Guild Wars 2

Boon hate was a mechanic they were throwing around as a possible solution. I was not expecting something that was given the “probably” status during an interview to be in this patch.

Although when warriors do get boon hate, it’ll probably be extremely useless, require 30pts down tactics line, and be tied with a buff to banners making them 2x larger for people to see what items they can steal from other players.

Frenzy+HB was breaking content. Quickness in general was breaking content.

Now let’s hope they open their eyes and remove the rediculous +50% incoming damage debuff for using a 5s ability that is no longer broken.

Panacea.4927:

Knowledge of the thief provides you with enough “counterplay”. Stealth isnt a invul skill, nor does it suddenly teleport the thief away.

No stealth doesn’t teleport the thief away, he’s got teleport skills for that. IA in stealth and cya later.

Panacea.4927:

They are still at the place where they stealthed and will either try to go for you or run away.

Only fools stay in one spot when stealthed. The “noobs” are the ones that stealth and keep running in the same direction at the same speed. These changes won’t effect them since they’re probably already having a hard time figuring out how to confuse people.

Panacea.4927:

With abit of knowledge about the movement speed of a class, you can easily hit the thief before he can backstab you.

Hitting the thief doesn’t break stealth. If you hit them, they can still backstab you.

Panacea.4927:

I play a thief myself and CnD on alot of stealthed thieves already.

Thats because you don’t have to face the target to land CnD. Haven’t you noticed?

Panacea.4927:

The only real issue with thieves is and always was culling. Besides that you can try to avoid the CnD of the thief on you. Either blind them, get aegis, CC them or dodge. As thief I tend to kill thieves with S/D. I infiltration strike to them, immobilize them for 1 sec, CnD and daze them, do some autoattacks, scorpion wire them, CnD them again, daze them again and switch to D/D for some final burst.

Most people who know how OP thieves are play other classes. I’m not sure what your arguement here is about countering a thief with a thief. Yes an OP class CAN counter an OP class.

Panacea.4927:

Thieves itself arent overpowered, it are the players they fight against who are underpowered (and I dont mean the class here)

Right here man. About midway down the page:
Habib Loew – “Thieves are still going to be useful – still going to deadly; mesmers are still going to be useful – still going to deadly, but hopefully not overpowered any more”

Devs thought stealth was OP. How come you don’t?

Firstly, I’d like to address this point:

ANet has said time and time again, they nerf small amounts at a time in attempt to level the playing field. That sounds great in theory to me. My first thought at balancing a thief would be to remove the culling issues. Step 1, remove culling and observe for a period of time. Then decide if further action needs to be made. Instead, ANet chose a much more drastic nerf.

Regardless of culling issues for thieves showing up when they should, you shouldn’t get a “mulligan stealth” because I dodged your attack and you did no damage. Sorry. My being a good player is no longer going to reward you in the troll department.

Oh and the “L2P” issue? Right here:

swinsk.6410:

So I watched the whole thing and I am amazed that thieves are getting nerfed because “how the forums” have been reacting to thieves. ANet doesn’t want to tell noobs “L2P” all the time but in most cases that is the problem. Which is how I feel the problem with thieves is right now.

Followed immediately by:

swinsk.6410:

Don’t tell me to “adapt”. I’ve already “adapted” to guardians and elementalists on my thief. My answer was chaining a CND here and there to avoid them and regen health.

So now, we have to “adapt” again? Great answer!

Correction, you have to “L2P” now. You have to play in such a way that you’re actually changing your roflstomp strat against a good player. No more trolling. Again, sorry you like the troll class but its going away.

You should probably try playing a non-OP class in PvP and WvW before complaining that you’re awesome and QQing that the game is being changed for “noobs”.

Ohoni.6057:

The only events people “flock” to are those that are worth the effort, namely those that offer full chests, and usually are part of a chain, meaning multiple doses of event rewards. Try picking a random “vanilla” event and drum up a party over map-chat, like trying to take out the Champ Troll in Sparkfly. Good luck.

If guild missions gave full rewards to all participants, people would flock to help. So long as they only give vanilla event credit, you’d have to personally bribe each of them.

People flock to events specifically for “vanilla” credit as well. The problem is what would you rather do: A group event of killing a boss where you could die horribly over and over and over again because you don’t understand the mechanic OR a nice healthy ‘gather worms for me please’ event where you can just about AFK for credit? Both give you nearly the same rewards. Now choose.

Chuo.4238:

The mistake you made here, ArenaNet, is you tied this new guild content to tier gear. If you hadn’t, I think the complaints would be far fewer.

Wake up. Read my lips. No new Ascended Gear.

It’s jacked your game into something you didn’t intend, and your players hate it.

kenshinakh.3672:

All this time people were asking for more ways to get ascended. It’s a tier of endgame content, so it makes sense to let guild stuff reward you ascended parts.

I’ve quoted these two comments but there are far more like them. The reason Anet is creating a complex and time-consuming system for ascended gear is because people had essentially “beat” their game (aquired all facets of advancement) outside of sPvP within the first couple of weeks. This is the pendulum swinging far to the other side of the mid-point as a reactionary means to combat the content-devouring masses.

In other words, they’ve realized that their game goes fast and they’re putting on the breaks. Lets just hope they’re anti-lock or we’ll start skidding and possibly collide with something unintentionally.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Brook.5263:

If Guild Missions are designed for 15+ people then why allow guilds to have less?

• There’s lots of things that guilds do other than guild missions.
• You can be one person, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to have to work with other people.

