Guild Wars 2

It’s highly unlikely that would ever happen, as GW2 (and indeed most modern MMOs) are designed around the admission that players generally want to have the best possible stats for their build, and want to have freedom in their cosmetic appearance. Thus, we have transmutation systems and reward systems designed not to make use choose one or the other.

Creating a system in which you were forced in to a binary choice between a skin or better stats would be a massive step backward not just for GW2, but for MMOs in general. Giving plaers the option of acquiring both, and only asking them to prioritize on an individual level the order in which they do so and the level of importance they place in either is a much better way to go about it, and in general the GW2 system that essentially ensures that stats are widely accessible (because they impact play) and skins are not (because they have completely subjective rather than objective value) is a reward system that retains the idea of unique and interesting loot without the annoyance of actually requiring you to acquire specific loot from specific content in order to do other content.

Exclusivity is about having meaningful rewards for content while allowing you to actually determine on a personal level which rewards are meaningful to you.

As a thought experiment, let’s say you could log in tomorrow and completely unlock every skin. From that point forward what rewards would you find desirable?

It’s easy to say “I’d play content because it was fun” of course you would. However that’s not going to last when everything gained from playing that content is essentially meaningless.

Collection titles, skins, and every reward tweak to the game since release has been about making content not only fun, but rewarding because the vast majority of players find that rewards from doing things are just as important as doing things being fun.

“Loot is boring” has been a thorn in the side of GW2 for a long time, and one of its largest complaints. It is not a baseless complaint either. Most of the things you pick up in the game are carbon copies of things you can pick up anywhere else in the game. People don’t complain about blues and greens because of the stats or gold value, but because there is nothing interesting or exciting about getting the same item from a silverwastes chest as you get from killing shatterer. It begs the question “Well why would I bother to do shatterer more than once?” from most of the people in the world that aren’t Ohoni because production and release of PvE content can not keep up with its rate of consumption. Once you’ve done a piece of content once, you have, in terms of its fun factor, largely consumed that content.

What makes repeated completion of a piece of content compelling is the rewards. Those can take many forms, but the one people seem to agree universally are the most fun and interesting are skins.

These are the reasons people are proponents of exclusivity. It’s not about bribery, or limitations, but rather about feeling that what you’re doing is special and different than the other things you could be doing, and that the lasting mark on your character as a result is reflective of the stuff you did.

When skins are homogenized, the result is that the specific pieces of content you did to get them are homogenized. People don’t farm silverwatses because it’s the most fun content in the game. They do it because the things they want can be had with gold, and it’s the most efficient way to get gold. When the things you want can’t be had simply by trading currency, it shifts people away from the time/gold efficiency mindset, and spreads players throughout the game on a series of diverse and invidual quests for those things.

My reasoning, agree with it or not, is that skins being exclusive do not have the potential to function as access gates for content. This is the model that WoW and a lot of other raiding setups work. Raiding gear is simply more powerful, and without those advantages you don’t even have the option of tackling subsequent raids. Without that gear you don’t have the option of walking through and cleaning up other content at a severely inflated power level.

So, my reasoning, and how I interpret Anet’s use of the system across GW1 and GW2.

• They are highly desirable rewards for all types of players. PvE, PvP, Hardcore, Casual, it seems that all players find skins more compelling rewards than titles, trinket icons, or other cosmetic systems due to the versatility, mix and match ability, and dye system.

• Not having access to a skin does not impact your ability to compete in PvP, or adequately fulfill a role or design a build for PvE content.

• Desire for specific skins is subjective, encouraging players to try content related to specific rewards that does not immediately funnel every player in to the same content. This is better for the overall longevity of all content, as different player desires will lead to different priorities rather than a “better stats” approach that simply funnels the entire player base in to whatever content pays out the “best” item (which they then skin with their preferred skins)

• Usability of skins is varied. Skins tend to have variant appearances and access across the range of playable races, genders, and classes, again creating a larger breadth of desirable content in stead of funneling everyone in to a single “best” reward.

Buy Some Apples.6390:

You just have to compare American voice actors to Japanese voice actor to realise that many American voice actors are terrible!

I refuse to watch anime dubs, firstly due to the obvious americanisation of the original animes’ dialogue, and second american voice actors have no feeling, or emotion when they do their lines.
With Japanese voice actors, you can tell they are putting in the effort to make the character seem real. American voice actors are just drone people reading off a script. Just no love for the work they are doing.

Do forget a strike, they need a pay cut!

Weeaboo checklist!

• Brought up anime in a conversation not at all related to anime
• Claims “Japan thing is better, American thing sucks” rather than discussing individual titles, producers, or artists"
• Inserts “Americans are lazy, Japanese people are awesome!”

Yep. Checks out.

Now, I’m going to reply to this as if it’s not a waste of time and you’re not sitting around in kawaii desu cat ears, listening to jpop, and claiming that just because it’s all from japan that it’s automatically better than all the things from everywhere else ever!

See, in most cases anime dub voice actors are kitten because the company in charge of the dubbing is cheap. The english VO is for a secondary market.

In stead, compare Japanese works in their native Japanese with American works in their native English.

Then go find the Japanese dub of the same movie or show and tell me it’s “better” In virtually all cases, re-dubbing in a new language for a secondary market is done with less of an eye for quality. To do so you’ll need to be fluent in both languages, obviously. I’m assuming you are.

Japan makes about the same ratio of amazing to complete crap as everywhere else in the world. Some of it is good, and some of it is horrible. There are plenty of bad actors no matter where you go in the world.

It is not a subjective definition. It is completely objective.

10% more of a stat is more

It doesn’t matter if you want to use it, need to use it, or if you care. It is actually more.

You’re arguing that having a choice between a red shirt and a blue shirt is the same as having a choice between a red shirt and a blue bulletproof vest.

