Guild Wars 2

I took up mesmer in PvP this weekend. This is the build I’m playing. It’s a berserker shatter build.

I think I’ve got a feel for it now. Timing interrupts, and understanding when to use distortion I’m working on still. However, there’s some things I’m not sure how to handle at all.

1) Warrior – I’m not sure how to deal with bunkers at all. The best I can come up with is to run away from them in 1v1 situations. Berserker warriors are a challenge too. They force me into rushing everything I do, because I can’t build up illusion due to their cleave, and they have just enough active defenses to prevent spikes 1v1. Bunker or Bersker I am rarely able to outlast heal signet, even with poison.

2) Ranger – The ranger pet always identifies me and rangers quickly target what their pet is following. Bow ranger channel skills and pet make my stealth attempts largely unsucessful. Vs a ranger that knows how to keep track of my position it’s 50/50 whether I’ll be able to out damage them.

3) Thief – This is really hard for me. S/P less so than D/P. D/P has frequent stealths which totally mess me up when it comes to casting illusions. It’s actually the stealth combined with obstacles, that gets me. My illusions and phantasms won’t cast unless I have LoS, which most thieves seem to know how to utilize very effectively. I don’t feel like I have enough active defense measures to counter backstabs. Guessing dodge rolls, decoy, and distortion I have at my disposal, but I often find it hard to down a thief before those are all exhausted. I try to keep in mind that when revealed I have a 4 second window, but it’s still a challenge.

4) Guardians – I feel like guardians counter me very well, similar to warrior. Bunker or Berserker, their cleave, blinds and blocks make it hard for me to get my Phantasms out in a timely manner. I take a lot of damage before I can clear the blinds and blocks, and all too frequently they time their defenses so that I can’t cast my phantasms, and they’ve been wasted so I can’t even use them to shatter. I feel like in 1v1 I should just run from any guardian that knows how to use its active defenses, but Leap of Faith and Judges Intervention make that very difficult.

5) Engineer – I usually run into Condi or Bunker engi’s. Either way it’s rough. I don’t have but a single 2 condition cleanse every 20 seconds, so that makes condi engi’s somewhat challenging, but their conditions are avoidable so as long as I can spike them down quickly enough that their abilities don’t come off cool down I’m fine. Decap engi’s though are like guardian and warriors in that if you are fighting a solid one, you’re better off just running away and not wasting your time 1v1.

As far as necro’s and elementalists, I have yet to fight a build I haven’t been able to figure how to counter them. I don’t feel outmatched vs those two professions.

Should I wait to open the PvP chest from achievement rewards until after the feature patch?

Stars.2179:

I don’t see how it is so hard, I leveled 18 characters to level 80 in one day and I actually got about 10g as a bonus with no cost. It only took me about 6 hours too.

Post your guide, people would be appreciative

Leveling just needs to be faster, not instant or accomplishable in 4 hours.

If they had a place where you could do a scavenger hunt (it could be a leveling college or whatever) where once per hour the reward for the scavenger hunt was a level that’d be great. The hunts would have whatever theme, do this dynamic event, kill champion, help 2 people in X zone (Hearts), be a cartographer, find X vistas & Y PoIs, etc.

Every hour, you could get 1 level by doing this scavenger hunt. It already is fairly normal to get 1 level per hour. This extra level per hour would cut the leveling time in half via regular play for most people.

People could game the system and do tricks like, only logging in once per hour to do the scavenger hunt for 10-20 minutes and get a level. Effectively allowing them get max level in 800+ minutes over 10 days assuming they logged in 8 times a day (assumption is 16 hours on work and sleep). So it might be good to make this only available to level 30+ characters. Or make it only available every 2 hours, so it’d take 800+ minutes over 20 days assuming they logged in 4 times a day.

Or an even better safety for the system would be to make the scavenger hunt available X times per day (we’ll say 3), create a counter that makes a hunt only available after playing a day for 45 minutes (so a player who plays for 2 hours 15 minutes in a day can do all three hunts). This would effectively prevent the gaming above and result in about 1 extra level per hour.

I kind of wish mesmers had a condition removal slot, similar to the heal skill slot. It’s hard for me to give up Mantra of Distraction, Blink, or Decoy.

