Eh, really the only change I want to see is to lower the time we have to wait to use the skill to 0.5-0.75 seconds. Other than that I think its pretty much fine as it is
Mystic Coins are only used in the production of top end luxury items.
This is not at all true. Go look on the wiki for all of the uses for MC, there are way more uses for them that are not high end luxury items than there are high end luxury items that use MC.
So basically, before the teleport didn’t happen because two bugs countered each other. Then one bug got fixed and it revealed the presence of another bug.
Yeah this kinda stuff is why fixing bugs in a codebase with millions of lines of code is always scary. Sometimes its better to NOT fix a bug :P
Do you have an example of a bug that if fixed could mess up a diff something else?
When designers play “Attached” effects on a creature, the effect is actually rotated 180 degrees the wrong way due to a code bug. So artists and designers would manually rotate the effect to work. But since there are already thousands of attached effects, fixing this bug would break all of those effects.
Granted, with some work you could probably make a clever python script to find all references to all attached effects and manually do some kind of fixup along with the patch, but it will still break for people working in different code streams than the main one that you do your fixes in.
thought this would have been fixed by now…
The fix is in the arkk balance patch. Just wait a day.
Lol. You are amazing for taking the time to interact with us like this and tell us great stories. You should seriously consider running a mini blog where you just post stuff like this to it.
Complaining? No. But look at the attacks again. As individual attacks, they aren’t near strong enough to warrant using a dodge to gain access to it. They just aren’t. Only when using clones to launch 3 or 4 ambush attacks at once are they worth that tradeoff
Was he banned or something?
I don’t think you’re qualified to make assumptions about me Ori, or assertions about directx performance.
If you really think modern APIs play no part in how well an engine can perform, a quick google can immediately find mountains of data to explain why that’s not correct.
If you really think a shiny new API will make the game run better then you don’t know what an API is.
The devs have explained before that the render thread is not the cause of bottlenecks in GW2, its the main thread because its overloaded with too many things to update right now. That is where the lag comes from 99% of the time according to the devs. And moving to DX10/11/12 will only ever affect the render thread. So it will improve the performance of a thread that isn’t limiting the performance of GW2. Plus, GW2 itself isn’t designed to run very well in parallel processing last we were told, which means it wouldn’t even be able to take advantage of the multicore abilities of newer directX editions, which means the majority of any improvement you might see to the render thread (again, not the cause of the lag) wouldn’t happen regardless.
It would be a massive project to update the engine to work with DX10/11/12, and it wouldn’t fix the lag. It would not make the game better to run.
All you did was see a shiny new number and a shiny demo and just assumed that a newer version would unequivocally mean that the entire game would work better. Which means you really don’t know a thing about what directX even is.
Just remember that you can complete the hearts in LWS3 maps daily for more karma.
@apharma – I guess we’re looking at it differently. This was billed as a DPS spec, no? Yet it pumps out primarily stacks of torment and confusion from what I have seen. Yes, the 1 scepter attack outputs 5 stacks of each, but compared to what some of these other specs are putting out that’s just downright pitiful. Holosmith’s third strike in the auto attack chain has a base damage of around 1,000 and you honestly think that a single ambush attack will keep up with specs like that? It won’t sadly. Either infinite horizon should be moved to minor, or every spec should be nerfed hard immediately.
Also, remember the tradeoff. I don’t know how abundant the mirrors are going to be yet, but without them we are using a dodge to pull off ambush attacks. So they aren’t exactly free, if there are no mirrors out, we have to actually use a dodge to pull them off, which means we have to decide between saving a dodge for a big attack or doing a bit of extra damage for 1, maybe 2, attacks.
It has been explained before that upgrading to DX 11 will not improve performance in GW2. If you honestly think it will then you really have no idea what DirectX even is, much less what it does or why GW2 performance isn’t as good as it could be.
Full counter needs to be toned down significantly.
Just for slotting the spell breaker line, you get full counter on an 8 second base CD. Just as a reminder to everyone, this skill does the following:
- Straight up ignores the next attack. It doesn’t block it, it ignores all the damage it does. So it works against unblockable attacks as well (seriously, we should never have anything other than full invulnerability that can stop an unblockable attack). No way to get through it
- Has an AoE, unblockable daze attached to it
- 8 second base CD
That’s beyond ridiculous. Remove the daze and it would still be incredibly strong just for its short CD.
