Guild Wars 2

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

I’m actually disappointed at this news. I’d rather they spend an extra 2-4 weeks giving us a more polished product AND not kitten us out of what is traditionally been the favorite holiday for GW2 players… Halloween

Do you really think they started working on Halloween 2012 after the 25 August 2012? They plan things ahead and they have already polished Halloween 2015 for several weeks… or not.

sorudo.9054:

if it’s a trail then i hope it’s spammed with chat limitations, if they really are gonna make the core game free then i expect them to put HoT in every account who payed at least €70,- for their account.
i payed €150,- for GW2 + all the gems i payed for, making the core game free would be the worst move of the history of Anet and that includes the first trait system change and the NPE veterans are getting sick and tired of.

I paid 0,15€ for my cell phone a year and a half after it was released though people bought it for more than 100€ at release. Should I have a limited autonomy, less space to save my data on it? Should the first customers be granted the next generation for free?
In both cases the first customers enjoyed the phone or the game ahead, that is something new customers won’t have anymore. In the case of the game you experienced season 1 and 2 in live for free which will not happen for new customers. You paid for being here when it was trendy.

Just out of curiosity, how many account can I link to the same phone number/authenticator ?

It ‘s funny how people here want to play a MMO, complain about under population on WvW but still hope that no stranger will be allowed to play and interact with them. Come on, just the idea that the population may increase should be a good news. And if the new algorithm is right this will first increase low populated world in WvW where players have basically no fun since there are no fights.
And to be honest I’m not sure that a horde of new players will arrive in the game that fast. At least not after starting zones.

Charrs’ last name are suppose to depict their warband and a personal addition if I remember well. My question is what is the probability that 2 Charrs have the same last name and then what would it mean.

In fact I was playing in Fields of Ruin last week until I met a merchant called in the US version Harcla Grindtooth (Grincedent in french). I got really surprised (and happy) since my Charr ranger’s name is Rena Grincedent. I chose the name before I met this merchant and just for the sake of thinking I went to wonder what could it mean.

Any Xtooth charr in the game would logically be part of my warband (though in PS they almost all die in tutorial) but I would be surprised if 2 charr of the same band could have the exact same name.
Now I was wondering, and thought I could find an answer here : could 2 tooth warband coexist at the same time ? This would mean that the name is just pure luck (ofc it is in my case but I mean from a RP point of view) but so far I don’t recall any Charr bearing the same name.

Connor Obrian.8420:

Hm now. Let’s think about this whole situation.

ArenaNet has stressed a couple of times that they want to have a buy to play game, not a f2p game. If they wanted to show that their base game is becoming f2p, why do they not call it f2p? Instead they call it play for free. Is it maybe the same as always? Could it be that ArenaNet is stuck in time and play for free means still that it has simply no subscription costs?

Then it would mean this is just a campaign to make marketing for buying HoT or cheaper GW2 base game keys.

Our only source for the exact information that the base game is becoming free is IGN. IGN is, like some people said, none for misinterpreting small information. TBH: You can blazingly fast misinterpret these things.

The trailer itself doesn’t say anything about the free base game and it even shows the WvW map of the addon. I would call this suspicious. Exspecially the last point. Why would you show a WvW map that is not coming in the nearer future, when you want to advertize the soon beginning f2p era of your game? That makes no sense. I mean it makes no sense at all. And to emphasize it further: The marketing teams put a lot of thinking work in this kind of trailers. They don’t do such mistakes.

I think the easiest way to see it is :
- GW2 : F2P game
- GW2: Heart of Thorns : B2P game

The difference with what already exists on the market is that both games can interact together. Let’s be fair the main development going to the game will be on the HOT part not on the core.
On the other hand, every Gw2 player will encounter tons of player playing a subclass they can’t or access loot they can only dream of…. it will attract them to buy GW2:HOT.

Killyox.3950:

Ragnarox.9601:

I realized something was wrong when Anet started to price its expansion 45€ while giving new players core for free and vets get nothing. All start with greed. You could just price 45€ for core+exp and 20$ for those who have already own game. And now you are going to f2p. I’ve played so many f2p games and all companies milk them like cows, so much greed out there. We will just wait and see official announcement but I don’t have any good thought about it.

did you even read it? This is more like a Trial GW2 than F2P :P

Honnestly if SMS becomes mandatory starting today then I’d say they will be real account. If I would be in the industry I wouldn’t advertise trial account as a “big announcement” either…..
We’ll see tomorrow but from what I’ve said and since Anet tries since always to make things differently from other games I’m quite confident they will be real accounts.

Couldn’t Queen Gauntlet and Silverwastes be raids if instanced?

I remember they said each boss in QG was scaled for 5 players and could upscale from that point. So the raid could be 30 people, if you want gold it is 6 times 5 good players, else it becomes bronze and every boss is zerged by 30 people. Depending on your rank, different rewards.