You don’t have the get shot for the bulletproof vest to be better at stopping bullets

It’s a mechanical difference. Those differences are where GW2 draws the line and says “everyone should have equal access to this” because those differences are actually what have the potential to prevent you from running builds, running content, or playing at a handicap in WvW.

Skins are cosmetic and have no mechanical value.

They are locked in acquisition behind content, and locked from use behind class, gender, the gem store, character race, and a host of other factors for this exact reason

No one is disputing that skins are desirable. That’s the whole point. Skins are designed to be harder to acquire than stats on purpose, because they’re the primary reward model of the game. There is no objective definition of cosmetic “advantage” as the very word first necessitates an objective system to measure value.

Preferring one skin to another is not a matter of advantage it is a matter of preference

Preferring to have less stats to wear an item you think looks better is not a matter of advantage, it is a matter of preference.

You can’t treat “enjoyment” or “happiness” as an objective measuring stick and assign skins a numerical value that competes with stats because “happiness” is not objective.

You’re grasping at straws here.

We all know what you want. We know. You have explained it. You don’t need to go out on a limb to prove it is somehow objectively logical because it is not. it is a matter, like what skins or dyes someone likes, of preference.

You’d prefer all skins could be obtained by doing whatever you want. There is not an objective case for this any more than there is an objective case for the way the game already works, and will continue to work.

Stop treating your opinion as a scientific fact. You have made your point, yet you keep responding as if there’s some greater truth we’re all not getting, or that you’re saying 2+2 = 4 and we’re all like “no man, it’s seven”

We get it. We don’t agree with you, but we get it.

There is not going to be some epiphany or come to melandru moment here. We simply do not agree with your opinion.

Thund.2795:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

The only problem is with the placement of the Daredevil and Herald. The colors are too similar making them somewhat indistinguishable from each other.

Regardless, nice job; I like it. =)

Thanks everybody ^^
I know the problem about the herald and the daredevil… I can reposition the herald near the druid but i like the tempest at the center of the image ^^

move the herald up and to the right a bit, shift the reaper and the scrapper right with him, and move the daredevil to the bottom left semi in front of the scrapper?

No. Signet of malice’s passive should keep its current functionality, buff the healing ratio if you like but don’t make it a boring, flat heal over time that doesn’t scale or allow cool skill interactions. I use SoM and can honestly say that I would get less healing when I actually need it, and more useless overheal if it worked that way. Making SoM’s active a condition purge with the same pretty crappy active heal and better healing power ratios would be enough to give it a compelling active effect without breaking literally every pve and wvw build that uses it, and indirectly nerfing 2/3 of the daredevil dodges that actually make it a lot more attractive (Lotus dodge is 9 attacks, which is 9 heals from SoM even on a single target, bound is up to 5 heals direcly following a heal on evade proc)

You’re basically asking for a nerf to signet of malice.

The other two, maybe, though I doubt Anet would be willing to give us full-on swiftness speed as a passive signet, or add life steal to a signet whos primary role is damage and not sustain.

Calcifire.1864:

Palawa Joko

About that. I have some ancestral documents here that assure me that he is most definately not still freed from eternal prison and not slowly amassing an army of undead and giant sand wurms to strike at central Tyria when it’s weakened from fighting back the elder dragons.

Nope.

Not like anyone released him and them sort of forgot about it and then wrote a deathbed confession or anything.

It’s all fine in Elona. Bet they’ll just show up one day and be like “It’s cool, we killed that last dragon with swords and didn’t see any zombies at all.”

I gotta… go… see a Magister about something.

I would much rather hear nothing but RAWR than constantly hear canach go “It says it wants all the minions to attack us now.”

Calcifire.1864:

PopeUrban.2578:

Calcifire.1864:

Agemnon.4608:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Asura. I can’t believe the other races haven’t united to exterminate them.

Why? Wouldn’t they unite against the humans instead? The other races view human empathy and compassion as a weakness. However, what they don’t know is that despite human overall inferiority to the others (weaker or dumber depending on the race) the humans have heart and fighting spirit to make up for it. Humans are the Rocky of Tyria while Norns are that Russian guy, Charr Mr.T, and Asura Apollo Creed.

fighting spirit?

yeah I guess “their gods did everything for them” counts as “fighting spirits”,I mean balthazar is literally a “spirit of fighting” considering he’s a war god who caused all of the problems with the charr with his lust for conquest

Total retcon. Also, the gods did basically nothing for humans for what amounts to the entire GW1 storyline. In fact, in Nightfall our characters literally walked through hell just to ask them for help and they were like “uh, no, why don’t you take care of it?”

And do you know what we did, with no help from the gods, while keeping track of a blind lady with a sharp stick?

We literally killed a God

And then the blind lady was like “k guys, thx for all the godlike power… worship me! Sorry I almost killed the world!”

Also, the whole bit where Charr have no gods? They stopped worshipping gods because humans killed the only gods they ever had. Like 8 people. With hand weapons and no special relics or machinery. Then they freed Charr-Jesus from prison so he could spread his message of atheism to his people.

Charr were literally designed as “demonic fire-worshipping cat people” and later were retconned as “well, only this one group of charr” so they could shoehorn in some more completely unnecessary playable races. You know. because it’s an MMO, and we HAVE to have extra playable races, even though it quadruples animation costs and art time for every single piece of armor, resulting in all players ending up with less cosmetic and gear options.

It was only at that point (when they cancelled utopia and decided to do EOTN and GW2) that they decided that charr had:

• Females and children
• Legions that weren’t evil
• Enough sense to topple Orr (originally orr was simply lost, and the why was lost knowledge
• Any other redeeming qualities

So, you’re welcome charr. Even though you blew up ascalon and have been occupying it ever since, we’re glad we could help you find atheism, and it’s cool that you’ve repayed the favor by providing the pact with sweet tanks and junk.

Even though we don’t need them.

