Guild Wars 2

I’ve never once understood why people like Shiro so much.

Mechanically, Factions was a great campaign. The encounter and mission designs were great, and the maps were fun. Story wise it was laughable. Everything from the voice acting to the deus ex machina devices that drove the entire plotline were just plain silly.

Shiro himself was remarkable only for his appeal to fans of eastern culture tropes, and had no more depth as a main villain than the Lich or Abby. People like Shiro because he’s a long haired asian guy with two swords and some nonsense tortured past. The fact that he showed up in a few more cutscenes didn’t make him a unique and interesting character. It made him a carbon copy of every single bad guy trope ever.

Seriously, have a look and tell me this is the hallmark of a well developed character:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uvfT4iYuV4#t=4m42s

He literally does every evil thing ever because some random old woman told him to. There’s no other reason for him to betray the emperor. Then he goes on, supposedly tortured about the experience… on a quest to come back to life, raise an army of shiroken, in order to what… murder everyone for no discernible reason?
There’s no clear or consistant motivation for anything Shiro ever does. Ever.

In fact, the entire GW beyond Cantha story, despite the lack of voice acting, was filled with far, far more interesting and believable villains and plot notes.

It honestly always really bothered me that people could skips JPs with a mesmer portal.

I mean, it’s literally effortless loot. That’s just messed up.

Behellagh.1468:

Except gold has no direct value to ANet. Paying for a Gem Shop item with gold doesn’t help ANet meet payroll. And since you aren’t paying them in a currency ANet can use to make payroll, you are getting that item for free.

It’s not that hard of a concept.

It does though. The gems on the exchange aren’t magiced up out of thin air. Each and every gem you’ve ever purchased with gold began life when someone whipped out a credit card and put it there.

The echange didn’t being life with a stock of gems. It began life with a finite stock of gold.

In fact, the supply of gems in the exchange is what affects the gold price of gems. When you buy a gem item with gold, Anet is making the same amount of money they would have made if someone bought it directly with cash shopped gems, and in fact, that money was already made before you even bought the item, the moment the original purchaser of those gems completed their transaction.

Your ability to buy gem items with gold is absolutely of value to Anet, because it encourages people to buy gems so they can sell them to you. Thus, your ability to reliably make and spend gold is of value to them because for that transaction to be attractive to the gem-buyer it has to be reasonably affordable in terms of the time and difficulty required to gain the gold to buy them.

Boring 6-slot is boring.

How about something cooler, like “when you use an elite skill, allies gain the effects of your legend for 3 seconds” or something.

Nothing I hate more than 6-slot bonuses that just hand out a few stats or boons.

Knighthonor.4061:

PopeUrban.2578:

They won’t have any effect on racial skills. Racial skills are designed on purpose to be worse than dedicated profession skills.

The most likely outcome is that you’ll have the option of racial/common skills to slot in place of revenant utilities, and that it will be a silly thing to do in most cases.

Engineers get a Toolbelt skills based on Racials. So not a reach right?

I mean it’s possible, sure, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Racial skills were DOA in the first place and have languished in obscurity ever since.

Why Anet purposely designed skills intended to be mostly useless in the first place is beyond me. Like, if you don’t intend the skills to be useful, and you don’t want people choosing race for a mechanical advantage, then why have them in the first place? Just add… like… racial emotes or something in stead.

I mean, racial armor is like that. using it doesn’t actively put you at a disadvantage and it adds racial flavor to characters.

I really just wish they buff them up to useful tier and add mastery tracks to learn racial skills from the other races or something.

They’ll just re-use one of the PvE ones, perhaps with a bit of a buff.

Because thieves don’t get fun new toys, our new specialization is their answer to thief balance, and our new specialization will lose access to steal.

That’s my theory anyway.

Vayne.8563:

I’m dying to know what percentage of players actually particapted in GvG in Guild Wars 1 as a total.

I’m guessing that GvG had a very hard core base, but it wasn’t a majority of the player base. If it was, it would exist here…that’s my theory anyway.

This.

GvG was a super fun mode, but the hardcore PvP crowd revolved around the HoH ladder, and Anet never added any of the originally planned functionality to guild halls or GvG (early on there was talk of customizing the hall’s defenses and other such functional GvG upgrades)

In fact, my one fear about guild halls in GW2 is that they’re just as useless as they were in the first game. Just giant set pieces devoid of content or purpose outside of their use as GvG arenas.

Without GvG even being a thing, my fear is that guild halls will be even less useful than the first game. I don’t want to see another system where all you’re able to put together is a big empty structure with the same vendors you can already find easily in any major city in the game.

They won’t have any effect on racial skills. Racial skills are designed on purpose to be worse than dedicated profession skills.

The most likely outcome is that you’ll have the option of racial/common skills to slot in place of revenant utilities, and that it will be a silly thing to do in most cases.

I honestly don’t know why they felt the game needed another class in the first place, given the extremely small amount of skills avaliable to existing classes.

Masteries and specializations ALONE, alongside a whole massive chunk of personal story, and the logical assumption of at least one brand new dungeon (To kill Mordy) and a giant new landmass of zones is more than enough to justify an expansion. Guild halls and stronghold are icing, but I’d gladly trade either for a solid 12 or so utility/elite skills for every existing class to go alongside the specializations.

Where do people get the idea that expansions MUST have new classes and races, or that expansions should logically revolve around rolling new characters to get to the lion’s share of the content?

That’s not how GW1 worked. They added classes, but every added class was a value addition to existing characters as well, due to the secondary class mechanics. In the GW2 setup this is not true. To get any playtime out of a new class or race you’re stuck rolling yet another character. Expansions shouldn’t overly prioritize, you know, shelving your existing characters to enjoy a disproportionate share of the content. They should expand those characters in terms of progression and story first and foremost.

TBH I think the addition of the revnant is pure fan service, and is a silly move in general that just adds bloat rather than value to the expansion. That time and effort could have been better spent adding an extra specialization to the existing classes.

There will be text on the screen:

These events took place before your return to Tyria

In every LS mission.

