Guild Wars 2

Melody Cross.8465:

Does anyone else feel this way?

Yes, but they’re mostly misinformed.

Strang.8170:

We´ve been asking for out of combat weapon swap since the first beta, thus far they haven´t delivered.

I think the last excuse was that they want to make a full template system (gear, skills, traits etc.)

There have been many posts by the community explaining why in-combat weapon swap is neither viable nor desirable. The last one involved insane dagger/scepter blast finisher stacking in staff fields.

The only way to implement weapon swap for eles in a non-broken way is to introduce all kinds of crazy restrictions, which nobody’s gonna be happy with.

Canthan descent here, sorry.

I though ArenaNet stated they didn’t want finishers and fields in the same attunement?

And all of the above combined doesn’t work? Why support OR heal OR deal damage? We can do all at the same time, and we should do so to become at least somewhat useful.

I get what you’re all saying but…why do you always focus on one or the other? Healing or damage? Support heals or support boons? Because we CAN combine them all at the same time.

Off-hand scepter would be a good place to start I think. The best part is that you’d only have to think of 8 new skills.

Other good candidates, balancewise would be two-handed weapons since they don’t run the risk of overpowered combos with the current single hand weapons.

Morsus.5106:

Well, Berserker builds are probably the most OP specialization in the game, so it’s nice to see the Soldiers and Knights get a chance to shine

You can’t crit, so why would Knight’s shine?

And more importantly, how’s replacing one top set with another a good thing? It’d be much nicer if you could play anything and be just as viable in terms of usefulness.

I’m not sure I entirely get this post, but in my experience if we’re sucky, then at least we’re starting to become less sucky with the recent changes. 30 Water for one thing, is no longer ‘mandatory’. 15 points is still useful, but that does give us 15 more points for something else. As for the cantrips mentioned, it’s been a long while since I used more than Armor of Earth on my skill bar and I don’t miss them at all.

Hekmatyar.8725:

It could be anything, literally.

Maybe they’re making new icons for combo fields, like they did with confusion/retaliation/etc.

SilverRule.7426:

Lightning doesn’t belong in the air attunement, it belongs in fire. I really want to see air redesigned, not necessarily changing the damage values, but the visuals to be AIR. And for anyone who thinks you cant hurt anyone with direct air, just take it up with Kazuma from Kaze no Stigma.

You’ve watched avatar too much. This is Guild Wars. Lightning belongs in Air.

Knote.2904:

If a “water bender” can turn water into steam or ice, that means they can control the temperature over water, then shouldn’t an “air bender” be able to control the temperature of gasses? Thus being able to superheat air into lightning, or even condense it.

Shouldn’t an earth bender be able to melt rock into lava/molten rock?

It’s all about the movement of molecules. If you ‘force water molecules to stand still’ you get ice. That doesn’t mean it’s cold (as shown by encased characters not freezing to death). Vapor is the opposite, you’re basically forcing the molecules far enough apart and they become a gas.

Air benders can probably speed up the molecules of a gas, but because they don’t add heat (just motion) it doesn’t do as much a firebender would do. The same goes for you earthbender example: they would need to supply a lot of very fast motions to individual atoms to get a ‘molten rock’. I’m guessing that it’s just not very practical.

Fire is different because it applies energy. So when a firebender creates steam, he cooks the water, whereas a water bender simply moves the particles apart (and thus creates ‘cold’ vapor).

Today, we did a level 10 fractal with a level 33 mesmer guildie that went in there for the first time. He didn’t go down any more often than the rest of the group.

Earlier this week, I did an AC story mode run (level 35) on my level 25 thief because I didn’t knew my level was too low. I got defeated a few times, sure, but overall I held up a lot better than anyone expected, including myself (think I went down maybe 5 times or so). Even ressed my teammates a few times.

So no, not required. This game is more about player skill than gear in any form. Gear checks are a relic from other games that we do not need.

Yes, some do. I find the staff elementalist to be one of the most fun things to play not in this game but across many games, even in 1v1 duels.

Just had this issue during a fractal run. We had to jump off to reset the hammer in Cliffside and for some reason, even after the party wipe, we were stuck in combat. Fortunately one of the party wasn’t stuck in combat or we would have had to abandon our run.

haviz.1340:

Both power and condition damage scale linearly. Critical damage and damage modifiers are what makes the difference.