Dungeon runners will dominate, might stacking FTW!

I don’t play with PU, or beefy phantasms. Any advice?

*Added – Context is PvP

Human Engineer as…

Inspector Gadget

Is because when loot bags drop I miss most of them. I am unable to keep track of them, and if I go looking for them I’m either slowing down my party, or getting left behind by a zerg.

Swim.6830:

Shockwave.1230:

The most obvious reason to be at the end of the dodge is Air, blinding while you are evading would just waste the blind.

I’d prefer dodging someones attack AND blinding them to prevent a second, than have to waste a dodge to go INTO a fight to blind someone (plus the AOE on that is horrible if you have tested it). The same goes for the rest of the specials.

That’s what it does currently.

The most obvious reason to be at the end of the dodge is Air, blinding while you are evading would just waste the blind.

Shockwave.1230:

JonPeters.5630:

Pro Tip: Crit Damage (aka Ferocity) can now be a primary stat if that opens up some suggestions.

Jon

From what I can tell in doing the math, there is no situation where 1 point of ferocity will be more beneficial to effective power than 1 point of power.

Even if your crit chance is 100%, 1 point of ferocity is less than half as effective as 1 point of power in boosting your effective power.

So while it might seem apropos to do a Ferocity – Major, Power – Minor, Precision – Minor set, the math shows that this isn’t as good as berserker.

In fact any set that would replace power with ferocity, won’t be as good as it power counterpart.

The only kind of sets that would make sense to add would be Power/Precision/X, Power/Ferocity/X to allow more flexibility in min/maxing. The math says adding sets that have ferocity without power would allow players to gimmp themselves, and you don’t want to give people low quality options, as enough of those exist already, and it just adds unnecessary variables/complexity for new players to consider.

I found a threshold for ferocity to add more value to effective power than power.

Weapon Strength = 1000
Total Power = 2258
Total Precision = 2922 (100% crit chance)

Adding 1 point of ferocity to this spec would be more effective than adding 1 point of power

Another threshold

Weapon Strength = 1000
Total Power = 2863
Total Precision = 1872 (50% crit chance)

Adding 1 point of ferocity to this spec would be more effective than adding 1 point of power.

Given this, the most feasible way to make use of a Ferocity, Power, Precision gear set would be coordination in Dungeons/WvW where you can stack might.

Alternatively, for a solo uncoordinated situation, a pure berserker build with 30/30/x/x/x with power food might be able to swap out 1 piece of berserker armor for a Ferocity, Power, Precision piece in order to min/max.

It’s extremely niche to find ways where Ferocity gear as the major stat would even make since to ever use, but it is possible.

JonPeters.5630:

Pro Tip: Crit Damage (aka Ferocity) can now be a primary stat if that opens up some suggestions.

Jon

From what I can tell in doing the math, there is no situation where 1 point of ferocity will be more beneficial to effective power than 1 point of power.

Even if your crit chance is 100%, 1 point of ferocity is less than half as effective as 1 point of power in boosting your effective power.

So while it might seem apropos to do a Ferocity – Major, Power – Minor, Precision – Minor set, the math shows that this isn’t as good as berserker.

In fact any set that would replace power with ferocity, won’t be as good as it power counterpart.

The only kind of sets that would make sense to add would be Power/Precision/X, Power/Ferocity/X to allow more flexibility in min/maxing. The math says adding sets that have ferocity without power would allow players to gimmp themselves, and you don’t want to give people low quality options, as enough of those exist already, and it just adds unnecessary variables/complexity for new players to consider.

M-Power
m-Precision
m-Vitality

M-Ferocity
m-Power
m-Precision

Please

What’s better from the player perspective for contested waypoint behavior after the feature patch?

1) Not being able to use contestable waypoints for all maps except your current map?

2) Being able to use all waypoints for all maps except contested waypoints in your current map?

In my opinion option 2 is better, as long as they show what waypoints are contestable, so that players understand there’s a risk with going to those waypoint.

Also not being able to waypoint to contested WPs within your current map should prevent whatever ANet wants to prevent with making waypoints contestable in the first place.

