Guild Wars 2

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Rauderi.8706:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Here is the 38 page [Merged] English forum thread on April Fool 2015 with people complaining about April Fools and accusing ANet of insensitivity for not thinking of that plane crash. Once I read the complaints had made ANet go to the forums and apologize, I figured they would stop April Fools as there’s no way for them to know in advance what joke is going to blow up in their face.

Or crash hard, amirite?

How dare you joke around. Now I’m TRIGGERED! Aplogize!!!!!!!!!!!

:P

I.. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Ever.
Guess I’ll reallocate jokes to the balance team. (..get it? ;3)

Wondrouswall.7169:

I’d rather Anet rework some of the core game’s mechanics before reworking professions. Revert the change to dashes and leaps so soft-cc snares regain their value, alter defiance bars so – when broken – conditions such as blind, weakness, chill, and cripple affect the boss while it regenerates as an extra incentive and reward for breaking it.

This.

Also add in “scrutinize and change Stability again,” because as it sits right now in the current CC-spam environment, it’s actually devalued. Uptime too low + long cooldowns + disablespam = Why Bother.

To say “total rework” is a bit overkill, though. In a lot of cases, there needs to be analysis of traits and why they’re weak/failing and bring other traits/combos into line with the power curve.

GW2 has found a way for me to like all of the classes in some way or another, even after I hated ranger and necro at launch. So, nope, can’t just play one. I’ve got 80s of every class, often repeats of some classes, often for wardrobe/play style purposes. And GW2 being so alt friendly is a huge selling point for me. Like, literally. I’ve purchased all but one of my spare character slots with cash-gems.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Here is the 38 page [Merged] English forum thread on April Fool 2015 with people complaining about April Fools and accusing ANet of insensitivity for not thinking of that plane crash. Once I read the complaints had made ANet go to the forums and apologize, I figured they would stop April Fools as there’s no way for them to know in advance what joke is going to blow up in their face.

Or crash hard, amirite?

I could definitely use an eater for them. Just opening chests in my home instance can shovel 5-11 of these into my inventory every day. If I go to map/meta an HoT map, it gets even more ridiculous.

SirDrygan.1823:

Where? I don’t remember anything like that? Or just that I didn’t bother with it.

But, while we are at it, can we remove those those kids who are playing pretend as Kasmeer and Marjory? Those two ARE really annoying.

Agreed. It was cute the first time, but the one-hundred-first time? I’m done with it.

..no idea what this bird thing is about though.

There isn’t just a frequency problem with CC, either. With enough experience, player characters are easy enough to read, but most enemies have very poorly telegraphed attacks. Or in Immelhoof’s case, no warning at all. I could be doing pretty much everything right (stay out of the red, don’t fight near the fire twisters, attack from behind), and he will still, without any visual cue, sentence me to a damaging stunlock. It’s an absolutely cheap thing to do.

There’s also not much of an active counter set one can do against some enemies. The wrong kind of rolling devil doesn’t take CC, breakbar enemies can’t be controlled (so no blind, stun, etc), cripple doesn’t halt/slow a charging enemy (because that was changed, for Reasons), which leaves block, dodge, maybe stability if it works right (it often doesn’t), and that’s all stuff that varies between classes.

I wish I could at least give him a rope.
Or maybe glue together all of the crap that Cin didn’t want in his collection to form a ladder of junk so he could climb out.

AliamRationem.5172:

Simply making the vague observation that combat is “chaotic” is not a reason to make this change. Why should we do it?

Taking a stab at the source of the phenomenon, I’m thinking most people who ask for “less chaotic” combat come from those trinity games as:

• tanks who feel the need to control the battlefield (and be a fantastic diva); a loose add drives them nuts
• healers who hate getting hit or doing damage at all, ever
• dps not used to getting hit and want a tank to front for them

I’ve had friends that mention all of the above as why they don’t take so well to GW2. I generally try to be self-sufficient in MMOs, since I solo a lot, so the breakaway from trinity has been a huge boon for my play experience in GW2.

TheOrlyFactor.8341:

Ashen.2907:

I prefer Triscuit.

Edit: D’oh. I thought it said “Saltines.”

Chicken in a Biskits are the superior crackers. :V

I threw up in my mouth a little, but I still support your right to allegedly like that sort of thing. :P

The fragments do have a fairly generous vendor value, so I could understand if they just forget about it as a currency item.

