Guild Wars 2

Why not just make players immune to control effects during dashes?

Came to the forums specifically to send my last regards to this.

My heart aches for this loss.

cocowoushi.7150:

Your character doesn’t talk to their legend, but sometimes the legend will say a line when you swap to their stance. I’m sure it will get old fast, unless it’s Jalis shouting “Stonehammer is ready for battle!” In a really forced Russian accent. That is just funny to me every time.

Ventari Stance is going to have the quotes from on the tablet most likely.
On Stance: Act with wisdom.
Ventari’s Will: Where life goes, so too should you.
Protective Solace: The only lasting peace is the peace within your own soul.
Energy Expulsion: Never leave a wrong to ripen into evil!

Swagger.1459:

no legendary stance swapping during combat.

That sounds terrible. Why?

Network Errors out the butt.
Can’t play.

JoshuaRAWR.4653:

Nilix.2170:

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

Nilix.2170:

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

First of all people the Revenant is not meant to be a major damage dealer. It’s a tank and therefore does low damage like a tank does. That’s why they are full celestial. Get your heads out of the stupid meta crap and think.

Everyone was full celestial in the beta. Everyone.

This is a thread about the Revenant not other classes.

Yeah, but you’re saying they’re Full Celestial because they’re tank. But that’s justnonsense because EVERYONE was full celestial. The issues here have less to do with meta-anything and more to do with the skill options you had on hand. You’ve got a Legend whose skills deal in transferring conditions and applying Resistance in a map where you aren’t really taking any much conditions on. Deals Torment and Confustion but a good amount of your enemies don’t even move and attack slowly. Almost everyone stayed in Jalis Stance since it was more useful. Lightning Field, Area Swiftness, Stability, Weakness, SPINNING HAMMERS etc.

There’s a trait that said gain 50% Crit Chance while in Fury. I wanted to try out, but there was no way to actually gain Fury with the skills I had.

Read a bit more, the trait doesn’t give you 50% crit chance, fury is 50% more beneficial (meaning you gain an extra 10% crit chance from fury, totalling at 30% from fury, instead of the base 20%).

Ah yeah, it said “Effective”. That makes more sense. I couldn’t really try it out to see that for myself anyway but that’s okay.

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

Nilix.2170:

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

First of all people the Revenant is not meant to be a major damage dealer. It’s a tank and therefore does low damage like a tank does. That’s why they are full celestial. Get your heads out of the stupid meta crap and think.

Everyone was full celestial in the beta. Everyone.

This is a thread about the Revenant not other classes.

Yeah, but you’re saying they’re Full Celestial because they’re tank. But that’s justnonsense because EVERYONE was full celestial. The issues here have less to do with meta-anything and more to do with the skill options you had on hand. You’ve got a Legend whose skills deal in transferring conditions and applying Resistance in a map where you aren’t really taking any much conditions on. Deals Torment and Confustion but a good amount of your enemies don’t even move and attack slowly. Almost everyone stayed in Jalis Stance since it was more useful. Lightning Field, Area Swiftness, Stability, Weakness, SPINNING HAMMERS etc.

There’s a trait that said gain 50% Crit Chance while in Fury. I wanted to try out, but there was no way to actually gain Fury with the skills I had.

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

First of all people the Revenant is not meant to be a major damage dealer. It’s a tank and therefore does low damage like a tank does. That’s why they are full celestial. Get your heads out of the stupid meta crap and think.

Everyone was full celestial in the beta. Everyone.

I like the Revenant feel, but I don’t like the skills I’m running with. Having only those skills and not being able to change them outside of swapping Legends didn’t really give you much to go on. A lot of how Mallyx functions feels like it’d be better when playing WvW or something. Torments aren’t doing much of anything on tendrils and vines. I didn’t feel the usefulness of taunt neither in large groups, small groups, nor solo. And I didn’t really take in much conditions other than poisons to transfer them to my opponent that I wasn’t self-inflicting.

The skills themselves are nice and I can see them being good utility. I just felt like it was a pretty uninteresting build for PvE.

The “assumption” is that ArenaNet isn’t going to give out the same mechanic twice.
Mesmer receives Wells (Necro)
Guardian receives Traps (Ranger)
Necro receives Shouts (Warrior)
It’s a very safe assumption to make.

