Guild Wars 2

style.6173:

haha. Just like turret engis and before that spirit rangers.

Do you really think that MM is on the level of Turret Engis and Spirit Rangers? Just MM’s targeting issues is IMO enough to put it a tier below them.

Nova Stiker.8396:

Name 1 Druid trait that goes great with a Ranger trait.

Honed Axes/Path of Scars/Ancient Seeds.
Moment of Clarity/Primal Echoes.
Moment of Clarity/Lunar Impact, which can have 100% daze uptime (so long as you remain in Celestial Form).
Tidal Surge/Clarion Bond.
Predator’s Onslaught/Ancient Seeds.
Bark Skin/Cultivated Synergy/Lingering Light.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

They’re really not.

So you think the system called “specializations” is not a system designed around specializing your character.

Idk what to say other than that. Sorry, you’re just plain wrong; the Druid toolkit has a pretty meaty range of control skills, so saying that druids are pure heals is ridiculous on its face. It has tools which can really help an offensive playstyle, like Druidic Clarity and Glyph of Empowerment, so when power rangers use one or even two survival lines and go pure Marksmanship it’s potentially a big boon to swap from Wilderness Survival to Druid.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The biggest problem with the druid is that it is a mono-tool. A tool that exists to do one very specific job, and not much else.

This is kinda what specializations are for. You don’t take Druid if you don’t want it for the healing or the control; just like you don’t take, say, Reaper if you don’t have any use for it or if Reaper’s Shroud is a detriment rather than a boon.

Just looking at it now, Druid may be worth considering for Power Ranger, just because you always have Point Blank Shot, Hilt Bash, the sword Block and your dog to land consistent control effects, which you can chain into free Entangles every ten seconds, which is a really strong effect for just about any ranger.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Exact same issue with the druid. Why bring the druid when the guardian, elementalist, engineer, and revenant are already good with healing?

Because they have different healing styles and strategies, and bring different cooldowns and other tools.

I think it’s a bit premature to make a judgment when we haven’t even seen more than parts of one HoT zone, let alone the raid.

Frost.1503:

Possible Solution:

What’s the problem?

brannigan.9831:

A system like that could never be abused though right?

They can, but abuse would probably be statistical noise.

If you play 1000 games and maybe 50 people “troll” you by giving you a bad review, there’s still 950 games of real feedback.

The Grenadier trait was:
1. Doubling the number of grenades launched by the tool bar skill
2. Attaching a hidden Piercing skillfact to I think the first 4 Grenade Kit skills

The first is overpowered for obvious reasons.
The second makes grenades scale in damage based on the number of targets the projectile passes through. If your grenade passes through four targets, it explodes five times; one for each target, one when it lands. With good use they could deal twice as much damage against a single target as they should; when fighting a clustered group of enemies, they’d deal up to six times as much damage as intended.

I am not certain how changing Plague’s bleed stacks from multiple short ones to a single long one will help Necros.

I am somewhat suspicious that they are being very careful with Plague because of the hypothetical Spite/Curses/Reaper build which takes “Chill deals damage”, “Blind applies Chill” and “Chill applies Vulnerability”. However, Reaper should not be a mandatory pick for a viable Plague.

I will possibly try Signet necro with Spite/Curses/BloodMagic.

I don’t expect it to be good but I expect it to be fun to have an effective 7 signets to use.

Kury.8210:

Also all the shorthand ending in “M” kept me expecting to see an “S&” in front of one. Probably just me… Do I have a problem?

You’ve got the exact opposite of a problem, bud.

I’m not sure what to make of this. I’ve made one Ascended set (Zerker’s Light). It’s irrelevant in sPvP, and PvE is always a sliding scale, so the only thing to really be worried about IMO is WvW and economic balance.

With the new stat emphasis falling entirely on gear, I think Exotic and Ascended prices could possibly go up quite a bit in price. Think people will finally want stuff with defensive stats for PvE? :p

I actually really enjoy Ricochet. Don’t care if it’s viable, it’s just a super fun trait.

nexxe.7081:

Imagine if they made necro minions static. Necros would be upset too.

Considering half of them are melee attackers and one of them already is immobile, I think your comparison might be a wee bit disingenuous.

Spirits are not minions.

Pure Heart.1456:

I think it’s a boring decision, to remove Ranger spirit movement.

Spirits are spirits, minions are minions. Personally I think solidifying how Spirits work, particularly in the context of expansions adding Spirits to other classes, is a good thing.

It is still possible to reach over -100% condition duration using food in PvE/WvW. In sPvP you would need another external effect, and I’m not sure one exists.

Gryph.8237:

I would like to see godzilla come up from the ground and snap an ele, engie, or thief in half for dodging like an idiot every .5 seconds.

