Anyone can be a critic, but the act of criticizing in itself does not by default make your criticism correct or what you are criticizing incorrect. Also, I’m not being offended, I’m just debating, because we simply have different viewpoints. XD
Spear of Justice does exactly what Binding Blades does, and Magnetic Leap does similar, just without the damage. When you’re first making the game you have a lot more leeway to create unique functionalities. When you’re game is already established, the answer isn’t to give Guardian Staff the equivalent of a Druid Grandmaster that requires no build up nor any other requirement then a landing very large area affecting cone. And why would you make an entirely new thing when you can just add Vulnerability for 4-5 seconds.
Speaking of Binding Blade though, they should definitely add that to more guardian skills. Applying a few seconds of the DoT would be nice on Immobilize or most Control Effects.
Your specific words were “no other weapon has a buff, or even functionality, that matches that idea. It only appears on a single weapon and only interacts with two skills. It has the same functionality as an existing condition, Vulnerability, except it’s even better as it goes over the Vuln cap”.
My response was showing that there are already existing, unique buffs/debuffs on weapons that overlapped the roles of existing buffs/debuffs, but were still separate. That’s all. Binding blade is to burning what my suggestion to staff would be to vulnurability, a separate debuff that acts on top of an existing condition, while still somewhat mimicking the functionality of that condition.
Also, the reason I didn’t want to just make it cause vulnerability is because in organized groups, 25 stacks of vulnerability is already being achieved easily. For staff to be viable in end game PvE, it needs to bring functionality that is a boon for the group, and the only way to do that is to give it functionality that isn’t being fulfilled yet. If I’m going to trade a large amount of dps for a pure support weapon, I’d kitten sure want that support weapon to enhance the group in such a way as to justify that dps loss (either by giving the group more dps to compensate, or by bringing greater utility).
When you consider how steep your dps loss is when switching to the staff, in all honesty, a 5% dps boost for the party is likely not even going to cover that gap. As you pointed out, even just auto attacking with hammer would bring your group more utility and damage than staff currently does. As for whether the debuff would stack with multiple staff users, the answer would be no, but then I think you wouldn’t want more than one pure staff supporter in your group either way (because like all kinds of support, including might, fury and vulnerability, you eventually hit diminishing returns).
The other problem is that groups are already getting their full might and vulnerability stacks, and they’re usually doing it without trading as much dps as a guardian would switching to staff, so adding more might and vulnerability to the staff will not help and will in fact get us nowhere. This is why I offered an alternative that makes staff a better support weapon without overlapping existing roles. It’s the ONLY way to make it viable aside from a straight up dps increase, otherwise it’s use will remain limited to WvW or being a loot stick.
In any case, it’s fine if you don’t agree with my suggestions. I’m not one to assume all my suggestions are perfect or always reasonable. But I do think it’s odd that you only ever say what’s wrong, instead of offering viable alternatives. Do you perhaps think staff is fine as is in PvE or PvP? It can certainly be argued that it fulfills a decent role in WvW, but I’m curious about your thoughts as to its use in other game modes.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)
Warrior banners are a set of utility skills that fulfill particular aspects of what the Warrior profession has and can do. Putting some unique buff on Staff that has never before been seen does not correlate to the profession identity that a Banner represents. No other weapon has a buff, or even functionality, that matches that idea.
Sorry, but this is not accurate. Binding blade for Greatsword 5 has a unique debuff with a damage over time effect, which is similar to other conditions but technically doesn’t count as a condition. It is also unique to Guardian Greatsword and can be seen on no other class or skill. So you’re arguing the point that there can’t be a unique buff or debuff unique to a single weapon, even though we have an example that contradicts that idea.
Also, just because the functionality did not exist before, that doesn’t mean it cannot be added. Alacrity didn’t exist before, now it does. Resistance didn’t exist before, now it does. Why must an idea be excluded just because it’s new? It’s just an idea after all, if you think you have better alternatives then you are more than welcome to put your ideas on the table as well.
2: You can easily reduce pulses for symbol to reduce the amount of quickness you can get, but when you consider that mesmers can get 2 seconds of quickness with each well (which can be increased with boon duration) on top of group alacrity, it seems like a moot point.
It is not because other classes got unbalanced abilities that should get toned down that applying it to other classes is the way to go. Quickness is an extremely powerful boon that should not be that easily shared.
You are right, but other classes have enjoyed a lot of power creep since expansion and Guardians have been left behind. It’s just I don’t see ANet nerfing those other classes to any reasonable extent. The only other option in that case is to bring guardian in line.
Quickness was also not the first boon I thought of either, it was just one of the few that we weren’t getting from symbols already. I also thought of aegis, resistance and stability, but those might also be considered too strong for a symbol. Perhaps stability might be the best alternative though?
1) Warrior Banners do not compare to a brand new special snowflake buff only found on Guardian’s staff
2)“You can easily change whatever I say to actually be balanced instead of the unbalanced piles I suggest”
3)PS warriors only work when you have: a) a Greatsword b) the Strength line c) the specific Greatsword trait d) the Tactics line e) PS traited f) enough precision to crit consistently.
Other than the precision, Warriors are lowering their potential dps to take those options. The combo takes a lot of moving parts to work. Just because one profession has one thing, doesn’t mean another profession must have it also.
4) Guardian already has a strong pve niche. It doesn’t need an even stronger claim that’s already been filled. These changes aren’t going to affect WvW or PvP in any positive manner.
1: How do they not? They are limited only to warriors, but give buffs to stats in a manner similar to boons, despite stacking in dependently. The same would go for my suggestions for staff.
2: Of course, I am only making suggestions, I never mentioned tick counts in my suggestion (you made that assumption on your own) and obviously they’d need to be balanced properly. I’m not a balance expert though, and I’d have to leave that to the discretion of the devs.
3: PS warriors have all of that and can usually achieve 100% crit chance. Regardless of what it takes to achieve, the point is that if you have a PS warrior in your party, then staff 4 for guiardians is useless. And even if you don’t other classes like ele are still better at giving might. Why must we have skills that are completely overshadowed when we could bring something more unique to the table instead?
4: What strong PvE niche? You just say we have something but you don’t explain what it is, which makes your comment questionable at best. Guardians lose out in damage and support to other classes. We can’t give the offensive support of mesmers, revenants, warriors or eles, and even our defensive support is sub-par (revenants, for example, can have more projectile block and stability uptime than us). The only unique boon we bring to the table is aegis, and that is too weak to build around.
But if you can elaborate on one area where we equal or surpass other classes, I’d gladly hear it.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)
Why would you give a single weapon its own special condition that functions exactly like an existing condition?
