Guild Wars 2

Henge.3907:

Hmm I thought the devs mentioned the villain being someone we would recognize that would be recurring and snarky. Wonder if Kudu scanned his brain into a computer or something…

Your nemesis:

Colyn Mohansen,

Fight mechanics include adding pieces to the dungeon then removing them shortly thereafter, swinging a sword, whipping midbosses Gore-Blux and Fore-Man in to a killing frenzy, swinging a sword again, and a really annoying “infraction” mechanic in the final fight that prevents resurrection if you allow it to stack too high by failing to type an acceptable series of new krytan characters in to his terminal bay.

Also, he’s an android programmed to smile a lot.

I really do like the idea of spritzing up expired living story content as fractals. Just cut out a section of the content, like a somewhat downscaled version of the end of the ancient karka event (say from camp karka to the kill-stomp… Man that kill stomp was awesome) or the last however much from F&F without the story NPCs

It seems like a realtively resource light way to add continuing value to fractals while ensuring the living story content is unique and memorable, as the fractal version is more like a trailer of the actual movie. I know a few people who adore fractals and the scaling difficulty idea, but lament the low number of potential fractals. This seems like a win for fractals as it makes sure they continue to expand but doesn’t seem to require an entire instance-sized team to continue to develop them.

I’m running Acrobatics/Malice at the moment and was using increased poison duration, which was okay but not doing a whole lot for my build. This makes mug viable for uses other than as an opener, doesn’t overly penalize balanced builds, and brings down GC burst (which they’ve been trying to do for a while) in a way that doesn’t kill other builds. It’s a refreshing balance change in that it’s not another flat nerf like so many patches we’ve seen. Mug crits were over the top, just like RTL was over the top and WvW confusion was over the top. Mug still adds a respectable amount of damage to a burst chain, but now makes a viable trait for stealing as a mid-fight action, which better synergizes with other steal traits in practical use. As a bonus, it means you can truck through a little damage before your closing skill.

It isn’t supposed to be saving your life. Its supposed to expand the use of the trait. Now mug is useful for burst, sustain, and escape usages of steal wheras before it was only useful for burst really.

PvE AND WvW according the the guru SOTG interview. Though I guess we won’t really know until patch day.

Combo fields, stolen items and shortbow.

• Shortbow: Remember, your shortbow is an amazing support weapon with a spammable blast finisher, large uptime AoE weakness potential (traited) and superior mobility (an evade and a shadowstep) if you haven’t tried one out, do so. There’s a reason the majority use a shortbow swap. There’s no benefit to swapping within a fight for most builds so unless there’s some synergy you need a second weapon set for, shortbow is a very good option.

• Combo fields: Aside from shortbow blast, remember that Pistol 1 and Dagger 4 are projectile finishers with a 100% combo chance. This means pistol’s sneak attack will trigger 5 combo effects every time, and dagger 4 will trigger one for every target it hits. Dagger 4 can also be spammed, achieving and extremely high number of combo activations in a very short timeframe. Learn what these interactions are if you use pistol or dagger. D/D 3 is a spammable 100% whirl finisher. if you’re D/D make sure you know what this means and how amazing it is when combined with fields from other classes. Learn how fields work, what they look like, and what they can do for you or your team so you can make an informed decision about when to prioritize them. Thieves are amazing combo activators all around.

• Stolen items: Every stolen item has value to you in one situation or another. learn which ones create or set off fields, learn which ones are melee, self targeted, and ranged, and learn every situation in which they’re useful. Tossing a stolen item is wasted potential for a long cooldown skill. Even if you’re not a condition build, for instance, tooth does a poison. Poison can be traited to also weaken. Poison aslo reduces heal effectiveness. many thievew will waste the cooldowns on “crap” stolen items just to view the steal CD again when they could be getting a leg up from those items. Only time you should waste one is when you know steal is up again, and you should be developing a sixth sense for when steal will be up again.

• Thinking on your feet. because of the initiative, steal, and spammable combo finishers, thief needs to be approached with a slightly different mindset than a lot of other professions. The class is all about improvisation and reacting to the battlefield on the fly for best effect. Don’t approach your weapon skills as if they were on cooldowns. Don’t simply run a rotation. find and exploit opportunities to gain an edge from using something outside your rotation. Shadowsteps can also be used to range out projectiles or overcome soft CC. Blinds make targets miss key attacks. Combo finishers can heal, harm, cleanse, and do all sorts of things for you and your team and they may not be in your standard rotation. Your steals may be better used to advantage an ally than yourself. Always approach every encounter with an opportunist mindset and you’ll have more fun, and be more efficient in both PvE and PvP.

Experience has indicated that there are more bad rangers than any other class I’ve ever run in to. In WvW I’m generally not interested in the fairness of fights. I’m interested in my team winning. Taking out something that can function as a mini arrow cart and deal pretty significant damage with good range also helps cover the bads on my team, and is an easy way to remove a bit of ranged pressure from myself.

Also, I kinda like that they come with a free extra target for skills like CnD, HS, DB, and the D/P or P/D shadowsteps. Makes maneuvering where I want to be a little easier when fighting them.

In fact, I’ve fought, since release (In my probably 8ish hours a week of WvW on the weekends when I can afford to get sucked in to it) probably five or six rangers that really seemed to know how to respond to a thief. It happens so rarely I actually re-tell the tale to guild members when it happens.

“So, today I fought a ranger and he trapped his pos, pulled sword/torch, and messed me around with a warthog. Man, that guy was pretty tough.”

Every other class in the game I end up telling the opposite story about how I fought a dude that was just really bad. That’s why I go for rangers I guess. I need conversation topics.

RedSpectrum.1975:

Warjin.8942:

randomfightfan.4091:

Very much so thank you. Was disgusting trying to use this. My gw2 playing time was dropped down to nothing except doing my dailies but now I will be able to enjoy my favorite class again! All the other nerfs I can see as being warranted, they suck, but I see where you’re coming from.

The only tears here are tears of joy.

Really 1 second made a difference lol, yeah ok, what ever man

But 1 second did make a difference. If you’ve played a stealth heavy build, youd see that.

Truth. especially in PvE where stealth builds can actually run a rotation like other calsses do, and need to do so, and in PvP you were informed with that knowledge so you never needed to actually stop what you were doing and search the tiny buff monitor for the revealed debuff. In short, once you got it, the timing worked out in such a way that you could use autoattacks to learn revealed and use it naturally.

