Guild Wars 2

Curunen.8729:

Make a Spellbreaker.

Actually that’s what I’m doing – going to make a Warrior alt for it. Always been a one character only mind of player, never had any serious alts, but I really want to play Spellbreaker.

I’ve seriously been considering making a Warrior clone of my Mesmer, so that I can get that Lockdown Mesmer feel, with the “same character”.

This is a feature that was in the game when it was released. Another feature was the waiting lists to join a map, so you didn’t have to spend all your time clicking join [player] in [map].

Daddicus.6128:

I simply despise the typical attitude that goes along with typical raiding people.

Suppose I shouldn’t have been paraphrasing. Either way again, you’re not talking about people who raid, you’re talking about people who Pug raid.

Throughout my experiences in GW2 since way back to BWE1, the people who do the high level content of the day (dungeon speed runs, high level fractals pre-HoT, current raids) were always some of the most chill groups of people. The people who pugged dungeon “speed runs”, did low level fractals and currently pug raids though?… lol I’ve long since decided that not playing the game at all (or just play with friends/guildies or make friends/join guilds) was a better use of my time than associate with those people.

“Pugs are bad and you shouldn’t do them” has basically been a constant throughtout GW2.

Seems like most people replying to this thread are not answering the question “why don’t you raid?”, but “why don’t you pug?”

Pugs are completely different than guild or friend groups. Pugs even have different motivations much of the time.

tl;dr: don’t pug

GreyWolf.8670:

All LW content should be made available to anyone that has paid for the game no matter what expansion.

That was one of the selling points of HoT though, like a new legendary weapon set and raids.

As a fun little fact, in the creation of Astralaria when you go out starwatching, there are Human, Norn and Charr constellations, but no Sylvari or Asura constellations. Charr and Norn interest in the stars may be moreso as a means of navigation though.

Another thing to think about is that Humans have been on Tyria for the least amount of time. The Norn and Charr have been on the planet for longer than any Tyrian history we know of. Although both Norn and Charr have been around much longer than Humans, their societies back during GW1 days don’t necessarily seem to be the best for retaining historical knowledge… so who knows perhaps even without being around that long, humans may still have good historical records in comparison to other races, even if many of their kingdoms (from the parts of the world we have access to in GW2) were destroyed, presumably with much of their libraries and historical knowledge.

With how much power creep Elite Specializations have introduced, sub80 characters are even further behind max level/geared characters than they’ve ever been before, especially when it comes to straight up arbitrary damage numbers and certain classes like Elementalist and Guardian.

If someone is so far behind in terms of arbitrary damage numbers, then you’re almost purely being carried by the other players. Not many people PUG because they want to carry random people, that’s one of the most central things about PUGs.

Gemstore goodies (or subscriptions) are useless there are not enough people around to spend money on them.

Wander.5780:

some sort of make good like free gems or black lion chest keys

The fact that the gemshop is so central in people’s minds for “what would get people’s good will back” is very telling on how overused it is.

Adding content to the game is feeding the cow. The gemshop is milking the cow. The milk is going to dry up if you don’t feed the cow enough, no matter how hard you try to milk it.

The gemshop does not bring in and retain players, that’s is what adding (and not removing) content to the game is for. There’s no marginal cost to gemshop sales either, so one would think that trying to bring in and retain more players would be far better than putting so much effort into the gemshop. The gemshop feels scummy enough, without it coming across as the highest priority aspect of the game.

For those that may not be able to log in during the designated times, it is not just the story instances that you would be excluded from, but the rewards as well. Obviously no one wants to be excluded from new skins, in a game such as this where acquiring weapon and armour skins are the main end game goals, however if good stat distributions are also locked behind the LS than it almost gets into a P2W situation for those that missed it.

Sure Sinister stats have now almost been rendered obsolete due to Viper stats existing, however back when Sinister stats were introduced, you could only acquire some pieces from LS rewards. If you missed the “free” period than you had to buy those LS episodes on the gemshop, in order to access those (then) top tier of condition damage stats.

