Guild Wars 2

Don’t know if the guy is serious but this oO https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ogusa/the_guild_wars_2_heart_of_thorns_economy/cvx7mtk

Whoa so fast??!!!
I’ll quote dlonie on that one :

Hey Weth, has anyone told you that you’re awesome?

You’re awesome.

+1
Especially since with the reward reduction it will become harder and harder to find groups to run dungeons so if at some point you are interested in a dungeon skin or just a set of these account bound runes you’ll have to wait a long time.

Ah true.. I guess they didn’t count eternity as a legendary in the blogpost since it won’t have its own collection… so you were right : death to underwater !

Well if chaining all swamps for 1 gold each becomes a thing there will be much more money generated out of fractals than from dungeon tour….

Trice.4598:

I also want to point out “full set of sixteen weapon”, underwater combat also officially death, good job Anet, you dropped the ball big time with this.

I don’t know, if you remove the 2 additional greatswords, you have 18 weapons. Since there are 3 underwater weapons the final count should be 15 not 16. So either they scraped UW and there will be only 2 greatswords instead of three or … there will be one legendary for all UW weapon, meaning you can change it into one of the three. Anyway the price to pay for a weapon that is barely used (or not at all in the expansion) was a bit too high.

GrimmR.3541:

“As a part of that process, we’ll shift some rewards away from dungeons and into other pieces of content. While dungeons will remain cool experiences that’ll reward players with unique items, their liquid rewards will be reduced and other content will become more rewarding.”

Guys, anyone ever got unique items from dungeons? Can’t believe what BS that is.

I’m sure they meant armor token ….. In other words, if you have unlocked all of them then go to fractals…

I also liked the sidebars more to have fight description and Boss description without scrolling. You option is great since your pop-ups are really nice. Is it intended though that if I ctrl clic one boss to have the pop up then all boss of the same page, whether clicked or ctrl clicked will be displayed as pop-up?

May I suggest two things?
1/The pop-up closing : could you have it like a cross in a corner ? I’m old-school and I must admit that before thinking to clic out of it I first reload the page thinking it was bugged :s
2/Something I thought about long time ago : add a clicable summary at the top of the page to directly access the part of the dungeon you are interested in.

From the wiki :
A Q&A session with Isiah Cartwright revealed the way Magic Find works: “Everytime you kill a monster you roll on a number of tables, inside these tables are different rarity categories. Magic find increases the chances you will get higher categories. For example if there is a 1 in 10 category, and you have 200% magic find you will have 3/10 chances to get that category. This improves not just the rarity of the items you get but can also improve your chances at getting trophies and rare crafting materials like lodestones.”

It would be so cool to have an ingame tool for guild advertising, an LFG-like tool but less dynamic. Somewhere you could put/read announcement of guilds with filters. There was a tool like this in Wow back in the days I was playing and we actually recruited some people like this, very useful tool.
From the LFG tool basis I’m sure it could be done, especially now that HoT will have a bigger focus on guilds.

They said that with upgrading Fractals to lvl 100 the difficulty from 1 to 50 will be lowered. I wouldn’t be surprised that AR requirements would also be rescaled with the 85+ AR being only required for the top lvl Fractals (75+). There is still announcements to be maid about Fractals (hopefully this week !!) but I wouldn’t be surprised if the level 75-100 are actually the ones that will count in term of leaderboards, unless these are only completion speed for every single level.

What about, instead of a tool that may be hard to implement in the UI, have someone like this guy: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Master_of_Damage

Basically in GW1 you could hit this guy for 3 minutes, solo or in team and have stats about your damages and DPS. Now with some tweaking he could also have boons reappearing every second so he could count the number of debuff, CC and the heals provided. You could even have a dialogue asking him (or better : a golem) to run in circles to have an idea of moving DPS. Teams could organize their build and strat around it.

On the other hand, if this was to be info brought in raids I think it should only be seen by the raid commander and only if the player allows the leader to read their data. In the end, people wanting to use those data should make it clear in the beginning. If you play with your friend, it is a matter of trust so normally this won’t lead to any drama. If you’re in a PUG then you may choose to trust the guy or not. Conversely, the leader can put this as a pre requisite, so instead of being kicked, a PUG who doesn’t want to compare DPS would simply not be grouped.

