Guild Wars 2

Ashen.2907:

Fernling.1729:

The good thing is that we already know HoT is better than this. The first story instance we played in the bwe is a million times better than this. We’ve waited this long for an update, we can hold off another month for the release of HoT.

Perhaps.

Someone on the fence about buying HoT sees this event and wonders if this is what Anet considers to be an engaging and rewarding game experience and if this is how they see the threat of Mordremoth.

This is a good point, I’d also like to add that the thin slice of content we’ve been shown in the beta is not necessarily indicative of the entire product’s quality. For instance, compare the first two arcs of the personal story with the later arcs. The early content, what we were shown before release in the betas, was head and shoulders above the arcs in the middle and end.

Don’t TTH occasionally get exclusive sneak peeks and first article postings regarding the elite specialisations?

Because it looks super suspicious that they’ve been given privileged access by Anet in their reporting but when they try to cast a critical eye over the development team’s actions, the critical article is pulled so fast that it makes your head spin.

But you know what, guys, just because it looks like they were leaned on to remove their critical press, it doesn’t mean they were. I’m sure this whole highly suspicious event was perfectly cromulent.

The entire event felt like trying to get event participation in the Thaumanova Reactor Fire Elemental pre-event. You maybe hit a mob once and then it’s dead and you didn’t tag it. Then you have to hork it half way across the map to have the exact same thing happen again.

Just… Why? Who thought this was a good idea?

Yesterday I met a human girl in Queensdale who was wearing nothing but her underpants. We danced and quickly became friends. That Brady Games strategy guide has given you good advice.

For what it’s worth, I had nine stacks and got five blooms and a box that contained my choice of a different kind of box.

Greysonn.3698:

I was about to make a post regarding this when I was stopped by the forums being flooded after the Mordremoth invasion farce. I, on the other hand, think the article was written in an incredibly unprofessional fashion. Every sentence starts with “The Mordrem Guard, The Mordrem Guard, The Mordrem Guard”.

On top of that the attempt to keep immersion with “Worst of all for Pact forces, Mordremoth has an inexhaustible supply of all three Mordrem Guard commanders; when one falls in battle, the jungle dragon simply creates a new one with the same look, same name, and same deadly abilities as the one it replaced.” For real? That’s so childish and the most immersion breaking thing I’ve ever read.

If the Mordrem Guard commanders are so good and so easy to replace, why doesn’t he just make an army of them and send them to destroy Tokyo Lion’s Arch?

Killyox.3950:

Tapioca.9062:

When It’s Ready was an on the nose lie. The preset deadline is rapidly approaching, the expansion content isn’t ready and both Rangers and Engineers are going to eat the consequences of apparently being low priority professions. How can anyone look at this situation and not be disappointed by it?

And what stops them from fixing them in the first 2 months after release still? Nothing.

If they have to fix it two months after release, it was, by definition, released before it was ready. There’s also the issue that once the expansion is live there will be other things that need to be focussed on. Anet’s MO is not to fix. It’s to sweep things under the rug and then work on something new.

Beyond even that, your statement is simply an apologist stance for Anet’s poor development schedule. You’re tacitly admitting that the Druid and Forge won’t be in a playable state at launch and time past launch will need to be spent tuning and iterating to get them into a place where they’re ready. This could have been avoided if Anet had prepared enough time for thorough testing and iteration for all the elite specialisations or waiting until They Were Ready before setting a release date. However, it is plain to see that they picked the release date, said they’d release when it was ready and then, once again, Rangers and Engineers got a raw deal.

Given the amount of tuning that the other elite specs have needed to get up to a reasonable shape it just seems odd that Druid and Forge are being given so little time for iteration and improvement. At this point it’s not even the big things I’m worried about. Daredevil went into testing with dodges that rooted you to the ground for a second before letting you dodge. How did something that basic not get picked up before we got to try it?

There is no way that Druid and Forge will be anywhere near the same level as the other elite specs when HoT launches. Not in regards to polish or even basic profession mechanics that will need serious time to work the kinks out of. We’re somehow going to get all this done in the one remaining BWE and six weeks until HoT launches when both elite specs haven’t even had their official reveal yet.

When It’s Ready was an on the nose lie. The preset deadline is rapidly approaching, the expansion content isn’t ready and both Rangers and Engineers are going to eat the consequences of apparently being low priority professions. How can anyone look at this situation and not be disappointed by it?

