Guild Wars 2

Juvenile Delinquent

Claudia Christian is a great actor and her voice quality, and role history suits the Norn very well. She shows a great range in B5, with an emphasis on the “strong woman” archetype, and she should have been a natural at Nornishness. I can definately agree that this does not rank highly on her list of works though. She’s capable of much better.

I think there’s two major factors involve, the first being that she’s primarily a screen actor. Voice actors are in the unique position of having absolutely no body language to convey meaning, and no context to act in while doing it. It takes a very different set of skills than screen acting and the difference shows in the finished product. Marina Sirtis has the same problem when she voices games (example: Mass Effect 1) in spite of her abilities as a screen actor.

Second, the voice direction was obviously given to make the PC’s characters very flat. I think they didn’t want to impose a particular character onto the players perception of their character, but the result is a dead performance. Emotion doesn’t register at all, even the most basic ones like inquisitiveness when asking a question.

Which of the two takes more blame is up for debate; I think it’s probably the combination of the two. I don’t blame the actress for at all; I think she was a great choice for the role based on her voice and past roles. She was just obviously put into an incredibly challenging voice acting job (making a character that’s both appealing and neutral) with mediocre or bad direction, and didn’t have the voice acting experience to carry it past that. I do think that the direction must truly have been terrible; if any of you gets the chance to do the Ogre racial storyline (40-50, and Norn get the option) you’ll get to hear Claudia do a very, VERY bad monster voice. I’m talking about the girl-faking-a-deep-voice-and-failing kind of bad. And then she talks to herself in her Norn voice. It’s painful. I can only imagine what went on in the voice studio that day; all parties involved should be embarrased about that one.

I didn’t mind the old one- the position the sword was held in makes a lot of sense for a long, high leverage weapon because it allows your first strike to come up under the enemies guard with lots of power. What wasn’t cool is that it looked like she was about to drop it.

The new position isn’t bad either. What’s bad is that it’s clunky and doesn’t link properly to the attack animation. It’s obviously not as fined tuned as the original and not an improvement.

What’d be really awesome is if she just threw it over her shoulder and swung it around like a twig. That would convey some strength and confidence there.

Just did a couple of quick tests in HOM. I was too lazy to use a stopwatch so I counted the number of attacks made, since they are roughly the same between pets. Close enough for ballpark anyway.

VS a stationary Heavy Golem with autoattack only, Jaguar killed the fastest with 10 hits. Hawk was 2nd place but only by 1 or 2 attack cycles (depending on crits).

VS a stationary Heavy Golem using F2 on cooldown, Hawk was first place with 7 hits. Jaguar was about 1-2 attack cycles behind. Raven was very close match to jaguar. Jungle Stalker was last, because the time spent casting Might took away from it’s actual damaging hits.

VS a moving golem with autoattack only, hawk beat jaguar rather handily. The jag’s attack animation is longer, and he gets far fewer in. I also tested canines and ranged pets. The canine is easily the best against moving targets- their built in cc, and the shortest attack animation of all the pets I tested gives them a decisive win. Ranged pets were dead last- they spend too much time moving to get LOS and very little time actually attacking.

Sigil of Battle for an Elementalist- or any other compulsive weapon swapper.

This is actually a pretty old discussion and I’ve seen it brought up with every MMO I’ve ever played. (Except EVE- but the backstory there was specifically designed to enable to player to be sociopathic). The core answer is that gameplay demands things to kill. Game design requires a variety of such things to prevent boredom. So there you go.

Because of the limitations of a game format, you really can’t take the story elements of an MMO at face value. You have to accept that what you do as a player on a day to day basis is not how things would play out in a novel, for example. That logging village might rally behind a leader – a roaming adventurer, or a local who just won’t take it anymore- and take the fight to the skritt. There would be a battle, the issue would be resolved and life would move on for both parties. You would not see god-like unstoppable heroes cutting their way through hundreds of thousands of skritt for days on end for ever and ever.

So there has to be a kind of artistic separation between gameplay and storytelling. The game is used to tell a story, and GW2 is doing a great job on this, better then pretty much any other MMO I’ve tried. However, the game itself is not the story. It’s only the medium. How can 100k’s of people all be the hero who killed Zhaitan? They can’t. But you, the player, experience it like that anyway. The limitations of the medium need to be accepted in order to understand the story.