I acknowledge your point and I see its validity, but up until now all guilds could complete all tasks regardless of size. Even just one person. Yes a one-man guild could literally achieve all points and every aspect within a guild on his/her own. It was only a question of time played as to when you would have access to the content.

This is the first piece of guild-related content that has been released where small guilds, regardless of time invested, absolutely must rely on outside help.

You must not resort to the arguement that there are other things available to guilds. Of course there are. They’ve been there since day one. People want new content. You can’t develop new content for people who play one way and then turn around to the rest of the players and say, “just let it go and do the other stuff you’ve been doing.” That furthers the feeling of a smaller guild’s neglect and possible irrelevance.

I’m a member of a large guild, a small guild, and a two-man guild of just myself and my brother. I can see the restraints put on missions are there for a reason but I also see the stress it puts on smaller guilds. It is undue for small guilds, but unfortunately necessary for the guild system overall.

All that being said, the new Bounty Hunt Training addition is the perfect way to combat that feeling. Larger guilds can definitely complete these missions as well, but the 3,000 influence is probably not worth the time invested. All of those people could have been out completing events and earning far more.

In my extremely limited opinion, these “Training” missions should be adapted to all mission modes. That would give them an excercize to practice with instead of trying out a costly mission only to be trounced immediately by something they don’t quite understand. It also gives the smaller guilds the ability to experience something that is either a long way off or a near impossibility otherwise.

Edit:
And while you’re at it, you should probably tie a weekly +1 Commendation reward to the “Training” missions that takes the spot of the Non-training missions’ weekly. That way larger guilds can’t exploit the system and get +3 Commendations per mission, but smaller guilds can still earn things they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

John Smith.4610:

I tried it with larger time periods, but the quantities at each price point needed to be accounted for in a moving subtraction, it would take more time than I currently have.

The problem with going longer than two weeks is market reactions to information about upcoming patches. When you announced the change to “mega-boss” chests the price of ectos shot up more than what would have happened on a normal day. And now they’re kinda stuck artificially high in anticipation of the lower number of rares available to the economy. They do cycle down a bit but people are stockpiling ATM. This sort of behavior only exists when information is known by the players ahead of what the market is experiencing.

Another reason why putting out tradeable loot specific information ahead of time has great potential to damage the market.

Nike.2631:

Healix.5819:

Considering my current rate at getting more than 1 rare in a chest is about 1 in 3, farming the chests on multiple characters is still better than playing in the open world. Unless the change additionally nerfs drop rates, I really don’t see it changing anything. The dragons will still be a great way to AFK for rares, so I fully expect overflows to still be common after reset.

Since farming dragons on and off for months I think I got 2 rares total, I don’t for a MOMENT think that second rare I’ve gotten a dozen times since the change to include auto-1-rare or better came from the infinitely repeatable junk-filled-chest.

I’m pretty sure once we have the auto-rare calved off into a sperate pile, people will see that the times they get 2 rares are times the auto-rare reward happened to be 2 rares, NOT 1 auto rare + 1 OMG the chest finally spit out something more than trash…

There were two bullet points in the Feb. patch notes:

• Increased the loot rewards on many world boss chests, including the chests in Orr temples and the dragon chests.
• Fixed a bug on certain world boss chests that was causing them to drop fewer rewards than intended. These chests can now only be looted once per day, to encourage players to fight multiple bosses and spread out across the world.

The guaranteed rare was the second bullet point. The first is where your “+1 OMG the chest finally spit out something more than trash…” comes from. It actually is spitting out something more than trash.

Zyphent.2967:

Redscope.6215:

Martin Kerstein.3071:

I am honestly surprised that there is still some confusion about this upcoming change. So let me try to clarify it once more:

Current:
- You get one guaranteed rare (or better) per event per day per character from the event chest. Everything else in the event chest is based on normal drop chance, so there is a chance to get rares (or better) as well.
After the change:
- You get one guaranteed rare (or better) per event per day per account from an extra chest that will be displayed like the chest for the dailies. Everything else in the event chest is based on normal drop chance, so there is a chance to get rares (or better) as well.

So the guaranteed rare is going to an account-based daily. Does that mean the “event chest” can go back to being looted more than once per day?

Seriously people, its not that complicated.

You can loot the chests as many times as you have characters, but you only get a garunteed rare (or better) once per event per day.

How can it be any more clear?

Pretty sure I was able to do events more than once a day and loot the chest on the same character before the change. Which is why I was asking. I understand perfectly what’s going to happen.

Has nothing to do with what Martin said, I was asking a separate quesiton.

Vol.5241:

This is really all silly.

There is no method for every single person in a MMO community to have the same gold/rate per hour based on what they’re doing unless you want to tear up the game and rebrand it as some other new genre.

You pretty much have to design a game that rewards people who spend their time in a game doing a certain activity.

Spend 3 hours in game doing nothing and afk? 10g for you in your mailbox!
Spend 3 hours in game pvping? 10g for you in your mailbox!
Spend 3 hours killing mobs for no apparent reason? 10g for you in your mailbox!

And then you’d spend that gold on things in game that have fixed prices.

Its never going to be perfect, no, but you don’t have to resort to pointless conclusions such as going AFK and recieving money. The valid methods of play should be determined, and then balanced, by the company who makes the game. In this case, Anet should clearly state what methods of gameplay are considered to be supported and consistantly rebalanced by their staff based on other changes made to the game.