John.8507:

I’m sure some people will open the gate for free, no need to pay.

This. I used to GM for free, although people would generally still shove money at you for helping anyway.

The group quest in pre only gives you the Res Signet anyway, which you can buy from a skill trainer once you’re out of the introductory area. I played through the vast majority of GW1 solo only grabbing groups for content that I had a tough time with alone.

Some kind of Ascended Bag? I never thought I’d see the day, let alone actually supporting it and thinking it’s a good idea.

Sya should take over high command of the Pact while Trahearne is MIA. This would be a clear victory for diversity and representation and is an essential step to raising awareness and acceptance for a small minority of players.

You know how when you were a kid your parents told you not to get into a stranger’s car? Extrapolate that advice and consider the following: Maybe don’t jump into a stranger’s portal if you don’t know where it goes. Nobody can force you to enter a portal. If you don’t know where a portal leads and you jump on through it anyway, it’s on you.

As for this being reportable, that’s never going to happen. How do you distinguish between trolling and people not being very good at placing portals? If I do a dungeon with a pug and they’re not very good which leads to me having a bad time, can I report them for trolling?

Sweet Kormir’s blindfold, reporting people for portals. Come back and discuss this when a Mesmer appears in a shower of butterflies, puts a gun to your head and forces you to press F while standing over their portal. Until then, take some personal responsibility for your actions.

I saw a thread requesting dueling again recently. So here’s my idea, how about we introduce both dueling and mounts but we introduce them together in the form of jousting. Now, admittedly, this proposal is likely something that neither camp actually wants, but on the other hand, what they’re asking for is something that I don’t want either. So let’s compromise and give everybody something they don’t want. On the upside, it might stop these threads for like a week? Or is that too hopeful?

1000 bolts of silk?

Of course 1000 bolts of silk. That is exactly what silk needed. Another giant resource sink. The new map rewards system can’t come in soon enough.

What’s the deal with the bizarre delay with dodging on Daredevil? You press dodge and the character just stands there eating attacks like a member of a dungeon pug. Then like a second or so later it finally decides to dodge when it’s far too late to be of any use.

I thought maybe it was lag or input delay, possibly because Anet keep deciding that the best time for stress tests are at the exact same time that people are trying to beta test. However, I loaded up a different beta character and did some test dodges and they worked perfectly.

So what’s the dealy? Is this intentional? Did Daredevils get the name because they just refuse to dodge until it’s too late?

Valento.9852:

@heartless, but you fail to see overloads as a whole. Read the elementalists’ forums, people are annoyed by the mix of: channeled+melee+no stability. You are just making yourself a vulnerable doll who’s about to get interrupted. The very raw concept isn’t really bad, but it has such a poor execution. And since eles already have damage, we wanted more appealing traits and effects. Fire and Air didn’t even need to deal damage, but provide cool effects. Our elite is… something… I can’t even comment on.

And you are devaluing chronomancer’s Continuum Split. Just like you can land two healing/utilities, you can also land two Time Warps, or two Phantasmal Berserker. You can do almost anything twice.

Minor quibble here, when Continuum Split ends it returns your health to the point it was before you split. Using it try and double heal is just going to waste your precious, and very limited, split time. But beyond that, I absolutely agree with you.

MauricioCezar.2673:

Fox.3469:

So basicly you are saying change this entire class to my idea with only 50 days left till launch. I mean no offense but that’s pretty ignorant, give feedback they can use, you know, on the class, not on what you think the class should be.

Give feedback that they don’ hear you mean uh?

There is a kittenton of detailed feedback into this particular spec on elementalist forum, detailing all the problems and how terrible it is.

What we get as “Changes” is some changes into numbers and thats all. Well, at least finally necro have some love since reaper has all the attention.

This is hardly surprising though. It’s the same situation with Dragonhunter. It’s become increasingly clear that “When It’s Ready” was just a catch phrase and there was always a concrete deadline that the scope of changes had to be scaled to. Considering that we’re eight weeks out from launch, I’m not confident that the struggling elite specs will be in anything resembling good shape by release.

Consider playing the Guild Wars 1 expansion Eye of the North if you want to see part of the Blood Legion lands. I hope we go back there. They’re pretty.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

means the dev team and its lore dept will be making the content and deciding on how the story goes, instead of a distanced NCSoft… You should care because the game is about to get more immersive in the story department!

