Guild Wars 2

I think a class that uses a greatsword to shoot laser beams and summon illusionary blades from the ground to damage enemies is more than capable of protecting its hands while wielding an axe.

I think an axe is very fitting, and you yourself admitted it works for necromancer, so why on earth do you state unequivocally that it wouldn’t work for mesmers?

@Prime Shock – In regards to your comment about ANet being able to know how far away you are when placing portal exeunt. They can’t get that to work out. It’s been requested for years and the most recent thing we heard on the issue is that they don’t have the technology to check that before placing the skill. I agree that the functionality should be there, as other parts of the game clearly demonstrate it, and as soon as the skill is placed it knows if it was too far or not. But they don’t have a way to check before you use portal exeunt.

ANet also announced that they wanted skills to work the same way in all game modes. They want any splits that happen to be numbers only. Changing how portal works in one mode would necessitate changing how it works in every mode according to what we were told when skill splits were announced.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Here are some more that we could try and see how they work. All with the standard 9s cooldown:

• Surprise: The next attack dazes target for 0.75s
• Grace: Gain distortion for 0.75s.
• Composure: Break stun and gain 1 stacks of stability for 0.75s.
• Haste: Reduce the recharge of your weapon skills by 3 seconds and gain 2 initiative.
• Restitution: Your next 3 attacks transfer a condition.
• Ruin: The next condition you inflict lasts 50% longer. (does not bypass the total cap of 100%)
• Pyromancy: Create a blast finisher. (the visual is a small explosion like those from an engineer’s small, but there’s no damage)
• Aeromancy: Blind up to 4 nearby foes.
• True Sight: Your next attack can’t miss. (the next attack ignores blocks, evades and blindness, but you won’t lose blindness if you have it, so it’ll still affect you the next attack)

These sound awful for balance. Surprise grants you over 8% uptime on stuns simply from swapping weapons. Similarly, Grace grants you absolutely ridiculous 8.33% uptime on distortion, simply from swapping weapons. This one in particular would be awful for balance both for the person using it, and the person fighting against it. But in a coordinated team, the bunker/healer could easily run the sigil of grace and have almost 10% uptime on being completely invincible to your attacks while supporting their partner, who would still be able to contest and hold the point.

Composure not only makes breaking stuns commonplace (seriously, what other stunbreaks are on such a low CD? And it would give them stab?) but is just power creep.

The concept for Haste could be balanced, but I don’t know if it would actually bring anything except more spam to PvP. Actually I know it wouldn’t.

Restitution becomes one of the most powerful condi cleanses in the entire game. Coming in at 3 condis cleansed every 9 seconds, on top of your other cleanses. That is beyond ridiculous.

The concept for Ruin is ok actually.

Pyromancy is also ok in concept, it could be tuned to be balanced.

Aeromancy is just AoE cover condis. Nothing more than condi spam. I like the idea of generating blindness, don’t like this implementation of that idea.

True Sight. This one is the monster here. It is pure 10,000% power creep. Not only would this make your attack ignore evades (removing and nullifying one of the strongest balancing mechanics in GW2 combat), it would also ignore Blind as well? I mean do you want it to ignore invulns as well? Maybe just ignore a player’s HP entirely and be a OHKO every 9 seconds? Because that is the direction the game is headed if it keeps implementing these “one-up” mechanics that exist solely to ignore another mechanic that was used for balancing. This should never, in any way shape or form, be implemented into the game. Period. Not even in PvE.

Not true. The guaranteed teleport functionality is kittening amazing at hard JQ, especially at Chalice of Tears. I’m not sure if you have made it up by yourself, but without that guaranteed port from portal I never would have been able to finish that JQ. I know that is PvE, but fundamentally changing how portal works would affect PvE as well, so you have to consider it before proposing changing how portal works.

And it still would not fix the actual problem.

I think we will see mounts, but I’m personally more inclined to believe that the differet mastery levels will affect which mounts you are able to use, with the mounts that require higher levels of mastery being “better” by offering new utility.

Arms Mastery sounds kittening awful. Gating new weapons behind a mastery? And its not even consistent. I main a mesmer currently. Assuming that doesn’t change, why should I have to train the 4th tier of this mastery line to unlock my new weapon, while warriors, rangers, and necromancers get their new weapon at the second level of this mastery? That is fundamentally unfair to 6 of the 9 classes (and if you thought people already complained about lacking MP, wait until you gate new weapons behind masteries). Not to mention, the 6th bonus is 100% gear treadmill, which is something ANet has worked extremely hard to avoid in this game. It wouldn’t fit in with the rest of GW2 and would be downright awful to have. Also, On Sea or Land wouldn’t work without redoing underwater content as a whole. The reason that a lot of skills are not available underwater is because they are ground targetted, and that really isn’t possible with how underwater combat is currently setup. A few of them were tweaked to be allowed to work underwater, but not all of them. It would be way too much work to implement this just for the sake of a mastery.