Unfortunately, I don’t agree. It’s a matter of design and what’s being done with it, not the presence or absence of tanks.

Tanking makes for particularly boring / same-feeling fights. Maybe sometimes the dps have to dodge a little more, or they multiple tanks in raids have to juggle aggro, etc, but having been a ranged-dps in WoW, my fights looked almost exactly the same. It was stale. Static. Pressing the same four attacks as they popped up in my rotation, almost never threatened or taking damage unless the tank flopped, the healer flopped, or the mechanics overwhelmed the fight. My contribution overall was pretty meaningless.

Where ANet seems to be stumbling is designing for this game. World bosses and champs routinely deny the Control role and punish anyone they become the sole focus on in melee. Yes, there’s a breakbar, but it reduces control to “which class stuns the best,” because the CC-dots don’t do enough to break Defiance before the bar disappears in clutch situations. Bosses should be taking some effects and shunting the rest to Defiance. Healers should be focused on aiding groups because of cleaves, not power-healing some poor sod who drew boss attention because he needs a bit of extra Nomad gear to survive.

Monolithic bosses just don’t work properly when there is no tank. Even in trinity MMOs, bosses will often summon adds that have to be managed by a(n off) tank. In GW2, that sort of strategy can easily become part of a Control role, and DPS can divert quickly to burn it down. It’s actually a smooth integration of roles that requires more versatility than a trinity-oriented MMO. But, we still primarily over-damaging monoliths that can’t be controlled. Cripple and Weakness become the fodder for the occasional trait proc and that’s about it.

Moonyeti.3296:

I wonder if maybe calling it something like ‘Combat Metrics’ instead of a DPS meter would help to change people’s impressions? Sometimes it just takes a new way of looking at things.

Maybe?

I’m not against combat metrics for the right purpose, success-based outcomes. Efficiency in performance is limited to those who run progression (might as well just say beta testers, since the strats are known from Day 1) and record running, both of which don’t typically apply to PUGs. Using combat metrics to improve personal performance is absolutely okay.

Opposite that is flailing around on anyone and everyone else while not understanding the nature and purpose of data. Low “relative” DPS might very well be still above the “absolute” needed for an encounter. There’s just this sense that most raiders aren’t asking the right questions, even with the data in front of them.
Did the group win? Yay, that’s all fine.
Did they not? Where was the breakdown? Were mechanics failed? Did too many players mess up a defense? Was healing sparse? Assigning blame to DPS is the last thing that should happen, yet it’s often the first.

So, in the end it kinda boils down to stuff we’ve said in the past, combat trackers or not:
1. If you’re elite/pro/toxic, cool your jets. Unless you’re pushing to be that top 1% of 1% of the 1%, your tryhard isn’t necessary.
2. If you’re “casual”, be open to advice and remember that your group is made up of other people who want to succeed. Your raid build will probably be different than your open world roaming build. Commit to be better.
3. Don’t seek to be in groups you don’t fit with. Meta/Meter runs not for you? Hit LFG with the right tags and you’ll get a group eventually. Hopping into a non-meta group with your DPS tracker? You’re gonna have a bad time, so keep the rabies to yourself.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

What I find completely ridiculous is the fact that a damage meter cannot dictate whether or not you’re a good player in any respect. I mean really, just because I can produce high damage doesn’t mean I can dodge for kittene or know when to heal or support or anything else. That coupled with the fact that the game is literally nowhere near difficult enough to require anything like this to clear this content is reason enough to never need this kind of tool.

For all those that say well I want to clear the raid in record time yadda yadda, well in actuality you likely represent less that 5% of the total player base so why would anyone introduce a tool that truly isn’t needed to begin with and serves only to add negative and toxic behavior in the first place a mystery to me. There is no valid reason to have one it certainly cannot fully define a players value nor can it ever replace the experience of multiple runs through content. In the end even if you do clear a raid in record time who the hell cares in the grand scheme of things and did it really justify degrading other players or spouting vitriol, if it does you should take a good long look at yourself and re-evaluate your priorities in life. Anyway it’s always been a tool that really has more downsides attached to it then positives and I personally could never justify using one and don’t care to ever play with anyone who thinks it is that critical to playing a game.

Agreed, especially with bolded section, but slight dispute with the italicized part. The meters used, while called “DPS” meters, are usually far more robust and can track buff uptime, damage taken, healing done/received. They do track a reasonably impressive amount of data, so in that, they get a nod of respect.

