Guild Wars 2

LexIcon.2819:

No.

We would lose the variabilty we have.

Well, that’s the idea behind it actually. It would allow those that want to focus on a single attunement to do so, while those that don’t want to can simply not use the trait and keep their build the way it works now.

Although I’ve been thinking about it lately and a focus on two attuments at a time (firewater, airearth, any combinations of two) and making them stronger somehow would be quite nice. You wouldnt lose the entire cast and it would be up to you what you choose. Focusing only on one attument is too strict

With 70 trait points, you could get 2 of these traits for 2 attunements, and focus on those. Keep in mind the actual numbers aren’t important, they’re just an example.

Is that the same ESRB that decided Smash Brothers: Melee doesn’t contain violent?

redslion.9675:

example: when you confront Scarlet, you might decide not to kill her, and fight against your allies for it. You win, and Scarlet ends up in prison. One day later, she is found dead.

There, Scarlet is still gone, nothing actually changed, but you decided to stand up for what you felt was right and those B-iconics might see you now with resentment mixed with fear, for you faced them and made them eat dirt.

Here, now players are not the main heroes, but likeable secondary characters.

They won’t have the spotlight, but they’ll come out and kick your kitten if they want to.

If such a thing could be implemented for future LS releases, I’d be very happy.

CHIPS.6018:

I ask this because a number of players have said that they felt bad for killing Scarlet. And this is shocking. Scarlet killed thousands of civilians and soldiers. Even if we capture her, she will certainly be executed.

I guess this question expands into: Do we want to be that ideal hero with a no killing no matter what rule? Or do we want to be the dark knight, doing whatever it takes to protect the people?

Different people play in different ways. For me personally, killing during a fight, in self defense is regrettable but ultimately my opponent’s own choice due to not yielding. Often they either were the agressors, or in an area where they could expect conflict (i.e. the Mists). However, I personally draw the line at butchering defeated opponents. Scarlet may attack those that cannot defend themselves, but my character does not. Just because she’s caused so much trouble doesn’t mean she should just be killed outright. Even if just to interrogate her first.

Many who live deserve to die, and many who die deserve to live. Can you give life to those? If not then don’t be so hasty to deal out death!

People foolish enough to try to wake up an elder dragon is well beyond any sort of redemption and Moral Event Horizon.

That’s just your opinion. If there was a plan to wake an elder dragon prematurely so it’d be weaker and easier to defeat…you’d execute them on the spot?

No. Not now not ever.

What would you think of a trait like this for each attunement:

Fire Mastery
Your fire attunement skills recharge 20% faster.
Recharge of fire attunement is reduced by 50% (minimum of 1 second).
Recharge of other attunements is increased by 20%.

Would you like traits like this or do you think they wouldn’t work?

Duran.3196:

This Skill is melee, has a 3 sec channel and dont forget the class u are on.

With such a large redius you can hardly call it ‘melee’. In fact none of the ele’s main weapons are melee. Most attacks have at least 300 range.

phaeris.7604:

My main issue is the blind effect

You could solve that too with lightning flash, because the flash will deal some damage (and thus consume the blind debuff) before churning earth lands.

Mystogan.4157:

Arcane percision technically belongs in air…

All arcane skills are automatic crits, so it has a place in Arcana.

Your problem is that you’re not using a Sigil of Battle. The sigil triggers on attunement swaps, and even with 0 boon duration should add another 6 stacks of might.

The other thing is that your build is made for teamplay, so you should be getting some might from your teammembers as well. You don’t have to get to 25 all by yourself. In fact, if you did, your party’s mights would essentially be wasted so I wouldn’t stress over it.

Lawful.5314:

I don’t understand the concept of might stacking, its technically impossible to have too many stacks, as each stack has its own timer, thus they do not all refresh if you build up a new stack, and they will decrease every few seconds by one stack, thus getting up to like 20 stacks is impossible?

There are many ways to do so, but if you cast multiple blast finishers in a fire field, you’ll get 3 might per finisher and that adds up quickly. Also, keep in mind that most might stacking builds use a Sigil of Battle. The sigil itself will give the about 10 stacks of might. Add to that 3 blast finishers and you’re almost at 20 without too much effort.

The ele is more like the WoW shaman imho.

Chuck Zitto.2367:

There lies the problem. If you want to provide boons to allies your way better off playing a guardian.

Why? Can guardians provide near permanent uptime of 4 boons through just 1 trait?

