Yea I think that throwing SoI on the bar for Pugging isn’t a bad idea. Helps give a small buffer to the quickness chrono in case they mess up their rotation.
I like the changes of elite specs. What i don’t like is imbalance in doing so.
Chornomancers being tanks is ok.
Chronomancers being only tanks that matter is not.What elite specs should do is provide alternative roles and playstyles to core classes (staying true to their theme), but not set iron clad meta of “this spec is best for the role out of all professions, and all elites specs!”
^
This.I would give my left nut for a viable guardian, warrior or revenenat tank build. I wanna be the heavy guy in heavy armor taking the heavy hits.
I do think chronotank is cool too though, but I want more tanks!
I’d also like to see more tank mechanics for raids. Threat mechanics and stuff like that, not just simple toughness-based aggro or first-hit aggro, that’s too easy.
I know that this has been explained to Zeft before, multiple times, so I really don’t understand why he insists on still bringing it up, despite having been explained why he is so wrong.
- Chronomancers are not the only tanks that matter.
- Chronomancers are not the only class that can tank.
The reason people want the chrono to tank is twofold:
1 – They can still perform their alacrity/quickness rotation while tanking = they aren’t just a useless spot in raids that does nothing but eat the attacks without dying
2 – They lose the least amount of DPS by switching their gear over to tank since their DPS is so low to begin with.
This is why chronos are the tank, not because no other class can. its just that chronomancers sacrifice the least of any class in order to tank
Magic find does not worth anything…
there was a video Potatoe Made not long ago about it
he stacked a BUNCH of stuff to get his magic find to arround 800-900….. then oppened a BUNCH of chests and bags and also done some stuff and events…
and there was no visible change in the loot at all….
that stat is the most useless stat in the game right now…
Most chests are not affected by magic find. To the point that the few that are affected by it go out of their way to mention it in the description.
There;s nothing wrong with adding adventures. Some people enjoyed them. Its only a problem if these are also locked for any amount of time related to a map meta. If its a single localized event that is quick enough to do and not on a timer that locks them, then its fine.
It’s this skill: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shadow_Meld
Jesus christ is that really deadeye’s elite? That’s so kittening cancerous. Revealed is the one counter to stealth, allowing them to just flat out remove revealed, and then also re-apply stealth in the same skill, is just broken.
The skill designers really need to stop with this constant one-upmanship. Stop introducing mechanics that circumvent balancing mechanics in the game. Removing revealed needs to go. 100% damage reduction from spellbreakers full counter needs to go. Anything else that is designed in a similar manner needs to be thrown out and re-designed
Welcome to Guild Wars 2, where by now no skill should have less than 4 total effects. Also the more spammable the better. Instead of any purity of design, we get barraged with effects and skills at all times.
I mean, having skills that do 4 things is definitely a problem. But its a smaller problem than what this is. This is none other than ignoring counters and balancing mechanics.
Stealth is a ridiculously powerful mechanic, and its pretty broken in GW2 in its current implementation. Revealed is the one and only counter to it. This allows deadeye to flat out ignore the one and only counter to stealth in this game.
Spellbreakers full counter is similar. At its core, its a blocking skill that procs various effects if you sucessfully block something. But the counter to blockable skills is unblockable skills. However, this ignores that counter by instead going with a flat 100% damage reduction, allowing it to also block damage from unblockable attacks. Yet its not invulnerability, so you can still contest nodes while using it.
This is pure cancerous design. The Anet skill and class design teams really need to figure out that adding new mechanics into the game purely to ignore counters and balancing mechanics is the quickest way to ruin a game’s balance forever. You can’t improve it by making it more and more complicated, you just can’t.
I’m not surprised that rev got even more alacrity yet base mesmer didn’t get any.
Jesus christ is that really deadeye’s elite? That’s so kittening cancerous. Revealed is the one counter to stealth, allowing them to just flat out remove revealed, and then also re-apply stealth in the same skill, is just broken.
The skill designers really need to stop with this constant one-upmanship. Stop introducing mechanics that circumvent balancing mechanics in the game. Removing revealed needs to go. 100% damage reduction from spellbreakers full counter needs to go. Anything else that is designed in a similar manner needs to be thrown out and re-designed
If its an F skill then it would be a shatter, so there would be nothing to retarget to.