Because humans can kill a god with swords.

It is a lot more convenient.

you know the fun thing about retcons?

no matter how much you sceam that it’s a retcon, IT’S STILL CANON, AND IN-UNIVERSE, ALWAYS HAS BEEN.

as for saying how humans can kill gods with swords, it’s always funny to see people bring up that point when they had to literally nuke two countries (and in one case, bind their souls to endless burning agony) to beat the charr. and STILL lost.

let’s hope mordremoth doesn’t get too tough to handle, jennah may decide to bleed on the bloodstone behind her and reduce tyria to a smouldering crater, humans seem to excel at that.

Look here. Two insane monarchs (One of which was, again, murdered by humans with swords thus ending his threat for eternity while the Charr still can’t seem to clear the fallout from the other from Ascalon after 250 years. Also, Ebonhawke.) do not represent the entirety of humanity. Especially not current humanity, which is basically what’s left after we killed all the insane despots and cultists and kept the god-killers and people smart enough to flee over the mountains after fire worshipping demon cats turned their country in to a smoking crater.

Canon is, in the end, humans kill gods with swords. Charr can’t kill ghosts with tanks and helicopters. But hey, it’s okay. Bring the tanks, we’ll bring the swords, put the past behind us and lets go kill a dragon together.

But hey, treaties. Dragons and everything.

And those sylvari man, we gotta do something about them

Reaper isn’t a new class. Like all elite specs it’s simply an extra trait line that gives you a new weapon type, some large mechanical change, and 4 more skills when you use it.

Every skill on the base necro is also usable when using the reaper elite spec (expcept for your shroud skills, which are replaced by reaper’s shroud) just like every other class.

I’m willing to bet the 2 sigil torch was a bug. Extra sigil slots sounds like power creep, and power creep is a ting anet is pretty against in the overall design of HoT in theory (though in practice a lot of the elite specs introduce it quite well)

Good question. As our resident scribe-to-be I’m interested in how the nitty gritty of it works as well.

Calcifire.1864:

Agemnon.4608:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Asura. I can’t believe the other races haven’t united to exterminate them.

Why? Wouldn’t they unite against the humans instead? The other races view human empathy and compassion as a weakness. However, what they don’t know is that despite human overall inferiority to the others (weaker or dumber depending on the race) the humans have heart and fighting spirit to make up for it. Humans are the Rocky of Tyria while Norns are that Russian guy, Charr Mr.T, and Asura Apollo Creed.

fighting spirit?

yeah I guess “their gods did everything for them” counts as “fighting spirits”,I mean balthazar is literally a “spirit of fighting” considering he’s a war god who caused all of the problems with the charr with his lust for conquest

Total retcon. Also, the gods did basically nothing for humans for what amounts to the entire GW1 storyline. In fact, in Nightfall our characters literally walked through hell just to ask them for help and they were like “uh, no, why don’t you take care of it?”

And do you know what we did, with no help from the gods, while keeping track of a blind lady with a sharp stick?

We literally killed a God

And then the blind lady was like “k guys, thx for all the godlike power… worship me! Sorry I almost killed the world!”

Also, the whole bit where Charr have no gods? They stopped worshipping gods because humans killed the only gods they ever had. Like 8 people. With hand weapons and no special relics or machinery. Then they freed Charr-Jesus from prison so he could spread his message of atheism to his people.

Charr were literally designed as “demonic fire-worshipping cat people” and later were retconned as “well, only this one group of charr” so they could shoehorn in some more completely unnecessary playable races. You know. because it’s an MMO, and we HAVE to have extra playable races, even though it quadruples animation costs and art time for every single piece of armor, resulting in all players ending up with less cosmetic and gear options.

It was only at that point (when they cancelled utopia and decided to do EOTN and GW2) that they decided that charr had:

• Females and children
• Legions that weren’t evil
• Enough sense to topple Orr (originally orr was simply lost, and the why was lost knowledge
• Any other redeeming qualities

So, you’re welcome charr. Even though you blew up ascalon and have been occupying it ever since, we’re glad we could help you find atheism, and it’s cool that you’ve repayed the favor by providing the pact with sweet tanks and junk.

Even though we don’t need them.

Because humans can kill a god with swords.

It is a lot more convenient.

maddoctor.2738:

PopeUrban.2578:

You do know that at release cursed shore (and all of orr) was much harder. nearly all the mobs had some form of pull or decent CCs and you were virtually forced to fight your way across the landscape.

Orr at release was more annoying, the fights themselves weren’t harder, you just had to fight all the mobs instead of running past them and so you wasted time. That didn’t make the fights harder though, you could still face tank all the risen, but after the “update” you can now completely avoid them.

The fights themselves were quite often harder due to greater overall mob density and faster respawn timers.

Also, it’s completely dumb that it’s so easy to walk past mobs in most of the high level zones filled with dragon minions and such. Fighting is more interesting than walking. The problem is that the fighting itself didn’t feel rewarding enough so it felt like a thankless chore getting in the way of what you really showed up to do.

Would you rather have a landscape owned by the massed armies of evil that’s easily traversible, or one that’s an active challenge to navigate, but rewarding because of that extra challenge?

Personally, I’d pick the second every time. That’s what was fantastic about GW1. If you didn’t have a town unlocked, it was always a legit journey to get to the next place, and you had interesting fights and got interesting loot while doing it. It was so hazardous, in most cases, that people (including myself) actually made a living serving as runners to shepherd new characters through certain areas to save that time. We have the same “unlock a fast travel point” design in GW2, only with a seriously uninteresting open world in most cases that’s being increasingly designed around farming events in zones that are mostly just complete cake walks.

I’m fine with the existing core tyria to continue to be this way, after all it is, in the theme and lore of the game actually the safest part of the world and the primary home of its major races for the most part.