Similarly, Glint’s Prophecy sounds awful as well, from a logistics standpoint. For one, the 4th tier, gleaming soul, would break bouncing mushrooms. They send you on a fixed path for a reason. Either this would break and they would no longer send you to where you needed to go, or it would be pointless. But more generally, the entire concept is beyond broken. Having a constant jump height is the best resources the devs have to gate where we can and cannot go in the world. Being able to double jump would already break that, but being able to jump 4 times in a row would be awful logistically. Everything would either have to be flat-ish, or have massive walls everywhere to gate where we can and can’t go solely due to this mastery. Plus, it would make jumping puzzles trivial (though to some extent leap skills already do that).

Forgotten Lore looks alright. Standard mastery line that opens new vendors and ways to travel. Only thing is that To Be Unseen would have to be the last tier, and should only affect regular enemies. Why on earth would Anet want to make the champions ignore you, but not regular mobs? If this got implemented it would surely be so that standard trash mobs ignore you, but veterans and champions still hunt you down.

Margonite Lore also looks promising. I like the idea of using the power of the branded against themselves, but not a fan of the CD reduction on a 10 min CD. Instead, I would like to see this extended to all dragon minions (if possible and applicable), wherein you would gain some benefit versus them, depending on which dragon minion it was. It could be something as simple as being able to burn destroyers, or something more unique and distinct (for example, when fighting risen thralls and they use frenzy you would turn it against them and make them take 50% increased damage [instead of the standard 25%] and it would slow their attacks instead of applying the effects of quickness. Or for fighting branded, if they use “branded magic” against you instead of simple auto attacks the damage is reflected back at them, 6 sec ICD. Or something). Secrets Unleashed also looks ripe for exploits. It would have to be disabled in PvP and WvW obviously, as well as fractals (to prevent you from cheesing something like the automatic KO attack that Siax has in CM if you don’t kill the 4 adds fast enough) and raids. So already it would be heavily limited, but also due to Rezzing and the whole downed state the entire concept feels weak and not original. It also feels useless on a 1hr CD.

MLGKorno.5419:

Why would you want geo doom combo to be removed when it adds an extra condition attack that is fully instant (like a second Steal or shatter) which raises the skill cap for Condi builds like Condi mesmer and Condi rev (will be pushed further out of viability) that use it? And even if Condi rev got better Condi applications as compensation, Condi rev has no abilities that are instant so all of them can get outplayed. Currently you can use Geo Doom Hydro Leech combo and be able to time Condi bursts between peoples evade/block frames.

You listed exactly why they need to go. They add yet another, instant condition application. They are nothing more than glorified spam. For hydromancy in particular, it can hit extremely hard, harder than some weapon skills on some classes, and its ridiculous that you can do that just for weapon swapping.

Weapon swapping already gives you an advantage in a fight. It shouldn’t be turned into a spamfest as well. All that these sigils do is make condi builds even more braindead, as you can unload an entire burst, then swap weapons to apply 2 cover conditions instantly, making it so that the other player can’t cleanse your burst at all. This leaves the other player with no counterplay. How is this skillfull play? Why should this sort of spam be encouraged and allowed?

Yes, condi rev needs some work. No, on swap sigils are not what is going to make it good. They are a bandaid at best, and that doesn’t justify the spam that they bring with them.

Urejt.5648:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Due to technical limitations, we will likely never be able to add a delayed observer mode to Gw2.

time to talk to the boss and get permission to convert gw2 from dx8 to dx11. Blizzard did it with diablo 3 very easily, i think u can do it too.

DX is used for graphics. Its really hard to take someone seriously when they try to pin anything that isn’t pure graphics on GW2 running DX9, because it shows that they don’t really understand what they are talking about.

Good to know that you guys aren’t fully happy with the current implementation of damage/condi on swap sigils

Hopefully we will see all 9 on swap sigils removed from the game, but I would still be happy if just intelligence, hydro, geo, doom and leeching were removed.

It would also be nice to see some standardization of the sigils. For instance the +X% condi duration sigils are all 20%, but paralyzation is +30% stun duration. Similarly, the on hit sigils range from 60% chance to activate, down to 30% chance to activate, and on crit sigils vary between 50% activation rate and 60% activation rate. I know you mentioned that you would like to redo these so that they are less reliant on RNG, and I think that’s awesome. So when you do redo them, it would be nice to have consistency, regardless of what the new implementation is.