With 100% boon duration, you’ll be getting 12s of quickness on 16s cooldown. Permanent with FmW!.
Implying half-max stacks of Might is low
Again with 100% boon duration, you have permanent 12 might to your party. Sigil of Strength you get permanent 25 Might.
Commander Guardians would be like combining commander Chronomancers with PS warriors. Guardians are already extremely useful in raiding and wvw. Staff doesn’t have to be a requirement in pvp while overshadowing other game modes too.
1: Why not? Other classes get unique buffs/debuffs that overlap with the roles of existing buffs/debuffs. Warrior banners are a good example.
2: You can easily reduce pulses for symbol to reduce the amount of quickness you can get, but when you consider that mesmers can get 2 seconds of quickness with each well (which can be increased with boon duration) on top of group alacrity, it seems like a moot point.
3: It is low considering one phalanx strength warrior can get full stacks just from attacking, yet we have to stop dps to get 12 stacks for a short duration. Why must I use sigils and boon duration to get what another class gives without using either of those?
4: What about PvE? The only use for staff is to tag mobs. No-one actually uses it for its intended role, which is support. They just spam 1 all the time against trash mobs in open world events. No organized group will ever use staff in high level content over other dps options like longbow, greatsword or hammer. The only way to make it competitive and to fulfill it’s intended role is to give it support comparable to options from other classes.
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Here are my suggestions for staff:
Staff 1 – Range and damage stays as is. But if it hits an enemy or ally, it applies a special debuff; let’s called it “radiance”. Radiance causes all enemies to take 5% additional damage and allies to take 5% less damage (introduce traits that improve this bonus to 10%). Stacks separately from vulnerability.
Staff 2 – Is completely reworked. Instead of firing a super slow orb that’s hard to hit allies or enemies with, it detonates the “radiance” debuff on all enemies and allies, causing burning to enemies and healing to allies.
Staff 3 – Changes from Symbol of Swiftness to Symbol of Quickness. To me it doesn’t make sense to have to stand still inside a symbol to get a movement speed buff. Instead, the symbol will give a pulsing 1 second of quickness for each tick. Increase the cooldown to 20 seconds.
Staff 4 – This skill is currently pointless thanks to the low amount of might and low uptime of might it gives. Considering other classes can maintain 25 stacks for a group quite easily, there’s literally no reason for Guardian’s to even bother. I’d change it to give aegis and swiftness to allies (similar to retreat). No longer roots.
Staff 5 – Is fine as it is.
Out of the classes you mentioned, I reckon Mesmers are probably the most sought after thanks to Alacrity and other strong support options.
Aside from that, I’d say whatever you enjoy playing most.
I know I’m a bit late commenting here, but I’ll put my two cents in.
Crafting new legendaries was one of the new features that ANet was selling for the expansion. Sure, it can be argued that it wasn’t the most important new feature, or the most discussed, but it was still a selling point for some people and may have indeed been the grain of rice that tipped the scale in favor of buying it for some. After all, only those who bougth the expansion could craft the new legendaries, thanks to the system being locked behind masteries.
While I will personally not cry over the lack of new legendaries, I do still feel disappointed. Not just disappointed by a lack of shiny new toys though, but rather by the implications of unfulfilled plans and empty words. We were told that there would be new legendary weapons for each weapon set except for underwater weapons, and now that statement is being overturned and rendered false.
What will happen next? What statement or promise will be overturned next? How can you instill faith in your playerbase over promised content or ideas, when you do a 180 on the content you’ve said you’d add, but then chose not to? How do we know that we’ll get all the content we’re told about for the next expansion? Can we in faith make a sound purchasing decision based on what we’re told, when half the time what we are told never comes to fruition? Hell, even legendary armor is taking forever to add to the game. It was meant to be added with Raids, but 8 months + after launch, we still don’t have them. For all we know, those will be scrapped as well, and there’s certainly no reason to have faith that they’ll definitely make it to the game.
Perhaps next it will be living story. Or the quarterly updates. Or the addition of new armor or weapon sets. Who knows? But one thing’s for certain, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to put my faith in ANet with the decisions they are making lately, which is sad, because I truly believe in the potential of this game. Hopefully the new living story adds something worth being excited about, otherwise it might be time to move on.
As someone who has main-ed a guardian for over three years, it’s easy to see how they have fallen from grace. Our most viable build options are continuously nerfed, while none of the alternatives are buffed to a point of being competitive. We’re pigeon-holed into select builds, and even the best of them cannot compete with other classes, whether it’s in PvP or PvE.
The only thing that keeps me going is that I still find them somewhat fun to play, but even then, I’ve shifted lately from maining a Guardian to playing with it a lot less. Other classes are now occupying much more of my time.
I think the main issue is that ANet has balanced Guardians based on rash player feedback from PvP. DH’s with traps and bow can come across as overwhelming to inexperienced players, so they rage on the forums about how overpowered they are and they get nerfed as a result, even though they were never, in my opinion, in a state of being overpowered.
The problem is that these nerfs from PvP bleed out into PvE as well, and our performance in that game mode is continuously marred. For exmaple, bow, being one of our primary damage weapons now, gets nerfed in PvE because the devs thought True Shot was overpowered in PvP (despite the numerous ways to counter it).
To list a few issues:
- More than half of our weapon sets (sword, torch, shield, scepter, mace and even staff) are not viable.
- Half of our utility skills (consecrations, spirit weapons, signets) are still not viable.
- A lot of traits are still not viable.
- We lose out to other classes in BOTH damage and support roles.
- We bring nothing truly unique to the table except aegis, which is too weak to build around.
- We have too many kitten projectiles in a game flooded with projectile block/reflect options…
- Our only viable condition build was nerfed to being pointless again and we have no dedicated condition weapons.
Frankly, Guardians are in dire need of a rework, more so than any other class I can currently think of. Back in the day it was Rangers, Engineers and Necros that needed some love and they got it. Now I think it’s the Guardian’s turn.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)
I am very unhappy with bringing it back. Ruined the efforts of veteran players like me, because it is much easier to get now and also no longer a symbol of being a veteran pvp player.
And yet players had all or parts of this armor, previously, without ever setting foot in PvP. Gotta love the old Achievement Chests.
I am pretty sure the achievement point chests gave skins from paid tournament reward chests and not from specific rank x chests. So Tribal armor was not amongst what you could get from achievement point chests. Same with skins like Infinite Light which came from r70 chests (or at the end you could trade glory for cultural armor to salvage for r70 tokens and try your luck with a pvp mystic forge recipe)
I am very unhappy with bringing it back. Ruined the efforts of veteran players like me, because it is much easier to get now and also no longer a symbol of being a veteran pvp player.
