Guild Wars 2

Limnage.9581:

Servanin.5021:

Battle presence – 84 per second, and competes with the amazing Pure of Voice.

First world Guardian problems: both Grandmaster support traits are so good it’s hard to choose between them. Imagine if the Grandmaster traits in your support line didn’t even help allies at all. That would suck, huh? Imagine a world where your traits have little to no synergy with other traits in the line, where each trait line seemed to be a random mish-mash of effects with no organization.

For regen, you forgot regen on resolve from inspired virtue, random regen from Pure of Voice, and increased boon duration from the Virtues line. It may not always be 100%, depending on Pure of Voice activations, but in practice I’ve noticed that with a Guardian in my party I almost always have regeneration up. Of course if you go Battle presence instead of Pure of Voice then you actually do have a 100% mini-regeneration on your whole team.

Inspired virtue’s regen is 5 seconds out of every 57, didn’t seem relevant. Battle presence isn’t that good for the same reason that most small heals aren’t very useful; If a player is capable of surviving 20 seconds for their heal to come back up, they probably didn’t need 84 HP/second from you.

Best way for a cleric guardian to support it to try and get the mobs to attack you instead, so you can use your own massive healing and mitigation to soak up all non-circle damage.

Limnage.9581:

Servanin.5021:

Limnage.9581:

Servanin.5021:

What kind of healing do you think Guardians are bringing?

Altruistic healing only heals the guardian. Empower is 1500 + 80%(?) of Healing power, Restorative Mantras is 2600 + 20% of healing power. Mantra of pain has a shorter cooldown.

I guess theres the might stacks from Empower, but its 600 yard range. You are unlikely to hit more than two people with it.

Are you serious? Just look at this list:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Healing
This is not even considering traits that give more healing for Guardians.

Guardians can put out way more healing than restorative mantras, and they don’t have to sit there spamming Mantra of Pain channel and doing nothing else.

But did you look at the values and uptime of those heals? They either have an incredibly small value, or a very long cooldown.

Symbol of Faith, Ray of Judgement, Hold the Line: Regeneration, not unique.
Orb of Light: 980, 15 second CD
Empower: 1500 after 3.5 seconds, 20 second CD
Faithful Strike: 463, 3rd auto-attack for mace
Merciful Intervention: 2152, 80 second CD
Sanctuary: 2660, 120 second CD

Not sure about Tome of Courage. I’ve never seen anyone use it, and i haven’t used it. Renewed Focus seems to be the definitive guardian elite.

Uber guardian self healing is self only. Altruistic healing is actually quite selfish.

Orb of Light is 12 seconds, not 15. Also, so what if regeneration is not unique? It’s still amazing, and Guardians can keep it on their group with basically 100% uptime. Only regen Mesmers can provide their group is Phantasmal Regeneration, with it’s horrible 10second startup time and miniscule 240 AoE range.

Yes, Altruistic Healing is selfish. That’s why it’s in the Valor line. Did you even look at Honor, the support line for Guardians? It has loads of party healing, and it blows Inspiration out of the water. Seriously, it’s so much better it’s ridiculous.

Pure of Heart – Don’t know, never used it before

Writ of the Merciful – 107 + 7.5% of healing power per second. Just as ranged restricted as banners or phantasmal dualist.

Battle presence – 84 per second, and competes with the amazing Pure of Voice.

Where are you getting 100% regen uptime for guardians?

Hold the line is 6 seconds, 35(28) second cooldown.
Save yourself is 10 seconds, 60(48) second cooldown and self only
Symbol of Faith is 4 seconds, 8 second cooldown
Ray of Judgment is 3 seconds, 25 second cooldown. It’ll bounce and hit twice for 6 seconds if you are alone.

So to regen someone else, you could do symbol of faith, ray of judgment, hold the line, then symbol of faith again for 17 seconds, with an 8 second gap before the next symbol of faith or ray of judgment.