The Game Slayer.7632:

zealex.9410:

Choppy.4183:

Right, but condi builds still viable despite resistance offering total immunity. This wouldn’t be true for power builds with a 100% protection buff.

I’m not saying they’re isn’t justification for different approaches to resistance, but it’s not a straight comparison with protection.

its the only boon that directly does kind of the same thing with resistance but then again aegis is a more similar boon.

Also you cant exploit protection while you can exploit resistance and we see it with the epi bombs

Again, the problem is epidemic, not resistance.

Also, his point is that you’re trying to compare an apple to an orange. It’s pointless.

Condi builds are very much viable even with resistance offering 100% immunity. Protection offering 100% damage reduction would make all power useless. (I’m simply re-iterating his point.)

Epidemic is absolutely NOT the problem. The problem lies almost entirely with resistance and the absurd amount of condis it allows you to stack on yourself, and the rest of it comes from how freely condis are handed out by every build now. Without resistance, you wouldn’t be able to stack this many condis up on someone before they died, so epidemic wouldn’t be able to transfer ~70+ total stacks of condis at once. The root of the problem is resistance and the proliferation of condis.

Resistance is just way too powerful to be a boon. If it has to stay in the game it needs to be turned into an effect. But ideally it should be removed completely.

Evan Lesh.3295:

The PvP team is investigating opportunities to update the sigils available in the game mode. This means removing, adding, balancing, and reworking. Our high-level goals include reducing RNG gameplay, promoting counter-play, reducing raw damage output, and removing ineffective choices. Some example changes would be removing on-kill stacking sigils and changing proc sigils to on-next-attack effects.

We are looking for feedback on these goals and potential changes. Feel free to suggest new sigils, sigils that exist in other game modes, or feedback on current sigils.

Question. When you say this do you mean reduce raw damage output in general, o reduce raw damage output that comes specifically from sigils? Because its an important distinction.

Regardless I do want to see some sigils removed. I think that sigils like hydromancy/geomancy that damage enemies purely for swapping weapons is an outdated concept and doesn’t add anything except damage spam to the game mode. I really would love to see them removed. Swapping to a weapon happens when you want to gain an advantage in the current fight, whether that is more pressure, more defense or more mobility. You shouldn’t gain an extra advantage of dealing potentially several thousand damage from weapon swapping. And they just make it absolutely trivial to add cover conditions. You don’t even have to think about it and do it intelligently.

Justine.6351:

If they change it I would just make the exit portal placement restricted like shadow steps are and be done with it. Mechanically, if you cannot shadow step to the entrance portal due to pathing then you cannot place the exit portal.

I don’t think they should but ya if I was forced to “fix” it…

That would kill portal, and not fix the core problem. Portal is unique precisely because its a guaranteed teleport. Terrain not considered.

Conditions would definitely need to be rebalanced if resistance was removed. But I do think that long term it will be much healthier for resistance to not exist and conditions to be rebalanced around that, than to keep resistance in the game.

While it isn’t a boon, there are a few traits in the game that do increase your healing power under certain conditions, which would be of a similar nature to what you describe (boon that increases healing done).

Could we get an actual boon that does the same thing so you can share it with others? Yea, I don’t see why we couldn’t have that. I don’t know if we need another boon introduced to the last game (and am in favor of removing 1 or 2 for that matter) though.

Ok so I hope you are exaggerating on how much it cost you to craft the perfected staff. According to gw2efficiency, it costs about 700 gold to make the perfected staff, while buying the Bifrost on the TP would cost you 2,800 gold, which is 4 times as expensive as it would cost to make the perfected staff.

jojorne.2175:

i don’t think what zealex said is a valid point. my guess is on you have to think your actions but yet… see, you could swap to get a shield skill from your short range weapons and then swap back for the normal long range attack, no biggies.
so “the think your action” makes a valid point, but also slows the combat. there are several games out there you can swap with no cooldown and have a fast paced combat and yet have to think your next action.

also the ele attune comes into play for comparison to swap weapons… my guess is that ele attune should have some cooldowns but to not make a big diff they increased the cooldown of swap weapon. anyway i also see no point for the long cooldowns for ele attunes.

in real life you could swap weapons in a second or two, so i still don’t get this long cooldowns time. there must be something like sigil skills holding arena from lower the cooldown or they are afraid of players becoming overpowered by creating a buffer weapon set.

And in GW2 you swap weapons instantly. The cooldown between weapon swapping is 10 seconds, but the swapping is instant.