The only work around to get to contested waypoints would be to waypoint twice (more than doubling your fees) out of map, then back to the contestable waypoint. However with the new mega-servers you’re not necessarily guarenteed to get back into the server you were in, meaning you’d have the additional steps of being in a party/guild then right click someone that was in that server to guarentee getting into the same one.

Obviously option 2 should only be applied to PvE, and not PvP, or WvW.

Would there be anything game breaking about option 2? In most cases it would prevent players from having to waypoint twice to get to the waypoint they want, assuming it’s uncontested. Even if it is contested players have fair warning to expect to have to run for their lives.

I just thought of an option 3, that involves doing option 2 but waypointing players to the nearest uncontested waypoint if they choose a waypoint that is contested. A message indicating a waypoint redirect occurred due to waypoint contesting, should be displayed when this happens.

The option that ANet is going with seems to be a nuissance when players wanting to go to contested waypoints, it also makes them waste coin, but more important waste time choosing two waypoints and loading twice.

Bunker is more important than roamers.

That said though, a team with 5 bunkers is less likely to win than a team with with 4 bunkers and 1 roamer.

3 bunkers / 2 roamers
4 bunkers/ 1 roamer
^ Are the best ratios to have. Between these two ratios profession comp determines which is actually better to use. In my opinion though, 3/2 is better as long as 1 of the roamers isn’t a super squishy build.

Playing a non-bunker is harder than playing bunker.

There’s no viable Thief bunkers in the meta currently. So you’re not only shifting from playing a profession, you’re also shifting roles.

I feel like the best way to learn is to just jump in go. I’m not sure how many arena matches you’ve done with your thief, but that’s where I’d start.

Another good option for you, since you’re comfortable with your guardian, is to run a dps roaming build on your guardian until you feel comfortable with the roaming role. Then swap to the thief and figure out how to apply what the thief does to what you were doing with the guardian while roaming.

My logic for how Divinity Runes will play

Current Behavior:
10 to all stats
Traveler’s Runes stats are half as much

Currently Known:
Traveler’s Runes stats are 36
PvP Celestial Amulet Stat increase = ~47%
2 × 36 × 1.47 = 105

Future Behavior:
Divinity Runes
+12
+14
+16
+18
+20
+22
Total 102

I can read the forums without logging in. I’m guessing the OP is saying they can’t?

ANet has said their business model allows people to stop playing and come back.

If you don’t enjoy the content, why play? When enough people stop playing, there will be a point where ANet starts to worry about revenue and then ANet has to make content people want to play. They could also choose to let the game die, but I’m pretty sure they can’t let that happen for another half-dozen or more years.

Just fyi 3rd party investor analyst groups have anounced an expansion in 2015, according to a WoodenPotatoes and Matt Visual video from youtube. It’d be nice if it were to be released during the holiday season of 2014 instead, but we’ll see.

The things I enjoy about the game right now are the storylines and solo PvP. I check up on the lore online and play some PvP matches. The rest of the game isn’t any good for me solo right now, so I don’t play it (unless I happen to have other people to play with).

Stealth is well balanced for what’s in the game currently.

PvE – Stealth duration is irrellavent

WvW – Stealth duration impact scales up as combatants goes down, being the most noticeable in a 1v1 fight. Inability to impact capture points.

PvP – Same as WvW impact. Inability to impact capture points is far more impactful in PvP.

In WvW when you get fights where groups are 10+, stealth loses it’s potency. It’s value is in Roaming, but you can’t be outnumbered by much, out coordinated, or out skilled as those will easily neutralize any advantage provided by stealth.

In PvP stealth is strong, because it gives players the opportunity to spike. Most of the available spikes aren’t without counterplay, where a lot of the damage can be avoided. Eating an entire spike won’t down a bunker build either.

I play stealthless thief builds, because I find stealth to be too limiting on my sustainable dps. I value sustained dps over the spike opportunities offered by stealth. I feel less dependent upon others to be effective this way, because spikes won’t down someone unless they are low on health or mess up. Sustained dps means I just need to keep at the opponant and not make any mistakes (or as few as possible) to down them.

I view stealthless thief builds as just as easy to play as stealth builds, but having more risk. If you manage the risk, you get more reward (Overall more dps and potentially cleave). Currently S/P is the best stealthless thief build base, but before the Infiltrator’s Return cast time was added it was S/D as the best base due to the way that at-will spacing played to S/D’s advantage.

