Guild Wars 2

“A lot of the focus of these final releases will be putting the player character at the centre of the story again. For the personal story it was all about the player’s journey and during the last year we’ve been telling the story of the world. Now we want to get back to why the player matters in the story,” Mike again foretold, with the promise that Tyria won’t be the same after this current season wraps up.

Just out of curiosity… does anyone think that our characters are going to “matter” so much that they actually speak?

I’m tired of being struck mute.

That has worked in the past.

Keep in mind that there is another ring with the same stats – it just has the other infusion slot type…

Everything can be destroyed… except Scarlet.

wongdong.9162:

They fix AI, Pet classes become the new meta.

I am SO WILLING to take that chance.

Amongst other things it’d be easier to tone doe hir stats once their AI is in hand, assuming its even a real problem (I’m not convinced it is). And even if it somehow produced a temporary inversion of the meta rankings between profession, its not the worst thing for classes laboring under the penalty of pet AI to have their day in the sun, even if only briefly.

Over the course of a couple AAA MMOs, I’ve come to the conclusion that making sure opponents can read your class via your silhouette in PVP does not help you keep as many active players as allowing people to create characters that look they way they want as much as possible with the assets in game.

Having PvP convenience trump cosmetic flexibility is dumb.

The entire point of the Tower of Nightmares was to get Marjorie (or some other hero like her) to cook up something that would kill Mordremoth.

See how she salvaged the injector?

She’s not mapping ley lines. She’s mapping Mordremoth’s roots.

Whichever rune give +10/15/20% might duration is going to be a serious contender for some builds. Same for Fury.

Dave.4695:

When berserker statistics change to ferocity…

we will be able to change for other as it happened with magic find armors???

I have spent a lot of gold in my berserker armor. Ascended armors must be like legendary weapons, with stats change.

What do you think?

What would you change it TO?

Even with the nerf, there is no other set that is going to surpass Berserker at raw power-based DPSing.

It still fulfills the role it is used for better than all other options. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a free swap .

I enjoyed the instance, but it also showcases the trap GW2 has worked itself into.

All of these incredible world shaking events… and my character is struck mute.

It’s all massively important… just not important enough to get the hero voice-actors back into the studio to record dialogue for the players.

Please, review all the heroic dialogue you have recorded, and try to at least scavenge a word or two for us to say aloud in response to the events going on around us.

There are 5 chains to sever before the bar fills…

Go to the heart of the Mists (sPvP – the crossed swords icon on the upper left). You can review all the armor in the game from the “PvP locker” there.

Superior Rune of the Trapper
Icon resembles a bear trap

(1/6) +28 Condition Damage
(2/6) +10% Condition Duration
(3/6) +55 Condition Damage
(4/6) When an opponent triggers one of your Traps they are Tormented (2 stacks, 8 seconds duration)
(5/6) +100 Condition Damage
(6/6) When you set a Trap you also remove 1 condition.

I’d like to see Ranger and Thief both get a little more out of those families of Utilities and have a new approach to condition removal that still has a substantial opportunity cost.

Usagi.4835:

I’m all for discussion but I don’t see the need for people to propose sweeping changes like this; why fix something that isn’t broken?

I’m going with “Because we do not agree that it isn’t broken” .

I would think an Asura would HATE that name and would build ridiculously elaborate gizmos to the punish whoever spoke such vile imprecations in her presence, preferably from the ‘shrink ray’ family of advances… They do seem rather touchy about their height . 8/10

Newly emergent from her incontrovertible victory at the Snaff Prize, I present the inimitable Ranger Wrangler Sorjji and her companions ‘Weaponization Demo’ (seen in pictograph below) and ‘Specimen Fourtyfour’ .

As to condition cheese, first thing I’d ask is “how many resources have you poured into countering conditions?” Are you willing to give up offense to gain defensive benefit? If not, commit yourself to the DPS race and KILL THEM FIRST.

Vol.7601:

I don’t think that would be reasonable speculation.

We know precursor crafting was supposed to come out in 2013 and was delayed.

I really don’t remember them saying this, but lets take it as a given.

We also know that any new legendaries that were to come out, would be trinkets/rings/backpiece (as per Colin). So put 2 + 2 and you can say with confidence that precursor crafting would be involved with current legendaries. Otherwise, they would have to come out with new legendary weapons early this year.

We know that if Legendaries move into a new slot that slot would be trinkets/backpiece not armor. That its quite separate from doing a new round of weapons skins. I put 2 and 2 together to get “since the art for the weapons isn’t ready yet, we held off on the whole thing which is why it slipped to 2014” .

