Guild Wars 2

There are situations when a character can block, turn for a counter attack, and then be left facing away from the original target for auto-attacks. No attacks are made until the facing is corrected manually by the player or a new target chosen. Although the player can correct this the player can still be accidentally punished by game mechanics for good positioning, good targeting, good block timing, but unlucky attack sequencing by the enemy.

I’m sure someone will post and say ‘learn to play you idiot’, as always happens on these friendly forums, but I’m sure many players would appreciate not having to manually correct glitchy combat mechanics like this.

You can trigger more effects with faster weapons.

Have fewer characters so that we don’t see new faces for one or two missions then never see them again. Many of characters/artifacts are seen in the early personal stories and reappear later but there’s seemingly only a low chance that story lines cross each other and when they don’t it all seems too bitty. An example would be the two pacts soldiers who help rescue the archaelogists from the dig site. As soon as you find out who they are, you never see them again.

I wonder if there were problems coming from the Trahearne actor recording all his voice parts against 10 possible voice actors for the player character. Maybe his parts were recorded first and he was unable to find a natural conversational rhythm.

He also had some pretty bad lines though. Any time in a movie or book that a character is telling you the plot it’s a sure sign that the storytelling isn’t particularly good. The plot should unfold from events. Trahearne was regularly telling you things out of conversation as you were travelling.

I was told that bandit slaying worked for ascalon and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a more general typecasting for potions of

inquest = asura
bandits = humans
flame legion = charr
svanir = norn
nightmare = sylvari

Elemental slaying might be worth considering for the fire shaman fight as well.

I actually run with the 30-0-30-10-0 and it works. I’m sticking with it really as it’s how I want play PVE rather than through any min/max calculation. I get good venoms but I see them as one option amongst many since they are just not optimal all the time ( I only use 3 venoms when underwater, and this build should be good underwater). The build provides a strong shortbow with the trait for extra damage and the bonus of weakness upon poison. You get a good offhand dagger with choice of main hand weapon. The bonus damage against enemies with a condition is a given. There are times when it’s still better to have an offhand pistol and the build struggles to give much support there. I usually work with no additional initiative generation at all.

To be honest, I’d recommend 10/15 points in acrobatics for any thief in any build since you need vigor and endurance for the most dangerous dungeon/fractal opponents.

The knights have only melee attacks so cripple, immobilize, and ranged damage will work. Traps can halt their initial rush. I think they are warrior types with great swords so they have high damage, some gap closers, but inflict no conditions.

Does the cave troll ‘bonus’ event in AC story now have the same spec as the cave trolls in explorable AC? Fear, earth tremor attacks, ranged daze?

I was just in a scratch group that found the rest of AC story pitched at exactly the right level for us, levels 37-67, with people experimenting with skills, some deaths, lots of revives, bosses going down, people watching the story, plenty of fun. This cave troll spoiled the party and casually wiped us again and again. The first time he feared two people so they ran off a ledge and fell to their deaths within a couple of seconds of the fight starting. Thereafter he gave gave us continuous streams of damage and fears, stomped us, beat up anyone who was reviving or being revived, and often downed us in one shot. He might be fine for an experienced group of 80s but kick this trolls lousy backside out of the first starter dungeon please!

(We eventually skipped him, as suggested by someone whose previous group had also had to skip him as they couldn’t kill him either).

There is a longbow problem that is not entirely about the longbow itself. If you use a longbow for damage you are putting yourself about 1000m away from the melee. This separates you and your buffs from the melee group and their buffs. For easy play this is fine but in any difficult dungeon this is insufficient since the group needs to perform better than the sum of its parts.

“Anyway, the situation isn’t that simple because whoever could figure out to solve this problem would be a multi-millionaire over night. The problem is dynamic because player’s definition of fun changed once they approach a higher level of competency. What’s used to be fun before now becomes boring. What were challenged before now become easy. And there is no end to that. And it could be why Anet has made a change to cater to those “casual” players have moved up to a different level.”

Well casual players haven’t moved up. Whenever I’ve done a pick up group for AC since the patch there has been a lot of pain. Plenty of those players have said ‘not going back there again’. It might be a better dungeon in terms of storylines and design but it is just too hard. The old AC was fine for difficulty since it did kill inexperienced players regularly, to the point that they could not complete paths without better tactics. It wasn’t the pushover that some people like to remember it as. The new design with the old difficulty would be an actual improvement.

Someone mentioned reviving team mates. Well my experience in the AC is that if I go near someone to drop a shadow refuge it will probably be interrupted in the quarter second it takes to cast by a graveling leaping on the downed person with a wide arc of aoe, leaving me knocked down, knocked down, down, and dead. The mechanics of the dungeon severely punish mistakes or even just not sighting all the incoming attacks. If it was the level 75 dungeon it would be ok, but not the level 35 dungeon.

Leo G.4501:

When people talk about Rangers being useless because they gear up in MF gear or are plinking away at max range…

…surely that isn’t the extent of this profession, is it?

The design problem is that the longbow works best at 1000m range and then any buff or utility provided by the ranger is 1000m away from the melee classes. Moving the ranger into skirmish range with traps and healing springs makes the class looks different. You’ve still got problems with spirits getting squished, pets getting squished, and so on.

