Guild Wars 2

Also, there’s a 10 second cooldown on each individual element each time you use the ability. For maximum effect, switch attunements during your dodges.

Which Arcane Fury are you talking about?

→ The skill that makes the next 5 hits critical hits?
→ The Arcana trait that should be affected by the next trait (which lengthens the duration of all ‘on attunement’ boons)?

If the first, then I’d say there’s nothing stopping you from going to PvP, take the skill and a target dummy, and try it out. I don’t know wheter it works atm, but me going out to test it would take you longer to learn than testing it yourself.

If the second, well…yesterday, it dodn’t yet. Maybe it’ll do today (even though it’s not in the patch notes).

No, the Elementalist isn’t the nightmare to play that most people make it out to be.

It is however, a pain to learn how to play it. Only after you know dodges, attunment swapping, combos AND what gear to pick will you start to enjoy it.

But then, you’ll enjoy it immensely.

No, it’s not related to the skills. Try swapping to Earth when standing near critters and you’ll notice they get hit. The idea of the ability is nice, but it tags everything in range to be hostile when you’re merely swapping attunements.

There are plenty of abilities, like Evasive Arcana for example, that only trigger while in combat. I don’t see how AoE around you abilities are any different from those.

Crucible of Eternity, specifically, Project Alpha. However, I also got instantkilled by a single mob on two separate occasions, as well as the golem boss’s stun beam ray and the viking’s sword attack.

All other than the viking weren’t even things I saw coming. It’s just instantly BOOM!

Swagman.9013:

There is no skilled musicians, there are musicians with more knowledge of their instrument and song composing.

If you claim that to be true then you’re not a skilled musician. There’s some brilliance that can be achieved through knowledge. However, true talent creates something without needing the knowledge.

Knowledge is just a tool to help the other 99% get by. Some people can do stuff by instinct. Or feelings. Whatever you wanna call it, it’s something that cannot be learned.

The problem isn’t the swiftness, the problem’s that elementalists die more often unless they’re perfect at dodging.

Others can take a hit without going down. Elementalists can’t.

We just did CoE and there’ve been some changes. Stealth fixes probably. I guess I should be happy, but the fact that they’re stealth fixes instead of open admittance that the dungeons are too frustrating kinda annoys me.

Inci.7560:

It’s really a learning experience, and the more you do it the easier it gets.

Statements like this make me so mad. An Elementalist with toughness on each piece of armor, and 30 points in Earth Magic, still dies from most things in 1 frikkin hit. I can dodge 9 out of 10 things, but unless I make it a perfect 10, I’ll die at least 5 times per boss encounter.

Toughness should be worth something, but at the moment, all it does is making you die instantly instead of dying instantly.

At least place a few waypoints closer to the fights for cat’s (not kitten) sake.

Godmoney.2048:

I’m so tired of hearing how hard these dungeons are as me and my friend clear all 3 wings night after night on multiple dungeons. I guess we must be playing a different game then the rest of you who keep complaining.

I’ll bet you’re playing warrior. Try Project Alpha as an Elementalist. No matter your gear, unless you dodge everything perfectly, you’ll die. And by perfectly I mean 10 our 10, not 99 out of 100.

Maybe it’s because I’m an Elementalist, but even with a full set of Knight armor (+toughness), just about everything kills me instantly. I don’t know if this is yet another subtle way of draining money from the economy, but it’s getting pretty frustrating. Even if I dodge 9 out of 10 effects, I still get taken down from full health to 0 by single attacks.

It’d be nice if the waypoints were placed a little closer to the fights.

Or maybe, you know, fights shouldn’t be balanced around warriors…

Are they fun? No. Are there too many instant-kill mechanics? Yes. Are the waypoints too far away when you’re an Elementalist.

Yes.

You’ll have to keep in mind though, that Magnetic Aura is also an AURA. That means it’ll benefit from certain traits (unlike the scepter skill).

In certain trait builds, Magnetic Aura will also grant the caster Swiftness, Fury and Protection. Making it equal to the scepter version will therefore make it overpowered compared to the scepter version.