Jerus.4350:

That’s the point of giving it to people in raids, if you’re capable of beating the raids I’d hope you’re aware enough to understand that just because soandso did more damage than whatshisname, it was whatshisname that was able to provide that clutch defensive tool that saved soandso and other people.

So what you say is that people are reasonable…. kitten when did I lose my faith in humanity?
I’d like to share your optimism about players’ awareness, and in a sense I’m sure it will be the case for the first 2 months. But as soon as the raid will be “on farm” then I’m sure the way to look at data with a cold mind and analyse a bit more than one column will be lost.

Sorry but I would hate having a DPS meter of any sort. It’s not about how people will kick others or not but in term of future design.
Basically if such a tool happens, there will be comparative post of “I did this rotation on ranger and I have XX DPS while Elementalist have YY so you should boost ranger or nerf Ele”. Nobody cares about amour, defensive tool, sustain, mobility, health… only DPS numbers count ! From that point there are 2 choices : either Devs pretend they don’t hear anything because they actually take everything else into account or they choose a WoW way where every single class do the same DPS more or less 5% (with similar rotation of course because “Profession Z is too hard”) and there are less and less class variety.
In the first case, people will keep on complaining in the second the class diversity will shrink, the game will become boring … and people will complain.

The DPS tool is a good tool for the dev to design and if they do a good job they will also factor the other things in order to design encounter . But giving the tool to everybody, especially people not able to fully understand what it means (read the majority) it has a good chance to hurt the health of the game more than anything.

Problem is there is a tendency to increase damages in PvE if you just listen to players feedback.
Without PvP there is no reason to nerf anything unless it totally breaks the game. In the end one class will say “look at class X, they do more damage” and the answer will be “ok let’s boost you” but then class Y will say “class X and the other are better, we deserve a boost” … run loop until satisfaction=1 (better say infinite loop)
If a big split is created, then that means one part of the game will be abandoned. Look at Rit in Gw1, instead of rethinking them in a clever manner they simply OP’d them in PvE to satisfy the whining people but nothing was done for PvP, lazy design, power creep….
Rather than spliting abilities I’d much prefer splitting the available stat numbers or have a PvE/PvP-only stat like agony.

Also there is no “Addon War” on GW2, meaning there will not be a voice saying “Beware, enemy is using this skill on you” so that you can directly target him and reflect the spell…

If I remember correctly, while he was not directly at TwitcCon, they recorded an interview of him for the Making of the Trailer.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

maybe sinister isn’t berserker but it is still glass, zealot is glass as well (IMHO)

I expect

• sinister
• berserker
• zealot
  to be the " holy trinity" :P

Don’t forget one guy with Knight/Cleric or the like to have high toughness in order to control the boss aggro…. you’ll have the new …. what the word for trinity with 4 things, tetranity maybe ? :p

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

regeneration doens’t stack… so If people with low or no healin power apply it it tends to make regeneration from other sources less interesting.

That is called team organisation/coordination. You want to be the healer of the team, ask the other to avoid regeneration boon. Moreover, regen stacks in duration and I am not sure if the rule is first in first out or if there is a priority on the bigger heal.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

And with raids the numbers stay the same even though the party has 10 ppl most buffs only apply only for 5 people, so 2 people need to spec in buffs… where you’d normally expect 1.

That is a totally different problem here, I don’t see any correlation with the healpow intensity and the fact that raids are 10 people. Then you can also argue that personal DPS increase in raids only account for 10 % of team’s DPS increase (so if you increase it by 50% the team gain 5%).
And who said you want only one healer in raid? I mean the vids we have seen have most of the time 1 single druid but they are also bringing heralds with their insane amount of boon (including regeneration).
But whatever you do with scaling you’ll always heal 5 persons. I would add that with chaotic persistence (but any boon duration increase will do the job) I’m quite sure your phantasm turret will apply regen on more than 5 people with time. At least that is what I observe in world boss when I want to have fun as a healer (and yes it saves people when they simply don’t dodge Claw’s attack while using mortar on the ice wall)

Coulter.2315:

Mantra Healing trait on Mesmer goes from 2600 -> 2900(ish) from maximising Healing Power, certain things really have terrible coefficients.

Most of the time, the bigger the initial heal, the smaller the coefficient (doesn’t always work like that tough, CD and radius have to be taken into account). In the case of mantra heal you are right you go from 2600 at 0 healpow to 2900 at 1500… but with a CD of around 5 to 6 seconds when use with mantra of pain…. ok this is an increase of around 10 % but the number are quite huge (520 to 580 hp per second passively for 4 people in your team when you spam it).

