Guild Wars 2

irrumatio.4893:

SkiTz.4590:

Ascended will probably be needed because (this is just a guess) they are tied into masteries which BOOST/CHANGES how ascended gear will function in raids….

Now if that isn’t a cheap way of enforcing grind and gear tiers, I don’t know what is. Of course, that is exactly what they did with the AR system.

To be fair they straight up said AR was designed as a gear progression mechanic so that people that like gear progression had an area of the game they could do that in.

They also said that it was a unique system intended for fractals and fractals only. When I start seeing agony outside of fractals I’ll be worried.

Wait. People are complaining about ascended gear?

You mean you don’t have it after all this time? After silverwastes handing out ascended materials like candy?

After the drop in the price of mats from all the login reward laurels?

It takes like a fourth of the cost and effort to get a full set of ascended now compared to when it was first released, and you can get +4 infusions just by logging in to the game.

Are you telling me that -12 to a stat from not having expensive +5 infusions is even noticable?

Ascended is a reasonable cost for BiS gear that’s not even that good. Going above and beyond for omni infusions is a bit of a grind, but the payoff is minimal to the point I don’t even notice it (after swapping my offensive slots for omni toughness)

You people are complaining like they’re breaking their promise about adding gear tiers or making you farm wing 1 to get the gear for wing 2 or something.

If you can’t simply log in and get all the stuff you need to make some ascended gear, what makes you think you have the patience to learn what’s supposed to be a super-hard raid?

Masteries are leaps and bounds more grindy than ascended gear.

Don’t stand around and kill mobs. It’s crappy XP because your character isn’t actually experiencing anything new when you do it. Follow the little arrow in the upper right of your screen. it always leads you to large sources of XP like undiscovered POIs, events, vistas, hearts, and undiscovered regions of the map.

GW2 rewards you the most for doing content. It rewards very little for standing in a field killing mobs that are just minding their own business. In fact, killing the same mob over and over awards less XP, as mobs become worth more XP the long they’ve been alive.

Still, forget that mobs give XP. Think of gaining experience as literally gaining experience as you would in real life. You have to explore, do new or important things, climb stuff, etc. Killing mobs during an event is where the experience is, because they’re actively attacking something, or you’re with an NPC to clear out a camp of them, etc.

FeelsAlright.5860:

PopeUrban.2578:

Trickery – Preparedness
+3 max initiative should be baseline. This minor makes trickery, very much like pre-nerf critical stikes, too much of a ‘must have’ line.

Change functionality to “Using an initiative based attack from stealth refunds 100% of its initiative if it hits a foe (5s ICD)” to be both thematic (it’s a trick, using a non-sneak attack from stealth) and make trickery more situationally initiative friendly without being so good it feels required.

I like the idea of making preparedness baseline, as it would get us out of the pigeonhole that is trickery, but I don’t really see anyone taking the your version of the new trait. All of the stealth attacks are almost always worth it. The only situation I see it being useful is getting a free pistol whip as thats better than the daze on sword, but then again s/p rarely stealths, same with s/d. D/P is the big stealther and backstab will always be better than any other skill on dagger.

It’s a minor meant to replace the flat +3 init. It’s not really a choice. It’s the extra thing you get when you decide to pick up trickery for “real traits”

The trait is meant to add initiative efficiency like what it’s replacing, but not such great efficiency that it feels like a line you have to have.

Stealth focused builds will have less use for it, but it’s meant to give stealth some additional utility in more brawler builds that don’t take SA. You know, so you can do something useful with stealth on builds that don’t benefit as much from their sneak attacks. It also allows the user to pull a little extra oomph out of their stealth even if they can’t position properly from a legit stealth attack.

It’s quite useful for:

condi deathblossom (backstab isn’t all that great, but a free heartseeker to close or an additional free deathblossom is)

P/P unload (sneak attack is a poor move for non-condi builds, but getting a free unload off a stealth would be good.)

S/* (more free closers, free pistolwhip)

Staff (free vault from stealth)

And other builds that, in general, don’t focus on stealth, but probably have at least one stealth ability because they’re still thieves.

Showbiz.9725:

Yea, I’m curious how significant the nerfs were to the other classes today. Are the nerfs on the other classes strong enough to the point where Thief can actually 1v1 them? Specifically Ele, Mesmer?

Or is a Mesmer still basically a better thief?

Nope. PU mesmers got the hammer. They’re about as strong as they were before the buff. Other mes builds are mostly untouched, but the invisible super-boon mesmers are now a thing of the past.

Turamarth.3248:

There are no pvp servers.

Or, conversely they are all PvP servers

but only if you choose to visit the PvP areas.

There is no random world PvP in the PvE zones in GW2.

Yeah, I did what I usually do after balance patches, went and solo’d some L1 fractals.

Since I’m already running gear and a blight sigil for d/d condition, I went in to check out the damage. Up until now I’ve been using Improvisation as doubling up on stolen items is generally a bigger DPS increase with goo/poison combos and the long duration bleeds/etc.

