This is extremely straightforward. Nobody owns any open world mobs at all anywhere. Nobody owns any open world events anywhere. Nobody owns any open world resources anywhere. Anyone who wants to kill a mob can do so and anyone who wants to join in can share the credit. Anyone who wants to start/finish an event can do so and anyone who wants to join in can share the credit. Anyone who wants to harvest resources can do so. End of story.
Telling people that they cannot kill a mob, harvest a resource, or start/finish an event is going against the game ethos. Preventing them from doing so is griefing.
Spirits should provide an area effect around themselves and the pet (with the right requirements). The spirit then would not need to be mobile.
“How can you be bad on a class that all it does is shoot arrows. "
That’s exactly how you are bad. As previous people have said, ranged dps is less than melee dps for all classes. If you want to contribute to the group with utilities you need to be closer than 900m to the melee.
Rangers are generally bad in dungeons. However a good ranger will still be better than a bad player in any other class. Any decent group will appreciate that.
Blind from the front is useful. You use it on opponents with stun immunity.
There are two arguments against a thief mace. Firstly if you renamed the existing sword skills to be mace skills they could make sense for a club/mace attack, so you have to ask whether maces are needed if another weapon already fill that space. Secondly the mace was a heavy power weapon needing a firm strike for damage. Any combatant balanced to move away from or around opponents would lack the momentum into/through the opponent on each strike.
The ranger isn’t particularly high on the skill curve. It may be difficult to get top end performance out of the ranger but the same can probably be said for all other classes. At the low end the ranger is probably the easiest of all classes to play.
They will still need a solution for dungeons and karma vendors that currently provide top line exotic items that will become ignorable exotic junk once ascended is available. (Assuming that ascended will be widely accessible and not just for an elite few).
I think the reactor is interesting because it might be crazy fun. Explosions. Chaos creatures. Mad Scientists. Failed experiments. Usual sort of fun with or without much lore behind it. I’m guessing that’s how it will get votes.
In dungeons you can try a signet of malice, caltrops, smokescreen, daggerstorm type build and customize a bit for each boss. That shouldn’t feel much like a guardian.
Given that a vacancy might appear on the council over time anyway, it doesn’t seem reasonable for the Aetherblade base to have been built just for the dragon bash attack with a plan of exposing it immediately. If Kiel was actually Scarlet then the better move would be to follow the original plan of putting Mai onto the council as a puppet. If Mai got out of hand then she could still be arrested for the Dragon Bash attack giving Kiel another vacancy on the council. In fact, from her Lionguard position it would have been much easier for Kiel to ‘remove’ one of the least popular councilors to start with.
Give these dungeons some respect. GW2 is meant to provide some challenge and be tough for those who don’t know the tactics and play style. If you wipe badly on the first time through it just makes it more satisfying when you eventually stroll through easily.
If you take a build from a website and watch strategy videos then you might do every dungeon first time easily but you’re not playing your own game. You are walking through the game under instruction. If you can find your own challenges and overcome them you might actually feel like you’ve achieved something.
Give all the other dungeons a go. If you can go with a guild group that can take you through properly you’ll have some fun. Forget all the ‘dungeons are easy, take zerk warriors blah blah blah’ nonsense. All the dungeons are difficult without tactics. All the dungeons can be done by any classes with good tactics. Dungeons that were previously seen as hard are now seen as easy (CoE) because the common knowledge tactics have improved, even though the dungeons have not changed.
Stacking and skipping are parts of the common knowledge tactics. You don’t have to always do that. People often stack in the middle of red circles and wonder why they die. People often skip too much but can’t understand why the rest of the group is in trouble and losing time. For your first run however it is easiest to go with the flow and follow the staking and skipping.
Yes it is poor. Anything you want to poison can be fed plenty of poison without this trait. Everything else is not going to be inconvenienced by the poison duration.
The story dungeons can be done by new players on level. They will be hard but they are achievable. The explorable dungeons are at a higher level of difficulty. The good news is that as you get more experienced you will be able to get far, far more from your character than you can now. The bad news is that this means you should wait until level 80 before trying the explorable dungeons so that you have some gear/skill benefits to counter your lack of experience.
“Actually, they’re not even necessarily evil from our characters’ point of view – most NPCs view them as a literal force of nature. Something that’s supposed to happen – kind of like they’re a physical manifestation of Fate. "
I don’t accept that at all. Dragon Bash seems to represent a majority opinion that elder dragons are evil and should die.