Now look at regeneration boon:
Basically you can maintain 100% uptime of regen on 5 people with illusionary inspiration at the cost of keeping your phantasmal warlock up (since it’s a range phantasm it is more resilient). With 0 healpow you heal 5 people for 130 HP per second. With 1500 HP (sans bonus from healing prism or other stuff) you manage to give 318 (=130+1500*0.125) HP per seconds, representing a global sustain increase of 144% for the entire team.
On the other hand, if one person double his DPS, the team’s DPS increases by 20%. That is the exchange between scaling : DPS scales for one fifth of the team’s when healing (since every outgoing heals are group wide) scales for 100% of the team’s sustain.

I’d prefer see an increase in allies’ heals as percentage of your healing (say 1% per 100 HealPow … more or less 15 % for main stat heal) and maybe get rid of the traits giving it.
That would make self sustain remains as it is now but would make the stat more meaningful for somebody wanting to heal his allies.
In term of PvP/WvW balance it would increase team sustain but since June 23rd patch increased damages by a lot, I’m not even sure the balance would come back to its former state.

The problem arises in almost every escort type event. People tend to go more and more ahead of the NPC. In the end either the NPC will be stuck in weird spots or it will wait for fights forever.
Best example is probably the escort close to meddler’s summit in Cursed Shore, or that quaggan in Snowden drift.
Sometimes making mobs kill the NPC unfreezes the event but it doesn’t always work.
I hope Anet will eventually review those type of events and add a reset option in the code for the already existing and new escorts as these can stall meta event forever…

What’s the difference between requiring 9 dps and requiring 3 supports?

It is always a matter of semantic, but the 2 heralds brought support through glint and some traits like equilibrium.
I mean I understand what you want to say but the game is made in such a way that you can have a support (ish) role while not wearing a healing power gear set.

Now if you think the other way around, imagine that the raids would require 2 people to have healing as a main stat to provide enough target-less reactive heal (opposite of stat-less proactive dodges and blocks)…. Since a lot of people give regen it will be a mess to be sure that only the regen from the healers would be applied (e.g forbidding any dps engi to bring healing turret) or to be sure that the healers are exploding in the

Rising Dusk.2408:

Note that when they finished they still had ~1:20 on the timer. That means slightly bulkier and lower DPS groups could still finish just fine.

And I’d add that they have heavy use of unfinished Elite spec which could be heavily nerfed during the next balance pass….not saying they will but who knows.

Aidenwolf.5964:

If 10 players can clear a raid in full DPS gear then the raids are poorly designed. I’m not saying that’s the case with GW2 raids I haven’t been able to get in yet (logging in now) but they are meant to be challenging and if you can face roll them, they aren’t.

If ANY 10 players would do this (almost the situation of dungeons right now) I’d agree. But one can always think about the possibility that the 2 or 3 wipes that have been advertised were achieved by really good players

This is just an example of how they can design a raid, it does not mean all the encounters will have the same check. If you want to promote diversity in fights, you don’t design all of them the same way. In other game it is no surprise that the first boss is a DPS check (reading a gear check) just to be sure you can pull enough damage to go further.
The other bosses will probably have something else.
On the other hand, but I haven’t played it so I may be wrong, is the fact that there is just a timer and no “lorish” explanation like “the platform will explode kill him fast” or “if you don’t do it in that time will have to use or mega laser and you’ll be wiped”.
It doesn’t bring anything to the encounter but I would find it more immersive

Your experience is quite surprising since leveling in this game is really rapid.
First a 100% map completion is not only discovering the map but it requires you to “activate” the hero challenges, the Points of Interests, the vistas and the waypoints as well as filling every hearts.
Normally if the map is uncovered, you should see where are the missing things by hovering your mouse on the map recap (on the left side of the full screen map). If a heart is missing, try to speak to NPC with a telescope icon on their head.

