Guild Wars 2

Hence why they should not be balanced for the low skilled bracket of the game, no matter how much they complain.

Stealth is only really useful in PvP in low skill brackets.

Abilities should not be balanced around the lowest skill brackets.

Hexxen.7216:

Unfortunately, if the confusion doesn’t hit hard enough it doesn’t count as a tag so you won’t be getting all those glorious loot bags.

Good point. How much damage is required to get a tag again?

Hmmmm… this thread is doing the opposite of what I wanted it to do for me… Making a build for novelty is all fine and good and all… but it needs to have a bit of functionality to at least make it not a burden Maybe I should just stick to Guardian and Necro if I want to roll with the zerg, and not simply be a portal/veil bot.

Yeah, Confusion got absolutely obliterated near to the state of uselessness.

Might it be better to just go full PVT, ignoring condition damage, and just having piece of mind that the couple times confusion will actually proc will be taging targets in those big WvW fights? Perhaps I wouldn’t need to worry at all about the “Glamours Blind” and “Blind inflicts confusion” since that’s not going to add anymore damage. The blind might still be somewhat useful though… but that would still free up 10 trait points.

Having the “Glamours cause confusion to enemies who enter/leave their AoE” keeps that “confusion tag”, as well as adding a short duration junk condition (to help protect the conditions from the actually good condition damage classes).

Way back during the beta, and just after release I was playing around a bit with Glamour builds (as well kittenter builds). I ended up sticking with the Shatter builds to this day, however Glamours always seemed rather neat.

I understand that since I was playing around with them, Glamour builds have basically been butchered and nerfed into oblivion. However, if I wanted to make a Glamour build for novelty, and try to make it as decent as it can be given the limitations, how should I go about doing so? I’m thinking mostly about WvW, as opposed to sPvP (PvE doesn’t count for anything but how hard you are zerking).

I was thinking something along the lines of 20/0/0/20/30, taking all the Glamour related traits there are there, as well as sacrificing the Grandmaster trait in Illusions for Blinding Befunddlement (blind inflicts confusion). This would give the build Confusion when target enters or leaves a Glamour’s AoE, Glamour skills blind enemies at target location (and therefore inflicts confusion), as well as reduced cool downs for Glamour skills, as well as increasing the duration of Glamour skills (which seems to not work for half of the Glamour skills anyways).

As for armour stats, there don’t seem to be many options. You’d want condition damage for that [lacklustre] confusion so that it isn’t completely useless, and being a WvW minded build, you’d want some Toughness and Vitality. Since there isn’t any condition damage version of Soldiers (PVT), it seems like you would need quite the mix and match, including stats that won’t help your build. Perhaps a mix of Carrion, Rabid and Settlers?… maybe even just go for Celestial even since the stats are going to be so spread out anyways?

Not entirely sure about weapon selection. Perhaps Staff (Chaos Storm) and Sword (melee AoE, Blurred Frenzy, sigil of Earth if precision is high enough?) and Focus (basically the only option).

Does anyone even still use a Glamour build? If so would you care to share some of your impressions on it?.. especially for dealing with WvW matters. Perhaps we should also just highlight the [many] shortfalls of Glamour builds as well.

Well my Thief support build used to be able to keep up almost perma regeneration on himself and high regen uptime for the party, while putting out almost perma poison and weakness on enemies, in addition to interrupts, stealth and removing boons from enemies… but apparently Anet thought that was OP for a Thief to focus on support and nerfed it into oblivion.

Until they fix this, its faster to log out to character select and go back in… even if you are guesting and therefore need to re-guest.

If you got increased tokens from Arah, that will depreciate the prestige from the armour, and the tokens themselves. Just give more loot, and/or completion reward to account for the length and difficulty and that would be fine.

Chrispy.5641:

Kasama.8941:

The first rifle was called a hand cannon, and dates back to the 13th century China. There’s nothing modern about it.

The First rifle was invented almost 800 years ago, but it wasn’t used in Hunting for those 800 years, and it never automatically replaced bows. There are still many people who hunt with bows today, so there is nothing about Bows that equals ancient history either!