“But even if it isn’t, we only view them as evil because we only see their actions, not their reason. "
While their reasons are unknown we can only judge them on their actions. Their actions are not only evil in effect but they are evil in design and evil in execution. They recruit and create servants that perform evil acts in their name. To use your analogy, a courtroom would convict a criminal if the evidence was present but no motive could be established.
“But they’re only evil from our point of view.”
Right! Our (character’s) point of view is the only view that matters. We can talk we like about whether Klingons and Romulans think Elder Dragons are evil but it’s all irrelevant. The only point of view that matters is that seen by our fictional characters in our storyline. There’s no need to go into deep philosophy of what some imaginary characters might think of other imaginary characters. The context of our shared discussion is based on our shared understanding of the stories presented to us in game and those stories show evidence of unrelenting evil.
“While it is true the Dragons seem to have knowledge of the cultures of these races, I still believe they are more of a force of nature than a force of evil.”
There is nothing to stop them being both at the same time.
I’m surprised that so many posters want to believe in a higher concept that rides above all the evidence of the evil acts by dragon minions within the game. The evidence is shown in every meeting with dragon minions withing the game, in every zone, in every dungeon, in all dialog, in every story line. When Svanir and corrupted minions storm the Honor of the Waves they are not just ensuring the survival of Jormag, the storyline explicitly demonstrates the evil nature of those minions.
“If something does not know how to do something other than to try to make everything like themselves, does that mean it is evil? "
The elder dragons have more awareness of the world than most creatures. They are intelligent. They seem to have free will. They have knowledge of the culture of other races and the Gods. Yet they unrelentingly perform evil acts so we must assume they are evil. If however there is secret evidence that their nature is unalterable and their nature compels them to perform only evil acts then yes they are still evil. In any way that an agency or tool could be considered evil the dragons would be considered evil.
Sometimes game design allows players to spend their time in ways that is ultimately not good for game balance, not particularly enjoyable, narrows the game focus, and creates tensions between players. This is what has happened with CoF1 path 1. It would be a good dungeon route if players didn’t try to extract every gold possible from it (bad balance), run it until they can no longer enjoy it for itself, run it in exclusion to other content, and selfishly exclude players from dungeon runs in order to save themselves a few precious minutes.
So the problems are all player created but could be resolved with better dungeon design. If CoF was balanced a little better then players would create the same problems in new hotspots. Maybe however the problems would not be so frequent and so obvious. Perhaps players would fall victim to themselves less often.
“if they’re invulnerable it’s because someone attacked them from a position that couldn’t be attacked back”
This is how it is meant to work but the invulnerability can start for a variety of other non-exploit reasons (such as the harpy knocking you into a place where it can no longer shoot you) and then never ends. It wouldn’t be a big problem if it ended when combat could resume normally but the invulnerability doesn’t end until one party is dead and that is a clear bug.
By most standards the dragons and their minions are evil. They do not accommodate anyone or anything else in their world view. You must become their slave or die. They enjoy killing those who do not serve them. Everything is reformed in their image through corruption. They will destroy or corrupt anything to sate their desires. If the dragons have their own virtues then those virtues are not recognizable to the playable races. Any free race that wants to preserve their lives, culture, laws, homes, art, history, families, crops, nation, or anything else will see the dragons as an evil threat.
Even if the dragons have a natural purpose that drives them to act the way they do, unable to achieve their ends by any other means, all the playable races will perceive the elder dragons as utterly evil.
Destiny’s Edge and the Pact will lead the personal story. The new characters will lead the living story and will probably not be seen in any new personal story at all.
I run a 30/0/30/10/0 build with those two armor sets, bezerk and carrion. I don’t think the 30 deadly arts are powerful but I like having a venom option. Anyone else might want to spread those points elsewhere. My carrion armor has adventurer runes for extra endurance and I use it as a purely defensive/kiting set.
For fractals I don’t use any single weapon pairing. I use almost every combination somewhere. The traits and utilities change regularly as well. I firmly believe that the right skills for a fight are more important than having the right skills for your traits. All the fights are possible with that approach.
“It’s a mechanic to make you melee them.”
Nope it’s just plain broken. Obviously broken. There’s no need to confuse the issue.
