Guild Wars 2

I greatly support this suggestion. Showing the unacquired skins in the wardrobe from within the hero panel UI would be a huge QOL improvement for basically every player.

I think the best solution doesn’t take the skills away and keeps in the spirit of the skills… I just think reflects in their current incarnation are too bloody strong. The worst solution is to simply make it so the projectiles cannot be reflected/absorbed at all; what ANet did with Malrona, for instance, was depressing. I would much rather see an evolution of reflect skills that keeps them relevant anywhere projectiles can be found, but not contributing too much to overall DPS to the bosses. A good example of them done right is the Grawl boss, IMO.

I think we can come up with some good solutions here, and I’ll make it a point to report it along to ANet after we’ve given it all some thought.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I’m actively checking on this today. Thank you for your continued patience.

Thank you very much, Gaile.

EcoRI.9273:

Why can’t we just make reflects scale off of our own power? This way there is no way to one shot any boss.

I think the reason it is the way it is is because it enables less DPS-y builds to successfully contribute to team DPS by reflecting an enemy’s projectiles. Conceptually, it makes sense as well. Maybe the opposite of what you suggest would be better; instead of having it use your Power, have it use the enemy’s precision and ferocity? I’m not sure what this would do for something like GL, but not having 100% crit chance would potentially stop a lot of DPS from reflects.

This and your idea are the easier of the suggestions to implement, but I still think converting reflects into blocks against legendary creatures might just be the better solution for the game. It’s really hard to say, though.

Honestly, your list doesn’t bother me much at all. None of those four things are questionable issues to me.

That said, some of the biggest things I see as failings of GW2 design decisions are:
- Removing Solo Queue
- Not allowing players to queue for PvP outside of HotM

Laraley.7695:

No, timer should be longer, period. Making respawn times longer would only solve one issue and bring many others and one of that would be people running mostly tanky builds and I’m pretty sure no one wants to see that again.

No one would run tankier builds because against a team of DPS players no bunker can currently easily stay alive, and dying is punished by the revive timer. People would play whatever builds are most effective for team fights, mixing survivability with dps pressure… which is exactly the meta we have right now (modified only by the roles seen in Stronghold).

It’s important to respect people’s time. 20 minute games are too long and will be stale by the time they finish, even if they do end by lord kill in the last 5 minutes. It is far superior to keep the same timer and simply improve the pace of the game to minimize situations where it would go to timer.

As I said in another thread, one way to reward defense is to make player revive timers longer the further into a match you are. This makes player kills more important, and rewards more defensive teams for stopping pushes and gives them more time to turn around and push themselves.

I strongly disagree with the idea of extending the timer. 15 minute games are the longest they should be. Instead, they should focus on improving the pace of the game so that it ends naturally by a Lord kill before you reach the 15 minute timer.

One way to do that would be to make player revive timers longer the further into a match you are. This makes player kills more important, and rewards teams more for actually killing people by taking them out of the game for longer.

I still think the best way they could address reflects trivializing bosses is by making reflects used against bosses merely absorb the projectiles instead of reflecting them. In this way, a WoR against Malrona could stop her poison blasts, but not reflect them to autokill her. Doing it this way maintains reflect skills’ value without causing them to annihilate high-powered bosses like GL.

Marcos.3690:

Then the expansion includes literally no content for PvP players. That’s even worse…

Best case scenario: The new specializations are so bad that they are not relevant
Worst case scenario: The new specializations are so good that game is now P2W

The best-case is that they are balanced and diversifying, enabling new builds for different roles to emerge fluidly. Additionally, don’t forget that HoT will be bringing a brand new class to PvP, which in itself is pretty exciting.

We are still recruiting for those interested! We had a huge Stronghold party last night with the guild, so that was fun. We don’t often have PvP events or what-not, but we do have a small group who PvP’s frequently. In addition to that, missions have been successful as ever and we keep on keeping on with the nightly Tequatl and biweekly Wurm runs. If our sort of community interests you, talk to one of our officers!

As always, while we don’t require repping, know that you get out of a guild what you put in, so I recommend repping so that you can get to know us better when we start being chatty.

IF (GameFormat == “PvE”) THEN
{
use PowerBuild;
}

The only thing conditions are better against are general Husks, not even for Copper because of the condition cap. Even in the case of Husks, a Power build melts them plenty quickly.