Vol.5241:

But of course, we’d still have complainers who will say that they “don’t play as much and feel forced to play in order to progress”. Go look at laurels and dailies and how people are complaining that they’re missing out because they don’t play as much as a hardcore player.

This is true. Players who are not able to achieve the daily every day are missing out on a form of currency that has a time gate on it. If you miss a daily, you cannot make it up.

However, the reverse point can also be made that players who only play a short period each day, and complete the daily, benefit just as much from said system as someone who plays all day long because of the time gate.

Its not a 100% fair system, but its more fair than letting some lifeless shmo in a huge guild grind his way to top-end goals in two days while casual players struggle at every corner. It favors casual in some instances and hardcore in others.

Vol.5241:

Better yet, what’s the fun in that? You know you’ll be getting the same amount of gold as that botter, or that dragon farmer, or that guy who just afk’s in town all day. Why play? What’s the point? I think people would rather take the least stressful activity.

Exactly. Whats the point of playing if you achieve without playing? This isn’t what people are saying but it is somehow the conclusion you’ve drawn. Nobody wants to have an empty game where whoever logs in is at the top just “because.” People just want their supported method of gameplay to be equally time effecient. The whole phrase “play your way” comes to mind. The word “play” is, of course, part of that phrase.

I’ll say it again, its all about supported methods of play. If Anet says its a way people are meant to play their game, it should be just as viable as any other method. Don’t say it if it isn’t true.

That’s why legendary items can be sold at the TP, because otherwise people would HAVE to 100% the world and craft in order to have a legendary item. Some people in this game, as easy as it is, will never do those things out of lack of interest.

The question is: how much time do you have to invest in any other aspect of gameplay vs. the TP in order to make money and get what you want? It should be an almost (never will be perfect) equal amount of time across the board spent in every “valid” method of gameplay.

If Anet is going to consider playing stock broker and buying/selling your way into wealth a supported form of gameplay, it should be just as rewarding as any other mode of play given the same amount of time spent.

Your time as a consumer is what’s really at stake here. There need to be methods of play that achieve the “ultimate” goals for both players with lots of time and players with very little time. That’s the best way to attract customers to your game and keep them there.

Vinny.6924:

Entitlement again.

Its a skin, you won’t die if you don’t have it.

Its a very long term goal.

Wait for the scavenger hunt.

Quit.

Apparently its a skin that makes you good at the game.

Just sayin’…its what I’ve heard. :p

Martin Kerstein.3071:

I am honestly surprised that there is still some confusion about this upcoming change. So let me try to clarify it once more:

Current:
- You get one guaranteed rare (or better) per event per day per character from the event chest. Everything else in the event chest is based on normal drop chance, so there is a chance to get rares (or better) as well.
After the change:
- You get one guaranteed rare (or better) per event per day per account from an extra chest that will be displayed like the chest for the dailies. Everything else in the event chest is based on normal drop chance, so there is a chance to get rares (or better) as well.

So the guaranteed rare is going to an account-based daily. Does that mean the “event chest” can go back to being looted more than once per day?

WvW rank and ability system is nearly a carbon copy of LOTRO’s trait system for creeps in the ettinmoors. I was totally expecting this anyway.

Boon hate shouldn’t be damage per boon. Boon hate should be short-term boon leeching.

In other words something like, “Striking a target with >1 boons grants you Swiftness; > 2 boons grants Swiftness and Might; > 3 boons grants Swiftness, Might, and Protection.”

You don’t want to punish players for applying good skills to themselves, you want to help classes that are lacking in the boon and boon ripping department combat other classes who have a large access to boons.

The GS skill Arcing Slice could be given the first skill-based burst ability based on this mechanic. Boons applied this way could last for 5s, 10s, or 15s depending on adrenaline level.

There were a lot of ’um’s, ’uh’s and ’well’s in that SotG. They even had the players suggesting things that they would turn around and say, “well…uh…YEAH, see…that’s another option we were looking at…”

I know you guys aren’t PR masters and you don’t want to say things you’ll later regret but you need to SAY when things are too powerful. You certainly don’t have a problem with saying when things aren’t powerful enough. Why not the other way around?

Xeph had to really push hard on them about the ele’s healing until they finally thought twice about the difference between what they thought was happening and what was actually happening when fighting well-played eles. And I saw that “wtf” look on his face when they said that Spatial Surge would pierce…he plays a mesmer and was immediately referring to how it was going to be OP. I’d like to hear/see a transcript from one of these balance meetings.

Hopefully not a “Go 30 down Tactics and grab the 1% more damage per boon to your target” build or we’re talkin’ less-than-useless ideas.

Mobile warrior problems? Counter with:

• Chill
• Cripple
• Immoblize
• Daze
• Stun
• Knockdown
• Knockback
• Fear
• Wards
• Stealth
• Clones (body blocks and de-targets)
• Swiftness
• Dodge roll once

Saved your mobility for running? Better start now while there’s still health in your bar…

Stiv.1820:

I don’t know… how often do you chain stealth? If you want to chain, go D/P and trait init regen. Nothing indicates you can’t stack/chain a bunch of stealth together.

You could always stack stealth so long as you don’t deal damage to grant yourself stealth while in it. Outside of SR or running with multiple thieves, there’s no real effective way of doing that in combat.

Stiv.1820:

This only effects the uber trolls who are usually trops/poison arrowing from stealth. It also makes it so D/P thieves who spec more for damage can’t chain as quickly, although it won’t do much because good because you can just sit in your smoke in relative safety then HS out when reveal drops. It for sure will make thief vs thief a lot less of a waist of time.