No.

First, it doesn’t add anything. The level scaling system, and the non-treadmill design eliminate all benefits to increasing the cap other then stroking your kitten with a bigger a number.

Second, people need to get used to the fact that GW isn’t a treadmill game. Throwing them a bone like this will just make it harder for them to adjust, and obscure the true nature of the gameplay. Get ready for a whole new batch of “no endgame” complaints if this is done.

Also, no.

Dev post is stickied for those interested.

Also- YAY!

a FPS drop in lions arch is normal unless your computer is boss. The sheer number of characters and unique textures, etc, that have to be loaded will murder all but a major high end system.

Best workaround is to use lower quality textures, turn high-res character textures off, or lower resolution.

If it’s going on in the entire game, it’s either driver issues (if it wasn’t happening before) or graphics settings are just too high.

It’s a massive improvement. The max-range camera panning up and down is a nice touch as well, will help a lot for jumping puzzles, enjoying the scenery, and setting up screenshots.

There’s still a lot of work to be done with the camera- better zoom control, vertical position, geometry bounding issues, etc; but this handily solves the biggest one. I can play in fullscreen without causing headaches and blurred vision for the next half hour now. Yay!

Sounds like a valid bug.

This isn’t intended to adress the issues of minion’s being effective, boring, on-use abilities being delayed, etc. Those are all important things but not what this idea aims at.

One thing absolutely murders all other aspects of minion use before you even get to them: the minions are dead. They die fast, and then they go on cooldown. The result being that you are often left with (up to) 4 slotted skills on cooldown doing nothing for the majority of combat.

So, here’s the idea to address that in a balanced way. When a minion is killed by enemies (or two minions, in the case of the explodey rats), it’s subsequent cooldown is reduced by lets say 5 seconds for every other minion skill currently on cooldown.

Example: Flesh Golem has a 60 second cooldown. You have two other minions, the Shadow Fiend and the Bone Fiend, both already dead. Flesh golem goes down, and the cooldown is reduced by 5 seconds for each already ticking skill, resulting in a 50 second cooldown instead of 60.

The example obviously doesn’t include the 20% trait because I don’t want to do that much math in a brainstorming post. The timing involved can obviously be tweaked, changed to a %, etc, and the base cooldowns adjusted as well. I did think about the reverse (reducing the cooldown on other skills when an active pet dies), but that seems to result in burst of pets and no pets rather then a dynamic fight.

The benefits to this system is that it still punishes the Necro when his pets die- an important part of minion balance. The intention is that the harder your minions are hit, the less time you spend without them. So if you lose a pet, you’re basically in the same place the game puts you now. If you lose all your pets, you’re not completely borked for the next 60 seconds, but actually have a chance to recover before the fight ends. It also scales with how invested the build is into pets, and may create new strategies of when to summon what pets mid-battle for the best uptime. Because it requires enemy action, pets sacrificed by the player (blood fiend, flesh worm, etc) are unaffected and retain the balance of their natural cooldown.

Hopefully this hasn’t been brought up before and I’m not being a moron with bad search skills. Please discuss.

I can do all of that through Catalyst Control Center, which is built into my video driver. I don’t need a 3rd party program to do it.

Unfortunately I don’t use it, since I run in windowed fullscreen for the best color balance (curse by low-end monitor), but I’ve done endless amounts of tweaking on other games and programs. In fact, I often get better visuals and better performance then the games built-in graphics enhancements because I can match it to my systems capabilities better.

6 months is the tipping point I’d say for evaluating the life of an MMO. EVE online being the exception, since they operate according to a completely different design structure. It takes about that long to see the community mature, all the options tried, and for the developers to gather data and get into the nuts and bolts of tweaking things. Altogether, the first major balance and mechanics tweaks should start about 6 months in. MMO’s are absolutely massive projects, and it’s unreasonable to expect major changes to be concepted, studied, developed, and implemented all in less time then that. How on the ball the developer is at this point, and how well they comunicate with their community, is a good indicator of how well the game will age.

