Guild Wars 2

The event didn’t get harder, people just stopped trying, and the result was that they failed. When people figure out that simple stuff like defending batteries isn’t getting done they’ll stop standing at the laser and start defending batteries again if they still want the loot.

I’m pretty sure its written in a combination of COBOL and binary punch cards and runs on servers powered by thermal turbines powered by bruning money and expired content punch cards.

OnizukaBR.8537:

They really should buff other places to farm not nerf SW, new fractals need to be more rewarding

They did. As of HoT the new map rewards system adds SW-like event chests to every zone in the core game, as well as area-specific currencies that can be traded for stuff similar to bandit crests (but for whole regions, so one currency for the whole shiverpeaks in stead of a different currency per zone)

In addition, they added a majoy sink for SW shovels in the guild mine upgrade system, so you’ll find a lot of players won’t be using their shovels for a while as they upgrade their halls.

They haven’t revealed exactly what those currencies can be traded for, but the overall goal is to make every zone much more rewarding to play in.

As for fractals, nobody knows, but anet’s approach for instances is usually that the rewards are less quantity and more about unique items, so It’s unlikely instances will ever be as good a farm as the open world, since they usually make unique instance rewards account bound.

I’d venture that within weeks after HoT ships the super-secret expansion team will begin work on the next unannounced expansion, and they’ll reveal and release it whenever they feel it’s done.

Anet has been really careful not to put out a hard schedule for expansions because of the highly iterative nature of their content development. They’ve been known to spend six months on a thing and scrap it because they felt it wasn’t enough fun.

I would expect it to be sooner than three years though, as they didn’t spend three years working on HoT, although nobody outside Anet known exactly when the decision was made to do a full expansion and it’s likely a lot of the HoT systems were designed in the middle of that process as reactions to player concerns and behaviors in the live game.

I think with HoT they’ve solidified their game plan after the grand experimental stage and have built all of the extendable mastry, guild, living story panel, and other such systems so it’s a lot more content driven and less systems driven from here on, so probably a lot less time tossed away in terms of iteration.

Aidenwolf.5964:

MadOtaku.8532:

Simple, don’t be that guild leader who is too tight to buy the ex-pack and cause everyone trouble. Be it you do it for attention or cause you don’t have money to waste either one you end up being “That guy”.

He/she can play the game that was paid for as long as the servers have power. Anet risk splitting the play base with HoT try not being that guy on the forums.

They’re splitting the player base on purpose. That’s the point. GW2 is a buy-to-play game, which means, occasionally, you have to buy something if you want to play it.

They’re not trying to make the game balanced between HoT owners and people without because their entire business model for HoT depends on people actually buying the game. Just as the box price of the core game, combined with a little gem store money funded three years of content, the HoT purchase price plus a bit of gem store money will fund the content that comes out after HoT, and fund the creation of the next expansion.

Eirian Direstorm.9748:

During the last BWE, I noticed that during a few nightime events, the hostile hylek attacking outposts had “Mordrem Xocotl” tags over them. (Or maybe it was just mordrem hylek, I don’t recall for sure).

So I wondered about that too, whether we had run into something like the Toxic Alliance.

The Mordrem ones are corrupted. That’s also why they have different textures. Mordremoth actually does have the ability to corrupt living animals somehow though none of the events/lore I encountered in the BWEs explained why he doesn’t do it more or how it works.

I remember doing this with a full hench party before they added the map flags and heroes because a guildmate bet me 20 plat it couldn’t be done.

It would work decently as part of a raid. It was really just multiple gangs of mobs with a non-timer based “enrage” by requiring you to clear the packs fast enough that you didn’t get overwhelmed by the constant stream of mobs coming in both doors. In a GW2 raid, it would make a lot of sense. Defend an NPC, split the raid to one group at each door, and those groups would need to be pretty self sufficient as if one fails the other isn’t going to be able to cover both the npc and their door.

Once the defend phase is over, spawn the boss.

Once you had nightfall heroes, you could just flag 2 monks in the middle who would use their super NPC perception skills, then just split the party and rely on the NPC hero’s super reaction times and awareness to keep up both groups while they downed all the incoming mobs super fast with the much higher damage builds you had access to from the factions/nightfall stuff.

It was a pretty well designed encounter initially, but it got super easy with factions, and even easier with nightfall due to the power creep from all the new builds and the EZ mode than having NPC healers with perfect reaction time gave you.

If they were to bring back something similar they’d really need to build it in a larger arena I think, to prevent “center healer” syndrome and make it more difficult for the two groups to quickly support each other. Probably also be good to add more stairs as fallback positions so that if you fail a door you can have one group fall back to the stairs and try to hold the tide long enough to get the second group back up.

It would also be cool to actually use thunderhead keep, the location, but not the exact same fight, so with a different story context and enemies, maybe holding out for an airship evac, and when it gets there the boss is a big dragon or something that trashes your escape vehicle, and that’s why you have to fight him.

They could just add a “hide glider” toggle and be done with it. I saw plenty of people with wings in the BWEs gliding for a few seconds before my client loaded the glider model and it looked pretty fine.

symke.3105:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

Further, you don’t even have to do boss 1 as long as whoever starts the instance has, but each boos has unique loot (the assumption is that each drops a different armor precursor in addition to its unique skins) so you’d want to do them all if you were after a full set of precursors, but if you don’t want the precursors and only want a specific boss skin, you can do just that boss as long as you’re in a group where the instance starter has access to that wing.

Does that mean raid LFG calls will also contain something like “Starting at Boss No4. Will skip others before it”?

You don’t have to skip them. They said when you hit the portal there’s a popup that says “go to wing 1, wing 2, etc.” so lets say you couldn’t make it to raid last week and your group did wing 1 and completed the boss.

This week, they’re moving on to wing 2, and you’re back. The instance starter (not you) gets a popup at the entry portal, like the fractal level or explorable/story selection that says “start at which wing?” and 3 would be greyed out (because the instance starter hasn’t unlocked it)

So he selects 2, and you start at wing 2 as well with your group.

You guys spend a couple hours, finish half the wing, and start having real trouble with a certain encounter, so you decided to hang it up for the day and go do dailies and have a dance party to chill some and chat about ideas to solve it. You all agree you’re free to pick it up tomorrow, so you say goodnight and log.

