Guild Wars 2

displacedTitan.6897:

I think the incentive is the recipes that are only available in Tier 4?

I don’t believe there are any recipes exclusive to T4; they all unlock in T3. What T4 does is massively reduce the price of all the items available.

Good:
The zone is visually appealing and has a cool mechanic (the sandstorm switchover)
The new story steps are, mechanically, very good
Using zephyrite crystals to ascend a vertical map is a cool gimmick
The characters seem a bit more ‘full’
The zone champions are interesting and threatening

Bad:
Using the JP/aspect mechanics is necessary to enter the zone/story content at all
Characters have too much dialogue (yes you’re hooked up marjory and kasmeer we get it) (yes braham you don’t like scarlet, go outside and let the adults talk)
I don’t really want to look at Scarlet’s finger paints; too much of the story stuff is required reading
The map feels somewhat small- possibly because of the vertical design

Ugly:
I am not sure how the Nomad’s gear will play out
Quicksand is an interesting gimmick but can be kind of annoying
Dust Mite blindspam augh

So I went with “pretty good”, or whatever the 4/5 option was. It’s a solid start, and if this is the low point of the content, then we’ve got good things ahead of us!

Taimi actually kinda seems like she might have a place in the story now, and she seems to be getting a bit more personality. I’m a fan of that.

cainejw.7142:

And I thought we were clear in that we didn’t like Scarlet at all, but here she is. Again. She’s dead and this entire first chapter was once again wasting time explaining her. We don’t care. Scarlet was a crappy character. It’s time to move on from trying to get us to like or understand her, Angel. We don’t want to do either.

Something I really would have preferred here;

I would have liked it if it wasn’t a 10 minute segment with enough VA to choke a cat. I don’t think that entire block of stuff should have been required reading; a lot of it was waffling about the metaphysics of the universe when, while it is nice to know, isn’t necessary to understand the plot at hand. It should’ve been;

Bust down the door
“wow look at all this junk”
“oh here’s her diary”
braham tries to read it and he can’t because he didn’t finish elementary school
he gives it to taimi
“okay so apparently something happened in the mine isn’t that super cool! let’s go”
everybody except taimi piles out of the house because taimi is a scarlet fangirl

Then you can either stick around and read all of scarlet’s junk and talk it over with Taimi, or leave because you’ve got places to be and people to kill. The entire (mandatory) scene should have taken 2 minutes.

Arewn.2368:

Perfect example: Nexxe.
He doesn’t like this release format and is expressing as much. Many other people do, and more still will be converted and start liking it.

Statistics, please.

You like living story. Fine. Cool. Good for you. But unless you have statistical evidence, arguing that “many other people like it” is silly.

you know what would be cool? being able to change your thieves guild/ambush trap thieves to wear this

Boneheart.3561:

I think I speak for everyone in this thread when I type ’we’ve had enough of Kasmeer and Marjory’. We all clearly want a male couple, that will set things right, the majority of this thread identifies more with a same-sex male couple.

trahearne x canach pls anet. fruit salad!

It’s pretty easy to do solo. I would wager that most classes can do it.

Allow us to proceed with the content without forcing us to stop to listen to their girl issues.

Marjory. MARJORY. Stop chatting up your girlfriend and GIVE ME THE KITTEN CRYSTAL.

I strongly agree.

I think part of this ‘push’ to make outfits rather than armor pieces (if there is such a thing) is because they might be worried about how much stuff they put out.

If they put out a single armor set for one armor class, the other ones will feel left out
If they put out three at a time, that’s three times as much work to do

And if this is an issue, I think it’s an imaginary one, so long as there’s some effort put in to make it ‘fair’. I far prefer individual pieces because they’re just so much more fun to mix and match. Hopefully this is just an imagined trend, and that they’re just putting out outfits atm because it’s a new feature, rather than something that they’re actually going to do.

lordkrall.7241:

The fact remains that it is fully possible to train up jumping ability and as such this is basically a non-issue. Especially since it is permanent.

TIL I can practice jumping so much that the leashing issues which all of the zephyrite skills have because I have 400 MS for living in Australia will go away if just GIT GUD!

I’d like it if jumping were an option. However, it’s the only way to proceed. If you have bad latency, it would hypothetically be completely impossible to access the rest of the zone simply because the lightning leap has leashing issues.