Hey guess what? I’ve got great news for you! You get to keep all that stuff that you earned! No one is taking anything away from you. At. All.
Yes, the prestige was taken away. The only reason to use these armors because they look ugly.
Having something noone can get anymore is a great value.
I can confirm the achievement chests gave the PvP exclusive armor. I know because I got Stalwart armor from them, and this was back when I seldom played PvP (certainly not enough to get those sets in any case).
Aside from that, the fact that you’re admitting you’d wear armor you don’t like just because of the prestige associated with it is kinda sad. As mentioned before, there are plenty of other ways to show prestige than through an armor set you hate, such as titles or rank finishers. Frankly though, I think you’re just being overly selfish over what ultimately amounts to digital items in a game that is meant to be fun for everyone, not just for a self entitled minority. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it makes business sense for ANet to cater to the majority.
I am very unhappy with bringing it back. Ruined the efforts of veteran players like me, because it is much easier to get now and also no longer a symbol of being a veteran pvp player.
What efforts did it ruin exactly? You still have the armor, it’s not like anyone took it from you. If you want a status symbol for being a PvP veteran, rank finishers and seasonal rank icons are a much better indicator than an armor set that some people got without ever even playing PvP.
How is all of this different than Signets? I would rather go with the pet thing.
Aside from what was said above, I would surmise the main differences as follows:
1: Most signets provide a continuous active effect. My idea for the spirit weapon passives is that the provide a “Condition Dependent” effect. In one case, the condition is attacking the enemy, in another case, the condition is being hit, etc.
2: Signets lose their passive effects when you activate them. My idea for spirit weapons would retain their passive effects even when you activate them. This is so that you never feel like you have to choose with a constant passive effect that alters stats or an occasional active effect. This promotes more active use without punishing the player for it and makes using spirit weapons more fun and engaging.
3: Spirit weapons would manifest themselves in a more physical, visual form. The idea is to make them feel less like invisible effects that simply alter stats and more like physical manifestations that act as an extension of the guardian’s spiritual power. This again makes them more appealing and fun.
As for why I’m not a fan of the whole pet idea, it’s simple really. Pet AI is not that great, and with spirit weapons, which are mostly melee in nature, it’s even worse because they aren’t very good at chasing enemies and positioning properly for hits (except for the bow which doesn’t even attack enemies).
In PvP, any player with a decent amount of mobility will run circles around Spirit Weapons, that is if they don’t melt first from aoe spams first. Having effects that activate from the guardian’s attacks and affect your target directly, or that you can aim yourself is, in my opinion, much more reliable than relying on clunky pet AI. It also makes the entire skill chain feel more unique and less like shiny necro pets.
To be honest, when I think of Spirit Weapons, I think of the early Guardian concept art which gives a more inspiring visage of what they could have been as opposed to the rather mediocre iterations we have in practice right now.
As shown in the image above, I thought of Spirit Weapons less as pets that mindlessly wander and attack enemies, and more as magical manifestations that were an extension of the Guardian him/herself, conjured through their power and will.
As such, this is how I imagine Spirit Weapons functioning as a rework:
Spirit weapons are no longer pets, but are instead direct manifestations of the Guardian’s holy power.
How this would work is as follows. Spirit weapons would have two parts to them. The first is a passive effect that manifests under certain conditions, the second is a more powerful active effect that can be activated at will on a cooldown. In this sense, they would be similar to signets, only unlike signets, they manifest themselves as physical apparitions when their effects take place and do not lose their passive effects while their active effects are on cooldown.
Here are some examples of how the skills might function as a reworked utility set:
Heal: Bow of Truth
Passive: Once every ten seconds, a spiritual bow will appear, firing a bouncing arrow that cures conditions on you or nearby allies. Bounces 2 times. Must be in combat to activate.
Active: Cause your spiritual bow to fire a rain of healing arrows over the target area, recovering health and granting regeneration per tick. (25 second cooldown).
Utility 1: Sword of Justice
Passive: Your attacks have a 30% chance to summon an arcane sword that strikes your target, dealing damage causing vulnurability (5 second internal cooldown for each hit).
Active: Manifest your spiritual sword to impact the target area, dealing damage and crippling enemies (15 second cooldown).
Utility 2: Hammer of Wisdom
Passive: Your attacks have a 30% chance to summon an arcane hammer that damages and dazes your target (10 second internal cooldown per hit).
Active: Manifest your spiritual hammer to damage and knockdown the target (20 second cooldown, 2 second knockdown).
Utility 3: Shield of the Avenger
Passive: Incoming attacks have a 10% chance to be blocked by an arcane shield.
Active: Manifest your spiritual shield at the target area, summoning a protective dome that blocks projectiles while granting aegis to allies in the area of effect (10 second duration, 30 second cooldown).
Utility 4: Lantern of Knowledge
Passive: 30% chance on being hit to summon a torch that releases a radiant flash of light, blinding and revealing nearby enemies (15 second internal cooldown).
Active: Manifest your torch in the target area and cause it to explode with searing flame, burning, blinding and revealing nearby foes.
Elite Skill: Armor of Courage
Passive: Gain 1 stack of stability every 10 seconds (3 second duration). Incoming attacks have a 30% chance to grant 1 stack of retaliation (1 second internal cooldown).
Active: Manifest your spiritual armor to protect you from incoming damage, absorbing up to 10 000 damages and granting stability and retaliation every second it remains active. If your armor survives the full duration, it shatters violently, dealing damage equal to its remaining hitpoints and knocking back nearby enemies (90 second cooldown, 5 second duration).
This is just an example, obviously it would need to be balanced but I personally like this take on Spirit Weapons. I also think it would be more reliable, as you wouldn’t be at the mercy of pet AI.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)
You guys have to keep in mind that when we talk guardian balance, we’re not just looking at PvP. Burn Guardians might have been strong in PvP for a short time, but considering all their damage came from one condition, it also meant that it was easier to remove that damage completely even with the most simplistic condition removal methods.
That being said, guardians also exist in PvE as well and in that game mode in particular, they are in dire straights. The torch is really just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to the fixes guardian needs to become more competitive again. But in terms of this particular discussion and the theme of the topic, as well as the viability of burn guardians it subsequently entails, I do think it would be nice to allow guardians to pursue burning builds as an alternative to their current dps meta.