Actually the first rifles were made in Europe during the mid 15th century, and only really became more than a novelty during the mid 18th century. Before that they weren’t using rifled barrels, but smooth barrels for firearms, such as muskets.

I understand you guys weren’t actually talking about rifles, but just thought I should add that little note.

Cats can be pretty big and still be very sneaky and agile. The average Siberian Tiger is almost 500 pounds, and they a very, very sneaky and agile.

But yes my comment was somewhat in jest. It really is annoying that a more traditional “slim and agile” looking Thief (or any class really) would have all their weapons floating around them when they are supposed to be stowed away.

Funset.7893:

I do not care about 10 additional trait points. All I want is Role Slots and/or the ability to respec my traits on go.

I would absolutely love to be able to save builds, maybe even have the gear saved to the build to, so you can swamp out your multiple builds with a click of the button, rather than several seconds of retraiting changing your gear while everyone else in the party waits for you to change your cloths. It is especially a pain when you accidental forget some traits, or pieces of gear… or even get thrown into combat and have to fight with miss matched gear/trait.

I am sure that almost everyone else is in agreement 100% with this.

Again, you’re trying to beat Rock with Scissors there. The elaboration about how Scissors gets utterly demolished by Rock is not the most compelling of arguments. This reminds me of those Rangers and Thieves unloading all their projectiles into Walls of Reflection and Feedbacks then complaining about how those reflect skills are so imba because they always result in that player’s death.

The entire point of retaliation, is to punish volume of attacks, and it does this very well. The problem is that some classes don’t necessarily have easy access to hard hitting attacks that aren’t multi hit attacks. Basically a Ranger fighting at range only has Scissors to fight against Rock. You shouldn’t be calling for Rock to be nerfed, you should be asking for more options of bringing your own Paper to the challenge. Alternatively just bring Paper next time when you know your opponent is going to be playing Rock again.

tl;dr: Retaliation doesn’t need a nerf, but Rangers could certainty use buffs and more options.

This was going on far before any actual rewards beyond abstract achievement points and titles. Remember all the whining back during the Halloween and Wintersday events?

The good thing about an Achievement system is that it provides both time sinks, time gating, and skill gating, all without actually denying people without skill or time from seeing any of the content. The problem is all these low skill people with massively inflated senses of entitlement just cannot fathom that the game wasn’t designed for them alone… and it is not good enough that they are not being locked out of content due to their skill level, but that they are being locked out of having a few more abstract “Achievement points” and titles.

However it is a good point that the Achievement rewards spur these low skill players with massively inflated senses of entitlement to go into overdrive with their whining. It just sucks that they are so adamant about trying to ruin everyone else’s fun because they just can’t be without those extra achievement points. Keep your OCD obsessions to yourself please, we don’t want it polluting all these channels of communication.

Xsorus.2507:

…

Zenith.7301:

…

Perhaps my choice of words wasn’t the best. True you cannot fully remove all those boons, Necros and Mesmers are still going to be able to remove a lot of boons, thus reducing the amount of retaliation damage coming back at their side.

As for Barrage still being a fruitless suicide attack attack for Ranger… well that’s not a problem with retaliation, that’s just that Barrage is not the ability you want to use as it is easily countered by retaliation. If anything needs a change, it is on the Ranger side, not retaliation. Either rework Barrage or give the Ranger another AoE ranged attack… otherwise just know that Barrage is not the best skill to use against organized groups… and it is simply just yet another of the Ranger’s shortfalls.

Kasama.8941:

…

As Castaliea pointed out immediately before your post here, even Anet doesn’t think that rifle goes with the Ranger’s theme. The theme matters greatly when determining how skills will work and appear. Sure, if Anet wanted to they could have the Ranger rifle shoot mechanized sharks with laserbeams on their heads (because “its fantasy”), but we all know that there is approximately zero percent chance of that happening because it would grossly hurt the theme of both the Ranger profession as well as the rifle weapon.

Even if the rifle wasn’t at odds with the theme of the Ranger, again, development on one thing means that there isn’t going to be that development on something else. You can’t simply say “I want both” when the limiting factor is the time it takes to make those two options.

