Guild Wars 2

Are you running in a zerg? Conditions shouldn’t affect frontline that much if you stick with the melee train and avoid the red circles and time your dodges/cleansing.

I played a bit in WvW with my warrior (2700 armor, 26k hp), and didn’t find my survivability lacking. The only thing I changed on my old gear was 2 celestial rings instead of 2 zerker ones. If anything, I live longer now because I take defy pain when I used to slot merciless hammer.

Played around with mortar in WvW for a few hours.

It’s still quite effective, very good when complemented with grenade. I’d say current damage slighly less than Well of Suffering’s tick, making it great ranged pressure on zergs. Best used when you’re on an elevated area where you can take advantage of the projectile arc to LOS other ranged damage.

In terms of usability, IMO, it’s much better as ranged pressure than old grenades simply because you won’t kill yourself using it, and the AoE is more reliable than grenades. The frozen field and poison fields can also be quite disruptive when shot on the middle of a zerg. You need to be smarter now when using it. Whereas I could just spam mortar 1 before, I need to switch between mortar, grenade and rifle now depending on the situation. Orbital strike + grenade barrage on the backlines can down a lot of people when coordinated with a good push.

So even in its nerfed state. still a very good weapon (for wvw at least).

If anything it’s even MORE viable with the increase of everyone’s damage.

Random Wax Orc.7695:

-28% damage on an Elite range skill that reduces its dps to lower than auto-attacking with a rifle or using an already nerfed grenade kit is not a buff. It it were a buff, then please give that -28% damage buff to every other classes’ ranged skills in the next 24 hours.

Tuesday’s patch convinced me that the expansion was a good buy. Twenty four hours later, this nerf update took that all back. I am sick of everything fun to play getting ruined by people complaining that they aren’t automatically winning against a class they don’t like.

Even with the nerf, mortar still does more than rifle.

Btw, if you don’t use it yet, using middle mouse button/right mouse button for movement makes things a lot easier.

1)There are no foods in sPVP.
2)The 24% from Melandru will not help you given the speed of application.

There are ways to counter condi, but food and runes alone won’t do it.

insanemaniac.2456:

i hope you guys realize mortar 1 has a much lower aftercast than nades

Yeah, for some reason, it felt much more spammable despite having the same travelling speed, then I realized that engineers “gathered” after throwing a grenade, while the mortar keeps on firing without interruption.

I find it colored weirdly. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems lit by an unnaturally colored light. And the structures seem a bit blue-ish.

For those who hate wings, don’t worry. They’ll fall out of fashion in a few weeks like every other backpiece ever made (surely people remember when everyone and their mother had the Spinal Blades?).

Zerker should still be a safe bet since Elementalists are still one of the top direct damage classes in the game. Though, I’d probably hold off till the builds becomes more stable since we’ll see a lot of balance adjustment the next few weeks.

Hmm, so roughly an 18% damage nerf, which is in line with the stated 28% plus the 10% increase from explosive powder.

Kodama.6453:

Seems like Explosive Powder is working now as intended. But still huge damage nerf.

What was your damage prenerf and postnerf?

Maybe they could have made it 1 single stack, but stacked per player. So instead of X players doing 10+ stacks of burning each, you got X players doing 1 stack of burning each (of course numbers would be adjusted to compensate).

I can see it being Revenant, the main revenant picture has black and red as the main colors:

http://cdn.tentonhammer.com/sites/default/files/styles/mgi_style_article_attached_image/public/Revenant_0.jpg?itok=CeGnuBgT

But I can also see it being thief. Guess we’ll have to wait.

I haven’t experienced being two shotted, but I get burst down really quickly by both direct damage and condi. Before, I could dance around and even inside zergs as a full zerker backliner, but now I usually have to pull back once the blob gets a bit close. Can’t even risk staying on the periphery now.

I bind my other buttons to ALT 1, ALT 2, ALT 3, ALT 4, etc. so the tilde is actually easy for me to press.

So anyone actually test the numbers? I remember dropping 4k crits on squishies in WvW. Not at home so I can’t test, but according to the nerf, it should drop down to around 2.9-3k or so.

Pride.1734:

Gern.2978:

Pride.1734:

Can anyone link me to the nerfs?

There was literally only one, the mortar 28% nerf.

Still. There weare narfs to other classes as well and i would like to check out all of them.

Check the game release notes section of the forums.