Its purely a balance decision. Different weapons are good at different things, so if you swap there should be a “consequence” to it. If you need a defensive skill, then you have to evaluate if you need it enough to justify being stuck with weaker pressure for 10 seconds. If you switch from ranged to melee you have to evaluate if you can down the other player before they get out of range, or if you can prevent them from just getting out of melee range and leaving you more or less useless until you can swap back.

Its a huge balance decision, and I love that it is in the game. I think it adds a lot more depth to the combat.

ANet doesn’t have the technology to be able to know if you are too far away from portal entre before placing portal exeunt. What makes you think they would be able to tell if Portal has crossed a wall/gate and be able to check if it has been taken down recently?

Portal is fine as it is, its the exploits that need to be fixed.

zealex.9410:

still the puprose of the training area should not be to check how much dmg a spec can do it should be purely about learning rotation as ppl dont seem tomunderstand that the result they will get there they will hardly reach in a real raid scenario thats why dps meters are a blessing ^^ also @OriOri u got a link to a dps rotation that goes up to that number?

Here you go.

Ayrilana.1396:

OriOri.8724:

Ayrilana.1396:

Pifil.5193:

Adding it to the chest would add at most 1 per day as you would only be able to get one for the Chak Gerent, it would encourage partipation in these metas and will pretty much be required once the next expac drops, I think.

It’ll still drive the price down to less than a gold if not further. There only sink for it is the armor/weapon and the new current event. With players having the option to get it on a wide scale, even if 1 per day, you’d eventually create a large surplus and drive it down. Currently this provides a great opportunity for farmers or players just casually playing on those maps.

No, it wouldn’t. Stop spreading lies. Every single heros choice chest has an amalgamated gemstone in it, which are hovering 1.90 gold each. As soon as the price of lilies dropped below this, people would stop picking it from the chest if they were just trying to sell the reward, as the amalgamated gemstone would then be more lucrative.

It provides a perfect floor (in the sense that its been at a steady price for a long time now) to how low lilies would drop in price. They would by no means drop to below 1 gold each

Gemstones have a much greater demand as you need them for crystalline ingots among others. They’re nowhere near the same level as Maguuma lilies. So no, I’m not lying.

Yes, you are. Yes, amalgamated gemstones have a substantially higher demand than lilies do. But for people who are selecting the rewards from the chest for the purposes of making a profit, they will choose the gemstone as soon as the price of a lily drops below that of a gemstone. And that price is hovering at just under 2 gold each. So no, lilies wouldn’t drop to below 1g just by being added to heros choice chests

Zez.9018:

Tricare.2946:

I say it needs to get reworked. It’s making people lazy.

Also complete immunity to conditions is a bit much.

And complete immunity to power damage is a bit much and making people lazy. Blocking, Invulnerability skills, Evading; maybe they should be reworked to only grant a 33% reduction in power damage.

Blocks, invulns and evades cannot be extended period, but resistance can. And its substantially harder to share those than it is to share resistance. Not to mention that when you do share an invuln, its only ~1 sec that is shared. And yes, we have too many of them at the moment. But that doesn’t make resistance balanced.

How can you defend a build that can damage you without breaking stealth. Its fundamentally broken. Either no one should bring stealth when you deal damage, or everyone should. None of this bullkitten where everyone but thieves have to follow the game mechanics.

Evan Lesh.3295:

We also think automated tournaments would be neat. For viewership, we would have to re-implement the authorized shoutcaster program to allow certain people to stream the tournaments.

It appears that both the players and the devs liked automated tournaments. So what exactly is stopping them from coming back? Don’t have the time to implement it? Don’t have permission to do so?

rechner.1408:

OriOri.8724:

rechner.1408:

zealex.9410:

rechner.1408:

ez fix for WVW only:

+10 cd
only 5 stacks max (mby + remaining time -50% or something)
shorter range (cast and effect range!) + 1 sec cast time

there u have it a not op skill and not a dead skill WOW

its better to remove it than do all these not only it will be come useless with all these nerfs but it will also be so bad ppl will make it a meme and laugh about it for years

even with the changes it would be the best utility skill in the game y mby the cast time is a bit to hard

Those nerfs are too hard. Anything below a 10 stack limit per condi is too low for the skill considering its purpose.

are u guys srs? look every other utility skill in game there is nothing as strong as this skill even with my changes

Epidemic takes a lot work to setup, and can be completely nullified by proper cleanses beforehand by the other team. I don’t think 10 stacks of each if your group took the time to set it up, and the other group didn’t cleanse at all, is too much. Besides, if Resistance wasn’t a thing (which it shouldn’t be), no one would even get to 10 stacks of every condition to spread in the first place.