Base mesmer needs a forced retarget skill. Even if it is in the elite slot on a decently short CD (think 25-35 seconds), we do need one on core mesmer.
How the bloody 4377 do you think one solo character with exotic armor only can defeat a boss and 20 adds? Are you kidding me. That’s the same problem I had with HOT. I solo this game. None of my friends play anymore. So I’m supposed to go into story mode with NPCs that die instantly and fight my way through and then go further in with no NPC helpers at all? Tune it down and up the rewards or most will never do the story modes at all. And where’s the dragon hunter’s bow.
I bought Path of Fire because of the open world. I doubt very much based on this that I will do the story mode at all.
And before you all criticize, I have a high level dragon hunter that does high level fractals. In fact, every one of my characters is level 80, medium to high level fractals. Solo story mode in these expansions is a pain in the kitten terrible rewards and dying every 2 minutes because you are one again 20 adds and a boss is ridiculous.
So I’m asking the devs to tune it down on the story mode content. Some of us don’t have a merry band of four/five that we can take into story mode.
Ignore the boss until the adds are dead. The boss is slow and has very slow attacks that are fairly easy to dodge out of. Just focus on pulling 1 or 2 adds away and killing them, then find a few more and kill them. When the adds are dead, focus on the boss.
Its not hard if you do it that way. But if you try to tackle the boss first then it becomes significantly more difficult. Hopefully this helps, if you even read the response
I believe we will see gem store mount “skins” that have more dye channels. And I don’t have a problem with that, it should bring in more money for Anet while still remaining a purely cosmetic upgrade.
I kind of enjoy how the events are more spread out. While I like the density of events in HoT maps, I do also like to relax and enjoy the scenery, and that is very hard to do when events are practically on top of each other combined with enemies everywhere
Triple Trouble, major world bosses, crafting Legendary weapons (i.e. defeating Vinetooth Prime), and I’m sure there are others.
Could you go into more detail as to what you think the actual issues are? Is it population? Difficulty of said encounters (and if so, what kind of difficulty? Coordination difficulty like TT, or just difficulty of having enough players who know what to do, like DS)? Timing?
I really love the mounts. Like others have said, they feel incredibly fluid and lifelike. I especially love the inertia that the raptor has! It really brings to mind that you are actually riding an animal.
And the animations are beyond beautiful as well. Seriously, props to the entire team who worked on mounts. They do have some small bugs with terrain, but other than that they are pretty much everything I could have wanted out of mounts.
I for one would like much shorter breaks in between seasons. Especially since so much of the reward structure of PvP is tied up in seasons.
I disagree on the ammo system not being any better. I think its a vast improvement over the previous iteration. The implementation leaves a lot to be desired, but it gives Anet more control over mantras, so they now have the ability to customize each mantra more than they used to.
So I need to point out one thing here, ANet explicitly said that they wanted mesmer mantras to be unique from firebrand (or whatever its called) mantras. And to accomplish that, our mantras were designed to encourage combat casting. Its literally intended for us to “waste” our charges so that we have to rechannel to get the effect we actually want from the mantra. Think of the charges as just being bonuses at this point.
Now, whether you think the new mantras accomplish this goal and have a payout relative to their charge time is a different issue. But we are supposed to be combat casting them.
As for my issues with them, I haven’t spent much time with the new mantras so I will update this later once I play with them more. But a few big issues:
- 2.25 seconds is still a ridiculously long channel time, especially in a PvP environment. Ideally we should have a 1.75 sec cast time. Still long, but no skill that isn’t broken is worth a 2+ second channel that can be interrupted. 2.25 seconds is still too long imo
- The ammunition system was a real chance to cater the amount of charges each mantra received specific to that skill. For example, power lock is powerful and as such is good at just having 2 charges, but power return might be better balanced with 3 charges considering the large cooldown on each charge.