In SW, you could also have 30 people, 5 in each fort and the rest for Dolyak runs. Then 6 people for each breach boss and 10 for each lane on VW….

Could those fit raid definition?

So far, by speculating I think the free core game is a nice move.
First, I’m not sure you can bind different account to the same Phone number, so the risk of people holding tons of accounts is limited. On top of that there may be some people having tens of account for the login reward, but they will be a minority.
The bot risk is higher since they can affect the supply of mats. That said, the valuable things will be in HOT, there will be new mats, new crafts and this will not be touched by free core game.

But on the other hand it is a nice move to keep core regions alive, advertise the game and generate money through gem. I mean let’s be real, if the company could wait 3 years for an expansion and sell the game for 10 € it is because their main source of cash is the BLC.

However I do think the impact on revenue will be much more pronounced on NA than EU. From my experience and some numbers I’ve read in the past, American people tends to give more money for things they like (sometimes they feel a bit forced to do so) which is a very cultural thing. In EU we don’t do that so easily. No judgement, different culture.
Anyway for those saying it is unfair that they have bought the game and now people won’t have to, don’t forget you still have your 3 years worth of loot, money, achievements .. and experience!

Now I’ll see what won’t be accessible for core game at HOT release. It is clear they won’t have free season2 and following ones, nor access to Magumma. For sPvP the only sure locked thing is one hero in SH. I suppose there will be reward tracks that will be HOT-only. Of course they won’t be able to touch any Elite spec. For WvW it is unclear what will be locked for core game since there, maybe some lines. I must admit I fear there may be some risks of destabilizing this game mode in term of population and access… unless maybe they add new world to push the new accounts on those in a first time.
Masteries are also HOT exclusive, Guild Halls are not but maybe Scribe will be. I just hope Pact Tyria masteries won’t be available at least at the beginning.

PowerBottom.5796:

This would pretty much lead to the same “set up” of GW1; very important mid, but the option to split offensively or defensively.
It would also get rid of a lot of boring running around for supply.

Isn’t it more or less the way Conquest work already? I mean I’ve always seen the mode as old GvG with cap point instead of flag stand and NPC. They just removerd the part of killing the Lord but the philosophy is really similar, just the combat mechanics are really different and more aggressive (no turtle fight for 20 minutes trying to interupt the monk on his big heal or try to down the mesmer so that he won’t interupt your monk on his big heal).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_performer
It could make sense if you are jumping/evading everywhere.

This part puzzles me in fact because a lot of things seem to proc on dodges which could mean that if you want to play a full power one you have to be constantly on the move.
In sPvP, zerg WvW I can see how powerful it may be but for PvE it seems to not fit with the actual gameplay of static World Bosses and dungeons (the two main activities in PvE). I mean the risk is to see people jumping everywhere around (unless bounding is a targeted dodge) and in the process either loose a lot of DPS because they spend half of the time out of range or, if they are attracting aggro, the boss will always be out of range of the team….

I hope they’ll speak in POI a bit of how the spec will fit in PvE and not only PvP… but since they never do I think only beta week ends will answer the questions.

Maybe I misunderstood that but I think Pact Tyria Commander mastery line will grant you access to NPC who will sell exclusive stuffs including returning items from season 1.

Maybe we will be able to buy recipes of zealot insignia and rune of torment through it.

I noticed something on the french client about some NPC lines.
Everytime a NPC refer to a female PC, there is no sound and the NPC doesn’t even move its mouth.
I think there is some revoicing work in the loop but not sure.

Example:
Norn story, Eir start a dialogue and suddently goes silent since her line says something about the “pourfendeuse” (female for wurmslayer). Then the sound comes back again because her lines are not dependent on the PC. Afterwards, Eir is speaking in the instance and call me “pourfendeuse”. This was striking since Eir’s actor changed during season2 so it is clear what is original dialogue and what is new.
I dont know if it is related but maybe the de-activation of some gendered language did also cancel the english version

BrokenGlass.9356:

But ya know what the Dev’s recently did? And its why I don’t really do this anymore, unless I’m in the mood to troll the trolls…

THEY GAVE US THE SILVERWASTES!!!!!

now, speedrunners…. please go ride the train down there, and make like 5x the gold. and let me run dungeons with a group that wants to have fun.

Sorry but this quote made me laughed really hard. So you want to have fun in dungeon so people who wants money should accept you even if you don’t fit their requirements.
BUT it is no problem for you that people who want to play SW “as intended” (fort + breach + VW + Laby) get screwed by a chest farm map were nobody cares about map objectives and where they simply can’t play the way they want….

If you answer those people can find another map thenyou know what you can do to have fun in dungeons.