That’s how they handled it in GW1, and that’s how they’ll handle it in GW2. There’s no reason to suspect otherwise, as adding such a massive amount of content specific to a single profession is bad from an impact standpoint, when you’re attempting to develop an expansion’s worth of personal story for already existing characters.

They may give revs the new HOT story as the first thing in their journal, and POSSIBLY a class-specific starter mission (which ejects them from the mists to their appropriate starting zone at the end) and add a few historian NPCs so they have the ability to play the original LS.

That’s about the absolute maximum I’d expect though. An entirely new rev specific 1-80 LS or starting zone is an unreasonable expectation of effort when considering the already massive effort in personal story extension for existing L80 characters.

Honestly, it isn’t THAT huge of a deal to swap voice actors. They did it in GW1 and aside from the first few cutscenes nobody really cared.

As long as your new VO is largely similar to the old one (no massive differences in pitch or accent) it’s a change that’s only mildly perceptable, and made less so with a little bit of massaging the audio.

I think everyone would rather have more voice lines, with the occasional “huh, that’s slightly different” than no new voice lines ever.

Donari.5237:

There are apparently technical limitations preventing them from making universally sittable chairs, per the zillions of threads on the subject over the years.

The best suggestion imo (sorta tooting my own horn since I was one of the suggesters) is to have a toy chair. Y’know, like the pirate sword or chef’s frying pan, it replaces your skills with other abilities, in this case a variety of sitting poses in a summoned chair.

Or else just have a /chair emote that summons a chair and poses you in it in a persistent state.

This worked really well in COH. There were a truckload of /sit, /lean, /crouch, /prop style animations that let you pretty naturally use the environment despite that environment having no real bind points on chairs.

You had the option of a relaxed, arm-on-the-back sofa /sit, and sure, it looked dumb if you didn’t actually USE it on a bench, sofa, or other such seat, but generally, because so many were avaliable people that wanted to sit, hang, lean on stuff, etc. were able to do so in a mostly plausible looking manner. You had sit anims designed for various styles of chairs, various “moods” of wall leaning and crouching, thematic animations (and even some cash shop sets) and tons where you just pulled out props to mess around with.

If I could get some environmental emotes, say a solid set of maybe 10 sit/lean/crouch animations, I’d probably pay around 800 gems for it. Way more useful and impactful cosmetics than a mail carrier.

Thieves suffer from low HP, unreliable condition removal, and almost complete lack of access to stability. This makes a “made” thief a dead thief in most cases, and it makes us pretty terrible group fighters in most situations.

Thieves are good at roaming, decent at 1v1s against certain specs, and quite good at choosing favorable engagements.

The last point is why theives get such a bad rap. Play a thief for a bit and you’ll come to understand that thieves aren’t the be-all-end-all win machine you think they are, but rather that when a thief completely owns someone in the face, it is because they chose that fight very carefully.

That’s an intended feature of the class. Without the ability to easily disengage and choose engagements, thieves don’t have the sustainability to last through unfavorable matchups or team fights.

Go play a thief for a bit and you’ll understand much, much better how to counter them.

KILROOOOYYYYY STOOOOOOONEKIIIIIINNNNN

I’d like to channel the powers of drunken brawling and yelling my own name really loud.

We can pretty much reach back to GW1’s mechanics for a lot of inspiration. Life force is basically a hybrid replacement for corpse exploitation and mana.

In GW1, necros siphoned mana from anything that died, and could use that mana to power any ability, including but not limited to corpse exploitation abilities. This sort of broke down as a mechanic when factoring in secondary classes, as the necro, compared to the primary stat effects of other classes, had a pretty huge advantage when it came to cross classing. This was responsible for a lot of neat meta builds that often made necros better at specific subclass jobs than their primary classes.

Corpse exploitation did the same thing, wells, minions, etc. allowed necros to use corpses to top off HP, do zone denial, DPS, and all manner of things.

Puting the two together, in theory, created a class that was designed around a snowball effect. Necros were powered largely by death. This was limited somewhat by the fact that corpse exploitation was limited to enemies that left corpses, corpses being a limited resource, and the point cost of gaining tons of mana was offset by the inability to put points in to other skills.

GW2’s method was, essentially, twofold. Corpse exploitation was removed because it cuased a design problem with their open world event systems. The potential for an extremely large number of necromancers participating the the same fight, all competing for precious few corpses would result in an amplified corpse starvation effect, making cthose skills very difficult to build around or use effectively in a large section of combat, and driving players to avoid rather than team up with others. This is counter to one of the main gaols of the GW2 design: all players should be able to do nothing but help you. Why they didn’t consider this same design problem when designing conditions (across all classes) I don’t quite understand.

Life force, on the other hand, was a mechanic that WOULD scale nicely to large player numbers, could be unique to the necromancer, and was thematically appropriate.

So, life force became the primary necro mechanic, and death shroud implemented to replace the snowballing mechanics of the GW1 necro with the sustain mechanics for the GW2 necro.

So, what’s that mean for specializations?

We know that the current implementation of death shroud is about sustain in order to prop up a class design that would, without it, be extremely fragile. We know that the design of life force necessitates the necro be able to initiate a fight at a deficit, and that it is implicit in its design that it allows the necro to complete encounters that would otherwise overpower his ability to stay alive until the end.

I’m willing to guess that since we know that greatsword is a feature of the new spec, that life force usage will swing the other direction, and that rather than granting a greater ability to withstand damage, it will impart a greater ability to inflict it.

Given that our principal GS necro, Marjory, wields a sword imbued with the spirit of her dead sister, I’d also be willing to bet that this new life force mechanic is largely tied in to a weapon enchantment system similar to the GW1 ritualist’s weapon skills.

I’m betting that life force’s use will either be a binary heightened damage state, similar to death shroud, that provides a limited pool of bonus damage added to all skills, with each application costing chunks of LF in addition to LF draining over time while it is active, or a limited bar (f1-f4, or so) of personal weapon enchants that work much life thief venoms, adding X strikes of Y effect to the necro’s attacks until depleted.

exii.8913:

I personally still think dmg benefit is completely useless, even for dungeon runs.
Elementalists do tons of dmg more with conjure weapons through their massive counts of bonus % dmg. I managed to hit 15.4k with LH on the coe golem yet and about 7.8k hits with the frost bow on ele and I wasnt even able to achieve a 9k hit with the LH on thief.