I’m happy to say that potent poison is actually potent now, and clears stuff out with the d/d build with much less spotty/random DPS, wheras before it was almost universally slower than just intelligently using double stolen items. Toss some lotus dodge in there and I think I’m finally ready to let go of improv. It is a tough choice and I will miss doubling up on daggerstorm or caltrops, but the reliability of that poison damage is just too good to pass up.

Body shot needs to be given stronger synergy with pistols in general.

Daredevil puts p/p condi builds in a reasonable place, allowing leap-stealth to trigger sneak attack gives it a reliable ranged stealth chain. If you’re going for condis as of HoT, the daredevil build will function a lot like p/d, not leaving enough damage for unload to be practical, or like backstab D/D, not leaving enough init for death blossom to be practical.

Unlike other professions, I think it’s okay that in some configurations we have a mostly ignored skill, as our initiative and stealth attacks let us get greater use out of the remaining four, and it’s a good way to have a little build diversity even on the same weapon sets.

Body shot, however, is in a bad place as it’s an initiative hog that doesn’t work well with their condi or power p/p, or have decent synergy with P/* so really that’s where pistols need to go.

The theory here is that if body shot were more usable, power P/P would have a good init>DPS faucet, some good situational abilities in the form of headshot and black powder, and a good setup/synergy skill, and thus the only “waste” would be in the bleed on the auto/sneak, which could be totally acceptable if unload did the proper amount of damage.

So, how do we fix body shot?

Make it a literal combo skill

What if body shot marked a target for 3 seconds, and during the mark additional pistol attacks stacked a debilitating (rather than damaging) condition? The rapid fire nature of both sneak attack and unload would interact well with it.

Sneak attack’s five attacks would stack it less, but may even out with the use of condition duration gear that those builds are likely to have, while unload’s 8 attacks would pick up the slack on power builds.

So, what condition are we talking about here?

Slow and Cripple

Cripple alone isn’t a compelling reason to spend the initiative, it’s one of the easiest conditions to clear, and is often passively cleared.

Combined with slow, however, it becomes a potent sustain tool against ranged fighters. The stacking nature also serves to pressure your target in to burning dodges. If Body shot, when in effect, turned all pistol attacks in to a 1s slow/cripple, you can bet your butt people would want to dodge the majority of those rapid fire bullets.

The init cost makes it a valuable choice rather than a straight up given, using body shot to open people up to heavy slow and cripple would cut your DPS drastically, but unlike the current body shot it would be worth the sacrifice in those situations.

If we want to get really creative, we could alter it to say “all ranged attacks” in stead of “your pistol attacks” making it a powerful group support tool in line with the other CC on pistol, which might also have the effect of making venomshare builds a bit more fun to play.

In P/* builds it functions as a less powerful, but still situationally useful sustain/chase/disengage tool since you can still get some decent slow/cripple stacks from the auto.

Ohoni.6057:

I have a question that I hope some dev can answer either here or in a future Guild Chat.

Can you display the emblem from one guild while repping another?

I ask because I belong to two guilds, one is a “real” guild of medium size and does activities, while the other is my own personal guild, just me and my vault, however, my personal guild has a much cooler (for me at least) emblem. I use Guild finishers and a Guild longcoat which can display this emblem, and would much rather ti show my own emblem than the “real” guild’s. On the other hand, I don’t like to freeload.

So it sounds like with chat channels, I could at least rep my own guild while still being able to chat with the other guild, which is nice, but I’d still need to at least rep them to take advantage of the new guild member map trackers, to feed Influence to that guild, and of course for Guild Missions, and really I’d like to be able to do all of that while still showing my personal guild’s emblem. Is there any chance of this?

Guild emblems are effectively the in-world “guild tag”

Maybe if enough people lobby for it this could be a thing, but the general intent of guild items is to represent the guild you’re representing rather than showcase a personal logo.

Nothing saying you can’t do as you please of course, just that your use of guild logos may not align with anet’s general intent, so unless a lot of people speak up on it it doesn’t seem like a high priority.

Considering how much people complained about Zhaitan being a dungeon when the rest of the PS was solo instances? Yeah. I mean they Did make that path soloable for story integrity.

I would personally be cool with it being part of a raid, but Anet seems to have made the decision that personal story should be soloable from start to finish. If you put a dragon on the box, and tell people the expansion is about a dragon… people kinda want to fight the dragon.

In general, traits do what they say on the box.

So, for instance, if you have a trait that gives you a chance to poison with dagger attacks, and another that makes your poison do more damage, the damage trait doesn’t directly affect the poison trait, but it does indirectly affect it by making all of your poison deal more damage.

Basically, whatever the trait says, it does.

Is there a specific interaction you’re not sure about maybe we can help with?

Considering the uproar that would occur if they locked mordy behind a raid or pushed him back to an LS release, I’m fairly confident that the HoT story will conclude with killing/dealing with the dragon (And hopefully it’ll be a better fight than Zhaitan)

The raid, given its position, will likely be a bloodstone related side plot, in the vein of mallyx’s relationship to Abbaddon. A final powerful minion that if not stopped would become as big a threat as the dragon, but a self contained story that can be easily ignored by the rest of the world.