Can we please pool together some gold and make a community wide contest for whoever gets the best screenshot today?

I’ll contribute 10 gold.

We need to collect all the pictures and put them in an album then link it to the wiki. They’ve never done the same april fools joke twice, so we should capture the best of what we can today.

I vaguely remember this being brought up previously. Some suggestion like /rank [1-8] was the basic solution, but I don’t believe it’s been implemented yet.

If ANet doesn’t have the resources to do 8 armors, unlikely that they don’t have the resources, since doing that just means it takes longer to roll out, but if they don’t have the resources, maybe they can just make the legendary armor effects be profession based instead of per profession armors.

Basically have a set of legendary armor per armor class, but then make the effect different depending upon the profession wearing it. Maybe the elementalist gets cool effects from swapping attunements, whereas the necro gets different visual effects from death shroud, and a mesmer gets cool visual effects from shatters. Linking legendary armor effects partly to the profession mechanic sounds logical. Also other effects could be added that are always on per profession.

Zenith.7301:

Because healing power is a garbage stat for anyone that isn’t a BM regen ranger, especially necro?

Necro has absolutely no real self healing so settler’s is a waste on them.

Healing Power is a waste in general, it’s better to grab toughness always because 1) Healing Power scales with 0 skills well and 2) Toughness actually makes your heals give you more effective health (what’s better a heal for 1000 on an ele or a heal for 1000 on a guardian? the guardian, because it’s harder to reduce that 1000 gained health due to higher armor)

Shockwave.1230:

I can just imagine teams in TA going condi/direct damage hybrid all with perplexity applying 15-20 stacks of confusion with over 50% uptime from everyone running perplexity with cover condis of 10-15 stacks of bleeds, 10 stacks of torment, burning, and poison.

Not sure how feasible it will be, but it’s easy to theorycraft this stuff.

A thought jumped into my mind. How would a team of 4 decap engi’s with perplexity and 1 roamer fair? Engi’s could hold 2 points, do a 2/2 split, apply various conditions, confusion would be applied regularly due to the amount of CC engi’s have and they are built to take hits, so the perplexity 4 would trigger a lot, plus engi’s have AoE heals and can keep each other alive. This team comp already seems strong without perplexity, might be an optimal team comp now.

Will skins that an account has unlocked that can be applied for free continue to be free when the wardrobe system is released?

For example GW1 accounts have numerous skins unlocked. Also many accounts have skins unlocked via achievement points. Will these skins cost 0 transmutation charges?

I can just imagine teams in TA going condi/direct damage hybrid all with perplexity applying 15-20 stacks of confusion with over 50% uptime from everyone running perplexity with cover condis of 10-15 stacks of bleeds, 10 stacks of torment, burning, and poison.

Not sure how feasible it will be, but it’s easy to theorycraft this stuff.

With the upcoming wardrobe, if I’m understanding the implementation correctly there’s a layer overlayed on top of gear now. This layer shows you whatever skin you use a transmutation charge to display. So regardless of whatever weapon you actually have equipped you always see the same skin from the wardrobe layer. If this is wrong, then in my ideal world this is how the wardrobe system would work.

Assuming the wardrobe layer behaves as described above. Something that would be pretty cool to add to the gemstore would be interchangable, customizable wardrobe templates.

Think of these customizable templates as a kind of one click swappable outfit.

The way it would work is every account has their one set of choices to display from their wardrobe for their wardrobe layer. Any account would be able to buy additional interchangable templates. Once a template is bought when you swap to that template from your default wardrobe template layer, it’s a clean slate for the wardrobe layer that you can use transmutation charges to customize an entirely different look. You be able to swap between these templates at any time, for free depending on what look you want to display.

The value that this system would provide to the player is that they can change their entire look in one action, and (besides the initial charge cost to set up the template) don’t have to use 6 transmutation charges for armor, 1 charge for the backpiece, and 2-4 charges for the land weapons, and 1-2 charges for water weapons.

The templates should take into account unequiped weapon types as well, but all slots on the template should be optional to apply a skin to.