Other than that I advise you to gather plants, ores and wood since these give exp. You may also want to visit other low level map in other region. The waypoints for those zones are normally either unlocked or you must travel through asura gates (Divinity’s reach to Lion’s Arch, then Lion’s Arch to another main city).
There are plenty of food you can find which increase exp by 10% (search NPPC in cities) and you can also interact with banners that people plant everywhere… chances are you get an exp bonus.
Your personal story (green star in the upper right corner if you have the appropriate level) is also a good source of leveling, along with the many dynamic events. Bashing mobs randomly is far from being the best source of experience points.
Also last advice, don’t forget crafting. If you gather materials, use them for crafting, this will give you experience. You can learn up to 2 crafting profession at one time but you can switch to others by paying a small fee to the trainers in cities. Your progress with any profession will be saved if you want to come back to it.

Wethospu.6437:

You will not be able to revive players that have been completely defeated when a raid encounter is active (originally it was only during enrage). Downed is okay, so you can still get that clutch banner res off. Once a player becomes completely defeated you won’t get the interact prompt to res them.

Fells like transfusion will be more than advised… maybe res skills too ? Well they’re barely used so far so why not…
Incoming Illusion of life PUG trolling

At first I had hopes that raid boss would be treated like world boss i.e a big chest upon death and a bonus chest once a week (instead of once a day).
But from what they said during TwitchCon it doesn’t seem to be so which is a pity because if your guild has 15 people then 10 will make their weekly raid but then nobody will feel like helping the last 5 to complete theirs. Drama incoming ….

Torsailr.8456:

It looks like Druid, Ele, and Revenant will all be mandatory in raids.

Druid will be necessary for the massive heal bursts to heal after one of the strong attacks.

Ele and Revenant will both be necessary for heal over time and versatility. Both are the only professions that have the versatility to be a healer without sacrificing support or damage capability. Other professions sacrifice a lot more to be a healer.

On the surface I would expect 1 Druid, 1 Revenant (Ventari/Glint), 2 Eles, 3 control/damage specs, and 3 pure DPS specs in raids.

Well the need of the druid is dependent on the strength of damages and timing.
For OHKO damages, no need of any healer, toughness will do it.
For smallish spread damages, any classes with a bit of off-heal or good regen uptime will make it (if not everyone can do it with self heal).
For bigger spread damages, aegis, blocks and dodges can be enough to mitigate.

Maybe the question will be either bring a “dedicated” healer, druid or Ventari/Glint herald or bring some hybrids like venom share, engie or mantra mes to make some damages on top of their heal.
If they stick to their design this is the way it should go : bring the people and build (maybe gear) them to have the required amount of DPS/CC/Mitigation/Sustain.

LH 4 will do half the damage of the new IB 4 (according to the wiki) so I don’t think LH will be a thing ( at least not for this skill).
Ice bow still has DF which is one (if not THE) longest CC in game : negation of damage for 5 sec, still strong support.
It won’t disappear directly after patch. My only concern is if they homogenize all bosses with defiant bars after HoT maybe IB5 won’t see any advantage anymore.

I would prefer a NPC at the entrance where you choose either to do it fast or to clean all cleanable threat in a dungeon. Both challenge come with rating (gold to bronze) and have different rewards. People would then choose their dungeon mode in the lfg.

Now the gold times should be close to world record to make it challenging but it also means every time there is a balance pass, they should re evaluate it…

But nothing will be made with dungeons for a long time so better focus on the new content.

CHS.5160:

Something I’ve noticed after quite some time is how there is Gear that, under realistic circumstances, is only usable by healers or tanks (such as Nomad – Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power), even though there is no way to play a designated tank or healer in guild wars 2 due to the lack of proper taunting mechanics or healing skills.

Does anybody have an Idea why this gear prefix even exists in the game?

I’m always surprised when such discussions comes by the way people feel so “forced” to wear a single gear set at one time. You are not the first one to raise this question (and it is often about nomad) and every time my thoughts are : think about pieces not entire gear set (gear + trinkets).
I always see gear like self-imposed difficulty mode in PvE. It is less true now since condi revamp though.
For example, I had hard times playing berserker only gear and that is why, while playing a DPS build, among my berserker pieces I had some knight’s, to improve toughness and be a bit more resilient ( at that time there was a toughness to power conversion for engi iirc).
That’s how I see nomad stats : some pieces in your stuff can actually change your survival while you are going for a DPS build. You can even put a scholar rune in a gear set which has 2 or three nomad pieces. You lose some dps but it is balanced by survival… for some people it worth it.
I personally like those stats for micro management. When I create a new toon I always simulate its stats on gw2skill. net or into the mist to achieve the stats I want to reach and most of the times it implies mix and match but I find it cool.