LS2 will start the churn toward the next major foe, be that another dragon or something else.

Personally I’m hoping they’ll skip over the dragons for the next big story and visit some previously unseen areas of tyria, or visit some old mysteries (Who built the Eye of the North? Why? What is its true purpose? Is it a weapon to fight dragons? A cosmic library? A day spa for the gods? Just a mechanism to hand out skins with no real purpose? A Teleportation Device? I want to know!)

Signet of Malice:
Lower base passive healing and raise healing power coefficient to increase build variety and make healing power good for something in thief builds.

Add a condition cleanse or stunbreak to the active. Currently the active is a lackluster heal (which is fine given the potential power of the passive) but it needs a more compelling active. Currently there are virtually no situations in which anyone would actually use the active on SoM, as you’re virtually guaranteed more health if you simply keep attacking.

If you want to keep the aggressive theme, perhaps give it a ranged instacast daze in stead, which has a similar compelling defensive function but might be more “on theme” for the skill.

Trickery – Preparedness
+3 max initiative should be baseline. This minor makes trickery, very much like pre-nerf critical stikes, too much of a ‘must have’ line.

Change functionality to “Using an initiative based attack from stealth refunds 100% of its initiative if it hits a foe (5s ICD)” to be both thematic (it’s a trick, using a non-sneak attack from stealth) and make trickery more situationally initiative friendly without being so good it feels required.

Zodryn.4216:

Hold on, I found out what the boot is for!

So very totally cool

Can we get TEEF together to do a music video now? I will join TEEF for that.

Basically, join silverwastes maps that read 60% in LFG, do the sub and main boss meta events, and save all the shovels, keys, and crests you get from the events.

Once you’ve got enough crests to top off your key stack to 100+ keys, take your keys and shovels and look in lfg for a shovel map.

In shovel maps you’ll join a massive zerg of people that visit every possible chest spawn, dig it up, and then the whole zerg loots. be a good person and use your shovels for the zerg if you see it start to slow down (you gain no additional loot by digging up the chest solo)

Once you’re out of keys or get bored, go open all the bags, sell anything of value, then head back to boss farming for more keys/crests

Repeat until you’ve got enough money to afford whatever it is you’re after, or until your eyes bleed from farming and you want to go do something different.

symke.3105:

PopeUrban.2578:

Thank you for recognizing that thieves exist Karl. Looking forward to future updates.

It’s scary when you see posts like this. Is he really that out of touch with the Thief and it’s players?

I’ll put it this way:

This forum had not seen a red name post in over a year until someone had to drop by because they were designing elite specs and they couldn’t opt to ignore thieves when they were engaging the other profession forums so much.

If we get more regular developer interaction once Daredevil is shipped and its bugs are all ironed out, I will be pleasantly suprised.

And I hope I am. after languishing in obscurity for an age Necro and Ranger finally got a modicum of love, so hopefully it’s our turn next.

Any guild can earn a guild hall. It is an instanced map, and as of HoT release there are two options, anet claims to want to add more (they also claimed to want to add more guild missions but… yeah)

According to today’s live stream, it works like this:

First, you’ll need a guild. Then you’ll need to pay an NPC in the guild initiative 100 gold to get access to the expedition to find the hall. (You do not lose the gold if you fail, you can retry until you succeed)

Once you have the expedition, you’ll have to go look for the entrance, and once inside you’ll need 5+ players to fight off the mordrem that infest it (the mordrem scale for everyone on the map, so 200 players should be just as challenging kitten

Once you’ve cleared out the mordrem you build a tavern and from there can build and upgrade buildings in the zone.

Guilds who do not yet have a guild hall can access most of the same services at the guild initiative in LA.

Henchmen were acceptable in GW1. Heroes simply destroyed the social aspect of the game. While they were implemented with the best of intentions, Arenanet recognized the flaw of the hero system in a full fledged MMO.

GW2 is already heavily weighted toward soloable content. All of the story instances are soloable, the open world is soloable. In truth it can be a very lonely game if you let it.

Make some friends to do the dungeon with. There are a lot of new players kicking around now. Go give those guys a hand! If you still haven’t done kanaxi/urgoz you really only need one friend. You don’t seem so intolerable you can’t make one friend.

Orpheal.8263:

Green and Yellow runes should be useable in a refinement process via either Crafting or the Mystic Forge to be upgradeable…

Say put 4x a green rune of the same type into the forge = 1x Yellow
Put 4x yellow rune into the forge of the same type = Exotic
Put 4x Exotic rune of the same type into forge = Ascended Rune

Ascended Rune = Accountbound Rune which when unlocked for your Account works like an Exotic Rune which you can always put on every Lvl 80 Equipment and remove from Lvl 80 equipment as often as you wan,t practically making FINALLY runes/sigils work in PvE/WvW exactly like in PVP!!

You do realize runes or gear are supposed to eventually be destroyed as an economic sink to prevent literally every rune or sigil from becoming completely worthless right?

They’re not supposed to work in PvE like they do in PvP.

That’s why the price point of extractors is where it is, why the only cost effective way to regain a rune is to destroy the gear it’s in, and why even the least popular runes still bring in a decent amount of silver.