With that said, things like Bug fixes and content (not counting major releases, but tweaks to keep things engaging) should be going on constantly. IMO Anet is doing a decent job on the first (they should communicate more, and be more aggressive about hunting down the bugs that have major gameplay impacts- otherwise they are making steady if slow progress), and a great job on the second. I really see that Anet love’s their game and are caring for it like an artist and his paintings rather then a corporation and it’s products. I’m looking forward to the big balance update cause I think it will clarify and polish what’s already a great game.

I’ll take another look at the mesmer then. I just hate the clone system, it feels so clunky and hard to control. I’d have to find a build that didn’t focus on them, and I don’t think that’ll work out well. But I’ll go look up some builds.

To answer the title question: Ele’s would become rangers that shoot fireballs instead of arrow, with no pets. Bad idea.

The problem you’re looking to address I think is that it’s not worth it to spec into one element. There’s two reasons for that, one it doesn’t offer any real advantage, and two it’s actually punished since you NEED to be able to swap for utility abilities, and then you’ve lost all your spec advantages for the next 15 seconds. This brings up two obvious solutions:
-20 and 30pt traits need to be buffed.
-Cooldown for a specialized attunement needs to be reduced. I mean like down to 5 seconds for your spec. That way you can swap when needed, and then be back to your primary. The 25 pt passive traits would be a great place to put this. Numbers wise, 50% cooldown reduction (after Arcana) would be great. That’s 7.5 in two elements max, or 5.0 secs in one element with 30 arcana.

There’s no way this would be overpowered, since each element is fairly limited on its own you’re giving up a lot of versatility to get this. It opens up the way to buffing single or double elemental specs though without overpowering or nerfing attunement swapping builds.

Class or Build, primarily PVE

I know there’s no hard control in GW2. I’m looking for a “manipulator”- one that controls and manipulates it’s enemies, predicting or forcing their next move and turning their own actions against them. A lot like the Mesmer from GW1 (gw2 mes doesn’t have remotely the same playstyle). I’ve played most of the classes to lvl20 or higher in trying them out, along with an 80 and a couple 40+, and none of them seem to fit the bill for this kind of gameplay. The closest I’ve come so far is a corruption spec conditionmancer. It seems the game just isn’t built that way and I am sad.

Anyone have any ideas?

The first time I did the Brill Alliance heart. I started chatting up the skritt and nearly died laughing. Literally, because the skritt invasion DE started and I didn’t notice till the mob started bashing me.

Metrica has a lot of really awesome things in it, in fact.

I’d like to point out that GW1 casters are not the weak and flimsy archetype. I mean, really, look at what they do:

-Exist on a battlefield. That takes a certain chutzpah just to do it.
-Run and dodge accross that battlefield. These guys are better athletes then you or me, for sure.
-Take massive hits to the face and keep ticking. Sure, build specific maybe, but there’s nothing flimsy going on here.

A massive hulk of flesh and testosterone (Conan!) they are not, but they are probably stronger and in better shape then you or me by a long ways. If one of these guys want’s a sword, are YOU going to stop him?

There is a timing bug in the Norn Female Ranger’s Greatsword animation that makes it appear jerky or stuttery.

The Norn Female Greatsword attack chain usually consists of 3 strikes:
Strike 1: A downward slash, from top right to left of the character.
Strike 2: A downward slash, from top left to bottom right.
Strike 3: An upward slash, from bottom right to upper center.

With the ranger, the ability #1 Greatsword attack ability replaces the 3rd strike with a 360 degree spin and strike from top left to bottom right. However, there is a brief timing gap, where after Strike 2, but before Ranger 3, the character gets into position for Strike 3 before going into the Ranger 3 animation. The result is that the transition from Strike 2 to Ranger 3 does not line up, and the instant position change creates a jerky, stutter like effect.

The attachment shows the end of Strike 2, and the beginning of Ranger 3. The error occurs in between the two frames shown, which are very close together (my reflexes are not good enough to catch the exact moment). I’ve highlighted the area where the error can best be seen in game. Follow the sword tip, it will warp from the behind-the-character position on the left, into a right-of-the-character position as shown on the right. The body position will distort at the same time.