Going forward though? I’d rather be “annoyed by mobs” than have mobs that are completely non threatening and functionally inept to such a point that they’re just annoying rather than seriously making players think about taking longer or alternate routes if they don’t want to fight, and a waypoint density that fiarly breaks up the zone in to chunks without making death completely trivial.

Woah, calm down. The initial offering of most stat sets is content locked. Beyond that, however, they always end up making the recipies tradable or easily acquired through a braindead token grind of faceroll content.

Also, “crafting only” is not a content barrier, as crafting is not a content type. It’s a resource usage mechanic with no inherent challenge or gameplay, so that doesn’t even really count. Crafting is not a “play style” or “content type” it’s simply a thing the game expects you to do, like salvaging or using vendors. Whether people like that or not is another thing, but it’s right there in the DNA of every character as a “required” rather than “optional” element of play.

Point I’m making here is that people need to sit down and realize that Not having skins is not a mechanical disadvantage

I don’t know why you’re riffing on my post specifically, as I absolutely agree with you, as I said in the post. Skins are now and should remain the real “focus rewards” for content because they don’t create an underclass of lesser-equipped players if those players can’t or won’t do specific content for them. I’ve been saying that since the beginning. You are preaching to the choir,and you’re also preaching to a pope

As long as you have the power to claim your hall, you can have a hall. Send me a PM if you find you need extra manpower, and my people and I would gladly help you clear out the nest. You know, because we’re nice people, and not because clearing mordrem nests is court mandated community service or anything.

Tinfoil hat theory:

Completing the story grants non-sylvari a translator item as part of the plot (so that everyone can hear his evil speech before the last boss fight) and they can use that when they replay it for challenge achievements.

Bllade.1029:

PopeUrban.2578:

Bllade.1029:

Nice suggestions, but timing is off. With HoT so close to launch, Karl barely has the time to fix DD much less make changes to the core Thief.

You should re-post this after launch, you’d have a better chance of attracting some attention and your ideas are solid.

no, we wouldn’t have a better time of attracting attention. We’ve been trying for years. DD feedback is the first time any developer that we know of has read this forum in over a year.

And you think that because he’s responding in the DD feedback topic that hes just going to mosey on over here and open up a whole new can of worms one month from launch?

Post this after launch once things have calmed down, too much focus is on DD/Tempest/Dragon hunter right now and if enough people get behind your post could usher in some good changes for the core Thief.

Unless of course, Karl has intentions to make some changes to the core Thief while at the same time working on the DD. I Guess we’ll see.

Once he started coming here for DD feedback he actually read and posted in a thread about ricochet, despite people having been complaining about richoechet removal since the trait update.

So yeah, I think now is literally the only time anyone at Anet is going to bother surfing the thief forums before they can say “okay guys, we did the thief chore, now you can all go back to reading forums for classes you care about”

Skins absolutely fit that criteria specifically because skins do not have a use at all as purely cosmetic, non-mechanical rewards.

People don’t ever have a “use” for a skin, only a desire for it.

If there was a specific stat combo you could only pick up by raiding? That’s not cool, and not how GW2 works. Will they add additional legendary armor sets outside raids? I sure hope they will so people can get the little QoL stat swapping feature even if they just farm open world stuff all day.

Skins, however, are fine to segregate by content and have been done this way since release, including but not limited to being segregated not only by content, but by class and race as well because they don’t produce a barrier to accessing other content.

The amount of complaining the people on this ofrum do about the names of specializations is out of this world. Have you read the names of most of your skills and traits lately?

Sometimes names are dumb. nobody cares, as long as it works.

It’s not a halloween track. That track played in the magumma jungle in prophecies, I think perhaps in the tangle zone where you did the “follow carlotta or you’re gonna have a bad time” quest, I’m not sure, but it was definately one of the vine-choked forest maps.

Or I’m just totally remembering it wrong, but that’s what instantly comes to mind when I hear it.

FrostSpectre.4198:

Why wouldn’t they fix every vanilla map?

Cursed Shore, for example, is supposed to be enemy territory with dreadful foes who can kill you if you’re not utilizing the combat system completely.
Instead there are Risen that:

• attack you every 3-5 seconds
• deals average of 1000 dmg per attack
• utilizes HP as the defense instead of armor, blocking, Protection or dodging, which leaves them all extremely vulnerable to “full berserker DPS” and resistant to conditions
• uses boons and conditions extremely rare and inefficient
• dodging is not needed at all if you can kill them before they deal enough dmg
• healing and CC are generally useless since foes cannot do anything than deal small bits of damage with long delays

For once, I’d love to have more use for my Necromancer, class which specializes on conditions and boon manipulation, these kind of things are extremely rare in vanilla PvE content, and is outperformed by Full-Berserker-DPS builds.
Boon manipulations has had one use, in the Kodan dungeon last boss!

Yes, you can play any build, but you’re always outperformed by Full-Berserker-DPS…

• Condition build: You take damage and kill foe after some time
• CC build: You take damage and kill foe after some time
• Healing build: You take damage and kill foe after some time
• Hybrid Direct DMG and Condition build: You take damage and kill foe after few seconds
• Crit Direct DMG build: You kill foe within few seconds, you take abit or no damage at all
  The problem is very clear…

What it should be: Any build will take some time and damage to kill foe, player also receives some damage depending on their active defenses. “Stand-Spam-DPS” should be glass cannon tactic

You do know that at release cursed shore (and all of orr) was much harder. nearly all the mobs had some form of pull or decent CCs and you were virtually forced to fight your way across the landscape.

Then they made it easier because babies cried about “not wanting ti fight when I just want to run to a harvesting node” and they sort of kept going with that “you can fight stuff in the world, but only if you feel like it” idea.

Then they realized that design approach was a big fat sack of boring and unnecessary failure and remedied the problem in HoT

At this point I wouldn’t expect any updates to core tyria, as Anet figured out what every pve developer before them already figured out: When you make faceroll content, people get bored repeating it, so you need to prioritize regular releases of new content.