You are struck down with a massive cold and end up home sick from work, so you decide to try and PUG wing 2 to see if you can learn anything that might help your group.

You get in a PUG, but nobody in the PUG has actually completed wing 1, including you, so you guys don’t have anyone who can start at wing 2. You excuse yourself as you prefer to do W1 with your regular group, wish them well, and log to take advil and chug nyquil.

That evening, your group gets back together. People have a few ideas for some build and strat changes, you all feel good about it, and you head back in to wing 2.

Because the weekly reset hasn’t happenned, the half of the wing you guys have done (becuase you went back today with the same instance starter) is still done. You run through half a wing of empty hallways, right back to where you left off yesterday.

Luckily, your group is really awesome today and the new strategy pays off, you complete the encounter and go on to complete the rest of the wing, you get phat loot from boss 2.

However, because you, personally, still haven’t completed wing 1 you can’t insta-warp to wing 2. You’d still need someone that can do that if you wanted to just replay wing 2. However, since you have beaten wing 2, you’ll see that when you go to star an instance, you can start it at either wing 1, or wing 3.

DJSushi.5406:

This is awesome. I really hope the staff animations move in this direction before release.

With regards to the team not wanting to lean too far towards Martial Arts style animations I have to ask – Is there another style of fighting with a big stick that I’m unaware of? Besides yknow, swinging really hard toward the ankles.

eh?

JediYoda.1275:

Vayne.8563:

So join a casual guild with no requirements, and profit? You seem to think that joining a guild means having to do something. That’s not always the case.

Casual guilds are social organizations. There are even guilds made of people who solo. I don’t know what guilds you’ve been in, but you’re probably picked the wrong ones.

How does joining a casual guild solve one issue that I have is to earn Favor for my guild so I can to contribute on my own with +5 banners, buffs and other bonuses I have access to? If I join a said guild as to your suggestion I would just get player rewards and the favor goes to said guild thus my problem.

We really don’t know how the credit systems will work yet if two or more guilds can team up and do a missions together, without members need to rep a guild other than their main one. If it is then no issue here! If its not just wait till the 23rd and after there will be more threads and post on this issue!

Anet recognizes there are some issues they trying to fix as they see it from their side. “Missions for All” is something we want to achieve in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns.:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-halls-missions-for-all/
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-mission-changes-and-improvements/

We do know exactly how that works because they explained it in the guild week streams.

You can taxi anyone you want in to the instanced missions. The non-instanced ones work like they currently do. If your guild has a bounty and another guild has the same bounty, you will both get credit if you are both there at the event killing it.

However, to access that system you will still need a guild hall, which means at least once you’ll need at least five players to clear out the hall. From there you have guild missions with no further upgrades required, but can take upgrades to get a wider selection to choose from each week.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Karl McLain.5604:

• Evasive Empowerment: This trait has been renamed to Havoc Master and grants the player 7% bonus damage to enemies within the 360 range threshold.

This is what we’ve been talking about. Straight up buff without hoops, loops and hurdles.

Thank you.

• Bounding Dodger: In addition to granting access to the Bound dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% bonus physical damage for 4 seconds after dodging.
• Lotus Training: In addition to granting access to the Impaling Lotus dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% bonus condition damage for 4 seconds after dodging.
• Unhindered combatant: In addition to granting the Dash dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% damage reduction against physical and condition damage.

Lotus Training is inferior compared to the other two. I used this GM during the BWE using P/P power based, thus this 10% bonus condition damage will not be beneficial. P/D “might” use is but why would anyone use it over Unhindered?

The only real build that will use Lotus Training is P/P. Even D/D is better off with Unhindered.

I see what you’re trying to do here, but we’re talking about Thief here, not Ele, Necro, or Mes. Lotus Training might work for those professions but not for Thief.

Maybe, this is a BIG maybe, if you really fixed P/P like you have proposed, then maybe this iteration of Lotus Training will be fine. If Vital Shot has no casting time and Unload deals additional condition damage, then yes, keep it — however currently, this doesn’t help any Thief condition build, Unhindered will still be the best choice for condi build.

Havoc Master has taken its place, as we felt that the line could use a more guaranteed damage increase.

Evasive Empowerment worked for both melee and ranged, now it just for melee. :/

Leaving P/P in the dust again.

For trait mods, we’d like to experiment with Weakening Strikes slightly, adding a secondary to it within its role of debilitation. Options we’re looking at it:

• Inflict X (torment, bleeding, something) when you weaken a foe.
  or
• Receive less damage from weakened foes.

Since Havoc Master is for physical damage, I vote for the " Inflict X (torment, bleeding, something) when you weaken a foe" just to give condition damage build something.

Once again, thanks for your continued constructive feedback. It’s greatly appreciated.

-Karl

Thanks for the hard work.

It boggles the mind why you would use lotus rather than bound or dash on p/p

bound grants you stealth from your smoke field (though it was bugged last weekend so you had to end the dodge in the field) and dash gives you MUCH better kite.

Why on earth would you use a dodge that does primarily condition damage and only benefits your build by tossing out tiny bits of cripple when faced with two clearly superior options?

Not criticizing, I just don’t understand the logic that it’s only useful on p/p

Lotus is extremely effective on p/d and d/d condi. It helps you land CnD on p/d and it stacks loads more damage on d/d due to the much better endurance uptime from dagger auto, and in general adds 30% to 50% more condition damage depending on the circumstances of the fight.

Astralporing.1957:

MissKitty.9054:

I think people are missing the point of what the raid is about. people in dungeons have been isolating people who want to be tank/support/healer in the group by kicking them then whispering them “go get your zerker armor scrub” or something demening like that. personally when I watch the LFG I see more post about Zerker lvl 80s only then Lvl 80s only groups. the raid i see it will bring more ppl out of the dark(tank/support/healers) an in to the light, so everyone can be appart of something. ofc the change is hard for ppl an most ppl dont like change at all.

Have you actually seen that last encounter? DPS is the key, you are not going to kill that boss if you exchange your precious zerkers for some healers or tanks that not only aren’t needed, but also increase your chance of failing the enrage timer check.

It’s still “go get your zerker/sinister gear scrub” but this time it is improved to “get your ascended zerker gear”.

To kill a trash miniboss.

In an untested raid.

That may be significantly overhauled due to the fact people actually zerked it in BWE-supplied exotics

Maize balm farming is champ train drama all over again.

