Guild Wars 2

Your move, anet:

I think that elementalist attacks suck by design. But hey, you have 4 of them so they should be 4 times as weak, right? Wrong…

Anyhow, you have plenty of things to use that aren’t them, so they might as well not even exist. Improving them would make the elementalist’s weak skills appear even weaker, which once again, seems to be by design.

Winds.3087:

You compare that huge purple aura around mesmer when he’s casting moa with necromancer’s mark animations? That’s… weird, to say the least.

His point was that marks don’t have a distinct cast, and can be used right on player. It’s hard to dodge roll out of a mark being cast right on you.

As for moa, it has the same animation as mass invis.

I’d love a larger/more obvious one for aegis too! It’s impossible to see on anyone standing within any aoe, or near pets. So mesmers, mostly.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Sure, but then would you see it? And if there is a different effect for each sigil (or rune set), then don’t you need to make them more distinct than just a slight green weapon glow so you can tell them apart?

Sure you would, the same way you see forged weapon’s glow. They’re quite obvious when someone carries them.

Most other sigils already have effects; air, fire, water, etc.

I think they balanced these traits around an older, better version of vulnerability, where 4-7 stacks might have been a good amount to do something noticeable. But it no longer is outside of super duper high damage builds, why don’t really happen in sPvP/WvW (so half the game).

The problem is that it was probably balanced around the idea of using it as a very short cooldown whirl finisher… but they’re awful right now. Whirl finishers need a buff, or this skill needs to go. It’s weaker than an auto attack, so what’s the point? To cover your stronger conditions? Who uses axes and conditions?

Poor design.

The effect could just be a slight green weapon glow. Something as simple as that. Don’t say that’d clutter anything, because then you’d have to remove forge weapons since they glow too!

Arganthium.5638:

I would be willing to voice my opinion on this show.

Depends, are they taking nobodies on the show as well?

Scoundrel.2139:

Sometimes, I wish the word “Subjective” was actually 15 characters long…

You mean, like your own experience(s) with this achievement?

PvE isn’t scaled up, so compared to others you may do a bit less damage, but stuff didn’t become harder. Were you good three days ago? You’ll be good in a month.

Hi, I am anet. I want to defend a point. I bring up nonsensical arguments, then never comment back. Truly yours, anet.

ps: i am anet

Mammoth.1975:

Condispam meta has nothing to do with anet. Hivemind too slow to figure out the counter is all. 5000 people just watched a warrior walk all over SYNC and the spvp forum is still whining about condis. Good for lols I guess.

No s**t sherlock? A warrior with an entire trait tree, gear and utility skills dedicated to countering conditions fare well against conditions?

yoshoken.9432:

Boycotting the Gem Store.. you are so going to punch yourself later on for missing these items when they’re no longer available.

I’m not sure where you got the “thousands” numbers as I can assure you, the achievement is doable. I personally have it and I continuously see chat of people stating they just finished it.

All of those “technical restrictions” listed by Josh Davis are all things having to do with the player. Even the random DCing isn’t a problem if you had participated in any of the events in the map (you just have to sit around in the map until the event is done). Did you seriously expect achievement credit when all you do throughout the event is farm Aetherblade/Molten Champions? The first step to healing is admitting guilt.

Edit: I’ve also received Credit when akitteng. I got on, killed a few twisted invaders and then ported to a safe location. Came back to see the Scarlet loot and my counter advanced by 1. Of course I’ve only done this a couple times but it works.

There’s the issue, lady. It works for some, it doesn’t for others. I’m the latter.

GW1 was competitive with decent PvE. I’m pretty darn sure they advertised it as the “next esport”. They’ve clearly given up.

Invasion Canceler is bugged, and we’re getting sick of being given no respect.

Nevermind the fact that the achievement is nothing but a mindless zergy time sink plagued by playtime RNG, your lack of a tracking feature only adds to your intransparency. Have you not learned anything from… anything?

Not only this, but we also have to deal with so called “technical restrictions”. In an attempt to shift the problem on us. But we aren’t the issue. We’re not stupid. It is flat out and straight up bugged, and you haven’t done anything to fix it. Two days left and thousands of us are sweating over something that should be so, so simple.