They hit the nail on the head with the LS2 master achievements and it has been reported that the HoT storyline will work on the same episodic-with-secondary-challenges system. From what i’ve played for the HoT content it feels sufficiently lethal, but the open world remains unrewarding and repetitive due to a lack of any remarkable incentive for fighting through tougher areas more than once, and the fact that they still haven’t come to terms with the fac that you can’t balance the open world enough to brevent map-wide zergs from trivializing any and all content in it within the confines of the GW2 combat system. Luckily they’re adding more fractal scales (and hopefully more fractals) as well as investing heavily in the idea of challenging raid content for people who aren’t content with the status quo of one handed silverwastes farming as actual content.

Just watch out for that one bunny in brisban while you’re at it.

Bllade.1029:

Nice suggestions, but timing is off. With HoT so close to launch, Karl barely has the time to fix DD much less make changes to the core Thief.

You should re-post this after launch, you’d have a better chance of attracting some attention and your ideas are solid.

no, we wouldn’t have a better time of attracting attention. We’ve been trying for years. DD feedback is the first time any developer that we know of has read this forum in over a year.

I like the venom stuff.

Stealth should never trigger due to outside random occurances specifically because of reveal mechanics. One could argue “well don’t set the trap” but the primary purpose of ambush is to summon an NPC, and there are multiple ways to use the skill for its intended function that don’t kitten up your stealth flow.

I’d even be okay with making the trap/thieve’s guild pets invincible and decreasing their durations/upping their damage, or just making them more durable, or whatever, but a pet trap does not need to grant stealth.

Thieves guild, being pretty much just a bigger version of the trap, should also lose the stealth in this manner, as what it summons should remain pretty much a carbon copy of the trap thieves.

These are extremely niche skills that go “hey, the thief summoned a pet temporarily” and should play to that strength, summoning your own +1 or +2, and thus any buffs that aren’t centered around the cooldown or cast timing should really be focused on the generated pets and not the thief.

blarghhrrkblah.3412:

Phil.8901:

If you take the other 2 dodges, the dodge damage will reveal you if there is someone is in the range.

So no, gm traits are all bad options with SR.

Btw if you want to drop SR, thief needs a completely new source of defense to survive.

The old broken s/d with the old feline grace needed SR to survive.

Every meta thief build in the past and in the present needed SR.

Without SR, thief is pure garbage.

DD, with acrobatics too, can’t survive with only dodges without SR.

And we have also bandit’ s defense with more 5 s on cd.

I think what you’ve said highlights a pretty big issue about thief. What should happen, then, is to have thief as a whole be reworked to be able to survive without SR…not build more on it.

Edit: this is going to take a bit of time though, but I think it is still more important for Daredevil to be self-defining as something different from the core thief…and that means not relying on SR to survive.

Daredevil is still 2/3 core thief, and core thief is weak and busted. That’s what we are all saying. You can’t have a well balanced daredevil if thief itself is already in the crapper for survivability, as you then resort to placing all the survivability in daredevil, which hamstrings core traits in the future, writing a never ending string of “all defensive stuff” elite specs because the class as a whole can’t survive with its innate defensive lines.

Again, DD is not the problem, core thief is the problem with most of DD’s failings that aren’t just buggy or lazy animation issues.

However, the last time we got a designer to buff thieves in a meaningful way, it was reverted within two months because people complained they couldn’t roll face across the keyboard and beat thieves any more.

I’d leave our base HP alone but give us much better cleanse against damaging conditions.

If our primary defense is supposed to be not getting hit, it shouldn’t be so easy to undo that by applying DoTs that invalidate the evades and stealth we rely on to avoid taking damage.

Thieves should be scared of big, direct, up front hits, and the proper counter should be catching us with our pants down and no way to clear snares or stuns, but we should be quite resilient against damaging conditions as they deal far more damage per successful hit than white/crit strikes, and it would simply be borked to design us in such a way that we could evade/stealth every single incoming attack

So, with this design, we’d still be largely reliant on active defenses, but people would have to actually work and try to land big attacks rather than spam conditions because after a certain point they’re all going to stick.

If that’s done, I feel it’s fair to be so glassy, provided we keep our mobility and primary forms of active defense, with perhaps more supplemental life on hit mechanics to add sustain rather than core defenses, again, to make defeating thieves around securing cc and big hits while making them waste init and cooldowns on avoiding little ones.

Thief 101: Don’t stealth and stand around where you stealthed at. Stealth doesn’t make you unhittable, just invisible, people can still hit you with blind swings, so always move out of their attack field when you stealth, and watch out for aoes.

You’re not supposed to have the cleanse, swiftness, AND easily stay in melee range. That’s the freakin’ point. Its intended to be a dodge used for zipping around, not harassing single targets.

That is why Lotus, a dodge that is much better against single targets than multiples exists

However, for people that actually want to move around the battlefield faster/better to hit more opponents, get to points even faster, or maintain range dash is the obvious choice which is why it is designed that way

Well, you know, if the concept art, 3d modeling, and software design industry all formed strong unions they could make similar demands.

The problem is that they won’t, which sucks. People are still making money off of art and code I did five years ago and I don’t see a cent of it. That’s how things work. Actors, however, have very individual skill sets that are noticable in the end product.

Your audience will more than likely not notice if you switch systems programmers halfway through production, and if your artists are good they won’t notice if you switch concept or production artists halfway either.

Your audience will most assuredly notice if you switch voice or film actors though, as there’s a consistance to that which can’t really be mimiced or replaced.

Actors used to be treated as much like dirt as production artists are in (many, not necessarily Arenanet) game studios right now, but in the 20s they rose up and formed a union so they weren’t mericlessly exploited by their mother companies any more. That union persists to the current day.