There are equally valid reasons to kill the crows as there are for hitting them with the balm.

You go kill the crows for your heart, you get “griefed” by balm farmers. You balm farm, you are “griefing” the people trying to do the heart.

They really need to just change the balm to a different function.

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

There’s nothing wrong with raids having a bit of side lore.

All of the personal story early paths have bits and pieces of lore and story in them, but none of it is crucial to the overall plot. However, some of it is information about the world you wouldn’t have access to any other way.

Like, it’s not important in the battle against mordremoth to know the history of the jotun, but you won’t really get that history if you don’t play the right PS. You’ll have far less information about uzolan or caudecus when you do CM story if you didn’t play the right story path.

It’s completely fine to have lore in raids as long as the knowledge or understanding of that lore isn’t crucial to the plot and can be summed up easily anywhere the story requires it.

I’d image that the final system will say the guild tag rather than G3

You’d only really have confusion if you were in two guilds with the same tag which… I mean that doesn’t sound like a huge problem.

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

That’s not what is said in the GW2 wiki:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Raid

“Progress within a raid will be saved for players that leave the instance. Restarting an instance will remember progress made if created before the weekly reset.”

Therefore, if you kill the first boss before the weekly reset, you have to kill him again, unless you find someone who killed the first boss after the weekly reset to start the raids.

If Anet changed their mind and use what you said to implement the weekly reset, then it would acceptable, though not ideal.

I encourage you to go watch the raid stream from twitchcon. They were quite clear about this.

That refers to progress within a wing. If you have progressed up to, but not beaten the boss in a wing and come back before the reset all previous encounters will remain completed so you don’t have to repeat them.

I knew this, and I also know that reset is done every week. Therefore, your progress made before the reset is lost when they reset it on a weekly basis.

Yes, but it’s progress within one wing, and each wing is a “single session” chunk of content if done successfully, 1-2 hours worth, which you can spread out over an entire week if you’re failing repeatedly and learning the encounters.

The raid as a whole is split up in to wings, so when you reach that “checkpoint” of killing the first boss, that progress is never reset. You will never have to kill that first boss, or any of the trash that leads up to him, ever again unless you want to do it for more/different loot.

We do have to wait to see if each raid wing can be cleared in 1 hour. If this is the case, then Anet should announce it, because this means that raids in GW2 are very, very different from raids in other MMOs, and proves that Anet is true to their manifesto.

I’m literally just parroting what Crystal said in the raid stream from memory. I encourage you to watch it and clarify any place where I might have mis-remembered stuff. I’m at work so I can’t right now XD

Lamuness.3570:

I hate SB as well. If we had weapon swap cooldown reduction like Warriors, it would be a better set. On that note, why does Warrior get swap cooldown? Aren’t we supposed to be the masters of weapons?

No, warriors are supposed to be the masters of weapons. That’s why they have so freakin’ many. That was key to their role during launch reveals as well. The idea was that, because warriors are thematically a pure martial and brute force class they’re the best at picking up any martial weapon and using it effectively, but don’t have many “tricks” like magic or adventurer classes do. I believe they specifically called warriors “masters of weapons” in the class breakdowns at one point pre-release.

We’re supposed to be the masters of creative finesse with small weapons, which is why we have initiative, dual, and stealth attacks, but no truly huge weapons (until we pick daredevil, which is an elite spec and thus intended to sort of “break the mold”)

BaronSolace.6831:

Question Karl, why the change in Distracting daggers visual que, the arm pouch of daggers was so much cooler then the hovering ring of magic daggers

I’d imagine they did it to be more readable by opponents since Karl previously said part of the skill design is as a pressure tool so it’s important the opponent knows you have it up so you can freak them out with it.

The arm pouch was small, so it was a bit difficult for the opponent to see and be afraid of unless they were constantly looking at the UI, and we know anet prefers to design as few reasons to stare at the UI as possible.

Good for humans and sylvari, but I think a big part of the problem with “acrobatic” animations is that you have to do alt sets for charr, male norn, and asura.

Like how charr have a different deathblossom animation, asura tend to have a bit up a jump or bounce so all of their strikes aren’t ankle-high on everyone, or accounting for the broader shoulders of the male norn.

I can see charr and male norn working with a less flippy and more spinny auto 2, and asura using nearly the same sequence but with a bit of a jump on 1 and a full body drill-spin on 3.

Remains to be seen what anet’s cooking up though, as we were told they were working on all the animations.

Thanks for clearing up the havoc master question guys. Makes sense!

Karl McLain.5604:

Aloh,
As we continue screaming toward launch, I’ll update this thread with the goings-on for Daredevil. Here’s a few things we’re testing now:

• Reduced channel time of Channeled Vigor from 2.25 to 0.75
• Vault: Fixed an issue that caused it to not travel its full distance.
• Fist Flurry: Reduced cast time by 20%. note: The final strike occurs just prior to 1 second.
• Evasive Empowerment: This trait has been renamed to Havoc Master and grants the player 7% bonus damage to enemies within the 360 range threshold.
• Impaling Lotus: Increased bleeding duration from 8 to 10 seconds.
• Bounding Dodger: In addition to granting access to the Bound dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% bonus physical damage for 4 seconds after dodging.
• Lotus Training: In addition to granting access to the Impaling Lotus dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% bonus condition damage for 4 seconds after dodging.
• Unhindered combatant: In addition to granting the Dash dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% damage reduction against physical and condition damage.

We like the interaction that Evasive Empowerment had with your endurance bar and wanted to carry it further, but didn’t feel like it could have the desired impact in the adept tier. Thus, each of the grandmaster traits have their own version, geared toward their specific style of play.
Havoc Master has taken its place, as we felt that the line could use a more guaranteed damage increase. For trait mods, we’d like to experiment with Weakening Strikes slightly, adding a secondary to it within its role of debilitation. Options we’re looking at it:

• Inflict X (torment, bleeding, something) when you weaken a foe.
  or
• Receive less damage from weakened foes.

Once again, thanks for your continued constructive feedback. It’s greatly appreciated.