Swapping runes is supposed to be a money sink.

Here’s the deal.

PU mesmer was a better thief than thief. That was the primary problem. When the “class with some stealth” became better at both utilizing and providing stealth than “the stealth class”

You’ve discussed thief in your video without also recognizing the fact that thieves have zero sustain, zero ability to actually deal damage while stealthed, and are completely shut down defensively when revealed in the case of most stealth builds.

Mesmers are still relevant. You’ve still got stellar burst, good CC, and sustain the thief would literally give up a weapon set for.

Take it from a thief, they don’t care how much you complain when they hit something that hard. It has happenned to thieves over and over since launch. It’s 50%, and it’s probably going to stay at 50%

I just like that someone is actually asking for less loot.

Why any PC game bothers with integrated voice is beyond me. You’re on a PC. You have a huge variety of VOIP options. No need to burden developers with just another thing to spend money on.

Most instances of people not getting VOIP clients to work is user error or a bad host. if your TS doesn’t work properly, I suggest finding a different provider, fixing your rig, or using another VOIP client.

I’m a little unclear on the pvp objectives. Can we cycle them, or is it just luck of the draw?

Like, I’ll play Conquest if I have to, but everyone in my guild prefers Stronghold, and getting them to que for ye olde “stand on the magic spot” game mode will be challenging.

THANK YOU for the MOTD upgrade though. I’ve been wanting a quick login MOTD for the longest.

Thank you for recognizing that thieves exist Karl. Looking forward to future updates.

I just don’t understand why venomous aura can’t just be balanced with an ICD so they can buff venoms to a point they’re worthwhile choices individually. Just give it a UI icon when it’s ready if it feels like it would be too difficult to balance.

Just have it last 5s when triggered so you could still pile all the venoms on, and use a UI icon so you know when it’s up, then rebalance vendoms around lower cooldowns/stacks so they’re good without VA.

I mean, ICD is like the go-to anet trait balancing tactic.

I’d like to see some more trait support for thief healing TBH. Venomshare heals are okay, but some sort of shared lifesteal on steal or other venom/steal related stuff for a viable thief healing build would be pretty awesome just to round out build options.

It would also be nice if we could rebalance venoms so VS was a less boring overall build to play, but alas, one thing at a time.

This. Right here. Is why we can’t have nice things.

Iason Evan.3806:

The price needs to be adjusted for the item extractors. I wanted to salvage some Perplexity Runes off of an old set of Exotic Temple Karma Armor. It was cheaper to buy new armor and new perplexity runes than use the extractor. It would be the same for any runes on my ascended armor sets. I would just put new runes over the top of the old ones. This strikes me as odd.

I feel like some items like the extractor should have variable gem pricing. There’s zero reason for a person employing logic to buy some of this stuff. Then again, maybe logical people aren’t the target audience on some of this stuff.

The primary purpose of extractors is infusions, not runes/sigils.

Runes and sigils are designed to be plentiful and their value is kept in check by destruction. Destruction due to salvaging and replacement is the only armor/rune/sigil sink in the game.

Top tier infusions (omnis escpecially), on the other hand, are well above the cost of item extractors, and are only socketed in to much more expensive ascended gear which as of now, and until HoT can not be salvaged in the first place.

IDK, assuming the animation is fixed, lotus is actually quite powerful. It’s a really good source of condition damage that sits on top of all other condition damage, it’s 9 attacks for the purpose of onhit effects, and all 9 attacks are always fires no matter the number of targets you’re fighting. Bound and dash could use love though. Dash is a great mobility tool, but I think it could use a short 1 stack of 2s stability to really push it over the top in the anti-cc department. Bound would be better/more unique if it kicked off the damage at the beginning, rather than the end of the dodge, and maybe some built in lifesteal to reinforce its intent as a zerg-fight tool.

Given its recharge this doesn’t seem like an awful idea.

Be a crazy amount of blind sustain if you kicked off daggerstorm in there, a much bigger target for you and allies to burst it for stealth, etc.

Another insane idea:

What if it lost the combo field and in stead reflected back blinding projectiles using the new projectile conversion tech the druid has.

Or, another crazy notion:

What if it was a channel behind you like the rev’s sticky reflect wall in front, and lasted longer since you have to channel it?

Serious Thought.5394:

Pistols need 1200 range. Period. The set alone would become an ACTUAL CHOICE if they were not 900 range. Seriously. The assassin class has no 1200 range weaponset? wtf is this prejudice

Anet would tell you they don’t want thieves to have 1200 range sets because of our disengage.

That’s less of a decent reason looking at some of the elite specs and rev though. Rev has crazy potential range and disengage, and engi/ranger got some very mobile specs without really losing range.

Some sort of shadow magic spec.

Do an F1 replacement with an explosive component.

Like, in stead of steal, create a clone and gain stealth. Unlike mesmer clones this one would actually be a functional duplicate using all the appropriate weapon skills. You can not shatter the clone on demand, but when it dies it leaves a smoke field + all f1 traits (so it would healthstel/damage if you take mug, poison, daze, etc. from traits)

This could be simply additional DPS or a legit distraction if you used it from stealth, as it would stack a bit more stealth duration on you while giving your opponent a false target.