Read this and immediately searched the thread for the word Cantha. I was not disappointed. Cantha? Cantha please.

It is a little disappointing. I didn’t even particularly want to play a staff Ranger but knowing that we’ll have less time for feedback and refining of the elite specialisations is sad. Even after testing and refinement the Dragonhunter still looks completely terrible and knowing that, it’s hard to get my hopes up that an elite specialisation with less testing time is going to fare better.

Zalladi.4652:

As the saying goes; “never play on patch day”.

Anyone that takes a day off for the 23rd will likely be kicking themselves by the day’s end. It is far better to take a day off a few days down the line, say for the 25th or so after all of the major bugs have been fixed.

This is an excellent point but it won’t work for me. PAX Aus is less than a week after HoT launches and between that and other commitments, I need to cram as much sweet, sweet new game content into my craw as possible before I head out into the wilderness of Conventionland. We all know the best part of a new online game or expansion is gorging yourself on it and discovering new things before Dulfy posts a guide to finding all the cool things in Heart of Thorns. Although, that is presuming That Shaman doesn’t just datamine everything and spoil the surprise for everybody.

Playing on release day is going to have crazy bugs, crashes and assorted nonsense for days and there’s no way known I’d miss it for the world. Even with the teething problems, it’s just the best.

I’ve used a Logitech G400 for basically forever now. At this point you couldn’t pay me to use a Razer. They look pretty but they’re overpriced and they break far too often and easily. Razer is pretty much the Alienware of mice. Overpriced, overhyped and underperforming in comparison to equivalent products.

I can’t wait to make a new Revenant, level it up, run through the personal story, kill Zhaitan, complete the LS2 arc, head into Verdant Brink and have Rox just about soil herself with amazement at this NEW MAGIC that Rytlock is using.

Torolan.5816:

So much truth in just one post. I salute you, good sir.

But to be honest, i see my guardian as more of a dog guy instead of a bear. But how do you harass a dragon with a bear or a dog? They can´t fly, so would be pretty useless against a dragon. I´d suggest some flying beast instead of a bear.
Maybe an owl? It can, uhm, warn you at night if a dragon approaches.
Or an eagle? It can circle high over the dragon in case you have missed it´s giant footprint where it landed.
Or a raven? I heard nothing scares a 10 ton dragon more than a 10 pound raven.

Given the current state and apparent design of the Dragonhunter, I think a bear would be a perfect fit. You raise excellent points about a bear being completely useless in a ranged combat role, but rather than this precluding the bear as an addition, I think that’s what makes it the perfect choice. We just have to frame the presentation to the player the right way.

So, without further ado, I am pleased to present this new suggestion for the Dragonhunter specialisation: The Bear Trap.

I think, ideally, this would be a trap that the Dragonhunter lays and then when the stars align and something eventually wanders over it, a bear will launch itself out of the ground, run straight towards the toughest enemy it can find, aggro it and train it right back onto you.

Which would actually be really useful given the Dragonhunter’s trap utilities now that I think about it. We may have accidentally found the key to fixing the Dragonhunter here. It doesn’t need a knockback, it needs a strong taunt.

I don’t even main Guardian and I would prefer this over Dragonhunter. Then again, I would also prefer a nice tall glass of milk over Dragonhunter and I’m lactose intolerant. It’s just so bad. I don’t think the individual aspects of the specialisation work together at all in any meaningful or effective way which makes the spec fundamentally broken from my point of view. I also worry that Anet is going to dive headfirst into the sunken cost fallacy by trying to tweak concepts that aren’t working with the very limited time they have left in their intended 2015 release window.

I’ll play the upcoming BWE and test it, but considering the released change notes I don’t think any of the underlying problems with the spec have been fixed. I also don’t think they will because the scale of the required changes would be too large. If Dragonhunter isn’t shoved out the door a hot, broken mess when HoT launches, I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I doubt it.

Although, on a lighter note, the trait that makes the basic longbow attack periodically perform knockbacks is going to cause no end of hilarity when players start using that outside the beta. Speaking as someone who mains Ranger, I can reliably inform you that community just loves players with longbows who throw out knockbacks on enemies multiple times a minute. Maybe that’s what the Dragonhunter is so desperately missing: Bears.