What prevent the rest of your gamge development team from doing the same is that the code and art skills aren’t nearly as rare, and there are far far more potential new hires waiting in the wings that can actually do the job as well or better than the staff that would strike, so attempting to strike as a production art team would only be a minor inconvenience, and most of the more cutthroat studios would just be like “K, we’ll just call up people from this big list of 900 qualified applicants we have to replace you, bye”

Well, in GW1 it had a unique purpose as a “mind games” style caster rather than a more straightforward nuker. The high fashion and all that stems from the original mesmers all being more performance artists than researchers or warriors. GW1 mesmers were all about illusions, but also mental effects, the ability to interrupt skills, and basically do other psychic nastiness. The mesmer skill pool had an effective set of tools to completely lock down any other character if they built for it, but due to the way GW1 was designed they couldn’t build to lock down all types of characters at the same time.

Since they removed so much of the complexity from the combat system, but felt mesmer was unique to the world they wanted to keep the core theme of mesmers as alluring mind games casters with a side of chaos, so they invented the clone mechanic since they decided to make an easier game with less fulfilling and challenging combat. Along with the illusion theme, they felt it appropriate to continue to portray the class as that sort of aristocratic high stage magician.

As for the butterflies, they come from some iconic mesmer hexes in the first game like pacifism that basically did what cofusion does, only more directed and a lot more painful (e.g. a curse that only hurts you when you make physical attacks, a curse that only hurts you when you cast spells, etc.) and I’m guessing they felt it was pretty on theme for mesmers to keep the pink/purple theme that the old curse icons had since pink is a “pretty” color and would contrast well against the other skill effects.

Arlowslol.1974:

Karl McLain.5604:

Re: Dash update!
The original reason we had removed the extra distance on Dash was that we lacked the tech. Since that post, it’s been resolved. Thus, the distance of Dash is back, with a fervor. Now you’ll travel a full 450, up from the 360 previous (~300 base dodge), while moving at a faster-than-running speed. Swiftness duration increased to 10 seconds, up from the 8 we talked about originally.
This thing’s about solid movement, so we’re going to push it in that direction for this BWE. Please check it out and let us know how you feel about it. The animation’s going to remain as your character’s run for now.
We are aware that this new distance will cause some de-sync in synergy with Shadow Refuge, but feel that the open-field movement capability for daredevil needs to take precedence over this abliity. note: You can still dodge from edge-to-edge and remain inside the field, but it’s pretty tricky.

oh, noooooooo,Karl

it was not only Shadow refuge, if you fight a guys, the extra distance will make you run out of the target, when im use daredevil with my S/D thief, 360distance is not good at melee fighting , and now 450…..you just

attack->run away->run back->attack..this is terrible

the normal S/D style is usually be attack->dodge around target->attack, this is what we need

pls, cut that extra distance ,it just sound cool on paper, not good in the game!!!

Then dash isn’t a good choice for your build. That’s why dash isn’t the only option. Dash is a mobility dodge to rapidly move between targets or kite with. if you want to stick with a target , run lotus to cripple them and make your job easier, or bound for increased damage.

It’s actually great in the game for the purpose it’s designed for, moving around well in team fights or for ranged pistol builds.

Karl McLain.5604:

Re: Dash update!
The original reason we had removed the extra distance on Dash was that we lacked the tech. Since that post, it’s been resolved. Thus, the distance of Dash is back, with a fervor. Now you’ll travel a full 450, up from the 360 previous (~300 base dodge), while moving at a faster-than-running speed. Swiftness duration increased to 10 seconds, up from the 8 we talked about originally.
This thing’s about solid movement, so we’re going to push it in that direction for this BWE. Please check it out and let us know how you feel about it. The animation’s going to remain as your character’s run for now.
We are aware that this new distance will cause some de-sync in synergy with Shadow Refuge, but feel that the open-field movement capability for daredevil needs to take precedence over this abliity. note: You can still dodge from edge-to-edge and remain inside the field, but it’s pretty tricky.

Now that’s a meaningful choice that might give a nice buff to P/P viability. Can we please get any comment at all on core thief issues? Even a “We’re looking at updates as part of HoT for all existing traits across all classes” would be nice.

oh I’m not saying our condition removal is up to par, but i know how anet like to toe the “everybody’s got a weakness” line, so my thinking is if damaging conditions are supposed to be our weakness for some reason, why not ramp up the white damage resistance and cc resistance to compensate?

Personally I’d be happy if our squish level stayed where it is and we just got better condi removal and some sort of additional defensive gimme while revealed if we spec in to SA. Stability maybe? IDK.

No more Cantha/Elona related stuff until we can actually see it in its native environment?

I wasn’t weird to see ninjas in prophecies because I could go to the place where there are ninjas. It’s super weird to see all the long dragons, ancestral outfits, and other Canthan stuff that doesn’t look like someone’s family heirloom (like the Delequa sword, that one seems appropriate as a cultural heirloom) but rather like they just found it lying around.

It doesn’t bother me really, it’s just weirdly explanationless like the wings, demon horns, etc. Why bother going through all that effort doing Canthan stuff when you’re not working on Cantha? or, you know, why not make that stuff seem antique or at least of tyrian manufacture like how the Zephyrite stuff has a sort of cultural middle ground feel?

People talking about immersion. I mean when I’m immersed in a fantasy world nothing pulls me out of it like people being all meta and fourth wall breaking.

Maybe 500 cooking could roll in to a whole new system in stead? Pet food? Craftable +XP items that work like scrolls/tomes? The ability to craft a deployable food vendor? A selection of crafted-only dye kits? Craftable luck?

I would have said something like trays, but considering trays are already in the game I’m at a loss for how food could be “better” in stead of “different” considering how but the mechanics are built around avoiding power creep.

Jana.6831:

Right now playing thief or even playing D/D thief is suicidal, so making things worse than they are now would take some effort.