This is precisely why all the conjure summons summon two weapons, one for the ele, and one for a friend. At least in theory anyway. It is a little…. awkward to be in a party with a “conjure spec” that yells at everyone for “stealing my conjures”

Co-Op mechanics are weird.

Knighthonor.4061:

PopeUrban.2578:

Taunt is a CC, not an aggro mechanic. Re-read it.

The way its implemented is specifically to bust up the murderball formations that trivialize most of the pve content, and give melee specs additional and interesting cc that synergizes with rather than conflicts with their weapon sets.

For example: if you’re running a melee warrior, and you want some interrupt on your utility bar. Well, you could use fear me, but it’s a giant pain in the kitten , as you’re forced to use a mobility skill just to catch back up with the guy you just interrupted. On the flip side, if you’re running a ranged build, fear me has much better synergy as you’re trying to maintain distance. The addition of taunt (AKA Bizarro-fear), allows more build options and better skill synergy.

On top of that, mobs are going to use it on you, and I’d imagine that’s going to be pretty heavily abused by encounter and monster designs to break up the ‘all DPS IN A CORNER’ boring as heck strategy that pervades most of PvE, and moves general PvE in a more fun direction with real interrupts, timed cc saves, and other such fun stuff.

Aggro mechanics are a form of CC. So it’s not wrong to label Taunts a form of Aggro control.
Tanks in all trinity games do the job of CONTROLLING mobs.

That’s a purely semantic argument.

Aggro mechanics are not crowd control abilities. They’re laser-focused number crunches designed to create encounters in which risk is entirely removed from the majority of the party, mitigated completely, and ultimately creates a game in which a small portion of characters in the party are disproportionately responsible for that party’s success. Aggro is not designed to quickly save a party member from a near fatal attack. It’s designed to prevent that party member from being attacked ever. It’s a distributed hate system that all members in a given party play in to with positive or negative values.

The taunt boon is not an aggro mechanic. It is a short term crowd control condition with no lasting effects, no tracking of stacking hate mechanisms and no way for a single character to even mostly prevent the rest of theparty from ever being in real danger. Its impact on combat, as a whole, is the same as all other CCs rather than being the single defining element of the flow of PvE.

Saying Aggro is a CC is like saying running away, stealth, or killing enemies is a CC. Technically all of these things control the way enemies behave, but their primary function is not to disrupt the attack patterns of the enemy. Similarly, aggro,as a mechanic is not designed to disrupt the attack patterns of the enemy, but rather to control the targeting of the enemy.

The taunt effect is not an aggro mechanic. It does not create a situation in which players can control in a meaningful way the target prioritization of enemies. it does not allow players to take on roles dependant on such systems.

It is a short duration crowd control effect, with similar impact on combat as other short duration crowd control effects.

Does that clarify my statement?

When I played P/D condi I found out really quickly that my lack of closers and burst damage pretty much prevented me from taking down any target that didn’t want to fight me.

A P/D spec is one of the closest things thieves have to a viable PvP bunker. It’s going to be very hard to kill. Unlike other bunkers, however, P/D doesn’t have any really good ways to make sure you stick around long enough to get killed, or enough burst to kill you before you can decide to retreat and get some friends.

The core weakness of P/D is reliance on stealth. Cut off the stealth, either by making him waste init on failed C&D, blocking/reflecting his pistol bursts so he has to waste init or cooldowns to clear conditions, or otherwise kittening up his attack chain, or forcibly applying revealed with traps/skills. and you’ll make short work of him, or at the very least scare him off.

I used Improv for quite some time, and the recharge on it is pretty slick. They never fixed the bundle issue. Originally, stealing granted the thief a bundle, which is why this trait addresses bundles specifically. This was changed to the current system of stolen skills shortly before release as thieves in testing didn’t like being stuck with bundles when stealing.

Improv’s bundle interactions still have some interesting teamfight interactions though, but you should really be equipping it for the recharge, and only if your build is using at least 3 different kinds of utility skills.

If you’re already equipping it though? Make a beeline any time you see an ele drop a conjured weapon, an engineer drop a traited supply drop with the flamethrower, or any of the more worthwhile bundles in the world (like those in the claw fight or various other special encounters) The buffed damage to these is pretty neat depending on how damage heavy your gear is.

Unless they’re moving a LOT of the existing condition clears to resistance, this is a largely redundant boon, as the game is so overloaded with AoE cleansing, extremely short duration conditions, and over-restricted stack limitations that conditions are already a waste of time unless you happen to be a class that can stack 4+ separate long duration conditions on a target within a 3 second burst.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Nike.2631:

Interesting. Could you take a moment to compare and contrast it to Thieves then?

Thieves can spam while revenants need to think about it. :P

Not quite this. Initiative is a more “short view” system. There aren’t any “ultra moves” in the thief toolkit that you’d want to build a full far to unleash.

Basically, Initiative is more of a shared cooldown system rather than a resource management one. It spends fast, but regens quite fast as well, and functions specifically to allow thieves to have a greater access to their skills while preventing them from endlessly spamming them.

Revenant energy is more like the mana bars in GW1, it’s about taking a long view of combat, as you’ll need to make tradeoffs around it’s regen or degen effects, often at the expense of using other skills, and you’re going to have to modify that energy management game plan via swapping of hero channels, so it’s a very weighty system that requires a lot of attention, more like mes clones.

Basically, initiative is built to encourage reactionary play, while rev energy seems to be built around preparatory play.

Taunt is a CC, not an aggro mechanic. Re-read it.

The way its implemented is specifically to bust up the murderball formations that trivialize most of the pve content, and give melee specs additional and interesting cc that synergizes with rather than conflicts with their weapon sets.