So, there will be evidence when you don’t dodge enough or dip in support by missing some synergy in your rotation. The problem comes when data is used for data’s sake, or for the wrong reasons. Armchair commanders or shoddy raid leaders are going to use this data improperly, and it’s not like an MBA is necessary to use them. :\

While I’m dispelling misconceptions, “it’s the people, not the tool,” is only partially correct. There is an effect of People and an effect of Tool, but within that variance is the interaction effect of [People x Tool]. If an actual study were done, I’m pretty sure this could be statistically significant. In simpler terms, we would see toxic behavior increase in the presence of DPS meters. It’s a solid hypothesis, but I’m not going to design and implement a controlled study with full HSRB, because that’s too much work just to tell people to stop being kittens to each other.

Fremtid.3528:

This is one of the reasons I don’t have my card saved to the gemstore. I’m not blaming you for not wanting to pull it out and type it in everytime but these kinds of things happen when info is saved like that.

Paypal, yo. Easy to log into when you want gems, but it doesn’t save the data, so you still have to authenticate.

Sorry that happened to you, OP. :\ Please do be more careful in the future.

Jahroots.6791:

Rasimir.6239:

Dungeons aren’t as important in this game as they are in other, similar games. It’s not the be-all end-all endgame, but rather some activity among many, and accessible at different levels, not just at endgame. I feel they are in a decent place for this game, to fill the niche they have found over the years.

They used to be, though. sniff.

Dungeon rewards are in a pretty good place overall, but I do feel like they need a little something more as an extra incentive. There’s very little reason to run them after you’ve collected all of the skins.

I’d suggest adding dungeons to the daily rotation, or some new items to the dungeon vendor (Transmutation charges would be just perfect)

They are on the daily rotation. I’ve gotten dragged to them by my guild leader on those days. :P

Jahroots.6791:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Fractals are the gw2 dungeons and gets all the love.

Raids get all the love. Fractals are tolerated and from time to time get yelled at – ‘Why can’t you be more like your brother?!’. Dungeons are the family embarrassment that lives under the staircase and they never take anywhere.

Poor Dungeons, still waiting for its [Snow Owl Mail Carrier] to come invite it to school.

:P

kamedin.4698:

You know if they didn’t allow dps meters they would use AP to exclude people and if they get rid of achievements they would want the API to look people up on that gw2 efficiency, or even something else. So pick your poison, because they will always find something else to use.

Also you have the choice of who to play with, as do these other people. They want to have everyone carry their own weight. If you don’t want to play with these elitist then make your own group or get into a guild group. Just because this is a MMO doesn’t mean you have to play with every single person that enters a group/map/party/guild, otherwise they wouldn’t have a block list so you can ignore people you don’t like.

In general, yeah, this is true.

But there’s a rather large section of the community that seems to think “pick-up group” and “high performance” are somehow a good intersection of traits to look for. Hate to break it to the pro players out there, but you’re not breaking speed records with a PUG just because you have a DPS meter. There’s a very entitled attitude that goes along with it, and it’s not healthy for the game.

For the 1% of the 1% who have static groups and push boundaries, sure, DPS meters and sharing that data makes for a great tool. For those who want to be better for themselves, cool beans and rock on and hone those rotations into shining diamonds.

For those who will cry and whine when a fight takes an extra minute (after spending an 15-60 minutes finally putting a dungeon/raid group together), stop inflicting that sourness on random strangers and get a thicker skin. A DPS meter around random strangers does nothing for you.

carabidus.6214:

This game does not have enough viable build diversity where such a tool would provide anything useful.

Most relevant statement, right here.

Add on that raids don’t need max DPS to complete or even to finish quickly, and I have to wonder why most people supporting meters even care, except to exclude “the bads”.

I can understand a rare few who actually want to push the envelope or those in static groups who have many iterations worth comparing against, but PUG-DPS? I can’t even entertain that seriously.

- The forums should be for anyone to say anything, and if you don’t like the game, go play another one instead of complaining.

Sounds about right for the forums.

Astralporing.1957:

Ookamikun.6472:

ThomasC.1056:

Ookamikun.6472:

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

Not sure it’d be really useful because the stunlock trend doesn’t come from CC being long, but being spammed.