At 4s what happenned was that the timing changed to 4.5 autoattacks, so there was this no man’s land after the fourth auto, where to hit your rotation ON A STATIONARY TARGET you literally had to either watch revealed or watch your own cast bar. It screwed up the ability for stealth builds to actually know when they could stealth. it was messy, counterintuitive, required playing the interface rather than the game, and most importantly created too much potential for wasting stealth actions on even a minor amount of lag.

I was running blinding P/D in PVE at the time and I tried, really tried for about a week to learn the new timing, but it was borderline impossible due to the way latency affects timings in the .5 seconds range. I could time the attacks on a stopwatch and still waste stealth on the tail end of revealed wheras the 3s version prevented this from ever happenning because the stealth was qued behind another ability and it synced perfectly. Thus, even with latency, 3 attacks was always the same amount of time serverside, and your stealths were reliable without constantly staring at the interface. Not to mention the net DPS loss of having to use an extra auto and then .5 seconds of dead time wherin nothing was filling the gap was a massive damage nerf primarily to builds that relied on sustained damage.

I will put a silver lining on that unfortunate patch though. it encouraged me to try an acrobatics build, and I discovered that acrobatics is a lot of fun, and that I’m good at it, and that has improved my play as a thief overall. I might even split time between stealth and acro after the 30th since both builds use the same gear aside from weapons and respeccing traits is cheap. So I guess its cool that it got me out of my bubble.

What if it started at “legendary” for 150

Legendary Invader > Legendary Legend (lol, no, I’m serious, Who wouldn’t want that rank for a while?)
And then even more adjectives of ridiculous power.
Ultimate
Mistwrought
Divine
Transcendant
Tubular
Radical
Amazing
Awesome
Pure Awesome
Indescribably Awesome

Glam mesmers are to zergs what mug>CnD>backstab thieves are to 1v1s

They’re both getting nerfed this patch. Confusion is gettin the SpVp cap, mug is getting its ability to crit removed.

While we’re at it Eles RTL is getting put in check, bubbling trebs is going out the window… warriors are getting something useful to do in PvP… I’m not seeing the overall problems here. Outliers are being addressed because they are problematic. using steal for a 6k crit followed nanoseconds later by a cnd and then backstab was just as easy to mitigate as glam builds, and just as broken in terms of low reaction time counterplay. Same deal with the haste nerf. The damage was too compressed, which led to damage compression strategies dominating the meta and leaving little room for anything else.

Like it or hate it, Anet wants to stop people from being able to kill each other in less than ten seconds without a decent number of people all banging on one dude. Anet wants bunkers to be viable but have a few 1v1 weaknesses. Anet wants to remove the extremes of burst damage and survivability from the game so that the entire meta doesn’t revolve around extremes.

It’s not just your class, or my class, or that build or this. It’s what’s best for the overall game. Making sure even numbered fights don’t resolve too quickly or too slowly means a game that just more fun all around.

Getting curbstomped by a GC backstabber or glam mesmer was so fast, despite the fact both can be mitigated, that it was frustrating to defenders. Not because it couldn’t be countered, but because the counter happenned within two seconds or you are dead. Because not every class has access to these types of builds. Because it was inconsistant from a pacing standpoint.

Similarly, bunkers are being brought down a bit (either directly or indirectly through mechanics like boon hate/larcenous strike/unblockable corrupt boons) because they were similarly frustrating for the attacker. They dragged fights in to infinity not because of player skill, but because the best bunkers were mechanically unkillable by a single player with very few exceptions.

Take out those extremes and you’ve still got the ability to build for burst, still got the ability to build for bunkering, but its consistant and fun for both parties. People have a slightly more reasonable reaction time to burst, and people have a mechanical chance to actually 1v1 a bunker.

If you want to take on mobs of trash with dual daggers, stack up on condition damage. Death blossom counts as a full on AoE, and stacks 3 14s bleeds on everything it hits, not to mention functioning as a dodge. basically, the dagger has AoE and single target potential, but the single target build is pow/crit and the AoE build is condition based.

DeWolfe.2174:

the way Warriors are the teachers pet in the game, I’d say all of them.

There. Fixed that for you.

Warrior class adjustments are the only ones that have never completely broken something without adequately compensating in the same patch.

Every other class gets stuff like “we want to ride this nerf out… we’re talking about ways to compensate for it”

Granted, they do get around to the compensation, but it usually takes a month or two if you’re lucky enough not to get nerfed again in the interim.

You know, you have a lot of wacky balance suggestions but this one might actually be in line. Consider that steal is a one way shadowstep, and that compared to the other class with a single key ability of moderate power (warrior) a fully traited 18 second steal cooldown seems like it might be in line with warrior adrenaline use, mesmer’s basic shatter, etc. I feel like even traited with the new non-crit mug steal traits add up to a similar power level as these profession mechanics.

Combine this with the idea in SOTG of making steal function as a shadowstep regardless of distance and you’re looking at what Anet seems after, which is increasing thief mobility (shadowsteps) and survivability (most PvP steals are a form of defense or CC) across the board.

It’s also sort of internally limited because of the basic binary nature of our one “pocket” for stolen items. You’d be spamming them a lot if you wanted to keep steal’s CD ready, but that’s not always an optimal way to use them so it would definately make steal more useful without, IMO, overpowering it, or needing to add complex mobility tools to individual weapon sets.

However… 18 seconds recharge may necessitate a few nerfs to some stolen skills. Having warrior axes, guardian stun, or necro fear on an 18 second cooldown may be a bit too powerful. I’d be willing to trade in duration on these kinds of effects for the faster steal CD though.

This is badly unbalanced. Fun. But unbalanced.

It’s the kind of thing I want to show up in a patch just long enough for me to enjoy stealing a bomb kit from an engineer, so I can be a stealth bomber for a few days before it’s reverted, or use guardian bubbles on top of a shadow refuge.

Maybe I’ll pick up D/P for PvE facerolling again. Thanks!

At best I’d imagine them doubling the healing power ratio. Realistically I’d see it being untouched. Time will tell. As long as it’s not a nerf I’m okay with it.

I’ve been running MK runes on my condition thief practically since the halloween event. Why?

It’s not the damage.

The logic is very simple:

Are you using signet of malice as your heal?
Yes: Use MK runes.
No: Don’t bother.

I’m built around Signet of Malice. I use MK runes not for their damage (which is icing on the cake) but because every single tick of damage, on every target, from every bird, counts as an attack. This means that using any elite will heal you about 1/4 of your total HP for every nearby target (give or take you amount of healing power and vitality) These attacks can’t be dispelled or completely dodged, and turn daggerstorm in to practical godmode against anything less than eight people, or basilisk venom in to a very good 45s cooldown heal against single targets (that also baits a stunbreak or gives you an easy setup for CnD>Sneak attack, Death blossom spam, or just plain running away.

