Nalhadia – Kaineng
Traveler = no need for singet of locusts = free utility slot = more damage/utility. I love it.
Assuming you never use your Locust Sig, yeah.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
A few thoughts;
1. As the supply of golems drains from the TP (and they are draining) the price of golems will rise. This is good, the problem will fix itself to an extent over time.
2. The money supply is being inflated, making it easier to get the money to buy a golem. Today’s 5g is yesterday’s 1g, etc etc. This is bad; the price of golems from the vendor will not rise to match it. Only Mithril and Elder Wood prices will rise, and whether they will rise is questionable, and they’re a minimal portion of the overall price of an Omega.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
yesterday one guy of our server got an ascended weapon drop from ther champion in a tower
bad thing is you can only choose the weapon type not the stats so he got healing power vita and condi dmg
and yes the difference will be big if you use full ascended vs exotics i think will be arround 200 primary stats at least
Was it soulbound or account bound?
Sucks you cant choose the stats but did we really think it would be a good system?
If you have a decent spread of alts, you can probably make use of every weapon stat.
It’s a shame there’s a certain character-based levelling system that completely undermines that, though…
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Flipping paper keeps as we were yesterday is a lot faster than waiting for Temple runs to start.
I think this is what these numbers are tuned around.
What if it were possible to adjust the rewards depending on how well upgraded an objective is? My 2c. WvW building upgrade system needs revisions overall.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
At the very least, it should have been better tested. Lag breaks more than a few mechanics.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Jatoro’s/Errol’s/Yakkington’s. You should probably also be able to get it from CoE tokens, but don’t quote me on it.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
but throughout history they had permadeath,
you don’t plan on complaining on the cosmic forum that is the afterlife?
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Well this is… Interesting. On the one hand, it might encourage people to move from PvE to WvW as there’s not really any shortage of objectives to take. On the other hand, it’s gonna exacerbate the merry-go-round.
A few thoughts;
1. What if there were daily/weekly WvW categories, and they rewarded these materials, with defense events included in the table?
2. What if the Gatherer Power of the Mists bonus granted the chance to gather Ascended mats from existing nodes, possibly WvW exclusive nodes?
Also, an unabashedly good thing; they said that anything that would drop these mats would have a chance to drop ascended weapons. Chug through enough objectives and you might get lucky.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
While they will rise in price, it’s still something to be worried about with general inflation of the money supply.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
DevonCarver then please lower the cost on carrying supply to 10-20-30-40-50 or something like that. (that is still 150lvl to max out)
This sounds very reasonable, I think, or maybe to 15 per rank. Them being expensive is a good thing, seeing as carrying supply affects just about everything you do.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
It should be time gated so there is some meaning to specializing in something, instead of rich player = master of all. Respec every season or every reset makes sense.
Then what if a player actually change their class specialty?
We can respec for 3 kitten silvers, changing between bunkers, dps, cc support, whatever.
Why shouldnt we be able to change our WvW mastery to match when we change our build?
Maybe a dps build want various siege masteries and building, as they will stay in the back. Maybe a bunker want a bunch of defensive masteries. And when a bunker change to dps for 3 kitten silvers… He’s stuck with useless masteries.
Its not rocket science, Anet. Its 3 kitten silvers worth of logic.
If you can retrait whenever you need to play a specialised role, what good is getting more than 300 skill points? You can just change to whatever specialised role needs filling at the time. Breadth is supposed to be a desirable attribute, not the standard.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Honestly, I hope that the leagues won’t really change the way we play too much, other than put the worlds into smaller overall pools of realms. It really depends on what exactly the rewards will be; if it’s literally just a lump of WXP and a few fancy stomps, I doubt people will be too worried about moving servers to try to get that.
Hopefully, they stay really invested in changing how actually participating in WvW offers rewards.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I’m skeptical. I don’t think hard limitations on when you can get points on your server is a good idea. I think having rotating days is an especially bad idea and is going to alienate guilds which can only play on certain days; like if you’re a weekend guild and if you get three weeks in a row where you can’t contribute? People are gonna trickle out because they (rightfully) don’t feel like they’re contributing.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I would be fine with this, as long as they don’t add new masteries.
I don’t have a problem with new masteries. I have a problem with new masteries being the only thing delivered with a patch. If we’re effectively getting patches every two months (and i’m assuming they’re going to have a few weeks’ breaks in between seasons), then they better be godkitten big patches and not just 5 masteries stickytaped together.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Interesting. So if it does happen every season, we can probably expect to see a reset every 2 months, assuming season length doesn’t change.