If such a feature were to be implemented, it’d be much better if it couldn’t be activated in combat. That would make it easier to switch roles in let’s say dungeons, but would still block the Elementalist from being able to acces 40 skills in combat.

Could it be possible to make Sunspot, Electric Discharge & Sunspot activate in combat only? It’s getting really tedious to always have to fight the local wildlife whenever I swap to Air for a Swiftness boost.

Maybe through story mode?

The thing I dislike most about the dungeon is that when you’re an Elementalist and time you dodge just a little bit wrong, you die at Project Alpha.

So even if I get it right 9 out of 10 times, I still get blow up a lot.

And even that would’t be so bad if I didn’t have to run back for 5 minutes. Waypoints placement ftl.

Now that this obvious flaw in the npc AI has been discovered, I’d expect Anet to fix it shortly.

As for dungeons being easy, some are…maybe. Some, like the boss you just mentioned, aren’t.

AndrewWaltfeld.4621:

Or go to tpcalc.com

Input what you bought the item at and desired sell price… bam – you now know how much profit your making.

It’s a sad thing when people need websites to actually calculate these kinds of things.

What I’d rather see, is that the 15% is taken into account when checking if an item is ‘under the vendor price’. It’s utterly rediculous that the game checks for you if you’re not shooting yourself in the foot, only to cut it off when you actually do sell something.

The armor really doesn’t matter because in most dungeons, you’ll be oneshot anyway.

Conjure Weapons don’t inherit stats from the main weapon, making them deal less damage than the normal weapon’s attacks (and thus, useless).

How about:

Conjured weapons don’t inherit the stats from your weapon (making the much weaker than your normal skills)?

So basically, you’ve shown that we can run around screaming “don’t hurt me!” like a little girl?

I already knew that.

What you’re showing isn’t proof of the power of elementalist, it’s proof of a flaw in the AI of the enemies. The other professions could do the same thing (only much better).

I like the elemental. I don’t bother with any of the other skills, because the elemental is so versatile.

Add 2000 points to our level 80 base health.

Outside dungeons, it would make speccing for defense an alternative rather than a must-do.

Inside dungeons, it might help a toughness specced Elementalist with 2000 armor survive a hit instead of being instantly killed.

After playing through the Crucible of Eternity for a few days, I must say that I find myself somewhat cheated out of my gold. I’ve purchased a set of armor and gems that all boost my toughness. I’ve also spent 30 points in Earth Magic. I’’m one tough Elementalist.

And yet, many things still take me out in 1 hit.

Now, before you say something like learning to dodge stuff: I do dodge stuff. In fact, against Project Alpha, I hardly do anything else. The problem however is that when I miss just 1(!) dodge, I get downed. A second AoE defeats me easily before I even get a chance to get back up.

It’d be nice if my investment in toughness yielded some reward, but as it stands now, I’d be better off just going with Magic Find equipment because I’ll die just as often. It’d be great if the damage would be 90% of my health or something. That’d be still a great incentive to avoid stuff.

But at least my toughness would actually DO something…

At the moment, my favorite opening is:

Eruption → Lava Burst → Evasive Arcana dodge into the field.

10+ stacks of Might after that mean I can pretty much just Fireball if I feel like it.

DaPala.5346:

Snip.6138:

Right for the most part, but the staff has anything but “huge” aoe heals. Geyser is a 1.1k heal at the most, and healing rain offers no healing other than the regen. The blast combo finishers are also pretty weak, depending on the healing stat of the person applying the finisher, they range from 1.6k at the most to as little as 900-1k.

If you want to offer actual healing support, the scepter/dagger is the best for that.

Geyser ticks 3 times, so its 3k healed with a support build. Also blast Finishers heal for 1.4k if I am not mistaken, if only with a 0.1 coefficient. And the Healing Rain Heal is about 6k from regeneration… Just try it sometimes, and combo it with your own blast finishers. And Blast finishers from Evasive Arcana. never will you cite scepter for heals again.

And don’t forget that most other classes combo with them mroe or less automatically. Each arrow that goes through it adds another bit of restoration. I’d say the staff fields do at least 10-25% more healing than is listed. 50% more if you got a good team and a good ele (Evasive Arcana comes to mind…I can heal myself and nearby allies for about 7k health when I roll into my own Geyser).