Sadly, Dragonhunters got that for their elite.

I think Jagged Horrors are fine.

I don’t think there’s a problem with having a Shout that primarily services Death Magic necromancers as the other three utility Shouts seem very strong for general use.

Maybe knock down the CD a bit.

If there is a problem with the Jagged Horrors, fix the Jagged Horrors. It’s probably their AI, or the rules for their abilities.

Trying to pump and dump? Good luck.

Really I think the best fix is to make it so that instead of progressing automatically you need to get those yaks to the towers.

For example, to get from T0 to T1, you need to get 6 yaks to the tower. Time doesn’t matter.

Invictus.1503:

I wonder if they’ll make condi’s viable in PvE with HoT. Would love to run a PvE terror/chill build.

Changes to the condi caps, and how burning and poison stack, are massive buffs to conditions for PvE already.

Anet should look at Reward Tracks and Silverwastes for good ways to make WvW rewarding. Cool unique weapons and armor sets, and just plain higher rewards, would probably do very well for WvW.

How does this ruin wvw again?…

I think that arriving yaks should be required to push the progress bar. Buildings should not upgrade simply for existing. Depriving supply is a cool option.

I like the rest of the changes though. It may remove strategic options but there were few real choices to make; the big one was waypoint or defenses.

Hopefully we will see something come in to fill the gap. Maybe they should do up the Guild upgrades and make WvW objectives into a cool guild thing? Idk.

I think there are cases to be made for both scaling with your own condi damage and your opponent’s.

Something of interest; will Chill, when transferred from yourself to an enemy, deal damage when traited for Deathly Chill?

ronpierce.2760:

Anti-dodge is referring to weapon mechanics that lock you out of being able to dodge if I’m not mistaken.

Oh I see. Isn’t this just the very first portion (about half a second) of nightfall?

Why would a weapon with large, slow, telegraphed attacks be anti-dodge?

I’m confused.

Well, if it’s condi damage, you could run Dhuumfire/Terror/Deathly Chill and go Rabid or Dire and probably do something in the field of a gajillion damage.

Why should Deathly Chill get a special pass? Nothing wrong with having something nice for condimancers and celestialmancers.

Why not unlock the Fort Marriner waypoint? Thing’s been set to off for a long long time.

maha.7902:

when you run with two sets of armour, multiple copies of weapons for different slaying sigils, a variety of different actual weapons, two sets of jewelry, have consumables, slaying potions, food and so on, yeah, you tend to fill your bag up quite quick.

Sure, you definitely can fill up a lot of slots with stuff like that. Even then, I have a hard time believing you’d fill up more than 60 slots with that kind of thing, leaving you with 100 slots to crush gear in; so functionally, you’d have around 90 slots to hold salvaged sigils?

Also, an aside; do you hold weapons with sigils in them, or just a stack of sigils? Like do you have a Greatsword with Sigil of Dredge Slaying and a Greatsword with Sigil of Flame Legion Slaying?

serenke.4806:

Have you ever done a dungeon sweep?

Yes?

Srs tho, how many effective bagslots do you have?

maha.7902:

because maybe some of us got the copper fed so we could salvage our blues and greens in the field and not have to vendor every 2 seconds?

Are your bags really so full that you both can’t upgrade them, and you need to vendor every single time you salvage?

Why not just vendor the runes? If you do your play by building up bags full of items, taking them to the vendor, buying kits and then using them to salvage, why not just vendor the runes while you’re there?

Cyninja.2954:

Since the mats are buyable on the TP, the answer is “who gives a c….?”. What about the veteran players who were not able to buy the mats off the TP? When the timegating actually mattered and had an effect on when you’ll have your item.

Learn patience.

why are you quoting me m8, i agree with you

Aranvar le Voyageur.7521:

Please could you stop to wall every topic about ascended with “No”, its becoming really annoying to have an intelligent discussion about it.

The OP asked a very straightforward question

CookieMonster.5869:

Does anyone else think it is totally not fair that we have to grind this time gated gear out?

to which there is a simple answer.

Altair.8402:

No.

Isn’t Adrenaline Rush (Warrior heal) becoming a Shout?

koffein.9374:

I’d really love to have shout “THIS WON’T END WELL” – probably AoE chill or fear …

moving on.

A hypothetical 5 Jagged Horrors from a shout means that conditions could just evaporate from you if you have Necrotic Corruption, or they could all detonate for a massive pile of (now stacking) poison dots.
It’ll only be 1 JH against a single enemy, but against enemies like Turret Engineers, Rangers (especially Spirit rangers) and Mesmers, it could very easily be an absolute monster of a skill. Reapers will be able to, er, reap AI builds in a way most classes can’t.
Going Reaper just for “Rise!” as an MM necromancer definitely seems like it’ll be a solid option. The new Death Shroud may also fit the Reaper much better than the existing Death Shroud… Though if Life Harvest is replaced by a new skill, what will Transfusion interact with?