Without Signet of Malice… meh. It’s kinda Okay damage and a cool effect but not a better option than undead or 2x krait/afflicted/centaur in my experience. It’s more useful for D/D condition builds than P/D because the birds, as an attack, will break your stealth.

As a user of virtually everything people forgot about I’m kind of interested in the mug change. That’s just one more passive heal in my malice evasion build, and bonus, it happens at the same time as improvisation procs, meaning that now I may not only be doubling up on basilisk venom, shadowstep, shadow refuge, roll for initiative, or whatever, but I’m actually getting a bonus heal? That’s neat and actually a good alternative to increase poison duration. I’ll wait until I play with it to see if the new pathing for flanking strike is less off putting than the last time I tried S/D.

I think the thief won’t be forced to rely on compressed burst damage as much in that fight, and should have a lot more tools at his disposal to adjust mid-fight to the outcome.

It seems like what anet wants to do is kill 2 second burst builds for every class, and give those classes/builds that rely on them toold to actually stick out a fight. I’d imagine that this future-thief would be capable of a 7-8 second kill if his target isn’t paying attention and he’s specced for it, but that this thief can swap weapons or simply adjust his initiative use if his burst starts to go wrong and actually have a chance at winning the rest of the fight in stead of having little option but to reset and try the burst again.

Arrow.4619:

I don’t use steal much either. My thief’s not specifically built to take advantage of Steal so I think that is part of the reason I tend to ignore it. But the other part of the reason is that frankly the few times I’ve tried it I wasn’t impressed with the ability I got. Its a one off skill with a long cooldown that may or may not be effective but robs me of my attack bar until I use it. And using it seems to pull me out of the flow of a fight. I could be hitting something/someone three times, cause bleeding or poisoning or vulnerability, or kiting it or dodging blows coming from more than one direction but instead I’m playing around with the gunk or whatever I’ve stolen. Steal just isn’t the Thief class specific mechanic I care about and really like – that would be Initiative. I will admit that if I could just use the skill as a shadowstep type teleport with say 1-2 seconds of stealth at the end I probably would use it far more often. Bottom line is that whatever becomes the new skill has to beat my using the number 2,3, or 5 skills on my D/D thief and I have no faith that will be the case.

So… you’ve basically never EVER used steal. Not even once. Since like early EARLY beta.
Steal doesn’t rob you of your attack bar, and its primary function is to keep you in the flow of a fight as a gap closer. Unless you’re ranged. In which case its purpose is to take you out of a fight by stealing from bunnies, trash mobs, and anything else in the opposite direction of your target.

Learning how to use stolen items (learning to improvise) is key to getting the most out of steal. Stolen items are, with few exceptions, very powerful. In PvP there are no exceptions, every PvP steal is very powerful. Traiting steal to reinforce a burst, function as an extra stealth, or whatever happens to be in the trait lines you’re already building for specializes it pretty well if there’s nothing else in that major slot you need.

Yeah, you can’t build completely around steal like a mesmer can build around clones or an ele can build around attunement swapping, but that isn’t really the point. Steal’s function is to blend in to whatever it is your thief already does. The trick is, like a lot of the thief’s mechanics, to learn to use it creatively and improvise.

I’m happy about the revealed split. The 4s needlessly hampered the flow of PvE and too negatively impacted the survivability of stealth builds in zerg fights in WvW.

I’m interested in the mug change. This is a good middle ground i think, as the thief community has been saying “nerf mug if you want to control burst” for the longest and they finally listened. I’m also happy about it because I run a Malice Evasion sustain/bleed pressure spec which previously had no real use for mug. Now mug is a good companion to improvisation in my dagger bleed build, giving me another solid heal spike option other than mad king birds or dancing dagger through shadow refuge.

I’m concerned about signet changes, both because my build revolves around a signet to function, and because I know exactly how potent several passives and actives are already. They seem to have not commited in the SOTG to WHAT sigents were changed HOW so I’ll just have to hold judgement until I see the patch notes. I’m hopeful than malice is left alone or has its passive HP ratio or active heal buffed. I’m afraid that it’ll see a left field nerf and I’ll be figuring out another respec and buying some new gear again.

As a side note, I’m happy to hear about epidemic and corrupt boons becoming unblockable. Necros needed the love and it’s going to help a lot as I usually duo roam with a necro and this will make using guardians for a pressure spike a much more viable option, which we found problematic before as guardians tend to be in the perfect spot to stack+epidemic to hit his friends, but you usually couldn’t pull off the epidemic.

Well the vast majority of these bosses are absolutely huge. AoE density and positioning is generally nonexistant in these fights wheras it should be the primary concern. if you’re standing right next to a foot, that should be a very dangerous position, and that dragon should choose as part of its attacks to kick/tailwhip clusters of players around its vital spots at random intervals and well as attempt and occasional “field clear” every now and then. Think of a massive 360 tail whip or sustained breath attack that works a lot like the jade maw final attack, only in stead of hitting everyone simultaneously it actually cruises around the arena, and it’s so big you can see it coming without relying on grounded AoE circles.

Really, if each boss had a selection of anti-cluster mechanics and the ability to incapacitate players less predictably by grabbing, crystals, etc the fights would be a lot more dynamic. Currently the bosses have some interesting mechanics, but because their attack patterns are so narrow or random they’re largely wasted. In addition the AoE fields from boss attacks should really be widened by at least 300% and their warning time increased maybe 50% This prevents players from camping a spot and just dodging occasionally and actually forces players to pay attention to the fight and move around the battlefield. Melee usually has multiple “ground” targets so they’ve got the ability to move without being locked out of DPS (just hit another leg) and ranged usually has a good pick of targets as well.

In addition, I feel like the majority of these bosses should absolutely come with scaling adds like we’re seeing in the updated scaling events. Roaming champs and veterans in the mix would really help to keep people on their toes.

Olba.5376:

And to answer the question you will ask: No, it’s never worth it to lose class uniqueness in the name of build diversity. You can get build diversity elsewhere, but you cannot get back the feeling of uniqueness if you take away classes. After all, the only difference between two professions of the same race is the profession.

What? Again, no. Thief dagger skills are not = other class’s dagger skills. You’d be developing 5x dagger skills for thief, 5x for ele (per attunement) etc.

I don’t know where you got the idea that I was suggesting a “Give other classes each other’s skills” idea as you’re right. It’s a stupid and horrible one that would completely screw up traits, class specific mechanics, and a host of other things. I’m suggesting a single alternate option for each individual slot per weapon, per class

I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about that.