For example: if you’re running a melee warrior, and you want some interrupt on your utility bar. Well, you could use fear me, but it’s a giant pain in the kitten , as you’re forced to use a mobility skill just to catch back up with the guy you just interrupted. On the flip side, if you’re running a ranged build, fear me has much better synergy as you’re trying to maintain distance. The addition of taunt (AKA Bizarro-fear), allows more build options and better skill synergy.

On top of that, mobs are going to use it on you, and I’d imagine that’s going to be pretty heavily abused by encounter and monster designs to break up the ‘all DPS IN A CORNER’ boring as heck strategy that pervades most of PvE, and moves general PvE in a more fun direction with real interrupts, timed cc saves, and other such fun stuff.

Except for the part where thieves aren’t particularly the best class at long running mobility to run supply, aoe to clear enemy mobs, support to keep guards or bombers alive, or survivability when attempting to channel.

Basically, Thieves are good at thiefy things, they’ll roam well, and might make good treb masters due to their 1v1 potential, but they can’t simply dominate the meta for the mode because too much of it depends on NPC support and assaulting fixed positions, both things thieves suck at unless specifically specced for support. And lets be fair here, thief support specs are one trick ponies with a really long cooldown that can’t do anything else when specced that way.

A team full of thieves would likely end up burning so much initiative, and so many cooldowns killing npcs that they’d get wiped out by players, or so much killing players that they’d lose the match due to not being able to keep up with the blow of npcs properly.

Assuming that rifle is the new thing (not confirmed, but it makes sense)

Gunslinger:
Thieves that choose the path of the gunslinger forego the up close and personal art of theft for the deadly precision that a practiced aim provides.

New weapon – Rifle:
In the hands of a gunslinger, The rifle is not merely a tool for putting down opponents. A gunslingers’s rifle is a precision instrument, used to disable, disarm, stun, and interrupt targets at long range. This weapon set posesses moderate damage, but superior ranged control, as the gunslinger’s legendary aim allows him to target even the tiniest weak point, weapon, or device.

New offhand: Sword

A practiced gunslinger has learned to wield a sword in the offhand as a masterful defensive tool. The thief may use the sword to parry single blows both ranged and melee, combine it with a mainhand pistol to execute a channeled projectile block while firing rounds from his pistol, or execute a dazzling flourish to blind neaby opponents.

Lost weapons: MH Dagger and Sword
Gunslingers are firearms specialists, and as such may no longer equip swords or daggers in their main hand.

New Mechanic: Aim (replaces steal)

The gunslinger may use the F1 key to closely study his opponent. Aiming is a channel, costing one initiative per second, and adds one stack of Aim to the gunslinger for each initiative consumed. A gunslinger may not accrue more aim stacks than his maximum initiative. Initiative does not regenerate while aiming, and for each stack of aim, the thief’s next weapon skill is granted additional damage and condition duration. If the gunslinger loses sight of the target, uses a non-weapon skill, or moves, the gunslinger loses all stacks of aim. The gunslinger may use aim while stealthed.

Koviko.3248:

Or there was a time in which humans assumed their continent was the entire world and didn’t decide to fix the name after they learned otherwise.

Or because all humans on tyria are descended form the first humans brought by the six “gods” and only later journeyed outward to settle other lands.

Keep in ming the word “tyria” is a human term, adopted by other races with the spread of the common new krytan dialect.

In regards to “splitting the already sparse player base”

Have you considered that the player base is sparse because people don’t like the game mode, and that requiring people to play it in order to play a mode they like may actually drive those players away, or result in behaviors like idling through conquests maps and actively creating a worse experience for people that actually like it?

You’re basically saying random que should be the only option, which is like suggesting that activities, WvW, conquest, and all matchup number variations should be on the same que. Doesn’t that seem a little unreasonable?

Except they’re not at odds because it isn’t about the power budget of a single skill, it’s about the power budget of the entire skill bar.

DB underperforms on condition builds due to its single condition type, which is one of the most common proc cleanses. Condition D/D builds also have a severely hampered stealth attack, but marginally better control from dancing daggers. In PvE they suffer compared to other condition specs due to their target limitations. Sure, you can reach the cap with caltrops, but other condi specs can reach that cap on far more targets with far more conditions, and do it tons better, and often with better survivability to boot.

Finally, adding two targets without functionally changing the duration or parameters of the bleed at all, and increasing its utility doesn’t overpower or even over-incentivize spamming 3. You’re still make an opportunity cost decision between spamming out initiative for more condition application, or save some for using an evade, and your performance is still unchanged in duels aside from having some much needed survivability against thinking humans, and the option of better survivability against massive mob hordes.

Put a condition thief in perspective with aoe condition builds of any other class and you’ll find they seriously underperform already. Adding two targets will increase their aoe potential and possibly their survivability, but will not measurably increase their damage output in PvP whatsoever.

The problem, right now, with the skill is not that it’s good in one spec and bad in the other. It’s that it underperforms in a condition spec and is absolutely useless in a power spec, and this is true in both PvE and all forms of PvP.

What it needs is a buff that makes it worth using in both without overpowering either. Get that balance right and people can hybrid all they like, as the game is not balanced around hybrids, as hybrids are a composite of sub-optimal damage that are made viable by the combination of that damage.

I agree. I find the conquest game type boring, and stronghold sounds fun. I’d like to just play stronghold when I que.

Never mind that I’m in que with my guild, and team compositions are different for both modes, and often different players.

I don’t think anyone cares if there’s only one stronghold map at the outset. DOTA had one map for kittening years, so did LOL, and nobody cared. There should absolutely be a separate que per gametype.

I think other covered “teef” and “kitten” but the term “bunker” rather than “tank” comes from GW2s combat mechanics.

“tank” usually connotates an expectation of aggro management in a trinity style system, and GW2 “tanks” don’t have that kind of a skill subset.

In addition, the primary PvP modes in which “tanking” is viable all involve point capturing or area denial by remaining in a fixed position.

Thus, the “bunker” terminology comes from a combination of a lack of aggro for PvE (bunker/tank setups are not favored, so the “tank” teminology never reall caught on) and their literaly function in PvP (They are fortified positions designed to hold an area)

Thus, when the PvP community started calling certain builds bunkers, the subset of the PvE community that was playing those builds picked up the terminology already in use when discussing them, and the term “bunker” spread to PvE.