Curunen.8729:

I don’t like the Electro Blue – it’s just too intense (same with the other Electro dyes).

I’m still deciding but am more tempted to get one of the Glint’s dyes.

Is it worth ignoring prices in this case and getting the colour you want (assuming it costs at least more than a few gold), or is it better to use the opportunity to buy what is currently expensive?

How is this even a question? Do you seriously need advice on whether to get something you want or something you don’t want that’s expensive? Get what you want.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

The only things casuals are likely to care about if someone goes YOLO Leeeeeroy Jennnkinnnns! ahead of everyone else and promptly gets killed. Other than that, casual groups are casual.

I can’t agree with this enough. My biggest issues with dungeon pugs come from inexperienced players trying to use MLG Pro LEET STRATS they either watched on Youtube or watched other groups do and then getting wrecked when they try. There are times when players try to do skips or stack on enemies and just get killed for their trouble and ultimately would have had an easier time if they’d just played normally.

If I don’t mind the guy who can’t figure out how to dodge Kohler’s pulls or the guy who keeps going full kamikaze into volatile blossoms, I won’t mind the guy who knows what he’s doing, no matter what equipment he’s wearing.

All signs point to yes. Although it yet remains to be seen just how widespread Mordremoth’s Call was considering that it happened at the end of LS2. So we’ve only seen its effects in a localised area and we haven’t had much story time pass to gauge its repercussions. The Soundless in Caledon might be affected but it’s also possible that the distance between them and Mordremoth means they didn’t turn or perhaps he didn’t specifically target them. We’ll have to wait for HoT to release before we can find out how widespread Mordremoth’s Call was.

The main issue for the Soundless is that they have no protection against Mordremoth which makes them especially vulnerable. To explain this in more depth: The Pale Tree.

Manasa Devi.7958:

I just got a few of these Celebratory Dye Packs. Can anyone tell me, before I do something stupid, can you go back after selecting the kit you want a dye from, or is the Celebratory Pack replaced by the kit you choose?

The Celebratory pack is replaced by the kit you choose.

Seera.5916:

Question: Do you get to choose the dye you get or is it random after selecting which dye kit to get?

You choose a dye kit and then you select an individual dye from that kit. There’s no randomisation at all. Pure choice.

I’d also like to add my voice to other people saying that this is a very nice gift. I was a bit snarky in the lead up the third birthday and had very low expectations for what Anet had planned, but I like this a lot. Every character that hits 3 years old is going to find the rare dyes nice and the level 30 booster scroll is basically equivalent to 2 Black Lion keys via the Personal Story if you have no interest in levelling new characters. They clearly put thought into how to avoid another Mini Queen Jennah situation and I’m grateful for it.

You make good points, Konig, and I don’t like that because I was fond of this wind rider theory.

Unless the Kings of Orr were also secretly wind riders. Consider the following: Wind riders and Orrians are both renown for their ability and affinity with magic. No? No. I’ll just have to channel my inner Elsa and let it go.

My bet is on something extravagant. Like a coupon that gives you twelve gems off the price of your next gemstore purchase. Coupons must be used at the time of purchase and only one per customer. It will be one of the best gifts that GW2 Anet has ever given us.

I think I’ve managed to convince myself that thrashers are corrupted wind riders. They float, have tentacles, have a prominent central eye and they do that spinny wind rider attack animation. They’re mutated, sure, but there’s enough wind rider there to convince me. It would also explain the complete lack of wind riders in Mordremoth controlled territory. The Maguuma should be absolutely lousy with them and yet the only place we’ve seen them is in Dry Top.

Although, as Konig has rightly pointed out, many different creatures share animations and skeletons. Some of them are wildly different in nature, for instance, air elementals and karka. Yet there’s enough similarities between thrashers and wind riders for me to think there’s a link here beyond animation sharing.

If they give me more medium chest options that aren’t trenchcoat, trenchcoat or trenchcoat, I’d probably consider the expansion worthwhile even if everything else is a bust.

The corrupted trolls and wolves are the most obvious ones but the rest I’m having difficulty figuring out. The teragriffs looks vaguely like griffons if you break their wings and remove the feathers, but those huge horns aren’t griffon like at all. The thrashers look a bit like corrupted wind riders but not definitively close enough for me to call it. Menders look like midget Charr so I have no idea at all what they’re meant to be originally.