Another thing to keep in mind is that LS2 was released when GW2 existed under a completely different payment scheme. Back then we were informed that Anet would refuse to use paid expansions, and would make their revenue entirely from the gemshop. People with good attendance are exposed to the gemshop far more frequently than those that did not show up as regularly, thus it is less of a “reward” for logging into GW2 often, and on Anet’s schedule, but more so that you’re already in the game and being exposed to the gemshop, thus you’re already contributing to Anet’s gemshop revenue (even if you don’t actually use the gemshop, you’re a statistic and on average that means that you contribute a certain expected amount of gemshop revenue). With LS3, we are now in the era of GW2 expansions. In addition to paid expansions now existing, we can easily see that there are very common opinions of HoT being a bit anemic and underproforming on the “delivering content” point, and that we’ve already paid for this future LS-related content.

The only difference between balance now, and a harder system to balance, is that we’d have more options to play around with. Might even have enough options to counter unbalanced builds that come about.

I’ve given up on the game being balanced even before Elite Specs completely destroyed GW2’s class balance. Might as well have some more fun.

Yunielesca.2850:

That’s not free, you’ve paid an expansion for it…

The concern some of us have is that, indeed it won’t be included in the paid expansion, but if you don’t log in at the right time you’ll either be excluded or as with LS2, you’ll have to pay even more to access parts of it.

Healix.5819:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

At any time after it got released or while it is “active”?

They probably won’t be clarifying anything until it’s almost ready, meaning maybe a month prior. At this time, you should assume it’ll be the same as season 2, meaning you have 2 weeks to login. I doubt they’ll stick to 2 week cycles however, and instead switch to releasing on a monthly cycle or every other.

My assumption at the moment is that I’ll just be excluded from this, due to having a job that won’t give me the opportunity to log in for a few months. It goes without saying that I’d prefer Anet to simply give the content freely to anyone who purchased the paid expansion (especially so as many people feel that the content we have so far for HoT has yet to reach the full price paid).

At the very least, any new maps should be available to those of us who couldn’t log in at designated times.

Ever since the introduction of Specializations, I always thought that would be a great way to implement cross classing.

Specialization lines from your subclass could simply be taken rather than your own. Depending on how Anet would wish to balance it, you could be limited to a single cross class Specialization, perhaps you’d have to use your elite spec Specialization slot for a non-elite Spec slot, or perhaps there would not be as many limitations. A lot of Specializations lines are closely related to one kind of utility type, perhaps the Specialization you select would determine which utilities from your second class you have access too… or perhaps you’re utilities/weapons would be completely open.

Obviously there would be balance concerns that would arise, but when has that bothered Anet?

I see what you mean now. However I don’t really see the need for the degree of privacy that masking party member’s DPS would give.

The benefit in this example to the Mesmer seeing party member’s DPS, would be to see how much of an improvement that those buffs give. This could help for deciding on party composition, or even raid subgroup organization. At the very least, it is more information and gives players an opportunity to become better and more knowledgeable about the game.

The only downside seems to be that:

Surbrus.6942:

Sure there will still be people who substitute aggression and ego in place of teamwork and knowhow, but that’s just the nature of interacting with other people.

In which case, again, why do you want to play with those people in the first place?

Miku.6297:

I’m still confused as to how that shows a need for group displayed DPS rather then just personal DPS.

If the dps and the source is adequately identified, why would the thief need to see the other players DPS as well?

Thief is a bad example, a far better example would be Mesmer, with their applications of Quickness, Alacrity, and reapplications of Might and Fury. Different party compositions and different builds from those party members will influence how much extra damage a Mesmer is responsible through their party buffs.

Again though, this is still just a simple tool, as it would not take other utility into account (such as defensive boons allowing party members to focus more on their tasks)… but that’s just part of the fun of games like this.

“Living world” is too much of a general term. New maps and dungeons/raids/skins/lore are most important to me, with GW2 quality PS/LS story and story instances being near the bottom of my priority list.