It seems like the new specialization system is almost tailor made to allow MM necros to remain MM necros, while still being able to play with new toys; as it should, with MM being one of the most iconic Necro specs.

The main stink of Reaper that I can see at the moment is that the existing Shout runes do not really synergize well with other Necro skills. You can Shout away your conditions… So you can’t throw them at your enemy with Throw Bugs/Stinky Mark.

I’m confused. The subject title does not match the content of the post.

Yes, there will be a reason to play a normal mesmer. You may want 3 base specializations because the shield may not do much for your spec particularly compared to the pistol.

Could classes be built to be easier as their base class and harder as their elite spec? Sure.

Malisane.9461:

The European version of the User Agreement has different wording in section 4.b

Gotta love those consumer rights laws in the EU

“If an Account and/or the Service was provided without the requirement of the payment of a recurring fee upon Your acceptance of this agreement and NCSOFT in its discretion decides that access to such Account and/or Service will be subject to a required recurring fee, you may claim a refund under Section 3(d) for the Software.”

That’s pretty cool. I’m assuming this is different because the US version does not have a similar clause?

I should check if the Aussie one has this clause.

Nowhere near worth building around. It’s basically just a teensy bit more sustain for MM.

New fitg sounds good. Might try 20606 again for giggles.

I’m looking at Barbed Precision, Vampiric Precision, Vampiric and Bloodthirst in particular. Our downstate 1 is a rapid-fire effect which means it benefits a lot from on-crit procs. It’s probably not what you think of when you think ‘op nerf anet plox’ but Vampiric alone would significantly reduce how quickly we bleed out.

Maybe I’m just overthinking this, though.

Also Master of Terror working is just a flat buff to condi necros. An extra second on downedstate Fear seems like a big deal against classes which can’t ensure the stomp.

I knew that two of the MM traits – Flesh of the Master and Death Nova – didn’t work, because your minions exploded as soon as you went down, and they didn’t leave novas.

But jesus christ, 16 traits.

Might fixing these traits actually constitute a meaty buff to the class?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Or, maybe when they looked into why Flesh of the Master was killing our minions, they noticed that none of these traits were working in that situation and fixed them all.

That’s what I’m expecting.

Bit worried that Condi Revenant will hard counter condi necro, but then again, condi necro is hard countered by AutoResponse and Diamond Skin.

Other than that… Eh. It’s hard to tell how these skills will bear out without seeing them in proper play, and in interaction with their class mechanic. All of the play we saw today was devoid of stance-switching mid-combat.

I can’t wait until we see condi Revenants stacking condis on themselves, thinking they’ll be super powerful, and then just dropping dead.

Basaltface.2786:

Yea… and random skill spawning engineers are effective how?

Maybe he means random in the RAM v SAM sense.

Still got all the vanilla skins, bosses, etc. to do.

All 5. 45 character slots inc!

cillard.3986:

You are leaving out WvW from your reply.

Sure am, mostly because I don’t know jack about WvW. However, because of WvW scale and mechanics, it’s very hard to see changes having a significant impact in the short term. The meta doesn’t move very quickly at all. You can’t reasonably test the impact of the changes. Therefore, it’s better for changes to be tested in a more quickly moving meta environment (sPvP), and assume the fundamentals work more or less the same.

cillard.3986:

Also, your logic isn’t very good. Why potentially unbalance other aspects of the game to try and balance sPvP when you can just make the changes specific to sPvP only. Seems to me it is a lose-lose situation as you create more work for your company while kittening off your player base at the same time.

Because making changes to the entire ruleset of a game, rather than parts of the ruleset, means less work down the line. Making exceptions makes more work for people on both ends of the game; people programming the game need to code those exceptions and need to add separate code for each game mode, and it also makes it more difficult for the players to understand.

Sure, in a perfect world, it might be nice to have three completely different sets of rules, but that’s very difficult to execute in practice and it may not even result in the best game.

This all also assumes that they haven’t thought long and hard about the impacts of a Might nerf in PvE and decided that PvE actually does need to have Might nerfed.

Because PvE balance is relatively easy to do compared to PvP balance. If damage is too low because of these Might changes, they can do a blanket tuning down of NPC HP. I suspect, though, that ANet won’t do this, because stacking damage is a very dominant strategy in PvE and making an adjustment to Might helps to address this dominance.

Power.2957:

…It’s dead for GvGs already

Fair enough. I don’t bother going to obsidian sanctum anymore because there’s noone running portals to farm the JP chest. B^)