Still a good rune, but less overwhelmingly so.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Is 4 truly useless? It seems situational, but I don’t think situational === useless. You’re approaching a Guardian who has Aegis up. Do you lead in with the typical Steal+CnD, and just blow Mug damage on the Block to get the CnD off, or do you throw a dagger for 3 initiative to break the aegis first? It seems like a tool to blow Aegis/Blind while at range to avoid having your actual hitters potentially miss/get blocked. Additionally, I feel like the Cripple could be useful, but maybe that’s because I don’t have a good feel for how Initiative actually plays out (which I admittedly dont’).

Sure, popping a blind or an aegis with the dancing dagger can be a use for it. Very very situational, but if you’re in that situation, then fair play to you. This isn’t anything that Head Shot couldn’t do, though.

The cripple duration is really pathetic. The only way to get a respectable Cripple duration out of it is to either spam the ability or rely on good bounces. Additionally, according to the wiki, it’s bugged and doesn’t grant the effect duration that it says it does.

As a skill overall, it could hypothetically be useful, but only under very specific circumstances. It has a few traits that could make it valuable; it’s a 100% projectile finisher with a lot of hits, so throwing it through a correct field would cause a lot of effects. Thief combo fields are few and far between, though. Beyond that, it’s basically Shortbow 1 except with a couple more bounces and an Initiative cost.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Also, I’m not sure you included this as something that needs to be looked at, but 5 being “difficult to ensure” just sounds like good design to me. If you’re comparing it to the ease of which you can enter stealth with D/P, I personally think that’s an unfair comparison as I feel the ability to leap back into stealth almost on a whim (and even land the damage from the Heartseeker that puts you into stealth) while even blinding your target in the process is complete overkill on the Easy scale.

Yeah it’s more of a ‘unique challenge to overcome’ than a ‘anet plz buff’. I’m pretty happy with CnD as is, but it is an ability that’s overshadowed by the DP combo, and you’re making a trade that you don’t really get that much out of.

Assuming you are making every celestial ascended item possible, with duplicates for offhands, you only need (24 weapons)+(18 armor pieces)=42 armor/weapons, 42*5=210 charged quartz, 10 charged quartz per stack = 21 stacks of quartz.

if you are making every possible combination.

Sors Immani.8429:

Imo, it just needs to be reworked completely. Either revert back to a higher % of efficiency, have it increase bleeding damage, have bleeds heal per tick, or cause regen when applying bleed.

IMHO roll it into one of the dagger traits. I want to say combine Dagger Mastery and Bloodthirst to create

Bloodthirst:
Lifedrain +20%
Dagger CDs -20%

Now it’s like Radiant Fire. It’s very meaty if you’re using the appropriate weapon set, but even if you’re not, you still get a dollop of something out of it.

Fundamental misunderstanding of what poison is for.

Poison is, first and foremost, a control skill. It is not like burning or bleed; it is not plain damage. You use it to make sure that your enemies can’t easily recover from your attacks. It is not like torment, confusion or retaliation; it does not directly punish a specific action. I would hesitantly say it’s most similar to Chill; where Chill slows your ability to put out pressure, Poison slows your ability to recover from or during a fight.

The damage is gravy.

Also trying to address DD by changing its 1 is silly. DD’s problems are a useless 4, a somewhat schizophrenic 3 and a difficult to ensure 5. Try fixing the stuff that definitely sucks before trying to fix the stuff that might suck.

I find Jeremy Soule’s music to be very… Jeremy Soule.

He makes pretty music, don’t get me wrong- but it’s the same music in every game he does. You can transplant TES music straight into GW2 and it doesn’t feel out of place, for example, and I’m worried that he’s kinda generic simply because he’s so popular in fantasy RPG space.

IMHO these events need a few changes. Not big ones, but a few; chiefly, giving defense events and assault events identical rewards which share a cooldown. You shouldn’t want to leave the temple undefended for the sake of better rewards.

IMHO, it really depends on what events we’re gonna get in the new zones.

Some of the events in Orr should have been heart quests. For example, the one to collect bitter omnomberries- That’s basically a heart quest redone as an event. So put them in when they make sense, but keep them out when they don’t. So long as they aren’t an obstacle to zone completion, like some of the ones where you have to transform or whatnot, I’m happy with them.

Personally I would like it if they introduced controller support before looking into moving it over to consoles. Making the controls work on a controller is one thing; moving it over to the new consoles’ operating systems is another (at least, I’m fairly sure they use different operating systems; XBone probably just uses a lamed version of Win8.1).

Besides, if you can plug your computer into a TV and play it with a controller, you’re pretty much already there. Steambox is on the way, too.

HardRider.2980:

Cleave would be a powermancer weapon.. minion and conditionmancers would have to stay ranged.
But that would also means people would need to learn to necro then.