The ambush is fine for newbie solo PvE so that’s not useless. The needle trap and tripwire are occasional skills and that’s fine, I think, since we can’t use all the skills all the time. The shadow trap seems strange to me, certainly for PvE, so perhaps it could be removed and its ability made into a trait that applied to all traps.

Voice acting for the personal stories will only have been recorded for the required races.

But if you spending time gearing up with rebreathers from exotic sets just to mirror the stats you have on your mask, isn’t that just a waste of time compared to having those stats from your mask all the time?

Deadly arts is a bit of a mess but it seems to have a bit of everything for every build, just.

Wouldn’t the game be better if rebreathers were made a purely cosmetic item? They provide no extra capability or customization through stats. They are just an extra item to purchase to bring up to level. They add nothing to play style.

Weapon controls are sometimes a bit buggy after a cut scene in a story or dungeon. Weapon swapping might not work (until you change weapons in the inventory). An attack skill might keep flashing. Characters can be stuck in an animation bodyshape. These things can also I think happen when moving from water to land.

Pistols need some mobilty so there might be an evade put in. I’d quite like to see a modification to infiltrator’s arrow since it is useful but oddly designed. The blind seems to suggest moving into melee range of enemies but we have enough gap closers already in the melee set. (I tend to nearly always use infiltrator’s arrow for escape or to reaching downed team mates).

I agree entirely that experience is more important than itemization. However with AC becoming so tough, where are new players going to gain experience?

In fractals you know what enemies are coming up so you can change your weapon sets before each fight. Picking the right weapon for specialized enemies is as important as picking the right weapon for your traits. Once you get into general melee with trash you can use any melee set up as long as you use it well.

My current feedback would be that thieves are not scaling well against the big armies sent against groups, particularly in fractals. The short bow is the only effective weapon against these groups with constant use of the cluster bomb. Dodge and evade mechanics fail against constant multiple incoming attacks. The gameplay becomes dull as well as frequently ineffective.

Boon classes can scale their boon bonuses across many enemies (as with protection, stability) but a thief struggles to apply conditions across multiple foes. Venoms for example have limited targets. Traps do not scale up well. Smoke fields are too small and single target interrupt are irrevelant. Shadowsteps and stealing can become irrelevant. And so on. Thief traits do little to address the problem.

Rather than overhaul the thief I’d rather see fewer encounters with such large enemy headcounts. The dredge fractal is the prime example of how encounters should not be scaled up.

Sustained long range dps is a feature of a ranger. It comes for them through bows. A thief rifle without sustained long range dps would be pointless (other than for breaking pvp with sniping), and with that dps it supercedes the ranger.

I don’t see thieves getting a rifle. A rifle is typically a weapon fired from a static position at long range for sustained single target damage. First of all, that’s the ranger’s job. It is also out of style for the thief. If you customize the rifle for effects then you’re becoming an engineer. It’s also too similar to our existing pistol skills since they are also single target with low mobility. Long range also voids our shadow steps.

I think some mileage could come from improving our existing pistol skills, perhaps adding some ‘light’ skills so that pistol is a viable without an off hand.

You could make a stronger case for block than for miss. Thieves are already quite vulnerable already to block responses so perhaps this is too is a non-issue.

I don’t see much flexibility in your build to deal with multiple enemies and that would be a problem in dungeons. Signet of malice can be weak however unless you are striking multiple enemies. Shadow arts is also quite a lot weaker without hide in shadows and the offhand dagger but that’s what trying do with pistol/pistol. Maybe you can take some points out of shadow arts and get heals from acrobatics. Extra endurance will be useful too since pistol attacks have few evades. Instead of wanting pistol/pistol you can perhaps use an offhand pistol with any main hand and pick one of those to use with a shortbow in dungeons. If you keep with the signet of malice you can experiment with caltrops.

Alternatively, if you keep the daggers and drop the pistol then perhaps you want to consider if you really need so much initiative generation and look for more utility such as blinding foes on stealth.

Extra cosmetics mean extra data passed to everyone’s client every time they see you. The game doesn’t need that just to see your undershirt.

Someone mentioned that they don’t use spirits in fractals. I actually do. I put down a sun spirit for the harpies, bloomhunger, and the jellyfish. In two of those cases it just makes the fight go faster and I could have used sharpening stones. For the harpies I only really get the benefit for one harpy before moving out of range, so again I could use sharpening stones.

In all of those cases I’m not triggering the spirit. This seems to me to be a fundamental problem with spirits. In all cases where you want to trigger the spirit on nearby enemies the enemies instead kill the spirit too fast. We can trait up for the benefits on death but this really only makes them into a trap, but we don’t need more traps, and we are using a trait to get an effect we should get without wasting a trait.

So I suppose I’m suggesting that the activated portion of the spirit is removed and either (1) the spirit is non-corporeal and just watches over the target area while giving its benefit or (2) the physical spirit gives a worthwhile effect when it is summoned and then gives its benefit within the area as long as it is alive. The on-death trait can be removed and something useful put in its place. The spirits look really mediocre anyway and I wouldn’t visually miss them at all.