I can’t remember whether I read it already somewhere, but when the season starts, will there be a moratorium on new WvW updates?
Nalhadia – Kaineng
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
I don’t think that it’s so much Living Story fatigue as it is zergy-zergy-zerg fatigue. The last two months’ prime content has been zergy; the pavilion was a roundabout of zergs, the new event is pretty obviously a zerg.
Thankfully, with SAB up next, that can’t really be zerged at all, as it’s obviously a solo/small group endeavor and an opportunity to calm the pace down. Hopefully ANet figures that they should probably just spend one fortnight doing heavy zergy content every few months, as doing it for too long gets pretty tiring.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
The idea here is to look at recent WvW ratings and match up worlds in similar levels,
Problem is there is little similarity in levels between servers.
Each league will end up like this :
1 or 2 servers that will always finish at the top
1 or 2 servers that will always finish at the bottom
and the rest that will always finish between those two extremes.As long as there will be no mechanisms to even up the strengths between servers, this idea of creating leagues will not works.
I’m wondering if the Anet peoples in charge of WvW are even taking a look at how that part of the game is going on, sometimes….
This assumes that the server populations will be stagnant. Hopefully there’ll be some kind of incentive for guilds to move around between servers, both in and out of the league. It might sound kind of weird, but I think that GvG will probably be the best way to actually encourage people to bounce around season to season, assuming there aren’t more changes in the pipe to GvG.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
what would be a beneficial activity to encourage people to defend? 1WXP per second? every 10 seconds? every minute?
IMO, you’d be better off with objectives offering less points immediately as they’re ticked. So for example, as soon as you capture an objective, it only grants 50%, and every tick you hold it brings it up by 25%.
And maybe double camp points baseline, seeing as 90% of them are flipping quite frequently.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I really hope that material rewards are based on participating rather than winning. If the end of the season does not reward any items/gold/etc, then I can’t see much of a motive for bandwagoning. tPvP back-ends its rewards, hotjoin doesn’t, for a reason, and WvW is far more analogous to hotjoin than tPvP.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
How is this done…..I hope Anet does it based solely on WvW populations
It’s no secret that coverage = wins in WvW
There’s no magic quotient for “skill” in the leaderboards. If wins are determined by coverage as you say, then the leaderboards are absolutely an analysis of coverage, so they can just set up the leagues by the leaderboards.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
It is kinda kitteny, but you can use 1 point in Supply Capacity to juke how many ticks you get, which is something at least. That should change your ticks to -6-6-4.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I’m of two minds about this.
On one hand, it’s timegated, which is kitten in the long term. On the other hand, my accessories are pink and my clothes are orange, and they clash horribly.
Really though, WvW could use some structural changes so that the weapon damage vs hp/toughness isn’t thrown out of whack. While I like a tier beyond Exotic gear in theory I think the execution leaves something to be desired.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Axe 2 tracks when they stealth? I haven’t noticed that even though it’s my primary weapon. They seem to come off no worse for the wear when I try it.
Depends on the thief.
If they’re moderately tanky, then you can for the most part shrug off their attacks and if you can get a good CC chain on them (bonefiend immob/charge/double fear) you can work them down.
If they’re full zerks, then it’ll be hard and fast, but if you can land one of those tracking abilities it’ll deal a very significant amount of damage and Death Shroud 4 and 5 can wipe them up.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
And Fetid Consumption is God mode against many sustained damage builds. 4 Rune of vampirism + 2 melandru, fetid consumption, dagger off-hand, full minion bar (including Blood Fiend), and you’re looking at massive condi removal, and massive HP regen.
I’m personally quite partial to Lyssa runes. A full condi clear along with more boons for you, particularly Fury, can help a good bit on flipping situations, and Flesh Golem’s short Charge CD lets you use it pretty quickly- quicker than the rune’s CD, even. Only problem is that spawning the Golem in the first place will eat your Lyssa CD too. If you get super lucky you can get something nice on the Blood Fiend raise, too, but RNG is RNG.
I would also like to add that shadow fiend is good against stealth thieves. When they pop out of stealth, you use its ability before they restealth to track their position when it hits. You can hit that area with aoes and they will most likely fail their first attack out of stealth. Its long activation is a boon in this instance.