Also, the GW2 system was put in to place not because managing the skills from a balance standpoint was excessive, but because the dynamics of the skills creates too much potential for “trash builds” and often, due to the freeform interaction of the way the skill bars were set up, some skills were just plain not useful because they didn’t synergize well with anything. Additionally, it became a chore to add new skills because of these factors. You can’t just add a given skill to a class in GW1 that’s extremely similar to another because it often has no value. In GW2, something as simple as giving, say, the warrior greatsword the option of either hundred blades OR a lesser damage PBAoE is actually a valuable skill addition, despite the fact that the warrior has other PBAoE options. It doesn’t devalue the skill as it would in GW1 because that warrior has a finite and controlled number of mutually exclusive attacks on the greatsword. Thus, if you like the current setup of mixed mobility and high rooted damage, you can still use that, but you’re given damage options on the mobility slots, and mobility options on the damage slots. The weapon fulfills the same two basic roles, but its given to the player to choose how heavily slanted his GS is one way or the other.

Thus, in stead of viewing weapons per profession as suited to one specific role, you’re designing two complimentary roles and allowing the player to tweak by selecting those choices.

The GW2 weapon skill system is a much more controlled system for that reason, and for that reason it’s actually much easier to QA skill additions because there are far far fewer potential build interactions. In fact, GW2’s combat system is better suited to adding skills than the GW1 system because of the massive exclusivity requirements. The vast majority of skills are locked to a specific place on the bar, which are mutually exclusive to every other skill on the bar. Bumping up the potential number of weapon skills is no harder a QA check than adding an extra healing slot skill because _all weapon skills are locked to a slot, and all weapon skills per slot are mutually exclusive with one another.

disagree. It’s well within the realm of possibility to balance that many skills.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page

It worked pretty well for seven years, and I’d trust them to balance a fraction of that number within a much more limited and controlled framework as we have in GW2. Throughout my time in the first game I saw constant and air balancing that never threw anything out in the trash that wasn’t an extreme outlier. In addition, the problem with the GW1 system was the complexity and freedom of the bar in and of itself. This led to a lot of “trash skills” because hey, if I’ve got an ability that does a cripple, and an ability that does a cripple AND damage… well the straight cripple is usually not worth it in most cases.

When gauging skill interactions you had to consider literally every other skill on every other profession on the same bar, factor in that everything that wasn’t a condition stacked with other effects of the same type, etc. This system is FAR simplified. There are a limited number of buffs and debuffs with static effects, and what’s more, any given skill would only ever need gauged in terms of its interactions with three utilities, one elite (and let’s face it, elites more often than not don’t interact meaningfully with any other skill on your bar anyway), and a maximum of four other weapon skills from an extremely limited pool at a time.

That’s EXTREMELY limited in scope compared to the first game, where each character had around 100 skills per class by the time EOTN hit, that, with the exception of elites, could be slotted in any combination on an 8 slot bar, were buffs/debuffs all by themselves, and every character had two classes. Here you’ve got seven skills with extreme exclusivity requirements, and only three that are “freeform” in the manner that GW1 skills were. I really, Really don’t think making a pass on professions and adding an alternate 1/2/3/4/5 option per weapon (and many classes have offhand-only limits on several types, further cutting this number) is outside the realm of possibility for reasonable balance.

Acrobatics thief.

All movement. Great damage. No surrender.

For increased fun, try a signet of malice acrobatics build. I’ve yet to play any other character that’s as much fun in PvE. PvP varies XD

SAB is actually more efficient and easier solo in every case except for the bosses (which take a little longer, but are no more difficult)

You don’t have to wait for/ be yelled at for everyone standing on the button.

You only need one key to open chests.

You are the sole recipient of every health drop.

Olba.5376:

PopeUrban.2578:

I’ve posted about this before, but I feel like skills being “hard wired” to weapons is a good system. Where we could expand it is in terms of weapons being able to drop or be crafted with variant skills, and adding a sort of advanced transmute to combine weapons to get exactly the skills you’d like on your weapon.

I sometimes find myself wishing that a specific weapon would have skills from other weapon sets. But then I realize how much of a balancing nightmare it would be. Even if you were only allowed to choose from all the available skills in specific slots, it would end up with things like Warriors with axe auto-attack, Savage Leap, 100 blades, Charge and Shield Stance all in one. Or Thieves with Backstab, Heartseeker, Shadow Shot, Headshot and Cloak and Dagger.

This would also open up some fun loot possibilities in that weapons could contain alternate versions of skills with prestige effects, character shouts, and other distincitive visual flair which would really spice up the loot pool. Imagine that each named exotic had at least one “unique” skill animation effect for every class capable of wielding it for example, and that all rares had a good 40%ish chance to have some sort of unique version of a skill.

You would have to be pretty careful though. There are some exotics, plus of course Legendaries, that give trail effects, so giving flashy effects to skills could be seen as a bad thing.

Also, the visual effect was a big hook on the Molten pick.

Personally, I would love to have my human using the voice overs from other races, especially if they came with an awkward tone to them.

You misunderstand. I mean doing something like “expand the number of greatsword skills to 10, with 2x complete greatsword bars” Weapons will drop with a random selection of these skills slotted, and you can use crafting at a low cost to destroy one weapon to move its skill to that slot on the other. So, basically, if you wanted hundred blades and in stead you have th other #2 skill, you need only find a GS with hundred blades and transmute the skill to yours.

I wasn’t really thinking of flashy particle effects for the rarity options as much as variant animations. This game already has too many particle effects, but what if, say, in stead of a spinning cartwheel flip you could find a “unique” version of Death Blossom that in stead executed a ground based cartwheel, or one that sort of ballerina pirouettes with stabbing. If you could find a “unique” hundred blades that was a bit more acrobatic, or one that was one handed while you scream and beat your chest with the other hand. Stuff like that. That said, Legendary weapons aren’t the only weapons with unikittenfects. Many named exotics have unikittenfects that can’t be found on other items.

I like the spirit of the idea, but not the implementation. This assumes specific weapons have specific and unique upgrade paths/abilities. This is bad and shoehorns people in to needeing specific pieces of gear which screws up the freedom of form not being tied to function, which is a fantastic part of GW2’s design.

In stead, what about using what we already have avaliable?

Weapons you use are soulbound to you. You have a class. You will gain skill points from now in to eternity.

What if, in stead, you could invest your skillpoints in to sidegrading stats in your items, moving points from one stat to another slowly over time, and at specific benchmarks you could trade base stats for a class-specific effect from a large selection of effects. For example a necromancer might have a selection that includes life force bonuses, fear procs, and life steal effects. A warrior may have adrenaline, passive damage reduction, or ally buffs. A Thief may have blind, weakness, and shadowstep effects.