By the way, if you think 240 is small, symbols have a 120 yard radius in melee range, 180 if you take Writ of Exaltation which competes with Superior Aria, 20% shout cooldown reduction.

I didn’t say that they can sit at 1200 ranged and just auto-attack, I said that it seems that people intend to roll traditional long ranged DPS classes so they can put out high numbers while minimizing the risk, and that GW2 does not support that.

What does “Ranged Tank” mean to you? To me, it means that under all circumstances, the TC wants to maximize survival, combining tankiness with being far away from danger.

Limnage.9581:

Servanin.5021:

What kind of healing do you think Guardians are bringing?

Altruistic healing only heals the guardian. Empower is 1500 + 80%(?) of Healing power, Restorative Mantras is 2600 + 20% of healing power. Mantra of pain has a shorter cooldown.

I guess theres the might stacks from Empower, but its 600 yard range. You are unlikely to hit more than two people with it.

Are you serious? Just look at this list:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Healing
This is not even considering traits that give more healing for Guardians.

Guardians can put out way more healing than restorative mantras, and they don’t have to sit there spamming Mantra of Pain channel and doing nothing else.

But did you look at the values and uptime of those heals? They either have an incredibly small value, or a very long cooldown.

Symbol of Faith, Ray of Judgement, Hold the Line: Regeneration, not unique.
Orb of Light: 980, 15 second CD
Empower: 1500 after 3.5 seconds, 20 second CD
Faithful Strike: 463, 3rd auto-attack for mace
Merciful Intervention: 2152, 80 second CD
Sanctuary: 2660, 120 second CD

Not sure about Tome of Courage. I’ve never seen anyone use it, and i haven’t used it. Renewed Focus seems to be the definitive guardian elite.

Uber guardian self healing is self only. Altruistic healing is actually quite selfish.

Yeah, I just sucked it up and bought a focus and switch it out whenever there is an abundance of ranged enemies around.

Air and earth focus are great. Fire focus seem just awful though. Fire shield sucks, Flame wall is the exact same thing as ring of fire, but clunkier and only in a straight line.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/70080-guardian-effective-dps-tests/

This is not exactly what i’d call a minimal advantage. I don’t know what they can really do about it though – I don’t think the Anet is going to go review every encounter and remove or nerf things like the Charr Fractal boss’s fiery greatsword whirling blade.

Kill shot was awful and not worth the time it took to get the adrenaline. It was better to just stay at max adrenaline and make use off the traits with increasing benefits off of adrenaline.

As far as I know, ranger shortbow and longbow have not been touched since release.

Warrior ranged still isn’t as good as warrior melee. Nobody’s range is as good as melee. Its a little weird to wrap your head around it at first, since a lot of people seem to make rangers or elementalist with the intent of being “high, safe from danger DPS” and it turns out they need to be in melee range to do so like everyone else.

GW2 doesn’t have room for energy management because the skill system isn’t very flexible. Your first five slots are locked, and having a skill category to balance energy usage under utility would make it mandatory to have, leaving only two slots open for utility skills.

If we had 8 open slots and a variety of energy management skills/traits, that would be another story.

Initiative is not very well designed for thieves either. Roll for initiative is okay, but you tend not to see the specific effects of the traits in combat and it has no impact on how you play.

Red circle attacks shouldn’t be able to kill you from one mistake. They don’t in action games without RPG elements even on the highest difficulty settings with no health power-ups.

Getting rid of Defiant could also go a long way too. Your average group isn’t likely to have the co-ordination to permanently stun/KD chain a boss anyways, between the huge CDs and tiny durations on them. Even if an organized group can, shouldn’t teamwork be rewarded?

Karizee.8076:

http://www.gw2armor.com/

Does not include crafted sets or sets you find while leveling.

The majority of those sets are all locked behind dungeons or rare/exotic crafting. Between the general disdain for running dungeons and the significant amount of grinding needed for either of them, it should come as no surprise that very few people will see them.