Why do you fight it, anet? The numbers are in your face. Get to work, or grant us the achievement. I’m indefinitely boycotting the gem store over this.

That’d be pretty sweet, though would you still want it to be a projectile that can be intercepted?

I’d be ok with movement skills getting double cd if it doesn’t hit a target. However, target detection needs to be way better for stuff like rush.

Signet of healing is pretty standard right now. Consider stability for stomping /rezzing, such as signet of dolyak or balanced stance. To deal with conditions, you have berserker stance and signet of stamina. For control, fear me or stomp are good choices. Pick one in each category and you’ll be balanced and stronk

You guys are derailing the thread or not understanding what I was trying to say. Maybe I expressed myself poorly.

The point I was making is that reckless dodge interrupts/prevents your skills from being used for about 0.5 seconds after the roll occurs. As if the damaging effect was a cast in itself.

Derps.7421:

Darcy.2079:

kitten s.7421:

Hmm i cannot tell but was i their with you guys? I was healing you on my necro?

If you saw guild [nine] there, then yes.

Yep im Whitney E Houston.

hey, I’m Minister of Murder

Player Character.9467:

Oxygen.5918:

EvilSardine.9635:

Yes, it will conflict. When you swap to that set it will trigger the battle sigil which has a 9 second cool down. For 9 seconds the strength sigil will not trigger.

Sigil of strength is on-crit effect. It won’t conflict with battle, which is an on-swap effect.

It will, every cooldown sigil conflicts with all other cooldown sigils.

I don’t think you understand here, the cooldown is low enough to be OK in this case (2 sec)

EvilSardine.9635:

Yes, it will conflict. When you swap to that set it will trigger the battle sigil which has a 9 second cool down. For 9 seconds the strength sigil will not trigger.

Sigil of strength is on-crit effect. It won’t conflict with battle, which is an on-swap effect.

Darnis.4056:

Crit is mitigated by weakness right?…
You also need to choose between crit and surviveability on a condi class..
Bunkers should not get on hit weapons…

Crit also decreases the instances of procs.. even at 50% crit with a 20% sigil that’s only 10% chance it’ll go off, what about multi attacks with low low crit, should we buff those builds just because?

There are so many things wrong with your line of thought.

1) You make a counter claim without defending it. Why should bunkers not have access to half the sigils in the game? What is your reasoning behind cutting diversity in a game that lacks diversity despite having like a million ****ing traits and options?

I suggested above to make sigils scale with offensive stats better while removing their crit component. So bunkers would still have less-good sigils, but at least, they’d be an option.

2) Multiattacks aren’t an issue because sigils have internal cooldowns. You’re discussing an issue you haven’t research/do not properly master, so I have nothing else to say to you.

Ryan.9387:

On critical balances the effects of the signets with builds. Imagine a shaman build making use of sigils of earth. Maybe a heavy aoe class with sig of strength. On crit forces people to drop a defensive stat to make use of the offensive power of sigils.

A better way of doing this would be to make sigils scale with power and condition damage…

Wait, they do. Just not enough to really make a difference.

As stated above, akittens core, it’s a good idea to make a poor stats more appealing, but the balance is so terrible that it doesn’t feel the way it should.

Cygnus.6903:

Power is generally better for sustained damage, whereas crit boosts burst. Take your pick.

That’s only circumstancially true. 1 pt of precision will trumpt 1 point of power after 100% crit damage while under the crit cap, and 80% if you have a good fury uptime.

Azrayl.4936:

What I don’t like about the signet heal is that I can’t counter burst. How are others dealing with this? Using a shield as one of their off-hands?

The tankier you are, the better healing signet becomes. 400 per sec is better than surge’s 10k after 25 seconds of fighting only

We should all make new threads about it.

Golems were indeed tweaked to ressemble players more. Your results are in line with the ones I posted above, with arcing arrow keeping its damage (but having the tooltip say reduced), smoldering being doubled and dual shot reduced by 10%.