Basically, you earn the ability to customize in to class specific (and thus easier to balance) effects by sacrificing core stats over time, or simply have the ability to move stat points from one to the other to really tweak your gear in to something that’s unique for you.

Runiir.6425:

Ehhh…talk to a hunter or a sniper some time Pope…rifles take far more finesse than a pistol. If you are going to take a kill shot at max range for a weapon (say 1200 yards for many rifles, which is why I find it so amusing rifle has 1200 range in game) you need muscle control far superior than a pistol…that you are lucky to hit someone at 30 yards with where you want to hit them (ie aiming specifically for the left leg).

You are really saying a longbow doesn’t require finesse? You’ve just angered every archer in the world with THAT comment lol, and fired a shot at Robin Hood’s legacy (he was a master archer and marksman with…the longbow!).

I’m really saying that firing a longbow or rifle at range with both hands is much, much easier than firing a pistol at range. I’m saying that a pistol (or dagger for that matter) is not a soldier’s weapon.This is why military personnell are issues and trained with rifles and only given cursory handgun training as they’re unlikely to ever be in a situation to use the handgun except as a backup.

Luckily, in the world of Tyria weapons never run out of ammo unless the plot requires it (convenient and useful that. I’d hate to calculate how much I’d have spent on ammo otherwise) Any weapon you use in GW2 IS a primary weapon.

Again, Warriors are neither hunters nor snipers. You don’t need to be either to use those weapons. In fact, the average longbowman fired in to the air at an angle in massed fire to just blanket the enemy without aiming at anything, and the earliest firearms were so inaccurate they were used in almost exactly the same way.

Exceptionally trained individuals are just that. Rangers are exceptionally trained bowmen in GW2 for example.

The point is that GW2 Warriors are a “brute force” class. They’re not grounded in skill, or magic, they’re grounded in rigorous field drills and just plain being tough as nails. They’re only exceptional because they’re stronger and louder than their counterparts and it has yielded results. Longbows and rifles are both absolutely big brute fore ranged weapons. Pistols and daggers would be as out of place on the warrior as a scepter. it doesn’t fit the class’ theme. Get it?

Malikkus.4396:

I agree completely, but I mean at this point we still have to put in all that hard work for the items.. It’s just a little bit anti-climactic when you farm a really amazing exotic, and you transmute it for something with better stats..

Everything should have it’s boundaries, and I have played too many games where the glorification of one stat or proc reduced the economy to garbage, but it does feel a little demeaning getting a really amazing item, or farm it, to realize I’m just gonna end up transmuting it with my Zerkers pearl item, cause it has the same/better stats, and cost me less than 1g to make.

It’s guild wars man, the reward for that uber-rare is, literally, that you have it visually. Exotics all have good stats, but just because they aren’t the stats for you doesn’t make them trash weapons. Luckily, if you like them you do have the option of transmuting.

I’m not going to go super fanboy here or anything, but I really do like that system.

I also do feel like adding more prefixes, runes, and sigils on a regular basis should be a high-ish priority as that stuff is all exciting horizontal advancement, as we’ve already got our form of shallow/limited vertical through ascended/infusions in place.

Actually… wouldn’t it be cool if there were “runeset-like” infusions that’d work on all ascended gear? One-off “sigil like” infusions? Infusions that have larger bonuses but came with drawbacks (+105 power/ -105 vit) Things that create build options as you advance a character through their paces from exotics (AKA Finished build gear) to ascended/legendary (AKA Prestige gear)

That was the way gearing worked in the first game and it was a lot of fun. as you have effectively twelve gear slots (counting runes, inscriptions, and weapon parts) but they were all unique bonuses/penalties rather than a bag of stats. Here we have the bag of stats setup, over twice as many functional gear slots (14+upgrades=24 gear slots) but not enough unique to go with it.

I’ve posted about this before, but I feel like skills being “hard wired” to weapons is a good system. Where we could expand it is in terms of weapons being able to drop or be crafted with variant skills, and adding a sort of advanced transmute to combine weapons to get exactly the skills you’d like on your weapon.

This would also open up some fun loot possibilities in that weapons could contain alternate versions of skills with prestige effects, character shouts, and other distincitive visual flair which would really spice up the loot pool. Imagine that each named exotic had at least one “unique” skill animation effect for every class capable of wielding it for example, and that all rares had a good 40%ish chance to have some sort of unique version of a skill.

Instantly all of your loot is a lot more interesting, the economy is more interesting, and you can do a lot more to distinguish yourself visually and in terms of game play by deciding which skills you want on your weapons (standard skills are easy to find, drop randomly on blues+, skill transmutes are a cheap crafting service) and (optionally) hunting down any “visually upgraded” versions of those skills in the same manner you hunt down dyes or specific armor pieces for transmuting.

Malikkus.4396:

I was a little disappointed with stats, it seems like most things are the same with interchangeable skins. I was really hoping for weapon-specific stats or procs that would make them more desirable, at this point the only thing that really exceeds the stat value of an exotic is a legendary, because it’ll eventually scale with better weapons.

Nothing wrong with the sigil system, but there’s nothing special about it either.

At this point, when people speak about their gear, more times they’ll just say what stat set it falls into (like berserker/valk/etc) instead of the name of the gear itself. If gear had notable stats, then you could just say you had a Zhed’s set, and people would know you had a certain aversion to your stats (more offense) and an interesting 5-piece effect, exclusive to that set.

Not the best example cause something like Zhed’s is known but, let’s say you had final rest, would you rather people stop you saying “hey, nice skin”, or “hey, that’s a kitten staff, did the demon on the end just fly off and start attacking your enemy?!?” or something along those lines.

The reason this wasn’t done, same as in the first game, is because the entire idea is that build decisions should all be equally reasonable to achieve with the same effort. There are a few outliers like Apothecary or certain Shaman pieces, but in general the idea is that you don’t have to break the bank to find “That one item that I need for my stats” and can in stead put together a bank of stats based on the total combination of gear slots. While having the epic staff with the special attack that only that staff has sounds cool, think back to games that had such systems and how much of a pain it was to acquire that item.

The idea in GW2 is that stats are roughly equal in terms of acquisition difficulty to get no matter how you build, and that “super cool” feeling comes from cosmetics. Of course, the player market has some say in this as you can’t directly control things like the price of blood or zerker gear unless you just scrap the player run economy altogether.

In short, an idea like this effectively creates builds that are “harder” and “easier” to even start playing in stead of harder and easier to actually play. The current limited spreads prevent that whole “I built it another way in stead of the one I wanted because the gear was too expensive” that you find in games with such systems.