So aside from that, I think there are 3-4 different item skins from 1-40 per armor type. Another 2-3 from 41-60, and 2-3 more at 61-79.

Survivability difference between armor types isn’t that big. Comparing 3 level 80 exotic sets:
Light – 920
Medium – 1064
Heavy – 1211

So, its 291 armor between Light and Heavy. With scepter and 10 points into earth, you can get 250 toughness from rock barrier and 170 from obsidian focus, 100 from the trait point investment and 80 from stone flesh.

Sure, it requires you to use a scepter, but 520 toughness while in air or 600 in earth is pretty great for 10 points.

Base HP at 80 is the lowest, tied with guardians and thieves, and guardians certainly don’t seem to have survivability issues.

If you are fragile, its because you chose to be.

I do Illusionary riposte, mirror image, blurred frenzy + shatter. Shatters work like instant abilities and can be used even while you are attacking.

My problem is ranged or AoE enemies. They constantly kill illusions and phantasms as they spawn.

What kind of healing do you think Guardians are bringing?

Altruistic healing only heals the guardian. Empower is 1500 + 80%(?) of Healing power, Restorative Mantras is 2600 + 20% of healing power. Mantra of pain has a shorter cooldown.

I guess theres the might stacks from Empower, but its 600 yard range. You are unlikely to hit more than two people with it.

Malefactor.2971:

Do you feel that maybe the developers are limited in what they can do with boss type encounters due to their removal of the “holy trinity”? Did they perhaps design themselves into a corner by trying to be different?

In WoW, tanks have no mechanics in raids but to pick up adds that spawn and swap aggro to prevent stacking mechanics. For healers, there is usually an unavoidable amount of raid damage going out, with everything else being possible to avoid.

These are mechanics that are there specifically to give tanks and healers something to do, and boss encounters even in WoW could probably be created without them by just removing those, but they can’t because its too deeply ingrained into the design.

So no, there doesn’t need to be a trinity to have more boss fight diversity, GW2 just doesn’t have it.

43, power/precision traits and gear, I can pretty much gather an indefinite number of melee mobs and AoE them all down with no trouble.

However, seems like it only takes one or two ranged to kill me. Ranged attacks can’t be dodged with distance or strafing; Strafing around a centaur archer makes it shoot forward so it looks like its visually missing me, but still hits me.

I can dodge them, but at 10 second cooldown per dodge, i can’t exactly do it forever and Elementalist don’t seem to have any utility that reflect, just long cooldown/short duration blocks/invulnerability.

So, how do you D/D elementalist deal with it? Am i just gonna have to suck it up and switch to D/F?

Zelkovan.2630:

I don’t know why the hell people are complaining about zones being empty, i’ve played tons of other MMO’s and their lower level zones were empty as well (including you-know-what) and it seemed no one ever cared. But dear god, a patch that shows up that people overreact over and now apparently it’s broken the game and everything is going to hell.

As for my server, there are definitely people playing in zones. Just the other day i ran with a huge zerg of people in Kessex doing hearts and events. Orr in itself just isn’t very solo-able at all, plus the fact that they nerfed Orr makes it even worse.

Probably because population is central to GW2’s experience, while in other MMOs questing is a solo activity where you don’t want to see other people.

Reminds me of one month into Rift, after everybody has stopped doing rifts and the world is overrun by them with nobody to do them with. Luckily they eventually fixed that. Its a similar situation to here, where they built it for the first month and not a day longer.

That being said, I do see a lot more people in the open world than I did last week. 80% of GW2LFG is still Fractals, but people are also getting sick of it.

Swords for elementalist, both mainhand and offhand. Considering that Elementalist don’t actually swing their daggers at all, there doesn’t really seem to be any difference between the two except cosmetics.

Ranged in general is a lot worse than melee for every class. You ever try killing someone with Warrior Longbow, or Rifle before they buffed kill shot?