So far we have Surge at about 25%, mending below 10%, and Signet for the remaining %’s. 57 votes cast.

Zygil.1276:

Was playing around with “improved” longbow traits recently and I’ve come across another issue when choosing to take Stronger Bowstrings. The first well known being the less Dual Shot damage.

Stronger Bowstrings now heavily reduces the damage output of Arcing Arrow compared to its non-traited skill set. Arcing Arrow does roughly 62% less damage and that is HUGE and clearly unintended.

It is bad enough two traits, Stronger Bowstrings and Burning Arrows, are supposed to be required for full Longbow potential, demanding 20 points for one weapon in a single trait line. But now Stronger Bowstrings is counter productive when it reduces the damage output of Dual Shot and more importantly Arcing Arrow heavily. 100% combo finishers are not worth the reduced damage.

I suggest Stronger Bowstrings to just be removed and made into the default weapon skill set for Warrior Longbow. Burning Arrows is enough to take its place in Adept tier. It seems too prone to oversight due to the 2 different skill sets when supposed benefits are applied to Warrior Longbow. The Stronger Bowstring’s skill set either gets nerfed or made worse than the non-traited version.

I recently edited the wiki to include all info regarding this trait. I’ll copy-paste it here for you. Some of your info is wrong, and you don’t want to rely on tooltips. Here:

This trait modifies certain longbow skills in the following manner:

-Dual Shot’s damage is reduced by 10%. This fact reflected in the tooltip.

-Both Dual Shot and Fan of Fire become guaranteed projectile finishers.

-Fan of Fire’s tooltip is changed to display a flat 2 seconds of burning despite still applying one second per arrow hit up to 3, akin to the unmodified skill.

-Arcing Arrow’s tooltip is changed to display 33% less damage. This is however untrue in effect as the skill still deals damage equal to that of the unmodified skill’s.

-Smoldering Arrow’s radius fact becomes hidden and its damage is doubled. The damage increase is reflected in the tooltip.

Kelnis.1829:

It was likely added as a means to make damage less predictable. Most games do this.

Also, if you’re referring to guardians… focus #5 is one of our hardest hitting abilities. If it had a higher weapon damage, well, I wouldn’t complain.

The RNG aspect could be added to every skill, like, as in every skill has a +/-5% damage factor on every hit.

ensoriki.5789:

Oxygen.5918:

Seems like you’re arbitrarily killing build diversity…

It makes specs with low power but high precision have better value given that precision itself isn’t a phenomenal stat without high power to support it.

So, how about making precision better instead? That’s much less convoluted.

It’s like, we want A to be better, so we’ll add B to make C. Why not just change A to C right away?

What’s the point? Different skills have different arbitrarily selected power ratios anyway. Focus damage range is 832–883; greatsword 995–1,100. Does that even matter since focus skills tend to not even, or deal very little damage off the getgo?

I think GW2 was a rushed game, and this is a relic that was never removed or really thought of.

Seems like you’re arbitrarily killing build diversity…

Rifles aren’t offhand, they’re your weapon swap in this case. Get your terminology right!

As for a “good” sword/shield build, it’s hard to say. Relatively, it’ll always be inferior to axe or gs due to traits or scalling. However, if you’re hell bent on using that, then I’ll help out. I’d rather you try to figure things out on your own, and show us some of your work first. I hate birdfeeding, and you’ll learn more by trial and error.

So you run the same meta 0/10/30/0/30 with hammer/longbow instead of the typical mace/shield+gs? Am I missing something here?

I think you should run stomp instead of bull rush as well, especially if you’re looking for team fight potential. It’s invaluable for capping points, shoving people down hills, reviving / preventing revive and it breaks stuns! It’s basically an aoe bull rush.

edit: it’s also a blast finisher which are cool, while bullr is a leap, which is at least half as cool

Reckless dodge appears to “block” the use of your skills for a fraction of a second after completing a dodge roll. Does anyone else feel it? I’m trying to edit the wiki with details regarding to warrior traits and skills, and this one is hard to really test out. The best way you can see if this affects you is by spamming a healing skill while you’re rolling with the trait to see if you’ll get it off quickly. Remember to be in combat.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6GG5ZJ9

Simple survey trying to see which healing skills are more and less popular. Feel free to comment here saying “why” and all.