-Karl

Karl McLain.5604:

Aloh,
As we continue screaming toward launch, I’ll update this thread with the goings-on for Daredevil. Here’s a few things we’re testing now:

• Reduced channel time of Channeled Vigor from 2.25 to 0.75
• Vault: Fixed an issue that caused it to not travel its full distance.
• Fist Flurry: Reduced cast time by 20%. note: The final strike occurs just prior to 1 second.
• Evasive Empowerment: This trait has been renamed to Havoc Master and grants the player 7% bonus damage to enemies within the 360 range threshold.
• Impaling Lotus: Increased bleeding duration from 8 to 10 seconds.
• Bounding Dodger: In addition to granting access to the Bound dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% bonus physical damage for 4 seconds after dodging.
• Lotus Training: In addition to granting access to the Impaling Lotus dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% bonus condition damage for 4 seconds after dodging.
• Unhindered combatant: In addition to granting the Dash dodge ability, the thief will gain 10% damage reduction against physical and condition damage.

We like the interaction that Evasive Empowerment had with your endurance bar and wanted to carry it further, but didn’t feel like it could have the desired impact in the adept tier. Thus, each of the grandmaster traits have their own version, geared toward their specific style of play.
Havoc Master has taken its place, as we felt that the line could use a more guaranteed damage increase. For trait mods, we’d like to experiment with Weakening Strikes slightly, adding a secondary to it within its role of debilitation. Options we’re looking at it:

• Inflict X (torment, bleeding, something) when you weaken a foe.
  or
• Receive less damage from weakened foes.

Once again, thanks for your continued constructive feedback. It’s greatly appreciated.

-Karl

NOW we’re talking. Those stat buffs on the dodge GMs are exactly what they needed.

I’m confused about havoc master though, does it mark targets as you dodge with a special debuff, of is it an effect centered on you so that it basically doesn’t work with ranged weapons?

As for weakening strikes, I think it needs an AoE weakness Currently, unless I didn’t get it right, if you’re hitting a single target and it procs, you only weaken that one target. This doesn’t meaningfully increase your sustain with pistol, dagger, or most weapon sents. If it in stead did an aoe weaknedd, its power would remain unchanged in 1v1s, but it would offer better overall sustain where the DD is intended to excel versus the base thief, in group encounters, and better group support besides that.

After that, I like the “selfish” benefit of taking less damage from weakened targets. it makes the trait a really compelling choice, again, that makes it scale much better in group fights without making to overly good in 1v1s.

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

That’s not what is said in the GW2 wiki:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Raid

“Progress within a raid will be saved for players that leave the instance. Restarting an instance will remember progress made if created before the weekly reset.”

Therefore, if you kill the first boss before the weekly reset, you have to kill him again, unless you find someone who killed the first boss after the weekly reset to start the raids.

If Anet changed their mind and use what you said to implement the weekly reset, then it would acceptable, though not ideal.

I encourage you to go watch the raid stream from twitchcon. They were quite clear about this.

That refers to progress within a wing. If you have progressed up to, but not beaten the boss in a wing and come back before the reset all previous encounters will remain completed so you don’t have to repeat them.

I knew this, and I also know that reset is done every week. Therefore, your progress made before the reset is lost when they reset it on a weekly basis.

Yes, but it’s progress within one wing, and each wing is a “single session” chunk of content if done successfully, 1-2 hours worth, which you can spread out over an entire week if you’re failing repeatedly and learning the encounters.

The raid as a whole is split up in to wings, so when you reach that “checkpoint” of killing the first boss, that progress is never reset. You will never have to kill that first boss, or any of the trash that leads up to him, ever again unless you want to do it for more/different loot.

BassHunteR.7246:

Changes on this bwe were positive and it improved the class overall but still.. it is more of the same..
Thieves were already ok at spvp and roaming wvw modes..
Thieves need a boost to be viable on high end pve areas and small/big wvw fights…
So you added a non stealth build for thieves where the only survivabilty comes from dodges..
And boom.. you announce high end HOT pve mobs willvhave NON dodgeable damage.. ta daaa.. you just killed the whole survivabilty of the class.
And on wvw small/big fights 1 extra dodge just isn’t enough..
Needs more endurance recovery to be able to dodge more often and cond cleanse if you wont have access to stealth.. 1 random condi cleanse is just not enough when you are taking 3-8 condi in a single second..
So the spec, in my opinion, just does not offer any boost on the areas where thieves were not viable..
You could have made it so that DD became bad spec for roaming/spvp but a good spec for wvw/high end pve.. so thieves could alternate between builds, but nope. You just gave thieves a different way of being “ok” on same modes where he is already ok..
Till now my 2 classes (thief and warrior) are getting really underwhelming specs from HOT..
And i already pre-purchased..
/sadface

The mechanics in the raid we tested were percentage based damage. Classes like thief with lower HP pools were balanced against this as incoming/personal heals actually worked better against this kind of damage the less base HP you had. Thief actually worked just fine in the raid compared to everyone else in a survivability sense against unavoidable damage.

Torolan.5816:

I don´t know about you PopeUrban, but i would have been much less kittened if the message sent from Anet would have been:
“Hm, ok, you can have the legendary armor. But you at least need to do any one part of the raid successfully once for the piece of legend found there”
instead of:
“Hm, ok, you can have the legendary armor. But we hide everything about it behind multiple instances you have to suffer through until you get your legendary armor. If you´re interested in raiding or not is of no consequence for us.”

Although a toad, I would have swallowed option A with much less groaning and moaning than option B as that not only offers me just one way of playing for a long time if I want the content, but is nothing less that a hardcore grind for me.

I think the general idea was that a full set of armor is 6 pieces, and each precursor denotes a separate piece of content. This is a bit different than weapons, since you can’t use 1/6 of a weapon, and they said the material requirements for a full set of armor are much closer to a single weapon than six weapons.

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

That’s not what is said in the GW2 wiki:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Raid

“Progress within a raid will be saved for players that leave the instance. Restarting an instance will remember progress made if created before the weekly reset.”

Therefore, if you kill the first boss before the weekly reset, you have to kill him again, unless you find someone who killed the first boss after the weekly reset to start the raids.

If Anet changed their mind and use what you said to implement the weekly reset, then it would acceptable, though not ideal.

I encourage you to go watch the raid stream from twitchcon. They were quite clear about this.

That refers to progress within a wing. If you have progressed up to, but not beaten the boss in a wing and come back before the reset all previous encounters will remain completed so you don’t have to repeat them.

