Guild Wars 2

Your entire problem is invalid already.

Condi D/D Daredevil with signet of malice and mad king runes already fulfills your criteria of area attack, damage mitigation and sustained recovery from wounds.

I can absolutely engage 15+ mobs at a time using the build, and do it frequently.

Your issue isn’t that you want a build thief lacks. It’s that you want a tanky aoe damage build with massive crits and massive sustain at the same time. I’d argue that they’re mutually exclusive across practically every other class in the game. Staff is already quite good at AoE damage if you want to go power.

The entire point of d/d is that it’s a composite set, suitable for hybrids. I don’t know why everyone seems so keen on somehow splitting it off. Since the most recent update to deathblossom, every skill on the D/D bar has valuable uses in either power or condi variants of the build. Complaining that condi builds can only spam 3 is like complaining that power builds can only spam 5>1. The rest of the bar has situational, mobility, combo exploitation, or defensive utility.

This isn’t like pistol, where it has some fundamentally wasteful skills and a massive disconnect between the auto and dual skill. Dagger auto is a solid defensive, power, and condi applier depending on traits. Deathblossom is either a bread and butter condi applier, or a situational evade depending on build. heartseeker is either a bread and butter DPS finisher or a situational mability tool depending on build. Dancing dagger is a situational combo exploitation skill on either build. CnD is either an offensive enabler or a defensive positioning tool depending on build.

D/D already works for either build style depending on trait and gear selection.

We don’t need more boring weapons that simply dictate trait and gear choices by equipping them. Staff is a bit boring for this reason. Thief, and to a lesser extent revnant, are the only classes that don’t need their weapons designed around being purely power or condition damage skill sets because of the unique resource mechanics. I don’t know why people are so keen to put Thieves in the same boring box as every other class in the game.

Changing the fundamental function of deathblossom would be a massive mistake. It’s not a mobility skill because heartseeker is already a mobility skill. Deathblossom is a “sticky evade with bleeds” and enables the d/d condition build for that exact reason.

Could we cut the aftercast on it some? Sure. Could we look at further improving its evade functionality? Sure. Does it need to be a mobility skill? No. It would simply make it harder to use while adding nothing to the set.

Improving poison procs on daggers is a solid idea, as is looking at some functional improvements for what dancing daggers already does (ranged bouncing cripple/projectile finisher spam) but fundamentally changing the function or damage typing of dagger skills is just not a good idea. it’s a fantastic and functional set with a lot of diversity already that only needs minor trait tweaks. It doesn’t need an overhaul just so that people can spam crits with every skill on the bar.

Despite being account bound, ascended gear (and gear in general) isn’t really intended to be shuffled around to multiple characters on a regular basis due to variance in builds. They made it account bound so that you don’t have to lose that investment if you decide you want to get rid of the character. It wasn’t really intended to be a “craft one set and never again” thing.

These slots are a convenience feature intended for things like eaters, salvage kits, map keys, and other such things that you wouldn’t want to be constantly moving around, but would rather just leave in the slot.

That said, i don’t see any reason for the arbitrary 5 slot limit, or why a single slot costs so much. They should have just make this a bag slot.

Why would you assume they’d put a visible character with an arenanet tag to carry out surveillance on botting?

That’s absolutely the worst way to collect information. It’s like putting a uniformed officer on a streetcorner for a prostitution sting. You can monitor servers retroactively via logs, or in real time with completely invisible observers.

Players with the arenanet tags are just that, players, Anet staff are given the option of joining a special guild that displays that tag when they represent it. Those are their live server characters in most cases, and don’t have any kind of dev console abilities. it’s just a way for them to “declare” themselves as anet staff if they choose to while they play.

I’ve had a few on my friends lists in the past, and you’d be suprised how often you’re playing with untagged anet staff, as people tend to bother/whisper them when they show their tags. When you see an anet tag just standing around, they’re usually replying to like nine billion whispers because they put on the tag and people assume they run everything and can answer every question imaginable.

Zohane.7208:

A slight word of advice: bring lots of hard CC, the end boss has a huge breakbar that you have to take down quite fast.

Or you can ignore the breakbar and just range him to death. Plenty of time to kill him, but the breakbar witll of course make it go a lot faster. Lost Precipice is the easier of the two halls to fight him on because you have some pillars to LOS around when he does his axe spin attack, while in Gilded Hollow it’s a flat platform with not much to use for cover.

You should be able to pull it off with your group, it might take a few extra tries just because of the RNG nature of where the maws spawn. It’s pretty straightforward, burn the tenders, then the maw, then move quickly to the next maw, and kill the boss at the end.

I helped someopne claim and we pulled it off with extreme luck on close maw spawns with three people, though most claims I’ve helped on were in the 6-8 people range.

The only reason you should really fail is if the mission decides to spawn several maws in a row extremely far away from each other, or if some of your claiming party doesn’t have updrafts/mushrooms unlocked, and thus takes way longer than they should to get to new maws. Past that, you just have to not be awful at PvE.

It doesn’t cost anything to make new attempts, just just hit it with your group until you complete it. Good luck!

The Ronin.4673:

If i replay all personal story, can i get other chest with all 18 parts again?

Yes. Every character that completes the story gets to choose any piece of the armor they want, even if they can’t wear it. You can get the full collection without ever doing the DS meta provided you have enough characters. Doing so is also a good way to make some reliable crystalline ore from the last few story steps.

The only account based rewards are the bonus mastry XP and the achievements. Everything else will be granted to every single character the first time through.

They purposely killed dungeons as they aren’t updating them. Fractals are the 5 man instances from here until infinity. Dungeons are there specifically for the tokens at this point.

They intended for dungeons to take a back seat. That was literally the whole point of the rewards nerf. They want you to be running fractal scales for general loot income, because they actually intend to keep fixing exploits there. They don’t want you to keep running dungeons because they’re not going to do further work on them.