No reason to think this. At least, not for minionmancer. Minionmancer works pretty well with Dagger, as it stands; no reason not to be up front and cleaving with your zombie chums.

Why do we always see threads with “NOW” instead of “IN A COUPLE WEEKS” or “WHENEVER YOU GET AROUND TO IT”? Will adding your pet change somehow be less effective if they do it in two weeks?

It seems that effects are always overridden by ones which occur later.

If you apply a 4 sec stun using something like Skull Crack, and then the biggest jerk Thief around taps them with Head Shot, your stun’ll get eaten by it. I don’t think you can simultaneously be affected by both Stun and Daze (or Fear, or Knockdown, or Blowout, or Knockback).

It does seem like a bizarre, self-contradictory effect, though.

There’s another one in Harathi Hinterlands, where Caudecus sends assassins after you for ‘stealing’ her daughter.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defeat_the_attacking_Ministry_Guards

These events are really cool and it would be nice if they showed up more!

I think that there should be a quest in which Trahearne dies and you take Caladbolg and this lets you equip greatswords. As any class.

More seriously, let’s just take the Spear as a base weapon and examine that.

1a- Cleaving damage
b- Cleaving damage
c- PBAoE with life force gain per hit
2- Whirl and vuln
3- Swiftness and AoE damage w/ leeching
4- AoE cripple-pull
5- Target-based movement with bleeds

Really, necros should just get landspear as a weapon.

A necromancer could hypothetically work well with condi damage based retal. It could alternately completely neuter their existing builds, because the 3 is pretty much the only button worth pressing on Axe, and changing it to Condi Damage knocks it down quite a bit.

Too much complication for too little return. Condi-based retal as a more common trait, though? Sure.

I’m just confused about who this is for.

Is it for new people? It’s pretty vague about what actually happens.
Is it for people who did the content? We’ve already had half a dozen recaps, in videos, in game cinematics, ingame NPCs…

LordByron.8369:

balancing 1vs1 is the key to balance multiple formats also.
Its way better than balancing around a silly concept like capture the point.

Okay I’ve been playing Hearthstone a bunch and I think this is mildly relevant.

Some decks give certain other decks a really hard time. This is just a fact. You have to deal with it when you’re laddering. But by that very same caveat, your deck kills certain other decks without a problem. You’ll end up with 50/50 wins, and that’s balanced.

I think that it’s really far fetched to expect any game, up to and including MMORPGs, to have meaningful balance on a 1v1 basis. It’s possible to try to perfectly balance a game for 1v1, but for a game of GW2’s size, it would be a project of unimaginably huge scope to balance- if it’s even possible. Being able to reframe the question sidesteps this entirely.

That’s not to say that 1v1 balance isn’t good. It sure is, and if it’s possible to whack a mole, it should be done, but placing perfect 1v1 balance as a realistic ultimate goal is counterproductive.

Also yeah Cleansing Ire should be grandmaster. Maybe swap its place with Spiked Armor.

Ferever.7014:

Yes I’m not a SPVP player ,but someone told me once before this system is already existent in this game and I agree. Also if I may ask can you provide an example of how it will limit experimentation so I can get a better understanding for your point of view.

You just can’t mix and match skills which may or may not improve your effectiveness(which is the experiment). I’ll use traits for an example.

Let’s say that, for example, the new set of Grandmaster traits that ANet added in were instead attached to a subclass system. Say, for example, there was an Engineer subclass which revolved around magnets, and you inherently got the turret bubble trait through becoming a Magneteer.

Would this be better or worse than the current situation, which is them as a grandmaster trait? At the moment, you can currently mix that toy with the new toys in the other line; for example, you could grab boon-on-turret and bubble-on-turret and become super turret man; it’s not necessarily viable, but it’s a fun experiment to try and see whether that’ll work. You can do tons of things like this; for example, you could grab the haste-on-knockback GM trait and the fury-on-gadget trait and become some kind of super gadgeteer.

If there are five subclasses, and each only gets one of these tools, then there are a lot of synergies, and places to experiment, which are lost for the change. It becomes a very straightforward decision, but straightforward decisions are not good things to have for encouraging imagination.

I’m reminded of this video.

I really dislike the idea of subclasses, mostly because they’re kinda sorta unnecessary with how weapons and skills are laid out.

In a game like SWTOR in particular, it makes sense, because which AC you pick drastically affects the roles you can play, the skills you can use and the weapons and general aesthetic of your class, and it’s a permanent decision. But in GW2, your abilities and what you’re playing fundamentally spring out of which weapons and utilities you use. If you use a longbow as a ranger, you are always going to be a long-ranged attacker. If you use a shortbow or axe as a ranger, you are always going to be a skirmisher.