Thematically, it’s because warriors aren’t a “finesse” profession. Longbows and Rifles? These are weapons that to use effectively require not much in the way of manual dexterity or pinpoint accuracy. It’s a big gun that’s relatively easy to use wearing all that armor, or it’s a big bow that you don’t point at things so much as general directions.

Yeah, I know, Warriors have killshot etc. etc. but that’s just general QOL.

Wielding any weapon smaller than a mace is just extremely counter to the entire concept of the class. It’d be like giving them daggers. Neither of these is a big hitting bruisery weapon.

nexxe.7081:

Will this dungeon be temporary or will it be a permanent addition to the game?

My Guess/Hope:

Story mode is activated on the 30th, and pays recurrent/unique rewards throughout the month.

After the month is up, Story mode remains in the game but offers standard story mode rewards.

Explorable paths are added later, along with the standard dungeon treatment of explorable mode tokens and skins as Explorables are are always chronologically after the story, and explorables are always self contained stories that aren’t all that important to the rest of the world (unless, presumably, you were allowed to fail and not magically go back in time to start over.)

BadHabitZz.1856:

Thief can rip his boons with Flanking Strike right?

Yes, but my method used steal (without mug) and the Bountiful theft trait, as well as the consumable wooden plank:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wooden_Plank

Which was, IIRC, under 2s per plank.

This allows a single thief (with the proper timing) to rip stability and might and launch Komali all at once, solving the fight for any number of attackers. It’s tricky to time, but no moreso than chaining any other attack with steal. The down side is if you get it wrong you’ve got to wait for steal to recharge. Any thief build with at least 20 in trickery can pull this off.

We pulled him and I came prepared with a consumable plank on my thief. Basically, I hit 2(the plank knockback) and steal to coincide with the end of the plank animation, basically stealing might+stability and knocking him outta the fire in the same moment.

Took a couple tries to get the timing right, but I was able to pull it off in the middle of our party plus another giant zerg fighting him and he went down pretty fast after that.

Mac Twinsong.
(Thief)
(Allegedly)

BlackBeard.2873:

I agree that blindness is pretty useless as is. Here are couple of suggestions:

- Blindness stacks, and each stack multiplies hit chance by 0.85 geometrically (i.e. you have a 0.85, 0.7225, 0.6141, 0.522, 0.4437, 0.377, 0.3206, etc hit chance for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc) or 0.8 geometrically (i.e. 0.8, 0.64, 0.512, 0.41, 0.327, 0.262, 0.2097, etc. for 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, etc) for each stack for 3 seconds. Thus, 1 stack isn’t debilitating, but it can become some very good damage mitigation at higher stacks. Also, by scaling geometrically, you get diminishing returns and never miss 100%.

-Have blindness stack give 0.8 miss rate (20% hit rate) and stack for # of attacks. (these numbers could be tuned. Again, this doesn’t 100% shut down attacks, and can be overcome by proccing many times, but still offers some decent damage mitigation.

These changes would have to come with some burst reduction on thieves with greater sustained damage (as planned).

“effectiveness stacking” Is actually a pretty good idea for blind as mitigation, provided it still clears the entire stack with a single remove so as not to overpower it.

Thunderbrew.7034:

Well, I dont know about the other classes, but I have an 80
warrior, thief and Ele. In playing all of them, the same common
problem arises where “an ability is too good NOT to have on your
skill bar.”

Another example is the Signet that gives 25% speed to a Thief. You are
already down 1 slot because thats just too darn good to not have. Things
like that should be traits, not skills.

That’s the skill that every thief puts on their bar… and then switches for something else before starting a fight TBH. The only way it stays on most bars during a fight is if you’ve been ambushed and didn’t have a chance to swap it for something more useful for your build.

Now, I’m not convinced at this suggestion, namely because all professions still need some balance passes on their skill selections. As for giving the thief other options than steal, I’m on board with that. Take a page from the engineer book and thing of our “big three” as utilities, and the f key abilities as “toolbelt” versions.

The difference here is that we can’t choose different skills, but the general idea is that you’d have a “mini” version of our big three with a shared GCD that’s modified by trickery.

In addition, traits that apply effects to steal would need reworked to apply said effects to all “Thievery Skills” in addition, these skills all work thematically like steal in that you can “set up” with the first chain and hold on to that setup indefinately until you’re prepared to use it. However, using any thievery skill will dump the “charge” on all of them. For instance, if you’ve set a shadow mark, and then use steal, shadow mark will revert to it’s initial ability in steal of remaining shadow return.

for example:

• F1: Steal>stolen item
  Fine as is

• F2: Escape Route>Conceal (Mini-refuge)
  Prepare an escape route at a nearby location within 900 units and a radius of 400. When activated with “conceal” this ability grants 2 seconds of stealth to up to 5 allies within the area of effect and heals for 500. Acts as a dark field for 2 seconds. Generally useful as support or a more work-intensive additional stealth for stacking.

• F3: Shadow Mark> Shadow Return (Mini-Shadowstep)
  Mark your current location. You may shadowstep to this location with Shadow Return at any time from a range of 1000 or less. Using Shadow return from outside maximum range will shadowstep toward your mark 1000 units. In either case, the mark is consumed after use. Useful in a number of ways. Melee can use it to pre-set an ambush location while ranged can use as a reliable escape mechanism.

• F4: Dust Trap>Ignite (Mini-Smokescreen)
  Prepare a Dust Trap (line trap) at your location. When triggered with the “ignite” skill, this trap will block projectiles for three seconds and blind any foes that pass through it. Does not function as a combo field. Useful for pre-setting an escape route or on the fly as a personal/party defensive tool.

and finally

• Trait – Master Thief
  Trickery – Grandmaster – You may prepare two Thievery Skills at a time
  For example, you can have a stolen item and shadow mark simultaneously, and the “dumping” on the chains on use of a new thievery skill would follow FIFO, with the first chain clearing and the second remaining.

Example Trait interactions:

• Malice (Formerly Mug)
  Steal deals damage
  Shadow Mark’s Shadow Return drops mini-caltrops (like uncatchable) at source and destination.
  Dust Trap Reflects Projectiles
  Escape Route inflicts Confusion

• Serpent’s Touch
  Stealing Poisons
  Shadow Mark AoE Poison at source/destination
  Dust Trap Poisons
  Escape route leaves additional Poison field for 4s

• Improvisation
  Recharge proc applies to all Thievery Skills.
  Damage buff applies to any prepared Thievery Skill (capped at 10%)

• Hidden Thief
  Steal Stealths
  Escape Route grants an additional 1s of stealth
  Dust Trap Stealths allies that move through it for 2s
  Shadow Recall Stealths for 2s

• Getaway Artist (Formerly Long Reach)
  Increases range on Steal &Shadow mark
  Adds Swiftness to Escape Route
  Allows Dust trap to be ground targeted in a 900 range.