This happens if two guilds have overlapping missions, but not the same difficulty of mission.

For example, if you’re doing a race at the medium mission slot/time, and you activate it while someone else is doing it at the hard slot/time, you will not get credit as it is not technically the same mission, and thus you will not get the chest.

The same is true for bounty targets. if you’re doing a 1 target bounty, and someone else is doing a 5 target bounty, and the 5 target bounty guild activates the mob, you won’t get credit for the single target bounty if you jump in and assist their attempt.

In order to get credit you have to be doing the exact same mission as whatever guild initiated it, not just the same content

This thread can outrun a centaur!

I could spell check through again, but I think I’ll leave it as I already see so many typos.

As for the ease of acquisition for the mastry points, I look at it largely in terms of the commendation difficulty. Considering there are a lot of compelling uses for commendations, and 10 commendations is right about what most folks earn in a week, I felt that the 10 point trade off was significant enough, and with guild missions varied enough that it felt good on difficulty.

Consider that ascended trinkets cost 12, and lots of people are regularly spending commendations on shards, skins, and other stuff, and the value of commendations seemed to me the most thematic way to grant the points. You get them solely by doing guild missions, which are generally unique content compared to the rest of the game, which seems to be the overall design for mastery points.

Thief – Vandal

Weapon – Torch (MH and OH)
Unique Armor – Vandal’s Gloves (Heavy insulated looking gloves)
Unique Weapon – Kindle(exotic)>Bonfire (These are double ended torches)
New Skill Type – Concoction – Glass vials full of powerful AoEs that give the thief a powerful buff, alongside a powerful debuff.

Vandals are unique in that they can wield torches as main hand weapons. As such, the Vandal’s torch adds a significant number of fire and smoke focused dual skill options.

Vandals excel at using the thief’s signature mobility and stealth to alight and control large areas of the battlefield with smoke fields, or apply and benefit from the burning condition, making them valuable in support and condition damage roles.

Not as adept as alchemy as the masterful Engineer, The Vandal’s Concoction skills are dangerous double edged swords, powerful PBAoE effects as dangerous to the Vandal as they are to his enemies.

Vandals tend to be defensive and support specialists, with low damage output but highly defensive torch skills and traits, though the Vandal Specialization can serve as a supplement to add damage or defensive variety to more traditional thief builds as well.

Traits

Hot Stuff – You take 5% less damage from burning foes. You gain the ability to wield Torches, and Mix and Use Concoctions.

Friction – Stealing lights your target, and up to 4 targets in range on fire.
Thick Skin – Duration of your Concoction’s negative effects are reduced by half, and all your concoctions grant protection and aegis.
Smoke Trail – You leave a smoke field when you shadowstep or dodge.

Suffocation – Blinds you apply deal condition damage when applied and removed.

Smoke Signals – Your smoke fields reveal enemies and apply weakness.
Mixologist – You cleanse two conditions when you use a Concoction, and all your Concoctions recharge more quickly.
Accelerant – Gain initiative and swiftness when you apply burning.

Dense Smoke – Your smoke fields destroy projectiles.

Vanish – Gain stealth and cleanse movement impairing conditions when you enter a smoke field.
Blindside – Attacks you make while inside a smoke field deal additional damage
Burn Everything – Your Smoke fields also apply 1s of burning per tick, and are larger.

Weapon skills
Torch 1 Stealth
Enflame – Enflame your target for 5 seconds, applying 1s of burning and 1s of blind each second.
Torch 1
Scorch (Cleave)>Kick(Actual kicking animation)>Burn(2s Fire field, applies 1s burning)
Torch 2
Ward Off – Whirl around, attacking up to 5 foes, and reflect projectiles.
Torch/Torch 3
Conflagration – Create a fire around you that burns enemies and pulses blindness. Smoke field.
Torch 4(flip)
Smolder – Throw your torch (600 range) at target location, creating a blinding smoke field for 3 seconds. Smolder becomes Inhale.
Inhale – Shadowstep to Smolder’s smoke field, consuming the smoke and healing yourself.
Torch5
Vandalize – Drag your torch across the ground for 4 seconds, creating a burning smoke field where you step that damages and blinds enemies. (Works similarly to slick shoes)

Torch/Dagger 3
Fire Blockade – Shadowstep to your target, stab, and immobilize them with a ring of fire for 1s

Dagger/Torch 3
Brandish – Brandish your dagger and torch menacingly for 1s, apply fear to your target for 2s.

Torch/Pistol 3
Ember Fan – Toss your torch in a high arc, then shoot it with your pistol to create a line of fire that burns any that pass through it.

Pistol/Torch 3
Return Fire – Create a smoke field in front of you for 3 seconds. Fire a shot at the owner of any projectile that enters the field. (Can cancel return fire effect on self)

Sword/Torch 3
Trip – Burn your target with your torch, then take advantage of their panic to spin and hamstring them with your sword, knocking them down for 1 second.

Concoctions
Cauterizing Concoction – Smash a burning Concoction on yourself, cleansing all conditions, but setting yourself on fire for 10 seconds.

Flashy Concoction – Smash a concoction, dazing and weakening yourself and up to 5 enemies in range for 4 seconds. Breaks Stun.

Tasty Concoction – Drink a tasty concoction and gain endurance and superspeed for 5 seconds. At the end of 5 seconds, become crippled and dazed for 1 second, and throw up.

Warm Concoction (heal) – Smash a healing concoction on yourself, and gain pulsing health and condition cleansing for ten seconds. At the end of ten seconds, Catch on fire and become weakened for 5 seconds.