The ‘math’ behind attunement switching giving more dps is actually quite straightforward when it comes to the staff.

Staves make combo fields. So when playing in a group, you could stick to Earth and spam your stones. Or you could swap to Fire, drop a Lava Burst, then to Air for a Static Field, and then back to Earth to continue throwing stones.

What just happened there? Well, when you popped Lava Burst, the Ranger on your team fired enough arrows through it to provide burning for a minute or so. He then decided to also fire a few arrows through your static field that cause vulnerability. That’s added damage that your stones simply couldn’t have provided.

On a side note, the Lava Burst combo field effect is also why traits and skills that cause more burning are pointless in a staff build.

More voice options would be rather expensive, both in data files and money for recording/implementing them.

I’m pretty happy we get voices in the first place. You have no idea how silly Kitten Trek Online’s curscenes are.

It’s issues like these why I always pick the standard body look (i.e. option 1).

The country outfit combined with the guild light armor had the same problem though.

We all know why the options only include mostly ‘perfect’ bodies (both male and female). Granted, Guild Wars 2 does have a few that wander from perfection, but you still cannot create the ‘stubby innkeeper’ or ‘Prince Bokka’ types.

Which is a shame, really.

On a side note, it took me a bit of effort to actually find some realistic clothes for an adventuring female. For those of you that want the non-revealing look, I recommend Student armor.

My guess is that Prayer of Dwayna scales very strongly with Healing Power (something most people wouldn’t bring if they got it for free as an added bonus).

For my Elementalist, Prayer of Dwayna is the strongest heal of them all. However, the recharge is also the highest and skills like Glyph of Restoration provide other benefits besides the heal.

So it has its niche, but I don’t use it personally.

Another point I’d like to add, is that bosses don’t need to have that much health.

For example, the smaller dragon bosses you fight on the airship are basically:

Fight some turret shots.
Defeat a large wave of thrash mobs.
Repeat.

A boss should have an amount of health so this takes 3-4 rounds at most. Making it 20 rounds doesn’t make the boss more challenging, it just takes a LOT longer to finish.

Also, if the fights are shorter, the repeating pattern won’t be so noticable.

EricGORE.7896:

I don’t quite understand where you’re going with this, but I think you missed my point.

No, I get your point. You claim your issue is about the Architecture 3 not granting anything special, but I trust you realize it’s simply Architecture 4 split up over 2 projects. They could remove it, but then they’d have to make Architecture 4 more expensive, resulting in 0 gain for the players.

Your underlying issue is quite clear. You want to be done with things faster. Well, I can assure you that compared to some games (*cough* Star Kitten Online *cough*), small guilds have it easy. The number of rewards you can actually unlock is short. When you get something, you actually get something (apart from Architecture 3 of course). Everything can be unlocked in 3 months or so, even with small guilds, because you’ll also get Influence boosters during your storyline.

The only thing that seems to be tough for small guilds to get is the bigger bank. But when you’re a small guild...

...you don’t need it.

Klazmaunt.2591:

but you will also have a 2-3 copper listing fee which means you LOSE money selling it on the TP.

Don’t forget that listing the item costs you money, but selling the item costs you an additional amount of money. Overall, just to break even, you should sell an item for at least 110% of its vendor price.

It doesn’t cost you anything to gather influence.

It doesn’t cost you any effort to get somewhere.

It’s not required for everyone to have everything instantly.

I think this sums it up quite nicely.

So I suppose that when you do a dungeon, you’re morally obligated to have every player who asks join in?

Get real. It may have taken quite some effort to setup some sort of special event. And to have it change story or location just because it was in your way is asking way to much. It was their event, so their choice wheter to include you or not.

If this comes across as vindictive, then I apologize, for it must be because I’m tired. Tired of the final dungeon, where we ‘fight’ the last boss. Tired of the huge waves of undead, whose main difficulty seems to stem from the fact that they swarm you in large numbers when you’re glued to a cannon. Tired from the ‘sub-bosses’ that have just high health and aren’t challenging in any other way. Tired of being one-shot even though I wear armor and traits stacked with toughness.