The issue with guardian burn mechanics right now, is that 90% of our burning comes from virtue of justice. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting mechanic and it can be fun to use, but it suffers from a case of extremes. Against single targets, it’s very hard to apply any reasonable amount of burning. The duration of VoJ’s passive burn is not very high so even if you hit the enemy a lot, you won’t achieve the condition damage stacks that other classes are able to maintain a lot more easily.
On the flipside, if you fight five targets, and thus get 5x the number of hits in to proc VoJ, you then see astronomical burn numbers, albeit for a short time.
As a whole, the mechanics are very unbalanced and, subsequently, unreliable. Guardians have no true dedicated condition weapon sets to help maintain consistent burning against single targets, and rely on a class mechanic which has varying degrees of effectiveness depending on the situation. Let’s face it though, fighting trash mobs, where VoJ is at it’s most effective, is not really where the DPS matters, because they usually melt fast against groups either way. Where dps is needed most is usually against bosses, which are typically alone, and this is where VoJ fails.
I would personally like to see weapons like torch and maybe even sword be altered more to help apply conditions more reliably, against fewer or single targets, even if it means that VoJ’s effect against multiple targets is nerfed a bit as a result.
Don’t bring burn guard back; it was stupid
Why not? Other classes get to have condition build variants, why can’t guardian?
Skill 4 – Zealot’s flame/fire
This skill is fine for the most part. But It would be cool if the zealot’s flame part of the skill (where you get set on fire) removed a condition from the user and nearby allies for each second the flame is active on you. This to me would be better suited as the condition remover skill and it would be easier to affect allies with it just by standing near them rather than trying to aim with Cleansing Flame.
Skill 5 – Cleansing Flame
Personally, I’d remove the condition removal from this skill. Instead, I’d change it so that Cleansing Flame removes boons from enemies with each tick and then applies a stack of burning for each boon removed.
This way the skill would still fit the theme of “cleansing” but you’re just cleansing the enemy of boons instead. I also think it makes more sense because the skill is much easier to aim on enemies than allies. The duration doesn’t need to change because the utility and burn these changes would add would make up for low physical dps and long cast time.
I don’t agree on number 4 to be honest. It would become too powerful as it would be the main condi cleanse of the guard ( 3 sec duration of the fire x2 if radiance traited) + it would still be a big damaging skill and would still lack effectiveness because of the targetting problem.
However your 5 suggestion was impecable. I really liked it and I liked the concept as well. So +1 for the n° 5 suggestion.
Yeah, number 4 might be too strong if we take into account the radiance trait for the free cleansing flame every 10 seconds.
In that case, it might be better if it just removes one condition from the player and nearby allies on the initial cast. Either that, or one condition on initial cast, and another when the skill ends. However, if you cast Zealot’s fire (the projectile) before it ends, you don’t get the second cleanse. That way it becomes a choice between a dps spike or a second cleanse.
How about making it a legit condi weapon? I mean Guardians already have Greatsword for high burst dps and Hammer for high sustained dps. Give it short duration burn on auto or something.
Not a bad idea. I’d personally make the scepter more condition oriented because we already have a ranged dps weapon with longbow. However, having the sword as a melee condition variant might be a good idea as well (so we have both a ranged and melee condition weapon option). Considering mace, sword and hammer and greatsword are all physical damage oriented, having one of those four change to more of a condition focus would be nice.
Personally, I’d like to see the torch shine as a burn oriented weapon, while still maintaining its “cleanse with holy fire” theme. Here are my suggested changes:
Skill 4 – Zealot’s flame/fire
This skill is fine for the most part. But It would be cool if the zealot’s flame part of the skill (where you get set on fire) removed a condition from the user and nearby allies for each second the flame is active on you. This to me would be better suited as the condition remover skill and it would be easier to affect allies with it just by standing near them rather than trying to aim with Cleansing Flame.
Skill 5 – Cleansing Flame
Personally, I’d remove the condition removal from this skill. Instead, I’d change it so that Cleansing Flame removes boons from enemies with each tick and then applies a stack of burning for each boon removed.
This way the skill would still fit the theme of “cleansing” but you’re just cleansing the enemy of boons instead. I also think it makes more sense because the skill is much easier to aim on enemies than allies. The duration doesn’t need to change because the utility and burn these changes would add would make up for low physical dps and long cast time.
These two changes together I think would greatly improve the utility of torch, and make it more competitive as an offhand option (right now, there’s basically no reason to choose any other offhand over focus).
It still baffles me that they came up with the DH longbow and only included one unblockable ability while the amount of projectile reflects exponentially increased.
Add to the fact that Guardians have a crap ton of projectiles, even on their melee weapons, it adds to many frustrating matches and skirmishes.
I’ve pretty much given up on any type of remediation other than the wishful thinking that our next elite spec doesn’t have to deal with this nonsense.
With regards to the longbow, I think the community had a heavy hand in ANets decision to add that as the weapon of choice for the DH elite spec. I remember a lot of discussions on these forums pre-expasion with people asking for the Guardian to be given the longbow, mostly because they weren’t happy with the scepter as a ranged option.
Still, longbow aside, I do agree that guardians have too many projectiles to deal with. Two out of three of our sword skills involve projectiles and 2 out of five our our greatsword skills also launch projectiles. Fighting any enemy in PvE or PvP with projectile reflects is very punishing for a guardian, even when they’re using their dps oriented melee weapons.
why is it possible for wvwvw and pvp players to get pve skins through reward track but it’s not possible for pve players to get pvp/wvwvw skins?
To be fair, there are still quite a lot of PvE skins or items that cannot be gotten in WvW.
If you ever do a search on the forums, you will notice countless topics and posts regarding guild hall a few months ago. What you suggested is already suggested and the pros/cons are also discussed in those topics. Do a search on it.
When I do a search for anything guild hall related, the only results that come up are from this thread and one about scribing mats. I’d write that off to how poorly the search function on these forums work, but the point remains.
In either case, just because it has been discussed before, that doesn’t mean some fresh ideas cannot be bought to the table.
I agree with you the forums search engine is bad. The dev too agree with you that the search engine is bad. The mod team too agrees with you that it is bad and even made a pinned thread about it. But, you could use other search engine like google’s.
Do keep in mind that I mentioned “What you suggested is already suggested and the pros/cons are also discussed in those topics.” What being discussed right now is just repeating the same thing what other’s have mentioned months ago, likewise the same arguments rephrased differently.
Also, there were tons of topics and pots about it, however, despite the many posts and arguments, nothing is conclusive and dev did not mention any plans to make any further changes to the costing to accommodate tiny guilds.
You can’t assume that because nothing has been done, that it means that the devs have no intention of doing something. It may simply be a case of priorities.