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

Further, you don’t even have to do boss 1 as long as whoever starts the instance has, but each boos has unique loot (the assumption is that each drops a different armor precursor in addition to its unique skins) so you’d want to do them all if you were after a full set of precursors, but if you don’t want the precursors and only want a specific boss skin, you can do just that boss as long as you’re in a group where the instance starter has access to that wing.

Torolan.5816:

Content does not change in the middle of the fight either, so that it does not change in combat is rather irrelevant in my opinion. But you are right in a certain way, it is much more like the omnimech instead of the transformer then.

You can change your zerk gear into soldier or celestial within a few minutes and join where you want with whatever you want in the confines of your armor type and available classes. If that is not a vast advantage and a comfort funtion all in once, I don´t know what comfort and versatility are.

That’s kind of my point though. Comfort and verastility are not advantage in a mechanical sense. In fact, you have more versatility toting around multiple sets of ascended (and players have the bag space to do that) due to the way runes and sigils work in the first place.

One of every set of ascended, with appropriate rune and sigil sets for the build is actually far more versatile than a single set of legendaries, and have the exact same set of limitations. You can only swap them out out of combat.

The primary difference is purely cosmetic.

If anet starts adding stat creep to gear, I’ll be right there crying fould with everyone else. I felt ascended was a good addition as at the time it was being introduced acquiring “The last gear you’ll ever need” was just trivial, even by GW1 standards. Around release I was toting around at least two sets of exotics, including one of every weapon my class could use, within days of hitting 80.

Conversely, finishing one set of armor in GW1, with the superior vigor and all the other runes I needed for a given build was actually much closer to the time frame required for ascended. It was similarly only marginally more effective than using the much cheaper major runes.

Ascended feels like an accomplishment, exotics feel like an expectation. Adding more stat tiers to the game would invalidate the accomplishment of ascended, but the existance of ascended never really invalidated the accomplishment of exotics because exotics were always trivial to acquire.

It felt more appropriate in the new design. Max level in GW1 was “training mode” and max level in GW2 was a more progression focused achievement. It seemed only appropriate to make that last little bit of stats similarly more progression focused, and I applaud anet for going to the massive effort of sticking to their guns and taking the much more expensive and work intensive route of designing the mastery system for HoT than just adding another tier of stat gear to the game.

If that’s not an indication that they’re serious about sticking to the promise of ascended being permanent BiS I don’t know what is. Do you have any idea how much less work it would have been to just add 10 more character and gear levels?

Legendaries build on that idea of accomplishment without invalidating the ascended stuff, and further they don’t even really do anything but make you look different and free up some bag space. It’s such a small difference that it’s completely okay to just ignore. I’ve ignored legendary weapons for years and haven’t really felt at all disenfranchised by the fact those that were willing to pursue them had the option to do so.

We all knew it would only be a matter of time before legendary armor would be a thing, and we knew anet wasn’t happy with the idea that legendaries were tradable. They always intended legendaries to be these big things you really had to work for and play the entire game for. This is just an extension of that, building upon what they learned from the old precursor model. People pretty much universally said “why isn’t this tied to some super-hard content somehow so it feels, you know, legendary?”

Now it is. The first step of your legendary armor is completing some pretty gnarly content. Past that you get to farm for mats, go do a much of WvW and PvP stuff, probably have to max out a bunch of masteries, and generally play everything in the game. Raids replace the dungeon requirements of weapon legendaries, which were a spotty and inconsistent system where some legendaries required dungeon completions and some did not.

Would people have been less upset if the precursors were crafted but one of the final components was raid specific? Who knows?

Will they add a different set of legendary armor that doesn’t require instances just as some of the current legendary weapons don’t require instances? Who knows?

Torolan.5816:

PopeUrban.2578:

If you want legendary armor that is functionally identical to ascended armor should it not also follow that you’re willing to do what it takes to get it? You’re not going to just get it handed out during the raid either. Getting any new legendary from here on means doing stuff you might not want to do because they are all account bound

It is statistically identical, not functionally identical. Ascended is missing the central component of the function of legendary armor, adaption.
Basically, if you have a zerk ascended Armor, you have a fast car. If you have legendary armor, you´re sitting in a transformer or clan omnimech.

Except for the part where you can’t transform in the middle of a fight, so the ability to transform isn’t at all useful in a practical sense, just in an economic one.

MyriadStars.5679:

By the way, I am totally shocked that many posts suggest that casuals = no skills. In the days of vanilla WoW, people tended to think that casuals = players who cannot spend a lot of time gaming due to real-life commitments, and it had nothing to do with skills. There were many people with amazing skills in WoW claimed themselves to be casuals.

I agree with you. “casual” should not be used as an insult.

It’s simply descriptive of a player who plays less frequently. It has no bearing on their skill level.

That said, people that play more casually should do so with the understanding that it will take them longer to get things in stead of demanding _everything be built around their schedule.

Most of the game is built around casual play. Adding a tiny portion of content to cater to a more hardcore crowd. When casual players demand that 100% of the game should be made specifically for their schedules, it is equally as daamaging and insulting as “hardcore” retirees, students, or other people that play much more frequently demanding that 100% of the game is designed around them.

The notion that GW2 is a casual game only for casuals is false, and has always been false. It’s a game designed to be as inclusive as possible of all types of players. That’s why we have wvw, and spvp, and fractals, and now raids, as well as primarily accessible casual content in the open world and story instances

The demand that “well I play the game 4 hours a week and can do some things so i should be able to do all the things” is extremely selfish.

It’s not like anyone is demanding the entire game be suddenly made “more hardcore” yet people find it acceptable to demand the entire game be “more casual”

How about this:

Why don’t they do exactly what they are doing, and try to serve some content for all types of players in stead of designing the whole game around one subset of the community?

Astralporing.1957:

PopeUrban.2578:

In fact, since the release of ascended two years ago they have done nothing but make it easier and easier to acquire.

Quite the opposite. Each next group of introduced ascended required more and more effort and grind.
Just compare rings to armor – the second is soooo much easier[/sarcasm]

PopeUrban.2578:

There was once a time where the only way to get dragonite was from world bosses and the only way to get empy shards was from JP chests you know.

First, those were never a real problem, and second, it’s not actually true – empyreals for example were available from dungeons and wvw since day one.