The 3 is okay at best. Its range is shorter than Wail of Doom and it’s not even unblockable. Pretty much the only time it’s useful is to prevent someone stomping/ressing or if there is a major spell being cast. Otherwise, you’re better off autoattacking for ~6k piercing damage.

The 5 is useful, but has a prohibitive casting time and is also easy to dodge.

I think in Well of Darkness’s case I’d definitely recommend the cooldown be much faster. 40 seconds is pretty horrendous given that something like Black Powder is available for so much less and is on a weapon set no less. Well of Darkness could potentially even use a damage component on the order of Well of Corruption and still be fair.

Signet of Vampirism should really just be changed to life steal on hit rather than life steal when hit. Its current form is basically garbage no matter what.

Also, let’s talk about Litany of Wrath on Guardians. Even when you fully trait meditations, which is when this healing skill should shine, you still never want to take it over Shelter. Honestly I would like it more if Merciful Intervention were made into a heal skill with a teleport/stunbreak, but given Litany’s current design, the best I could think of here is to reduce the cooldown on it and increase the base healing component by 25%. That would go a long way to justify losing the huge block on Shelter.

Aktium.9506:

I’d say make it a Smoke Field but we don’t exactly have a viable way of using a field ourselves anyway.

I’ve always liked this idea too. Necromancers could use the smoke field.

Bhawb.7408:

If you want to make Lich more skillful, give people a reason to press anything other than 1. This doesn’t mean you have to spread out the damage, but give the other skills meaningful utility so they actually have a reason to be cast.

That’s a fine alternative as well. I still think the 1 does too much damage compared to even the potential value of the rest of the skills. If it maintains its damage level, you’d have to make the other four skills bloody incredible to make them worth the wasted cast time. It’s pretty much impossible to argue with the ability to three-shot a MediGuard or something comparable given the design of the skills right now. It’s even worse in PvE where the other utilities are utter garbage in their current incarnation.

Rolisteel.1375:

If they change it to require more skill without increasing its survivability i change it for plague anyday

That’s fine, of course. Better players than you will make use of its added utility and have no trouble with any mechanical demands placed on them, so it works out for everyone.

Don’t forget Well of Darkness on Necromancer. That’s a pretty abysmal utility in its current incarnation.

Bhawb.7408:

Not every skill should have “high” mechanical skill to use. Almost every Elite in the game is less an issue of mechanical skill and more knowledge and decision making, which is absolutely in line with MMORPG combat. Artificially increasing Lich Form’s “skill”, which probably isn’t even that realistic anyway with 5 skills, does nothing to make it a better elite. Right now Lich takes skill in knowing when to use it, who to target, how long to stay in it, and other decisions like that, instead of mechanical skill.

All it needs is to have all 5 skills have actual meaningful use cases, which just isn’t the case right now.

I’m not saying it needs a complex rotation or anything, but 1111111 is not even remotely mechanically skillful play regardless of its lack of durability or recent changes it’s suffered. I would vastly prefer if the 1 took a significant reduction in DPS and the 2, 3, 4, and 5 gained huge DPS buffs to encourage smarter use of all of the skills. It’s about as skillful right now as Turret Engi, insofar as of course a smart Engi can place Turrets intelligently so they can hit things but won’t be cleaved down, but all things considered it’s still very mindless.

You say that you think it’d be artificially increasing its “skill”, but I think if there were more opportunities for skillshots and more play/counterplay to using all of its skills, it definitely wouldn’t be artificial.

Honestly, I’ve always felt that Lich Form should be rebalanced anyway, but not because it’s “too strong” or whatever. Elites on 3 minute cooldowns should be very strong, but they should also require a lot more skill to be that strong than Lich Form currently does.

Coulter.2315:

The 2 effects are not bound to each other, you push Shelter you get a 2sec block AND a channel for 1.25secs which heals at the end. You are interupting the channel, the block is still running.

This is how I’ve always understood the skill as well. I think this is working as intended.

My sense of time is all screwy. For some reason I thought I saw this first like a week ago. x_x

This was never approved? Doing it now Done.

Just finished watching this and it looks good. Approving Approved.

Why did I get moved off of my team, Team Eta, into the Panda team? We were practicing last night and trying to plan our comp and such.

I’d love to sign up. It sounds like a lot of fun!

I’ll say that just because you can beat teams that use turret Engineers does not mean they aren’t broken. They require minimal effort to play and require massive plays to counter them, which can by itself be characterized as overtuned.

