introduce.

•At HoT launch including the one elite spec-line per class we are going to drop down to one-eightieth (1/80 or 1.25%) of our current range of choices.

Heh. Wasn’t in the part being quoted. Serves me right for not going and examining the source .

I don’t see anything in that statement that says they come from mobs at all.

It could be an item on the ground. It could come from herb nodes.

And I think if you’re serious about getting one it’d be silly to not play on several different maps in the region.

If you believe ‘diversity’ is a list of 3 builds that exist above a magic line you can move up and down at will to fit your current argument, then HoT is increasing diversity because you can pretend you’re not going to move that line to again exclude everything but what you feel is the post-HoT top three and say “oh, after HoT hits I’ll set my magic line so now there are 5 builds above it — woo hoo diversity”.

If you’re one of those people who understand the word ‘diversity’ has an actual meaning that encompasses all possible permutations that don’t crash the second you leave a city-safe zone then you know that the design space of the game if about to experience an apocalypse that will annihilate 99% of the game’s diversity. And since the reality has ALWAYS BEEN that new top builds emerge over time as people explore those deep and vast wilds of possibility, the future meta-builds of the game are being murdered in their sleep in favor of the blatantly obvious builds left in the wake of this change.

Invictus.1503:

They should just make all the revival traits baseline.

Not even a little true.

There are modes where revival is a HUGE advantage. Having some people be good at it (by choice) and others not is a place where the system does and continues to separate roles and create a difference between team-minded support builds and self-sufficient lone wolves.

Believe me, we don’t need to be homogenized even more than we have been.

Pretty much.

I enjoy playing healers and have built them using every profession in this game. BUT. most content simply isn’t dangerous enough to merit a full-time healer. They can create some hilarious blowouts in the deathmatch mode, and they can be amazing in WvW mass battles, but in any other solo and 5-man play they simply aren’t needed.

Tanks (generally called bunkers here) have a place in both PvP modes, but again they’re really unnecessary in the solo/5-man player vs. environments. Also the threat mechanics of this game mostly come down to ‘have you done a lot of damage?’ and ‘are you close enough the critter can get a swipe off quickly?’ Answer yes to both and bubba is gonna swing on you.

Now, I still build and thrive with characters that can heal (I find Battle Presence to be immensely satisfying for toughening up pugs in fractals) but understand you will ALWAYS be expected by both the scenario designers and your fellow players to bring a decent amount of damage potential. If you heal, you have to heal and do damage. Which can be challenging and satisfying in its own way. ANd if you are running a guard you have loads of support potential of the kind the game really rewards – Aegis and blinds are both immensely powerful tools for preventing damage in the first place (pre-healing ) and Guardians can splash those effects around like crazy.

Heal power scales pretty badly but it still has an effect. The Zealot’s/Keeper stat combo can be very nice for dual role builds. Celestial is a passable filler also, though you have to have a very good understanding of your profession to really maximize it’s value.

Hope this helps.

Consider the possibility some of us are experts .

HoT is a physical box.

Which means its not going to have a release date announced without 3-4 months of advanced notice to retailers. August is now the absolute earliest and even that gets less and less likely every day.

yolo swaggins.2570:

I will gladly pay you 2000 gems Tuesday for BETA access today.

New burger recipes confirmed for HoT !

The secret password for the open beta is “Wimpy”

Closed beta is coming up soon. I don’t know that I really expect there to be an open beta for the whole package. I only anticipate more targeted exercises like the stronghold test.

Maybe they’re going to allow heals to crit…

That actually seems to be a pattern across all the professions. There are a lot of beefy Grandmaster minors now…

Guys? If you have concerns about the Arcane line, please read this suggestion for Elementalists here.

It frees up a slot so that some existing builds could be made possible again.

Please read this suggestion for Elementalists here.

Please read this suggestion for Elementalists here.

I have a suggestion that could kill two birds with one stone with the upcoming introduction of specializations:

• Remove the Arcane adept trait Arcane Abatement. Believe me, there are tons of people who have issues with the rearrangement of Arcane traits that could be addressed by opening up a new slot in the Arcane line.

• Add “you take 50% damage from falling” to the Air Magic minor trait Zephyr’s Speed. This will help cement Air Magic’s role as the mobility line both in terms of speed and vertical flexibility. Its thematically sound that landing gracefully after a fall should belong to Air mages, and it means more people will get to try out a falling damage reduction trait and perhaps come to appreciate their value. IF the trait is still slightly lackluster, incorporate the full Arcane Abatement trait and have the Elementalist cast a spell based on current attunement when they land.