Its called opportunity cost. Even for rangers, their melee is a lot better than ranged. I guess crossfire can be pretty potent, but why are you standing there with your back facing a ranger for an extended period of time?

biggs.4702:

The problem I see from many of these replies is assumed skill: you think you’re a good enough player, but the proof you are not is that you get killed. Some of the story quests are indeed difficult, but nothing which cannot be overcome.

All mobs have animations which play before an ability is cast, but you may not see it because you weren’t paying attention. The biggest one is what some people have called “dusting” where the mob appears to gather energy to itself before unleashing the attack (which, I guess, kinda looks like gathering dust, hence the term). This dusting can be very short but often it’s plenty long enough to see… if you’re watching.

As for the risen hylek (well, any hylek, for that matter) and their rapid-fire dart abilities: every profession has abilities that reflect projectiles. If you’re not smart enough to use them, I don’t know what else to tell you other than dodge, which of course you should be doing, anyway. Often the biggest source of damage when fighting multiple mobs is ranged attacks from the other mobs you’re currently not trying to damage. You have to use block/reflect/absorb/dodge abilities or you’re toast.

I find it insane how cheap potions are on the trading post: for goodness’ sake, use them. Eat them like candy. You can’t laugh off an additional 10% damage dealt to a class of mobs plus -10% incoming damage from mobs (hello Potent Potion of Undead Slaying… oh, how I love you!).

Channeled ranged abilities can’t be dodged. You’ll evade one or two ticks of it, then it’ll start damaging you again. They’ll also tear through blocks, same thing – it eats up their trigger counts fast on any (eg. most) blocks that have them.

Basically, if you end up fighting a champion who channels and you didn’t know to equip a reflect before hand, you are either built to tank or you are screwed.

The problem is PvP. Fire Grab is instant, Hundred blades is 3.5 second channel, Kill shot is 1.75 second channel.

People cry about a ranged attack that can be reflected for massive damage, blocked or dodged.

Imagine the kittenstorm if Fire grab hit as hard as hundred blades, but instantly and guaranteed crit thanks to arcane power. That being said I don’t see why they can’t buff things PvE only and make it hit that hard in PvE while doing the same damage it does now in PvP.

tigirius.9014:

I find it odd that most of the mobs of the world have a chargeup effect but there isn’t one for these bosses, they use these skills like I would swat a fly.

Something does need to be changed in the ui.

I notice this happens a lot with shark champion DEs in any zone. For those saying “suck less”, some of these literally have no choreographing and thus aren’t realistically avoidable sans a lucky dodge, or having aegis covering you at all times.

Underwater krait witches do this a lot too. I think the idea is that for group events, they are intended to be able to one-shot people at random. The problem is, it kind of undermines the concept of skill based play.

There are some DEs that have a champion that aren’t labeled [Group]. These ones can usually be taken down solo, but it takes a while.

I don’t know if building for tankiness is even viable early on; You only have two stat items until level 60ish, and there is no power/toughness affix. I guess you could go half power/X and half vitality/toughness, but that seems like it would really hurt your killing speed.

Recently.1043:

This has nothing to do with warriors really.

Thief is weaker in PvE than most (all classes really) due to the same mechanic that makes them so strong in PvP which is initiative. Thieves basically have no cooldowns, which gives them the BEST front loaded burst possible (insanely good for PvP). That being said, once their low on initiative, they lose alot of damage. This matters alot more in PvE where you have longer drawn out fights, and are fighting things that wont die in ~3-5 seconds.

What weapon you use is gonna matter alot too. d/d isn’t a good PvE dungeon weapon set; you probably want to be using like sb, or p/p and play from range.

It can feel that way due to the feeling of initiative regenerating, but at 1 initiative per 1.67 seconds, its 8.35 seconds per black powder or 5.01 seconds per heartseeker. This is before any initiative traits or skills.

For D/P or D/D stealth spam builds, you also have to wait 3 seconds between each stealth anyways, plus you get 2 initiative for every utility, heal or steal.