Thief rotations per weapon set are pretty predictable so it wouldn’t be super hard to have it fool someone for a couple seconds if it simply dodged occasionally and ran the “bread and butter” attack chain for each set.

New utilities would be conjures which are lesser duration than ele conujres, run on init, only summon one in hand, and function as mines when dropped. Maybe 10 sec durations on these, used more for set up attacks and then dropping than as weapon replacements (so, like a better, more controllable stolen item at the cost of a utility)

Weapon would be a MH/OH focus centered around crowd control abilities with low damage (cripple, chill, slow, etc.) and the dual skills would be combination slow/disengage in the MH or combination slow/gap closers in the OH.

Elite would be a straight up instant 10s stealth with no additional effects (unless SA traited OFC)

Well, I mean, the end goal of any raider or dungeon runner is to get good enough at the content that you have it “on farm” and it is functionally impossible to keep that from happenning.

No matter how hard it is, with enough practice people will develop teams and strategies that by sheer force of perserverence and practice can eke out a nearly 100% success rate eventually.

So, you know, you have to design from the jump around the idea that people could theoretically run it perfectly every time, and what that would do to your item economy.

If the rewards are good enough to justify the lockout, that sounds awesome. If, however, they’re mostly trash with a 10% chance to get something nice, the lockout seems overbearing.

What I’m hoping for is a situation more like the fractal rings, where you have a table that is nothing but good stuff, and a table of potentially good or crap stuff.

This was kind of my problem with the EOTN dungeons. They were fun, but the real reason you did them was for the skins, however the drop rate of the skins was quite low and the “guaranteed” loot was really just currency.

If, in stead, each boss had a pool of 5 unique skins and a pool of random crap + that pool, then you’d know every run you were getting something neat. Sure, it might be a duplicate, but you wouldn’t ever walk away with two greens and a blue only.

Might also be a good idea to make all the non-precursor skins tradable, as this would give the repeat successful raider value for the duplicates, and give non-raiders a way to acquire many of the rewards through trade?

Boss skin trading was a pretty good market and mechanism in GW1 and it could work similarly in GW2. Specific boss skins are rare, but tradable, so killing bosses always had some value to it, but if you really wanted a thing and didn’t want to or couldn’t kill the boss you could farm for it.

Some things, just a few, should be account bound on pickup though. I mean you’ve got to have at least a couple “I did it” trophies.

An Expansion is an add-on to the base game. It’s a pretty normal practice in video games to package additional content and major feature upgrades as expansions.

GW1’s Factions and Nightfall campaigns were a little different as they could be purchased as stand alone products. However, Heart of Thorns is an Expansion, like Eye of the North.

It does not represent a complete leveling experience or grant new leveling content like the “newbie island” areas in factions or nightfall. It simply adds on to the base game.

The way Anet is packaging expansions now is the same, only that every time they release a new expansion the older ones become free, just like the base game has become free now that HoT is coming out.

No, you’re deliberately skewing things. The correct allegory you’re looking for is not “80% exclusive” but, literally “80% of items” my perfect world would see 100% of items be content exclusive. I’m perfectly willing to settle for 20% of that perfect world. Or 10% or 5%

“Exclusive” is a binary concept. You can’t have an “80% exclusive” item. You can however have 80% of items be exclusive or non-exclusive.

The system in place is heavily weighted in the favor of your position already, but it is still not enough for you. Why?

There’s where your position falls apart. It’s either 100% or unacceptable to you. You can only see things in terms of “All” and “none” while your opposition is fine with “Some”

At the same time, nobody is actually asking asking for 100% of all items to be content exclusive because they realize that it would cut off players from the majority, not the minorty of rewards in many cases

Your “best” (and indeed, from your rhetoric, only) possible outcome is the outcome where you get 100% of what you want, and the opposing viewpoint gets 0%

And, again, you phrase this as a question of “keeping things from people”

You are either unwilling or unable to understand that content exclusivity is not about keeping rewards away from people as much as it is about having rewards that are fun and matter

Again your position about titles, etc., you openly admit “these are not as exciting as a skin”

That is the point we are trying to get you to see. Your “Solution” says that skins are somehow on a different judging point than other cosmetic rewards like titles or outfits. Again you posit no logical support for this other than that you want skins because they are the most interesting rewards

This conversation is not about titles. it is not about outfits. It is about skins.

You proposed solution is, literally “how about get 0% of what you want, while I get 100% of what I want and you also get… 100% of something you didn’t want in the first place.”

You’re attempting to frame compromise as selfishness and your personal opinion as that of a vast majority.

With that I’m leaving this conversation again. It is obvious you will never be satisfied unless someone simply says “Ohoni is right and the whole game should heel-turn to cede to his vision with no compromise for other points of view”

I’m sorry but I just don’t see it happenning, so I don’t think there’s any reason for me to get roped in to this a third time.

I’d like to see armor themed along with where it comes from, like the carapce stuff, the GW1 armor, etc.