I find Druid to be akin to Ventari for Revenant : an off tool you can choose to use at will when skritt happens.
For now the only way to apply constant reliable regen with ranger was a bit clunky through resounding timbre.
In fact you could just spec Druid without having a staff ( staff is only one adept trait of the spec) and just use Avatar when some heal is needed, just the same a Rev may want to switch to Ventari only when healing is required (and you can just play Shiro/Ventari with Sword/sword//mace/sword).

In fact depending on the power of Celestial Avatar’s heals you may also play a berserker Druid because you won’t need to boost the heals more than their base value since you have so many of them. It will depend on your group and on the encounter. Sure, during Avatar you won’t do any damage but it will be in the way of playing, not the way you gear your toon.
I don’t think (hope) a full dedicated healer will be needed in HoT, just some form of group sustain and it will be up to the player to choose if they want one guy to handle this or spread it on everyone in the group though traits and water fields explosions.

It is like actual Meta : you normally wouldn’t require a PS war, just act in a coordinated manner to maximize might for the group. But putting the task on one single character makes the role more reliable and let other people to focus on something else (DPS or group defence).

Kordash.2197:

If “can’t just dodge to survive” is like the pistol shot or Mai Trinn, i mean using a block utility to avoid it, or either blasting water fields in a coordinated manner, i’m fine with it. If it’s forcing us to wear Cleric’s or Nomad’s or any combo stat, kitten YOU DEVS, you’re going against the first idea you sold us with the game.

To me it sounded more like attacks will be more frequent so that your endurance bar won’t be enough to never get hit by anything. They just want the player to bring some form of sustain like regeneration/heal other trait/explode in water…. somewhat less proactive and more reactive. Why not, these exist since day one so why not try player to bring them. They just need to find a good balance between both.
Maybe some low life/armor class like Ele and Thief will have more trouble in a berserker gear but this is not even sure.

Vayne.8563:

Anything you get without paying for it is free, by definition, even if you’ve prepaid for it, unless you knew up front you were prepaying for it.

For exaxmple, when I bought this game the concept of the Living World meant dynamic events and NPCs that existed in the world whether you were there or not. Fractals and the Living World never even entered my mind. I got them for free, because though I paid for the game, I didn’t actually pay for them.

Anyway, the cash shop paid for that development not my purchase of the game. Saying it’s all boxed sales is a bit naive.

Nobody will ever confirm or dismiss your statement. I do think season 1 and more (maybe not all season 2) was part of the business plan coming with boxed sales because it was impossible to foresee how well or bad would the BLTC work. THis is the kind of things you plan years in advance and with gems they only had hopes and speculation… they needed something solid as backup.
My feeling is that if BLTC would be enough to be sure to pay all development for the years to come there wouldn’t be any need of boxed expansion.

But again this is a matter of feeling, there is one truth but I don’t think we will ever know it because business strategy is to not communicate on these things.

mtpelion.4562:

Again, it astonishes me that people are willing to pay $60 for things we have been getting for free.

Absolutely astonishing.

You are getting nothing that we weren’t getting before other than a handful of additions that are smaller than the updates we’ve gotten previously (again, for free).

This is a backwards step in terms of gaming progress, but I can see why they are doing it since so many players are more than willing to immediately rationalize dropping this money for nothing.

There is a relevant PT Barnum quote for this whole subforum…

What is astonishing is that you think everything was free !!

It was never free, basically everything what has been implemented since game release was included in the price of the core game.
It goes the same as navigation system. You pay for the system and are granted free updates for a period of time (most of the time 2 years). If you want updates afterwards you have to pay either for a new system or for access to the database.

It’s not because you didn’t pay for three years that thins were free though I think the marketing was good because you believed it. If you buy HoT you are paying for the exclusive content of the expansion as well as for what will be implemented until next expac.

Lodius.5392:

I guess I was wanting to know if there are also any new features that maybe I overlooked. I just don’t have time right now to go through 6 months of patch notes and upcoming changes.

I think the best way to get some sort of answers is to wait for the expansion to be released and for players to have tried the new features, because right now we don’t have more information than you.
If you do that provide some sort of list of what you disliked or what you expect so that players will be able to tell you if you can find it or not.
Based on this you’ll be able to think about returning or not.