It also makes bad thieves who refuse to wait for optimal backstab situations and spam CnD think a little bit before doing so.

This isn’t as much about a stealth nerf as it is about a noob nerf. This makes the class a little less ‘noob proof’ as its currently the mulligan class of GW2.

Stiv.1820:

To add to all of this, they said they would be giving thieves “boon hate” which will make us do more damage the more boons are on our target.

Actually, that was a warrior thing. Never mentioned the thief once when talking about “boon hate.” With all the burst damage and movement he gets, I’d be surprised if he even got anything remotely close to that mechanic.

Stiv.1820:

There may be a Mug nerf in there but no real detail. Sounds like they want Mug to work more with stealth instead of just being anytime damage.

Sounds like they’re probably going to take Mug’s damage away entirely and change it to something else.

After reading this OP I’ve only got 2 things to say derail-wise:

FASTCAR.7831:

I play daily at work and some at home.8-10 hours a day.

1. Where the hell do you (not) work that you can spend all day playing GW2 instead?

FASTCAR.7831:

FASTCAR EVOTURBO ( or Im Sooo Cute and my pet Piggy tails)
http://ascendant.dkpsystem.com/viewpic.php?id=161

2. Why would you go out of your way to post a link to pics of “yourself” from what appears to be a selection of highschool senior/prom photos from the 80s?

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled trolling…

I’m thinking either:

• Players are revealed when an incoming attack lands
• The “Revealed” debuff is removed

-or-

• UI damage numbers displayed near players in stealth

Just gonna call that right now.

John Smith.4610:

merkator.9206:

Hey John, can you tell me the current ecto rates when salvaging rares, depending on the salvage kit used?

I could, I won’t.

What are you saying, that the 25% and 50% listed on masters kits and BLS kits don’t directly translate to ectos?

Astrum.3652:

I think this is because Sunrise and Twilight are in an odd place. They take about as much effort as any other legendary to create, but Eternity is the one that gives a legendary medal.

If they gave a medal for Sunrise or Twilight, then what reason would you have to combine the two into Eternity?

I’m not saying this is how it should be, but it’s just a tricky situation to deal with I’d imagine.

You have no reason to waste a legendary into eternity in the first place.

You have a greatsword, one weapon.
You have another gift of exploration.
You need another legendary for the achievement.
Solution: Make a non-greatsword legendary.

Don’t waste all that time put into another legendary for an achievement and nothing else, have another weapon to show for it.

If you don’t use mouselook then ‘fast cast’ is already an option. The only problem is when you use your mouse to turn, and there’s a quick solution to that as well.

Make sure ‘fast casting’ is enabled and place your mouse pointer where you want the skill to land. Then when you right click for ‘mouselook’ mode, your pointer will remain in place and the skill will cast where the pointer last was on your screen.

This translates into a cast point based on where and how you’re facing. It’s not perfect and it has drawbacks. One of the biggest being the inability to discern maximum skill range, and using skills that have varying ranges can be difficult to juggle. It is definitely a whole lot better than ‘3’, ‘click’, ‘4’, ‘click’, ‘2’, ‘click’

Thing is, the story mode in dungeons follows your personal story (and I use the term ‘personal’ loosely) but you don’t have to do them (outside of Arah, and they’ve stated it was their intention to do so) because they’re group oriented. So you’ll end up missing main character-specific dialogue if you don’t want to group up while playing the personal story.

What they should have done, and perhaps still can, is make a “Solo Story” option when entering the dungeon individually. This would count as completing “story” mode but would give significantly less loot (if any) and remove the guaranteed rare at the end.

Then all you have to do is add a ‘breakout event’ type buff to the player so s/he is able to face the challenges presented in story mode.

Drigan.7382:

Draygo.9473:

Its hard to compare FA to TC, it seems like TC’s American prime is stronger

Score update!

So wait, BG moved to T1 where they belong and SoS is on the slow track downward so the only real T2 server this week is Kain?

Kinda feel sorry for FA when TC gets bumped back up and they have to face two T2 servers instead of one :/

Paid server transfers need to cost real money, not gems that can be bought with fake money. This stuff just needs to stop happening…

This was nerfed a loooooooooong time ago b/c of Eviscerate.

This should be a totally different stat though. Not all burst skills are damage oriented and a small increase in damage isn’t going to help your situation with most burst skills.

Daecollo.9578:

Many people didn’t think the developers would break something without compensation, or would do so after they improved many of the broken or buggy trees by adding new mechanics that allowed the classes (Like Warrior.) to thrive without using the same gimmicky builds that everyone else used.

Like omnomberry pies, hundred blades, and whirling axes? Because that wasn’t what everyone was using before…

The best builds will be used. Period. The exploits that are found and not fixed will become fotm ‘builds’ until they are fixed.

This has been going on ever since the advent of the ‘skill tree’ in RPGs

This happened to me as well. Completed veteran kills and levelling at the same time, completing the 5/5 daily achievements, and recieved two chests.

Havana.8625:

Think I received two chests as well.

My last two were Ambient and Leveler and it got it on an ambient kill. Leveler wouldn’t give me ambient so it must have went the other way around. I must have gotten ambient then immediately gotten xp, but then I shouldn’t have gotten xp from an ambient kill, so that doesn’t make sense either. Not sure what happened. Think I got rewarded twice so I’m reporting it.

It would seem that people are getting two chests when they achieve the daily from levelling off of the experience from a daily achievement.