I haven’t tried to work out any numbers on the proper gem price for these templates from the gemstore, because I don’t have the data available to do that, but I would imagine this would be somewhat pricy, like 1000+ gems because this would be an additional template per character on an account.

Assuming ANet finds a balanced gem price point, this kind of feature should be a win win for ANet and the players, as it offer convenience and potential savings to players, while increasing the amount of gems consumed in the game economy for ANet.

Evan Lesh.3295:

We wanted to make build crafting much easier than it currently is on live. Part of this was removing underwater items from PvP. Only one map had underwater combat, but required you to consider up to 6 more build pieces (Helm, rune, 1-2 weapons + 1-2 sigils). Not only will the removal of Capricorn simplify build-making, it means that we have to store far less data inside templates when those happen.

It really only reduces the items to think about by 4, the sigils. The helm never needed to be thought about. The rune no longer needs to be.

Shadow step removes conditions at the expense of teleporting back to your original location.

Sword 2 removes a condition when you teleport back to your original location as well.

I’m guessing with the ferocity change and Celestial PvP Amulet change divinity runes are changing as well in PvP/PvE?

JonathanSharp.7094:

I probably shouldn’t be reading the forums at 10:45 on a Friday night….but I am.

1) Thanks for talking about this in such a constructive manner. A lot of you guys are bringing up great points with highly cogent logic. I like. I like how you’re bringing up possible issues in multiple game types as well, kudos for espousing a holistic point of view.

2) There are going to be a lot of changes, as we’ve stated before on the 15th. The meta will probably shift a lot for many areas of the game, so we’ll have to see how things shake out.

3) Please keep the talking open, rational, and with as little salt as possible – you guys are rocking. We are listening, and I’ll check this thread next week to see how the conversation goes.

Thanks for keeping it civil.

/Chapout

Is the PvP dev team okay with with 64%-75% (condition duration buff dependent) uptime on 5 stacks of confusion at 15 second intervals? I would imagine some of them have brought up concerns.

Necro, Mesmer, Thief, Warrior. Each of these professions can easily stack conditions to cover confusion. Direct Damage builds won’t be able to cleanse this without respecing away from damage into condition removal. Condition removals will HAVE to be used immediately upon the confusion being applied, the 15 second interval, and needing the removals for bleed spikes, and immobilize will make this hard to do.

I think there’s a balance for perplixity to reach, but it’s off the mark by a signicant amount at the moment.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Pyriall.5027:

I find it a bit curious that NOW you quote a forum post, being that is supports your position (even moderately at best). Yet, all the other posts (hello skyhammer and skyhammer farming threads) were thought of as not valid enough.

Pyriall, I don’t HAVE a position. If anything, my position tends to stand with the community. Sometimes, you guys send mixed messaging, which is what I am trying to understand. If I go back to the devs and tell them the feedback you give in this thread, then what should I say when they bring up the point I made?

I’m not going to get into detail on the Skyhammer point because I don’t want to derail this thread, but I will say that using Skyhammer to argue your point is backwards. The only reason I commented on that thread is because I needed to know what I was going to say when I went to the team and explained how the community feels it should be removed. It was literally the first issue I raised to the team the day I came back.

You act like it is ArenaNet vs. the community, and that is just wrong on so many levels. When you see me picking apart your arguments and pointing things out, it’s because I want to make sure you have thought everything through before I raise it to the team.

We all want the same thing. For GW2 to be the best it can be.

Now, back on topic. OE, I think your points are valid. I feel like your thread has mixed messaging in it, though. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you started this thread with the concern that we are removing a piece that you feel is tantamount to build diversity. Can you explain which builds you feel this will affect? I’m asking this because I am seeing posts from others that say it’s not really going to change much.

Everyone kept asking me “Is this patch going to shake up the meta?” and it always made me chuckle knowing what was coming. Given that we are changing so much, it will be a major shake-up for those of you that have known our game through it’s ups and downs. In that sense, it will be a big adjustment.

This is why I ask that you guys try things out before assuming this will hurt build diversity or the game in general. We are shaking things up and changing systems that we have not liked for a long time. Yes, it’s going to be a renaissance of GW2 PvP.

I’m just asking you guys to be open to it. If this goes out and it didn’t work out as we had planned, then we are open to change too.