The nightmare court kill a lot of sylvari that won’t convert. So the ones that are in it are the ones that willingly converted.

This can range from sylvari who were presented with a good enough argument from the nightmare court to join and change their views, all the way to sylvari who were “destined” to join the nightmare court, as they fundamentally disagree with the Pale Tree. Mind you that LWS2 introduced the notion of Soundless Sylvari, who also reject the teachings of the Pale Tree and those of the Nightmare Court. Which shows that Sylvari do have free choice as to what to believe.

rechner.1408:

zealex.9410:

rechner.1408:

ez fix for WVW only:

+10 cd
only 5 stacks max (mby + remaining time -50% or something)
shorter range (cast and effect range!) + 1 sec cast time

there u have it a not op skill and not a dead skill WOW

its better to remove it than do all these not only it will be come useless with all these nerfs but it will also be so bad ppl will make it a meme and laugh about it for years

even with the changes it would be the best utility skill in the game y mby the cast time is a bit to hard

Those nerfs are too hard. Anything below a 10 stack limit per condi is too low for the skill considering its purpose.

Make a LFG post for the path you want to run. Barring TA Aetherpath, I’ve never had to wait very long to get a full group. In my experience 1-2 people who join are usually new to that dungeon at least, if not new to the game. But still with elite specs and proper gear dungeons are a breeze, even with new people in the group.

Oh my. That’s quite a wonderful picture

I have been proven wrong here, I fully support bringing dual longbows to rangers!

Aeolus.3615:

if players didnt had resistance they would still not have time to cleanse, or didnt even had that window.
Still resistance was a lame adition to not adress what is wrong, its like put broken gimmick on top of broken gimmick in hope to cover it.

I mean how else were they going to sell people on Revs when the concept for the class wasn’t fully fleshed out. But seriously I wish resistance would be removed from the game already and have condis re-balanced without resistance in mind.

Ayrilana.1396:

Pifil.5193:

Adding it to the chest would add at most 1 per day as you would only be able to get one for the Chak Gerent, it would encourage partipation in these metas and will pretty much be required once the next expac drops, I think.

It’ll still drive the price down to less than a gold if not further. There only sink for it is the armor/weapon and the new current event. With players having the option to get it on a wide scale, even if 1 per day, you’d eventually create a large surplus and drive it down. Currently this provides a great opportunity for farmers or players just casually playing on those maps.

No, it wouldn’t. Stop spreading lies. Every single heros choice chest has an amalgamated gemstone in it, which are hovering 1.90 gold each. As soon as the price of lilies dropped below this, people would stop picking it from the chest if they were just trying to sell the reward, as the amalgamated gemstone would then be more lucrative.

It provides a perfect floor (in the sense that its been at a steady price for a long time now) to how low lilies would drop in price. They would by no means drop to below 1 gold each

The Game Slayer.7632:

zealex.9410:

true condis got better and for that reason alone without the resistance you wouldnt be able to stack so many of them and proceed into 1 shotting 5 more players its as if they never tested resistance before adding it into the game.

Resistance is too involved with class balance to touch. It’s a boon that a lot of classes have access to. Nerfing resistance, a boon that a lot of classes have access to through a myriad of skills, is asking for trouble. And the devs already know that.

The problem is epidemic. It’s far more healthier and less catastrophic to fix the real reason people die to condis in 1 or 2 ticks, which is epidemic.

Now that just isn’t true. Only 4 classes have access to Resistance without relying on RNG.

Removing resistance is not “asking” for trouble.

The Game Slayer.7632:

OriOri.8724:

The Game Slayer.7632:

No. Resistance is fine. It’s involved in too many skills. Just fix epidemic and its all good to go.

Resistance is not fine. Its way too powerful to be a simple boon.

It should only be a % decrease in condi damage for the duration, and it shouldn’t allow you to ignore all CC effects from condis either. Or it should only protect you against condis’ “secondary” effects (CC and the heal/endurance refill reduction from poison/weakness) but not decrease the damage condis do to you.

But total immunity to both the soft CC and the damage from condis is bullkitten.

And I say it should be 100% negation from condis.

The only reason you don’t want resistance to be 100% negation is because you think it’s bullkitten.

Ok, I think that full trailblazer and dire gear is bullkitten.

Do you have any other reasons for nerfing resistance, other than you don’t like it?