There is a massive gap in capability between new players and the experienced players. Firstly the experienced players have common knowledge tactics that are run in PUGs and work very well. Lots of players don’t realize how much difference they make and would be unable to form their own tactics. Secondly the experienced players can get massively more out of their characters. By applying the right defense at the right time they can avoid the worst damage/effects and dps almost unhindered.
AC was revamped however a few months back. This made it more punishing for beginner groups though not much more difficult for experienced players. Many people posted on the forums that it is too punishing for the first explorable dungeon and you probably now agree. The other dungeons can be just as tough but there are certainly some easier paths amongst them.
All the dungeons are hard if you don’t know the tactics. CM is one of the dungeons that is very hard is without tactics. It’s a big help to know the dungeon so you can ambush the ambushers. You need to know what each enemy does and actively control them with missile defense, blind, etc.
I managed tonight to miss my daily in the worst way. With 4/5 daily tasks done, and 2/3 skill points gained I just needed one more. The closest skill point was the one in the beer cellar in wayfarer hills. I got there, the beer went in my inventory, and while I was looking for it the clock ticked over for the daily.
That’s bad enough but my bags were full of junk because I’d just got out of the fractals and rushed over. I would have had enough time to sell and go over except that I’d been forcibly booted of the game for a patch when I left fractals. The fractal run wouldn’t have taken so long except a group member had disconnected and weren’t allowed back in after being patched. We’d also waited to get a replacement and they weren’t allowed in because of the patch. So we’d done the last couple of fractals with just 4 people and that wasn’t fast. We’d wiped on the ice elemental boss when it was down to about 5% health. And guess what our third fractal was? Dredge of course.
If that all wasn’t bad enough I did get a dancing chest when I drunk the beer, one minute after the daily swapped. Had I got the daily somehow? No. It was the achievement chest coming through automatically for the next day.
Sometimes groups advertise in more than one place for members and they advertise with different requirements. Anyone who asked for high AR might be expect newcomers to have high AR, even though the newcomers never saw that.
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People always seem to want these weapons without knowing what skills the weapon would have. A sword off hand would really have to give something different from daggers (so no stealth or throwing) and different from warrior swords. I suspect that getting it different from warrior double sword is a big problem since there’s no obvious blind or movement mechanic to put in. The dual skill is a bit easier to imagine, a crossed sword parry, but can thieves legitimately have a spammable parry?
You always have to dodge one of the tree’s attacks or else more spiders came. This attack has a similar animation to the tree’s major attack on the other paths. I haven’t run this path for a while but I’m guessing nothing has changed. This fight always used to overwhelm the players who couldn’t spot an attack animation and dodge.
Isn’t it strange that NPC pulls always seem to work no matter what, while player pulls fail for the most spurious reasons?
All the people who like the sword following a moving target, telling others to learn to play with auto attacks off , why don’t you learn to follow a target?
Although this fractal seems big it is not massively bigger than the Asura laboratories seen around Tyria, such as the one in Fireheart Rise. Those labs are run by one or two scientists and some golems so I don’t see much to suggest that this isn’t at city at all but just another lab. That would allow it to be anywhere, but the inhabitants seem to fit the Ebonhawke area.
Although the fractals seem to use elements from the elder dragons I don’t see there being any direct correspondance. There’s certainly nothing seen of Kralk.
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Carach was Sylvari.
Thieves are immediately in trouble when a condition based defense (blind) is not working. Boon based classes are much more resilient and can dodge just as much as thieves if they want to. They usually don’t want to since they have better defense elsewhere. Thieves are also effectively running with missing utility lines since traps cannot form the basis of a build. We’re not the only class with this problem and all these redundant utilities need fixing across all classes in order to promote some variation in builds.
PvE content is there to be beaten. If you learn the skills you will beat it eventually. As soon as you move to PvP you are immediately in the opposite position. You are there to be horribly beaten up by streetwise PvP players until you learn the skills to get some parity. You might never get the skills to regularly beat the enemy. It needs a different mindset to play.
So how do you get PvE players into adversarial play? The team games are a good start. So would be automatching against other newbie opponents or introductory events. A lot of this is already there.
Some players also don’t enjoy the PvP formats. Holding a point in SPvP. Zerging in WvW. It just doesn’t float their boat.
“I am trying to complete world completion on my third character and all that is left is Orr. It is almost impossible because…. you guessed it…. there is hardly anyone in Orr anymore. "
Yes they broke Orr. It has the format of an end game zone but they made it harder, took out all the rewards, then put new rewards into temporary and trivial content so everyone does that instead. All they need to do is balance the effort and reward back to where it was a few months ago.