Chuck Zitto.2367:

I would like to see ele get some kind of niche.

The ele’s niche is the fact that they can change their role on the fly, and always have something of everything. They have good damage, heals, a little burst and partywide boons. Their other niche are staff combo fields, which are long lasting and of various types.

The ele’s niche is that they don’t have a niche. And while most claim it doesn’t work because you don’t specialize, the opposite is true for me. Because you don’t specialize, you can always do something. But that’s just not something that fits the playstyle of the majority of the players. So I fear the ele will end up somewhat like the engineer or WoW druid. Forced to choose before the battle what role they’re gonna perform instead of during the battle.

As you can tell, I’m pretty pleased with the ele right now but I realize that it’s not well suited for everyone so I fear they’ll end up being changed.

Maliken.5630:

The engineer may need to use a utility slot, but he also gets an extra slot in the forms of F1 through F4 so its not really like hes having no utility at all.

True, but if he picked a regular utility, he’d get a toolbelt as well so he’s still losing a slot.

Also, the attument swapping need some traits too in order to be even doing something.

Disagree. Attunement swapping gives acces to damage, conditions, cc and healing just by equipping the weapon. You don’t need a specific trait like Juggernaut or Grenadier to make them work. Those traits aren’t mandatory either of course, but the kits do lose a lot of their potential without them. Attunements don’t require such major investments just to be useful.

The focus fireaura is on a freaking 40 seconds cooldown, sorry but thats just over the top.

Agreed, it’s way too high but I think that is a leftover relic from the beta days, where skills got increasignly high cooldowns based on their slot position. If Shocking Aura can get 25 seconds, so can Fire Aura. But I have a hunch that’ll be on the changes list, seeing as how it’s a nobrainer.

CorneliusCoffin.3169:

I have a problem with this whole “Scarlet wants to intrrupt the leylines to wake up Modremoth”-theory.
It’s that in the Thaumanova Reactor Fractal she says:

At least they helped identify the network of magical channels that crisscross the globe. That was a breakthrough. Now we know how NOT to do this kind of research right on an intersection of those channels.

This is something I never really understood. Scarlett basically knew that there was an intersection of ley lines beneath thaumanova reactor. If she wanted to simply disrupt them, why not just drill there? Especially since they seem to be fairly close to Modremoth’s estimated location. From the schemematic on the wall inside of the breachmaker it seems, however, that her intention was to find the “center” of the ley lines. (which could either be where they all meet or where they all originate.) I’m not an expert on dragon magic but wouldn’t that mean that all of the elder dragons get affected by her drilling there?

Maybe it was an intersection of the wrong leylines?

Funny. I figured that all who missed Scarlet would go back a second time to make sure they hit her with a finisher before the shield went up.

Autumn Frazee.3158:

In Tune

• This achievement is also a tricky one, I would recommend you disable your auto attack so that you are precisely controlling when you hit the holograms. Necros, Rangers, Mesmers; watch your minions, pets, clones, and phantasms, their damage counts against you if you are not attuned. Engineers, your turrets fall under that category as well. For all professions, I would recommend crafting your build based solely on damage your character does and not use any summons or sources of outside damage. Again, attention is critical, always be aware of your current attunement and the attunement of the hologram you are fighting.

So what does that mean?

-no elementalists, rifle engineers or melee because they have aoe they cannot turn off.
-no mesmers, necors or rangers because they have pets.
-no professions with conditions, ground target damage over time skills or retaliation because you cannot make them stop dealing damage when your buff runs out.

What does that leave us with? Rifle warrior and scepter guardian?

My wife will love this. She always tends to be one step behind with stuff like this, and this is no exception. It means she will again lose out on achievements simply because Anet only fixes the exploits instead of the reasons for said exploits.

If you could actually get the achievements normally, there would be no need for this.

Also, you’d think a developer would reconsider an achievement/event once they made a list of things that players should avoid. There was this developer that literally stated that you should bring no AoE, no dots, no pets, no clones and no retaliation.

What does that leave us with? A rifle warrior? And what else?

ShibVicious.9681:

Here’s how I see most the knights battles go down that I’ve partaken in.

Large group of people rush the knight. All those wonderful zerker characters that do tons of damage run in, get swinging there swords and sure, they’re putting up some big numbers. Good job. Problem. 20 seconds later. Half of them are dead. One attack and poof, all lying on their backs, perma’d and begging for a res, instead of wp and running back.
In contrast, I’m running knights gear. Sure I don’t hit as hard, but I don’t die as soon as I’m hit. My increased survivability means that ultimately I’m out damaging a large number of these zerker characters because I’m constantly damaging the knight throughout the encounter, as opposed to throwing down some mad spike damage at the start and then nothing else for the remainder.