People make the assumption, because when Anet makes trailers with player characters they generally clothe them in a manner that’s themed with their profession.

They generally clothe engis in either neutral browns, or if in flashier colors more magictech looking stuff, they usually put warriors in the more utilitarian heavy sets, guardians in the more fillt looking sets, necros are usually given darker colors and themed gear than eles, and mesmers are usually in pinks/purples etc.

people are assuming it’s a thief becuase in trailers Anet usually depicts player thieves in dark colored minimalist leathers, and usually with bandana style facemasks or no headgear, while they generally select brighter colors and very rarely use the bandana style masks for engis, and when they do they usually use a more “engineer-style” leather set.

Basically, beome assume it’s a rifle-thief because the norn depicted is dressed like a thief, and anet tends to “dress to class” in trailers.

TaCktiX.6729:

Problem 1: It’s Completely Expansion Exclusive
Negative Incentive: Why Not to Make Masteries Expansion Exclusive

TL;DR, The masteries associated with the core game should not be locked behind the expansion, but given to any owner of Guild Wars 2. This functions as both an incentive to get the expansion for the cooler Heart of Thorns part, and a way to keep the community together even when it “splits” over the expansion.

Problem 2: Mastery Track Tiers aren’t Horizontal
Levels by Any Other Name: Mastery Track Tiers

TL;DR, Masteries are vertical progression, just like the existing leveling system is. Calling it “not the typical” is disingenuous and builds hype that is bound to get disappointed. But with a few simple changes, it can shift from raw vertical to almost horizontal, with added benefits.

1:
Masteries are used to unlock content. Specifically, expansion content. Just because it is located in the existing map doesn’t mean that the new content accessed by the mastery system is not expansion content. The expansion is not a free content patch, it’s a feature and content-rich paid addition.

2:
Masteries are horizontal in that they don’t invalidate your existing achievements. That was the intent of the system. They are progression tier that build upon your progress rather than incentivize you to throw out your hard work for a shiny new set of things. The mordrem armor is a great example. You don’t need to go grind out a whole new gear set for “of mordrem slaying” and toss your old stuff. You keep your achievements and treasures, and they retain their value, but your character progresses. They’re intended to be vertical in that they add ways for your character to improve. That’s what progression is. They’re horizontal in that they are several alternate paths to several different goals and content types, and co-exist as the system is expanded. You won’t need to grind out a mordrem fighting mastery in order to unlock, say, a corrupted fighting mastery. You won’t be putting points in to content that you don’t find valuable. Those tracks exist independently so you can choose how to direct that progressing in whichever order you choose. When the next big area or expansion releases, you won’t have to play catch-up by doing a bunch of unrelated tasks in this one if you don’t like the content, as all masteries use as a base level the existing leveling and gearing balance.

Maugetarr.6823:

PopeUrban.2578:

Maugetarr.6823:

PopeUrban.2578:

I don’t think replacing it functionally is a good thing. It has an implied function as an aoe condition application skill with short term defensive benefit, and that shouldn’t change.

People crowing that it has an inconsistant damage type are missing the point, Daggers are and always were a combined condition/dps set, and the skills set up on thief bars for them were done as they were specifically because initiative allows us to skip a skill if it doesn’t work with our template, and use it for rare utility cases.

DB already does that. It’s a good bleed applier for condi builds, but it’s a kittenty defensive tool for crit builds. Thus, it needs its utility upped, not a damage change.

Adding ranged reflect to it is a great idea, another might be moving the evade frame to the END of the skill (since they don’t want thieves to have spammable initiative based evades considering they nerfed them all) which would solve the current problem it has as a defensive tool (people just wait until you’re on the way down from the spin and whack you)

If it added evade to the end of the animation and a short .1 sec evade buff after it completed, it would be functional as a repositioning tool, and if timed well could actually be used to gap open or close as you could chain a dodge after.

Increasing target count to 5 doesn’t seem unreasonable, as they like to buff lifeleech style builds (and I play such a build) as it would make it a solid aoe option and help out the survivability of lifeleech/evade bunker style builds as well as a little teamfight utility.

Adding a ranged reflect might make it too powerful, but as you stated the utility just needs to be upped. If they left the damage and bleeds the same, but changed the skill to have a 0.5 second evade with a 0.75 second total time, and a directional component like whirlwind attack (warrior’s GS #3), it would be no more powerful than flanking strike or disabling shot, but would be useful in whatever build you play. That would be about the same amount of spam at 4 initiative as the others. So I second most of your argument.

True, the reflect might be a bit much, but it sounds like a fun idea. I suppose one or the other needs to be the case, either a functional evade people can actually use in pvp somehow, or a reflect, both would make it have decent utility.

The 5 target limit just seems like a given. If you’re sacrificing enough to stack heals from Signet of malice and sunk deep enough in CA for invigorating precision, you’ve already traded off enough DPS traits and utility for the direct healing skills that the situational benefit of the extra heals from two more targets hit per cast seem a worthwhile tradeoff.

As a guy who likes to run such a build in zerg fights and PvE, i can say that the sustainability of these builds is decent, but it’s not nearly where it should be given what I have to sacrifice to take a CA master trait on a largely condition based build.

I guess I’m “meh” about the number of targets. Take engi bomb kit for example. The autoattack on bombs has 5 targets, but outside of pve, the likelihood of hitting all 5 isn’t that great, even with big ol’ bomb. So if DB had a sliding range of 300, the likelihood of connecting with up to 5 people (again,outside of pve) isn’t that great. I personally don’t think this would be overpowered (even with a 5 target cap) because D/D is trading the soft CC that D/P gets and the boonsteal and gap closers/creators that S/D gets for damage. Bringing up the dual skill would round out the set without outshining the other sets.

Edit: I guess in WvW you could hit up to 5 people with a slide, but individual damage to each would certainly not be gamebreaking.