However, I don’t agree with your implications that having more threads on a particular topic is a bad thing. If the community feels strongly enough about a topic, then it should be bought up as many times as possible so the devs are indeed aware that it is a more widespread concern or desire. For those who feel they’ve seen a topic too much, it is a very simple matter of not opening that post and reading it, it’s hardly what I’d call inconvenient. Indeed, if the topic is as unworthy of attention as you believe, those threads will quickly be buried out of site and out of your mind.
In any case, just look at what happened with Tribal armor. Players have been asking for its return for ages and many threads were created. Now at last it is back. The devs didn’t act on it immediately, but the community ensured that it was at the back of their minds by reminding them of it regularly. That tenacity eventually paid off.
If you ever do a search on the forums, you will notice countless topics and posts regarding guild hall a few months ago. What you suggested is already suggested and the pros/cons are also discussed in those topics. Do a search on it.
When I do a search for anything guild hall related, the only results that come up are from this thread and one about scribing mats. I’d write that off to how poorly the search function on these forums work, but the point remains.
In either case, just because it has been discussed before, that doesn’t mean some fresh ideas cannot be bought to the table.
Don’t get me wrong guys, we are upgrading the guild despite everything, it’s just the cost for getting everything is much higher than I think it needs to be for smaller guilds. Can it be done? Yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s not needlessly expensive.
A guild with 100+ members will probably find upgrading their guild to be an insignificant cost. For a guild with less than 30 active members, it will be much harder. And for smaller guilds, harder still. I just think it would be nice if smaller guilds were catered to as much as larger ones. You also have to keep in mind that for a lot of members, upgrading the guild isn’t always a priority. If they have to decide between giving 100 ectos to the guild and selling them to get something from the gem store, a lot will naturally do what they think benefits them the most immediately. But if they had to contribute say, only 5 ectos (which would be the case if it was a larger guild splitting the load between lots of members), then I think it wouldn’t seem so overbearing and thus they would more readily contribute.
The Scepter deals superior damage versus large hitboxes + inanimate objects though.
+ it allows for an off-hand.I always pick Scepter over Longbow myself.
So it’s superior in a minority of situations. The offhand argument might be nice if we had better offhands. Only the focus is good for much, and usually it benefits melee use more than ranged.
I still think either way it doesn’t make sense to have two weapons fill almost exactly the same role. We have no dedicated main hand condition weapons, so that’s a gap that could still be filled.
I think I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve suggested sword changes in guardian threads. The devs simply seem to overlook it completely, despite years worth of suggestions and complaints about the sword’s performance in the community.
Compared to sword skills on other classes, it’s easy to see where the guardian sword is lacking. It’s damage is mediocre at best, and it offers very little utility to make up for it. If you were to compare it to Revenant sword skills for example, it loses on both fronts.
The problem therein is that no matter what I can think of to suggest for sword improvements, I simply feel far too pessimistic regarding any chance of such feedback being even heeded by the devs, much less acted upon, to even bother anymore.
One may hope to summon Gaile and get to her get some discussion with the class devs about moving community opinion of the variety of weapons per class that need to be buffed to par with the HoT power creep
The sad part is while other classes are enjoying power creep, the guardian continues to be nerfed into an ever-increasingly dire state. We have mediocre performance from both a damage and support point of view, and our sword skills are really just the cherry on top of the salt laden cake, so to speak.
I feel sad as someone who has been a guardian main for this long.
Its fine really…if you play this really really really specific build and min max it /s
Still needs a buff or a skill swap with focus
That and give spirit weapons a purpose – engi style kit imo
Give signets a perma effect and buff similar to eleSided with bug fixes and baselining bits and pieces and we’re hopefully on par with the power creep
I don’t think it’s really fine at all. I can’t think of any kind of build that a guardian can focus on that another class cannot do better. The only remotely unique support mechanic we have going for us is aegis, and even then it doesn’t really perform well enough to build around without sacrificing too much performance in other areas.
I wouldn’t say guardians are terrible to the point of being unusable, but they’re certainly not up to par.
I think I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve suggested sword changes in guardian threads. The devs simply seem to overlook it completely, despite years worth of suggestions and complaints about the sword’s performance in the community.
Compared to sword skills on other classes, it’s easy to see where the guardian sword is lacking. It’s damage is mediocre at best, and it offers very little utility to make up for it. If you were to compare it to Revenant sword skills for example, it loses on both fronts.
The problem therein is that no matter what I can think of to suggest for sword improvements, I simply feel far too pessimistic regarding any chance of such feedback being even heeded by the devs, much less acted upon, to even bother anymore.
One may hope to summon Gaile and get to her get some discussion with the class devs about moving community opinion of the variety of weapons per class that need to be buffed to par with the HoT power creep
The sad part is while other classes are enjoying power creep, the guardian continues to be nerfed into an ever-increasingly dire state. We have mediocre performance from both a damage and support point of view, and our sword skills are really just the cherry on top of the salt laden cake, so to speak.
I feel sad as someone who has been a guardian main for this long.
Hello.
As a member of a small guild, who does not want to be part of a larger 100+ player guild, I and my guildies have found the task of upgrading the guild hall to be somewhat insurmountable. While it is “possible” with enough time, the cost is vast to the point of being disheartening.
I thought of a few possible solutions of how to fix this issue, like reduced costs for guilds with less members, but I realized that such systems would be exploitable. For example, you could buy a guild hall, but don’t invite members to the guild yet. Get all your potential members to send you resources and upgrade the hall at a reduced cost, and then invite them afterwards.
So after some deliberating, I’ve come up with what I think is an ideal solution that both circumvents possible exploits, while giving smaller guilds some love.
Introduce smaller guild halls.
The idea behind this is to add smaller guild halls that are separate from the larger ones, and that specifically cater to guilds with less than 50 members. You could make it so that smaller guild halls can only be acquired by guilds with less than 50 or so members and if a guild ever grows beyond that capacity, it has to buy a larger guild hall.
Smaller guild halls will also be much cheaper to upgrade, but because of their player limit, you can’t exploit them by upgrading them and then inviting more players afterwards. Their upgrades would also be counted as separate from the large guild halls, so if you move from a small to large guild hall, the upgrades will not be carried over (this will again help avoid exploits where a large guild would first purchase all upgrades and then move to a large guild hall afterwards to benefit).
This is honestly the best solution I can think of to cater to smaller guilds, without penalizing larger ones (the average cost per player could work out to be similar), and I think this would be a great addition to the game.
This might be a similar issue to the thief’s staff 5 skill, which also cannot seem to reach it’s full range and lands before the area you’ve targeted.