Charak.9761:

Some precursors are normailized around 500g which is okay. What’s NOT okay is that Dusk is 900g and there’s no stopping its inflation.

Your basically saying its not ok that people keep grinding gold and continue to race each other to a very limited number of goals.

I’d agree with the limited number of goals part, but if people think grinding gold to hand it over to other people who are luckier than them is the path they want to contribute to, I’m still largely in favor of allowing self-fleecing.

Waffler.1257:

g e o.2589:

I bought around 3k boxes during wintersday BEFORE quartz drop was nerfed and got around 85 charged I dont even use celestial

It’s amazing you haven’t been perma banned yet.

I did too – I was looking for a Wings of Dwyana recipe. Opened about 3,000 before I got it. The 150 charged quartz was definitely a nice side effect, but there was no conniving on my part.

I still charge one a day that I’m on-line. I use celestial on several of my characters AND its one of the few stat combos I can craft that doesn’t eat into T6 mats I need to build a Legendary one day.

Astralporing.1957:

The timegate to Charged Quartz became irrelevant anyway – the conversion of Crit Damage to Ferocity will make celestial gear useless (seeing as the only reason why anyone might have wanted it was either Crit Damage or Magic Find, and MF got already removed).

Of course that does make the timegating on it even weirder and less understandable than before.

And there’s that ‘useless’ word being thrown around again. It does not mean what you think it means .

Just like Berserker will remain the best choice for power-based damage dealers, Celestial will remain the best choice for Support characters – because while DPSers are allowed to neglect all other stats in their lust for moar damaj!, Support characters still have to actually contribute DPS while providing support.

“Killed the class”? A bit self-absorbed, doncha think? It doesn’t even affect many builds. The profession lives on, thank you very much.

Process this thought – DPS builds for all professions are going to get beat with the nerf-stick until they no longer outshine all other contributions to success. If you were already playing a more Support or Control-minded build, you’re gonna find yourself buffed most days and untouched the rest.

eleshazar.6902:

And in response to you Nike. I’m assuming it will be difficult, but it will be cheaper than buying on the TP. The reason I’m assuming this is because ANET is implementing this because they said that they are concerned with how inflated the prices of precursors have become. By that logic why would they make it take an equal amount of gold to craft it as it does to buy it?

((Shrug)) I’ve watched them bend over backwards enough times to fold themselves into 16ths to not shock the economy. I still think the most likely outcome is that there will be a second set of precursors and we won’t be competing against people’s current investments at all. But if we do craft the current ones, I expect it’ll be at as close to the current prices as they can make it, and if they feel they have to err, it’ll be to the high side…

The point isn’t so much to make them cheaper as to add an additional path at all for those who don’t wish to participate in economic PvP. And you can satisfy that goal completely with a recipe-template that costs considerably more than the precursors do in the Trading Post.

I want to know how people got the impression that crafting a Precursor would be easier than grinding out the money to buy one…

There’s also been reasonable speculation that crafting Precursors would only allow crafting the precursors used to make the new set of Legendaries – that the value of the old ones would be protected.

In any case there are so many fine details in how they could do it, that I’m sure we won’t see an announcement until the system is essentially done and ready to promote to live servers.

I always thought the goal was to get “fastest/most efficient reward in the complete absence of risk” .

Goorman.7916:

Chrispy.5641:

How does forcing you to play in one of three archtypes instead of play how you want increase build diversity?

Forcing people to choose one of the archtypes is the essence of build diversity. If you are not forced to choose and you play how you want, there are no builds at all.

That is the most banal piece of double-speak drivel I’ve seen in months.

“Forcing you to choose from a tiny pool of pre-defined options is the only way you can have choices.”

Yeah. Pass on that. Thanks.

Or… It could be that when you can no longer speed kill fast enough to avoid being face-planted bringing along a Support character will seem like a good investment.

Trying to push DPS mono-culture even harder is just going to get them nerfed further until the other roles finally seem relevant. Hopefully Support and Control come up a little in the mean time, because DPS-uber-alles has so very far to fall.

mini.6018:

When will players stop being so bad ?Warriors die like flies arround necros,engies and mesmers and they still keep moaning warrior is op. Newsflash if it dies in 1v1 then it’s not OP.Bye now and l2p already.

News flash – if warrior kill/death ratios were more balanced, it wouldn’t be getting nerfed.

Cynz.9437:

8% nerf is a joke

it is still passive, it still heals for quite a lot and better than any other war heals

Regenerative mechanics are actually quite sensitive to small changes. The difference between seemingly immortal and abrupt faceplant is usually a lot narrower than 8%.