A less safer assumption, but also quite likely, is to not expect any of the future Elite Specializations to get any mechanics from classes already having their mechanics taken from.
Which is to say, we can scrap the thought of getting any other mechanic that is specific to the Ranger, Warrior, and Necro.

edit: Traps are being shared by both Ranger and Thief so there’s that assumption down the drain. Still, the way I figure that… If another Elite Spec gets a mechanic from the Ranger, we probably won’t see another Elite Spec getting a mechanic from the Thief.

I would find it funny if the Engi in the trailer was actually a Warrior’s Elite spec that gives him mobile turrets.

Because Engineers, just like Elementalists, do not have a secondary weapon set at all.

However, you can use the Utility Kits (Grenade Kit, Bomb Kit, Flamethrower, Tool Kit, and Elixir Gun). They work similarly to Weapon Sets since they replace your weapon skills and they trigger effects from weapon swap sigils and etc.

tramwajarz.2369:

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

I guess we are just called Heroes?

According to LS2 we’re only “the Boss”

That’s the best title one can ask for.

Well, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting traps.

Arantheal.7396:

HT still works exactly like before the patch.
Devs never nerfed the healing turret, they actually made it more viable for group-play.

If you’re talking about the patch I was mentioning (looking it up, it was the 4/30/2013 patch), you’re 100% right about that. They made the turret a lot better for the group. But that was a means to an end. The intention was to make the Healing Turret a strategic object to protect while it was on the field. So that the Engineer and his allies would protect it, while the enemy team would want to destroy it for the passive benefits it gave. A presence of importance. But instead, it had the opposite effect. You drop, you pop overcharge, you pick it up or detonate, you move on with life.

That said, I’m going to concede this point for lack of evidence. I can’t find the dev post or video in which they actually said the reasoning behind the change. I just specifically remember the situation becoming the exact opposite of what they wanted to promote.

Arantheal.7396:

You do not serve your purpose well if you keep comparing apples with bananas.

That’s the point I’ve been trying to get across. Whenever someone says that turrets are in line with other summons like Phantasms, I have to point out these differences because the functionality, availability, and use between the two are completely different. If the idea is to make them similar to the others, why only bring the negatives?

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Turrets needed to be more vulnerable from the start, now, they are in line in that respect.

So what you’re saying is that they are now just as useless as Spirit Ranger and MM Necro and that’s a good thing.

Oh, you wrote it! High Five! But you can definitely just go down all the posts I wrote about it. Or rather, just fish through the threads. You’ll undoubtedly see the conversation.

Arantheal.7396:

Combos are a intentional, often promoted mechanic in Gw2
Giving turret destruction a blast finisher was a intentional dev-decision.
Giving healing turret 2 short-lasting waterfields was a intentional dev-decision.
Not counting 1 and 1 together is your intentional decision.
We are not supposed to use anything.
We just got options for possible combos from the game’s design. When it comes to the engineer, the intricate design is to combo & chain as much skills as possible. If you insist on this not being true and rather use one single key at a time, you should not expect to be taken seriously, especially not when it comes to PvP.

There are numerous dev decisions that don’t work as intended. 100Nades got nerfed because “Engineers weren’t meant to have this amount of burst”. Kit Refinement got utterly destroyed because “the utility was too good”. In fact, the Healing Turret is an example of this in ITSELF.

They changed it to the way it is RIGHT NOW to give players more of an incentive to leave it out rather than pick it up. They did this by moving a portion of the overall heal from the deployment effect into the overcharge effect. But all this did was force more people to learn how to immediately deploy, overcharge, and pickup/detonate, because you weren’t getting the same amount of personal heal otherwise. It even changed the timing of how we used to do it before, so those of us who DID know to do that already had to go and practice the timing again when the patch was made live.

Developer decisions aren’t perfect. If they were Kit Refinement would still be remotely good, thieves would be dealing half of my life total with Heartseeker, and this conversation wouldn’t be happening because turrets wouldn’t have had their longevity neutered. That’s the thing about game design. It is an ITERATIVE process that builds on itself and you make changes based on the things that don’t work. If making turrets much not viable in PvP was their plan, then I guess they’re succeeding. But it does so in ways that go against their ideal for the Healing Turret, and turrets in general. The only reason we don’t use the other turrets the same way as HT is because the CDs are too long. If they ever drop the cooldowns on them in response to turret life being absolute garbage, you better believe I’d be using the Thumper Turret just like I do with the Healing Turret. It would really be just like the Mesmer Illusions that some players like to compare them to. Put out, get effect, shatter it.