In other words, each part of the daily, when completed, gives xp. If that xp levels you, you can achieve the ‘leveller’ daily as well. If you complete the daily from the level achievement by levelling off of a daily achievement, you get two chests.

Si?

Ursan.7846:

No, it’s actually not. It’ll be like government printing money if Anet was creating gems out of thin air. But they aren’t. There is a limited supply of gems that is subtracted/added to/from whenever players make Gems/Gold and Gold/Gem and Cash/Gem transactions.

They do make gems out of thin air. When people purchase gems with real money:

John Smith.4610:

As a quick aside. Gems in the currency exchange are finite. You may buy gems with real money to your hearts content, but if you don’t put any of them gems into the currency exchange the currency exchange’s stock of gems never changes.

The bolded text states that buying gems with real money has the same effect as creating gems out of thin air.

John Smith.4610:

Think of it this way. The government can print as much money as they want, that doesn’t mean your bank account has access to that money.

No, but you can’t argue that it has an adverse effect on the money in your bank account. Inflation taxes hurt like a B.

John Smith.4610:

The currency exchange does not have access to gem creation. It has a limited stock that players add and subtract from.

Except when they buy gems with real money and exchange it for gold. If gems are created with cash and put into the exchange, the pot gets bigger. Right?

There’s only two ways in the game to get gems, exchanging gold for them or buying them with money. As you’ve stated, one creates gems, the other does not. In order to keep a finite amount of gems in the pot without it going bankrupt you’d either have to have a steady inflow of gems that were NOT already taken from the pot, or have the spent gems go back into the pot.

The question then, is when people spend them on gem store items, do the spent gems go back into the currency pot? It would have to be the only way that pot is kept fluctuating outside of people purchasing gems and exchanging them for gold.

If the spent gems are not going back into the pot, what you’re then saying is that people are buying gems and exchanging them for gold SO much that the amount of gems available is visibly fluctuating hour-to-hour instead of just consistantly going up as people buy gems from a fixed source. I find that hard to believe. Not saying its impossible because it clearly isn’t, its just very hard to believe.

Scoobaniec.9561:

Leo G.4501:

Scoobaniec.9561:

Im running on 1,7k toughness with forge runes on 20k hp, i need to get more?

My friend that plays guardian running in full zerk gear, has maybe 12k hp at best and can survive far longer than i do, i understand everything is ok?

I dunno. Are you dying? If you are, then you need to practice.

I hardly dying, i just moves to rifle when things goes bad for me, but i wants to stay in melee entire time like guardians does. IT IS HARD TO GET?

Hang on a tick….

Is this Skwisgaar Skwigelf? lmao

Daecollo.9578:

Twiista.1689:

Hmm…

I always laugh at the warrior forum community when they start complaining. It seems the most vocal warriors on the forum all want to use beserker set and still have the same survivability that a soldier’s set would bring.

Fact is Omnom Pie/Ghost was overpowered. Healing potentially all your hp in 3 seconds because of a 5 silver purchase was a broken mechanic. If you want to go beserker thereby having high dmg, then prepare to be squishy as well.

You don’t see soldier’s warriors complaining because they dont have a food that makes them crit 12k eviscerates, so why would giving a zerker a food that gives them similar survivability be appropriate?

It’s NOT. It was a good change. Now you have to pick your poison in terms of your build. It makes complete sense. So please…act more like the warriors you are and stop whining.

That is all

Ever try meleeing in dungeons?

Melee is hard mode. If you can’t play hard mode, go ranged.

Let me see if I can find where the dev actually posted that melee takes more skill…

Daecollo.9578:

Disturbed.9305:

We will adjust and be fine.

This, in my opinion, was merely a crutch for many. Time to adapt.

Not really a crutch, it was a way for people to build and spec beyond the norm, but since it didn’t effect you since you don’t use it, its obviously a crutch.

People built around it. Now they’ll build without it.

The game worked fine before it was a norm, it will still work.

Daecollo.9578:

Redscope.6215:

Daecollo.9578:

HannaDeFreitas.4236:

Well to be honest healing up to 17k over 3.5s on a Warrior was pretty OP.

It was, which is why it should of had a limit to how much it could heal per second, not an internal CD.

A cooldown is a limit on its healing per second. Take the healing proc over the seconds of cooldown time. That’s your maximum heal/sec.

Not really, “You can only have 8 heals a second.” instead of an Internal Cooldown doesn’t nerf things as badly.

It leaves almost all the non-overpowered things viable and nerfs whirling axes and other OP things a bit.

Think of it this way. They realized that healing every 2/3 of all hits was OP. You want a healing-per-second cap on it. Okay, here’s what they did:

The healing was, say 240 for 2/3 of all your hits as many times as you could land them. They made it so that you can’t go above 240 HP per second. So you can proc all you want, but you can’t heal for more than 240/sec.

How is that not the same as having a 1sec cooldown on a 240 heal proc? … Minus the off chance that you won’t proc it on an attack, its no different.

Daecollo.9578:

HannaDeFreitas.4236:

Well to be honest healing up to 17k over 3.5s on a Warrior was pretty OP.

It was, which is why it should of had a limit to how much it could heal per second, not an internal CD.

A cooldown is a limit on its healing per second. Take the healing proc over the seconds of cooldown time. That’s your maximum heal/sec.

Daecollo.9578:

Redscope.6215:

Oglaf.1074:

Redscope.6215:

Oglaf.1074:

“Food items that give special bonuses upon a critical hit now have an internal cooldown before they can produce the special bonus again.”