Dinks.2478:

I don’t know why I bother with these conversations. Nothing but children going on about how they purposely spite people who want to play differently than them. Why anet doesn’t ban these trolls is beyond me.

To be honest, I’ve barely seen any dev or community manager talking about what the game actually is in PvE. For PvP/WvW they all speak about the builds that exists, or the way people play the game (they at least mentioned the existence of roamers, zergs, GvG and scouts in WvW). For PvE they only talk about what will/could be the future but barely speak about how people play the actual game.
The only mention I’ve read was Linsey Murdock commenting on the SW chest farm. She didn’t say anything about its future but at least she acknowledged its existence. Back in the time there has been a comment by Robert Hrouda about the skipping. But since then I’ve never seen any mention about Metagame, being build or gear set.

If they would come from time to time and say a sentence like " for meta players this change would lead to…. " or “with the LFG everybody should find likeminded people, be it full metazerk group or come as you want run” it would just make players understand that (at least I think) they are ok with the fact there are different ways of playing the game.
Instead of this we have people like OP thinking he has better knowledge of what others should do or not and what is fun or not. This, as always leads to a sterile topic which will be either closed in the next 5 hours because the name-calling game will reach unmanageable levels or will sink on page 3 so that somebody else will again reopen a new one in two days and this will again lead to the same trouble.

I know Gaile Gray will read this and I’m sorry in advance for what I’m going to say but the entire community team (I don’t talk for devs since it is not their job) did a much better job before launch (read from Prophecies launch until Official GW2 forum launch) to create a friendly community where everyone was not necessarily playing the same way but it was no problem for anybody since we knew it was no problem for the devs. At that time the only big wall between players was the PvP ones against the PvE ones when there was a balance update. Other than that, solo farmers/SC team were richer than other people but since it was clearly stated that there was no intention to remove those game plays the whining never lasted long.
It’s 2 years now that the community splits more and more with more and more acidic arguments and no peacemaker tries to calm things down……..

Lux Dominatoris.3941:

Enjoy the Video!

Thank you very much again for your support and I’ll see you in game!

Nice video… though a bit static. I must admit I have trouble to follow a video when the speech and the images don’t show the same thing.
There is one thing maybe that shouldn’t be said : you talked about berserker and cleric build… there are many arguments on the forum to say that gearset =/= build. So maybe these are words to avoid.

Maybe I’m just stupid but I would have shown three examples :

Example 1
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWhMMo0hdOwwB8RM8AYzFIEsCkAwCoFWDyjQTA-TBSBABFp8jm9Hc+BAEhSwbU/BFdAIY+DgLAAA-e

This is a bad build. There is a huge lack of synergy between skills and traits. It is in fact really hard to be sure to do such a build after spec patch but this is something that should be avoided.

Example 2
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWnMICtMgVPA2NA0RghQAjiAdgt4EAKALwKGMCWBA-TxhGABB8AAmU9nFuAAEt/wlm/AQJYlK/AA-e

This is a healing build that tries to find a good compromise between dps and team regen. Skills, runes and traits are working towards the same support purpose, in healing version. It is a viable choice in the sense that you can create a group relying on life regeneration. It could even be the optimal build when the purpose is to find the crossing point between dps loss and healing gain.

Example 3
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWnMIClNgVPAONA0RgBBAjeCbhjQEAKAHA5SGCSBA-ThRBABXt/o8j9LAAe6AA4BAQp6PmpEMAwBwwDHAWf91Xf91b4hHe4hHuUARMMC-e

This is also a good dps build. Though I am not sure it is the optimal dps build solo, it is when playing with a meta team. The build is meta because given the state of the art it is the one that will maximize your damage output when played with a phalanx and when your defence rely on your guard and your ability to dodge.

The meta that we have now takes into account that enough people in the game population are able to read the tell of bosses and know the encounter. You need people who are enough skilled to play this team composition or need a low skill floor in the encounter. Arguably the meta is a bit different for different activities, even between dungeons, and what is now called THE meta is the solid backbone of the build that should be usable in every situation.

Optimal builds are defined by their purpose, meta is defined by the actual game “life”. A content-only patch may change the meta but won’t change the optimal. Conversely a balance patch may change the optimum while not changing the meta.

that is at least how I understand the words and the game… if I am totally wrong then tell me so that I won’t say BS to new players

Just wanted to add that buying the xpac doesn’t only buy what will be at xpac’s release but all the content until next xpac. That is also one reason they can’t really tell what is included in the xpac right now.
For example the base game didn’t include several things like Southsun, Dry top and Silverwastes, new PvP maps, collections, guild missions…
It’s not that I want absolutely defend Anet but it would make sense for me that not all maps are available at release, maybe the real Mordremoth fight will happen on a new map that they are not happy with right now but will be available 4 months after HOT. Basically buying HOT will buy you this … but not at release.