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended

oh, please, stop exagerrating. Few days of SW will not get you even close to enough mats for ascended set, and to get enough gold you’d have to run the farm literallycouple of days.

PopeUrban.2578:

and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

If those hypothetical new acquisition methods change the situation that much to have a serious positive impact on difficulty of obtaining ascended, i may change my opinion, but so far we haven’t heard even a hint that anything like that is planned. Besides, based on past experience, any method with such a big impact would get nerfed into the ground within hours anyway.

“each new group” of ascended?

There haven’t been new groups since the last of the gear was released. They didn’t add new equipment slots. They finished adding the tier to the game with weapon and armor crafting and haven’t revisited the system since aside from adding new recipies which you don’t even need because you can now just craft the absolute cheapest piece and change the stats with miyani.

As I said, it’s far easier to obtain than it used to be.

I’m not exaggerating. go ahead and scroll up, read me other post. I went from 0-500 armorcrafting in a week, and built a full suit of ascended in a week playing ~6 hours a day during a vacation. On a more normal schedule you can do it in a month. That is not any kind of special effort. It’s just prioritizing a goal. I didn’t lay out exactly what I did, but it’s the proetty standard vinewraith farm intil you have a stack of keys, then run the chest train. And that was farming it. Should I have decided to persue it more casually it still would have amounted to a full set of BiS gear in a few months. It is not some lofty unattainable goal. It’s very easy to obtain gear. You just have to prioritize it like you actually want it, which means not spending your gold elsewhere. This is the same thing you’d do for any items you were trying to collect.

Yes, you’re right, you could get the shards from dungeons, I’d completely forgotten that method, sorry. Looks like it has actually remained even easier than I remembered.

It’s not that it’s unreasonably difficult to acquire. It’s that certain people find any level of effort unreasonable. They want full sets of ascended, legendary armor, and to not spend any of their stack of gold on it so they can keep saving up for whatever skin or mini or dye or whatever else they usually prioritize.

All you have to do is prioritize the gear, and it’s trivial to acquire at this point in the game compared to every other measurable goal in the game

Compare ascended to a mini collection, or lumi armor, or a legendary weapon, or a single fractal skin. One could argue “but ascended is manditory!”

No, it is not. It’s no more manditory than it ever was. You will probably want it for a very small and specific portion of endgame content, but if you’re not they type of person that could be bothered with it for L50 fractals I fail to see why raids are suddenly such a big draw.

Is it because they made content worth doing with decent rewards?

If you want legendary armor that is functionally identical to ascended armor should it not also follow that you’re willing to do what it takes to get it? You’re not going to just get it handed out during the raid either. Getting any new legendary from here on means doing stuff you might not want to do because they are all account bound

You can’t buy any new legendary, weapons included, by just farming gold and visiting the TP.

You don’t just have to raid for the precursor. To craft the legendary itself you are going to have to do WvW, and sPvP, and go through a whole lot of stuff that probably isn’t your preferred content because that is how legendaries are made

Honestly I think the biggest issue with healing power is the way the coefficients work in the first place.

Most skills are heavily balanced around raw numbers with pathetic healing power coefficients.

IMO only peronal heals should be balanced in this manner, and then not even all of them.

Guardian’s recieve the light? That’s a clear group utility skill. That should be a healing power focused skill. It shouldn’t really be a good build pick in any situation where you’re not investing in support gear. The tradeoff needs to be enforced so you can’t have a build that’s bot high support and high damage.

Stuff like thief signet of malice? That’s a clear case of valuable tradeoffs. It’s a heal that only works when you hit stuff, so healing power should be the majority of its weight, thus you have to choose between damage or healing on an ability that heals while you damage. This is another case where the tradeoff nature is very clear. Using the skill means trading safety for sustain, as he loses personal burst healing, but also has to actively engage targets to proc his passive healing, so the user needs to have more control over how much sustain vs. damage he wants since the ability only works while he is actively in combat.

Warrior’s healing signet? There’s a case of where you shouldn’t use heavy healing power scaling. It’s a pure passive hp source. Allowing such sources to scale too high makes them too good in comparison to active defenses and simply create pure face tanks.

Most of the other active heals though, on every class are usually “here is a personal heal and a bit of an extra effect.” And scaling them too high with healing power would just make everyone’s personal healing too good and kill all of the external healing from being at all viable, so most of the personal heals work fine as they are.

The problem is that the support heals all suck, and that’s where you’d expect users with high healing power builds to be playing. In stead anet keeps doing stuff like traits with +% outgoing heals, when all they needed to do was up the coeffs or directly address healing power. Water ele stuff? Make it more dependant on healing power than raw numbers as you kill two birds with one stone. It doesn’t skyrocket a cele user to total overpowered, and it becomes next to useless for a full zerk build, but it becomed very good for someone trying to build support. Roll this logic across the rest of the game’s support heals by balancing support healing against builds equipped with healing gear and you also do a bit more to combat the “zerker meta” problem where pure DPS builds have too much built in support (though that problem is far larger than just support healing and is more a content and skill design issue)

wolfpaq.7354:

Why the heck not? The staff does have a stealth attack does it not? One of the biggest failures with the daredevil spec right now is its complete failure to synergize with any of our other trees. A smoke field would grant us stealth access which daredevil is sorely lacking, which could start to give us some of that synergy which basically every other class has.

I think you meant to say “synergizes extremely well with all our other trees except SA, and it’s even good with SA if you take dash”

You do realize the point of staff, specifically, is that it has a crazy good low damage stun as a sneak attack, but pays for that power by not having weapon access to stealth so you have to take a util or use teammates if you want to use it, right?

The rest of the set other than staff has insanely good synergy with our other lines and weapon sets. It adds a leap finisher on dodge so p/p has access to more stealth at range. It stacks sustain. It stacks damage. I have been hard pressed to find a single thief build that DD doesn’t improve with the exception of all-glass signet backstab, which, TBH, is a gimmick build useless for actual fights in the first place.

You realize that the entire point of daredevil is a mostly stealthless spec, as evade sustain is intended to be a viable build alternative to stealth for thieves and always has been the intention

Why everyone demands every weapon has the ability to spam weapon stealth is beyond me.

Just because non-stealth builds suck right now in live doesn’t mean they’re intended to suck at a conceptual level. Anet is just bad at actually balancing the thief profession, so we all got it in our heads that it’s shadow arts or GTFO.