This could potentially mean that Omnomberry Pies/Ghosts will be nerfed quite a bit. All speculation on my part, of course. This would prove devastating to certain ’zerker builds, as it is what keeps them alive.

It means all the fools who thought that the “Whirling Axes” and “Omnomberry Pie” combo was going to stay around forever just got a nice dose of balance changes.

Its probably a 1sec cooldown that won’t effect most builds outside of the one mentioned above.

Sorry guys, I won’t say “I told you so” because I never made a post on the subject…but I’ve been reading the warrior forums about the axe builds lately thinking: “These guys are going to flip when they nerf ‘on-crit’ food…”

As Stewie Griffon would say: “Well, go on! … Start flipping!”

Now hold your horses, mate. I’ve been a Hammer Warrior for ages, and Pies have been a staple ingredient in my PvE build forever. They essentially removed a lot of Warrior sustainability, for what? Warriors did not get anything resembling a tankyness buff this patch. Warrior sustain is horrible as it is. Us other Warriors sorta needed this, only ’zerker Warriors abused it.

A lot of people use omnomberry food. It would essentially turn any multi-hit channel skill into a massive heal. This wasn’t a warrior-specific issue.

What you’re seeing here is a change due to high-crit builds’ ability to utilize crit healing food as an unbalanced offset to their lack of defesive capabilities. The cooldown, as I’ve said, is probably a measly 1 second. In most cases, you won’t notice it. As a hammer warrior, how often do you hit more than once per second?

Now if its a 2-3 second cooldown, the food will become nearly useless for any build of any class.

Hammer Warriors had a lot of AOE attacks that could hit many targets.

Most attacks in the game hit more than one target. And honestly, I would consider this step #1 in the AoE rebalance they’re currently heading up. There were a great many things designed around the early single target-centric system that have been overlooked.

I’m not saying certain things shouldn’t be looked at after changes are made, I’m saying that this change was a long time coming and hurts the high-crit builds way more than the others.

Oglaf.1074:

Redscope.6215:

Oglaf.1074:

“Food items that give special bonuses upon a critical hit now have an internal cooldown before they can produce the special bonus again.”

This could potentially mean that Omnomberry Pies/Ghosts will be nerfed quite a bit. All speculation on my part, of course. This would prove devastating to certain ’zerker builds, as it is what keeps them alive.

It means all the fools who thought that the “Whirling Axes” and “Omnomberry Pie” combo was going to stay around forever just got a nice dose of balance changes.

Its probably a 1sec cooldown that won’t effect most builds outside of the one mentioned above.

Sorry guys, I won’t say “I told you so” because I never made a post on the subject…but I’ve been reading the warrior forums about the axe builds lately thinking: “These guys are going to flip when they nerf ‘on-crit’ food…”

As Stewie Griffon would say: “Well, go on! … Start flipping!”

Now hold your horses, mate. I’ve been a Hammer Warrior for ages, and Pies have been a staple ingredient in my PvE build forever. They essentially removed a lot of Warrior sustainability, for what? Warriors did not get anything resembling a tankyness buff this patch. Warrior sustain is horrible as it is. Us other Warriors sorta needed this, only ’zerker Warriors abused it.

A lot of people use omnomberry food. It would essentially turn any multi-hit channel skill into a massive heal. This wasn’t a warrior-specific issue.

What you’re seeing here is a change due to high-crit builds’ ability to utilize crit healing food as an unbalanced offset to their lack of defesive capabilities. The cooldown, as I’ve said, is probably a measly 1 second. In most cases, you won’t notice it. As a hammer warrior, how often do you hit more than once per second?

Now if its a 2-3 second cooldown, the food will become nearly useless for any build of any class.

Oglaf.1074:

“Food items that give special bonuses upon a critical hit now have an internal cooldown before they can produce the special bonus again.”

This could potentially mean that Omnomberry Pies/Ghosts will be nerfed quite a bit. All speculation on my part, of course. This would prove devastating to certain ’zerker builds, as it is what keeps them alive.

It means all the fools who thought that the “Whirling Axes” and “Omnomberry Pie” combo was going to stay around forever just got a nice dose of balance changes.

Its probably a 1sec cooldown that won’t effect most builds outside of the one mentioned above.

Sorry guys, I won’t say “I told you so” because I never made a post on the subject…but I’ve been reading the warrior forums about the axe builds lately thinking: “These guys are going to flip when they nerf ‘on-crit’ food…”

As Stewie Griffon would say: “Well, go on! … Start flipping!”

John Smith.4610:

As a quick aside. Gems in the currency exchange are finite. You may buy gems with real money to your hearts content, but if you don’t put any of them gems into the currency exchange the currency exchange’s stock of gems never changes.

Actually it sounds like what you’ve described is an INfinite amount of available gem stock. Unless what you’re saying is that if nobody buys gems with real money, nobody ever spent their gems, and everyone kept buying them with gold, then the system would eventually run out of gems, there’s an infinite amount of gems.

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Actually, no, they can’t be applied when you can’t hit the target. If they’re using an evade or block move then you can’t apply them because you have to actually hit them. Righteous Indignation doesn’t keep you from hitting them, it just insanely reduces damage and condition duration on them.
And if you were direct damage you could’ve killed them in that same number of hits without having to run away at all.
And direct would have downed that person before you got downed at all, which gives you even more of an advantage.

Righteous Indignation reduces all incoming direct damage by 100%. Attacks still land and therefore conditions can still be applied.