I think some have suggested a bug where the skill counts the actual aoe circle’s radius as part of the maximum range, so the apparent cast distance shown is inaccurate or bugged out somehow (basically it would be the distance stated in the tooltip, minus the radius of the aoe effect, if I’m making sense). Perhaps Wings of Resolve suffers from a similar issue.
I think I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve suggested sword changes in guardian threads. The devs simply seem to overlook it completely, despite years worth of suggestions and complaints about the sword’s performance in the community.
Compared to sword skills on other classes, it’s easy to see where the guardian sword is lacking. It’s damage is mediocre at best, and it offers very little utility to make up for it. If you were to compare it to Revenant sword skills for example, it loses on both fronts.
The problem therein is that no matter what I can think of to suggest for sword improvements, I simply feel far too pessimistic regarding any chance of such feedback being even heeded by the devs, much less acted upon, to even bother anymore.
I like the idea for a melee spear with a focus on condition damage. I also wouldn’t mind if the scepter was given more of a condition role as a weapon because it’s role as a physical dps ranged weapon is completely overshadowed by longbow (I have no idea why we have two weapons that fill the same role, where one is blatantly superior).
That way, you’d be able to invest in a condition build spec with both a melee and ranged weapon option to switch between.
To be honest, I do think HoT has become stale. As someone who had been playing GW2 for three years +, I’ve come to a point where I find myself no longer wanting to play it anymore. I think what kept me going for so long was my friends playing with me and the sense of community, but even they’ve stopped playing, so that feeling has greatly diminished.
I think if one were to point out some of the issues that have lead to this loss of interest, it would quickly become obvious. The first main issue is that HoT really just didn’t add enough new end game content to keep the game interesting. In fact, it did quite the opposite, it ended up invalidating some of the end game content like dungeons by nerfing rewards and trying to force a focus on Raids.
The second issue is Raids themselves. They have a very narrow target base as far as players are concerned. Not everyone wants super difficult, hardcore content, and while I myself have no issue doing difficult content, the inaccessibility of Raids for a majority of players and the subsequent difficulty of finding groups simply makes it too frustrating to bother with. Couple that with the complete lack of new dungeons and fractals, and it leads to a situation where the end game in HoT really feels bare bones at best.
Lastly, my main issue is there severe lack of new content that has come out since the release of HoT. We’ve been promised a lot of things, but very few of them have been delivered on. Where’s living story Season 3? Where’s all the new legendary weapons we were meant to get (we’ve only gotten 3 weapons over the course of six months)? Where’s the legendary armor that we were meant to get when Raids were introduced? Where are the new Fractals? It’s been about six months since HoT launched and we still haven’t been given a lot of the stuff we were told we were going to get pre-launch. Instead, all we’ve gotten is rehashes of old events that we’ve already done before and the odd new gem store outfit/wings or Black Lion weapon set.
The current pace for new content is abysmal. There is no other way to put it. ANet is really going to have to up the tempo if they want players like myself to come back and reinvest any reasonable amount of time or interest in GW2. It’s really sad because I feel like I spent more money than I should have buying the Deluxe edition for the expansion, and the return on investment has been very inadequate.
Honestly, for a quarterly balance patch, not enough balance changes were made to class skills. A lot of skills and traits remain underwhelming.
Guardians in particular are still underwhelming in PvE, because:
- They’re being balanced solely for PvP and it just hurts their performance in PvE more and more.
- Hammer and Sword are still underwhelming and broken in some areas. Zealots defense still remains completely useless.
- Scepters are hardly used because bows exist, and they need a rework so their roles don’t overlap (scepter could become a condition focused weapon).
- Shouts are underwhelming.
My suggestion is that the bow “string” only appears as you draw to shoot. They can also make it that it glows like the colour of the arrow and flashes away as the arrow is released (so it’s kinda like a mystical force more than a physical string). It can also be faded towards the ends of the string where it meets the bow, so it gives the impression that it’s invisible, but gives a faint glow along the area where it is touched.
This would save them from having to reconstruct the bow to incorporate a string seamlessly while also keeping in theme with the legendary’s aesthetics.
Never have an issue getting into the JP so I can’t relate, sorry.
Maybe it’s more prominent on different servers.
The instance isn’t always full. That’s not really what’s happening. What’s happening is a bug.
The servers like the JP servers, as far as we know, spawn more copies as they’re needed. This doesn’t have anything to do with how many people are doing it. I’m in Australia and in the middle of the US night, the servers are still always full and then they start?
It’s just a bug. That’s all.
If it’s a bug then it would be nice if they fixed it, rather than me getting world full messages or having it simply send me back to DR every time. I’ve been trying to do the JP for a while now and join at different times and it still doesn’t work.
Just don’t do it, it’s just a collection with a silly effect, why do people whine about it so much.
Yes, the requirements are absolutely arbitrary and ridiculous for a small effect like some snowflakes around your body wtf? The intention that they gate it behind those ridiculous numbers (same with precursor crafting btw) is they want you to pay with real cash.
Just play, do your daily, don’t grind and sell the drinks you get for gold and call it a day. Just don’t bother.
You didn’t even read my post, did you? Because if you did you’d know that getting the skin was not what my issue was at all. X___x
I have to admit, I’m really disappointed this Wintersday.
To me, this should be a time of the year when we’re all just relaxing and having fun. Wintersday events in turn, should be about having fun and simply enjoying the holiday season. Rewards are nice, yes, but we should also have fun getting them.
But this year, ANet has decided to turn Wintersday into a huge grind fest, with a lot of players trying to get Winter’s Presence shoulders. Normally that wouldn’t bother me in the case where I can just opt to ignore the grind and go do what I enjoy, but unfortunately, that is not really possible.
I’ve been trying to do Winter Wonderland for a while now, but because of all the players trying to farm drinks for Winter’s Presence, the instance is always full and I always get kicked out or get an error code. Obviously ANet have not catered for the huge influx of people trying to do the JP now to farm for the ludicrous amount of drinks needed for the shoulders, and this in turn has created a very unpleasant situation for players who are simply trying to get in to do it for fun or for achievements. I’ve literally spent more time trying to get into the JP, than I have been able to actually do it.
Is this really what we’ve come to? We’re eliminating the “fun” aspect of a game in order to accommodate massive grinds? Is this what the holiday season should be about? Hell, nevermind that, games as a whole are meant to be fun, not frustrating. But this Wintersday, all I’ve been met with is a lot of frustration.
Sigh
Festive Imbiber is a ridiculous achievement if you ask me.
Why has ANet adopted this policy of introducing overly expensive or grindy achievements? Why must we pay for achievements with gold or mindless farming instead of earning them through actual challenge or fun events? Shouldn’t Wintersday be fun?