Bhawb’s suggested using Axe, and the Axe 2 will track them even while you’re in stealth for 2 1/4 seconds. I use Dagger MH and Dagger 2 will also track them for 3 seconds.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
What’s happening? They realized WvW is part of the game ?
Good one!
Ya’ll should do an AMA or something. That’d be neat.
I don’t even know what AMA stands for, but yeah, the dialogue this past week’s been pretty good.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I do not recommend putting 30 into blood line to get the minions to take your conditions. I’ve found that this causes them to die very fast. As for MM being a face roll build, I am beaten often by good players. I faced a ranger the other day in wvw who I couldn’t beat. He appeared to be a signet build who could tank and put out lots of conditions. He would lock me in place with chill/cripple/bind and throw conditions and aoe while his pet worked on me. He ignored my minions so I was getting as full dps on him as you can expect to get on a ranger. I reset my bar to have consume conditions and well of power to remove the ball and chains but, once they were on cd, I was once again eating his full dps and taking on a lot of conditions. I run a 20/0/30/20/0 build with 30% minion dmg. Can anyone tell me what I could’ve done to beat him?
Dying is a natural part of minions. If the conditions are enough to kill a minion, then they’re also enough to kill you, so you dodged a bullet with that transfer. Fetid Consumption taking away a condition stack before staff 4 can be a bit of a pain, though.
Low variation of conditions is exactly where Fetid Consumption shines. It drops off when you’re facing an enemy that can frequently apply 5+ conditions, but with a full roll of minions, 4 or less conditions will have a rough time sticking to you. If you need a hard condition dump, staff 4 is the way to go, but minions can only soften frequent heavy condition dumps, not completely erase them.
You built with presumably MM traits and are surprised when your output dropped when you didn’t have minions equipped?
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Some kind of at least very vague command system that we could use would be really helpful. Simple “focus on that target” “come back to me” commands would be lovely.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
According to my tests, Shadow Fiend has an attack speed of ~1.65 seconds, Flesh Wurm ~4 seconds, Shadow Fiend does 350 per attack, Flesh Wurm 833, Shadow is then 212 DPS, Flesh Wurm 208. So yeah, it is really close, and in combat I’m sure most would argue that Flesh Wurm would out DPS shadow because of melee vs ranged (one reason why I think shadow fiend is very subpar in general as a minion).
Anyway, that said, if you are playing as an MM and you don’t have Bone Minions I have major questions. They are your only meaningful source of real “burst”, dealing up to 4-5k total every 18s when traited. If it wasn’t for them, I’d lose a lot of my 1v1s simply because you very rarely can wear someone down with otherwise meh DPS, especially when you’re on the later half of a fight when it is difficult to have all minions up at once, giving you the chance to have full AA pressure plus your own DPS. Bone Minions forgo all that, you press a button twice and they’ve dropped people a significant chunk of HP.
The above is why Shadow Fiend rarely finds a place on my bar except in very specific hybrid builds that are super defensive and have Melandru runes (lolstuns?). They are matched in DPS by other minions, their “utility” is subpar in most situations (compared to the amazing burst/escape/lockdown of the other 3), and most of what he can do on paper is even harder in reality because he is melee and his active has a HOLYCRAPWHATWEREYOUTHINKING long animation.
If I were to give Shadow Fiend any position, I’d probably put it into a Fetid Consumption build. Bone Minions aren’t really minions that can capitalise on Fetid Consumption as chances are they won’t live long enough to actually proc it, but the Shadow Fiend is one that you keep out permanently and I think has the tankiness to survive direct attacks as well as the conditions that it eats.
Haunt, though, is absolutely rubbish and really the animation should be either instant (like pretty much every utility you use primarily for blinding) or something tiny like .5 sec.
Again, though, I’m like rank 28 so don’t take what I say too seriously. I don’t even know how much HP Shadow Fiends and Bone Minions have.
I used a lot MM build, but I didn’t like the flesh wurm.
Yes, it is indeed usefull. However, I had the feeling that I was forced to play a too static role, which is the main problem of MM build.
You don’t have switness (unless you replace focus with warhorn, which isn’t a good idea), you can’t jump cliff cause minion will do the walking path to reach you (if there is any, otherwise they will tp near you. But this happens only when you enter in the first place in the arena).