What you’re not realizing is that Vulnerability directly effects the buff’s %. In other words, you can only do direct damage to the target with that buff when Vulernability is applied. Otherwise, you could be doing all the direct dps in the world and you’d still end up with a bunch of 0s over the target’s head. That is, until it attacks you a couple times and kills you from massive damage.

Saturn.6591:

What you’re saying is so… wrong, that I just had to log in and reply. Even if the chance to get the bleeding on a critical hit would be 100%, one second of one stack of bleeding would maybe add around 100 damage to this hit. If your opponent is invulnerable, the hit will not do anything and thus it can also not crit and you get no bleeding on it. Actually, as far as I know, you can not APPLY any conditions on someone who’s invulnerable (at least not with weapon-skills). Those conditions that are already in effect continue to tick, though. However, 1 second is going away almost instantly, so there will not be a single stack of bleeding from this trait while someone’s invulnerable.

First of all, if anything invulnerability hurts direct damage more than condition damage specifically for the reason you’ve stated and I’ve highlighted in bold in the above quote. Even if the target is soaking 100% damage, conditions continue to damage it. That’s a major advantage to conditions and a point you seem to have made against your own arguement.

Are there tons of situations where this applies? Not really, no. There isn’t much of a reason to discuss its positives and negatives in those situations (save supply camps in WvW). Most of the time a target is invulnerable because of a specific mechanic and regardless of your build trying to “dps it down” isn’t the best option.

Saturn.6591:

Now let’s look at direct damage. Let’s say an attack does 1000 points of damage. If it crits, you get at least 1500 damage (more if you’ve got increased crit-dmg from traits, equip or runes).
That’s a 100% chance for 500 more damage vs a 66% chance for 100 more damage. Of course the direct damage is affected by protection, but it’s not like most mobs/players run around with perma-protection. Also, the chance for bleeding actually requires a specific trait, while the increased direct-damage doesn’t need a trait at all.

Outside of the fact that you’ve blatently chosen a larger hit than 1s of the bleed condition to beef your arguement, that’s a very valid point. However you’re missing one critical element: the attack that the player applying the conditions with also does damage, and also crits. In fact most skills in the game that apply conditions, either on-hit or chance-on-crit, will do damage in conjunction with the condition itself. Anet has built condition-heavy attacks that way for a reason and you absolutely have to take that into consideration when comparing/balancing “direct damage only” attacks.

Saturn.6591:

The other thing that’s influenced by precision are sigils that have a chance to proc on crit (the one for bleeding is actually much better than the necro minor trait or that ranger MAJOR trait). I’d say in terms of sigils, direct damage and condition damage builds benefit equally from precision; that’s why I didn’t use them in the example above. Except if… uhm… does someone know if the lightning strike from Sigil of Air and the fire blast from Sigil of Fire can crit as well? Because if they can, they would kinda double-benefit from precision.

As far as I know they can. I’ve watched my combat log with the fireblast proc and the damage seems to fluctuate between that of a normal hit and a critical.

Saturn.6591:

Generally, I do think that for condition-builds, precision isn’t the way to go if you’re looking to increase your dps; except maybe for Mesmer (because of the “Sharper Images” trait). I assume Necros and Rangers would get a bigger dps-increase from carrion-gear than from rabid-gear. But obviously, damage is not the only thing that matters, so they may also decide to go for precision instead of power (thus, it makes perfect sense that condition damage gear with precision on it exists). But (yes, another “but”) that’s like… trade utility for damage, which isn’t the case for direct-damage builds.

The main reason people get confused by precision is because they see it solely as an offensive stat. Landing a critical hit can ‘proc’ a great many things that are not damage-oriented as well depending on your class. Also, it is more beneficial to have higher precision when using something like omnomberry pies which steals life on roughly 2 of every 3 critical hits. It all depends on what your build excels at.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Some of these methods have a latent effect on difficulty as an event scales down. For example, you don’t really notice stat changes since an enemy’s health bar is a percentage. But if we increased the enemy count, we don’t really have a good way (in a lot of cases) to make them simply vanish if the event is abandoned or otherwise reduced in scale. They won’t respawn unless the event gets scaled up again, however, so it should just be a matter of clearing them out of the event. You just might have to do it gradually.

How about combining spawn waves and stat-scaling with regard to a large downgrade in event participation?

In other words, if the event had 20 players and suddenly lost 10 in the middle of a large wave, the monsters wouldn’t have to disappear but instead would have their stats cut down greater than normal to make up for their over-generated numbers.

I’m assuming, of course, that you don’t already do this and/or it is completely feasible with your current systems

WonderfulCT.6278:

what does a crossbow offer that a shortbow, longbow, or rifle can’t?

Whatever they want it to offer. There’s no real difference between a rifle, a shortbow and a longbow in GW2 outside of the fact that the skills are different. What makes you think they can’t come up with new skills for a crossbow?

WonderfulCT.6278:

I can’t see a reason for the devs to add a new ranged weapon they would have to balance when they already have some that can have the same functionallity.

They will add new weapons at some point. Most likely in an expansion. Among those I would expect at least one new ranged weapon, and it may very well be a crossbow.

First off, the “Ghastly” weaponry is some of the most attractive looking stuff in the game, in my opinion. Most people that don’t have Twilight/Sunrise use the greatsword because its one of the only intricate-looking greatswords that doesn’t resemble a sharpened piece of hardened slag with a stick on one end (no offense to your art team, but we’ve got enough of those already :p).