If you look at daredevils, or centaurs, or giant bloodstone elementals with little bombs, or Grella or so many other examples, they spam a lot of CC’s, hence wrecking stability stacks, and stun breakers available.

Such a system wouldn’t help against that many SPS (stun per second :p), and same goes for food.

But it does prevent spammed CC since in Champions Online they tend to occur too. In CO, the Defiant buff remains there and even goes up until you resist the CC, which then resets the Defiant buff stack.

And then you get CC’d again with next attack half a second later.

Sounds like GW2 to me.

Forgot one:

• Better communication from ANet when making mean/useless posts but have the devs cater to them and comment on all the wonderful half-ideas because they’re so wonderful and deserve to be in the game!

Ashantara.8731:

Rauderi.8706:

I’ve got a Norn who picked Raven as his spirit animal. Perfect fit for him! Glad I have it.

Yes, great. Another huge character with huge equipment that is going to block everyone else’s view, even their player models during JPs. GG.

If my Norn/Charr have to suffer for being overlarge and shoddy jumpers, so does everyone!

Really though, it only appears while gliding. It’s not likely to get in anyone’s way. :\

I’ve got a Norn who picked Raven as his spirit animal. Perfect fit for him! Glad I have it.

Sephas.8793:

If you want more of those “troublesome cloth/leather components” open these boxes that you can’t stand opening on a level 51 toon. And then salvage those items to get more…

Because a quasi-exploit is good game design.
smh

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Still thanks but no thanks. I’d rather the devs work on actual content rather than more ways for people to skip playing and make a profit by only logging on once a day as per the suggestion in this thread.

Understandable! It doesn’t seem like a good fit for GW2.
And really, the idea kinda derails the thread.

Since the thread has captured Gaile’s attention (yay), pretty sure she’ll communicate the need for box/bag overload to the devs. We can help by coming up with some possible ideas.

The simplest idea I can put forward is an Open All button in our inventory or options menu that functions like Salvage All. It would systematically open each bag and put the rewards in your inventory until it runs out of space. For the most part, it’s almost copy-paste code, or at least copy-repurpose code.

It’s kinda that simple.

Sure, we could have complicated QoL things like a side bag in inventory that holds containers and has the relevant commands for managing inventory or being able to salvage lesser runes for some kind of product, but for the actual complaint at hand, a relatively simple command option would save a ton of wrists and mouses.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Oh great. Invisible legal farming bots. I’m so relieved.

Not.

I’m putting in my vote as no to your suggestion for legal farming bots. I don’t care if they’re invisible or if “some restrictions apply.” A game “selling” farming bots is a game where the devs have given up on getting people to play it and are instead focusing on getting as much money as they can before they close down.

Not exactly, but that’s only because I’ve seen FFXIV do it, and it worked well. It required having special tokens that you got from doing dailies, so it was limited, and it took the NPC about an hour or two to finish the job, so it wasn’t 100% uptime. The NPC could also only farm stuff the player was capable of farming via class skills.
It was a fantastic way to get mid-tier materials, especially troublesome cloth/leather components (HINT HINT, ANet).
Perhaps the most important thing about it was there were sufficient daily materials sinks to justify the demand. (Also, HINT HINT, ANet.)

I realize one successful case doesn’t mean it’d always be successful, but done mindfully, an auto-farming mechanic could work very well.

Less skirt armor, more skritt armor!

…whut? I want playable skritt.

Really though, stop with the buttcapes and trenchcoats for a while, pleasethanks.

If it means testing the waters for including Tengu as playable, bring it on.

Though, can we make it a dude? Between whine-a-day Braham and petulant Rytlock, we don’t really have any competent guys to look up to. Maybe Canach, but he’s too tied up in his own snark to extend beyond that for right now. :\

As for the Thief role, we tentatively have Caithe. Granted, I’d be thrilled if she still turned out to be a traitor and our new Tengu buddy has to splat her. ^v^ Yay burbs!

Sadly, leap finishes still give Light Aura, which borders on useless. :\

mtpelion.4562:

They should have copied the “Resolve” system from The Old Republic, which was a pretty creative solution to CC and allowed intelligent use to be rewarded.