Well since the thread has now derailed I can maybe join the conversation to add my 2 cents.

I would like to fully support dlonie (tbh since maha has disappeared I couldn’t find anyone I enjoyed so much to read each time) about how the dungeon community behaves sometimes.

Skady’s post was for me one of the best answer to threads claiming cleric is useless or healing is too bad in the game. There are so many threads in general sub (because now people understood this sub was not a good place to have discussions) about misconceptions of what the meta is and they all finish the same way. By having threads showing that though unoptimal other tactics in dungeons exist and can be fun, people wouldn’t feel that the dungeon sub (and by extension the entire dungeon activity in the game) is reserved to some elitists jerks.

I think there is one thing that is often forgotten : a lot of people actually read the forum without even login in. In my french case (oh and in France a wink is a friendly sign … or it has a sexual meaning) I can tell that many french people don’t even try to speak or write English though they can read it. A lot of them, while not participating, know about the discussions held here.
That means the discussions and behaviours from here have a huge impact in the entire game. I mean people didn’t start to mock non-zerker in mapchat magically… it was because they read it somewhere ( most probably here !) because most of the time it is easier to repeat what we read rather than to think.

You have a greater influence on this game than you think and if an initiative is made so that the good face of the dungeon community is shown then it has to be done. But please don’t show the jerk behaviour, there are much more better discussion here than these little pesky comments.

As much as I was fond of Ritualist in the first game I just don’t really see what kind of archetype not yet implemented it would fill.
Ok the atmosphere of rune, herbalism and spirit is not in the game yet but in term of functionality and game mechanics I don’t see how different it could be.
Right now I find the engineer fill the versatility and the “zone of power” created by shaman (well the vanilla shaman because now the buffing zone follows the character… like the herald).

A topic with 19 post doesn’t show the assumed huge population!

But if you want to show how popular and easy it is to implement why don’t you first try to organize your own 2v2 event. There won’t be any reward sure but since you say it will be much more fun than anything else it should be enough to start.
Show how big the interested population is, show how simple it is, show that there are no bad meta emerging from this activity. Then you prove your point.

frifox.5283:

Happens all the time, just like my yesterday’s Arah run. “zerks only blah blah speedrun” type lfg post yet the mes who made the lfg is 100% pvt. I asked why the heck is lfg asking for zerks only when he himself isn’t 3 times throughout the run but got silent treatment for each.

Actually I am in the opposite situation but don’t know what to do. When I go to a dungeon with my guild they always advertised the lfg as “80 exp zerk meta” though most of the time I don’t have a meta build and not always zerk gear…. but I don’t hide it, guildies are aware of it. Same for my bf in the group. So sometimes we are 4 with 2 being meta and 2 not and they insist on the the pus being meta…. every time I feel guilty ……

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

An Attribute line NO-ONE who’s objecting in this thread had any wish to use.

Sorry but I like to use healing power but I’m not supporting the need of any buff right now!
As I said when I’m not sure if people need or not healing (like anonymous FFA PUG groups) I enjoy running heal build, on top of granting other boons. But if I now the people and they don’t need or don’t want heal then I simply change my build. When HOt will be released, I’m sure there will be a lot of people who won’t be able to outdps the new content without losing any HP and will be happy to exchange 5 or 10 % of group DPS for a 20 % (minimum) buffed group regeneration.

That said you can’t just compare the loss of 100 points with the last patch because many profession were granted a new trait boosting their heal to other (it is baseline for water now). It is somehow a big boost for heal build and heal gear.

Sure 30 % were lost but I do think it is a good thing to try to get them through itemization (both gear and rune). And the fact that a berserker group is still able to maintain 25 stacks of might with a 100 % uptime or some healing build granting Regeneration with 100 % uptime show that boosting boon duration is still not required.

mtpelion.4562:

Just reduce falling damage across the board and reuse those traits for something that is actually useful.

To get a picture of how useless they are, consider all existing runes that can be used to free a trait. Movement speed runes are currently selling for 4g74s91c each (the useful Rune of the Traveler), for a total cost of 28g49s46c or 1g59s91c each (the fairly useless other than the speed boost Rune of Speed), for a total of 6g39s64c. Fall reduction runes (Rune of Snowfall) are fairly useless other than for the trait-replacing feature, and currently sell for 24c each, for a total of 1s44c.

Comparing the Rune of Speed to the Rune of Snowfall shows that movement speed is considered to be at least 444 TIMES more valuable to the players than falling reduction.