The expansion pack does not look exciting to me. Is there any reason at all to re-invest my time in this game?

I think you have your answer. Either you want to try the new features though you don’t feel excited for them or you are not able to find yourself any motivation to try them out.
Nobody can do that for you, I’m afraid there is no answer to your question… it has to come from you.

“Full-Berserker-DPS-PassiveDefense” is superior over builds with more utility and variable team play.

Are sure you wanted to write that ? Because the thing with berserker gear is that you only rely on active defence (block/dodge/reflect/control/positioning) because you reduced the passive one to its minimum : 1000 toughness, 0 healing power and no additional HP.

The thing is there is much more team-play in meta team than random team. Team-play exist at every level. Though their is no on-line resources for it there are so many possibilities to create teams in this game… only one is meta but I’m sure you can create your own team which will provide the same things but in a different manner.

Open world maps are not design for team obviously and for every level of player… I mean if you can’t reach the last starting points of your personal story, the not-too-much-involved players won’t be able to finish their story.

That said I don’t think the core experience will be ever revamped. Maybe some mobs in core Tyria will be granted a defiance bar (sources about that are sometime contradictory) but nothing more. HoT new zones will be more difficult (at least during the first 3 months) but mainly because the new mobs have been granted different behaviours and you can’t just give a new code to old creature without spending a huge amount of time and resources to test the effect of it.

Your max number of chest depends on your personal level.
lvl 1-10 : no chest
lvl 11-20: one chest max
lvl 21-30 : two chest max

Beware though the bonus is counted when you enter the fractal. The day I turned 21 I only got one chest.

To trigger the chest you also have to complete a fractal of the tier. If you are personal lvl 22 and do a 15 and a 17 you’ll have one chest, not two.

That said, I’m not even sure I fully understand the system myself. Globally I think the system of FOTM from agony resistance requirements to tiers via bonus chests is one thing they could explain way better in game. It is impossible to really get it without the wiki page and even that source is not so clear.
Maybe the reshuffle coming with HoT will clarify the system and make it more straightforward to understand but the golem in the entrance should explain a bit more how it works…

With all the spirit traits and utilities given to the druid, I don’t even see why I should log on my Ritualist. Anet just destroy their class to please the whining minority. Basically HoT will be full of Druid-only group. If you don’t believe me then wait for my post part II and you will see how wrong you are.

IronEdge.2481:

OK, so in the latest article on HoT Anet announced that yes, the sylvari were destined to become draconic minions. BUT, it also says that Mordremoth can grow back his 3 most powerful commanders. Yes, this is a clever way of explaining why they respawn, but if Mordremoth can literally just grow soldiers, how does he even lose fights?! EVER?! Theoretically he has INFINITE SOLDIERS!!!! I mean… what?!?! Can anyone explain this…

It is not different than Jormag creating new Claws once one is defeated or Kralkatorik spawning new Shatterer to patrol on the brand when one got… well shattered.

The concept seems fun but to me it sounds as a WvW oriented spec ! Stomp/revive drone plus frontline weapon, hammer 4 and 5 and elite gyros (and its toolbelt) will all see a large use in the mists.
If the elite gyro doesn’t draw mobs attention it can be useful for skips in PvE, along with hammer being seemingly a power weapon.
For sPvP there are also good things like mobility from hammer3 and condi resistance though trait and gyro.

But on the paper it will really shine in WvW.

nearlight.3064:

Gaaroth.2567:

Well necro is the boon corrupter by definition and is pretty good at it.
Thief can steal them, engi can remove them.
Revenant is a nice addition in the panorama, but is not that we lack it.
Surely, not every class can, but I do not see a problem

Not every Mesmer runs domination, and almost no engineers use throw mine in pvp. I’m merely saying that it’s odd that none of the elite specs have an option for boon removal.

Then it simply means that boon stripping is not a Meta at the moment in the game. I don’t see then how adding more removal would create anything since as you say the already available options are not widely used. It would make sense to have more option if boon removal/corruption would feel like a mandatory role in the game and that only few build were available.
And as Nike said, if it became mainstream then Necro should remain king for it to have their niche, the same way thief is king of blind/defiance removal. Others can do it but not as well, else thief would be out of dungeon with his necro friend.