They were glad turrets were now useless and that overnight, they had vanished from ranked play. What frustrates me so much about this attitude is that it’s entirely selfish as opposed to looking at the bigger picture of how a profession and its skills function. I regularly hear about how turret engineers and the fact they are AI controlled is unfair and yet a mesmer differs little in the sense that Phantasm’s are also AI controlled damage. The only difference being that a Phantasm’s damage is higher than any turret, lower in cooldown, can be shattered and you don’t sacrifice any utility for having them. Oh, and unlike a turret, they can follow you.

Has he been reading my posts? Can this guy just come here and high five me?

I got mine yesterday. I’m still wondering whether or not I should tell the absolute embarrassing story of what happened when I got it. But I got it.

Even if Turret Engineers DID find the proper placement to keep you from attacking the squishy turrets…

Even if they DID learn to outplay you with immobile, squishy, AI bots that can’t get boons but can take conditions and can’t deal crits but can be crit…

It does NOT change the fact that the build is an AI-reliant mess that has nothing to fall back on except a single weapon with no weapon swap (unless you took a kit which, by the way, means you’re not running as many turrets), utility bar that’s completely occupied with skills on high cooldowns when destroyed, and a toolbelt that’s conditional depending on whether your turret is out or not (which puts you in this kitten ed if you do, kitten ed if you don’t predicament where you can’t use the skill you want without putting a turret on cooldown).

Out of everything the Engineer has had issues with, turrets have historically been the most problematic thing and the problem lies deep in the design. We have literally seen the scope of it go from absolute garbage, to “So OP that people have quit playing PvP because of turret players”. Soon, they’ll probably head back to being absolute garbage with this fix since they now suffer from the same problem that they do in PvE. It’s downright hilarious.

And for the record, I really don’t like it when people go around saying things like “they did this because [business decision]”. That’s just putting words into their mouth and damages integrity. Yes, ArenaNet is a business but they’re job is to make a good game and gameplay changes should reflect the future of gameplay. So, I’m going to take what they said at face value. The reason they did this was to promote active counter play. And with that said, I’m going to disagree with their methods. In fact, I feel it does the opposite of promoting active counter play. I’m not against conditions being applied to it because those are pretty tactical use and I can consider it active counter play (confusion, blind, chill, etc). But the longevity of the turrets decrease exponentially with crit damage and it enables people to go in without thinking about it.

People on both sides of this argument know that turrets fundamentally promote a method of play that isn’t looked at very highly. The solution we needed would be to change it from the ground up. The solution we got was just to make it less viable.

Arantheal.7396:

…this only can mean a new design for turrets after the dust of HoT has settled.

This is what I’m praying for. I have been crossing my fingers hoping that whatever “drones” in the HoT trailer that showed up isn’t actually anything to do with the Elite Specialization but rather a complete rework of how turrets function. I’m sorry for anyone who really loves turrets and turret gameplay, but they just can’t be balanced properly in a game.

And I’m sorry, I really am sorry for regurgitating the same stuff we’ve been saying, playing, and understanding for two years now in this mile long post. I feel bad for making you read it and if you tell me tl;dr, I won’t feel offended at all. But at the very least, I do want someone to read this I do not care for the PvP community’s distaste for Turret Engineers. I don’t care for their distaste towards Bearbows, Celestial overuse, or the tanky, healy, perma-sustainy, Ramirez-do-everything-esque meta that they feel their being plagued with. And I wish I didn’t have to care about it at all. I like WvW. I like PvE. PvP doesn’t attract me too much, but I play it every now and then just to see what it’s like. But whenever anything I like about this class changes for the worse, it’s almost always because of PvP issues and it makes me bitter just to be playing the same class as you. But I also understand that it isn’t your fault since it’s the developer’s job to make balance changes. I hope that one day they start to notice this bitterness and decide to start splitting balance changes for PvP/PvE/WvW use so I can stop discussing problems that PvP players are having from my PvE/WvW viewpoint that is utterly and totally different.

Arantheal.7396:

Turreteers – by design – depend on their opponents stupidity. If their opponent is smart, they lost the fight even before the match started. The only circumstance that let this build appear so so strong before the nerf, were that so many people would get frustrated and ran heads-first into turreteers in unorganized teams. In this environment turreteers were totally OP, caused dull and uneven matches for new players, and therefore were nerfed into the ground by a-net …

Currently it seems that a-net has completely given up on their original design plans for turrets, and in lack of a better solution – as of yet – nerfed them into the ground to get rid of them.