Konig is absolutely correct though, delivering what was promised (especially when it was a promise that people paid for) is the most important.

Mouse.3608:

I wouldn’t mind a set of target golems in the PvP lobby and Lions Arch that reported back what your DPS and Spike damage are, similar to GW1. You could work on your build easily enough there, w/o incurring the chat idiocy that live raid stats would.

Controlled test environments under ideal conditions like this will not give accurate results, because these are not the actual conditions you’ll have in gameplay. For example: under these sort of ideal conditions, Mesmer had been calculated to have one of the highest DPS rates of any class for quite some time due to 100% uptime of their phantasms… when in reality everyone knew that Mesmer was only taken for utility, never for personal DPS.

As far as build crafting goes, a DPS meter benefits “casuals” far more than “hardcore”. As it is now, you are required to be hardcore if you wish to create your own build with confidence of it being effective and efficient, because it requires a great deal of testing and math. A casual is not going to bring out stop watches, and hunt for unattended champions and attempt to test the offense/defense of their build, nor are they going to devote a lot of time to analyzing the damage log, or math out their stats and tool tips (which then requires testing to make sure that the damage logs or tool tips aren’t lying).

If we could simple open up and glance at a DPS meter after a fight, a lot of this busywork required to become confident with any buildcrafting could be greatly simplified, and thus made far more accessible to “casuals”.

The assumptions that people who do not understand the point of a DPS meter will misuse it are not without merit, however why would you want to play with over aggressive idiots anyways? This may have been more of an issue back when dungeon farming was en vogue, however with the simplistic dungeon rewards being nerffed and the new raid instances being more in focus, there’s far, FAR less emphasis on straight up DPS (especially with Salvation Pass, with it’s even lower requirement for party DPS). Sure there will still be people who substitute aggression and ego in place of teamwork and knowhow, but that’s just the nature of interacting with other people.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Unfortunately, there’s not much lore on any of the elite specializations. The one with the most lore is Scrapper – the rest are pretty much loreless, except for some name ties. And Scrapper is the only elite specialization who’s name actually holds a connection with another thing of the same name (Scrappers are a low, often punishment duty, position in charr society – the elite specialization began when said charr society scrappers decided to become useful in fighting).

Even that example is a very loose association. A “scrapper” in Charr society has nothing really to do with the Engineer class, other than the simple fact that the Engineer class originated from the Charr, and that some Charr are Engineers. Presumably there is no more connection between scrappers and Engineers as there are between scrappers and Warriors/Necromancers/Rangers or any other class.

In fact one might be able to argue that the human “druids” that gave away their flesh have more to do with the “Druid” specialization than the Charr societal term of “scrapper” has to do with the “Scrapper” specialization, as at least the old “druids” had similar nature/Melandru themes as Rangers… and the “Reaper” specialization also has the connection of “cold” as do Grenth’s Reapers.

Anet just likes reusing certain words, which can cause confusion (another example would be Berserker specialization and the berserker stat distribution). I’d argue that these specialization names should just be regarded as arbitrary names that don’t necessarily have any lore implications.

dubstax.9102:

I’m saying that the small group of hardcore players burn through content faster than everyone else. Hardcore players are concerned about the present and not so much the future. Casual players tend to be more long term driven and will fund the game that way. Hardcore players also earn a majority of what they receive through the game itself rather than spending real world cash. Would you rather cater to a hardcore player that sinks little to no money over a small period of time before they get bored and leave the game, or a casual player who spends $30-$40 a month over several years to buy cosmetics, toys, etc.?

My experience is the complete and polar opposite.

For the first three years of Guild Wars 2, the “hardcore players” played the same handful of Fractals and Dungeons. For the past two of those three years, in order to achieve challenge and replayability, these players did everything from speed runs, undermanned Dungeons/Fractals to even more bizarre self imposed restrictions on gear/skills/classes/etc (forcing ever more unoptimized builds).

At the same time, the “casuals” blaze through content, and demand more.