Well gw2spidy says here is 228 times more runes of snowfall than traveler in supply… so when rescaled, fall reduction only 2 times less valuable than speed

But you forget one thing : your boost in healing for the team is bigger than the loss of DPS team. In my example of Mesmer, say you loose 20 to 30 % DPS, it is a lot but your team (assuming 5 player like in dungeon) loose 5 % DPS because everyone contribute the same to DPS (more or less).
On the other hand, everyone’s Regen is boosted by 40 % , so 40 % team Hp per sec regen because one guy providing Regen is enough for the entire team.

In other traditional game, the healer won’t contribute to dps (or minimally) here you are still required as dps on top of being a healer.

Right now those traits are really nice and useful in WvW and open world. In some Pvp map one could imagine it is an advantage to jump from the clock tower with less damage.
Maybe it could be used as defensive tool when launch or knocked back… but then the ICD should be high enough to be comparable as defense against control traits.
But I’m not sure the change would not make it worth than now.

Sorry Pax but what I don’t get is how healing is a useless stat !
You say it yourself, a full healing gear set boosts your team heal by 211% for regen or 166% for water blast. It can be even more in the case of traits and runes increasing your heal on other… it is sometimes another 25% in the case of water ele with monk rune. I mean if you keep regen on everyone around you it is a huge increase.

In fact having one “healer” in a group is making runs smoother without loosing that much time for the average Joe group. But it is a matter of group level, if you have no death in the run while running full DPS why would you need more heal?

On top of that you won’t loose all your dps by doing it if for example you mix cleric and magi to keep your power and crit chance high enough. You also don’t loose vulne/weakness application in most cases and generally your build increase naturally the uptime of boons you provide. Saying healing power is useless is simply not true.

Also don’t forget the impact in PvP where the stats is even less useless. Giving too much opportunity to have turtle team would just recreate the meta of GW1 GvG when the entire match was a flagstand camping until VOD. Lately sPvP Meta is maybe too aggressive but the balance has to be on the damage side.

Aetrion.8295:

NikeEU.7690:

Every character is Control, DPS and Support all in one. No dedicated roles was intended. Everyone contributes to everything. Sorry you don’t like Guild Wars 2!

Well, not everyone, only the 4 best builds. I mean if everyone does everything there is no need to build a character for anything other than producing the biggest possible numbers while doing so.

But I’m sure that’s exactly what the devs where shooting for when they gave us a variety of classes and specs and gear. It’d be silly to make a game where no build variety exists without spending a good chunk of your development time putting in builds nobody is supposed to use.

Well almost every single weapon set brings all three aspects in a form or another, sometimes the support is more personal, sometimes more group oriented. Then your traits allow you to emphasize one or two aspects. Finally gear, as few to do with your build but only affect your comfort zone, only exception ow being condi build which can only work with a condi gear.

I made a rapid calculations based on tooltip.
Setup : Mesmer staff auto attack, regen, self heal and mantra heal to others (inspiration line with 2-2-2 traits) plus regen applied by phantasm. I compared Berserker gear and Zealot gear, basically, exchange of ferocity towards healing power. For this I presumed a 12 sec time for healing mantra (1 sec between cast and 10 sec recharge).

If everything is correct for berserker:
-AA 612 dps // Regen 130 HPS // Self heal 433 HPS // Heal to others 216 HPS
In zealot it becomes :
-AA 495 DPS // Regen 209 HPS // Self Heal 499 HPS // Heal to others 231 HPS

So changing ferocity to healing power leads to a loss of 20 % DPS on auto attack, and an increase of 38% HPS on regen, 13 % on self healing and 6 % on healing to others. Of course the biggest difference is that auto dps is always required and healing is on demand so you won’t spam your heal on recharge (though it is possible if you want to maximize your output in team heal).

Basically it seems to work as intended, you trade dps to hps in a comparable amount. Maybe one could imagine a boost of healing power in the form of healing to other except regeneration ( like every 100 points in healing power you have 1% of heal to other instead of those given by traits) but for now it doesn’t seem necessary.

I think what most class lacks is access to resistance, thi is a super new nice tool that is barely accessible right now (2 skills and all traited Mes glamours).
If more frequent this boon would really see nice clever uses like if you have too many stack of burn and no condi cleanse then relieve the pressure some seconds.

Sadly they introduced a new tool but forget to give it to people.

I have a good news : since 6 nCr 3 = 20, when HOT releases there will be a 100% increase of accessible builds for each profession!
Enjoy the future !

Rising Dusk.2408:

cthaeh.2168:

Oh, man! That’s gonna be so much fun! I can’t wait to spam “LF2 Cleric Guard then gtg” for an hour before I get frustrated and go back to SW!

Just remember kids, if you can beat the “challenging group content” with any group composition, then it’s not challenging. This content is not for the casuals who farm SW to buy shiny skins, this content is to challenge people to really put head-to-paper to figure out optimal compositions, optimal load-outs, and optimal strategies.