Etc. etc.

Yamsandjams.3267:

PopeUrban.2578:

Crazy Idea that would beef up blind without overpowering it:

Blind –
50% miss chance
Blinded targets can not crit.
Stacks duration

I think the only real valid point the OP has is that stacking blind duration generally has no point. This is exacerbated by the fact that someone can remove the blind by auto-attacking the air.

If they did change the mechanics to work how the OP says, the only way I could see it is with the above miss chance being lowered as quoted. Something like 33%-50% would have to be implemented instead of 90%-100%.

Blindness was OP in GW1 against classes that had to “attack” for damage. The only thing that didn’t put it over the top is that you had access to abilities that would ignore blindness. In GW2, everything is subject to blindness, so the GW1 model would need to be revised.

I’m not sure the OP appreciates that this will be a double-edged sword though. There would surely be a follow up post by someone describing how blindness destroys thief offence.

Note that my suggestion doesn’t list “removed on attack”

Essentially you have a blind condition that works in tandem with weakness for more reliable mitigation, and you wouldn’t have to massively rework a lot of duration effects. It’s still a condition, it’s still subject to removal, and it’s a patch to the critical flaw of weakness as a damage mitigating condition in that pvp-wise the volume of critical hits makes weakness far less potent at mitigating damage than it could be.

Crazy Idea that would beef up blind without overpowering it:

Blind –
50% miss chance
Blinded targets can not crit.
Stacks duration

I’ve got to agree with people saying martial staff would fit the theme of thieves. Martial staves are very acrobatic weapons, and we’re one of the most acrobatic professions. I could easily see some for of martial staff use as the thief’s “melee AoE and survival” option. Think about something with the kind of utility you get from a shortbow, but that’s actually effective at keeping you alive in melee range. A solid damage auto (I do like the idea of making it a chain with an auto-evade at the end), a solid AoE DPS #2, and three other skills for mobility, evasion, and team utility respectively.

I could easily see them using the current head-heavy staff models if the fighting style was more in line with a weighted staff than the balanced hand approach of the quarterstaff.

I recently swapped to it from P/D (because P/D was awkward and frustrating after the revelaed change) and have run it both ways.

I’ll admit my D/D is a bit different, in that it’s a hybrid power/condi setup but it serves pretty well in WvW as well as PvE

Core stuff in my build:

Signet of Malice Contrary to popular belief, SoM is actually a great skill that gets better the more you’re outnumbered. The trick is building around it and stacking it with other passive heals. The down side is you don’t have a panic button The up side is that you can actually eat a few hits if you’re playing your evasion right and never stop putting pressure on the enemy. Also, burst self heals are for sissies

Try getting used to it and how it changes your playstyle and see if it’s for you. If it is, consider a build something like mine!

20/0/20/10/20 – Traits are pretty obvious, I won’t bother listing them.

6x Runes of the mad King a must for any thief using SoM in the heal slot. Turns your elite in to a decent heal against single targets, and a full heal that gets better they more you’re outnumbered. The reason? Every single bird bite on every target they attack activates SoM. It’s zerg daggerstorm on steroids. It’s turning a semi-useful 45s elite in to a heavily useful 900+ heal that also adds a stun to your attack chain. It’s even more mayhem with thieve’s guild. In addition it adds a nice little bit of wide PBAoE damage to your elite, and turns you in to the hero from a John Woo movie.

The down side? It doesn’t work underwater. The solution? Avoid fighting underwater like everyone else. Underwater combat sucks anyway.

Life Sigil 250 extra healing power translates to about 20 extra HP per hit from SoM alone, and a bit better from assassin’s reward. DB hits multiple targets three times, and dagger’s auto-chain is four single hits, so it adds up nicely, especially considering you’re evading the vast majority of incoming damage. Also helps to supercharge the MK birds and turn cluster arrow in a a semi-reliable source of healing in long range zerg battles as each explosion can proc up to 5 heals, totalling 15 heals per shot, or 200-300 extra HP on top of assassin’s reward from the sigil alone.

Improvisation, shadowstep, roll for initiative, and shadow refuge Caltrops was questionable with the old duration in WvW, and with the new and shorter duration it wasn’t worth the spot, though I swap RFI for it in PvE. Improvisation opens up opportunities for a lot of cool combos if you, you know, improvise! Generally I’ll steal some feathers before I go out to fight in case I need some extra condition removal from my 10 in shadow arts, and I’ll engage from visible and fight out cooldowns, saving the feathers for the extra damage (it helps with the power from the MK runes and deadly arts) then, when a few are on CD i’ll pop my steal at an opportune moment and see if anything refreshes. What happens next is largely determined by which CD I just refreshed, if any at all. Doublecasting RFI can power-stack a lot of bleeds really fast or fuel a HS string if you’ve got the target low, double shadow refuge is… just hilarious, and double shadowstep can be really great for baiting CC. if nothing refreshes at all then I just continue to rely on what I’m already doing, possibly finding a good spot to use the stolen item to buy some time or finish. In PvE, double caltrops is just about the best thing ever. It’s fairly survivable and capable without Improvisation, but the improv recharges really make the build click in PvP as you’re able to pull off things the enemy (and you) didn’t expect which can often lead to victory.

It’s all about timing
This build isn’t about spamming DB as many times as possible and praying. It’s about precision evasion timing and using every tool at your disposal. You need to know the duration of steal-vigor, how to chain a dagger auto-2 or auto-3 in to a dodge to keep the target weak and your endurance up, and you’ve got to pay attention to cooldowns, improv refreshes, positioning for dodgetrops, and know the attack animations of the enemy. I won’t say I’m as proficient as I’d like to be with it yet, but it’s a lot more like playing a sword build than a dagger build.

digiowl.9620:

The long cooldowns are there so we will consider the situation before using them. This in complete reversal to GW1 where elites were build defining skills that everything else you selected revolved around.

And it was a point of contention among GW1 players when that idea was released while the game was under development.

Elites in GW2 were supposed to be like the nitrous in a drag race. Situation-altering abilities that were so powerful that you’d actually WANT to save them so that you have a chance to respond to the other guy. Pop it too soon and you waste your clutch ability.

The problem with the majority of elites as they exist in the live game is that they have over-long cooldowns for abilities that are more often than not ineffective or actively detrimental to your play.