As far as I can tell sand shards has no ICD, start considering that and how many ways you can get mirage cloak (hint there’s another trait for this) and you can see some obvious synergy. The question for me is if these mirage cloaks you can pick up also make you evade attacks, if so you can have some high evade and damage uptime, slap some krait runes on and that’s 2×9s of bleed every time you evade or shatter.
4-6 bleeds will knock off half the opponents health and I’m not including the additional condition duration part which will become a free 20% duration almost. This is not a terrible trait at all.
That’s all fine and well, but you need the GM to apply mirage cloack to your clones presumably (there might be an inherent AoE application in a small radius around you, idk). And truthfully, those ambush attacks are really only good if you are throwing off 3 or 4 of them at once. So sharing mirage cloak with clones should be baseline
We don’t really know how good the attacks are and the ability to make clones do that attack sounds like an upgrade not something that should be baseline considering how strong it could be. I don’t want a repeat of HoT where things are just power crept and allowing crazy trait synergy.
Allowing these two traits in the same build would be insane, it would be the old roaming Mesmer on steroids, still might be even picking one of these traits.
We have tooltips for some of them, and they are fairly underwhelming when you can only use them 1 at a time (say, like, if your clones aren’t getting mirage cloak, so only you can perform the ambush attacks).
From what I have seen, it looks like the spec is designed around and balanced around your clones having access to mirage cloak as well, so if we have to trait just to give it to them, then its underwhelming imo. Though the mirrors might automatically grant cloak to the clones as well, which would be different.
If Renegade and Base Rev are getting all this Alacrity, can base Mesmer get some pls k thx
Forreal though. Its kind of kitten that alacrity was given to core rev without being given to core mesmer.
As far as I can tell sand shards has no ICD, start considering that and how many ways you can get mirage cloak (hint there’s another trait for this) and you can see some obvious synergy. The question for me is if these mirage cloaks you can pick up also make you evade attacks, if so you can have some high evade and damage uptime, slap some krait runes on and that’s 2×9s of bleed every time you evade or shatter.
4-6 bleeds will knock off half the opponents health and I’m not including the additional condition duration part which will become a free 20% duration almost. This is not a terrible trait at all.
That’s all fine and well, but you need the GM to apply mirage cloack to your clones presumably (there might be an inherent AoE application in a small radius around you, idk). And truthfully, those ambush attacks are really only good if you are throwing off 3 or 4 of them at once. So sharing mirage cloak with clones should be baseline
Personally I’m hoping they do the full balance patch. The game will be broken for a month and a half but it’ll be fun, honest
If the patch makes balance better then balance will be good even without the new elite specs in the game. But if its only “balanced” with the new specs, then the balance is near non existent, since it ignores HoT elite specs and core classes.
This was put into the game to appease veterans who have been whining about having nothing to spend karma on for years, and therefore have accumulated millions of it. Its honestly not that much karma for someone who has been actively playing for 5 years and has nothing else to spend karma on.
Still though, LWS3 was extremely heavy on how much karma it costs to buy all the exclusive stuff, and I hope that trend doesn’t continue with expac 2 and LWS4.
Going to have to step in and disagree heavily with this because I want Mirage to be viable in all game modes and you don’t know what you’re asking for.
GM Trait: Dune Cloak: Use Sand shards when you gain mirage cloak. Conditions applied to bleeding foes have increased duration (20%).
Sand shards: AOE bleeds 2 stacks, 6 seconds, 5 target aoe, 180 radius.If infinite horizon becomes a minor, all illusions get both an ambush attack AND sand shards every time the mirage gains a mirage cloak. That’s going to break balance for a few reasons.
1) The damage is currently balanced around one or the other of these GMs. Having both means that one, or more likely both, get nerfed heavily.
2) Infinite horizon looks easy to counter in PvP. All the illusions attack at the same time so 1 dodge will counter it all. The scepter, staff and axe ambushes (don’t know about the sword/gs yet) are projectiles and likely to be reflectable. Sand shards is instant AOE. Not OP if it’s just the Mirage. 4 procs of an instant cast aoe damage.. is a problem for Sand shard balance.