I’ll be very curious to see this one pan out.

My dream combo in PvE back before the stat was removes was Precision Primary with Heal Power and Magic Find secondary. If “giver” armor ever actually gets FIXED, I’d take Precision Primary with Heal Power and Boon Duration secondary in a heartbeat.

That’s actually a pretty good match right there, though it may be different on metal or cloth surfaces.

Not many other ways for an Asura to find someone worth talking to .

Kills with utility skills count as other specific weapon types. One of them must be counted as rifle. What did you have in your Right-hand tray at the time?

((I completed a Hammer kills achievement with a sword/torch Guard who hadn’t even unlocked the hammer skills yet…))

What’s a gear check supposed to be revealing: “Hey, are you wearing the most nerfed gear? Cause if you’re one of those people whose build is no worse off GTFO!”

There is comedy gold lurking beneath the entire concept .

When their pvP Lead Dev chortled during an interview about how he’d gotten a whole section of PvE quests/content moved into the PvP realms just so PvPers would have people to gank, I was certain I wasn’t going to be playing that game. Ever.

Combine that with a max party size of 4 and a mouse-moves-the-whole-screen interface and there was exactly NOTHING for me to be had there.

What exactly are you doing with transmutation stones on trinkets…?

KOPPER.1458:

Don’t you have a ton of legendary weapons Nike?

I have 0 Legendary weapons. I bought The Bard with a buy order of 40 gold long, long ago, and after than I had Storm drop from a trash mob during a Scarlet Invasion in Sparkfly Fen, but I haven’t built either of them into legendaries. I keep working up my crafting skills to 500 (eats into my tier 6 mats for Gifts of Might and Magic) and haven’t had the will to do Cadacus Manor over and over again for the gift of Dungeon-Grinding. I have most of the other mats. Just waiting to see if they can be applied towards new legendaries and skins that might appeal to me more.

I get dungeon runes more often than I want them from combines in the Mystic forge…

Celestial is included by default in the phrase “Crit Damage-to-Ferocity gear” .

Over the life of the game, maybe as many as 20 4x rares attempts and five 4x exotics tries.

In the last 6 months, zero. After researching legendaries more there weren’t any I thought looked good enough to chase after. So I’m just biding my time waiting for a second wave and to see if the process is different to acquire those.

Wethospu.6437:

I think some people would change from Assassin to Berserker.

So you’re thinking all the Crit Damage-to-Ferocity gear needs a swap?

Seriously. Your build scared them and now it will no longer be able to dodge-spam the extra explodey clone. Gonna have to shred them to cash out instead of one popping on its own each roll.

And with the reduction in Vigor up time there will be fewer dodges powering it too.

Out of curiosity, if you were given a stat-swap on your gear, what would people be changing TO? Berserker is still the pinnacle of Power-based damage.

Given their poor reception in the East, I suspect Sylvari are being removed as a playable race. We’ll keep the ones we have, but no new ones after the Pale tree burns…

Wow… useless you say?

I’m not convinced people even know what the word actually means anymore .

The only change I think is absolutely necessary is they should give you a #6 healing skill appropriate to the form, that shares a cooldown with your normal #6 heal.

Assume all of them will be similarly affected. That’s what “passes” do – look at everything at the same time.

You and I use the word “useless” very differently.

On Celestial, crit damage is equivalent to a secondary value (like Berserker and Valkyrie), while all other stats were tertiary. If Ferocity is lowered from secondary to tertiary, its gonna be a pretty substantial reduction in value on a set that’s already been downgraded once and is unusually heavily gated to create.

Dungeons are probably a good bet – they’ll get you tokens for buying exotic armor from their vendors in Lions Arch and you’ll get gold to pick up specific gear you want from the Trading Post.

You might also spend some time trying out WvW as its one of the major endgame activities. You have a separate XP bar there that will give you a lot of potential growth in that realm.

Why not buff instead of nerf? Because the principle way to keep a game environment from dissolving under endless power creep is to have target levels of performance and then keep the players near them.

The game is already trivially easy. Just handing out buffs to chase after the absolute peak performers is madness. Fact is you hammer the over-performers back into line.

If you got hit, odds are you were playing a build that outstrips many other builds… and odds are you knew that, which is why you chose that build. Unless they wildly over corrected, its still be good, just not extremely good.

Fotosynthese.8095:

What do you guys think?

I think they’re inspiring . In particular 1 & 2 show better blending of the coat and leggings than I would have expected.