Victory Or Death started out pretty well. The first bit where you get the airship parts is nice. The bosses are varied, challenging but doable and it doesn’t take too long. After that comes the air part, and this is where the trouble begins. The airship is pretty cramped, making fighting tough. Fighting the dragon could have been fun, except that you get stuck on a cannon when the undead port in. There’s heaps of them, including veterans, and they down you before you get a chance to react. Destiny’s Edge pretty much decides not to help unless you lure the undead to the waypoint. Downing them all takes a few minutes easily, and to down the dragon, you have to repeat this several times.

After that dragon was finally done (it could really do with less hp to speed up the fight a bit), the ‘difficulty’ was upped by now facing 2 dragons. This meant that the fight simply took twice as long. And we were already pretty much fed up with it the first time. Less health on the mobs wouldn’t change the difficulty per sé, but it would really speed up the fights (making it last less than 45 minutes on your first attempt).

And then came the worst bit: the final fight. For whatever reason the game decided that we hadn’t fought enough mindless waves of thrash mobs, so we got another few. Destiny’s Edge fought with us, thankfully. Still, there’s just too many that take too long to take down, so eventually you run out of dodges and heals, and your teams goes down again. Then the giant laser fires, and a humongeous wave of undead spawns around the three eyes. After taking about 30 minutes of spawn, damage and respawn, we finally managed to get the undead down and the eyes were doable after that.

The boss fight was as uninspired as I’d feared (most of the Traherne complaints are exagerrated, but this unfortunately proved to be true). Pressing 2 while occasionally dodging a shot. If this was supposed to be the boss being ‘downed’ then congratulations, it felt as such. However, the one thing that made me wanna smack my pc through the window was the fact that his attacks also spawned more undead!

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ALREADY!

I just spent 4 hours mostly fighting thrash mobs. And now I’m wondering: is this supposed to be ‘for casual’ gamers? Sure, you can learn to get better at it. Faster too. But shouldn’t it be doable on your first run? That’s what the story’s meant for right? Fun? Because the problem is that the general difficulty is so high that for players going through things ofr the first time, it’s not fun, it’s frustration.

It’s not fun. It’s frustration. I think that in itself should say enough.

P.S. For those of you who aim to reply with a variation on ‘learn to play’: I can honestly say that I’m in the upper echelon of player skills when it comes to the Elementalist. I can dodge, I can combo, I can switch attunements. I know what I’m doing. However, with these numbers of enemies, it’s pretty much just hack and respawn.

Where should I post my feedback to the game, and how should it be formulated, so that it won’t accidently be deleted?

In effect, what are the rules it should abide by?

After a mission of 4 hours, at 1:30am, I take the effort to try and write some constructive feedback and you simply delete it without even giving a reason?

You sir, shouldn’t have been made moderator.

And yes, I know this will be deleted, and frankly, I don’t care. If this is the way constructive feedback is treated then I’ll just state Anet sucks in all of my posts from now on.

Bah.

Then why not test it for yourself?

Transmuting basically means that Anet doesn’t have to design every armor with every stat combination.

So basically, if you want the looks, just transmute them.

The mai nquestion you would have to ask is:

“What do mounts actually add to the gameplay?”

And then you’ll realize it’s not a whole lot besides being able to travel a bit faster. The game areas are simply too small for that.

Gauradan.8361:

They might just as well say there’s no need to play the game after hitting level 80, because grind is all that level 80 is about. Then, if I’m not required to play the game, whatever did I buy it for?

There’s alts, there are jumping puzzles. There’s PvP, there is going out to experience all Dynamic events. There’s even Keg Brawling, upcoming content, Polymock and who knows what else is in the works. Max level isn’t the end of the game, it’s the beginning. It was that way in Guild Wars 1 and it’s still that way in Guild Wars 2.

The game has just begun. If you can only grind because you have nothing else to do, then maybe you should spend less time ingame.

Zen

No it isn’t.

Yes it is. That’s like saying the main characters of Lord of the Rings all experienced the same story because they all ended up in Mordor.