Thank you for reading. Please share your thoughts.

runeblade.7514:

My PU and my condition clone death build is destroyed. please unnerf.

Please recognize that you’re not giving enough information and largely wasting your breath until you do.

Lana Del Rey.1873:

Totally disagree.
They want us to make bigger decisions, to actually think.

For the record, this is completely untrue. They want the process to be almost mind-numbingly easy.

Choosing 1 from a limited pool of 3
Then choosing 1 from another separate, limited pool of 3
And finally choosing 1 from another separate pool of 3

Takes a ton less thought than~

Choose 1 from a pool of 6
Then choose 1 from a pool of 11 that includes 6 new choices
And finally choose 1 from a pool of 13 that includes 3 new choices.

The psychology of choice in game systems is actually a pretty well understood field and “choose 1 of 3 options” is the holy grail of “most people can accept they’re just guessing in the absence of experience”. It is designed to reduce option paralysis and measured in those terms it will succeed brilliantly.

This system is not for dedicated build-crafters. It is for the most casual of the casual, like the New Player Experience.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

What i would love to see is some spvp maps that actually allow for some tactical use of the falling traits.

Have you watched the videos for the new borderlands map?

People were screaming at how blatantly vertical/fall-inducing it is.

I think of the 100 things that I can immediately think of that could go wrong in implementing a massive system overhaul and introducing elite specializations in a way the doesn’t detonate the game… naming the first variant of the Elementalist after a “fierce storm” doesn’t appear anywhere in the first 99.

Seriously, if that’s the worst misstep they make we’ll be singing their praises for years to come.

Then they’d have to track the total number of points earned as a floating pool, and as a player you’d have to respend your whole account one character at a time (because WvW reset affects every character on your account at the same time…)

Lord of the Rings online has a similar situation each time they reset all our legendary weapons because they’ve made some tweak to the equivalent of trait lines. For a mature account it can be more than an hour staring at build screens cleaning up the mess it triggers every single time. And its usually messaged poorly enough that you don’t realize you’ve been reset until some slightly ambitious pull kills you because all your passive bonuses are disabled. It could go better here, but I am leery. Plus ANet may simply not want people with less than max points rearranging their whole account every time they want to do a WvW reset.

Some sort of non-linear, telescoping reward based on total WvW rank earned might be better… a hero point point at WvW rank 10, 30, 60, 100, 150, 210, 280 (10 more ranks earned to reach the next point each time) might work.

I posted an example (it turned out not broken, but it did reveal there was one trait that was gone I would have liked to have kept). Originally I put it here in the Heart of Thorns sub-forum, but I later asked the Moderators to move it to the Profession forum the build was related to and they did move it, so I think putting them in the class forums is probably a sound call. You can check it out in the Thief board if you think it’ll help. The thread is Here.

I named the thread “[Build name]: Before/After”. In my case it was “Super Unicorn: Before/After” If you’d like to use the same structure for the subject line and enough people do the same it may also help them spot that type of thread when they are gathering info.

And thank you for putting in the time. My Mesmer-mojo is pretty weak so I’m not gonna be much help on that class. I’m glad someone is stepping up for them .

But I could spend those points in a different line and get more of them if I retain my old ones…

Nightmare. Honest.

Consider there are only two possibilities:

• They are pulling your leg and you getting worked up over it fills them with glee.

• It actually happened and you getting worked up over it is really, really insulting.

There is no version of events where getting worked up over it is a good play. Nod your head, smile, and move on. Because if it did happen, that’s awesome for them but it’s not going to happen for you before the heat death of the universe, so why worry about it?

I like the concept (a lot, actually) but it would be a nightmare to untangle each time they reset all our WvW points…

ZeftheWicked.3076:

our stats are getting nerfed

The sources of our stats are getting re-apportioned. The total number of points we’re expected to have is not significantly changing. No nerf or ninjas. Sorry.

Now gear can only boost up to 3 stats, and not equally. Only one gets a strong boost, other 2 a smaller one. So in short we lose out not only on ability to customize our attributes more but also on how many of them can we boost and how strong that boost will be.