Nuka Cola.8520:

Just want more, more of what’s available so im not forced to run same couple of builds (most of the times there’s one or two builds that significantly outshines the rest so you stick to them) the passed 10 months and years to come. Adding a weapon on which you can’t even swap skills or a new utilty/elite skill isn’t enough to diversify from what’s available.

You’re still implying that power creep creates diversity, when the opposite it true. All power creep will do is change what the viable builds are, where adding more stuff without power creep will do just that, add more stuff that can compete alongside what already exists. Also, power creep is as I said, going to mess up balance even more.

What’s all this talk about Shield being a gimmick… Shield 5 is great in high level fractals for some instant projectile defence and an AoE knockback/interrupt. I catch Mossman Axes with my Shield 5 all the time. Also, why does Guardian need even more blocks? Guardian already has more blocks than anyone else… can’t you just be content at being the best?

Although Shield 4 could be a good candidate for a change, it is somewhat underwhelming.

I always just assumed that the purpose of Torch5 was only to clear conditions on allies, and look like a bad kitten while getting you Ambient Killer daily… as yes, the cast time and damage is terrible.

Nuka Cola.8520:

I’m sorry for creating this thread then, i totally forgot this was a casual mmo and it needs to be as straight forward as possible, so a kid playing with his father could understand what’s going on, my bad

If anything, the casuals (when the term is used in a derogatory way) are the people who want power creep. There is absolutely no reason why power creep is a good thing.

All power creep does is ruin balance and invalidate what already exists. Sure, a causal like yourself won’t necessarily mind that, but the rest of us don’t want to see balance skewed even moreso than it already is.

There is plenty of ways to add new traits without simply adding power creep… since you seemed to be trying to imply that nothing can change, or be complex without power creep.

MindfulPerson.5273:

What is the definition of a ranger? It’s a person who uses weapons at a distance.

You do understand this pretty much invalidates your entire argument right? I am assuming this is the thinking of many of the “Ranger needs rifle” people.

Kasama.8941:

And what the hell is this “magical theme” you’re talking about? Are there some for of universal fantasy rule that says; “a rifle in a fantasy setting, can not have any magic associated with it”?

With exception to the Mesmer Pistol, non of the firearms in this game are magical. A Ranger isn’t going to be one of the few that is able to enchant a firearm into some magical implement before you’re going to have Elementalists having rifles that shoot snow balls. A magical firearm for the Ranger would thus break established fluff, and break immersion… if anything, the Longbow or Shortbow should shoot magic before a Ranger rifle does.

As for why people are against the idea of rifles, that would be because, until every weapon is usable by the class, development and implementation of a Ranger rifle is taking away from more legitimate weapons for the Ranger, such as a staff, or even sceptre/focus which meshes much nicer with the natural magic theme the Ranger already has.

Back to the fluffier stuff, you could also argue that a firearm, needing manufactured ammunition, is a bad choice for a Ranger.

The proponents of Ranger rifles such as the OP, are claiming they have “common sense” backing them up, and need not elaborate. However it looks like any closer look at the potential weapon selections would have firearms obviously being the worst option… well, 2H hammer would probably be the very worst one for fluff.

tl;dr: There are so many better weapon options that would be ahead of Ranger rifles, and any work on a Ranger rifle is work taken away from a more legitimate new weapon.

More trait points and more trait tiers is power creep. Screw that.

Additional traits, maybe even additional trait lines would be nice though.

DargorV.8571:

In the same line of thought, Thieves should never be allowed to use Pistol because BANG BANG is not stealthy.

Eles shouldn’t have daggers because duh, melee and Mesmer 2h Sword cannon makes no sense.

<.<

Non of that which you said even makes sense though. Your reasoning is basically just saying “well this is how I think it should be, so therefore it should be common sense for everyone else”. Whereas the Ranger Rifle goes against the natural magic theme, as well as doubling up on weapon roles that already exist. You’re not going to convince anyone with that kind of explanation.

Xsorus.2507:

I wouldn’t mind Retal if it wasn’t AOE, AOE retal though just supports bigger zergers.

Since the only way to actually counter large zergs is lots and lots of AOE damage.