All we can hope for is that they revisit the core-design of turrets and give them actual purpose in competitive builds, along with a well-balanced setup for all skill-levels in the future.

This is what I agree with.

Arantheal.7396:

This build was cancer, and even tho I ran turrets around 7-8 months ago myself, I’m extremely happy about the well deserved nerf

This is what I don’t agree with. Doubly so since it’s something that affects all game modes right now. You want to talk about signals they send out? For PvPers, I guess it’s a godsend. The same build that they continued to call garbage for a year only to turn around and “become OP” once a good amount of people actually understood the pressure it can cause. For everyone else, it’s just absolutely laughable. Do you remember years ago when Engineer was pretty much the “all work no payout” class because it didn’t do enough damage and people didn’t really know how to play the class well? Engi was the kind of class that takes more to get used to than Warrior, Guardian, and Thief. Even Mesmer was getting some nice play since clones easily confused people in the early days and it made incoming damage spread a lot thinner. And on top of that, Engineer was getting nerfs left and right due to not corresponding to the vision of the class.
- 100 Nades? Engineer’s not supposed to have this kind of burst.
- Kit Refinement? Rest in Peace.

And you know what was getting buffs all this time? Turrets. Honestly, I can’t remember a SINGLE nerf to Turrets before. Hitbox was too big, gotta make it smaller. Damage too low, bump it up a little. Range too low, bump it up a little. Traits are garbage, gotta make them worth taking. Autotool Installation used to heal the turret for ONE PERCENT every TEN SECONDS. Not enough kinds of traits, let’s add TWO new GM traits that focus on turret usage. The only nerf that I could think of the “Turrets last only five minutes” adjustment to prevent people from AFK farming. But who actually leaves those things out for so long in actual play? For the PvE player, the biggest problem they have is their longevity and that’s been NERFED. Why? Because a lot of people in a completely different game mode finally realized that it was useful for scrubbing out scrubs. So while you’re cheering the death of a single build, I’m dying during vinewrath because an Elite Mordrem Wolf managed to crit my turret before my overcharge went off.

Turrets became a thing to avoid in PvE. It’s going to become that way in PvP after a while. I know a lot of people are going to hang onto it to prove “Yeah, it can still work! You just have to position like THIS and THAT and TIME THIS DROP THIS WAY and people can’t stop you as well as they do!” But let’s face the reality of this situation:
(cont)

There was some guy who supposedly has about 60 of them. It was pretty ridiculous.

Yes. It is for me anyway. That’s exactly why I bought a set of it. Your Elite becomes an Elixir C and if you’re using the new inventions line, your heal becomes a Toss Elixir C for yourself.

velhavn.7694:

anet, please rename engi supply crate to bandages crate. thx

[Tooltip : A box of bandages that stuns opponents on impact. Can cause random conditions. Combo Field: Blast]

I want the new Engineer “drones” to be the result of “a complete rework to Turrets and how they function”, not something locked into HoT. I don’t see the point in making a “mobile turrets” trait when their immobility is the root cause of just about everything wrong with them.

Engineer gets a weapon swap.
Done.
Boom.
/everything

I don’t mean to derail your thread but I want to share some amusement. 95% of the 1500 hours I’ve logged into this game has been as Engineer. I opened the Necromancer forum by mistake. I came into this thread because this is a thing that Engineers talk often about themselves and I was curious about how Necro players could possibly feel such a thing. Then I stumbled onto this post.

Silv.9207:

[lots of stuff omitted]
-Engi is still… I don’t know what ANet want to do… but it’s still it!

Our class is a class without a real identity.

You have no idea how bitterly I am laughing right now. Non-Engineer players don’t even have a general grasp at what we’re doing. It’s like meeting your ex-girlfriend’s husband at a bar and he’s complaining about her nagging. You want to say things like “Now you know how I felt!” and “I’m sorry for your loss.” and “At least you’re married” but all you can do is laugh.

Bitterly.

That said, I finally got my Necro to 80 a few days ago and while I’m pretty bad at it still, it’s quite fun.