Remember that PvE enemy thieves will inherit skills given to player thieves. I don’t think it is a good idea to give bandit mobs many attacks that penetrate block. Some more boon stripping, to wipe away passive benefits, is surely better than defeating active skills with regular attacks.

I actually have trouble use flanking strike for block breaking since auto-attacks trigger a block response before I can use my strike. Trying to time my instant response to to an enemies instant skill is too difficult for me.

If suppose that if you really want to break a block you can lay trap. You can also blind a foe and wait them out, put down aoe with a shortbow, stealth and reposition, well there are plenty of options and one of them might not be as bad as they all sound.

The second boss in Arah path 3 is not particularly dangerous and most groups can melee and heal through easily, no blocks, no evades. Lots of groups still want to just stand under his ledge as an exploit since the boss will then do them no damage. It really is just an example of how pointlessly players will use exploits for their own conceit of cleverness, since melee attacks and healing is the fastest way of killing this boss.

Try changing your traits to get defensive benefits from acrobatics or shadow arts.
Get out of fights early against multiple opponents, especially crossfires.
Keep initiative for defense (evade, shadowstep, daze, blind, stealth) and let auto attacks work.

A lot of players have had their butts kicked in AC story, their first dungeon, but then have realized just how much more they can get out of their character. I’m guessing you’ll do the same.

Everything else in the game is unfortunately out of balance until CoF1 is fixed. Let’s not forget that CoF3 needs fixing as well, not least because the final boss is awful.

Team play isn’t just about boons. If you can apply conditions like weakness, blind, or cripple, anything to keep the mobs under control, your warrior type can jump in and mash things to bits. Your team will appreciate that more than bringing some boons to the table when they can bring their own boons already.

Bri.8354:

If it is technically possible, it would be nice if lightning reflexes would always dodge in the opposite direction your camera is facing. Right now it activates in the opposite direction your character is facing which you cannot change while stunned or knocked down.

Yeah I come across this problem with this skill and the similar thief skill. Knockdowns often leave you on the ground, unable to get a good facing, and then the escape skills throw you in a random direction. These skills should work exceptionally well when you use them at the right time, since they’re not at all useful at any other time.

Lupicus tends to pick a target for each of his attacks and stick to them. If he picks someone who can’t dodge you might wipe again and again. If he picks on your experienced dodgers then it’s plain sailing.

" I almost never use a doge roll out side of battle "

I use the dodge so often for swiftness that I now do it on my other characters even when running through Lion’s Arch, just out of habit.

Swiftness isn’t required for mobility. Shadow steps are far better if you can use them well.

Gimmicks are not necessary. Dungeons with balanced rewards for time and risk are the solution.

I don’t think the role of a balanced ranger will be any different from what’s meant to be in place right now. Sustained long range dps, trapping and snaring, skirmishing, melee with agile defense, pets with tanking and dps, etc. Boons and spirit buffs are likely to stay since rangers always have a pet to share boons with, even when playing solo.

It isn’t necessary to have exotic armor for dungeons. Ideally you should be getting your exotic armor from the barter tokens. It’s worth remembering that this is a game where skill is more important than itemization so exotic armor is only really giving you some contingency for mistakes as you learn the dungeons.

Nevertheless, if it’s your first character, with no experience, then some extra protection will help a bit. You can get some 76-80 exotics from the chests for completing zones so you might want to consider doing that for malchor’s leap, cursed shore, straits of devastation, and frostgorge sound. Rare armour is very cheap now from the Trading Post.

What you’re asking for is a massive amount of repeatable game content that is good enough to make you log on again and again. That’s the MMO nirvana. Until then we have to make do with some sort of character advancement to keep us interested.

As more anecdotal evidence, I did Forging the Pact with a friend last weekend and the result was the same. The rest of the story chapter was easy (with 2 players) and those those 3 krait downed everyone really fast. It took a few revives to even get one krait down.

Underwater combat just isn’t good enough for a full zone, for all the reasons that other people have mentioned. An underwater zone could be puzzle heavy, but it would probably need a new alternative to the jumping puzzle. I’m glad underwater combat is in GW2 but that doesn’t mean I want to see whole zones of it.

Try playing a ranger then come back and answer your own question.

How many ales have you had? The Norn female voice is fine even if it is destined for the Vigil. Just be glad that you’re not listening to the Sylvari male.

Perhaps warriors should get +5% damage against opponents with aegis.

Works as intended? PvE thieves effectively only have 3 downed skills at the moment and one broken button that does a pointless stealth animation.

Two person content would be much more useful than seven.

You need to be very fast with an interrupt to prevent healing. So if you haven’t all got a handy interrupt on your weapons or are running out of range too much, the boss is just going to heal up. It’s also a fight where you can gain a massive amount of net damage from characters staying on their feet and avoiding revives.

CoF is the easiest. TA, HotW and SE, are probably on a middle tier of difficulty. CM and CoE are more painful. Arah is the hardest. The new AC will probably sit in the middle tier of difficulty once people know the tactics.

A few of the triggered stealth effects might need rebalancing if this happens. They need to be worth their short stealth duration and the reveal duration.