3) Mesmers have been asking for damage to be tied less to illusions regardless of PvE illusion issues in certain fights or WvW “My illusions blow up instantly and are useless” reasons. I see sand shards as a illusionless DPS GM while infinite horizon is the illusion DPS GM. They should remain mutually exclusive so that both can be balanced to be strong in their respective areas.
Especially for the WvW zerg players that want to DPS as a mesmer, infinite horizon can’t be a minor because they need something like Sand shards to work. Instead we should be asking for a buff to Sand shards. That 180 radius is pitiful. Also think it needs more damage.
This would still be less powerful than some of the other specs previewed though, which means mirage would still be behind.
I’m still interested to see how phantasms will interact with mirage cloak. Will they perform an ambush attack as well? If not, will they at least attack as soon as they gain mirage cloak? If that answer is yes, then pistol OH could be pretty good if you get 3 pistol phantasms up
The narrow meta is symptomatic of the players, not systemic to the buildcraft.
But see, in theory this is correct, yes. Only this assumes an infinite amount of resources to use for balancing purposes and game design.
Even in extremely narrow designs (WoW after the removal of talent trees for example, or with vanilla trees), perfect balance is usually agreed to be impossible. Even the best of balance will still lead to clear favoritism by the community, and in WoW, even with the much much larger money and manpower Blizzard throws at that game, 2%-3% were all it took for one DPSer to be rolled by everyone and their mother.
Guild Wars 2 has… I’d guess easily x1000000 times the possible build options? And yet the balance is so problematic even between the handful of “meta” builds that even speculating about how great all these combinations could be is just … absurd. IMO. There is no value in the variety, and there hasn’t been for 5 years now.
If anything, a narrower choice system would lead to less players running around with extremely weak setups, then clinging to them because of the time invested. Setups they end up with as a result of a deluge of options, a lack of clarity, a lack of balance and an absence of explanations.
As the game hasn’t significantly changed in this regard in, well, 5 years now (and to be fair given the raw amount of options I don’t blame the devs for this, again, WoW struggles to handle a teensy tiny fraction of choices with a much larger company), I don’t see how this would ever improve.
Because while yes, on paper a ton of options and custom setups would be nice, in reality first having 5-6 good setups per class and then as developers end up sitting around bored in the office breaking up elements into new choices, that seems much more sensible to me.
I agree with your premise, but that isn’t an excuse for why some things remain so broken for so long, or why other skills/traits are absolute garbage and Anet doesn’t care. Or why some classes haven’t yet been allowed a proper DPS spec at all outside of the most niche scenarios in game.
Its not a technology problem, the engage skill proves that. Its a design choice. They don’t want us to be playing the game from on top of mounts. Mounts are meant purely as a movement mastery, just like gliding or mushrooms.
It definitely should be a minor trait.
@Sigmoid – Like apharma said, its way overtuned. This was a problem with HoT where skills were doing too many things at once, and now its just worse in PoF so far. It shouldn’t be boon corrupting or damaging enemies. It should only be porting allies, and the barrier it gives them should be much lower as well.
That would actually allow them to increase the range of it as well. This is just kitten design.
ArenaNet, you are going in the wrong direction!
You need to nerf baseline durations, not the duration of the increases. Stats should be required, not just have everyone running around with an average.
Now you’ll have people with full Expertise only doing 7.5sec bleed while someone with a build nothing related to conditions does 5sec. The problem is that the base conditions come too often and too long, not the increases.
Why do you think almost no one even takes Condition Duration? All existing condi builds are built almost entirely around Condition Damage alone.
My dumb suggestions:
- Change Condition Duration to an absolute; i.e, having 50% means that your conditions last only 50% of their normal time, not 150%.
- Give players a base Condition Duration(Expertise) of 50%, and make it able to increase to 150% with the use of Expertise and duration% gear.This will put conditions back in the hands of condition users, not random joe builds.
Also almost no one uses the new foods outside of raids and WvW because it takes too many resources to craft something that only lasts for 30-45 minutes, we’re talking up to five gold for some of the benefits which is too much.
At least introduce lower level versions of the foods to save costs.
A – there will be lower levels of the food and utilities. Nowhere did they say that they were removing non level 80 food/utilities.