Blackout Concoction (elite) – Smash a Concoction, Creating a 900 radius smoke field that lasts 10 seconds, and stun yourself for 3 seconds. The Blackout field applies stealth to all allies, and blindness to all enemies.

This is the biggest gem store rip off since the trait respec items.

Five slots might be worth it, but one for 700? That’s dumb.

I’m suprised you’re upset about this and not the Cow-a-pult

So, Part two of… however many parts of my string of “how to extend the mastry system posts” because my job is boring and has a lot of down time, and I’m a sucker for systems design.

Looking for part 1: Diplomacy Mastries? Here you go.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Suggestion-Mastries-Diplomacy/first

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to the new stuff!

So, what are guild Mastries, and why would I want them?
Guild Mastries, like any other mastry track, are a series of themed mastries that hrlp you benefit your guild, and help you guild benefit you. These are specifically aimed at being long term usable things, so I’ve designed them around content that most people in guilds will be doing long after all the hall upgrades, scribing, and other limited content is over. The general idea here is that, like other mastry tracks, doing guild stuff makes you getter at doing guild stuff.

How do i unlock this Mastry track?
The Guild Mastry track is unlocked when you complete your first Guild mission. This is tied to your chest reward, so the first time you acquire a personal reward for a guild mission, you’re ready to start mastering the use of your guild!

How do I get the mastry points, and where are they?

There are 25 Guild mastry points, Though you’ll only need to acquire 19 of them to fully level the mastry. This approach is taken to benefit guilds with higher rank halls, without necessarily requiring high hall service ranks to complete the mastry. In general the hall ranks are simple for member to acquire, and are usually attached to structures. The reamaining mastry points are acquired by spending commendations, which are easy for guilds of all size and wealth to acquire simply by completing guild missions.

The mastry points tied to guild halls are tracked per account, not guild, so no double dipping in to two halls to double up on your mastry points!

Guild Hall Waypoints -2
You can channel the mine and entrance waypoint for one point.

Guild Mine – 3
As your guild excavates an ever larger mine, powerful aetherium veins can be channeled for mastry points. You’ll fine one mastry point in each new mine rank.

Guild Crystal – 1
You must resonate in it, as it resonates in you. Channel your guild’s crystal for a mastry point.

Guild Historian – 19
A new NPC, Found in the Guild Initiative in LA, and in the Tavern in any guild hall, will record the heroic deeds of your guild. In exchange for 10 Guild Commendations, he will provide you with 1 Guild Mastry point. You can earn up to 19 points in this manner, and at the 19th one, he will provide you with a unique guild hall decoration “Collected tales of Heroics” An expensive looking leatherbound volume in a glass display case. L50 scribes can craft a “Heroic Libram” from five of these decorations and a basic shelf, creating a fancy bookshelf gilded with laurels and your guild’s emblem. Start your library of heroic deeds today!

What about XP? Where can I level These mastries?

Because guild specific content is extremely limited in scope, and instances won’t deliver much, you can select and level this track anywhere you like, provided you are representing a guild.

So, what’s in it for me?

So Glad you asked! There are five ranks of Guild Mastry, focused around making you more awesome at guild missions, and providing you with bonus guild-specific resources, discounts, buffs, and abilities.

Rank 1 – Guild Crystal Attunement (1)
Gain a chance to loot Shards of Crystallized Resonance, Tenebrous Crystals, and Shimmering Crystals from fallen foes.

Rank 2 – Guild Intelligence Network (2)
When you guild has an active Bounty or Trek, the targets will be displayed on the minimap if you are within 1200 units. The range of this display is increased by an additional 900 units for each additional guild member on the map. Your advanced knowledge of enemies and terrain allows you to gain a stack of 5% damage reduction for each bounty target killed during bounty missions (up to 20%) and 10% move speed during treks for each trek target you complete (stacking up to 50%) Intelligence network buffs are lost if you enter an instance, WvW, or PvP.

Rank 3 – Advanced Guild Logistics (3)
Gain a 10% discount on all gold prices from merchants in the guild hall and Guild Initiative headquarters.
In addition, any items you donate to the guild’s treasury have a 10% chance to grant twice as many items to the treasury, and you gain karma for every donation. The doubling effect has an internal cooldown of 24 hours (to prevent splitting large stacks in to single items from being more efficient than just donating stacks, as that would be annoying)

Rank 4 – Brand Loyalty (5)
Buffs gained from guild banners with the same displayed tag as you last for two hours (with the exception of road markers) and give you a choice of utility buffs (wrench icon) to power, vitality, or condition damage(from a dialogue when clicking the banner)

Rank 5 – Never Walk Alone (8)
You may teleport to any guild member from a right click action in the guild roster once per hour. (Same effect and limitations as teleport to friend) You may use the Guild Portal to travel to any waypoint you know for free once per hour. You gain 2% gold, magic find, and xp for each guild member on the same map as you, up to 20%.

Double checks

I’m pretty sure that says central tyria gliding.

Yeah. It does. That was unexpected!

Guild hall trophies? That’s BAF

NEW FRACTALS? I refuse to believe it.

Now, if we could pretty please have some economic loosening on the whole scribing thing, that would be awesome.

All of the armor on the character creation menus is avaliable by playing the game, though much of it is Karma gear, which is bind on acquire. That’s why you can’t find it on the AH.

In fact, pretty much all non-crafted gear other than one set per weight of dropped exotic skins is bind on acquire with very few exceptions. Check out the dungeon vendor, or just look through your wardrobe and wiki the name of the skin you’re interested in to see how to acquire it.

This is an amazing idea. The animations though, that’s what we need.

Sickle shouldn’t be an omnom though, you should just smash your head against the ground repeatedly. That’s a far better animation!

The reason there are extra hero points in the new system is the same reason there are more hero points than you need in core now. It’s so you’re not forced to collect all of them to finish a spec, and that choosing to go above and beyond gives you a head start on later specs.