- As others have pointed out, the recharge time on the charges is a bit ridiculous for some of the mantras. Power break is particularly bad for a variety of reasons. A 30 second CD on a stunbreak is not that bad really, but the focus was supposed to be on combat casting, so why is the charge effect better than the effect we get once we fully channel mantra of concentration? Power break breaks stun and grants 3 stacks of stab, fully channeling mantra of concentration (which, btw, is no small task to do without stab already on you in a competiive environment) gives you a single stack of stab and aegis. This active effect is not strong enough to warrant combat casting of this mantra imo
- Power return in particular is a really weak heal. Revert the nerf to healing if we are above 50% health. Consider that this is a 2.25 second channel just to get access to our heal skill. it takes a considerable amount of investment to guarantee that channel, and our reward is a 20 second heal that is significantly less powerful than mirror (a full second faster cast time, extra ~1,500 base healing from the “under 50% health” healing value from power return, extra ~2,700 base healing from the “above 50% health” healing power from power return, along with a much higher HP modifier, along with a base CD of only 15 seconds, which is 5 seconds faster than the recharge time on power return). I get the purpose of the skill and everything, but it doesn’t make sense to nerf the healing so hard when we are above 50% health. Just remove that stupid change. Even if we blow through both charges immediately, it takes a total of 3.25 seconds to get a grand total of 7,860 health back, and that’s assuming that you were so low that both the heal on channel and the first charge we’re not enough to get you back above 50% health. That is beyond weak for the amount of investment we have to put for that, and conditions we have to meet.
These are the biggest issues that I see with mantras right now
Yea hopefully that gets fixed before launch. But this is also why these demo weekends are such a good thing. This might be something that ANet wasn’t even aware of before today.
With the current elite specialization costs, you could unlock your entire HoT elite specialization with only central tyria hero challenges, and I’m hoping that you could do that again for PoF elite specializations and only HoT hero challenges. That way I can try out all of the new stuff while working on hero challenges for the next expansion.
That’s not true. There are 189 HPs in core tyria (every map that counts for map completion), a few more in Southsun, Dry Top and Silverwastes, and then a handful in WvW. But you need 250 to unlock your HoT elite spec. So best case is you have around 200 HP from core tyria, would still need 5 HoT HPs to fully unlock the spec
Hopefully soon.
I imagine the rule breaker could eventually tie into some sort of jail system like what is in Rata Sum. Well I hope that at least as its much more immersive that way.
As to identification, I didn’t try that out (mainly just rode around on the raptor for a bit and logged off), but if it is 1.7 silver each, that is a bit steep. Maybe 1 silver would be a good price though?
And the first instance was pretty easy, just rather long compared to other instances we’ve had. I didn’t even bother to change the default mesmer build for it, completed it no problem.
The mount seems clunky to me.
- Gets caught on the terrain a lot
- Tends to be overly difficult to turn or pivot
- Jumps are hard to time for me. Either I jump way too soon and don’t cross the gap, or I end up waiting too long and don’t get off the jump. There also seems to be a bug where the jump simply doesn’t activate at all sometimes.
- The opening strike thing (even with mastery 1 & 2 unlocked) doesn’t seem very useful.
The jumping part will just take practice.
But about the opening strike, its intentional that its not very good, ANet doesn’t want us fighting from mounts. Its literally just a way to get that tiny bit of extra damage while you are dismounting, other than that its honestly just a dismount.
They’ve said that, but I find it hard to believe that they won’t have any major PvP or WvW features in an expansion.
I personnally don’t understand the point of a public beta test if the elite spec aren’t avaible. I don’t want story spoilers …
This is not a beta test tho. This is just a small demo.
i beg to differ
The screen literally says “DEMO” at the top of it…..
2 problems with this
1 – Removing the blind on interrupt weakens your sustain in a duel by removing a pretty big source of blind. So I don’t like removing blind, especially considering it is the dueling line
2 – We already have a trait in domination that deals power damage on interrupts, which means we would essentially have 2 identical traits. Keep ineptitude as the condition one, keep the domination one as the power damage one.
That said, an argument could be made for updating power block significantly. Namely, making it affect skills that have an initiative cost, and increasing the damage it does.
To play the devil’s advocate, the fractal is new, so people aren’t used to its mechanics yet. Give it some time, and I’m sure pugs will clear it more consistently.
Sure, because the people that can’t clear it consistently will stop pugging it.
The mechanics aren’t really that bad. It only takes a bit to get the hang of them.
The answer is not portal. Its portal and moa. Because people can’t ever grasp how moa works, so they want mesmer nerfed into the ground to compensate for it.