Not so sure if the “upon entering stealth” thingy would work as right now we have to “sit in stealth” to benefit from it – you can make it a lasting buff – that would work. But still; one of our main defenses is that the enemy doesn’t know where we are, thus might or might not attack us. That falls away with all the revealed stuff. How about: Invulnerable but revealed? I would love that actually, makes everybody think twice about using these skills.

Or, less blatantly overpowered, how about just getting a SA trait that grants damage resistance when revealed? Not the protection boon, but straight up DR so it doesn’t get hate/stripped This means we’d still be a bit weak to conditions, would still have to camp in stealth for much of the clear, and still be vulnerable to CC as we’re back to supersquish once revealed ends, but it would give some much needed cover and help to counterbalance all the revealed. Maybe not DR as strong as protection, but something?

Evon Gnashblade has been stocking a massive selection of pre-dyed gliders for discerning fashionistas, and Black Lion associates are busy packing them in to this holdiay season’s distribution of black lion chests. Don’t you worry!

Hire More Animators

Honestly it looks like lag to me.

Dodges are coded in such a way that you do the animation client side so it feels smooth, but the actual effect (including the evade and movement) usually happens a split second after that on the server. if your ping is high enough, you might see yourself in a dodge where the server does not long enough for someone to actually land a hit. It’s happened to me before when I was downloading a bunch of stuff and there were two people streaming video.

You see a similar effect if you’re playing with any “dodge grants effect or boon” traits, where you dodge but the boon/caltrops.whatever doesn’t fire right away but in stead fires a bit after the dodge in an interesting place.

I use the caltrops trait on my thief, and I instantly know I’m lagging up when I dodge and don’t hear the tink sound of caltrops as soon as I hit the button.

Elite Spec: Evil Twin

As masters of disguise, Evil Twins forgo the theft of mundane items for something far more insidious. As an Evil Twin, you no longer gan a stolen item when you steal. In stead, you gain the ability to mimic the form of your target, though when you do so you have a goatee, and sharp eyes players and some new enemies in the expansion can cue in to this detail and see through your deception. This form mimics the name, shape, resource totals at the time of theft, and non-elite abilities of that target when used, and is dispelled automatically as soon as the thief uses any ability other than autoattack.

Sounds balanced right? You know, especially the part where you can appear green in PvP and gain a second HP pool, or mimic bosses in PvE! Also, the part where it forces everyone to buy gems to remove their facial hair

It’s not arbitrary at all. The concern is that allowing infinite combinations overcomplicates the design space and at some point actively prevents designing impactful and fun new skills or weapon sets. The difference between 5 new weapon types that you can only use one of, and five new weapon types you can use any of all together means you have to balance each addition against not only the core spec, but the elites as well.

It’s done the way it is so they can, for instance, design a 15 second stunbreak with a reactive knockback and put it on the daredevil, but don’t have to worry about that skill making a future “shadowmancer” overpowered because the shadowmancer’s focus skills also grant blocks, and the mixture of the two creates a build that’s simply too good.

Going forward in to 5 or 10 elite specs later you start to see the same problem that GW1 had over time, it becomes virtually impossible to design cool new things that don’t become somehow completely broken and overpowered because they can be used with any or all of the old things, so you end up having to make completely lackluster nonsense to prevent it.

The way they’re handling elites now, they only have to balance each new elite spec against the base class, which means each can have a pretty strong set of skills and identity without worrying that they’d end up completely overpowered when combined.

Druids have too much sustain, and coupled with their ability to maintain a pet they are effectively two player-level durability targets in stead of one.

I think everyone should get access to pet skills, and also skills to banish the ranger’s pet directly because their pets don’t have any counterplay. That’s the only way it will be fair. For WvW since there could be a whole zerg of rangers, you should make a new trap that banishes pets in an AoE too because a zerg of druids is like facing two zergs and that’s not fair.

Thematically, most of acro’s good traits are “damage control” traits. Since DD is now the “master of all things evasion” perhaps its time to rething acro as “the trait line that gives your character reflexes” and theme the whole darn thing around that idea. hell, rename the trait line “Reflexes” while we’re at it.

For example, a trait that gives you init when interrupted. A trait that retaliates with a immob dagger when launched, a trait that gives you reflect for a few seconds upon taking a ranged attack, a trait that makes a lethal hit in stead drop you to 10% and launch you back, etc.

Thematically it’s more about superior reaction time than actually having more dodge, the assumption that your character, as a wily thief, has a lot of cool ICD ways to counter common thief-killing incoming attacks, and due to the trait mechanism they’re all good options but you can’t take all of them, but you can build around actually taking certain hits or effects on purpose as part of a combat strategy.

In light of the passive defenses we see on other classes it seems an appropriate change, and I think there’s a lot of room to build unique traits that feel appropriately thiefy and slippery in there.

This won’t make it good at preventing bad things, and that’s okay since that’s apperantly DDs job now. What it will do is give theives a usable not-stealth defensive line to bring up the survivability to a level that it’s worth taking in stead of SA or DD, or in addition to them if you want to go nots and sacrifice your damage lines for taking multiples.

So what are the animations for lotus dodge being replaced with? Is it just a normal dodge now?

Furthermore, is there any way someone at anet could explain why rerolling a character gets 9000 times more love than ongoing development of existing characters in an expansion?

What happenned? The Dragonhunter, Tempest, and Daredevil certainly do not feel like something that is ready to release in a month. This is in extreme contrast to their counterparts.

Quickly:

Tempest: It’s a no brainer. The overload mechanic should have been a new 1-5 set of skills worth camping in the attunement for that put all the other attunements on cooldown. That’s what people wanted most in a new Ele. They wanted to be able to actually build a “fire mage” or “earth mage” etc.