As a Scot descendant, and fan of Celtic myth, a wizened mystic wielding a massive greatsword doesn’t faze me in the least. In fact, it gives me a nerdgasm, since there’s no reason that mystic archetypes should be limited to using sticks or whatnot other then D+D tradition, which is mere game balance. The warrior-mystic has an even longer and older tradition in fact; the pure mystic really only comes from the imagination of 20th century gamers and authors.

STRanger.5120:

@Strang.8170:
I don´t want to argue man, but try to give me any reason why master of elements and a caster class dressed in a light suit (not even an armor I´m afraid) should even touch something so rude and barbaric like a huge Greatsword, which of course requires quite a bit of physical strength to even lift it (I doubt that Elementalists are going to gym at all)

All kinds of wrong going on here- not that it’s uncommon, given the widespread misunderstanding of historical weapons. A greatsword was a high-impact, high speed weapon used by foot infantry primarily against cavalry (although it worked great against everyone else, too). It was used more like a polearm than a sword or hatchet, with stabbing, lunges, and rapid parries with the tip of the blade. The leverage granted by using two hands (one placed above the hilt for greater leverage- this is why they are often leather wrapped and have tines midway up the blade- to protect the forward hand) makes this possible with surprisingly little strength- in actual practice, a greatsword is a lot faster then a 1 hander, even in the hands of a novice. The skill is in getting it to go where you want, not getting to GO. Physics takes care of that part. A spellcaster wouldn’t need that second part, since they’d be using it as a focus anyway, so it’s entirely feasible to use one.

The edges were only lightly sharpened (except near the tip, which was razor sharp) and used for parries and for disarming the opponent (lances and spears in particular)- that’s why they so often have wavy edges on them, to catch the haft of an enemy’s spear and cut it. The preferred killing blow was dealt with a thrust, heavy slashes from the top 3rd of the blade being an alternative if distance or position weren’t right, and bashing with the extra-long hilt guards and pommel as a last resort. Think of it like a halberd, but instead of only the axe-head being deadly, any point on the weapon could be used for striking. Often the task of a soldier wielding this was to disarm, ground or disable a foe, then move on and allow the lesser infantry (spearmen, conscripts, etc) to finish the job.

And a TL:DR to sum up: A greatsword is a fast, brutal skirmishing weapon meant to disable and disarm. It’s not heavy and barbaric, as popular myth suggests. It would be perfectly suited to a warrior-mystic class.

Plus, it would look REALLY awesome to shoot fireballs out of one.

Mostly agree- staff specialist so no comments on other weapons. I have some comments to OP and others but quote isn’t working so I’ll pile them in.

Ice Spike Blast Finisher: This would make OP heals sine there are 2 water fields in the same attunement.

Eruption Cast Time: The cast time is effectively instant; you can cast another ability or attunement immediately and the explosion will still go off.

Glyph of Elemental Power: Casting in a different attunement is it’s only appeal (weakness on fireballs? I’ll take one of those, thanks). The problem is it’s low proc rate, low duration of conditions, and internal cooldown mean that an on-crit weapon sigil will proc more reliably then a skill taking up a slot- that’s pretty bad. At least one of those things needs to be seriously relaxed.

Water Blast: Good suggestion. Alternately (or concurrently), it’s heal radius should be increased. Currently it’s useless for both damage and healing, especially since mob’s hitbox sizes vary and even melee classes will often not get the heal.

Gust: The pushback is a nice interrupt, but otherwise this skill is identical to shockwave. It fires a slow projectile along the ground that’s used to create a gap. This should be changed to something like a PBAOE knockdown. This would be a good way to put a finisher (whirl) in the lightning line as well.

While all the above is true (water attunement in particular), #1 tip is to avoid water. The primary reason being that water is buggy as hell. On a regular basis, I get mobs that leash and go immune while in melee range on top of their spawn point. A Grenth help you if you try to use any CC skills. It seems abotu 50/50 that sink or float will instead be “make mob invuln and heal to full after 5 secs”

These are not elementalist problems though, but water in general

Knights.

Power, Prec, Toughness. Dead ele’s do 0 dps after all. Also, staff is pretty low on condition damage since all of it’s condition applicators are on cooldowns and there’s only 2, in two separate elements.

Fire is the most damage vs large targets, like bosses that don’t move much (Kol) or static objects (Graveling Burrows) because all the bolts hit the target. Much like staff fire/5. Seriously, it’ll burn through event targets (AC path 3 I’m looking at you) like nothing else.