Its not remotely balanced. Resistance is as powerful as effects are, more powerful than some effects for that matter. And those are separate from boons precisely so that you can’t increase the duration of these super powerful combat boosts. To get the same bonuses as Resistance gives you against a condi build versus a power build, you have to have both stab (to ignore the hard CC that power skills can bring) as well as bring an invuln skill, which have short durations that cannot be extended, and are few and far between. On top of that, almost all invuln skills prevent you from contesting a node.

Yet Resistance is complete invuln against condi damage, as well as complete invuln against soft CC. As well as does not prevent you from contesting a node.

Its far too powerful to be a boon. This isn’t some opinion, this is just basic comparisons to everything else in the game. Resistance versus condi builds is so powerful that to get teh same effect versus power builds you need to combine both a boon and an effect that very few classes have access to. There’s no rational way to call resistance balanced in its current iteration. None.

Small correction, but condi wars can get around 32k DPS against the golem with realistic buffs. Which should increase their DPS in a real raid scenario by several thousand

But you need 2 hands to shoot a bow

The Game Slayer.7632:

No. Resistance is fine. It’s involved in too many skills. Just fix epidemic and its all good to go.

Resistance is not fine. Its way too powerful to be a simple boon.

It should only be a % decrease in condi damage for the duration, and it shouldn’t allow you to ignore all CC effects from condis either. Or it should only protect you against condis’ “secondary” effects (CC and the heal/endurance refill reduction from poison/weakness) but not decrease the damage condis do to you.

But total immunity to both the soft CC and the damage from condis is bullkitten.

They can solo the first part of the fractal?

Its also incredibly effective, even in the hands of people who have never played thief before. I know some thief playes n the forums here will die before admitting that this build is broken, but its stupidly effective, breaks core game mechanics that are designed the way they are for balance, and can output tons of condi pressure while remaining invisible, effectively making it impossible for all but 2 classes to fight. And of those 2 classes, they don’t have the ability to force the ghost thief out of stealth if the thief doesn’t want to be forced out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5wfsbf/i_tried_out_permastealth_thief_in_wvw/?ref=search_posts

Best way to address this is to add it to the hero choice chests. It is timegated enough to keep the price from crashing, but it also offers a guaranteed way to gather them yourself if you were so inclined. Right now with the riduculous drop rate (I’ve never gotten a single one) its not feasible to gather them yourself.

Was epi an issue? No. Conditions couldn’t stack to such ridiculous levels, and due to the absence of resistance, builds in general carried more condi cleanse, so there were fewer condis to spread via resistance, and they also didn’t stack as high before the target died.

And truthfully epi is still not really a problem. I think bouncing it off of lords, who can easily get dozens of stacks of each condi stacked on them, is a kitteneap, but a valid tactic. The only reason epi seems so ridiculously powerful is because of resistance, both directly and indirectly.

Directly, resistance allows ridiculous stacks of condis to be built up to spread via resistance

Indirectly, resistance conditioned a lot of players to run with fewer to no condi cleanses period. Also indirectly, resistance is part of the reason condi builds keep getting buffed each patch. As they have so little time to deal any actual damage against groups running resistance.

@Artemis – Yup, reliance on resistance has shifted the way people play WvW in general. I hate the boon. Its blatant power creep and I do think its a reason condis keep being buffed over and over. Condi builds now have to burst down someone in a few seconds before they can get huge uptime on Resistance and then your condi build is completely innefective. At least with power builds and invuln, you can’t share more than 1 sec of invuln at a time, and invulns are are and in short supply. The same is not true of Resistance.

@Lahmia – There was a thread where an epi stacked 31 bleed stacks at once due to deathly chill on reapers. I do think that 25 stacks is too high of a stack count, but regardless of what the count is, it should be a hard cap. If you have 25 bleed stacks and a bunch of chill, you should only get 25 bleed stacks, regardless of the effects of deathly chill.

Say what now? I’m actually in favor of taking them both on at the same time. Makes the fight shorter, less time to make mistakes and go down.

zealex.9410:

OriOri.8724:

Put in lower stack limits on epi. Even 10 stacks of every condi is an insane condi bomb by a single skill.

Implement proper condi cleanse hiearchys, with the most dangerous ones always cleansed first (so no more cleansing 4 condis and then downing yourself because you got unlucky and didn’t cleanse the confusion).