Most of DD is about enhancing non-stealth builds.

If you’re constantly getting disconnected it’s usually not the game’s fault. It’s rare that server instability is such that people experience random disconnects.

Megaserver seems to work pretty well for most people.

I wouldn’t be opposed to a district selection though.

Yeah, after LS1 they got a massive earful from the proletariat about temporary content, so they sat down, had a meeting, and decided that more really is more.

I still would have rather had a bigger living story budget for more frequent small releases with system upgrade patches coming out one by one over time than wait for an expansion, but that’s just me. People wanted the expansions, so they got ’em

I thought they also said on the stream they were upping the number of ranks. I seem to remember hearing that on I think day 2 or 3.

La Goanna.8142:

PopeUrban.2578:

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players

So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty should be relatively the same, but don’t gate all of this behind a grindy gear-wall.

I built an entire set of ascended heavy armor in a week, starting at zero armorcrafting, doing nothing but silverwastes. Salvage the trash, sell the mats you don’t need, use the resulting money to buy the ones you do, use laurels from dailies to fill in the difference.

Granted I was off work that week so I probably played 6ish hours a day, but given a more normal play schedule of the industry average 20ish hours a week, you’re still only looking at about a month.

That’s a HUGE difference compared to the first time I crafted the stuff, getting dragonite on world boss timers and being hard capped on empy shards due to the daily cooldown of world chests containing them.

Not only that, it is literally best in slot gear. It’s the first assumed goal of every player once they hit 80 and figure out their build. Those who choose not to persue it have already made a conscious choice to be less mechanically powerful than they could be. You can’t exactly design content you claim to be a challenge for your veteran players around the assumption that people that started your game two days ago would even have interest, let alone gear and ability to complete it.

I spent my first four months in GW2 doing nothing but world completion, story, and dungeons, and that was before fractals, the living story, achievement chests, and collections were even a thing.

The assumption that new players would immediately prioritize the “endgame hard content” without also being willing to pursue the most efficient route toward that goal kind of doesn’t make sense.

I have tons of super casual people in my guild. They choose manageable goals that are fun for their preferred playtime and schedule because that content exists and is built for that type of player, and anet has been very good about giving them a continual stream of new things to do right up until the content drought after LS2 that left every type of player without new content for several months while anet was buckling down on HoT.

Why do people that never pvp, wvw, dungeon, or fractal suddenly even care about raids? All of those pieces of content have unique skins as well. It’s not like that stuff was changed to make it more accessible to the guy who only wants to solo open world events 5 hours a week. What they did do though was introduce a constant stream of content that was achievable on that schedule, and paid out pretty good rewards for playing it that way.

I just don’t get it I guess. Are people just afraid that going forward GW2 will become a raid focused game? It just doesn’t seem to be the direction anet is going given the focus on story and open world in HoT versus the extremely small amount of raid content that isn’t even finished or playable on release day.

MyriadStars.5679:

Actually people do have the reasons to be alarmed. In almost all MMORPG games, raids = time sinks. Just google raids and time sinks and you will find many articles. Anet hasn’t said how different raids in GW2 will be, so people can assume that raids are highly likely to become time sinks in GW2 as well.

There are two types of players who currently think it is perfectly fine to have raids in GW2:

1. Those who think that the raid boss available in the beta weekend is the only and final boss in the raid. They are misinformed.

2. Those who think it is okay to spend the required amount of time to raid in other games. One person said: "With reference to the 30-40hrs/week some think are required for raids (I was GM for a raiding guild in WoW WotLK), firstly that was mostly for gearing requirements to ensure that team members progressed at the same rate and didn’t hold each other back since people can read up on the fights in their own time and learn the general tactics. Usually a few tries is enough to get someone into the swing of things once they’ve read up on the fight. Secondly I don’t recall ever spending 40hrs/week for a raid, maybe 20, 25 at a push. So I hate to suggest it, but maybe the guild was the problem? "

For the above argument, I would first say that almost all raid guilds in WoW indeed required 30+ hours per week for raids, before raids are made shorter in WoW WotLK. A guild who was learning BWL and farming MC at the same time often had 5 raid nights per week, and each raid night required 6-7 hours. Therefore, people who experienced raiding in vanilla WOW were telling the truth.

Second, Even if a raid wing in GW2 requires 25 hours to clear, it is still not okay as the progress is reset every week. If a player can raid 25 hours, then he probably will play 35 hours a week at least. This is equivalent to have another full-time job. How many people here with a full time job and a family can fit another full-time job into their daily life?

One can argue that you can find a raid guild who already has the raid on farm status and take a three-week vacation do the raids. Even if you can do that (assuming that you wife and kids can understand your choice of using your vacation time for raids), wouldn’t it be selfish? You were not there when guild members kept wiping to learn raid encounters (otherwise 3 weeks’ vacation wouldn’t be enough), and you wouldn’t even help the guild maintain active raid activities after you finished the raid for yourself and your vacation time was over.

In a previous post, someone used college studies as an example to show that people should make this kind of commitment to raids. Let me ask this question instead: how many college students managed to maintain a GPA of A+ while finishing all the raids that were available in the MMO game that he played during his four years of studies? I don’t know any.

Blizzard realized this problem later, and that’s why in Cataclysm, they implemented LFR. People can use LFR to do easier versions of each raid, and this easier version contains shorter but more wings, so that each wing can be done in 60-90 minutes. They did this because they respect players’ real-life commitments.

Therefore, it is not true that players who are skillful enough are able to finish the raid as long as they are willing to. Among players who have enough skills, I think at most 10% of them have enough free time for raids. For the 10% who have the time now, 90% of them will not stop having this amount of time in a few years when they have challenging jobs or growing families.

False. WoW added LFR because the majority of their ongoing content is raids, and as such they were bleeding casual players because they had not given those casual players enough to do. Thus, they had to figure out how to keep pushing their raid content so as not to make a massive fulcrum shift in the direction of the game while expanding the content for those less hardcore players. LFR was the result.

The majority of GW2’s ongoing content is soloable living story and open world zones. Raids are a minimal portion and as such are unlikely to have the same effect on GW2’s casual population.

GW2 basically already future proofed against the “hardcore doomsday” scenario be ensuring that when they release content, the vast majority of it is accessible to the widest portion of the player base.