This is the reason tehy changed core hero points to be basically not at all required to finish all core specs, as it’s a “leg up” while leveling now. It’s also why there are more HoT hero points than you need. So that you don’t NEED that last HP locked behind a map meta or L5 mastry or whatever to finish the spec, but if you go for them then you’ll be less reliant on new map HPs to get what you’re after.

Eventually, once that system expands to 3+ elite specs, you’ll have a massive number of options fort how to approach a given build post-80, since you can’t technically use, and thus don’t need more than one elite spec at a time, you’ll have tons of ignorable HPs, often enough to fully level a new spec on release if you skip a spec you know you won’t want.

Reflects. We should dust projectile attacks like water, preferably with one spammable reflect on every weapon set. This is valuable support, and if they were all relatively low effect range reflects, it would require a lot of mobility and be very thematic for the theif.

I envision support thief builds that are just jumping all over the place, intercepting arrows and bullets for their party, and redirecting them back to the enemy. Reflect is kind of a boring mechanic in its current implementations, what with guardian fields and mesmer bubbles. it’s powerful, but easy to use, and has long cooldowns.

I think thieves with lots of easily accessibly but harder to use reflects would halp our support, survivability, and overall be in theme with the class.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

But yes I was referring to how most classes have a unique way of buffing the party War has banned, Rangers have spirits, Revs have aspects while Chrono only has alacrity they should give all classes a group utility that makes them desirable in their own way that is unique.

It makes zero sense that guardians, who have a ton of party healing and aegis applications also have some of the best reflects in the game. Guardian prot should have always been about blocks, heals, and the best condi cleanse to go around the purification theme.

Thieves should really be the ones with all the reflects. It’s thematic in terms of it being flashy and tricky. I don’t know why, as an extremely anti-range class from a basic design level, that we don’t have significantly more reflects or projectile destruction abilities.

Pistol 5? This should destroy projectiles.
Deathblossom? Reflect.
Smoke screen? Cut that cooldown in half.
Daggerstorm? Actually that’s fine. Maybe increase the reflect radius?
CnD? 2s smoke field, destroys projectiles.
Pistol whip? Reflect

etc. etc.

Thief’s mobility and spammable skills make him the perfect choice for anti-projectile support. he should be the guy constantly shadowstepping around forcing ranged enemies to resposition or shoot at him. In stead of mostly long line reflects, thieves should have access to a bunch of small radius reflects on their init skills that force them to move around and get between shooters and targets to support their allies.

This has the added effect of making theives play extremely well against ranged opponents, giving them a clear design advantage in PvP as range controllers, and allowing them to better engage med range builds with skillful play. In this way we can keep the design idea that thieves aren’t strong long range fighters, but make them strong AGAINST long range fighters so they have a valuable role at all ranges.

I think the thief change is a safe way to go, but one that will ultimately not assist the class where it lacks in PvP.

Upping auto damage is a solid way to give the thief a leg up in PvE DPS so it is desired again for its massive damage without also making it over the top in PvP, as unlike PvE, players don’t stand around and just suck autoattacks. This means that they can give thief overall more damage, but make that damage less reliant on spamming heavy initiative attacks, making the thief’s squishiness actually counterbalance against high damage potential as is the intended design without also giving the thief so much burst it can’t be counterplayed at all.

This is a problem on Revenant because rev has passive suriviability tools to sit there and autoattack people while sucking up damage. Thief doesn’t have that ability. You can’t lean on “all autos” with thief simply because you can’t stand next to a person for that long and still be alive. You have to break your chain regularly with dodges and stealth just to stay alive.

This is the problem with upping autos for thief. While it may technically increase their lethality, in order for it to sufficiently counteract their squish factor in PvP it would have to be completely through the roof. to such a degree they’d be broken in PvE. I’m guessing we’re going to see an upgrade to thief autos that puts them at the top of the pile in PvE DPS, but only marginally helps them in PvP. The acro rework, and the nerfs to the current massively OP bunker meta builds are really what’s going to determine how usable thief is in PvP.

It’s a good direction, but we’ll have to see how the implementation works. Also, no word on venoms and how useless they are outside of a VS build. That makes me kinda sad.

Acro NEEDS a rework if base thief is going to have viable builds (or if future elite specs are going to see any play at all, as people have to give up daredevil for them) and it’s a long time coming. Any thief that’s geared for anything but full glass cannon can’t rely on SA as their only defensive trait line. SA is a good defensive line, but it’s only good on stealth builds. Acro is awful alone, and needs to do for non-stealth builds what SA does for stealth, otherwise they’re going to be hamstringed in to making every future thief elite spec highly defensive, and remove a lot of otherwise fun design options.

You may be completely devioted to WvW, sephiroth, but you weren’t proposing “making loot thematic” You literally said “no more PvE rewards”

They tried that once. It was called glory. It sucked.

In fact, the reason they removed WvW completion from gen1 legendaries was that it forced people to go to WvW that didn’t want to. That has nothing to do with WvW being unrewarding from a total game experience standpoint.

Imagine, just for a moment, that you play MMOs because, like most people, you like getting loot for doing stuff you find fun. PvP, PvE, whatever.

Now imagine that you have the opportunity to go play PvE, or you have the opprtunity to go play PvE. You enjoy both of these activites equally, but only one of them pays out loot worth a crap.

Again, the legendary. Let’s say I want to get myself an incinerator. This is a “free trade” legendary. It’s not, strictly speaking, PvE content. You can buy it off the TP if you so choose.

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but it sounded like you just wanted WvW to pay out worthless siege in stead of stuff one could sell to buy crap he wanted off the AH.

That system already exists! You make virtually no PvE loot, and enough badges to buy all the siege you could ever want. You can get everything you need to WvW by playing WvW, right?