Now, I won’t post for the rest of the weekend, but I had to get that off my chest. The movers are going to be here in 30 minutes so I need to go scramble to get things ready.

I think it’s important to understand that quantity of choices isn’t what players need. What players need is quality of choices. Removing jewels is going remove both quality and quantity of choices for some builds. This is why mixed messaging is occurring, because players inherently know positives and negatives are happening due to this change.

The positive is that the barrier to entry for PvP is lowered, due to the simplification. On the other hand, these ‘minor’ stat changes that occur due to jewels really can give players a way to tailor their stats to more highlight their strengths and cover up their weaknesses.

Really what the nay sayers are clammoring for is better stat distributions period. This can be done with the amulet system alone, and doesn’t require jewels. It just requires an understanding on the development side of what stat combinations the playerbase as a whole wants.

When I reference the stat combinations that people want, I’m not suggesting to continue doing Major Minor Minor stat distributions, but stat distributions more complex than that. Similar to how berserker’s is distributed.

For example, I would put money on players wanting amulets with stats similar to celestial that removes Condition Damage and Healing Power redistributing those points into Power for a balanced Direct Damage Amulet.

This might be something in progress already, but the dev team should take a step back and think about reducing the amount of amulet choices leaving available only stat combinations that can result in builds being used in upper tier play. Reduce quantity of low quality build possibilities, while increasing the quantity of high quality build possibilities to further reduce the barrier to entry.

Maybe this results in eliminating amulets and introducing a new system at some point, but it doesn’t matter as long as the chosen solution is focused on eliminating low quality choices, and offering a limited amount of high quality choices that aren’t too similar.

Shockwave.1230:

Isn’t there a way to make legendaries unbound with a transmutation splitter?

I would do that and then sell my spare

According to the wiki, this trick only makes legendaries account bound.

Just request that ANet make all legendaries on accounts unbound post patch. That way if you want to keep them you can, if you want to sell them you can.

Isn’t there a way to make legendaries unbound with a transmutation splitter?

I would do that and then sell my spare

… per armor class at the very least, but hopefully armor class wide.

The announcement of account bound ascended and legendaries is what really gives this away in my mind. The thought process behind this is the same as the wardrobe. Why make people have different armor base stat combinations taking up space? Why prevent ease of use by making players swap gear between characters in order to use it?

Why not just allow stat combo’s to be unlocked and selected in a similar fashion to the wardrobe?

I think this will happen within the next year, because it’s the next logical step for them to take with gear. The question is, should they apply it to tiers lower than ascended?

Thank you very much!

I don’t want to end up making a mistake by spending/not spending my laurel’s on dyes, will the trade in of laurel’s for dyes be changing in any way?

Hello,

I bought 2 Kasmeer’s Staves and 2 Marjory’s Daggers when they came back for a day. I really liked the skins and wasn’t sure I’d ever have the opportunity to get them again and I have them all in my bank, except one of the Kasmeer’s Staff skins. With the upcoming Wardrobe changes did I waste any gems by getting duplicates?

Launch was Zhaitan, we’re over a year and a half later and he still has lots of minions somehow. They won’t give up on those temples either for some reason.

I understand that it would be a massive undertaking to gradually redesign 3 existing maps, but the story is what was told.

Orr has been cleansed, Zhaitan’s been defeated yet all this time the land hasn’t changed.

This hopefully shows that it’s important to be careful with lore, because the game can break it’s own immersion.

In the future with the main stories in game, set expectations that will be followed through with.

I don’t actually want development time spent transitioning Orr, because there’s more valuable ways to spend that time. It would be nice if at some point Orr received a story update, or we learned more about what the deal is with Orr post Zhaitan in some fashion.

KillerJacket.9735:

Yamsandjams.3267:

Zacchary.6183:

Chilled C&D = 5 initiative
1 initiative per 3 seconds
C&D CD = 5s x 3 = 15 seconds.

This is actually good to point out. I think when people describe reducing initiative regeneration (myself included), they don’t consider the actual math behind it. I believe the intent is actually to reduce the amount of initiative regeneration such that it effectively works out to a 66% longer cooldown like other professions have. For instance, a 10 second cooldown should become a 16.6 second cooldown.