If that were true everything would be fine. However…

…if you pick a non-melee weapon, there’s only 1 attack you gotta dodge to take 0 damage. This means that there’s literally no reason not to take max damage gear for these events. And given the huge amount of time it takes to take them down, I’d say they were balanced for a full zerker group.

Once what you say actually starts being true ingame, the different gear sets will have their place. But right now, there’s no risk for the berserkers and thus their main downside doesn’t exist.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Engineers can swap between their kits extremely fast, and their skills have usually shorter cooldowns.

But the engineer’s kits require both a utility skill slot and traits to become viable. A grenade or flamethrower kit without traits is very mediocore. And although you get a toolbelt skill alongside your kit, you do so when you take a regular utility skill too, so it’s still a wasted slot.

The ele on the other hand gets those 4 skill sets right off the bat with no slot or trait investment required. So naturally, they’re gonna function a little different. Wheter they’re balanced relative to eachother is another discussion, but to say the engineer’s kits are attunement swaps without cooldown or downside isn’t fully true.

phaeris.7604:

As I stood there getting hit by a mesmer greatsword auto from 1200 away noting it it for 600-1k a tick I thought, arn’t eles meant to be the true casters of this game?

My fireballs easily surpass that, critting for as much as 1400. Also, unlike the greatsword, they don’t get weaker at short ranged.

And finally, our auto attacks are only filler skills for our dps. For mesmers, it’s pretty much all their dps. Most staff eles will constantly use their #2 (which in my case do 3-4k damage crits) skills and only resort to auto attacks when they have to.

Leap finishers does sound like a good idea. I like it.

TooBz.3065:

Honestly, I wonder how much is it that ele’s need a buff and how much is it that no one in this forum shares or discusses builds. If you look at other forums all the other classes combine collective experience to maximize their collective success.

That’s because we have in the past, and people continue to complain because they cannot manage to make them work.

It’s not build, gear or stats. It’s about a mindset, and a lot of practice, and most people would rather complain about things than actually trying to make it work.

And if this sounds condescending, I apologize, but I’ve been there too. I’ve complained like the best of them, yelled at the elitists…until I got that click and realized they were right. Ele is about player skill and you need to play well to make them work. You have no gear to fall back on. It’s not funny but it’s true.

I’m kinda worried that this was part of her plan, and she merged with the dragon to it over (Snaff style).

That would ruin the story for now me as much as the Living Story did back when I still enjoyed the story.

It can always get worse…

It would be good to know how the knights scale exactly, so we could at least put rumors of that being an issue at rest.

Or report them as bugs.

If the max is 50 people, then it should scale between 35 and 50. Anything more would be impractical.

They could have added an RP element by making the player choose wheter or not to finish her, and when they choose to save her, let an npc make the final blow, or a console exploding to take her out.

There, you now have an element of choice without it changing the general story one bit. Problem solved.

And for those who originally liked living story;
Do you still like it? Why? What changed/reaffirmed your opinions?
No. It was ruined for me the moment they introduced Scarlet as a genius surpassing even genius Asura. There was no reason for a Sylvari to be smarter than the smartest of the smartest race in Tyria. It showed some predisposition towards Sylvari and that irritated me at that point. They then continued to make Scarlet do more and more unrealistic or downright impossible things, with less and less actual story in between.

It kinda picked up when they allowed for the writers to implement some of their writing into the game, and the biconics were actually pretty well done. I started to like the LS again when the marionette came out (best boss fight to date) but Anet’s decision to stick with Scarlet’s overpoweredness ruined the experience in the end. The final attack on Lion’s Arch, advertised by Anet and some fansites as ‘the best ever in story and gaming’ was completely unrealistic and improbable.

What ruined the Living Story for me was actually the story. It felt cheap and poorly written. And no amount of gameplay can make up for a poor story. At least for me. I play rpgs for the story, and the Living Story’s story was among the worst I’ve played so far. All thanks to Scarlet.

Do you consider yourself a Dungeoner/PvEr/FotMer/PvPer/WvWr/LivingWorlder/etc?
Which ones are you?
PvE player mostly, though I do the rest as well.