Additionally due to how the Real Money Trading system works in GW2, those purchasing gems for gold increase the value of those gems (for the purposes of gems to gold), thus bringing in more gem purchases for real world money.

In short, it appears that a lot of your arguments and opinions are based on nothing at all.

I think one of the big reasons for this misconception that Anet is focusing entirely on raids, is simply due to when they are released. It is actually less so that they are focusing entirely on raids, but that they are focusing so little on raids that the single raid instance was not completed by the release date of the expansion.

It is not that raids are taking all of Anet’s effort, it is that they are so late in being implemented after the expansion’s release.

Then of course, raids have their own small, dedicated, and incredibly vocal hate group. I still do not understand why these vocal raid haters don’t also hate that WvW and PvP also get attention from the devs (however little amount of attention that is), as it is the exact same thing: content that they personally do not like exists in the game. The constant whining from this small group just makes it appear at first glance that there is a problem where there is not.

If you are using Shield, make sure to cast Shield5 last, before ending Continuum Split (CS). Manually end CS if you have to the moment Shield5 is cast. Immediately after ending CS, cast Shield5 again. Make sure to “catch” both of the Shield5 attacks as they come back to you.

Congratulations you now have double caste Shield5, while benefiting from BOTH cool down reductions (cool down will be 20s, rather than 40s or 30s).

Mesmer has been blessed by the fact that the class is not simplistic, and it has not been too powerful when it comes to balance. Thus the class has evaded the terrible scourge that is known as the Flavour of the Month crowd.

The term “casual” has been co-opted as a nicer way of saying “lazy” or “low skill”. Funny enough, the word is often used with the opposite meaning here. Much of the time , “casual” means that it will just take a long time, but it will be easy for anyone no matter of skill/attention but simply possessing the patience to devote the time to get whatever they want.

Unfortunate for those of us using the old version of the term, as we by far prefer to play the game on our schedule, not having to play the game on the game’s schedule (looking at you, every open world map in HoT, and the incredible amount of map currencies that are required for the rewards).

Also people should really stop using the excuse “there are other games that exist that are worse than GW2’s grind”. Just because there exists something terrible, is not a reason why another thing should be given a free pass. If you make these sorts of comparisons, then compare GW1 and GW2.

I wholeheartedly agree that the survey questions are terrible. In addition to Andraus’ point, it also appears that some questions simply assume that every participant does PUG raids.

I would suggest looking into how to make survey questions, not only for clarity but also for removing/minimizing bias. As it is now, the data that are gathered from this survey are largely useless.

Update. As of the latest patch this issue appears to have been fixed.

I am overjoyed, thank you Anet!

Now time to add Shield skins to my to-do list.

Never found the timer to be an issue, even our Sabetha kill last night had one party member dead at around 55% of the boss’ HP, and we still got it in just under the time limit (although just barely in that case with the massive DPS loss).

The difficulty is high enough to give a great sense of accomplishment for beating the fights, but yet lax enough that you have plenty of room for mistakes and non-optimal builds/party comp. After getting experienced with the fights, the biggest “difficulty” seems to be accepting Anet’s bugs and latency issues.

I’m guessing the testers were not paid? Anet got the professionalism they paid for then. At least the raids actually being tested means that they aren’t buggy messes like the rest of the releases.

Still very good to smack them down like that, after seeing that the raids were cleared so quickly without having the background knowledge, I assumed Anet had been lying through their teeth again about providing challenging content for those of us that have been desiring that kind of content from the company since GW1. Seeing that they actually had a month or so to learn the content before being able to complete it after it released (and playing the content myself), I’m rather relieved in that respect.

First thing I did with access to Chronomancer in this beta was to test this issue.

Confirmed.

This is even the case with the new Mesmer shield phantasm.

Unless the Mesmer is using the Inspiration traitline, conditions are still going to be a problem for them.

I’ve been running a Duel/Chaos/Illu Sinister WvW roaming build lately, and I find Condi Necros and Condi Thieves to be very challenging to fight. Not quite as mis-matched as Mesmer vs Power Thief was pre-patch, but still difficult to the point that I’ll just avoid them oftentimes.