Scaling linearly doesn’t mean they’re equal, it just means that if you spend 1 point you get +X, spend 2 points you get +2X, 3 points +3X, etc.

When you look at a skill like Fireball and apply the damage formula, you’ll notice that its variable damage is roughly 0.33*power. Even burning only gets 0.25*condition damage. But that’s not so much the issue as are precision and critical damage.

If you take Fireball and invest 20 power, you’ll get roughly 6 extra damage, which is roughly +1% extra damage. If you invest 20 precision, you get 1% extra critical chance…which, at 0 critical damage, equals 0.5% extra damage on average. In order to get precision to even compete with power, you’ll need at least +50% critical damage. But to get at that point, you essentially have to spend twice the number of stat points (precision and critical damage). This means that precision/critical damage are only viable at either very high levels, or when you’ve maxed out your power already. At that point, you can still increase your dps but you’re simply paying twice as much stats for the same % dps increase as power does.

Seeing as how Power also boosts all your critical hits, and Precision/Critical Damage only boost your critical hits, I’d say things are a unbalanced right now. Upping skill base damage and lowering the power coëfficient could fix that somewhat. If anything, taking precision without power at this point is basically wasting your stats, and even then you’re probably better off with Soldier’s than Knight’s simply because power scales so much better than precision.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

http://wartower.tumblr.com/post/60458277036/this-lorespecial-is-about-scarlet-briar-the-evil

This interview will be educational.

Short version for why I linked: She didn’t graduate the full college courses, but specialized coursework that only proved she had what it takes to do the full college coursework. She didn’t see Eternal Alchemy (most likely) as she was merely placed in a sensory deprivation device (basically, she hallucinated). Her superiority complex she always had expanded greatly because of said hallucinations.

I think Scarlet has strong potential to be an interesting character given this interview. Anet’s just doing a kitten poor job of portraying her properly.

Would love to see it but cannot open it. Do you have any non-podcast links?

Of course, if ArenaNet would put this info on their OWN WEBSITE for a change, that would be even better. I’m getting a bit sick of having to surf all across the net for this stuff.

Apparently there’s a great interview about Scarlet on wartower.de

Would love to hear it because supposedly it makes Scarlet a lot more fun as a character than our first glance has given us.

However, I can’t seem to open the podcast so I was wondering if somebody would be willing to provide a link to maybe youtube or something so I can learn about it as well (text is also good).

And on a sidenote…why isn’t any of this on the official website (or better yet, ingame)? Why do we have to surf the entire web just to get some scrap of what’s going on ingame?

Personally, I feel that the elementalist’s healing is just one of the many tricks rather than something to focus and build your character around. After all, healing is far from the only way to support other characters. We can provide our party with boons, remove their conditions and last (but certainly not least), we boost their skills by providing combo fields for them.

The thing is, in games with the tank/heal/dps system, the healer was responsible for say 90% of the healing done and the remaining 10% was done by the players themselves. In Guild Wars 2 however, every player has their own healing skill to provide 70-90% of their heals themselves, and the other 20-30% by the rest of the party. That doesn’t mean that your ‘healing role’ isn’t effectively contributing to the fight. It just means that staying alive isn’t primarily the job of your team anymore. But they can still help (and effectively so).

As for healing power on its own, it’s not great but if you take 15 points in Water combined with Evasive Arcana, you’ll get more health per point for Healing Power than you get for Vitality whenever a fight lasts more than 30 seconds. So it’s hardly worthkitten

ttom line however is that healing (and support in general) is just a part of our job, and should be treated as such.

Knote.2904:

Power isn’t that broken, crit isn’t meant to be a standalone stat like Power, and they just scale extremely well together, Conditions don’t as much, just from some procs but it also is very good standalone and you get get tankier builds with condition dmg.

You don’t call power broken when it’s more effective than 2 other stats combined? Fair enough. That still leaves me with the issue that whenever I pick a piece of gear that doesn’t have power as a major stat, my damage goes down the drain, even when replaced with something that has other offensive stats too (say, Soldier vs. Knight).

haviz.1340:

And I’m certain 2000 toughness guardian is not as squishy as elementalist with just 1000.