Is there any official word or strong speculation lying around as to what the various Mordrem critters were before they were corrupted?

In the sentence: “I’d just like to add that making an assessment of a game while in beta is, at best, premature.” The phrase “at best” is inside parenthetical commas, which means that it is information that is a non-essential addition to the sentence. You can remove it and still have the sentence and its underlying meaning make sense. The base sentence would read: “I’d just like to add that making an assessment of a game while in beta is premature.” The meaning here is plainly that making a final assessment of a product before it’s finished is something done too soon.

The parenthetical addition of “at best” acts as an antecedent to premature. The meaning here is to state that in the best interpretation what was done was premature. The inference of this is that there are worse interpretations that could be made. For instance that the act was silly or borne from malice.

Whatever its role, I bet it will have some kind of amazing name like Dragonburner.

Just chiming in to say that I’ve experienced the same problem. Pretty much every single story step that I’ve gone through recently has had unvoiced audio issues. So to give an approximate range to the issue, that would be pretty much every single story step from The Orders of Tyria through to Against The Corruption.

I chose an Elonian ancestry during The Fall of Falcon Company story step which gives Deborah dark skin and dark hair. Which is why it’s weird to see her rocking the blonde hair, white skin and probably blue eyed, Aryan Ascalonian look during the Marching Orders story step. She was back to Elonian during the next story step, Armor Guard, so maybe it was just a phase?

I just finished up Against The Corruption and found it curious when I got a level 70 reward instead of the level 80 items I’d received in the earlier missions. I looked up at the green mission text in the top right corner and noticed it had a [Level 70] tag on it. I clicked through and accepted the reward and saw that the next story step, Cathedral of Silence had the same marking there.

I did find the bugged version of the event more engaging than the intended version. However, it’s worth noting that the bugged version goes against one of GW2’s core event design principles: A player should not be able to cause an event to fail for everybody else.

If I had a dollar for every time I saw people killing the low health Vinetenders either due to trolling or an inability to understand people around them saying some variation of “Please don’t kill!” or God knows what, then I would have enough money to, I don’t know, fund a nice night out where I could irritate my friends with tales of The Irritating People Who Didn’t Understand The Concept Of Waiting To Kill The Mob. Apolus argues in an earlier post that this is evidence that players aren’t dumb and should not be treated as such. And I mostly disagree. This is evidence that MOST players aren’t dumb but there’s still that small contingent of players who can, and will, ruin everything for everybody else and they’re why we can’t have nice things.

Where I would agree is that I would like events that are more complicated than stand in the blue square and kill all the things. But I don’t want events where players can introduce a fail state for everybody else. Whether through malice or stupidity a player shouldn’t be able to ruin events for everybody else.

You can just mouseover the name in chat and see the account name. You can do the same thing in the open world with character portraits. It only works with if you’re both repping the same guild though. If HoT does bring in multi-guild chat, I’m not sure how that would work.

Word says I wrote over 3.5k words of feedback. I hope you enjoy it! Also, I didn’t play Stronghold.

Revenant

This weekend I primarily played with Shiro and the swords. I completely forgot to check out the buffs from the last event beyond weapon swapping. And on that note, weapon swapping is nice and works well.

I didn’t have much joy with dual swords in Verdant Brink. I chalk this up primarily to the Revenant having a slower ground speed than a fat, lazy turtle. It was just completely terrible. I would run after one of those Teragriffs disguised as a T-Rex and when I got close to it, it would knock me down and run off. So I would waddle after it because apparently spiky edgelord armour comes with a capped top speed, try to bang it a few times with my sword to do some damage except it was apparently in a charging stance again which seemed to make it immune to damage. Long story short, melee weapons on a character as slow as the Revenant against mobile enemies is not a great time. You can play smart by knocking it down, using one of your closer skills to move up to it and then smack it around for a while but then it’s still not dead and your skills are now on cooldown.