Sure to berserkers power, hell no to adrenal health. You should have to make a conscious decision to save up for a T3 burst outside of berserker mode in order to get that T3 adrenal health. It shouldn’t be given away literally for free just for playing berserker, like it has been since HoT dropped
Oh I still need to go and do that achievement :/
While OP shouldn’t be singling out DD mechanics like this, he does bring up a good point. Dodge rolling should never in and of itself damage opponents. Conditionally damaging someone (like if you actually evaded an attack instead of just randomly dodging) are fine, but a dodge roll that automatically damages, or gives you a lasting damage boost, is not ok and should be looked at.
Yeah, bit of a shame. I think overall I’d genuinely prefer Confusion to just deal damage on skill activation again, but it’d require a massive overhaul of the entire condition / skill mechanic in the game to be viable across modes.
That would never be viable in PvE, but for WvW/PvP that would probably be best for confusion in order to keep its uniqueness.
The conditions are split anyway so what’s to stop them giving PvP confusion 10% of the PvE tick but maybe even higher skill damage?
Theoretically nothing. Realistically balance is stopping them. With such a drastic change to confusion they would have to do a complete balance of all skills/traits/runes that can apply confusion and look at the duration and number of stacks. That would be a big undertaking that might as well be accompanied by an entire overhaul to the condition system instead of just addressing confusion.
Obviously lol it has the potential to be very overpowered, especially if we can force 3 clones at once to all use ambush attacks with mirage cloak. I understand why they didn’t go with this.
It might just be because this was a pug full of inexperienced people (seriously, someone didn’t know what snowblind was), but at lower tiers the bosses seemed like a bit of a punching bag still. Mechanics aren’t that bad once you get used to them, but the HP seems a little inflated for uncoordinated groups. That could be intended though
Yea, apharma gets it. We are actually punished for using our F skills. Other classes might have slightly less DPS for a few seconds if they use theirs, but they aren’t punished like mesmer is. So seeing yet more phantasm buffs in this patch is pretty disheartening. Yes, its nice to finally have a decent DPS build, but it still suffers all the problems that phantasm builds suffer, mainly that it is a single target build and still has a noticeable ramp up time. And to get that we actually have to ignore our f skills, or all of our setup is undone for a tiny (for PvE at any rate) tiny little “burst”. Having an effect to recharge our phantasm skills by 2 sec for each illusion shattered go baseline (and then balancing IR and chronophantasma around that) would help out a lot, but even then it wouldn’t change the fact that our mechanic is literally self defeating. Imagine the outcry if rangers’ pets died on pet swap, yet that is roughly what we have to deal with when we use our shatters.
Minstrel chrono is not a dps build.
As for ele, switching to water or earth is just switching to more defensive/supporty skills. Its not as if eles aren’t using attunement swapping or overloads at all. Don’t play enough druid to know what to say about its pet swapping, or lack thereof. But again, a druid a support class, so we should be comparing cRanger to the power mesmer build.
And none of that changes the fact that we have a self defeating mechanic. It literally destroys itself when we use our F skills.
I do think that we will see a new utility type with PoF as well. Just a hunch, but I do think its coming.
if we require a full picture, why bother giving us half a picture which was basically just ruining peoples fun for a month and a half?
Yes, im definitely sure your profession dealing a bit less dps will ruin your fun. Just literally unplayable.
“A bit less”? Like, spec full glass to get every single bit of dps possible, go through a complex rotation, train it so you don’t mess it up, then get in party and get outdps’ed by a support class? Sounds pretty fun, right?
o.0 what dps class got nerfed so hard? I only glanced over most of the changes because there were so many, saw yet another nerf to overload air/fire, but that’s all that caught my eye.
WP said that some core skills would be getting barrier. I guess we have to wait until PoF drops to get those changes? It seems silly to have such a huge balance patch and then not include everything in it all at once. So I don’t understand why the rest of the changes didn’t make it, unless ANet is still trying to decide if that is balanced or not
You don’t think the foods were the least bit overpowered?
From the WvW standpoint there was that -20% condi duration reduction food to cancel it out. I hope that gets nerfed too along with the -10% damage reduction food.