Light armor is amazing- if you are a female humanoid character.

Medium armor is too uniform, with the belted vest and trenchcoat look. Although some of the cultural (norn in particular) and some of the Karma armor are good, the selection is pitiful compared to the others.

Heavy armor is bulky and crazy. I suppose it’s good artistically, but it’s just not my style by a long shot. The norn and asura (makes you look like a mini golem) t3 are great though

Calavera.1086:

I hate WoW now and used to love it but that’s because the game changed so much, not me (I think).

True enough. But the (very) basic premise of structured progression remains. Perhaps it’s why we can’t get into any wow-clone type games e(ex: SWTOR) either?

Ghastly shield, Ascalon Catacombs token reward.

Stevoli.8795:

Rhyse.8176:

30, love it.

First game in a decade or more where you can just wander around and find things to get distracted by. Plus the art… woooooo.

That’s how I play as well, I just go wandering

Our younger players that left were going straight from one heart to the next, completing what seemed like a map per day.

Yes, and then they come here complaining about how there’s no content. Dude, you just ran past it all…

I wonder if it has more to do with WoW etc being more structured, and GW2 having much more free form gameplay? I’m not a cognitive scientist, but I’ve definately noticed changes in the way I look at things in the last 10 years or so.

How many of us 30-ish-ers, used-to-play-WoW (or w/e)-but-hate-it-now-ers discovered wow in our early 20’s and loved it then? I wonder if there’s something there.

30, love it.

First game in a decade or more where you can just wander around and find things to get distracted by. Plus the art… woooooo.

One approach is to buff one or two elements, swap out when you’ve used all your cooldowns or desperately need that shield from Earth or something, and get back into your primary as soon as you can.

Honestly though the elemental traits are all pretty weak. I run 30 arcana/10 all and it’s by far the best build I’ve tried because it applies equally to all attunements, gives a balanced stat spread and encourages swapping. With all the buffs I get from attunement swapping, I can keep all my major skills in all my elements on cooldown and get a pile of boons and passive effects in the process.

What needs to be changed is that once you’ve invested in one, the cooldown on that particular attune goes way down, to like 5 seconds. That way you can swap out when needed for utility and be back to your primary in no tome. IMO the 25 pt minor traits should all be replaced with this; it would allow specialization without hurting attune swapping. ATM though, Arcana is the way to go.

All of the above.

Primarily kiting and movement combined, with a healthy dose of dodge, an active defense for when you desperately need one (I usually only need 1; I use Arcane Shield), and the occasional pop into water for a big burst heal and some regen. The trick is learning how to keep track of them all.

Razarei.2809:

I have yet to meet an “elitist go l2p” type ele on these boards that have shown me to be even remotely better than I am at the elementalist class

Try reading through this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Are-the-Eles-where-Anet-wants-us-to-be/first#post353877

In between the normal collection of whiners and doomsayers, there is a discussion between myself and another player who is genuinely interested in learning what the class has to offer. Read over it and see what strikes you.

There is definately a lot of screen clutter.

One way to minimize it would be to add a feature that de-emphasises spell effects that aren’t yours. Something simple and unobtrusive, like reducing the saturation so yours pop out more is all. Would make a big difference in knowing what’s going on around you.

I think it’s safe to say that what is there now will be up for change as time goes on.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-outlines-guild-wars-2-live-game-development/

We think Guild Wars 2 is one of the most enthralling online worlds ever created, so we are dedicated to a live game that impacts this world with events and milestones that are immersive and possibly permanent.
…
Living World—The Living World team is focused on adding new content to the game world. This team will be adding and refining the types of content you already know in PvE and WvW, as well as developing new features and rewards.

It would be nice to see event chains that last a day or more though, so that when you put a lot of work into capturing that front line position, it’s not knocked back 15 minutes later because everyone moved on to the next event.

So… you want a mouselook option?

It already does, I think.

The only things I’ve encountered that don’t break on dodge are some world objects for hearts and things. And some of those seem to be deliberate to force you to clear out an area before finishing the objective.