B – This change will help enforce needing teh stats. Now you actually have to build for condition duration if you want it, instead of having stupidly easy ways to hit 100% duration and then going tanky and just kiting while you outlasted their cleanses. This is literally what this change is implementing, so how can you be upset over it?
i hope they also address 10% damage reduction food, not just pve foods
Yea, those foods are kitten as well. But one step at a time if nothing else. These changes were sorely needed and I’m happy that they are finally being implemented
https://i.redd.it/uwg4kdtj7cdz.jpg
Based on that image, Scourge’s portal will last for 20 seconds as opposed to our 10 seconds, will give allies that use it a HUGE barrier of around 1,300, as well as convert boons on any enemies that are near it when its placed, as well as it actually dealing damage.
This is kitten. This isn’t sharing portal with another class, this is flat out giving portal 2.0 to another class and not giving mesmer anything in return for it. I mean hell, our own portal isn’t even updated to match this. Not to mention a 28 kittening second CD on this, instead of the 72 seconds on portal for mesmers.
It would be fine if other classes were given portal. Its kitten that they are given something that is way better than portal is. Especially for a PvP environment this is kitten.
Its replaced with blur, important distinction. Blur doesn’t keep you from contesting nodes, distortion does. So pray that ANet doesn’t nerf this to be a distortion effect (especially since that would trivialize distortion share. No longer needing a bar full of signets).
Well, it will make it harder to hit 100% boon duration.
Overall I’m happy with this announcement. I’ve been saying for a while now that utility and food buffs were way too powerful. Nerfing them this hard is good for the game. I just hope that the rest of the changes in this balance patch are this good.
If it is better than mesmer portal then its going to be stupid that it was given away. And if it has “extra” mechanics like cleansing conditions then it may be better than mesmer portal depending on how limited its range is
I’m worried about the HoT maps, especially since they revolve entirely around their metas. Depending on when you play, it can already be hard enough to find 2 maps completing the meta on VB or TD, and its just going to get worse when the expansion drops and the HoT maps are all but abandoned for a while.
Giving away portal would be to give the very last unique Mesmer skill away.
I have to admit, watching the video again, I did not see the Scourge use a portal. I saw them use AOE and a Revenant style bouncing/jump attack. I don’t see a portal.
Look at the very second I linked to. It shows a prompt to use a portal. Except its not a mesmer portal prompt, its a different color and a different symbol, along with no mesmer portal on screen.
Last thing chrono needs os a buff. Of any kind.
Lowest dps increase of the 3 support classes in Raids
Lowest dps of the 3 support classes in Raids.
Useless in Open/Stories/Achievement hunting.Utterly necessary for any real support, fairly irreplaceable for tanking while not losing any boon-support ability…you shouldn’t be able to do incredible dps if you can do everything else too. Not everything is about big numbers
Not this old kitten again.
Some players want other options. They DO NOT want the support spec to do high dps at the same time of supporting.
Just look at mesmer pure DPS specs who bring very little support. These specs are useless. This is where players want change.
Chrono FOCUSES on support and buffing that actually a good thing since its makes the devs job easier to create diff elite specs. If you dont want supporting dont olay chrono.
Alot of dos secs bring little to no spport. utilitiy and buffing isnt everything if your dmg is high enough you are fine. And im sure Mirage will do just that.
If you want to see power buffs they should then make a doff elite spec for it.
Just cause chrono focuses on support and buffing doesn’t mean that core mesmer can’t focus on damage or that mesmer can’t have a valid and competitive damage spec. I mean, look at ranger and druid. Druid not only is one of the best healers, but also is an incredibly powerful buffer with its spirits and GotL, yet core ranger also has a strong condi dps build that is pretty simple to play as well.
ANet has shown that they can do that, so why do you and so many other people continuously argue that just because chrono is good at buffing, that mesmer is not allowed a proper dps spec at all? Its illogical
These specs look awful honestly. I mean they look fun, but the powercreep is absolutely insane. I was hoping they would have learned from HoT, but this is kitten honestly. The specs WP talked about are ridiculously overpowered. Beyond broken.
Well… is this a surprise?
I mean this entirely seriously. GW2 has no increasing item level and no increasing player level. With HoT they did exactly as expected, used a rampant power boost across the board as their own version of boosting player power. And ofc now with PoF it happens again.
Same as any other MMO increasing player level, there is really nothing surprising about this :o
Honestly yes, it did surprise me. Given how poorly received the powercreep in HoT was, I was expecting them to not repeat the same mistakes. Except some of the elite specs teased were worse than what HoT brought.