I partially disagree with what you say. The challenge is not necessary to be able to find the optimal comp/rotation on a paper but rather to challenge people skill playing their build optimally, (almost) independently of their build. That GW2 philosophy from the beginning I think : play what you want but play it well then !

That why I think challenging content is something that you can’t predict totally. Say you have a basic strat that is easy to learn, but you have to perform it well to succeed.

Just an example : imagine a boss in a small circular room with 5 posts around. When the posts turn red, there must be one player at each post in the next 4 seconds. If blue, nobody should be around, if green, one post should be occupied by at least 2 players.

If the conditions are not met : big damage from the boss. Now you can have this basics rules drawn on the wall of the room so that everybody knows. The trick is then to have a post illumination every 15-25 seconds but the colour is random each time. Now you set the boss HP to something like the best DPS output needs 2 to 3 minutes to kill it and the failure damage so that a leather armour with no additional vitality dies.

You then have an encounter for everyone : high DPS comps needs to perform extremely well on each post phase or they ll die (ofc you can negate big damages with aegis/block/dodge) and high sustain comps have space for errors but they need to be able to follow the rythm longer (which at some point open for more and more errors). But whatever the team, each time you have to be aware of what the boss does and not see it automatic. Plus since you have to move, ranged weapons may find a use.

To me the most challenging thing you can add to video game is the need of rapid adaptation to a situation you cannot predict 100%. You can also think about daily gambits on a monthly rotation or as I said in a previous post boss skills activated depending on team composition/playstyle.
Working on team / rotation on paper is not challenging after the guides are edited on the web.

Gray.9041:

tempest, on the other hand, brings nothing new to the Ele, the overcharges leave you as a sitting duck, and the shouts were lackluster at best. I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it, and I still feel like it’s the worst elite spec to date.

While it is a recurring comments on tempest, I disagree totally that it brings nothing. It is a new gameplay, a new dynamic brought to the class. Now that people don’t enjoy it because of numbers or whatever is a different story, that can be easily changed. But overall the concept is good since it is new. I’ve seen many Ele in game camping the same elements over and over, I’m sure they may be interested by tempest. Those players who actually switch their attunements permanently won’t.
The spec is a support spec but felt different to me as other support specs of the class and in that the goal of bringing something new is achieved. Numbers will most probably change over time but the design is nice for me.
Take all the professions into account and think if you like say bleeding signet earth ele, mantra healing Mesmer, venomous share Thief, turret engineer, banner support warrior…… those are specs that offers a different gameplay to those professions but they are far from being popular. They could be better sure, but I think tempest will be such a spec, not too much played in competitive environment but for those wanting a different gameplay it’ll serve its purpose.

the most challenging content would be bosses that react to player’s actions to break monotony.
Things like “this guy has huge DPS then challenge him with more attacks to see if he brought enough blocks/vigor” or " oh this player brought a lot of armor… then focus him with conditions to challenge his abilities and team coordination to manage condi removals" …. so depending on your team, your mood and other stuff the encounter would never be the same and you couldn’t solely rely on a skill rotation.
But that’d require bosses that don’t die in less than 3 minutes, and this wouldn’t please people and I’m not sure such programming is easy to do.

dlonie.6547:

- Zergable, open-world “raids” on a static timer.
- No party control/kicking, just ‘luck of the draw’ RNG based on who’s in your map instance.
- kitten support and maintenance support for the first few months after HoT launch, shortly followed by complete abandonment and neglect.
- Nonsensical reward structures that are disproportionate to the contents’ difficulty levels.
- Complete lack of community involvement in shaping the iterations of the content (if iterations even occur).

Wait, was the question what we want to see, or what we expect?

For the first two points I still have high hopes, especially since they insist a lot on that feature for some time now. They know that there is an audience in the game for raid-like content (or call it hard mode dungeon). I don’t know the format and I hope it will at least worth to give it a try.

On the last points I am forced to admit that the past of the game makes your assumptions probable….

I still have faith though, the company is always surprising with nice new concepts.

It is nice to see some theorycrafting in this part of the forum, however I wish OP’s title was “Why condition damage is OP (and zerk sucks)…. for rangers”. I am really not sure it is true for every class in the game and then I don’t see the problem if one class’ meta would be sinister rather than berserker.
And I know it is not as easy as it seems to run proper sims but there is maybe an optimal stat setup when you add berserker piece to a sinister set since scaling are different.

dlonie.6547:

“omg this is too hard” has my vote. Followed quickly by the new “nerf defensive combos!” cries once they see coordinated full zerk/sinister teams clearing it faster than they can.