I might actually go with Lyssa. Using your Elite would convert conditions into boons, and your heal would give you a boon. Actually, if you go down the new Inventions line, you’d also get the minor trait where “Using your heal would remove a condition.” Plus regeneration. So your elite is an Elixir C and your heal is a Toss Elixir C.

Conncept.7638:

Immunity to conditions while above a certain health threshold

Hey man, if you don’t want that, they can always give it to Engi instead

Toxsa.2701:

Nilix.2170:

The ICD on it will probably be either 10 or 15s. What you’re saying isn’t even outperforming the HT, it’s just flat out broken.
There’s no way they’re going to let you equip, unequip, and reequip the Med Kit to remove all of your conditions one at a time while triggering regeneration for each of them. Also, I don’t think it will remove YOUR conditions. If you look at the Power Point slide you can see that distinction between the first and second minor. The first one says allies, but the second says yourself and allies

Nope. When Anet refers the skill description with “allies”, it includes yourself. I’m pretty sure. Otherwise it’s quite a bad traitline to pick.

Well I hope that I am dead wrong. We’ll just have to see.

brannigan.9831:

lordkrall.7241:

Jasher.6580:

I hope so otherwise, they should hotfix it to do just that.

Why?
It is for a PvE beta event, why give access to it from something that is not PvE?

A hotfix also suggest something is wrong or not working as intended, which is clearly not the case here.

What if I am a player that likes to do pvp and pve but I like pvp more? So I have to do pve only and quite a lot of it if I want a chance to get in the beta? Why can’t I have do silverwastes 30% of the time and spvp 70% of the time and have the same chance of getting beta portal as somone who does 100% silverwastes.

Because they don’t want people who play 100% PvP and 0% PvE to get it.

Keysha.2815:

Nike.2631:

Keysha.2815:

Tell me, how, exactly, does that trait help any build with combat?

Play more WvW. Then watch the videos for the new design for the borderlands map, which will make ability to survive falls even more important.

Surviving falls is not fighting. That is my point. All other traits help fighting in one way or another. This should NOT be a trait.

It is in WvW. Not surviving falls is how some of us kill people.

You can also reduce illusion cooldowns up to 40% depending on choice of traits, but yeah. That’s not important. You’re talking about skills ranging anywhere from 5s-30s CDs that you get a minimum of 4 of no matter what combinations of weapons you take compared to skills that only ever exist in utility slots with 20-50s cooldowns that only get reduced if you don’t detonate them for a small Knockback (or if the player doesn’t attack them into destruction himself).

I’ve been noticing the changes to this immediately in the Silverwastes. Supply Drop is now just a stun and second heal at this point.

Sidizen.9048:

I quit PvP because of Turrets.

I’m going to wear this post as a badge of pride.

No portal yet, but I’ve gotten two named Exotics, 70 Obsidian Shards and an Ascended Weapon Chest

An Elite skill that turns me into a Fifty-Five Monk.

The ICD on it will probably be either 10 or 15s. What you’re saying isn’t even outperforming the HT, it’s just flat out broken.
There’s no way they’re going to let you equip, unequip, and reequip the Med Kit to remove all of your conditions one at a time while triggering regeneration for each of them. Also, I don’t think it will remove YOUR conditions. If you look at the Power Point slide you can see that distinction between the first and second minor. The first one says allies, but the second says yourself and allies

Chaith.8256:

robertul.3679:

Since having speedy kits will require 6 into tools(because of stupid design reasons) the only real choice for mobility would be the new power shoes in firearms, especially with incendiary/napalm stuff there too.
Except power wrench, static discharge and speedy kits the tools line is pretty horrible.
Why go into tools when the new inventions has fancy sustain stuff that probably benefit more than 50% vigor uptime and slightly higher speed.
Alchemy is probably still a valid choice because it offers backpack regenerator and protection injection.

Med Kit provides out of combat Swiftness, and the Swiftness and Vuln on Crit trait in Firearms can stack up pretty well, especially with the right runes.

All is not lost, it just might result in a slight meta change.

There are ways, but for WvW and open world PvE I suspect that Tools will pretty much be a must-have. Traveller Runes are always a possibility.

Sure, it’s a shock to Engineers, but there is life without Speedy Kits.

I’m looking forward to using BOTH honestly. I don’t know how many people remember the old “Superior Runes of Speed”. They were supposed to give you +7% bonus movement speed in swiftness. ie Swiftness at 40% bonus speed rather than 33%. They never worked for some reason or another though and I had a full set of them really early in the game back when 1 gold was about 400 gems each but it was a waste. Here’s to hoping it’ll be functional this time around!