Rika.7249:

Milennin.4825:

They are hard in a combination of the following things:
-You and your team don’t know the dungeon.
-You and your team are unskilled at the game.
-You and your team are severely undergeared.
-You and your team are severely underleveled.
-Your team is unwilling to communicate.

This, and a question:
What does dungeons have to do with encouraging players to buy gems?
I really don’t see where this silly idea comes from.

Buy gems, sell gems for gold, use gold to buy full exotics/superior sigils and such. 42k karma per piece is still quite a lot.

Honestly, they aren’t tuned that well. For a cleric/soldier, the only way you’ll ever die is if something one shots you. For a berserker, you probably are going to die a lot.

This happened a lot in Diablo III before they put in Paragon levels. Trash gave you nothing, so people didn’t bother with it

Instead of nerfing speed runs, or nerfing the reward and increasing it back by killing trash, i’d rather see either trash capable of dropping tokens, or the end reward increasing relative to how many trash mobs and bosses you downed.

Venomancer thief has a ton of utility, and even if you don’t go that route no other class can blanket blind like thieves can with black powder spam.

Spread venoms to up to 5 party members (or NPCs) in a relatively small area, each venom has two charges.

- You can give Basilisk venom five people, and either stun for 1.5 seconds each or strip off 10 stacks of defiant. Probably the only useful application for that skill actually…

- You can permanently keep weakness on a champion, make their auto-attack manageable for even berserkers.

- You can give all your allies 2 stacks of might for each venom. You can group heal with leeching venom, just pop up beside someone and share it with them if they are dying.

- You can give skale venom to everybody and spike up to 20 stacks of vulnerability.

- You can give devourer venom to people, and permanently immobilize a mob. 3 stacks per player, 2 second immobilize, with 5 people that could be 30 seconds.

- Ice drake venom, 4 charges, 1 second, 20 seconds of chill. Its not just a snare, it increases the cooldown on enemy attacks.

Its worth noting that thieves are the only one who can stack immobilize and chill that high.

Both? They don’t directly compete with each other, the runes that have +bleed duration on them also have condition damage.

Duration doesn’t spread the damage, it just adds more ticks that do the full bleed damage. Extra duration is never really wasted since bleeds stack in intensity rather than duration, but i’ve also heard that they only tick at 1 second intervals, so if you have a 5 second bleed and 10% bleed duration, it’ll round back down to 5.

Shadow return and shadow step are the same skill, and I’m not sure if anybody really uses it since its essentially just the sword 2 skill with longer ranged, but a 50 second cooldown because of it.

Not every class has the exact same tools – How come nobody else has a 15 second water combo field with a 30 second CD?

Honestly that should have been the original intent. As it is, a lot of traits/utility skills are so underwhelming that aside from the benchmark levels, there is nothing to look forward to because by that point you will have long gotten everything you want and have a bunch of skill points pooled.

They kind of shot themselves in the foot here though – Most utility is intentionally lackluster to prevent things like the 55 monk ever appearing again. That is, things like 1 second stun every 60 seconds, or a laying down a sanctuary that heals for 3% health, with a 2 minute cooldown.

And skillpoints are already used as a currency for end-game items rather than for you know… skills.

There are a lot of traits that are just genuinely bad for every class. Makes me wonder if that was intentional to limit the amount of potential builds purely to the ones worth taking.

Blind exposure – Inflicts one stack of vulnerability for 5 seconds when you blind. Think about that for a moment. Thats 1% damage for 5 seconds, on a 30 second cooldown that refreshes on kills.

There are tons of these.

Thats the damage with 0 condition damage. You can have up to what, some 2k in full exotic gear at level 80? That makes each bleed stack tick for 143 damage, or burn tick for 828.

At an easily sustainable 10 stacks, thats 1430 DPS. When you burst up with flurry, that could be 3575 DPS. You might think, “big deal, my kill shot crits for 20k” Well, in the 10 seconds its on cooldown bleeds will have far surpassed it.