Can we PLEASE get those skins in a non-glowing version? It wouldn’t be too hard to implement and I’d be willing to spend the same amount of dungeon tokens on them. I know (I use the term loosely) a great many people who have chosen a different skin simply because of the glow effect. Sadly, bright blue does not match every color scheme.

CookMETEnder.7582:

Steroid.8317:

CookMETEnder.7582:

Steroid.8317:

Sigil of Bloodlust and when 25 stacks are up swap to 2nd GS from inventor with Sigil of Force.

What about stacking Might?
You would get 875 power and condition from having 25 stacks of might, which isn’t too hard. I was thinking Bloodlust would not be a bad idea for 2nd set weapon.

With Sigil of Strenght you wont stack much might, its 1 stack for 10 sec, even with 100% crit chance you have 30% of that to happens which means ~1 stack every 2 or 3 seconds. For 10 sec its 3-5 stacks, depending of situation and with 100% crit chance.

Do your math after that.

Also dont count other sources of might, as they will work with other sigils as well.

Dont forget might have hard limit of 25 stacks. If you have other sources of might which can hit 25 stacsk, then the sigil is totaly useless.

You’re assuming that each attack is exactly one second though. Each crit would automatically give you 1 stack of might for Forceful, then 30% chance at another stack. I can see what you mean though…

There’s an unlisted (player testing found) cooldown on the Sigil of Strength of 1 sec per proc. In other words, even if you could get might 100% of the time, you can only get 1 stack per second which would amount to 9 stacks of might total (since by the time you were striking the 10th, the 1st would be gone).

CookMETEnder.7582:

But I don’t think bloodlust is a good alternative. High chance of being downed w/ a simple mistake in dungeons, and you need to kill 25 trash mobs to reacquire it… so if you down once on a boss, the sigil is basically useless.

There is an arguement for not relying on it in dungeons depending on how often you get downed, however its pointless not to have stacks of something just to have them. You don’t have to wear the item the gives you the stacks in the first place. If you were sure you’d go down somewhere, such as a boss fight, switch to another weapon with a different sigil in it and keep what stacks you have.

Majora.6028:

Oh no, I don’t have an issue with a swap here or there, I did it on my Ranger. The thing is, on my ranger, I ran Greatsword almost constantly, but every once in awhile I’d pop shortbow and just sit back. That only for a few minutes, and it rarely happened. I’m fine with that. What gets me about Eles is that it is almost a constant swapfest. Not my thing. I’m just going to try something else out. Thank you for your help, though.

I’ll just throw my advice in the ring, take it or leave it.

The only class that doesn’t swap weapons (or attunements in this case) for optimal play is the thief. The skills with longer cooldowns are usually more powerful and having two sets of weapons (in the elementalist’s case, four) with “power” skills is better than one.

You can play effectively enough by yourself in PvE without swapping anything. You may even get away with it in dungeons in many cases. Once you get to the PvP scene, its a completely different story. Especially for the ele. Ele gets 4 full weapon skill sets that all have longer (30-40s) cooldown skills to rotate through.

This is essentially why the class is being nerfed. Once people figured out what F1,2,3,4 did instead of trying to WoW-Fireball-Gank their targets, d/d eles took their place as an ‘apex predator’ (term used by Anet devs referring to incoming ele nerf).

Robert Hrouda.1327:

It depends on how well you move, and, again, class mastery. If I can stand -smartly- in front of something utilizing my skills to mitigate damage, then I don’t have to run around and use zigzag/circle strafing to overcome things. Again though, its a class/technique thing, and even then also dependent on the mobs you face.

Problem is, its easier to tap A, D, A, D, A, D, A, D, A, D or hold on W than it is to utilize all of your mobility skills and endurance as effectively as possible.

Your arguement is skill. If you have more skill, you can overcome certain things without kiting. Great. Then the question becomes: “Who cares? Kite it.”

Its why most games consider kiting an exploit but for some reason Anet decided to call it a “Strategy”.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

In the case it is a 1v1 moment, it could be that you are the last survivor of your group on a boss nearly dead, or got ambushed by something while separated from your group. Dungeons are group play, but there are standout solo moments in them.

And those standout solo moments usually devolve into run, run, run, run, run, heal, damage, rinse, repeat, dead boss. Melee has very little, if any, access to that mechanic, but ranged has every opportunity for it.

I’m taking this response to mean “Melee is hard mode” … basically.

“Fury” is a boon that increases crit chance by 20%. The “Fury” boon stacks in duration.

Both skills grant you access to the “Fury” boon for a period of time listed.

CHIPS.6018:

1)Graphic lag + culling.
All your allies are pre-rendered so they won’t lag your computer. But your enemies, when you suddenly rush into them, causes huge graphic lags for them since all those characters need to be newly rendered.

I would like to make a note that the culling system has been changed to cull both friendlies and allies separately. This means, you have your friendlies culled if you’re in a large group regardless of the number of enemies in sight. This was part of the January patch.

CHIPS.6018:

2) Network lag.
When you rush your 40 men zerg into the enemy, and all cast skills at once, it causes massive network lag for the enemy. Your enemy cannot use any skills because your forces already filled all the “skill usage slots” available on the server. So your enemy literally just sit there and let you kill them. There are cases where even dodging won’t respond.

Logically this makes sense, but technically I don’t think anyone outside Anet has any idea how their systems handle latency internally.

Not saying you can’t be right, or its impossible, but I’d call BS on this one until confirmed