Where do you see the future of GW2?
I think it’s time for ArenaNet to finally deliver on some of the promises they made during the time before GW2 was released. The grind should be reduced, especially for ascended gear. There should be guild halls and player housing improvements added before the end of the year. Most importantly however, they must take a good, honest look at their storytelling process, and improve it. Nobody likes a character that can do everything. Even superman has his kryptonite, and even the elder dragons have their flaws. Scarlet had none, and that ruined the story the second she was introduced. The biconics have great potential, but Anet must take care not to overuse them. The relationship between Jory and Kasmeer for example, is quickly becoming a cliché if they keep focusing on it. Which means that for now, just let them keep dating. Don’t throw in a wedding next release for example. Save that for next year or something.

Has the answer to the above question changed over the last month?
Although many like the attack on Lion’s Arch, I do not. The gameplay is fun, the setting is awesome, but without a believable story behind it, it just feels like a poor children’s cartoon. And that’s a shame actually, because some children’s cartoons actually have great plots.

Cities of Gold for example, has a relatively weak story…until they revealed the alchemist to actually be the main villan. From the get go, he seemed friendly and yet there was those slight hints of ’can’t put my finger on it’. And then they revealed his true identity, and I was genuinely impressed by how it was done. ArenaNet’s writers can learn from that.

Funny…I was just thinking this morning how maybe Scarlet had ‘planned all this to happen’ and actually used the ley lines to take control of a dragon’s body. We know it’s possible, seeing how Snaff did it.

It would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to the story of course. Just imagine an elder dragon with Scarlet’s personality and voice.

Yuck.

Vol.7601:

The # of pacifists playing in GW2 is so miniscule that Anet really doesn’t care about designing content around those type of people.

Not true. You can decide the fate of Captain Tervelan.

And it’s more about having a choice to begin with, not have Braham make it for you.

Warkupo.1025:

You’ve been slashing and hacking your way through charr, mole-men, and aether-soldiers for the past week and now you’re having a moral dilemma about killing the chick that routinely drops orbital nukes on peaceful cities?

Yes. It’s my job to make sure she stops harming people. I leave judgement to those more qualified. Also, the issue isn’t defeating her in self defense…it’s about killing her when she’s pretty much helpless. I’m against the death penalty irl too.

Zaxares.5419:

@ThiBash: You can headcanon it as Kasmeer (wouldn’t that be fitting?) or Rox was the one to land the final blow. Both have ample motivations for doing it.

In my headcanon, all 5 of my characters are journeying together at the same time. My Charr Warrior is the one who gladly spiked Scarlet through the heart with his sword.

I suppose I could. I could even say ‘Kasmeer made me do it with mesmer magic’. It’s just that the whole thing makes me feel so cheap.

Exosferatu.2961:

Your character has resolve, and therefore did not spare a mass murderer.

I’m sorry, but my character is way too much of a whimp for even that. She even tries to avoid hitting critters with aoe while going about the game world if it can be done.

Tamias.7059:

Seriously, this is a MMO where, by the nature of the gameplay, the vast majority of your interactions with the world take place at the end of a sword. Don’t complain about having to kill stuff.

I’m sorry, but I do complain about being forced to play a role in a role-playing game. There are many ways to go about dealing violence. Some rush forward and gut everything that wasn’t smart enough to surrender. Some only defend when attacked. There’s plenty of games that leave things open enough that you can choose how brutal you want to be. To me, kicking someone when they’re down is only acceptable in the Mists, where it’s part of the sport and people res.

But I an understand that not everyone is as invested in their character as I am, because as a whole the RPG genre has been going downhill in terms of character investment and actual role-playing.

But don’t fault me for not liking my character to be forced into big moral dilemmas. If Kasmeer wants her revenge, she can go get it herself. If Marjory wants to murder her instead of bringing her to justice so be it. But don’t force my character to go Braham.

It would be so like Scarlet to do that. Why just settle for an elder dragon, when you can be mary sue and release something worse than an elder dragon?

Really, if there were any time for anet to retcon’s Scarlet’s epicness, this would the moment. Not pile even more on top…

lakdav.3694:

But that would quickly diminish her name in the history of Tyria

I vote yes.

Which brings me back to my original point. If the biconics decide they want to kill Scarlet, shouldn’t they at least do the job themselves? Why do we have to get out hands dirty? Are we some hired muscle mobsters or something?

My guess is he’s at home composing a ballad based on his horrible experiences being a sidekick to Tyria’s friendly neighborhood spidergolem.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I think the last couple of LS updates have done their best to improve on that.