Burn and poison are really more supplementary. The idea is its something thats on the enemy all the time as a bonus, while poison suppresses healing in PvP.

Condition damage does have it’s problems but the odd side-effect of the world being dead, is that there is little competition for them. Even with 2-3 other players, unless they are specialized for bleeding its unlikely that they are going to overtake your bleed stacks.

Sword warriors can spike up to 25 stacks of bleed. Can’t hold it up there forever, but at least every 10 seconds they can use flurry.

I don’t know if i’d call the damage slow. The bleeds from flurry only last around 3 seconds with traits, don’t attacks like hundred blades and pistol whip take that long to finish anyways?

Thieves are decent bleeders too. Spec for all the initiative returns you can, spam death blossom.

STRanger.5120:

I have an easy solution for you, if you don´t find playing the Thief fun, choose another class, very simple
I´m glad that Thief is not like WoW Rogue, I was playing Rogue back in the old days when WoW was actually a good game, and got sick of the 3 – button rotation in PvE/stupid stunlocking in PvP very quickly. Also I´m glad that Thief don´t have weapon sets like dual swords (It´s the weapon set for totally different class, not for Thief/Rogue, same with the axes or maces. These classes are just not light warriors, they´re cunning, agile and stealthy killers, the class with those wepon sets is more like Blademaster/Duelist etc…).

Shortbow, Pistol/pistol and Sword/pistol have no means to enter stealth, and stealth in GW2 is not really stealth in the general RPG sense but an enabler for special attacks.

The idea of sword/dagger as it is, is more of a light warrior than an assassin. In fact none of the stealth attacks but dagger and pistol really do anything at all.

GW1 didn’t necessarily have horizontal progression, at least not until you played it for a very long time and had every skill set and captured every elite you wanted to have.

At least for me, there were always new elite skills I wanted lot of which were gated

Green weapon drops and elite skills were actually closer to how vertical progression MMOs work – You reached it, you kill it, you get it.

People would not be so receptive to the system if say, a rare who drops a green instead has a 5% chance to drop a component, which you need 50 of, 50 skill points and 250 of a common material to craft.

The part that boggles me is that they already have a system in place to reward moving instead of staying in one spot and farming. You can get up to 2.5x kill EXP by killing things that have been up for a long time? That you haven’t personally killed? Not sure the specifics.

That principle could easily be applied to zones. 250% MF, experience, reknown, and cash from a zone you’ve never been to before, and each DE would decrease it, resetting each week? Two weeks? month?

Its better to reward people for doing something than to penalize them for not doing what you want them to do.

As terrible as it sounds the level of challenge in Fractals, as well as the old dungeons has no place as farmable content. Is there a sense of accomplishment for barely winning? Sure. It quickly turns to dread as you realize you have to do it dozens more times to get anywhere.

I’m not saying that the game shouldn’t be challenging, heavens no, but save the frustration for those who seek it. Challenge modes in WoW, FoW/equivalents in GW1.

I’d even advocate challenging, optional solo content, like some of the horribly overtuned story quest. Thats great too, it should be a choice for those who want it but not forced upon those who don’t.

Is there another EQ2 than Everquest 2? It has an auto-attack, probably the most powerful one of any MMO out right now.

You can gear for up to 6 additional attacks per swing, so if you dual wield, every swing is 14 hits.

But if SWTOR taught me anything, its not the presence or absence of auto-attack that really means anything – It doesn’t have one, and doesn’t feel any different.

Draeka.5941:

E Tan.7385:

Josher.9612:

Removing the energy/mana-like system that most RPGs have, took away a lot of depth in the combat system.

Totaly agree. Also it remove a in deep management of skill reload / mana cost.
So, most skill with “powerfull” effect will have a huge reload intead of having for exemple a high mana cost and small reload.