Wrong. Even if you’re winning super hard, running high PPT, and this week’s server MvP you’ve got jack all to show for it. They finally fixed rewards in PvP because they realized glory and purely cosmetic unlocks actively discouraged people from leaving pvE to pvP when they played both modes.

it’s not about bribing people to play the mode or flat out requiring them to, like the old gen1 legendary requirements before the change) but rather making sure that, when I’m sitting there thinking ‘yeah, let’s play some WvW’ i don’t immediately go “oh wait, WvW is fun but I’m actually trying to save up for a skin right now, and WvW is a huge waste of time and money”

They need to pull the same stunt they did with PvP. Add universal rewards that actually make playing worth it, and playing well even more worth it. Currently, the payout for playing WvW is complete trash compared to either PvP or PvE. That’s why it has population problems. it isn’t that people don’t find it fun. It’s that most people (though apperantly not yourself) don’t like fighting over objectives that don’t benefit them at all, and often actively lose them money.

We already have the system you want. It doesn’t work. It sucks. it is why WvW on most servers was deserted even before HoT, and why more often than not people who want to WvW regularly were forced to swap servers just to see action.

You muight be a cool edgy tough guy who plays just for rank points and other such stuff, but when I pvP, I expect to get paid. Murdering people for free is something I can do in might better games with much better control schemes and much better balance. This is an MMO. MMOs are about doing stuff to get loot. The loot sucks. Fix the loot, you start fixing the mode.

darkdeminion.1045:

is there like monthly subscription or something now?

No, but the core game is free to play now with some pretty heavy restrictions in terms of chat, tp use, only 2 char slots, etc. so that new players can try the game before they decide to buy HoT, and don’t have to pay for two separate things.

As for your account information, like these guys said, talk to support. There are other ways to prove account ownership, and they’ll walk you through them.

In the future you might want to use character names you can remember though

sephiroth.4217:

No more PvE rewards… It’s a combat zone, not a Queensdale champ train.

Rewards need to be WvW based, like siege.

They did away with the idea of “content specific economies” when they got rid of glory.

There’s no such thing as “PvE rewards” at this point.

Siege costs money and mats. The same money and mats that show up everywhere else. WvW has one content specific currency, badges, and it doesn’t need more.

The primary reason they did away with glory is the same reason they don’t need to make wvw a closed economy. It actively discourages people from playinmg multiple modes. In the glory/gold system for PvP, playing both modes meant you were just slowing down two forms of advancement in stead of getting unified rewards you could use wherever you want. For this very reason I didn’t play as much PvP as i do now. Playing PvP actively took away from my pve earnings potential. I couldn’t use my PvP time to buy PvE things I might want, I couldn’t use my PvE time to buy pvp things, etc.

We don’t need another split economy. We just new WvW to pay out well enough that you can actually afford hall upgrades, tactics, and siege scribing, make a profit, and not feel like you absolutely must switch modes to do it.

Lots of people do play the whole game rather than just one part of it. Completely split economies just encourage people to play nothing but 1/3 of the game. In stead of encouraging people to move around and play PvE, WvW, and PvE because they find it fun, people go “Well I would WvW two days a week, but right now I really want to make legendary skin X and I can’t make progress on my goal doing that part of the game, so I’ll just not play WvW at all until I’m done with this goal.”

The same way you level in core tyria for xp. The difference is that the HoT maps have a concept of “participation level” and hand out meta rewards in big chunks of xp as the map progresses.

That participation level raises for each event you do on the map, so the more time you spend in the map doing events, the more xp you’ll gain from the map as it progresses.

To start with, do what you normally do, explore, do hero points, etc. but your fastest method to xp is to do what the maps want you to do, get involved in the big meta event chains by starting at outposts and following their event chains to whichever final battle the zone you’re in culminates in.

Honestly, for pvp it’s less a thief issue and more a “all these bunkers are overtuned” issue.

Thief (daredevil specifically) isn’t actually that bad in a pvp sense in a bubble, its primary problem is that the current bunker meta that’s so bunker/aoe heavy is out of whack, and that’s an issue that’s more about certain builds being too good than it is about thieves being not good enough, and is an overall problem in pvp that makes more than thieves extremely underpowered. The meta in the past was about apex predators that were only marginally better than other options. The current meta is about apex predators that are so much better than the alternatives that the alternatives may as well not exist. That’s not just a thief problem. It’s a problem for everyone not playing exactly 4 specific builds.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

Sounds like more dmg creep to me. Thief was never meant to support a grp like the other class’s can, or do. A thief is a thief, they don’t share. Only venoms but they are kinda weak

That’s precisely the reason thieves are in a bad spot in pve.

GW2, with its lack of focus on hard roles, is built around stacking combinations of support and damage. In most games, the rogue archetype makes up for a lack of support by being hands down the best at damage. This paradigm doesn’t work in GW2 because the role-less profession system ensures everyone can deal comparable DPS to everyone else, given similar builds.

Thus, professions are selected or not selected for their utility rather than their damage. Thief, unfortunately, doesn’t have utility.

This is an extremely easy fix, as thieves already have a built in pve specific mechanic that wouldn’t affect pvp balance in any way in the form of stolen skills. All you really need to do to make thieves have valuable utility in any given raid encounter is ensure that their stolen ability is as useful as the built in utility of other classes.

For example, in VG, what if thieves stole a guardian essence, which placed a shield around him that destroyed red wisps? What if he stole a “spirit bomb” from gorseval that he could set up to time-bomb the walls? Bam. Thief is valuable without being required, and you don’t even touch pvp balance. You could still complete the encounters with methods already designed (DPS, knockbacks, etc. etc.) but the thief’s unique mechanic (stealing stuff) would translate to unique encounter mechanics, making him useful for a range of encounter-specific utility purposes.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Malediktus.9250:

I like mastery points.