As others have alluded to, these suggestions do nothing but increase tedium, and if there is any increase in difficulty, it is only for the players of the lowest skill level brackets, as even moderately/poorly skilled players can trivialize GW2’s PvE content.

The only thing approaching a respectable challenge is undermanned content, but even then two/three-manning dungeons is not difficult enough that it cannot be completed in one sitting, even bugging paths to combine events/boss fights in 2-3 man dungeons isn’t something that’s going to stop decent players. (another issue being that these desperate attempts of providing challenge are basically forfeiting any in game rewards, when they should be far, far higher).

Also healing builds are already incredibly overpowered. Some bosses can literally be two-man akitten in a Clerics build, more challenging bosses can easily be beaten with added hourse-rules such as “no dodging or evade/block skills”.

The biggest problem is that much of the time, it appears as if PvE enemies in this game are not designed with Player Characters in mind. PvE needs to act more like PvP.

The way difficulty and rewards go for dungeons, if you actually want a challenge you are required to run the dungeon/fractals undermanned. This not only takes a longer time, but the game itself does not award a greater payout even for simply completing it at a higher difficulty. Selling dungeons/fractals is simply what people are forced to do if they require higher difficulty content and wish to at least not take a hit to their rewards simply for attempting to seek out more challenging content.

Yes, the terribly entitled portion of this game’s playerbase wails in envy over other people buying and selling dungeons and fractals. However this same entitled portion of the playerbase will be just as vocal in their dissatisfaction if Anet actually implemented a proper hard mode for dungeons and fractals (while awarding accordingly). Thus ignoring these whiners is the best policy no matter how Anet ends up addressing the problem with the difficulty level of PvE being set to “Warning: high probability of falling asleep”.

Charr need more well fitting and lore appropriate armour before shoehorning in lore unfriendly outfits for the purposes of attempting to sexualize them to real world cultural standards. If Anet is going to spend time making long dresses like you describe work, they would have better spent their time working on making lore appropriate stuff work.

Say NO to removing content.

New content should be added. Old content should not be removed.

My biggest annoyance with the lore is the Living Story, and much of what it brings. Not only is lore malleable to make room for a terrible quality story, but the LS tries to make game mechanics into lore, eg: Waypoints.

Waypoints actually existing in lore now is probably my biggest beef with the lore at this time. Instant transportation like that invalidate a great deal of what is done in a fantasy setting, including in GW2 along side Waypoints. What is the purpose of merchant ships, merchant caravans, and the like if we can simply toss the goods to be transported though a Waypoint? Additionally for the transportation of people, soldiers and the like, the existence of Waypoints invalidates a lot of the logistical aspects there, including bringing reinforcements to front lines of conflicts.

This is actually rather similar to how the Personal Story kind of wrote the story into a corner. Anet wanted us to be an individual in some very powerful role of the largest military force in the land… however that was at complete odds with any other story they wanted to go with, so in the LS we found that we were inexplicably out of a job as second in command of the largest military force of the land… not only that our position of trust and people’s respect for the main character suddenly vanished without explanation, since even though we knew of Scarlets planned LA attacks and all that. No one would listen to us and we needed to group up with some misfits where it is still not explained WHY we are even hanging around them.

For these reasons, from a lore/RP perspective I generally ignore much of both the Personal and Living Stories, because the [very poor quality] story is the worst enemy of the [wonderful] lore much of the time in this game.

Leodon.1564:

troll build

There’s nothing wrong balancewise with troll builds. If someone wants to use Nomads and load up on stealths, evades, blinds and the like, making near zero contributions then that’s just what they’re doing. Same thing as people complaining about unkillible Thieves who save all their initiative and cool downs for escape, while not actually doing anything offensively… so what?

Solori.6025:

But in this class community.
We have people advocating for everything we have be Nerfed into the ground before the dust for a new meta even settles.
why are we like this? I am genuinely curious.