That’s what I’m saying. it seems like a “gimme” change that’s only situationally useful but doesn’t remarkably overpower the skill at all, so while being a straight up buff it only reinforces the AOE function of the skill’s implicit design, and only greatly benefits specific builds in the very situations that they need it (lifeleech and bleed scaling better in larger fights, when you need more lifeleech and bleed)

tekfan.3179:

But seriously! I’m fed up with this topic! Is anyone here actually reading what is being written here? Are you even noticing what kind of thoughts and “interesting ideas” you have on screen here, in a forum for a fantasy mmorpg for children?

Internment camps?! Sub-human and that kind of kitten?! That’s the last kitten ed shove!

But somehow you’re okay with:

Murder
Blackmail
Theft
Arson
Graphic on screen asphyxiation
Rampant sexual innuendo
Violent Insanity
Murder of innocent civilians.
Carpet bombing an entire platoon of friendly forces, by the player, resulting in their mass death.

Oh, and also

The fact that it is an established onscreen and offscreen fact that sylvari were tortured and experimented on in asuran laboratories based solely on their race.

The overarcing thread here is that evil acts are the misguided efforts of bad or confused people. Horrible, awful things have and will continue to happen in this world. The tone, however is consistant. Player characters are always presented as heroic and virtuous, rather than complicit in these horrible acts. That heroism and virtue, to exist, requires evil to fight against.

What makes you think any part of the plot will place us as complicit with the jailing and mistreatment of sylvari? Even if such things come to pass, the trailer seems to indicate that our characters and the biconics are the shining beacon of reason in a world gone mad. You can’t have exemplary characters like that if the thing they struggle against does not exist. A large theme, like it or not, of the expansion, just like the base game, is racism and how it is wrong. In the release content that racism is explored in the continual charr/human relation, and we’ve been killing racist separatists from both factions of playable races for years.

This is not a game “for children” and in fact, the ESRB rates this as T, which means they consider it appropriate for ages 13+

I’d say the lack of explicit graphic sexual content, dismemberment, or other such onscreen depictions, while alluding to or discussing them is par for the course. See the recent boom of teen-marketed films and teen-marketed books. They all introduce mature and complex issues whilst avoiding explicit and graphic depictions of especially distressing or violent acts. If you allow your underage children to play a game you were informed was intended for a teenage-and-older demographic, that isn’t Anet’s fault, it’s yours.

Maugetarr.6823:

PopeUrban.2578:

I don’t think replacing it functionally is a good thing. It has an implied function as an aoe condition application skill with short term defensive benefit, and that shouldn’t change.

People crowing that it has an inconsistant damage type are missing the point, Daggers are and always were a combined condition/dps set, and the skills set up on thief bars for them were done as they were specifically because initiative allows us to skip a skill if it doesn’t work with our template, and use it for rare utility cases.

DB already does that. It’s a good bleed applier for condi builds, but it’s a kittenty defensive tool for crit builds. Thus, it needs its utility upped, not a damage change.

Adding ranged reflect to it is a great idea, another might be moving the evade frame to the END of the skill (since they don’t want thieves to have spammable initiative based evades considering they nerfed them all) which would solve the current problem it has as a defensive tool (people just wait until you’re on the way down from the spin and whack you)

If it added evade to the end of the animation and a short .1 sec evade buff after it completed, it would be functional as a repositioning tool, and if timed well could actually be used to gap open or close as you could chain a dodge after.

Increasing target count to 5 doesn’t seem unreasonable, as they like to buff lifeleech style builds (and I play such a build) as it would make it a solid aoe option and help out the survivability of lifeleech/evade bunker style builds as well as a little teamfight utility.

Adding a ranged reflect might make it too powerful, but as you stated the utility just needs to be upped. If they left the damage and bleeds the same, but changed the skill to have a 0.5 second evade with a 0.75 second total time, and a directional component like whirlwind attack (warrior’s GS #3), it would be no more powerful than flanking strike or disabling shot, but would be useful in whatever build you play. That would be about the same amount of spam at 4 initiative as the others. So I second most of your argument.

True, the reflect might be a bit much, but it sounds like a fun idea. I suppose one or the other needs to be the case, either a functional evade people can actually use in pvp somehow, or a reflect, both would make it have decent utility.

The 5 target limit just seems like a given. If you’re sacrificing enough to stack heals from Signet of malice and sunk deep enough in CA for invigorating precision, you’ve already traded off enough DPS traits and utility for the direct healing skills that the situational benefit of the extra heals from two more targets hit per cast seem a worthwhile tradeoff.

As a guy who likes to run such a build in zerg fights and PvE, i can say that the sustainability of these builds is decent, but it’s not nearly where it should be given what I have to sacrifice to take a CA master trait on a largely condition based build.

Leo G.4501:

There are points I agree with and points I don’t. The root of my disagreement though is the assumption that the meta/optimize play is the goal of balance changes. Heck, the reason the set might have the bust and utility that it has might have been granted for the less than optimized dual skill. Basically, the meta doesn’t need help. Build diversity and encounter diversity needs more help.

But like I said, hybrid builds aren’t balanced around and are usually to take advantage of alternative attributes and playstyles that are usually written off by the specialized builds. It kind of requires skills that fit that criteria. If everything was always cookie cutter into specific styles there’d be little chance to try something “creative” (and I put that in quotes because it’s not really creative but the results play different with different goals from most of the standard builds in most if the meta).

This. You have to assume that, in terms of damage, people are stacking for crit, or stacking for condition. Condition thieves suffer a bit from limited condition types, which can easily be built around with the introduction of new sigils, or compensated for with greater survivability. I think the repeated buffs to stacking lifeleech is a good indicator that anet doesn’t want condition based builds to benefit from a play pattern of DOT>Stealth>repeat, but rather wants to give more condi focused builds reasons to trade potential damage for increased survivability, which aligns with avaliable condition gear.

This is where I feel that, as an offensive tool, DB is fine. I use it, it stacks bleeds good, and on builds that focus on maximizing bleed damage it does a fine job of everything except accounting for the behavior of other players. At release it was effective at its intended role, but due to the full evade frame it was too effective, as inititative regen at the time made it too spammable. however, that evade frame was what made it useful for builds not completely focused around condition damage to use it effectively as a defensive tool.