As such, the math that I believe should be used is that a chilled thief would regenerate 1 initiative every 1.66 seconds, rather than reducing the regeneration rate by 66% to 34%.

This effectively works out to approximately 0.6 initiative per second, and thus could be considered a 40% reduction in initiative regeneration rather than 66%.

Reworking your calculations, this creates the following:

Chilled C&D = 5 initiative
1 initiative per 1.66 seconds
C&D CD = 5s x 1.66 = 8.3 seconds.

Ding ding ding we have a winner. Someone that actually understands balance and doesn’t just suggest an end all I win button.

This isn’t really a winning suggestion. All other professions can swap to another weapon set to access another set of skills while they are impacted by chill. The thief doesn’t have that option if they’re initiative is impacted by chill.

Additionally the thief is designed to use it’s skill much more infrequently over time than other professions. For example a D/P | SB’s average weapon skill cost is about 4 initiative average between skills 2-5. Over 60 seconds they have 72 initiative to use naturally. That’s between 18 weapon skills they can use.

Compare this to a Hambow warrior. Who can use about 36 weapon skills over 60 seconds.

If you scale an encounter down to 30 seconds. A thief has about 10 skills they can over 30 seconds because they have 42 initiative to work with.

A warrior will be able to pull off about 18 weapon skills over 30 seconds.

What happens if a thief has chill for 5 seconds of that 30 seconds?

They regen 3 less initiative, out of the 12 they can have available at any time. That’s 25% of their global resources (20% if traited).

Compare this to 5 seconds of chill on another profession. 1) They lose 3 and 1/3 seconds off their recharge time. 2) only skills on recharge are affected, not skills that are off cooldown, so it’s not impacting other professions globally like it does the thief. 3) Every other profession has other weapon skills to swap to, because they don’t have a global resource pool.

Let’s say half of player weapon skills are on cooldown, and let’s continue to look at hambow. Hambow’s average recharge time is about 15 seconds a skill. That means chill impacts their skill resource of recharge by about 23% per skill. With only half of the weapon skills on recharge, that’s less than a 12% impact.

So with average numbers, a hambow warrior would be impacted less than half as much as the suggestion to thieves.

This is theory, but I have a feeling this combo may be OP on some specs

Air/Fire
Air/Intelligence

On a warrior with Fast Hands for example. The warrior will be able to Proc Air, Fire, and Intelligence pretty much all the time immediately off cooldown. It seems like this would be a mandatory sigil setup for a glass warrior, because of how good it could be.

Options like this aren’t even available to the engineer and elementalist, but this is a separate concern.

Conncept.7638:

Shockwave.1230:

Conncept.7638:

Shockwave.1230:

If it did the 66 percent reduction to recharge all thieves would instantly lose when they have chill applied to them for 4 seconds or more.

You mean kind of like elementalists have suffered through since launch?

I main an ele, and can compensate chill impacting attunements because I have 20 weapon skills to work with plus plenty of condition removal. I happen to be an advocate for removing chill from impacting attunement swapping, due to it not impacting engineer kit swapping.

Even when I play on another class with only 10 weapon skills, I can swap weapons if chill is slowing me down on my current weapon set.

On thief I have only 1 universal pool of resources, so to be able to impact that pool so severely that it reduces my access by 66% is like introducing an anti-thief mechanic to the game.

Chill directly impacting thief initiative in the same way as skills with recharge are currently impacted can’t be introduce to the game without nearly eliminating the class from the meta.

I main an ele as well, and I’m also a third year design student, and that is a completely nonsensical excuse.

A skills output is measured by its affects compared to its uptake and downtime. Most classes only have one resource controlling their uptake and downtime, including the elementalist, that being cooldowns. The thief is the only one which has more than one resource dictating its uptime, initiative and cooldowns. If their method of gaining initiative was dependent on skill-use without any other affects, and therefore controlled by cooldowns itself, that would be different. But it isn’t, the resource is gained with no active play required just like cooldowns regen. And those on-CD traits and abilities which do give initiative are all married into other affects such as stealth, evasion, and critical hits.

Having their initiative regen drop by two thirds will affect their output no differently than cooldowns and cast times dropping by two thirds affects every other class.