So, with this huge stiffness, using a minion that bounds me in a specifi place it makes me more stiff, and I don’t like it. Especially cause MM build is NOT a point holder. It’s not a guardian, it’s no ele….the moment you are 1vs2 you instantly explode.But…in 1vs1 you faceroll people.
I find it’s the other way around; the Flesh Wurm gives you much more ability to poke because you know you can always teleport yourself back to somewhere safe and hopefully away from the enemy.
I’ve also experimented a bit with Signet of the Locust for the sake of keeping that mobility. It has a nasty long CD, but if you can hit enough targets, like in group fights in WvW, Spirit Rangers and other MMs, you can get some great healing if you have Bloodthirst; something in the field of 6-7k heals in my PvE gear if you can nab the full five targets.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
From what I was told months ago from a Developers wife, they tried to add it in but encountered some massive bug which is why we got the 1 Respec.
My uncle works for Nintendo, and he said that we got the 1 respec because the devs felt bad about people buying a skill that was subsequently nerfed, so they gave us a refund.
One of GW2’s strengths is the ability to test out builds – we need this for our WXP builds!
I think this is kind of a problem? You can’t really poke around and see exactly what all these super special awesome 75 point abilities actually do. How do you even judge how effective Burning Shell is when you have to spend that much WXP on it?
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Y’know what’d be super neat? A completely plain map which guilds can fight in. No Power of the Mists, no Borderlands Bloodlust, no nothing. Just three gates in, and a whole lot of bodies.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Just a note, Shadow Fiend has 2nd highest DPS (Flesh Wurm is third).
Is it? I remember seeing something that indicated otherwise, but that was quite a while ago. I’m still inclined to say that Flesh Wurm’s important because of the stunbreaker/escape. You should still be able to fit both in.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
So how much exactly do we know about the materials required?
A. There are materials which are constructed from other, lower-tier materials. Most crafting mats are obtainable in WvW; the main difficulty is rare crafting mats. PVE does have an advantage, but we don’t know how much by.
B. There are materials which are granted by completing some kind of content on a daily basis, and WvW was explicitly included as an example of this. I don’t know whether we should assume this is “daily per content” so you can get one by JPing, one by wvwing, one by pveing… Or whether it’s “material per day” in which case WvW is enough to get it.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I’m not an authority on anything, so take it with a grain of salt, but;
I personally don’t find Bone Minions worthwhile without the trait that makes them apply a poison field when they die/are exploded.
Flesh Wurm is pretty vital, though annoying to have to place every fight. The stunbreak is vital, and it does the most damage out of any minion bar Flesh Golem and Bone Minion explosions. Use it and get used to placing it/blowing it up after every fight.
I personally use Dagger MH for 2’s synergy with Bloodthirst which synergises with Vampiric Master, and the 3 helps a lot with landing Bone Fiend immobs, but Axe also has its appeal. Staff’s a no-brainer. I seem to be able to get away with using Knight’s rather than Soldier’s for the sake of a bit of extra personal damage.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Why not just add a new golem blueprint instead of allowing them to transform?
Now that I think about it, you know what would be cool? Siege tanks, SC style. You drive them around and they can’t do much but plink at fortifications, but you can deploy them and they turn into beasts.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Honestly I think they could still achieve the trinity that they intend. I don’t think they need to completely rework the game, just look to some of the encounters which really tested the player’s abilities. The game really shines when players are confronted with wave encounters rather than single bosses, for example, as we saw with the Support instances in Cutthroat Politics; use them more often.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Perma Death character creation.
In short, create a character and level to 80. If along the way you die you lose everything and start over, from scratch, using a new name. Name of fallen character is kept track your awards page.
If you hit 80, without death, you are granted a precursor of your choice and a title.
Ironman mode?
IMO, just give an achievement for getting a character to level 80 as an Ironman, along with an account badge like the Explorer one.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
This has been in the game since d1.
…Diablo 1?
But yeah this has always been in the game, AFAIK.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
so, some day will I have all mastery?
Because my problem is, I change the goal of my character and now I can’t back all points that I learned until now.
are you fine with these?
ps: ( sorry, english isn’t my main language )
Yep.
Think about whether you’re buying something that you actually need before buying it.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Because you can just get more.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Maybe gem rewards for winning? Small amounts like 25 for winning 17 for 2nd and 8 for 3rd?
Eligibility would need to be establish. Maybe off the daily system?
Gem rewards is, in my opinion, not a very good idea. As they are now, they make a decent barometer for how the economy’s going, and amounts like 25gems is trivially small.