Good ideas. It’ll add a bit of skill to the game, which caps pretty early

I think this is due to how it has a delay upon firing. Overall, it’s a great skill but it feels super clunky to use, and I often have to makitten to get it off.

do they really censor a-fk?

To answer to the op, it’s pretty simple: Initiative makes the thief binary. In a nutshell, missing some of your more important skills, such as cloak and dagger or black powder (which is a “miss” if you get nothing out of it) will set all of your other skills back. What if, for whatever reason, you fail to heartseeker through BP? You’re down 9 initiative out of 12. No other class suffers as much from missing two skills. Notably, but not limited to, the fact that most thief survival traits rely on offensive skill effects that must land true.

Carrion: 1980 armor, 17245 health
Rabid: 2624 armor, 10805 health

Right off the bat, we note that carrion provides you with 60% more health at the cost of 33% armor. While it’s a little more complex than that, this illustrates how characters with low base health pools (elementalist, guardians and thieves) will have a tendency to benefit from vitality more than higher health characters.

If we take a necromancer, which is a high health low toughness class, for instance, we get the following values:

Carrion: 1836 armor, 24812 health
Rabid: 2480 armor, 18372 health

Carrion provides 35% more health at the cost of 35% armor. Then comes into consideration that condition necromancers benefit much more from precision than from power, due to traits such as Dhuumfire, Barbed Precision, etc. and overall low power coefficients. However, the thief gets no such traits, and tends to have much higher power scalling.

To add to this, necromancers have several built-in ways of shedding conditions (Putrid Mark, Consume, Locust Swarm, Spiteful Removal…), while thieves do not. Given that toughness provides no mitigation against said conditions, carrion’s vitality stands out once again here.

TLDR: Carrion for thief because precision is near useless for non-power builds, and vitality scales better at low health levels than toughness does. It also provides some sort of buffer against conditions, which toughness does not.

edit: one should note that toughness’s value goes up as you heal. However, the illustrated 30~% disparity is still huge, and the other aspects (condition damage, power scalling…) should obviously not be neglected.

Thread title.

To add to this,

At best, this skill doesn’t miss and you can kinda catch someone, though less than just using heartseeker or any other gap closer. At worst, it’ll be “obstructed” by a blade of grass. As if it wasn’t underwhelming already, the tooltip needed to be wrong and for the worse.

Ever wonder why no one reported this? Nobody uses this skill seriously. The damage nerf more or less killed it completely, and now, it’s also useless for condition thieves due to the godawful duration. #1 testing anet.

Winterfell.8915:

Oxygen.5918:

Winterfell.8915:

10/30/0/0/30

As you can see the daze on steal is amazing when ppl are stomping with stabilty. n4 daze when ppl are almost dead and trying to heal :P

And the burst its just a fun build with a 20 sec steal.

hf

Everybody wants to be somebody lol

Daze can’t interrupt with stability

It does man

Steal is kittening awesome when a guard stomping your teamm8 with stabilty.. You just interupt it.

And what if BT doesn’t rip the stability?

You added a variable, you didn’t specifically mention steal or include bountiful theft. Or account for multiple boons. You’re like a kid adding rules as you lose a madeup game.

panicbutton.1053:

I love the skill. I utilize it as a last resort-gtfo ability.

The trick as stated above is to watch your health — utilize your other stealth skills to regen hp far before you hit 25%. Trigger them around 50-60% to get the cooldowns to start cycling. Generally if you’re at 25% health you’re doing something that got you in trouble. With the average health being 17k, sitting at 25% is asking to be a one hit KO.

Thank you mister I-balance-things-around-MY-gear. Not everyone runs health, so should this trait suddenly become more dangerous then? Absolutely not – that’s awful design.

“watching your health” doesn’t work against burst -typical shatter mesmer can hit upwards to 10k in a second- either, or heck, right in the action of any intense-ish PvP scenario. While I appreciate your perfect world numbers and fluffy bunnies and enthusiasm, I actually don’t appreciate these.