If your talking about large scale combat, then bring large scale combat tactics to counter them. Mesmers and Necromancers can easily strip all those boons. They are using teamwork to produce these AoE Retaliation with high uptime, try using teamwork to negate that AoE Retaliation.

If you insist on using scissors when you already know your opponent is going to use rock, then you deserve to lose, and no one cares about your whining that rock in imba because scissors can’t beat it. There are people from pretty much every class that whine about how their spammy attacks get countered by Retaliation. Deal with it.

How is rifle “common sense”? What does it have to do with nature magic? Personally if Staff and/or other magic weapons were added for even more of a Druid feel I would love that… and unlike a rifle, it actually fits with the rest of the theme.

Unless you are one of those “Ranger = range attack” people…

I’ve never had a moment where I said “I wish I had a Ranger in the party”. At least Thieves have that sometimes. I groan a bit when a Ranger shows up to the party and isn’t planning on swapping to a more useful class.

Although the other day doing high level Fractals I had a Ranger in the party who stacked a bit of vulnerability for the party’s bursts on bosses. Ok, at least the Ranger can stack some vuln when built for it… but I’d still prefer a vuln stacking any other class.

I want to like the Ranger for PvE, but Anet is making it hard to do so. Also yes, Rangers have a disproportionate amount of absolutely terrible players amongst their ranks for some reason, giving the class a bad impression to other people. I think it is just that the Archer archetype attracts these kinds of people for some reason… and they just assume that the Ranger should play like any other archer in other MMO’s (because it has “range” in the name… as infuriating of a justification that is).

That’s why you should make big beefy charr.

LA has free transport to it (through the Mists), and is central (lower waypoint costs to whereever you want to go). Other cities have no free transport to them (unless you want to go through the Mists→Asura Gates→city, and they are not central (about 5s fee to go from Ratta Sum to CoF).

Remove waypoint fees to all cities. Perhaps even reduce all waypoint fees when you are waypointing from a city.

Scrap the Pact arch. More focus on the Race arc. To account for the added work (5 races vs 1 pact), just split those pact quests up evenly amongst all the races, and perhaps amalgamate some of the Pact missions into the Order missions. Example (numbers are arbitrary): remove 20 Pact missions, give +2 Race missions (10 total), +3 Order missions (16 total) and 4 missions that are basically Pact missions, but more tailored to your order.

This would mean that there would be an equal amount of work involved (same amount of missions), but the more memorable and interesting missions (Race and Order) get more flushed out… and it gets rid of a lot of the Pact nonsense that people don’t like. This would mean that Trahearne plays a smaller part, even if from afar, the ridiculous organization of the Pact forces isn’t stressed as much. Also the organization of the Pact forces would work more like a real military organization with expeditionary forces, rather than a transparent “diversity is great” politically influenced message that overshadows how the disastrously disorganized such a layout would be.

Those couple extra Race specific missions should focus on tying up loose ends. I’m not the most familiar on most of the races personal stories… but the Charr personal stories ends so abruptly you wouldn’t even think that that storyline was being dropped. I don’t know about you guys, but I think Vallus Smokemane (Gladium sire) is orders of magnitude more interesting than Trahearne… after I finished that story mission during the beta, finding out how that story ended up progressing was a somewhat high priority of mine… only to find out that there is nothing more and that storyline simply gets dropped.

crestpiemangler.7631:

Not to add fuel to the fire, but maybe that was Anets intention to some degree….

Of course making only dungeon have that property out of the many is kind of shortsighted, since people get tired of CoF runs quickly.

I would hope this wasn’t their intention, as yes, people are going to bore very quickly with their “10 minutes of end game content” (or 5:30 minutes if you are really good). I could see how it might be a valid strategy to make the easiest dungeon path also the shortest one, to help ease players into dungeons… but it is completely ridiculous to make it also the most profitable path by far. It should be a no-brainer that higher difficulty, or at least a larger time investment requires a better payoff. Perhaps they didn’t want to make harder dungeons more profitable due to unskilled people whining about being skill-gated out of profits?… but at least award longer paths for the time required to do them.

Funset.7893:

The reason is the revolutionary “no holy trinity” thing. Thats all I have to say.