For those unfamiliar with the Resolve system:

1. You have a Resolve bar that has 1,000 points. You can see it in your UI, and enemies can see it in their UI.

2. All CCs have a point value (hard CCs have high values and soft CCs have low values. Long durations have high values and low durations have low values). These CC points are subtracted from your Resolve bar when they are used against you. For example, a 3 second Stun would subtract 600 points from your Resolve bar, while 8 seconds of cripple would subtract only 400 points.

3. When your Resolve bar reaches 0, you gain 10 seconds of unlimited immunity to all forms of CC, during which time your Resolve bar slowly refills back to 1,000. Any current CC is not broken automatically.

This system rewarded coordinated and intelligent CC use and punished CC spamming. it also rewarded intelligent use of Stun Breakers.

I’d be jazzed to see a system like this in place.

Astralporing.1957:

jojorne.2175:

in real life you could swap weapons in a second or two

I’d really like to see you switching between sword+shield and a longbow in a second or two, without ditching one of those sets.

As a long-time larper who fought sword-and-board, I sure as kitten wasn’t swapping gear every 10 seconds. :\

But yes, it’s very likely that the cooldown was intended as a design decision to force players to make a critical decision about when to swap weapons. It’s bad enough I see plenty of people just spamming whatever’s off cooldown (bearbow gets the worst accusations, but…) then swapping to spam those cooldowns and then… yeah, it just repeats from there.

Given the number of begs for “baseline Fast Hands” on the warrior forum, maybe there’s some thought in lowering/removing the cooldown universally. It might be a design decision to be deliberate with weapon swaps, but it seems like one of those decisions that can sway with how players use the game.

ThomasC.1056:

I totally agree with Svarty. From a PvE point of view, there’re many veterans or bigger bosses (centaurs, jade armors etc.) that liberally stun and toss and overall forbid the fights.
In WvW, it’s even worse. High CC builds like berserker, some chronomancers, some DD or guardian totally forbid you to do anything and stomp you in the process, which is no fun at all.

Stability is no use, considering the way it works currently. In the previous version, it was a total immunity, and such stunlocks couldn’t happen as easily.
Stun breakers are roughly no use, because of the amount of CC you get : you can’t break that many stuns.
Dodges and blocks may help, but you can’t use them when you’re locked, and when the stunlock is an opening, then you’re doomed.

That’s the problem I tend to run into with some choice spots in PvE. Stability, even if it worked well, doesn’t have a huge uptime. Enemy attack rates that might actually use CC are still slow but can be excessively frequent, so using a single skill might block one attack, only to leave the player to be tagged by the next one 6 seconds later, now with no stability, because it went on a 60-second cooldown.
Stability is actually devalued by the sheer excess of CC on some enemies. There is no “right time” to use it, because in order to deal with enemy CC-autoattacks, you have to block/dodge/stability/break everything, sometimes literally with every attack. It’s an issue with encounter design that borders on fetishistic and/or lazy. There are ways to punish players for taking hits that don’t include one-shot-KOs or losing control of the character.

It’s time for the balance team to, for the whole game, re-evaluate how Stability works, not just as a boon/mechanic, but also in how it’s obtained and distributed.

Lite Ning Strike.5203:

46.000 wth xD

LOL Doing my best to support the game!![/quote]

I think I saw you online the other day. [Picture attached]

I tease, I tease. Thanks for your support! And for making my $10-$20 per month look like cat litter. XD

Healix.5819:

ArenaNet’s likely not going to bother wasting resources on a minor annoyance. It’s too bad they don’t support addons. They could officially allow people to use the trading post’s internal API for example.

If this were to be implemented, it’d likely work by allowing you to mark items as junk. A simple client side list of item IDs would be trivial to implement.

Reminds me of a similar add-on I used constantly in WoW. It auto-sold grey items and anything else could be declared junk that would auto-sell as well.
It’s nice that GW2 has the Sell Junk button, but I really wish we could define what that button does. I don’t need more tenebrous shards, green runes/sigils, etc.

I also wouldn’t mind the idea of salvaging those runes for …well, almost anything, honestly. And that includes Exotic grade, but the ability to salvage green runes means they would get caught in the Salvage All action, making quick cleaning this vendor trash much easier.

Sartharina.3542:

It looks fine. It’s designed to be sleek instead of bulky. Only thing that makes the knees large is the ornate winged plate.

Now – you want to know bad, terrible, awful cultural armor? T1-3 Charr Light armor.

It’s a shame that Charr armor, armor made for the race, clips or doesn’t seem designed for how they move. I can tell the four-limbed running came pretty late in development just by the number of dangling bits on the leggings.