True, they have tried to at least expand the ‘story’ part of the Living Story. I’m still not happy I was forced by the game to kill Scarlet though. It broke character for my elementalist.

Morrigan.2809:

These forums are very anti LS but that is not what I am seeing in game at all.
What I am seeing is people being invested in what is going on.

My theory on this is that:

a) People like to farm, and for farming the backstory doesn’t matter.
b) Those that dislike the story aren’t playing it. Even if only 1% of a million people liked the story, and they were the only ones playing, that’d still be 10,000 people. With 100 players per instance, that’s 100 instances and thus more than the number of available home servers. Make it 10% and you’d see a very crowded game even if the majority didn’t play.

Mind you, these are all theories and in no way have to be seen as truth.

I was about to post a snarky replay here but I’ll let it go. It’s probably well known what I think about the ‘story’ by now.

GuzziHero.2467:

Thats where player and guild housing will be, of course!

They would ruin a long requested feature by adding Scarlet to it. Sounds totally plausible.

snailboyjr.4592:

Don’t get discouraged, and don’t take the unhelpful critiques to heart.

You mean as in: ignore any valid and constructive feedback you get until people get so sick of being ignored they lash out, just so you can say ‘see? this is why we ignore you’?

I liked the marionette fight a lot. I also liked the Biconics. The rest was meh, with most of it being pulled down because of the way Scarlet was written. By making her so over the top mary sue, it made everything she did less fun too. The Molten Alliance bit was quite fun, but once they introduced Scarlet and her ridiculous backstory, it all went downhill for me.

So:
marionette – 9
Biconics – 8
Molten Alliance storyline – 8
Scarlet – 2
Rest – 5

Total score for me is about 4.5. Sorry Anet, but if you’re gonna say ‘Game of Thrones’ then you’ll be judged accordingly.

Entertaining yes. Would have been nice if there’d been a link on the official site to alert players to its existance. I’m too busy following reddit, twitch tv and dulfy just to keep up with the current story (if any).

Maliken.5630:

I dont think its that hard. Put internal cooldowns on the traits that trigger when swapping, and let all those cooldowns be reduced for example by lingering elements or when investing in the arcana tree.

Designwise it may not be hard, but implementationwise, it will be. It requires changing a dozen or so traits. Any chaneg they make also needs to be tested, translated, documented and checked for interference with other mechanics to make sure it doesn’t affect things it’s not supposed to. It’s not a small job to make this change. And after that’s all been done.

Not saying it can’t be done, or shouldn’t be done. But I think it’ll be a relatively big project.

It could theoretically work, but it would require quite some rework of traits. There’s a lot of traits that trigger on attunement swap, and they’d all have to get internal cooldowns to prevent abuse. There’s also Lingering Elements, which could lead to issues with stacking or such.

And then there’s of course the design element: will it make things more fun, or does the added restriction add a strategical element (in the sense that you have to plan ahead if you want a certain attunement to be available at the right time).

And of course, Arcana would need to be redesigned. So yeah, it’s possible, it could be fun, but it’ll be quite a job to make the change.

Well, the simplest build would likely be a staff fire-based build, with longer lasting fire fields and extra damage while attuned to fire.

But the best ele builds aren’t simple. Knowing how and when to swap attunements (the how being combining skills), as well as smart dodging and kiting, is a big part of ele gameplay. Many builds use Evasive Arcana and Elemental Attunement, which give you lots of boons, and an on demand blast finisher on your earth dodge roll. There’s also the lightning hammer build, which effectively turns you into a warrior. However, even that build requires some reading and proper team/trait/gear setup before you can play it well.

I think it was Zelhyn that made a thread on PvE eles? Maybe you should check that one out.

If possible, I’d like to take surveys on the game too. Not for the gems (Anet can keep those), just to be part of the group that is allowed to give their opinions on the game.

Shinzan.2908:

ThiBash.5634:

I’m kinda shocked that being the main heroes means our characters are forced to commit murder on a beaten and defenseless enemy. I’d have preferred to capture her.

She seemingly killed one of your friends and was actively trying to kill you while you finish her.

She was down. When the players goe down, they also attack stuff to rally. It’s self defense. Scarlet was literally fighting for her life at that point.

There’s a few combinations that could result in massive chill spam. GoEP, arcane builds and of course Frost Bow come to mind.

ArcanePower+FieryGreatSword+GoEP=potential for disaster?

I wonder if there are technical limitations on increasing underwater aoe.