OLD JUGGERNAUT RETURNS. Welcome back, Engi stability.

I’m expecting, or rather “hoping” for, a rework of “Kit Refinement” again. Abilities on a Global Cooldown and Sustained Swiftness don’t like to work together.

I’m interested in Inventions and how effective it’ll be in terms of passive sustaining while applying streams of blasts. I want to work on a base of:

Rifle – [Med Kit|Heal Turret] – Bomb Kit
Explosives: Short Fuse
Inventions: Heal Skill Blasts/Blasts Heal

ZeftheWicked.3076:

To sum it up short – being able do deploy my own siege engine, that others can use is pretty awesome and feels 100% elite.

The idea of old mortar is awesome, it’s the implementation that sucked. So rather then this “new & improved” how about “old & fixed?”. But that i mean:

1. Ability to pick it up. Goes on 10s cooldown if you successfully pick it up, as it’s supposed to be the “always with you” elite.

2. Global cooldown on it’s skills gone, placement cooldown lowered to 30s (when destroyed).

3. Making it a turret rather then kit would also be awesome. Imagine all those traits working in it’s favour – especially fortified turrets, experimental turrets (small stability pulse?), and deployable turrets – place it for buddy who’s got higher ground so he can rain some death from above even if he’s full melee himself.

4. removing the minimum range from it would also be nice. Fix it’s animation to make it able to shoot 90 degrees upwards (read right into where you’re standing).

5. increase projectile velocity, let it crit. It’s still an arcing projectile, not ranger’s traited sonic speed arrows.

Why the new mortar sucks in my opinion?

1. It’s a kit. Where’s the bad-ssery of mounting an actual mortar?
2. self-only. Why can’t i let others use it while i jump into the fray?
3. Much less tactical terrain gameplay. New mortar is a kit. Only tactics here are traits/specialization choices, not using placement, terrain and teamwork to your advantage.

The idea of them turning it into an Elite Turret that provides Stability pulses from Experimental Turrets is incredibly funny. I’d probably use Mortar just for that and never touch the thing’s skills (which, by the way, showcases a pretty obvious design problem). But from the look of how ANet and the general angry mob feel about Turret Engineer, I don’t think “Tactical Terrain Gameplay” is something that they want to promote in anything the Engineer does.

xDudisx.5914:

How about transform them in mobile turrets?

Why mobile? Regular turrets should be fine. They ARE overpowered enough to need nerfs after all.

Vieux P.1238:

Shadelang.3012:

Hence why they die faster than ANY non sacrifice based pet in the game now.

I guess you don’t play a mesmer or you would of known that clones & illusions upon summoning dies upon hit by any aoe, condi or direct damage. & that’s b4 sacrifice. So i don’t know why you complaining. FYI: Even now, turrets have more life then clones.

Clone skills also have an 8-15s CD on average whether they are shattered or not, don’t conditionally limit other class mechanics, and are also primarily on weapon skills (with the exception of Mirror Images and Decoy) meaning that they don’t eat up a utility slot to use. Clones are also able to accept boons. If all the turrets had the same cooldown as Healing Turret, or maybe were packaged into a Turret Kit so I can play it off as a nice weapon set, then we’d find some equivalence. But there really isn’t.

You know what? I’m going to make another chart. I have nothing better to do tonight.

Remember Guild Wars 1.
You weren’t able to play Dervish, Assassin, Ritualist, nor Paragon if you didn’t buy the expansion associated with them. It’s the same with “Elite Specializations” in Heart of Thorns.
Buying HoT won’t unlock the rewards, it will unlock the “Reward Track”. If you don’t have HoT, you won’t have access to the Reward Track at all.

PvP players don’t need to unlock the skills and weapons through the Reward Track because they will be unlocked automatically for PvP use just like all other skills, traits, and weapons used in PvP. The only requirement that you have as a PvP player to access those new things is to purchase Heart of Thorns.

MiniEquine.6014:

Unbinding stats from the trait lines may have some extraordinary effects, since you don’t have to kitten yourself for losing a 2H weapon and chest-worth of stats by going into something aside from the power and crit trait lines. It’s more the entirety of the changes they are making that would improve customizability, even if it doesn’t necessarily increase the number of options available.