Crovax.7854:

On the very same day GTA V launches on pc? Not a very smart move :/ A lot of people in here will participate but as for players who left and for whom ANet could potentially generate some kind of interest, this will kinda fall short.
Not saying open beta is bad, just that the date could’ve been chosen better (marketing wise).

Agreed. It being a Tuesday seriously limits my and a lot of workerbees’ ability to participate. If this were a Saturday or Sunday you could be certain you’d see a lot more activity.

As a general rule, I skip what it makes sense to skip and I kill what it makes sense to kill. If my team is really good and we have the classes to skip stuff, I prefer to skip, but I’d also prefer killing stuff if it means that my pubs won’t die during a skip five times back-to-back. In the end, though, I vastly prefer fast-paced runs that skip as much as humanly possible; it’s a lot more fun for me.

Thanathos.2063:

I hope you at least open the box for some random part selling for 1G.

That only works for Ascended Weapons. Ascended Armor merch value is unfortunately not 1g.

Bhawb.7408:

A 2s duration is insane for a 1s pulse.

So ANet can make it 1s if they agree. Poison Grenade pulses 3s Poison every 1s per grenade where fields can overlap already and lasts for 5s, so I felt 2s Poison/Weakness every 1s for 12s was fine for something with a much larger cooldown and that takes a critical utility slot.

I would expect that any fixes or changes to these issues will be silently implemented in assorted patches as they figure them out. They are absolutely aware of the issue, but unfortunately they haven’t indicated that they want to discuss it with us in any greater detail, so the best we can do is hope and wait.

I reported the aforementioned list to ANet earlier this week. So far already the CoF p1 and Arah p4 issues have been resolved. A few weeks back I reported the turret bug in Thaumanova Fractal, which is now fixed, and they also fixed the Fear issue not counting as an interrupt which I snuck into one of reports when it first happened. Additionally, they addressed the cone/line beam AOE radius issue that happened two patches back and I immediately reported.

Suffice it to say that as things happen and I hear more, I let the community know immediately. Additionally, I make it a point to follow threads like this to report issues ASAP so that the dev team can address them. I think it’s easier for me to report back progress to you all, the community, within the threads where the issues are reported rather than in an entirely new thread. It’s also better for ANet because fewer threads means I can direct them to read certain ones and they can browse easier. If I were actually able to physically moderate this specific forum it’d probably make my job easier and make communication easier because I could handle stickies and stuff, but I don’t foresee that ever happening.

Thanks for the feedback! Hopefully you approve of my work thus far.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Evan, do forfeits count as losses on the leaderboard and are they reflected in your displayed W/L ratio? Furthermore, does the winning team against the team with a deserter still get credit as usual? Lastly, if you win as a team with a deserter do you still get credit for the match?

For the leaderboard and in-game UI:
Wins include victories and byes.
Losses include defeats, forfeits, and desertions.

Winning against a team with a deserter results in a bye.
If you win with a deserter on your team, it is still a victory.

Sounds good. Cheers for the clarification, Evan!

Evan, do forfeits count as losses on the leaderboard and are they reflected in your displayed W/L ratio? Furthermore, does the winning team against the team with a deserter still get credit as usual? Lastly, if you win as a team with a deserter do you still get credit for the match?

Pelopidas.2140:

To be honest i would use CPC alot more if it didnt apply weakness on self.
I wouldnt want a milisec of weakness on a power build, or having to spend a condi clear/transfer.

This is one of the skill’s biggest issues at the moment. Corrupt Boon is nice because if you use Consume Conditions (which you should) then the poison does literally nothing to you except some very minor DPS. Blood is Power works in PvE because you can afford the bleed on yourself, as you’ll consume it and be on your way. The vulnerability on Epidemic isn’t too bad, but it has other problems. Weakness on CPC is crippling, though, and you have to blow a cleanse on it immediately or you’ll seriously hurt your damage output.