I don’t understand. The game has been taking increasingly worse turns lately. How can you keep making so many poor decisions, one after the other without proper testing or implementation? Did you just think “oh, let’s make it 10 000 drinks because that’s the first number that popped into my head”? Did you even consider the potential costs involved for the player, in terms of time or gold and consider whether it was balanced or viable?
You are forcefully ensuring only a minority will be able to get these shoulders (thanks to resource limitations that will become increasingly worse once Wintersday ends). If your new policy is to make a game that’s rewarding and fun only for a minority, I honestly think my days in GW2 are numbered. I’m becoming very frustrated lately and I don’t think I’m the only one.
“State of the guardian in PvE?”
Trash tier. Right up there with thief
Can’t heal, druid is wayyyyy better. there isn’t even a contest
below average DPS. I don’t need to elaborate this one. If you aren’t convinced yet, chances are you never played any other class beside guard.
Mediocre support. chrono, herald, warrior, tempest is actually better.
Every guard main rerolled in my guilds, or transferred his ascended gear to other soldier profs. no point in being part of the sinking ship
The white knights will tell you guardians are in a good spot however.
At least thieves still have great damage and can bring some utility that other classes cannot (long duration aoe stealth). They also have the most spammable blast finisher in the game, spammable aoe blinds and a lot of CC capabilites (which is good for taking down enemy break bars). Thief is actually a good addition to any party.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)
Most guardian utility skills have high cooldowns with low uptime on boons or effects. For example:
- empower gives 12 stacks of might for 10 seconds on a 20 second cooldown. Revenants Warriors and Eles on the other hand can stack up to 25 stacks of might with no downtime.
- Guardians get a shout that gives 4 seconds of protection and 6 seconds of regeneration on a 35 second cooldown (Hold the Line). Alternatively, Revenants can give a group 9 seconds of fury, 9 seconds of might (3 stacks), 12 seconds of regeneration, 6 seconds of protection and 12 seconds of swiftness on a skill with a 25 second cooldown (One with Nature).
- Empowering Might (give might to allies on crit) has a 1 second internal cooldown, which greatly limits how much might you can stack. Phalanx Strength and Forceful Greatsword, on the other hand, have no internal cooldowns.
How is that even fair? I can give lots of other examples but I don’t want this list to become too long.
Because we can heal from boon application.Removing the cd from empowerin g might would make it extremely strong. Stand your ground can heal for 2k with 4 allies around. Empower is a 60%+ heal if traited. besides you compare a master with a grandmaster trait.
The rest of you post is filled with very personal points of view which I almost completly disagree with since yu are exaggurating way too much.
So because of one trait which gives strong personal healing, all other guardian support skills must be sub-par because you’re worried about too much self healing?
Wouldn’t it be better if our skills were balanced so one selfish skill isn’t OP, while our other skills for group support are more useful? This is what balance is about. It’s about ensuring that synergy between all our skills and traits is well-rounded as opposed to being lopsided.
In any case, it’s fine if you disagree with me, but to say I’m exaggerating is a bit much if you can’t even elaborate on exactly how. Perhaps you’d like to point out specifically where I am exaggerating so I can better respond or discuss it with you, rather than adopting the “I disagree with you but I don’t want to say why” stance? I don’t mind people pointing out if I’ve made a mistake or if I’ve missed something, but not when they’re so vague.
…there is a reason why people are complaining.
People don’t need a reason to complain. Especially on the forums.
You’re missing the point.
Rev is a great class. One that’s easier to bring in multiples to raids than Guardian.
But to say Guardian is “useless” or “hits like a wet noodle” is 100% hyperbole.World 1st’s have happened with Guardians in the comp! How can you ignore that?
You’re the second person who has responded by completely avoiding that fact…
Are you sure you’re not one of the ones just wanting to find any reason to complain?
: /
People don’t need a reason to complain, but in this case we do actually have a reason. A few actually:
1: Guardian damage is lacking vs other classes. The sad part is that some of those other higher damage classes can also bring more support and utility than guardians.
2: Most guardian utility skills have high cooldowns with low uptime on boons or effects. For example:
- empower gives 12 stacks of might for 10 seconds on a 20 second cooldown. Revenants Warriors and Eles on the other hand can stack up to 25 stacks of might with no downtime.
- Guardians get a shout that gives 4 seconds of protection and 6 seconds of regeneration on a 35 second cooldown (Hold the Line). Alternatively, Revenants can give a group 9 seconds of fury, 9 seconds of might (3 stacks), 12 seconds of regeneration, 6 seconds of protection and 12 seconds of swiftness on a skill with a 25 second cooldown (One with Nature).
- Empowering Might (give might to allies on crit) has a 1 second internal cooldown, which greatly limits how much might you can stack. Phalanx Strength and Forceful Greatsword, on the other hand, have no internal cooldowns.
How is that even fair? I can give lots of other examples but I don’t want this list to become too long.
3: Guardians are still the slowest class. While other classes have access to lots of escapes, mobility skills and permanent speed buffs, Guardians still have only 2 escape skills (one which needs to be cast on another player to work), no permanent movement speed traits and they can’t even achieve 100% uptime on swiftness UNLESS they stand still inside a symbol (which kinda diminishes the point of being more mobile).
I know ANet intended for Guardians to go into battle and stay there, but the sad part is other classes can even be more tanky than Guardians now. So we lose out on both fronts.
4: Guardians have a few lackluster weapons:
- Guardian Sword does not compete well with the damage, or the utility, of Revenant, Warrior, Mesmer or Thief Sword.
- Scepter has been all but replaced in role by longbow as a ranged damage option (I’d prefer it as a condition weapon).
- Staff is useless as a damage and support weapon and only good for mob tagging.
- Hammer has broken functionality (like auto attack popping a light field, which can mess up fire field blasting in groups).
So yes, guardians are not completely useless, but they’re certainly not in a good state, not by a long shot. I don’t see why anyone would be against them getting some reworks here and there.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)
I’m going to offer the ever-popular response:
No class was ever balanced, designed or conceived based solely on the skills of another.
That applies to any single skill or family of skills as well. If any consideration is made of ‘between profession’ factors, at best it’s a litmus test of what the developer deems ‘reasonable’. Based on how I’ve interacted with Devs over the years and how they interact with the community, I’m convinced there is no line of thought they enter that relates how or what Class A does because of how or what Class B does it.
The relevant question is if the whole toolset of a class enables a player to fulfill the role intended by those who conceived the class.