If all you have to say is some vague “I told you so” statement (that arguably isn’t even related to this topic), then why bother say it in the first place? A lack of a holy trinity does not mean that every boss fight needs to be a tank&spank, nor does it mean that the easiest and fastest dungeon path must also be the most profitable by a long shot.

CoF P1 is the easiest, fastests and most profitable dungeon path. This means that this is where low skilled players go to do their dungeon runs, this is where people without much time go to do their dungeons runs, and this is where people who just want the most profitable dungeon runs also go. This combined with a great sense of entitlement and lack of patience we see from many gamers nowadays means that this easy dungeon is going to be the one that gets the most use. Player’s skills will get rusty, as they are not required to use any skill for CoF P1 (unless they are trying to do the fastests possible speed runs, as that takes a fair amount of precision and practice).

Now when these people who have been babied by CoF P1 go out into real dungeons, they are not only unprepared for the step up in difficulty, but they have no patience for the time required for such a petty reward at the end. Their time is literally better spent just running CoF P1 rather than any other dungeon path.

This is what happens when you make one path so much easier, faster and profitable than all the other dungeon paths. This isn’t even commenting on how this form of making wealth for a player contributes to inflation (as gold itself is what is farmed, not actual useful items).

A couple different death animations are welcome. Before you’d only be in that one certain pose, unless you died mid-air, in which case you’d land on your stomach with arms spread out (and sometimes with a “panting” animation even though you’re supposed to be dead).

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

The “toughness = aggro” myth was, as far as I can tell, perpetuated by one guy who wanted to justify his knight/AH build as viable rather than running full DPS

I’m pretty sure that this “myth” was created by Anet people, when they were giving a vague explanation of the aggro (or “hate”) mechanics for enemies. I don’t know about giving out boons and all that, but high toughness giving higher aggro is very much a fact. Of course there is still a bunch of randomness involved in NPC’s picking their target, and some have different behaviours (some bosses seem to prefer to target ranged, etc), however if you want aggro, get high toughness.

I can notice the difference in aggro I get on my Guardian whether I’m using my zerker gear, or my knights-mix gear, and when someone else in the party has higher toughness than I do.

You were gambling and you got the default result for gambling. At least your gambling money went to support the game rather than to some random casino or slot machine.

deathklock.4961:

Seriously getting into battle faster is not a bad thing.

Yes it is a bad thing. If you just had an endlessly replenishing zerg, then it would take a lot of strategy out of the game. It would be less of an objectives gameplay, and more of some big silly deathmatch sort of gameplay or some such. Having everyone able to jump right into the fight right after they die just means that it would give even more power to boring old zergging tactics. If you want to always be close to the action, try sPvP.

Increasing movement speed, and shrinking the size of the map is basically the same thing. If anything, most people want bigger maps, not smaller ones.

If you aren’t voting for their positions, then what are you voting for?… simply the cult of personality? Granted that’s what many people vote for in elections anyways (including this one), but still that is not what you should be basing your decisions on.

My vote would probably still go to Evon though, he knows how business works, and the economic health of Lion’s Arch is in his best interest. He doesn’t try to hide his actual motives, you always know where he stands and what he is going to do. Kiel is a loose cannon by comparison, and she has this fake-ness about her where she has many people perceiving her to be a goodie-two-shoes, and glory hog, when in reality she is no were near that perception she tries to give off.

Oh the topic of going back to non-Orr zones to make money, I used to have very profitable farming spots in different maps. Perhaps they’ve reduced the global drop rates, or perhaps I’m just better at clearing dungeons for gold now than I used to be… but I went back to one of my non-Orr farming spots today and the drops were absolutely terrible… I only had a single crafting mat drop, some whites, junk, and a whole bunch of voting tokens, from a half hour of farming.

Everything about farming in this game keeps pointing to the tired old, inflation inducing, CoF P1 farm.

RyuDragnier.9476:

GNASHBLADE IS NO CHARR. Do not vote for him. Why? Because CHARR NEED NO GODS!

To be fair, he’s interested in research on how to kill gods.

Waypoint fees to all the capital cities should be waved, or at least drastically reduced. That would help spread out the population, and give a little more life to the other cities. Its no surprised when LA has overflows, while Rata Sum has a population of like 10 players total.