You should read some of the points made early on. It’s great that you’re a design student, but don’t overlook valid points.

While you say cooldown is 1 resource, it’s not. It’s more like 4 resources per 5 weapon skills, and it’s not universal because these cooldowns can countdown simultaneously.

Chill universally affects cooldowns, but that does not make cooldowns a universal resource from a resource pool perspective.

Initiative is a universal resource to weapon skills, because each weapon skills requires initiative except skill 1 which has an initiative cost of 0. Initiative is a resource pool.

If you impact the resource pool of one profession you are severly crippling it. I don’t know what games you have played previously, but I’m going to use GW1 as my example.

In GW1 you had a resource pool called energy. Skills required drain from this pool and the pool naturally replinished over time like initiative does. In GW1 many of the classes that GW2 has were present. Now imagine you have a Mesmer and an Elementalist putting conditions on each other.

Let’s say our condition is Daze. Let’s say Daze increased your cast time and for the mesmer decreased its energy gain rate over time, but it didn’t do this to the energy pool of the elementalist.

These professions put daze on each other. What happens? Over time the mesmer will have fewer resources, in GW1 it so happens the mesmer was designed to activate skills quickly while the elementalist had a bigger resource pool to play with. What this would mean is that the mesmer’s resource pool would be depleated quickly and restore slowly, while the elementalist would restore normally and has more resources.

The above comparison has parallels to chill impacting initiative and recharges. Chill impacting the thief means they have a system in place that causes them to depleat their resources quickly and recharge them slowly, because they have 1 universal resource pool and can’t swap weapons to be able to use skills off recharge. On the other hand every other profession has at least 8 weapon skills each with their own resource available. This is the big difference, and why the thief would be hit so hard by chill impacting initiative.

Forzani.2584:

Shockwave.1230:

Wow I can’t believe I never thought of this…

This is actually a big issue for PvP rerollers.

Trait/Skill unlocks being soul bound is definitely a big issue here. I missed this, because I don’t need to reroll and have always thought the added healing skills too weak to use.

I watched much of the twitch feed but I admit I don’t understand this issue or what these changes do

To clarify the OP, basically it was communicated that PvP character unlocks (such as skills and traits i.e. the 25 skill point healing skills and the new grandmaster traits)will be the equivalent of Soulbound.

Soulbound means character bound, so if you delete and reroll your character your unlock progress is deleted and restarted.

Ideally for a PvP reroller (someone who delete’s one of their character slots and recreates so they can play any profession in PvP) these would be account bound, because they have already done the work to unlock these things to be competitive with the rest of the playerbase.

Account bound means they are available for any character on the player’s account. Sorry if that’s all too basic, just wanted to make sure everything was understood.

Justin ODell.9517:

As an altoholic, I feel your pain. I’ll need to take a look at the data tomorrow, find out just how common re-rolling is for PvPers.

I’m sure you will think of other data to check, but make sure to get the total number of rerolls per x time, the total number of accounts that reroll per x time, and it might be worth while to check these numbers during PvP’s peak month each year since live as well.

Cush.4063:

I would settle for initiative to be reduced by 33% instead of 66% to make it fair. Otherwise elementalist’s need to be not effected by chill regarding attunement swaps.

I’ve been waiting for someone to suggest Chill cause initiative regen to be the old rate. That’s where my head’s been, and we know it worked in the game previously.

Cush.4063:

glaphen.5230:

Thief and Elementalist are faster and sacrifice less.

I’m sorry but elementalist’s are far less mobile than warriors. An elementalist can never catch a warrior who is running away or a can outrun a warrior coming after them.

Chill dude, don’t Cripple your perspective, Immobilize yourself so you can put more energy into thinking more broadly.

Wow I can’t believe I never thought of this…

This is actually a big issue for PvP rerollers.

Trait/Skill unlocks being soul bound is definitely a big issue here. I missed this, because I don’t need to reroll and have always thought the added healing skills too weak to use.

The biggest nerf here is that orbs and jewels aren’t insanely scaling in favor of crit damage anymore. They could have not introduced ferocity and could have not reduced the overall crit damage from builds.

The fact that orbs and jewels scale so incredibly high with crit damage and that is being changed is what will be the destruction of hybrid builds, not the concept of ferocity.