At the moment, for sPvP anyway, subclasses are pointless because this kind of specialization already exists in the game. If there was a subclass system, then MM would be a subclass, Spirit Ranger would be a subclass, Meditation Guardian would be a subclass- formalizing it as a system adds nothing- it actually reduces the amount of experimentation you can do to try to create your own ‘subclass’.

It is still in the game, however it operates behind the scenes. You can’t see what it’s doing easily.

Personally I think Corruption is not really distinguishable enough from Vulnerability.

Thick Leather is still vendor trash.

Would be nice if they had universal costs across the board. It makes sense. 3 raw → 1 refined → 50=ecto refined.

make leaps consume endurance so that you can only do two in a row, like fireball form in sanctum sprint

While I dunno about everything here because I am really tired and my brain is relaxing, a ‘manual’ of sorts would actually be really cool to have. There are some things that new players will only learn the existence of by chance. I didn’t even know that sigils shared cooldowns until the feature patch fixed it.

Something like loading screen tips would be really cool, too.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Also, with a good Mending you could run something like this or possibly even this and have enough condi mitigation to kill your target before the conditions become a problem. Also, no one uses Burst Precision, it’s a worthless trait when Sigil of Intelligence exists.

Burst Precision could be an interesting decision when used with Sword Mainhand.

Personally I would prefer it if they waited until they had the opportunity to do a really good ele/necro CDI than put out one that they can’t capitalize on right now.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Let me give you an example then. Churning Earth: the red haired stepchild of focus earth magic.

Change the skill coefficient in PvE to 5.5, PvP to 4. The skill itself doesn’t change, it’s in both game modes a high-risk high-damage skill. But the philosophy behind using it is different: in PvE you use it as a part of a rotation if you can to increase your DPS (you aren’t expecting to ‘burst’ a boss with 10m HP down with it), in PvP you use it as a skill to wreck a target.

Same skill after the change, different philosophies for its use.

Surely you mean Dagger earth magic?

Regardless of that, you’re ignoring several elements which affect the budget of Churning Earth. It has Cripple, it has a very wide AoE effect, it has a lot of bleeds, it has a blast finisher. You’re only analysing one element of the ability, which is its direct damage- and while its direct damage may be a problem, it is one element of many, and to ignore the other elements is to underexamine the ability on a fundamental level.

Xae Isareth.1364:

And that’s the problem. You’re basically asking for them to massively change how PvE works and pretty much redesign how damage mitigation works in this game. You’re supposed to dodge often to avoid attacks, enemies are supposed to hit you hard, and the attack speed in this game was made to cater to that.

Whether that was bad game design or not, that’s an another argument but changing it would mean stripping down almost every encounter in the game and rethinking them. That’s not viable.

On the philosophy of the game aspect; you’re not supposed to dodge often enough that you’re able to avoid every single enemy attack that comes your way. You are supposed to be dodging key attacks, not every one of them. This is where the entire zerker meta springs from- kill them before you run out of dodges, because every attack which you don’t dodge will deal huge amounts of damage. If you like that, fine, agree to disagree.

On the resources aspect; don’t care. Not my problem. Not my job to ponder on what resources ANet has available.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Then you’re completely changing the way the trait works. That’s basically a new trait, that’s not balancing, that’s an overhaul.

So?…

Bad traits get reworked.

Xae Isareth.1364:

1. You don’t nessecarily need to. You often have the PvE guys and the PvP guys inside balancing teams of companies. You aren’t nessecarily paying for extra heads if you consider the fact that trying to balance for multiple game modes at once is harder than trying to balance them separately.

2. They are very different. Just the fact that one game mode has enemies with 10-100 times the HP of the other makes them very different.

3. I don’t really see how adjusting a skill’s coefficient is changing the skill right underneath them. On the topic of actually changing how a skill works, if you got a mechanic like confusion which doesn’t work in a particular game mode from a fundamental level, what other choice do you have?

1. So basically, what they already have. So no reason to change anything. Because they already think about these things.

2+3. You don’t see how adjusting a skill’s coefficient is changing the skill right underneath it, yet PvE is very different from PvP because of the exact same numbers. I do not see how these positions are mutually available.

Xae Isareth.1364:

^ confusion is a mechanic that’s based off the element of decision-making. Unless you’re going to basically completely redesign the entire mechanic and strip it of that fundamental principle, it doesn’t work in PvE.