Because high burst out of stealth has never been an issue in MMOs which draws a lot of hate from players.
I predict they will gut us like a dead fish the moment Mirage hits spvp and wvw.
At least there is some hope that with skill splitting pve might not be affected to hard.
We shall see.
Our one saving grace is that thief got an even more ridiculous elite with its kittening deadeye rifle. So people will kitten and whine about that too instead of only focusing on mesmer.
I’m excited about mirage honestly. While I’m not sold on it being the dps spec we were told was comind via leaks, it looks like a lot of fun to play in open world PvE at the very least.
Though honestly, its one of the least powerful specs that WP showcased, so if it gets nerfed without the other ones getting nerfed way harder that’s just plain stupid
How is this in any way a downgrade for mesmer?
I agree with @Rong – Weaver is ridiculously overpowered based on what was shown. Some of those traits and skills need to be nerfed hard
This seems extremely evade heavy as well, which does fit in with mesmer’s theme imo.
So from watching WPs stream, mirage’s DPS seems to come from giving your clones mirage cloak and watching them load insane condi stacks via their ambush attacks. He was hitting some pretty good stacks in a short time by basicaly autoattacking and “dodging”.
When you combine the enhanced vigor with all of the sources for mirage cloak, I can see how it might have decent DPS.
Also @Me Games Ma – I feel like that second GM will be way better than the third, since it would allow your clones to use ambush attacks as well instead of just you. Opening up the potential for 4 ambush attacks simultaneously all stacking conditions.
Well I don’t have any details on it yet. I don’t know if its as useful as our portal is. It might be only for the scourge that uses it.
Portal’s balance was in its pretty limited use cases though. Super in jump quests and dungeon speed runs, but of very limited use anywhere else in PvE with few exceptions (and even some of those got patched like using portal to cheese gorsevals auto-kill mechanic that one time).
WvW and PvP wise, its a lot more powerful. But without knowing any details on Scourge’s portal, its hard to say if this is just handing portal away to hand it away or to balance how useful it can be.
I really wonder if mounts would trivialize navigating around HoT maps. Its already easy enough with the HoT masteries, but imagine having that jumping ability from the springer or the raptor, and not needing to have a mushroom anywhere near you to jump onto the cliff above you, or cross the chasm to get to the other side.
Why do people think graphics API has anything to actually do with graphics ? DirectX 11 and 12 are APIs, nothing more, they provide an interface to the programmer, and don’t determine what kind of content you can create.
Even if they completely rewrote the game the graphics would not just magically look better, this is a myth that is used to sell bad games.
All you’d really gain is better CPU usage from thread-safe GPU model.
This would require anet to actually work on their engine and improve it. Something they have never shown any interest in doing. So no, it’s not gonna happen unfortunately.
They have massively improved the engine over the years, at launch the game could barely handle world bosses with 10-20 players, much less the kind of content that was introduced with HoT and LS3 and now PoF.
Even just Tequatl and Shatterer required significant internal retuning.
Because people fundamentally don’t know anything abotu computers and programming. They see a higher number, read some marketing line and assume that it will unequivocally be better in all situations and that it will be dead simple to implement.
The specs sound ridiculously overpowered based on WPs post announcement stream. I really hope they are nerfed hard before release
I don’t understand why so many people are upset over mounts. Fundamentally they are no different from any other mobility mastery we have received so far. They allow you to travel to new places in teh world that are locked behind that mounts’s upgraded ability.
If you don’t like them, then don’t use them. But just because we have mounts doesn’t mean GW2 is a generic MMO
https://youtu.be/nflQFIFnpVo?t=205
So yea. I thought this was interesting to give portal away. I don’t know if it is a personal one or an actual portal anyone can use like ours is though
These specs look awful honestly. I mean they look fun, but the powercreep is absolutely insane. I was hoping they would have learned from HoT, but this is kitten honestly. The specs WP talked about are ridiculously overpowered. Beyond broken.
Why tf did Warrior, the profession with the most weapons already, get 2 weapons with the elite spec?
They literally just announced last week that they have switched to shipping competitive updates as soon as they are ready, instead of holding them for an expansion release. No competitive features in the expansion doesn’t mean no competitive changes are coming.
It’s going to be insanely OP
Do you have inside knowledge or just guessing?