Remove epidemic and rebalance condis in general accordingly. No more allowing a war or rev to gather dozens upon dozens of stacks of condis to be spread via epi. This would be a natural check to the maximum power of the skill as long as you aren’t near a lord, while still allowing it to be devastating if set up properly

That is all you need to do to have epi be perfectly balanced.

in one line you said remove epidemic in the other you said reduce the stacks of condis pick one m8 xD

its fixed. I shouldnt forum when low on sleep

You aren’t paying attention. You have to stop thinking about the gold price of gems, because its irrelevant. Regardless if it costs you 1 copper or 1,000 gold to buy 400 gems, you are still buying $5 worth of gems. A different player has already paid Anet the $5 for those gems. ANet made the same amount of money on that sale, and the amount of gold you paid for it will not change that fact. Gems are NOT being created out of thin air when you buy them for gold. Someone has already used real money to buy them from ANet.

Flurry of dancing flames.9830:

Erm.. one thing I’d like to see MORE of, is the usage of weapons that are used the least amount (like Rifle, Mace + focus/scepter, Rifle specifically).

One thing a friend and I LOVED the idea of was a thief with a Rifle (for Sniping, Assassination) or a Ranger with a Rifle (because it’s a “RANGE-r” which both make enough sense and let us use Rifles at long last. Engi rifle is the only real, playable class atm…

Not shortbow? Only 2 classes can use it right now.

zealex.9410:

Rawr.9467:

Greener.6204:

zealex.9410:

If that was the case ppl would sell their gems in the tp.

They do. It’s called the Currency Exchange. It’s the portion of the game where gems are sold by players to other players.

To expand what I typed above:

1. Player X gives cash to Anet to get gems. <— Anet profits right here.
2. Player X trades gems to Player Y for gold. <—Anet doesn’t care what happens; they already made profit.
3. Player Y spends gems on things. <—Anet doesn’t care what happens; they already made profit.

I don’t think Zealex really understands how currency exchange works.

This is shown quite plainly when a highly requested item is released. Take when they re-released the bunny ears for example – The value of gems skyrocketed in price because people were buying gems with gold way more than usual and supply of gems was decreasing making the value of them increase.

It’s very basic Supply and Demand.

yes i said that above that when ppl buy gems with gold the ratio of gems to gold also goes down meaning that for x gold you will need more gems compaired to a time where theres no popular release and vice versa correct? My issue with that is that anet will make more profit that way from only ppl that buy gems to turn into gold on a non release date since someone who buys gems to buy stuff directly from the gemstore pays a fixxed price and ppl who exchanged gold for gems for the bunny ears didnt play any real money they indirectly just raised the gems to gold racio right?

No. That isn’t how it works. An item in the gem store that sells for 400 gems is worth $5, since it takes $5 to buy 400 gems. As long as the price of the item stays the same, ANet will always have made kitten sale when someone buys it (barring the gems you get from achievements).

Regardless of how much gold it costs you to buy 400 gems if you use the currency exchange, you are still purchasing an item worth 400 gems. That doesn’t change. It doesn’t matter if you paid 1 gold for the gems or 400 gold for the gems, you are still making a 400 gem purchase. You are still removing $5 worth of gems from the game. And those gems were paid for by someone. Anet still made $5 from the sale of those gems, regardless of how much gold you needed to buy the gems.

ArthurDent.9538:

OriOri.8724:

ArthurDent.9538:

It was nerfed from probably the most over powered utility in the game, to still probably the most over powered utility in the game (at least for raids). In short it is still viable.

It was only overpowered in so much as classes were pumping out boons at absolutely ridiculous levels, and still are. It was a unique aspect of mesmers that was nerfed into the ground when it really only needed small tweaks to bring it into line. And nerfing it did absolutely nothing to stop the proliferation of powerful boons like quickness, prot, retal, and resistance.

In a typical raid scenario SoI provides about 6 seconds of quickness, 10 seconds of regen, swiftness, and fury, and 40 secs of might to 5 players in the group. Depending on group comp it can spread any boon for a substantial duration all on a measly 30 second duration before traits. Throw in appropriate traits, and it gives aoe distortion and can be used twice every 24 seconds not factoring C split or alacrity. There really just aren’t any other utilities in the game that come even close to adding this much power to a group. The only other utilities that can sort of rival it are warrior banners, frost and sun spirit. These bring much less impact but are unique buffs that can’t possibly be replaced by any other source while SoI boons can be gained from other sources, though not nearly as efficiently. Would you care to enlighten me of the more op utility skills that are out there?

Here’s the thing with this, and when anyone else starts with similar arguments. You guys need to start separating SoI from the trait that procs it, Illusionary Inspiration. The skill and the trait are separate. I was always in favor of having the trait changed as it was too good for a trait, but that did not mean the skill itself was nearly as overpowered as people want to believe.