La Goanna.8142:

After playing the raid with entire squads in full ascended and still having trouble beating the boss, I’m now very concerned that raids truly will be reserved for the hardcore elite 5% of the game’s population.

While trinkets aren’t much of an issue to get (just time-consuming due to laurel or fractals grinding,) armor and weapons still aren’t purchasable at vendors and require crafting 500, which can be ridiculously costly and time-consuming for some. It gets even worse when some classes like engineer, necromancer, etc. may require two sets for a raid, (and this is where Anet really needs to give us a proper build editor where we can choose builds/sets on the fly for raid encounters because it takes a while waiting for a few to properly gear up.)

Maybe something like a fractals layout would be better, where ascended is only required for higher scaled raids with better rewards, while lower-scaled raids are reserved for exotics?

All in all, I did enjoy the beta raid content, but I don’t like the grindy treadmill/powercreep direction that this is going in.

I honestly don’t see any power creep in terms of gear. It’s not as if they added more powerful gear to the game or have any plans to do so.

In fact, since the release of ascended two years ago they have done nothing but make it easier and easier to acquire. There was once a time where the only way to get dragonite was from world bosses and the only way to get empy shards was from JP chests you know.

Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.

The elite specs on the other hand, yeah, total power creep, but at least you have those from an easy mastery just by getting the same expansion that unlocks the raids.

vpy.6183:

I am also trying dual wielding pistols…they are more fun imo….how pistol/pistol fare with respect to solo leveling ?

Not great TBH. The main problem with p/p is that it’s a single target set. You’ll live, but you won’t tag as many mobs in events and you’ll spend extra time killing pretty much everything because you have to burst each enemy down one at a time.

There used to be a trait called ricochet that added an aoe effect to pistols… but they removed it.

You could also link to the thread where you got the shadowstep traits from.

Just sayin’

I think we should wait until we’ve all actually seen what’s available before suggesting anything.

For all we know anything we suggest may have already been implemented.

Like most of the abilities in the game, there are different coefficients for their “main stat”

Most damage abilities have power as a main stat, with different coefficients per skill. Healing skills have different coefficients per skill as well.

It’s not about healing power as much as it is the poor design of healing skills. Too many of them are overly weighted toward raw values with really insignificant healing power coefficients, and this is one of the many elements that makes non-DPS stats such a bad investment on many builds. Armor versus toughness has a similar problem, vitality in many cases has a similar problem, etc.

Basically, anet wanted to make a game with stats, and then completely forgot that for stats to be fun they have to actually have noticable effects.

There is literally no diference between the space taken up on the world map or in an instance. They simply decided that this particular instance isn’t under ground, so they left the map on the world map.

The idea that it’s somehow “taking away” from potential open world zones is ludicrous. Do you have any idea how big the global map of tyria is compared to the currently playable portion?

It is highly unlikely that every section of every landmass will ever be playable, and even then… it’s a video game. They can simply invent more land mass.

It isn’t as if imaginary terrain in an imaginary universe is some sort of finite resource. This is the most ridiculous logic I’ve yet encountered in these forums.

Deadly paradox isn’t really reflective of the original skill. The whole point of deadly paradox, originally, was that you had to nerf your attacks to buff your spells.

I think it was fun, mechanically in GW1, but GW2’strait systems usually work on a straight buff mechanic rather than the complex system of tradeoffs that many GW1 skills used.

Maybe a better rewrite would be something along the lines of reducing damage on weapon skills. As written your deadly paradox is kind of a clearly OP trait that overshadows your other GM options, and pretty much all other trait lines as it’s a straight buff to every single conceivable thief build.

SlayerSixx.5763:

Path of deception made me lol. Make it drop a translucent wooden training dummy/log for extra keks. Aside from that, I like this suggestion. Only issue is, I’m not sure whether or not this is the right direction, but it makes a little more sense than what we have currently.

That’s a little too copyright infring-ey but as soon as I had the idea for a shadowstep line I knew this had to be in there as the tech already exists, it’s thematic to the thief specifically without going too far in to mesmer clone territory, and it would synergise really well with any of the weapon shadowsteps.

Imagine spamming p/d or d/p 3 with these, or diving across a zerg with sb5, right? Rather than being like a mesmer and having to fiddle with the clones, they just sort of go as a passive effect so you can focus on personal mobility, but they still might distract someone for a few seconds and punish them for being fooled. It seemed logical to have an all encompassing aoe style GM to go with the solo fight scars and the ranged-specific least resistance so that all three were compelling choices based on the build you wanted to run with it.

Sagat’s idea to have burning in the line was a great one, as the damage pie on these could be set such that they deal good but not totally OP damage on condition or white specs, so they’d be generally usable on more builds.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This definitely sounds interesting. I’m willing to try anything other than current acro at this point.

Though I would like boon stealing to be in there somewhere. Thieves need more of it IMO.

I also think the thief needs more boon stealing, but I’m of the opinion that it should be associated with trickery, or just made baseline to the thief in general, leaning way closer to the “make it baseline” approach.

The biggest thing with the mad king birds is that they scale with number of targets, similar to Daggerstorm. The heal is better the more targets you have, and it you’ve got to keep an eye out for white mobs that the birds may oneshot, thus wasting your heal potential.

I rather tenjoy the more hybrid approach, and the stats on the mad king runes also sort of play in to that so they’re generally a better pick the way I have it set up than the way you have it set up

The spike issue you have is why I went buck wild with two stunbreaks when I traded acro for DD, hard to Catch was a godsend in the pre-HoT version of the build, and I looked at it and went “well, I gave up a 30s ICD stunbreak, can I sacrifice a utility for this 15s active stunbreak?”

I did, and I loved it, not to mention I just like the animation and revenge nature of bandit’s defense. It’s hilarious to actually down someone with the kick in a close fight after they think they got that last stun they needed to finish you off.

As for an sPvP version, I’m still playing with it. I don’t really like conquest on thief any more, but I love stronghold, so I’ll probably be setting up the sPvP version specifically for playing stronghold.

I think, also, that with the alacrity/chill question it could be easily remedied by simply giving the thief additional innate counters to chill. We already have many traits that specifically cleanse debilitating but not damaging conditions. Adding chill to those lists as a counterbalance and having chill affect init again would be a fine middle ground IMO.