Just noticed this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuvtest

There are a total of 20 threads in that forum, including the one that’s locked and the “Welcome to the subforum!” threads. Am I missing something, or does anyone else smell a flop? :-/

There were really few people in the test, mostly friends from press guy and twitchers. As I understood (cause I was bored after 10 minutes on twitch) they didn’t even fight but wanted to see the map for best screenshots. It was too few for people to actually comment on it or even be interested in it.
It is too soon to predict a flop I think, wait for a real beta test of the map and the kittenstorm coming with it

NikeEU.7690:

It’s funny, I’ve been repeating this on reddit and Wooden Potatoes comment section for a while: if super hard content comes out that requires party healing due to ambient damage effects Berserker will still be the meta because with a coordinated set of blasts you can heal back to full and go back to DPS. A lot of people (same people I see commenting on Nemesis videos or anti-meta reddit threads) seem to think that if party healing becomes a mandatory thing that suddenly a role in your team for a clerics ele/guard/rev becomes optimal. It’s really hard to convince these people that berserker builds have tons of defensive tools already at our disposal we just don’t often have occasion to use them.

The other mind blowing thing for them is that if there are new challenging bosses who have “interrupt or wipe” mechanics that doesn’t mean we will have a dedicated control bot, it just means that each player will have to make a slight adjustment to bring some CC to get that interrupt done when needed. There won’t be a hammer warrior just spamming CC despite their fevered dreams.

IF they put hard content, IF they’d put ambient damage and IF healing scaling would be increased (lots of IFs) maybe it could be worthy to have one dedicated healer (cleric or apo to have damaging stats) rather than asking to everybody to contribute to the global healing…. but it don’t see that coming in that game, and I’m not talking about how it would mess up pvp balance.

Arkblue.6129:

Harper.4173:

It’s the players – not necessarily the encounter that push this.

No, it’s the encounter.
The game was never built around a required healer/tank, but the devs intended to built it around a required soft trinity were at least a player was supposed to stand there dodging/mitigating/blocking/kiting the damage. Stacking was never meant to be META. In that scenario regenerations and heals would have proven more useful because it would have been harder to avoid all damage, but still they wouldn’t be needed.
TL;DR= the encounters are designed around not needing dedicated tanks, healers, or anything but dps weapons.

While stacking is not META but laziness from fake pros, I don’t think it makes the encounters easier. Basically if boss cleaves with a OHKO skill, everyone dies. If people are spread only those in range do. Now if you have a good support (not healer) he’s able to negate the damage for the entire team since they’re all around.

About the stacking, the only “mandatory” thing is the 600 radius for combo, shouts, phalanx….

So compared to your Tl;DR I would say : The encounters are designed around not needing mandatory healer, tank or minimal dps. You can test different team composition but DPS gear with a minimal support character will be the most effective.

Support is already in good place in dungeon Pve. It is even a bit too strong if you count that almost every single group NEED a support guard to go through the dungeon, being for aegis, blocks, condi clean or stability.

It is possible to play support/healer with other professions already. You can be a venom thief (might, life steal, condi, stun on bosses), mantra/PU mesmer (aegis, regen, boon sharing, might from staff, stealth,heals and condi removal), water ele, EG engi, just adding a sigil of water is in fact a good help for your team….The fact those build are not meta (hence people overlook them ) is because they are either random or not as simple to play.
You won’t speedclear with those build but since 95 % of dungeon runs are not speed clear it won’t change the completion time by a lot. But in any case support is already required for dungeon in almost every team… hence the Phalanx + Guard !

That is for the playstyle. Now people tend to complain about the gear set. And yes in that case if you compare damage scaling with healing/boon duration scaling then you will see very soon that the loss of damage is not fair compared to the gain of support (aegis, block and might efficiency don’t scale with any stats, regen scale weakly with healing power). Basically better take a zerker gear and put a rune that fits what you want. Arguably sinister or other condis sets can now be considered as efficient since with short time conditions the ramp time in this game is not really huge (again not speaking about speed clearing).
Maybe the original sin was to put three damaging stats on gear like zerk or defensive like nomad. They should have done one major aggressive(but double value as minor) and two minor defensive or the contrary. That way people would have mixed their stat and even by optimizing aggressive stats, there would be more diversity for heal or toughness so that people would feel less frustrated.

In the end what was said will not really change anything, there won’t be a need of a healer or of a tank as before. It is just some PR talk to reassure people that there will be space for non-zerker in the expansion and they should look forward for it. But the truth is that there is already space for not playing zerker, and support is always needed in PVE.

dlonie.6547:

Oh, the kittening irony of this thread getting locked: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Once-again-Communication-issues-guys

With no comment. Less then a week after I get tempbanned for mentioning that it’s helpful to have comments on closed threads.

That one hadn’t even gotten off-topic or unconstructive, f//fs.

Yeah I wanted to answer (busy week end) and saw that…. just Wow !!