Given the number of rude and insulting posts that somehow get to stay, I would say the censorship is pretty lax.

OP, was it your topic that was posted or just a comment on someone else’s thread? If it got binned for the topic itself, it’s not particularly your fault. If it was your post specifically, consider that while ANet is generally open to critique, if a moderator finds it rude or combative, they’ll remove it and slap it with an infraction.

Side note: complaining about forum moderation out in the open is generally a no-no.

Short answer to the question:

Nope.

They tried fixing them once or twice, and they’re still a miserable experience.

The Chosen One.5369:

I dunno i was a little disappointed with the weapons. I was hoping there would be a staff in there the potential for a beautiful staff was great but there wasn’t one.

There wasn’t a hammer, axe, or horn either, so it wasn’t useful for the one character I finished the story with.
Or rifle, or longbow, so even having it as my ranged alt wasn’t going to happen.

Still, I’m glad the event exists and that the writers cinched up something many players had concerns about the memorial.

azureai.9764:

Yeah, I support this. Give charr more love, Anet. We know Gail loves cats.

Be cautious of how you invoke the devs.

We might end up with frogs for horns! :P

Obtena.7952:

Rauderi.8706:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Sounds a lot of ‘non-raiders’ are actively fighting against going to the raid in any way. Bullheaded behaviour… just do the kitten escort. It’s really not harder than any dungeon. If you are not even willing to do that then live with it.

A sterling endorsement from the ‘raid community’. Come one, come all to experience the lack of joy and poor attitudes!

…Seriously, this doesn’t even affect raiders, so why kew about it?

The offensive thing here isn’t about raiders vs. non-raiders. It’s about people that do things to accomplish something vs. people that complain about doing something they don’t want to, then trying to negotiate their way into accomplishing something.

Wow, that’s being late to the party. :\

And “accomplishment”? Really? With the rhetoric as it stands being “go do escort nub,” it doesn’t exactly reek of achievement. So it doesn’t even matter if the devs tweak it to open without a boss kill. The tracks themselves have no prestige, and it actually benefits the player pool as a whole to have them, so they have another desirable trait for raiding.

…18g each? Yeesh, glad I had 5 leftover for finishing Saladbolg.

Feels as in, seeing it in action or just how it looks passively?

Probably not a huge help, but if you go to a crafting station/bank, you can see all the skins available in the Wardrobe Storage tab.

Eowin Of Rohan.2619:

That’s why I always cltr+a/ctrl+c before I post any text on internet (which just let me save a post because I was also typing when the thread got closed !). Though you might have got your text back from going back in your browser : it sometimes works.

Considering how spotty the forums are for connecting, always, always ctrl•a/ctrl•c. Saves me a lot of heartache.

Meanwhile, topic should be:
Don’t make 18 feedback topics that need to be closed.

They’re going to get merged, and if the writer is too whiny or salted about it, it’s going to get closed. Some people need to take a step back.

Sorry you lost your post, OP. [/hug]

Thanks:
Some reduced cooldowns across the board. That addresses some issues with how slow/uninteresting combat can be when too much is on cooldown.

Warrior shout changes made me spit-take. Rather hearty buff. I almost feel guilty about, and yet, with conditions so heavily factored into HoT-era gameplay, sorry-not-sorry I have two cleanses on Shake It Off.

Warrior hammer damage buffs. Sadly won’t be enough to break the Forceful Greatsword / Phalanx Strength meta, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

Disappointment:
While getting a few damage buffs to hammer, the trait for it is still lackluster. The weapon is too slow to take advantage of stuns for more than one hit, at best. When I can get quickness on any weapon, a limited benefit to hammer with some cooldown changes doesn’t seem as useful.

Banners. I keep waiting for that huge 30-second gap in between to change.The 75% uptime isn’t terrible, just the huge gap in between. A 60-sec uptime and 80-sec cooldown would preserve the uptime ratio while closing the actual downtime gap.

The trait for regen (one of the weakest boons in the game) without a cooldown reduction is also lackluster. Unless the boon switches to stacking potency, the regen it feeds is going to be fairly low.

I doubt a few damage tweaks will make it meta/competitive, but I still enjoy hammer for some situations in PvE, mostly large group murder and breakbar slaughtering.