There are 17 more tyria mastery points than required to max them all. So there are plenty of options
For HoT there are 22 more mastery points than required. Good luck.

I did not know that, this actually really disappoints me. There is no good reason to have extras since they’re not good for anything else.

The whole reason there are extras is so that you have some choices in terms of which ones you do and which ones you skip.

The purpose of mastry points is to require you to do both breadth (mastry points tied to specific, different things) and depth (xp gained from simply playing a lot of content) in order to advance.

Originally I was also confused why we needed mastry points, until I saw the CoF and spider farms at launch. Then it made immediate sense. Without mastry points, the entire system is nothing but one big XP grind, and doesn’t require any specific content checks at all. The points are what puts the “mastry” in the mastry system. Otherwise it would just be a flat xp grind.

It’s a good system, but it could be made better. Arenanet has to make peace with the fact that some people don’t like jumping puzzles, and some people don’t like minigames.

Mastry points should exist, but there should be significant overflow so that people can more readily choose the types of content they persure to obtain them. This would, of course, necessitate building more content that actually requires people to engage in the meat of the pve game, specifically combat and exploration.

I really think they thought adventures would be more popular than they were. I like adventures, but at the same time, I’d like them more if they were instances that let me actually use my character. I like HoT, but far too much of it revoles around transforms, skill bar replacements, and other such things. Those are great when used sparingly (The bomb path of the AB meta finale is a great example, with a few players in armor, and players bringing appropriate builds for the floor fights being the difference between victory and defeat) but make you seriously question the effort and time put in to previous character advancement and build planning when overused.

They look armor sized. About what I expected that one to look like based on the icon.

However, I agree with you, a preview with player character in it (like how minis are previewed) is needed greatly. Alternately, allow you to select and “ghost” any item, and move the “you don’t have this item” check to the final placement click in stead of the ghosting click. That way you could check if it actually fits places, etc. as well before building it.

Or, here’s an idea:

Let people play the market, because they find it fun, and they aren’t actually breaking the market for anyone.

Market speculators don’t control prices in GW2, and they never have. There is no market cartel making your ingame life difficult. Those TP fees exist specifically because they are one of four gold sinks in the entire game, the other three being waypoints, salvage kits, and harvesting tools. Two of those four being completely avoidable with a gem store purchase. The cost of waypointing is purposely a near zero sum, and is not a meaningful sink. Most sinks in terms of ingame items acquired with raw currency are extremely cheap one time purchases. That leaves TP fees, a basic income tax that is the only reliable way for currency to leave the economy in perpetuity.

Without the TP fees, inflation would run stupidly rampant. I don’t think I need to explain to you why that’s bad.

John Smith and Anet control prices. Soft wood wasn’t up to ridiculous prices because of market speculators. It was up there because there was a sudden massive surge in demand without any corresponding surge in supply. The entire guild hall upgrade system, scribing, the wintersday karma bags, everything is built around a strictly managed system of supply and demand. People playing that market are working within that system, and with the region-wide trading post it’s virtually impossible to completely monopolize a given item market for any length of time. I can’t understand what your problem is, other than that you are trying to sell competitively in a competitive system, but you don’t seem willing to invest time and effort in to competing.

Furthermore, Anet has repeatedly gone out of its way to place many modes of acquisition and advancement outside of the market entirely through account and soulbound items. This is a tightly managed market specifically to stop market flippers from disrupting it too heavily. As a result, they don’t disrupt it too heavily.

I can’t think of any reason to disallow a form of play that many people find fun. Many many players play MMOs specifically to play the markets. That only becomes a problem when those players are permitted to monopolize item markets and jack up prices unreasonably. That just doesn’t seem to be a problem in GW2.

We have successfully ferried unguilded people in to instances, the system seems to work the same for guild halls, challenges, and puzzle instances.

Did you invite them and make sure they selected your guild on the entry portal? There’s a menu/dropdown where you can select from several guilds.

Harper.4173:

How exactly were dungeon rewards disproportionate? I honestly have never heard this to be the case until after they were nerfed.
The rewards to dungeons were fine – they were what kept dungeons running.

One could easily make 12 gold in an hour while half asleep running dungeons, reliably, in liquid currency, and by knowing where to stand so that you didn’t actually have to play them.

I used to run them a lot as well, but I didn’t run them because they were fun. I ran them because they paid well while allowing me to watch netflix.

Anet had two ways to go with them. They could have fixed the numerous exploits and poorly designed fights so that they were actually worth what they paid, or they lower the payout so it actually matches the difficulty.

Unfortunately, Arenanet decided fractals are cheaper to update, and more valuable as content versus effort due to less emphasis on narrative, shorter development cycles, and a shared reward pool. This is why they routinely close exploits in fractals. The skip exploit in molten, boss permastun in cliffside, the stacking in the aetherblade laser room, etc. once those things start to get widely used by players, they’re instantly nerfed. Expect the next big patch to fix the new common exploits used in mossman and duo.

Basically, They were nerfed because it was the easiest way to bring them in line without actually fixing them. It’s sad, but understandable from a business and future content standpoint. Dungeons have a limited shelf life, while fractals, with how the fractal system is designed, have an unlimited shelf life due to how they are reused with scaling and instabilities with future updates.

I’d love to see dungeons fixed, but Raids have replaced that sort of narrative heavy group content, and fractals have replaced the ‘quick run’ content, so it makes sense they chose the easiest way to bring dungeon rewards in line with their difficulty.

Downscaling exists, specifically, because the cooperative nature of GW2s event systems would collapse without it.