I eventually pulled out of Verdant Brink and went wandering around Orr and the Silverwastes to look for enemies that weren’t “Knockdown-Keep Away” or “Sitting In A Pool Of Blind” or “Literally A Dozen Tiny Raptors” that I could gauge damage levels against. The swords do excellent damage when you can get a grip on an enemy. I ended up swapping out the off-hand sword for the axe because it wasn’t doing much for me and the axe has an excellent shadowstep skill that was exceptionally useful for getting into melee range. Shiro does have a closer skill Phase Traversal but it’s not great. It’s essentially just a slow Bull’s Charge, up to and including a recycled Bull’s Charge attack animation, but without the knockdown that makes Bull’s Charge useful. The axe closer is faster, lets you shadowstep to enemies on a different vertical level to you and is just superior in every single way. If you try and use Phase Traversal on an enemy standing on a ledge slightly above your height you will slowly slide towards them and then lovingly press your cheek against the side of the ledge and you continue to slowly slide against it.

As much as I enjoy playing a hammer Revenant, the professional as a whole doesn’t feel like it’s working for me. Your skill bar being determined by your legends is an interesting design concept but ultimately leaves you with skill bars that are over-specialised when you need versatility. The biggest thing that I don’t understand though, is the complete lack of swiftness or stability. I just want to make a poster with a picture of Rytlock and text that reads, “‘That’s so sixteen stun breakers but no swiftness or stability.’ –Think Before You Speak” because apparently that’s the life of a Revenant now.

At least Jade Winds is nice. Deal with THAT, tiny raptors.

Tempest

I enjoyed playing Tempest a lot. The Warhorn skills are definitely more support oriented which was exactly the aim from what I understand. They do their job well enough. My favourite combo was stacking as many boons on myself as I could then sharing them with Heat Sync and refreshing them with Sand Squall.

I like Overcharging as a mechanic and got the best results out of overloading fire. It did solid damage, especially if you stack might before using it. Overloading water didn’t seem to do much of note from what I could tell. The healing from the weapon skills felt like it outclassed that of the overload. The animation was nice though. Similar story with overloading earth. It gives a bunch of people protection but that’s not really something I can gauge the effectiveness of. It does its thing but it feels a little underwhelming. Overloading air could probably do with a little love too. It feels similar to overloading fire, in that it’s mostly direct damage, but it didn’t seem as effective to me. I think it could do with a little boost, but I’m not sure what specifically could help it out.

The utilities are decent. I didn’t have any problems that stood out while playing. Eye of the Storm is an excellent stun breaker but its worth on a skillbar is debateable since you can just trait to use it automatically when you’re hit with control effects. The aura sharing utilities are also useful, but I don’t have much more of note to say beyond that.

As it is, Rebound needs work. It’s not offering enough to warrant taking up an Elite skill slot. I like the idea of faster recharge but I don’t think 25% on one skill is enough. I also don’t know what you’d do to improve it beyond throwing stacks of Alacrity at people but that route require stepping all over the Chronomancer’s toes which is less than ideal.

Chronomancer

Continuum shift is amazing and I love it. Even if Chronomancer offered basically nothing else, I would spec into it solely for that shatter ability. It’s not even the fact that it’s a powerful ability. It’s just fun to use.

The shield skills felt like they were in a good place when I was using them. The block is nice, and Tides of Time does its thing. They work. But ultimately, I wouldn’t use the shield outside of the test because I don’t like the mainhand options for Mesmer. Even though sword and shield worked reasonably well when I tested it, I wasn’t a fan. Additionally, if I had to pick an off-hand weapon for Mesmer, I would choose the focus every time. Ultimately, the shield isn’t bad, it’s just not a set I would choose to take.

There isn’t a lot for me to say about the utility skills. Nothing stuck out to me as needing improvement while I was playing with it. I did particularly like Well of Recall though. I think that’s earned a permanent place on my skill bar. It’s just so very useful.

I enjoyed using Gravity Well in PvE, if only because the float animation is lovely. It worked well enough but I don’t think it’s doing enough for me to replace Time Warp as my default Elite skill. I think the ultimate problem here is the same one with Dragon’s Maw. It’s spread a little thin trying to do too much. Additionally, there’s the issue that it’s an Elite skill with a 90 second cooldown that people are just going to roll out of in a PvP situation. It could do with a little love, but I’m not sure where.

Dragonhunter Cont.