Dragonhunter: Traps are not a range-themed mechanic. Ranged support mechanics are CC. DH should have been designed around ranged pin down and imprison style skills, and knockbacks.

Daredevil: The basic DNA of this spec is good! The theme and intent is actually workable unlike the other two. However until someone over at arenanet admits it is a band-aid on a functionally weak class that is being made doubly weak indirectly by being the only class which Literally has skills designed to hard counter it and that mistakes were made when balancing it, which is agreed upon by virtually your entire PvP and PvE player base of any skill or sense you’re simply going to have a rough time balancing it.

Can you please address what’s being done for the thief in light of even more revealed and stealth being handed off to other classes? Is anything being done at all? Are we expecting to see HoT release and still have an elite spec full of nothing but re-used animations and a core class that is made less desirable and powerful by default due to everything that makes it unique being stripped away piecemeal or invalidated by the updates to the design of its peers?

I get the impression that literally everyone on the design team just gets super-frustrated by thieves in live play because they’re all hard working people who don’t have time to learn how to fight thieves like real players do, reflexively nerf them, and then ignore thief feedback because they simply expect players to complain when they get nerfed.

Round one of thief nerfs was warranted. Rounds 2 through I-lost-count were just insanity. The constant attention to crap like venomshare (without actually fixing venoms) and attempting to minimize stealth builds is mind boggling. You designed thieves as a stealth-centric class in the first place so it confuses a lot of us as to why changes are constantly made to the game to virtually force thieves to abandon stealth which all thieves are expected as a function of skill design to have at least a little of

Daredevil is cool, but we’re rapidly approaching a situation where playing a stealthless daredevil will be the only way to actually play thief at all, and that’s just plain not build diversity.

If you’re not the guy in charge of general thief design, can you direct us to whoever is? Is anyone at all? is anyone actually even looking at these issues or is the offical word that you feel like core thief is in a good place?

I don’t understand why any extra game system is needed for someone to recieve complements.

Are you looking for some kind of compliment score to keep track? Just find a post-it or something.

Sounds fine to me actually, assuming the content had some sort of ongoing unique reward I’d be all for a unique set of “world first kill” skins.

People complained about the jetpack/monocle drop rates for instance. This was valid because the acquisition method for them wasn’t about being better at something, or getting extremely rare rewards for exceptional ability, alacrity, or going above and beyond. It had the same flaw as precursors do right now, its rarity was gated completely by RNG.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again:

The idea that a thing can maintain its value when it is trivial to obtain (and all grind methods are tirvial to obtain) is a logical fallacy which does not take in to account the very real economic and physical definition of value and rarity.

There is a reason Chest skins command a higher price than champion dropped exotics in most cases. It’s not because of a sense of personal value based upon how much people like the skins. It is a simple economic fact of rarity = value.

Simply handing out 500 tokens for a raid and 1 token a day for logging in and using the same tokens to buy everything absolutely diminishes the value of those items in the same way that handing out a stanley cup to everyone who bought tickets to an NHL game would.

I’ve kept out of this as I felt I said my piece on it, but it’s ridiculous that certain posters are still espousing this idea that everyone deserves every reward for doing nothing special.

It’s not about people not having stuff. I don’t care if every single player also has the raid skins. I care that the players that do actually had to earn them in the same exact manner

That’s what gives them value. They’re trophies, not sensible blue jeans marketed by myriad vendors with varying brand names.

The real issue here is the idea that some people are concerned that there is something in the game they might not be able to obtain

Right now I have in my bank a tier 3 might boon. This item was mistakenly left on certain vendors at release. It was part of the old food buff system that they forgot to remove. You can no longer acquire it, and you’ll never be able to acquire it. it is functionally useless. You don’t care that I have that, but you very much care that perhaps someone will have a shiny armor skin that you don’t.

The position that “I don’t care if others have things and the people that do are selfish jerks” isn’t accurate. You’re worried that other people have things you don’t I don’t think a single person really cares how many people have the raid armor. What they care about is that every person who has it actually got it from a raid, just like every person with a legendary had to do world completion, every person with the liadri mini had to fight liadri, and every person with the GW2 ball cap was actually around at release.

Exclusivity is about those rewards having meaning in an intrinsic and irrefutable way. it’s about seeing an item and going ‘cool, where’s that from?’ and being able to say ‘well, to get this, you have to do something special, and I did that’ rather than ‘well, I got it the hard way, but you can buy it off the auction house by grinding silverwastes’

I realize the idea of trophies, and the use of skins as the highest value and thus most desirable trophies doesn’t make sense to you, but the fact that you’re even concerned that you might not have access to a skin says everything about why they make the best trophies.

Astralporing.1957:

From what i see, the only odd one is Daredevil, which gives increased endurance on top of standard (weapon access, specialization skill access, adjustment to class mechanics) changes.

The extra endurance is half of the adjusted mechanic, the other half being the dodge replacements that take the place of the GM traits in stead of having GMs that are more universally useful.

initiative and just steal in general

Steal doesn’t get a lot of love from a lot of people, but I really like the way it instantly flows in to attack patterns. The other class mechanics seems like a thing that they have in addition to their skills, but steal really feels like this cohesive thing that is part of the skills because of the way to teleports and applies whatever trait’s you’ve got on, but doesn’t require precasting or other recource building.

The stolen items are fun as well, especially with improvisation, and learning what they do and how to use them was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the thief in both pvP and PvE, it’s like a little secret lexicon of knowledge that you have to build up and it can change the way you approach some fights. So yeah, init and steal feel more peanut butter and jelly than the other class mechanics I think, and I prefer having a resource to manage rather than having everything dictated by cooldowns.

I was considering rolling a support ele or guardian for my non-thief play until I played around with revnant and I like the revnant for the same reason, it’s got a resource to manage rather than just plain telling me “no you can’t do that for practically forever” with lengthy cooldowns like other classes.