The fear I feel is based on what we have already received in the past/have at current and what it’s likely to turn into. All things considered, this can really work. However, this pretty much REQUIRES ArenaNet to make really good M/GM traits for each and every line. There can be absolutely zero dud lines. Because if they aren’t worth using, you’re going to find people forced out of traitlines because “going into it isn’t effective”. It’s essentially the same problem that we have now with attribute points being tied to traits.

The build making process that currently has dilemmas like this:

“TRAITLINE isn’t a very helpful line for this build. I’m getting +X00 in ATTRIBUTE when I could be getting +X00 OTHER ATTRIBUTE in OTHER TRAITLINE instead and be more focused and effective. But if I don’t go down TRAITLINE, I don’t have access to BUILD-DEFINING TRAIT.”

(e.g. Is it worth it to miss out on extra additional Power/Condition Duration in Explosives or Precision/Condition Damage in Firearms for Elixir-Infused Bombs in the Inventions or Experimental Turrets in Alchemy?)

Will instead replace its dilemma to this:

“TRAITLINE has BUILD-DEFINING TRAIT in Adept level that’s useful to this build, but the Master and Grandmaster traits don’t help me. I could go down OTHER TRAITLINE instead and have three okay traits that have wider range of use rather than have one really good trait and two traits that don’t synergize. But if I don’t go down TRAITLINE, I don’t have access to these BUILD-DEFINING TRAIT.”

In the current dilemma, the meaningful decisions tends to sway away from the traits themselves and more towards the lack of synergy that is wrapped in between the lines. The trait builds that work the best are often the ones where there is little or no baggage to speak of.

Conner.4702:

Nilix.2170:

Morfedel.4165:

Nilix.2170:

So you want the portal that takes you into the Heart of Thorns to drop in locations that are nowhere close or related to the Heart of Thorns?

How do you figure that? HoT is in maguuma. Drytop and Silverwastes are in Maguuma. So… ?

The question was more directed to the person suggesting that the portal drop would probably be better as a game-wide added thing. I mean, in terms of absolutely everything, the decision to do it this way looks to be more of a lore-choice than anything. It’s an object that appears to active players who are closest to the new content. If a “portal” drops in the middle of my Caudecus Manor run, sweet! That’s cool, I guess. It just… doesn’t make as much sense. Why is this portal item in my dungeon run?

Why it would be better to have them drop anywhere? Well because you don’t want a small subset of players to only do your testing, you want a wide variety of players. I Consider this move to be a bad business move to be honest.

Anet has this inane fear that not funneling players into specific content is bad, because that is eaxctly what they keep doing, funneling players into specific content.

PvE is a small subset? I think you’re forcing your perceived intent into this. This isn’t a business move. They aren’t making money from you farming in the Silverwastes and I don’t think they have any financial reason to keep you in a certain spot of the map beyond your natural desire to be there for X thing. Proximity and active play just makes a lot more sense.

- How do we make sure that people playing the game now are the ones getting access into Beta and tie it into the game?
- Make it an item drop that they have to get.
- There is a place opening up in the Magumma Wastes.
- An item that you can get in the Maguuma Wastes will provide you with access to it.

If you want your dungeon tokens, go play dungeons. If you want your PvP rewards, go play PvP. If you want to dive into the Mad King’s realm, stay within the L1-15 areas. If you want to get into the beta, go to the Maguuma Wastes and find your portal object. You want to talk “business moves”? They can open up preorders RIGHT NOW and access to beta will be determined by that.

Morfedel.4165:

Nilix.2170:

So you want the portal that takes you into the Heart of Thorns to drop in locations that are nowhere close or related to the Heart of Thorns?

How do you figure that? HoT is in maguuma. Drytop and Silverwastes are in Maguuma. So… ?

The question was more directed to the person suggesting that the portal drop would probably be better as a game-wide added thing. I mean, in terms of absolutely everything, the decision to do it this way looks to be more of a lore-choice than anything. It’s an object that appears to active players who are closest to the new content. If a “portal” drops in the middle of my Caudecus Manor run, sweet! That’s cool, I guess. It just… doesn’t make as much sense. Why is this portal item in my dungeon run?

So you want the portal that takes you into the Heart of Thorns to drop in locations that are nowhere close or related to the Heart of Thorns?

“Starting tomorrow, April 28,”
So tomorrow, it starts. I would just look for when a patch happens and then get into either one. I just want to know which one is going to be more fruitful.