So… in the version of Tyria that exists in your game client, does gear CATCH FIRE when you mix different adjectives? Because you’re acting like it does. Oh noes, my boots might not be Berserker anymore! I might have something truly crazy like 1 magi ring!

It has always been easier to customize you stats by mixing gear than by shuffling trait points. Now that flexibility has been applied to even more of your total stat budget.

Are there still question? Sure. There’s a lot of outstanding interest in boon/condition duration and the class attributes previously associated with the fifth trait line. More information will be forthcoming.

I just bought the deluxe edition upgrade recently and I was wondering if this skill will be available to my Revenants when Heart of Thorns comes out?

Strip, steal, corrupt, or time your high number-of-hits attacks to go into the 50% down time.

I get it its a scary trait. I think it’s manageable as written, but there is one thing I would like to see – the base up time reduced slightly so that when people stack boon duration all over this (and they will) it caps out around 50% instead of starting there.

I already swap back and forth between Battle Presence & Force of Will on my zerg-leader. Having both at the same time and getting a new bonus to healing power on top of that (improvement to Force of Will) is going to be amazing.

Dunno. But I would strongly expect the damage buff is ONLY shortbow skills.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I’ll say this slowly then.

THIS. IS. NOT. ABOUT. RAPID FIRE.

I’ll speak slower then…

Reflect
only
ticks
once
per
hit
so
cope

Ehecatl.9172:

At any rate it seems like this trait would give warriors the ability to kill other professions who rely on multi-hit skills by simply standing still and occasionally healing up. In what way is this not passive play?

And yet the Devs have laid it out as the way they intend to go, so I guess the appropriate answer is “they don’t think your ‘passive play’ argument is all that compelling. try another one.”

Looking over your build, I looks like going into HoT you drop the 1 point in Virtues (awesome minor trait, I know) and get full progression in the other tree. You’ll need to make up for the lost might from activating justice as often as possible, but I think that the extra minors and major traits will probably let you get back to parity.

Its not exact, but the Devs have also indicated they are not trying to preserve exact. The core of it seems to be the refreshing Justice on kill and that certainly hasn’t gone away.

Arken.3725:

I don’t think Battle Presence is strong enough to compete with PoV, not even close.

I’ve always enjoyed Battle Presence in places where there’s people around to benefit and lots of damage incoming (deathmatch, WvW zergs) and now they’ve relocated it into the Virtues line where its one-stop shopping with the enhanced virtue. It may even give out the extra endurance generation to allies.

It also has odd synergy with spirit weapons as it will heal them if there aren’t enough players around to soak up all the target count.

I always enjoy people screaming at me how bad a player I am when I’ve held a point against 2-3 for 20+ seconds and the rest of my team has swept up the entire board.

That you don’t know how a bunker wins matches doesn’t make them pointless.

Thing is the odds that there is not a staff-boosting trait in the druid line are really, really remote.

Spectrum.4985:

TL;DR at the bottom. Warning: this is a long one!

A little hint about persuasive writing… Put your clear, concise summation AT THE TOP. The place where people might actually read it. If my eyes glaze over I’m not going to scroll down to find out if you have a point to make, I’m going to go read another thread.

HoT is still a box.

Which means its still not going to have a release date announced without 3-4 months of advanced notice to retailers. August is now the absolute earliest and even that gets less and less likely every day.

And I’d just mention in passing that crafting every Legendary puts you SO FAR OUTSIDE THE NORM for use-cases that you are practically begging them to ignore you. You may want to re-think your persuasive strategy in the future .

All evidence based on the last time they re-wrote the entire trait unlocking system is that you should absolutely try to get alts to 80 now rather than later.

Nike.2631:

Who is/are the “Guild Wars 2 Forum Specialist – Profession Balance” folk? That’s a position I’d be interested in.

Wolfey.3407:

The current Guild Wars 2 Forum Specialists are as followed:
Rising Dusk.2408: Dungeons and Fractals
Riku.4821: PvE
The Gates Assassin.9827: PvP
Wolfey.3407: PvP

Ah, thank you . They described the position in the original call for volunteers… they just never filled it. Good to know.

…Because I doubt it will affect staves when druid’s take it .

Wow, its almost like you’ll need to knock them back and proc the reflect, then maybe check your nails or brush some burs out of your pet’s coat… maybe even in stealth for most of that time… and then blast the hell out of them with rapid fire as they lose the retaliation.

Elevate your game. The cooldown gap is on the same timer as Rapid fire too…