Of course the ending is the same. That’s the whole point. They never said the whole story should be different, and it doesn’t have to be.

And at the very least, you have much more influence on things than you did in World of Kittencraft.

Gauradan.8361:

- a fully-branching, personalized storyline: false. The storyline starts out as a diversity of choices and possibilities, then it adds up into 3 paths and finally into 1. You still get to choose between 2 missions at times, but these choices have no impact in the end. Everybody still kills the Eye of Zhaitan; everybody still helps Trahearne purify Orr, despite their choices. So, the story is not branching, but converging;

That’s just nitpicking. Compared to just about any game, there’s a lot more diversity to the ‘main story line’. In World of Kittencraft for example, the main story is exactly the same for every single character. In Guild Wars 2, you can make 2 identical characters and still have a main story that’s about 75% different. That’s a huge change to the MMO standard that has just a single, non varying main story. So wheter it’s branching, converging or some other literary term is really just arguing semantics.

Player choices do matter to the story, and though it may not be as huge as people were hoping for, but at least the difference exists. That in itself is a new thing.

Gauradan.8361:

To conclude, I’d like to say that, for this part I did not try to debate whether these grind are optional or not, or justifiable or not. I simply pointed out their existence, contrary to Colin Johanson’s statement in the manifesto.

Except in this particular case, you misunderstand the statement. A grind is, according to wikipedia definition, a ‘repetitive and boring series of simple actions’. The fact that most players define grinds as ‘anything that has to be repeated more than once or twice’ doesn’t mean that this game is in fact, much less grindy than similar games.

For example, sure, you need a lot of Karma…but you don’t have to do the same event hundreds of times. You can travel across the world of Tyria and do a hundred different events a day. So if you want to grind that one event, you can…but you’re in no way obligated to do so.

The same thing with dungeons. Rather than having to go through a specific sequence of events, ArenaNet added 3 different paths you can choose when doing the dungeon. That’s combatting the grind right there.

You can gather all types of crafting materials on any of your alts, in many different areas. Instead of having to stick to a particular zone on your ‘only character with mining’.

And last but not least, you’re not in any way required to do any of it. You don’t NEED exotic armor to participate in any part of the game (PvP just grants you a set that equalizes all players). And even if you do want it, there’s various ways to get it, be it crafting, karma, dungeons or questing.

The key difference with grinding in Guild Wars 2 is that where in other games, you’re limited to a a single thing, in this game you can actually choose how you’re going to the top. And they’ve tried to make every path as much fun as they could, reducing the grind by as much as they could manage without ruïning the game.

It could also be that the dragons don’t treat the races of Tyria to their intelligence because they don’t find it worth the effort. The undead didn’t start to use tactics until the Pact put up a decent challenge. Even Claw Island wasn’t really a big battle for the undead, it was merely part of the slow but steady expansion of their conquest. That’s probably why they didn’t push on the Lion’s Arch straight away either.

As for wheter the all dragons are evil…I’m not convinced they are. They’re more like forces of nature, trying to satisfy their hunger. Glint may have been a champion of a dragon, but from the Edge of Destiny Novel, it is clear that’s from a time when dragons ruled Tyria. The elder dragons may have been noble back then, or maybe there were no lesser races to devour yet. There’s no conclusive evidence in the novel that Glint was evil. Not unless you decide the elder dragons and anyone who helps them is.

I think the main issue isn’t so much the waypoints, but rather that the economy has a lot of gold sinks in general. It seems that by trying to avoid gold becoming useless, ArenaNet went a bit overboard with the gold sinks.

The individual costs of repairing, travelling, crafting and cultural items aren’t an issue. But combined, they make it hard to keep more than a gold in your pocket.

If you have that much healing power and condition removal already, you may wanna give Signet of Restoration a go. It’ll give you a decent amount of ‘regen-like’ healing.

The main problem when balancing the staff is the fact that almost everything’s a combo field. Sure, the heals on the staff may feel weak, but a rapid firing ranger firing through it gains large amounts of regeneration. That’s probably why the base heal is quite weak (especially on Geyser).