Because Mesmer players are on average more skillful than people who do not play this class. A better understanding of the game and our class means that we can better identify where the class is unbalanced, whereas the plebs playing other classes simply just ask for blanket buffs simply due to a lack of understanding.

Telly.4962:

Not any more, they already stopped the Mesmer stealth stacking

Since when? Has there been a new build since last night?… that’s last I was roaming and stealth stacking.

apharma.3741:

It’s also now worth pointing out Mesmer stealth is unique. What do I mean by this? All other forms of stealth as far as I know stack duration. You can have 4 guards blast a smoke field and get 12s of stealth. Get 4 mesmers to use mass invis and you will only get 5s as it doesn’t stack, thus making you stagger stealth. It also bugs out the stealth effect which is annoying.

This is false.

Mesmer stealth is simply a different buff than Thief/combo stealth. Mesmer stealth stacks with Mesmer stealth, but does not stack with Thief/combo stealth. If a character has both Mesmer and Thief/combo stealth stacked on them, both stealth buffs will tick at the same time and do not stack in duration.

Related to this note, PU stealth stacking is incredibly strong now. Able to stack around a minute of stealth at a time, PU’s former nerf of adding Swiftness to the mix has now turned it into a mobility strategy. I now routinely stack stealth on myself when roaming WvW simply for the RNG swiftness stacking when moving from point A to point B while out of combat, and this is able to serve as a relatively reliable source of Swiftness. PU stealth stacking really feels very powerful now, personally I feel it is almost too powerful.

I still believe that adding more RNG into the PU boons is a bad policy, as the more RNG there is in traits an skills, the less control the player has, which means the skill/trait is inherently less skillful to use. A good thing about the former PU boons, was that they all served a similar purpose, you could rely on stealth simply giving you defensive boons. However you could also look on the bright side of this, in that this gives Mesmer more potential types of boons, which now with the Chaos minor trait “Chaotic Persistence”, outgoing boon duration very well could be increased by having that one random Might stack on you.

Scholar Runes requiring a Charged Lodestone to craft is where a lot of the consistent demand for them comes from.

While that quote from John Smith is correct on an economic standpoint, it is wrong on a game design standpoint. He’s [presumably] the one who keeps OK-ing more and more uses for Charged Lodestones, which continues to push up the demand while not adding any new supplies of them. People looking to farm Charged Lodestones are then forced into the rather limited areas of the game where they can acquire them, namely CoE (since open world farming for specific materials was nerfed to near uselessness not too long after the release of the game).

Essentially directing Charged Lodestone hunters into CoE, the same dungeon for the past three years is a terrible way to handle this, especially when the demand is as arbitrary as picking from a list of mats to determine what the crafting recipes will require. It might be a different story if the source of these particular mats wasn’t as much of a snorefest as GW2 dungeons.

I hate this change as well, it removes a bit of complexity from the game that otherwise is sourly lacking in depth. No more cripple to counter Eviscerates or Heartseekers, or movement impairing conditions to impair movement skills. No more comboing movement skills with swiftness to go faster.

There is one hilariously unintended thing about this though. Quickness and Slow both affect the distance and speed of movement skills, however in the opposite way you would think. While under the affects of Quickness, movement skills are horribly nerffed, a Warrior GS5 rush looks pathetic. However under the affects of Slow, the movement is buffed massively, a Warrior GS5 rush while subject to Slow will rocket the Warrior nearly twice the distance that GS5 rush normally would do.

While funny, this gives off a lot of second hand embarrassment, that something so clearly unintended remains while something that simply added depth to the game was removed for the sake of CONFUSED NEW PLAYERS or an equally terrible and painful to listen to justification.

This is something that I’ve wanted since beta.

On a related note, your build that you have in WvW is now separate from your build in normal PvE now, just as the PvP build you last used is “saved”. This is very convenient, and greatly appreciated, however it would also be great to see actual build templates along side this function.

Gear templates would also be great, so you don’t need to individually swap out every accessory, weapon and armour piece when you want to change into a completely different build.