Jormin.2761:

Option 1 would be good, but would need A LOT of balancing. Option 2 IMO will never happen, do you want to be able to attack from stealth and not cause reveal? That is OP. If your talking about already being in the reveal state and Last Refuge triggering and not stealthing you again it’s also OP, double backstab anyone? Mesmer’s don’t have their DPS tied to stealth attacks, which is why they can stealth while being in the revealed state. It sucks when your going for a CnD and LR triggers during the animation yes, but it can also happen when your buddy drops SR or BP. IMO the only thing broken about it is it not triggering due to high stacks of condition damage, but due to the way condition damage works I doubt they can fix it. If this is constantly happening to you it’s a L2P issue, b/c the game makes it VERY obvious that your getting low on health.

Attacking on stealth would still break the attack. It just wouldn’t apply revealed. Are you maliciously trying to misinterprete what I’m typing here? There’s only 1 mesmer skill that lets them stealth and bypass the reveal effect, and to be frank, there’s no real reason for that to even exist. Who cares if it’s obvious that you are low on health? The issue at hand is how clunky the mechanic is.

style.6173:

For everyone complaining about last refuge…. practice. This is one of the best skills in the game. If you watch your health bar, it will save you way more than hurt you.

Just… stop. Please, stop. If you like the trait, have it your way – as a major trait. But don’t screw everybody else. As I’ve illustrated earlier, this is the only minor trait (aka: forced to use) in the game that comes with a potential downside. If you don’t recognize this fact, you are blind. No amount of practice (and condescendence, in your case) will make up for better thought out design and functionality.

Incurafy.6329:

Swapping one of our three most powerful traits in that line (Infusion, Embrace, Cloaked) with Last Refuge would create an imbalance in the Shadow Arts trait-line. As it stands, Thieves who go 30 into SA (which is a lot of us) must choose between the three aforementioned traits for their Adept and Master traits while they take Rejuvenation as their Grandmaster. Allowing Thieves to take all three of these traits in addition to Rejuvenation would be overpowered, and would then result in one of them (or Rejuvenation) being nerfed.

Create an imbalance in the shadow arts trait? You put a whole lot of too much faith into anet. As if any of the trees were remotely balanced to begin with.

Incurafy.6329:

So yes, genius, replacing it would be stupid, but perhaps you haven’t seen stupid so really don’t have any basis for comparison.

I read your post, so here’s my basis.

Incurafy.6329:

Oh, and suggestion #3 was a joke? Well kitten me dead, I never would have known without you telling me! Thank you, oh wise master of subtlety!

Yeah, you guessed in hindsight. After being told. #1

Incurafy.6329:

EDIT: Just fyi, it’s spelled “fascism”. No insult intended, but it’s a public forum for people of all ages and the censor just happened to pick up a slang word for female breasts, get over it.

Thank you for the lesson regarding your beliefs adolf. I’ll be sure to correct my post. Could you have guessed that english isn’t my mother tongue?

As for my criticism, these forums have by far the worst filtering I’ve seen. “Get over it”? Yeah, no. I’m not a sheep nor a mute. I point out bad things in games and anything supporting them, which includes these forums.

Acrobatics need to promote not only dodge rolls, but also weapon dodges and positioning. Also, traits like flanking strike (5% damage when attacking from back) and side strike (7% crit when attacking from back) belong there, and need to be buffed up the wazoo.

This is one thing that’s kinda beyond me with the thief, how so many traits just seem out of place or randomly selected. It’s like they had a list of stuff and just pseudo randomly assigned them to traitlines. What makes back fighting objectively more deadly-artsy than, say, signet use and vice versa?

Check out my older stream videos (see my sig or try www.twitch.tv/oxygg) for some slightly outdated (2-3 months old) 10/30/30/0/0 WvW roaming footage. There should be about 40 hours of it, some with commentary.

Black Cat.1024:

I didn’t get it

I’m pointing out that vital shot’s icon should be disabling shot’s, and vice versa.