I don’t want to get a bunch of fur armor in a jungle expansion, or samurai armor in an expansion not at all about cantha.

For HoT I’d like to see more improvised/hylek style stuff as well as bark/plant themes.

Not the “oh you grew armor” stuff like the nightmare and sylvari cultureal stuff, but more like “oh, you chopped down a magic tree and used rope to turn it in to armor” or “Oh, you got those cool tree frogs to make you awesome stuff with beads and dinosaur leather”

http://img.aegen.nl/ON/Improvised%20Armor.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/b6/5f/0a/b65f0aa32e2bc29e3bd9da0ba220c1bb.jpg

http://emilyjoyzeller.com/playing/images/bark-7241.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/35/ea/75/35ea7571ba7dc5e91cac9c5e73a21166.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/46/3e/c5/463ec508534b716978e77eee349e8973.jpg

Donari.5237:

PopeUrban, I’m starting to think I’ll be stalking you when I’m looking for guild claiming and raid groups … you keep offering.

We’re recruiting to fill ranks for all the shiny new HoT stuff to find one or two raid/regular guild mission groups of people who aren’t jerks to each other and would rather figure out an internal meta than copy/paste one because it’s 2% more efficient!

EDIT: This is totally going off topic. PM me if you like! back to the topic!

Ryou.2398:

PopeUrban.2578:

Ryou.2398:

PopeUrban.2578:

Initiative.

Every time I play another class I feel like I’m forced to use skills just because they’re off cooldown or my damage sucks. When I’m playing a thief I feel like I use skills because I choose to use them. If I see something that 20% HP, i get to choose to use dagger 2 twice in a row in stead of hitting 3,4,5 because they’re the only skills off cooldown.

I can do loads more damage on my mesmer, but I just don’t have as much fun playing it, as the cooldowns-only skill system feels like the class is playing me rather than the other way around.

Like, every other class (except revnant, again because of the resource mechanics) I spend most of my time with everything but a few buttons on cooldown, so I don’t feel like I have all that many moment-to-moment choices in combat.

I dont know what class your playing but between weapon swaps, kits, and attunements I never had that issue.

I sure do. On non-thieves you run rotations not because it’s an efficient use of resources, but because you’re hard locked in to a system of cooldowns. There’s never any choice between “do I use my dash or my ranged cripple?” You obviously use the one that’s off cooldown, and if that doesn’t work you use the other one.

Playing other professions is essentially playing with a full bar of less powerful utilities. I cringe every time I use mesmer GS 4 and 5 for the DPS rather than the utility on a single foe. Sure, I could hold those skills, but in the end I’m just wasting damage because I can’t in stead choose to prioritize my character’s resources on single target attacks.

I’m not saying it isn’t skillful. Knowing when to hit buttons and how to prioritize the use of those cooldowns is still skillful play, but I like thief and rev because they’re more complex than choosing which order to hit buttons in, as I choose both what order to hit buttons in, how many times to hit the buttons, and what buttons to not hit at all based on the situation I’m in. In stead of being loaded with more buttons, the skill there is choosing when to use the buttons and whether it’s worth the cost compared to the other buttons.

I think you may be prasing thief a little more then what the truth is, I have played thief and you still have to utilize certain rotations for the situation and the same goes for many classes, and you still have to manage initiative, on my characters I do not use the same rotations either, it depends on the situation not to mention abilities can have many uses to the group and myself, I think if anything your only seeing more of an illusion of choice as there are no cooldowns but stop saying other classes do not have the same amount of choices because they do, and you do realize you lower cooldowns on allot of abilities once you spec right?

This isn’t a contest. It’s just a matter of how these classes feel to me personally. I prefer having a resource bar to track rather than multiple cooldowns. It just feels more intuitive and less limiting.

Calm down. You’re acting like I’m saying “all those other classes suck” I’m just saying I don’t like playing them.

I’m glad other people do! A game full of nothing but thieves and revnants would be pretty boring.

Substance E.4852:

It’d better not be…

I’ve been looking forward to this set since he revealed it back in January and we are supposedly going to get 2 new sets (I would assume this means 2 sets of H/M/L) in HoT.

If it requires a massive scavenger hunt or multiple Raid runs to get then that’s just depressing.

I’ll take you raiding for it and not yell and be rude like some people if it comes down to it

There is an event in Mount Maelstrom that appears differently and uses different NPC dialoauge based upon which order you joined and if you have completed a specific story step

Substance E.4852:

CETheLucid.3964:

But I wish every other person that wants this would quit minimizing that some of us like the traditional look.

I think most of us just want more options, especially on males.

It’s not even close to the sexy/functional ratio of female heavy armor. On my male human ranger I have 3 armor sets that aren’t some kind of longcoat/buttcape, 2 of which are basically the same armor set with different levels of detail. (Scout/Duelist)

The upcoming, ‘upgradeable’, armor that Shaman datamined months and months ago looks incredible on the female human he rendered it on.