Retaliation is another case. PvE enemies hit slow and hard. You don’t want to get hit because getting hit in PvE often means 50%+ of your HP going poof. How then do you make a mechanic based around getting hit work in PvE?

The solution I came up with after 5 seconds; increase the attack rate of enemies’ standard attacks in PvE while also reducing the damage of each individual hit to balance out the DPS. Both Confusion and Retaliation are solved by doing this, and the impact of dodging in PvE is reduced as well.

On Powerful Banners; have it increase the damage of the 1 and 4, and 2 when applicable, skills and have the damage caused by the Powerful Banners trait to also cause a PBAoE on the 5.

Xae Isareth.1364:

I’m really not convinced it does. First of all, if you want to balance every game mode at once, your balancing team needs to have detailed knowledge and extensive understanding of every aspect of the game, not just one. Harder to find someone with that knowledge (and Im convinced Anet sin’t using people with that kind if knowledge).

The balance team needs to have detailed knowledge and extensive understanding of every aspect of the game anyway, unless there are three separate balance teams, one for each core aspect of the game- in which case, we’re now paying for three times as many balance teams as before. That’s not a trivial amount.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Second of all, it’s a lot easier to adjust the equation for one variable than for 3 very different variables.

They’re not that different. They’re all fundamentally much the same thing; adjusting the amount of damage Hundred Blades does in PvE has exactly the same effect in PvE as it does in PvP.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Also, Im not exactly convinced that splitting them is ‘bad’ either. PvP and PvE have very different playstyles, even when using the same skill. You wouldn’t throw bolas/KD before you 100b something in PvE, and you wouldn’t use 100b as a part of a rotation in PvP. So a PvE player transitioning to PvP and vice versa has to essentially relearn parts of the game anyways.

This is true. However, changing a player’s experience as a result of a change in enemy behavior, and changing a player’s skills right from underneath them are two wildly different things, and you are brushing under the rug a very huge amount of learning that has to happen by saying “they have to relearn parts of the game anyway”. Yeah, they have to relearn parts of the game, but they don’t have to relearn how their own controls work.

Personally I would adore it if the three borderlands were each different. There wouldn’t be a random rotation of them, for each location; it’s just a simple “green borderlands is different from blue borderlands is different from red borderlands”.

I would say necromancer.

Your tools as a Mesmer do not fit well with wearing the arrow. You want to portal bomb something? It’s gonna be hard, because all the zerglings will follow you. Blink around and whatnot? You’ll disorient your zerglings. Even in an organised group, you’ll have a lot more work communicating to make sure that your tricks are understood by your own team. While these tools are very nice to have, they are not very nice for you to have while you’re wearing a dorito.

Necromancers don’t do fancy movements and they don’t do anything tricky.

It is not necessarily like hambow because it is OP- You don’t magically slough off your weaknesses like Hambow does; you’re still vulnerable to CC and you’re still vulnerable when your bag of tricks runs dry(arguably even moreso because the other player controls when you run out of tricks, not you). An MM can be a tricky shellfish to crack open for the uninitiated, but once you get past the razzle dazzle of the zombie horde, you can knock them down.

It arguably has a low skill floor, depending on whether you consider finagling the fine aspects of the AI to be a measurement of skill or not. You could argue that this makes it similar to Hambow in a respect.

Would be nice if you could swap everything up to and including armor and trinkets.

I want an entire second set of gear slots, so I can press a button and switch to and from my regular gear. If possible, even attach talents to it.

Also this won’t be a problem in spvp because just disable it in solo/team queue.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Name one other good heal that forces you to do that

good is a point of view, anakin!

More seriously, Ether Feast operates in the same way. I don’t know whether it’s ‘good’ but it’s there.

I actually kinda like this interpretation of Thief Torch. My personal interpretation was something along the lines of “arson, arson with a side of arson”.

They should change Healing Signet’s passive to increase healing power.

Mostly just because I think it would be funny.

They can still add world bosses and zerg content or whatnot as part of the ‘living story’ releases. It just won’t be the story components.

Look at the patch with Marionette and Wurms in it, for example- You would have to pay gems to visit Scarlet’s hideout, but you wouldn’t have to pay to do the open world content/bosses. This is hopefully not the scope that the gem-bought content will have- it’ll be bigger- but at a glance it seems like it could be how it’ll work.

Zok.4956:

I do not have a problem to pay for an add-on. But in the end, my experience shows, that micro-transactions tend to become more expensive than buying a “complete” add-on.

Greetings.

Hopefully once a season is all wrapped up they’ll have deals, like being able to buy the entire season for less than it would cost to buy all the chapters individually, specials, etc etc.