What you just described is not an in-depth management over the current system. If the mana cost is high, without potions you’re relying on your regen timer…with potions, you’re bypassing the system entirely, thereby requiring potions for combat (moneysink). It all boils down to timers, so go ahead and say it: you want shorter timers.

Did you play GW1? Have you played any game with resources past like, 2005? In GW1, your natural energy regeneration, even for 4-pip classes in generally insufficient to keep doing things for a long period of time. Instead, you had to take skills or in the case of rangers/asssassins, certain point allocations to allow you to do so.

There were more expensive skills or builds, and those required more drastic energy management.

http://youtu.be/XrcNb7JwJNw?t=9m27s

I don’t see how thats any less dodging than dodging in guild wars 2. Its a lot easier in WoW because you don’t have to deal with crap like red circles forming a venn diagram over you, or rolling from one and ending up inside another red circle, being KD’d for 5 seconds and being hit by another one because you can’t move.

WoW isn’t the absence of dodging to do a rotation, its the combination of both and being able to do both at the same time.

Ever fight a dragon as a D/D thief? Conditions, crits, and backstab don’t work on it.

Find a foot, auto-attack it. Before the heartseeker nerf, you might spam heartseeker, but after it, its not worth using until an enemy is at low health.

Also as far as 2-5 go, you have to compare their animation speed as well as damage to 1. Auto-attacks may do less damage per hit, but say for a greatsword warrior’s whirling blade, the time it takes to do it and the positional disorientation tends to make it weaker than auto-attack if you can’t spin against a wall.

Auto-attacks being as powerful as they are is only the tip of the iceberg though. Even if they buffed the damage of 2-5, it wouldn’t be dynamic because you would just be repeating a different sequence. What other MMOs do now, is focus on things like procs, resource management, watching timers etc.

But as you know, GW2 doesn’t have resources and timers are all incidental – short duration effects on a long cooldown, that just happen as you do your thing.

So, how about procs or conditional (Not status effects)skills and traits? GW1 was filled with these.

Last Chance:
Now | Gain quickness for 4 seconds when you strike a foe with less than 25% health (90-second cooldown).
After| When you strike a foe with less than 25% health, your damaging skills recharge instantly.

Critical Haste:
Now |10% chance to get quickness (2s) on a critical hit (30-second cooldown).

After |10% chance on critical hit to gain Critical haste. Critical haste causes your next damaging skill (Not auto-attack) to act under quickness. Lasts 6 seconds, can hold up to three charges.

Fire Grab:
Now | Damage foes in a cone in front of you. Deal more damage to burning foes

After | Damage foes in a cone in front of you. Consumes burns on enemies and deals increased damage based on the remaining duration.

Cod Eye.1632:

We would of seen more creativity. We wouldn’t have people screaming for mounts everytime a new mmo hits the market. I could go on and on, but shall leave it there, and as someone already mentioned, someone somewhere would of created the WoW.

People would still want a faster way to travel around, it just wouldn’t be treated with such disdain because they are associated with WoW. I prefer super-hero travel speed, but obviously thats rather context sensitive.

Funny thing is, didn’t EQ1 and DAOC both release expansions that had mounts before WoW was even out?

Anet was extremely conservative with skills and traits in GW2, to the point of a lot of them being completely useless. I guess its so that someone with a better build couldn’t just stomp over someone else with no chance of fighting back, but it really takes away the excitement of getting new skills.

This shows most in elites. I remember seeing the old aura of the lich, the sacrifice mitigation version not the minion version, and thinking “wow, I want that”.

I look at my guardian’s tomes and think “meh”

Tempest.1254:

I entirely disagree.

Their model works just fine. It did throughout the first game. It was working just fine up until last week.

The people who bought the game and got something other than what they expected (a WoW clone) have only themselves to blame.

Content locusts have been demanding hamster wheels since a week after release. ArenaNet didn’t have to give in. They chose to go against their design philosophy and manifesto. It’s their game and it’s their choice. That’s fine.