It’s still a slow weapon highly vulnerable to blind-spam and stuns, and it’s trait is useless unless you have a pocket thief with headshots.

The changes to the two main shouts are kinda hype though.

OGDeadHead.8326:

1. Don’t fight smokescales within their smoke cloud (which is called ‘spray mist’ when it comes to the mob smokescale)

That is a large part of the mechanic, yes.

Side note, anything with spawnable help (turret engis, mesmers, necro minions, ranger) might make smokescales harder than they need to be.

I generally like smokescales as enemy designs, I just wish their evade cloud wasn’t useable every ~10 seconds, nor that veterans can (near-)murder even if the player dodges. At their core though, not bad mobs.

Menadena.7482:

Probably one of the reasons why people rarely visit that map now. I do not even need to go there and get a guaranteed 3 rubies per day from my home instance. If I am feeling ambitious about getting more rubies I can WP there and get 2 more doing back flips and collecting UB. After those 5 easy ones it is a case of diminishing returns.

When I time it right, sometimes Halbion is up. That’s an extra +1 for a total of six.

Though, to be fair, the berries require significantly more to get the same kind of gear that you could get for Bloodstone. And it’s much more annoying to get, what with Range 2000 “Freeze Transformation” elemental vets or Constant Chill-Damage Gryphons roaming around. I don’t really stick around, so proportionally, my time in Fen is actually better spent. >.>

OriOri.8724:

@Rauderi – I fully agree that condis need to be removed from auto attack chains. And boons for that matter. The only exception are pure condi weapons that deal absolutely minimal direct damage, and the only point of their auto attacks are to keep condition stacks up. We could get more themed cleanses, personally I’m not the biggest fan of them though, really not sure why I don’t like them.

snip. Even if it is jut .5 seconds, it would at least keep you from being chain-stunned, unable to react after you break the first one.

That would be my main point of bringing it up. :P
If something else doesn’t change with condi-spam, then we might need a universal not-a-boon that blocks specific conditions for (.5-1 second?, 3 seconds?) after they’ve been cleansed. Possibly even if it’s only yourself who cleanses it, so the water-ele can’t just make the party immune to conditions. It gives cleanses more power, which might finally justify some of their cooldown times.

As far as condi autos, I mainly have Necro/Mesmer Scepter in mind. They exert quite a bit of pressure with each swing, but that contributes to the condi-spam that many players find unsustainable to fight against. Mesmer-sword vulnerability stacks aren’t so bad, but it contributes to the same principle. So it’s stuff like that which could be changed. Front-load the opening hits with better power damage, the final wind-up has the big condi burst, and it makes dealing with conditions a bit more strategic for the defense.

I got distracted detailing other points, though I did also like the idea of a condition duration shortener, something to be mixed into other cleanse/healing skills that blunts some of the overall condi threat without removing it completely.

Rognik.2579:

The final fight wasn’t quite as bad as people made it out to be. Yes, the first time I ran it, I died several times (a rarity for me on end bosses), but I managed to finish it in part by switching armors I had going into the fight. I agree the room was far too cramped for the fight in which AOEs appeared constantly at the edge of the room. They did tone it down after the patch, and it was much more bearable.

One thing that I think might be the problem (just a guess) is that some people are going into the fight full melee. After running Ascalon Catacombs once, I realized it was a wise idea to always bring at least one ranged weapon. Swapping from a ranged weapon to a melee weapon also allows for surprise close encounters to be more manageable.

Admittedly, for actual mechanics, the fight at its core isn’t that hard. Run in circle, grab bloodstones, hammer Caudecus with weapon of choice until survival is untenable for one’s skill/range. Shield comes back up, repeat.
It’s what gets added to the fight that makes it unbearable. If the word Jade is anywhere on the field, the fight goes to pot in a very frustrating manner, merely because of hideous design that somehow things constant disable-hammering is “fun” for a player.
(It isn’t.)

Wondrouswall.7169:

Med Kit for most useless skill (with the most potential).

I think that’s the biggest disappointment with Medkit. The skills got a total rework to be more active and useful, but they still don’t do enough.

The worst part is the risk-reward for the healing gun is utterly terrible. Short range, aim required, and it still does spittle for healing effect. Comparatively, Druid staff gets long-range damageppewpew and positional healing with much less risk. Even accounting for the difference between intended healing elite spec and basic medkit, the difference is still staggering.