If we’re going to get weak elites, given them short cooldowns. If we’re going to get long cooldowns, make them worth it. That’s all people really want. The fact that a lot of people are saying they’d rather have another utility than their elite choices is telling enough about how simply not useful most elites are.

As a thief that did GC backstab for a aobut a week, got bored/frustrated, and went for more sustainable options (p/d attrition and D/D deathblossom attrition) I can say two things:

• GC backstab is a completely polar build. You either make the kill, get killed, or get a CD forced time out. It’s very high risk and high reward and its play and counterplay is measured in seconds. Like all burst/glass builds in any form of PvP its going to pubstomp. It’s going to wreck new players. The same is true in MOBA games, the same is true if FPS games, it’s a general PvP design paradigm. Burst weapons and builds, regardless of the drawbacks, will destroy new and inexperienced players.

• Pubstomping builds are vital to competitive play. You know what makes people get better at competitive games? Learning the game. You know the fastest way to entice players to learn? Pubstomp them, then let someone explain the mitigating factor. With two minutes of study, the new player goes from “I DIE EVERY TIME” to “LOL I KILL THAT GUY SO MUCH NOW” That’s an instant and gratifying learning experience that improves the overall skill level of both parties. The pubstomper has to learn to play more skillfully to counter and bait the simple counterplay, and the stomp-ee has learned a valuable lesson about studying the meta. This is why pubstomp builds/heroes/weapons aren’t usually seen much in high level play in competitive games. It’s not that they’re not effective. They’re just as effective as they were when you were stomping newbies. It’s that, often, they’re leaps and bounds higher on the skill floor to use effectively against a seasoned opponent.

• GC backstab is balanced, but the thief has little else that can achieve similar results in a similar timeframe. I like my attrition builds. I like reading my opponents, calculating my own and my opponent’s available resources on the fly, and forcing a fight to a long and bitter end. However, this mode of play is simply less efficient than the long-haul strategies avaliable to other classes. A bunker guardian or ele has a similar experience in PvP, but is worlds more effective in terms of both sustain and damage than a “sustain” thief. Not slightly moreso, which is expected due to class flavor, but wildly better at both staying alive for longer and killing faster. I’m okay with being squishier in a sustain build if it also means a better damage output than classes with better sustain potential. I’m okay with less damage in sustain if it means better survivability. The problem with thief is that its non-burst options are woefully inadequate when compared to non-burst options found on virtually every other class which is compounded upon by the fact that burst thieves are, by design, very good at delivering reliable single target burst damage

• It isn’t a matter of nerfing or un-nerfing thieves It’s a matter of creating real and viable build diversity in the competitive environment for us, and while we’re at it for every other class too.

I pack daggerstorm on my thief. It synergizes really well with signet of malice when you’re surrounded and delivers more often than not a full heal.

Some classes have better elites than others, and over all on a class by class basis there’s rarely a choice that’s meaningful. The only elite which I regularly swap is between supply drop and mortar on my engineer because they’re both pretty decent. Every other character, there’s usually only a single obvious option for a given build. I’d like to see some more GW1 styled elites that are elite because of a useful effect with a short CD in stead of a powerful effect with a long CD.

Heck, we should buff up the racial elites to be on par with class based ones, but add the ability to acquire them from other races with some quest/content to learn them if they’re not your native skills.

It’s a fair point. Say what you will about the karka event, but it did, after its one time story, leave a substantial chunk of world in its wake. Nevermind that the world that it left was underdeveloped in comparison to its kickoff event, I’d expect non-holiday stroy arcs to leave behind substantial amounts of content. A new zone, a new dungeon, a new minigame, etc.

Its not that the Living World is a bad idea necessarily. It’s that the story arcs need to be designed to change the world and add permanent content first and foremost. Any temporary instances, events, limited release skins, etc. are a nice bonus for players to say “I was there” but the meat of each arc really should culminate in “Here, look at all this new stuff that’s gonna be here for a VERY long time!”

Barring that, if we’re going to see living story as an instanced approach from here on, it’d be a good idea to append “expired” content to the end of personal stories, perhaps by use of the storyteller/historian NPC approach, only without the unique rewards. This ensures that a new player, fresh to the game, can actually benefit from years of concurrent development while the people that were there “in the moment” can still experience and have trophies from having been there.

Torvic.8256:

Not only are both my GW1 and GW2 mains male human rangers, but the latter is a direct descendant of the former (both even have the same last name).

Mine’s also a direct descendant of the original with the same surname. it can be a pain to find armor that doesn’t cover up the balthazar gauntlets but I feel it would just be disrespectful to a retired character I played for years not to wear them.

In terms of game play itself, I haven’t had this much fun in PvE in a very long time. However, I wanted the DE system to be a lot bigger and more world changing than it is.

Currently, GW2 is still a game I come back to every day for the dailies (which, with the new select your own system usually sees me doing different stuff each day, which is nice) and on weekends for guild missions/dungeons

Like any theme park MMO, the onus that’s on ArenaNet is to produce new content for us to gobble up, and it’s nice to see that the monthly update schedule is something they’re really passionate about and trying really hard to start pushing something substantial every month.

I kept going back to GW1 because there were still things I legitimately hadn’t done. There was a lot of learning through failure in that game, and the vast majority of the content took a decent amount of inventiveness, teamwork, and strategy to complete. I come back to GW2 regularly because there’s new stuff to do… but I almost never have to think about it. I power through the content on the first try and either don’t look back, or farm it.

I understand that the game should be accessible to a point, but currently the only “hard” content in the game is fractals, and by the time you get to the hard fractals you’re already bored with the content because you’ve done it so many times.

We need zones like old Orr, we need Zones, dungeons, and other content that’s actually difficult. Take a page from the SAB. Add an easy mode if you must, but I’d really like to see something that requires some thought and effort in addition to moving a story forward and supplying new and interesting rewards.

GW1: Ranger – Ranger was the biggest toolbox in GW1. With secondary professions, I found a lot more fun and viable ranger builds than any other class.

GW2: Thief – I nailed down thief early on because GW2’s ranger was stuck with a pet. I didn’t want to be forced to take a pet, an the thief looked like a solid “toolbox” option.

I’ve since tried the GW2 ranger, and found it much less fun to play in any game type than my thief, so I feel I made the right choice. (I also like my engineer)

Crazy Idea:

What if the level cap was raised, but 80 remained the highest gear requirement?

This wouldn’t have the annoying side effect of invalidating all of your hard earned exotics/ascended pieces, but would allow progression possibly in to new tiers of traits or other such core character advancement systems. In addition, new areas could, like they’ve done with some of the update content, add new stat configurations for more options in terms of horizontal progression.