This is sort of how I’ve always wanted CPC to work:

Corrosive Poison Cloud
Torment yourself. The target area is enveloped in a noxious cloud that destroys projectiles and afflicts foes with Poison and Weakness.
Poison: 2 s
Weakness: 2 s
Self Torment (2 stacks): 10 s
Number of Targets: 5
Duration: 12 s
Condition Application Interval: 1 s
Radius: 240
Combo Field: Poison
Range: 900
Unblockable

Only changes here are:

• Destroys projectiles
• Self-Torment instead of Self-Weakness
• Applies conditions every 1s instead of every 3s
• Reduced condition duration to 2s instead of 3s

I forwarded this issue along to them along with a number of other issues a few days back. They’re looking at it, but at this moment they have neither confirmed nor denied that this change is intentional. I wouldn’t expect quick action here, sorry to say.

zapv.8051:

If your in a situation on that build where you can’t do anything it’s because you miss manage your cooldowns. Yeah you’ll die quickly at that point, but medi guard is an extraordinarily forgiving build. Tons of heals, bunch of aegis, invuln, and blind. There is simply way too much defense for me to consider that a hard build. The burst is also way easier to land than many other builds.

This is the point I was making earlier. Just because you die easily when your out of cooldowns or afk doesn’t mean your build is hard.The burst is easy to land, and you have a ton of defensive cooldowns. It’s harder than a warrior that has a bunch of passive defense, but saying it’s on the same level as a shatter mes, or fresh air ele that have way less healing, condition removal, and defensive cooldowns, and less armor is kind of silly imo.

My previous list was extremely rudimentary. I by no means think that everything on the “Hard” list is equivalent, and even mentioned in that post that many things are closer to the edge than the list may immediately suggest.

I definitely do think that MediHammer is easier to play on average than a Fresh Air Ele or a Shatter Mesmer, but at the same time it also has a far more telegraphed burst that is easier to avoid than those other two and both the Fresh Air Ele and Shatter Mesmer have far superior disengage than a MediHammer Guardian. It’s give and take, and while the two examples you chose are certainly tougher, I do think the MediHammer is tougher to play well than a lot of people give it credit for.

Booms.2594:

hahahahahaha okay get your friend and 2v2 me on medi hammer and see how easy it is to deal with in skirmishes

You have to follow the context; your personal skill with the build doesn’t matter. I’ve never contested that it is very powerful in the hands of a smart player, but it’s a riskier build for players to pick up because you can get locked into situations where you can’t do anything and the enemy can burst you down with ease. That’s sort of the whole point of this thread’s discussion.

Rym.1469:

Medi Hammer and P/D Thief demanding, Condition Necromancer medium in this meta. Alright.

MediHammer is hilariously easy to neuter with just about any measure of intelligent play. All you have to do is bait JI and range it from outside 300 range when it goes into Hammer and you get free shots against it. All good players at this point can handle MediHammer exceedingly well in skirmish contexts. The entire build is about teamfight coordinated burst anyway, and it’s very easy (and common) for players to use it wholly wrong and get rekt.

CondiNecromancer has a fairly simple rotation, and don’t forget that in a skirmish setting it matches exceptionally well against a lot of the other meta builds (CeleRifle Engi, for instance). It’s definitely not easy to play because in teamfights it can be ping-ponged easily (especially if Wurm is down), but it’s by no means hard to play either. It also scores a defensive stat in its amulet, lessening the risk of getting rekt in three seconds by a competent enemy duelist.

PU Mesmer is definitely something I think is on the easier side to use; I ended up bumping it down in an edit before refreshing and seeing your post. That said, the lack of Dire in SPvP makes it less bulky than it is in WvW for instance (and less deadly without the +40% condi duration food), which makes it easier to burst down and get rid of. I think it’s borderline in the context of SPvP.

Low Demand on Player Skill / Knowledge / Timing
- AI Builds (Turret Engi / Minionmancer / Spirit Ranger / etc)
- Power Necromancer
- Shoutbow
- PU Mesmer

Medium Demand on Player Skill / Knowledge / Timing
- Bunker Guardian
- MediGS Guardian
- Condi Necromancer
- Condi Engineer

High Demand on Player Skill / Knowledge / Timing
- CeleDD Elementalist
- CeleRifle Engineer
- Fresh Air Elementalist
- P/D and S/D Thief
- MediHammer Guardian
- Shatter Mesmer

I didn’t cover everything but I covered a lot. Some of these builds are on the edge of one classification into another, but this is generally how I see things in the current meta.

It really depends on what you consider part of player skill with a class. I included rotational knowledge with a build because knowing where your class belongs (in the team fight, roaming, defending 2 points, etc) is important. Some are better at certain roles than others. Complex mechanical rotations are definitely more demanding of player skill, which is why double kit CeleRifle Engineer and CeleDD Elementalist are tougher mechanically to play.