A note on balance: I won’t comment on inter-class balance here, but the balance between different traitlines lookss great so far. There is so much synergy between traits of all traitlines, that it really looks like the traits were well designed for the class, and to be used with other traits and skills.

Where much of the time, builds in similar games (and this game as well) generally have mechanical or flavour themes to their specific build trees, however they might not necessarily fit together smoothly. Mesmer traits and skills right now fit together very smoothly. They fit so smoothy together, it feels so polished that I’m almost afraid of nerfs specifically to make the traits feel more clunky and awkward to use.

I’ve been having a great deal of fun with the Mesmer changes. I do think some of the numbers might be slightly imbalanced compared to other classes, but the meat of the skills and traits, what they actually do mechanically I absolutely love.

If balance-wise it’s determined that Mesmer’s skills/traits might do too much and have too much synergy, the class itself should not be nerffed, but the fun level of the other classes should be increased to be more inline (or the boring method of just increasing their arbitrary numbers in the skills/traits).

My two favourite classes are Mesmer an Necromancer, so I feel awfully lucky to have Robert being a big contributor for those two classes. Big thanks to the other Devs who helped with Mesmer as well.

I really hope any new additions/changes to the class down the road are as awesome and fun as what’s been shown recently here. I don’t doubt that could very well be the case.

I got myself a bunch of experience with the Manip trait and manip skills last night. Although changing the reflect into an evade might sound powerful (and would be far more powerful against melee/AoE), personally I prefer the reflect.

The reflect on Mass Invis isn’t too intrusive. In fact you’re probably trying not to get hit while channelling the skill anyways (so that it does not get interrupted), so either using LoS, use a faster invis skill before, or simply using the skill while the enemy’s focus is elsewhere.

The vast majority of the time the MI reflect is just inert. It still does feel a bit clunky that it exists in the first place, however I think it’s a small price to pay for the reflect on all the other Manipulations. Another suggestion raised here was to take away the Manipulation tag from MI, again even though reflect on invis feels clunky, the cool down reduction from the trait is more valuable than the cost of having a reflect on an invis skill.

A simpler solution would be to change the Manipulation trait’s reflect into a simple evasion. I hesitate to say turn it into a Distortion, as that would be a very large buff (synergy with Inspiration’s minor trait to give allies your distortion), while a change from reflect to evasion would have some positives and negatives (mostly positive though, probably too powerful).

Excludee.3850:

Conditions now are the best reason why Anet should split PvP and PvE balance. I don’t understand why they just don’t do this.

What’s the issue here? Conditions are perceived to do too much damage in PvP, while not enough in PvE?

Easy solution: Decrease PvE enemies’ hit points so that they aren’t so bloated, bringing them more in line to what players’ hit point totals are. Increase toughness to make up for it. Although this suggestion goes as far back at least as far as GW2’s betas, so clearly this is not going to happen for one reason or another.

If the issue here is simple numbers, then change the numbers so that PvE and PvP aren’t so widely different.

Bad idea. You already have to mix and match dyes to try to approximate the same colour over different materials, or even the same material over different armour sets. Dye that does not match itself when applied to two different pieces of armour you’re wearing together doesn’t sound very “legendary”.

More dyes with gradients would be great though, to help match the ones that are already available. Also it goes without saying that non-gemshop methods of acquisition would be nice.

Anyandrell.6238:

But it confuzzles the bejezzes out of me when people are saying “we need to fight in order to be considered and accepted like a normal person, like everybody else” and on the other hand they’re like “we need something that would show that we are different than everybody else”.

Any sort of arbitrary groups of people will have the former and later examples of what you mentioned. Some people will act normal, while others (who simply share something in common) are attention seekers. It’s just unfortunate then the attention seekers keep trying to shine a spotlight on themselves and those that share something in common with them when those others just want to be left alone.

Basically, the attention seekers and the people just wanting to be normal are literally two different groups of people that just happen to be arbitrarily grouped together by whichever parameters happen to be used in this artificial grouping.