Getting kill credit in GW2 requires you be able to actually hit enemies. Handing people event credit for killing L12 mobs with L80 stats not only creates a massive risk/reward imbalance, but makes it stupidly easy to troll lowbies by denything them kills because GW2 has no mob tagging feature.

Downscaling exists because of the pvE paradigm that other players should be viewed as help rather than hindrance no matter where you are in GW2. if you could engage L11 mobs with L53 stats, and the game actively encouraged you through map completion systems to go to L11 zones, you would be actively ruining the game for everyone around you by one shotting everything in sight, preventing those lower level characters from gaining xp, event credit, heart credit, and loot.

If it didn’t, then it would be stupidly easy to just powerlevel everyone around you with a L80, just blowing stuff up and handing out loot to every lowbie in range without requiring them to do anything at all.

Just because you want to blow up low level camps for low level loot doesn’t mean it wouldn’t actively break the rest of GW2’s cooperative PvE game design. GW2 is not GW1. Gw2 is an actual persistant MMO, where you have an effect on the people around you whether you chose to be in their group or not. Different rules apply, and must apply, to ensure the game is fun for everyone involved.

Fairness isn’t really an argument due to the way WvW works in the first place, due to the scoring system not really caring where you cap stuff. You could easily ignore your home Bl and win the match anyway.

Yeah, let’s keep a system in which the vast majority of servers have less than 20 players on the map most of the week just becuase of “server pride”

I mean, kitten fun gameplay right? As long as you can have “pride” in your team because you win matches by taking down objectives that nobody is around to defend.

Server pride is the dumbest reasoning to do anything to WvW. have community pride. Have guild pride. None of these go away when you get rid of servers, as long as alliances work properly. Servers have been proven to be the absolute worst way to organize the total population of GW2 for WvW matches.

I think the point he’s making is it would have been better if the desert was randomly rotated as one or two of the avaliable borderlands.

I agree. The game would be better if we had non-clone borderlands that rotated out every matchup. preferably with each BL being a different map.
’
Then people would complain about getting the “bad” home BL, but everyone whining about the new BL maps could just go fight over whatever the alpine BL rolled as.

It wouldn’t change anything though. The WvW community as a whole has no idea what it wants. They want it to be better, but also stay the same. They want higher pops but they don’t want to merge/eliminate servers. They want more interesting fights but hate more complex maps.

I think Anet is making the right call by not listening to anyone at this point, and just using internal metrics and player population counts to see what players are really doing versus what players say they are doing.

smiling.9028:

sarasvatri.6871:

Both WAR and GW2 were/are MMOs. Beyond that I don’t see the connection.

lol @ “non-bias”

I agree, There’s almost no comparison between the fate of GW2 and Warhammer.

On a side note IF GW2 fails in the near future it will be because they continue to listen to the vocal minority and keep designing content that is a grind instead of a fun experience and continue to reward the elitist element with special tags next to their names and elusive gear.

I don’t think the vocal minority is who you think it is. But hey, you’re being extremely vocal about this. You must know what you’re talking about.

Also, you don’t need to 2500 candy canes to get it. That achievement isn’t part of the collection.

So, what you’re saying is that a game that your friend is logging in to and playing for free is limiting him to encourage him to buy a one time purchase.

Man, it’s almost like it’s a trial designed specifically to sell more copies of the actual game or something. That’s awful.

You get what you pay for in f2p land dude. That’s why free to play generally isn’t unless you want to have a less convenient/rewarding/content rich experience than someone willing to pay developers to keep developing the game. This trial is actually an amazing amount of content with some very minor limitations that doesn’t really impact your ability to play the content on offer to you.

I don’t understand this thread.

What made you think tengu have flying cities?

I’d guess because they designed it before gliders were finalized, and you have to kinda build glidable maps with gliders in mind.

I doubt we’ll see a wvw map with gliding until after HoT is free, just so they can be sure everyone has reasonable access to gliders so they can make bits of the map actually require them, or simply make them perma-active in the WvW maps.

You’re specifically talking about dungeons because you’re stating there’s no incentive to do them. Then you’re saying that it’s not about the income. Note that the incentive to do raids and fractals is equal parts income and unique rewards. Dungeons have retained their unique rewards and lost their disproportionate income.

Fractals/raid absolutely pay out better in terms of rewards. Specifically, we’re talking about reliable acquisition of ascended items and progress toward legendary pieces. Technically several dungeons also pay out progress toward legendary pieces, but those that wanted them generally have them by now because its old.

Dungeons have the same primary incentives as they have always had. The difference is that they’re three year old content and everyone you know already has all the stuff they wanted and thus were only doing them for easy and brainless gold.

Fact is, the “incentive” to do dungeons before the nerf was that they had a disproportionate difficulty to gold earned ratio. That’s why people ran dungeons. it was easy money. Now it’s not. That’s why people won’t run them with you.

Granted, this is because anet simply couldn’t be bothered to fix old content to make it actually measure up to what it was paying out, but the core of your argument is, literally, that you can’t get your “bad friends” to play easy content that you carry them through because they’re not making enough gold from it. You thus aren’t motivated to play because your friends don’t want to play if they can’t be carried to fat money stacks without actually doing something that isn’t faceroll status easy.

If raiding and high level fractals were similarly easy for them to complete riding your coattails, you wouldn’t be having this problem, right? It’s human nature. People want the best reward for the least amount of effort. The reward for dungeons was extremely out of line with the effort compared to all other activites, that’s why they wer popular, but also why that reward was broken. That’s all I’m saying.

HtFde.3856:

PopeUrban.2578:

Thought experiment:

What would you have done to make the pve content in these maps challenging, without actually giving the mobs the abilities you find annoying?

Given the GW2 conbat system the only things I can think of are more telegraphed OHKO abilities, or turning them all in to massive HP sponges. I don’t know if I can think of too many ways to add challenge that aren’t “force you to evade, have cleanses, and position properly” given the way GW2’s combat works.