As I said in the thread, communication is two sided but apparently when you want to discuss about it they don’t want…. too bad.
Then I think it is better to to cater to the nth thread about " I feel fooled", “I spent 1 billion dollars worth in gem in the game and I want a char slot” or " Stop content that is more than 30 minutes long because I have chronic diarrhea"…. that is much more helpful for the game

Sadly there is a trend to see everything black or white. Not specifically speaking about OP, it is more general. What I mean is that recently passionate people are like “If I am playing a game, the company that makes it has to be the best. Now there is something I don’t like so they are the worst”. On the other side there are some developpers who might think "OMG people are so angry about our game, is that amount of job I have done and I am proud of suddenly so bad? ".
Like in every field of life, passion is good but its expression may be a disaster, artists learn to channel it but other people are easily overwhelmed by it.

Communication is a relationship that needs time to be built, they were a bit more open in the past but it ended up as other kinds of fiascos (craftable precursors anyone?). So there is a thin line between being too open and too secret, and finding the right spot takes a lot of time.

That said, past experience show also that ANET is able listen to their customer (commander tag is an example) but it is hard to listen to “the community” since nobody wants the same things in the game. Also there is always a hard question in video game development : “how much should the development of the game be driven by player ?”. What I mean is that we don’t boycott movies because the trailer doesn’t show the end, we don’t ask any writer to revamp the last chapters because we think the main character should not die. MMOs are a good opportunity for the player to have an influence on the development but we should keep humble and let the devs have the initiative, it is their work and our leisure. And on top of that one has to remember that devs are not paid to tell what they are doing on social media, they are not all community managers. If they do, it is on their free time… if they have some.

So in the end there is a lot of pressure on the communication team.
I must admit I found the team much more efficient before launch (even though I don’t think until Gaile arrived in the team there had been so much changes in term of people) but I can only imagine how hard their task is.

They surely can improve what they do, but we can surely improve our way to give feedback other than “that is typical Anet, they are bad” or “they lied to us since the beginning” “this game is dead since XXXX”.
In other words if communication fails, it is rarely only one side’s fault… if we ask for better we should also be able to give better.

Well maybe my feelings are wrong but I had the impression that more people were able to run SC-like compositions since April 2014… but maybe it is a false impression.

And also I think I’m trying to figure out what the devs have in their mind to promote so much healing spec recently (Ventari, engi revamp, the huge amount of outgoing heals traits…) since this is maybe the least played style through all game modes.
I mean, I’m talking here about healing, not support in general.

maha.7902:

I suppose they want to promote more needs of tanky or healer for unorganized groups

no, they aren’t

move along nothing to see here.

I really think there will be far less “noobz get home ! I do AC in 10 minutes in my zerker gear while I don’t know what should be my build”
People will really have to know what they are doing and why to complete dungeon in Meta setup.
It won’t affect the majority of people like you (are you still playing? ) and others posting regularly in this subforum but average player will fell the difference and start to fail in their daily AC/TA/SE COF p1 tour (see I’m talking about people who actually run Arah daily).

The problem with upscaling is when you are at a stage where your gear has one or two stats, what should be the third one ?

Heal power by default for everyone ?

Stark.1350:

If you found out the expansion just contained “Verdant Brink” as the only PvE map being released with the expansion, what would your reaction be?

I think I would wake up… was just a nightmare.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Bleh. They should make all regions level 80 and just scale low levels up.

That was their intention during development but then they thought it was weird for people to go to Orr two days after release while not having developed their character or not knowing how to play.

I didn’t see that much discussed but the patch notes for next week’s update state this :

Level scaling changes
In general, scaling down has been weakened, and scaling up has been increased.
Stat Scaling now better accounts for level ranges where equipment start offering more possible stats (e.g. one, two, or three stat pieces of gear).
Rarity scaling now takes into account how close you are to the maximum available rarity when scaling up or down.
Some Minor stacking on kill Sigils have had their values reduced.

So I guess the bugged downscaling from March was actually only a “leak” between Dev build and Live.

Basically low level dungeon should be harder, I suppose they want to promote more needs of tanky or healer for unorganized groups which is what a lot of people are more or less asking for.

Nevertheless I don’t think SC teams will be touched in their gameplay but record times may be affected. So you should maybe plan ahead a reset of those records…

I can’t count myself as a hater but honestly they could have done something like “if you already own an account you will be granted a new character slot”. At least it makes a difference between those who got the game before the xpac.

The way it is done is more that not already playing the game is the best deal… not the best way to thank your player base.

Better than reduction of damage : negation

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Resistance

I would add that treadmilling systems imply a content difficulty scaled on the last tier of gear.
For now (and I hope for the future ) the game level is balanced around exotic stats (well fractals are maybe scaled on ascended stats other than agony res but I am not sure).