I believe that within the class itself, DH is a very significant improvement to ranged capability while continuing to support the theme established for the Guardian profession at beginning of the game. DH just provides another dimension that allows me to ‘play Guardian’ and that’s as I believe it should be. If anything, I think the Guardian class has done very well in Anet’s goal to maintain the flavour of the profession while adding some additional interest. I don’t think Anet has achieved that objective for all professions, like Necro/Reaper.
The problem is that no matter how much a class might seem to improve relative to its own last iteration, when it comes to group content naturally people will want to play with classes they deem to be efficient. That’s when class comparisons will inevitably arise, especially when two classes can fulfill the same role.
Right now, the Revenant can fulfill the same roles as the guardian, only in a superior fashion. It may not seem important in lower level content where the game is easy enough to ignore some disparity or imbalance, but when it comes to difficult content like Raids, Guardians might end up being excluded altogether in favor of more efficient alternatives, for the sake of optimal group compositions.
I don’t think it’s fun for anyone who likes a class to feel like they’ll be excluded from content simply because that class isn’t up to scratch. The Devs can go on about roles or class flavour all they want, but at the end of the day, this is still a game and it needs to be balanced if the aim is to make it fun for everyone.
I think ANet did something right with the Chronomancer by giving Mesmers a unique class mechanic in the form of Alacrity. It means regardless of what other classes bring to a group, the mesmer will always offer something unique and will thus have a role that isn’t being totally overlapped by any other class. I think ANet should have done this with other classes as well, including the guardian. Sure it’s fine if some class mechanics overlap a bit, but every class should be able to bring at least one unique asset to the table to ensure that they always have a role to play in any party.
Keep in mind as well that this isn’t just a discussion about DH’s. This is a discussion about the state of the Guardian in PvE as a whole, and as far as the parameters of the discussion go, the Guardian is not in a good place. No matter how much flavor DH adds to the class it won’t matter if the class as a whole is sorely under-performing. I say this as someone who actually likes the DH quite a lot.
@Kjeldoran
That’s the thing. Sometimes it feels like when they make changes to classes or add new stuff, they only look at the class itself and not where it sits next to the other existing classes.
If they did consider how Revenant compares to the Guardian, they would have picked up on a lot of issues, not the least of which is overlapping roles where the Revenant vastly outperforms the Guardian. It’s downright depressing.
At least before guardians had some key uses compared to other classes that made them important in group content. Because of that you could forgive their lower damage. But now not only do they under-perform from a damage point of view, but even from a defense and utility point of view.
It just doesn’t make sense.
As far as PvE goes, I really feel like guardians are just an inferior version of Revenants.
This is why I feel this way:
1: Revenants do more damage than guardians.
2: Both have heavy armor but Revenants get around 50% more base health.
3: Revenants have longer uptime on aoe projectile block skills (Protective Solace makes Shield of the Avenger feel like an insult).
4: Revenants can offer more overall support with Herald elite spec (potential 100% uptime on boons like might, fury, regeneration and swiftness).
5: Revenants even have more stability uptime than guardians with inspiring reinforcement.
6: Revenants can be just as tanky, if not more tanky than guardians.
Really, guardians do need a lot of attention. I find them to be a very fun class but their usefulness becomes very limited when you introduce another class that can do almost everything that guardians can do, only better.
This has been a topic that has come up numerous times on these forums, and typically it comes up more frequently around the release of a new outfit.
Unfortunately, despite the frequency of this topic and the regularity of more armor requests, ANet has shown little interest in adding new armor. Even the amount of new sets added in the expansion was relatively low and as far as I am aware, they are against adding new armor sets to the gem store as a whole.
It is unfortunate because more customization is better. I don’t think I’ll ever buy any of the new outfits that come out, no matter how good they look, simply because of their shortcomings.
2 works better than Warrior’s 100b (lower dps yeah, but still higher than most guardian’s skills).
Whirling wrath actually has higher dps than 100 Blades and is, in my opinion, definitely the superior skill of the two in just about every way conceivable. People just look at total damage numbers and assume it’s lower. What they don’t take into account is that WW does it’s damage over just under 1 second while 100 Blades does its damage over 3.5 seconds.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)
Then l2p, simple as that.
My example is a demonstration than an entire player can be carried, which means that an entire group of less than optimal players CAN get through. at least 90% is Play-what-you-want friendly and yet ppl complain cause they can’t have it all without any time investment?
A minority has completed the raid as of now(big surprise, not), but I’m confident that a majority can and will complete it with time.
How do you propose people learn to play when Raid groups are stringent with who they accept? There’s no difficulty curve, very specific class/role requirements and a high entry point. A lack of accessibility will make it hard for people to learn raid encounters because few will be given the opportunity to do so. Players who are already experienced will be less inclined to allow less experienced players to enter their group.
Asking for more accessibility is logical and will give players an entry point from which they can progress and improve. No-one’s saying there can’t be difficult content, but there is a reasonable expectation for a properly implemented difficulty curve. Creating difficult content purely for the sake of it is never good and often results in imbalance. Difficulty is something that should be implemented correctly, and with a great deal of thought, balance and an emphasis on natural or organic progress.
Keep in mind that I can be a godly player and it won’t matter if my group is less than optimal. My personal skill becomes meaningless in those situations. By implementing a proper difficulty curve, you allow more players to access content and learn it and become more skilled, which improves the pool of players doing higher level content which makes it easier for you or I to find a good group to play with. It benefits high level players as much as lower level players.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)
Yeah It’s just that nobody uses the features with them, which is why I said its for aesthetics. I don’t think that was Anets intention tho. They just didn’t think it through and realize they needed legendary armor and weapons to save sigils and runes in some way. And that sounds like some complicated coding if they wanted to correct it after the implementation of stat selection. They probably haven’t had the time for it, but I’m hoping its at least on the table.
Personally I have 5 legendary weapons and only changed the stats like 3 times for kicks on my first one. I’ve found most people have the same experience but I haven’t done a poll or anything.
I also have 3 legendaries and I haven’t changed stats on them much, but that’s mostly because it’s pointless changing the stats on only one piece of gear if none of your other gear can change with it, which wouldn’t be the case if you had a full set of legendary gear.
For me personally, I’d mostly be interested in using the stat change feature as a means of testing different gear stats for builds, without having to invest in new gear every time. I know you can test some builds in PvP well enough, but there are more gear stat combos in PvE and new ones being added fairly regularly.
On that last point, that’s another area where legendary gear will be incredibly useful. Being able to change to a new stat combo the moment is released is a huge plus and would allow people who have full legendary sets to test and use new builds the moment they become available. It also gives you access to potentially limited or unattainable stat combos.