It’s also my choice never to play or give them my money.

GW2 isn’t the same as GW1 though, and wasn’t even last week. Guild wars 1, you could get a few common monster drops and trade it in for the best weapon. A full level 20 set of armor was i think… 1500 gold per piece, plus mats. I think I had the means to buy a Drokknar’s forge platemail set a little after reaching Lion’s Arch.

GW2, it takes 42k karma per piece and access to a vendor that may or may not be up. On top of that, they might not be the affixes that support your build and you need to get superior sigils.

The funny thing about playing with other people is its not about being social. In fact, talking kind of strains it. When you organize it, there is a certain level of stress which is a large part of why queuing systems are rampantly popular.

“Will people stay leave because its taking too long to put together a group?”
“Its awkward just being in party with this one other person”
“Will the group I join kick me for whatever reason?”
“I want to leave, but I don’t want to make an kitten of myself.”

Sometimes its just neat to travel really deep into a dredge cavern going towards a Vista with a bunch of people Impromptu. So while its certainly doable to play alone, its just not as much fun.

Berserker power does not affect condition damage. None of the “increases damage” traits do. Adrenal reserves is wasted. Unless you are running a soldier set or something, you will have 3 bars of adrenaline back long before the 10 second CD on flurry is over.

Either put it into quick burst, or what I like to do is put at least 15 into defense, for the regeneration and embrace the pain. Helps a lot with survival.

Sodapop.3715:

Fortuna.7259:

atrossity.6437:

All I can say is this: the forums cry out that the game is “dying,” yet I still see a ton of people everywhere I go. The noobie zones are just as populated as when the game launched, although they no longer have overflows either.

This game is far from dying.

Now, I don’t know about all this “game is dying” talk. However, claiming that the noobie zones are just as populated as at launch destroys your credibility. And the 30-70 zones can be even more empty. This could have everything to do with rewards and nothing with server population. However, empty is what these zones have become.

i really like what u said here. could u eleborate on the “This could have everything to do with rewards and nothing with server population” comment and to clarify u dont think this gw2 is dying?

The game is touted as the “entire game being end-game”. Whenever you travel to a lower level zone or even a lower level portion of the same zone, your level is downscaled to it but you still get experience or drops, scaled up.

Problem is the threshold is only about one zone down for levels before the rewards start to sharply diminish, so at 80 nothing lower than say, 70 is worth doing.

Also travel cost scale up faster than DE rewards. You might get 2 silver per event, but it costs 3 to warp anywhere at 80 as opposed to lower levels where its pretty much neglible.

Combination of the two means that every zone that isn’t Queensdale, level 80 or Lions Arch is deserted, where you’ll be lucky to see one other player doing a DE.

I’ve been playing again since the 16th, various times of the day on from Friday to Sunday, and from 31 to 50 on my guardian, every zone was deserted. There were DEs everywhere that were abandoned. I end up having to solo all of them. If i’m lucky, there might be one other person there or on the way.

Went to hang out in Queensdale and Plains of Ashford to see if i could get a storymode group for a change. Both of them were deserted around the dungeon enterances.

Most of the group DEs that weren’t done very often before like Kol in Harathi Highlands are now undoable.

Its not really unexpected. Everybody is either just starting or at end-game/Fractals, but its hardly a case of just “Its monday morning”

Well when you consider that Guild Wars 2 was toted to be a skill based, no auto-attack action game where instead of relying on mitigation, you were supposed to dodge, is it that crazy to think that it should play like an action game instead of Age of Conan with a dodge key?

Just think of every 5 levels as one real level. Every one inbetween doesn’t matter anyways due to level scaling, and even every 5th might not matter if there just isn’t a good trait 5 points away.

Aside from the trait you actually get weaker as you level, since you need more precision to maintain crit and say, you are 60 but you are still using 53 gear, and the content is tuned for 60 gear.