Yea these foods should now be toned down as well. In my opinion food and utilities should always be supplemental to your build, not a fundamental part of it. Yet foods like this and the offensive foods/utilities before this patch were so ridiculously powerful that this was not the case. Overall this was an excellent change and will make the game better
I imagine it came with the PoF files that were downloaded for the beta. We’ve seen that it has a new water renderer at least, so I’m not surprised some other graphics got touched on as well
The change made sense. There was too much overlap between sharpening stones and oils. Does it suck that some players lost a lot of money? Yes. But making them very distinctive is ultimately a good move, otherwise there wouldn’t even be a point in having different types of utilities.
If you have to keep the cap why not at least raise it some? 500 a week is fairly reasonable, allows dedicated players to earn their rewards significantly quicker while still mainly rewarding veteran players (since you’ll need those bonus pips to have a chance at reaching anything close to 500 tickets in reasonable playtimes), and it also doesn’t trivialize it and allow you to earn it in just a few weeks. Its less than twice as fast as currently, but still rewards people who put extra time into WvW
Mesmer still suffers from a mechanic that is self defeating. Looking here, we can hit close to 30k DPS if optimized with a power build https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6siame/power_mes_post_patch_285k/
But notice that to do that we can never use our shatters. Why is it that 1/2 of our mechanic is ignored? Its because its a self defeating mechanic Anet. Using our shatters should never hurt our DPS by so much and for such a long period of time compared to other classes, it just shouldn’t. Why is it that this is never addressed by you? Why do we just have to ignore our F skills to have any chance at a decent DPS build?
That’s interesting, I haven’t had the chance to get in game yet to see but this sounds like a really nice PvE buff.
Yeah, bit of a shame. I think overall I’d genuinely prefer Confusion to just deal damage on skill activation again, but it’d require a massive overhaul of the entire condition / skill mechanic in the game to be viable across modes.
That would never be viable in PvE, but for WvW/PvP that would probably be best for confusion in order to keep its uniqueness.
Having the burning apply to mage attacks would be better. Or better yet, though this might be too strong for an adept trait, would be to have all of your attacks while wielding a torch have a chance to apply burning.
To sum up, it’s nice to actually do something else in open world than twiddle my thumbs. No idea how long this novelity will last. It’s also worth mentioning that mesmer was one of the only classes which came out with almost only buffs from the rebalance just as an fyi to everyone who was constantly arguing mesmer was fine pre rebalance.
Don’t let azukas see this lol but yes it was nice to not be nerfed for once
These changes are just so…… underwhelming. The cast time reduction on mantras is welcomed, but overall teh changes seem pointless to me. The count recharge times are fairly long in general. And the rest of the changes were mediocre at best.
Ineptitude and mistrust getting gutted was absurd as well. Yea, ineptitude would have been ridiculously overpowered with mirage cloak, but at the same time I don’t see why core mesmer should be nerfed to account for that. Fairly disappointed honestly, especially considering that in the same patch where mistrust is removed, Warrior’s “Merciless Hammer” trait gets an improved version of mistrust tacked onto additional effects (4 stacks for 8 seconds on interrupt, vs our 4 stacks for 6 seconds. Not to mention that merciless hammer also offers CD reduction on hammer skills AND improved damage from hammer skills against disabled foes).
Where the kitten is the logic in that? Clearly the effects of mistrust were not overpowered……. so why did we lose it when warrior got a better version of it?
Fair enough, as long as they add another stat that condition builds need to invest in to gain max benefit. Like halve all the durations and then let condition damage crit so you need to invest in ferocity as well.
In all seriousness, this would be a good fix:
- Condition Damage removed.
- Condition Duration removed.
- Conditions now scale from Power.
- Conditions can now critically hit.
- Critical Hits are calculated per tick, and will use your Precision and Ferocity values.
This has two big upsides: For one, it puts the balancing game in the hands of scaling numbers alone, making it easy to balance DoT vs DD on each specific class.
Second, as they now both scale the same way, and the only big difference is DPS vs DPCT focus (and ofc cleansing vs toughness), classes can be designed to inherently work “more with DoTs” or “more with DDs”. As a function of class theme.
That’s straight powercreep though. Now you could focus purely on a power build and still be dealing huge damage with your conditions. Is that what you really want instead of making people choose between power and condition (even though some stat sets are fairly decent at both)?