If players who had defeated Zaitan were taken into an end game without the risen in Orr then the new players would complain that (a) they are not playing with their friends who had already completed the story and (b) the zones are empty of players generally and © they need to complete the story to enter the endgame. This is more problematic than players wanting the story to be perfect. Guild Wars II goes to great lengths to allow friends to play together even if they are different levels or on different servers.
As soon as you create some other artificial method for friends to play together the story will get out of synch for some of them anyway, so leaving Orr in an ambiguous state of just before/after/during the war against Zaitan is the most sensible solution.
The problems with thieves getting revealed on block are nothing to do with warriors. They relate to other classes with easier access to blocks. The warrior forum is not the best place to talk about it. In fact there is a post on thief forum from the same original poster. That’s the place to talk about it!
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“Don’t use sword if you don’t like it. Stop asking for changes on weapons when you don’t like them, use other weapons instead.”
Nope. Good design would leave us with a full set of weapons that are all enjoyable to use and balanced for different situations and play styles.
If you really like the sword but don’t like stealth you could try a sword/pistol thief with access to smoke, shadowsteps, pistol whip.
If you haven’t played a sword ranger at all yet you should check out the animations. It could put you off the sword for life.
Sword/dagger doesn’t really offer much for dungeons. The sword is self-sabotage as you either lose control or lose auto attacks and the dagger doesn’t offer enough utility. In PvP the 4 and 5 skills are good for duelling but dungeons are not about duelling. I’m guessing the dagger suits condition builds but for dungeons you’re generally better with direct damage and bezerker gear. If you like sword/dagger for roleplaying you’ll be able to make it work but to be honest, as someone who swaps weapon sets a lot, I’ve never needed to swap to sword/dagger for anything.
Try playing a ranger, stuck standing in a healing spring for decent condition cures. Thieves have it quite good with a cure on a common ability, stealth, for only a 10 point trait.
I’ve run this dungeon frequently without heavy armors and it seems fine without them. I’d be more bothered running an explorable dungeon or fractal without a guardian than the aetherblade retreat.
As last man standing, I did once manage to get all my party up from dead during the last boss fight. They all died again on the next cannon wave though so we didn’t get a miraculous victory.
" Or, if you aren’t against a boss, use Black Powder every 5s, press 1 and get a coffee.
Doesn’t work against mixed melee-ranged groups"
That’s why smokescreen is so good.
“Channeled attacks tracking and damaging the thief while in stealth.”
That’s working correctly. The channeled attack is still weaker than an attack that does all the damage instantly, the attacker has to channel the skill, it can still be dodged, it can still be interrupted. It’s clearly not helpful to us that it works this way but it is correct. Aegis and blind are not the best defense to channeled skills either.
There is one hidden flaw with the thief dual skills. Most attack skills can be interrupted for a utility skills. Utility skills are however queued until after a thief dual skill completes. The utility can even get lost in the queue and not happen at all. This does not affect instants like blinding powder but it does affect smokescreen and caltrops.
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There needs to be a complete rethink of what end game players are doing. If Malchor’s, Straights, and Cursed Shore are all meant to be populated with many players running end game events, which seems to be the purpose of these zones, then the cumulative effect of all the changes seems to be counterproductive.
– Karma rewards for events are meaningless
– Experience rewards for events are meaningless
– Loot rewards are poor
– The skill base for zerging events is really low and zerg events are not much fun (better done in PvP)
– Any events needing more than zerg tactics fail too easily (design issue?)
– Risk that Arah never gets opened if the cursed shore population vanishes
– Splitting Orr into 3 event based zones leaves two of them short of end game population.
– Malchor’s and Straights will always be dysfunctional as end game event zones while they are below level 80.
– No achievements, minis, or cosmetic rewards for Orr events
– No daily completion in Orr
– Revamps of mobs often seem unpopular and untested
– No dancing chests for meaningless slaughter of trivial world events in Orr
Many of the changes to Orr seem to have been designed to move the player base from Orr into other areas. That seems to have been too successful and I can’t see why the designers no longer want the endgame played in the zones that were designed to be the endgame event zones.
This has been posted up before. Different people have have different ideas about what should break stealth and what shouldn’t. I’d say that an active block should break stealth but a miss or dodge should not.