On your first point:
I think Mordremoth has corrupted seeds (the one of Ronan’s cave) which are able to give life to Mordrem. The problem is the Pale Tree was planted without a hive mind to control it and its fruit, the Sylvari. The Pale Tree acts the same way other corrupted trees do, it has used bodies (human ones from Ronan and his family) as template for its creation. Malyck’s tree did the same apparently.
I don’t know how but at some point the Pale Tree, and only this one from what we know, gained sentience / access to the Dream to grant protection on its furit and apparently on itself. Is it some centaur ritual from Ventari or proximity of a ley line? It could also come from a forgotten purification ala Glaust. I’m not sure the Pale Tree herself as protective conciousness is aware of her corrupted plat state… she would have told us before.

On your second point:
For what we’ve seen so far, people in Tyria are defiant against Sylvari because of Scarlet, and maybe they heard the news about Aerin. At the beginning of HOT, the only ones who are naming them as dragon minions are the Pact Soldiers who see many of their sylvari comrades turn against us. Some may have told things like “My master calls… death to the Pact”. So far, the news of this event have not spread to the east, but it will eventually and then those who are already angry at the plant race will be ready to hate them and convince those who were just wondering.

Finally on your point three:
I don’t see the problem of not getting used to horror. Some of my ancestors have seen two world wars during their life and they never said anything about WW2 being easy to deal with after the atrocities of WW1. Your quote doesn’t say they will discover the horror of fighting former comrades but that they will experience it. They should have written “again” maybe but I also think that after Zhaitan’s fall, some brave Tyrians saw hopes and rallied the force of the Pact to fight the next dragon. For those ones they will experience the horror for the first time.

I feared to have turned a bit pessimistic with age but right now I’m a bit scared that forge will actually transform our turrets in drones.
That means no new skill type per se but a adaptation of an existing one. In that they “fix” turret problem by saying “Ok if you want a mobile turret build just play forge”. All traits from turret will works with drones like DS traits work with reaper shroud.

Kordash.2197:

dlonie.6547:

Kordash.2197:

Actually, you can have the full glass and the tanky aswell, and do well with both. Why would you change that ? Forcing player to have a certain stat combo won’t enforce diversity.

This. The ‘lack of gear diversity’ is a good thing. One of the best parts of GW2’s combat system is that you don’t need to lug around multiple gear sets — your build comes from traits, which don’t waste inventory space.

I’ve never understood why people think requiring multiple gear sets to complete content would be a good thing. It sounds like a giant pain in the kitten tbh.

Well some of my mates would like it (Ranael, i know you’ll be reading this :P), but personaly… i would hate it. Just thinking of getting multiple full ascended sets on my 8 (soon to be 9) toons give me nightmares. The actual freedom of choice we have is good.

Boss has called ? ;-)
Actually I don t think everyone should have all stats combo with him but I don t find it a problem to ask people to have lets say a high Hp or toughness set as safety if one boss requires someone to control aggro. Not tanking but just make him go at the place you want with better control. Those are mechanisms already available in the game so why not use them ?

(Would like to be more explicit but from my phone it is too long to answer… I hope I ll catch the thread this week end )

Uriel.6310:

Im not sure how to feel about this F2P business… the first thing that comes to mind is League of Legends.

Dont get me wrong, its a great game.. but their community of players has to be the worst I have ever seen in online gaming.. Its straight toxic and they have not figured out a way to fix it.

Now Arenanet would like to go the same route? Lol.. man SPVP will be the new grounds for trolls especially with the introduction of leagues. If this goes through we can kiss our good little community goodbye.

I’m sure that this is not what you mean but I don’t see why there should be a correlation between how nice is a community and the amount of money people spent. Such thought could then be derived to say that CE buyers are nicer within the community while the 10 € players are some toxic newbies…. again not saying you said that but just that this would be an easy way to take.

More specifically for League, my experience was the higher rank you were the less toxic people were, even if all players were still F2P. On the other hand I played some PvP game on GW2 were some players were at least as toxic… so no correlation again.
I think the comunity is what the players and the game make it to be. This game and the previous one always had nice people playing for the fun, taking time to dress their barbie, exploring landscape, organising crazy events… there is no reason why more players arriving would end that.

Thanksfor the precision, I somehow thought that warband could have a name of a former one, sort of a dedication to them. But I skipped the part of two at the same time

Oh and about the order of words, I also didn’t know it could change. Most of the time it is reversed between english and french but I wasn’t sure if it was different within a single language.