Form fitting leather armor that looks perfect on a Ranger or Thief. One can only hope the male version is basically the same.

http://imgur.com/qqevj6q
http://imgur.com/pYbRYMS

I don’t KNOW this, but I’m betting that’s a couple forms of the legendary precursor. Seems to fit with how they revamped the art for the precursor crafing. Baby steps of fancy until the last level adds all the overblown ugly particle effects.

Or it could be a silverwastes style thing and they use that upgrade style of crafting a lot more in HoT.

Behellagh.1468:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Never heard of this site.

Gamasutra is a game developer news/resource site. Use to be a magazine I once got, a very long time ago. The post-mortem articles were my favorite.

Site is legit. It’s how I got my last three jobs.

I think it would seem odd to have bigger choppable trees simply because how you have some trees you can chop, and others, of the same size, that you can’t. Sure, it wouldn’t be that confusing because of the UI but still, the visual effect of felling a larger tree is a little at odds with it having no practical gameplay effect.

In stead I’d like to see more areas with little groves of trees, like the one around that melandru statue in Orr. Functionally it’s about the same as a rich node, it’s just nicer to look at, and you have to walk two steps between them.

@Ohoni

Again, you’re framing it as if access to items is the only factor that contributes to player happiness. Exclusivity isn’t about getting access to all the items you want. It’s about the sense of accomplishment from earning items that can only be earned through specific content.

You insist that:

“What it would do is make the most people as happy as possible. It is the best possible outcome. Plenty of people would prefer exclusivity, and they would not get that, but they would at least have access to the items they want, exclusive or not, so they would receive some happiness from the outcome. In an exclusivity model, the players who could not earn the items they wanted would not get those items, resulting in no happiness from that situation.”

No, it would not. Access to items, and the very idea of exclusivity are two equally valid desires. Claiming that having access to items is the primarily happiness driver of everyone and that everyone would be made happier just because they could get stuff is missing the point.

I don’t know how many people have to explain this to you.

You don’t care about items having intrinsic value as trophies for content. Many people do. So many in fact that it is a primary design goal for HoT’s raid rewards and legendaries.

That desire for intrinsic reward value based on experience rather than equivalent time spent is not on any level compatible with a total lack of reward exclusivity.

You counter that “all items accessible” is the only satisfactory outcome, while your opposition states that they’re fine with only a minority of items being content exclusive.

Your unwillingness to engage in compromise completely removes any incentive to discuss the issue further with you. This conversation is about skins. It’s not about titles or trophy potions or whatever other false compromises you’ve proposed. It’s about skins, and your position is, quite literally “I want it this way and anything that isn’t 100% the way I want it is bad and for <Insert thinly veiled insult of the week> people”

Meanwhile your opposition has raised a very strong case. They want you to have 80% of what you want. However, you will never be happy unless you get 100% of what you desire and they get 0%

Doesn’t that sound selfish to you?

Agemnon.4608:

PopeUrban.2578:

I don’t want to be that guy but…

Maybe it’s better this way? That whole “PvE that doesn’t suck” request was made on his watch, and Anet seems to be moving in that direction with HoT

Not wishing Mr. Flannum Ill, but maybe it just wasn’t a good fit and the new design teams can actually fix some of the (totally unintentional) mess he left behind.

Who is taking up the mantle of lead designer now? (Say Josh Foreman or Robert Gee please.)

Mai Trin is very counterintuitive (logic says stay out of electricity shot by someone with a red name…) while Silverwaste mobs are cheap as all heck if the player group is too small.

Disagree on both counts. Mai trin would be an actively worse fight if the thing you had to kite Mai in to was some harmless or benign effect. “Use lightning to short out technology” is pretty intuitive.

As for silverwastes, Those mobs were a breath of fresh air compared to the largely nonthreatening menagerie of “it does a unique thing, but that thing doesn’t matter because you just stand there and hit it in the face” that we had before they were a thing.

Flannum’s missteps as lead designer revolved largely around greenlighting content that had ignorable mechanics, like every world boss, most of the dungeons, mostly ignorable combo field interactions, etc. etc.

AFAIK he was also responsible for such major hits as paid trait respecs, the trait scavenger hunt system, and the general mess that put the game in the “we have non-damage stats that aren’t even a tenth as useful in combat as damage stats” state the game shipped in.

Like, the guy had good ideas, but everything GW2 greenlit on his watch was extremely short sighted, or in denial about how the live game actually worked. It may be that he’s just not outside the box enough to design within the style of less rigid play GW2 uses and a more mechanically complex system like GW1 is really where he shines.

“Cowboy themed”

No. God no.

Elona is Tyria’s version of Africa. Elonans have an extremely rich cultural heritage reaching back hundreds of years, very much like Canthans, and are very unlikely to have homogenized their culture the way humans in central Tyria have.

Remember that central Tyrians have lived arm in arm with a diverse group of cultures for 250 years, wheras Cantha has cast out all non humans, and Elona has been in the iron grip of a brutal undead dictator. Both of these places are far more likely to have clung to their cultures out of mandated tradition or pride than to have implemented the trappings of other cultures.

I could definately see the plains north of harathi hinterlands hitting that theme though. That’s all praries and centaur country, and it makes sense humans (and by association the other major races) would have established some sort of foothold there since it’s so close to DR.