I think if we simply return it to a usable defensive tool without it also being too effective (by altering the evade frame timing) it can return to being a valuable part of a crit build’s kitten nal similar to the way that heartseeker is used by condition builds more for its gap closing utility than its damage.

I’ve posited my suggestion before:

Last Refuge:
25% HP – Remove revealed and gain stealth for .5 seconds. you are immune to revealed for .6 seconds. (Cooldown – 60 seconds)

The basics idea here is that as a SA trait it reinforces rather than invalidates existing stealth skills. The duration is cut as the primary point of the trait is to function as a window of opportunity for stealth at low HP when you would otherwise not have it, rather than an automatic escape mechanism that triggers uncontrollably and actively prevents you from using other SA skills.

This means you can ignore it, or actively play around it in your build, and both are valid opportunity cost actions. You can either jump in a fight and use the last refuge window to re-stealth quickly if you take a big hit, using init or cooldowns, or you can simply benefit from “on stealth” effects from other traits with it passively.

This retains the “adds reveal” counterplay accessible to other classes, but makes those skills less of a brainless instant win button against stealth based thieves, and it prevents the uncontrollable triggering of SA from screwing the thief out of tools he might have been saving specifically to stealth in case of emergencies.

I don’t think replacing it functionally is a good thing. It has an implied function as an aoe condition application skill with short term defensive benefit, and that shouldn’t change.

People crowing that it has an inconsistant damage type are missing the point, Daggers are and always were a combined condition/dps set, and the skills set up on thief bars for them were done as they were specifically because initiative allows us to skip a skill if it doesn’t work with our template, and use it for rare utility cases.

DB already does that. It’s a good bleed applier for condi builds, but it’s a kittenty defensive tool for crit builds. Thus, it needs its utility upped, not a damage change.

Adding ranged reflect to it is a great idea, another might be moving the evade frame to the END of the skill (since they don’t want thieves to have spammable initiative based evades considering they nerfed them all) which would solve the current problem it has as a defensive tool (people just wait until you’re on the way down from the spin and whack you)

If it added evade to the end of the animation and a short .1 sec evade buff after it completed, it would be functional as a repositioning tool, and if timed well could actually be used to gap open or close as you could chain a dodge after.

Increasing target count to 5 doesn’t seem unreasonable, as they like to buff lifeleech style builds (and I play such a build) as it would make it a solid aoe option and help out the survivability of lifeleech/evade bunker style builds as well as a little teamfight utility.

They alter your base mechanics, the don’t remove them. This means that, for instance, a ranger becoming a druid doesn’t lose his pet, but he probably trades the ability to use his pet’s special ability for a druid special ability based on that pet. It fundamentally alters the way he plays his calss because that button is now a different ability, and it’s casted by the player in stead of the pet.

For instance, a guardian probably won’t lose the basic idea of virtues, but he may trade the ability to cast them for his group for the ability to cast offensive versions on enemies. A warrior may trade his focus skills for shouts. A Thief may trade steal for a deathmark style ability. A mesmer may trade clone shatters for clone absorbs. An engineer may trade toolbelt skills for drones. etc.

In addition, the new elites and utilities gained will probably directly relate to this change, and you’ll probably lose utilities or elites that relate to what you lost, and you may trade access to one weapon for access to another, or experienced altered 1-5 skills on your weapons to reflect the specialization.

As Colin said, it’s a subclass. It will alter the way the class plays at a basic level, but it won’t completely replace it with a new one. GW2 classes are a combination of several core mechanics, and specializations will likely take one of the 3 or 4 unique mechanics of a class and replace them with something else, as well as tweaking weapon types and skills to make the spec feel unique.

Persuasion/Deception/Intimidation

A pseudo-language mastery as a re-imagining of the personality system. Mastery works similarly to other games with such systems. At certain breakpoints it opens up content that was otherwise unavailable with some overlap.

For instance, all three would have some passive mercantile benefit (merchants pay more for junk) and each would unlock different subsets of content. Persuasion might unlock some royal/noble related stuff, Deception might unlock some more spy related things, and intimidation might unlock some more underworld related stuff.

Guild farms or mines?

Imagine using guild influence to directly determine a set number of harvesting nodes, with a specific amount of upkeep.

You could even extend farms to livestock, creating a way to get resources passively over time that you would otherwise only get from farming mobs, basically a harvesting node that gives scales, claws, etc.

Well, off the top of my head:

Racial abilities all kinda suck (on purpose) it would be nice if we could buff those, but use the new mastry system to acquire functionally identical skills from the other races so people don’t have to pick a race just for its abilities. For instance, in EOTN the human characters had the ability to learn Norn transforms, but rather than giving them a full on shapeshift, they simply gave them a “spirit” version which changed their abilities, but didn’t change their shape. A similar idea would work well in GW2 for skills that are very race specific. For instance, only humans could learn hounds of balthazar, but other races, by applying mastery to “human racial lore” could learn “Release the hounds”, a skill that functioned the same way but summoned two drakehounds rather than the flashy balthazar ones reserved for humans. Some skills would make sense without any art changes at all, like technobabble, the charr mine, etc. and it would be a great way to further specialize characters and dig in to lore.

Thief Venoms and Traps Suck
Seriously, thief traps are horrible, even when building around them with traits. There is literally no reason to put them on your bar with the exception of shadow trap for PvP. Venoms suck unless you’re running full venomshare, and venomshare is a notoriously unfun spec because it requires you to give up far too much in terms of damage and survivability and is completely ineffective when the venoms are on cooldown. Buff venoms, nerf venomous aura.

Necro Minion builds (still) suck
Minion necros were a huge part of GW1, and highly effective at proxy tanking/crowd control machines. Necro minion mechanics need a complete rework, as minions are too few, too weak, and have far too long a cooldown to build a coherant spec around them. We should be able to spend life force for minions rather than using cooldown timers, since GW2 replaced all corpse mechanics with it, and we need a reliable means of maintaining minions.