ALT + tilde for closer pressing.

It should still do very decent damage.

To compare, it used to do roughly the equivalent of a superior arrow cart on up to 5 people. So basically, an engineer was a walking superior arrow cart that hit 5 instead of 50. Literally walking artillery.

With the nerf, I estimate it will drop down to regular arrow cart levels. It should still be much more reliable range attack than the old grenades, which had a tendency to spread out the damage the farther away an enemy was due to the arc of the grenades. It was also prone to killing you due to retal x3.

Not to say that I support the nerf however, but if it will really be this way, mortar will still be usable, especially in large group situations.

digitalruse.9085:

FWIW, it is still not receiving the +10% correctly from Explosive Powder. The tooltip updates, but actual damage dealt is not correct (I was doing 600-670 with and without Explosives line). You can test this on dummies in Silverwastes. So, actual nerf might be more along the lines of 10-15% not 27%.

Maybe they are adjusting it before the fix is applied. They did fix Shrapnel after all. They also still have to fix the projectile finisher and MK#1 will be pretty neat to use.

If this happens, then it’ll be a more reasonable 18% nerf, though I feel 10-12% should be the max.

Kodama.6453:

Range shouldn’t be an argument here, rangers got long bow range 1500 too and it is outdamaging mortar kit a lot, and it has a high burst skill like rapid fire on it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want the same damage for mortar kit like the rangers with their long bows. I just want 1 viable long range AA, is that really too much to ask for?

I felt that mortar slighly did more damage than rangers LB (was hitting 3.6k AA LB vs 4k AA mortat autoattack crits against low armor targets).

Are people really this obtuse?

Got rejected by too many zerker players? Sense a lot of bitterness here lol.

I bought them but not the black one because I HATED how the old ones looked. Looked like some crap out of some F2P Korean MMO. At least this one, while still obtrusive, is much more palatable to me.

Just replace some trinkets with cleric ones. Hell, I just replaced 2 zerker rings with 2 celestial rings, and I don’t notice the reduced healing at all. You get Empowered Allies now anyway, so you’ll still be doing higher damage.

The fact that I can use Defy Pain, Cleansing Ire, Merciless Hammer means I’m much more survivable in zergs now.

Just click the 9 o clock trait/skill in the window and it will unlock the whole spec.

It literally takes 15 seconds to unlock everything on an 80 char… don’t know if I’m getting trolled here.

Anyway, even with my old gear and 1k healing shouts, I’m surviving a lot better since I can take Endure Pain, Cleansing Ire AND Merciless Hammer at the same time.

Might be the loss of healing power in the traitlines? What was the ratio before? It’s 1:1 now.

I can approximate my old WvW build by dropping some zerker and soldier stuff and adding some clerics.

fluidmonolith.3584:

I think it could be a challenge to make the hammer meet expectations as a cool and appropriate (hammer-esque) melee weapon without making it too similar to the rifle. The rifle is already a short-range burst direct damage weapon with heavy CC, which is what hammers typically do (well, minus the burst damage maybe). What should we expect the hammer to do to be different? Maybe sustained damage at the cost of burst? More or less CC than the rifle? Mobility? Defense?

CLEAVE

dbgfeller.8120:

I don’t care if it’s cheap or expensive, the point is that I don’t want to pay for something I already own.

Which is?

Just wait a year. No need to rush, it will drop down to 30 bucks eventually.

What you can play today, is what I’m assuming.

The catch is that you will have to give up everything you’ve built so far for a completely blank slate.

Yes, I will sell my current account on ebay, legendaries and all.
Then buy HoT because, hey, I get the core game free. The advantage of being a newbie right?

Ask your local lawyer.

upsdn.5426:

Shifu.4321:

upsdn.5426:

Shifu.4321:

Here’s what most likely happened:
Anet DID plan to make the expansion as a separate purchase from the core game. So they did all these sales so that people would get the game and naturally upgrade to the expansion.
But one day, some marketing or business development guy thought to himself: “If we made the core game FREE with the expansion, that would lure in even more players.” So he makes the core game come free with the expansion, because hell, why not? Of course, they probably failed to consider that a lot of people would be kitten over this, but eh, sometimes that happens.
So kittenty situation, but I don’t think Anet meant any malice.

Stay out of adjudicating or lawmaking anywhere ever. “I don’t think x meant any malice, despite how malicious what they did seems. Probably some stupid person decided it might work and they went along with it.”