Another factor is “how easy is it for you to be bad at this build”. Most high burst glassy builds are very easy to be terrible with, meaning you get burst easily or you rely on getting in/out of combat reliably. It’s easy to say that a Thief is braindead because it hides in Stealth a lot, but knowing where to be and how to effectively rotate on a Thief is something I see a lot of even high-tier Thieves be ineffective at. It’s tough to always be in the right place at the right time.

I think builds that have minimal mechanical complexity and typically sit on or around points and are very defensive are extraordinarily forgiving of a player being awful and are very rewarding even in spite of that. Meanwhile, I consider things like Power Necromancer very braindead to play because they rely on spamming the 1 key a lot and have extremely simple burst rotations (if any at all). It gets even sillier in Lich Form.

Not sure if that’s a bug or not Bohantopa, but I’ll report it up to ANet and discuss it with them and try to figure it out. I’ll send my report on the remaining issues today. Thanks for the help in testing them, everyone!

• Shield 4 gets a CC component to the skill for enemies it hits.
• Swiftness on Meditation use trait
• Merciful Intervention buff (cooldown reduction would be ideal)
• Some kind of grandmaster trait that turns Symbol fields into Fire fields

Some of the other ideas here are pretty good, too, although I’m perfectly okay with Spirit Weapons being terrible. I’d actually prefer it if all AI utilities were reworked to be require more action from the player. For instance, remove the auto-attack on Spirit Weapons, super buff their command skills, and that’s great. Now it’s a powerful utility skill with the counterplay that you can kill the spirit weapon.

Better yet, keep it on entry and then make healing work on Necromancers in DS.

Pomdepin.7068:

Even without freezing the sea, not placing anything underwater would solve the issue

No it wouldn’t. ANet removed underwater weapons from the PvP build entirely, which means that if you somehow got underwater in a PvP map you’d just have no weapons (or the game would crash? Honestly who knows) and it’d be pretty much terrible.

While I agree that losing maps sucks and I think this map had some really fun LoS spots (those palm trees), they’d have to fully remove the underwater components for it to fly, and since the map was originally designed around the underwater components they might as well just give us a brand new Conquest map for similar levels of effort instead.

53 rares is 13 combinations minimum, and the upgrade rate is 20%, so we would expect ~2.6 or 2-3 exotics from those combinations. I’d say you were a slight bit unlucky, but not by much. If you turned around and put all of the returned rares back into the forge, you would’ve gotten an extra 3 combinations, bringing the expected returns much closer to 3 exotics.

You can make 10g in about 90 minutes with average groups running dungeons such as AC p1/2/3, CoF p1, CoE p1/2/3, Arah p1/p2, SE p1/3, and so on.

Rising Dusk.2408:

• [All] The game seems to not be rewarding all dungeon chests or end of path reward chests, even if you haven’t done dungeons in many days.
• [CoF p1] Ferrah cannot continue after the Slave Driver event, breaking the path (we somehow managed to unbug her but not sure how).
• [HoTW p1] Aldus Stormbringer’s adds don’t all turn hostile now, they run around as friendlies and occasionally turn hostile. They also dodge around.
• [Arah] Lupicus’s Necrid Bolt auto-attack hits in melee range.
• [Arah] There seems to be a strange pathfinding bug whereby mobs are teleporting into Giganticus Lupicus’s arena. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVP9_6r98SM
• [Arah] Lupicus is failing to track his targets like he used to when using skills, causing skills like his Necrid Trap (Bubble) and Shadow Step to miss their targets by wide margins.
• [Arah p4] The Grenth event never finishes when the last wraith is killed.
• [CoE p2] The Husk event never finishes.
• [Fractals – Thaumanova] The eastern event where you have to break open the doors to save the Asuran engineers is broken insofar as the door to the collider is open even if you never save any of the engineers.

Can we verify against this list after the patch? I heard from a number of people that Arah p4’s Grenth issue was fixed, for instance, and they said they fixed CoF p1. I have a feeling that the CoE issue may be resolved as well, but I haven’t had a chance to test it.

Glad to have heard of your interest, and welcome to the guild, Fus.
Hopefully you enjoy our community!

It’s for real. Chill of Death activates on the target when it triggers, and does not require LoS or facing.

Still looking! If you have a group of players that organize to win, let me know!

It’ll be added to the gem store just like the Bobblehead Laboratory was, so you will be able to experience it again soon.