Staff is pretty handily the best ele weapon for all situations, but it has the highest skill ceiling by a massive amount. Not only do you have to master attunement swapping and every one of all 20 skills, but you also have to learn combo fields by heart, be hyper-aware of positioning, and anticipate or control the enemy’s movement. If you’re the sort of player that can pull off that many things at once though (hooray for ADHD! Never thought I’d say that…), then you’ll be pretty much unstoppable.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

10/all, 30 Arcana, Evasive Arcana, Staff. Arcane Wave, Arcane Shield, x <situational>

With all the combo fields Staff gives you, and 6 blast finishers, you can rotate through a series of combos that stacks might, burning, chill/cripple, and heals you for 50-75%+ every 20 seconds or so. In addition, with Sigil of Battle and the various combos, I’m usually maintaining 5-10, with up to 20 at times, might stacks on myself while soloing. The key is to have REALLY good reflexes, attunement swap like mad, and dodge roll into your fields for a massive number of combo effects.

I find Rune of Divinity is hard to beat, at least with my spec. I really do everything at one time or another, often in the same fight, so the even stat spread gets more use then a specialized stat would.

Knight’s or Soldier’s imo. Use upgrades for more DPS if you want it; anything less and you’ll be too squishy, and the damage gain isn’t enough to compensate.

No character should ever build as a glass cannon, ele or otherwise. It doesn’t work well in gw2 because each player must have a certain level of indepence. The question is the proportion of DPS/Tank, not the presence or absence of them.

For events, support just isn’t needed.

For dungeons, support is built in to any decent DPS spec. If you aren’t dropping combo fields or using finishers in other people’s fields, you are weakening yourself AND the entire party. The idea of standing in the backline throwing heals and buffs doesn’t really work here; it just means you aren’t using your full potential and weakening the team.

Improve would imply such a ‘tool’ exists.

Last I checked there is no LFG tool in GW2 short of asking in open chat.

There is indeed such a tool, it’s found in the contacts menu. However, it may as well not be there, since all it does is flag you as lfg to people in the same zone. Using zone chat is more effective because it lets you advertise what content you want. To be useful, it needs to be realm-wide and content specific.

People have this fantasy notion that the LFG tool in WoW somehow “killed the community”.

Well, it kinda did. Dungeons were fine and terribly hard even, until gear progression trivialized them. The dungeons were never truly nerfed. What gave the RDF a social impact was that it matched you with random people from different realms, who you then never saw again. This made building communities on your own server unimportant (er, less important) and gave anonymity and immunity from consequences to everyone. And then the Penny Arcade Effect (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19) takes over. This had much more impact then any perceived changes in game difficulty.

I use it almost as often as the cooldown allows, either for accessing new field/finisher combos, or just to wait out the cooldowns on my first set.

I’ve just changed my FoV in game with nvidia custom res, but is there anyway (mods included) to stretch the game vertically so those black bars aren’t using half the screen while keeping my fov? (current custom res is 1920×810)

google for gw2 camera tool. It doesn’t SEEM to violate the Anet guidelines (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Policy-Third-Party-Programs/first#post354869), but still, use at own risk.

Here’s an edited version of the image from earlier in the thread (original from Wikipedia)

The blue dot is the original camera position. The purple dot is a new, zoomed-out camera position. You can see a couple things:
1. More of the circle (aka visible game world) is visible in the new position. This gives the illusion of increasing FOV; it actually does not.
2. The field of view (in this case 90 degrees) is unchanged.

FOV is NOT zoom. Done. Fin. Complete.

FOV is important in ways that zoom is not- when you can’t zoom out because of a wall being the obvious one. Less obvious ones include getting all of a piece of scenery on the screen and movement and vision issues. On a screen that’s as close to you as a computer monitor usually is (12-24 inches for most desks), when the FOV of the game does not roughly match the FOV that your monitor takes up in real life, it can result in motion sickness, blurred vision and eyestrain, headaches, that kind of thing. Lots of people are reporting exactly those symptoms in other threads.

Either reason -in game view, vision problems- should be enough to justify a FOV slider. It’s not a unique issue to GW2 either, but is becoming an industry standard (see earlier posts about Borderlands). The engine already supports it, it’s as simple as putting it into the options menu.

1. Encourages people to walk and experience content, stumble accross events, etc.

2. Gold sink.