I know people really want to see Cantha and Elona sooner rather than later, but I wouldn’t expect Elona before the “Charr expansion” or Cantha before all the dragons are dead.

Release was “The human expansion” and I doubt they’d go back to a plotline so human-centric before giving each major race a time in the spotlight and then letting everyone find out about the mysterious largos and quaggan homelands in the bubbles expansion.

I don’t want to be that guy but…

Maybe it’s better this way? That whole “PvE that doesn’t suck” request was made on his watch, and Anet seems to be moving in that direction with HoT

Not wishing Mr. Flannum Ill, but maybe it just wasn’t a good fit and the new design teams can actually fix some of the (totally unintentional) mess he left behind.

Who is taking up the mantle of lead designer now? (Say Josh Foreman or Robert Gee please.)

Don’t forget the trait that gives them permanent unstrippable swiftness.

Ryou.2398:

PopeUrban.2578:

Initiative.

Every time I play another class I feel like I’m forced to use skills just because they’re off cooldown or my damage sucks. When I’m playing a thief I feel like I use skills because I choose to use them. If I see something that 20% HP, i get to choose to use dagger 2 twice in a row in stead of hitting 3,4,5 because they’re the only skills off cooldown.

I can do loads more damage on my mesmer, but I just don’t have as much fun playing it, as the cooldowns-only skill system feels like the class is playing me rather than the other way around.

Like, every other class (except revnant, again because of the resource mechanics) I spend most of my time with everything but a few buttons on cooldown, so I don’t feel like I have all that many moment-to-moment choices in combat.

I dont know what class your playing but between weapon swaps, kits, and attunements I never had that issue.

I sure do. On non-thieves you run rotations not because it’s an efficient use of resources, but because you’re hard locked in to a system of cooldowns. There’s never any choice between “do I use my dash or my ranged cripple?” You obviously use the one that’s off cooldown, and if that doesn’t work you use the other one.

Playing other professions is essentially playing with a full bar of less powerful utilities. I cringe every time I use mesmer GS 4 and 5 for the DPS rather than the utility on a single foe. Sure, I could hold those skills, but in the end I’m just wasting damage because I can’t in stead choose to prioritize my character’s resources on single target attacks.

I’m not saying it isn’t skillful. Knowing when to hit buttons and how to prioritize the use of those cooldowns is still skillful play, but I like thief and rev because they’re more complex than choosing which order to hit buttons in, as I choose both what order to hit buttons in, how many times to hit the buttons, and what buttons to not hit at all based on the situation I’m in. In stead of being loaded with more buttons, the skill there is choosing when to use the buttons and whether it’s worth the cost compared to the other buttons.

Their entire goal structure with raids is not just that they’re challenging, but that they remain so throughout the life of the game.

I’m not saying Anet hasn’t reversed course on things before, but they did go out of their way to hire entirely new staff to set up and maintain this system, and they’re intentionally putting the wings on a drip feed so that they can revise the design in the instance that it becomes too easy.

They’re heavily invested in the concept of challenge for this content. From Anet’s point of view raids are not “big dungeons” but rather their answer to where dungeons failed.

They didn’t opt to fix the dungeons for the same reason they didn’t make old legendaries account bound. Past a certain point content and the way players use it becomes fixed. Making the dungeons shift with the meta people figured out to run them would drastically shift the difficulty in acquiring rewards going forward.

This new raids initiative, and HoT PvE in general, is their last straw to retain players that have been the harshest critics of the PvE in this game. They don’t use the words ’living narrative" as the selling point for the PvE. They use the words “progression” and “challenge” for a reason.

They built the entire release cadence around making sure if peope find a broken comp to easy-mode wing one, that broken comp and the encounter design will be tweaked before wing two is released, and so on for wing 3, and the next raid, etc.

They’re looking at raids like they look at living world releases, as a major portion of the ongoing live release strategy. They haven’t reversed course on living world because it is, for them, a huge selling point for the game and something they care about. They have been invested in it from day 1 as an idea and have done tons of design and software enhancements to improve that system because, hey, they thought it more important that new content is good than that old content is bad.

That’s something they never said about dungeons. They never said “dungeons are an important part of our live release strategy” or “we want dungeons to remain challenging”

Dungeons are considrered “finished” content. Anet has already adjusted the rewards around cheesing them, so they’re okay with people cheesing them. It’s a decent half-step between the open world and their new raids. They also built a set of expectations with dungeons that I don’t think they want to continue. The whole “story and 3 explorable paths” thing is a LOT of work for one piece of content of medium difficulty.

For the actual challenging content they’re focused on raids (which are big releases) and fractals (which can be developed like dungeons but in much smaller chunks without the expectation of voiced plotline or multiple lengthy paths)

You were allowed to try any content in GW1, and they never went out of their way to dumb it down. Doing Kanaxi, Urgoz, UW, or FoW today is just as challenging as it was at release. That’s what they’re attempting to do with raids and fractals going forward. Bring back a sense of accomplishment to group instances, not make those instances easy to find groups for.