That’s really poor judgment on your part.

Yes, I’m speculating since I’m not in a law court. Jail me for it!

My point is that you’d be awful at it. Not that you should be great at it. Nonetheless, if you’d be awful at it (and judging from the relative likelihood of the situation you describe, you would), then you should stay out of it.

That’s all. Nothing more and nothing less than what I said. No jail necessary.

That’s why I SPECULATED. I don’t have to prove if I’m right or wrong, since it’s speculation. I’m not trying to convince a jury but give an OPINION on what I think happened. It’s no different from any average Joe giving his opinion on what he thinks happened during the OJ Simpson case.

Why should I have to be a good lawyer wannabe for that?

I think ultimately, they will give players something additional. They won’t change the price, I’m pretty sure about that. That won’t satisfy everyone, but it will be good PR and many people will be content with it.

upsdn.5426:

Shifu.4321:

Here’s what most likely happened:
Anet DID plan to make the expansion as a separate purchase from the core game. So they did all these sales so that people would get the game and naturally upgrade to the expansion.
But one day, some marketing or business development guy thought to himself: “If we made the core game FREE with the expansion, that would lure in even more players.” So he makes the core game come free with the expansion, because hell, why not? Of course, they probably failed to consider that a lot of people would be kitten over this, but eh, sometimes that happens.
So kittenty situation, but I don’t think Anet meant any malice.

Stay out of adjudicating or lawmaking anywhere ever. “I don’t think x meant any malice, despite how malicious what they did seems. Probably some stupid person decided it might work and they went along with it.”

That’s really poor judgment on your part.

Yes, I’m speculating since I’m not in a law court. Jail me for it!

Animism.9803:

rapthorne.7345:

Did people go insane and claw the walls when they merged the original GW trilogy in to one pack for a lower cost?

Did they go mad and scream scream when WoW merged it’s first three expansions in to the base game cost?

I really fail to see what the big deal is.

Because GW1 expansions had content…………

Ah, so we’re basically buying a box or a nice loading screen with HoT then?

Acharyn.4738:

It doesn’t matter what ANet meant. The players are speaking, and they have time to change it.

They WON’T remove the core game free with expansion. As bad as you think this backlash may be, that would even be worse. It would be removal of a feature, which is probably the one of the worst things you can do in a game. And it’s up for prepurchase, so there’s already money involved.

They’ve made their decision with this. The best they can do is to compensate existing players, no moving backwards.

Celtic Lady.3729:

warbignime.4610:

Us and Anet do not care.

I care.

I care that you care.

You’re not complaining! This thread is not allowed!

But on a more serious note, it would probably happen during the next few weeks.

I can get down with that. Or better yet, give each upgrading player 1000 “untradeable” gems so that they can do with it as they please (not much different from giving each player 1 armor skin of their choice).

Here’s what most likely happened:

Anet DID plan to make the expansion as a separate purchase from the core game. So they did all these sales so that people would get the game and naturally upgrade to the expansion.

But one day, some marketing or business development guy thought to himself: “If we made the core game FREE with the expansion, that would lure in even more players.” So he makes the core game come free with the expansion, because hell, why not? Of course, they probably failed to consider that a lot of people would be kitten over this, but eh, sometimes that happens.

So kittenty situation, but I don’t think Anet meant any malice.

Baldrick.8967:

The OP totally fails to consider the amount players have spent in the BL store, as well as character slots, etc etc .

£60 for an expansion with one character slot (basic package is useless, can’t roll a new toon without a slot to roll it in) is a rip off.

To be fair, I have not spent a single dime on this game ever since I got it in August 2012.

Value will always be relative. If you feel you’re getting ripped off, don’t buy it.

Dondarrion.2748:

Shifu.4321:

Still not as bad as when Ascended was first released. Now THAT was pretty bad.

I was surprised that the June 23rd patch where Ascended gear increases from 5% to 10% from Exotic didn’t cause another upheaval :P

I had my popcorn ready, just as when Ascended gear got introduced, which I also welcomed

I think most of the guys who were really vocal about no gear treadmill have moved on to other games.

After thinking about it, I think the best solution would be for Anet to give existing players who upgraded to HoT $10 worth of untradeable gems (so as not to wreck the gems<—>gold conversion). That way, they can spend those gems as they see fit while still getting at least $10 worth of what they spent.