As for weapon skills, I like the ideas here, but they need some love and work. First up, let’s discuss True Shot, it’s a charged attack that pierces but roots you while you’re charging. This is an issue because to get the best effect from a piercing attack you need to line up targets but they’re not going to stand still in a line while you’re rooted to the ground. This skill could be improved by allowing the player to move while charging or by swapping out the pierce for an AoE burst on impact. Deflecting Shot is a great idea, but by the time I’ve seen an incoming projectile and lined up the ground targeting marker, I’ve already been hit. I feel like this could use something to make a little more workable, but I’m not sure what. Symbol of Energy is fantastic. This is exactly the kind of skill I wanted when I heard about Longbow Guardians. Finally, Hunter’s Ward, the most important thing to me here is that this skill needs a unique attack animation. Until the barriers come down, the attack animation is just a recycled Barrage animation and that’s not okay. Firstly, it’s lazy. Secondly, it’s confusing. A player should be able to distinguish between different attacks coming at them so they can make the right call on how to respond. I don’t care if it’s a rough and cheap fix like adjusting the colour values of the arrows in the animation so they glow white. A player just needs to be able to distinguish between a Barrage and a Hunter’s Ward at first glance. Beyond the effects of the skills themselves and onto the overall effectiveness of the weapon, I feel that the damage could do with an increase. I took it into WvW and found it difficult to get kills with. It was pretty good at being mildly inconvenient to enemy players, but it wasn’t particularly great at racking up kills.

The only thing that leaves us with is the improved Virtues. I love Wings of Resolve. That saved me multiple times in WvW. Being near death only to fly, fly away and heal made me laugh every time I did it. As for Spear of Justice and Shield of Courage, I didn’t use their active effects much. I like the passive burns and aegis enough that I don’t want them on cooldown unless there’s an absolutely pressing reason to activate them.

Dragonhunter

Overall, I found the Dragonhunter to be underwhelming. Giving the Guardian access to Longbow was a good choice since it needed more ranged options but I don’t think the bow skills are quite up to par yet and there are synergy issues between the bow and the new trap utilities. Namely, the issue is that there is no synergy.

I like the bow and traps the same way that I like freshly mown grass and peanut butter. Individually: Great! Mix them together: What are you doing? The combination of ranged combat and PBAoE traps fell completely on its face for me when I tried to play with both. Which is probably funny to hear me say if you know that I main Ranger, more specifically, if you know that before the recent “Destroy Your Entire Build” Hero Points update, I played a trap Ranger. Before the update, trap Rangers were a little uncommon to see. After the update removed thrown traps, you don’t see them at all. For the good reason that ranged combat and PBAoE traps are a terrible combination. I understand the thematic underpinnings behind the decision. The hunter lays traps and then lures prey into them. It’s just not how it tends to play out in reality. In reality, you’ll often kill the mob before it wanders into your trap, kill it so easily that you didn’t need to lay the trap at all, have it aggro something completely unrelated and run off in a different direction, start to pull the mob towards the trap and have it be killed by a passing player, belatedly realise the mob is a ranged attacker, never gain aggro on the mob in the first place since it’s a champ that’s too busy dealing with the twenty other players around it who don’t have to try and coax it into wandering into their attacks or the prey happens to be another player in a PvP situation who sees you lay the trap, walks around it, /laughs at you and rightly so. Good idea. Doesn’t work.

The fact that the new healing skill is also a trap brings with it the exact same problems that the offensive traps have. The initial heal is weak and if you manage to set it up and have an enemy wander into it when you need it, they get a blind and you get a big heal out of it. This is a bad skill. It’s too situational and there are too many things that can go wrong with it. I would not run this on my skill bar. Not even as a joke. Why would you pick this when you can pick Shelter for a 2s block and a decent heal or Signet of Resolve which heals for more, clears a condition and doesn’t require an enemy running over the trap for you to not die. To improve it, I would recommend either making the initial heal stronger or giving the player the option to detonate the trap manually for a portion of the secondary heal. That way even if they don’t get the blind or the inconsequential damage, they still get a decent heal from their healing skill.

On a similar note, the elite skill is terrible. It traps enemies for four seconds, slows them for four seconds, does minor damage and has a sixty second cooldown. It feels like Chains of Light and Line of Warding had a baby that’s worse in every single way. There’s no way that players will pick this as an Elite skill over something like Feel My Wrath. The primary issue here, I think, is that it’s trying to do too much but ultimately achieves very little. To improve this skill, I would suggest picking one area that you want it to absolutely shine and then lean as hard in that direction as you can. Something like a six to eight second Line of Warding that acts like an AoE trap offers an amazing degree of lockdown and would make a fantastic Elite skill that I would have no issue placing on my skill bar.