Any ideas?

Um, NOT spawning 10+ mobs when there’s only one player around? Limiting the duration of the effect for normal mobs, adding duration for vets, more for elites and champs and make them spawn when x players are around? Cooldown of said skills dependent on number of players?

Better scaling then? Makes sense I guess. I’m also not thrilled with normal mobs with break bars TBH. Feels like those should be limited to vet+ mobs. It completely screws over any build that tends to rely on cc for defense and kills some build diversity. I always thought CC was a more fun way to mitigate damage than invulns/blocks/etc.

1. Condi Reaper – Just a lot of spamming untargeted damage, cc, and facetanking. These guys need an achilles heel that doesn’t revolve around a new and rare boon, or just bringing another one. Something that tanky shouldn’t be able to put out that much damage.

2. Trap DH – These traps are easily on par with GW1 traps, yet share none of the limitation that made them balanced. Let the DH keep his awesome traps, but they need longer cast times, and they need to be easily interrupted by damage so they can’t constantly recast them while being hit in the face. Everything else about DH is perfectly fine. The traps just need to be harder to deploy mid-fight.

3. Auramancer – Elementalist was already in a good place, and overloads alone make them generally better at point fights. They didn’t actually need condition immunity and the ability to delayed rez themselves without using a healing slot. Rebound needs to be an instant rez for downed players, and grant an aura to non-downed players to prevent the caster from self-rezzing with an avaliable healing skill. Diamond skin is just dumb. have it auto-grant 15s resistance every 15s while above the threshold in stead so there’s some counterplay via boon stripping and enough time if stripped to actually apply pressure.

Thought experiment:

What would you have done to make the pve content in these maps challenging, without actually giving the mobs the abilities you find annoying?

Given the GW2 conbat system the only things I can think of are more telegraphed OHKO abilities, or turning them all in to massive HP sponges. I don’t know if I can think of too many ways to add challenge that aren’t “force you to evade, have cleanses, and position properly” given the way GW2’s combat works.

Any ideas?

Adding gliding to the core game would add absolutely nothing to the core game, and require a significant amount of work to keep gliding from actually breaking many maps, JPs, and other content.

In stead of revamping old content for no other reason than because people want to glide, I’d rather see new content being developed.

Thornwolf.9721:

PopeUrban.2578:

Thornwolf.9721:

Warriors have been kitten on for a long time, by everything.

That’s hilarious.

Warriors have always been a meta class until recently, and they’re still a meta class in PvE. They have not been kitten on for a long time. Take a look at necros, who sucked literally all the way until HoT, or thieves, who haven’t been even worth playing since the trait revamp… or rangers who sucked at launch and continued to suck until… well unless you count druid they’re still not in a good place.

Warriors got left out of the pvp meta for one patch cycle. That’s not “kitten on for a long time”. That’s just arenanet’s normal poor balance actually effecting warriors the way they have been affecting other classes since launch.

Your kittening kidding me right? Are you stupid. Literally the ranger has had the advantage over a warrior for so kittening long, gurads with their burn builds. And kittening Necromancers if built right could just condition damage you down because they took out all of our condition removal. Take your warrior hate out of here for kitten sake and look at the bigger picture, your so kittening up on this “Oh its about time the warriors suck”. You wana know why we did not completely suck before? Because we are for one simplistic, and for two we have only one method of doing decent damage. Melee. Ranged has sucked forever and day now on the warrior, so in reality you commented on post about the benefit of racial specs for all classes under a specific races with warrior hate.

Calm down buddy. There’s no warrior hate here, just attempting to be realistic. The fact is that warriors have been in a good spot for the majority of the life time of the game. In fact, the stuff you’re talking about is all within the most recent year.

Warrior is in a bad place for PvP right now, like a lot of classes, but this thread isn’t about PvP, and in PvE, warrior is still one of the most desired classes in any party composition, and in the current raid meta is the most desired class.

I don’t hate warriors, but your assertion that warriors are “kittened on for a long time” is observably false. Warrior have it no worse than a multitude of other classes, and in terms of PvE are actually perfectly viable in general, and better DPS than any other option in raids.

Thornwolf.9721:

Warriors have been kitten on for a long time, by everything.

That’s hilarious.

Warriors have always been a meta class until recently, and they’re still a meta class in PvE. They have not been kitten on for a long time. Take a look at necros, who sucked literally all the way until HoT, or thieves, who haven’t been even worth playing since the trait revamp… or rangers who sucked at launch and continued to suck until… well unless you count druid they’re still not in a good place.

Warriors got left out of the pvp meta for one patch cycle. That’s not “kitten on for a long time”. That’s just arenanet’s normal poor balance actually effecting warriors the way they have been affecting other classes since launch.

The argument evident here is that you don’t like that the easiest content no longer pays out the best rewards.

That’s actually been fixed. Sucking at the game should not reward the player better than not sucking at the game. This is where raids and 50+ fractals are at now. They pay out better/unique rewards because they require you no not be bad.

HoT also shipped with substantially more content than that for people that are bad to enjoy, and that pays out a resonable amount of income just for showing up.

The case you’re making is that higher skill levels shouldn’t be rewarded with greater income, and that’s silly. Higher skill levels should absolutely be rewarded with higher income. It’s the basic risk/reward model that makes any PvE in any game even remotely interesting. You don’t kill more dangerous foes because they drop less loot. if they did, nobody would bother killing them, you know, like champions before they added champ bags.

You absolutely shouldn’t be rewarded equally or better for playing the game worse, and any instance that allows a single player to carry four other players is badly designed in the first place.

Either acknowledge that playing with your friends is more important than rewards, or acknowledge that rewards are more important to you than playing with your friends.

The master scribe warned us all.