Lore surounding Abbadon is far more interesting than “Asura experiment gone wrong #9372”. Abbadon is almost like if the Greek gods Prometheus and Zeus were combined… rather than Prometheus not being able to do anything to defend his actions and simply being locked away and tortured for eternity, Abbadon was powerful to not only resist his imprisonment by waging war against other gods, but even cut his eternity of torture short, break out and try to get vengeance against those who wronged him.

The Fall of Abbadon has massive potential to be an incredible thing to see, as this would be back in Abbadon’s prime, before he was tortured and mutilated for over a thousand years. Anet has a lot of potential to show Abbadon as a very tragic hero here, which would be just great.

Abbadon/Gnashblade 2013!

I think it would be better if dead players were just that… dead. Give them their consolation prize, then remove them from the game. Automatically (or have the option) join another game. This way its more of a survival game, and less or a “be the best at hiding from invisible foes” kind of game.

The feeling when you’re going around with a low amount of supplies, and seeing another person in the distance (too far to check their supplies), and you know that they see you too is really fitting for the game. Its a shame that if you just happened to be the one that the defeated players stumbled upon first then you are the one that will lose the fight against that other player you happen across.

Also if you don’t like the crowded starting position, do what several other people do… just get a head start to the rest of the map while the rest of the people are scrambling over the pile of supplies. Scrambling over the big pile of supplies at the start is not necessarily the winning strategy.

Also, the karka is the easiest wisp ability to avoid ever. I like it when I see people use karka’s on me because it means that they aren’t using the actual useful skills on me.

I think thakittens actually pretty neat that they are attaching actual real decisions to an in game election. However yes, it is sad that many people simply don’t care enough to even know what they are doing, and just support Ellen because they think she is some goodie two shoes (when she’s arguably just as bad/worse than Gnashblade as a character when you look at her more critically).

It is fairly annoying that people can’t be bothered to even know what they are voting for, but do so just because. However I suppose that’s what makes this in game election such an amazingly accurate parody of US politics and the US election system.

Most of the minigames I wasn’t really a fan of. However I really, really liked both the South Sun Survival and the Wintersday CTF minigames.

And I was just learning myself how to play “Ode to Joy” on the flute as well.

Preferable reverse this terrible change. If not, can we at least get a refund?

Charr need more “skimpy” armour to just bypass all the clipping issues. Showing off the fur patterns and such is just a bonus to spending most your shopping around for looks being devoted to finding out which armours don’t have massive clipping issues, and how much clipping you can get away with.

As absolutely great as that rapier skin is… the sword animations would look fairly clunky for a rapier. Even the thrust sword animations look a bit too “heavy” for a rapier. But yes… the skin is just great… and that clunky aetherized sword skin is rather “blah”.

Electro.4173:

There’d be little reason for renegades to show up in any of those areas, since they’re whole purpose is opposing peace with the humans, and there aren’t really human settlements or anything in any of those areas.

The Iron Legion allows for the Pact, Vigil, etc to run around unchecked in Charr lands. Allowing foreigners to go as they please, and interfere with Charr matters is something that should rile up a lot of Charr. I think that there is plenty of room for “Renegade” Charr concerned with sovereignty to show up all over Ascalon. I’m actually fairly disappointed to see such indifference towards Charr sovereignty in game.

if you are looking for a “viable build”, then yes, pretty much every build is viable for PvE… because the PvE content has such a low difficulty level, you don’t even need to be playing anything near optimal to be able to work though the content. However if you are looking for optimal builds, then yes, it is just zerkzerkzerk all day every day so that you can get through the content faster… the only real difficulty in PvE here is generally “how fast can you go”?

Note: isn’t even referring to cookie cutter builds or anything, you can have plenty of different trait builds… just put on zerker stats and you will be more optimal. Example, my WvW Condition Mesmer build simply throws on 100% zerker gear for PvE, with no retraiting required… just the zerker stats.

The only time I seriously used Warband support, was when I really need additional targets to divert attacks away from me. It might be useful for reviving people during the Jade Maw fractal, to absorb attacks. Also, I found it mildly useful for soloing champions, where I just need another ability to avoid a couple incoming attacks.