The thing is that toughness is actually rather weak per hit. It’s intended as a long term stat, vitality is designed for spikes. 10 points of toughness give about 0.5% damage reduction (varies with the actual armor level) per hit. That’s 100 damage for every 20,000 damage you get. So it’s not gonna help you survive spikes. The 1000/2000 would suggest a 50% damage reduction, but of course the base armor values would have to be added and in practice this would be more in the range of 25% reduction. But with both professions having 10,000 health, this means a 20,000 damage hit will still down both.

If Isha were to invest some of that toughness into vitality, he would notice a much bigger increase in his survivability against single hits.

Shemsu.8721:

An ele can get multiple buffs just by switching attunements, not even using any skills, if they blast a couple fields while switching through 2-3 attunements, your easily looking at 4-5 important boons within a VERY short time frame. Ele aside there are multiple skills for certain professions such as Rage signet, that can provide 2-3 buffs INSTANTLY. So yes it is absolutely needed that LS maintains 2 boons per hit, unless its intended that thieves only play d/d or d/p backstab builds?

The key thing you’re missing here is that some professions, like the ele you mentioned, are balanced around having boons. They’re not optional, they’re not nice buffs, they’re required. Given the fact that you can also stack your boon stripping with things like weapon sigils, 2 per cast is over the top. There’s very few skills that remove more than 1 condition at a time for the same reason.

You should be able to weaken a boon user or condition spammer, but you shouldn’t be able to make them completely useless. Not for 100% of the time anyway.

Anything that doesn’t involve conditions or criticals.

FrownyClown.8402:

hoelbrak runes or just ruby orbs

So no ruby orbs.

Valzemodeus.8163:

It just means they are no longer universally the most desirable stats in EVERY SINGLE SITUATION and that it’s time to start utilizing new builds and equipment, which is probably what A-net is hoping for.

By making Power the goto offensive stat by a large margin?

For the record, I’m not a zerker player complaining that the zerker gear no longer works. I’m annoyed that Power is the only answer when it comes to dealing damage. All other damage stats are already inferior to Power without the bosses being immune to crits and conditions.

Have No Faith In Me.1840:

Soldier is listed first for a reason :p Those are back ups, celestial still survives and provides decent heal support if you happen to have it so it shouldn’t be ruled out.

Edited first post to say preferred.

To be honest you’d be better off with Cleric’s, as it would provide better heals AND give you more power. Celestial’s about the worst choice for this boss, with 3/4 of its offensive stats being useless. The only thing worse would be precision/crit/condtion gear…

Bright.9160:

Actually, I get the feeling you don’t, because there are at least 3 attacks you need to dodge, or you’ll have a bad time…

Big ring filled with ice. Big ring with icy fog. Dragon’s tooth.

Miss any of those and you’ll have a really bad time.

I wonder how much of his hp you solo’ed though, because I heard getting crystalled is fun and avoidable when solo’ing him…

They can also be avoided by staying mobile, ESPECIALLY Dragon’s Tooth. I for one can attest that it’s perfectly possible to avoid all attacks without vigor or endurance regen.

Ortumbra.7490:

It was always just really fun to be the person that could make or break a group with one cast or one mistake or awesome play. There are still opportunities to make awesome plays in gw2, but I feel like there was a lot more with a trinity and distinct roles.

That’s exactly what’s wrong with the trinity concept. No matter how skilled you are as a player, if that ‘special person’ messes up, you won’t be able to complete your task. The good thing about GW2 is that you can salvage the fight through skill. On several occasions, I’ve managed to turn a loss into a win by temporarily soloing the boss while ressing people. That’s fun gameplay, not having to restart every time the healer or the tank makes a mistake.

I’m running a mix of soldier’s, berserker’s and celestial gear. The latter being especially worthless against world bosses.

It’s worse enough that conditions do very little to world bosses, but with them being immune to crits as well there’s essentially 3 stats that are completely worthless in boss fights.

Power is already the end and all stat, is it neccesary to have precision/crit damage have another downside? It doesn’t just affect Berserker, but Knight’s, Valkyrie and Celestial as well (the latter being beyond utterly useless agains world bosses).

Have No Faith In Me.1840:

Invest in:
- One of the 3: Soldier gear, Sentinel gear, or Celestial gear.

Why celestial gear? Since you cannot crit a boss, and with the way condition stacking currently works, you’d only be able to use the power part of it for damage…and that’s very low.

The Eternal Grace.3157:

To be completely honest, yeah, it’s annoying that you can’t crit a world boss, but I’m glad it’s finally something in the game you can’t just throw on your zerker gear for and smack it down.