Now that that is said, there are also problems with your “analysis” of SoI. It shares all of a single might stack now, and if your warriors are doing their jobs correctly you’ll already be at 25 might stacks at all time. Similarly, you should already have large-100% uptime on fury from other classes in the raid, and swiftness + regen, while nice, are not all that powerful as boons. Nice yes, not on the same level as quickness, fury or stacks of might. Yes, it was a powerful trait before when it shared the full stacks of all of your boons, it needed to be brought in line. But it was nerfed way too hard. It should have been changed to drastically lower the sharing of boons that mesmer is not great at generating (fury, retal, resistance, stab and aegis), with a few of those boons potentially even being removed from the list of shared boons (namely resistance and retal). Other than that it didn’t need to be nerfed nearly as hard as it was for the other boons. We should be able to share more than a single stack of might, more than 3 sec of quickness.

Vinceman.4572:

Bugabuga.9721:

Like phased gorilla of a bloomhunger

Bloomhunger could actually be much shorter in pugs if people

1. stop separating Bloomy + champ after 75% and 50% and fight them together or at least focus on Bloomy, the champ is neither dangerous nor important to kill.

2. run consistently and faster into the green fields to pull Bloomy.

You want pugs to actually think through fights and do stuff that makes sense? What is wrong with you? /s

ArthurDent.9538:

It was nerfed from probably the most over powered utility in the game, to still probably the most over powered utility in the game (at least for raids). In short it is still viable.

It was only overpowered in so much as classes were pumping out boons at absolutely ridiculous levels, and still are. It was a unique aspect of mesmers that was nerfed into the ground when it really only needed small tweaks to bring it into line. And nerfing it did absolutely nothing to stop the proliferation of powerful boons like quickness, prot, retal, and resistance.

zealex.9410:

OriOri.8724:

zealex.9410:

stop acting like optional subscriltion is the mother of all issues if they handle it correctly and keep it optional and not something that alienates the player who doesnt use it i dont find a reason for it to nost exist esp now that thentop mmos have some kind of subscription whether its optional or mandatory. Also anet has been really careful on what could give advantage to someone and they have not added it into the game what makes you think an optional subscription could bring that.

Even when such subscriptions start out benevolent, they don’t last that way. If implemented it will be one of the worst things ANet could do for the game.

U got proof of this? because i can think of 3 games that have a subscription model either optional or mandatory which are the biggest mmos at this time.

Subscription models are different than the VIP package that was discussed in this thread. Not to mention that a mandatory subscription is not at all relevant to the discussion, so I don’t know why you are bringing it up as an argument.

zealex.9410:

stop acting like optional subscriltion is the mother of all issues if they handle it correctly and keep it optional and not something that alienates the player who doesnt use it i dont find a reason for it to nost exist esp now that thentop mmos have some kind of subscription whether its optional or mandatory. Also anet has been really careful on what could give advantage to someone and they have not added it into the game what makes you think an optional subscription could bring that.

Even when such subscriptions start out benevolent, they don’t last that way. If implemented it will be one of the worst things ANet could do for the game.

@Fay – I still think sharing our boons with phantasms should be baseline.

For one, I know we can trait fury. But with how much of our damage comes from phantasms we shouldn’t have to trait for fury to affect them. What other classes in the game have to trait just for fury to be fully applied to their damage? Rev doesn’t. Guard doesn’t. War doesn’t. Elementalist doesn’t. Thief doesn’t. Engi doesn’t. Ranger doesn’t since they can share fury with their pet via We heal as one. Why is it that mesmer alone has to trait to get fury to be fully applied to our damage? It should be baseline, like it is for other classes. It just doesn’t make sense that when we get fury it only affects a small portion of our damage, and ignores the rest. No other class has to take an entire traitline just to make Fury apply to all of their damage. Most of them don’t have to do anything, and with Rangers its as simple as taking a healing skill, it doesn’t lock them into a specific trait to do so.

Another issue with this is that like you said, a lot of boons won’t affect them at all, so why shouldn’t they be shared baseline? Quickness will make duelist better, will make iWarden worse, and will have no effect on the other phantasms. So why isn’t it just shared baseline? iWarden’s attack can even be slowed up if that becomes and issue, so that it still has decent uptime even while under the effects of quickness. Or, alternatively, Warden’s Feedback could lengthen the duration of the attack so that while underquickness its the same duration as now.

Lastly, I agree that aegis and prot are effectively useless on a phantasm right now. In PvE it won’t matter. And in PvP it won’t make enough of a difference. Well first, phantasms should take reduced damage from indirect attacks in PvP as well, even if it isn’t as reduced as it is in PvE. Secondly, like you said, it won’t make much of a difference, so why not have it be baseline?