Looks at anet’s track record on this:

GW1 expansions (campaigns, though EOTN was just a mini-campaign really)

New area/pve content is locked
new classes/progression mechanics are locked (only obtainable by accessing new area)
PvP access to new progression/specs locked (you can still pvp, but can’t use the masteries/new skills)
new PvP maps and guild hall maps, not locked
new pvp modes, not locked
acquisition of new items, locked (you need access to their content) but you can trade for them.

Basically, I’d imagine anything not directly relating to character advancement/specs or PvE content to be accessible to people without the expansion.

I’m down with block/parry.

But I want to dual wield shields to do it.

I’d like to dual wield shields. My lifeleech thief build keeps getting buffed, but to really throw it over the top I think I’d like to trade in my daggers for a shield in each hand.

I just need a spammable multihit AOE to keep that leech going.

There’s no point to “raids” when we now have the ability for guilds to manually trigger the open world raid content at will.

3 headed worm IS a raid on the overworld map, and I wouldn’t be suprised if future raid-like content will exist in the open world. Even your standard cave with trash>boss>trash progresssion will still probably exist as open world content with the guild trigger flag avaliable, and will be indistinguishable from the “raids” found in other games aside fron being build to scale better.

I’m guessing three per profession, so that every character has the ability to fill the control/support/damage roles that are currently only barely there in pve content.

My guess is that specializations are sets of skills/weapons that specialize that character ofr a specific role, and those roles are more important for future content, as this allows any class to fill any role, successfully getting around the whole “we can’t do this dungeon without a warrior, priest, and 3 DPS” anet wanted to avoid with the original system, while allowing them to develop more complex and role-focused play.

If I were designing revamped progression and specialization mechanics:

GW2 is theoretically designed around a “soft trinity” of control, support, and damage, however the current control, support, and damage specs avaliable on a per-profession basis are generally lacking in role specificity.

Basically, the idea was, like GW1, that any character could fill any role. Where this fell apart was that in trying to get away from the trinity they created systems that prioritized damage as the most efficient means of content completion.

So, how to we let people keep playing their favorite characters without suddenly shoehorning them in to tank/heal/DPS party configs?

Specializations!

Each class has three avaliable specializations that grant one or two weapon sets and a range of skills/traits that make that class more… well… specialized for a specific role. Thus, for every existing class (and the new one) you’ve already got a jack-of-all-trades selection of abilities that can be built to varying degrees of success, while skewing heavily toward one of these roles. E.G. You can in theory build a guardian as control, support, or DPS, but guardians tend to have better control builds than the other two options.

Specialization aims to fix that. once earned, you can hot-swap to specialization builds to fill out party comps, so rather than sitting around waiting for a guardian or mesmer or whatever to finish your party, anyone in the party can just pick it up as needed. Your current characters, all of them, can play effective and useful support, control, or damage roles, but they can’t do them all at once.

This steps around the problem of simply adding skills and resulting with characters that have, say, great damage weapon skills preventing them from getting really useful support elites or utilities. Withthe specialization system, we can give a ranger the ability to play “main support” in the new content designed to require these roles by speccing in to druid. However, if that same range joins a pug that doesn’t need a support, but rather needs more damage, he can spec in to “marksman” right then and there, similar to how parties did some build shuffling in GW1 to fill out all needed roles.

Thus, you end up with a system in which any collection of classes can successfully complete content that is designed around a more role-focused meta without actually requiring players to wait for inordinate amounts of time because their PUG couldn’t find a support.

Some of what we see in the trailer seems to support this. There’s a shield mesmer, likely running the mesmer’s “tanking” focused spec. There’s an engineer with a wrench/greathammer, filling a melee DPS role in that spec, there’s a thief with a rifle filling a ranged DPS role, etc.

So, my thoughts are we’re looking at roughly three specialization options per class, which, like GW1, are horizontal additions to progression. If you’re currently geared out for DPS, chances are you’ll have all the equipment you need to run a DPS-focused specialization line, and if you want to use a new weapon that it opens up you can acquire that, or use the options in that spec that support your class’ basic weapons, but if you want to run tank on that same character, you might be able to do a decent job with your current equipment, using the spec’s traits and skills, but if you want to step it up a notch you might want to acquire a specialized set of gear for when you run it (similar to gear swaps for differing builds in GW1)

I think it’s also a good idea to note that torment is a sort of special case for thieves who rely a lot more on mobility for survival than other classes. Evade thieves are always moving, as are stealth thieves, so you can’t mitigate it’s damage by standing still and popping an invuln or uber or just letting your large HP pool soak it up.

I think adding it to pain response is a great start and is a small trait change that kills two birds with one stone without being a massive change of the sort anet seeems to never want to make to us.

I kinda like the idea of VA creating a sort of “supercombo well” rather than “copy all the venoms by magic” as well. We could even re-use the engi bottle toss animations for it, to shatter a bottle of stuff on the ground.

Alternately, what if they didn’t buff our teammates at all but created an actual persistant aoe well. Then the trait might actually combo with traps, give anet a good reason to finally look at traps, and not be a completely useless build if your fiends are all getting killed. Also, like necro wells and engi turrets it’s still a great support ability, creating zone denial coupled with CC or cover conditions.

In this manner you could still buff individual venoms and it would feel pretty logical, as breaking your venom vial is bound to disperse the effect and make it a bit weaker since it’s spread on the ground in stead of thickly coated on a knife or bullet or sword.

Honestly, while it was fun I felt like the design of the marionette fight felt a little too contrived. The five paths in part felt pretty natural, but the whole “force everyone to split up by using magical teleporters” didn’t feel natural, ditto for the breachmaker. You could have the same effect be having everyone rush the boss during those phases and then destroying hcunks of a path or somesuch to split them up in stead, and the fight would feel more natural and less obviously “this is a scripted encounter with design goals” I guess it goes back to my previous post. Big bosses should destroy more things during big fights and move around a lot more to showcase their frightening destructive power. When they sit in one place the way they do now they just feel like less intelligent versions of normal mobs with a bigger HP pool rather than towering monstrosities that must be destroyed for the good of tyria.