True that, but what about Knight/Celestial/Valkyrie/etc. gear?

Just replacing zerker with soldier’s is not the answer imho.

…when they don’t even work on bosses? It’s not like power wasn’t scaling much better on its own already, it’s also needed to make the other offensive stats worthless in some parts of the game?

Guess I’ll have to start replacing my celestial gear because it has virtually 0 use now…

Guess it’s not an issue at this point in time. I’ll bring it up on a later date…

Cole Eyre.8471:

Thank you for chiming in on this. I appreciate you providing your perspective as an “insider” – it’s very encouraging.

Also, while I’m not a fan of minipets, I would really appreciate a lifesized Hobo-tron minipet – just for the record. Just putting that out there.

Aye, but it would be even better if it was an interactive minipet, like some of those in WoW. Maybe he could speak every so often…

Of course the other effects will need to be changed to rebalance things, but think about it for a moment.

If you want something that seriously affects a warrior at base health, it will oneshot a guardian. Lowering the relative difference might make things like thrash mobs attacks a bit more…dangerous.

The trinity mechanic is horribly artificial and very much outdated. The fact that some fights are less interesting in this game won’t magically get solved by reïntroducing the trinity. If anything, they’ll become even more stale because you now need a rotation instead of actually fighting something.

Another downside to a timer is that if you get in an overflow where part of the timer has already elapsed without meaningful damage, you just give up and leave. Whereas failure mechanics would give you a shot at salvaging the fight and be victorious after all.

Stx.4857:

It would have been great for a dungeon or guild instance.

That’s actually a great idea for an upcoming ‘guild mission’. Improved versions of world bosses specifically for the guild to fight…

The thing is, when hits from mobs are based on our health in order to be challenging, it becomes nearly trivial for warriors. 5k damage is a lot for us, but in most cases barely noticable for warriors. Equalizing the health pools a bit would level the playing field a lot in that respect.

Normalizing base health over all professions would make it easier to provide challenging PvE content. The main reason warriors can go full zerker gear for example, is because all damage has to be balanced for the low health professions, which is only half as threatening for the high health professions.

For example, if a boss deals 5000 damage to an elementalist, their health goes down by 50% and they’re in serious trouble. The warrior on the other hand, has lost only 25% of his health and can easily continue, having plenty of time to heal or postpone his heals until they’re actually needed.

As long as the health difference between low and high remains this large, damage will never be as dangerous to the high health professions as it is to the low health ones. This makes fights challenging only for the low health professions, as they’re constantly in danger whereas the high health ones can just shrug it off and ignore it. Not all professions must have the same amount of health, but 12,500-15,000-17,500 may be better suited for this than the current 10,000/15,000/20,000.

A pinprick for one, a landslide for another.

“I-think-that-golem-is-working-for-the-Sylvari-super-villan.”

Haven’t tried it yet but so far I’m liking what I read. Let’s hope it’s not offset by the waypoints block, the timer watching and the boss-timer-means-dps-only-effect.

Knote.2904:

As the OP just said, there’s nothing but one shots, anything tankier than zerker essentially just slows down the killing for no benefit.

Condition Builds get limited and probably lose DPS on the slow beginning ramp up on top of how fast a boss or mobs die.

There’s just nothing in the content that demands anything other than Zerker builds.

I suppose that’s part of it. What I notice in practice is that most zerkers tend to ‘leave the boss for a breather’ when their health gets too low. With a bit more defensive gear, they could have stuck around and continue attacking but apparently their dps is so much higher that they still deal more damage even if they don’t fight 100% of the time.

So yes, what you say is certainly true. But the other side is that compared to all other stats, Power is twice as powerful as literally anything else. It may not be THE reason, but it’s certainly something that should be changed, and non-zerker gear would certainly be more useful if the dps gap wasn’t so frikkin large.

Easy fix…really? I guess that’s why it’s gamer’s fix. Implementing something like that will be virtually impossible in the current game, unless they have like, a year to spend.

Yeah, or something like the Jade Maw when it leaves.

Knote.2904:

ThiBash.5634:

The main reason for this is that power scales too well. When comparing Soldier’s gear to Celestial gear, even the combined effects of the extra precision, condition and critical damage aren’t enough to make up for the loss of power. It’s too good, it scales too well, and it’s effect on the base damage of skills should be lowered. If that were to happen, a lot more gear options would suddenly become viable.