Also, I don’t think having participation and victory tied together is a good idea. That will encourage stronger blowouts. Have rewards at the end of the week in two ‘chests’;
Chest 1’s the server score-based chest. Give it maybe the same contents as a Solid Ocean end chest and a FotM reward chest put together, with roughly the same contents; Ascended gear, crafting mats, a few currencies and a few pieces of loot. You get a small chest for coming third, a medium chest for coming second, and a large chest for coming first, but the rewards aren’t really anything that you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. Encourage people to drop in for maybe an hour a week and they get enough credit for it; something to get people’s feet wet.
Chest 2’s the personal contribution chest. Have a big chart detailing everything that the player got involved in, and give some really meaty rewards which scale directly with personal contribution, including things like fancy models which can’t be gotten any other way, high chances of an Ascended piece or two, good chances for Superior siege, etc.
Optionally, a third chest for taking and holding a location for your guild, which grants guild commendations, guild rewards, etc. Claiming an objective just so you can give it +5 supply and that being the lot of it seems silly to me.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I think all our alts should have this +50% booster active at all times till they get to same rank that you highest character is at. My main is +400r already and even with the increased wxp rates and liquid wxp bottles, i still dont feel like playing any other class in www.
I was actually thinking this would be a good idea; if I recall correctly, WoW has a similar system with its reputations as of not long ago.
Could even make it a ranked ability. +20/40/60/80/100% for 2/6/12/20/30 points.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Why not dump the scraps and just have the tickets drop at the accelerated rate? Everything costs a million tickets to buy, anyway. Even if you get lucky and get 5 tickets from 5 chests, that’s still 450 gems worth of keys.
I wonder if Dragon’s Jade will get changed over to tickets.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Also, new mastery skills = ew without account-wide wxp.
People don’t seem to quite get the implications behind this. If you make it account-wide, you can simply keep/farm the points you make on your main character(s) and then invest those with a twink who solely exists for a gimmick, like said Treb Mastery.
And if you do that, you can just ask to introduce fully refundable traits, since people would abuse it as a quasi-reset anyway.
So you’re really asking for something more far-reaching than account-wide WXP.
Sorry, yes, my mistake. Should have said account-wide ranks.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Cool, good to hear.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Out of curiosity, can you get the WxP boosters from BL chests/rankup chests?
Also if Devon wants to have a poke at talking about something that’s coming down the line but fair enough if you can’t say; we know that at some point Magic Find is going to be removed and turned into some kind of permanent account unlock consumable… Thing. Is this going to just be Magic Find, or are you going to be able to increase XP/Karma/etc? If yes, WXP too?
Nalhadia – Kaineng
I wonder if this is the entire list of changes or whether there’ll be more on the Borderlands. With the Quaggans presumably out of a home, we need new mercenaries. Veteran Wurm for new mercenary?
Also, I hope this isn’t getting in the way of new borderlands maps?
Also, new mastery skills = ew without account-wide wxp.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
That was the original plan, but a variety of factors led to the decision of shortening the painterly cinematic and doing the rest via the in-game systems.
Please please please try to put more of it into either the painterly cinematics or into the Personal Story style dialogues. I’m guessing that Personal Story style dialogues are really easy to produce compared to the painterly style, and using them will probably let you completely bypass these problems.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
. . . you realize the last time we had this attempt, it was Kormir and Abaddon, Gwen and the Vanguard, and Trahearne. I liked all these things but I recognize they really . . . fell short for a rather large amount of people.
I don’t know about anyone else, but if Scarlet were on Trahearne’s level, I’d think much more highly of this content. I’d probably be around ‘meh, at least i can enjoy the mechanical improvements’ rather than ‘guess i’m spending this fortnight chewing on my steam backlist’.
Nalhadia – Kaineng
Mm, no, the problem might be that the LS writers are trying to have it be “fun and entertaining” as opposed to “stirring and exquisite writing”. Which is good, because people shooting for “stirring and exquisite writing” sometimes risk missing the mark and moving right on into “boring and pretentious” or too far into “just plain boring”. Like shooting for Inception and instead getting Minority Report.
Might be more fun and entertaining if I could actually relate to the villain’s motive, let alone believe that the villain could actually exist in the narrative. They may as well have just said that freak weather conditions interrupted the festival; at least they don’t have to try to explain why a hurricane graduated from all three asura colleges.
Nalhadia – Kaineng