No it’s because of the content.

Explain please.

Tagus Eleuthera.7305:

I think Colin said at Pax that guild halls and player housing is something they’re actively working on, and that it’s somewhat at the top of the priority list.

If what you say is true than I’m halfway between ‘super happy’ and ‘flying to the USA to give Colin a big kiss in person’.

THAT WOULD BE SO AWESOME! YAY! YAY! YAY!

And how do you feel about Power being roughly equal in damage to Precision and Critical Damage combined?

Is the boss immune to critical hits?

Seriously?

So power being the best answer by a longshot wasn’t enough?

IT HAS TO BE THE ONLY WAY?

If I could swap my old ‘unlimiteds’ to my alts, I’d very much like to get a ‘themed set’ for my main.

If not, then it’d just be another money grab and another reason for me to dislike ArenaNet.

Seriously, I’m all for the gemstore but I think they should be a lot more careful in how they bring things. Because when the wrong items are offered in the wrong way, it could cause a LOT of grief.

The main reason for this is that power scales too well. When comparing Soldier’s gear to Celestial gear, even the combined effects of the extra precision, condition and critical damage aren’t enough to make up for the loss of power. It’s too good, it scales too well, and it’s effect on the base damage of skills should be lowered. If that were to happen, a lot more gear options would suddenly become viable.

I’m still ticked off because this (and player housing in the form of the home district) was promised to be added to the game on release.

What then happened was this:
-We were told it wouldn’t be in the initial release.
-A while later we were told it wasn’t a priority.
-Even later we were told they weren’t even working on it.

Given the fact that player housing (and to a lesser degree guild halls) were one of the major things I was looking forward too, I’m pretty annoyed by this course of events Everytime I read about it I get angry again because I feel things were promised and later dismissed, as if they were politicians just before an election. I know, cooldown, not the worst thing in the world but it runs deep.

And to add insult to injury, we get a node in the home district to get our hopes up, and then: nothing.

ADD THE FRIKKIN’ THINGS ALREADY! PLEASE!

Another thing to look at could be the ‘strength’ of Power.

Currently, the added damage from Power is as strong as Precision and Critical Damage combined. Non-dps builds would become more viable if Power wasn’t so mandatory. By increasing the base damage and lowering the effect of Power, the gap between Power focused builds and non-Power focused builds would become more bearable.

Another issue with Power is that it scales too well. Any modifier applies directly and fully to Power, whereas it will only apply partially to Precision and Critical Damage. Also, it’ll always be useful whereas Precision and Critical Damage will need both eachother AND a generous helping of Power in order to become viable (it takes about +50% critical chance AND damage for Precision to even become equal to Power).

I mean, most people won’t even touch Celestial gear because even the combination of Precision, Critical Damage and Condition Damage isn’t enough to offset the loss of Power. That’s a little extreme don’t you think?

EDIT: I know precision is meant for bursts and not raw dps, and therefore should be a bit weaker. However, currently Power is more than twice as good, and in my opinion it should be roughly 1.75 times as good to start out.

So I was wondering…would it be possible for a sufficient number skilled players that know all the mechanics and whatnot, and play perfectly, to beat the bosses if they all wore Giver’s armor?

The reason I’m asking is because there seems to be a trend towards offensive stats (which I’m not against) but I’m wondering wheter defensive gear is still viable outside PvP. And if it’s not, what’s the minimum power/precision that one would need? Is full cleric’s viable? Is soldier’s the minimum?

What do you guys think? Are players forced into gearing a minimum of offensive power? Is the difference in damage (and survival) of tank and dps gear too large?

JonathanSharp.7094:

Class balance:
Elementalist
We’re working on the staff in an effort to make it a stronger support weapon, and we also improved the conjure weapons so that they’re stronger for support. You’ll see improvements to all 4 of the conjure weapons to make them stronger and better for support.

We also increased the healing on Water Blast, the radius on Geyser and we reworked
Unsteady Ground to make it function more like line of warding.

The main issue with the staff is its ability to land its spells. Supportwise, it’s in a pretty good place already. Minor things like making Lava Font deal its damage at the START of the second instead of at the END, making projectiles travel faster and maybe a small buff to non-fire auto attack damage would adress most of this.